So, you are all excited about this new chapter you are going to read. It may be any of your favorite subjects be it Physics, Chemistry of Economics. You breeze through the chapters, understand all the concepts and solve all the examples. You are all gung-ho and confident, "Here's one chapter knocked off from the to-do list this year".

Switch to two days later, the teacher asks you something from the same chapter. Ahh, you have done it and you know you will answer that. But, just as you try to remember what you learnt just two days back, it just slips your mind. You have read it, you understood it, you know its just there but the elusive brainwave doesn't come. Its just there somewhere in the fuzzy world of your brain but it refuses to come to your tongue tip. You are left wondering what happened to the understanding you were so sure about just two days back. Two days more and it becomes a distant dream. A couple weaks later and the only thing you remember is that you read that chapter and some terms and vocabulary but you forget how everything connects.

You are not alone. Research suggests that we tend to forget 18% of what we read within the first 24 hours. Then how do we remember stuff?

All of us have faced this problem. All of us have, at some point or the other, wondered about the fleeting nature of "learning". The way out however, is simple.

Since we forget majority of what we read very soon, we need to reinforce what we read and learn periodically. Its the same refrain, we lose what we don't use.

This brings us to a very powerful learning tool namely revision. Review, review and review. Now, the exact nature of this review might vary slightly from subject to subject. In math, for example, a review might mean solving difficult problems of the chapter a number fo times while in a subject like Economics, it may mean just re-reading important concepts.

Another very important aspect of review is what you plan to review. If you try to re-read the whole chapter every time you review, it will take so much time and will add very little value. So, you need to plan your revisions smartly. Here are a few techniques we recommend to review stuff:

1. Always take notes, or if possible, underline important portions in the book and write notes in the margin. If you have borrowed a book from the library or you want others to use the book after you, you are better off keeping the book clean and taking notes in a separate note-book. Taking notes has an added advantage of re-inforcing whatever you have read becuase writing it embeds it deeper in your mind.
2. Notes need to be short and just cover crucial points in the chapter. A lot of points serve as anchors - just remembering one anchor point reminds you a lot of auxilliary points. Make sure that your notes cover such anchor points but are not so lengthy that you take the same time to read them as you would do if yo read the whole book.
3. Plan the first revision within 24 hours of the first reading.
4. Thereafter, plan on periodic reviews. Better still, fix a day of the week as a Review Day and just do a full review of everything that you have made notes of that year.
5. Topics that you read long time back and have reviewed some 4-5 times may be scheduled for review every fortnight. Be creative while scheduling reviews. Everyone would have their unique optimum review style which would work best for them.
6. Start with some review plan and then keep observing what works for you and what doesn't. Keep tweaking your review plan so as to finally achieve your best review plan.

Reading, learning and high performance will be much less stressful and much more enriching and enjoyable if you keep utilize this simple but very effective technique.