People often ask what the best thing they can do is to quickly improve their concentration.
They ask because they can’t pay attention when they need to. There’s an important project they need to work on so they carve out the time to focus intently on it. But once they start, they can’t get anything meaningful done. They’re too distracted. There’s an invisible pull to check their phone and email and do anything at all but that which they set aside the time to focus on right now.
My advice to improve concentration is always to first examine how you behave when you’re not trying to concentrate. Let me explain.
Most people think the solution to a short attention span is to eliminate distraction when trying to work deeply. If you can just ignore the influx of emails and messages and lock your phone in a different room, you should be able to intensely focus, right now, on this one thing.
This is partially true. Minimising distraction helps. But it doesn't get at the root of the problem.
There's a reason you can't focus at work when you need to, and it's not an external one. It's internal. It's your brain no longer being comfortable doing just one thing at a time.
Your behaviour when not trying to concentrate dictates your ability to concentrate
When you're not actively trying to focus, how do you behave? If you’re anything like the average knowledge worker, your attention is fractured and rapidly shifts from one app or screen or tab to another. When a notification hits, you stop what you’re doing and check it. And you do this all day long.
When you're at home, you’re scrolling social media while watching YouTube. Cooking dinner while listening to a podcast. Talking to a family member on the phone while simultaneously texting a friend.
You spend the majority of your time, at work and outside of work, multitasking 1. And you likely have for years. In doing so, you've trained your attention to behave in a specific way.
You see, your attention is like a muscle. It can be trained and is capable of performing in a variety of ways. Attention isn't just on or off: it can be narrowly focused or more diffused; stable or dynamic. Healthy attention is able to move between these different states fluidly as needed.
But if most of your time is spent training your attention to behave in one way — rapidly switching dynamic focus (the kind required for multitasking) — you’ve created an imbalance. And your attention will want to behave like that in most situations — including ones where you need to do deeply focused work.
If you want to concentrate for 30 minutes, but the other 930 minutes of your day is spent in a constant state of multitasking and rapid context-switching, do you really wonder why it's so hard to focus?
All your seemingly inconsequential decisions and behaviours add up and define the quality of your attention (and by extension, the quality of your life).
Taking one step forward and ten steps back
I tried a variety of tricks and hacks to improve my concentration over the years. While some helped to some degree, I wasn't seeing the results as quickly as I was expecting.
It's because, like you, my entire workday and home life was spent constantly scrolling a rapidly switching — the exact opposite behaviour that doing focused work requires.
It's only when I realised I was training my attention every single moment of the day — whether intentionally or not — that things began to shift.
And this is fantastic news. You can't train your muscles every moment of the day. It’s not feasible to learn Japanese each second or study physics or any other thing: but you can constantly be aware of how you’re paying attention and do your best to ensure it’s contributing to the work and life you want.
Become aware of what you’re aware of
So how do you start improving your attention? The answer should now be obvious: single-task — do just one thing at a time — at work and home as much as possible, especially when you’re not trying to concentrate.
But there’s a problem you may run into: you often don't even realise you're multitasking. It’s habitual. You're on attentional autopilot. When walking, you might not consciously choose to take out your phone and text someone. A thought just popped into your head about that person and you did it without thinking.
In order to single-task effectively, you’ll need to be aware of what you're aware of. This is called meta-awareness. I'll write more about meta-awareness another time, but if you're not consciously aware of what you're doing, it's hard to change what you’re doing.
(This is where meditation helps. It's great for developing meta-awareness.)
Single-tasking your way to better concentration
A good rule to keep in mind throughout the day is to finish what you start before starting something else. This is the essence of single-tasking. It's paying attention to one thing at a time — but not in a rapid, dynamic way. In a slow, calm way.
Here’s some ideas to get you thinking about how to single-task:
- Set up specific times in your workday to check and deal with email rather than constantly checking throughout the day (Do the same for Slack and other async tools, if possible).
- When working on your computer, close all apps and tabs that aren't related to the thing you're working on.
- When walking to the bathroom at a restaurant, don't check your phone. Just walk.
- When cooking, don't put on a podcast. Just cook.
- When eating, don't watch YouTube. Just eat.
- When watching YouTube, don't scroll your phone. Just watch.
These are just a few examples. There are dozens of ways each day that you can practise doing just one thing. In fact, there are as many things as things you do.
And I use the term ‘practise’ loosely. You don’t need to set aside extra time and effort to do something new. You really just have to do something less.
All these fewer things will add up quickly. You’ll make big improvements to your attention in a very short period of time if you put in the effort.
It's really quite simple, but it won’t be easy. You've trained your brain to crave stimuli. So when you don't have it, you're going to feel discomfort.
That's what makes single-tasking tricky at the start. It's uncomfortable. And it's ok. Use your meta-awareness to notice it like a detached observer.
Then tell yourself, This is what it feels like to get better.
Footnotes
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It’s actually a combination of multitasking (which can be done with simple tasks like walking and talking) and context-switching, which is what happens when trying to do two or more complex tasks at once. You can’t actually do them simultaneously and instead your brain rapidly switches back and forth between them.) ↩
