How do you stay focused
for long periods of time? Are there certain evidence-based methods that work better than other methods? What has worked best for me in the past? What changes have I made to my
studying and study strategies and focusing strategies during college and now medical school that have helped me to stay focused for longer. So in this video, I'm gonna show you guys how I actually maintain my focus when I'm studying for a long, long periods
of time in medical school. (soft ambient music) The first thing I do, is I have a start and an end time. Instead of saying, okay, tomorrow, I'm gonna study all day, which never works, I actually set certain times
for when I'm gonna study, and when I'm not going to study. When I'm in this study
time, it's just study time. No doing anything else, just studying. But, this also means when
I'm done with my study time, when I'm not studying any more, I don't study anymore. It's not studying time. For example, during the first two
years of medical school, we would usually have about
four or five hours of activities that were laid out for us during the day that we just had to attend. Now, this could be anatomy lab or certain lectures or
a certain group meeting, but there was other time
right during the day that I had time to study. And what worked really well for me, is kind of treating the day, every day while I'm in medical
school, like a work day. So what I would do, is because this is medical school, my study day, my work day would start
at 7:00 instead of 9:00 and end at 5:00. That means from 7:00
to 5:00 was my work day or my study time and
then after 5:00 was over. So, I wouldn't study past five o'clock and this means I would
wake up around six o'clock, get my day in order
and then start studying between 7:00 and 9:00. And then maybe I would have my four hours of required activities, have lunch and get back to
my house like around 1:32, and then study again
for another three hours between 2:00 to 5:00. But that also means when I didn't have required
activities during the day, I would study pretty much
the entire day, right? So, I'd study from 7:00 to 5:00, taking a lunch break and the
occasional pomodoro break, of course, but I would treat it as a work day. My start time was 7:00
and my end time was 5:00. And I usually would stick to
this pretty strictly, right? Because as soon as you start
to go away from this routine, it becomes easier for
other things to creep in, like looking at your phone or watching TV or kind of something like this. And also if it's a work day, right, you have to imagine there's a boss, right? And if there's a boss, you don't wanna look bad to your boss. You wanna make sure that
you're actually working during the whole work day. And the other great part
about this strategy, is it would help me not focus kind of after five o'clock. There's a cool quote from Mark Black and it says, "Sometimes the most productive
thing you can do, is relax. And I think it's a little bit cheesy, but I think it's true, right? A lot of times you need that break, so afterwards you can focus even more. If you never take a break and you just try and work all the way through, then you start to lose efficiency with kind of what you're working on. Having a start and end
time to my studying, let me know that, okay, this is the study time. This is when I study time. And it also let me know that, okay, this is not study
time, no more studying. Bottom line, have a start time for studying, have an end time for studying and stick to that. (soft ambient music) So the next thing to do, the next tip I have, is do the worst thing first, or as Mark Twain said, "Eat the frog." If it is your job to eat frog, it's best to do it first
thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first. Now, I recently discovered
this quote and I like it a lot, but I think I've been doing
kind of the maximum outline with this, by this quote for awhile. And I don't know if it's
because my mom would usually make me do my homework before I was actually allowed
to go outside and play, or if it was because I just wanted to get the sucky things over with. I just remember kind of growing up and going through high school, I would always start with the worst thing. I would always eat the biggest, smelliest, most disgusting frog right away. Also, who wants like
pages of math homework hanging over their head
when they want to go outside and hit their brother with sticks? Not me. So, I would always do the thing
I least wanted to do first. For example, English class
at school, I was awful at, and I really didn't like, so I'd always write my essays first. I would always do that first. I would write my essay and then I would do the rest of my homework, and then I would be able to go outside and kind of chill out. And another way if you're thinking, okay, I don't wanna do this, I kind of wanna save the
