Study better next time

Maybe midterms didn’t go the way you planned. You realize you need to review test taking tips and attack the problem from a different angle. Here are few tips:

• Talk to the professor. Discuss the important points of the class material and how you can concentrate on those. If possible, bring your midterm and go over the questions you got wrong.
• Study with a buddy. Get tutored by a peer who understands the material. Ask each other sample test questions.
• Take a deep breath. It’s not the end of the world. Get a pizza, play a video game, unwind. This is a chance to learn from our mistakes and aim to improve our grade on the next test.

Study scientifically

Benedict Carey in the New York Times reported in “Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits,” September 6, 2010, that some counter-intuitive methods of studying actually work.

• Alternate your study location. Being in different environments helps improve retention of class material.
• Vary the material you’re studying. Do a little reading, then some vocabulary, then some math or problem solving. The different ways of thinking stimulate the brain. Nate Kornell, a psychologist at WilliamsCollege, explained that this strategy undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work.
• Study in chunks. Don’t cram all at once. Space out your studying over a period of time to let your brain absorb the information slowly.

Take harder classes next term

Hey, maybe you aced your midterm exams. You’re really getting the hang of college, good study habits and taking tests. Why not challenge yourself to be the best you can be? See if there are one or two harder classes you can take next term. An organic chemistry class, a physics or math class, or just a more advanced version of an elective. Attempting a difficult class helps us learn to tackle challenging tasks and develop coping skills and strategies.

The age-old question arises: Should we take easy classes we know we can get better grades on, or take more challenging classes and possibly get lower grades? Which is better? “Taking too many easy classes can be construed that you can’t handle difficult subject matter,” said a blogger in the article “Are Harder College Classes Better For You Than Easier Ones?” on Tutorii.com. “[Then] there are times where you can garner more respect because you did take a challenging class that few others would take. It depends on how you present the academic record to potential interviewers.”

Improve your GPA

The general rule is two hours of study for every one hour spent in class. But to improve a grade point average (GPA), a whole lotta studying needs to happen. Professor Carl Zulaf of OhioStateUniversity found that a 40-hour increase in weekly studying was needed to achieve a one-letter increase in quarterly GPA. “A lifestyle change has to happen before an impact is made on a student’s grades,” said Zulaf in “Studying Still the Key to Academic Success,” in USA Today, April 2001 found on Questia.com. “The ability to use time is positively related to academic performance. But it takes a lot of commitment by a student to significantly increase the number of hours he studies.”

How did you do on your midterms? Do you think you’ll sign up for a harder class next term?

#1 Gather your tools

Successful students don’t necessarily know everything but they do know where to find it. For many students the first stop for academic writing, reading and research is Questia, the world’s largest online library with thousands of full text books, magazines and reports. But more than that, Questia also has tons of cutting-edge tutorials, videos, and examples to help you research and complete your writing projects in record time.

#2 Manage your time well

Mastering your time schedule is a top priority for the successful student. No one knows this better than Hai Nguyen who earned his doctorate at Stanford University while also acting as a teacher’s assistant, researcher, and part-time consultant.

In a June 14, 2012 article for Appfluence.com titled, “Top 10 time management skills for college students from a Stanford entrepreneur,” Nguyen listed his top tips for time management.

“Write everything you have to do down, especially if you are thinking about it. The worst thing that you can do on a daily basis is use your active brain to think about small irrelevant things. It destroys your focus and makes it impossible to enjoy the moment,” Nguyen concluded.

#3 Show up

According to the great humorist Woody Allen, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” What he means is that you stand a much better chance of succeeding if you dive in and get involved with your project — whatever it is. In your case it’s your classes. Showing up also means being an active participant, sharing, taking notes and doing the work.

#4 Know and be known

Showing up to class also means that you’ll get to know your instructors and they will get to know you. Developing a working relationship with your instructors can pay off in many ways. Not only will you feel more comfortable asking for help on assignments, you may be able to get recommendations for internships and jobs down the road.

