Focus at Work: Essential Tips for Staying on Task
Modern life means we are surrounded by distractions: from smartphone notifications and multiple social media streams, to a surplus of unnecessary commitments and a never-ending to-do list. There is always something we should be busy with, and so many distractions pulling our focus from the task in front of us.
This conundrum is made even more challenging when we face it in an open office setting. Spontaneous interactions with colleagues, ringing phones, loud conversations, people moving about, or doors constantly opening and closing can all contribute to more distractions and less productivity.
Here are a handful of strategies to consider if you are exploring how to stay focused in an office without coming off as rude or antisocial to your colleagues.
Benefits of Learning How to Stay Focused in an Office
As with anything that requires effort, the benefits of exploring how to focus better at work serve as an excellent incentive. Some reasons to put a little more energy into your concentration levels in the office include:
Getting More Done in Less Time
Distracted workers are less productive, sometimes losing over two hours a day to interruptions. That could mean more than 10 unproductive hours per week. Simply reducing work hours can be motivating when considering how to focus better at work.
Building Momentum
Uninterrupted time spent on projects is the key to completing them efficiently – or at all. 45 minutes of undisturbed focus is likely to produce more work than 45 minutes of total work time broken up by indulging distractions whenever they crop up. Uninterrupted work could also mean putting smaller, less important daily tasks aside to pursue a higher priority one with more important outcomes.
Reducing Stress and Promoting Better Work/Life Balance
Working less productively means more hours spent on work than is necessary. This may result in work bleeding into your private life, with you taking work home or staying up late to complete tasks. When you finish the work you aimed to complete in the day, you are less likely to feel guilty about clocking off and reduce stress by promoting better work/life balance.
Tips for How to Stay Focused in an Office
Put Aside Time for Your Colleagues
While fellow workers may be one of your biggest distractors, there is also merit to having company in the office. Getting to know your colleagues and interacting regularly provides opportunities for connection, collaboration, humor and support. Mentally block out time each day to catch up and interact with other staff members. This will help you set more realistic deadlines and feel less stressed or rushed for time if a colleague wants to catch up.
Go With the Flow
If you are establishing how to stay focused in an office, dedicate time to observing your circadian rhythms. They dictate the times of day we are most likely to be energetic, focused or drowsy. Pay attention to peaks and dips in your concentration, assigning more important tasks to those hours where you feel the most productive. Digital time trackers can help you observe time spent on the same activity during the morning versus afternoon, helping you deduce when you are at your most efficient.
Align Expectations
Sharing an understanding of office dos and don’ts can help colleagues in a communal space to work more effectively together. Perhaps all team members agree to speak in whispers when a colleague is on the phone, or there is an earbud protocol in place where wearing two earbuds means “do not disturb”, wearing one earbud means “ask before disturbing” and no earbuds in means “I’m free to talk”.
Wear Noise-Cancelling Headphones
When you are in “do not disturb” mode, noise-cancelling headphones can help to drown out distractions – whether you choose to play classical music, white noise, or whatever helps you concentrate best. As discussed above, these can also serve as a visual cue that you don’t want to be interrupted – although you should use them sparingly so as to still promote healthy social dynamics.
Move Around the Office
Even the most open-plan offices are likely to have a few secluded areas for more concentration-heavy work. If you are exploring how to stay focused in an office, ask your boss if you can keep an eye out for an open conference room, semi-private cubicles or even desks that may be free due to absenteeism. If you work in a large company, it can be helpful to move to a different floor of the building, where you presumably know fewer people and are thus less likely to be distracted. You may even request permission to leave the office temporarily to a nearby coffee shop when you are busy with particularly focus-demanding tasks. This is a smaller ask than requesting to work remotely.
Use Your Commute Wisely
Having energy to focus requires taking full advantage of your “off” time. If you have a commute to the office each day, make use of the precious alone time with a consistent “pre-work routine”. Whether it is listening to a podcast, reading a book, planning a holiday or even napping on the train, targeted, routine downtime can help to not only provide you with extra rest, but also condition you to slip into work mode once your commute is complete.
Keep an Organized Work Space
A cluttered space can create a restless mind. When exploring how to stay focused in an office, try freeing your work space from old post, unnecessary office supplies or non-urgent filing. Even if your desk is tidy, remove extra items and create a simple, even slightly boring environment. Too much visual stimulation – even if it is organized and appealing – can contribute to brain fog and lower productivity.
