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10 Study Habits for Better Learning
10 Study Habits for Better Learning
Learn how to improve your study habits with step-by-step strategies in this guide.
Apr 30, 2025
Study Techniques
8 min read
Ever catch yourself reading the same page over and over without understanding it? Or cramming the night before a test, feeling stressed and tired? Studying doesn’t have to be like that.
With the right methods, you can study smarter, not harder. Effective studying is all about using a few key elements:
- Good study habits.
- The right study techniques.
- Regular, focused sessions
In this article, StudyAgent provides simple, practical tips for different situations, whether you’re working with course material, creating mind maps, or trying to take better notes.
Does Cramming Actually Help You Learn?
Not really. Cramming isn’t an effective way to study.
It may feel like you’re doing the right thing by stuffing everything into your brain at the last minute, but it’s mostly a false sense of control. When you cram, you don’t get a chance to fully understand or explain the material in your own words. And that means it won’t stick in your memory for long.
If you’re wondering how to study effectively, the first thing to know is this: avoid cramming. Students often fall into the cramming trap for a few reasons:
- They feel anxious or under pressure before the exam.
- They don’t really understand how memory works or how to study well.
- They haven’t built a regular study routine.
But here’s why cramming doesn’t work:
- Stress makes it worse. If you’re already stressed, cramming just adds more pressure. Instead, learn how to deal with school stress in a healthy way.
- You’re only using short-term memory. When you cram, you overload your short-term memory, which can only hold a small amount of information. Most of what you memorize this way will be forgotten by test day.
- You need a steady study routine. If you don’t have one yet, don’t worry. This article will help you build your own routine and share useful tips for better learning that actually work.
10 Study Methods for Students (Step-by-Step Guide)
Here is a list of the best study techniques that are comprehensive and built in a step-by-step approach:
- Set specific studying goals
- Create a study schedule
- Eliminate distractions and create a study space
- Take care of your health and resources before studying
- Get all your reading materials organized
- Use the anchor tagging method
- Group the concepts and ideas to learn
- “Pulse check” your material understanding
- Make studying rewarding
- Find a study buddy or a study group
1. Don’t Cram! Set Specific Studying Goals Instead
Setting specific studying goals is the first step to boost your academic performance and achieve steady study success.
- Start by using the SMART method. Goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and tied to time periods.
- Apply chunking. When getting overwhelmed with reaching top marks and a high GPA, divide long-term goals into clear, realistic tasks that match your weekly planning ahead strategy. Breaking big academic goals into smaller, subject-focused steps makes studies more manageable.
- Use the Eisenhower Matrix. To meet deadlines for exams and assignments, write down all your tasks and evaluate your commitment and urgency for each of them. The Eisenhower Matrix helps you to visualize your study time and prioritize study sessions.
- Avoid cramming. Keep yourself motivated to understand course material rather than just passing the exams. Break your workload into manageable steps and schedule them across time periods with realistic deadlines. You will turn even the most overwhelming academic goals into achievable milestones with good studying techniques.
2. Create a Study Schedule
To build an effective studying schedule, you need to develop good time management skills and know your study rate.
- Create a study routine. First, use time blocking and timeboxing, assigning specific hours to each subject or assignment. Use your calendar to plan weekly study sprints, preparation, and review sessions. Make sure your timetable is tailored to your circadian rhythms and chronotype. Your study sessions will be more productive if you know whether you are more focused in the morning or evening.
- Structure each class or topic with a schedule. Apply the Pomodoro Technique to create strong focus windows. Short, concentrated bursts of work help keep momentum and balance your routine and recovery. Mix these periods with short breaks here and there.
- Assign time for deep focus sessions. Manage your study methods by alternating deep focus with preparations and repetitions. Keeping track of your schedule and assignments may be your low-productivity tasks. When you feel energized, try theme days weekly for deep dive sessions.
- Make a flexible study routine. Remember that you need to set time for active studying, preparation, review phases, personal life, and resting. You handling tasks and assignments is great until you face chronic student stress and burnout. Think about that in your planning sessions.
Study schedule is an abstract idea, similar to many concepts you learn in college. You need to make these abstract ideas more concrete.
