4 Ways to Study at Home With Maximum Efficiency

As you’re probably well aware, the world is struck by a pandemic of the coronavirus. It put many businesses to a halt and universities are affected too. Many students are leaving their dorms and universities and heading to their homes.

Even if courses are paused for a while, that doesn’t mean that there is nothing to. It’s the ideal time to catch up on things and learn some of the materials you haven’t yet covered. If you’re wondering how to study and thrive at home, here are some great ways to get the maximum out of your time at home.

Make To-Do Lists and Organize Your Time

When you’re alone at home, you have only yourself to be accountable to. Most likely, your list of things to do is slowly piling up and you’re probably already worried about upcoming exam terms. There’s one thing that you absolutely need to do, no matter how much or how little you have to do in the upcoming weeks.

Making a to-do list is pretty straightforward – just list what you have to study or do for the day. There is a technique called “eating the frog” which comes from Mark Twain. He said that if you eat a live frog as the first thing in the morning, that’s the worst thing you will do all day. In other words, do your most difficult, most dreaded task early in the morning. That way, everything after that will feel easier in comparison.

There are lots of apps for to-do lists if you don’t want to do it old school and write down your tasks. The one that I use is IDoneThis and it’s great if you want that feeling of crossing off a finished task – on your phone or laptop.

Moreover, when you’re studying from home, you can easily get carried away – before you know it, you’ve been staring at your books for hours. To prevent this from happening and to better manage your time, I suggest trying out a time management technique called Pomodoro. It entails 25 minutes of focused work, followed by a 5-minute break. If you’re struggling to measure your time, you can try out a Pomodoro timer app like PomoDone.

Watch What You Browse

Let’s be honest – one of the main reasons why you get distracted when you’re studying at home is that it’s too easy to just open a new tab and play some music, go see what your friends are doing on Instagram or take a look at some new gear on Amazon. One of the ways to prevent this is this Chrome extension, which limits how many tabs you can keep open in Chrome.

If you really want to control what you browse and watch, there is a neat Chrome extension for that too. It’s called Work Mode and it automatically blocks all social media websites from your Chrome browser with one push of a button.

If you have to study from your laptop or tablet, this will be one of your biggest challenges, so consider opening your browser in incognito. If possible, get a separate device just for studying.

Stretch Your Muscles

If you want to stay healthy in isolation, there’s nothing to worry about. Sure, you can’t hit the gym and you can’t go for a jog outside, but there are other ways you can get your blood pumping while indoors.

YouTube is chock-full of home workout videos that you can watch and try out at home. If you want some company, you can always invite some friends over on a video call – there are plenty of free video tools available nowadays.

If you’re worried about your lack of weights and equipment, don’t be. There are hundreds of exercises which you can do at home, using nothing but your own body weight.

Study in a Specific Location

Your mind is a funny thing. It associates certain places with the actions that you perform. That way, it will associate your bed with sleeping (or something else) and your living room with watching Netflix and relaxing. Needless to say, studying in any of these locations is not such a great idea.

If you have an option, dedicate a place in your apartment, room, or hours where you do nothing but study. That way, your mind will automatically associate the location with studying and doing some work, rather than resting and getting some sleep.

Connect With Your Peers

Just because you can’t hang out together in the same room, it doesn’t mean that you can’t study together in a remote setting. In fact, it’s now easier than ever to connect with other students and study together.

One of the tools that use a lot internally and that students can benefit from is Zoom – you can use it to make video calls and it’s free up to 45 minutes. If you want to quickly catch up on your lessons, it’s a great way to do it easily and for free.

Moreover, you can hop on social media and create a Facebook group for all your peers that study with you. That way, you can check up on each other, post updates about your course, upload materials, etc. Bear in mind, however, that wandering from that group to browsing your newsfeed.

If you have some more ideas on how to study at home more efficiently, please let us know in the comments below!