Introduction
“You can’t reach for anything new if your hands are still full of yesterday’s junk.” – Louise Smith.
In my view, the goal with studying has always been to learn as much as possible with the least amount of effort and stress.
For me, the most important factor in passing professional accounting exams is good organisation… and it’s where I came up with the phrase the “lazy organiser”. The “lazy organiser” isn’t lazy per se. They do however spend less time studying, have less notes and are less stressed than the average student. These five tips are in my view essential to starting you off on that path.
1. Use Ringbinder Files, not notebooks.
Seems simple, but when you are building a holy grail of notes you won’t get it right the first time. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither were great notes.
Here’s why: you can constantly add, throw away and reorder your with a ringbinder file. You can’t do this with a notebook. Yes they are bigger and bulkier to carry around but unless you write perfect notes, in the correct order, without any mistakes, you need to be able to add, throw away and reorder your notes.
The end goal is to have a fairly small amount of notes you can reference and use for examples. Cutting out useless information is as good as learning the important stuff. As you open your file…
2. The first page is the Competency Statement.
A competency statement (or syllabus) is the list of content you need to know to complete the course.
Not using a competency statement is like jumping in a boat without a rudder; you will just be hoping the wind takes you in the right direction. A competency statement at the front of your file will keep you on track and allow you to continuously check and tick off sections as you practice them.
As exams become bigger and tougher you will naturally adapt to them being more challenging. The competency statement being the first page just stops you from being complacent and keeps you honest with your progress.
3. Organise your notes by Topics, not lectures.
This is probably the most important tip I have in this list, so I will try to briefly summarise the main benefits:
- You can go from a competency statement -> topic -> practice questions, cutting out unnecessary information.
- Exams are based on competency statements, not lectures. Lectures may miss out or add in completely pointless information that you don’t need!
- Gives you the ability to roll forward notes from year to year saving hours, days or in some cases weeks of work. (It’s a thankless task to do when your file is labelled Lecture 1, Lecture 2 …etc. A personal favourite of a lazy organiser.)
I toiled with this idea the whole way through university and as soon as I made the change I was able to compound all my notes, saving me countless hours.
4. Use Sticky Index Tabs.
I’m not going to lie, I think I would have a panic attack if I had to look through my file for a certain topic without index tabs. Ultimately it came down to me being too lazy to sift through my files for notes but looking back now, everything ‘clicked’ much better when I started index tabbing sections.
Indexing gets you where you need to be quickly and with less stress.
5. Colour Code Subjects
This last one is fairly subjective. If you like your files to look like a rainbow of highlights then you are likely already doing this. The basic idea behind colour coding is that it increases attention and thus retention to your long-term memory, (Dzulkifli MA, Mustafar MF, 2013).
In practice though studies seem to show people learn best from black text on a white background. My recommendation is to do whatever you like the look of; whether that be indexing in certain colours or using highlighters, it’s mostly down to personal preference. I personally had a colour for each file/module at a time.
Conclusion
These tips may seem quite basic, but laying the solid foundation will save you from having to go back to square one if s*** hits the fan. I believe that if you place a disorganised genius against a well organised student in accounting exams, good organisation prevails in the long run. Any time invested into organising notes is time, effort and stress saved later down the line.
If you would like any more specific organisation tips on how I approached each subject, feel free to reach out to me on the Contact page.
I hope these tips start you off on the right path to being a productive “minimal effort organiser”.
Hi, where on the website can I access videos?