My typical day starts at 3:30 pm. To clarify, that is not when I wake up, nor is it when I first leave the house. I don’t stay up till four in the morning, and my employment doesn’t involve shift work.
My day starts at 3:30 in the afternoon because that’s when I get home from my full-time job, sit down at my desk, and try to squeeze a few more hours of productivity from my brain to meet the demands of my distance learning courses. Like most students, I have regular battles with the motivation monster. Thankfully, I’ve found a few ways to fight back.
1. A simple chore + a simple snack = a gateway to better focus
Sitting down at my desk is easy; staying there is another challenge entirely. As soon as I crack open my textbook, my mind starts to wander to the dishes in the sink or the laundry that needs folding or the biggie: what should I make for dinner?
My problem is that I love to cook, and I don’t shy away from recipes that contain a staggering list of ingredients (sometimes resulting in some spectacular culinary fails). Who knows; maybe I was a chef in a past life. In this life, however, I am a working student who needs to find a way to focus for a few hours on homework.
I’ve found that if I spend a few minutes cleaning before I sit down (and distract from the food thoughts with…a multi-tasking snack!) that I am better able to focus on studying.
2. Running to clear the mind
I also fidget. A lot. Sincere apologies to anyone who has ever had the misfortune of sitting near me at work or school; I have no control over my bouncing foot. It even annoys me sometimes—it’s that bad.
The only thing that comes close to taming my tap-tap-tapping is full movement. Going for a short run between work and study time helps me burn off a few calories of nervous energy while also giving me an excuse to turn my brain off for a few minutes.
Or, if I’m just not up for the rigmarole of putting on running shoes, my dog is always down for a fetch session in the yard. Either way, I’m primed to hit the books. As an added bonus, the exercise makes the dog more interested in napping than pacing around the house.
3. A power nap to provide some zap
On days when the idea of stepping outside is about as appealing as the moldy sandwich I once discovered at the bottom of my high school locker (don’t judge—we’ve all been there), I’ve found that nothing recharges the battery like a good old-fashioned nap. Falling asleep in the middle of the day is a glorious feeling.
Some days, I come home to my cat lying in the exact same spot she was in when I left for work eight hours earlier, and I wake her up just so that she can watch me fall asleep on the couch. I think it comes from some irrational desire to prove that I can catnap just as hard as she can (take that Professor Mittens!). Thirty minutes of magical slumber later and I suddenly have the ability to focus for the rest of the afternoon.
4. The clever art of breaking up
At some point, of course, I have to roll up my sleeves and actually do some work. For me, getting started is impossible if I have a huge task with only a vague idea of how to accomplish it. To overcome the inertia, I try to break up assignments into manageable chunks.
One of my particularly daunting courses required two chapters of reading per week plus 12-15 assignment problems (taking between 10 and 30 minutes each), capped off with a quiz. Yikes.
Just thinking about all of that at once still makes me sweat. The only way to tackle it was to break it up over the course of the week: Monday was spent reading the chapters, Tuesday through Thursday was devoted to the assignment problems, and on Friday I would take the quiz. For some reason, the motivation of a responsibility-free weekend always helps to keep me on track.
Practice makes (almost) perfect
To make any of these tips work takes practice. For me, it doesn’t take much motivation to get up early to go to work because I’ve done it every weekday for nearly a decade (of course, the paychecks don’t hurt either). Prior to my courses, though, I didn’t do much to challenge myself on my own time.
As with a sport, being a student and developing good study habits takes practice. Just like I used to hate my cross-country coach for pushing us to run up hills on a hot day (while chasing us in a truck, honking), I also find that I have an aversion to my coursework because, most of the time, it’s just not easy.
Like running, though, the more I do it, the better I get and the less work it becomes. I usually even end up liking the tougher courses by the end of the semester.
I am by no means a perfect student. On one particularly embarrassing day, my husband came home early to find me not at my desk, but lounging on the couch reading a trashy celebrity magazine while simultaneously watching E! on television. The look on his face told me he could understand one of those distractions, maybe, but not both at the same time. “Uh, I was taking a study break?” was all I could sheepishly reply.
On my good days, however, I take my own advice and chip away at my educational goals, moving one step closer to graduation. Today, in fact, I have every intention of going home after work, sitting down, and diving into the business of learning.
Well, maybe after I vacuum.