#5 Take care of yourself

Just because you’re working hard to develop your mind doesn’t mean that you can get away with neglecting your body or your spirit. Be sure to take time for sleeping, eating, exercise, and recreation with friends. St. John’s University offered its list of “Ten Tips for Student Success,” which included the following tip:

“Get involved in campus activities. It will help you learn valuable skills, expand your social network and enhance your self-confidence. Seek out opportunities to apply what you learn in the classroom.”

#6 Learn it right the first time

Steve Pavlina graduated college with two degrees and did it in three semesters. In a May 8, 2006 post to StevePavlina.com titled, “10 Tips for College Students,” Steve described how he approached his college tasks. Key strategies included:

• Setting goals for each class: goals include the grade, a letter of recommendation, or mastering the material
• Allocating time based on specific goals: spend more time in achieving the goals with the bigger payoff
• Mastering advanced memory techniques: learning the material the first time it’s presented can save students a lot of time

#7 Find your grit

Researcher Angela Duckworth found that intelligence is not the only predictor of student success. Character is just as important. Specifically, Duckworth found that passion and dedication to success, despite meeting obstacles, was a reliable predictor of success. She termed this quality, “grit.”

In a May 3, 2012 post for Forbes.com titled, “Got Grit? The Secret Sauce to Success,” Shabbir Dahod described what he has learned about the theory of grit. “So people are not just born great technologists, salesmen or marketers and it requires constant effort in a specific direction to build the knowledge and skills to become great at a task or market,” Dahod said.

It’s like the old story of the tortoise and the hare. Those who are successful, who win the race, are not necessarily those who run the fastest. Success goes to those who stick to their task despite setbacks, failure, and discouragement. The winners are those who work hard and focus on constant improvement especially in areas where they lack talent or skill.

The moral of the story is, to be a winner you have find your passion — find your grit.

Your professors will appreciate your hard work!

Around this time of year, students may begin to feel a bit of panic as they realize that final exams are rapidly approaching. Not to worry! I’ve been a college instructor for going on 16 years now and I’m going to spill the beans on how students can get better grades on their final exams. Here’s my list of insider tips on how to study and prepare for that all-important final.

Tip #1 — Think like a professor

How can you prepare for your finals? Think like your professor. What would he or she put on the final? What has been discussed and covered in depth in the course? Still not sure? Ask your professor what will be covered on the final, what kinds of questions will be asked: essay, true/false, problems, etc., and study for that type of exam.

It’s all very likely covered in your syllabus and on the web site for your course, if there is one. But it never hurts to ask. While you’re at it, ask for advice on how you can improve in areas where your performance has been weak.

Tip #2 — There are no shortcuts to success

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts, although students still seem to look for them. One shortcut, cheating, is a tactic that I won’t ever recommend. Sooner or later you will be caught and the consequences can harm you for the rest of your life.

Claire Potter, Professor of History at The New School for Public Engagement in New York offered this advice in a December 7, 2011 post for TenuredRadical titled, “If I Had College-Age Children, I Would Give Them This Advice for the Final Weeks of School: Don’t Cheat.”

“My point is this: because cheating is evidence of rank stupidity, many people do not get away with it. In fact, many people are no better at cheating than they are at doing the work for the course. Others spend time that might have gone into conventional studying devising elaborate systems for cheating,” Potter said.

Tip #3 – Reduce your anxiety — Be honest with yourself

One reason why students don’t do well on finals is that they manage to work themselves up into a frenzy of worry and fear. Do yourself a favor and find a way to reduce your level of anxiety.

In a February 12, 2011 article for Science News, titled, “The Write Stuff for Test Anxiety: Fearful Students Score Better If They Jot Down Their Worries,” Bruce Bower described a method that might be of help to students preparing for finals. That method includes writing down your list of worries before taking the exam.

“Among test-anxious students, those who wrote about exam-related feelings scored an average of 6 percent higher on the final than those who wrote about biology topics. Expressive writers received a B+ average on the final, versus a B- for biology writers,” Bower reported.

