You’re probably sick of studying right now because you’ve been doing it for the past 10 years in school. If that’s you, you’ve come to the right place.
In this post, I’m going to show you the easiest and most effective ways to study now and actually get something done. I’ll also show why the old way of meeting up with friends doesn’t work anymore.
The best part? You can use these techniques to make class projects super easy, get motivated, and stop wasting time on low-value activities.
Let’s get started!
The Old Way to Study and Why It Doesn’t Work Any More
If you were born in the 1980s or even the early 1990s, it was pretty common to meet up for homework study sessions.
So when I started Studygate, I thought students would want to find efficient ways to collaborate using video chat. I’m not going to lie to you…I was wrong!
You see, I was thinking that students would care about real-time interaction. And that’s certainly true, but not so much for studying.
In fact, I conducted a study on this very topic. This is what I learned:
I also learned from running StudyGate that most students would rather chat with a tutor than get on a live video feed to discuss their homework questions.
The old way to study worked because students had fewer things to work on. My research shows that students now need MORE time management skills to succeed in school.
You don’t have to take my word for it. An op-ed by Michael Gonchar in the New York Times contains 83 comments from students sharing this exact same problem.
What’s the bottom line? You need parallel learning options where you can communicate outside of real-time, but you also need space to express yourself.
2 Very Easy Tools for Your Study Problems
There are tons of ways to think about motivating yourself to study. As I’ve shown, none of us have time to meet up with classmates to study and work on projects any more. But what are the alternatives?
Chanty offers chat-based project management so you can work with classmates on your class projects. You can set due times, highlight your teammates in chat threads with @mentions, and share files.
After creating an account, you can set up a channel for each subtopic in the project. And like I mentioned before, this site is free to use.
TheStrive Studies gives you an instant study partner when you need to do your homework alone.
Why is this important?
You can watch the videos on the side while you work (many are over 2 hours) and know you have a digital partner working with you in parallel.
No more distracted browsing because your device is already playing the video while you do your part. You can also watch these videos with music included if you need some background sound.
Instant focus!
But if you need a break, you can leave a comment on the video for social interaction.
For more great tips on college life, check out the other blogs on College Basics.
About the Author: Jacob Hallman is the learning-obsessed co-founder of StudyGate, a tutoring platform for college students trying to get through Gen Eds and pass their STEM classes. Why so obsessed? Well, his skills on the saxophone have nothing to do with it (OK maybe a little). It’s because StudyGate provides insanely practical help that students like you can use to start getting better grades.
