Student Study Hacks

The+Pomodoro+Technique

The Pomodoro Technique

DeAsia McCorvey, Editor

The life of a student is far from easy. It’s actually quite hard. Balancing the heavy workload, after school clubs, sports, outside obligations, and still finding time to study and do homework or keep your grades up in general, is pretty difficult. Especially nowadays with all the technology and social media, it’s extremely easy to get distracted and procrastinate. Hopefully you learn to pick up some tips and tricks to make school just a wee bit easier and more manageable. Each year, you’re better than the last and then by college you’ll be an efficient high achieving student. In case you’re not there yet though, these hacks will hopefully help you get there soon.

1. Change Your Scenery

Just like your environment can affect the way in which you grow up, your environment can affect your productivity. Change in environment can refresh not only the eyes, but the mind, and might even get the right hemisphere of your brain highly functioning.

2. Let’s Get Physical!

When working on long and complicated assignments, it’s great to take small breaks. When you start to feel stiff or achy, take some time to stretch or walk around to get the blood flowing, which will also help your cognitive function.

3. War of Colors? What’s this Voice?

Color coding your notes for classes is more helpful than you think. It can help jog your visual memory and help you remember the words you’ve actually written. If you’re not a visual learner you can use a text-to-speech app or website that will read your notes back to you.

4. The Pomodoro Technique

Staying focused while doing school work is a daunting task, especially when you’d rather be doing thousands of other things. This technique is used to help with procrastination and the mantra of “Ugh, I don’t want to do this.” Divide your time into blocks, and take short breaks every 20 minutes or so.

5. Listen to Nature and Classical Music!

Lots of students admit to listening to music while studying or doing homework. Their song choices can actually turn out to be counter productive though/ Studies find that listening to sounds of nature or classical music can elevate your level of productivity as well as your mood. Listening to Mozart can actually raise IQ and cognitive abilities!

6. Rewrite! Rewrite! Rewrite!

Rewriting notes by hand can also be an effective method of studying. Since your hand can only write at a certain speed, you would use, in essence, more brain power than if you were typing up notes. Unlike being able to type word-for-word what the teacher says, with hand-writing you can’t do that. You have to think, analyze and summarize all at once.

7. Don’t Cram!

It’s been said thousands of times over, “Never cram,” and “It’s the worst thing you can do.” We know this already and yet, many of us continue to do so. Instead of cramming, try to plan ahead! Create a schedule of when you will study and what subjects you will study. Prioritize your classes whether from urgent to not so important or easiest to hardest or vice versa. Don’t try to study multiple topics all at once.

Using one or all of these techniques can greatly improve your success in school and at home. Try a few out today!