Concentration
Lack of concentration is all too often a barrier to success.
Fortunately, concentration is a learnable skill.
This page outlines approaches that have helped me to shut out distraction and train myself to focus.
Hopefully they will help you to spy opportunities to work more effectively.
Intentional time management
Time is a finite resource, but I don’t always think of it as such. I’ve found it helps to keep a detailed account of my time – just as, to be in control of my finances, it’s necessary to understand where I spend my money.
Toggl makes it easy for me to track each minute of my working day. This simple program allows me to mark with a click when I switch from one task to another.
This lets me decide in advance how many hours to allocate to a task.
Once the hours are up. I can stop without feeling guilty.
And when I’ve worked my hours for the week, I can go home and
enjoy a restful weekend without feeling any need to ‘keep up’ with work.
As a meritious and unexpected side effect of having to stop a timer each time I check e-mail or the news, I noticed that such interruptions were more frequent than I would have estimated – and what is more, occurred subconsciously. The active act of stopping the timer prompted me to evaluate whether I really needed to check the news. The answer to this question usually turns out to be either “No: you need a proper break, go and make a cup of tea”, or “No: you are procrastinating because the next task is difficult. You can do it!”.
Pomodoro technique
A more fine-grained (and less digital) approach to allocating time is the Pomodoro technique.
I find this helpful when I have an interminable task on my plate in which progress is slow and intangible – a recipe for procrastination!
The basic idea – see Wikipedia or the book for details – is to set a kitchen timer for 25 minutes. This 25-minute block is devoted to a single task. When the timer rings, you make a tally mark against the task on a piece of paper that records your progress through the day, and take a well-earned five minute break before commencing the next pomodoro, or half an hour every four pomodori. However, any interruption or deviation from the task causes progress against that pomodoro to be lost.
The tick marks are the essential part – they give a positive reinforcement to the surprisingly difficult task of surviving 25 minutes intact, and give an opportunity to appraise a day – where did the time go, and can you beat yesterday’s score?
This is more difficult than it might sound – on my first full day with the technique, I accumulated just four ticks. But over a few weeks I made my way up to a full work day of 12–15. In my view, this process made a profound and, ten years on, persistent improvement on my ability to concentrate – both in developing my skill at concentration, and spurring me to make changes to my working practice that minimised the pressing urge to get distracted after 22 minutes!
Interruptions
Internet firms want to sell your attention to advertisers.
I half remember an experiment performed on pigeons who had been conditioned to peck at a red light to obtain food. Like Pavlov’s dogs drooling at a bell, the light, once seen, triggered an irresistable peck reflex. When the experimenters replaced the food with a painful electric shock, the pigeons couldn’t overcome their peck reflex. What they could do – if they were quick – was turn around so they could no longer see the red light. With the light out of sight, their urge to peck waned, and they saved themselves a shock.
I recently went to a website that I often visit for information. On this occasion, there was a little red dot next to one of the icons in the toolbar.
I’d never noticed the icon before – perhaps it had been there for years. But now it had a red dot next to it. Obviously, I stopped looking for the information that I needed, and clicked on the red dot. A menu popped up.
This menu contained more red dots!
I had no idea what “First Posts” or “Triage” meant.
Certainly they were not going to help me to get the information I needed.
But they were accompanied by red dots. My attention was needed! How could I possibly refuse?
Purpose in browsing
When I am concentrating well, I always have a specific reason for visiting a website. Once I’ve accomplished by purpose, I close the site.
However, websites are often designed to divert you from the task that you intended to perform. Sometimes – as above – this leads to getting sidetracked from a task that you were concentrating on.
I suspect that it is helpful to adhere to a ‘purposeful browsing’ philosophy even when not prioritizing concentration. Sometimes this means finding ways to avoid the addiction-forming elements of websites. Rather than encounter Facebook’s ‘news feed’, I always navigate directly to the messages page. Usually my reason for visiting Facebook is to read messages; on the occasion that I am enthusiastic to see what photographs a friend has recently taken of their dinner, I can search for their profile from the message page without being bombarded with opportunities to peck at red dots.
uBlock
To complement this approach,
I use a browser extension called uBlock Origin
to block website components that target my attention.
The plugin will silently remove selected elements from webpages,
as if they never existed.
A little zapping later, and I have never been bothered by this particular red dot again:
As a convenient side effect, uBlock also removes intrusive advertising from web pages.
Perhaps you are thinking of a website where you need to be notified the second that something happens? An example that might spring to mind is your e-mail inbox.
By default, my e-mail provider marks unread messages in bold, highlights their background, lists the number of unread messages in the page title, and will even offer to flash up an intrusive notification each time a message arrives. This product design, based on the premise that every e-mail that arrives is more important than what you are currently doing, elicits an unhelpful state of regular interruption. A different approach is necessary.
Rather than seeing e-mail as a constant chatter, always clamouring for my attention, I set aside blocks of time – one in the morning, one in the afternoon – for responding to e-mail. I don’t open my e-mail client except at these times. (Browser extensions make it possible to deny oneself access to certain sites: self-control is a finite resource.)
But what if this means I miss an urgent e-mail, your subconscious may yell.
I found it helpful to make a list of people who may require a response within three
hours, and to give these people the freedom to telephone me whenever they have an
urgent enquiry. (They have never needed to call.)
The instinct that e-mail requires immediate action is deeply rooted. I have tried a few experiments to train out this feeling of stressful hurry. One approach that helped was to configure my e-mail client to delay the arrival of e-mails in my inbox by half an hour. Another is to have a default policy of waiting 24 hours before replying to an e-mail: the occasional exception is necessary, but I found instructive the number of ‘urgent’ messages that, the next morning, had resolved themselves and required no reply. This approach also made my e-mail workflow more efficient: instead of exchanging a dozen ‘urgent’ messages to arrange a meeting, I now write “Can we meet in room 7 at 14:30 on Tuesday? If not, could you suggest two or three times on Tues afternoon or Weds morning that would work for you?” Incidentally, often the reason for such urgent or inefficient e-mails is that e-mail is not the best tool for the job: purpose-built tools such as youcanbook.me can eliminate those nagging, unresolved e-mail threads that dribble angst into the recesses of the subconscious.
The other way that that e-mail exerts a hold on concentration is by giving a feeling
of work undone. Most e-mail clients distinguish between “read” and “unread” e-mails.
I have configured mine to mark all incoming e-mails as “read”. For me, the important
distinction is whether an e-mail needs action from me, or not.
When I log on to my e-mails, I first triage every message in my inbox. If it doesn’t
require action, I archive it immediately – I can always search for it later if it
contains important information. If I can reply within a minite, I will.
But if I can’t, or choose not to, act on the message
immediately, I decide when I will need to take the next action – perhaps to chase up
a response, or to forward information that I don’t yet have – and use the ‘snooze’
function (implemented in Gmail and Outlook) to remove the message from my inbox
until the appointed time. This done, I can thoughtfully respond to those e-mails
that I’ve selected for the present moment until my inbox is empty.
Any I really can’t stomach get snoozed until later.
This way, when I log off, I am no longer generating internal guilt about having left
tasks undone in my inbox.
Deep work
Most of the thoughts developed above have their origins in Cal Newport’s Study Hacks blog, which contains many thoughts on how to concentrate well, work deeply, and produce great work; I recommend it as a resource for further ideas to make better and more fulfilling use of your time.