Time-Management Strategies for Prospective Medical Students

Premed students can practice prioritizing their studies, a skill that's necessary for medical school.



Premed students can start using a symbol, like a star, to flag key material they will need to restudy for an exam.

In medical school, time is your most important – and rarest – commodity. The staggering volume of material covered in medical school is often referred to as "drinking through a fire hose" and represents a substantial increase from the amount of material presented in undergraduate courses.

With this in mind, it is essential for prospective medical school students during their undergraduate years to begin cultivating effective time-management strategies, particularly with regards to their studying. Here are four tips to build strong time-management skills in advance of medical school.

1. Ruthlessly prioritize studying: At the undergraduate level, it may be difficult to master every piece of information presented in a given course. During medical school, this is nearly impossible.

As such, it is essential to learn how to triage concepts based on your mastery as well as the relative importance of the material – or in medical school speak, "yield." This is a particularly important skill considering medical students have perfectionist tendencies that have benefited them academically as high school and undergraduate students.

In contrast, the quest to comprehensively master all of the content in a given course irrespective of its importance will likely hurt more than help in medical school. I've lost count of the number of times I watched classmates dedicate hours to memorizing minutia that was low yield for both examinations and patient care.


Specific habits and systems that can help you prioritize your studying are outlined below, but your first step to implementing these systems is to acknowledge that not all information has equal value and that prioritizing the information is essential to surviving and excelling in medical school.


2. Attend class and pay attention: This may seem obvious, but this is a key time-management strategy for prospective medical students. In both college and medical school, I had many peers who chose not to attend lectures, preferring to read from the professor's slide deck or handout.

Skipping class is even more tempting in medical school, since many schools offer lecture video streaming. With this approach, four hours of lecture can quickly turn into eight-plus hours of streaming video and annotating, since students tend to be less disciplined when streaming video.

It's tempting to pause the lecture repeatedly to look up concepts, take excessive notes, read a message from a friend or check social media. The advantage of attending class is that it forces you to limit your note-taking to the finite period of time allotted to the lectures.

Additionally, since professors either write or provide a great deal of input on the content presented on examinations, students who choose to skip lectures are missing the key points the professor emphasized that are most likely to be tested.

A system that I used to ensure I prioritized this material in studying was to add a unique, easily searchable character – I chose a star – to each slide the professor emphasized in a lecture. When I reviewed the material presented in the lecture, I used the search function to locate each slide with a star and made sure that I spent the greatest amount of time studying that material.

3. Consult popular review sources: Professors typically stress knowledge that is emphasized on standardized tests like the MCAT, United States Medical Licensing Examination and Comprehensive Osteopathic Medical Licensing Examination because it represents an important, foundational concept for a particular field of study.


When learning the material presented in your courses, consult a popular review resource that covers the same concepts in parallel. At the undergraduate level, this will likely be an MCAT review source, while in medical school, this will be a USMLE or COMLEX review source.

The advantages of this are twofold: First, you will be able to distinguish material that will most likely be tested in your current course and can dedicate your time to studying this content, and second you will simultaneously be studying for a standardized exam that is likely on the horizon.

Take this one step further and incorporate the prioritization study system by marking slides that contained content also covered in review sources with another character, such as a diamond.

4. Adjust strategies before exams: During your studies, follow these strategies. Then as time becomes increasingly precious in the days prior to an exam, stop studying other material and focus exclusively on material that you have annotated with characters, such as a star or diamond. During the final day before an exam, only study material with both characters, since this represents the content that has the highest likelihood of appearing on the exam.

Here is a visual representation of this strategy.



Implementing this system – or a variant of it that works well for you – as an undergraduate will enable you to hit the ground running and effectively allocate your limited time when you start the first semester of medical school.

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