talking about focus hacks…when at uni I had odd studying hours, often mixing day and night without any clear distinction.
What kept me grounded were scented candles. IKEA used to sell those with an expected burning time. My favs were the 40hrs ones [0]. My exam preparation was 1 candle for revising notes, 1 candle to go through relevant books and 1-2 candles to do exercises (exp for calculus and similar courses). Add 1 more for the final revision. I was constantly lighting on and off those.
Can you elaborate more on this? I couldn’t quite understand whether you used these candles to “anchor” yourself to different times of day, or if you were just using them as kind of cumulative timers?
I used them to keep track of time in a broad sense. Once the candle was on, my mind wouldn’t care about the time and could focus on the course work. I was offloading the time tracking to the candle (if that makes any sense).
It was also handy to know when preparation was done. Once depleted the candles any doubt about my preparation would be relegated into “impostor syndrome” symptom.
Doesn't that add up to like 200 hours per course for study? Two or three courses and you're at 600 hours study per 13-week term? 46 hours a week on top of your actual class load?
