Why is it so hard to focus? (and what we can do about it)

| “Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus” Alexander Graham Bell

Our focus is often referred to as a resource we can control or something we just do - like a switch the best of us can turn on at our own will. It has become synonymous with ideas of maximising productivity and an essential characteristic of “success.” At times, focus is associated with hypomania and bursts of creativity while at others, it’s thought of as an element of ruthless self-discipline and enduring persistence. But why is it so hard? And how do we regulate our attention?

A simple answer to the question, “why is it so hard to focus?” is that our attentional capacity is limited. We can experience far more than we actually process. Right now, you’re (hopefully) focusing on the text you’re reading but equally, you could focus on the sounds you can hear, or how much your legs sink into the chair you’re sitting on. Importantly, you couldn’t simultaneously focus on all of those things. Certain information is making it through the bottleneck. That’s essentially to say, we’re focusing on an aspect of our experience by paying attention to it.

Regardless of what you’re paying attention to, some stimuli always make it through the bottleneck (and disturb our “flow”). These are typically sudden changes in our environment like an unexpected loud sound, a rapid movement in the corner of your eye, a flash of bright light. Hence, while you’re reading this, if your smartphone sounds (loudly), or a message pops up on your screen (and it’s in your field of view), it will probably draw your attention (at least, momentarily).

That’s where the first of 2, suggested actions come in to play…

Suggested Action #1 - Eliminate Distractions When Doing High-Focused Work

When we’re doing work that requires consistent, high levels of focus there’s a range of actions we can execute to minimise distractions (these would otherwise, involuntarily make it through the bottleneck). Here are some examples:

Move your phone to another room or if that’s not possible (e.g., at an office), turn off (or minimise) notifications and keep it out of sight

Remove (non-essential) notifications on your desktop e.g., calendar reminders

Close communication apps from your taskbar etc - the visual prompts (e.g., small red circles in the top right corner) can be so tempting!

Avoid navigating through “home screens” e.g., YouTube - they’re all so good at distracting you with other appealing videos!

As a side note on this one, without ever opening YouTube’s home screen, I simply have saved a link to a search bar to reduce temptation. Something like this could work - just create a bookmark of the link and use that to navigate to YouTube (as opposed to searching for it). I’d imagine this tip won’t work for everyone, but it could be worth a try!

See below for a distraction-full and distraction-free desktop!

Once distractions are removed, there’s a few more strategies we can employ.

Avoid “Multi-tasking”

Focusing on one task at a time can minimise the “switching costs” we may experience. While it’s tempting to manage conflicting demands simultaneously, Ian Fagan, co-founder and Director of Skodel put it best when he said:

“When you need to wear many hats, I think the risk that you find yourself in, in terms of productivity, is that you get into that multi-tasking habit and it feels like you’re being really productive”

While working on task A and task B at the same time feels like you’re making more progress, research suggests your overall output will be lower i.e., you’ll perform each task slower than you otherwise would have if you’d opted to progress them individually.

Utilise the power of interest

Activities that spur our intrinsic motivation are also easier to focus on. When we’re inclined to learn and explore a topic or area of interest, focus seems like a useful biproduct.

How do we do this? Let’s look at a school context as an example - something we can all relate to.

When revising physics, students could graph real-life events, like the rain outside falling from 3 stories high (giving you a distance, velocity etc to work with). This was an idea Chess Grandmaster Maurice Ashley used when helping his niece to improve her test performance.

In English, students could think about how the characters in their texts are similar to people in their lives and draw a diagram to represent the similarities in their traits. This helps utilise the power of personal contexts, categorised as “context personalisation” in this paper.

In History, students could talk to an AI tool that imitates someone from the time period they are studying to converse and strengthen their understanding.

Set Strategic Time Limits

A strategy I’ve found effective is scheduling other activities into my day to limit the time I have for a high-focus, cognitively demanding task.

 While it’s easy to want to finish everything before moving onto other commitments, I’ve found my focus to be higher when I know I only have X hours to finish something. The power of limiting time to complete a task (and otherwise, facing the consequences of not completing it) helps provide a sense of urgency and drive I sometimes need to push through challenging, high-focused work. The key is to abide by the allotted time without granting yourself permission to continue once you’re out of time. 

Below is a breakdown of how effective time limits can be set.

Suggested Action #2 - Use a Timer

Simply allocating 20 minutes to a task may not be particularly helpful, particularly if you know you’ll keep working on it afterwards if it’s not done. Your mind might wander for the first five, ideas may start coming to you by the ten-minute mark and before you know it… 20 minutes is up. And you haven’t finished the task.

Often, 20 minutes is too long. It gives us time to procrastinate. We need small, achievable sub-tasks that help us achieve our overall goal.

To start, set a goal for the task at hand. Not just ‘learn about X’ but a specific, SMART goal.

E.g. Develop a clear, systematic approach to taking notes on the next non-fiction book I read.

Then break it down into micro chunks.

E.g.,

5 minutes: brainstorm different notetaking strategies

5 minutes: list 3 key advantages and disadvantages of each

2 minutes: determine your purpose for writing notes

3 minutes: choose a strategy that best fulfils the purpose, using the advantages and disadvantages to make a decision

The second key element is to use a timer for each sub-task, and make sure it’s visible.

Then, when your mind starts to wander, seeing the timer can remind you that you don’t have much time left. This forces you to focus, because believe me, five minutes is not a lot of time to brainstorm different notetaking strategies.

Now, you might be wondering, what happens if you don’t finish? 

You have two options. One, finish off the task quickly (preferably with the timer still ringing in the background to remind you to focus). Two, stop. Yes, that wasn’t a typo. Stop doing the task. Before you look away in shock and think you’re telling me I’ve done all this quality work, got into a great state of focus and now I can’t even finish off my work? it’s worth understanding why. When you stop, you acknowledge that the deadline is real and next time, this should push you to work with more intensity to finish within time. Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t finish, you can come back later that day or the next day. Just stop for the time being. 

Then, your timer is meaningful.

Here's an example of the set up...

It’s to be noted this method is more effective more methodical tasks and less effective for creative work. More broadly, relentless time management of all tasks can easily trap a person in a viscous cycle of framing each and every decision in terms of its opportunity cost, preventing the free exploration of ideas and perhaps more dangerously, minimising one’s opportunity to engage in valuable tasks (e.g., reflection, ideation, connection) that may not show immediate or easily measurable benefits.

References 

From Attention to Distraction

Task switching and the measurement of “switch costs”

Interest Matters: The Importance of Promoting Interest in Education