How to Develop Good Study Habits
If one excludes preschool and college, the average person’s total number of years in education can be 11–13 years. Throughout these years, a lot of people form new behaviors that they carry into adulthood. While some habits, like drinking or smoking, can cause issues and challenges, others, like time management, are incredibly helpful. Any person who cultivates good study habits will find great benefits from them. They include a variety of routines such as reviewing assignments each night, getting ready for tests a few days beforehand, or creating study guides to help organize your notes.
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How to develop good study habits?
Although most people want these habits to help them in their academic path, few actually do, or they don’t know how to. If you fall into the latter category, you should read this article carefully because it emphasizes creating effective study habits.
1. Set the right atmosphere for studying
Not everyone has good study habits by nature; instead, many people learn and develop them over time. It follows that anyone can form these behaviors at any time. However, the most important thing to remember is that people need to want to learn and form these habits.
Creating the ideal environment for study is the best approach to promote learning and encourage the development of study habits. This means maintaining a particular level of order and cleanliness in the study space as well as reducing noise levels to avoid distractions. When studying, it also pays to maintain a somewhat low temperature because high temperatures might be uncomfortable for some people. These simple preparations are the first step towards completing the task at hand, and they can go a long way toward maintaining a person’s motivation to form healthy study habits.
2. Create and stick to a schedule
Study habits are, well, habits. This means that they are to be developed over time and should be repeated over and over again until they become almost second nature. Due to this, it is advisable to start planning a schedule for when you shall conduct a study session to manage your time effectively.
But your primary priority should be to make sure you follow the specified timetable with a sincere desire to finish the assignment. Regardless of how efficiently someone allocates their time, it will all be in vain if the tasks specified in the time slots are not completed. After a few months of sticking to the set study schedule, the motivation to study at the allotted time will almost certainly arise spontaneously, and you’ll be well on your way to forming lasting study habits.
3. Take breaks when necessary
Achieving a goal through hard work is a commendable accomplishment that demonstrates one’s dedication to their aims. Creating effective study habits is the focus here. There is a thin line, though, between working hard to realize a goal and working so hard that one’s body and mind become less productive.
This is the reason it’s important to remember to take short pauses from studying or other academic-related tasks from time to time. It may surprise some to learn that using the brain consumes a lot more energy than one may think, which is why taking breaks can help stave off exhaustion and burnout. Taking a break allows one to return to a task with a relaxed and refreshed body and mind, which increases productivity. Taking a five-minute break every thirty minutes while working on academic assignments is quite acceptable. But any more than that, and one may find themselves vulnerable to the cursed procrastination. Thus, maintain moderation in all things.
4. Reward yourself
If getting someone else to want to study is the hardest aspect of creating strong study habits, making yourself engaged or motivated enough to stick with the process is the second most difficult thing to accomplish. It is fairly uncommon for people to lose interest in the activity at hand and completely ignore the goal, particularly those who have not made enough of a commitment to cultivating effective study habits. Rewards are a workaround, though, and people have been using them as a motivator for thousands of years.
Incentives can take on any form or size. Whether it’s a snack, self-affirmation, an additional five minutes of relaxation, or anything else that qualifies as a reward. These are excellent ways to maintain motivation for the duration of the process until one forms sound study habits.
Rewards provide reassurance that one’s actions are advantageous to them. It also gives you something to anticipate, which makes it more likely that you’ll form productive study routines.
5. Prioritize based on difficulty
When students are first organizing their schedules and allocating time to study different subjects, they frequently avoid the more challenging ones and push them to the bottom of the list. That shouldn’t be the case, though. Instead, they should choose to study the things they are struggling with at the top or start of their program. There are several advantages to doing this.
First, because they may take a few minutes out of the easier subjects to thoroughly understand the content of the subject they are struggling with, this gives students more time to study the harder subjects. The second benefit is that they can perform at their peak when they begin with a challenging subject because they haven’t yet been weary or exhausted from prior study sessions. This implies that if they begin with a challenging subject, they will be able to concentrate better and have more energy.
Finally, after a person has overcome a challenging subject, their confidence and speed will significantly increase. As a result, the study session won’t stall because there are no longer any challenging subjects to impede it.
6. Utilize outlines
Of course, there are more ways to learn besides just reading from books or reference sources. Outlining a book, a class discussion, or an internet article is another option. Creating an outline is an excellent technique to strengthen study habits and retention of information.
Making outlines takes a lot of effort and requires constant repetition, just like studying textbooks, because the topics covered with students will always change and grow more difficult. As a result, it may become exceedingly difficult to break the habit of doing so.
Outlines also offer a few benefits such as shorter and more concise study material. As well as the fact that a student can create their outline in any format that they want to maximize the effectiveness of their study session.
7. Ask for help
You can always ask for assistance from others if you find that studying alone is boring or that your own efforts are insufficient. To add some flavor to your studies, see if you can organize a study group with your buddies. Alternatively, ask your elder siblings to explain concepts to you that you find confusing. By learning about other people’s perspectives on the subject they are helping you with, calling for help can help you feel less burdened and also provide you with greater understanding. In addition, studying in a group or in pairs is a novel experience that can be a refreshing change of pace if you sense that you are about to burn out.
Asking a tutor—someone whose job it is to support your studies—for assistance is a terrific choice if you believe that asking the people you know will be a hassle for them. Additionally, you can be confident that the tutor you select from FamilyTutor—the top home and online tutoring agency in Singapore—will be a highly qualified and capable individual who can support both your desire to form excellent study habits and your demands for personalized instruction.
8. Set clear and proper goals
Finally, setting goals is a great way to help you form effective study habits. Goals can function as a benchmark or a point of completion to indicate your progress. For example, if you decide that you want to finish the year with an A or higher, that will be your finish line, and you will work hard to get there.
Alternatively, you can aim lower, like scoring 40 on the 50-item test the next week. To gauge how well your study habits have worked for you, you might use this as a benchmark. Since achieving these goals requires intensive study, one might utilize these goals to further fire their love for creating study habits. Additionally, realizing one’s goals might make one feel good about yourself because their efforts have finally paid off. This can increase a person’s motivation to study and help them form even better study habits.
Conclusion
Forming good study habits can be something that some students see as tiring or burdensome. However, forming them early on and making sure to strengthen them as you get early greatly outweighs the hassle you may feel at the beginning. Remember that forming habits requires you to work on them in repetition so you need to stick with some of these tips for longer periods.
Carelle
Carelle is a teacher who has been through the ups and downs of the teacher and learner life. She wishes for every learner to gain educational satisfaction that will help embody the people they want to be in the future.
