How to Focus on Studying?

College can be overwhelming when you're trying to maintain your grades, work a part-time job and/or balance relationships. Most of us get distracted by push notifications, text messages and phone calls. According to research conducted by Dr. Larry Rosen, professor emeritus at California State University, Dominguez Hills, "the typical student" is "distracted for at least five out of every 15 minutes they set aside to study," most often as a result of texting and social media use.

With so much going on, it can be very difficult to stay focused, but it's not impossible.

Here are seven tips to help enhance your productivity:

1. Get organized with a to-do list
2. Silence alerts and keep open Internet tabs to a minimum
3. Break big projects into small pieces
4. Use music and headphones to cut down on noise
5. Find the best environment for efficient studying
6. Clean up and organize your work space
7. Reward yourself for accomplishments

Make a Schedule or To-Do List

Juggling multiple projects and deadlines at school can be stressful. When you're working on one assignment, it's easy to forget about another. You can help organize your deadlines and manage your time more efficiently with a proper schedule. Figure out when you're most productive and set time aside for homework and activities. Keeping a planner or digital calendar will help you keep track of your classes and assignments. Paper planners are perfect for those who like writing to-do lists and scheduling appointments by hand. One study suggests that the simple act of writing things out helps boost your concentration and memory.

Turn Off Alerts

Constant notifications and text messages are every college student's enemy. Put your phone on silent or in "Do Not Disturb" mode, and close unnecessary tabs on your computer. If you need the Internet, keep one tab open. You can fight online distractions by blocking or hiding time-wasting websites and apps.

Break Down Your Work into Smaller Tasks

Defeat procrastination by breaking a large project into small pieces. It's easier to motivate yourself to do something in smaller tasks rather than jumping into a huge one. If you're having a difficult time studying or getting work done, break up your time effectively. Try giving yourself a 10-minute break for every 45-50 minutes of work you do. Studies show that taking breaks can help you retain information and increase productivity.

Use Headphones

If you're working in a noisy environment, use noise-canceling headphones. Listening to music through earbuds can also tune out distracting noises like people talking too loudly or construction work. Often, though, music with lyrics can be too distracting. Researchers suggest listening to classical or instrumental music to improve concentration.

Find the Right Place to Do Work

Some students work best with a little background noise, while others need complete quiet. Get to know your work style and the type of atmosphere you prefer. Are you the kind of person who works better in silence at the library? Or do you prefer the campus coffee shop with ambient noise? Try a few different spaces and see how each study session works out.

Clear Your Desk

Is your desk covered with stacks of papers? Is your computer monitor framed with layers of sticky notes? If so, it's time to get organized. A messy workspace can keep you from getting your work done. Go through your desk and keep only the essentials. A clean workspace can help reduce anxiety and make room for motivation.

Reward Yourself

A little motivation can go a long way. Setting up a reward system is a good way to encourage yourself to do something. For example, if you finish an essay without any distractions, give yourself a reward like watching a video or taking a nap.

How to Avoid Distractions ?

1. Find your ‘why’

Fighting distractions: find out your whyLack of motivation. Lack of interest. Lack of purpose.

Call it whatever you want to, but it’s the single biggest and pivotal factor behind most distractions.

Do you think Roger Federer gets distracted in his practice sessions? (BTW, he too found it difficult to put in long sessions early on in his career, and back then he used to admire Mirka’s – whom he married later on – work ethic.)

Do you get distracted when you’re watching YouTube videos? Are you coaxed into playing video games or surfing Facebook?

“Son, I haven’t seen you checking Facebook for a week now. Are you alright?”

Sounds weird, right?

You don’t procrastinate when you’ve to play video games. You’re already on to these things big time on your own because they interest you. And when it comes to things that matter to your academic and professional future, it’s the opposite. You’re disinterested.

That’s the fundamental reason why you get distracted so easily.

So how do you motivate yourself for less interesting, but important, matters such as academics?