Tip #4 — Start early

It may sound trite but the time to prepare for your final exam really begins on the first day of the semester. If you wait until a week before the exam to get serious about studying, you may be setting yourself up for failure.

In a May 16, 2006 post for CastingOutNines.com titled, “Thoughts while grading finals,” math instructor Robert Talbert expressed his thoughts as he waded through a pile of final exams.

“Final exams week is a model for how our campus should look all year long: students asking questions and coming to office hours, all the laptops checked out of the student center, people getting together to study, people talking about what’s going on in their classes [...] there’s an air of a significant undertaking being taken seriously,” Talbert mused.

Tip #5 — Take responsibility

After spending years grading final exams I can tell you that as an instructor I want my students to succeed. I don’t enjoy handing out failing grades. I don’t believe that any instructor does. But we can only assign a grade based on what the student turns in. So it’s up to each student to take responsibility for learning the material, finding out what will be required on the final and then preparing for the final to the best of their ability.

Need more ideas? The staff at Eastfield College in Dallas, Texas have come up with a list of 101 Ways to Prepare for Final Exams Now. Check it out and good luck to you on your finals!

Grow your brain

As summer winds down, another semester is just heating up! It’s time again to gear up for fall semester and Questia can help you make it a breeze. You’ll want to want to make sure you stay organized, grow your brain to retain what you learn and adapt new study skills such as the concept of “active study.”

A few simple strategies are all you need to get yourself supercharged and ready to go back to school for fall classes, and the new and improved Questia.com can help you on your way.

Stay organized by getting into the work flow

When it comes to organizing your study time more efficiently, you’ll need to have some solid skills in place. The book, “How to Be a Student: 100 Great Ideas and Practical Habits for Students Everywhere,” by Sarah Moore and Maura Murphy offers some ideas on how to develop those skills. Moore and Murphy draw from many experts in the field of learning and memory such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist who studies how people can work and learn more effectively.

Csikszentmihalyi calls this state of effectiveness “flow.” How do you get into the flow? Moore and Murphy list tips including:

• Concentrate: get rid of anything in your environment that could distract you from focusing on your studies.
• Challenge yourself: push yourself to the next level and get help with any skills gap that you discover.
• Schedule your time: use a calendar to map out the weeks and months ahead. Pace yourself so that you’ll work more efficiently and with less anxiety. Otherwise, those research assignment due dates can sneak up on you unexpectedly.

Questia helps you to stay organized throughout your research and writing process. Questia Senior Product Manager Gary Jeppsen reveals that the website’s recent redesign includes “a larger library, intuitive navigation and search filters for finding research faster, and a slick new interactive reader that makes it easy to read, create citations, take notes and organize your work.” Organization from start to finish!

Grow your brain and retain what you learn

You should also check out the book, “Research-Based Strategies to Ignite Student Learning: Insights from a Neurologist and Classroom Teacher,” by Judy Willis, M.D. This book is chock full of information to supercharge your brain. For instance, did you know that you could grow new pathways in your brain by learning skills such as juggling or a foreign language? It’s true. Researchers have found that learning these skills will actually increase the gray matter in the visual memory area of the brain.

Once you learn the skill, you have to keep at it or the newly acquired brain matter will vanish. “It is the ‘use it or lose’ phenomenon. The process is called ‘pruning’ because the brain pathways and connections that are used regularly are maintained and ‘hard-wired,’ while others are eliminated, or pruned,” Willis said. It sounds like this could sure come in handy when it comes to preventing writers’ block!

Still need a little help to get your creative juices flowing when it comes to research papers and creative assignments, though? Questia Content Manager Nancy Buchanan recommends heading to Questia’s collection of research topic pages for help in selecting your topic and sources. “Our topic pages provide students and researchers alike with great resources categorized by subject. These topics link users directly to high-quality sources that were all hand-selected by librarians,” said Buchanan. This means you can be sure that everything you’re linked to is relevant to your assignment’s topic!

