I thought I would share some of my study techniques as it might help someone else help make their studies a bit more efficient, so here goes.
Efficient studying
Make sure you have no distractions, you don’t want to be interrupted by facebook notifications etc. Commit to studying efficiently for something like 25 mins, then take a short brake for a few minutes and then repeat. You can set an alarm for 25 mins to get started. This is called the Pomodoro Technique and has many advantages. It helped me get more focused while studying, and the breaks also helps you retain more of what you read.
Active studies
Don’t just read the book cover-to-cover or watch videos while idling, you will remember much more of what you are studying if you are actively taking notes and putting things in your own words. This also makes it much easier to repeat the things that you felt were new or hard.
Repeat
Repeat what you read multiple times, in increasing intervals. There are special techniques for how long you should wait before you repeat something for maximum retention as well, but for me I just made notes and then transferred the notes into small bite-sized questions and put them into a flashcard app (www.cram.com) so I could easily repeat topics on the bus etc.
CCIE-specific
For the CCIE lab exam the most important thing is to do actual labs on IOS software, sitting at the CLI and trying out different things. You need to get really comfortable with the core topics and get really fast at them as well. I usually don’t like to overlearn things because it’s so very boring, but for the CCIE I think you really need to, otherwise you just won’t have the speed required at the exam.