Setting goals gives you a chance to choose and set up your success. Goal setting gives you the short-term motivation and tools to help you achieve what you want longer term.
Goals should be SMART:
Setting goals helps you: improve your self confidence, feel more motivated, perform better, achieve more, find greater focus and feel less stress and anxiety.
Setting priorities and arranging tasks in order of what is most important relieves stress and makes it easier to know where to begin.
To set priorities:
Sometimes being busier helps you to organize your time. When you have large open blocks of time, procrastination can easily set in. Learn to break time up into manageable pieces for doing work. Set a routine based on the times when you know you need to take breaks and when you know you study best. Be realistic and schedule enough time to complete tasks. Scheduling even a few minutes to get work started in advance helps to make sure you don't leave it to the night before.
Take Control:
Knowing what motivates you is the key to sticking to your goals. When most people lose motivation, they cannot regain focus because they did not understand what motivated them in the first place. We can say that we want to succeed, but if we don't know why, we will always be at risk of losing focus. Sometimes we are motivated by marks, treats, special privileges or offers and other times, we are motivated by encouragement positive feelings of confidence, self-worth, accomplishment and pride. Awareness of what motivates you keeps your goals in focus.
Stay motivated:
Whenever and wherever you work, concentrate and stay focussed so that you can work efficiently. Reaching for your phone for only a minute at a time has a greater impact than you think. Without you even realizing it, your mind is still processing the transaction long after you have put it back down. It is possible that after even a 1 minute distraction, your mind may take up to 15 minutes to fully engage back into the work you were doing. Don't just plan to study for a long period of time; plan to study in shorter blocks of time but with fewer distractions and greater emphasis on the quality of your concentration. Make a commitment to yourself about your use of technology. Rather than punishment and avoidance, which will be a constant distraction of curiosity, allow yourself to take texting, calling and gaming breaks.
Avoid distractions:
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