Build new study skills

If you’ve been in college for any amount of time, you’ve probably figured out that the same tactics that got you the good grades in high school may not be working so well for you now in college. That’s because the papers, tests and assignments ask you to demonstrate a deeper level of knowledge and to show your ability to use what you’ve learned in new and different settings.

In other words, simple memorization won’t be good enough. You’ll need to develop new study skills. You’ll get an idea of how to study successfully at the Dartmouth Academic Skills Center where they recommend study habits such as:

• Study in chunks
• Use daylight hours
• Study actively
• Find the right place to study

What is “active study”? It’s when you involve as many senses as you can to see, hear and feel the information you’re learning. It’s developing tools such as mnemonic devices to help you memorize new concepts. For example, use your favorite song to help you remember a long list of items or use the first letter of each item to create a word or name. Active study also includes using note cards. Reading them aloud will keep you more actively engaged in learning the content.

With a little planning and practice, you can make sure that your attitude is primed and ready to start when the fall semester begins. Instead of floundering around trying to organize your deadlines, you’ll have your plan of attack all mapped out. And, who would have ever guessed that learning to juggle might help you improve those creative thinking skills? Following these tips and looking to the new and improved Questia.com this semester will see you rising to the challenge of your greatest academic goals this semester!

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Mental gymnastics

Your mental training will include strategies for using your memory such as using acronyms, acrostics and rhyme-keys. Don’t know what those are? Check out the Joe Landsberger’s Study Guides and Strategies website where you’ll learn tips for how to study and ways to build your mental mass. For example, one way to recall information is called “chaining.”

Landsberger explains how to chain: “Create a story where each word or idea you have to remember cues the next idea you need to recall. If you had to remember the words Napoleon, ear, door, and Germany, you could invent a story of Napoleon with his ear to a door listening to people speak in German.”

Get physical

According to the American College of Sports Medicine, students who do some form of vigorous physical exercise regularly get better grades. A study of 266 undergraduates found that the average grade difference was 0.4 points higher for students who exercised seven days a week.

How is a busy college student supposed to exercise regularly when they have little time and no money for a fancy gym membership? Try these routines that can be done just about anywhere.

• Build strength: push-ups using the floor or a wall, lunges, squats, sit-ups
• Cardio burn: jumping jacks, running in place, jumping rope, walking/running up and down stairs, kickboxing

Shape.com has specific dorm room workout routines that are quick and easy to do.

Talent — Are you born with it?

Some students take to math like a duck to water and others can explain biology in their sleep, but even they have to work hard for their good grades. Just what does it take to be successful? According to Geoff Colvin, talent is overrated and what really makes a success is “deliberate practice.”

In a May 12, 2009 post for FranklinCovey.com titled, “Book Summary: ‘Talent is Overrated’ by Geoff Colvin,” Todd Wangsgard reviewed Colvin’s book describing his theories about success.

“The author explains, drawing several research-based conclusions, that the secret — deliberate practice — is designed, can be repeated a lot, requires constant feedback, is highly demanding mentally, and isn’t much fun,” Wangsgard said.

Not easy and not fun may not be your ideal choice, but if success were easy, your victories wouldn’t be nearly as rewarding.

Ace the exam without breaking a sweat

All of your practice and preparation will be put to use and proven effective when you have to take an exam, but the sheer pressure can make even the most prepared student shaky to the point of nausea. Sound like you? Relax. Plenty of strategies can help you whip your fall exams into submission.

You can read about them all in Motivation and Learning Strategies for College Success: A Self-Management Approach, by Myron H. Dembo. From time management, to study tips to dealing with different types of test questions, the author covers all the challenges that can derail student success.

Are you often baffled by true/false quiz questions? Dembo suggests looking for key words such as: most, always, better, or more, to give you clues that can determine what the statement really means. Always read test questions carefully and choose the answer you feel is the best. If you’re not sure, then he advises that you guess rather than leave the answer blank.

