Staying focused on your tasks and all the staff your professors tell you might be overwhelming, especially if you are a university student with an active social life and extracurricular activities like hobbies and work. Of course, your perception of information might vary depending on the pedagogical approach used by your tutors, but the responsibility for perceiving that information and generating knowledge out of it is on you. That is why you need to find ways to focus if you have a problem with it and use all of the available means to make your learning environment as comfortable as possible. That way, you'll be able to perceive the information better and transform it into knowledge and skills in a more efficient manner. Today, we will take a look at some of the useful tips on how you can boost up your focus and improve your performance at the university.

Establish Clear Goals

What are you working toward? You should have some goals in life you are working to achieve, so you should understand what really matters to you and focus on those things. A clear goal itself is not what makes you focus, but it surely makes you feel that urge to keep on achieving something bigger than what you have right now. Do you want to build a successful career? Well, you should study and get that knowledge that would be essential for your future job. That should give you that boost of motivation that's so essential for when you are trying to concentrate on your routine tasks. The goal is what keeps driving us forward, so you need to see that goal that pushes you forward and makes you walk towards it against all the odds.

Have a Weekly Roadmap

Achieving the Big Goal might be tough, especially when it is too distant. Sometimes, walking towards that far away destination might get too tiresome because it feels like you are not getting any closer. Most college students feel really frustrated and discouraged because they seem to never achieve anything and just keep on spinning in that endless wheel of doing homework, going to lectures, and passing exams. It feels like it never ends, and higher education might even lose its purpose if you end up hating your field of studies. To avoid this, you've got to create a roadmap for each week or at least a month, so by the end of each period, you would accomplish at least some kind of goal. Students perceive information better when they know what purpose it serves in a greater scheme of things, so you need to set up a wide range of goals and achieve them one by one each week.

Learn to Say No

College life is full of distractions - parties, dates, pub crawls, and all that fun stuff. Of course, you need to relax sometimes and go out with your friends or your special other, but you should also draw a line somewhere not to sacrifice your performance in favor of having fun. Education and knowledge are what you came here for in the first place, and all the parties and fun are secondary. Sometimes, you need to make a tough choice between spending a couple of hours with your books or go for a drink or two with your friends. For most university students, the choice is clear - go out with friends, and that surely is a great choice, but you should be honest with yourself. Do you really need to go out every night? Do you really need to get smashed every week? Or maybe it would be more beneficial to spend some time studying and achieving your goals? Be completely honest with yourself. Your future is more important than pub crawls, so set your priorities right. Of course, you must not fall out of your social network, but you should also understand that you are a student and that spending more time at the library is more beneficial than wasting it in a bar.

Eliminate Distractors

With all the information technology, social media, gadgets, and video games, it is easy to get distracted from your goals. The quality of learning environments translates into your ability to focus on your tasks and your ability to study. You need to make sure your learning environment is free of distractors such as social media, some redundant objects, people who might distract you, and all the outside noises that can break your focus. That way, you can truly concentrate on your academic goals and improve the quality of your education. The classroom itself has to be spacious, well-lit, and tidy. As the earlier study in that field shows, students tend to perform better when their classrooms are properly arranged. The basic rules for arranging a classroom are having large windows, lots of free space, avoiding stuffing the space with redundant objects, and making sure there's enough natural light there. If your environment is like this, you have better chances for the new information to be perceived positively.

Rest Well

One of the most important things in any activity is resting properly. If you open any case study in a scientific journal with focus groups composed of students enrolled in universities on a national or global scale, you'll see that students who rest well and have a healthy sleeping schedule tend to perform much better. Having a healthy sleeping schedule gives you a number of advantages, including a better focus during the lectures. This will also provide you with the advantage of having a better memory, attention span, and physical endurance. All of these are essential in the contexts of teaching and learning quality research. It's worth being noted that proper rest improves your health in general, so if you have any sleeping issues, you should probably contact a support network that provides free services to students with such issues. Use an online search to find one nearby.

Wrap Up

A discussion around the attention span and the ability to concentrate has been troubling researchers for decades. Conducting the analysis of different factors influencing students' perception, education specialists have been writing numerous papers. You can find tons of those on Google scholar, so if these are the research questions that bother you, it might be a good time to go deeper into that. With access to the means of mass communication we have today, you should use it to your advantage and study that issue in a profound manner. This will help you concentrate and fix some of the problems that might be troubling you right now.

This article was written by Mark Wiseman, who's been working as an academic assistance specialist for 6 years now, providing students with help in different fields. You can check PapersOwl review to find more of Mark's articles on the problems learners face and some essential tips and tricks on addressing those problems.