The Illusive Nature of Focus

"Just focus!" Why won't these words work? When we say "just focus," we end up focused on the wrong thing: focus itself. Those who've struggled with focus in the past understand that thinking about focus can be discouraging. It can bring our most frequent distractions or feelings of inadequacy to center-stage in our minds. Focusing on the topic of focus leaves us more distracted and in-our-heads than ever. So, if you can't focus, maybe stop "trying" to focus. If you injured your leg, you wouldn't run on it. Instead you'd let it heal. If your focus is injured, it might not be time to caffeinate or double down on concentration. Often times a lack of focus is a matter of some simple and unaddressed biological needs. Mathematics might convince us that working 16 hours a day is more productive than 8 and while that might be true for a computer, it's not always true for humans. In order for our minds to compute effectively, we must spend a fair amount of time resting and nourishing ourselves. Over-doing this can lead to mental decay, so it's often difficult to find proper balance for our minds. True focus can be especially difficult while living in an industrial world. For example, society often uses fear to motivate workers. Fear leads to stress, and stress leads to a lack of focus as our minds revert to 'fight-or-flight' mode. Society can also push people to work through lunch hours and skip breaks. Yet, overworking leads to burnout, which leads to a lack of concentration as our minds are overloaded and our thinking is no longer clear. While it's easy to find people who work too hard and are inordinately stressed, at the opposite end of the focus-spectrum are those who make little-to-no sacrifices and exert hardly any willpower. These 'slacker' types will also find it impossible to focus. The temptation to sleep-in or put-off important tasks will eventually create a large pile of to-dos and soon enough an insurmountable mountain of backlogged tasks will emerge. Ironically, those who suffer from burnout and work-related stress, are often those who fall victim to a slacker's mindset. Just like an extreme dieter relapsing into a cacophony of sugar and processed foods, the extreme worker may relapse into a world where they don't think about their to-dos anymore. To-dos once hurt them, and they're scared to go back to a life of achievement.

So what are we to do? Like most answers in life, we should find balance. It is most harmonious to spend time listening to both parts of our brain: the part of our brain that has current needs (food, rest, entertainment, socialization, family-time, etc), and the part of our brain that works toward a brighter future (paying bills, doing chores, setting goals, and marking-off all those to-do-list items). So many motivational speakers will tell you that you just need to find your grit and drive, but not many motivational speakers mention the need for leisure and relaxation. True focus and productivity are found when we find that happy medium between over-exertion and slacking. To focus most effectively, you should love the work you do, and to keep loving something, you simply can't overdo it.

If you haven't moved from your seat for hours, you should stand up and have a conversation with someone. Perhaps you need something to eat, to organize your desk, or take your body for a walk. Taking breaks to center yourself is critical for focus, because if you don't, the unaddressed needs at your core remain unaddressed, and it becomes harder and harder to remain focused as that neglect builds. If we continue down this rabbit hole where we keep telling ourselves to 'stay focused,' we will create a loop in our minds where focusing on staying focused becomes an energy-expending chore. Couple that with ignoring our body's need to walk around, socialize, make friends, eat, organize, etc and soon even the smallest tasks will seem quite heavy. If you've gone down this path for a number of hours, do something else. Make the task you need to focus on a secondary objective in your day, and put something more fun, like getting to know your coworkers, as a primary objective. Even though spending time away from the task at hand might seem counterproductive, spending some time socializing in the office might very well be better for your career than underperforming because you're burnt out. Sometimes you have detach from whatever it is you can't focus on in order to come at it again with a fresh perspective. If you've gone down the unhealthy 'just focus' loop for months, it's time for a vacation. Imagine if you got paid to simply stare at a symbol on a wall; that's all you had to do for hours every day. Doing so, your vision would eventually get blurry, and your eyes would grow tired. You'd lose focus. How do you get that focus back? If you tried harder to focus, your eyes would only grow more tired, and focus would continue to become more and more diminished. The only way to stare at a symbol effectively, once your focus diminishes, is to take a break and rest your eyes. Our minds and bodies are no different. Too much of one thing will tire them and make them ineffective until a break is taken. Interpersonal relationships are also no exception. Imagine you've been tasked with training a new employee. You might think they need all of your mental focus and attention, but when you feel that focus waning, it's probably time for you to let them take the wheel for a bit. Not only will this be good for you, but it will be good for them. Trying too hard to remain focused will set unhealthy precedences at your workplace as your direct reports will have unhealthy expectations about your involvement and bandwidth. This is why it is so important to listen to your body, and to be very aware of your diminishing focus. If you aren't aware, you won't set healthy boundaries, and you'll fall victim to burnout.

It isn't weakness we feel like we just can't focus. We're not computers, we're humans, and each of us has different thresholds and needs. Embrace yourself, communicate with yourself, and be okay with the fact that you can't just program yourself to do one thing forever. It makes you interesting and gives you a personality.