Do you stress out before the exam? According to Dembo, “Relaxation techniques can be grouped into physical and mental techniques. For example, controlling one’s breathing is an effective way to relax. Many experts in anxiety reduction teach individuals breathing exercises that involve long, slow exhalation. The diaphragm expands and tenses when taking in air and relaxes when the air is released. Thus, one way to relax is to increase the time you spend exhaling.”

Get into fighting condition this summer by strategizing your study routine, ready to hit the ground running in the fall. Success all comes down to deciding what you want and going for it with all you’ve got. With planning and persistence, you can go the distance.

1. Go easy on the caffeine: While a few large cups of joe may seem like the ideal solution, the temporary buzz will eventually give way to crashing the following day, perhaps even during the aforementioned test. Instead, stick to something hydrating like Gatorade, which replenishes electrolytes and allows your brain to perform at its peak.
2. Lower the screen setting on your computer: Eye strain is not only painful, but it brings on physical fatigue and decreases productivity. When staring at the computer screen for hours, dull the brightness of the display and your eyes will thank you.
3. Avoid distractions: From Facebook to texting, chatting with friends or surfing the web may tempt you. Health Psychologist Lynn Rossy suggests in “Ten tips to reduce end-of-semester stress” to check email at limited times during the day and avoid other unnecessary distractions like Facebook and phones. You’ll have plenty of time to reconnect with friends or watch the latest viral video once finals are over.
4. Make a to-do list: To avoid a lagging sense of motivation, set a schedule outlining your tasks so the efforts put forth aren’t wasted. For example, for every 40 minutes of studying, take a 5-15 minute break to allow your mind to refocus. The article, “7 Quick Steps to Getting Through Finals Week Without Stressing,” says that keeping a to-do list takes one more pressure off of you to remember every little thing.
5. Pick a study-friendly setting: While studying from a bed or couch certainly sounds more appealing, your brain will automatically associate your bed with a good night’s sleep, which can hinder late-night study time. Studying at a desk, table or at the library will help keep your mind on the right track.

Questia saves students valuable time on research papers and projects. With Questia, students can accurately cite sources in seven different styles and organize their notes, research and sources all in one place. To help get you through your late night session more easily, be sure to sign up for a Questia free trial.

• Plan ahead – Procrastination may be your middle name, but don’t wait until a week (or day, yikes) before the final to begin your preparation! It may seem like common sense, but planning ahead is vital when it comes to saving you time and stress as well as retaining information. When you cram, you tend to immediately forget all that information that had cost a lot of money to obtain.

• Organize yourself – “Study Tips for Finals Week” suggests reviewing the reading and coursework that you completed during the semester and organize notes and prior assignments by topic. Rewrite sloppy notes; make flash cards or chapter summaries to find all the information you need easily.

• Ask for help – Whether you’re confused on a particular topic or just need someone to bounce ideas off of, create a study group or contact your TA to have a sit down session to review your notes. Remember to plan ahead and contact them in advance instead of the day before the final, especially since there tends to be a last minute rush and professor and TA office hours may be booked solid.

• Stay healthy - Sleep, eat properly and workout as you’re preparing! Don’t let the vending machine tempt you. Studies have shown that Omega-3 fatty acids boost energy and improve memory. Fish, walnuts, flaxseeds, beans and olive oil are the best brain foods.

• Give yourself a break – Though you may feel productive, staring at your textbooks for 13 hours straight can do more harm than good. The article, “5 Tips and Tricks to Make Your Finals Week a Success,” suggests that every couple hours you give yourself a break to do something other than studying. Watch a half hour of TV, take a nap or blow off some steam outside.

• Set multiple alarms – Have you ever had that nightmare that you missed your final? So that you don’t live that nightmare, set a few alarms to ensure that you won’t only wake up in time, but that you’ll arrive early enough to get a seat and settle in before the test begins.

