Unfocused and Relatable: The Studyblr

*squints at clock in corner of computer screen*

1.) Start on paper

I know it’s tempting to just open a Google Doc and stare at it. That’s my favorite past time. But for me, opening a Google Doc as the first step is a terrible idea and that’s why we are here at 5am on a Saturday!!

Your paper doesn’t need to even resemble the final product at all. For me, I like to make a sort of list. Even though I have the rubric next to me, I still like to revisit key steps, such as “you need at least 3 sources”

I also tend to leave myself helpful reminders, such as “Check on OWL to find citation page order”

(Obviously a lot of people can just open a doc and get straight to work, but if you’re like me and you get distracted opening new tabs, here’s an idea)

Something isn’t working? Don’t be afraid to scrap it. You’re not stupid for chasing that train of thought. Change tracks!!

The article I wanted to use as a primary source doesn’t count as a primary source at all. While I was certain it was the only thing that fit my criteria, and the idea of researching again physically hurts me, I know I need to let it go. If I use this article, I will literally get an F, and I need to stop trying to find loopholes in the rubric to justify keeping it.

3.) BRAINSTORM!

I pulled up a timeline to help guide me through this sick web that I made:

Then part 4. Find sources and take notes on them

This is pretty much just so I can learn and actually know what the heck I’m reading. I cited the sources and took the paragraphs that were useful to me. I printed them off and I’m currently taking notes on stuff I don’t understand.

This is what it looks like:

Part 5.) Make notes

I’m not kidding. Write down as many things as you need to put in your brain! Even if you think “whatever I’ll remember it” or “That’s so simple it’s stupid” write it down anyway.

I made a note to myself that inattentive adhd used to be called ADD. A fact I have been aware of for like. Over a year.

Bam. I highlighted every weird “DSM” and learned that the roman numerals were different editions of the literal diagnostics manual. (I also made note of which year they all came out, because maybe it would be important.)

Plan an order and get the citations done. Citations are my favorite part!!

Also if the order doesn’t work out, don’t fret! You can move your paragraphs around once they’re written out well. A good transition sentence can restructure the whole paper!

Hello! @finally-a-realistic-studyblr made an awesome post with a few links to add/adhd studyblrs so I’ll link them below:

@adhdstudyblr

@studyingwithadhd

@adhdstudying

@adhdstudyingg

@studyadhd

@studybutch

@adhd-community

Hey guys, as someone with ADHD, I get distracted REALLY easily. I am the queen of distraction, but that also makes me very knowledgeable about tips for focus that ACTUALLY work. These tips are designed to hopefully be helpful to all students, but there will be more ADHD-focused recommendations coming up in a future post!

1. Essential Oils

One method that works particularly well for me is using essential oils. I know many people view essential oils as a bunch of bullcrap and not worth the money. Trust me, I used to be one of those people, but some essential oils really do work! My concentration and focus have immensely improved by using essential oils, specifically peppermint and cedarwood oil.

2. Completely Disable Internet

I recommend working offline whenever possible. If you need to use a laptop or use the internet, consider using a website blocker or app to block access to sites that distract you such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I personally use Freedom but have an upcoming post about different apps and websites I have tried and used to improve my productivity.

3. Engage in Principles of “Deep Work”

In his bestseller “Deep Work” author Cal Newport explained why and how to perform “deep work” which basically is just an extended period of intense focus with NO distractions. Newport presents some interesting practical ideas such as shutting yourself in an empty distraction-free room for a few hours.

Newport says “To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.”

4. Stay hydrated

Drink your water! Seriously. It is tough to focus and stay alert if you are feeling dehydrated. I recommend always having a full bottle of water at your desk/study space. Fill the bottle before you start your study session.

5. Write down things distracting you

If you have distracting thoughts when studying (which you more than likely will) write them down. If you think “oh I need to check the due date or send this e-mail to a professor” write it down, keep a list, and complete those tasks after the study session.

WHAT IS A HALF DRAFT? A half draft is somewhere between an outline and a first draft. It contains more information than just bullet points, but takes less time than a full first draft. 

HOW CAN A HALF DRAFT HELP ME? If you’re like me and have ADHD or other disorders that result in low executive functioning, then the process of turning a bunch of ideas into an actual paper is even more difficult. You may be pressed for time, overloaded with work, or just struggling to make your ideas make sense. A half draft allows you to get all of your rhetoric onto the page without having to worry about the frills. That way, you can look at your arguments more closely without getting stuck on phrasing or any conventional details. A half draft is the definition of function over form. 

HOW CAN I MAKE A HALF DRAFT? 

