Keep a scribble pad nearby

Anytime a thought pops into your head of something you need to do later whilst you’re working (which will happen a lot at first) jot it down and go straight back to what you were doing. It’s key to train yourself not to let every little distraction take you away from the task or use it as an excuse to stop.

Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress carries this exact notebook everywhere he goes

If there’s something in the middle of your work that you need to check or research, just put a note by it. When you get to the end of the 25-minute session, you can start the other tasks you thought of, or schedule them for later.

If your mind wanders off to other thoughts or daydreams, don’t stress about it. Just go calmly back to where you were before your mind drifted and carry on. It’s amazing how fast you’ll be able to overcome those mental drifts when you’ve been doing this for a while.

Know that although your mind will drift off frequently at the beginning, the continual ‘coming back’ that you practice will help your mind to get accustomed to the longer periods of concentration. After a while, it will start to happen less – and it will bother you less when it does.

Training your mind and your attention

One thing to stress is to remember not to multi-task, but to focus on a single subject or activity to improve your concentration. Trying to beat your timings means your productivity goes up too.

Like starting to train or exercise your body, with practice you’ll get used to working in 25-minute bursts, and be ready to start very quickly and maintain hyper-focus during that period.

If a particular task always seems to take an unnecessarily long time, you’ll be able to see that much better when working in this way. Maybe you need to break the task into smaller chunks or concentrate on fewer elements of it at once.

If you’re struggling with motivation or procrastination, then try to keep an idea of the bigger picture. Most of the time we have to do something we aren’t crazy about, it’s in order to achieve another goal: like schoolwork or budgeting. Keep reminding yourself of how the task will let you do something else you really want to.

If you want to improve your focus and concentration longer-term, you could also consider taking up meditation which will help to eliminate distractions, reduce stress and improve your sleep and relaxation as well. There are online courses and even apps if you can’t make it to a local class.

Although our lives are busier than ever, the real secret to getting more things done is actually to stop multitasking. Although it sounds counter-intuitive, if you reduce the number of things you’re doing at once, you can achieve so much more in terms of productivity.

Combine all these tactics together by prepping well and improving your attention in short manageable bursts, and you’ll soon be able to sit down at a minute’s notice and be hyper-focused on a single task.

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Do you think multitasking is a myth? Do you struggle to find focus and concentrate the way I did? Let me know in the comments!

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