How To Focus

For most of her writing life, Maya Angelou kept a hotel room in whatever town she lived in, rented by the month. She left her house around six in the morning and tried to be at work in the room by six-thirty.

She had the staff take every painting and decoration off the walls, and she wouldn't let them change the sheets, because she never slept in the bed. She wrote lying on it, on yellow legal pads.

She brought only a few things with her: a dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, a Bible, a bottle of sherry, and usually a deck of cards and some crossword puzzles. When an interviewer asked her in 2013 what else she kept in the room, she mentioned the cards and crosswords and said they were "something to occupy my little mind."

She said that as a child, she had decided there were two minds. The Big Mind let you think deep thoughts. The Little Mind would keep you occupied so you couldn't be distracted. So while her little mind played solitaire or worked a crossword, her big mind went deep into whatever she was writing about.

Look at everything she did in that room. She removed what would pull her eyes away. She went at the same time every morning. She gave the restless part of her mind something small to do, instead of fighting it. And she came to the room to do one thing she cared about deeply. By most accounts, she wrote 10 to 12 pages a day that way.

Compare that with how focus works for most of us. You sit down to do something important, maybe a report, a project, studying, or the business you keep meaning to start. Five minutes later you're checking your phone. You go back, and your mind drifts to an email you haven't answered.

You try again and suddenly feel the need to clean your desk or get a snack. An hour goes by and you've done 15 minutes of real work. You've probably been told to put your phone away, use a focus app, or try harder. Maybe it helped for a day. But it didn't fix the problem, because the phone was only one part of it.

Focus gets pulled on from several directions at once: by things around you, by feelings inside you, by unfinished business, by the restless part of your mind Angelou called the little mind, by whether the task holds you, and by how much focus you have left that day.

Each one breaks focus in a different way, and each needs a different fix. We'll follow one person, Nia, a 26-year-old who works in marketing and has been trying for a year to build a design business on the side, as she figures out which ones are breaking hers.

In 1890, the psychologist William James published The Principles of Psychology, one of the founding books of the field. In his chapter on attention, he described it as the mind taking possession, in a clear and vivid form, of one out of several things you could be thinking about at the same time. And he added: "It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others."

So focus has two parts. First you pick one thing out of everything competing for your attention. Then you hold it there, and keep pulling away from everything else while you do. Both parts take effort, and both can break.

Focus also has limits. You can only hold a small amount in your attention at once, and holding it for a long time wears you down, the way holding a heavy box does. So your focus goes up and down through the day. On top of that, several things pull on it at once, and the rest of this article goes through them one at a time.

In the same chapter, James wrote something that explains why any of this matters: "My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind."

Think about what that means over a lifetime. The hours you spend paying attention to something are the hours that shape what you know, what you're good at, who you're close to, and what you build. If your attention goes to whatever pulls hardest in the moment, that's what ends up shaping your life.

That's why focus matters. The goal is to be able to give your attention to the things you've decided matter: your work, your craft, the people you love, the thing you're trying to build. For Angelou, it was her books. For Nia, it's the business she wants to leave her job for. She's been working on it for a year, but when she adds it up, she's spent maybe a few real hours on it each month.

The most obvious thing that breaks focus is everything around you trying to get your attention. Your phone buzzes. An email pops up in the corner of your screen. Someone walks by. A notification badge sits on an app with a red number on it.

Much of this is designed. Many of the apps on your phone make money when you look at them, so they're built to pull you back with notifications, red badges, and feeds that never end. When you reach for your phone, you're up against products built by teams of people whose job is to get you to reach for it.

Even small pulls cost more than they seem to. In a 2015 study, Cary Stothart, Ainsley Mitchum, and Courtney Yehnert gave people a task that took steady attention, and secretly sent some of them calls or text messages during it.

The people who received notifications, even though they didn't answer or check their phones, made significantly more mistakes. The drop in performance was about as big as in other studies where people actually used their phones for calls or texts during a task.

The researchers believed the notifications set off thoughts about the phone, and those thoughts kept pulling attention away after the buzz was over.

This is the force Angelou handled by taking the paintings off the walls. Every object in a room can catch your eye and pull a thought along with it, so she removed them. (The time management article covers what happens when you switch between tasks, and how long it takes your attention to fully come back.)

