Need motivation to study? How study metrics can save you from procrastination

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.

To your brain, studying doesn’t feel essential to survival so every time you sit down to do it, you have to push through the friction of mental inertia. Coupled with all-too-common issues like poor emotion regulation, executive function, and low dopamine… and you’ve got yourself a real mountain to climb every time you try to study.

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”.

If you’ve ever used a Fitbit, Mint, Toggl, or any other app that tracks your fitness, financial, or productivity trends, you’ll understand the profound impact that metrics have over encouraging you to make small, daily investments towards a larger goal.

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 permanent and 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.

[Here’s proof: Do fitness trackers help people move more?]

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—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

Brainscape is a study app that uses digital flashcards and an adaptive, spaced repetition algorithm to help people of all ages and subjects learn much more efficiently than any traditional study method. (Go on and check out the app if you haven’t already!)

While we’ve made getting started much easier—because all you have to do is open the app and tap the “study button”—what we hadn’t fully optimized was helping learners find the motivation to study. In other words: bringing them back to study day after day. So we innovated study metrics to help our learners measure their progress and, in doing so, understand, inspire, and improve their study habits. 

It’s one thing to give you an app that makes learning faster, but if “getting started is half the job done,” then it’s also essential that we eliminate the mental inertia that gets in the way of you opening the app in the first place.

So, what study metrics can you now see in Brainscape?

A bird’s eye view of your time spent studying and the number of cards you've mastered

The mobile screenshot on the left shows my dashboard in the Brainscape app, where all of the flashcards I’m making or studying are housed (yes, I love birds). 

At the top of the screen, beneath my name, you’ll see some helpful study metrics, like number of days streak, time studied today, and average study time per day. Clicking the bar graph icon on the right, however, will reveal the far more detailed metrics screen, which you’ll see on the right.

From here, scroll down, and you’ll get the following high-resolution picture of your study habits over the past week, month, and year…

The left screenshot shows the number of minutes I spent studying every day over the past 30 days. The x-axis represents the day of the month, so this graph straddles two months, from the 24th of January to the 20th of February. (You can’t see the month here, but I know which month it’s referring to because these stats are for the last 30 days.)

Below that, you’ll notice that I’ve got a 90-day study streak going, which means that every day for the past three months, I’ve opened Brainscape to complete at least one 10-flashcard study round. (I’m super proud of that by the way.) My record streak, however, was 121 days and WOW was I mad at myself for breaking that.

The right screenshot shows the number of cards I studied for the same period, but by tapping one of the three buttons provided, I could easily increase the time span to see my study habits over the course of a year or shorten it to just one week.

In summary, the study metrics Brainscape now tracks are:

• The number of flashcards you’ve fully mastered (i.e. the concepts you have rated a “5 out of 5” in terms of how confidently you know them.)
• The estimated amount of time you have left to achieve 100% mastery of that collection of flashcards based on how quickly you’ve studied in the past.
• Your total number of cards studied and total time spent studying since you started with Brainscape (i.e. your overall study behavior). Also:
  • The number of cards you’ve studied in the last 7 days, 30 days, and one year
  • The total time you’ve spent studying in the last 7 days, 30 days, and one year
• Your current daily study streak (i.e. how many days in a row you’ve used Brainscape) and your record (best-ever) daily study streak
• How many flashcard decks you’ve created since joining Brainscape.

With this 30,000-foot view of your study trends, you’ll be able to explicitly visualize your progress and identify days where you slipped behind, as well as days where you pulled ahead. Perhaps this will reveal some interesting insights for you!

Above all, I find that these study metrics provide me with enormous motivation to study—especially when it comes to maintaining my daily streak—even if it’s for just 5 minutes on those days when I don’t feel like it.

A final word on why study metrics are so important

Study procrastination is the bane of all students’ existence, even the diligent ones (they’re just a little bit better at pushing through than the rest of us). And because it’s such a ubiquitous problem, you’ll find a ton of brain hacks out there to help you find study motivation to overcome procrastination, from setting a timer and committing to just 15 minutes of studying to rewarding yourself with a tasty treat every 15 to 30 minutes. (Watch the following video for even more tools and tricks…)

All of these are indeed helpful and—to some—essential for overcoming procrastination. But what we’re after here is more than just getting through inertia. We’re after actual motivation to study.

And one of the most powerful drivers of this motivation to study is study METRICS.

Without measuring our efforts, the path towards our goal becomes obscured by ignorance; whereas, if you know exactly how much you’re investing every day, you’ll become more aware of your habits, both good and bad, which’ll motivate you to improve.

Good habit: “Nice, I studied for an average of 30 minutes every day this week. 

→ Motivation: “I should keep this up so I’ll hardly have to study for finals!”

Bad habit: “Oops, I studied 20 minutes less per day this week than usual.”

→ Motivation:  “I really should pick it up again next week.”

There’s so much motivation to be gleaned from measuring our efforts; positive trends inspire us to “keep it up.” Negative trends encourage us to “get back on the horse,” and seeing trends over time allows us to understand our habits and behaviors.

And now that Brainscape has introduced these new metrics, we hope they help you find motivation to study and rise to your challenge!