CPA Exam: How to Find the Time to Study While Working Full Time

If you feel like you can't find the time to study consistently, or you struggle sticking with your daily study routine

in this video, I'm going to give you two simple steps to solve that for good

Let's start with a quote from the book Atomic Habits that was written by James Clear

He says, you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems

So, of course, anyone who starts the CPA exam process, their goal is to pass the CPA exams

but we also know from the published pass rates that only about 50% of candidates pass their exams

and some large percentage of all CPA candidates eventually give up and never finish their

CPA at all. Now everyone knows that you're supposed to stay consistent, you're supposed to study every day

So where does this always go wrong? And typically what you'll hear is someone that says life gets in the way and life does get in the way

People are busy. If you're working full-time, it's incredibly hard to find four to five hours a day to sit down and study

Now, if your life becomes you wake up, you go to work, then you study, then you go to sleep

and then you do it over and over again for months, life quickly becomes pretty miserable

In fact, going back to the book, Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about how if achieving your goals requires huge amounts of willpower

that goes against your natural tendencies, and you're always fighting yourself to try and accomplish

the steps that lead to your goals. You will not follow through

So the question is, how do you make your daily study routine doable

How do you fit your study routine into your normal daily life so that you don have to fight yourself every day to make time for it So let go back to that quote one more time You do not rise to the level of your goals You fall to the level of your systems

Or we could say you fall to the level of your daily routine

Okay, so how do we do this? So the easiest way to make your daily study sessions easier to accomplish

make them easier to fit into your actual daily routine, is to make them shorter

So what we teach our clients to do is to have. a two-hour main study session. And on workdays, that's all you do with your review course

So you do a two-hour study session. You're following our study framework. And you do it in the

morning so that your biggest task, your biggest mental hurdle, it's done out of the way. You

don't have to think about it and dread it all day long. For example, the main study strategy we

teach our clients for moving through new lessons, we call planting the seeds. This is where you

learn how to quickly identify the most tested parts of any lesson and you learn it backwards

which means learning it in the same context that you'll actually see it on test day

And this can be done with any review course once you know how to do it. When you know how to study like this, you really can get more done in two hours than somebody

studying four to five hours the normal way. Now, if you want more info on how to actually do this and our other strategies, then we

have a free strategic CPA studying workshop that you can attend. It's a webinar. It's only at certain

times. There should be a link below this video or a button below this video. You can click on to sign up

for one of those upcoming sessions. So at the beginning, I said I'd give you two ways to do this

That was the first way. A two-hour main study session, you lock it in in the morning. You make it

a morning ritual So it is done You do it when your brain is fresh You not trying to study for four hours after work when your brain is already fried and you can even focus on the video lecture It just

works so much better in every way to do it in the morning. So that's step number one

Step number two is then throughout the rest of your day, you continue to study from your phone

using study supplements. Now, we all get these screen time reports, which are shocking to say the

least, you know, you think, how did I find three hours a day to goof around on my phone

So what I'm talking about is simply taking advantage of all that time

Even the busiest people, all of us, we have these smartphones we carry around and we look

at them up to a hundred times an hour. So even taking a portion of those little mini sessions on your phone, you replace all your

time waste or time on TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, whatever your favorite time waster apps are

You replace that with reading review notes, taking quizzes. Whenever you're in your car, you listen to audio notes

When you're preparing meals, when you're just lounging around the house, you could be listening to audio notes in the background

Now, I don't just recommend this because we happen to sell the exact study supplements

I am talking about. So study after study, like this one, proves that when you're trying to learn a new topic

or a new subject, whatever it is, when you study, in small chunks multiple times a day, you're recalling the information you're trying to learn

multiple times a day. It is dramatically more effective for your long-term learning and your long-term

retention than one longer study period done just once a day. Now for our purposes, it just so

happens that it also a lot easier to do it this way I think you would agree that two hours a day is twice as easy as trying to sit down for four or five hours a day And then you make up the rest of the time by doing

the things you're already doing. You're already driving your car places. You're already looking at

your phone multiple hours a day. You simply fit in the rest of your study time in all those little

five to ten minute chunks. The big advantage is you have put in four to five hours by the time you're

done with work for the day, and you take the evenings off. You get to still do the things that you

would normally do so that you don't go crazy through this process. That alone makes this process much

more doable. It makes it much more motivating, but most of all, it just makes it much more likely that

you'll actually stick to it. So to recap, you do the two-hour main study session with your current

review course. It doesn't matter what review course you're currently using. You do two hours in the

morning. If you want more info on how we teach our clients to study, you can sign up for one of those

free strategic study workshops. There should be a link below the video or a button below the video

So you do the two hours in the morning with your review course. Then you take study supplements

and you keep studying throughout the rest of your day. This way, by the time you're done with work

you've put in four to five hours, maybe even more, of quality study time so that you can take

the evenings off so that you don't go crazy through this process. So if you found this video

please take a second to like the video, subscribe to the channel, click the notification

bell so that you're notified whenever we publish new videos. And then in the comments below, just leave a comment about your current struggle with finding

time to study. What does your average day look like? Why is it such a challenge to find the time to study

And then if the ideas in this video made sense, let us know in the comments

Thanks for watching and we'll see you on the next video