How Freedom Can Help You Study For Your Exam

How Freedom Can Help You Study For Your Exam

Studying. An inevitable and often dreaded part of school life. Whether studying for a high school quiz, the LSAT, the GREs, or finals, we’ve all experienced the strain, stress, hard work required.

Today, studying can seem harder than ever – not because the material is harder, but rather because we have to fight off the entire internet and our impulses every time we sit down to study.

With a few clicks and buzzes, studying can quickly turn into binge-watching and distracting conversations.

But with Freedom you can make those time-wasting online tangents a thing of the past!

Freedom enables you to block your most distracting websites, apps, or even the entire internet across all your devices for a set period of time.

Freedom also allows you to schedule blocks to help you commit to studying ahead of time, or even schedule recurring blocks for specific times or days to help make productivity a habit.

HOW A LAW STUDENT USED FREEDOM TO STUDY FOR THE BAR EXAM

But don’t take our word for it, a perfect example of this comes from one of our users, Katie, a law school graduate from Delaware. Katie recently reached out to us to say thanks and explain how she has been using Freedom to study for the bar exam.

We loved her story and wanted to share her experience and technique with other Freedom users – so we asked her a few questions:

What about Freedom was most useful to you while studying for the challenging bar exam?

“First, some background about the bar exam. There are both multiple choice and essay questions, and time pressure is huge for both. The entire exam is basically a reading comprehension test, but you have to be able to organize your essays really quickly and efficiently, which is where Freedom is most useful. When the Internet is ‘on’ there are a million things pulling me away from focusing on the question in front of me. I want to be able to start to sustain focus as if it was exam day, not work on my essays in the background while doing other things. When I start a session, it’s just the workbook of essays in front of me and my word document. Sometimes I catch myself trying to open browsers when I forget that I’ve started a session, but I don’t get far.”

What is your work process with Freedom?

“Basically, I have a white noise app that I set to brown noise, a word document, and my study materials (paper). I usually do about one hour sessions and then take a break, which is great because I really work through that entire hour. Sometimes, if a particular assignment is timed (i.e., a portion of the bar is a 1.5 hour essay), I’ll set the session to last the duration of that assignment.”

What have you been able to accomplish with Freedom blocking your distractions?

“So much more! I’ve been able to actually sit and think about an essay question instead of just giving up early and moving on because there is no real alternative when you don’t have the internet to fall back on. For example, instead of superficially answering a prompt and rushing through, knowing I won’t be able to waste time online until 45 minutes is up ANYWAY, means that I go through some thought process vaguely resembling “might as well finish this one right and then you’ll get the internet.” It’s really, really great. I wish I had this in college, to be honest.

ALSO, Freedom is really great at helping me focus on the narrow legal issue of what I’m working on. Legal research is typically done online, and it’s often the case that one thing will tangentially relate to another and so on and so forth. I’ve found that I can do all my research at once, collect all the cases that I think I need, download them, and then go into offline mode and actually write without continually finding more information that keeps pulling me in different directions.

On a non-professional level, Freedom is also great for when I want to read or journal without the nagging distractions of the internet, too. I like reading for fun, but sometimes it’s hard to put the book down when I feel like there are a million things I want to google, or news to check, or whatever, Just doing a thirty-minute session can be really great.“

Thanks Katie for the great story and congratulations on your success!  We love to hear how Freedom works for so many different professions, activities and needs.  Effective studying is crucial to millions of students of all ages and disciplines and no matter what you’re trying to learn, you can use Freedom to stay focused and committed.