 One of the most common comments that I get on my videos is how do you stay focused for so long while studying? How can you sit there for four hours and maintain your focus not get distracted, etc? Let's break it down. Before we even start, if you're serious about maintaining deep focus and not getting distracted whilst you study, then you absolutely have to take your phone and throw it away somewhere far and out of sight and out of reach where you can't touch it. If you're not willing to get rid of your phone while you study, then you're always going to be distracted by it. It's Isaac Newton's fourth law of distraction, by the way. The first thing I do, which I think is really easy and often overlooked by other students, is just getting everything that you might need over the course of your study session and putting it on your desk before you sit down. That way you have no reason to leave your desk and get distracted somewhere else in the house or the library or wherever you are. Common things I get are a lot of coffee or tea or sparkling water, whatever it is that I want to drink to keep me going throughout the session. Then of course, snacks are essential as well for when I start to get peckish. I usually have some fruit with me, apples, tangerines, bananas, grapes, whatever. And then for example, let's say you need to do a bunch of writing with lots of different coloured pens for flow charts or diagrams or something like that. Before you sit down, get your ruler, get your calculator, get your pens, your pencils, everything that you need within an arm's reach. If you need to at some point start using a textbook, then get that and put it on your desk as well, all from the very beginning. That way when you sit down, you're in the studying zone with everything you need around you and you have no reason to get up wander and get distracted somewhere else. Personally, for me, when I'm studying, I find that any time that I get up and off of my desk, that's when prime distraction hits. You know, my sister will come out of her room and she'll be like, hey, NASA, I want to chill for five minutes or I'll be tempted to check my phone or whatever. I just won't want to sit back down. And so the longer I can keep myself on my desk, the better I'm going to do over the long run. This honestly might be my hidden superpower. It's like a productivity hack that I swear nobody uses. Before any study day I have the night before or the day before I always, always, always decide what it is that I'm going to be doing the next morning. That way when I wake up, I brush my teeth, I have my breakfast, I chill and watch YouTube video, whatever. I'm not thinking about studying. I'm not worried about what I'm going to be studying. I'm just completely chill, relaxing and enjoying myself. Then when I sit down on my desk and it's time to get studying, I just check my schedule or my plan. And I look at what I told myself I was going to do the day before or the night before or whatever. This immensely reduces the decision fatigue around what should I study? When should I start? How long is it going to take me? How long should I sit down for? I just sit down and I study for a four-hour block. This reduction in the amount of time that I need in order to get studying makes studying easy and effortless. And beginning studying is often the hardest part. So if you can have these tips and tricks to sort of get you in that beginning zone, then the rest will just take care of itself. This is another easy one to do, but people just often forget about it. Obviously, we already talked about getting rid of your phone, but you can also use apps and software to blacklist websites like YouTube or Facebook or TikTok or whatever. You can also put on a pair of noise-canceling headphones to block out your environment. Or if your house is too busy and chaotic, you can always go to a coffee shop or a library. There's so many things that we can do to change our surrounding environment, everything else around us actually sitting down to study that makes the studying easier and simpler to do. Also, just close all of your desktop apps that might get you distracted, maybe things like Steam, Discord, WhatsApp, Messenger, you name it. Whatever it is that might distract you, just close it. Get it out of sight and make it more difficult for yourself to just move your mouse and click. Something else that I like to do is whenever I sit down to study, I open a new tab on my browser on justgoogle.com. And that way, in the middle of my studying, when I click my browser in order to Google something that I wanted to check on, I'm not immediately faced with the last thing that I was doing on my computer like YouTube.com, for example, or researching flights for an upcoming holiday or online clothes shopping or whatever. I'm greeted with a blank Google page, which reminds me that, oh yeah, I actually clicked on Safari because I wanted to do something work related and I don't get distracted as easily. So studying in groups has always been and will always be a key component of my studying. The reason for this is that accountability is a really useful extrinsic, motivating factor that can help keep us focused and keep us studying. Having a study partner, whether that's in the library physically or on Zoom or in a study with me, focus group on Discord like we have over on my Patreon, the Karma Club, link in the description down below, can be so, so helpful. Just knowing that other people around you are working hard, focused, and studying can really help you study and stay focused yourself. I love having that accountability in my life because as soon as I start to lose sort of the internal motivation or internal drive to keep studying, I get the external motivation from the other people around me because I know that we're all going through the same thing, the same experiences at the same time. Now getting up and walking around every hour might seem counterintuitive to what I've been saying above, but I think it has its role. Changing your environment, the scenery that's in front of you, the atmosphere of what you've been staring at for a couple of hours, whether that's a textbook or a computer screen can be really, really helpful. You know, when you get to those points in the study session where no more information is entering your brain, the lines are like almost blurry and just nothing makes sense. Honestly, getting up to grab a cup of water, a cup of coffee, a snack, walking around a little bit, just seeing something else and thinking about something else besides what's in front of you makes a huge, huge difference. But don't make the mistake of taking your phone with you because then you just spend the whole time on your phone without getting actual rest and relaxation from the work that you were doing before and you're bound to get distracted by checking some social media app on your phone. Now getting up and walking around is not a waste of time. You're getting up, clearing your mind and getting refreshed so that when you come back and sit down in front of your desk, you're good to go again. Honestly, having a plan probably should have gone further up in my list. Plans are my best friend and if you don't already make plans for your studying, please start. I promise you're not going to regret making one and just helps make life so much easier. If at the beginning of your day, you make a skeleton or an outline of what you're going to be doing that day and what you're hoping to achieve by one hour of work, by two hours of work, etc. It can A, help you stay on track, but also B, motivate you as you complete those smaller tasks and breaking up your bigger day into those smaller tasks and pieces makes them much more manageable to do. I always say that I couldn't be nearly as productive as I am without planning. It helps me so much and if you don't already make them, I'd highly recommend you give it a go. And all right, that is it. Those are my five best tips for maintaining deep focus. I hope that you've enjoyed this video and happen to take one or two valuable things away from it. If you're interested in joining a community of like-minded people who are all hardworking, caring and supportive of each other with live study with means, random conversations, meme exchange and chats or whatever, check out the Patreon link in the description down below, join the Discord server and become part of the Karma Club family. And that's it from me. I'll catch you in the next one. Peace.