Four steps for better focus from a cognitive scientist

One of the biggest barriers people face to their productivity is an inability to focus. Most people are highly distracted and distractable, which makes it hard to sustain the level of attention required to complete complex tasks and to think through difficult problems.

Chances are at least part of your problem is self-inflicted. We have created environments with lots of attention-grabbing information. You have learned to seek out that information regularly. Indeed, your brain has timing mechanisms in it, and the desire to check your phone or your web browser may interrupt you at regular intervals, even when you’re trying your best to get something else done.

Here are a few things you can do to train yourself to focus when you need to.

Look before you leap

Getting distracted from what you’re working on is such a deep habit for so many people, that they may not even be aware how often they are getting off-task. If you’re going to change the behaviors that are ruining your focus, you must start by becoming mindful of the mindless things you have been doing.

Before you intervene and try to change, spend a week or two just observing your behavior. How often do you grab your phone or go to a website when you should be reading, working on a document, or engaging in some other more important task? When you notice yourself switching away from a task, make note of what you were doing, how you were feeling, and how long it took you to get back to what you were doing.

After you finish this habit diary, look it over. Look for insights that may help you to figure out ways to intervene so that you can remove some of the sources of distraction from your world.

Clear the decks

Next, you want to make it as easy as possible to start your journey to greater concentration. There is no benefit in staring down your temptations. If you lose focus because you want to check your phone, then put your phone out of arm’s reach. If you flip from a document you need to complete on your computer to a social media site on your web browser, then close all the unnecessary tabs on your browser.

Over time, you may be able to face your temptations directly. There is no reason to start your journey to greater focus by creating a mental obstacle course.

Start small

Your goal is not perfection. You don’t necessarily need to be able to complete a long task without ever switching away from it. You just want to improve. If you get distracted every 3 minutes, then even going 5 minutes working on something is a significant improvement.

When you start to improve your ability to focus, you are likely to get sidetracked by your failures. It may even feel like a hopeless task. Bear in mind that you did not lose your ability to concentrate overnight. You may have spent years training your brain to interrupt you from what you’re working on. It may not take years to get back to a long attention span, but it won’t happen immediately either.

Reassociate the urge

The most important thing you can do is to work a bit longer when you feel the urge to move away from a task. Essentially, your brain interrupts you and suggests that you look at something else. When that happens and you then move off the task you were working on and do something else, you are reinforcing the connection between the feeling you should do something else and the action of doing something else.

Instead, when you feel like you should look away from what you’re doing to focus on something else, continue working on the thing you’re currently doing for another 30 seconds. What that does is to associate the feeling that you want to work on something else with persistence rather than with a change in task. Over time, you’ll start to learn to continue working on something even when your brain interrupts you. That builds a new set of habits that will extend your concentration time.