Developing Your Powers of Concentration

Thinking about: Your mind

If you have trouble concentrating, you are not alone, and to a considerable extent, you are not to blame. You are the unwitting victim of technology.

There was a time when, walking alone, you were accompanied only by your thoughts. That changed with the advent of transistor radios that allowed you to listen to something while you walked. These radios were largely supplanted, in 1979, by the introduction of the Sony Walkman, which itself was subsequently supplanted by the Discman, the MP3 player, the Apple iPod, and finally, the smartphone. This last device made it possible for your train of thought to be interrupted by getting a phone call or receiving a direct message. It also allowed you to listen to music and podcasts.

The advent of social media like Facebook meant that a walk could be interrupted by notification that someone had interacted with your content. Not long thereafter, the arrival of Twitter amplified the impact of social media. It was not only a source of distraction, but its rules required users to limit their tweets to 140 characters. This meant that if you wanted to comment on a current event, you had to compress and simplify your conclusion. Nuanced thinking became—and for very many people remains—passé.

As a result of these influences, people got used to reading things in small and easily digestible portions. They would be repelled by the thought of reading an entire book. They might also think twice about reading a 1,000-word essay—like this one—and if they did, they might find it difficult to concentrate for the time required to read it.

At the same time as technology was creating new sources of distraction, multitasking was becoming popular. People came to believe that the best way to get things done was to do several things simultaneously. As a result, they might put down a document they were reading to reply to an email that had just arrived, and then pause in writing their reply to deal with an IM notification. Having done so, they would complete the email, after which they would return to their reading. Three tasks would have been accomplished.

The problem with this approach is that our brains are not good at switching from task to task. Consequently, when people returned to the document they had set aside, they might have lost their train of thought with respect to it. Yes, they could reread what they had read, but it was much easier to simply press on, a bit vague about what, exactly, the author was talking about and why they were talking about it.

Reader exercise: Make a point of monitoring how you apportion your attention. Do you keep shifting it? And if you do, is it because you find it difficult to focus it on one thing for an extended period of time?

As I have explained in this Substack, your mind has a mind of its own. (If you don’t believe me, I invite you, once again, to do the zazen exercise.) Since you are only human, your thought processes are routinely interrupted by random thoughts that drift into your mind, uninvited. You might, for example, find yourself thinking about a mean comment someone made. As a result, you might find yourself getting angry, which in turn will disrupt your thinking.

Besides angering you, random thoughts can entice you. Suppose, for example, that while writing an essay on the novel Moby-Dick, you find yourself wondering whether dogs can walk on their front legs. A few minutes later, you realize that you are watching your third YouTube video in which dogs walk on their front legs. You didn’t really need to know whether dogs have this ability. In particular, it had no bearing whatsoever on your analysis of Moby-Dick. So why did you allow yourself to be distracted? It might be, at least in part, because your mind, tired of concentrating, was looking for an excuse to rest.

In earlier posts we encountered people who habitually feel rather than think their way to conclusions. These Feelers, as I call them, are motivated in part by intellectual laziness. Thinking is hard, so they avoid it, much as they might avoid physical exercise. With effort, though, people can become more physically fit, in which case they might come to enjoy physical activity. In much the same way, people can become more intellectually fit. It will take effort on their part, but for most people, it is an achievable goal.

It is also possible to improve your power of concentration. One way is to employ the pomodoro technique. When undertaking a task, you set a timer to give you, say, 25 minutes of work time and five minutes of rest time. During the work time, you must think only about the task at hand. If your mind drifts, you must return your attention to the task. If you find yourself wondering whether dogs can walk on their front legs, you might regain your focus by promising yourself to look it up during your rest time. You can set the interval timing to your liking, and you can also do multiple work-rest cycles.

When this technique was popularized by university student Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s, he used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer—pomodoro being the Italian word for tomato. These days, apps take the place of mechanical timers.

Over my decades of writing, I have developed my ability to concentrate for extended periods. Indeed, on a typical day, I spend my first three waking hours immersed in writing. After that, I exercise, take a nap, have lunch, and then spend another two hours writing. When I am having trouble concentrating, I resort to the pomodoro technique.

In case you are wondering, I write every day, weekends and holidays included. Also, it takes me two days to write a Substack post. Since they are typically 1,000 words long, that works out to 100 words per hour spent writing. It isn’t that I write at the rate of roughly two words per minute; it’s that I do research while I am writing, and do lots of outlining, rewriting, and polishing.

If you have trouble concentrating, I encourage you to experiment with the pomodoro technique. You might start with 5-minute work periods followed by 2-minute rest periods, and increase those times as the weeks go by. Do this regularly, and your ability to concentrate will improve. Indeed, it might improve so much that you find yourself accidentally working through your rest intervals. If this happens, it is a sign that you have entered what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the flow state. The world around you fades into the background as you become thoroughly immersed in the task at hand.

Dog videos are entertaining, but they are no match for the richness of flow. Once you experience it, you will see what I mean.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title.