1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
eintsein

Staying Focused: Tips for Maintaining Focus while Studying

eintsein

image

You’ve sat down at your desk. You have everything you need on your table or somewhere around you. You start to work. You think, “this is going well,” until a notification pops up on your laptop screen. And then another notification pops up on your phone. And during that period when your eyes were off of your study material, you also noticed a bag of chips, a magazine, your unfinished journal spread, your roommate bobbing their leg up and down and up and down, the pattern of the wood on your bookshelf, a text message, your bed … suddenly you can’t remember what you were supposed to be doing but instead think about how much you want to sleep. Or how hungry you are. Or how much you want to go hang out with your friends. Or your entire life choices.

I’m sure we’ve all been there. Sometimes it’s really difficult to stay focused while studying, and with all the distractions that surround us, it really isn’t surprising. However, there are ways that you can minimize the chances that you’ll give in to those distractions and focus on your work instead. Here are some that have worked for me:

Prepare for the session

The first thing you should do is clear your space. Don’t have things lying around that could make you distracted - put all your food where you can’t see them, your phone inside your bag, etc. However, there also comes a time when you have a thought that’s super important, but you can’t extend that thought or you’ll get sucked into a chain of other distracting thoughts. I like to have a notebook or piece of paper nearby where I can jot down these compulsive thoughts that I’ll get back to later - this is usually my bullet journal.

You could also find a study space where you’re the least prone to distraction. For me it’d be a cafe, since I would only have the things I brought with me. My dorm is where a lot of the distractions are: my books, all my journals and stationery, and my bed. Some people like studying in the library, but personally I find it distracting when other people around me are studying as well (especially when it’s super quiet and you can hear every pen click and page turn).

In addition, you might also want to do things like have a snack, go to the bathroom, and check your phone before you start your study session, so you won’t have the urge to do those things during your study session.

Block out your time and assign specific tasks

I’ve found that whenever I have a very vague schedule - like “I’ll study [ subject ] from 3 to 5 or something” or “I’ll complete these 5 tasks in 4 hours” or even worse “I’ll learn the whole syllabus in the next 2 months” - I don’t get as much done as I could. It’s hard to focus when you don’t really have a specific thing to focus on. You know how on the weekends especially, you have a whole list of things to do but every time you do one thing you get distracted by the thought of another? That can be solved by time blocking. Set aside a specific period of time to do a specific task, and eventually, those will accumulate into more productive hours.

It’s even more efficient to block smaller periods of time - 5 or 10 minutes or so. For example, even though I use the pomodoro technique of doing a task for 25 minutes then taking a 5-minute break, I break up those 25 minutes. If I were studying my flashcards, I might set a goal of finishing one stack - usually one topic - in 10 minutes (depending on the thickness of the stack). If I simply assigned 4 pomodoro sessions to review all my cards, this would make me prone to stretching out the amount of time I spend on a single stack, and in that stretching of time comes a loss of focus. It is a lot easier to focus for 10 minutes on one thing than 25 minutes on 3 things.

Note: What has helped me study for exams is scheduling out my time in months, and then weeks, then days, then hours, then minutes, so I’ll know the direction I’m going in, but I also won’t be overwhelmed by the amount of tasks I have to complete since I can do one small task at a time.

Practice, practice, practice

Like everything else in life, in order to be good at something, you have to practice. Learning to maintain focus is the same. At first, focusing for 25 minutes might feel hard and maybe even painful, but as you complete more pomodoro sessions, you’ll find that focusing for 25 minutes is effortless (or whatever period of time you usually work/study for).

Another way to practice focusing is by meditating. Meditating is part of my morning routine, and it’s definitely helped me stay focused in other activities, so you might wanna give that a try. 

Work alone

I can tell you that of all the group study sessions I’ve had with my friends, most of them are much less efficient than if I had chosen to work alone. (The exception was when I was stuck with a bug in my code and my friend helped me figure it out.) Friends are very distracting, and even when you promise yourselves you’ll work on assignment or that you’ll only discuss the topic you’re studying, your conversation will inevitably stray from that.

Take breaks

When you’re tired, you’re sure to be distracted, so one way of combating that is to take breaks. It refreshes you so that you have more energy to focus during your next study session.

Aside from that, you should schedule your distractions during your breaks - go to the bathroom, grab a snack, go on your phone, or during longer breaks you can talk to your friends, take a nap, etc - so that you won’t give into those compulsions during your study sessions. Because you’ve already done those distracting things, when you’re studying, you’ll end up thinking something along the lines of, “Oh, I’ve already checked Instagram five minutes ago; my phone can wait,” or “I just had a snack, I can go get another one once I’m finished.”

That’s all the tips I have for you right now about how to maintain focus while studying. I hope this has been helpful, but as usual, if you have any questions, or some of your problems aren’t covered in this post, feel free to reach out to me by dropping an ask or sending me a message. Also, linked below are several of my posts that you mind find helpful. Have an awesome day!

