Transcription
Here's a list of the most common tips you'll find on YouTube to fix your attention span. But unfortunately, if you are using these tips, then you probably will not be able to fix your attention span or focus. And it's not because these techniques don't work, it's because they are Band-Aid solutions. Which means you're going to be back on YouTube tomorrow, or maybe a week later, but definitely within a month, just looking for those tips again. And I don't want that for you.
So in this video, I'm going to give you a cure rather than a Band-Aid for your attention span by focusing on the first principle fundamentals for focus and distractions that are backed by science. And the first step to curing your attention span is to understand your win criteria. A win criteria is basically what needs to happen for you to have won. So in, like, if you're playing a game of chess, you win if you checkmate them or they forfeit. Most people, when it comes to focus and attention span, have the wrong win criteria. They think that if they use a technique or apply a tip and they're able to focus, therefore they've achieved the win criteria, they've solved the focus and attention span issue. That's not how it works.
I'll give you an example. Back years ago, when I first started working out, uh, I used to just want to like throw heavy weights around and I really didn't take care of my health as much as I should have. And so I, I had honestly, like, pretty bad form. And so I'd hurt my wrist and then I'd hurt my shoulder. I hurt both shoulders. And so in order to stop my wrist and my shoulders from hurting, I got wrist wraps and then I did like these, like, postural kind of like activities to stretch my shoulders back. Uh, but then I'd just like throw this heavy weight around with terrible form again. And so it aggravated the injury and then I had to get like even thicker wraps and then I had to apply like the Tiger Balm and I took ibuprofen. And so I had all of these things that I was doing to achieve the win criteria of not being in pain, which seems like a fair win criteria. But the problem is not the fact that I'm in pain. The pain is the symptom of the problem. The problem was that I was doing the exercise incorrectly in such a way that it was creating pain. It's exactly the same thing with focus and attention span. The win criteria is not being able to sit down and study for like a couple of hours with good focus. The criteria is being able to do that, to have good focus and to have good attention span without needing so many Band-Aid solutions and techniques and tips to get you there.
Because I want you to think about your ability to focus and have attention like this. Let's imagine that there's this graph here and this barrier. This is like the wall you need to overcome to have good attention. This is like the, the wall of distraction. If your baseline level of focus is like down here, then using a few tips and techniques can help you to get over this and then you'll be in focus again. But it means that every single time you need to sit down and do something, you need to use all those techniques to get you over that wall. The better solution is just fix our innate ability to focus so that we don't even need the techniques in the first place. It's about permanently improving our attention span rather than temporarily elevating our attention span. And if you're already feeling this, like you need even more, like you're doing all these tips but you still need even more and more and more and the effectiveness of these tips is like fading away, then it's very urgent that you work on this and you actually improve your innate ability. And it's urgent because step two, you've got to understand the rules of the game that we're playing here.
Step two, understand the rules of the game. Let's say that right now, your level of innate attention span is pretty low. It's, it's down here somewhere. And you're thinking that over time, I'm sure it will get better or you kind of can't be bothered training and improving your innate attention span. That's not going to work out well. And the reason is that the game we're playing right now is one where if you do not train your attention span, it's being untrained for you. Just by living, like existing like a normal human being in society, we are being bombarded with constant messages from multi-trillion dollar companies that are spending billions of dollars to figure out how to hack your attention span and keep it. Attention is the new currency. And ironically, even like me as someone who makes YouTube videos, I think all the time about your attention span and in this case, to keep it long enough so that you actually learn to have a better attention span. Ironically, really, if you don't actively work on your attention span, over time it will actually just get worse. Which means it will be harder and harder and harder to overcome that wall and actually focus.
I had a student a few years ago and she would lock herself in her garage. In fact, she would, she cleared out her garage and only put a desk. She'd go in there, no laptop, no phone, just textbook and pen and paper, like old school. And then just study. She would lock it and then give the family the keys. Uh, every time she wanted to go to the bathroom, she would have to like knock on the door, get permission to do that. And so, you know, credit to her for taking it so seriously. But if you're at that point where it takes such a level of refinement to create focus, it's going to be very, very hard to achieve difficult goals in your life. If you have such a narrow scope in which you're able to be functional and have deep work. But the good news is you can train it and you can improve that. And you should quickly. In fact, you have to train it quickly because, like I said, the rules of the game are, it's being untrained by default. So you need to be able to train it faster than it's being untrained.