To make it more tangible, keep your timetables and all visual conceptualization maps somewhere close to your eye levels. Seeing ideas visualized helps the brain make them more real and digestible.
3. Remove Destructions and Create a Studying Environment
Creating a strong study mindset begins with eliminating distractions and designing a dedicated study space. You need your particular space supportive for deep attention.
Here are the best study tips on how to organize a good environment for your studies:
- Practice digital minimalism. Leave your phone in a separate room, silence notifications, and use website blockers to prevent task-switching. Make regular breaks with no phone allowed. Prepare a well-organized desk with all the necessary materials. Set up your space to boost your focus, not disrupt it.
- Customize your study room setup. Make sure your chair, desk, screen, and room temperature are comfortable for long sessions. First, you will need good setup lighting to enhance your alertness. Second, try light background noise if it works well for your concentration. In some cases, you may also need sensory isolation techniques like earplugs, noise-canceling headphones, or white noise machines.
4. Take Care of Your Health
Students often underestimate how much physical health and brain energy impact their ability to focus, memorize, and retain knowledge during study sessions. But you can’t study effectively if your brain is tired or under-fuelled.
The best way to study is to care for your system first:
- Stick to a better sleep routine that supports deep REM sleep and stable circadian rhythms. Getting enough sleep is one of the main points in your productivity.
- Avoid blue light exposure at least one hour before bed to protect your sleep.
- Use a power nap to reset your brain when mental fatigue starts to build.
- Eat healthy snacks that serve as brain food. In particular, opt for nuts, eggs, berries, or dark chocolate.
- Plan meal prep for the week so you’re not scrambling during study breaks.
- Keep your blood sugar steady to avoid sudden crashes and cognitive overload.
- Drink water regularly and limit caffeine. Keep your water bottle nearby all the time. Neglecting your hydration directly results in jittery focus and poor academic performance.
- Keep an eye on your study stress. Make daily self-care and short active breaks your non-negotiable necessity so that you don’t fall asleep out of exhaustion.
- Do a weekend digital detox.
- Protect yourself against eye strain as it affects both your health and study quality.
- Stretch, move, or change posture during long study sessions.
Your body is your most valuable study tool.
5. Try Retrieval Practice
To get organized in college, you need good studying techniques, including scheduling, a note-taking system, a syllabus overview, and a daily study agenda. Let’s take these points one by one:
- Scheduling. Use a visual study checklist, calendar, or semester planning tool to track lectures, assignments, tests, and quizzes by week. Keep everything structured in a study program or workflow, whether through digital apps like Notion or a traditional course binder. Organizing your class тщеуі into manageable blocks will make your study sessions more productive.
- Note-taking system. Build a reliable structure using either digital or handwritten notes. For instance, you can try the Cornell system to take notes, mind mapping, color-coded notes, or flowcharts to break down and connect ideas. Stick to a one-notebook-per-subject policy or use subject binders. Index everything and use a color coding system to highlight key concepts from lectures, homework, and reading.
- Syllabus. Your syllabus is a roadmap. It exists for a reason other than for the professor’s class plans. Use it to plan your study routine for each class. Outline major topics, assignment deadlines, and test dates early. This helps you stay aligned with academic goals and ensures you don’t miss critical class materials.
- Daily study agenda. Create a focused daily study agenda that includes small review tasks, flashcards, and summaries of complex concepts. Update it as part of your weekly review for surveys, quizzes, or final exams. Try not to spend more than two hours on a single subject at once.
Use dual coding, which is mixing up text and visuals like maps, diagrams, tables, and mindmaps.
The mixed approach activates different areas of your brain, helping you to remember the information with strong visual associations.
6. Use Anchor Taging + Feynman Technique
Active recall methods mean acquiring new information purposefully and in relation to other knowledge you already have on the subject. Active learning is the opposite of simply reading the entire book.
Best study methods, like the Feynman technique, stand on the principles of intentional studying. It is the shortest way to perform better in classes for students, especially with well-built study habits.
The best active learning method is anchor tagging. It is a technique where you mentally "tag" every new chapter with a strong, memorable anchor.
