Then at some point, a voice in your head said: “I don’t have enough time.” As Dr. BJ Fogg from Stanford University shares in his book Tiny Habits:

Change is a process, just like growing a flower in the garden or healing a cut on your finger. And like any process, there are things we can do to optimize it — to speed things along and make course corrections along the way.

We can lean into what has worked for others as inspiration on how to get started.

In this article, we’ll discuss three periods in your day that you can use to jumpstart studying for your FAA written test.

Study in the morning

For many people, the early morning can be a productive time to get things done. Instead of feeling groggy and hoping for just a few more minutes of sleep, you can wake up rested knowing that you have time for yourself. It’s quiet and for a little while, you can set aside obligations. That’s time for you to make progress with your aviation journey.

To do that, we need to build discipline around our sleep. That starts with examining the day before like a scientist.

Gary Keller and Jay Papasan argue that making sleep a priority is key to your success. Keller and Papasan comment on the value of sleep: “Protect your sleep by determining when you must go to bed each night and don’t allow yourself to be lured away from it. If you’re committed to your wake-up time, you can stay up late only so many nights before you’re forced to hit the hay at a decent hour,” they said. “…When you’ve connected proper sleep with success, you’ll have a good enough reason to get up and you’ll go to sleep at the right time,” they wrote in their book, The One Thing.

Imagine being able to wake up an hour earlier each morning to study for your test. That’s about five hours a week. Each hour moves you a step closer to reaching your dreams. Instead of dreaming about becoming a pilot, you could take action.

Next, we’ll talk about another part of your day where you can try studying.

Study right after work

People tend to decompress right after work. This can make it challenging to have the willpower to study when you get home. However, there is an in-between. That’s the time right after work and before you get home. You just need a few things to get started with studying for your FAA written test:

1. Your computer. Start early and build the habit of studying from a computer. I recommend a MacBook Air if you don’t have a laptop.
2. An internet connection.
3. A quiet place.

One and two are self-explanatory. You’ll need your computer to access your online ground school and other materials. A quiet place to study is key. Eventually, when you go take your written test, it will be done on a computer in a quiet area. When you practice studying in a quiet area, what you are really doing is rehearsing for the upcoming performance where you’ll do well on your FAA test.

What if your workplace is loud? Take a minute, for example, to make a list of all places that you could use as an alternative.

Here are some ideas:

• Another location within your workplace (e.g., staff lounge, conference room, etc.)
• A library
• A coworking center
• A coffee shop

Next, choose a couple of them that you can test out this week by studying for one hour. Silence distractions from around you by investing in a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones from Bose. What if you work remotely from home? Choose a dedicated space in your home to study.

If your work schedule is flexible, then studying after an energizing activity may work for you. That’s what we’ll explore next.

Study after a daily routine

Think, for a moment, about the activities that you do on a daily basis. Some of them you may do on autopilot, like making a coffee in the morning. Now focus on the routines where you feel great after.

That could be going for a walk in your neighborhood during sunrise, having a delicious lunch, or perhaps heading to the gym right after work to exercise. Does your schedule allow you to study after any of these routines?

Here’s what has worked for some aspiring pilots like you:

• “Perfect for someone like me who works a full time job and studies during breaks. Now I don’t have to roll into work with all my books.”
• “For a lunch break, or any time you have a free minute you can just…have the same quality material.”
• “Provided me a way to keep my mind in the sky while juggling a full time job.”

As authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath write in their book, The Power of Moments, “Better to take a risk, try something, and distill the answer from experience rather than from navel-gazing. Action leads to insight more often than insight leads to action.”

Remember that taking action is important for learning what works and what does not. When you try something and it doesn’t work, you move a little closer to discovering what does work. This means that you can learn from failure. Three parts of your day where you can test studying for your FAA written test are:

1. Study in the morning
2. Study right after work
3. Study after a daily routine

When, where, and how do you plan to study for your FAA written test?

If you struggled with following through, then you are not alone.

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret to getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks and then starting on the first one,” wrote Mark Twain.

Our desire to make changes in our lives can be a good thing. However, we sometimes miss a few important pieces of the puzzle. And these missing parts can cause us frustration when we fall off track.

Here are three ways to use your calendar as a tool to get started with studying for your PPL written test.

