How Location Can Impact Study Efficiency?

The horse I was riding sensed the sudden movement of a plastic bag - then his brain yelled predator alert.

The plastic bag made him kick and scream like an angel of death was approaching.  That's because horse eyes can see almost 360 degrees around their body; and they continuously scan for distractions.  

Our minds are curiously similar to horse eyes; we are built to scan for distraction.

This is great for survival but bad for productivity.  

However, scanning for distractions has a lesser known consequence - just the act of trying to ignore a distraction damages our productivity. (It can be as simple as trying to ignore the last piece of chocolate cake!) 

So, hop on your horse, let’s go for a ride. Let me explain the nature of this lesser known, yet damaging factor of distraction. And then lets look at the steps we can take to protect our language learning productivity from distraction.

In grade 6, I was the new kid in school, and that made me a target.  

And there were two boys who didn’t like me. They didn’t want to fight me, but they did want to wrestle me - every lunch hour.    

And one day, I obliged.  Wrestling one of them would have been challenging, but wrestling two of them was exhausting.  

Mental effort also exhausting because we're wrestling two opponents.  The first, and obvious opponent, is doing the task.  The other opponent is the focus on the task.  And it turns out, the harder it is to focus on the task the less energy we have to do the task.  

How do we know this?

Researchers brought two groups of people into a room full of delicious chocolate treats and . . . radishes.  They instructed one group to eat anything they wanted.  They instructed the other group to eat only the radishes.  

Afterwards, they gave each group a challenging puzzle to solve.  And, interestingly, the “radish” group couldn’t perform as well as the chocolate group.  “Why is that?”, they asked. Their conclusion was that the radish group had used more energy on resisting the tempting chocolate and this took away from their energy to do the puzzle.   

The application for us is simple and extremely important - the more distractions you resist, the less energy you have for your task.  

Is there a way to reduce our distraction and transfer that extra energy to our study tasks?  

Yup.  And, it’s surprisingly simple to do.  But to understand how, we need to go back to the horse.  

There is a brilliant solution way to stop horses from going bananas over plastic bags - horse blinders. By placing a little piece of leather on each eye of the horse the horse only sees what’s in front of them.  And by blocking out the unnecessary distraction, the horse automatically focuses on the task.  

It turns out we humans will automatically focus on a task if we block out a distraction.  And there is a elegantly simple way to do it - location.  

But, in order to choose a helpful location, we need to know what we’re avoiding.  

Each person will be different, but here are some of my distractions:

• Working on a sofa or comfortable chair —> brain just doesn’t work
• Being near a refrigerator —> wondering about next snack
• Having Internet access —> want to watch YouTube
• People in my line of sight —> I get distracted when I see other people, so coffee    shops tend to hold me back.  

My list might not look like your list; nor should it.  

But, you can see that when I study at home, it’s kryptonite for my studying.     

It’s amazing; just planting my rear-end in an uncomfortable chair at library creates all that productivity.

Don’t get me wrong, a great study location can still tempt us.  If there is no wifi I can still use my smart phone for social media or email, or what have you.  I'll always have access to temptation, but whatever temptation I do avoid, the extra energy increases productivity.

So, let’s have a quick review.  

We all know that distractions can waste our time, but maybe we didn’t know that trying to ignore distractions and temptations drains our mental energy and lowers our productivity . . . a lot.  That’s because mental effort wrestles with two opponents, staying focused on the task and doing the task. And the more energy we use to stay focused the less energy we have to do the task.  

But, we can save this energy by noting our distractions, then selecting a new location that keeps these distractions far away from our scanning minds.  

And with a simple design like this our study productivity will increase.  

So what’s the one thing you can do today, right now, to help you improve your productivity?  

Keep a mental note of all the plastic bags that distract you intentionally choose a location that minimizes their temptation.  

And then enjoy your productivity.