most annoying thing for later because I just don't want to do it now. Another way to think about it, is as the day goes on, kind of your mental fortitude dwindles. Your brain is kind of
like a muscle, right? And the more tasks you do, the more mental tasks you do, it makes it harder for the
subsequent task to be done. And some scientists even
believe that as the day goes on, your brain kind of starts to
build up these toxic chemicals or they call it a toxic
biomolecular accumulation. And it's only cleared out every night when you go to sleep. Without bringing in the
scientific articles, right, you can kind of think about this, like when do you think you
can get more work done? At 10:00 AM on a Monday, or it may be 4:30 PM on a Friday? It's probably easier to
do more work at 10:00 AM on a Monday, right? And that makes sense. You've been working, your brain has been working all week. Doing the hardest tasks last, I think is a mistake
because your mental energy, your mental strength is weakest
as you go through the day. Do the hardest task first, do it when you're mentally strongest. So eat the frog, commit
the most brainpower, commit your best effort
to this first, most hard and most important thing. Do it, get it over with, and like people in France
seem to like doing it too. So, there must be something to it. Bottom line, do the task you least want to do, first. (soft ambient music) The next tip I have, is to remove all distractions. I cannot, I really, if I have my
phone anywhere near me, anywhere in my line of
sight when I'm studying, I just can't focus. Even if I'm fixed on
my screen and thinking, you know what? There's nothing that can tear me away from these amazing
medical school flashcards. Really, I see the phone right here. I see it just right there
and it's just distracting. And I know it's there and
I can sense its there. So, sometimes I'll pick it up
and just get distracted by it. I feel its presence and
inevitably, I pick it up. So, whenever I'm studying now, I remove any possible distractions, not just from my desk, but from my line of sight. I actually like throw my phone
to another part of the room, I'll take things off my desk. If there's an annoying
cushion on the couch, I'll kind of hide it away. I'll really clear everything out. Why do I do this? Well, not only do distraction, I notice these distractions
when I'm working, but distractions harm performance. There's this one cool
study that I looked up and it took 13 medical students
and surgical residents, and it asked them to perform
laparoscopic surgery. And laparoscopic surgery
is basically just a surgery where they have little cameras
that they insert into you. So that way, they don't have
to do big open procedures. Right? They just stick a little camera in, they stick another kind of device in and they can do the procedure
all through this camera without making a very large open incision. There's 13 students and
residents that are assigned to do this kind of surgical procedure. Don't worry. They're not doing this
test on real humans, they're doing it in kind of
a virtual reality trainer. So some of them were
distracted and some were not. And the distraction was
something pretty mundane. It was something like, okay, do the math problem, 11 times 14 right now, while you're doing the surgery. Well, what were the results? Well, the results were what you expect. The residents and students
that were being distracted, took 30 to 40% longer
to complete the tasks than the others that were not distracted. And to get a little less science-y and a little more feely again, I'm going to bring up
Marie Kondo's book here because I really like it. And her book is the life-changing
magic of tidying up. And a quote from her book is, "The question of what you want to own, is actually the question of how you want to live your life." I feel like when my desk is cluttered, my mind is cluttered and
my life is even cluttered. So, my desk has very little on it, right? It's got a screen, it's got two speakers, a keyboard and a mouse. And that's really all I try to keep on it. My phone is never on my desk. Food and drink is never on my desk, notebooks, unless I'm actively using them, are never on my desk. Unused papers are never on my desk. And my first aid book is never on my desk because I have it taped
to my body at all times. But seriously, why do I need my notebook, my phone, some food drink at my desk all
the time when I'm studying? I really don't need that stuff there. And sometimes, I take this
to an even bigger extreme. Sometimes I literally
just pick up this laptop, go to the park and just study there. One because there's nothing
really around to distract me. I can't, I don't have all my little
phones and gadgets around. And also, I really can't
connect to the internet when I'm in the park on this computer. So, what I'll do, is I'll just be able
to go through my study and go through my flashcards
with no distractions coming in whatsoever. So, the next bonus steps