Be specific

One of the challenges with goals is that we are sometimes vague. For example, at the beginning of the year, millions of people across the world create New Year’s resolutions like “I want to exercise more!” You can see proof of this if you have ever set foot in a gym in January.

What does “I want to exercise more” really mean? We can unknowingly fall into this trap when studying for the PPL written.

Details are the antidote to vagueness. Details lift the fog around your goals to bring clarity by helping you get specific.

What if you already know you need to study, but you’ve struggled with getting started?

In this case, starting small can help you remove some of your mental barriers so you can move forward. Studying for one hour is an example of starting small. The power of one hour is in its simplicity. You are already doing other activities for an hour each day. And studying doesn’t require a bunch of apps or the latest iPad — choose a quiet place in your home, turn on your laptop, open your Google Doc for taking notes, log in to your online ground school, and begin.

Now we are getting more specific with our goal. “I want to study for my written more” becomes “I will study for my PPL written test for 1 hour a day.” We can improve it further by adding details to describe it in vivid detail. Ask questions like these:

– Where?
– When?
– How often?
– What time frame?

The vague idea of “I want to study more” is then transformed into a good enough goal to start with:

“My goal is to study for my PPL written at my desk in the morning for one hour five times a week within one month from today.”

Let’s look at a couple more examples together:

– What if 1 hour is too much? Try scaling back to 30 minutes. → “My goal is to study for my PPL written at my desk in the morning for 30 minutes five times a week within one month from today.”
– What if my schedule changes frequently? Look for parts of your day that are predictable. → “My goal is to study for my PPL written during my lunch for 30 minutes five times a week within one month from today. I’ll also schedule two additional one-hour study sessions during the week.”

As the authors, Dan Heath and Chip Heath, write in their book Switch, “In one study, they tracked college students who had the option to earn extra credit in a class by writing a paper about how they spent Christmas Eve. But there was a catch: To earn the credit, they had to submit the paper by December 26. Most students had good intentions of writing the paper, but only 33 percent of them got around to writing and submitting it. Other students in the study were required to set action triggers — to note, in advance, exactly when and where they intended to write the report (for example, “I’ll write this report in my dad’s office on Christmas morning before everyone gets up”). A whopping 75% percent of those students wrote the report.”

What this study is suggesting, in other words, is that writing down when and where you’ll study for your PPL written can dramatically improve the chances of you following through.

Try this approach with your study goal right now.

1. Grab a sheet of paper or a post-it note and a pen.
2. On the left, write your original goal. Then on the right, write your new goal that is filled with details.
3. Now read it back to yourself. Notice how you feel when you say it out loud.

Next, we’re going to talk about setting yourself up for success.

Be realistic

When we begin some type of change, there’s going to be a period where you struggle. It usually happens near the beginning. It’s the period where you run into a lot of challenges and where people tend to quit. I imagine you know someone who has experienced this:

– Decided to become a morning person and get up every day at 5 am…only to sleep through their wake-up alarm from not getting enough sleep.
– Decided to join a gym and work out every day…only to fall off track after a couple of days because they were too sore to do anything else.

For this reason, we want to be realistic about how much studying we can do during the week.

An ambitious doctor, lawyer, engineer, software developer, or another professional may already have a demanding career. This is where starting with studying for 1 hour a day shines. Here’s feedback from someone who decided to follow through with studying:

“As a busy professional pursuing my private pilot license, time management is crucial…saved me countless hours. The 8 practice tests helped me identify my weak areas quickly, and the detailed explanations helped me understand concepts I was struggling with. Passed my written exam with a 92%.”

What you are really doing is changing your identity to show yourself “I can really do this.” Each one-hour study session is a small win. As you rack up wins, the momentum compels you almost like a magnet to move forward with your aviation journey.

By planning for failure, we can anticipate where we may drift off course and understand how to get back on track.

Be flexible

Do you remember that fable about the oak and the reeds? The oak is mighty, while the reeds bend with the winds. During a hurricane, the oak gets knocked over. The reeds, with their resilience, are okay.

You want to be able to bounce back like the reeds. To do that, think about three to five areas where you may fall off track with your goal.

For example, let’s say you want to study for an hour in the morning before work. However, you go to bed late and your mornings are already busy. What small changes could you make to help you follow through?