Adjust Your Environment
Learning how to focus better at work requires you to adapt the ergonomics of your chair and desk. Raise or lower your seat so your feet sit flat on the floor or on a foot rest. Ensure your computer screen is slightly below your eye level – computer risers can help if this isn’t the case. Adjust the back support of your chair to sit flush against your lower back (there are portable back supports that can help with this). Reducing stress is an important part of considering how to focus better at work. Plants have been shown to relieve stress in the workplace – so invest in a small houseplant to place on your desk. Try to bring in as much natural light as possible, opening shutters near you if available, or bringing your own overhead LED lamp to work to emulate natural lighting.
Just Start Working and the Brain will Catch Up
You don’t always have to start strong to get stuck into a project. Even if your mind is blank, get started on the task at hand. If, for example, you are writing an article, sit at your desk and begin writing, even if the quality is poor. Simply starting the process can be enough to kick start the brain into focus-mode, regardless of getting off to a bumpy start.
Write Down Other Thoughts and Ideas
Often, a plethora of thoughts, to-dos and ideas crop up while you’re busy with something else. Rather than allowing your brain to follow each thought, simply write all of them down on a nearby notepad. This way, you won’t worry about forgetting them later, but you’ll resist disturbing your concentration to address ideas in live time. If you’re writing up something, the same goes for editing. Rather than disrupting your focus by checking your grammar and spelling as you go, return to editing once the whole body of work is complete.
Improve Your Bedtime Routine
While this obviously doesn’t refer to in-office practices, the standard of other routines in your everyday life can influence your productivity at work. Focus and performance are dependent on sleep quality, and if your office hours are fairly rigid, you will benefit from consistent sleep patterns. If you are considering how to focus better at work, aim for more than seven hours of sleep each night, following the same pre-routine daily to queue the body for sleep.
Stay Active at the Office
If you are office-bound for the majority of the day, chances are you are stationary for hours on end. This can result in energy slumps and poor focus. Incorporate activity into an otherwise sedentary environment: consider sitting on an exercise ball for a few hours at a time; stand up and stretch every 45 minutes; take the stairs where possible; keep a mini-rebounder in your office if space allows, jumping on it between tasks (which proves more effective than a power nap); or keep a pair of dumbbells under your desk to practice bicep curls, weighted lunges or shoulder presses a few times in the day for a surge of blood circulation and concentration reboot.
Have a Focus Mantra
There are certain practices we can instill to bring the mind back to the present each time it wanders. A personal mantra designed to remind you of the task at hand can serve as a useful reset. Each time you find your focus straying, try repeating a statement in your mind, such as “It’s time to keep working on this task” or “Do what you are doing right now”. This can quickly become an effective tool to resume your concentration when working on how to stay focused in an office.
Do the Hardest Task First
Leaving the most challenging task on your to-do list for last encourages procrastination and casts a negative lens over the time leading up to it. Often the hardest part of a project is getting started, so commit to simply beginning the work, even if you don’t complete it. Getting used to knuckling down on unattractive activities is a powerful tool to teach your mind discipline and train it to push through procrastination.
Physically Remove Distractions
It takes willpower to ignore distractions such as smartphone notifications and social media. Rather than using energy to resist temptations, put them out of sight. A smartphone should be placed in a drawer or another room rather than simply set to silent, put your emails into “do not disturb” mode for chunks of time, and try app-blockers to keep you off of distracting platforms for predetermined time periods.
Plan Your Week
Having a game plan of tasks you want to complete will rope the brain’s reward system into your work day, triggering a satisfying release of dopamine after completing work. Take some time at the beginning of the week to realistically map out your responsibilities – there are apps that can help you plan your week, manage your time and knock important items off your to-do list.
If you are exploring how to stay focused in an office, there is also a range of other tools you can recruit, including food, medicine and supplements, that aren’t necessarily specific to working in a communal space. Whether you find yourself zoning out on Zoom call meetings, or working through your email inbox instead of addressing an important deadline, remember that focus is like a muscle: the more you work on exercising it, the more your focus can improve. Give the above tips a try and see if you can train your brain to stick to the task in front of you when you are office-bound.
