We Can't Afford to Lose Focus
- Cate Taylor
- Jun 1
- 3 min read
Why focus matters more than hours for real learning and revision
We’ve all seen it, and probably done it ourselves. A student sits at their desk for an entire afternoon, surrounded by a mountain of textbooks and a rainbow of highlighters. By dinner time, they’re exhausted. They feel like they’ve worked incredibly hard, yet when you ask what they actually remember, you get a worried blank stare.
This is what I call Performative Studying. It looks like work and feels like work, but it isn’t actually achieving anything meaningful. We've all experienced this, but when time is of the essence during preparation for a significant set of exams, we need to be help students to avoid it.
If we want to reduce the exam anxiety I’ve written about before, we need to change how we study. We need to stop measuring success by hours spent at a desk and start paying attention to the quality of the work. This is where Deep Work comes in.
What is Deep Work?
Cal Newport (author, professor, Georgetown University) popularised the term, but the idea is simple: Deep Work is the ability to focus without distraction on something cognitively demanding. In a world of notifications, tabs, and group chats, this is becoming a genuine superpower.
For students, the formula looks like this:
High‑Quality Learning = (Time Spent) × (Intensity of Focus)
If the intensity is zero because the phone is buzzing next to the textbook, it doesn’t matter whether they sit there for ten minutes or ten hours. The result is still zero.
The illusion of competence
The biggest trap students fall into is re-reading. When you read a page of Spanish verbs or a science chapter for the fourth time, it feels easy. Your brain recognises the information and whispers, “I know this.”
But recognising something is not the same as being able to retrieve it in a silent exam hall.
Deep Work replaces the comfort of rereading with the effort of Active Recall:
Braindumping (“blurting”): Close the book and write down everything you can remember.
Flashcards: Test yourself, don’t just glance.
Past papers: Work in silence, without help, and see what you can actually do.
Re-reading does have a place — but right at the end, when you already know the content and you’re polishing the edges. It’s the final sweep, not the main method.
How to build a deep work habit
If a student is used to shallow study habits, they won’t suddenly be able to focus for long stretches. Focus is a muscle, and like any muscle, it strengthens gradually.
But — and this is very important — you don’t need rigid timers or strict cycles. Deep Work isn’t about forcing yourself to stop when you’re in flow or pushing on when your brain is clearly done.
A more realistic approach:
Lock away the phone: Deep Work cannot happen with a phone in the room. Even its presence reduces cognitive capacity.
Start small, build up: Some students can manage 20 minutes at first; others can manage 50. The number doesn’t matter — the focus does.
Take breaks when your brain needs one: Not when a timer tells you to. If you’re still fully engaged, keep going. If your concentration slips, step away.
Define the task: “Revision” is vague. “Write a braindump on Photosynthesis” is Deep Work.
The goal is to stretch focus gently over time, not to follow a rigid schedule.
Quality over quantity
As a tutor, I would much rather see a student do one hour of intense, distraction‑free Deep Work than four hours of half‑hearted highlighting. When the work is deep, the learning sticks. And when the learning sticks, exam anxiety melts away.
Instead of measuring revision by time spent, let's encourage students to build the skill that truly makes a difference: focus.
If you enjoyed this, you may wish to read my recent post on exam success:
Cate is a qualified teacher with more than 20 years of experience teaching in schools and she has most recently dedicated her time to tutoring both online and face to face. Cate also delivers training to adult students working towards professional qualifications. Current and past students come from the New Forest, across the UK, Spain, Switzerland, France, Spain, Hong Kong and Australia. Cate has a waiting list for all hours outside of the UK school day but can often find space for those in other time zones (such as Hong Kong and Singapore, UAE, Malaysia) or adults who are able to have a lesson during the day.
