Most of us have something to study always. Education don’t end with our college or university. You might be preparing for a competitive exam. You might be studying a new topic of interest to your career. Studying for a certification. Or you might be interested in doing a research of your own and have lots of reference materials to skim through.

But many times we face a problem that we cant focus well on studying. If you are among the above categories, then here are few tips to increase your focus on studying.

Environment:

1) “zero distraction” zone : This is a zone or place where you do the following

(a) Turn off the mobile phone or put them outside your access.

(b) No access to internet (unless you need internet for your study. In this case, only those website relevant to your study)

(c) “NO” source of distraction : television, or any other source that could disturb you.

(d) The place you sit for studying should be totally quite. No shouting or talking, as they would distract you very easily.

2) Lighting and Sitting arrangements: Adequate lighting is very important while studying, since your eyes could strain very easily in improper lighting setting. Also make sure that your seating arrangement is proper. Some people like to study while lying down the bed. This is not a good practice as this wont help you to maintain the best physical position. Also studying while lying down cause you to feel sleepy easily.

Study Time:

Each of us are more productive at a particular time of the day. Some of you might be very focused at the evening/night, some people are highly focused on early morning. Schedule yourself to study the most hard lessons during these special times. Because these are the times when you are the best focused and can learn more in short time.

Many people comment that getting up early morning and spending 2-3 hours in the morning helps people to do more productive things than the entire rest of the day. So, you might be interested in trying to learn during these special hours.

Before sitting for a session, decide what exactly you would study in this session. And get up from that place only after you have completed them. You can start taking small “blocks” and try to complete them. Once you are comfortable, you can increase these blocks. But it is very important that we know what are going to study, and “lock” ourselves inside the zero-distraction zone.

Thinking about Rewards

A great way to keep your focus on studying is to constantly think about the rewards waiting for you once you successfully complete your exam, and get the score you wanted. Keeping this reward in our mind is a great motivator for us complete our study sessions successfully.

Finally, few important techniques which can really improve your exam score :

Start Preparing early

Most of the time, the day of exam is already announced. So, if we start early, we can avoid cramming before the exam. Start slowly as early as possible, and then while the exam time comes closer, we can push ourselves more harder.

Action Oriented or Result Oriented approach

There are two kinds of approach to study. Action oriented approach – where you decide to spent two hours of time without any distraction and complete how much you can during this time. The second is result oriented approach, where you decide to complete one chapter before you get up. Each person can choose which one works best for him/her, and decide to study on that.

Preparing summary notes

When you study some topics or chapters, if you can prepare short notes in a separate book, these notes would come really handy during your revision time. Because, you don’t need to read the entire book these times, as you have your summary easily available in your hand.

Practice Sample Question Papers

This is very important while we study for exam. Doing sample question paper will help you to know the kind of questions you can expect during the exam, and prepare accordingly.

With the above techniques, you are right on your way to crack your exams, and get your dream score.

Categories: Careers in IAS, Features, IAS Exams, IAS Papers, Tips on IAS
Tags: Exams