How to Stop Procrastinating in College: Study Techniques

It’s 9:00 p.m., your study guide is open in one tab, and in the other, you’ve been comparing flight prices for a place you’re not even going to go to for the past ten minutes. You didn’t decide to procrastinate. It just happened—again. Procrastination isn’t laziness: it’s a reaction to something that intimidates you, whether it’s your grade, the amount of material to cover, or not knowing where to start. The good news is that there are very specific study techniques that can help overcome that initial mental block—from the Pomodoro Technique to mind maps, right down to where you sit to study. They get straight to the point and include realistic schedules.

There are three reasons that come up year after year, and it's almost never the one you'd think.

• Perfectionism. If you can’t do it right, your brain would rather not do it at all. That’s why it’s harder to start a project that “has to be perfect” than just any other project.
• The cell phone as an escape. It’s not that the notifications are irresistible. It’s just that opening the syllabus requires mental effort that the cell phone doesn’t demand.
• The fear of failure disguised as organization. Tidying up your desk, making yet another to-do list, checking your email again: it looks like productivity, but it’s really just putting off facing the real task at hand.

Just knowing which of the three applies to you makes a difference. If it’s perfectionism, the solution isn’t to “try harder”—it’s to lower your standards for the first draft. If it’s your cell phone, it’s not about willpower—it’s about getting it out of sight, literally, not just out of your pocket.

The Pomodoro Technique works because it doesn't ask you to "stay focused for hours on end," which is impossible to do. It asks for 25 minutes. That's all.

That's how it's done, in real time:

1. Choose a specific task (not “study history,” but “read and summarize Topic 4”).
2. Set the timer for 25 minutes and work without looking at your phone.
3. Take a 5-minute break. Get up, drink some water, and don't open Instagram.
4. You repeat the cycle four times.
5. After the fourth Pomodoro, take a long break: between 15 and 30 minutes.

If 25 minutes isn't enough for you—because you're just getting into the swing of things when the alarm goes off—try 50-minute blocks with a 10-minute break. There's no magic number: there's just the one you can stick with for three days in a row without giving up.

To keep track of time without relying on your memory, a timer on your phone is all you need. If you'd prefer something that also helps you organize your notes and tasks, check out top 10 apps for studying and organizing your notes you’ll find a tried-and-true selection—no need to install five apps only to end up not using any of them.

Rereading notes gives you the feeling that you're studying. And it's almost always a waste of time: you recognize the information because it's right in front of you, not because you know it.

Active recall does exactly the opposite: you close the note and force yourself to remember without looking. Specifically:

• You read a section once.
• You close the book or the screen.
• Write down everything you can remember on a blank piece of paper, in your own words.
• Compare it to the original and mark only the parts that are blank.
• Do that part again the next day, not right then and there.

It's more uncomfortable than underlining. That's why it's hard to get started. And that's why, when the exam comes around, whoever has done it has an advantage: they've already made mistakes and corrected them beforehand, in private, with no grade at stake.

A mind map isn't useful for everything. It's especially useful when a subject has many interconnected ideas: causes and effects in history, systems of the body in biology, and articles that refer to one another in law.

To make sure it works and doesn't just end up as a pretty picture you never look at again:

1. A central idea, in the middle of the page. Not a long title: just two or three words.
2. Main branches that extend from there, one per content block.
3. Keywords, not phrases. If you write complete sentences, you've created a tree-style summary, not a mind map.
4. Colors and Visual Hierarchy. The brain remembers things better when they have distinct shapes and colors, not just black text on a white background.
5. Redraw it from memory two days later, without looking at the original. That’s when the mind map becomes active recall: you don’t review by looking, you review by reconstructing.

If you're having trouble getting started because you're "not a visual thinker," start with a small topic—just one page of notes. A mind map makes sense once you see the connections between the different parts, not before.

The room has a 1.5-meter bed and a "I can do whatever I want here" vibe that doesn't help when all you want to do is open your study guide. It's not that the room is bad for sleeping, socializing, or watching a TV show. It's bad for the two hours you need to focus fully on an exam.

A study room or coworking space changes your surroundings without having to leave the city: you sit down, there are other people focused on their work, and that gentle social pressure helps you stay focused longer before checking your phone. If you live in Madrid and want options outside your residence as well, check out the guide to study rooms in Madrid for students lists places with different hours and atmospheres depending on what you need.

Inside the residence hall, using the study room instead of your bedroom for long study sessions is as simple as reserving a two-hour slot in the afternoon, when you’re already itching to hit the couch. Switching rooms when you switch tasks (one for reading, another for writing) also helps your brain associate each space with a specific type of work, rather than thinking, “I’m supposed to study here, but I don’t feel like it.”

The September session has less leeway than the June one and, more often than not, less enthusiasm. A weekly plan prevents you from reaching the last week with everything still left to do.

Three weeks before: List your subjects in order of difficulty, not by which exam is coming up next. Start with the one you find hardest, while you still have time to ask for help if something doesn't make sense.

Two weeks before: a mind map for each major topic, and set Pomodoro sessions every day at the same time. A set time is more important than the “ideal” time: your brain stops second-guessing itself once it knows that at five o’clock, it’s time to study.

Last week: Review what you’ve already covered every day—no new material. If there’s something you can’t recall without looking, that’s the topic you’ll focus on in your next session.

Last 48 hours: Review mind maps without taking any new notes. Getting the sleep you need is more important than spending an extra hour reviewing at 2 a.m.

None of these study techniques require you to change your personality. You just need to try them out for a couple of weeks in a row before deciding if they work for you.

25 minutes is the standard, but if a task requires you to warm up before you can focus, a 50-minute block with a 10-minute break might be more productive. Try both for a week and stick with the one that comes naturally to you.

You don't have to choose. The summary helps you organize the material the first time you go through it. Active recall is what you do afterward, to see what you've retained without looking at the summary.

Yes, even if you're not good at drawing. A mind map doesn't depend on the drawing; it depends on connecting ideas with keywords and a hierarchical structure. Start with a short topic to see how it works before ruling it out.

Sometimes that’s the case, and a planner can solve the problem. Other times, it’s perfectionism or the fear that the result won’t be good enough—and in those cases, it helps more to lower your expectations for the first attempt than to buy another planner.