The Foundation of Focus, Flow, and Deep Work (1/3)
Practising Productivity Newsletter #8
In this mini-series of three newsletters, we’re going to explore the topics of focus, flow, and deep work.
Today, we’ll look at how you can build focus. Starting from the fundamentals, I’ll give you some practical tips for how you can enhance your ability to focus on the task at hand.
Over the following two weeks we’ll explore how you can use your heightened state of focus to better access states of flow, and from there, how you can minimise your distractions to remain in a flow state and do some deep work.
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What is focus?
Our brains are highly tuned machines, constantly on the lookout for the most salient thing to pay attention to and focus on. Evolutionarily, this was a huge advantage - seeing movement on the horizon could mean the difference between being fed, or being dead.
However, there are actually three states of attention which combine to create focus:
Selective attention: Short, tight focus on a single thing, excluding everything else. Serving a tennis ball, for example.
Divided attention: Managing multiple stimuli at once, often called context switching. Driving a car requires divided attention - rapidly switching from awareness of your surroundings, to awareness of the vehicle.
Sustained attention: A longer, less intense form of selective attention. Your brain actually filters out information that can distract you. Have you ever been reading a book and completely missed what someone was saying to you? That’s your brain helping you to sustain your attention.
Now, however, we are caught in tension between two competing states:
The type of work we do requires high states of sustained focus.
Life is full of things which distract from this focus and divide our attention.
To put this another way, we now find ourselves in a situation where our evolutionary behaviour - which once served us so well - now actually hinders our enjoyment of life, by preventing us from focusing on things that matter.
Further, we actively incorporate such distractions into our lives, making focus an even harder state to achieve. Who here can honestly say they have never checked their phone during a conversation with a dear friend?
Distractions are cheap, and focus is hard. So how to overcome this?
Overcoming distractions
The first step to building focus is to remove the most distracting things from your life:
Ditch the mobile - Personally, my mobile phone has captured so much of my time and attention that I daren’t add it all up. Apps like Instagram can have negative effects on your dopamine reward system, and receiving a notification is a surefire way to distract your focus. Use a notification blocker, or better yet, turn your phone off.
Set up a dedicated workspace - Working at a clean desk, free of clutter will help to keep your mind free of clutter too. By creating a space in which you do your best work, you prime your brain to stay on task.
Communicate boundaries - Mark out dedicated focus time in your calendar and request that your colleagues, partner, and/or children respect this time. You can’t remove distractions from your whole day, but carving out some distraction-free time is better than none.
Stick to a routine - Getting into a routine helps to reduce the fatigue caused by making too many decisions. Mark Zuckerberg famously wears the same outfit each day to remove the distraction of “what to wear?” from his day. You don’t need to go this far, but establishing a consistent schedule that includes dedicated work periods conditions your mind to focus during specific times.
Prioritise working on a single task - During the times when your mind is naturally more active - my article on chronotypes can help you understand this better - set yourself the clear goal of completing a single task. This helps you to avoid multi-tasking which can be an inefficient way to work.
But removing distractions is only one part of the battle. Each of us has a baseline level of focus - the amount of time that we can concentrate on a task in optimal conditions. This baseline isn’t fixed.
So what can we do to increase our levels of focus?
Increasing focus
Increasing your baseline level of focus is a real force multiplier. Even if you remove all the distractions from your day, there is a still a maximum amount of time you can spend focused on one task.
So here’s three ways to increase your baseline level of focus:
Set Clear Goals: Having a clearly-defined set of goals that align with your intrinsic values help you to build your meta-levels of focus. You’ll find it much easier to concentrate on the small things if you know they’re aligned with the big things. The Practising Productivity Planner has a full framework to guide you through this process if you don’t know where to start.
Meditation: Meditation is the practise of focus. By constantly returning your focus to a single thing, you train your brain to more easily recover from distractions and to focus longer. Try an app like Balance, or Insight Timer to learn the basics.
Use the Pomodoro Technique: The Pomodoro technique involves working for a set amount of time (usually 25 minutes) and then taking a short break. If you find concentrating for 25 minutes difficult, set a shorter timer. You can steadily increase the timer to build longer periods of focus. But be careful of burnout.
I’ve been working to develop my focus for a long time now, and these tips have helped me so much.
If you had to choose only one way to remove distractions, I recommend getting rid of your mobile phone. To build focus over the long-term however, don’t underestimate the power of meditation practise - meditation actually results in physical changes to your brain!
Tune in next week to learn about how to more easily reach your flow state for heightened productivity, increased creativity, and enhanced learning.
Rich