When Nia sits down to work on her business after her day job, her phone is next to her laptop, her work email is open in another tab, and her design inspiration feed is one click away. Any one of those can pull her out. With all three, she rarely gets ten minutes in a row.

A lot of the time, the work itself pushes you away, because of how it feels. In a 2014 study, the psychologist Timothy Wilson and his colleagues asked people to sit alone in a plain room for 6 to 15 minutes with nothing to do but think. Most people didn't enjoy it.

In one version of the study, people were first given a mild electric shock and asked whether they'd pay money to avoid getting shocked again. Then they were left alone with a button that would shock them, if they wanted. Out of the people who had said they'd pay to avoid it, 67 percent of the men and 25 percent of the women shocked themselves at least once during their 15 minutes alone. A lot of them chose a shock over sitting with nothing but their own thoughts.

That tells you something about why people reach for distractions. Hard, important work often feels bad in the moment. It can be boring, or confusing, or bring up worries that it won't be good enough. Reaching for your phone gives you an instant escape from that feeling.

For Nia, this shows up at specific moments. She can design for an hour without trouble. But when she has to write the price list for her services or send a message to a possible client, she finds herself on Instagram within two minutes.

Pricing makes her nervous, because she's afraid she'll charge too much and nobody will hire her. The urge to check her phone shows up right when that worry does. If the push from inside is strong in your life, our article "What Are You Afraid Of?" goes deeper into how avoided feelings shape what you do.

Have you ever sat down to focus, only to have your mind keep wandering to things you haven't done yet: the bill you need to pay, the text you haven't answered, the appointment you need to book? Psychologists have long known that unfinished goals stay active in the mind and keep coming back.

In 2011, the psychologists E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister tested what that does to focus, and how to stop it. In one study, they had students think about an important unfinished goal, like an upcoming exam, and then do an unrelated reading task.

The unfinished goal kept intruding: students had more stray thoughts about it while they read, and in another study, they did worse on an unrelated word puzzle. Then the researchers tried something simple.

They had some students write a specific plan for the unfinished goal, saying exactly when, where, and how they would get it done, without actually doing any of it. For those students, the intrusions went away. In one study, the students who had made plans also understood more of what they read.

Making the plan reduced the intruding thoughts, but it didn't make people feel less anxious about the unfinished task. And the effect depended on the plans being real. The students who later followed through on their plans were the ones whose intrusions stopped. So the plan has to be one you mean to keep.

When Nia tried to work on her business, her mind kept jumping to a client invoice for her day job, an email to her landlord, and her friend's birthday gift. Each one only took a few seconds to think about, but they kept coming back every few minutes, and each time she lost her place.

A lot of focus advice says to remove every possible distraction and sit in silence. For some people and some tasks, that works. But it leaves out the part of your mind Angelou called the little mind: the restless part that wants something to do, and that, if you give it nothing, will go looking for something on its own.

In a study published in 2010, the psychologist Jackie Andrade had 40 people listen to a dull, rambling recorded phone message and write down the names of people coming to a party. Half of them were asked to shade in printed shapes on a sheet of paper while they listened, a kind of simple doodling.

The other half just listened. Afterward, everyone got a surprise memory test. The people who had been doodling caught more of the names during the call, and remembered 29 percent more information on the surprise test. Andrade suggested that the doodling may have kept their minds from drifting off into daydreams.

It was one small study, and it was a boring task. Doodling wouldn't help with work that takes your full attention, like writing a hard paragraph. But it suggests that the restless part of your mind can be put to use. Angelou described her cards and crosswords the same way: they gave her little mind something to do, so it wouldn't go looking for distractions while her big mind worked.

The activity has to be simple and small. Shading shapes, playing solitaire, or holding something in your hands keeps the little mind busy. Checking your phone doesn't, because it pulls your whole mind away with it. Nia realized that when she gets restless on long client calls for her day job, she grabs her phone. When she started keeping a notepad next to her and drawing small shapes during calls, she stopped losing track of what was being said.