to kind of removing all the distractions from when you study, is actually removing the distractions from whatever thing you're working on. So, a lot of us nowadays, right, we use computers to work. So, I personally use an app
called the Self-Control app, and this really makes it
hard for me to get distracted on the internet on my computer. It blocks the internet, even kind of mail servers
for a certain amount of time, so I can't access them at all. Restarting my computer
doesn't do anything, deleting the application
doesn't do anything. I can't access the apps or the internet or whatever I block using
the app, no matter what. Anything that I can do to make
it easier for me to focus, to remove distractions
and help me focus, I do. So, bottom line, remove everything from your workspace that you're not actively using right now to get the work done. Block any websites or
applications on your computer or phone or whatever that
you're not actively using, to get the work done. (soft ambient music) Now, people who take
breaks perform better. I have a couple sources
that I'll say down below that kind of support this, people that take breaks do better. And to cut in briefly,
kind of a disclaimer, to all the data that I talk about, and all kinds of the research papers that I referenced in this video, in all videos, right? I have a bias here, right? I'm trying to confirm kind
of my ideas and my thoughts in each one of these videos where I talk about these things. And the researchers make mistakes too. Right? So, what you should do, is you should look at the
sources that I link below. Look at them yourself and see
if you agree with them or not. But okay, for taking breaks, the data that I looked at, seems to strongly support taking breaks because it improves performance. And this is why certain professions actually have breaks mandated to them. For example, medical residents aren't
allowed to work supposedly more than 80 hours a week. But beyond kind of the evidence, I know firsthand that
implementing study breaks, study break, study break strategies, improves my performance. Based off kind of my studying metrics, which is how many flashcards I can do in a certain amount of time, I actually increased my performance by 50% in the same amount of
time by taking breaks. When I wasn't taking
breaks doing flashcards, I would do maybe 100
flashcards every 30 minutes. And I would do this over three hours. So, in three hours, I would be able to do maybe 600 flashcards and this was just
straight work, no breaks. But when I began implementing breaks, I would work for 25 minutes and then take a five minute break, 25 minutes, five minute break. I actually started to do
more in that same three hours than I did when I took no breaks. And I did a lot more. I ended up doing 150
flashcards every 30 minutes instead of 100 flashcards,
every 30 minutes. And that meant over three hours, I was doing actually 900 flashcards instead of 600 flashcards. So, personally this taking
breaks really worked for me. And I think this happened
for a couple of reasons. One reason is, when I was taking no breaks, I kind of needed to integrate some breaks. So, I would just kind of pick up my phone, scroll through Reddit,
scroll through Instagram, without even thinking about it. So, kind of mental fatigue
started to build up, right? I would be doing cards,
cards, cards, cards, and the end of the tunnel was not insight. I didn't see anything coming
up that would give me a break, give me some kind of respite. And I think the worst thing was, I got into the habit of not focusing during these three hours because of what I said before. Because I would lose focus, because I felt like I needed a break, I would start to indicate great breaks and not know when I was
supposed to be focused and when I was not supposed to be focused. When I started taking
breaks and eliminated 90% of me not focusing, and I think this was because, okay, I know I have to
study during this time, and I know I get to not study pretty soon. As a final point, I was trying to figure
out the evidence-based amount of time that you should take for when you want to take a break, for taking a break to
maximize your performance. But I really couldn't find it. However, there was one
certain break strategy, one sneaky key strategy
that was across the board, supported by the evidence. Now, this one magical break applied to pretty much everyone in
every paper I looked at. That's amazing. How, what is this strategy? What is this break? Can you guess what this strategy is? Well, the strategy is sleep. Now, there are hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of articles that support sleep and performance. And I'm just gonna take
one from a review article that I read from the
journal of "Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews" and they said, "Excessive sleepiness is
a serious safety hazard and insufficient or disrupted sleep, results in numerous
accidents and adverse mental and physical health outcomes. Bottom line, take breaks and get the
