How to manage attention and focus

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Popular blogger James Clear explains how to stay focused on your goal, even if everyone around you is trying to distract you.

Concentration: what it is and how it works

Let's start with the most basic: what is concentration of attention? According to the definition of psychologists, it is the act of directing interest or actions towards one goal. Yes, it sounds boring, but there is a very important idea behind it.

What is concentration of attention

To concentrate on one thing, you have to ignore everything else.

Concentration appears only when we say "yes" to one option and "no" to all others. In other words, exclusion is a prerequisite for concentration.

What you don't do depends on what you can do.

Tim Ferris writer, speaker

Of course, staying focused does not require a permanent “no”, it is important to say “no” now, in the moment. Later you can do something else, but now you have to direct your attention to only one thing.

Concentration is the key to being productive. By saying no to any other option, you open up your ability to complete one remaining task.

Now for the big question: What do you need to do to focus on the things that matter and ignore the useless ones?

Why can't you concentrate

Most people have no problem concentrating. They have difficulty making a decision.

We can convince ourselves to focus on what we are doing by keeping distractions out of the way. Have you ever had a task that needed to be completed by all means? You did it because the deadline made the decision for you. You may be procrastinating, but as soon as the case forces you to make a decision, you take action.

Often, instead of making a difficult decision and choosing one thing, we convince ourselves that it is better to multitask. But this is an ineffective approach, and here's why.

Why multitasking doesn't work

Technically, we can do two things at the same time. For example, watching TV and cooking dinner, or answering an incoming phone call.

But it is impossible to focus on two things at the same time. Either you watch TV while stirring pasta in the pan in the background, or you cook pasta and the TV becomes background noise. At any given moment in time, you concentrate on either one or the other.

Multitasking forces your brain to quickly switch attention from one task to another. And if the human brain could move from one job to another without additional effort, there would be no problem. But our head doesn't work that way.

Think of a situation when someone interrupted you when you were writing a letter. When the conversation ends, it usually takes a few minutes for you to get your bearings, remember what you wrote about, and continue. Something similar happens when you do several things at the same time.

Every time you switch from one task to another and back again, you have to put in a mental effort.

In psychology, this is called the switching cost effect.

Switching costs are interruptions in productivity we experience when we shift our focus from one activity to another. Research Reducing the effect of email interuption on employees. In 2003, published in the International Journal of Information Management, it was found that by being distracted by a routine email check every five minutes, a person spends an average of 64 seconds to resume the task at hand.

In other words, email alone is wasting one minute out of every six.

The myth about multitasking is that it makes you more efficient. In reality, only concentration of attention matters.

How to focus and increase your attention span

Let's talk about how to overcome our tendency to multitask and focus on one thing at a time. How do you know which of the many possible options you need to pay attention to?

Warren Buffett's strategy - "Two lists"

One of my favorite methods of focusing on the important and excluding everything else was invented by the famous investor Warren Buffett.

Buffett used a three-step personal productivity strategy to help his employees prioritize and plan for action.

Buffett once asked his personal pilot to do a simple exercise of three steps.

• Step 1. To begin with, Buffett asked pilot Mike Flint to write down 25 major career goals. It took Flint a while to figure it out and write. Tip: You can do this exercise with goals for a short period of time. For example, make a list of 25 things you want to complete this week.
• Step 2. Buffett then asked Flint to revise his list and pick the top 5 goals. It took a while for Flint again, but in the end he chose the 5 highest priority targets.
• Step 3. At this point, Flint had two lists. The five most important items were combined into List A, and the remaining twenty into List B. Flint decided that he would immediately start working on the five most important goals.

At this point, Buffett asked what he was going to do with the second list.

Flint replied: “Five of the most important goals are my main focus, but twenty others are also important, so I will work on them from time to time when the opportunity presents itself. They are certainly not so urgent, but I still plan to pay attention to them."

To which Buffett said, “No, Mike, you got it all wrong. All but the top five goals is a to-do list to avoid at all costs. Whatever happens, you shouldn't pay attention to List B until you've achieved five important goals."

I love Buffett's method because it encourages tough decisions and eliminates things that might be considered a good waste of time, but not the best. Thus, from the tasks that distract attention, you choose the ones that are really worth spending time on.

This is just one of the ways to direct your attention and abstract from all the distractions. There are others, such as the Eisenhower matrix or the Ivy Lee method.

But whatever method you use and no matter how serious you are, at some point the concentration disappears. How to stay focused longer? To do this, you need to follow two simple steps.

