Sustainability: The Main Characteristic of a Good Study Habit

First of all good study habits are ones you can sustain. Repeatability is what makes them habits, isn’t it? So, whatever you cannot do at least 5 days a week is not a good study habit. Period.

If you struggle each time to reserve time for your study sessions, you cannot call it a habit. You cannot even call it a routine.

I don’t mean this bullshit that you always need to study at the same time and in the same place. It’s not that kind of habit. Yes, in an ideal world you’d do it that way, but needless to say, our world is not ideal.

If you can study for an hour between 8 and 9 PM in your room behind your desk, that’s terrific. It will make it significantly easier to develop and maintain the study habit.

You Need Your Mind in It

But studying is not like brushing your teeth. It cannot be done mindlessly. It takes more than a couple of minutes. Usually, it needs to be flexibly fitted into your schedule. Study circumstances also change quite often. Sometimes you study in the library and sometimes with your fellow students.

Sustainability is the main characteristic of good study habits. If you can study every day, that’s “good.”

Your Learning Style

Secondly, your study habits must be suited to your personal learning preferences. Some people learn better by listening, others by reading. Others need to make their notes by pen, because their motor memory is more developed. Some people can learn by watching, which amazes me to no end. My brain shuts down when I watch something. Some need visual representations, others can read pure numbers like a book.

Get to know your learning preferences and base your study habits on them.

You can spend long hours reading textbooks, but if it’s not how you prefer to learn, very little of it will stay in your head. Discovering your learning style is crucial in developing good study habits. It’s your step #0.

Learn in a Group

Even one other person accompanying you in your study sessions can make a great difference. All kinds of factors play a role here.

You get accountability and we are more social animals that we care to admit. I’m an accountability coach and it amazes me to no end how much of a difference it makes when I simply acknowledge my coachees efforts every day. I don’t advise them, I don’t prod them, I don’t even ask leading questions. I am simply there and it’s enough for them to show up and put effort in.

We do everything better in a group assuming the group has a positive attitude. So, if you adopt a ‘studying bully’ as your study buddy, your performance would suffer. But if you are on decent working terms, both of you will learn better. In fact, your results will be significantly greater.

Habit Basics

Other than that, make sure you build a proper habit with your studying. Your study sessions should have a reliable trigger (e.g. “every day at 7 pm” or every time I meet with my buddy for a scheduled study session…), a structure that you can call a routine (e.g. first reviewing the notes from the previous session, then going over a new material…) and an endpoint.

If you don’t have idea about habit basics, take the Tiny Habit course. It’s free, brilliant and doesn’t take much time (less than an hour overall).

Originally published in Quora.com.