Speaker 1: So, you've put your phone away, did your pre-studying routine and got your books ready and yet, when you sit down, you just lose focus and start daydreaming. Hey besties, in this video, I'll be explaining 7 unique study tips that will help you stay focused when studying and stop you from daydreaming so much. Study tips number 1, 5 and 6 are tips that I've not really heard anywhere else that really helps me overcome my inability to focus for a longer period of time so be sure to watch till the end of the video to know what those are. First, write your thoughts down and don't give in. Once you realise that you're daydreaming, stop and write that thought down. I find that this really helps me because if I don't write down what I'm thinking and put a full stop to it, I'll just keep thinking about more and more scenarios or ideas until sometimes hours pass by. Also, if you're halfway studying and you want to do something else like go on TikTok, online shopping or check your messages, write those things down and do them at the end of the day after you finish studying. It's so important not to entertain those thoughts because once you do, it's really hard to regain focus and go back to studying. If you can, I actually recommend writing these things down in a little book so that over time you can kind of track what is distracting you when you're studying and work to minimise it. Next, how to train yourself to focus for a longer period of time. I'll be introducing two time management techniques. You'll do the first method when you first start to build your attention span, then you'll move on to the second method when you are able to focus for a longer period of time. If you really have trouble focusing when you're studying, then this is what you should do first. Grab your books and right before your study session, set a timer. Stop the timer as soon as you can feel yourself getting distracted or start to daydream. The time that you recorded should be the starting length of your study sessions. So if your recorded time is 10 minutes, then you should study for 10 minute intervals and take breaks in between. Don't use your phone during those breaks. Instead, have a snack ready and take a few bites during each break or just close your eyes for a minute or two until you're ready to study again. After one week, extend your study session by 5 minutes and so on. Also, it's really important that you walk away from your study space when you're taking a break for two reasons. First, I find that sitting at one place for too long can make studying extremely boring and cause me to lose focus as the day continues. And second, you don't want to rest and work at the same place because over time, your brain won't be able to work or rest properly at your study space. You want to automatically go into work mode when you enter your study area to maximize productivity. So you need to clearly define which areas in your room are for what activity so that your brain will be able to do each job efficiently. I find that customizing the length of my study sessions according to how long I can focus really helped me reduce the amount of time I spent daydreaming because as soon as I get distracted, the timer goes off and it's time to take a break. Next, so once you are able to focus for an extended amount of time like 1 or 2 hours, then you should do this next time management tip. You see, the time management technique that I explained in my previous tip involves taking a lot of breaks, which is great if you can't focus, however, in reality, most of our work takes more than 10, 20 or even 30 minutes to complete, so taking that many breaks can actually make you study more inefficiently and disrupt your workflow. So now, instead of limiting yourself to a certain amount of time, you want to focus on completing each task and taking short breaks in between before moving on to your next task. For example, writing an essay takes around 2 hours. You want to focus on completing that essay before taking a break. If your task is more time-consuming and you know you can't focus for that long, break that task up into many small steps and take breaks in between completing each step. For example, writing a lab report might take you 4 hours, so instead you want to break it up like this. Check out my video on how to make a revision timetable here for more time management tips for students. Next, my secret weapon, an advertisement might play in the next few seconds, so if you want to support this channel, please do not skip the ads, thank you. My secret weapon, film yourself studying. More specifically, put on a time-lapse while you're studying. I swear, this is my secret tip that I have been telling people since I was in high school that I never hear anyone talk about. Let me tell you why it's so amazing. First, you can't use your phone because it's being used to film. So that is one major distraction out of the way. Second, you will have to put your phone in silent mode because you don't want any notifications or calls to end your time-lapse early. And third, at the end of your study session, you'll get this ultra-satisfying video of you studying and trust me, you will keep watching that video over and over again and be so proud of yourself. If you're going to try any study tip from this video, do this one. Next, create a distraction-free study space. Now this might be a little bit controversial, but I don't really agree that a study space should look something like this. If you're someone that gets distracted easily. It can be very motivating to have study areas that look like these ones and I've also tried to make my study space look like that. But I realized that although these study spaces are very pretty to look at, based on my personal experience, I find that it makes it 10 times harder to focus when there is so much going on around me, especially in front of me. I don't even need my phone to be distracted. If I could literally be looking at a blank wall and still manage to daydream, I know you guys feel the same way too. So what I like to do is keep the decorations beside or behind me and make sure that my desk area and the wall in front of me is clean and plain to minimize distractions. This way, my study area is still motivating and pretty, but my focus area is clean and minimal. Another thing you can do is to draw a cross on a few memo pads and stick them around your room. When you get distracted and start looking around, you'll snap back to reality once you see those memo pads. Those memo pads are like a physical reminder for you to keep studying. It's the same concept as writing down your goals and putting them in front of you as a constant reminder to work towards those goals. I will link some stationery and organizers down in the description box below in case you need them. Next, don't just read. When you're reading a story or an essay, you can try underlining all the verbs or nouns in the passage. This really helps me make sure that I'm actually processing what I'm reading and not just glossing over all the words. If you're reading a textbook, you can try highlighting the keywords, underlining the important points, and putting brackets on the examples. Of course, you shouldn't only depend on highlighting when you're trying to study, but it's a great way to avoid daydreaming when you're trying to focus. I highly recommend that you check out my video on why you have bad grades even though you study hard here because it tackles a lot of bad study habits that you might be doing that is hindering your academic potential. If you've made it this far, comment down below if you lose focus easily and why. I'd be sure to reply you. If you like this video, subscribe and turn on the notification bell and set it to all so that you do not miss out on any future uploads. Thank you guys for 233,000 subscribers and I'll see you all in my next video. Bye bye.