GMAT Life Hacks
“Life hacks” is a weird term that’s only been around for the last decade, brought to us by purveyors of clickbait. Most life hacks involve some resourceful repurposing of something (e.g. Got a tomato? Hollow it out and now you have a perfect ashtray!) The term itself mystifies me—how are these clever, janky solutions anything like hacking into a computer? I’ve never tried to penetrate the NSA’s mainframe, but I’m assuming it doesn’t involve saving up all your bottle tops in order to make a lower water usage toilet.
At any rate, I thought I’d share some techniques for GMAT studying—some GMAT life hacks, if you will—that may help you find it easier to cobble together around 10 hours of practice per week.
1. Schedule Your Studying in Advance
Motivational psychology has found that one of the most powerful ways to get yourself to follow through on a task is to designate a specific date and time to do that task.
Every year, I wait until April 15th to file my taxes, even though I intend to do it sooner. It’s just not something I choose to make time for until I absolutely have to. Well, GMAT studying can often feel the same. We know we should be studying, but “America’s Got Talent” is making a persuasive counterargument that we should instead be just sitting here waiting to see what this 80-year-old guy is about to do with a vacuum cleaner and six aquariums full of goldfish.
If I were to set a calendar appointment on my phone for “Sunday, March 1, 10 a.m., Tax Return,” I am (according to some studies) way more likely to accomplish this task than if I only have the fuzzy deadline of “at some point.” Similarly, publicly declaring your intentions ratchets up the pressure for you to follow through on your intentions.
I was never good at mustering the courage to confess my feelings to the girls I had crushes on, but if I had told three of my friends, “I will call Natalie on Thursday night,” then the social pressure of knowing they’d ask me about it on Friday would force me to actually call her, rather than crumbling in fear like an insecure scone.
So, Sunday night, bust out your calendar and your syllabus and make specific appointments for when you’re going to study during the week (and even better, what you’re going to do at each study session). This 10-15 minutes of plotting out your week makes you way more likely to follow through.
2. Redo Calendar
I’ve discussed this all-important habit in blogs past, so I’ll just reiterate it briefly here: According to learning science, the most efficient way to learn things is spaced repetition (you expose yourself to the thing you’re trying to learn at increasingly longer intervals).
Delay … Decay … Replay.
Doing a problem three times in a row will provide a momentary sense of mastery, but it will be fleeting. Doing a problem three times over spaced intervals (today, 5 days later, 10 days after that) will encode that problem in your long-term memory.
It’s the same investment of time—in either case, we’re doing the problem three times—but the latter method yields much better results. So why aren’t we all taking advantage of the power of spaced repetition?
Because it’s just hard to remember to when you should go back to which problems later! That’s why a redo calendar is so essential. When you do a GMAT problem, and it’s doesn’t feel like you already have an easy sense of mastery over that problem, you schedule two redo appointments on your redo calendar (make the first one 3-7 days later and the second one around a week after that).
Your goal is to have 5-10 redo problems awaiting you on most days.
3. Make GMAT.WILEY.COM the Browser Tab You Visit When You Need a Mental Break from Work
Even while writing this blog post, I felt the need to take a two-minute break, dip on over to Facebook, check my Noties (notifications, for those of you not ‘in the know’), and write an attempt at a funny post.
Before the Internet existed in its current fun form, we would walk down to the office kitchen and get more coffee, or we would flip through the page-a-day “Dilbert” calendar that sat next to our computer. We all need rewards/diversions when we’re at work.
It will take some mental effort to fool yourself into thinking that doing one GMAT problem is a ‘treat,’ but these problems are all essentially mini puzzles, so if you can think to yourself, Ugh…I’m sick of looking at this spreadsheet…let me reward myself with one Sentence Correction problem, then you can replace your normal jaunt over to Instagram with a momentary GMAT siesta.
On the inside of the cover of the Official Guide, there’s a cellophane panel that you rip open in order to reveal your special code that allows you to activate your gmat.wiley.com account. Once you set it up, you can go to that website and do GMAT problems online (you can’t request specific problems, but you can request what quantity / difficulty / type you’d like).
4. Play the ARITHMETIC Game When You Need a 2-Minute Mental Break
Getting better at arithmetic is the “rising tide that lifts all ships” on GMAT Quant. Since we have to do a lot of arithmetic by hand, we want it to demand as little time and processing power as possible.
If you have to pause a bit to know what 75/5 is, then you need to build your arithmetic skills. One great website for doing so is http://arithmetic.zetamac.com.
I don’t know who built this little gem, but we owe her a debt of gratitude. You can tweak the length of the quiz or the difficulty of the numbers involved, but the default options are great. Try doing these calculations without pencil and paper—this will force your brain to stretch and develop a better number sense.