So what do you need to do? That's step three. There are two different types of strategies. There is a short-term and a long-term strategy. And you do need to use both of them. Your short-term strategy involves using techniques and tips. So I was watching the recording of this and then I realized that the short-term versus long-term strategies weren't really clear. So let me just explain really quickly now. The short-term strategies are the techniques and tips that temporarily elevate your attention span. And then the long-term strategies are the ones that permanently improve your attention span so that you don't need as many of those short-term tips and techniques in the first place. And then I'm going to explain the short-term ones first. And instead of just explaining to you like all the different techniques that you can use, I've got other videos where I talk about this as well. If you want like a list of the common ones, again, here it is. You can take a look at this. But honestly, the value is not really just knowing all of these techniques. The value is understanding how you can solve the problem with using these techniques, which is actually step four, which is optimizing the short-term strategies.
The problem with just using these techniques is that there are a lot of them. And some of them work, and then some of them don't. And some of them work sometimes and sometimes they don't. And so it's really difficult to figure out which technique or tip to use in what type of situation. Really, there are actually only two main principles that make a big difference to your ability to stay focused in the short term. And as long as whatever technique you're using hits these two prerequisites of focus, it's probably going to be effective. First prerequisite for having really good focus immediately, short term, is prioritizing deep work. Deep work is basically when you are able to really lock in on just a single task and enter into the state of flow. Time is flying by, your brain is super engaged, just the focus kind of comes naturally. Basically, your brain working as best as it can. It's like your peak level of efficiency is unlocked when you're able to do deep work. So as a rule of thumb, anything that allows more deep work is better for your productivity. Anything that hinders your ability to do deep work is going to be detrimental, increase your distractions, and overall unproductive. Even if it feels like you're doing more stuff, it's not going to be done as quickly and it's not going to be done to the same level of quality.
Now, there's a lot of research on what conditions need to be met to enter into a deep work state in the first place. And without boring you with the details, here is the checklist that I go through that allows me to consistently enter into a deep work state almost every single time. Number one, you want to have a clear objective before going into any session. You want to know exactly what the outcome is that you want at the end of it. Don't have a time block in your calendar just saying study or like work. Be very specific about what it is you want to get done in that period of time. And try not to plan things longer than like an hour or so. Be specific enough that you know that after 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, at most an hour, you know exactly what the output you're going for is. This helps to create this tunnel vision in your mind and it gives your brain more focus.
Number two, only ever do a singular task at once. Multitasking is not a thing. No one can really multitask. People that are good at multitasking, they're just switching between tasks very quickly. And every time you switch from one task to another, it induces something that's called a cognitive switching penalty. Which is basically your brain has to switch out of the mode of thinking that it's in, switch to another one, and then when you switch back, it has to sort of remember what it was doing. And then it takes a bit of time for it to get back into things. And during that period of time, that's a great opportunity for distractions or procrastination to set in. And also, if you're switching very often, it means that you may be working on something for an hour, but if you're switching every 10 minutes, then literally half that time might just be burned through cognitive switching penalty. So whenever you're sitting down to try to get some work done, be very clear about what you're trying to achieve, but make it a singular task. Don't try to do multiple things at the same time.
Number three, try to prep the hard stuff. What I mean by this is that if you've got a big task that you need to do, you might feel overwhelmed because there's all the stuff you need to unpack. You know it's going to take a lot of work. Think about what part of that task feels the most overwhelming and try to do a little bit of that before your session. Something that doesn't really require a huge amount of focus. It could just be planning out a few things, collecting a few resources, the stuff that you know is going to make it easier for you to jump in and do the work when you need to. By reducing how overwhelming it feels and just creating a nice sort of package, you're gifting your future self with a head start. There's also this thing called the Zeigarnik effect. I might be pronouncing that wrong, but it's basically this phenomenon where the brain finds it easier to complete tasks that we've already started. So by taking that big overwhelming task and starting it in advance, we are activating this Zeigarnik effect and making it more motivating and more likely for us to finish that task.
