Concentration

[swan_tower]

I've lost my ability to concentrate.

I think a lot of us have. We live with countless electronic devices that are constantly demanding our attention, beeping alerts and notifications and even without that there's a little niggling part of our minds that wonders if we have any new email or anybody has posted something to that forum or surely we ought to take a look at Twitter, don't pay attention to that thing, pay attention to me. But only in bite-size doses, because there are a hundred other things you could be checking and probably should.

Even without that, we've got a society that encourages multi-tasking -- despite the mounting pile of evidence that it isn't good. Multi-tasking does not, contrary to what we've been told, make us more productive. It makes us less so, because we're devoting less of our attention to each thing, and we pay a cognitive cost every time we switch our focus. And part of that cognitive cost is that not switching gets harder, even as it drains us.

(True fact: just now, my phone rang a soft little alert. It's taking effort not to look and see what that was for.)

I can tell this is taking a toll on me because I can feel it in my work. Writing is not, in its ideal conditions, something you do for five minutes here and ten minutes there. It benefits from sustained attention, from getting myself into the state psychologists refer to as "flow," where I stop thinking about the world around me and instead sink into the zone for an extended period of time. I can't get there if I'm tabbing over to look at my email every time I pause to consider my next sentence, if I'm keeping a portion of my mind attached to the discussion I'm having on a forum or whatever and breaking away to update that. It's an exaggeration to say I've lost my ability to concentrate . . . but I know it has declined, and substantially so.

That's why I'm taking steps to fix it.

My steps are twofold, at least so far. The first is to get back to meditating: I got into the habit of doing that for a while in 2015 (true fact again: I made myself just drop some square brackets there and check the year after I finished typing this post, because I needed to check my email to find out which year it was, and that threatened to distract me from this), but I fell out of it after a while, and now I'm working to make it regular practice again. Meditation, mindfulness, learning to let go of all the little dancing monkey thoughts that want my attention NOW NOW NOW -- that helps.

The other, weirdly, is to watch TV.

TV as a tool of concentration? Yes -- when you put it in the context of what I was doing before. See, I've gotten into the bad habit of only really listening to TV, while I play solitaire or sudoku or something on my tablet. The result is that I only give the show maybe half my attention.

But when I started watching the Chinese drama Nirvana in Fire, the combination of subtitles + intricate politics meant I couldn't get away with that. If I tried to focus on something else at the same time, glancing up to catch the subtitles as they skittered past, I wound up not even knowing who half the people were and what was going on. The only way to understand that show, let alone appreciate it, was to put things down and devote my full attention to the screen.

Subtitled shows are great for this, but I'm managing to extend that habit to English-language TV, as well. And you know what?

I'm enjoying it more.

And it's getting easier to leave the tablet closed.

What other tricks do you all have for encouraging yourself to pay attention to one thing at a time? What helps you keep your ability to concentrate? I know some people shut down their internet connection entirely while writing, and there are lots of programs out there which exist to block other programs so you can work, but I'm also interested in the non-technological tricks -- the things that are just about structuring your life in ways that help you focus.

Comments

[sovay]

What other tricks do you all have for encouraging yourself to pay attention to one thing at a time? What helps you keep your ability to concentrate?

I don't think of it as a trick so much as a thing I do for basic mental health and space inside my own mind, but I take walks on which I do not talk on the phone. I'll answer if some people call me, because most people use the phone with me to schedule rather than just check in or chat, but otherwise I just walk and think and look at things. And unless I'm listening to music, I'm not doing anything else when I'm reading a book, which is also good for me because it gets my eyes off a screen. I really don't like the constant demanded connectivity of our culture at this time. I need a lot of time by myself and I need it in blocks, not slivers. My job is already fragmentary enough. [edit] I also don't multitask while watching movies. I just watch movies. Then I write about them.

[swan_tower]

Yes, walking tends to be good for me: I may occasionally read while I walk, or listen to music while I walk, but mostly I just think. When I was preparing to wrap up my last RPG campaign, I went for a walk explicitly for the purpose of getting myself to think through how I was going to set it up.

[jenett]

I'm in the middle of an ongoing project to reduce notification pings - I don't get many of them on my phone anyway, but also things like filtering non-urgent, non-personal email like newsletters and news updates into folders that bypass my email inbox, so that the stuff that shows up as an unread message there is most likely of high interest.

When I want a short break, it's easy to go check it, but I'm less likely to get distracted by seeing there's something there and wondering what it is.

I'm also doing more with having separate browser windows for different things (so I can have the 'one for current research while writing' up while having anything else minimised. I'm toying with exploring more about the Mac Spaces (having different workspaces for different tasks.

