Passing your CPA exams is hard, but it doesn’t have to take over your life. In this video you’ll learn how to pass your CPA exams and still have a life, in 3 steps.
Episode Timestamps
- 00:00 How to Pass & Still Have a Life
- 00:34 Introduction
- 01:15 Step 1: 2-Hour Morning Study Session
- 02:19 How to Master Your CPA Study Process
- 02:57 Why Morning Studying Works Much Better
- 04:38 Step 2: Mini Sessions Through Your Normal Day
- 06:26 Step 3: Take the Evenings Off
- 07:13 Built-In Retention Practice
- 07:59 Take a True Break from Thinking About Studying Each Day
Episode Transcript
There’s this huge sense of relief. You don’t feel like your life is bleak, that it’s just work, study, try to sleep and do it all again.
You get your life back to a certain degree, do the things that you would normally do, do the things that you like doing. And the biggest thing is you can feel good about what you accomplished during the day so that you can completely disengage and just shut off that part of your mind that’s always worrying about CPA study.
Introduction
All right. So in this video, we’re going to cover briefly how to pass your CPA exams and still have a life. And a lot of people out there think that, that’s not possible. That if you’re going to make the commitment that’s required to pass the CPA exams, that it has to take up your entire life basically outside of work, your whole life’s going to be work and then study.
That’s partially true, but I’m going to show you how you can take the evening’s completely off and why that’s so important to give your mind a mental break from constantly thinking about studying or feeling guilty for not studying.
Step 1: 2-Hour Morning Study Session
So step one is a two hour study session that’s done in the morning. So in the morning gives you several advantages. So first and foremost, for this to work, you have to have your study methods nailed down. You need to know exactly how to dissect and effectively move through each lesson so that it’s formulaic, it’s surgical.
When you sit down for the two hours, you know exactly how to move through that day’s lessons, so that you’re not constantly getting stuck watching and rewatching the video lectures over and over, and not really accomplishing anything. Now, when you do know how to study very effectively, very efficiently, you can honestly get more done in a two-hour morning study session than somebody studying the normal way four to five hours,
if they save it for the nighttime there’s constant distractions and their brain is already fried from working 10 or 12 hours. It’s just not effective, it does not work nearly as well. You have to spend twice the amount of time to get the same results if you save your studying for the evenings.
How to Master Your CPA Study Process
Now there’s a lot I could say and get into all the specifics on how to do the morning study sessions, such as what exactly your study routine should consist of, the different study methods, how to dissect every lesson. But we cover those in our free study training webinars. Those are a free one-hour training where we will walk you through our study strategies in detail.
And it’s primarily about how to use your current review course much more effectively and much more efficiently but we’re not going to cover that in this short video. To sign up for one of those trainings, you can do it at our main website at superfastcpa.com or there will be a link down in the description of this video.
Why Morning Studying Works Much Better
So a few other reasons why the morning studying works so much better, we kind of touched on this, but your brain is fresh. When you have worked 10 to 12 hours and then you’ve also kind of been dreading having to sit down after work and study for four or five hours, you are pretty drained mentally and emotionally, and you have to constantly battle distractions when you save your studying for nighttime.
When it’s early in the morning, hopefully wherever you live, apartment, house, I mean, whatever. At six or 5:00 AM in the morning, there should be relatively no distractions. Your phone’s not constantly going off. You’re not getting texts from people and it should be again, ideally just nice and quiet. It is just a thousand times easier to jump straight in and stay focused and on task and just knock out your two hour session.
Going along with that, it’s much more of a sprint versus a marathon. I think if you asked 95% of people, if you had to do one form of a race every single day, would you rather do a sprint or a marathon? Most people would say, yeah, it’s easier to sprint for a hundred yards than try and run 10 miles. So it’s easier mentally to handle:
“okay, all I gotta do is just get up, knock out these two hours,” again versus knowing that you have to sit there for four or five hours and think about it all day, dread it, deal with all the work stuff that’s going on, all other distractions in your life. It’s just a thousand times easier to do it like this.
And again, in those free study trainings, we will walk you through exactly what this two hours should consist of.
