It’s always easy to come up with a million other things you could be doing besides studying. I always think it’s better to workout, do laundry, help my roomate with her Spanish paper (when I’m not even taking Spanish), or anything that makes me feel productive to avoid my actual task of studying. “Fake it ’till you make it” is the perfect advice for studying when your brain is already past maximum capacity. Create the perfect setting to studying and maybe, just maybe, you’ll trick your mind into getting in the work mode.
1. Leave you room/house and find a study spot.
Go outside, find a quiet coffee shop, or somewhere with good background noise is you can’t study in silence. By leaving your home, you are allowing yourself to focus on studying, because you’re not capable of completing other household tasks once you leave with just your computer and textbook/notebook.
Her Campus Favorites: Grab a coffee and sit at a table outside of Royal Blue Grocery in Highland Park Village. There are plenty of dogs to play with during study breaks and the setting creates a relaxing mood with the perfect amount of background noise. Check out Sip Stir in Uptown for a snapchat worthy location and great coffee and teas to counterbalance the feeling that your stuDYING.
Studies show that writing information down by hand will help with retention rates. Even if you type your notes in class to be able to keep up with the teacher speaking a mile a minute, create study guides and summaries of lectures in an organized fashion. By making your notes organized and uniform, it will be easier to comprehend and read on the page. Many Her Campus members have testified that making organized, color coded notes makes test taking easier because they could envision where a topic was on their outline or what color the information was in during the test.
3. Make your Notes Visually Appealing
Similar to above, you want to look at your notes and not feel overwhelmed with the scratches and arrows covering the page. Rewrite your notes using colorful pens and different fonts for each topic. In an outline, write each new topic’s header with a different color or a different font to make it easy to identify and return back to a specific area you might need to study more.
4. Take Tech Breaks
Let’s be real. It’s 2017 and we are attached to our phones whether we like it or not. Rather than turning your phone off or leaving it at home, set time increments to study. Study for a solid 20 minutes and then give yourself two minutes of technology. This will allow you to focus on your studies and also give you a reward for getting through the material. If you’re one of those old fashioned humans that doesn’t need to check her phone frequently, study for 20 minutes and then get up and stretch or get a coffee or drink some water. The brain’s attention span cannot last for hours on end, so giving yourself breaks will actually help you stay focused when you do study.
5. If All Else Fails…
If you find yourself sitting with your book open and your head nodding off like your about to become Sleeping Beauty for the next hour, take a nap, take a break, do the laundry, or excersize. Regardless of if you take a break, just make sure to break up your studying so that you are not doing 8 hours of studying in one sitting.
Remember that studying shouldn’t be something dreadful. The best way to do this is to not save it until the day before an exam. Studying for one hour each day for a week seems much more pleasant (and successful) that studying seven hours the night before a test.