How to Improve Your Study Skills - Part 1 (The Pomodoro Technique)

Whether you are beginning your first semester of college or you are continuing your studies, improving your study skills and test taking abilities are major points of focus for most students. Better study skills translate into less time spent studying and a direct improvement in your overall academic performance. Over the next few months, I am going to offer you a few easy ways to improve your study and testing skills to help reach your academic goals. Once you begin to put these skills into practice, you will find that they become easier and more effective. Below, I outlined one straightforward study skill you can start to add into your routine today. 

Understand Your Attention Span

On average, most students can focus on a given task for fifteen to twenty minutes before becoming distracted. With the rise of smartphones and social media, instant access to entertainment may be substantially lowering  this threshold. Let's think about this for a moment. If you try to sit down and study for three hours on end, how effective will your overall study session be? You may find that the first fifteen minutes of studying go pretty well but as time goes on, you begin to lose focus. The longer the session goes, you may become so disengaged with the material that you are actually wasting time. How often have you found yourself rereading the same sentence for a few minutes without understanding what you are? Even reading? The reason for this experience is that  your brain has a certain “focus threshold”. 

For most, this threshold of attention lasts for about fifteen minutes before other ideas, thoughts, and the need for distraction kicks in.  After you reach your threshold, you enter the “distraction frame of mind”. While it appears that you are studying, you may actually be thinking about that last Netflix show you watched or what you're having for dinner. With this understanding of attention span and threshold focus in mind, we can begin to work out how to change our own behavior through a system that allows us to focus, reach threshold, reload our threshold,  and then refocus once again.

The Pomodoro Technique

With our new understanding of attention, we can introduce the Pomodoro Technique. The Pomodoro Technique uses Time Blocks (15 minute time block intervals of focused studying) followed by timed breaks between each study block. Given the fact that most new students have an average focused threshold of fifteen minutes, it's best to use fifteen minute study blocks when first beginning to utilize this technique. As you continue to train yourself to focus (a topic for another day), you can extend the duration of your timeblock to meet your new threshold.  This concept follows the following pattern I outlined below:  

• Turn off all distraction and organize your study space
• Set an alarm for fifteen minutes and begin studying
• Once the alarm goes off, stop studying and take a timed break. The first two breaks should be five minutes followed by a longer break
• During your five minute break, walk around, use your phone, or talk to friends. The idea behind the break is to give yourself a true break
• Following your break, start a new timer and begin studying again for fifteen minutes

After two or three rounds of study and breaks, you will find that you have covered more ground within your focused time block even though you have given yourself breaks. Following your shorter breaks, you can give yourself a longer break before starting the process again. This process can be applied to the work world and really any other project that requires focus. Once you start using it, you will find that your ability to focus increases and you will be able to enter the study zone sooner. At a certain point in time, you may be required to study for hours on end, for example professional school i.e. medical school or law school. Once you start to add this technique you will begin to see your retention improve, your work performance improve, and you will have accomplished more work in a shorter period of time.