improve your concentration

Three brain hacks to improve your concentration and to achieve focus amid distractions. Improve your concentration with natural techniques.

How many of you have sat at your office desk and tried to focus on a task? You found that your mind is wandering again and again? Despite your best intentions, you just can’t just concentrate. We have all been in this familiar, frustrating situation, and it’s something that can really undermine our performance.

In this article, we will review strategies that you can use to improve your concentration and to reduce your daily distractions.

How to improve your concentration amidst daily distractions?

Environment

Your personal work environment plays an immense role in your ability to focus. The more comfortable and welcoming your office environment is, the easier it will likely be for you to stay there and concentrate.

Here are amazing ideas for improving your physical environment:

• Make sure you are comfortable – Start by ensuring that your desk and chair are at the right height to work comfortably. If your chair and desk are too high or too low, you will be uncomfortable, and you will get tempted to use this as an excuse to get up and walk away.
• Put up pictures – Viewing natural scenery or watching wildlife can help improve concentration. If you can put up pictures in your office or work area, then choose landscapes or natural images that you enjoy. It can help your concentration, especially if you can see the pictures from your desk.
• Turn away from distractions as much as possible – Listening to music can help, especially if it’s instrumental music. Some people even use “white noise” apps, which produce a steady, undistracting noise like falling rain or ocean waves. This steady background sound can drown out other noise. It helps you focus better and ignore distractions.

 

Nutrition

Follow a few simple nutritional tips:

• Drink water – Most people don’t think about drinking an adequate amount of water while we are at work. Dehydration can make us feel fatigued, irritable, slow, or even sick. When our brains don’t get enough fluid, they cannot operate at peak performance. Staying hydrated during work is an easy way to improve your focus during the day.
• Eat breakfast – Start your workday with a healthy breakfast. It’s much harder to concentrate when you are hungry. So, have a well-rounded meal before you go to work. You can also help your focus throughout the day by keeping healthy snacks at your desk. Almonds, crackers, fresh fruits, and vegetables are great choices.
• Get up and walk around – Do you have a habit of walking around during the day? There are many people who don’t prefer walking around enough. Research has shown that walking around regularly can help improve your focus during the day.

Mindset

 

Constant distractions, and the low productivity that is associated with these distractions, have become so commonplace in today’s offices. Doctors have even given it a name. That is Attention Deficit Trait or ADT. And, they say that the entire organisation can suffer from it.

Follow these guidelines to help focus your mind:

• Set aside time to deal with your worries – Many of us have trouble concentrating during the day because we are constantly worrying about other things. It can be an approaching deadline for a project you haven’t started yet, a new colleague who is causing issues, or just the amount of work piled up on your desk. If you find yourself distracted by any of these worries, then note it down so that you don’t need to hold them inside your mind. Then schedule a time to deal with these problems.
• Focus on only one task at a time – It can be harder to focus if you take minibreaks to answer emails, send text messages, or make quick phone calls. Some researchers say that it can take up to 10 to 15 minutes for us to regain complete focus after a distraction.
• Close your email inbox and chat boxes – Let your voicemail do its job. Close your cabin door or put up a “Don’t Disturb” sign if your office allows it. It let your co-employees know you need to focus. If you are a manager and you want to operate an open-door policy, then consider working from home or work from elsewhere for those times you need to focus.
• Switch between high- and low-attention tasks – It can give your brain a rest after heavy concentration. For example, if you spend two hours working on a high-attention task, you will probably feel tired afterwards. You can fuel your energy by working on a low-attention task for 15 minutes before going back.
• Prioritise – Having too much work to do cannot be a welcome distraction. And this sometimes causes procrastination. Or, you may jump from task to task quickly, creating the illusion of work. But in reality, you are not accomplishing very much. If you aren’t sure which tasks to start or which are most important, take 10 or 15 minutes to prioritise your To-Do list.

Limiting distractions let you get into the flow of your work, so you get more done. Improving focus takes work and effort. However, it isn’t necessarily essential to be a difficult or complicated process. In fact, all it really needs is to challenge yourself in some way.

When we challenge ourselves, we are forced to stay focused on what we are doing. And, staying focused for extended periods helps improve our concentration.