Learn how to create a study space that you enjoy spending time in and that helps your productivity.
Creating a study space you love is a massively underrated way to both increase productivity and overall happiness. Having a cluttered, frustrating, uncomfortable, untidy or even downright dirty study space is perhaps not the best way to help focus your mind.
The aim here is to create a space that doesn’t ‘fight’ against you and make your studies more difficult, but instead helps you to relax into the process. It’s never easy when you need to digest a lot of usually very complicated information in a meaningful way. A little extra effort up front spent really thinking about how you can make the space work best for you can pay dividends in the long run.
Here are a few tips to improve your study space:
Clear Out Your Rubbish And Clutter
The number one stress-causer for a lot of people is untidiness and clutter. Have you ever heard the phrase “Tidy desk, tidy mind”? Well, for a lot of people that is true! Having a nice clean and tidy space will help you clear your mind and focus on the task at hand. It helps if you organise the things you are using to help you study, such as pens, highlighters, etc.
If you have extra stuff you want to remove from your study area, but don’t want to get rid of it permanently, then it might be useful to use self storage for storing items temporarily.
Improve Your Lighting
Lighting is very important. Bright, harsh or fluorescent lights can cause eye-strain and headaches, which obviously make it much harder to study efficiently. Choosing more diffused, softer lighting will help relax your eyes and make the overall feeling of the room less intrusive. A good tip is to use a lamp, but instead of pointing it straight down at your desk or study area, turn it to face the wall. This will bounce the light off the wall into the room and soften it.
It’s also advisable to use warmer coloured lights after dark or close to bedtime. This will further relieve eye-strain and cause less interruption to your sleep pattern. You can also use ‘night mode’ or something similar on your devices to reduce blue light from screens.
Don’t Forget Your Senses
As well as lighting and tidying your room properly, perfecting what you can see, your other senses are just as important! A bad smelling room or a lot of noise pollution can have a terrible impact on your ability to study. You can pretty easily fix both of these things by using something like incense, candles or reed diffusers to hide bad smells and make the room much nicer to be in.
For noise pollution, you can get sound-dampening blankets that muffle sound from the outside. This can be good on doors, windows or even hung on a wall. Don’t forget to add lots of comfortable, tactile furniture that pleases your sense of touch – you spend a lot of time in this space, it’s worth making it comfortable!
Hopefully these tips will help you get your study space in order and it will go from being a place of stress to a place of effective, happy studying.
