2 Easy Ways to Trick Your Brain into Doing More Revision and Even Enjoy it!

Let's be honest.

Revision can be dull.

Who wants to stare at their textbook for hours when you could be doing anything else.

When it comes to revision, even mundane tasks like cleaning, tidying, washing up and flicking through Netflix, all become super interesting activities.

We are very good at avoiding the things we should be doing!

So how do you stop procrastinating and get your work done?

Let's start with why you are most likely avoiding your work.

It's most likely because there is so much to do.

Having a large task or lots of little ones that we know will take a long time, is often what puts us off.

No one likes the idea of being stuck on one thing for ages.

Completing our work, tasks, revision, jobs and so on are all easier when we bring back some choice and make the task look smaller.

For example:

It's a bit like this article, I've broken down the sentences, so they are short.

I've also spaced out the lines, so that each paragraph is easier to read.

It's much easier to convince your brain to read one sentence at a time, then it is to make it read a page long, length of text with zero white space.

It also means you can stop reading whenever you want to. And that choice helps you stay motivated to keep reading.

So what I'm saying is, in order to enjoy your studying and GCSE revision, you need 2 things:

 - Small, fun tasks

 - Choice of when to stop

I'll also add in a third which you may or may not need - some students like to have a small reward. This might be a biscuit or 5 mins on tiktok for example.

Now we know what we need, how do we apply that to our revision?

This works for any subject, but I'll stick to a maths example.

Let's say you are revising or learning about fractions.

And, let's say you are terrible at them and need to do a lot of work to even understand the basics.

Find the most basic questions in your maths textbook.

Tell yourself you only have to spend 5 minutes trying to do 2 or 3 questions. 

You can even set a timer, so you know it's true.

Also, you can use the answers to help you answer the questions - yep, it's not cheating, because you are using the answers to figure out how to do it. (If you just copy the answers, that is cheating and this work does not count as part of your 5 mins.) 

Your goal for the 5 minutes, is to try and understand the topic.

For example, if you are figuring out how to add fractions, you only need to spend 5 minutes playing around with some questions and answers to see if you can make sense of it.

If not, you can always spend 5 minutes watching a Youtube video, or reading a tutorial or asking someone to explain it to you.

As long as you do something productive for those 5 minutes, you are doing this correctly.

Of course, you can do longer 10 - 15 minutes, or even 30 minutes. It is entirely up to you.

What you will find is once that time is complete, you will either stop as you promised yourself and come back later to do another 5 minutes. Or you will ignore the fact that your time is up and you will keep going trying to solve the maths problem that you are working on.

It works because its a small task, you can stop when you want to and who doesn't love a bit of problem solving and achieving a goal? ;)

Please try it and let me know how you get on, of course if you are still struggling, drop me a message or comment and I'll be happy to help!