Here are some ideas to overcome this challenge:

– Limit caffeine to earlier in the day so you naturally feel tired at night.
– Set a bedtime alarm on your phone to remind you to go to bed at least an hour earlier.
– Update your wake-up alarm to an hour earlier.
– Leave your phone in a different room of your home.

What if you start to build some consistency after a few days, sleep in, and miss your study session?

Remember that setbacks are part of the process. Don’t stay idle. Instead, continue the next day with your studying.

Now it’s time to put your good enough goal into action by using a calendar. The primary reason for using your calendar is how easy it makes it to get started with studying. One of the secondary reasons is the ability to adapt when something comes up.

Here are the steps to set up your calendar to help you succeed with studying for your PPL written.

1. Choose a calendar app. Start with a calendar that is available on your computer. That could be Apple, Google, Outlook, etc. Don’t overthink it. Choose one and move forward.
2. Add the calendar to all of your devices. Instead of trying to remember to study, have your devices remind you to study.
3. Create a calendar event with the details. Include links to your Google Doc and your online ground school.
4. Adjust the alerts/notifications. Set to at time of event.
5. Set your calendar event to repeat. Start with Monday through Friday.

How to create calendar events to make it easier to study for your PPL written

“As any coach or athlete will tell you, consistency of effort over the long run is everything…even more than the effort a gritty person puts in on a single day, what matters is that they wake up the next day, and the next, ready to get on that treadmill and keep going,” wrote Angela Duckworth in Grit.

Your calendar is the best tool that you have to get started with studying for your PPL written test. Here are three ways to make the most of your calendar so you can prepare for your test:

1. Be specific
2. Be realistic
3. Be flexible

Whether you are just getting started with studying for your PPL written or you fell off track and are ready to continue forward, remember that you prioritize what is important to you. If you are ever in doubt, pause and think back to something that you already learned to do, like how to drive a car. Then remind yourself that your FAA knowledge test is part of the process in your aviation journey.

What is your biggest challenge when it comes to preparing for your PPL written test?

An FAA written exam or written test is officially known as an FAA Airman Knowledge Test. The FAA uses multiple choice questions on the test. They can be a direct question with several answers, an incomplete sentence followed by several answers that complete the sentence, or a stated problem with several answers based on a provided image. Only one answer can be correct, and the others are referred to as distractors.

One thing that aspiring pilots like you have in common is a desire to pass the FAA written test.

As Atul Gawande shares in his book The Checklist Manifesto:

It is common to misconceive how checklists function in complex lines of work. They are not comprehensive how-to guides, whether for building a skyscraper or getting a plan out of trouble. They are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals.

The difference is how we approach our skills. Understanding how to use a checklist is a skill that will help you in your aviation journey.

Here is a mental checklist to build confidence with practice questions while preparing for your FAA knowledge test.

1. What are they really asking about?

Our checklist begins with simplifying a question to the key ideas. You’ll do this by prioritizing what is important and setting aside extra details. At first, it will seem like everything is important. Plus, the process may seem slow. Trust the process. Your speed will improve over time.

Let’s start with the following practice question.

At the discretion of the PIC and considering their effects on other aircraft in the area, what aircraft lights should normally be illuminated when taxiing on or across any runway to increase the conspicuousness of the aircraft?
– All exterior lights.
– All interior lights.
– Only the position lights and the rotating beacon.

We can use the following steps to help us understand what they are really asking about.

1) Read the question.
2) Identify the key ideas.
3) Create your version.
4) Verify it makes sense.

First, read the practice question above. Build the discipline to read a question so you can minimize silly mistakes like this:

“The worst part is there are questions that I know I missed that I NEED to know and are so simple to review.”

Second, identify the key ideas. Here’s what that could look like with the bold text below:

At the discretion of the PIC and considering their effects on other aircraft in the area, what aircraft lights should normally be illuminated when taxiing on or across any runway to increase the conspicuousness of the aircraft?

Third, create your version. Paraphrasing will reinforce that you are on the right track. Here’s a possible before and after:

At the discretion of the PIC and considering their effects on other aircraft in the area, what aircraft lights should normally be illuminated when taxiing on or across any runway to increase the conspicuousness of the aircraft?

↓

What lights should the pilot in command turn on when taxiing on a runway to help make their aircraft more visible?

Now you have an easier to understand question.

Fourth, verify it makes sense. A way to quickly do that is to verbalize. That means read your question out loud. If you get stuck, try to connect the key ideas from the question to the real world using a scenario. In other words, think about the question behind the question.