Since we keep our phones and other devices on us at basically all times, they’re really accessible and useful. When it comes to school, though, these devices can become rather distracting. Sometimes in order to focus, you need to leave it in a different room! But if used correctly, your phone can actually help you do schoolwork.

Here, my friend, is a post about using your phone to help you study and do schoolwork.

Just remember that everyone works differently and focuses differently, so experiment! Try out these tips. Alter them. Try doing some and not others. See what works for you!

Forest (app): This is an app that helps you focus; a tree is planted, and you set a timer. At the end of that timer, the tree has finished growing. If you use any other apps, the tree will wither and die. You can set a white list of apps that you deem productive; the app will allow these apps to be used during the focus time. At the end of each day, you have a forest of trees; it may be full of green trees, or withered trees.

Use the whitelist! If music helps you focus, whitelist your music app. whitelist any homework/working apps on this list you want to use during your focus time. Whitelist your calculator. Just go through the list of apps and whitelist any that you will need.

Don’t whitelist things you DON’T need. Remember the purpose of the app: to stay focused on SCHOOLWORK. Don’t whitelist things that will distract you.

MyHomework (app): This app is incredibly useful. You put your scheduled classes into the app (there are tons of options for the class times; block schedules, period schedules, weekly or biweekly schedules, etc), then you add assignments, tests, homework, etc. It’s basically a virtual planner. It allows you to include priority level. Then when you go to see what assignments you have, you can sort it by priority, due date, class, or assignment type. It will give you alerts too.

Widgets are miracles. This app has a widget for classes and for homework. It lets you see quickly what classes you have today, and what homework is due today, on your phone’s home screen.

Get it on all your devices. It’s on everything. Kindle, Chrome OS, Android, IPhone, Mac, Windows… I don’t know about linux. 

Cram (app): Basically, this app lets you make sets of flashcards virtually. It’s much easier than making paper flashcards, and it comes with you everywhere, so you can practice at any time. It comes with study programs, giving you easy ways to learn the subject fast. It also has a text-to-speech feature, and you can set one side to one language and one side to another language to help you with the pronunciation of words. It is the best form of flashcards I’ve ever used. 

Duolingo (app): This is an app designed to help you learn a language like you would naturally: through a kind of submersion. It gives you little phrases and makes you translate them. When a new word is introduced, it is underlined and you may click it to see it’s definition, so you aren’t completely blind here. It also makes you do pronunciation, match words with definitions, and it has a few other activities. It doesn’t really give you lessons, it gives you practice. It has tons of languages, and it’s even going to introduce Klingon soon. One cool feature is the feedback: each language has admins, and when you don’t understand a sentence, you can ask about it in the comments. Another student, or an admin, may respond to your question with an answer.

Use the desktop version when possible. The desktop version gives you access to actual basic lessons, and goes a bit more in-depth. The little sessons on the mobile phone are certainly helpful, and you will learn, but the desktop version is a bit more educational and even offers flashcards… Which the mobile version does not.

It isn’t perfect. It isn’t good at grading your pronunciation, and sometimes a sentence can have two meanings, but it only accepts one. Luckily, you can always flag a question with a wrong answer, so it will be corrected by an admin. It’s a nice system.

Practice daily! This app records your streaks, so you can keep track of how much you’re studying. An interesting feature in this app is fluency. If you stop practicing, your fluency number goes down. It keeps track of how well you’re doing in the lessons to track your fluency growth.

Redo lessons. One interesting feature in this app is the way it makes you redo the lessons. Over time, the “strength” of each lesson goes down. You need to redo lessons for the strength to go up. This is to stop you from forgetting what you’ve learned.

RescueTime (app): RescueTime is an app and desktop application. It goes on all your devices and records what you’re doing. Sounds creepy, but all it’s doing is telling you what you’re doing, and giving you a score on how productive you’re being. You mark some applications as being productive, some as neutral, some as distracting, etc, then it keeps you aware of what you’re doing too much of and what you aren’t doing enough of.

Get it on EVERYTHING. For a while I only had it on my desktop, but then I found I was doing productive things on my chromebook and mobile too and I wanted those to be counted. I found that it inspired me to be much more productive with my time. On the bus, instead of playing a game on my phone, why not up my productivity with Cram? Seriously, it really makes you more productive. Get it on your phone, laptop, desktop, browser, whatever. Get it everywhere. And update to Premium if you can, it gives you a more detailed report.

Here are a few more tips for your phone in general:

Organise your apps into folders. For example, here is my homepage:

See the folders? I keep them color coded. The red folders are distracting: Social Media, Entertainment, Games. The Green ones are productive! The white and yellow are neutral.