How to Stay Focused on Your Goals
Mental focus is the ability to direct sufficient mental effort to relevant information when needed. It is important for our wellbeing as it allows us to complete relevant tasks, acquire new information, come out on top during competition, and achieve important goals.
Staying focused is often a challenge, but it can be especially difficult when there are perpetual distractions on offer. Today’s world of constant connection means diversions are never more than a few clicks away, and modern society is finding it trickier than ever to stay on task. While this may seem like little more than a nuisance with everyday tasks, how much we are able to stay focused can have larger consequences when it comes to setting and following through on our life goals.
Luckily, focus can be thought of as a mental muscle: the more effort you put in, the more it will improve. If you are wanting to explore how to stay focused on your goals, here are a few strategies that may help.
Assess Your General Focus Levels
Taking time to assess your mental focus can help you to identify whether or not your concentration levels need some improvement. If you find it easy to stay alert, you set goals and break then up into manageable chunks of work, and you take short breaks between tasks, your focus is likely to be good. If you often find yourself daydreaming, you battle to tune out distractions and you regularly lose track of your progress, your focus levels may need work.
Some contributing factors to poor focus could include being hungry, not having enough quality sleep, feeling stressed, worried or anxious, or having too many distractions in your immediate environment. If you find that you are regularly battling to stay engaged in important tasks, there may be an underlying condition contributing to your lack of focus.
Get Into the No-Distraction Zone
No matter the scale of your goals, you need to create an environment and implement daily habits that support you staying focused. Here are a few simple yet effective strategies to support your concentration efforts:
- Plan your day in advance. Many people start their morning by working through a back log of emails and figuring out which tasks are most important for the day ahead. This is a wasted opportunity to dive into important tasks with a fresh and focused mind. Make a plan for your work day the night before, and enjoy putting your brain to better use right away when you sit down to work in the morning.
- Create a morning routine that you repeat daily to prime your focus. This could include simple tasks such as making the bed, stretching and preparing coffee, or following a 10-minute meditation and working out.
- Start the day off with a healthy breakfast of “brain foods”, including a balance of lean proteins, complex carbohydrates and healthy fats. Fresh fruit, veggies, nuts and seeds make great snacks between meals. Don’t forget to stay hydrated as well.
- Ensure you have a quiet area to conduct your work undisturbed. Keep the door to this area closed if possible, and ask loved ones not to disturb you for a certain period of time. If you are in an office environment, try wearing noise-cancelling headphones that not only reduce sound, but also let colleagues know you would not like to be disturbed.
- Keep your work space and immediate environment uncluttered and as plain as possible.
- Play calm or ambient instrumental music or white noise that you don’t notice much as you work.
- Close out of programs or apps on your computer that aren’t essential, and turn off push notifications on your phone. You can block-check emails and important notifications at dedicated times throughout the day between completing tasks.
- Consider putting a lock on social media. These apps are designed to pull our focus and encourage perpetual browsing. There are a handful of social media blocking apps that keep you locked out for certain lengths of time, helping you stick to the task at hand without the promise of distraction at your fingertips.
Find Out What Motivates You
When considering how to stay focused on your goals, it is helpful to understand the motivators that are most effective for your personality.
Incentive-based motivation involves assigning yourself rewards after reaching certain milestones. E.g. treating yourself to a weekend away after a good month of sales.
Motivation based on achievement would include the possibility of achieving something as a result of your work. E.g. choosing work roles that offer promotions and the opportunity to climb a career ladder.
While fear-based motivation has negative connotations, it can prove effective in helping you to stay on task. E.g. double checking your work due to fear of failure in a new job role. It should not, however, be used as a long-term strategy, as it can lead to unhealthy levels of stress.
Experimenting with different types of motivators can help you to develop an internal drive that keeps you on track towards your goals.
Determine Your “Why”
Learning how to stay focused on your goals involves determining your “why” – why certain projects, tasks, hobbies or habits are important to you – and help to fulfil a bigger picture of what you want for your life.
Aligning your life goals with your core values allows you to experience greater feelings of happiness and fulfilment when you achieve them. Ensuring that your daily responsibilities are connected to your greater purpose therefore provides a powerful internal motivation that is stronger than simply working for a pay check: it is easier to keep working on a project when you are regularly reminded of how it will benefit you in the bigger picture.
