How to get your attention span back

We live in a world of distraction. In the time it took me to write this sentence, I got a new email alert on my computer, two new DMs, and an alert on my phone that my Duolingo streak is in jeopardy. With all of this outside interference, how in the world do you manage to sustain attention on anything anymore?

Chances are, you’re having trouble with that. You may not be able to work for more than a couple of minutes at a time without your brain interrupting you to do something else. So, even when you don’t get pulled away by something that demands your attention, your brain stops you from concentrating.

What’s going on?

It is natural to think of your brain as being like a computer that manipulates information as a critical part of thought. There is a long history of conceptualizing the brain using the most complex artifacts of an era. Indeed, if you think about some of the metaphors around anger like “he was boiling mad,” and “she took a walk to let off steam,” you are seeing vestiges of a hydraulic theory of mind drawn from steam engines that entered the language in the nineteenth century.

What the computer metaphor misses is that the brain has important timing mechanisms in it. After all, your brain is also controlling your body, and controlled movement requires executing steps at particular moments in time. Those timing mechanisms help bring together information processing and muscle coordination to support complex action.

Those timing mechanisms also enable the brain to interrupt you when it thinks something important is about to happen. That contributes to your distractibility. If you are routinely pulled out of your routine by emails, direct messages, alerts from your phone, and other technology, then your brain expects something important is going to happen that needs to be checked every few minutes. If a short time goes by and you haven’t stopped what you’re doing, your brain breaks in and encourages you to scout around on your technology to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

How to fix it

You didn’t develop that set of habits overnight, and you won’t get rid of them overnight either.

Instead, you need to start training your brain slowly to give you more time to pay attention to what is in front of you right now.

Start by minimizing the number of potential distractions in your environment. If you have your phone near you and several windows open on your computer at all times with potential updates, then you’re building an environment with rapidly changing information sources that beg to be checked. Minimize your windows and turn your phone over to decrease the degree to which the environment calls attention to itself and reinforces your habit of distraction.

That won’t entirely eliminate the temptation to cut away from your current task. So, you need to start associating the desire to switch tasks with the action of continuing your work. When you find yourself wanting to stop what you’re doing to check email, messages, or something else, continue what you were doing for a little longer. Read another paragraph or page, write another few sentences, or continue with that spreadsheet.

The aim is to reassociate the feeling that you should switch tasks with the action of continuing what you’re doing. Gradually, that will benefit your attention span. Your timing mechanisms will learn, slowly, that you don’t need to be interrupted as often. That will give you more time to work without internal conflict, which will enable you to be more productive.

Finally, if you really need to work on something crucial that requires your full attention, consider getting out of your normal environment. Commandeer a conference room at the office or head to a coffee shop. Because that novel environment won’t be as strongly associated with your typical distractions as your office is, you may get a break from your internal disruptions.