If You Read This, You’ll be Able to Focus for Hours.
In this post I’ll be explaining how I have built my ability to focus. This post is one of the simplest I will write, but the ideas are incredibly valuable. When I follow these ideas, I can easily focus for hours in a day and produce large volumes of high quality work. When I don’t I am distracted and unproductive. I hope they are as helpful for you as they are for me.
I don’t procrastinate, and nor will you if you read this post and implement the ideas. This isn’t to say that I spend my entire life working, in fact I only spend a handful of hours a day working. But when I work, I work and when I play, I play. They don’t bleed into each other. This is, in my opinion, the best way to live as a student and the way to get the best results.
Building the habit of complete unwavering focus allows you to separate our work and play completely. You are so productive when you work that you can entirely relax afterwards, confident in your ability to get work done on demand when you need/want to. This leads to lower stress levels and better grades. You can then enjoy your time off and come back to work refreshed and recharged for another period of intense focus.
The aim of this post is to set out a strategy to build a habit of focus. Building this habit means that it becomes effortless to sit down and entirely dedicate yourself to your work, without losing focus. At the end of this work session, you can stop focusing and then entirely relax.
Focus is a habit. Like any habit it can be built or destroyed depending on your actions. If you build the habit of focus, it becomes effortless and habitual. If you don’t build the habit, focus can be incredibly challenging. In this post I’ll explain both how to build the habit of focusing for long periods each day, and also dig into the details of how to focus for longer without distraction.
The ideas in this post have changed my approach to working, I hope they have a similar impact for you.
How to Build a Habit
Building a habit is simple. There are three components to a habit. The cue, the routine and the reward. If you have these three and do the same thing regularly, a habit will build. Let’s run through some examples to show how some common habits are built.
The cue to go for a cigarette may be boredom at work, a desire to socialise or a craving for nicotine. The routine is you going outside, having a cigarette and chatting to a co-worker. The reward is the spike of social hormones and a nicotine hit. Hence smoking is an easy habit to build and a hard one to break.
The cue for getting a coffee may be tiredness when you wake up or it may simply be arriving in a certain place each day. The routine is you buying and drinking a coffee. The reward is the taste and the caffeine hit. Hence grabbing a coffee every day is an easy habit to build and a hard one to break, which is why I spend hundreds of pounds a year on coffee.
If you are interested in habits, changing them and getting control of them, ‘The Power of Habit’ by Charles Duhigg is an amazing book. In fact, I believe this is one of the most important books that I have read.
When building a habit, we need to design in these three parts of the habit. We must have all three. It is very tempting to just decide the cue and routine, without rewarding ourselves. This won’t work as it then relies on willpower as a pose to simply the habit part of our brain.
We can design whatever habit we want to, if it has these three components and we do it regularly. We also can benefit hugely from measuring the changes of habit that we make. What we measure, we can change and improve.
How to Build the Habit of Focus
With focus I use a simple system. When I sit down to work, I start a timer. This timer serves as my cue that I am now in ‘focus mode’. I then practice the routine of being focused. When I am eventually done I stop the timer, save the work session and then take a well-earned break and go chill with mates (the reward).
This then creates a log of the exact amount of time each day I am in a state of complete focus. I can see this improve over time, see it plummet when I’m low on sleep and see how it changes with other life changes I make. Through measurement, I can improve it.
Of the three components of a habit, routine is the key part. This is what we really want to build. We can choose this to be whatever we want it to be. Ultimately, building a habit of lazy unfocused unproductive work is as easy as building a habit of true excellence. Whatever standard we chose to hold ourselves to, will become our default standard. Therefore, it seems obvious that we hold ourselves to the highest standard and practice excellence.
The standard we must hold ourselves to is complete 100% focus. Where we are able to seep into a depth of work where we think clearly and produce brilliant, valuable work. This is as easy as deciding on any other standard, but it is simply a choice we must make. Therefore, chose that whenever the timer is running, we are entirely focused on our work.
Josh Waitzkin hammers on this point endlessly in his incredibly book ‘The Art of Learning’. Josh is one of the worlds most gifted learners and thinkers, being a world champion in both chess and the martial art side of Tai Chi. He now is a consultant on mental performance and has some incredible clients to which mental performance and clear decision making is invaluable.