Write Down Your Goals
When considering how to stay focused on your goals, it is helpful to have them written down. Not only does this supply you with a visual reminder of your goals that you can regularly revert back to, but it also allows you to formulate a written action plan of how to achieve them.
Setting SMART goals is widely renowned as an effective game plan when exploring how to stay focused on your goals.
SMART goals are:
Specific: Considering your goal in quantifiable or targeted ways will help shine a spotlight on exactly what you want to accomplish. E.g. “I want to get better at running” could be improved to “I’d like to complete a half marathon”.
Measurable: Applying methods that allow you to measure your progress helps to motivate you and keep you accountable.
Achievable: It is important to set realistic goals that you have the resources and time to work towards. E.g. perhaps “I’d like to earn six figures” is not likely in your career trajectory, but “I want to double my salary in two years” is within reach.
Relevant: While you don’t necessarily have to rule out left-field goals (e.g. learning how to play an instrument if you don’t think of yourself as musical), it helps to keep goals aligned with your values, dreams and ambitions to guarantee motivation and fulfilment.
Time-based: Goals that are time-based have specific deadlines. These can be short-term or long-term, and should have realistic milestones that you can adjust as needed.
The next point outlines this in more detail, explaining how to stay focused on your goals by managing your time.
Create a Time-Specific Plan
Creating a to-do list is only the first step in keeping you on track. Time management is a valuable skill that can bolster efficiency. Here are a number of time-relevant strategies to help get you closer to your goals:
- Do a time audit. Identifying how many hours you spend working, commuting, doing housework or enjoying leisure activities will help you realistically map out how much time you have available to focus on your goals, as well as pinpoint areas you could improve upon. E.g. reducing time spent scrolling through social media while working on a deadline, or pushing dinner back by 30 minutes each evening if you find yourself unproductive after eating.
- Scheduling your time is one way of guaranteeing that you put appropriate effort into working towards your goal. Blocking out patches of time daily, weekly or monthly to dedicate to specific tasks could help you to better prioritize working on specific goals.
- Then, consider setting milestones to identify smaller goals that set you on a trajectory towards a larger achievement. These help you stay focused by giving you bite-sized, realistic targets to work on, and provide regular opportunities for feelings of accomplishment that keep you motivated to continue moving forward.
- Identify the tasks on your to-do list each day that are the most important to make progress towards your goal. Making it a priority to get these tasks out of the way will help you keep your focus and ensure you make daily progress towards your chosen outcome.
Evaluate Your Progress
Periodically reviewing progress made towards your goals offers benefits that are two-fold: it supplies you with a sense of achievement for the tasks you’ve completed so far, reinforcing productive behavior; plus, taking the time to check for weak spots or identify successful strategies helps you to modify your game plan as needed.
Stick With Tasks to Completion
It may sound obvious, but finishing tasks is crucial for working towards your goals. Having a clear idea on what the objective of each task is and what it entails will ensure you keep working towards it. Celebrating every task completion with a reward of some sort, however small, will also provide positive reinforcement to continue working. It also assists with time management, by drawing to your attention the length of time each task takes to complete.
Try a Goal-Tracking App
Technology can help you stay on top of your goals by organizing and automating your workload. Goal-tracking apps can break down ambitious goals into reasonably sized tasks, helping you to methodically work through your to-do list. These types of apps also serve as excellent motivators, reminding you daily about the goals you want to achieve.
Review Your Goals Daily
Perhaps most important of all when exploring how to stay focused on your goals is to ensure you are still passionate about the targets you have set. Regular check-ins will keep you committed to progress, as well as create a habit of putting your goals at the forefront of your mind each day. This helps you prioritize tasks that are aligned with your goals, resist distractions, and keep you alert to relevant opportunities that may further your progress.
Share Your Commitment to Your Goals
Sharing your goals and intentions with others can have a positive effect on your productivity. Telling others what you hope to achieve helps keep you accountable, plus it helps you find and align with others who are chasing similar outcomes. Surrounding yourself with those who motivate or positively influence you can have a supportive effect when considering how to stay focused on your goals.
Get a Mentor (or Many)
With the above in mind, it is important to remember that a support system is essential for bringing your dreams to life. And as much as family, friends and like-minded individuals can bolster your progress and keep you accountable, you will also benefit from the input of mentors or those with advanced skills. Seek out individuals, companies or coaches that offer superior insight or resources to contribute towards your progress.
