Day 5 of 5, 22 min

Build a full map of your own topic

Everything this week in one move: a real topic, built into a map you made yourself. Here is what done looks like, and how it goes wrong.

1 Start here

Everything this week comes together in one move: taking a real topic and building it into a map you made yourself. Pre-study gave you the keywords. Grouping and the two-four rule gave you the shape. Chunking gave you the meaning. Now you put it all on one page.

2 The idea

What a finished map looks like — The target: one topic, a few clear groups, two to four things in each, and relationships drawn last. Notice what it is not.

This is what done looks like

Here is the target, and here are the ways it goes wrong. Step through them. Learning to spot a bad map in your own work is most of the skill, because the shape of your map is a picture of your thinking.

watch Justin diagnose real maps ls-lc47

3 Now you

Build a full map of your own topic

This is the capstone. Take a real topic you are studying and build the whole thing here: group the terms two to four at a time, then switch to Link and draw the relationships last. Hit Check as you go. Aim for the clean shape you saw above, not the messy ones.

Build your map, group then link then check

Pick a colour, tap terms to group them.

4 Get feedback

Ask your own coach

Paste your work into ChatGPT with this. It plays the coach we designed, and pushes on your thinking instead of handing you the answer.

paste into ChatGPT

You are my learning coach, trained on the iCanStudy method by Justin Sung. I built a full map of [topic]. Here is a description of it, groups and the links between them: [paste]. Compare it to a good map: are my groups meaningful and two-to-four sized, did I draw relationships across groups, and does it show any of the classic problems (waterfalling, crossed links, a near-empty group)? Keep it under 120 words, specific, and encouraging.

5 Get feedback

Ask your own coach

Already covered above. Use the prompt whenever you finish a map, and keep the ones that come out clean.

6 Week checkpoint

Week 2 checkpoint

If you can do these on a real topic, without help, Week 2 is in you:

Pre-study a whole topic in under an hour and come out with the keywords.

Group them into four or five meaningful groups, two to four things each.

Lay it out non-linearly, with relationships drawn last.

Spot waterfalling, crossed links and a lone chunk in your own map.

You can now get a topic into your head, connected and structured. Next week you make sure it stays there.

← Day 4 Week 3: make it stick →