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While we tend to think of learning as happening in our heads, it can be heavily influenced by our surrounding environment. Keeping where you learn and the objects you learn with organized can help you stay on track and feel less stress.
When you’re attending classes in person, your learning space is automatically divided into two: when you’re on campus you sit in classrooms or labs and use study spaces, and at home you likely have a space where you study as well. Taking classes online blends these two spaces into one.
On the one hand, this is great: you don’t have to worry about taking books and other materials from home to school and vice versa, and you don’t spend your precious time travelling between the two places. On the other hand, you’re doing all of your studying in a place where you do a lot of other things too, like sleep, eat, relax, spend time with family and friends, and so on, which means you are studying surrounded by a multitude of distractions.
There are some things you can do that can help you stay on track. These are helpful tips even when you’re going to classes on campus, but you might want to add more of them to your routine while you’re doing all of your studying at home to manage the extra distractions.
If you don’t have the space to do this, that’s fine. Instead, try to keep everything you need in a bag or box so that you can easily set up when it’s time to study.
Also, try to avoid studying in bed unless it's your only option. You primarily use it for sleeping, so adding studying to the mix can make you fall asleep in the middle of an assignment, develop insomnia because you can't stop thinking about school when you're trying to sleep, or both. Plus it can mess with your back!
When it comes to the actual space you're studying in, remove anything that can pull your focus away, like bills, laundry that needs folding, or game consoles.
Limit the ways you can be distracted by things happening around you while you study. Turn off the TV (or, better yet, study where there is no TV) and close the door if you can. If you live in a noisy neighbourhood or share a space with other people who are going to be around while you work, you might want to look into noise cancelling headphones/earbuds or ear plugs. You could also use white noise or music to mask sounds around you. Use caution with your choice of music, though, because experts are divided on whether it helps or hinders focus. If you want to listen to music while you study, try to stick with things you are familiar with since it's easier to treat it as background noise.
You might not be able to stop your roommate from making a protein smoothie while you work, but you can control how much you're distracted by your own technology. For example, you can install a distraction blocker on your computer to help you to resist the temptation to go to non-school sites. You can also silence your phone and put it out of arm's reach. There are apps that will work like a distraction blocker, too, and award points if you stay away from your phone for a set period of time.
Your courses are going to generate a lot of material for you to organize, like readings, assignments, textbooks, and notes. If you don’t keep them organized, you can waste precious time searching for the things you need.
Whether you have piles of paper to sort through or keep everything on your computer, the way to keep everything organized is pretty much the same:
For analog items, your desk or a nearby bookshelf would be an ideal place. If you don't have a dedicated study space, put everything in a bag or box that you can move around with you. For digital items, have a folder dedicated to school on your computer or cloud service (like Google Drive).
Break your digital folder for school into subfolders for each course. Analog material can be organized in binders or binder sections, or even separate file folders.
Give your documents meaningful names like "BIO 100 syllabus" so you don't have to open a bunch of files to find what you need. Put the course name or number and the date at the top of every page of paper you generate. If you use more than one page of paper for a set of notes, number the pages so you can keep them in order even if a small tornado touches down on your desk.
In order to make the most use of the notes you take, you need to keep them organized and easy to access. Whether you take notes with a pen and paper or use your computer (or both), finding a system you can stick with will make studying go a lot smoother.
Paper notes can be stored in binders, folders, or even a filing box:
If you have all digital notes, you can store them in folders on your computer or cloud storage system (hint: you have access to Google Drive through your CUE account). You can also use a program like OneNote (requires an Office 365 account) or Evernote (free and premium versions), which allows you to organize your notes and combine them with other resources like pdfs, webpages, and images.
If you like to take notes by hand but want to integrate them with your digital materials (or you just want to protect them from spilling coffee and hungry dogs), you can digitize them with your phone. There are a lot of free apps that let you scan documents and turn them into pdfs, and OneNote and Evernote both allow you to scan documents into notes. If you have Google Drive installed on your phone, you can convert papers into pdfs through it, too. As an added bonus, you can then convert your pdf into a Google Doc that you can edit and add to (if your handwriting is really messy this may not work super well, though).