Visualize the Results
Another key motivator for how to stay focused on your goals is to visualize the outcome. Actively imagining how it will feel to reach your goal – such as how it will benefit you, the level of pride and accomplishment you’ll experience, and the reinforcement of confidence it will give you in your own abilities. Thinking about this outcome serves as ongoing encouragement to keep working, particularly in the face of obstacles or setbacks.
Make it a Mantra
Putting words to your desires serves as a powerful way to hone your focus and prioritize goal-relevant tasks. It will help to add meaning to your actions – giving the task at hand more philosophical clout. It can also help make your goal sound more real and attainable. e.g. “I am going to complete this task and get one day closer to the life of my dreams”. Speaking your goals or mantras aloud is also thought to positively impact your physiology, taking the idea of a goal and bringing it closer to reality. It also acts as a powerful reset if you find your focus waning.
Distractions can range from irritating to dangerous when it comes to following through on important tasks. Taking control of how to stay focused on your goals can have a profound impact on your productivity, happiness and long-term progress. Start small by choosing just a few of the tips discussed above to try out. Making consistent, incremental changes to hone in on your concentration will help you build healthier daily habits that become second-nature over time. In this way, you can start to take more control over your focus and therefore your output, giving more attention to the things that matter and getting closer towards realizing your goals.
Food to Help Focus: Unlock the Power of These Brain-Boosting Foods
The ability to focus plays a crucial role in our lives, both day-to-day and long-term. It is critical for taking in new information, learning new things, executing daily tasks and achieving goals. How well we can concentrate can influence our levels of success, and focus levels can, unfortunately, dwindle as we get older.
Several factors can affect concentration, such as brain training, stress management, environmental elements and sleep. What we put on our fork can also have a significant influence on our ability to focus.
If you want to explore different types of food to help focus, here are many nutritional strategies and specific foods that improve memory and concentration.
Nutrition Strategies
Follow a Balanced Diet
Food is fuel for the brain and body, and a diet lacking essential vitamins, minerals, macros and nutrients can hinder your ability to focus. Following a general healthy nutritional plan improves all cognitive processes in the body, including concentration.
When seeking out food to help focus better, try to take in a balance of complex carbohydrates such as brown rice or sweet potatoes, protein sources such as lean, unprocessed meats, eggs or soya, and healthy fats such as avocadoes, nuts and seeds. Aim for an abundance of fruits and vegetables, including a rainbow of different colored ingredients as well as a wealth of leafy greens such as kale and spinach.
It is not only different foods that improve memory and concentration, but water as well; it is crucial to drink plenty of water throughout the day. You can also reduce certain types of food to help focus. Limit your intake of processed foods, refined sugar, empty calories (foods with low nutritional value) and trans fats.
Don’t Skip Breakfast
Studies have found that eating breakfast may help improve attention and short-term memory, with those skipping breakfast not performing as well on academic tests as those who didn’t. In particular, high-fiber whole grains, dairy and fruits tend to garner more positive results as types of food help focus, while high-calorie meals appear to hinder concentration.
Try Smaller Meals More Often
Blood sugar plays an important role in the body as a whole, specifically in concentration. When blood sugar levels are too low, there isn’t adequate energy for brain function, often resulting in poor attention and cognitive function.
Eating smaller meals more frequently helps maintain balanced blood sugar levels that don’t spike or drop too often. Lower GI foods (those that have little effect on the body’s blood sugar, such as leafy greens, high fiber foods and healthy proteins) also help to stabilize blood sugar between meals and avoid sugar crashes.
Specialty Foods
Caffeine
Well-touted for its abilities to provide a mental boost, caffeine is one of the most frequently utilized tools when seeking out food to help focus. It is found in coffee, energy drinks, certain teas, chocolate and some medication, and has been shown to increase alertness, elevate mood and sharpen concentration.
Fatty Fish
Many sources of fish are high in omega-3 fatty acids – key nutrients and major building blocks for the brain. Diets inclusive of fish such as salmon, trout, sardines and low-mercury tuna are linked to improved memory, cognitive function and learning ability, particularly as we age, making them an ideal source of food to help focus.
