Why Can't I Focus on my Studies? | “Method and Motivation”

Written By Riley Caldwell

How to Focus on Your Studies - YouTube

Good Morning!

If you haven’t yet read my blog post about studying on a laptop with MAXIMUM efficiency, you should probably go do that now.

Click here.

In this article, however, we’re going to look at how to become more productive and motivated for the REST of your LIFE.

Half of this isn’t directly related to studying on a laptop, or with a book…

Which is fantastic.

The other half covers the most effective ways to study and retain information, while understanding it better than the majority of your peers.

By the end of this, you’ll also have the resources to being more productive than most people…

What do I do when I have no motivation to study?

Find your purpose for life and therefore, for studying.

You say that you “need/want to get good marks”, but you don’t know why you need to do that.

You might say, “because I need to pass”, or “because then I get the degree, and can get that particular job”.

But guess what? I’m gonna do the unexpected to you right now…

WHY do you need to pass or get that job?

You might answer, “because I want to do it”.

And to that, I’d respond with, “why do you want to get that job, or what will happen when you get a good mark in school?”

You might say that you’re passionate about the career, or that the work aligns with your values.

That last answer would be the very beginning of how deep you need to go in regards to determining what’s motivating you to study.

You must keep asking “why?”, to go deeper.

As for your exams, if I ask you why you want to pass them, and you respond with, “my parents would be happy about it”, there’s a huge problem.

Why do your parents care?

What do you wanna do?

Does what THEY care about matter to YOU? Why/why not?

Answer these questions and any others that seem like they suit your situation.

Then download this PDF and fill it out if you want to make this process easier.

Don’t be an idiot by skipping that PDF.

I almost want to tell you to stop reading any further and just do that, seriously.

Download it.

I guarantee 98% of your friends/family members have never questioned themselves like you’re about to by answering the questions in that PDF.

Once you’ve done that, the rest of the content in this article will make more sense and work more effectively for you.

Is working out good for studying?

Working out is absolutely essential if you’re a student or someone who does a lot of mental work.

Or any work for that matter…

If you can’t concentrate on your learning AT ALL, then you should be exercising at least 3-4 times per week.

Just like everyone should…

The reason for this, is because forcing yourself to challenge your body, challenges your mind.

You become more disciplined and built a greater sense of mental resilience.

Here’s my morning routine that I do every second day.

Feel free to follow it, starting tomorrow morning:

1) Coffee 30 mins up to an hour prior to my workout.

Supposedly, this improves your strength and endurance, helps you focus on the exercises and makes the body burn more fat, as opposed to glycogen, which leads to calories burning over several hours.

It depends on your body though, and whether coffee makes you “jittery”.

Also, don’t drink coffee before or after your workout if you exercise in the afternoon or evening.

Because it will give you worse sleep, even if you fall asleep.

That’s something that not many people understand for some strange reason…

2) I go for a short run.

I have a specific route, and I don’t change it.

This helps me just go out and get it done.

3) Follow a Breathe and Flow yoga session on YouTube.

Yoga is ridiculously hard.

Stop going to the gym just to feed your ego, unless your goal is to be bulky and have a large-framed and good-looking physique, while sacrificing fitness, flexibility and the ability to perform complex movements.

I’ve stopped my barbell routine and military exercises, and replaced them with a simple run, and yoga.

Because the yoga’s actually absurdly fucking difficult…

Plus, once you start to get good (over months and years), there are always harder versions of stuff and THEN, opportunities arise to incorporate hardcore calisthenics and even gymnastics into it as well.

Yoga also creates peace within your mind, which improves your overall health, your will help you make better connections and you’ll be better able to focus.

Better connections mean that you can learn more about your subjects, about yourself, or just about the world in general by regularly talking to others and learning from them.

You guys could also just study together.

And as your “overall health” improves, you’ll get better sleep, start releasing more serotonin (happy chemicals) and you’ll become better able to resist unhealthy urges and dopamine-fueled temptations.

Check out this video I made on exactly how to resist urges and temptations, starting today.

4) Consume coffee and a small amount of carbs.

I whack a banana on a plate, with some honey on top some crushed un-salted almonds (not carbs but whatever), and some cinnamon.

This is like a dessert, but it’s actually healthy.

It supposedly helps your body burn fat over hours, instead of glycogen immediately.

So first of all, more energy, strength and endurance before the workout, and then better recovery following the workout.

So yeh, that’s it!

Get fit.

And work them biceps, or work that booty.

How to Stop Getting Distracted by YouTube

If you always find yourself getting distracted by YouTube videos, movies or your phone, you need to reconsider the ways in which you study.

Instead of using ineffective study techniques, like note-taking and video-watching, you should do active recall, make flashcards, spaced-repetition and teach other people your content.

Let’s look at active recall first…

Is Active Recall Really a Good Study Method?

It’s one of the best, because your mind has to actually… put in effort.

Note-taking is god-awful for the most part (but not completely), in comparison to something like active recall, because writing notes is easy, and remembering things takes effort.

So basically, active recall is using your brain to remember facts, concepts, formulas or whatever, and reciting them.

Or, it looks like you using your knowledge on something to explain it in a simple-to-understand, non-textbook way.

Below are some examples of how to perform active recall:

  • Teach content to inanimate objects, talk to people or explain complex topics to young people with little knowledge on the content.

    • Keep answering their “why?” questions until you can’t any longer. Now you know what you need to go ahead and learn. If you spoke to inanimate objects, or if you’re like I was in the HSC, talking to trees, just brainstorm EVERYTHING that someone could possibly ask “why?” to.

