Psychological Mini Tricks for More Motivation When Studying at Home
You lounge comfortably on your desk chair. You hold a cup of coffee in one hand and operate your computer with the other. Your favorite music is playing in the background. It may not look like it to outsiders, but: you learn. At the moment you go through the lecture slides and summarize the essential contents. After that, you’ll memorize a few definitions and then go through a case study.
And all of that within your own four walls.
But as nice as learning at home may be – studying in the home office involves some risks. Motivational risks, to be precise. Only the fewest students manage to motivate themselves to learn at the push of a button and then stay focused. Most become distracted after a short time or don’t even start because they lack drive and self-discipline.
Am I going to judge that? – No. I want to help with this article.
Psychological Mini Tricks for More Motivation When Studying at Home
Learning at Home: Psychological Mini Tricks for More Motivation
So that your future learning units at home are more productive, we are going to use the psychological bag of tricks today. I’ll show you simple mechanisms that you can use to significantly increase and sustainably improve your motivation when learning at home. Not only do these psychological tricks help you motivate yourself to study – but they also foster productive habits and ensure you use your time efficiently. As a result, you might figure out what assignments you really need in your life and what you can delegate to a residency personal statement writing service.
Additionally, discovering your strengths and leveraging them effectively can be a game-changer in achieving success. One popular tool for understanding and maximizing your strengths is the cliftonstrengths test, developed by Gallup, this assessment identifies your unique combination of talents and provides insights into your natural abilities and potential areas of growth.
1. Define a Mini Goal!
Many students know how important goals are – but unfortunately, they use their goal formulations incorrectly. Either they remain too vague, or they dimension their goals incorrectly. The most common mistake in learning is making goals too big, like, “Today I’m going to study for 12 hours.” Such a goal is everything except motivating. For this reason, you should shift down five gears when you are lacking in drive and define mini goals, for example: “Today I will read 3 pages” or “Today I will write a paragraph of my research paper”. The smaller the target, the more likely it won’t deter you.
2. Keep Two Separate To-do Lists!
In themselves, to-do lists are a good thing: you can use them to outsource your thoughts, collect tasks and plan the rest of the day. Unfortunately, to-do lists quickly become a pool of wild excuses that keep you from getting important things done. Learning for example. For this reason, you should keep two different to-do lists. On one list you write down all the tasks that have to do with your current learning project; on the other list, you compile all other to-dos. Now you can proceed systematically: Only when you have completed a “learning to-do” can you take care of a to-do on the other list.
3. Think in Steps!
Tasks that are too big have the same destructive effect on your motivation as goals that are too big. So get used to thinking in steps. Especially when learning at home, many students take on “big chunks”. Instead of shimmying from subtask 1 to subtask 2 to subtask 3, they write “solve all tasks” on their to-do list. With such a work structure, you can also let the learning be direct. Instead, learn step by step and break big tasks into small, manageable portions. First step 1, then step 2, then step 3, and so on.
4. Attach a Reward to Each Partial Step!
Learning in steps increases your motivation, especially if you link the completion of each partial step to a reward. The reward doesn’t even have to be big or particularly valuable – it’s enough if you reward yourself with a positive mini-experience for your commitment: A new cup of coffee or tea, a chocolate bar, a song from your favorite playlist, or comparable “little things”. ensure that your brain associates positive feelings with your learning units. After a short time, you can establish new, productive habits in the home office.
5. Study for Only Five Minutes!
It is particularly difficult to get started with complex topics or longer learning units. But you can use the five-minute rule to overturn this mental blockage. You set a small, specific task and work on it for only five minutes. After that, you stop and decide whether to continue or not.
If after five minutes you absolutely don’t feel like it anymore, just stop and do something else or start again later. The trick to the five-minute rule, though, is that you’re unlikely to pull away after five minutes. Most of them think: “Now I’ve started once, then I can continue.”