Measure your results

Mindfulness is often lost due to lack of feedback. Naturally, your brain wants to know if you are achieving your goals.

We all have areas of life that we claim are very important to us, but which we do not track. This is fundamentally the wrong approach. Only with numbers and full tracking can we do something when we get better or worse.

• When I started counting how many push-ups I did, I got stronger.
• When I started to follow the habit of reading 20 pages a day, I read more books.
• When I wrote down my values, I became more principled.

The tasks that I tracked remained my focus.

Unfortunately, we often avoid measuring results because we fear the numbers will be unimpressive. Understand that measurement is not needed to judge yourself. This is just feedback, which is necessary to understand where you are now.

Measure to discover, learn, understand. Measure to get to know yourself better. Measure because it helps you focus on the things that matter to you.

Value progress, not performance indicators

The second thing you can do to stay focused longer is to focus on the process, not the events. Too often, we think of success as an event that can be achieved and completed.

Here are some examples.

• Many people imagine health as an event ("If I can lose 10 kilograms, I'll be in great shape").
• Many people think of entrepreneurship as an event ("If our business was written in the New York Times, we would be successful").
• Many people present art as an event ("If my paintings were exhibited in a large gallery, I would become famous").

These are just a few examples out of many in which we define success as a single event. But if you look at people who are focused on their goals, you will understand that it is not the events or the results that matter, but the concentration on the process itself. These people love what they do.

And the funny thing is, focusing on the process will allow you to enjoy the results anyway.

• If you want to be a good writer and put out a bestseller, that's great. But the only way to achieve this result is to love to write.
• If you want the whole world to know about your business, it would be nice to be written about in Forbes magazine. But the only way to achieve this is to love the process of promotion.
• If you want to be in good shape, perhaps you really need to lose 10 extra pounds. But the only way to achieve this result is to love a healthy diet and exercise.
• If you want to be so much better at anything, you have to love the process itself. You should fall in love with building an image of a person who is doing a business, and not just dreaming about the desired results.

Focusing on goals and results is our natural inclination, but focusing on progress leads to great results in the long run.

Life hacks to improve concentration

Even when you are genuinely in love with the process and know how to stay focused on your goals, daily practice can wreak havoc and damage your mindfulness. Here are some additional ways to increase your concentration.

1. Select an anchor task

Choose one (and only one) priority for each business day. While I plan to complete other tasks throughout the day, my priority is one non-negotiable task that I must complete. I call it the “anchor task”.

With a single priority, we don't hesitate to start building our lives around that commitment.

2. Manage your energy, not time

If a task requires you to concentrate fully, schedule it for a specific time of the day when you have the energy for it. For example, I've noticed that my creative energy is highest in the morning. I am cheerful in the morning, write better and make better strategic decisions for my business. Therefore, I plan all creative tasks for the morning. And I postpone all other work matters until the afternoon: meetings, answering incoming calls, phone calls and Skype chats, analyzing and processing numerical information.

Almost every productivity strategy includes advice on better managing your time. But time alone is useless if you don’t have the strength to complete the task.

3. Never check your email in the morning

Concentration is the elimination of all distractions. And email can be the biggest distraction.

If I don't check my mail at the beginning of the day, I can create my own daily routine, rather than adjust to someone else's daily routine.

I understand that there is no point in waiting for the afternoon for many people, but I want to challenge you like this. Can you wait until 10 am? Or up to 9? Until 8:30? The exact time of the limitation is not that important. The key is to make time for yourself in the morning to focus on what matters most to you.

4. Leave your phone in another room

I usually put my phone away in the morning. It's much easier to tune in to work if text messages, phone calls, or notifications aren't distracting.

5. Work in full screen mode

Every time I run a program on my computer, I use it in full screen mode. If I read an article on the Internet, the browser takes up the entire screen. When I take notes in Evernote, I use full screen mode. If I edit images in Photoshop, the program window is the only one I can see. I configured my desktop so that the menu bar disappears automatically. When I work, I can't see the time, application icons, and all other distractions.

It seems like a trifle, but in terms of concentration, this is a very important action. If you see an app icon, you are tempted from time to time to click on it. However, if you remove the visual signal from the field of view, then the desire to be distracted disappears after a few minutes.

6. Remove any tasks that interfere with your concentration in the morning

I like to do the most important things in the morning, because at this time there is still no rush. So I rescheduled my first breakfast until noon to free up some extra time in the morning for work rather than cooking.

Regardless of which strategy you follow, remember that when the world distracts you, all you have to do is stick to one thing. You may not be successful at first. But you just need to start.