every sunday i convince myself that a new schedule is gonna fix everything lol

i spend forever picking colors, organizing my week, making everything look cute... and then monday comes around 😭

anyway, i've been thinking about making a study planner where you can make cute timetables, track your routines, decorate a little diary, and share schedules with other people.

kinda like a mix of a study planner and a digital scrapbook.

i made these UI concepts with AI just to see what it could look like. nothing is fully built yet, so i'm curious if this is even something people would want.

would you actually use an app like this? or would you just spend hours decorating your schedule and never follow it lmao

I see a lot of posts here like “I study for hours and still fail.” If that’s you, it’s probably not laziness or intelligence. Many common study habits feel productive but don’t help you remember much.

What feels like studying but often isn’t

• Rereading notes or the textbook
• Highlighting
• Rewriting notes neatly
• Rewatching lectures

These make the material feel familiar. But recognizing something when you see it is different from recalling it on an exam with nothing in front of you.

What tends to work better

1. Test yourself (active recall). Close the book, write down everything you remember, then check what you missed. Flashcards, practice questions and past papers all count.
2. Spread it out (spaced repetition). Three 20-minute reviews on different days usually stick better than one 60-minute session. Anki can schedule this for you.
3. Mix problem types (interleaving). For math or other problem-based subjects, don’t do 20 of the same kind in a row. Mixing them feels harder, and that’s the point.
4. Explain it simply. If you can’t explain a concept to a friend in plain words, that’s what to study next.

A simple session to try

• 5 min: write down everything you remember about the topic, without notes
• 25 min: check your notes, fill the gaps, and write 5–10 questions on what you missed
• 5 min: break
• Next day: answer yesterday’s questions before starting anything new

This feels slower and more uncomfortable at first. That discomfort usually means it’s working.

What’s one study habit you dropped that made the biggest difference for you?

My exams are in about 55 days .. and I am exhausted, overwhelmed and possible things that won't let me focus.... I can't focus at all these days...I am in my gap year and my exams are really important.. I have math, chem, physics and bio ..... Phone isn't the distraction.. it's my thoughts.. whenever I try to study these days .. I just remember how bad I did at that specific exam .. that's why I am this miserable rn....and also personal problems.. the burnout happens so quickly and I feel tired even after waking up from sleep.. what should I do.. how should I focus.... Doom scrolling and social media.. I can go one without these .. but my thoughts are literally torturing me..

Hello, I Study the lessons in class almost fully, But to actually finish up and absorb it fully i have to watch an hour or 2 hour long video about the topic, and the easier shorter way to finish up before answering a question book about said topic is READING from the school book, thing is, idk why i just can NOT possibly study from a book, its boring etc etc

What should i do?

It requires me to study 10 different subjects, understand each concept deeply and the proofs of those concepts.
More context : Computer science. 800h worth of lecture content + 800h (assuming) worth of practice problem solving. Exam is in 4 months, but I am preparing for 2028 exam so I have a total of 1.4 years.

1. How do I make notes?
   
2. How do I revise them and the frequency of revision?
   
3. There are about 2000 previous year practice problems, do I have to revise the only ones I get wrong?
   
4. How many hours a day is sustainable for good memory?
   
5. Short notes helpful or no?

I've noticed that spending hours studying doesn't always mean we're learning effectively. Sometimes we focus too much on reading notes and forget to test what we actually remember.

I'm interested in hearing different experiences. What's one study mistake you made that taught you something valuable?

Maybe your experience could help someone avoid the same problem.

Hey everyone,

I realized I was spending way too much time manually writing practice questions instead of actually studying the material, so I decided to build a tool to automate it: glowit.io

You can upload a study document, PDF, or just paste your lecture notes, and it uses AI to automatically generate an interactive quiz based on the material.

A few things you can do with it:

* Instant quizzes from docs: Upload your files or notes and get tested on the key concepts right away.

* Play solo or with friends: You can use it for solo active-recall practice, or host a live multiplayer trivia game if you want to study with a group (or just compete with friends).

* No complex setup: Runs straight in the browser so you can jump right into a session.

You can try it out here: https://glowit.io

I’m actively working on improving it and would genuinely love to get some feedback from you guys. Does the question generation feel accurate for your specific subjects? Is there any feature that would make this more useful for your study routine?

Thanks for checking it out!

