Now that you know how to remove obstacles to effective study, let’s look at the essential habits you can install to ace your study time.
Habit 1: Build Your Attention Muscle
Poor attention is a huge obstacle to our ability to study effectively. But there’s a way to train it: through meditation. As Richie Davidson and Daniel Goleman, world leaders in contemplative neuroscience, claim: “Most every kind of meditation entails training attention.”
Before we go deeper, let’s quickly say that attention is the ability to retain moment-to-moment focus on what you deem necessary.
There’s compelling evidence, both scientific and anecdotal, that shows that meditation (depending on the technique you practice) trains several types of attention, including selective attention (focus on one thing and ignore others), vigilance (maintain attention over time) and allocation (noticing small or rapid shifts in our experience). The first two are particularly relevant for work and study. Meditation also shortens the attentional blink, lessens mind wandering, and can undo the pernicious effects of multitasking.
What’s more, we can use meditation break the boredom cycle. After spending lots of time training our attention, we learn to see the beauty in the mundane. We pay attention to the present and take satisfaction from simple things, rather than immediately filing them under “Boring” or “Insignificant”.
Adopt a daily meditation practice, especially attention-intensive forms of it, and watch it strengthens your attention muscle. You can learn via online meditation classes, in-person groups, or with resources on the internet. There’s no excuse!
2: Restrict Tech Use
It’s simple. Don’t look at your phone or social when you’re studying. Turn off your devices and leave them in another room.
On a similar track, start decreasing your frivolous use of screens and smartphones in daily life. You’ll transform your relationship to boredom, regain lost time, and free up mental resources.
Besides, having lost the habit of being constantly connected, you’ll find it much easier to cut out these distractions when studying.
Habit 3: Diet and Lifestyle
To study effectively, you’ll need to keep your energy high. To that end, it’s crucial you have a handle on your diet and lifestyle habits. You don’t need to go overboard to get ahead of most people in this regard. And the price you pay to adopt healthy habits is more than offset by the vitality you feel as a result.
Keeping yourself at a healthy weight means you can invest in your hard work all the energy you might otherwise spend getting around. And the benefits of regular exercise are so well understood that I don’t need to repeat them here. Get your eight hours of sleep – it’s seriously important for your mental and physical health – and drink plenty of water.
4: Take Regular Breaks
We venerate the idea of studying for hours on end, but let’s be honest, after about an hour of flat-out work, we usually start feeling overwhelmed and uninspired. Incorporating regular breaks into your study routines is a brilliant way to keep your energy levels high.
Set a timer of 30-45 minutes before undertaking a study task. Then dedicate all that time to that one task, stopping the timer if you’re interrupted. At the end, check it off your to-do list. Then get up and move away from where you’re working for a few minutes, before repeating again. This simple habit will transform your work and study.
And this even allows you to keep up with people while you work, if you have to. Keep your phone away from your desk and use it only during these periods. This acts as a nice counterbalance to this intense form of work.
Habit 5: Create Plans
It’s way easier to follow through on your study when you have a roadmap. What do you want or need to learn? What’s your deadline? What steps do you need to take? If you have this clear from the start, you’ll save precious time later on. And you give your mind much less wiggle room to debate and doubt along the way.
The key with plans is to actually carry them out. It’s easy to come up with a fancy study schedule, but not so easy to stick to it. Don’t get lazy, don’t procrastinate, and don’t give yourself excuses. Have the persistence to stick to your plan and patiently wait for the results to come.
Habit 6: Structure Your Time
On a similar track, schedule your study time such that your days and weeks run like clockwork. This even works for artsy and creative folks who tend to scorn structure. You don’t have to turn into an inflexible robot, but do install regularity.
This makes it much easier for your study to become a habit, meaning you’ll stick with it and start building momentum without realizing it. Giving yourself too much wiggle-room is a recipe for failure. Once you’ve built the habit, you can relax into the regularity and find a certain freedom in it.
To practice regularly, even when you seem to be getting nowhere, might at first seem onerous. But the day eventually comes when practicing becomes a treasured part of your life. You settle into it as if into your favorite easy chair, unaware of time and the turbulence of the world.
George Leonard