Insights for improving focus over the course of a workday.
A visualization to tie together the various factors that affect our ability to focus over the course of a typical workday. Download the PDF version.
Sleep. You need somewhere between seven and eight hours of restful sleep to perform at your best, and it’s not purely about quantity. It has to be high quality restful sleep in order to be effective.
Prepare. Getting into the zone is a process. Eating breakfast. Making coffee. Meditating. Exercising. Cleaning your workspace. All of these things can help create a daily ritual that prepares you to focus and do your best work. Find the rituals and habits that work best for you and stick to them. These habits should be unconscious so you’re not wasting willpower making these decisions every day before work.
Mitigate distractions. Before getting started, make sure there aren’t any impending distractions that can pull you out of the zone. You don’t want these tasks to take over your day, but if you can prevent interruptions by spending a few moments on a task now, go ahead and do it. (Clearing your desk of potential distractions is a great example.)
Go dark. Put your phone away and out of sight. Turn on Do Not Disturb and turn off notifications. Quit your email and chat apps and put yourself in a situation where devices and apps aren’t constantly begging for your attention. You can always check them on your breaks between deep work.
Plan. Make a plan of attack for your day (or week) to break larger tasks into batches of more bite-sized tasks. This helps prevent you from being overwhelmed by large tasks and provides something concrete to refer to so you never have to wonder what your next priority is. This also helps prepare your mind for what it needs to focus on.
Start strong. Your willpower and energy only decrease over the course of the day. Start each day with your most ambitious tasks to increase your chances of being able to complete them. Try to organize your day into several one to two hour periods of deep focus punctuated by short restorative breaks.
Save your state. As you’re winding down after a period of deep work, set aside some time to save your state. What did you complete? What should you do next? These notes will help you resume your work with less friction when you return.
Rest. Our brains work a lot like our muscles. They need breaks, but the breaks must be restorative. You have to let go of complex cognitive tasks so your brain can turn off for a little bit. Go for a walk. Grab a small healthy snack. Check email. Catch up on industry news. During your breaks, perform those tasks that need to happen but won’t require too much cognitive effort.
Wrap up. Save some time at the end of each day to record some notes for yourself that will help you get started the next day. Just like when you save your state before taking a break, this will play a huge role in helping your brain create continuity and pick up where you left off. It also helps prime your brain for unconscious thought as you end your work day.
Eat well and hydrate. Studies have shown that hunger and dehydration negatively impact cognitive function. Unhealthy food also further impacts cognitive function. Candy and salty snacks may give a temporary feeling of a boost, but in the long-run, they hurt your ability to focus and increase health related issues that could lead to illness and time off.
Move. As software developers, we spend too much time sitting at a desk. When we’re in the zone, this can be even more problematic because we forget to stand up and move. Making time for exercise or even a short walk outdoors can have a significant positive impact on creativity and our ability to focus.
Focus on value and purpose. Our ability to focus increases significantly when we’re fully aware of the value of and purpose behind the work we’re doing. We increase our engagement with the work at hand and are better able to focus on completing tasks related to that work.
Avoid anxiety. When we work on something that’s too complicated or overwhelming, our brains tend toward procrastination and avoidance. Similarly, when we multitask, we tend to work faster and create stress. When planning your work, it’s critical to break it down into small enough chunks that they aren’t anxiety-inducing. We want to stay engaged but not overwhelmed.
Avoid boredom. When tasks are either too easy or too tedious, it’s difficult to stay engaged with the work because it doesn’t present enough of a challenge. As a result, our mind has spare cycles and begins to wander. We’re more easily distracted, and focus is increasingly difficult to establish and maintain.
Embrace learning. Learning helps our focus increase in value. The more we learn, larger tasks become less intimidating, and smaller tasks become more effortless. Unfortunately, effortless tasks can also become easy and boring. So while it’s important to learn and improve, we have to stay mindful of tasks that aren’t challenging enough to maintain our attention.
Automate the boring. Boring tasks are the enemy. The good news is that when a task is boring, it’s often something we can automate, and automation is often more challenging and interesting. That’s not to say you should always automate, but you should probably consider it more frequently than you do.
Delay low-cognitive tasks. Reserve the beginning of the day for your most important work and wrap up less-urgent and demanding tasks at the end of the day. Your focus and willpower naturally decline towards the end of the day. So that’s the perfect time to handle administrative tasks and email.
Curate your environment. Your environment has a significant impact on your ability to establish and maintain focus. Physical comfort, temperature, humidity, air quality, noise levels, visual distractions, clutter and more all play a role in your ability to focus. Take the time to ensure that your environment isn’t hurting your productivity.
Nurture happiness and well-being. While it can be tempting to dismiss happiness with relation to work, happiness increases engagement, decreases stress, and makes it easier for us to focus and get more done.
Give your brain a break. If you’re always thinking about work, your brain never gets a break. When you’re done working for the day, strive to avoid thinking about work any more. Instead, let your subconscious take over and chew on problems for you. It’s imperative that your brain gets the downtime it needs to restore itself and work through problems on a subconscious level.
