I used to think my focus was decent. After all, I'd completed many projects.
But recently, when I observed my behavior more carefully, I realized that my focus wasn't particularly good. I had simply invested massive amounts of time, so even though I was distracted often, a significant portion of that time still converted into real productivity that allowed me to complete those projects.
For example, at work, I'd suddenly want to look up concert information for a singer, get distracted by other videos while watching technical YouTube videos, randomly remember I hadn't paid my phone bill, or browse Facebook too long and end up working overtime. These things constantly appear in my daily life.
Recently, I've been drawn to the topic of focus again, and after reading and organizing a lot of information about concentration, I've realized how much I lack knowledge of neuroscience and psychology. Even though much of the information has references and sources, these methods for maintaining focus seem like ancient legends and folk remedies to me. As a Muggle, the best I can do—besides trying to understand these theoretical concepts as much as possible—is to personally test whether these spell-like methods actually work.
Below are several methods I've found for improving focus, along with my personal experiences practicing them.
Idle Rest During Focus Cycles
To maintain long-term focus, rest is crucial. Sometimes when doing something interesting, you get so absorbed that you over-focus, and when you're exhausted, you need double the rest time to recover.
But how you rest is equally important. I've recently been maintaining a Pomodoro work rhythm of 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of rest. So how do you rest during those 5 minutes? It's better to choose rest activities that don't overly shift your attention, such as stretching, eating something, or making coffee.
I recently read some interesting information. Several interconnected parts of the brain are called the Default Mode Network. When humans aren't focused on a specific purposeful task, these parts of the brain become more active, and people enter default mode. In this mode, they begin to reflect, recall the past, organize and plan for the future. In this mode, information flows and connects freely, which also means the information from the work you were doing gets reorganized in a different way.
So when you're taking an idle rest, your brain is still performing another form of organization and consolidation. Not only does your body get rest, but work-related information becomes clearer when you return to work. And since these activities don't pull away your attention, it's easy to return to a focused work state after resting.
However, during rest, try to avoid doing things that would pull away your attention, like going on Facebook or other social media. These social networks are essentially designed to capture your attention and give you emotionally charged information. Positive emotions from cats and dogs are fine, but sometimes negative emotions are mixed in—like sensationalist social news that can trigger anger, and then your focus is lost. Social media companies make money through advertising, and you lose your focus.
I've been practicing this principle recently and trying to avoid social media, and I've definitely felt my focus improve. I recommend you try it too.
Recalling Happy and Positive Times
In the article What I Do When I Can't Focus - Darius Foroux, it mentions that recalling past successes can raise your serotonin levels, and one of serotonin's important functions is delayed gratification—the ability to resist short-term tempting rewards to obtain longer-term future rewards. In other words, when focus is low, one reason might be lower serotonin levels, which makes you more inclined to seek short-term pleasures like drinking, shopping, or watching TV—activities that provide quick sensory stimulation.
The best way to raise serotonin levels is exercise. But besides exercise, recalling happy, positive times can also help.
This is an interesting claim. My practice method is this: I have an album of organized travel photos, and every morning I spend five minutes looking through it. Each time I see those photos, I remember the happy memories from those trips, and various recollections surface, making me feel quite happy.
As for whether it actually helps long-term focus, I find it hard to judge myself. But because looking at photos every morning makes me happy, I definitely feel my workday goes more smoothly and positively. If you're curious, I recommend trying it and letting me know your thoughts 😎
The Sense of Companionship When Working Alone
This is a method suitable for remote work. When you're working, you can try playing Apple's Study With Me video or Lofi Girl's lofi hip hop radio. When these videos are playing, you develop a mysterious sense of companionship that allows you to focus and work alongside them.
I haven't seen any related theoretical research. After discussing with ChatGPT, I think there are two possibilities. The first is social belonging. After all, humans are social animals. When working alone, having a virtual character for companionship also gives you a sense of belonging and psychological support, which enhances focus and motivation.
And what's better than a real person is that the person or virtual character in the video doesn't judge you—this kind of work companion is hard to find in reality.
The other possibility is observational learning. It's like when you study at a library—because everyone around you is studying, you gradually immerse yourself in that atmosphere and start focusing too. I think Apple's video does this even better. Besides the music and visuals, the video includes keyboard typing sounds and pen cap opening sounds, so even without seeing the video, you know they're working. And when you occasionally look up and see them, you of course see them working, which quickly draws you back into focus mode.
However, I haven't actually seen others discuss why this format is effective. If you've seen any theoretical basis or interesting discussions, please let me know!
Manage Distractions Rather Than Reject Them
Internal distractions are what happen to me most often—suddenly wanting to look up concert information, randomly remembering I haven't done laundry, wanting to Google something unrelated to current work, etc.
Previously, I had two ways of handling this: either interrupt my current work to deal with that random task, or try telling myself "Don't think about that stuff!" and attempt to focus on my work—but this didn't always work. Recently, in The Pomodoro Technique, I found a very simple little trick: write down those distractions and tell yourself you'll handle them later. That's it.