For example, it can be a vivid image, a personal story, or an emotional reaction.
Each tag serves as a hook that your brain can easily grab onto later, helping with retaining the information for exams. Moving the data from your short term to long term memory beats your forgetting curve.
Use it to:
- Study difficult subjects or complex data for math, biology, or history classes.
- Work with concept maps, dates, diagrams, preparing assessments, receiving articles, or completing homework assignments.
- Improve memorization for art or humanitarian college classes where you are presented with various concepts regularly.
Feynman step | Anchor tagging technique |
|---|---|
Choose a concept | Select a topic and create an anchor image or story for it. For instance, visualize “gravity” as a falling apple. |
Teach it simply | While explaining concepts, use tags, analogies, characters, or mini-scenes. This “glues” the info to your memory. |
Identify gaps | Notice which pieces of your concept or visualization do not click. Why? What is unclear about these parts? Mark them with a visual “?” or flashing red sign. |
Go back and review | Fill in the gaps and upgrade your anchor tags. Add stronger visuals or emotional meaning to weak spots. |
Simplify and organize | Connect all your anchor tags to a storyboard or map. This builds a mental route for quick recall. |
For example, when learning about the ways to organize an essay, link the essay structure knowledge to what you know about different types of communications, like public speech. Some verbal and written formats have a lot of common traits, helping you remember the new data better.
7. Group the Concepts and use Spaced Practices
In university and college settings, where professors and instructors expect critical thinking, simply reading and re-reading the concepts isn't enough for learning.
Study methods for college students must form a coherent strategy.
One way to do that is to connect every new concept to at least two other familiar ideas. This method is called concept maps. Here is a guide to building one:
- Subject interlinking. First, you need to establish your core interests across different subjects. Concept maps show you how everything fits together across different subjects, such as linking a historical event to its political context or understanding the scientific steps behind a biological process.
- Active engagement. This method works best when you are actively engaged in class discussion and sincerely interested in the topic. Knowledge webs don’t work for data retention if subject problems are irrelevant to you and rather lead to procrastination. However, if you have chosen the right career, turn your study sessions into a research lab, where textbook notes or powerpoint notes from class are about you studying what matters for you, not for your professors. Seek the information actively.
- Organizing material. Structure topics correlated to different subjects during your revision sessions to develop manageable chunks sorted out by your personal findings from the studying material. Separate your preparations for assignments and projects from doing your personal concept groups. One helps you pursue a degree, and the second is about actually improved learning.
8. Pulse Check” Your Understanding of the Material
The struggle students face when trying to apply concept mapping or anchor technique is struggling to realize when they are passively re-reading and when they are actually engaged.
It’s too easy to slip into a brain-fogged void instead of active learning. Here are some study tips on how to beat the brain with “pulse checking”:
- Pause during study sessions to formulate questions about everything you learn. For instance: “Can I explain this topic right now?”
- Look for subject gaps instead of passive reading.
- Use an active learning approach whenever your teacher or instructor clarifies something.
- Perceive PowerPoint notes, textbook notes, or articles as your research playground, not as a manual for memorization.
- Combine quizzes, flashcards, or study guides in personified ways. Don’t blindly follow studying concepts that don’t suit you.
- Choose the study zone that feels both comfortable and stimulating to you. If the library makes you foggy-minded, opt for more hours in an open space.
- When preparing for exams, don’t try to memorize everything. Only try to retail key points and examples from each unit.
- Develop a study cycle where learning has separate stages and engagement rates for each study session.
- Use self-testing to check your comprehension after each major section.
9. Make Studying Pleasant and Rewarding
To beat procrastination and distraction, studying has to feel like something that benefits you. As long as it is something you “have to do,” your study experiences will lack the internal drive and the flow to the whole process.
Here’s how to fuel your study motivation strategy with purpose and fun:
- Use a reward system to celebrate even small wins, like finishing an assignment or hitting a study interval with a minute break.
- Gamify your studying by creating a point system. You can use challenges or personal study game rules.
- Anchor your efforts in intrinsic motivation. Ask yourself why you care about progress and academic performance at all.
