[mbarq]

Really appreciate your self awareness. I come from a lower-middle class family. I sleep on a couch in a small crowded house with a 3y/o niece constantly screaming at the top of her lungs.

The libraries near me are all really just rec-centers, my uni is a 70min bus ride away, so having a place to just "study" is incredibly difficult.

I still manage, but I can only imagine what having one's own roon must be like and the time saved from travelling to and from school...such is life.

Thanks for the reply, puts into words a lot of what I've been thinking about lately.

[dhimes]

I wish I had an answer for you. To ease distraction you might want to try "brown noise." I use my mynoise.net (I'm not affiliated- I probably found it in a thread here on HN.) I also have some "nature" mp3s like ocean waves crashing and rainfall and such. It's remarkable how well it gets me in "the zone."

One word of caution: don't turn up the volume to drown out the background noise. You only need to be able to hear the brown noise, not overwhelm everything else. I did that and my hearing was off for a day and a half. I think that because the sound energy is distributed more evenly throughout the spectrum you're getting more intensity on your eardrum than you think.

[photojosh]

My bus ride was an hour, riding a bike brought it down to half that [a], plus I got free fitness gains. Of course you trade the time gained for sweatiness etc. I don't know if that's an option for you, but just putting it out there.

[a] I only generalise because it's true for almost any chosen route in my town: bus time = 2x bike time = 4x driving time.