Towards better concentration in five steps

Recently, I was asked in the comments of my post on motivation for my input on concentration. I've quickly given an answer in the comments, but I'd like to expand on the topic in a full post.

Concentration is not my natural strength. With a concentration span of about 20 minutes and my generally super-scattered brain, I've needed to work hard when I started university and couldn't simply study 20 minutes before an exam anymore.

My first years at university were not a big success (or at least, my grades were not as good as I would have wanted them to be), mostly because I didn't put my concentration where I had to.

Bit by bit, I started to learn how to focus (still working on it though!), and at the end of my studies, I was back to studying very few hours per day during exams, but with more concentration and dedication - which also resulted in significantly higher grades.

Therefore, I've gained some experience in observing my own habits and how to improve your concentration. I've already given my 10 tips for a better concentration, but here you can find 5 easy steps to implement and work towards a better concentration:

1. Know your tools

Identify the length of your concentration span: during a few work days, note down precisely how long you stay at one task. You can as well use a software tool, like ManicTime, to tag your time slots (but then, make sure you consistently tag whenever you leave your thesis document and go browse online or run off to the coffee machine).

Knowing how your brain works regularly is absolutely important to improve your concentration. Only once you know what you can work with, you can also work towards expanding your concentration span.

Action: map your concentration span!

2. Clear goals

This example should give you a sense for setting clear goals: compare "write thesis from 8am to 6pm" on your to do list to "write 400 words on paragraph 5.3.4 in thesis between 10am and noon". Setting clear goals, and knowing what precisely you need to do in which time slot, allows for less drifting off in thoughts.

Action: take your planning tool and schedule clear goals.

3. Frequent breaks

If you want to have several hours of deep concentration in a work day, then it is absolutely important to unwind every now and then. In the Pomodoro technique, 25 minute sets of concentration are alternated with 5 minute breaks, and a longer break after 4 Pomodoros. If you try to force yourself to sit on your chair for hours and hours, your mind will start to wander and you'll make slower progress. The key is to take short, but frequent breaks such that you can stay at a decent level of concentration throughout the day.

Action: build some air into your schedule and try a timing technique.

4. Take care of your body

You can't concentrated when you're tired, sick or generally unwell. Therefore, it's important to find time to prepare wholesome food, work out, relax and get your hours of sleep. Sleep deprivation is one of the most common reasons for poor concentration.

Action: Take that planning tool again, and schedule time to take care of your health (gym, cooking a healthy meal,...) or skip some commitments to safeguard your 8 hours of sleep.

5. Meditate

If you want to improve your focus over a longer period of time, there is no better way than to work out your brains. Meditation is indeed nothing more than a good workout for your brain (plus all the benefits that are associated with meditation!). As a researcher, you're "paid to think", and therefore taking good care of your brain and optimizing its performance is very important.

Action: Look at your schedule. At what point during the day can you guarantee 5 minutes for meditation?

Focus Booster

I've been experimenting with Focus Booster over the past days, and wanted to share some of my thoughts on this.

Focus Booster is a simple software tool to use with the Pomodoro Technique . You can start a Pomodoro with this, it runs for 25 minutes on your desktop (while gradually changing color from green to red), rings a bell and then times a 5 minute break for you. After this break, you can start a new Pomodoro time slot. Focus Booster also keeps track of the amount of Pomodoros you've accomplished over the day.

Previously, I was using the stopwatch on my cell phone to see if I can concentrate for 20 to 45 minutes before changing tasks (I was nicknaming this the "egg timer trick", but now that I am continuously with my eyes glued to my computer screen, I thought I could try a little app for this.

Here are some of my observations:
- I like how it "forces" me to take breaks. I've noticed that I can work the entire morning with only a few breaks, but then I feel really empty and unable to work in the afternoon and evening. Taking little breaks has helped me to be able to work more productively throughout the entire day, without burning all my energy in the morning.
- Having an app on your screen makes it very visible. It challenges me to start racing against the clock in the last five minutes of a 25-minutes slot. It also tells me that after 5 minutes of browsing the internet, I need to get back to my calculations.
- Whenever another thought crosses my mind, I just write it down on a piece of paper and get back to it later. And this "later" doesn't feel so far away, as every chunk of time is only 25 minutes.
- This method feel intuitively right for me. I used to work in time slots of 20 minutes, as this used to be the amount of time that I was spending on my homework in secondary school. When I went to university, I simply felt I could not really concentrate deeply for longer than 20 minutes, so I started to divide my time in sets of 20 minutes each (trying to study one proof at a time, for example).

Even though I'm not really familiar with the original Pomodoro Technique, I've been easily able to implement this software tool into my regular way of working, and by doing so, found a way to optimize my "egg timer trick" method.

If you are interested in the Pomodoro Technique itself, and how you could implement it into your work and benefit from it, I recommend the following blog posts as well:
Easily Stop Procrastination in its Tracks and Become a Productivity Machine: One Tomato at a Time
Productivity help with Pomodoro

Ten tips for a better concentration

One of my New Year's resolutions was that I would be working hard towards a better concentration and focus. My attention span is extremely short, and I have never been able to stretch it longer. I am not sure if this is because my brain just functions like that, or if it is because I could always get my schoolwork done in short amounts of time, and never got used to concentrate for longer than 20 minutes.

I've started to find what works for me, and thought it was time to track my process, and what I've learned from it so far. Here is a list of 10 insights I gained while trying to work on my ability to focus.