Blueberries
Blueberries and other deeply colored berries contain plant compounds that offer anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. These nutrients serve as helpful food to help focus by protecting the brain against ageing and neurodegenerative diseases. Some of the antioxidants in blueberries specifically have been found to accumulate in the brain, helping to improve the communication between brain cells.
Dark Chocolate
Part of the focusing power behind dark chocolate and cocoa is the caffeine content, boosting their status as foods that improve memory and concentration. But these foods also offer rich supplies of flavonoids and antioxidants. These offer more than the temporary effects of caffeine by enhancing overall health and therefore brain function long-term.
Turmeric
Curcumin is the active ingredient in turmeric. It has been shown to directly enter the brain (skipping the bloodstream) and potentially help new brain cells grow, boost memory and delay age-related mental decline that affects concentration.
Broccoli
This powerhouse food to help focus contains a variety of compounds with powerful anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. One of these is vitamin K, which has been linked with better cognitive performance and improved memory.
Walnuts
Coincidentally resembling a brain shape, walnuts are most well-known for their brain-boosting benefits. In addition to the antioxidants, healthy fat, fiber, protein and vitamin E that many nuts contain, walnuts also supply omega-3 fatty acids, recognized for their ability to support the brain’s function, including concentration.
Green Tea
Green tea is another healthy source of caffeine, although it has other beneficial ingredients that make it an ideal food to help focus. L-theanine in particular helps mitigate the anxiety-inducing effects of caffeine, supporting a mind state that is both attentive and relaxed – ideal for concentration. Studies conclude that green tea may improve alertness, memory, performance and focus.
Pumpkin Seeds
Pumpkin seeds contain many micronutrients that support brain function, including copper, iron, magnesium and higher levels of zinc than most other seeds. Magnesium helps reduce mental stress while zinc is vital for enhancing the memory and thinking skills that help us focus.
A Note on Sugar
While the many health pitfalls of excess sugar are accurately documented, it is worth noting that sugar can be considered a useful food to help focus as it is still the brain’s preferred source of fuel. This source, however, is glucose, not refined sugar. The body processes glucose from the sugars and carbohydrates in the diet, and receives a spike in energy levels that bolsters mental alertness. This temporary boost in focus may prove helpful when limited bursts of concentration are required, but the effects are short-lived, and followed by a drop in sugar levels that can result in tiredness and distractibility.
If you need a quick, short boost in your attention, skip refined sugar and try whole fruits, which include the fiber, vitamins and minerals to make them a more wholesome food to help focus.
While many approaches can help enhance mental performance, you can effectively support your brain health and boost your focus, alertness, memory and mood by adopting certain nutritional strategies. You can also include more of these specific foods that improve memory and concentration in your diet as part of a targeted strategy to increase focus.
How to Focus Better: 19 Activities for Improved Concentration
One of the most prevalent complaints of modern lifestyles is a lack of concentration and focus in adults. As the world we live in grows more complex, so do our work and home life demands, and it has arguably never been more important to boost mind power. Yet, ironically, levels of concentration are at an all-time low. Individuals are concerned more than ever with how to focus better.
Concentration refers to the control of attention: the mental effort directed towards a certain task or activity. In addition to this, it refers to the exclusion of attention to any other subject matter apart from the task at hand.
One’s ability to concentrate may vary person to person for a number of reasons, such as age, lack of sleep or stress levels, or simply the ability to tune out distractions. Cognitive issues such as head injuries or concussions, as well as a handful of mental health conditions can also affect mind power and contribute to impaired concentration.
If you are wondering how to focus better, here are a number of strategies to consider.
Follow Your Focus Better
We all have a time of day where productivity is at its highest – and that time is different for everyone. You may find yourself reading the same passage of a book a few times over, or battling to concentrate during a morning meeting. If you want to understand how to focus better, start by making a mental note of concentration peaks and dips during the day, then try to structure tasks or activities that require focus around them.
Create a Focus-Friendly Environment
The ability to focus for extended lengths of time requires a supportive environment. While not all work environments are within our control, make adjustments where possible when addressing how to improve concentration and focus. Make sure your seat is comfortable, your back has ergonomic support to avoid slouching, your desk is at the right height and the lighting is appropriate to keep your eyes from straining. If possible, control the temperature to be moderately cool, and have water nearby so you don’t need to get up often. Continually working from the same spot can also be an effective strategy on how to focus better – conditioning your brain to switch into concentration gear whenever you return to that space.
