What are the main motivation factors and tools at work?

Staying motivated throughout your studies can sometimes be more challenging than you think. Procrastination, lack of concentration, paralyzing stress, external pressure, inappropriate work environment, etc. can affect the smooth running of university studies. The combination of all these sources often leads to emotional fatigue and discouragement in the face of the workload. So how do you motivate yourself to study and how do you maintain that motivation in the long term?

Find out how to motivate yourself to study!

More than the ability to memorize or understand the material, motivation plays a major role in the success of your year at university. Finding and maintaining your motivation is above all a question of state of mind. Many solutions are often put forward to stay positive and boost your energy : sport, diet, meditation are methods that will act on your motivation but not only...

In this guide we offer you 10 tips and techniques to follow step by step to discover or rediscover how to motivate yourself to study effectively !

1. Arrange your work environment to increase the desire to study
2. Create his work bubble to motivate you to study.
3. Get to know yourself to find out what increases your motivation
4. Set goals to increase short-term and long-term motivation.
5. Develop a list of tasks in order of importance to put things into perspective when faced with a heavy workload
6. Make a schedule to have a clear vision of your review period
7. Get on with it !
8. Reward yourself to increase motivation
9. Take effective breaks to boost your energy
10. Surround yourself to be positive

1. Arrange your work environment to make you want to study

An appropriate, clean and tidy study space is essential to trigger your motivation. Your work environment should be comfortable and conducive to concentration. This is the place where you will spend most of your time. It must therefore be arranged so that nothing clutters your mind, both materially and mentally. The first step in boosting your motivation is to check your material working conditions. Are you well settled? Is this posture tenable over several hours? Do you have enough natural light? Do you have all the tools to study properly? (Course materials, notes, paper, notebooks, pens, highlighters etc.)

Then it's about tidying up your study space – even if it means disturbing it during your work session. To do this, you can refer to well-known methods, such as Marie Kondo 's, or improve your own storage technique yourself. The most important thing is to keep only the bare minimum on your desk (computer, courses and manuals, notes, pens, etc.). In the evening, once your day is done, take the time to reorganize your desk to find it clean the next day.

Change of environment can increase motivation

Moreover, changing the environment can be an effective way to increase motivation. This allows you to experience another working atmosphere and to have a different understanding of your courses.

If you are studying outside, do not hesitate to give yourself a moment to get your bearings and rearrange your study space as you wish.

2. Create your work bubble to study with pleasure

Enjoying studying is a sine qua non for stimulating motivation . To do this, maximize your concentration: remove any possible source of distraction. Social networks, notifications, games and other applications are to be banned from the moment you decide to embark on a work session. If you can't resist the temptation, you can always install blocking apps . This is the case, for example, of Forest or Focus Lock – which blocks access to your social networks for a defined time.

Human beings are naturally reassured by the systematization of tasks. By creating a morning routine , you put your brain in good condition to start the day. For example, start the morning with things you like to do – make yourself a good breakfast, discover a new coffee, listen to your favorite podcast, uplifting music, etc.

Yoga can help motivate you to study

If you wake up feeling anxious, breathing exercises and stretching are often effective in relaxing you. Practicing Yoga is also a method well known for its relaxing effects. You will find many workouts dedicated to beginner students on the Internet. The goal of these habits is to become aware of the present moment and redirect your focus to your goals for the day.

By putting things into perspective, you start your study session serenely and with a liberated mind, motivated to revise your courses and your exams .

3. Getting to know yourself and knowing what affects motivation

To maintain your motivation and before you start revising, eliminate the bad memories related to your school career. It can happen to lack self-confidence and question its qualities during university studies. The first thing to do to counter this is to stop dwelling on your failures and focus on your successes. As soon as you have succeeded in overcoming these parasitic thoughts that lead to demotivation, you will be able to concentrate on your desire to succeed and the first successes will appear.

Take inspiration from yourself. Think about your recent successes.

In practice, how to eradicate distressing ideas? Take inspiration from yourself. Think about your recent successes. What did you put in place at that time to achieve your goals ? To visualize these solutions and bring them to life, you can use the heuristic schema method – developed in the next point. Writing allows you to materialize an idea and bounce on other, more in-depth reflections.

By entering the university, you have shown ambition and a real desire to succeed. However, too much ambition can create latent pressure and produce the opposite of the intended effect. It is then a question of not seeking perfection and becoming aware of your limits. For this, you have to test yourself, test your ability to concentrate, your efficiency over a fixed period, your ideal working time, your memory, etc. To do this, you will need to set goals .

4. Set both long-term and short-term goals

Achieving your goals is not easy, especially when the motivation is not there. In this step, we give you some practical techniques to put in place to regain your motivation and stay motivated .

What motivates you? Why did you choose this course? What do you like to do ? The answers to these questions will define your long term goals . These are your dreams, your ambitions and aspirations from which your medium-term and short term objectives will derive.

Before you get to work, you must have a global approach of what is expected of you. You are about to define your medium term objectives . An effective tool for this is the heuristic schema or mind mapping . Take a sheet of white paper. In the center, write "What is expected of me for this course?" and circle this sentence. Then, put all the ideas that come to mind on the paper by connecting them with arrows to the circle; ideas can also be linked together by arrows. This technique will allow you to set the objectives to be achieved in general and to define the beginnings of your organization as well as your priorities.

Before you get to work, you must have a global approach

There is nothing more pleasant than seeing your progress throughout the year. Short -term goals are small goals that will make you want to persevere once you achieve them.