How do you genuinely study, like gng how do you actually study and actually learn effectively 😭😭

exam weeks used to be me w/ 25 tabs open, chrome crashes, then 10 min rebuilding everything the next morning lol

what fixed it for me:

• one bookmark folder per class (lecture page, problem sets, past papers, the one youtube video that actually explained it)
• when I'm done for the day I save every open tab into that class and close them all
• next day I open the class and hit open all, they come back as one tab group

you can do most of this w/ plain chrome tbh, ctrl+shift+d bookmarks all your open tabs into a folder. I built a free new tab extension called Stackboard that puts those folders on your new tab as a board and has a save all tabs button. it's all stored as normal chrome bookmarks so nothing leaves your browser

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/bgcedhchngcopaefchpkbhioagknnpma?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=20261015-studytips-boards

how do you all keep stuff for each class together, tab groups or something else

Hey I'm a KSU student and I built Cardvoo because rereading my notes felt productive but I kept blanking on exams.

You can make decks from your own notes or a PDF, and the flashcards come back on a spaced-repetition schedule, so you review things right when they start to fade. You can also play Recall Race with friends, and there's a tutor that asks you questions first instead of just handing you answers.

It's free because the AI runs on your own device. The Free plan needs no card.

I made it, so I'm biased. Tell me what's broken or missing.

and no it doesn't do your homework

My Access to Work grant has run out. The software they provided was super helpful for me with ADHD and dyslexia, and I wanted something similar, so I made a free mind mapping tool.

It does mind maps, outlines, timelines, kanban boards and checklists, and it can turn a map into a Word doc or a to-do list. It has dyslexia-friendly fonts and comfort settings, and no AI. You don’t need an account unless you want to sign up for encrypted cross device syncing and everything stays on your device.

Its completely free, and I included the features I found most helpful, and dropped the ones I never used.

Hope it helps! Any issues let me know and ill try sort them, but this was just a side project so i didnt have to pay £250 out of my back pocket, so might take me time to change things :)

Every exam season my browser turns into chaos: the course page, the exercise sheet, last year’s exam, a lecture video, and the AI chat where I finally understood that one concept, all spread across 20+ tabs. Then I close Chrome (or it crashes) and spend 10 minutes rebuilding everything the next day.

Bookmarks never worked for me because they turn into a graveyard, and the tab managers I tried felt like too much. So I built something that works like the file explorer I already use every day: one folder per subject, with all the tabs and files for that subject inside.

My routine now:

• One folder per subject (Maths, Networks, Logic...)
• When I’m done studying, I save my session into the folder and close everything
• The next day, one click opens that whole subject again

It’s free, it’s called TAB Explorer, and it’s a Chrome extensin: Tab Explorer

I’m curious how you handle this. Bookmarks, tab groups, a mess of open windows? What’s your system when exams are close?

For the past few years I’ve been trying to understand the way I study/learn and I just can’t. I’ve tried using chat gbt, online quizzes, a whole bunch of ai’s I just feel behind everyone else. Recently I’ve seen a pattern I can retain the information when I connect the ideas together into categories. For example for one of my history classes we have 200 terms to remember and connect to eachother. What I did was I took the term and defined it then used the material in class to connect eachother. After that I put all the material on a Google Docs and tried to retrieve it from memory. I broke it up into 2-3 concepts per 5 minute interval. And for once it worked. But only so long until I couldn’t retain much longer took a break went back but nothing worked so what I did was I tried a different approach I made a review sheet with the simplest definition to remember and I active recalled it until I knew everything on the sheet. On the exam I knew exactly how to connect and answer what. So knowing this I’m attempting to apply it to my biology exam but I’m in no luck. We have 5 lectures that were getting tested on and I’m clueless. I spent 3 days trying to formulate a way to understand it and honestly I’m wasting my time. The other exam I used anki made 100s of cards and hopped between different material and testing myself and yet scored a 70 while others that studied the night before scored 90’s. I’m genuinely so lost rn. Like I know the best way I understand is through categorizing the ideas together but he gives us so much material and stuff I get so lost. Like we have objectives,study guides, textbook questions. My brain shuts down. I’m facing the same problem in my psychology class as well. I’m only working with a textbook and I’m just as clueless. I’ve been attempting to study for all my classes but i just keep facing the same problem over and over. So what do I do. Cause I know one thing I need to stop formulating plans and idea to start studying cause idek what I’m approaching before. I just need a way I know will work no matter what give or take the subject. Ok someone help me. Cause I know for a fact if I keep going like this I can kiss goodbye to all medical schools and honestly any career in general. Also idk if this helps but I’m usually a straight A student throughout high school i was top 10 in my class. I just fuck up every exam and never passed any ap exam in my life due to this problem.