Step 2: Mini Sessions Through Your Normal Day
Now, the second part of this is something that we call mini sessions. All this means is studying from your phone in all the little chunks that you already do this, here’s the thing. You get those screen reports and it tells you that even if you feel like you’re a really busy person, somehow you found two to three, maybe even four hours a day to stare at your phone.
And obviously you don’t do that all at one time. You do that in these little five to 10 minute chunks. You know, we all have phones we carry around and we look at them constantly and it typically adds up to two to three hours a day or more. So all we’re talking about with these mini sessions, since you’ve already invested the money and years of your life, you know, getting college degrees, just to be able to sit for these exams.
Instead of using things like Reddit or TikTok or Instagram, or listening to music or podcasts on your phone for a few months, you simply switch all that out for review notes, audio notes, taking quizzes from your phone. And you can add in an extra two to three hours of very high quality study time just by going through your normal day.
So this is another thing we won’t get into on this video but our study tools from SuperfastCPA, we created them specifically with this idea in mind because this for our customers that adopt this idea, it’s very simple and it makes a lot of common sense, right. Instead of using social media apps throughout your day, you can rack up two to three extra hours of study time just by using study tools from your phone.
That should just make sense.
Step 3: Take the Evenings Off
Step number three, in this process is take the evenings off. Okay. So you do have to be regimented. You do have to be disciplined. But all you have to do is nail these two things, a two-hour morning study session where you study highly, efficiently, highly effectively. I should say that this is on weekdays, right?
I’m assuming you work full-time that’s on weekdays. So you nailed us on the weekdays and then you do the whatever it ends up being one hour or two hours, three hours. Whenever you’re in your car, you listen to audio notes. Whenever you’d normally pull out your phone and scroll through social media, just force yourself to at least do one mini quiz or read three to five pages in the review notes. Then, get your little five minute social media fix or whatever.
Built-In Retention Practice
But as long as you force yourself to do a mini session with CPA material first, you will start making connections with all the material. It’s also a retention strategy. So with our study tools, the idea is you’re constantly rehashing all the stuff you’ve previously studied so that you’re not forgetting things you’ve spent all this time going through all these lessons.
It doesn’t make any sense to put five hours into a lesson and then not look at it for two months, right? That doesn’t logically make sense. So mini sessions are a form of locking in your understanding and your retention. So you’ve done this two hours. You’ve done two to three more hours. So you’ve done four to five high quality study hours by the time that you’re just done with kind of your average work day.
Take a True Break from Thinking About Studying Each Day
So step three is take the evenings off and completely disengage and just don’t even think about CPA study in the evenings. And there’s a huge difference, there’s this huge sense of relief. You don’t feel like your life is bleak, that it’s just work, study, try to sleep and do it all again for six months or however long it’s going to take you to pass. You get your life back to a certain degree. You take the evenings off, do the things that you would normally do, do the things that you like doing. And the biggest thing is you can feel good about what you accomplished during the day so that you can completely disengage and just shut off that part of your mind that’s always worrying about CPA study.
So it’s this huge mental relief or it’s, you know, lifting off this huge mental burden. And you can listen to some of our podcasts episodes where person after person will talk about that idea. Once they adopted our study strategies, doing this exact thing, just how much easier the study process felt because they weren’t constantly worried.
Like if they weren’t working, they weren’t constantly in their mind just thinking you’ve gotta be studying, you’re wasting time, you’re falling behind. You nail the daily process and you just, you take the evenings off. This is like your time that you get back right now.
That you don’t have to worry about the study process at all. And when you’re following the study strategies that you will learn in these free trainings, everything you’re doing will be working better. It’s way more efficient, way more effective.
So again, to learn how to study incredibly efficiently with your current review course, you’ll be using it slightly differently than the normal way. You want to sign up for one of our free study trainings where that’s the basis; we get into the nitty-gritty of this is how you dissect lessons, this is how you move through material really quickly. And the last half hour of these two-hour morning study sessions is another retention component that we show you how to build in, we explain that on the training. Again, so that you’re not constantly just forgetting all this stuff you’re spending so much time trying to learn in the first place.
So you can go to our main website at superfastcpa.com to sign up for one of those trainings, or there should be a link down in the description. So I hope you found that helpful. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you on the next episode.
