If you struggle with finding the motivation to study then you’ve just arrived at your inflection point, for here in the virtual pages of this article, I shall reveal to you the key to vaulting over your mental inertia…
Study metrics!
(Okay, so it’s sexier than it sounds.)
In this article, I’m going to walk you through why humans procrastinate, the many apps that leverage metrics to motivate people to do more, and how Brainscape—a flashcard study app—applies the psychology of metrics to help you overcome procrastination and make studying as frictionless as socks on a waxed floor!
So, if you’re tired of the Sisyphean task of pushing your procrastination aside to get productive studying done, today’s the day everything changes for you.
Why do I struggle with motivation to study?
Show me a student who’s unfamiliar with study procrastination and I’ll show you an Italian who’s okay with pineapple on their pizza.
You know what I’m talking about.
It’s watching “just one more episode” of your favorite show “and then I’ll study”. It’s checking something on your phone and then “accidentally” getting sucked into the neutron star gravitational pull of social media. Heck, it’s even doing productive things rather than studying, like unloading the dishwasher or doing the laundry.
If you ever catch yourself saying: “I’ll do X and then study”, you’re doing it. You’re procrastinating.
So why do we do it?
The reason is simple: learning is hard work for the brain. And the brain is a lazy organ whose top priorities include conserving energy for escaping from belligerent mammoths.
Sure, there is the argument that procrastination isn’t a terrible thing but it can derail your academic and professional goals and make you feel rather crummy in the process.
So what’s the best solution?
Study metrics!
Why are metrics so important for making progress?
You’ve probably heard it said before: “What gets measured gets managed”.
Your ability to succeed in any endeavor tends to be greater when you measure:
Your efforts towards achieving that goal, and
The success variables that allow you to visualize your progress.
This is the reason that the apps I mentioned became so popular.
In the case of Fitbit, it took the ubiquitous exercise goal of “becoming fitter” and gave people a means of tracking their progress: by measuring the number of steps they take every day.
It sounds simple enough, but what is really going on is that Fitbit (or other fitness trackers) transforms the positive yet transient feelings you get from exercise, and makes them permanentand tangible in the form of numbers: as the “number of steps” or “total active calories burned” or “hours spent standing”.
You can then look at your numbers anytime, either to admire the effort you’ve already put in or to encourage you to work just that little bit harder. This, in turn, provides enormous motivation to “get back out there” and complete the next day’s workout, and the one after that.
It’s this psychological mechanism that compelled the team at Brainscape to think: could we give serious learners the motivation to study by providing study-related metrics to measure their success?
Could we:
Improve learners’ visibility over their progress,
Make them feel more accountable (to keep their stats trending upwards),
Motivate them to return to the app day after day to keep their study streak alive, and
In doing so, make learning more fun?
The answer was a resounding “yes”. So we did it.
(The caveat in all of this—and with any “productivity” app or tool, even our favorites—is that if you haven’t internalized the goal of getting fitter, then a Fitbit will serve as nothing more than a glorified timepiece. You’ve really got to want to improve your habits for these apps to work; otherwise, they’ll just gather proverbial dust.)
Brainscape introduces study metrics to help learners measure their progress