If we distill the original practice question to an underlying theme, we discover it’s about safety.

Next, let’s move closer to finding the best answer by tapping into our existing knowledge.

2. How does this relate to what I already know?

Instead of starting from scratch, we can lean into our memories to steer us in the right direction. These include skills you’ve developed, knowledge you’ve acquired, challenges you’ve overcome, your unique experiences, and more.

In Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel’s book Make It Stick, they talk about how learning affects us:

Learning always builds on a store of prior knowledge. We interpret and remember events by building connections to what we already know.

Let’s bring back our practice question. As a reminder, here’s the original alongside the paraphrased version:

At the discretion of the PIC and considering their effects on other aircraft in the area, what aircraft lights should normally be illuminated when taxiing on or across any runway to increase the conspicuousness of the aircraft?

↓

What lights should the pilot in command turn on when taxiing on a runway to help make their aircraft more visible?

Take 30 seconds to think of the ways that you can connect the question above to your knowledge. Here are some examples:
– You saw an airliner taking off while waiting at the gate for a recent flight.
– You spotted a Cessna 172 taxiing in a video while studying your online ground school.
– You noticed a flight instructor do something while getting ready to enter a runway during your discovery flight.
– You thought about how this scenario could apply to your car.
– You read something about this in the Aeronautical Information Manual.

At this point, you may feel nudged with a correct answer in mind. And if not, that is okay.

Let’s talk about what the next steps look like.

3. What are my next steps?

So far we’ve gone through the steps to understand the question and connect it to something we already know. If there are additional materials like a figure, chart, or diagram, then use it to continue towards your answer. If there are no supplementary materials, then we can begin working through our answer choices.

Let’s bring back our original practice test question.

At the discretion of the PIC and considering their effects on other aircraft in the area, what aircraft lights should normally be illuminated when taxiing on or across any runway to increase the conspicuousness of the aircraft?
– All exterior lights.
– All interior lights.
– Only the position lights and the rotating beacon.

Based on our earlier steps, we know they are asking about what aircraft lights a pilot should turn on while taxiing on a runway. Our intuition may say this is about safety. Our experiences may have us remember a specific moment from our past.

We’re now ready to work through the answer choices. I recommend starting from the top and working your way through the list. The exception is a calculation question where you have an answer that is an exact match or really close to one of the choices.

Here’s our practice question one more time with feedback in the brackets.

At the discretion of the PIC and considering their effects on other aircraft in the area, what aircraft lights should normally be illuminated when taxiing on or across any runway to increase the conspicuousness of the aircraft?
– All exterior lights. [Correct answer. If we want to make our aircraft more visible, then turning on all exterior lights is the best option.]
– All interior lights. [Distractor. Does turning on the interior lights make the aircraft more visible?]
– Only the position lights and the rotating beacon. [Distractor. What aircraft lights are required for VFR flight? Plus, the question asks how to increase the visibility of the aircraft.]

Let’s talk about how this approach helps you succeed. Check out the comments below:

– “1/3 of the questions I’ve either never seen were in the test, or the questions and answers were worded very differently.”
– “I did not do good on my PPL exam. Got a bunch of questions I’ve never seen before.”
– “Once the exam started I quickly noticed all the questions I were getting were only somewhat familiar, extremely wordy, or just way too similar of answer choices.”

What do you notice about the feedback?

The FAA does not release live ​​airman knowledge test questions. Start early and build the discipline to read each question and state it in your own words. This approach helps you develop a process to handle a question that you may not have seen before.

Malcolm Gladwell describes how we can learn faster by asking experts for help in his book Blink:

And everyone knows that it’s better to have an expert show you — and not just tell you — how to play tennis or golf or a musical instrument. We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.

Here is a video walkthrough of how to approach FAA practice test questions.

Walkthrough of a direct question

If you found value in the video above, then I have more to share. Let me know where I can send more videos:

Three keys for approaching FAA practice test questions are:

– What are they really asking about?
– How does this relate to what I already know?
– What are my next steps?

Whether you’ve just started preparing for the FAA written test, fallen off track and are restarting your studying again, or you have your FAA knowledge test coming up in a couple of weeks, remember you can learn the skill of how to approach FAA test questions.

When you think about your FAA knowledge test, how does that make you feel?