Another frequently used technique for each goal category is the SMART method . This method allows you to optimize the implementation and achievement of your objectives. SMART is an acronym for:

• Specific – as specific as possible
• Measurable – quantity, frequency or quality
• Ambitious - challenge yourself
• Realistic – consider both external and internal elements to achieve the goal
• Temporal – set time limits so you don't procrastinate.

This technique is also widely used in the professional world and in many organizations. By appropriating this working method now at school, you are one step ahead of your entry into working life!

To sum up, setting realistic and determined goals is useful to protect you from counterproductive pressure and to find the necessary motivation . This is a mandatory prerequisite before you can get organized properly. Indeed, to succeed, organization is an inevitable step. By creating a work program for yourself, you will concretize your objectives and give yourself a basis.

There are many practical methods to put in place to successfully set effective goals. However, this can be difficult to achieve at first. In this case, do not hesitate to get help from those around you or through coaching .

5. Develop a list of tasks in order of importance to achieve your goals

Did you follow all the previous steps? You are set and ready to write a to do list ! With your goals in mind and in good working conditions, start writing down the tasks to be done.

Once you've listed them all, prioritize! It is important to establish a hierarchy. The best way to motivate yourself is to start with what you love to do. A subject that you particularly enjoyed? A lesson taught by an exciting teacher? By starting this way, you activate your motivation and put yourself in a dynamic of performance and efficiency. Deadlines are another prioritization criterion: the dissertation to be submitted in two days is more urgent than the PowerPoint presentation to be produced for the following month.

Write down the tasks to be done

To help you prioritize, you can use the Eisenhower matrix . This tool allows you to categorize your imperatives according to the criteria of urgency and importance.

In order to motivate you to study , visualize your results by crossing out the completed tasks. Above all, do not delete them. By doing this, you will create a feeling of satisfaction and generate motivation to continue studying. In this way, you provide your brain with proof that you are moving forward to motivate yourself on a daily basis .

Revisions: How to motivate yourself to revise! Discover our 6 tips!

6. Make a schedule

Making a schedule is an essential step after listing all the things to do. To motivate you to follow your schedule , it is advisable to make it visually pleasing. It will make you want to stick with it and study. You can easily find printable planner templates on the internet!

Make your schedule visually pleasing

Also, don't hesitate to divide and subdivide your tasks. This fragmentation will facilitate the production of results and increase your motivation tenfold. The purpose of this schedule is to create a routine for you. Make sure you have a similar working time every day, without varying the schedules too much so as not to disturb your biological system. In addition, one of the most common errors when developing the schedule is to overload it. Remember the “R” in the SMART method. Your schedule should be realistic and accessible.

Also, it's important to be understanding of yourself when you haven't accomplished everything you set out to do. It will be more productive to understand the causes of your "failure" in order to ensure that this situation does not happen again in the future. Putting things into perspective and taking a step back so as not to feel guilty, here is the key to not becoming demotivated.

Tip : At Avempace, we show you how to create an effective schedule. Want to know more ?

7. Get started!

Procrastination is the worst enemy of motivation

Procrastination is the worst enemy of motivation. The longer you wait, the less likely you will be to get busy. More homework will pile up, more excuses will pop up and come the day before the exam where you won't be ready. To want to study , you sometimes have to learn to do violence to yourself and get started. Make yourself comfortable, repeat the previous steps and immerse yourself in your revisions, lessons and exercises . Once fully concentrated, you will enjoy understanding the concepts of the lessons and unlocking the problems of the exercises. The feeling of satisfaction will be all the greater as you reach your goals in no time! If you can't do it alone, don't hesitate to contact us!We can help you!

8. Reward yourself for moving forward and maintaining motivation

Your study session must be followed by a reward

To motivate you to study , your work session must be followed by a reward . By systematizing the release of endorphins after working, your brain will assimilate the cause (the work) and the consequence (the reward) and make the connection between the two. Therefore, keeping time slots for yourself as a reward for hard work is necessary for successfully motivating yourself to study .

9. To stay motivated, take effective breaks

According to some studies, the human brain is able to concentrate continuously for 25 minutes. The Pomodoro technique is inspired by this observation and offers to time your working time. Sit in your workspace and trigger your timer, previously set to 25 minutes, when you decide to start an assignment. When your timer rings, give yourself a 5-minute break before resuming work. This method is based on the principle of the reward that we saw above.

It is important to optimize your breaks

It is important to optimize your breaks with activities that you enjoy doing (listening to music, watching a short video - max 5 minutes, checking in on your friends, etc.). However, it is best not to engage in hobbies that are too tempting and ultimately time-consuming. This is the case, for example, of the 20-minute episode of your favorite series turning into an afternoon binge watching. Sometimes it can happen that you are no longer in a good condition to think. Longer breaks are therefore essential. Exercise , go for a run or simply go for some fresh air to activate your body and re-oxygenate your brain. That's why when you're faced with a blocking problem, the solution sometimes lies in letting go, for a brisk walk. On your return, you will have a different and more objective approach to the subject, having taken the necessary distance to answer the question.

10. Surround yourself to motivate yourself to study

We were talking earlier about changing the environment. As a student, studying in a group, in an appropriate workspace is also an option!

You will integrate information more easily after discussing it with other people. Thus, a very good group exercise is to explain the points of the lesson to each other and to ask each other questions. For example, you think you have understood an accounting exercise and you realize that your friend does not. Explaining to him and using different words to make him understand will allow you to check your knowledge and assimilate the concepts. You may realize that you didn't really understand what a working capital requirement is. No problem ! Do the research together and make the definition your own. This method is also a way for you to reassure yourself before your exams !

Revising with serious students can increase your motivation

Not all students have the same ways of working. Each of the techniques that have been presented in this article must suit you and adapt to your operation. Feel free to experiment and take the time to find the most effective techniques for you.