Be Sensitive to Sound
Reduce distracting or particularly loud noises as best you can. Consider playing muted instrumental music or even ambient nature sounds (there is an abundance of playlists on platforms such as YouTube) to drown out background noise and help create a consistent environment that your mind associates with concentration. When considering how to improve concentration and focus, the general rule of thumb is to not play music that you particularly like or dislike, as you may find yourself tuning into the song rather than the task at hand.
Take a Tech Break
Notifications on our many electronic devices contribute to a lack of concentration and focus in adults, thanks to the sporadic and ongoing distractions they create. Consider putting your smartphone into airplane mode, or turning off email and app notifications while you are attempting to focus on a particular task. The same goes for your laptop or monitor: if you are implementing strategies on how to focus better, work offline to prevent on-screen notifications from pulling your attention. To better improve these effects, consider placing devices such as your smartphone out of eyesight while they are not needed.
Set a Social Media Limit
Along with tech restrictions, limiting your social media use can go a long way when addressing how to improve concentration and focus. The reward mechanism in the brain is activated when we engage with social media, which encourages us to use it more often. Smart phones allow you to set limits on your social media interaction, which can be helpful in restricting your use, particularly in the work day. Designating time to look through social media versus having access to it at any time can also help you to stay on task if you are exploring how to focus better.
Make a To-Do List
Not having a clear idea on what needs to be done next can contribute to a lack of concentration and focus in adults. Write down a to-do list of what you would like to achieve in the day, preferably the night before. Creating a reasonable to-do list not only helps you to prioritize what tasks need to be completed first, it can also help you keep track of incomplete errands that are weighing on your mind. Prioritizing helps relieve the mind of distracting anxiety, while accomplishing small tasks daily can wire the brain for success.
Feed Your Brain
It comes as no surprise that the fuel you put into your body influences the output. If you are exploring how to improve concentration and focus through diet, boost mind power by including more of the following foods into your daily nutrition: fatty fish (such as salmon and trout), eggs, berries and dark leafy greens, along with plenty of water – even mild dehydration can make it harder to focus or remember information. Breakfast meals that are low in sugar and high in protein and fiber will also sustain your energy levels throughout the day: examples include oats, yoghurt and fruit or whole-grain toast with eggs.
Supplement with Micronutrients
Micronutrients – vitamins, minerals and antioxidants – are an essential component of wellbeing and cognitive function, yet even the healthiest of diets don’t always manage to include the diversity of nutrients needed for excellent health. Supplementation helps us to pick up the nutritional slack by supplying essential micronutrients that we would battle to take in through food alone. Specific micronutrients thought to support cognitive function include omega-3s, resveratrol, ginkgo biloba and B vitamins.
Get Moving
Physical activity should form part of any strategy on how to focus better. Improved concentration is among the extensive benefits of exercising regularly. Exercise can enhance both attention and concentration within as little as four weeks, thanks to its ability to boost the brain’s dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin levels. Memory loss that occurs with age-related brain atrophy may also be stopped or even reversed after a year of moderate physical activity. In particular, exercising before or between periods of focus has proven to be the most beneficial for concentration.
Train Your Brain
Playing certain games can support better concentration by sharpening your focus. These could include Sudokus, crossword puzzles, chess, word searches, jigsaw puzzles and memory games. These will also not only improve concentration, but working and short-term memory as well, along with processing and problem-solving skills. These types of games have a positive effect on children who are struggling with concentration, and are particularly important for older adults, since concentration and memory tend to decline with age.
Play Video Games
While children and adults are discouraged from overuse of video games, a limited time spent playing digital action games may prove helpful in certain levels of concentration. Individuals may be able to track multiple objects at the same time, switch tasks more effectively and even improve reading speeds.
Try a Concentration Workout
In line with using games to increase concentration, there are specific activities you can undertake if you want to learn how to focus better. The idea is to fully immerse yourself in a specific activity for a set period of time to encourage the ability to concentrate. Relevant activities could include spending a few minutes throwing a ball back and forth between you and another person, drawing or doodling for a few minutes, or reading a short story. Afterwards, reflect on how often you lost focus and needed to reassign your attention to the task at hand.
