Small Changes, Big Results

Hi there! 👋

If we haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet, I’m Kush, a passionate tutor who has been dedicated to helping students succeed ever since I graduated from high school. Over the years, I have witnessed my students thrive and achieve remarkable success, and this has led me to create Curiosity Curve. Not just a tutoring business, but a learning experience. My vision is to qualify everything that has led my students to excel in school, and bring that same joy to as many students as possible.

This article is the first edition of The Curve, Curiosity Curve’s very own email newsletter. The Curve will provide evidence based study techniques, unique insights from books and articles, personal thoughts from tutors and students, and so much more, all directly to your inbox. These will be short reads that you can scroll through while sitting on the toilet in the morning, and they are intended to make your high school experience that much better.

To kick it off, I want to give you an two actionable strategies that you can implement today in order to instantly improve your student life. These are 5% changes I used during high school that resulted in a proportionally large improvement in both my productivity & the enjoyment of my education.

✔️ The Weekly Checklist

I attribute a lot of my academic success and mental sanity to a little $5 journal that I picked up from Kmart at the start of senior high school. It’s arguably one of the most simple yet effective tools you can implement right now that will tangibly improve your results and make you a more well rounded student, and getting it started is extremely easy.

Firstly, I do recommend that it be a physical journal because it makes every task more concrete (compared to a to-do list app) which will make you more likely to stick to it… plus it is infinitely more satisfying to tick off physical check boxes with a pen.

You do have flexibility with how you set it out, but this is an extremely simple method that I find the most convenient and effective:

I like to split my weekly checklist into broad categories, such as school subjects, work and fitness, as this ensures that I am staying on top of my education while still being a well-rounded individual.

The point of the weekly checklist isn’t to write out every single granular activity that you hope to accomplish during the week, but rather to visualise the bare minimum that you need to get done that will ensure that you are on top of everything. It can sometimes be so easy to fall behind in class as little things pile up and important assessments crawl up behind you, and this can very quickly snowball and become extremely overwhelming. By having a visual cue for the bare minimum tasks you need to get done in a week, you are always aware of how you can spend your time more intentionally and you are much less likely to forget important tasks.

So, what are you waiting for… scrounge your house for a little A5 journal or go buy one now!

⏳ The 5-Minute Rule

Another extremely simple strategy that completely transformed my ability to perform well in school. This one is more of a mental reframing, but it is extremely effective. The idea here is that whenever you are struggling to start a certain task that you really need to get done, you tell yourself that you are only going to work on it for five minutes.

A common problem we face in our learning journey is that although we have the time to accomplish the tasks that we need to without having to cram them the night before the deadline, we simply lack the motivation to start them any earlier. We subconsciously know that there is still time left so we allow ourselves to put it off until it is almost too late.

By telling yourself that you only need to do the task for five minutes, the task suddenly feels less overwhelming. You just open up your laptop or book and start working on it, and you allow yourself to stop after that five minutes if you want to. The trick here is that once you’ve already been working on it for 5 minutes you are in the zone and do actually feel like working on it for longer. The main problem was just starting.

By using this mental trick well in advance of a deadline, you will find that you are completing tasks incrementally over a longer period of time. This massively reduces the stress that’s weighing on your brain and is guaranteed to improve the quality of the work you are producing.

I hope you took something away from this short article and I can’t wait for you to see what we have in store for the future!

Have a great week 😉

Kush