5 Ways to Build Focus and Concentration - College Info Geek

Key Takeaways

be honest with me here when you study your get work done how good are you at focusing on that work and by that I mean how susceptible are you to distractions that pop up or the temptation to multitask this is a really important question to ask yourself because a lack of focus a lack of the ability to concentrate is one of the best ways to waste a lot of the time you dedicate to studying that's because when you get pulled away from your main task into a distraction or some other task you're not just wasting the time that it takes to get that distraction done with there's also something called a cognitive switching penalty and as Josh Kaufman points out in his book the personal MBA which I highly recommend by the way in order to take action your brain has to load the context of what you're doing into working memory if you constantly switch the focus of your attention you're forcing your brain to spend time and effort thrashing loading and reloading contexts over and over again that's why it's possible to spend an entire day multitasking getting nothing done and feel exhausted at the end you've burned all of your energy context switching instead of making progress this is why it's so important to build the ability to focus if you can do that you're going to eliminate a lot of these potential cognitive switching penalties you could have incurred from your day and that means you're gonna be able to pack your work into a more concentrated shorter amount of time and get more done so in this video I want to give you five quick ways that you can start building the ability to focus and concentrate on the task at hand and the first one is called pre commitment pre committing to a task is simply building some sort of device that binds you to finishing it before you actually get started and to do this you can use what are called commitment devices it's why I use beeminder to ensure that I create two things every week on my website if you have some way of making sure there's a consequence for not getting your work done you're gonna be more motivated to stay focused on that work this can be as simple as writing down that you're going to get X done in 30 minutes and if you don't finish within 30 minutes you know that you've failed you've externalized that goal by writing it down and now that you failed it you're gonna feel bad you can even do something crazy like hiring a lady off Craigslist to slap you in the face like Minnie Safety did or you could stay within the realm of sanity that's cool too you can also pre commit to one task by eliminating your ability to do anything else during that time this is often called the burnt ships technique and it's in reference to an inaccurate but still compelling story about Hernan Cortes telling his men to burn their ships before they attack the Aztecs the motivation for doing this would have been to keep his men focused on the task because they had no option they couldn't go back now you probably don't have an actual boat to burn of your own and even if you did it probably wouldn't help you get your homework done but you can take inspiration from this idea by removing the ability to do other things while you're focused on a task and one way you can do this is by blocking distracting websites on your computer using an extension like stay focused or a program like focal filter you could even entirely disconnect the internet if you didn't need it tip number two is to have a distraction sheet next to you while you work now talked about this before as in addition to the Pomodoro Technique but whether or not you're pre committing using that technique or just studying in a different way having a piece of paper next to you where you write down what's distracting you helps you get back into your work because you know you've made a reminder of that distraction you can get back to it later if it's important but you're externalizing it you're pulling it out of your brain and you're allowing your brain to get back to the task at hand tip number three is to try out an app called forest which is available for both iPhones and Android devices forest is an app that tries to help make your smartphone less of a distraction and it does this by letting you plant a seed and then if you don't touch your phone for 30 minutes it grows into a tree you do touch your phone it kills the tree and you failed that session now I can see it already people in the comments saying that you could just turn off the phone or leave it in a different room and that does work but the thing that forest does is it provides an instant reward the minute you finish a 30-minute session getting immediate tangible and quantifiable results for something is a great way to build a good habits and if you're just turning off your phone and putting it in the other room you may not see those immediate tangible benefits but if you get a nice cool tree on your phone if you don't touch it for 30 minutes then that's a nice thing you can look at so if turning your phone off works for you that's cool but if it doesn't try the app Oh tip number four is to meditate once a day and I've been doing this for a few months now and honestly I just do it for three minutes in the morning and I try to focus on my breath now the idea behind this is that your attention is like any other muscle in your body as you train it it gets stronger and your ability to focus increases I found that just trying to focus on my breath for three minutes a day has increased my ability to stay focused on other tasks like reading or writing now an important thing to note with meditation is that your attention will wander and that's okay the act of noticing that your attention is wandered and they you've started daydreaming and then bringing that attention back to your initial point of focus is what helps build that attention muscle my fifth and final tip is to eliminate potential distractions while you're studying now when I talked about pre committing earlier I talked about the burnt ships technique and that's focused on eliminating your ability to distract yourself but there are also a lot of distractions that can happen to you environmental distractions people coming in and asking you to do things and if you can eliminate the potential for these to happen you're going to have an easier time focusing so pay attention to any potential source of distractions before you study this could be something that can pop a notification up like your phone or something on your computer or just being in a specific location where your friends are likely to find you I actually have a whole section on eliminating distractions in my book on earning better grades which is free so if you want to get some more tips in this area then you can click the card there or the link in the description and grab the book so those are my five tips this week for helping you build concentration in your ability to focus hopefully you found this helpful and I want to leave you with a quote from the Roman poet Horace who said rule your mind or it will rule you now if your internal ability to rule your mind and stay focused right now isn't as strong as you'd like it to be that's okay work on building it but also take advantage of the external systems and tools we have to help you out that could be using apps and extensions like forests and stay focused hiring some lady off Craigslist to slap you in the face or just asking a friend to keep tabs on you while you're studying anyway I hope you found this video useful thanks for watching and I will see you next week hey guys thanks so much for watching my video on how to build more focus and concentration if you want to get new videos every single week on being a more effective student than the best possible decision you can make right now is to click that big red subscribe button right there I also wrote a book on how to get better grades if you want to get a free copy of that click the picture and I will send you one if you want to get links to anything I mentioned in this video then go to the companion blog post by clicking the orange logo right there if you missed last week's video is a clip of it playing right there so definitely check it out and if you want to suggest topics for new videos or just connect with me I'm Tom frankly on Twitter or you can leave a comment thanks [Music]