Guide · focus · 3 min read
How to study when you cannot concentrate — a gentle, practical guide, when you are at home and cannot settle
Concentration is usually a problem of task size, not willpower. Shrink the task until starting feels almost silly.
Start here
The order matters less than doing the first one tonight. Start there and come back to the rest.
Being at home and unable to settle is a very specific problem.
If you only do one thing from this page, do the first point below. It is first because it removes the most friction for the least effort.
What helps
Stop while you still know what you are doing. Ending mid-thought makes restarting much easier than ending at a natural finish.
Test yourself rather than re-reading. Recall feels worse and works better. If it feels easy, it is probably not working.
Decide the smallest possible unit: one page, five questions, one worked example. "Study history" is not a task, it is a category.
What to do when it does not work
Put the phone in another room. Silenced and face down is not enough — the presence of it alone reduces available attention.
Work in blocks of twenty-five minutes with a real break. The break means standing up, not opening a different screen.
Write the question you are trying to answer at the top of the page. Reading without a question is how an hour disappears.
Questions people ask
How do I stop re-reading the same paragraph?
Write one sentence summarising it. If you cannot, you were not reading it, you were looking at it.
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