[swan_tower]

I don't have a lot of notifications set up, compared to most people. My husband's phone makes noise every single time an email arrives, which would drive me mad. But I still get the silent icon popup saying there's a new message, which is distracting. I've thought about doing the filtering like you say, but I'm concerned that I'd just wind up not seeing those emails at all -- maybe I'll experiment and see how it goes.

Edited to add: the pinging I got when writing the post was from Slack, which is one of the few things I permit to make noise like that. And I only allow that because we're using Slack to coordinate a certain project, and I want to make sure I stay on top of that for the sake of the people I'm working with.

[jenett]

This is one of those things where I think it depends a lot on your setup (I'm in Gmail, via the webpage, almost all the time.)

I have it set up so that the name of the label is in bold if there's new mail for particular ones, so it's very easy to see if I have something to read, but I have to actually look at that window, not just the number in the browser tab. I have different labels for

- comment discussions (for some high-traffic conversations I track where I don't need to be right on top of them)

- incoming : for things like summaries from news sources I have subscriptions to, alerts from stores where I do want to see things in a timely way, etc.

- newsletters : longer things from people with more significant content as a rule but not urgent (so they can stay there until I take a little more time to read them)

I also keep a label for sales offers from places I shop semi-regularly. These get marked read as they come in, but I keep them so I can check if there's a current offer if I'm thinking about buying something.

[thawrecka]

I sometimes just leave my phone at home when I go for a walk.

[swan_tower]

I'm usually pretty good about not pulling it out when I'm walking. It's when I stop somewhere that I tend to check for new emails, etc, even if it's been only a few minutes since I last looked.

[spiffikins]

I'm not sure I have any suggestions to add - but I'm definitely guilty of what you've described. I will have the tv on, and will be "watching" a show - but honestly I could not tell you most of the time, what happened - as I'm ALSO surfing the web - checking facebook, writing journal entries, reading journals, clicking links, checking emails...it's hard to remember the last time I sat down and JUST watched a tv show.

For me the biggest problem at work with all the little interruptions is that if I'm supposed to be working on a task that I don't *particularly* want to do - there are ENDLESS distractions that - because they are also real and valid tasks - can keep me occupied and busy and at the end of the day, another day is done and I haven't worked on the thing I don't want to do :D

[swan_tower]

That's one of the things I like Habitica for: I put all those things on my to-do list, and then maybe I set myself a daily goal like "five tasks from my to-do list, but one of them has to be a checklist item from the task I don't want to do."

[mindstalk]

My phone is usually silent unless I'm actively expecting a call or text I want. It's silent when I sleep and I usually don't change it back. A lot of the time I've been putting it in airplane mode to conserve battery, too, so I won't even get a notification light until I check in.

I don't have Facebook in a tab all the time. My email system is old school; I get a notification when I hit a new prompt but it otherwise doesn't jump out at me. Email from people I really want to hear from gives a different notification.

Those are pretty straightforward: you can't get disrupted if you shut down the channels of disruption.

Otherwise, I dunno, I don't find distraction as big a problem. If I want to be doing something and have mental energy for it, I can do it. Reading books or long fanfic on the screen? No problem. If I'm checkout a lot, probably it's boring me or I'm tired.

[swan_tower]

I actually have very few sounds coming from my devices. It's more just the constant lure of "is there a new email? Has somebody posted to this forum?" that gets me, for whatever reason.

[mindstalk]

I feel that too. Hit Enter over and over to see if I have mail, open Facebook in a tab, close it, open it again a bit later, refresh RPG.net... But as rosefox and others said, mindfulness is a skill. I try to be more aware of the "cut away" impulse. And again on the other side, when I'm plowing through an 800,000 word fanfic that I really like, I don't even have the distracting impulses. I'm reading! So there's something to be said for really wanting to something.

On email management, I've been using filtering for years. spamprobe catches almost all of my spam; procmail sorts mail into different folders -- one for close friends (which does give notification, as mentioned), various mailing lists into others. So main email is less busy, and in a way less attractive -- anything predictably interesting over the long term doesn't go there!

And of course there's making it difficult to check things. Be offline, say. Or when I started this new job, I initially deliberately avoided logging in to various distractions, so all I could do was work. I let that lapse as things got relaxed, but it helped.

[swan_tower]

It's definitely become a particular marker of book (or story or article or fic) quality, if I don't find myself with the impulse to cut away.

[landofnowhere]

Definitely interested in this thread!

Mindfulness meditation helps for me also -- and I've been taking it up again lately. Do you have any tools/techniques that help for mindfulness meditation? Personally I like guided audio meditations: specifically, the ones here and also various apps.