And the final one, which this is going to sound a little bit strange, but it is, plan to start, not to finish. What this one means is that when you have a big task, you know that that's going to take a lot of work. And so already your brain looks at that as a big piece of work and feels less motivated to try to do that. It's always looking for a shortcut. And so if we just plan to start and we're not really worried about finishing, we just plan to start and see how far we get. And maybe as far as we get means that we finish, but maybe it isn't. Then what that does is it means it's easier for our brain to get into it because it knows that it doesn't have to commit to this huge big amount of cognitive resources. So what that means is that two things. First of all, we're more likely to just get into it without procrastinating. But second of all, because we're getting into it and we're meeting the other checklist, we are able to enter into this deep work flow state, which means our brain is operating very, very efficiently. So even if we don't finish it, what we were able to complete is probably the best we would have been able to do anyway because we're using our brain as efficiently as possible. And a lot of the time, when we do get into this flow state, it's so easy just to get through work that we can finish it. There are times where I've blocked out like three hours to do something that I thought was going to take a long time. I followed this checklist, I just planned to start, and I just finished the whole thing in like 45 minutes. Never underestimate how much you can get done when you're in a state of flow.
Now, this was the first prerequisite. If whatever technique and other tip that you're using helps you to meet this checklist and gets you into deep work states, it's a good one. There's another prerequisite. The second one is to always frontload. Front loading basically means setting yourself up for success. There was a study that was done a long time ago looking at the brains of people with really great discipline and motivation versus people without great discipline. And what they found was that the brain activity of the people who were really, really disciplined wasn't really innately that different from the people who got easily distracted. What they found was that there was a characteristic behavior that people with lots of discipline tend to do, which is that they will use their time in advance to set themselves up for success later. For example, if you want to go for a run, then don't hide your running shoes and your running clothes like in obscure parts of your wardrobe. Have them right there. Put them on a chair next to the door. Make it easy to access. Get changed into it way in advance of when you need to go for the run so you're already dressed. All you need to do is get up and go. If it's about studying, think about what textbooks you need to have open, think about what tabs you need to have open on your browser, what you need to be accessing, uh, what notes you need to be writing. Have all of that stuff set up in advance. Clear your desk. Make it so that the only thing you need to do is just start.
Front loading is about thinking about every step that needs to happen to go from not starting to starting the task. And it's doing as much of those steps in advance as possible. And one of the best things that you should frontload is removing distractions. Most of the time, you can anticipate what things are going to distract you. If I'm sitting here trying to work and it's loud and people are talking, that's going to distract me. That's going to pull me out of my deep work. So that means that I should have my headphones next to me available. I should know, uh, what app or what I'm going to listen to to block out that distraction. If I know that there are people, uh, that might come in and disturb me or people that might message me, I'll put my phone on do not disturb or I'll put my phone somewhere else. These are all the things that individually people can think of as tips or techniques, but it's personalized for everyone. Not everyone needs a nuclear option of removing every single distraction around them to be able to focus. And sometimes it's not realistic. All you need to do is just think about what are those distractors that I can anticipate, that I can predict, that are likely to come up, and what can I do in advance so that those things are blocked off? And it's not enough just to do them in advance, you have to do them far in advance. If you're trying to deal with all of this stuff at the time you need to do the activity, that's where you're going to get a higher likelihood of procrastinating or not being bothered or following through with the task. Get all that stuff done the day before, the night before, the week before, so that when it comes time to you actually having to sit down and do it, there is nothing stopping you other than just a tiny little bump of motivation and focus that you need.
That was the short-term strategy. What about the long-term? Step five is about doing the long-term stuff. And if you do step four and optimize the short term in terms of deep work and frontloading, and you train your innate ability with step five, you will solve the focus and attention span issues for the rest of your life. So how do you actually train your focus? I want you to think of focus like a muscle. And we're going to call it the focus muscle. If you go to a gym and you want to train your physical muscles, you need to pick up some weights. And that weight is relatively heavy. There's no point going to a gym and then picking up like a singular speck of dust. Okay? You, you're never going to grow any muscle that way. It's the same thing with focus. To develop our focus muscle, we need to put it under some load, some pressure, something that's challenging. Not so easy for it to be meaningless, but also not so challenging for it to be impossible. And you don't even need a gym membership to train your focus muscle. In fact, there are only three things you need to meet to be able to train the focus muscle. Number one is target, number two is time, and number three is intensity.
