Staying Focused on Your Studies
If you find yourself doodling and dawdling more than reading and remembering, try these solutions:
Create a work environment in which you’re comfortable. The size, style, and placement of your desk, chair, and lighting may all affect whether or not you’re distracted from the work at hand. Take the time to design the area that’s perfect for you. Needless to say, anything that you know will distract you—a girlfriend’s picture, a radio or TV, whatever, should disappear from your study area.
Turn up the lights. Experiment with the placement and intensity of lighting in your study area until you find what works for you, both in terms of comfort and as a means of staying awake and focused.
Set some rules. Let family, relatives, and especially friends know how important your studying is and that designated study hours are inviolate.
Take the breaks you need. Don’t just follow well-intentioned but bogus advice about how long you should study before taking a break. Break when you need to.
Select a study symbol. Choose something you can associate with studying, such as a hat, a scarf, even one of those little trolls people keep on their desks. Whenever it’s time to study, just jam on the hat, wrap yourself in the scarf, or set the troll prominently on your desk. It’s study time! Not only will this “get you in the mood” to study, it will serve as a warning to roommates, friends, or family members that you are working. Don’t associate your new “study symbol” with anything but studying. Don’t wear your study hat to baseball games or leave your troll on the desk while you’re on the phone with friends. The instant your study symbol is associated with something other than studying, it begins to lose its effectiveness as a study aid.
Fighting Tiredness and Boredom
You’ve chosen the best study spot, and no one could fault you on its setup. So why are you still using pencils to prop up your eyelids? Here’s what to do if your energy has taken a brief vacation:
Take a nap. What a concept! When you’re too tired to study, take a short nap to revive yourself. Maximize that nap’s effect by keeping it short—20 minutes is ideal, 40 minutes absolute maximum. After that, you go into another phase of sleep and you may wake even more tired than before.
Have a drink. A little caffeine won’t harm you—a cup of coffee or tea, a glass of soda. Just be careful not to mainline it—caffeine’s “wake-up” properties seem to reverse when you reach a certain level, making you far more tired than you were!
Turn down the heat. You needn’t build an igloo out back, but too warm a room will inevitably leave you dreaming of sugarplums...while your paper remains unwritten on your desk.
Shake a leg. Go for a walk, high step around the kitchen, do a few jumping jacks—even mild physical exertion will give you an immediate lift.
Change your study schedule. Presuming you have some choice here, find a way to study when you are normally more awake and/or most efficient. Studying with Small Kids Since so many more of you are going to school while raising a family, I want to give you some ideas that will help you cope with the Charge of the Preschool Light Brigade:
Plan activities to keep the kids occupied. The busier you are in school and/or at work, the more time your kids will want to spend with you when you are home. If you schedule some time with them, it may be easier for them to play alone the rest of the time, especially if you’ve created projects they can work on while you’re working on your homework.
Make the kids part of your study routine. Kids love routine, so why not include them in yours? If 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. is always “Mommy’s Study Time,” they will soon get used to it, especially if you make spending other time with them a priority and give them something to do during those hours. Explaining the importance of what you’re doing—in a way that includes some ultimate benefit for them—will also motivate them to be part of your “study team.”
Use the television as a babysitter. While many of you will have a problem with this—it’s one that I and my daughter dealt with weekly, if not daily—it may be the lesser of two evils. And you can certainly rent (or DVR or TiVo) enough quality shows so you don’t have to worry about the little darlings watching street gangs bash skulls in (or bashing skulls themselves on some video game system).
Plan your study accordingly. All of these suggestions will not keep your kids from interrupting every now and then. While you can minimize such intrusions, it’s virtually impossible to eliminate them entirely. So don’t try—plan your schedule assuming them. For one, that means taking more frequent breaks to spend five minutes with your kids. They’ll be more likely to give you the 15 or 20 minutes you need if they get periodic attention themselves.
Find help. Spouses can occasionally take the kids out for dinner and a movie. (And trust me, the kids will encourage you to study more if you institute this practice!) Relatives can babysit (at their homes) on a rotating basis. Playmates can be invited over (allowing you to send your darling to their house the next day). You may be able to trade babysitting with other parents at school. And professional day care may be available at your child’s school or in someone’s home for a couple of hours a day.
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