Hello, everyone. How is your English study going? This is Hisanori. In this blog, I’m going to explain how ayou can improve your concentration in learning English. The method I’m going to talk about doesn’t require any training, and you can apply it to your studies and work immediately, so please try it out. So let’s get started! Class on how to blow up your concentration, here we go!
If you are reading this, have you ever had any of the following experiences?
Preparing a cup of coffee or something to get you fired up
APreparing breakfast to get pumped up, etc.
And then, when you’re convinced that you’re ready to study, and you’ve got a great environment, you start studying or working. I’m sure that many people do this to create an environment where they can concentrate.
I did the same. First, I had breakfast, then I took a shower…and then I tried to study.
However, after an hour or so, your phone would start ringing, and you would become distracted by it, and before you knew it, you were reading a comic book on your phone… I’m sure you’ve experienced this at least once in your life.
You’ve spent so much time setting up your environment, and you think you’re doing your best in a great environment, but then a notification on your phone breaks your concentration. And then you have to set up a new environment again to concentrate… And then you get another phone notification or something like that, and time just passes in that environment… Before you know it, you feel like you’ve done your work or study, and the day is over. The day is over. And then the next day comes… (the same thing continues below).
I think everyone has had that experience at least once in their life.
But as you may have already noticed, our productivity is not about the time we spend. Let’s talk about the formula for concentration.
Concentration * Time spent on the task = Workload.
By the way, according to a study done in the field of psychology, even if you work eight hours a day, you only work about three hours when you can say that you “really” worked. Amazing, isn’t it? It’s like, where did the other five hours go? It’s kind of ironic that we can only say we’ve done our job if we’ve increased our productivity. So, how can you increase your focus and be more productive? I’ve written about it, and I’ll introduce it below.
Here are three ways to boost your concentration that anyone can practice.
Table of Contents
Write down what you need to do in the morning.
Use a Pomodoro timer
Write down what you need to do in the morning.
The first thing to do is to write down what you need to do in the morning.
At first glance, the word multitasking sounds like a very cool word.
Multitasking means doing several things at once, in parallel. However, multitasking is something that is not considered in brain science.
It may look like you are doing multiple things at the same time, but in reality, your brain is only focusing its attention on one thing at a time.
As an example, let’s say you are memorizing an English word while on the phone. Even though you are doing the action of memorizing the word, you are actually distracted by the phone most of the time, so you end up not memorizing the word.
Let me give you another example. Let’s say that while you are reading English (I can’t think of a good example), your Twitter notification goes off, and you immediately go back to studying the words after seeing the notification. It’s really just a moment, but during this moment, your concentration is once again broken.
If you try to go back to the English text right away, you will end up wondering where you were and incur additional costs as a result. I believe that focusing on one thing at a time, such as “just English words for this time,” rather than two or more things to do on the spot, increases study efficiency by far and helps you maintain your concentration.
Use a Vomodoro timer
This is also the method that the author, Hisanori, uses, and I recommend it because it helps you concentrate like crazy. What is rag mode? I’ll explain it to you.
Pomodoro is a method that was created in the late 1980s.
To explain it really briefly, Pomodoro is a method of setting a certain time limit and repeatedly trying to achieve one’s learning goals within that time limit.
This is a method that Tetsuya Yasukochi, a professor at Toshin High School, wrote about in his book a long time ago, and I have tried it myself and found it to be very effective. I found it to be very effective. I was able to concentrate more on my studies. This is the book by Mr. Yasukochi that I found helpful.
For example, you can set a time for 30 minutes. In that time, do only what you have decided you should do. Then take a 5-minute break and do 4 sets. What you need to do is pretty simple!
The mechanism is that the pressure of time allows you to learn and work with the awareness that there is an end in mind.
It’s much easier to concentrate than doing it for a long time. I usually do this too, always setting a timer on my phone when I work, and focusing on one thing to do before I start.
I’ll show you how to use Bomodoro in a few steps.
First, decide what you need to do and what your goals are.
It’s important to note that you should always set one thing to do.
This is what I explained earlier, right?
If the goal is an input task such as word study, set a specific goal so that you can quantify whether you have achieved it. For example, instead of just reading an English vocabulary book, set a goal to memorize 30 words or some other specific number.
I think it’s difficult to quantify things like output, or in the case of English learning, shadowing. However, there is another advantage to setting a time limit. This is because just having the pressure of time makes it easier to stay focused, and it is still effective.
Admittedly, it can be difficult to find a way to evaluate how much has been done, but I still believe that Bomodoro is beneficial.
The second step is to “set the timer and run.
That’s it. You can simply set the timer on your phone for 30 minutes. There are apps for Pomodoro and YouTube. If you’re interested, please take a look! Please take a look.
As for me, I divide my time into 40 minutes and work in energy-saving mode for about 5 minutes. Then I go back to work. This is also a method that you can immediately put into practice in your daily studies and work, so please take a look at it.
Third: Just practice consciously!
The third method is. The third way to increase your ability to concentrate is to repeat the two methods I mentioned above with conscious practice.
To be honest, if you’ve never been able to concentrate before, or if you find it painful to concentrate, trying to repeat Pomodoro 10 times out of the blue will be quite difficult. Everyone starts from the point where they can’t do it.
When I was in junior high school, one of my classmates used to study for 10 hours before regular exams, and I thought he was a god. I thought he was a “god” and I didn’t want to lose, but by increasing the amount of time I could concentrate and gradually extending the amount of time I could concentrate, I was able to surpass him.
Now I can usually concentrate for 10 hours. In fact, 10 hours is not enough for me. I believe that I am where I am today because I consciously practiced increasing the number of times. For example, if I could do Pomodoro once a day for a week, I would try to increase it to twice a day. The key to success is to consciously increase the amount of time you can focus in this way. When I was 18 years old, I was able to study for about 15 hours a day, and when I entered university, I was worried that I would die of exhaustion if I extended my study hours any further.
Conclusion
So far, I have written about three ways to increase your concentration.
Do one task at a time.
Use vomodoro.
Practice consciously.
Of course, it was very difficult for me to concentrate at first, too. However, I gradually became able to do it. It’s not easy for anyone to do at first. It was the same for me. Let’s master the path of English together! See you soon!
