With the work-from-home era in full swing, I’ve found that I still venture out every few days to do my job from a coffee shop. Something about the change of scenery is helpful and gets me in a working mood. It’s hard to live, work, eat, sleep, clean, study, and relax all in the same space; at some point, when you’re stuck in a single room, those things all kind of start to blend together and it becomes all too easy to check personal messages during study time or tidy up when you should be answering emails.
Sometimes, though, you can’t change the scene. If you live in a shared space and are confined to your bedroom or are in a dorm and the library is closed, you can’t just go somewhere else. Hell, you don’t always have the time or energy to go somewhere else. You can still compartmentalize: by simply changing your clothes.
The benefits of compartmentalizing
The idea of compartmentalizing involves focusing on only one thing at a time, ideally in different settings. The advent of online classes and working from home has been great for so many reasons—but it really killed our ability to associate different locations with specific tasks.
Finding a way to compartmentalize is important, but it can be as easy as doing your job from your kitchen table and your homework from your bedroom. Whatever helps you change the setting just a bit to get your brain into “work” or “study” mode. But again, that’s just not always possible.
How changing your clothes can help you compartmentalize
During the pandemic, career advice sites were full of articles insisting you should still “get dressed” for work hours. Without taking it to an extreme, that’s actually a pretty good idea, even if it seemed offensive at the time to consider putting on real-deal business casual when the world was in pandemonium and there were seemingly more important things to think about. No, you don’t have to put on itchy nylons or stiff pants, but when you stay in your sweats from morning until night, you may find you have a lazier type of day.
The Exam Study Expert says that changing your clothes helps mark the transition between different tasks, so if you have to study for something big, consider having a designated outfit in which to do so. I recommend a “study sweatshirt”—really, just use a hoodie from your school. If you put this on at the same time every day and then get to work, your brain will start to associate that outfit change and time period with studying, even if you don’t alter anything else about your setting. Per USA Today, fashion psychologists say that people attach sentimental meanings to their clothing, even without realizing it.
There’s even a science-y term for this phenomenon: enclothed cognition. A study in 2012 involved giving participants a white lab coat, but telling half of them it was a painter’s jacket and the other half it was a doctor’s coat. The people who thought they were in a doctor’s coat had more sustained attention during tasks.
The researchers there found that the symbolic meaning and the experience of wearing the clothing played a role in the participants’ productivity and attention span, so you have to stick with this for it to be helpful. The repetition of putting on your “study sweatshirt” is just as important as designating the sweatshirt in the first place. Don’t wear the study sweatshirt for anything else or at any other time of day. When study time rolls around, that’s when you break it out. In no time, you’ll be as dedicated to your work as those people in the doctors’ coats.
