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Ass-Kicking Email – How You Can Increase Your Ability to Focus

Hey,

In today’s email I’ll be offering suggestions to a problem that
challenges many learners: not being able to focus.

—

Focus is essential for being productive and for learning anything.
This is doubly true if you’re self-educating, where the lack of
carrot/stick incentives from professors and exams means *you* are
responsible for staying on task.

Obviously everyone has different natural strengths in being able
to focus. Some people are easily distracted and have difficulty
concentrating. Others can be mesmerized for hours staring at paint
dry.

I’m guessing you’re somewhere in-between those extremes, but that
doesn’t mean you can’t rework your approach to increase your focus.

—

Step One — Change Your Environment

One of the biggest problems with focus is not having an environment
that is conducive to staying on task.

Look around the room where you work and ask yourself how it makes
you feel.

Does it make you feel like channeling all your energy into
productively accomplishing a task? Or does it make you want to
open up Facebook or play video games?

If your environment is full of distractions, focusing will be
impossible–that’s obvious. But, even more, if your environment
doesn’t *feel* focused, you probably won’t focus. Excess clutter or
an unmade bed may not be distractions in themselves, but they don’t
inspire a clear head.

An easy solution to this problem is to pick an outside environment
that forces you to focus. Libraries are a common choice for learning
but the key is that it should be something that motivates you.
There’s no need to pick a boring location if it doesn’t urge you
to stay on task.

—

Step Two: Enjoy the Boredom

Not fun, right? Well actually it can be. Most of the problem in
focusing is in the early stages, when you haven’t hit your flow.

If a task seems boring initially, that doesn’t mean you won’t be
engaged in 15 minutes, it just means you haven’t built up the
momentum to stay on task.

When I’m writing I force myself to stay in the state of boredom or
frustration for the first 15-20 minutes as I debate about headlines,
opening paragraphs and structure. It’s not fun, but once I get past
it, I can write for an hour or two without interruption, completely
focused.

The same is true with many learning tasks. When you’re starting the
initial urge is to take the first distraction as an escape. If you
force yourself to enjoy the first 15-30 minutes of boredom, you can
eventually push into a more productive state.

—

Step Three: Train Your Focus

Focus is like a muscle. If you don’t practice it frequently, it will
atrophy.

The way to train any muscle is to:

1. Know your current strength.
2. Force yourself to push between 80-100% of your maximum strength.

With focus, that means keeping track of how long you’re able to
productively focus on a project and how long it takes you to get
into that flow. Then, practice staying on task just a bit further
from the point you’d normally give up.

If you normally stay focused on writing for 30 minutes before taking
a break, force yourself to go an extra 15 next time you feel like
quitting.