Think of why you’re doing what you’re doing. (In most cases, you already know the answer.) For example, if you’re a high school student, you know that getting good grades and excelling in competitive exams, among other things, are important for you to get admission in your desired college, which is an important step toward achieving your career goals. And compare the answer with the contrasting result. So in this case, the two contrasting scenarios could be:

If you get admission to your desired college, you’ve a strong chance to achieve your short-term career goals and to be financially independent

If you don’t get admission to your desired college, you may not be able to achieve your short-term career goals, and hence your current situation may prolong

This contrast should be at the top of your mind. You should even write it down, and put it on the bathroom mirror and walls where you see it so many times every day that it becomes part of your conscious mind.

This (study) is just one of several motivational challenges we face every day. You could be struggling to motivate yourself to work harder to become a better tennis player or learn a new skill or lose weight.

Whatever the goal is, find your ‘why’, and compare the two potential contrasting results – success and failure.

And, in your daily schedule, few minutes before you sit down to work on a task, remind yourself of the contrast (the ‘why’, in other words) and where the next hour will take you in that direction. That connection between what you’re about to do and your ‘why’ will keep your interest level higher than usual.

Do the same when you’re losing momentum.

2. Wage war on distractions from phone and digital media

Avoid digital distractionsDistractions from phones and digital media have taken an almost epidemic proportion. And worse, they can distract us so easily: just a click.

It’s not that we don’t realize the deleterious effect of digital noise on our productivity. We do. Yet, we don’t escape.

Here are few steps you can take to limit digital distractions during your productive sessions:

Bury the phone: Turn your phone to silent mode, and bury it under the pillow or dump it in a drawer.

Get off the internet: Either pull the plug on internet or use browser extensions such as StayFocused to nuke the internet or study at a place with no access to internet. I use StayFocused, and it has worked wonderfully for me. I can tell you from my experience that once you know that you’re off internet for few hours, your mind adjusts to the new reality, and the deprivation turns out to be much less painful than we think. I started with blocking internet for 30 minutes, and now I routinely block it for eight hours (if I don’t need internet for my work) at a stretch. Just as you build physical muscles through practice in gym, you can build anti-internet muscles too through practice.

It’s not as tough as you think. Just start small.

Keep only one project open: If you’re working on a computer, keep only the bare minimum files and tabs open. Close everything else. This will keep you on just one thing, and make you less likely to fall to distractions.

Read your favorite articles through a reader service: Instead of checking and rechecking your favorite websites for the latest article, read them through a reader service such as Feedly, which pulls in all the articles to an inbox-type format as and when they’re published. This format allows you to access all the articles from one webpage.

If we check our devices once in few hours, then digital distraction wouldn’t be the menace it is. The problem is we can’t resist checking and rechecking them every few minutes for the fear of missing out on something important. Many, in fact, get anxious if they’re separated from their devices for long (recall the time when you faced hours of separation from your phone). This fear of missing on something important is completely unfounded and irrational, and can be shed by gradually increasing your period of digital abstinence.

3. Avoid multi-tasking

Multi-tasking is one of the biggest distracters for youngsters.

Three researchers divided around 100 Stanford undergrad students into two groups – heavy multitaskers and light multitaskers of media sources (internet, electronic documents, texting, and so on) – and asked them to concentrate on a problem, simultaneously introducing lots of distractions. (Heavy multitaskers of media sources are the types with dozens of browser tabs and few other projects open. Light multitaskers, on the other hand, have much less digital clutter on their devices at any point.)

The researchers expected heavy multitaskers to have better focus on the given problem amidst multiple distractions. After all, they’re the ones who are much more used to distractions. But, surprisingly, light multitaskers did better. On every attentional test that the researchers gave, light multitaskers did better, sometimes significantly. To quote Anthony Wagner, one of the researchers in the study:

When they’re [students] in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they’re not able to filter out what’s not relevant to their current goal. That failure to filter means they’re slowed down by that irrelevant information.

So if a person is multitasking on three tasks (math assignment, chatting, and internet surfing), she is getting information from all the three sources – and memory – even though she may be in this moment working on the assignment. This failure to filter out information from the other two sources slows her down.

That’s the problem.