When you see sums like 47 + 85, you make tradeoffs.
Think: 50 + 82
or
Think: 42 + 90
In both cases, I wanted to round a quantity up to be a multiple of 10. In the first case, I borrowed 3 from 85 so that I could raise 47 up to 50. In the second case, I borrowed 5 from 47 so that I could raise 85 up to 90.
When you see differences like 114 – 57, you think about “counting up, from 57 to 114.” I go up 3 to get from 57 to 60. I go up 50 to get from 60 to 110. And then I go up 4 to get from 110 to 114. So we went up 3 + 50 + 4.
When you see products like 32 * 12, you break it into two calculations and then add them.
30 * 12 = 360
2 * 12 = 24
So 32 * 12 = 384
When you see quotients like 456 / 8, you think “400 is the 50th multiple of 8.” Going up another 56 is going up another 7 multiples of 8. So 456 / 8 must be 57.
5. Make Your Own GMAT Podcast
A lot of students with gnarly commutes bemoan the fact that so much of their day is wasted driving. It’s a shame there isn’t a GMAT podcast out there (note to self: create a GMAT podcast).
But in the meantime, create your own GMAT audio by using the voice recorder function on your phone. As you’re reading chapters of the strategy guide, or as you’re reviewing practice problems, whip out your voice recorder and record yourself saying the takeaways you’d otherwise write in your review log or saying the notes you’d otherwise write in a cheat sheet.
If you find a particular part of a strategy guide chapter resonates with you, like, “Oooh, I want to remember this,” then just record yourself reading that part of the chapter. If you’re trying to encode a takeaway from a problem you’re reviewing, record yourself saying that takeaway.
If you’re thinking about writing a flashcard quiz for a given concept, record the flashcard quiz (just add enough of a pause between the question and the answer that you’ll give Future You a chance to answer. e.g. “When I’m doing an Inequalities problem, I should remember to think about [3 sec delay] NEGATIVE numbers!”).
Once you have a bank of these voice recordings, then you can play them to yourself while you’re driving or on the bus/train/bike.
6. Reading Comp Photo Album
Trying to get better at Reading Comp? One skill we have to develop is just having a willing, eager spirit when it comes to reading the passages themselves. I often tell my students to cultivate the same unhurried reading pace they might have if they were at a nail salon getting a foot massage, or swinging in a hammock in a Corona Light commercial, or sitting on the porcelain throne in the bathroom.
If you’re the sort of person who reads articles on your phone (probably 75% of them relate to Trump in some way), you already have this urge to use your phone to become more informed about the world.
Let’s funnel that same disposition into reading Reading Comprehension ‘articles.’ Just go through the Official Guide one day and take pictures with your phone of each RC passage (it should only take you about 5 mins to do this).
Any time you’re killing time on your phone and have the hankering to read up on the news of the world, go into your phone’s photos and open up a Reading Comp passage. Read it with the same mental attitude of, “I feel like reading about something interesting or informative.”
6. Flashcard Apps
A less hacky way to use your phone as a study tool is download a flashcard app.
The Manhattan Prep GMAT app has lots of mini-problems, lessons, quizzes, and flashcards in it.
There’s also a free create-your-own flashcard app called Quizlet that a lot of people like. You can even search for and download other people’s flashcard sets, so that you don’t have to start from scratch. Here’s one I’ve made.
7. Shorter Sessions
Sometimes the biggest impediment to studying is just how hard it is to find a block of time or how hard it is to commit to sacrificing a large block of our disposable time to something onerous like studying.
Good news! According to learning science, shorter sessions are more powerful than longer sessions (it’s easier for the brain to process and encode what it learns in smaller bursts of studying). You’d get more benefit out of 2 hours of studying if it were broken into four 30-minute sessions than if you worked for 2 hours straight, for example.
So really embrace that maxim and aim to create study opportunities in all the little nooks and crannies of your day:
- 15 mins of studying over breakfast
- 15 mins of studying during lunch
- 25 mins of studying after work / before gym
- 10 mins of reading a GMAT blog or Roadmap article, rather than Twitter-surfing, before you plop your phone on your nightstand and submit to sweet Lady Slumber.
I hope you find at least some of these suggestions useful. If you have any of your own that you’d like to share with the GMAT community, please let us know in the comments. Happy hacking. ?
Want some more GMAT tips from Patrick? Attend the first session of one of his upcoming GMAT courses absolutely free, no strings attached. Seriously.
Patrick Tyrrell is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Los Angeles, California. He has a B.A. in philosophy, a 780 on the GMAT, and relentless enthusiasm for his work. In addition to teaching test prep since 2006, he’s also an avid songwriter/musician. Check out Patrick’s upcoming GMAT courses here!