Get widgets. They’re good at giving you quick information without having to open the app.

Experiment. Remember, everyone learns and focuses differently! Use your phone to your advantage.

Also, these are the apps that I use. There are so many other good apps. I’ve heard really good things about Memrise, a free app for learning languages that focuses on vocabulary. If didn’t include it in the main list because I’ve never used it and I don’t know much about it, but if you’re learning a language you should go check it out! I know I’m going to soon.

As I touched on in my previous blog post, How to Annotate, active reading is an important tool to have in your academic arsenal. I prefer writing notes over annotating texts, below are some of my most hopeful tips for effective notetaking. 

Tip 1: Understand Your 3 Options: Outlining as You go, Summarizing Each Section, or Summarizing After You Finish the Chapter/Reading.

I, personally, prefer to outline as I read. The benefits of this strategy are that you don’t forget anything important, and this method can help people with focus and concentration. I recommend this method for anyone with ADD/ADHD or other learning differences (stay tuned for an upcoming blog post on managing ADD/ADHD in college).

Outlining after each section or even (immediately) after you finish the entire chapter is faster and helps you distill the information down to what is most important. It also helps with general synthesis. However, this is not an ideal method for people who struggle to remember details or focus on important information.

Tip 2: Decide Whether To Take Handwritten or Typed Notes

Once again there are advantages and disadvantages to both. Typing is better if you have handwriting problems, or need to take more extensive notes as it can be faster, but the notes may be harder to format. There is also some science to show that the act of handwriting helps the information stick in your memory better. Taking notes on the computer, however, makes them hard to store.   

Tip 3: Read the Text Before Class, Take Notes, and Bring Those Notes to Class

When I started college, I was constantly confused by what date you were supposed to have read the texts by. Often syllabuses are written as “Week 1: Read Chapters 1-3″ but what does that mean? By the beginning of the week? The end? The lecture? The discussion? In general, it is a good idea to have read (and taken notes on!) any assigned readings before the first class meeting each week. Bring these notes to class to reference in discussion and impress all of your professors.

Tip 4: Highlight or Star Important Details in Your Notes! 

This is especially important for people who take notes as they read. Highlighting is an excellent opportunity to review your notes and summarize what is important. 

Tip 5: Use the Margins or Sticky Notes to Note Questions You Have About The Reading or Concepts You Are Still Not Understanding.

 If these questions aren’t addressed in lecture, raise your hand and ask! (but if you’re feeling shy you can go to office hours too!)

Fair warning: this post is not really about doing homework, rather ideas for successfully acquiring/accessing more general living and organizational skills while dorming. Also, my first semester has been a shitshow so idk how qualified I am to give advice on the matter, but take it as you will. In a way it’s “things I learned the hard way”/a reflection on my first semester.

That being said, here we go:

1. To remember to bring the correct notebooks and materials, get a hanging clothes organizer and label for the 5/7 days of the week. Place the books/materials needed for each day on each labeled shelf. If you need certain books on multiple days, you can put index card placeholders or label what should be in each compartment.

2. Alternatively, you can get a mini days of the week dry erase board or a computer printout and write what materials you need on which days and which classes you go to (in order.)

3. This tip also works for homework: in college, the workload is much more predictable week to week, so if you always have online math due Monday, put it in another weekly table and schedule days to work on it in advance.

4. Schedule your asssignments to be done ahead of time. It’s a lot harder to get deadline-related accommodations in college and if you’re like me you feel uncomfortable asking for them. I’ve only needed to ask for one non accommodation included extension this semester, and it’s largely due to this.

5. Get. Your. Accommodations. In. Order. Before. The. School. Year. Starts. (if at all possible)

Learn from my mistakes. To be fair I didn’t have another option because my school requires everything to be done in person but it took me a month to get my letters which resulted in some awkward/discriminatory situations. Oops.

6. College accommodation processes are different than high school. There are no 504s/IEPs/under the table stealth accommodations here. Some colleges require retesting for your documentation. All require you to fill out a bunch of forms. You are largely responsible for knowing what helps you (though your liaison will likely make suggestions) so make a list of what worked for you in high school and will fly in college and request those (bring it with you to the meeting if you will forget). Also, your parents are generally forbidden from getting involved unless you sign a consent form, which is a huge change. You will need/be forced to develop self-advocacy skills. I definitely did. You also generally need to request to renew your accommodations every semester, and it’s your responsibility to remember. Set a reminder on your phone/digital calendar.

7. Post its are your friend. For me, they’ve been a valuable asset to my sucky working memory and using them minimizes resulting anxiety.

