Three Ways to Train Your Brain to Stay Focused

Like anyone with a career, you probably find yourself having to simultaneously juggle responsibilities and requests coming at you from every facet of life. At any point in time you might be flooded with client emails, phone calls, employee requests, and family commitments, all expecting to be treated with the same level of importance and vying for your immediate and exclusive attention. Understanding your brain’s limitations and working to improve them can help boost your focus, productivity, and ultimately the quality of your work.

As humans, our brains are chemically attracted to distractions and are therefore constantly seeking out the next thing to stir our mind away from the task at hand. This is exacerbated by how tethered we are to our digital devices and how readily available — and impossible to eliminate — distractions are.

While multitasking is an important skill, and one that most of us commonly cite as a factor behind our success, it also has a downside. Multitasking can hamper your brain’s ability to concentrate on one specific task causing you not just to make trivial mistakes like typos or missing a subtle cue, but also causing you to react incorrectly to certain situations or make mistakes that carry greater repercussions than a misspelled word.

When trying to improve your brain’s ability to concentrate, you shouldn’t aim for constant focus, but instead strive for short periods of distraction-free time every day. Even just twenty minutes a day of no distractions can be transformative for your productivity.

If you’re looking to improve your focus and productivity, these three tips might just do the trick:

1. Do creative work first

Most of us tend to start the day with mindless work and use it as a warm-up for tougher tasks. Although this may sound like a good plan on paper, in practice it tends to drain your brain, leaving you almost physically tired for when the real work begins.

An easy fix is to simply reverse the order. Look at the tasks you need to complete, asses how brain-intensive each one is, and tackle the tougher one first, leaving the easier ones like deleting emails or scheduling meetings for later in the day when your brain will be fatigued and not keen on more heavy-duty work.

2. Allocate your time deliberately

Studies show that, on average, people are truly focused for just six hours out of an entire week. For most, these six hours are distributed between early in the morning and late at night, but it will vary from person to person.

Take stock of when during the day you seem to be most focused and save important tasks for then. Being careful about scheduling important work for when you brain is sharpest is key to driving up productivity.

3. Train your mind like a muscle

When multitasking is the norm, our brains quickly adapt and succumbing to life’s distractions becomes a habit. Over the years we essentially train our brains to be unfocused.

But just like the brain can be trained to be unfocused, it can also be trained to concentrate. You need to start small by turning off all distractions and committing your attention to a single task for just five minutes. From there, start building up to larger chunks of time. When you find your mind wandering, make a conscious effort to return to the task at hand. It’s just like going to the gym, no one is going to expect you to run a marathon on your first day, but starting with just five minutes and building up over time, maybe a marathon won’t be such a daunting task.