Eternal Ulysses

Whether it’s developing a new skill, a task at work, or learning about a new subject, if you want to improve it will require focusing on the thing that you are working on. The good news is that focusing is a skill that can be developed, and like any other skill, it requires practice, repetition, and begins with incremental changes that you can implement over time.

What do we mean by focusing? The short version is sustained attention, or concentration: when attention is centered on one thing for a prolonged period of time. The longer version is when our working memory and the active part of your brain (your prefrontal cortex) is ‘attending’ a task or stimuli (information). While you’re focused on reading your brain is actively attending to the information and processing it.

But your brain is constantly looking for new information – importantly it is looking for information that IT thinks is relevant; that can be changes in sound, changes in your environment, changes in stimuli . The stimuli that draw our attention when we are trying to focus are distractions.

Start removing distractions

The most immediate distraction that we’re all aware of is our smartphones. If you can, turn it off while you’re concentrating on your work. Not everyone can do this, people have responsibilities that require them to remain accessible.

If you can’t, you can progressively turn your phone back into just a phone. You can disable or pause notifications from specific applications; you can alter the color scheme of the phone entirely into black and white to make it less visually stimulating, you can disable tactile responses so that it doesn’t vibrate while typing or when you receive a notification. You can turn on do-not-disturb and select who can reach you while it is active.

There are multiple options and they all follow the same premise: decrease or remove the number of stimuli that the phone is producing.

Maybe you can’t disable notifications entirely, but you can disable specific notifications so that they don’t draw your attention towards the phone. A few years ago, I installed minimalist phone, an application designed to make phones less attention grabbing – you can set limits on the amount of time you spend using an app, disable or hide applications completely, and it turns the application icons into simple text to make the icons less eye-catching. Recently I discovered that you can block specific applications during set windows so that in the very early morning I can check the weather, but I’m unable to view my text messages until 9 am.

Phones are just one (obvious) example.

Next time you’re putting in deep work, keep a small sheet of paper next to you and make a note of when something pulls your attention away, and then refocus on the task at hand.

Not only will this help you identify distractions, repeatedly refocusing will begin to train your brain to be more mindful of distractions.

Location Location Location

Perhaps you work in a space where there is a lot of visual information (an open office, a busy coffee shop); perhaps your workspace is prompting your mind towards other responsibilities (working from home, a cluttered desk). People may come up to talk to you – this can be nice,[1] but when you’re attempting to put in deep work it can be frustrating.

Try to find the location that works best for you. It may be a coffee shop with quiet music; it could be the library. Perhaps a visually unstimulating environment (the library) matched with a moderate level of music is your recipe for a good focusing environment. Your optimal environment for focusing and ignoring distractions will depend on your specific preferences and tolerance for different kinds of stimuli.

Change The Scene

If you can: regularly mix up where you work. When you go to a new location your brain naturally increases its attention level and when this is directed it can be used to increase focus. Our brains are wired to associate spaces with specific tasks, and changing your workspace has a researched backed benefit for increasing focus, given the new environment has the appropriate levels of stimuli.

Here’s a trick: use an elevated desk or laptop. The act of looking up increases visual focus.

While you should periodically change where you work, when you’re working you should try to keep your number of scene changes relatively low. Each time you change locations during the day you’re telling your brain ‘hey, we’re doing something different’ This takes energy.

Those days that you feel worn out and the front of your head hurts a bit? That’s from protein buildups in your prefrontal cortex, and at its most extreme this buildup causes stress and eventually burnout. Moving from one place to another all day, while also trying to focus on your work, is a recipe for you to feel exhausted by the end of the day.

Beware Multi-Tasking

We all multitask, but there are different kinds of multi-tasking and some seriously impede our ability to focus.

On a biological level multi-tasking is actually impossible, your brain can’t do it. What we colloquially mean by multi-tasking is actually rapid task switching; our working memory momentarily attends one task and then switches to another. Not every task requires working memory: many motor functions (walking) become automatic over time, which is why some people can play an instrument and be fully engaged in conversation.

The same as constantly switching between environments, multi-tasking increases your stress level throughout the day and this task-switching rapidly burns through energy.

The kind of multi-tasking we need to avoid are actions which require actively attending a task. While you’re driving, focus on driving, not your phone. Simple enough. If you’re working, you have to fully engage yourself on one task at a time.

Tip: Assemble the materials that you need beforehand so you are not switching back and forth between working and looking for the next piece of information – or better yet, memorize it.

The takeaway is that you should avoid trying to actively focus on two things at once. If you’re driving and you enjoy listening to podcasts as background noise, that’s fine. Perhaps you can and do actively listen to the podcast and drive, but in reality, what you’re doing is rapidly alternating your working memory between tasks – and its in the switches that we most often make mistakes.