8. Laundry is hard, especially when you have physical disabilities. Double check your pockets or you might accidentally send your favorite pen through the wash and induce a meltdown. (To be fair I do check- which is why I said double check)

9. Choose specific dates/times to do your laundry, and set reminders. If you alternate lights and darks and do it, say, every Wednesday morning (pick an off time- Friday nights are great) you are a lot less likely to end up with a month’s worth of laundry and nothing to wear when you really need to look nice. Also, your suitcase can double as a rolling laundry basket.

10. Try to eat around the same times every day. Set alarms if you forget. Try to go on the off hours and eat as healthily as possible.

11. Clean your room before it gets too messy. This should go without saying but my drawers got junky by the end of the semester. Try scheduling a day of the week to do a quick clean up.

12. Your space can be a reflection of your mental state. I need things visually organized, but when I’m not doing well mentally I stop cleaning off my desk, putting my clothes in the laundry basket, making an attempt to make my bed, you name it. I’ve learned to recognize that this is a sign of stress and that tidying up a bit will make me feel a bit better.

13. College is not conducive to sleep, especially for work heavy majors. You. Need. (around) 8. (ish) Hours. Get them. It’s hard but everything else will fall apart if you don’t.

14. Make “ routine cards” for things like showering. Write down everything you need to take a shower on an index card and your steps for taking a shower (you can set a timer) so that you don’t take half an hour to get out your shampoo.

15. Drink water. Carry a water bottle so you have the visual reminder. Drink a glass at every meal. Schedule “teatime” and make an event of staying hydrated.

16. Allow yourself to relax. This is hard because the college environment demands you be “on” at all times, and this resulted in me feeling guilty for not studying when I was, well, not studying. I’m trying to work on scheduling times to work and times to not work, and to remember that I need to do fun things to take care of myself.

17. If you dress nicer than usual, you will apparently not look as depressed (assuming you have depression in the first place…). Use this to your advantage.

18. If you have un/undertreated/situational depression, get help before it gets really bad. I know a lot of college mental health offices push people away but put your self advocacy skills to use and get that counseling or whatever.

19. In the same vein, if you are struggling in a class (for whatever reason) don’t be ashamed to get extra help/sign up for tutoring. Especially if you’re like me and never needed to study a day in your life before this because the courses are structured differently.

20. Recognize your accomplishments. College can be really, really hard for people with impaired executive functioning, mental illnesses, developmental disabilities, etc. The change is hard and the learning curve is steep. But you’ve made it this far- so congrats! Celebrate!

I don’t know about you, but long classes get the best of my ADHD. Today as I was sitting in my two hour composition lecture I thought of some helpful ways to endure a long class.

Take a break. At my college, if a class is over two hours the professor is required to give a ten minute break. By the time came for the break, I was already in a hyper focus and didn’t want to take the break. This may vary from person to person, but I found that taking the break really helped even if it did mean a break from the hyper focus. In my experience of my first semester of college, the other students did not want the break and would just sit in the classroom. That may work for some, but I found getting out of the classroom really helped, even if it meant just taking a small walk. Take advantage of the breaks the teachers give you.

Snacks, water, and meals. Most of the teachers don’t care if you eat in class, especially when it is a two hour+ class. Make sure you eat lunch/dinner before class if your class is around that time. Take some snacks and a bottle of water. It will help your mind and your mood. I always take a fun snack and eat it after the first hour to ‘reward‘ myself. 

Fidgets. Use fidget toys. Personally, I don’t like big fidgets but rather the small ones that you can just hold in your hand. I know they make some fidgets that can work with pencils or something… I’m not sure:)  you could doodle too as long as that isn’t a distraction in itself. Another thing I find useful is taking notes even if I don’t need to. It keeps me focused and I remember the material better. A girl in one of my classes brings a coloring book to class. Find what works for you!

If your teacher isn’t okay with you having food or drinks in class, start chewing a piece of gum before you enter the classroom, and make sure to either throw the wrapper away outside the class, or put it in your backpack. Just don’t leave any trash behind in the class or the building, and most teachers will be fine with it.

On fidgets: If texture is your thing, they make textured pencil grips that are nice and squishy, have pattern textures, etc. These aren’t just limited to use on wood pencils; they can go on most mechanical pencils and pens too.

This is a tip I saw on a different thread: If you have a hard time with zoning out bc you’re focusing too hard on trying to pay attention to pay attention, take your phone and use it as a voice recorder. If you run out of space between classes, email yourself the recordings you have and then clear them from your phone.

Also, since lots of phones also don’t have voice recorders, digital recorders are usually pretty cheap on Amazon and at places like Walmart. They also usually have more memory for it than a phone might!