Realize that it is a skill that can be trained. The current environment does encourages short attention spans. Working on your attention span needs to be deliberately. First understand your current ability. What is the longest show you can watch without feeling the need to engage in a different activity? How many pages you can read in a book before becoming distracted?
Work on engaging in those activities a little bit longer then you currently can, and slowly increase the duration. Use a timer to set a limit. This would need to be done with regularity and focus.
I've tried to build my attention span back up. I measure this by how long I can read a book without the reflexive urge to look away or switch to something on my phone.
What I find helpful:
1. Try not to multitask. Do not look at your phone while watching a show. Do not listen to a podcast while working. I tend to use podcasts as a way to get myself to do something else I don't enjoy, but I'm either distracted from work or tuning the podcast out so I stopped.
2. Let your mind think thoughts on its own without input. Take breaks that don't involve any media at all.
3. Dedicate time to reading longer things. Set a timer and say "today I'm going to read this book for 15 minutes without a break". Or 20 minutes. Or an hour. If you're already at an hour you probably aren't in the audience for this article anyway.
4. Use the pomodoro method while working.
I'm sure some people will read this list with a sense of derision, but perhaps others will relate. Attention span is like a muscle that's been atrophied to a different extent in different people.
If you can, try reading The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. It's not perfect, but it will get you thinking about how and why your attention span got to be the way it is. It will also give you hope, because you'll realize that it's totally within your power to change it (and rather quickly, too).
Your message started with "What wouldn't I give to have such attention span!", and it turns out that you don't need to give all that much. Getting started is difficult, though.
If you do start down this path, consider reading Deep Work by Cal Newport to give you some ideas about how you can use the focus and concentration abilities you're building. Again, it's not perfect, but if you take the book as a list of suggestions rather than a strict prescription of what you should do, you'll probably find that you can adapt its lessons to make your life better.
Programming and the internet can also lead to short attention spans. Reading - for long periods of time especially - is so healing because teaches a more patient, longer attention span to your brain. Meditation can help, too. It takes practice and gradual build up to develop this.
Yes but you're missing the rest of my reply: There is no try, only do.
That means, you gain a longer attention span by making yourself have a longer attention span. It's a struggle. It's supposed to be a struggle. If it had a quick and easy fix you wouldn't be needing our advice in the first place. You're probably a master of quick and easy fixes -- that's what people with short attention spans collect.
Encouraging the world to adapt to you by giving you short, easy quips about what you need to do is not helping anything -- it's just making it worse. You'll pick up the several dozen little shiny quotes and think about them for a few minutes and tomorrow be on to something else.
You want a long attention span? Go do something that requires a long attention span. I mean do it -- don't talk about it, don't blog about it -- just shut the hell up and go do it. When you are done, you will have a longer attention span.
Please forgive me if I sound coarse: this post reminded me of an alcoholic in a bar drinking to his sobriety. It just doesn't add up (at least to me)
Undivided attention is a skill, and it can be developed.
Make it a habit to read literature, something you actually enjoy, for an hour at a time, each day. In six weeks you will have trained yourself to stay focused for extended periods of time.
Focus, like many skills, can be improved, but takes practice and training to build up longer focus times. The below is mostly based on ideas from the Pomodoro Technique®[1]
To start, do a task without distractions for your current ability - 15 minutes. Set a timer and stay on task until time runs out.
Take a short break - 5 minutes, maybe 10 at most.
Repeat the above 2-3 times, then take a longer break, something around 25-30 minutes. If you feel OK, do another 2-3 rounds and then go do something less taxing that doesn't take deep focus.
If you have truly focused for the time, you'll know it. Just starting out, a couple of hours of work will definitely sap your energy.
Gradually increase you focus works times by 5 minutes. If you can get to 25 minutes without feeling the need to do something else, that's great. If you can do the above cycles with your full attention for a total of four hours, you're doing well. Not a lot of people can do really intense, focused work for more than four hours a day. The rest of your work day, do low-intensity things like answering emails, cleaning up your work area (both physical and virtual), and such.
There's an entire book devoted to this that I can recommend: Deep Work
Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport.
