Can't Stay Focused? A 10-Minute Daily Practice for Adults

In 2005, Gloria Mark and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine published a study based on detailed observation of 24 information workers. Their work was highly fragmented. People spent little time in one unit of work before switching to another, and 57% of those units of work were interrupted.

When we cannot stay focused, we tend to blame our own lack of willpower. Reading this study, though, it seems to me that much of the reason lies in our surroundings and the way our work is set up.

This post sums up what research shows about the main reasons focus breaks down, and then describes a practice that takes 10 minutes a day. One note first: if trouble concentrating is seriously affecting your work or daily life, please talk to a doctor before trying to fix it with practice.

Interruptions make you faster, and more tired

In 2008, Mark and colleagues ran an experiment on what happens when work is interrupted (paper). Surprisingly, people who were interrupted finished their tasks in less time, with no difference in quality. The price was more stress, more frustration, more time pressure and more effort. They made up for interruptions by working faster, and paid for it.

If you stop every time a notification sounds, you may still finish the day’s work. But if you feel drained at the end of the day, I think this cost may be part of the reason.

Unfinished work stays in your head

In a 2009 paper, Sophie Leroy studied how attention moves when people switch from one task to another. When the first task was unfinished, it was hard to pull attention away from it, and performance on the next task suffered. Leroy called this “attention residue”.

Starting a document while an email reply is half-written, and thinking about the email the whole time. Many people will know the feeling.

Sleep loss is hard to notice in yourself

In an experiment published in 2003, Van Dongen and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania restricted the sleep of 48 healthy adults aged 21 to 38 to 4, 6 or 8 hours a night for 14 days in a row. Those who slept 6 hours or less a night got steadily worse on attention and other cognitive tasks, down to a level equal to up to two nights with no sleep at all.

What I find most important is that the participants’ own sense of sleepiness did not get worse the way their performance did. The paper says they seemed largely unaware of the decline. When you have a run of days where you cannot focus, sleep is worth suspecting first.

The mind wanders more than we think

Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert at Harvard used smartphones to ask people, at random moments of the day, what they were thinking about (2010 paper). People were thinking about something other than what they were doing almost as often as they were thinking about what they were doing, and when their minds wandered they were usually less happy.

In other words, a wandering mind is not a special flaw. It is how minds normally work. If so, I believe what matters is not keeping your mind from wandering, but noticing that it has and coming back.

Where to put your phone

A 2017 study reported that just having your own smartphone on the desk reduces available cognitive capacity, and it was widely discussed. However, a pre-registered replication in 2022 found no difference by where the phone was placed.

So I do not think we can say for sure that seeing your phone lowers your focus. Even so, I think it is a good idea to leave the phone in another room when you want to concentrate. The reason is simple: if it is out of reach, notifications cannot interrupt you and you cannot pick it up without thinking.

A 10-minute daily practice

What follows is my own suggestion based on the research above. It is not a procedure that has been tested in a study.

First minute: get ready. Turn off notifications on your phone, or put it in another room. On paper, write down one thing you will do in the next 10 minutes. Something with a visible end works well, such as “decide the headings for the proposal” or “fold the laundry”.

Next seven minutes: do only that one thing. Set a timer and do only what you wrote. When your mind wanders, go back to the task as soon as you notice. You might also keep a tally of how many times your mind wandered in the margin. The point is not to reduce the number. It is to practise noticing and coming back.

Last two minutes: close it off. If you finished, write that you finished. If not, write one line on where you stopped and what you will do next. As Leroy’s study shows, unfinished work stays in your head. I think writing down your next step can make that a little lighter.

I chose 10 minutes because it is short enough that starting does not feel like a chore. Once you are used to it, you can make the middle part longer. I wrote about working in 25-minute blocks with short breaks in How to Use the Pomodoro Technique.

For long stretches of work, short pauses now and then may help too. In a 2011 experiment by Ariga and Lleras, performance on a monotonous monitoring task fell over time, but when participants briefly switched to something else from time to time (recalling digits they had memorised), the decline did not happen. It was a lab task, but I find the idea convincing: brief breaks may help more than trying to hold the same attention without a pause.

Outside the practice

Your daily environment may matter more than the 10-minute practice.

• Protect your sleep. As the study above shows, you may not notice when you are short of it, so it helps to decide on a fixed bedtime
• Turn off notifications altogether for apps that send many
• Before leaving unfinished work, write down your next step
• Check email and messages at set times rather than as they arrive

About brain training

Some people use brain training apps to build focus. BrainDojo, which I make, is one of them.

However, as I wrote in Does Brain Training Work?, tasks you practise get better, but there is no clear evidence that the improvement spreads to focus at work or at home. If you do an attention task every day, your score on that task will probably rise. That does not mean your mind will stop wandering in meetings.

I think brain training fits best as something like the “first minute” of the practice above. You sit down at a set time and give your attention to short tasks one at a time, and you use that routine as a switch before the work you want to focus on.

About BrainDojo

BrainDojo is an iPhone and iPad app for keeping up daily brain training with short mini-games. The app itself states that it is not a medical device. I do not promise that it will improve your concentration.

The first-time “BrainDojo setup” asks “What do you struggle with the most?”, and “I can’t stay focused” is one of the answers. For “How much time can you spend a day?”, you choose “3 minutes”, “5 minutes” or “10 minutes or more”, and your daily training count is set to 2, 3 or 5 accordingly. Choosing Morning, Daytime or Evening for “When will you train?” sets a reminder for 8:00, 12:30 or 21:00. You can change all of these later in Settings.

The training is grouped into lanes such as Calculation Boost, Memory Boost, Attention Boost and Handwriting Training. You answer by handwriting with your finger, speaking, or tapping. The free plan gives you two “Try” games a day, the Brain Dojo Check once a day, and a calendar where you stamp the days you trained. BrainDojo Plus adds Today’s Training and every game. Neither plan has ads.

Getting Started with BrainDojo walks through the first session, and How to Improve Your Memory as an Adult covers research on memory.