How I Find The Time To Study By Using Little Chunks Of Time

How to find the time to study while dealing with all sorts of “important” things we have to get done? Obviously, you go out and look for it. If you lost the keys to your house, you would go and look for them, right? You wouldn’t sit in front of your house and think “I hope the keys find me and come back”.

Yet this is exactly the strategy most people use when they want to find the time to study. So if the keys don’t go to find you, why would time be any different? When I was still going to school, it was my “job” to study, so finding the time for it wasn’t all that hard.

However, now that isn’t the case, I had to come up with ways to help me find the time to study. At the start, I tried the most basic strategy I just described. I waited for when I had enough time and to my surprise, it actually worked…

Yeah, you can probably guess that it wasn’t even close to working. But back then I had so many misconceptions about studying and the time it took to study, that I thought it was the only way. When I saw what people were achieving on the internet with the same 24 hours I had, I knew that there had to be something they were doing I wasn’t.

After some research, I found out what those people do and how they find the time to do the things they want. But everyone was doing different things and had different strategies. Among all of the advice, you could pick out one that could be interpreted in the same way for every one of those people:

If you are pressed for time, you can’t just wait for it to come to you, you have to find it.

This is hands down the most important piece of information I found for my quest to find more time. And what good luck to realise it so early. Until then, I always thought you had to wait for when you had time to study. But this approach was completely different. I can make everyday decisions that leave me extra time to study. I just needed to find the time to study and get started.

Now, I could go through my day while knowing that there will be time to study. If I made a plan for the day and followed it, that plan would give me the extra time. And this time could be used for anything. Even if you don’t want to increase the time you study, you could do something else.

Maybe you wanted to pick up a new hobby but didn’t have the time. Or, how about going out to spend more time with your friends? Or whatever else you want. At this point, you get what I mean:

Having the time to do what you want is awesome.

But, however great this strategy was, it had one big limitation. I liked to study in 30-minute to 1-hour time frames. If I couldn’t get at least 30 minutes of free time, I wouldn’t bother to try. You can imagine that in some scenarios this was quite difficult, right?

Imagine this: You have made a plan for the day and you follow it. Now it is 2 hours before your sleep time and you know that you have at least 30 minutes of free time. So you just have to go and start studying with the time you have left.

And here come endless distractions. Some of them include:

• Social Media
• Television
• Phone calls and messages
• News
• And don’t even get me started on those small problems that “definitely” require your help, and couldn’t be done without you, so whoever called you didn’t have a choice but to call you and take away your precious time

I personally hate all of these things with a burning passion. And especially at the time when I had to have at least 30 minutes of free time to study (now that isn’t the case anymore, keep reading if you want to find out why). If just one thing goes wrong I would abandon the whole study session I planned for that day.

Just imagine how many things can go wrong in one day. Here are some of the most common traps (yes, you read that right, I call them traps because that’s what they are), that I would fall into:

1. Looking at ONE post on any social media, starting the endless scrolling, and you already know what happens next
2. Leaving the television in the background, and after I find something interesting, it’s over for my study session
3. Answering a phone call or a message, just to be dragged into a meaningless conversation that doesn’t help me in any way
4. Watching the news, where I hear or see something horrible, making me too worried to do anything
5. Watching the news, where I hear or see something horrible, and then continuing to watch to make sure I understand everything about the situation

Just reading through all of that is exhausting, imagine dealing with all of them. Oh, and don’t forget that you have to follow the plan you made for the day to make sure you have this free time, in the first place.

But, why am I talking about all of my struggles while trying to make some free time, how does that help anyone?

Because I want you to look at the things that are holding you back. Everyone has something that is distracting them. You just have to learn how to deal with it and get started on what you want to do. And don’t worry if you can’t do it all the time, in this day and age where everything is battling for your attention, how are you expected to not procrastinate?

So, how did I deal with my problems?

Mostly by eliminating them altogether. I don’t watch or read the news at all. If there is something important someone will tell me about it. I don’t have a TV in my room, so I can’t get distracted by it anymore.

When I am learning something, I put my mobile phone in another room. I have yet to get a call or a message that requires my attention at that exact moment. And at last, I have scheduled the time for social media and only look at it at that time.

With all of the problems solved, I believed my routine was now perfect. I would pick what I wanted to learn and have enough time (most of the time, anyway) to dedicate myself to it. And then on one sunny morning, I found a book that would change my life.

Actually, I don’t remember the time of the day or whether it was sunny or not, but let’s put that on the side for now. The book I found was Someday Is Today by Matthew Dicks. If you are hearing about this book for the first time, to put it simply, this is a book about productivity. The man who wrote this book is as obsessed with productivity as I am with learning new things (maybe even more than that, but I don’t know if I want to admit that).

While the whole book is really good, and I recommend that you read it, there is one part that stood out to me. The part where the author talks about the importance of every minute. He found that he could get a lot done by doing a little bit every time he found free time. For example:

• when you are in traffic
• when you are waiting for an appointment
• when you are waiting in front of the dentist
• when you are waiting for your kids to find their shoes
• while you wait for your family before you eat lunch together

See how there is always some extra time, especially when you have to wait for something. I would usually (more like always) think about something meaningless and waste that time away. Now, I could use that extra time for studying, and learn new things.

What can you even do with that little amount of time? Most of it is just around 5 minutes.

True, but you don’t need much more. And if these types of things happen just 5 times a day you got yourself extra 25 minutes. If you planned to have two 30-minute study sessions that day, now you only need one 35-minute session. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

The first time I read this, I thought that there was no way this could work for studying. But then Matthew Dicks (the author of the book) started to talk (or write in this case), about his writing. He actually uses this method when he writes! That was enough to convince me to try it. And as they say, the rest is history (well, not really but that line sounds cool, so I am sticking with it😃).

I was able to find the time to study in those little 5-minute bits of time. The best use I found for this method is for learning a new language. I started to learn a new language with Duolingo. If you are really fast you could finish 2 lessons in 5 minutes, but even one lesson is good enough (0 < 1, that’s basic math).

Do that 5 times a day, every day and eventually you will learn a new language. And it works even if you don’t use any language app. After some time I found that Duolingo doesn’t help all that much anymore so I switched to Anki. And, just as you thought, it works with Anki too. You can go through a few words every time you have a few minutes to spare.

(For those that don’t know Anki is a flashcard app, if you want to try it you can download it here)

For the past few months, I have used the time I find to learn a new language, but you can pick what you want and learn that instead. The only thing you need is to know what you want to learn/revise ahead of time. If you think about what you want to do when you find those little pieces of time, by the time you decide, you will have used up all of it (at least that is how it is in my case).

If there is one more thing I can do to convince you, I would tell you to look at the time in terms of minutes, rather than hours (another recommendation from that wonderful book). By doing some basic math (it’s time for a calculator to step in), you get the amount of minutes in a day:

As you can see there are 1440 minutes in a day. Assuming that you sleep for 480 minutes (8 hours), and work the exact same amount, the time you have left is:

In the best-case scenario (which, let’s be honest, never happens) you get 480 minutes a day to yourself. But unless you live alone with no one to talk to, and no responsibilities whatsoever, you won’t get to use all of that time for yourself. Actually, you probably only end up with just a little chunk that you will have for yourself. I hope that now you can see how valuable every minute of your time is.

Your time is the most valuable thing you have, so learn to use it wisely.

The reason I find the time to study is because that is currently the thing I find the most important and enjoyable at the same time. If you had extra time, what would you spend it on?