How to Focus While Studying

Why you cannot focus on studying (it is not laziness)

In studies where readers are stopped at random and asked what they were thinking about, their mind is somewhere else between a fifth and two fifths of the time. That is ordinary attention, in ordinary people. Focus is less a talent than a set of conditions, and each lost-focus moment has a cause you can name.

Find your row first. Most learners have two of these, not all seven, and fixing those two is enough.

Step 1: choose one small task you can finish

"Study chemistry" has no first move and no end, so the mind looks for something easier. A task with a clear finish line is easier to start and easier to stay on.

• Write the task on paper and put it where you can see it. When your mind drifts, the paper tells you what you were doing.
• Decide the next two tasks as well. Choosing what to do next in the middle of a session is where many sessions end.
• If starting is the hard part, promise five minutes. Tell yourself you will do five minutes and may stop after. Starting is the largest obstacle; once you have begun, continuing is far easier.
• Have everything on the desk first: book, paper, pen, water, calculator. Each trip to fetch something is a chance not to come back.

Step 2: put the phone and the tabs out of reach

Every notification is a decision: look or do not look. Even when you do not look, the decision costs attention. And an interruption costs more than its own length: studies of office workers by Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine found it took more than twenty minutes on average to return fully to an interrupted task.

• The phone goes in another room, or silent in a closed bag. Face down on the desk is not enough for most people; within reach means within use.
• If you need the phone to study, turn on Do Not Disturb or a focus mode, open the one app you need, and close the rest.
• On a laptop, one window. Close chat, email, video and every tab the task does not need. If you need the internet only to look things up, write the questions down and look them all up in the break.
• Tell the people around you. "I am studying until six" stops more interruptions than headphones do.
• Choose the seat. Facing a wall or a window beats facing a room, a television or a bed.

An honest note on the research: one well-known study at the University of Texas found people did worse on attention tests with their phone on the desk than with it in another room, even switched off. Later studies repeating it found a smaller effect or none. Either way, a phone you cannot reach is a phone you cannot check, and moving it costs nothing.

Step 3: study in timed blocks

A timer gives the session an end, and attention holds better when it can see the end. The best-known version is the Pomodoro technique, named by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s after his tomato-shaped kitchen timer: 25 minutes on one task, 5 minutes off, and a longer break after four rounds. The numbers are a starting point, not a rule.

• One task per block. If you finish early, test yourself on it until the timer ends.
• Use a kitchen timer, a watch or a clock, not the phone you just put away.
• In the break, leave the desk. Stand, stretch, drink water, look out of a window. A break spent on social media is not a break for your attention, and five minutes there is rarely five.
• Tick each finished block on paper. Four ticks is about two hours of real study, which is more than most distracted evenings contain.
• Stop on time at the end. A session that ends as planned is easier to start tomorrow.

Step 4: answer questions instead of re-reading

This is the step that changes the most. Reading and highlighting ask very little of you, so the mind wanders while the eyes keep moving. Answering a question needs all of your attention; you cannot recall the steps of photosynthesis and think about dinner at the same moment.

Researchers at Harvard tested this with a recorded lecture. Students who answered a few questions after each part reported their minds wandering about half as often as students who only watched, took more notes, and scored higher on the final test.

It feels harder than reading, and that is the point: the effort is what holds your attention and what makes the material stay. The method in full is in How to memorize faster and Active recall and flashcards.

Step 5: what to do when your mind wanders anyway

It will. Focus is not never drifting; it is noticing sooner and coming back without a fuss. Each return is practice, and the gaps between drifts grow over a few weeks.

1. Keep a "later" list beside you. A message to send, something to buy, a worry about Friday: write three words and go back to the task. The thought stops returning because it is no longer yours to hold.
2. Come back without scolding yourself. Notice, look at the task written on your paper, and carry on from the last line you remember. Being angry at yourself is a second distraction.
3. Read with a pen in your hand. A question in the margin, a word underlined, a line summed up in five words. A moving hand keeps the eyes honest.
4. If you are restless, move for two minutes. Stand, walk to the door and back, stretch. Then sit down and restart the timer.
5. If you are stuck on one thing for ten minutes, mark it and move on. Confusion feels like lost focus. Write the exact question you cannot answer, do the next item, and ask someone later.
6. If a worry will not leave, give it five minutes on paper. Write what it is and the next small thing you can do about it, and when. Then return. A worry with a plan is quieter.

Step 6: sleep, food, movement and your best hour

• Sleep is the base. After a short night attention lapses come more often and you notice them less. An hour of study traded for an hour of sleep is usually a bad trade, most of all in exam week.
• Move before a hard session. Ten to twenty minutes of brisk walking or any exercise that raises your pulse improves attention for a while afterwards.
• Eat and drink normally. A meal before a long session, water on the desk. Hunger and thirst both feel like boredom.
• Find your best hour. Some people are sharpest early, some late in the evening. Put the hardest subject there and the easy tasks (sorting notes, making cards) in your slow hours.
• Tea or coffee can help, in moderation and early. Late in the day it takes from the sleep that tomorrow's focus depends on.
• Music is personal, with one rule that holds for most people: songs with words compete with reading and writing. If silence is not possible, try instrumental music or steady background sound at low volume.

How to stay focused at home, at night, when tired, or for long hours

If the exam is very close, the day-by-day plans are in How to study for exams and How to prepare for an exam in one day.

A worked example: two focused hours on a weekday evening

Aisha is in her second year of nursing. She gets home at five, sits with her pharmacology notes from six to ten most evenings, and remembers little of it. Her phone is beside the book and she reads the same chapter each night. This is the same evening, rebuilt.

That is 100 minutes of study, every one of them spent producing answers, and an evening that ends at nine instead of ten. Nothing about Aisha changed. The task became small, the phone left the room, the session got an end, and reading became answering.

Mistakes that break your focus

• Waiting to feel motivated. Focus follows starting, not the other way round. Start with five minutes.
• Keeping the phone face down "just in case". In reach is in use. Another room.
• Planning a four-hour session with no breaks. Attention fades without them and the hours look better than they were.
• Re-reading and highlighting as the main method. They feel like study and ask almost nothing of your attention.
• Doing two things at once. A lecture and a message thread is two things done badly. One window, one task.
• Studying in bed, or with the television on in the room.
• Spending the break on social media. The break ends when the feed does, not when the timer does.
• Blaming yourself after every drift. Notice, return, continue. That is the whole skill.

One more honest point. If concentrating has been very hard for you for years, in class, at work and at home, not only with study, and these steps change little, talk to a doctor or a school counsellor. Attention difficulties such as ADHD, poor sleep, low mood and anxiety are common, they are not a character flaw, and they have real help. This guide is study advice, not medical advice.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Interpolated memory tests reduce mind wandering and improve learning of online lectures. K. K. Szpunar, N. Y. Khan and D. L. Schacter (2013). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(16).
• Brain drain: the mere presence of one's own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. A. F. Ward, K. Duke, A. Gneezy and M. W. Bos (2017). Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 2(2).
• No task left behind? Examining the nature of fragmented work. G. Mark, V. M. Gonzalez and J. Harris (2005). CHI 2005, Association for Computing Machinery.
• The science of mind wandering: empirically navigating the stream of consciousness. J. Smallwood and J. W. Schooler (2015). Annual Review of Psychology 66.
• Does listening to preferred music improve reading comprehension performance?. N. Perham and H. Currie (2014). Applied Cognitive Psychology 28(2).
• The Pomodoro Technique. Francesco Cirillo. francescocirillo.com.