Revision, revision revision…. It seems like nowadays all everyone is talking about it revision. Whether it’s teachers leaning on you to get your act together and start it as soon as possible, or parents quizzing you on when you’re going to get started, revision is something that people just won’t let you get away from. And it’ll only get worse until exams are over in June. You may well find, though, that although you often try to actually get down to the job of doing some solid revision, your mind ultimately starts to wander. You let yourself get distracted, or can’t force yourself to sit down for any long period of time. Although this is something that can affect people right throughout their revision period, it tends to happen the most when they’re in the earliest stages of it. This is largely because, with big exams still a couple of months away, there’s less of a shadow hanging over you and less of a feeling of pressure. Unfortunately, though, if you don’t actually do revision in these early stages you’ll feel under an overwhelming amount of pressure if you reach a point when, just a couple of weeks before exams, you haven’t really done any at all. Short of tricking yourself into thinking that there’s an extreme pressure to get started with revision right now, how can you gently cajole yourself into starting your revision early, so you don’t have to cram hours and hours of it in just before exam time? Productivity tools, that’s how. There are all sorts of interesting sites and apps out there that can help you focus on the revision task at hand and ensure you get some good work done. Here are a couple of our faves: Mytomatoes.com This site is great if you simply struggle to focus when you’re doing revision, so you end up sitting there for hours without really getting anything done. The way the site works is it encourages you to divide up your time into focused twenty-five-minute bursts of activity, which are interspersed with 5 minute breaks (though you can take a longer break if so desired). It gets you to stick to this rhythm by way of a countdown timer which–this is the clever part–once it has run down is replaced by a field in which you have to briefly write down what you did. This process of writing down what you’ve done makes you more aware of how well you’re concentrating, and over time you can build up a record of how much revision you’ve done for the day, week or month. Cold Turkey (http://getcoldturkey.com/) This clever little programme is a must if you do revision on the computer and find yourself struggling to stop yourself looking at websites and playing games instead of revising. It allows you to block internet access from your computer (or just certain websites) or to other applications for a set period of time. And once it’s running, it’s very difficult to override the timer! You’ll soon find it’s amazing how much you can get accomplished without the internet (except for leavingschool.co.uk, of course!).