proper amount of sleep. (soft ambient music) My final tip, and this is kind of my
most recent and new tip that I've been applying to
myself during medical school, is to keep the lights on. So now, during the day, during my study time, I will keep the lights on in my apartment when it's study time
and what I used to do, what I used to do kind
of all the time before, is I would come home to my apartment and I would like the lights to be off. It would make me feel more calm, more relaxed and like more sleepy. And that way I could kind
of relax into my study, but isn't this feeling of sleepiness, isn't this feeling of kind
of lower mental energy bad if we're trying to study a lot and focus for a longer period of time? Well, yeah, it might actually be. Light is a dominant
player in the regulation of our circadian rhythm and
what the circadian rhythm is, is just your biological clock site. So, it's what your body tells you, okay, now it's wake time
or now it's sleep time. The evidence seems to
support that blue light pushes us more towards this awake state while red light pushes us
more towards this sleep state. And I find this pretty cool
and really interesting. In college, I studied biomedical engineering and this was actually my final project. I was trying to design goggles that would dim or brighten to kind of adjust your circadian rhythm, so you could avoid jet lag. During this project. I learned a decent amount of
kind of the circadian rhythm and what regulates it. And actually there's a lot of people that are working on this. NASA is actually trying to
work on how to figure out to best adjust this because there aren't as
good signals in space to regulate your circadian rhythm. Humans weren't evolved to
live floating around in space. So when they go into space
for extended periods of time, it kind of messes with their whole body. But what the people at NASA were, are kind of learning about, is that you can use light
to kind of manipulate and adjust people's circadian rhythms. And this is really important for someone that's driving a spaceship, right? Because you want their awakeness. You want their performance to be best. And when you're more awake, your cognitive performance is better. When you sleep here, your
performance is worse. If we believe everything above and all the resources I linked above, shouldn't we push for a more awake state so we can stay focused longer and perform better cognitively. Ever notice how like office lights, they're always on. People don't turn off the office lights really at any time. These lights above, have a large portion of
this wavelength of light that kind of hits our
retina and then signals to another part of the brain that says, listen, it's awake time. And when it hits that brain of the part, and that says, listen, it's awake time. The brain then sends other
signals to the rest of the body that lets the rest of the body know, like, listen, it's
daytime, it's awake time. And some of the chemicals
that it up-regulates, are chemicals like Orexin
and Norepinephrine. And these are more awake chemicals. And some of the chemicals
that it down-regulates, is melatonin. I think we're all aware of melatonin. Now, how do we apply this to our lives? How do we turn on more light around us? Well, I think it's fairly
straightforward, right? You just have more light
when it's study time. Now during the summertime, if I'm kind of working
a place with big windows and it's not cloud yet, I don't really need to worry about this because there's lots of
sunlight streaming in. However, during the winter time, or when it's darker in
a room with no windows, overhead lighting is essential. I wanna make sure I feel
the most awake as possible. And having these lights help that happen. And if you still don't
believe me, try this. Go to your bedroom, close all the doors, close all the windows
and turn off the lights. Bring in your computer
and set the brightness to a minimum and try to study. See what it feels like. Is it tough? Do you feel sleepy? Now, what I want you to do, is turn the brightness to
a max on your computer, turn all the lights,
turn all the lamps on, open the windows, open the doors. And if you even have any extra lamps, shine them in your face, shine them in your general direction and compare this feeling you have now, with all these lights on to
the feeling you had before, when everything was really dark. Do you notice a difference? So, shine some lamps on
your face and get studying. Bottom line, is just keep the lights on when you're studying. (soft ambient music) But that is it. These are tips that I've
kind of found useful and that I've been kind
of learning and adapting over the years, so I can stay focused for longer when I'm studying for kind of a long time and during medical school. I hope this video was helpful. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you on the next one. (soft ambient music)
