Wow, summer went by real fast! Now that the new school year is approaching quickly, many youth (including me) are trying to find different ways to help stay afloat and on top of their studies this upcoming school year.
One of the most common ways of maintaining our grades is to study. And to make it less mundane, here are 3 steps to make studying more fun!
1. Track EVERYTHING
Like a Snap streak, you can build a study streak as well! If you have a calendar, mark up every day that you’ve studied a specific subject, and see how many days you can maintain it for. If you don’t have a physical calendar, print one from online like this one. Tracking the days that you study can help motivate you to continue studying even when you don’t want to, because you will have a “streak” to protect.
You can also track your hours. This doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but it’s incredibly effective (at least, I think so). Like a fundraiser, you could draw a thermometer that has a tick mark for each 30 minutes and slowly fill it up! If you’re not that artistic like me though, you could also just draw a circle to represent each hour you want to study before a test and fill them up as you would a pie chart as you study. Tracking the hours you put in is very effective because you now have a visual representation of how much work you’ve put into learning something. This makes it harder to make excuses if you get a bad mark on a grade and you haven’t filled out any of the circles, and it’s very motivational. Never thought I’d say that about filling in random circles, but having a visual representation is just that powerful.
2. Make it OBVIOUS
Make studying the “path of least resistance”. Incorporate it into your daily habits. Like an app on your home screen, a reminder notification on your lock screen, or a newsletter in your Primary email inbox, obvious things demand the most amount of attention and are more likely to get done first.
How can you apply this to Step 2? Make it OBVIOUS by placing your calendar smack-dab in the middle of your wall, the first thing you see when you wake up. Place your pie-chart sheet on your desk. Show yourself exactly how much you have done, all the time. Make it easy to remind yourself to study.
But more importantly, make sure to set everything up in an obvious spot. Perhaps, instead of leaving your textbooks in your backpack or in a bookshelf, open them to the chapter you want to and put them on your desk every time you finish studying. This makes the environment perfect to begin studying the next time you have a chance. By doing this, you “prime” or “reset” your space to do exactly what you need to do.
You can also apply this in the reverse to things that you don’t want, or want less of. Ex: screen time. If I wanted less screen time, I would make my phone less obvious. I know this is a common goal, so I thought I’d also share a few tips I learned to decrease my screen time effectively:
- changing the entire color filtering to grayscale (can be done in the Settings app on iPhone)
- setting time limits on apps, and setting passwords for the time limits
- leaving my phone in another room
- letting my phone completely drain its battery and not charging it until I was finished doing whatever I needed to do.
3. Set Milestones and Rewards
Just like literally any decent game in the entire digital universe, there must be rewards. Why else would you play the game? Nobody wants to struggle; they just do it because there is a reward at the end and the struggle is the only way to get there.
If we apply a similar mindset to studying, you can set milestones for a certain number of hours or days that you have studied for. These milestones should be rewarded, but the form of the reward depends on personal preference. I reward myself for every 20 hours that I’ve studied by buying something that I’ve wanted for a while but don’t really need, like jewelry, candles, and fancy coffees.
This is the biggest motivation. It’s probably the most important step, because you need to keep yourself going when you don’t want to do something, regardless of whether or not it involves studying.
That having been said, the reward doesn’t have to be of monetary value either. Maybe it’s just having a break day, or a day to host a hang out with friends. Make sure to have a reward of some sort to make the study game more enticing.
That’s all from me for today! Thanks for reading and have a good one. Happy studying!