How to Improve Your Focus at Work
A workday runs long, and somewhere in the middle of it your attention tends to drift. Concentrating on whatever is in front of you gets harder. That drift costs you. Projects slip, and the important stuff piles up behind you. The useful part is that pulling your focus back doesn't require much. A handful of small habits can keep you anchored to the task, and the same habits tend to push your output up at the same time. More done, done with less effort wasted, and you're quietly building better work habits for yourself along the way.
Try the "five more" idea first. When you hit the point where you want to quit a task, promise yourself five more minutes on it. You already know five minutes is something you can handle. Athletes lean on this to stretch their stamina: they push past the moment their body says stop, and telling themselves there's only a little left gets them through. The same works at a desk. Those extra five minutes often hand you a second wind, and the second wind carries you further than you expected.
Sometimes the better move is the opposite, which is to step away. Give yourself ten minutes. Grab a coffee, walk around, stretch out your legs. Don't let the task you left behind keep running in your head during that window. Message a coworker, call someone, scroll through your feed for a bit. The point is to do something unrelated for ten minutes and no more. Stretch the break past ten and you'll find it much harder to drop back into the work.
Chewing gum sounds too small to matter, but it helps some people lock in. Students do it during exams to stay with the questions in front of them. It costs you nothing to test. Go with a mint flavor if you can, since mint tends to feel energizing and gives the focus an extra push.
Narrow yourself to one thing. Splitting your attention across several tasks defeats the purpose when the splitting is what's wrecking your concentration in the first place. Choose a single task, pour everything into it, finish, and only then look at the next one. That way your energy goes where it counts. A common trick is to handle the hardest work earlier in the day, when your focus comes more naturally, and leave the lighter items for the afternoon stretch after lunch.
Cut the distractions out before they stack up. When your focus is already shaky, an interruption only drags it lower. Silence the phone if you're able to, sign out of social accounts, leave your inbox alone for a while, and clear away anything else that keeps tugging at you. Even thirty uninterrupted minutes will move a surprising amount of work forward. If you can carve out several of those thirty-minute blocks across the day, your output climbs with them.
Break the day into mini goals. The real target is finishing everything assigned to you, but staring at the whole pile is a quick way to feel buried. Chop it into steps. Small things are easier to start, easier to finish, and far easier to stay fixed on. Say you're writing a long report: split it into sections and work one section at a time. Each finished section tends to nudge you toward the next, and the report gets done without you ever having to face the whole of it at once.
Begin with the five-more rule, since it's the simplest and it fits any task you can name. It works. Keep at it and the task closes out before you've really noticed, with your own habits a little sharper for it. On the days focus feels nearly impossible, stack two of these methods onto the same task. What matters is landing on the combination that actually holds your attention, so you can get through the workday clean.
- Rosemary Kitchen
Resources: Cardillo, J. A Three-Day Plan to Increase Your Focus. Retrieved on March 12, 2015 from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/attention-training/201207/three-day-plan-increase-your-focus