  • Create mind-maps for certain elements of topics. Everything that you come up with, you must obviously link to a particular thing that already exists on your mind-map.

Can you learn by teaching?

I need to touch quickly on “teaching content to others”.

A study by the University of California found that students who taught content that they’d just heard, or had worked on at home, to other people in their class, developed and demonstrated an incredible understanding of those particular topics.

Especially when compared to students who just listened or took notes.

This is because, to explain topics to people who don’t know lots of stuff, you need to simplify things and give examples.

You also need to be able to connect different elements together.

This is a scarily efficient way to learn.

Learn by teaching.

Are flashcards effective for studying?

Yes.

Either use an app like RemNote, create digital flashcards on Anki, or just do what I did in my final exams and put your flashcards in tables on a Google Doc.

Here’s an example of flashcards in a Google Doc.

As you can see, the top left box, which is the front of our flashcard, should have its answer be on the opposite side, down on the next Doc page.

This is because of the way that the sheets print.

I printed these out and walked around with them; literally around the streets for over an hour at a time.

You can just use RemNote or Anki though to make digital flashcards.

Physical cards just give you more creative options.

Using flashcards ultimately gives you lots of opportunities in regards to both simplifying your content (you break down the elements and obviously, you only put the important stuff on each flashcard), and in regards to TEACHING.

I walked around the streets with flashcards teaching them to trees; using both active recall and teaching.

What is the ideal “Spaced Repetition”?

The ideal ways to use spaced repetition include not studying things in order, using a retrospective timetable, and by using the algorithm embedded inside of the productivity software, “RemNote”.

First, NOT studying things in order, like this:

For example, math for 2 hours, english for 2 hours, physics for 2 hours.

NO!

It turns out that it’s way more effective to space out your subjects or work that you need to get done, mostly because of regularly revisiting information and having it be varied, as spoken about in the book, “Focused Determination”.

For example, math for 30 mins, english for 30 mins, physics for 30 mins, math for 30 mins again, repeat…

A similar method is using something that a couple study-productivity YouTubers talk about, which is called a “Retrospective Timetable”.

For this, you’d study every day, at any time.

You’d use Google Sheets to make a table that has different topics in the far left column.

Each day, you colour each topic with either RED highlight, YELLOW highlight or GREEN highlight.

Green means easy, yellow means that you’re okay, red means that it’s really difficult.

As you progress through the days, you’ll focus on the RED topics or what you haven’t studied in the longest time.

Like this:

Now for RemNote:

Basically, this app allows you to make digital flashcards, and then rate how confident you felt after trying to recount the answers.

Based on what “Confidence Emoji” you give, the software will take those flashcards away and spit them back out to you after an hour, a day, 3 days, a week, a few weeks and eventually months.

It’s a pretty good app; use it if you want to…

What's the most simple way to study for exams?

Imagine you’re moving into a new house.

You have a bunch of your own furniture that you need to move in.

But you’ve got to be careful in what order you move certain items inside the home, because it might get difficult to move a kitchen table to the other side of the house, when you’ve now got a dresser, a desk, a heater and other stuff to move OUT of the way.

You need to know the nature of the house before you throw everything that you have into it.

You need to see what the home includes; how many rooms, how big and complex are the shapes of each room, are the thin wooden boards in one room strong enough for a kitchen table and 6 chairs?…

This is called getting to know your topics, or your exams, or your subjects.

You need to know what order to move the furniture in, or in what order you should be studying for things.

As in, what’re the most IMPORTANT things.

1) The first step is to get to know your upcoming topics.

2) Break down what you might need to know or what you KNOW will be in the exams, tests, etc.

All of this same stuff applies to businesses, which is where I’m currently using these steps.

1) Come to understand what I’m getting myself into.

2) Break down all the stuff that would probably need to go into the business.

3) Put these in order of most to least important.

4) Break down these MOST important elements and look at what’s the easiest things to do first. I now proceed to take action on those things.

5) Do the hardest stuff as best as I can; it doesn’t need to be perfect and I don’t need to know or cover every detail.

6) Ask myself questions about the most important elements that I just covered. What if I changed THIS? If THIS outcome happened instead, what would’ve been the likely cause of that outcome? What’s a simpler way to do this? Why is that more simple?

7) As you go down the ladder of important elements, you’ll find that a lot of the shit isn’t necessary to study, unless you have time, or in the case of a business, the important stuff is automated or requires minimal effort from now on.

8) Get your friends to go through these most important and ask more questions about them, whether they study what you study or not. You answer these and learn. Otherwise, they can do this same thing with lesser important elements and then you guys collaborate your discoveries. Fast and efficient as fuck.

If you wanna be around people who want to help each other learn things, grow as people and become more knowledgable and mentally resilient to what life throws at us, join the Peaky Pines Email Community.

That’s it!

Basically, do these things from now on:

1) Find your purpose. Download these 10 Questions to achieve this, starting today.

2) Workout several times per week, preferably being mostly yoga; becoming stronger, more connected with yourself and the world and becoming calmer.

3) Stop taking notes and watching videos. Make flashcards, teach the content on them and use active recall to try and remember the answers and then check the back of the card.

4) Study with friends and use the Most Important to Least Important framework in the previous section to get assignments and homework done quickly.

5) Subscribe to the Peaky Pines Email Community! We’re a bunch of young people, students and entrepreneurs, who’re working together EVERY SINGLE DAY to become the most confident and tenacious (strong work ethic) versions of ourselves imaginable.

Are you against feeling like you’re making more progress in life, while doing it with people who want to succeed like you?

Join us!

Riley Caldwell https://rileycaldwell.com
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