I think this is the most important thing listed - nutrition, exercise, avoiding social media will allow you to get to an increased attention span, but won't take you there, and meditation will.
The closest meditation exercise I've found that is basically a workout for your attention span is to sit still somewhere quiet and count your breaths, in and out. Breathe in 1, breathe out 2, breathe in 3, etc. It may help to visualize the number as well. Every time you catch your mind wandering, you gently bring it back and begin with the last number you remember. After a cycles of this, you'll find you're able to count for longer without becoming distracted. Do this regularly and see if your attention span on other tasks is increased as well.
This is probably a very common problem these days. One thing you could try is to use a timer and start with smaller goals, like reading for 20 minutes straight. Gradually increase it to an hour or so, and decrease the breaks.
I find that when doing really boring work, just having a timer present makes me focus. Obviously I'm not using a timer now...
The book “The Distracted Mind” is a pretty good overview of the science behind this. In terms of how to alleviate distraction, they recommend taking restorative breaks like walking in nature, standing up, making tea, etc. Even looking at pictures of nature can be effective. If you can substitute these breaks for the constant need to flip over to some other novel stimulus, over time you can build up your attention span. (Also, for me, I find meditation can really help build your focus over time. You can start with concentrating fully on your breathing for ten breaths, and work up gradually from there. Even a few very “mindful” breaths can be very effective.)
I had an extended sabbatical during the lockdown where I made an effort to rekindle my reading habit - one thing I noticed about my attention was that it came in waves. Within a minute or two of really sitting down with a book, my attention would wander; if I ignored it and attended to the book, I was fine. Fifteen or so minutes later, my brain again started wandering; getting past this mark gave me another 45 minutes to an hour of focused reading. In previous years at work, I'd find that if I didn't succumb to distraction at that 45-60min mark, I could usually get another hour and a half or two hours of serious focused work in.
I had a solid year of sabbatical in which I was able to really get to know my attention span - it's much harder to maintain and cultivate now that I'm working again, but learning those patterns has given me a lot more confidence in my ability to exercise my attention span when needed.
I actually have short span of focus as well. My advice is to listen to music while you are working, any kind of music will do, especially one that boost your boost.
The best advice I can come up with is that it’s something that can be actively trained, and that it doesn’t come suddenly. Set up a temporal and physical space for concentration, and commit to leaving it if you feel the need to be distracted. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but the important thing is to associate that space with concentration at a visceral level. You’ll naturally start extending the duration you spend there as you get used to it.
Start mono-tasking. Focus on one thing at time and work on growing the amount of time you can keep that focus.
I've been doing this and it has been quite helpful. Some good mono-tasking activities:
- Read books. Books require you to focus for an extended period of time on the same subject. It doesn't matter fiction or non-fiction. Just find a book you enjoy and finish it. If you don't enjoy the book at 50 pages, try a new book.
- Actively listen during meetings. Close all your other tabs and applications and pay attention during a video call. Take notes with pencil and paper to keep your hands busy and keep the focus up.
- Walk. Just take a walk. Don't listen to a podcast or music, just walk and let your mind rest. You might even apply some meditation techniques and try to pay attention to your body. Can you feel your breathe or heart rate?
If you can only focus for 15m at a time, then work on increasing that naturally.
Make yourself a timer app that will increase your work time by N every day before sounding an alarm, then browse/do whatever. When you come back you restart it and do another block.
As other people said, it's the possibility of interruptions that break your concentration. I'm working in game dev (Unity specifically), and it's really good at breaking your concentration. It'll take a long time to compile, randomly crash or take time importing things etc, which then makes you want to not sit there and watch it.
Ohh Boy, I feel relate to your explanation a lot. After heavy gaming and diagnosed with ADHD. I started to think a lot about how we focus how our attention span various to the content. And it became obvious that we're losing long focus ability which is really hard to improve.
For that there's really nice book called Stillness is the Key from Ryan Holiday and Chop wood and Carry Water they're perfect examples to teach how precious focus and stillness is.
Work on engaging in those activities a little bit longer then you currently can, and slowly increase the duration. Use a timer to set a limit. This would need to be done with regularity and focus.
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