Focus also depends on what holds it there. Many people who say they can't focus can actually focus for hours on certain things, like a video game, a show they love, or a hobby. The researcher Suzanne Hidi, who has spent decades studying interest, argued that when people are interested in something, their attention goes to it more on its own, and holding it there takes less effort.

That means some focus problems are really interest problems, or purpose problems. If you can't make yourself care about a task, or you've forgotten why it matters, you'll be working against yourself the whole time. Remembering what the work is for, and how it connects to something you want, can make holding your attention easier.

A task also holds your focus better when you know exactly what to do next. "Work on the business" isn't something your attention can grab onto. "Write three sentences describing my logo package" is. Notice that this is the same thing Masicampo and Baumeister's students did: a specific plan gives the mind something concrete to hold.

Nia had no trouble focusing on design work. She loves it and could do it for hours. Her focus broke down when her to-do list said things like "build the business" or "marketing." She never knew where to start, so she'd look at the list, feel overwhelmed, and pick up her phone.

The last force is your capacity. Holding your attention on something takes effort, and the more you use, the less you have left for the rest of the day, until you rest.

In the 1980s, the psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan developed what they called attention restoration theory. Their idea was that the kind of attention we use to force ourselves to concentrate gets tired with use, and that some environments, especially natural ones, let it recover, because they hold our interest gently without demanding effort.

In a 2008 study, Marc Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan tested this. They gave people a hard attention task, then sent them on a walk of about 50 minutes, either through a park-like arboretum or along busy downtown streets. When they came back and took the test again, the people who had walked in nature did better. The people who had walked downtown did not.

Sleep matters too. In a 2003 study, Hans Van Dongen and his colleagues limited people's sleep to four, six, or eight hours a night for two weeks. The people sleeping six hours a night got steadily worse on attention tests over the two weeks, until their performance was about as bad as people who had stayed up for one or two full nights without any sleep.

But they didn't feel much sleepier. They rated themselves only slightly tired, even as their focus kept getting worse.

Nia had been working on her business from 9 to 11 at night, after a full day at her job, on about six hours of sleep. She assumed she just had a focus problem. A lot of it was that she was trying to do her hardest work with the least focus she had left all day.

A wandering mind is usually a problem when it happens in the middle of something you're trying to do. In 2010, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert at Harvard used an iPhone app to check in with about 2,250 adults at random times during their day, asking what they were doing, what they were thinking about, and how happy they were.

People's minds were wandering about 47 percent of the time, and they were generally less happy when their minds were wandering than when they weren't.

But wandering can also help, when it happens at the right time. In a 2012 study, Benjamin Baird and his colleagues gave people a creative problem: list as many unusual uses as possible for an everyday object. Then they gave them a 12-minute break.

Some people spent the break on a demanding task, some on an easy task that let their minds wander, some just rested, and some had no break at all. When everyone went back to the same problems, only the people who had done the easy, mind-wandering task got noticeably better. Letting their minds wander during the easy task seemed to help them come back to the problem with new ideas.

So part of the skill is knowing which mode you need. When you have to get something done, like writing, studying, or building, you need focus. When you're stuck on a problem that needs a new idea, it can help to work on it hard, then step away and do something easy, like a walk, the dishes, or a shower, and let your mind wander back to it on its own.

The two common mistakes are letting your mind wander when you need to focus, and filling every break with your phone when it would help to let your mind wander.

Nia had been stuck on a name for her business for weeks, sitting at her laptop trying to force it. She tried writing every idea she had for 20 minutes, then going for a walk without her phone. She came up with the name she ended up using on that walk.

Everything so far helps you focus better in a single session. But if you've spent years checking your phone every few minutes, you may feel like your ability to focus has worn down, and you want it back for good. That takes training over weeks.

In a 2013 study, Michael Mrazek, Jonathan Schooler, and their colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, randomly assigned 48 college students to one of two classes. One was a mindfulness class, which taught them to keep their attention on one thing, like their breathing, and to notice when their mind had wandered and bring it back. The other was a class on nutrition. Each class met eight times over two weeks, for 45 minutes at a time.

