Ten Tips For Studying

Hey!

As I'm writing this, I'm sitting at uni attempting to look like I'm doing something constructive and education enhancing - so perhaps I'm not the best person to give you tips on effective studying. Nonetheless, I'm going to give it my best shot.

1. Stop procrastinating. Procrastinating has many forms, and usually it's different for everyone. Take myself for example. If I have exams approaching, assignments to do, texts to read... my room will be absolutely spotless. My car will be clean. My bathroom drawer will be perfectly organised. Everything will be labelled. Why? I think it's because I feel productive, but I can still avoid what really needs to be done. Other people I know prefer playing Xbox (far less productive!) or cooking (although I can't say I complain about this one.) Whatever it is you do... identify it. Stop it.

2. Make your notes pretty. Boys, this might not apply to you as much. Anyone who has ever borrowed my school or uni notes knows that they are usually colourful and full of interesting pictures and quirky drawings. Yes, your notes might take a little longer to make. The difference is, you WANT to look at them!

3. Study in groups! Not only can you share notes, but you can also hold distracting conversations which lead to interesting tangents that may or may not enhance your learning...

4. Pretend you don't know what YouTube is. If you're not a YouTube person, then pretend you don't know what Tumblr or Twitter, or Facebook is. This may be an extension of tip #1, but I assure you that for me, YouTube is in a completely different category to procrastination. It's a whole new playing field of distraction - like having millions (billions?) of mini video series to watch and catch up on. Did you know that 70 hours worth of YouTube footage is uploaded every minute from around the world? That's a lot of content!

5. Invest in a set of multicoloured high-lighters. Highlighters are SO much fun! You can go crazy with colour coded note-taking and memorising, and they'll help you distinguish between the stuff that you wrote down because you were getting bored, and the stuff that you actually need for the upcoming exams.

6. Study breaks! Study breaks are my favourite types of breaks. Think of your most favourite thing in the whole world, and either do it or try and replicate it in some way. If it's travelling for example, jump on a travel site and plan your next big trip - or look at photos from old ones. Whatever it is, make sure it's something that fully distracts you from the work you're doing. Depending on how easily distracted you are, this should be relatively easy. On a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being "I'm on a role, I'll just have to keep studying" to 10 being "What was I doing ten minutes ago?" I'm probably about an 8.

7. Love your study space! Make the area you study in nice. It pains me to say this (truly, you have no idea how much) but my family and friends were right when they told me not to study in bed. Yes - it's comfy. Yes - it's warm. Yes - you can nap between book pages... but apparently this isn't a good thing! Personally, I study best when I'm not at home - although the uni library's not doing much for me at this moment - but for those 2am cram sessions, make sure your desk is nice. How? Well, I organised all of my pens and highlighters, put some photos on the wall and got a nice lamp so I can see my work in the dark... get creative.

8. Listen to good music! Someone once told me that it's bad to listen to music with words while you're studying. So I tried it, and it's true! That being said, none of the music I actually enjoy listening to is completely instrumental, so I downloaded some music in other languages. I know that this sounds ridiculous, but it's amazing how diverse and interesting music is when you go beyond the english language! I must admit though, the majority of music I listen to while studying or doing assignments is in english, but I do occasionally end up writing the lyrics of the song I'm listening to instead of what I actually intended to write.

NOTE: Always edit your work when you're listening to music. You never know what might show up.

9. Stop writing and start telling. The easiest possible way to study is to teach your work to someone else. This is particularly fun if you're telling someone who knows absolutely nothing about the topic you're studying, or will never understand the topic you're talking about. This afternoon someone asked me to help them with a maths question which went something along the lines of:

Prove by indiction that if A is an n x n matrix which has 2 identical rows, then det(A)=0 [Hint: expand along one of the other rows].

Although I am 101% sure they were joking due to the fact that I have an entirely unmathematical brain, I decided to give them an answer, and proceeded to draw a lovely picture of how I thought it should be answered. If I was patient enough, or listened to my own advice, I would have sat and listened to the explanation of why my answer would never be accepted by the faculty of mathematics and sciences.

10. Study a little bit lots. Even if you do 10 minutes every hour of studying for 3 hours, you get half an hour of work done and you feel like you haven't done anything!

NOTE: This is not preferable for serious study... serious study demands good solid time and good solid study food.

I hope you enjoyed the ten tips for studying. Feel free to comment with your own tips, share the blog on Facebook, or subscribe to get updates.

Happy studying!

Written for you by TenTipsToday :)