Relevant posts

smosh
putinyoudown: “ thisurlwasnttakenbutnowitis: “ soandsuch: “ war-lesbian: “good news everybody ” In this store, you go in, shop, and then walk out carrying the item’s you want to buy, and their facial recognition software figures out who you are and...
war-lesbian

good news everybody

soandsuch

In this store, you go in, shop, and then walk out carrying the item’s you want to buy, and their facial recognition software figures out who you are and charges whatever items you are taking to your account. It’s incredible and creepy.

thisurlwasnttakenbutnowitis

*Walks into the store with anti-facial recognition haircut/makeup and leaves like a bandit*

image
putinyoudown

the cyberpunk dystopia is upon us and it fuckin sucks

Source: emperor-ing
theonian
theonian: “Today I took a really close look at some SM64 maps in an attempt to get a better understanding of how they were made and how I can avoid further mistakes when making my own maps for the engine. Perhaps it could prove useful for you...
theonian

Today I took a really close look at some SM64 maps in an attempt to get a better understanding of how they were made and how I can avoid further mistakes when making my own maps for the engine. Perhaps it could prove useful for you too?

Let me first say that I’m pretty surprised at how inconsistent and sometimes downright lazy the mapping seems to have been done. Seeing as this was the first true 3D game on consoles, the tools available at the time may have had something to do with it.

Here are the things I discovered (long post!):

image

BOOLEANS

All holes for canons and rolling cannon balls, etc. seemed to have been simply cut out with boolean functions (placing a mesh through another and “cutting out” the shape”). This leads to a mess of triangles and very bad topology, so it’s not something anyone uses much anymore (it causes bad lighting when rendering and bad transformations when animating). However, it is very economic in terms of polygon usage, which makes sense when you consider how huge maps SM64 was able to use on the N64.

image

EDGE COLLAPSE

In fact, topology doesn’t seem to have been a concern at all. Here’s a clear example of how the creator has simply collapsed a bunch of edges to save polygons (all the lines bunched up in a single vertex). I have no idea how this works, as Mario simply clipped through the floor when I did something similar with my map. Perhaps it depends on how sharp the vertical angles are?

image

EXTRUSION

Extrusions also seem to have been done pretty haphazardly. This is particularly strange, because it creates more polygons, and doesn’t seem to have any sort of benefit. In the example below, you can see how an object has been placed on top of a flat surface, instead of having it extruded from it. Both seems to work just fine, so why extrude?

image

CLIPPING

Often objects are placed on the ground like this. There doesn’t seem to be any problem with collision detection, even if two separate meshes are joined together this way. There are some peculiarities to consider, though: The edges on these objects are always marked sharp. I have no idea why. The edges also never clip through the surface. They’re placed PERFECTLY aligned with the ground, never going through it. This is strange, considering the example below:

image

Here, the plank is clearly clipping through the ground, but it doesn’t seem to be an issue. Why go through the trouble of aligning the edges in the previous example, if it doesn’t matter for collision detection? Perhaps it just doesn’t matter for the plank because it is a fully enclosed volume, with no open bottom?

image

Here’s a smart use of the same technique. The blue line shows that an edge is marked as “sharp” (like the bottom of the previous rocks). Here, it means that instead of having the ground be one continuous surface, a perfectly aligned incision has been made across the section where the bridge begins. This saves polygons, which would have had to be drawn from the corners of the bridge legs if the surfaces were connected.

The same sharp edge disconnection is used on the side of stairs throughout the other maps as well. But why go through the trouble of making such extreme polycount optimizations, and then waste a bunch of polygons on needless extrusions? A lot of things seem very inconsistent…

image

UV UNWRAPS

Another point of inconsistency is the texturing techniques used. Here’s a really clever example, where the artist has taken two surfaces and used flat projection to unwrap them as two UV islands, but still managed to align the texture seams. He has done this by letting both islands have one part each which is of equal size, and letting this part be exactly 1:1 with the texture map. Sadly though, someone has later come and adjusted one side of the bridge mesh and made it a slope, which sort of ruins the seam a little.

This technique isn’t very relevant today, as you can simply use a UV unwrapping function to equalize the sizes of several island groups simultaneously.

image

Here’s a very dumb example of UV unwrapping. The ground and side slopes here have been projected as one surface seen directly from above, which has lead to very badly stretched textures on the slopes (which have a much larger surface than what they’ve been allotted in the UVs). It’s easy to tell that this is what has happened, because of the 90 degrees angle on the corner in the UV map.

image

A final little thing I found a bit confusing is that the back faces of fences are rendered in this map. I was expecting to find “double” fences with one mesh for each side, since everything I’ve seen imported to SM64 has only been able to render the front of any object.

Another thing to note: Yes, walls have to be 100% flat for Mario to be able to wall-jump off them. Ledges can be grabbed if the wall below is completely 90 degrees, or if the angle of the wall is inverted (so the wall slopes inwards). All walls which are angled outwards, even by a single degree, will be counted as slopes by the engine. All walls that are angled inwards by a single degree will function more or less like walls, but Mario will play a sort of negative sound and fall off it immediately if you try to wall jump.

Hope this autistic write-up is of use to someone!