• Don’t rush through the test – The faster you try to rush through the material, the more likely you are to make simple mistakes and lose valuable points. Take your time to thoroughly read and understand the question before rushing to an answer.

• Don’t stress once it’s over – Sometimes, you’ll leave a final feeling happy and triumphant. Other times, the impending doom of a poor grade is hard to shake. No matter how you’re feeling afterwards, it’s important to relax and let go without dwelling. If you didn’t feel as prepared as you were hoping to, learn from your experience and change your approach the next time around!

For all your last-minute research, sign up for a Questia free trial to get you through your final assignments.

1. Assess your workload: Start off on the right foot by taking a step back to see where you stand among your big heap of assignments. An article by Michael Sandler called “Surviving semester’s end: Expert advice for avoiding panic at the end of the semester” suggests that you put all exam dates and deadlines for papers and assignments in an excel table. If you have other responsibilities such as extracurricular activities or a job, make sure they’re on your radar, too. Excel tables help you to easily glance at what’s due and when.
2. Ration your time: According to the article “Beat the clock: Learning to manage your time,” you should budget three hours of outside class work for every hour you spend in class, as a general rule. Along with reading, reviewing and doing homework, factor in extra time for major projects or papers, while giving your hardest classes top priority.
3. Resist distractions: Health Psychologist Lynn Rossy suggests in “Ten tips to reduce end-of-semester stress,” to check email at limited times during the day and avoid other unnecessary distractions like Facebook and phones. If you can’t resist the temptations, disconnect your computer from the Internet and put your phone away in another room.
4. Organize your work space: A typical college dorm room or apartment probably looks as disheveled as your hair from all the hair pulling during finals! An article called “Testing Times to Come; as Coast Students Prepare for End-of-Year Exams, Experts Offer Some Handy Study Tips” by Hannah Busch shares tips for time-management and staying focused, including the importance of an organized study area. “Where you study has a huge impact on how you study. Having a tidy desk means you’ll spend more time studying and less time looking for things. The area should be well-lit and quiet.” If this sounds like an impossible feat for your personal desk, high-tail it to the library!
5. Stay healthy: Training your brain is like training for sports. Author Michael Sandler suggests that you take time to eat, sleep and exercise to maintain a healthy body and mind. Stay well-hydrated and snack on foods high in protein to keep you alert. Break out the shake weight if you must and exercise at least 20 minutes a day, three days a week to improve mental stamina and focus.
6. Go easy on the caffeine: Caffeine is fine in moderation, but you can recharge your mind in other ways too. Psychologist Lynn Rossy offers helpful alternatives to downing energy drinks and pulling all-nighters. “Use stretching, walking, running or other exercise as a way of re-invigorating the body and mind. Stay away from sugary snacks that give you a quick high and then have you running on empty for the next few hours.” With too much caffeine in your system, you might end up staying awake all night beyond the time needed to study and won’t get enough rest to actually take the final the next morning.
7. Remember what you learn: Eliminate the bad habit of cramming as much information into your head as possible then purging it after finals. A lot of time and money has been put into your education, so you should take the value along with you well after finals. In the article “Get the Most Out of Your Course,” Tara Kuther, Ph.D., recommends holding on to that course material. “A crucial course may become part of your basic skill set and something you refer back to often in your career. Other courses are useful in preparing for graduate admissions exams such as the Graduate Record Exam or licensure exams.” As finals week comes to a close, and all your exams and projects are finally handed in, don’t just throw away your papers and bolt for the door. Make sure you collect all your final papers and exams from your professors even if you turned them in on the last day. You never know when you’ll need to draw on them in the future.

Keep these tips in mind as you approach finals week and you’ll have a great jump start on wrapping up a successful semester. You’ve made it this far, you can go the distance! The education you’re striving toward is a life-long investment. Be sure to get the very most it by preparing, staying healthy and retaining the information you worked so hard to digest.

Share with us in comments below: What are your tips and tricks for surviving finals week?

