How to focus while studying (and stop drifting off)

To focus while studying, cut the competition before you try to concentrate harder: work on one task at a time, put your phone in another room with notifications off, decide your very next step, pick sound that doesn't fight the words on the page, and take breaks before your attention runs dry. Most focus problems are setup problems, and the setup is the part you control.

Why your focus keeps slipping

The reassuring part first: a drifting mind is normal. In a 2010 study, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert used an iPhone web app to ask 2,250 volunteers, at random moments, what they were doing and what they were thinking about. Their minds were somewhere else 46.9 percent of the time. If your brain keeps wandering away from the French Revolution, congratulations, you have a brain.

The less reassuring part: when you sit down to study, you're usually stacking the deck against yourself. A phone within reach, a notification every few minutes, three tabs open, a task as vague as "review", six hours of sleep. Each one is small. Together they make focus almost impossible. The good news is that every single one can be fixed without any special talent.

One task, one tab, one next step

Switching between tasks has a price. In a series of experiments published in 2001, Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans found that people lost time every time they switched from one task to another, and the cost grew as the tasks got more complex. Checking a message "for a second" in the middle of a math problem costs more than the second.

How to keep it to one thing:

• Write the task at the top of the page. One line: "Chapter 6, questions 1 to 8."
• Close everything else. One tab, the one you need. If you have to look things up, open what you need before you start.
• Keep a parking-lot note. When "I should email the teacher" pops into your head, write it down and keep going. You'll deal with the list at the break.
• Batch your messages. Answer them all at once during the break, not one by one as they arrive.
• Leave yourself a next step. When you stop for the day, write the very next action at the top of the page ("start question 9"). Tomorrow you skip the ten minutes of figuring out where you were, which is exactly when your phone usually wins.

Put the phone in another room

Not face down. Not on silent next to you. Another room.

In a 2017 experiment with about 800 people, Adrian Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin gave participants tests of how much information they could hold and work with at once. Those whose phones were in another room did significantly better than those whose phones sat on the desk, and slightly better than those with phones in a pocket or bag, even though every phone was on silent. One experiment isn't the final word, but moving your phone costs you nothing.

Notifications are a problem of their own. A 2015 Florida State University study (Stothart, Mitchum and Yehnert) found that simply receiving notifications, without touching the phone, hurt performance on an attention task about as much as actually using the phone for a call or a text. Turn them off, or switch on Do Not Disturb, for the whole session.

If your phone is also your timer, you've invited the problem to sit next to you. A kitchen timer works. So does a timer that holds you to it: Toxic Coach's focus timer notices when you leave the app mid-session and sends your coach after you. For the bigger scrolling habit, see how to stop scrolling.

Noise, music and where you sit

Your surroundings either help you or keep nudging you. A few practical rules:

• Pick a spot that means work. A desk, a kitchen table, a library seat. The bed means sleep, and your body knows it.
• Test your music. Do the same kind of task twice, once with your playlist and once in silence or with instrumental music, and compare what you actually finished. For reading and writing, start without lyrics.
• Cover the noise you can't control. Earplugs, noise-canceling headphones or a steady background sound can tame a loud house.
• Have everything within reach before you start. Water, charger, notes, calculator. Every trip to find a pen is a chance to never come back.
• Make it bright enough. Study somewhere you can read without squinting. A dim room with a soft blanket is a nap with extra steps.

Take breaks before your focus breaks

Attention fades over long, unbroken stretches of the same task, and short breaks help reset it. In a 2011 experiment, Atsunori Ariga and Alejandro Lleras had people do a long, monotonous attention task. Performance dropped steadily over time, except in the group that was briefly switched to a different small task now and then.

In practice: work for 25 to 50 minutes, then take a real break of 5 to 10 minutes. Stand up, refill your water, look at something far away, walk around. A Pomodoro timer makes the rhythm automatic. Avoid spending the break in the feed: it rarely feels like a reset, and it almost never ends on time.

Sleep is the focus you can't fake

No technique survives a sleepy brain. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends 8 to 10 hours a night for teenagers and 7 or more for adults. If you're getting much less, you can do everything else on this page and still read the same paragraph four times.

Staying up late to make up for a distracted afternoon usually sets up another distracted afternoon tomorrow. If your sleep is all over the place, start with how to fix your sleep schedule. And if you lie awake for weeks despite good habits, that's worth bringing to a doctor.

When it's been like this for as long as you remember

If you've struggled to focus for as long as you can remember, in class and outside it, and fixing the phone, the sleep and the setup hasn't changed much, it's worth talking to a doctor or a psychologist. Trouble concentrating can have many causes, from sleep problems and anxiety to attention conditions such as ADHD, and only a professional can work out which, if any, applies to you. It isn't a character flaw, and getting checked isn't an overreaction. If you're having a hard time right now, our support page lists free helplines.

Your next session, set up

Before you start: write the one task at the top of the page, put the phone in another room, close every tab you don't need, fill your water bottle and set a timer for 25 minutes. When your mind wanders, and it will, notice it and come back. That's the whole skill, and you get better at it one session at a time.