- Reflect on your values. How does productivity tie into your bigger life goals?
- Avoid peer comparison. Instead, focus on personal progress over perfection.
- Take time to visualize the future results of your studying for longer periods. Like, is it the graduation or a specific achievement that makes you the most excited?
- Use curiosity as a natural motivation tool. Make the subject interesting by linking it to your real life.
- Add study motivation strategies that match your learning style. It may be timers, music, visual trackers - anything that makes learning more pleasant.
So, how to study effectively? Make the process about you, not some external motives.
10. Find a Study Buddy
Finally, studying becomes more fun and engaging when it also has a meaningful human connection. Have you felt how doing anything with your friends, even mundane grocery shopping, becomes a fun thing to do?
“Body doubling” for doing your academic tasks works in the same way:
- Accountability and motivation. Partnering up with a studying companion or online study buddy keeps you accountable and motivated. A study partner turns solo tasks into shared momentum. Set study goals, review flashcards, practice problems, or simply stick to a study routine together. You are more likely to show up and focus when someone else is doing it, too.
- Brainstorming and studying ideas exchange. Human connections make learning more engaging through brainstorming, group projects, or idea exchanging. Studying with peers or friends can open up fresh perspectives and help you understand complex topics.
How to find a study buddy?
Choose common studying places, like cafés or libraries. These spaces are comfortable, public, and feel like accountability zones. In the comfy spaces, everyday academic work feels rather like a consistent and rewarding habit.
Set Yourself Up for Success: A Simple Checklist
The best way to study is the one that fits you (your personality), how you like to learn, what you’re studying, and your goals.
Some people learn better in a group, others prefer quiet time alone with their notes. Whatever works for you is valid. To help you build your own study routine, here’s a checklist of study tips. Just pick the ones that feel right for you:
- Explain things in your own words.
- Use active recall (try to remember, not just re-read).
- Try the Feynman technique – explain the topic like you’re teaching someone else.
- Make mind maps to link new ideas with what you already know.
- Test yourself often to check your understanding.
- Take good notes and highlight the main points.
- Practice with exercises or questions instead of just reading theory.
- Spread out your learning sessions over time.
- Break big topics into small parts.
- Ask questions about what you’re learning.
- Make a system to review hard topics regularly.
- Combine visuals with text to help you remember.
- Connect the topic to real-life situations.
- Teach someone else the topic.
- Split a long book into chapters and smaller sections.
- Keep track of what works best for your learning.
In Summary
You can do well in school or college with the right study habits, no matter where you are in your learning journey. These skills aren’t something you’re just born with; they’re something you can build.
Focus on three simple things:
- Stay active while you study (don’t just read or listen passively);
- Keep a balance between studying and taking care of yourself;
- Study to understand and remember, not just to pass the next test.
If you try out the tips above and create a study plan that works for you, you’ll start seeing results much faster than you think.
Frequently asked questions
To study effectively, combine strategy with consistency:
- Use active recall instead of re-reading,
- Express concepts in your own words,
- Practice distributed learning over time rather than cramming.
- Study in focused 25-50 minute sessions followed by short breaks.
Focusing on studying must align with your sincere values and goals. You cannot concentrate fully if you don’t know why you need to study. If you are beating destruction, the best way to focus is optimizing your environment.
While there's no magic solution to study 10x faster, you can dramatically improve efficiency by optimizing your approach. Here are the most effective study methods:
- Use active learning techniques like the Feynman method
- Focus on understanding core concepts
- Create concept maps
- Practice spaced repetition with flashcards
- Eliminate multitasking
- Take care of your physical health
Sources:
- University of Otago. (n.d.). Effective study techniques. Higher Education Development Center. https://www.otago.ac.nz/data/assets/pdf_file/0024/318642/what-can-i-do-to-become-a-more-successful-student-615340.pdf
- Studying 101: Study smarter not harder. East Georgia State College. (n.d.). https://www.ega.edu/current-students/academics/files/studying-101-202.pdf
- Carey, B. (2015). How we learn: The surprising truth about when, where and why it happens. Random House.