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Make Note

The main thing to know about note-taking, says Richard Palmer, is that “All notes that are not accompanied by solid understanding are useless.”  In Brain Train: Studying for Success (London: E & FN Spon, 1996), 102, he explains, “Your notes are both part of your thinking and a reflection of it, done as part of the preparation for a piece of work or as a record and reminder of your reading and research. Class notes…are as formal as the textbooks you study, and a significant part of your course material.”

Rather than launching “into a frenzy of scribbling-long before the focus of the argument has been established,” Palmer suggests listening “for a while without simultaneously attempting to record… All but the most abjectly bad lectures and classes usually ease into their topic in a complementary fashion, announcing their main concerns in advance and repeating each one as and when it is arrived at. So take in the main topics at the beginning, and write only when you reach them later.”

See Palmer’s chapter on Creative Doodling: Note-taking for Fun and Profit to learn about techniques like “key word noting” and how to invent your own abbreviations and short cuts. And keep in mind his advice that “There is no ‘right’ way, other than what works for you. So do your notes in any way you like. If it helps you to do them in alternative green and purple biro, do them like that; if you like weaving patterns or funny shapes with them, go ahead; and if it helps and amuses you to do them in a kind of secret code that you can understand easily, that’s fine too. The more you can make taking notes a natural and pleasurable exercise, the more vigorously they will assist your study.”

Myron H. Dembo’s book Motivation and Learning Strategies for College Success: A Self-Management Approach (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000), 168, explains note-taking steps to take before, during, and after a lecture. One recommendation, for example, is to “set aside about 5 to 10 minutes per lecture shortly after class to review your notes” and “add any important information” you heard but didn’t capture and locating info “you did not understand…from the instructor, another student, or the textbook.”  Find his step-by-step note-taking technique in the chapter How can I take better notes? and a test you can take to assess your note-taking skills.

Dazed and Confused

Are your efforts to work at peak effectiveness at school or on the job being derailed by the clutter in your workspace? Try these quick and easy tips to organize your desk.

In their Scholastic article A Space That Makes You Want to Study, Toby Leah Bochan and Shama Narang note that where you work should take into account whether you’re “a lone studier” or “you thrive in a busier atmosphere.”  Either way, they say, your work surface should be ergonomically correct – “about waist-height” with “a combination of overhead light and a reading or desk lamp” and room to “position the monitor about 18-30″ away from you.” Their recommendations, directed at younger students but appropriate for anyone who wants an effective workspace, include keeping supplies “all in one spot so you’re not always hunting for things you need.”

“If organizing the entire desk is too large of a goal,” says Renee Belisle, “break it down to be more manageable for you.” In her Business Credit magazine article 8 Tips to Make Work More Productive, she explains, “For instance, limit yourself to only clearing off the papers from the top of the desk today, empty the top right drawer tomorrow, organize the second drawer the next day, etc. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing endeavor.

“Limit the items on your desk top to 8-9 things at the most,” Belisle continues, noting, “Many offices and desks are filled with things that are not ever used. Meanwhile, time and energy are wasted looking for important things needed to effectively do your job. Depending on how much you have and how much space you have, follow these guidelines:

• Identify what you use on a daily basis and put those items within easy reach.
• Items used every other day can be placed in nearby drawers.
• Items used on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis may be best stored in a supply closet or some other type of longterm storage option.

The National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) agrees with this approach. In Office Organization, they note that – to “Tame Your Desk” – you should do the following:

• Create a paper flow system for your incoming documents.
• Avoid looking at documents and placing them back on the desk. Follow through with the decision you have made about the document.

NAPO’s suggestions to “Conquer Your Filing” include these steps:

• Create a filing system for your electronic documents that mirrors the one you have for paper. Sort, file, and purge electronic information regularly.
• Keep a file index (a master list of file names). Check the index before creating a new file to avoid making duplicates. Also use it when deciding where to put new documents.
• Keep the most recent papers in the front of the file. Whenever you open it, the current information will be on top.