Get Quality Sleep
If you find yourself choosing between extra time focusing on a task or activity and a good night’s sleep, go with the latter. It may seem counterproductive, but when you’re well rested your performance improves. The occasional late night won’t have any major effects on your concentration, but regularly falling short on sleep will negatively affect your concentration (as well as your mood, emotions and general cognitive abilities).
Quality of sleep is as important as quantity when considering how to focus better; try stick to a sleep routine to cue your body for bed, keep the room cool and aim for a consistent bedtime.
Our electronic devices are amongst the biggest culprits when it comes to disrupting sleep. They usually emit blue light that stimulates the eyes much like daylight, preventing the secretion of the sleep hormone, melatonin. Use a filter or glasses that block blue light to minimize exposure, or try avoid electronic devices at least an hour before bed. Also avoid exercising too late in the day, which can keep the metabolism fired up and resistant to sleep.
Practice Mindfulness and Meditation
Mindfulness and meditation helps us rewire the brain to find better, more efficient ways to handle tasks – and therefore improve concentration. Practicing mindfulness includes deep breathing, meditation to improve focus, doing yoga or taking time to fully concentrate your attention on one item as you observe and savor it – this could be an object, a piece of music or art or even your next meal.
Meditating in particular helps the whole body to relax and the brain to become calmer; the focus on breath encourages resistance to mental distractions. With practice, it is possible to use the breath to bring the attention back to the task at hand, encouraging concentration even when interrupted.
Spend Time in Nature
If you are exploring how to improve concentration and focus naturally, consider spending more time outdoors. Getting outside each day, even for a brief amount of time, is thought to supply focus-boosting benefits, as well as generally support your physical and mental wellbeing. This could include a short walk through a park, sitting in your garden, or spending a few minutes in the sunshine with your eyes closed.
If you are unable to get outside, including plants in your working spaces may help boost mind power and productivity too. This also contributes to air quality and workplace satisfaction, which may indirectly improve your focus.
Don’t Multitask
While you may feel productive bouncing between tasks, the opposite is usually true. The brain is not designed to cope with doing more than one thing at a time, and trying to juggle activities simultaneously may mean you perform worse on each task overall.
Multitasking is not the same, however, as task switching, which may prove to be helpful when considering how to focus better. If you are stuck on a particular activity and your brain needs something fresh to focus on, switching tasks may help revive your mind power and promote you staying productive for longer.
Time blocking may also help you achieve working on a single task before moving on to the next one. Assigning time to certain activities allows you the mental space to ignore distractions, knowing that time has been allotted to address those at a later stage. Making a rule to complete any task that comes to mind immediately, provided it takes less than five minutes, is another simple strategy for how to focus better and help stop small distractions piling up.
Take a Time Out
If you are considering how to focus better on a lengthier task, you may benefit from taking breaks more often. This has less to do with improving your concentration and more to do with the renewal of focus. Given that concentration spans are short, it may serve you better to take short breaks between 15-minute slots of intense focus than to push through for a consecutive 30 minutes.
Address Your Mental Health
While there are a wealth of external stimuli that may disrupt concentration, there may be internal factors affecting your mind power too. If you are exploring how to increase concentration and focus but finding little success, you may need to turn inwards.
Underlying mental or physical health conditions can contribute to a lack of focus, such as ADHD, which is characterized by a persistent pattern of hyperactivity, inattention and impulsivity. Untreated mental health conditions such as depression or anxiety typically present with emotional symptoms, but can indirectly affect concentration and memory as well. Certain medications and their side-effects may contribute to impaired cognitive function, and alcohol consumption can influence your ability to think clearly.
Support Your Eyes
Sometimes farsightedness or other vision problems may contribute to concentration issues. Notice if you are struggling to focus when using certain visual stimuli and consider having your eyes checked if you recognize ongoing issues. Resting your eyes during periods of intense concentration is a helpful strategy when considering how to focus better. Just as other muscles in the body can become achy and stiff, your eyes can become tired when only focusing on one object. Give them a break by using the popular 20-20-20 rule: staring at an object 20 feet away for a total of 20 seconds, every 20 minutes. If you are looking for a 100% natural and drug-free strategy to enhance concentration and focus, explore Super Patch’s Flow Patch. The Flow Patch recruits vibrotactile technology, sending a unique neural signal to the brain to help improve your concentration, memory and endurance.