The target just means you need to have a target behavior or target sensation that you're focused on. The overall idea is very simple. You're going to give yourself one target and try to direct your brain to focus on that target at all times. So a really easy target that's used a lot in lots of different types of practices is breathing. Just take slow, deep breaths and try to focus purely on the breath coming in and then going out. It seems simple, but it is extremely, extremely difficult. Partly because the act of breathing in itself is not very engaging. It's like innately a kind of boring thing to do. So by picking that kind of target, it means that it increases the opportunity for ourselves to get distracted. That applies the pressure, the load. And so if you close your eyes and purely try to focus on the breathing, then after really like two or three seconds, you're going to start feeling that there are these other distracting thoughts coming into your brain. And so the way that you train the focus muscle is that every time you feel that distracting thought coming in, you bring your attention back to the breathing. And so at first, you will get distracted very, very often. Like literally once every two or three seconds. It will take you several seconds to even realize you got distracted in the first place. And it will take you several seconds to try to bring your focus back. And as soon as your focus is back, two seconds later, you're distracted again. That's very normal. And what that means is that you're getting really good quality repetitions in. You're getting really good, uh, training for the focus muscle.
And so when you have that target, the next thing that you need to do is just have more exposure time. So if you think about every time you get distracted and then bring yourself back as one repetition, that might take you 20 to 30 seconds. So we want to do a number of those repetitions. Normally, about 20 to 30 minutes a day means that you can see results after a month. But even 20 to 30 minutes is quite daunting for a lot of people. So if you can just do like five or 10 minutes as much as you can, then it's better than nothing. And the time is necessary because our brain will not actually rewire itself if it doesn't have enough consistent exposure. We actually have to forcibly, uh, put our brain in enough level of discomfort for a long enough period of time that it will rewire itself. If we only give ourselves a tiny little bit of that discomfort from that training, like let's say we only do two, three minutes a day, that's probably not enough to actually make a difference. The growth in retraining only comes during the period of discomfort. So until you feel that sense of discomfort, the, the training hasn't really started yet.
And the other thing that's necessary, other than just time spent training it, is the intensity of the training. So the reason I told you to use breathing as a target is because it creates a high level of intensity. It's a very mundane activity, so it requires a high level of focus to stay on it. This is different to, like, for example, playing a game. I used to play a lot of games and I still do game, actually. And I can stay locked in for like an hour, two hours, no problem. Like I don't even have to try to stay focused when I'm playing a game. That's a situation where I'm technically staying focused, but the intensity is very, very, very low because it's too easy. The load, it's, it's like lifting a feather. And so we want to make sure that whatever we're setting our target at, it could be walking, it could be doing the dishes, it could be gardening, or, you know, just breathing, like I said. But whatever it is, we want it to be something that is simple. It needs to be challenging. And if you engage in this long-term focus muscle training for around about 30 days or so of 20, 30 minutes a day, ideally, you will start to notice some changes. But because it requires brain rewiring, you won't notice any difference within the first probably two weeks at least. It doesn't mean that change isn't happening, it just means that it hasn't happened enough for you to notice it yet. But again, if you want to have a focused life where you're not always getting distracted every single day and feeling like your attention span is getting smaller and smaller and smaller because it actually is, then you do need to train this. And it has to be an active process.
So if you take the long-term strategy and you combine it with the two prerequisites of focus in the short-term strategy, you'll be able to not only improve your focus today, but have your focus improving for life, as well as evaluate any tip or technique that you see out there and see whether it's going to work or not for you. Now, one more short-term strategy that you can apply specifically when it comes to studying and learning is to make the activity of studying innately more engaging, therefore making it easier for you to focus and enter into this deep work state. And if you're interested in learning a little bit more about that, then I recommend checking out this video that I made about that topic here.