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Online coaching asks you to do something a classroom does for you. In a hall, the room, the teacher's eyes and the student next to you keep you on task. At home, the bed is a metre away, the phone is in your hand and a second tab is one click off. The fix is not more willpower but building the classroom back.
Why is it so hard to focus in online classes at home?
The biggest leak is the second screen. In a study published in Psychological Science, researchers had students log into a proxy server that recorded what they actually browsed during an introductory psychology class (Ravizza, Uitvlugt and Fenn, 2017). Non-academic internet use was common among students who brought laptops and went with lower class performance, and the link held after accounting for motivation, interest and intelligence.
The second leak is mind wandering: the lecture keeps playing whether you are with it or not. A distraction parking-lot sheet helps with stray thoughts; the rules below fix the setup.
Rule 1: Should you keep your camera on in online classes?
Yes, where your coaching allows it, though wanting it off is common. In a survey of 276 students in an introductory biology course taught over Zoom, 90% had their camera off at least some of the time, and the most common reason, given by 41%, was worry about how they looked (Castelli and Sarvary, 2021). Others worried about people or the room behind them, or had a weak connection.
So make the camera easy to switch on:
Face a plain wall, so nobody and nothing personal shows behind you.
Hide self-view once you have checked your framing. Stanford researcher Jeremy Bailenson argues, as theory rather than a tested finding, that watching your own face all day adds to video-call tiredness (Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2021; his advice is summarised in Psychology Today).
On a weak connection, keep it on for doubt sessions and tell the teacher why.
Rule 2: One fixed class spot, used only for class
Pick one chair and one table, ideally not the bed, and attend every class there. Habits grow from repeating the same action in the same context. In a study where 96 volunteers repeated a daily behaviour in the same context for 12 weeks, the time participants took to reach 95% of their own automaticity plateau ranged from 18 to 254 days, and missing a single day did not materially set it back (Lally and colleagues, European Journal of Social Psychology, 2009). Expect weeks, not days.
In a shared home, a corner of the dining table works if you set it up the same way each time, phone out of reach. This guide to Focus mode on a teen's phone helps with the phone.
Rule 3: What should your notes template look like?
One page per class, with four boxes:
Top line: date, chapter, and the one question this class should answer.
Main box: definitions, formulas and the steps of each solved example, not the teacher's every word.
Recall box: at each natural break, close the slides and write two lines from memory.
Doubts box: anything you could not follow, written as a question.
The recall box matters most. In a study by Harvard psychologists, students watched a 21-minute recorded statistics lecture in four segments; those given short tests between segments reported mind wandering on 19% of checks, against 39% for students who restudied and 41% for those who were not tested, and they added notes to more of the slides (Szpunar, Khan and Schacter, PNAS 2013). Your coaching may not quiz you mid-class, so the recall box does the job. For keeping a term's worth of these pages in order, see how to organise messy coaching notes.
After class, take the doubts box to your teacher. If a doubt is really a missing idea from an earlier chapter, the Fermi Concept Library has a lesson for every concept in physics, chemistry, biology and maths, so you can fill the gap before the next class.
Rule 4: The no-second-tab rule
During class, only the class window is open. Anything you want to look up goes in the doubts box for after class.
A one-week plan to set this up
Day 1: choose the spot and a plain wall behind you.
Day 2: check camera framing, then hide self-view.
Day 3: draw ten copies of the four-box template.
Days 4 to 7: attend every class with Focus mode on and one tab open, and count your filled recall boxes.
If you have lost track of where to restart a subject, Fermi's AI tutor can work out what you already know and build a plan for the session, so you sit down to a clear next step.