1. Set smart goals

If I want to concentrate, I need to know precisely what I am concentrating on, and how much time I plan to spend on it. If not, I find it too easy to drift off. If I tell myself that I am now taking the entire month to get some serious progress on my literature review,  I am very tempted to let my mind float around. It helps to tell myself that I now am going to read this paper in this much of time.

Smart goals are a great way to stay realistic about your progress and your planning. Among other explanations, SMART stands for:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time-bound

2. Tackle procrastination 

Make today your no-procrastination day. Just say goodbye to it for once, and feel great about all the progress you can do. Imagine you are working towards a deadline. 

If you really feel that you can't beat procrastination, then start keeping a little log. Write down when you went off the path, started procrastination, how you were feeling. You might start to see a deeper pattern (Do you procrastinate when you're hungry? Does it happen after lunch because you are too stuffed? When you haven't had enough sleep?). Just take the decision for yourself to change it. And then pat yourself in the back for every time you felt like going to wander off but stayed on track.

3. Know your "brain rhythm"

 I've acknowledged for myself that I need to work in chunks of 20 minutes of concentration at a time. Even though I am trying to stretch this extremely short time span, I am now accepting this as the wave of my brain that I need to surf.
Just getting to know within which time I can concentrate already helped me to set that time as a fixed span of time to concentrated. After 20 minutes, I allow myself to look around and let my mind vent all its busy thoughts, but then I try to block them out again and focus for another 20 minutes.

4. Know your "body rhythm"

I've come to understand that I work best when I keep regular hours in my office, start at 8 am every day and go to sleep at 11 pm. I'm at my sharpest in the early morning, then I slack off towards lunchtime, and then I get my second peak around 3pm, until I go home around -typically- 6 pm. I usually have another peak in the evening, after coming from the gym, which I either use for additional reading or non-phd creativity bursts. Since I've discovered this (and I don't think caffeine can do much about this), I've been trying to place my heavy concentration activities during my peak moments, and wait for phone calls, e-mailing and the like for the moments of the day when my body is not at its fullest.

5. Clean desk

If you have a messy desk, all you need to do is to clear it out once. At the end of every day, I sort out what is left on my desk, and in the morning I can start on a completely fresh (or with my most important task for the day read) desk.
As a student, I used to work on the messiest desk you can imagine, and I even had piles with random papers and books around my desk on the floor. At some moments I couldn't even reach my bed without having to jump over the stashes of notes and homeworks. It took me so much energy to keep track of what was traveling around where, so one day I decided to change it.
It now really helps me to have only what I am working on at my desk, and not all possible shiny tings I can start playing around with.

6. Eliminate distractions 

What breaks your concentration? For me it is a wide variety of elements: noise and other sensory impulses, wandering of my thoughts and -when I am working on my computer- the temptation to go and surf around the internet.
Once you know what distracts you, you can try to eliminate it. For me, that means that I've been using a blocksite tool for a while to block the website of the news and facebook from my browser. I've now disabled it, because I got used not to surf around that much anymore (although, I admit, I've been slacking off this week again). Eliminating distractions also means that I need to close my office door regularly, if not I just start following all conversations in the hallway.

7. Meditate

I'm still fully experimenting with all this, as you can read here, here, here; here; here, here, here and here(looks like I've been writing quite some lines about my efforts and good intentions already, more than I realized).
I am convinced though that I can train my mind with this, and that it will result in a better focus.

8. Sleep enough

You can't concentrate when you're sleep-deprived. Even though our entire society is in a constant zombie-mode, it is important to discover how much sleep you need and make sure you get it.

9. Take time to unwind

I've discovered that I really need to relax on a daily basis in order to keep up with my PhD progress. I benefit a lot from going to the gym and sweat it all out, and from my choir practices. Sometimes I feel guilty about taking time for myself, while I could be reading another paper, but I've started to understand that for the quality of the hours I spend in my office, it is important to relax and get the most out of those hours.

10. Don't get frustrated

Whenever you do start drifting off, or can't concentrate, don't blame yourself (provided that you did an effort to focus). I've had a week with a lot of tension because of the situation with my housemates, and I got all upset because I wasn't making progress on my literature review. It only made it worse. I've decided to let the pressure loose for a while, and that helped me relax, take a deep breath, and get ready to concentrate again.

What are your ways to find a better focus? Please share them with me, I'm still trying out how to concentrate better...

The possible cause for concentration problems

Yesterday afternoon I had difficulties concentrating. Instead of being mad at myself and disappointed, I've decided to try to look for the possible causes of yesterday's reading failure (while my back-up is running and Scopus seems to be down).

So I've been sitting here and staring at the screen and contemplating all possible reasons why yesterday turned out the way it did, and, more importantly, what I could do about that.

1. I wasn't really reading exciting new material.
In fact, I was reading a PhD thesis. The material of this thesis was published in journal papers in the subsequent years, and I've had already read all these papers. All I had to do is to go and search for some more details in the thesis, which was heavy on concentration-intensity.

2. Reading an entire day is hard on me
I know this, but somehow I fail to plan accordingly. Reading an entire day gives me the vast amount of time of "an entire day" and somehow puts me off. I work much better when I divide the morning into reading and the afternoon into lab preparation.

3. Lack of breaks
Yesterday, after lunch, I didn't see any person nor talked to anyone nor had a break with the others. Bad idea, as simple as that.

4. My body
I was feeling painful and unfit yesterday. I did go to the gym in the evening, but my muscles (if any) were not collaborating at all.

The lesson I've learned from this is that I mainly should plan better and divide my time into smaller chunks so I can get a little more variation in my day.