The key here is managing distractions, not rejecting them. These distractions pop up because uncompleted tasks easily slip into your short-term memory and actively grab your attention. This phenomenon is the Zeigarnik effect—compared to completed tasks, the brain is more inclined to remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks.
To remove these uncompleted tasks from short-term memory, you just need to write them down somewhere and tell yourself you'll handle them when you have time later. Then they'll temporarily be removed from your short-term memory. And when your focused work time ends, you can review these recorded distractions, satisfy your urge to search for information during break time, or simply schedule a new work item to handle later in the day.
When you choose to manage distractions rather than reject them, you can quickly recover your focus in this situation, and these distractions or desires aren't ignored—they can still be satisfied later.
I find this practice extremely effective. Generally, the distractions I've recorded almost never pop up again to interrupt me during focused work, and when I satisfy my little pleasures during break time, it feels really good.
I mentioned earlier not to go on social media during breaks, but if I've written down a distraction like "want to browse Facebook," I'll still think about whether to during break time. If I really want to look, I'll still remind myself not to look too long and quickly check what I want to see.
Side Note: Dealing With External Distractions
For external distractions, I first recommend turning off all notifications during focused work periods. My approach is to close all messaging apps on my computer, but keep notifications on my phone. Then enable the phone's flip-down for Do Not Disturb mode, and when focusing on work, flip the phone face-down. When it's break time, flip it back up to see what notifications there are. If something needs handling, open the messaging apps on the computer to deal with it.
If you work in an office, colleagues will often interrupt your work at any time. In this case, like with internal distraction management, you can ask what help they need, write it down, and tell them you'll find them to discuss it after finishing your current task. This way, with only a brief interruption, you can still quickly return to a focused work rhythm.
And I suggest making the action of recording what your colleague needs visibly clear to them. This also makes them feel that you're taking the matter to heart and recording it, rather than just casually agreeing. Of course, this only works if you follow through on your promise to handle it. This small action can reduce psychological burden for both parties—it's a pretty good little trick.
Finding Your Rhythm of Progress
Attention dispersion caused by long-term work fatigue is difficult to recover from overnight. Usually by this point, people feel like their work never ends no matter how much they do. Every day when they open their inbox, they're buried by the volume of work. In this situation, people enter a state of chronic attention dispersion, moving forward like zombies every day, and the next day feeling like they accomplished nothing at all.
At this point, the attention dispersion has reached "Pinocchio, just electrocute this one directly" levels, and you need a longer healing period to recover. At this time, recapturing the feeling that your work is progressing every day becomes very important. I'll divide this into two steps.
Reduce the Work Visible to Your Eyes Each Day
First, accept that you simply can't multitask that many things, and that humans just aren't suited to multitasking. You can list the three most important things today and focus on completing just those. Put the rest of the work somewhere you can always find it.
When only three tasks are visible to your eyes, completing those three will give you satisfaction, and then you can pick additional work to do. Change your mindset from "I have 20 tasks today but can only complete five, I'm so useless" to "I completed the three most important things today and even did two more!" The work output is the same, but the mindset is completely different.
For details, see my previous article Less is more, Streamlining Daily To-Dos.
Cyclically Record and Review Work Items
The prerequisite for this is that you've already used reducing the work visible to your eyes each day to make your work generate a sense of achievement. When work ends or when you review again the next day, you can quickly record work progress. You can use just a few short sentences to summarize a day's work.
At the same time, you can also create weekly or monthly work summaries as appropriate. For example, when making a weekly work summary, you can use the summary records from five workdays and again use just a few short sentences to summarize your week's work.
Humans are forgetful creatures. Sometimes after a week passes, you'll forget what you did last Monday. With this kind of work record, when you feel useless and like your work isn't progressing, you can look back and remember that you actually handled many things—you just forgot.
For details on cyclical recording, you can also see my previous article How I Organize My To-Dos — Magic-Modified Bullet Journal Method.
I've been implementing the above steps for over a year or two. When I review these records monthly and yearly, I can feel my own progress in work and life. After establishing this kind of positive feedback loop, I've regained a sense of achievement in many things.
Conclusion
The above are the legends, folk remedies, and practices about focus I've recently learned. Actually, these aren't legends and folk remedies—it's just that from my perspective, I lack the professional knowledge to explore whether they align with theory and science, and can only search for information as much as possible to ensure they're roughly correct.
Besides the companionship feeling which I don't use daily, all the above techniques are methods I currently practice every day. Finding your rhythm of progress is a method I've always thought was great, and it's allowed me to better control my life and work. And other daily-use techniques like distraction management and idle rest have indeed brought significant changes.
If you also have focus problems, of course you should first evaluate the severity. If medical assistance is needed, I recommend seeking clinical treatment. But if it's at a general concern level, I recommend trying the above methods to see which ones help you.
At the same time, while reading these materials, I've discovered that focus is very closely related to neuroscience and psychology. If you're interested, you can also research more from these angles. In any case, I hope the above sharing helps you. If you also know techniques for improving focus, feel free to use the reader feedback function below to share with me on Twitter!