Human minds have evolved to pay attention to one task at a time. When you’re multitasking, you’re essentially switching (your attention) back and forth between those tasks, which is nothing but huge distraction. John Medina, a leading authority on brain study and founding director of two brain research institutes, in his book Brain Rules, says:

The brain is a sequential processor, unable to pay attention to two things at the same time. Businesses and schools praise multitasking, but research clearly shows that it reduces productivity and increases mistakes.

You may be wondering at this stage, “How can I then walk and talk at the same time without compromising on any of them?”

In those few cases of multitasking where one does fine on both the tasks, one of the tasks is automated in your long-term memory. In the aforesaid example, you can walk and talk at the same time without compromising on any of the two, because walking is automated and you’ve to pay attention to only talking. Try talking and watching TV. You’ll compromise on both.

You can multitask, of course, but you can’t pay attention to more than one thing at a time. And it’s attention (you may also call it focus) that gets things done.

In essence, multitasking is an extreme form of distraction wherein you’re getting distracted every few minutes as you switch between tasks. Avoid it. You’ll achieve much less when you read and surf internet intermittently for an hour than when you take one task after the other sequentially for the same duration. And stop admiring your friends who seem to be multitasking so effortlessly. In reality, they’re working subpar.

4. Maintain a distraction sheet

When professional writers write, they only write. They don’t pause even to look for a small piece of missing information, which would take just a minute or two to search. If, for example, they find that they’re missing an important statistic, they won’t pause and start searching it, because it’ll be a distraction from the main task of writing. (Remember, how each distraction can set you back by several minutes.) Instead, they’ll leave a placeholder at the point where the stat was to be used, continue writing, and come back to the placeholder when they’re done with writing.

You should do something similar when you’re at work. In the middle of your session, if you recall that you’ve to pay your phone bill today, then don’t drift to your mobile service provider’s website. Note the task down on a sheet of paper (also called distraction sheet), and continue with your work. If you get the urge to check Leonardo Dicaprio’s age, just note it down in the distraction sheet, and continue working. In short, don’t chase random thoughts. Your motto should be ‘be here now’.

The act of noting down these distractions will free your mind of them, and you can focus solely on the task at hand. And once you’re done with the session, you can accomplish the tasks you noted in the distraction list. Simple, right?

5. Control worries and unwanted thoughts

Fighting distractions: control unwanted thoughts and worries. So many things become so automated in our lives that we don’t even realize when they creep in, when they leave, and what consequences they heap on us. One such is unwanted thoughts: worries (‘what if I don’t score 90 percent’), unpleasant experiences (‘why did he say this to me’), and plain random thoughts or daydreaming (‘what about South Africa for my next holiday’).

Such unwanted thoughts can creep in anytime, often in the middle of a productive session, pulling your attention away from the task at hand. This is nothing but distraction.

How can you control such thoughts?

Become aware of the thought: As I said earlier, sometimes we get so used to things – good and bad – that we’re not even cognizant that something has taken us over. So, first of all, the moment an unwanted thought strikes, recognize it immediately. That’s awareness.

Note it down in your distraction sheet: Once you know that an unwanted thought has struck you, note it down in your distraction sheet (covered earlier).

Deal with the thoughts after the session is done.

After the session, for each of your thoughts, ask yourself: ‘is this going to matter a year from now?’

If the answer is ‘no’, then dump the thought then and there, and if it’s ‘yes’, then deal with it.

For example, if you’re bedeviled by the worry of not getting 90 percent in a subject, and if the answer to aforesaid question is ‘yes’, then deal with it. How do you deal with it? By being better prepared. Period. There is no other way. Worry and anxiety won’t get you the desired result. They can in fact affect your result adversely.

If someone’s comments are disturbing you, then the answer to the aforesaid question in most cases will be ‘no’. People say and do all sort of things, and many times we attach more meaning to those words or actions than even they intended. And many times the person doesn’t even matter to us.

Drop the thought then and there, if the answer is ‘no’. If you accumulate such thoughts even for few days, you’re burdening yourself with mental distress and loss of focus, which will take much heavier toll than those ‘disparaging’ comments. And if the answer is a rare ‘yes’, then meet the person and clarify.

Hope that this curated infoguide will help you get value:)

Wish you a Good Luck!!