Having a good studying environment is vital to your academic performance. Without one, you could get easily distracted, lose motivation, and come up with projects of lower quality. Unfortunately, a room setting is something that tends to be overlooked by young people.
They think something like “Why do I need the right setup for studying if I hired a person who is writing my papers on any subject?” The answer is pretty simple: you can’t order papers each time you have difficulties. If you want to pursue a degree and start a good career, you need to learn how to get rid of distractions and concentrate on your work.
Pick a good place
The first thing you need is to designate one area as your study space. It can be a library, a home office, a coffee shop, a kitchen corner, etc. The point is that your brain should catch on and switch to a study mode as soon as you enter this space. It is important to choose only one place because moving between apartments is not that easy mentally since you’ll have to deal with new distractions all the time. However, if you feel stagnation in a place that used to be your favorite, you might need to change a setting and get new emotions.
The place you pick should be reachable (one-hour commuting is a bad idea) so it doesn’t take you much effort to start studying. It is also very important that you like it because sometimes colors, decors, and other small details are able to make college assignments less stressful.
Keep your working place tidy
A lot of students claim that their desks are total disasters. It is very difficult to keep them organized when you have various textbooks, papers, stationery, etc. But are you sure that you really need all this stuff right now? Postcards, fiction books, your pet’s toys, and other trinkets distract your mind, increase anxiety, and don’t help you stay focused. It goes about open tabs in your browser, video games, smartphone, etc. Digital order is very important as well.
Before you start learning new material or writing an essay, remove things that are not relevant to clean up your desk. You should also ensure that you have everything you’ll need during your study session so you’re not looking for additional documents, breaking your concentration.
Ensure that your lighting is good enough
If you notice that you work efficiently in one place and can’t come up with a single idea in another, it would be a good decision to check the lightning. According to German studies, students are more creative under warm light and better concentrate under cold light.
To put this insight into action, try to organize your workplace near a window and study when it’s not dark outside, so you have natural light in your room. You can also experiment with different color temperatures and brightness levels until you find the best settings for you. Bad lighting is harmful not only for your focus or creativity, but it can also affect your health, e.g. cause headache or vision problems.
Don’t get too comfortable
People who had to start working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, have a lot to say about this. If your room is very nice and cozy, it can be your safe space, but can you consider it to be your workplace? Is it really good for you to work in pajamas or join Zoom meetings while you’re in the bad? Even though you might think that you kill two birds with one stone, such an approach leads to negative consequences.
That’s why it is necessary to buy a good desk&chair and dress in official attire before starting work. Your mind should receive a signal that it is study hour. It works the other way too, when you go to bed, your brain should understand that it is time to hit a sack.
Make your room setting inspiring
Sometimes, a dose of inspiration is the only thing that we need to study. The point is that you should not only look for inspiring ideas around you, but you should also know how to create an inspiring environment that will help you.
Even if your room is not a perfect place for some reason, you can make it better. Working on a long project, think about your final goal. Do you want to get the best grade in your class? Or do you dream to keep your performance at a stable level and join the sports team? You should place something that reminds you about your goals in front of you. Choose wisely since you still don’t have to make your room setting messy. It can be a postcard, a cup with a logo.
Sometimes, inspiring things have nothing to do with our goals, they just make us happy or sentimental. For example, many people like it when their study environment is full of green plants. Think about things that boost your mood and implement them in your workplace.
Try playlists for concentration
When it comes to noise, there are many views since different people have different habits. We know students who prefer to study in complete silence while their friends need some noise to come up with a decent project. That’s why some people study in coffee shops and others go to libraries. If you used to live in a dormitory or share your room with siblings, your brain might think that you need some background sounds.
There are some options for you to choose from. Firstly, you can check Spotify playlists like:
- Brain Food;
- Deep Focus;
- Mozart Playlist;
- Jazz Study Music;
- Meditations For Focus;
- Intense Studying;
- Study Beats, etc.
There are also applications like MyNoise that provide you with a huge list of different sounds, e.g. white noise, rain, forest, bonfire, and so on. They will create the right atmosphere in your room so you can forget about external distractors and delve into your homework.