Before and after the two weeks, all the students took the reading comprehension part of the GRE, a graduate school entrance exam, and a test of working memory, which is how much information you can hold in your head and work with at once. The students in the mindfulness class did better on both tests afterward, and their minds wandered less while they took them. The nutrition class made no difference.

he improvement was mainly among students who had been the most easily distracted before the class started. It was one small study, but it suggests that focus can be trained in a short time.

The training works like exercise for your attention. Each time you notice your mind has wandered and bring it back, you're practicing the exact skill you need when you're working: catching the drift and returning to the task. You can do the same thing on your own.

Sit for ten minutes, keep your attention on your breathing, and every time you notice your mind has gone somewhere else, bring it back. You'll probably drift many times in ten minutes, and that's fine.

You can also build up how long you can hold focus on real work. Start with a focus block you can actually finish without checking your phone, even if it's only 20 minutes, and add a few minutes each week. If you check your phone in the middle, the block ends there, and you try again next time.

Nia started with ten minutes of breath practice each morning before her work session, and work blocks of 20 minutes. Six weeks later, she was working in 60-minute blocks and rarely reaching for her phone during them.

The six forces act at the same time and feed each other, which is why focus problems can be hard to untangle.

Low capacity makes every other force stronger. When you're short on sleep or worn out from a long day, your attention gets worse, as the sleep research in section 08 showed. With less focus to work with, it's harder to resist the phone, push through the hard parts of the work, and keep unfinished business out of your thoughts.

A task with nothing holding you makes the pull from outside stronger. When you don't know what to do next, there's nothing for your attention to grab onto, so whatever is around you, like your phone or an open tab, wins by default. And when the work brings up a bad feeling, a vague task gives that feeling more room, because you can't even start on the part that would make it smaller.

Unfinished business and the restless little mind add to the load. Every open loop that keeps returning takes a piece of your attention, and a mind with nothing small to occupy it goes looking for something, which is often the phone.

This also works in the other direction. Fixing one force often weakens the others. That's why it helps to start with the two that affect everything else: your capacity and a clear next step. When you do your hardest work at your best time, on enough sleep, and know exactly what you're going to do first, the other forces get easier to handle.

Nia started with those two. When she moved her business work to the morning and rewrote her to-do list with clear first steps, the pull of her phone got weaker on its own, and the nervous urge to escape during pricing came up less often, because she had more energy to push through it and knew exactly which line to write next.

Because each force needs a different fix, putting your phone in another room won't help if your real problem is unfinished business, and making a plan for every open task won't help if you're running on six hours of sleep. So before trying to fix anything, figure out which forces are hitting you hardest. Here are the signs.

• Pulled from outside: You lose focus right after a sound, a buzz, or something catching your eye. You find yourself checking things without ever deciding to.
• Pushed from inside: You leave the work at the same kinds of moments, like when you have to start, when it gets hard, or when you have to put something in front of other people. The urge to check something shows up right as the task starts to feel bad.
• Unfinished business: Your mind keeps returning to other tasks you haven't dealt with, even when nothing around you reminds you of them.
• The little mind: You get restless and fidgety during slow or dull tasks, like long meetings, calls, or reading, and your mind drifts off without you noticing.
• Nothing holding you: You don't know where to start, the task feels vague, or you can't remember why it matters. You can focus fine on other things.
• Low capacity: Your focus is fine at some times of day and gone at others. You reread the same line three times. You've been sleeping less than seven hours, or you haven't stepped outside all day.

Many people have two or three of these at once. When Nia went through the list, she found four: her phone and open tabs pulling at her, nervousness pushing her away from pricing and client messages, a vague to-do list that gave her nothing to hold onto, and trying to do her hardest work late at night on short sleep. No single fix would have solved all of that.

Here's what Nia changed. She moved her business work from 9 at night to 6:30 in the morning, before her day job, and went to bed earlier. She worked at a small desk in her spare room with her phone in the kitchen. Before each session, she spent five minutes writing down everything else on her mind and when she'd handle it.

She rewrote her to-do list so every item started with a clear first action. And when she hit the parts that made her nervous, like pricing, she made herself write just the first line before deciding whether to stop.

Within a month, she was getting six to eight hours of real work on her business each week, more than she'd managed in a typical month before. Three months later, she had her first two paying clients.