The point Josh hammers home in every interview is to practice excellence. This means whenever you do any work, do it to the highest standard and hold yourself to this. It is a choice you make which is no harder than choosing any other standard, but this then becomes your default standard. This decision is one of the keys to highly effective learning.
If you time your work sessions, not only does it act as a cue to focus but It also provides a number that you can track. At first you may find that focusing for more than 20 minutes is a challenge, and an hour a day is your upper limit. This is completely normal, in fact its pretty good. That hour of genuine focused work is more productive than 4–6 hours of unfocused half-work.
It is crucial that you track the amount of focused work you do. What you don’t measure you can’t improve and somehow what you do measure almost automatically improves. This is due to many mental processes that happen, search gamification if you’re interested.
As you continue to implement the ideas in this post and track their impact, the duration of work session where you can sustain focus and the total amount of focused work done in a day will drastically increase. Some days I do 6 hours of focused work and get obnoxious quantities of work done. I aim for between 2 and 3 hours every day. The ability to focus for this long in a day is as close to a learning superpower as there is, the amount you can get done feels like it’s almost cheating.
We have established that focus is a habit we need to build and that we need to hold ourselves to a high standard of complete immersion in our work.
Building the Focus Muscle
We have established that focusing for significant periods is essential, we now need to dig into the details of how to build the ability to sustain focus for long periods of time. How do we go from our current default of high levels of distraction, procrastination and muddy thinking, to a standard of complete clarity and focus?
The answer comes from how we deal with distractions. Typically focus is framed as a battle against distraction. An exercise in resisting the temptation of distraction. As long as you maintain this frame, you will never be able to achieve the standard of focus described earlier.
Distractions are inevitable. They will happen. As long as we maintain the idea that distractions are a failure on our part, our ability to focus is drastically reduced. Every time we get distracted or procrastinate we judge ourselves as a failure to some extent, which is exhausting. Our minds get tired maintaining this untruthful persona of not getting distracted and continuously judging the reality against this. Ironically this makes us far more distracted.
Instead of maintaining this untruthful belief that we shouldn’t get distracted, we should accept that distractions are inevitable. When we do this, they stop being a failure and become an opportunity.
Every distraction is an opportunity to build what I call the focus muscle. We can simply note that we have become distracted, not judging ourselves for it, and then simply place our focus back onto the task we sat down to do. This strengthens the focus muscle.
If we do this every time we are distracted, this once again becomes a habit. We notice we are distracted (Cue), let the distraction go and return to our work (routine), and then continue to produce excellent work and enter a deeper level of thought and focus (reward).
Over time, this becomes habitual; meaning it takes less and less effort to do until it is effortless and automatic. The less effort this takes, the longer we can focus for and the more we can get done.
We will see this change over time as the length of time we can effectively focus for increases. At first it may only be 15–20 minutes before our mind turns to mush. Yet I now consistently work in sprints of 90 minutes or more depending on the day. I am excited for you to see this change and to be able to track it happening.
Fitting it all Together
There are two key ideas in this post. Firstly, focus is a habit that we can design and hold ourselves to. We can choose to hold ourselves to whatever standard we wish to in this habit, and therefore we must choose to practice excellence. Secondly, distractions are not a crime whilst attempting to focus. As long as we resist them, they will persist in distracting us. If we instead embrace them as inevitable and use them as opportunities to build focus, then the habit of maintaining focus will be built and become effortless.
Putting these two together, we can create an ability to focus effortlessly and produce excellent work. As we stop exerting effort to begin focusing or to maintain focus; work becomes enjoyable and easy instead of exhausting and frustrating.
We can then create a student life when work and play are entirely separated. We can fully relax when we relax content in the knowledge that we can sit down and get huge volumes of work done as needed. Equally we can work with this intense efficiency, confident work will get done and that there will come a time, later in the day, when we can relax.
If you truly implement the ideas in this post, you will build the ability to focus with extreme clarity for hours on end every day. This means you get far more done in far less time and create space in your life to relax and enjoy being a student. It also means the quality of your work is far higher. The ideas in this post are incredibly simple, yet that doesn’t mean they’re easy. Building this habit requires a commitment to it and discipline, and it must be maintained every day. But, it is worth it one hundred times over.
I really look forward to hearing how you implement these ideas and the changes they bring to you. Let me know either on Instagram Jackaspinall1 or as a reply to this post on Medium! If you have got to this point in the post, then it has bought you some value. Share it on Facebook so that more people can read it.
Writer — Jack Aspinall
