I’ve started studying again. After spending 4 years straight in College after High School, I told myself I wouldn’t ever study again. I was wrong. Now that I am studying again, I thought I’d share some tips and techniques about studying and show you some things I find really useful to use whilst I study. These are actually the same techniques I use whilst blogging. I hope you find this post useful and most of all good luck with your studying!

Things I use –

Note Flags

I never fully understood how useful these were until around 2 years ago. If you have textbooks in your course then I suggest you make note flags your best friend. You can use note flags to note out certain pages or passages in your textbook, a bit like a bookmark or even to remind you to read over it later. The best part is that they are colourful so you could even colour code your work for different sections.

Buy note flags on Amazon here. (Affiliate link)

Highlighters

When I read over a passage that I know I will need to remember I will highlight the keywords. Not the whole passage, just the bits that are the most important! This will make them easier to re-read over and hopefully make it stand out enough that it sticks in your brain. I actually use my pastel Tombow pens to highlight as I prefer the colours, I think some of the generic neon highlighters can give you a headache. I also like that you can control the brush stroke on the Tombow pens and you can also use the smaller brush to underline.

Buy Tombow Dual Brush Pastel from Amazon here. (Affiliate Link)

Notebooks

Notebooks are useful for many things, but I recommend buying a new one when you start a new course or a new project. This will help you keep all of your work in one place if you reuse a notebook you may find you have pointless things in your notebook that doesn’t relate to what you are working on. This can be a distraction, so I would recommend avoiding this.

Techniques I use –

Forest: Stay Focused App

I cannot recommend this app enough! The Forest: Stay Focused app is available on the App Store (iPhone) and on the Play Store (Android). The Forest app tries to help you stay on task by making you select the time you wish to stay focused for and then it will plant a tree in your forest if you leave the app your tree will die. So unless you want a forest of diseased trees, you will stay off your phone.

Tidy the work area

If you are in a messy work area you may find it easier to lose focus. I will always clean the surrounding area of where I intend to study, this also minimizes stuff of your to-do list, which may also help.

Change it up.

What I mean by this is that I always find it incredibly difficult to stay focused if I work in the same place for a few days, so I will change my surrounding every now and then. I do have a home office but I will sometimes work in my living room or in the bedroom.

Plan ahead.

Make yourself a studying schedule and follow it, work out what other commitments you have during the week and try to plan study blocks in there. This will make it easier to follow and commit to. I always feel like once I’ve written it down that it’s now ‘set in stone’ and I am more likely to follow it.

Take breaks.

Make sure you take regular breaks during your study time especially if you are in front of a screen, it can be really bad for your eyes and your physical health sitting down for too long. Get up and stretch your legs, maybe even go for a short walk in outdoors and get some fresh air. You may feel like you come back with a better attitude towards your work.

Reward yourself.

Not always do you feel completely satisfied with simply finishing the task at hand, sometimes you may need that extra reward as motivation to complete the task, the reward doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be enough to motivate you and to make you feel good about achieving the goal that you had set.

And that is all of my study tips for you today! I hope you have enjoyed this post and that it will help you out with getting your work done. I may update this post after I finish my course in case I have new tips and techniques that I have left out! If you have any more suggestions, leave them in the comments!