[swan_tower]

I started out using Headspace and liked it, but let my paid subscription lapse when I fell out of the habit. These days I'm just using the free timed meditations from the Calm app, because I have a slight ringing in my ears and I like the background sounds Calm gives you (the default is birds and wind and a stream, but you can set it to things like a gentle thunderstorm or a fireplace or weird space-age sounds). I'm still using the techniques from Headspace, though, which basically go: a few deep opening breaths, feel the weight of yourself in the chair, listen to all the ambient sounds, scan down your body, and then settle in to counting breaths.

The one bit I miss from Headspace is that the guy would speak up shortly before the end to tell you to stop counting and just let your mind do whatever it wanted, whether that was zoning out or thinking about something or whatever, and then bringing your attention back to your body to "wake up" from the session. I don't know when I'm close to the end of my timed meditation, so I don't know when to start that part of the process. But Calm has a nice, soothing chime to end the sessions, and I've changed the settings on my phone so it takes a full minute to go to sleep; that gives me one minute after the chime to do those bits.

[landofnowhere]

Thanks for the suggestions! I've been using the free meditations on Headspace recently (like you, I also really like that technique). I may also look at Calm for variety -- for a while I was using the Mindfulness App, and those meditations were reasonably good, but they no longer support the my old iPad2.

[wshaffer]

I like the 10% Happier: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics app. It has a subscription option, but there's also a ton of free content to explore.

[swan_tower]

That is an awesome name. :-D I may have to give it a shot.

[rosefox]

I've been writing about this recently in my own DW; feel free to take a look.

I've found a Shabbat practice to be extremely useful for improving my ability to focus, especially the part where I turn off notifications (I use Inbox Pause for Gmail so all incoming email is shunted to a hidden folder until I "unpause", which eliminates both phone and web notifications and also means that if I do accidentally open my email out of habit, there's nothing to see) and have a limited set of ways that I allow myself to spend my time, all of which are pretty gentle on the mind. There's no real religious component to it for me; it's more like a gift that I give myself every week. I recommend it highly.

I've started trying to be aware of when I feel the urge to tab away from a multi-page article or blog post, and to stay focused on it and keep reading it. It happens really quickly, especially if the subject matter is emotionally affecting in some way (and it usually is, that being the nature of long reads). I was shocked the first time I started paying attention. That single mindfulness practice has done wonders for me.

And I can't stress enough that sleeping and eating well do wonders for one's focus. Easier said than done, maybe, but really, really worth putting some thought and effort into, if those are things you find challenging.

[swan_tower]

I've thought about trying to do what Cat Valente calls "abbey nights" -- no electronics at all. But it's hard to make myself actually commit to that . . . which, of course, is kind of a symptom of the problem.

Can you say more about Inbox Pause?

Being aware of the impulse to tab away and resisting it -- yeah, I'm working on that one (see the comments in this post about when distractions arose and me telling myself to leave them for later).

I think I sleep and eat reasonably well. At the very least, I sleep until I wake up naturally -- I'm lucky to have that luxury -- so I assume that's probably enough?

[rosefox]

A thing I've found really essential to Shabbat practice is to develop a sense of what is appropriate, a positive construction of it, rather than focusing on the "not allowed" aspects. So yes, I might think "I want to open Twitter" and then remember I've decided not to do that on Shabbat, but even that is phrased positively ("I choose not to do this"), and I try to pair every instance of "It's not the time for that" with "It is the time for (writing to friends, journaling, studying, making beautiful things, spending time with family, playing games, etc.)". If I only thought of it as a day on which lots of things I enjoy are forbidden, it would be miserable, not a practice of active self-care and nourishment.

Doing it as a regular thing also helps automate the not-right-now process, I think. If it were always a one-off, I'd have a harder time maintaining the discipline.

Inbox Pause is part of Boomerang, an add-on for Gmail (with a shabbier version for Outlook) that lets you delay sending emails until a certain time/date and also hide emails until they're put back into your inbox on a certain time/date. There's a tiny browser button that will email you the URL you're currently looking at, either right away or on a delay. It's incredibly useful. There's a free version with most features enabled, and a premium version that lets you do things like whitelist certain addresses so you always see those emails even while your inbox is otherwise paused.

https://www.boomeranggmail.com/ has videos and such. Highly recommended.

[varidog]

Yes, and yes. And in my best mansplaining voice, yes. Focus is a skill.

When I first got a smartphone, the constant interrupts annoyed me, so I systematically turned them off. Recently with so many robocalls, I've switched to white listing. Only approved phone numbers get through. In email, some website now go entirely into trash because they were always bugging me to log in and look at them.

Your time is yours. Where machines disagree with you, the machines are wrong. And where you don't serve yourself, then you get to own that too.

Bravo and keep at it.

[swan_tower]

Urgh. I opened the window to reply to this, got a chat message, tabbed over, looked at the link my husband had sent . . . I think I need to figure out a better way to wrangle chat, as that's one of the biggest PAY ATTENTION TO ME distractors I have.