Why can't I just focus?

In our always bustling, often stressful life, focus is priceless. It's also becoming increasingly difficult to locate. When you're up to your eyeballs in work and find yourself sucked into a social media rabbit hole or a YouTube binge, one question pops into your head:

Why can't I just focus?

Because digital temptations are abundant, it's simple to blame them for the problem. Others, particularly perfectionists, attribute the problem to a lack of discipline or willpower. The truth, though, is a little more difficult. Understanding our own biology and behavior patterns, which may have gone unnoticed for years, is the first step in navigating the murky waters of distraction. We may switch our attention to practical methods to increase our focus once we have a firm grasp of the problem.

Causes of Lack of Concentration or Focus

Difficulty Prioritizing What's Most Important

When you're faced with an infinite list of tasks, a distant and hazy goal, or both, this happens. You'll frequently find yourself multitasking, crossing stuff off your to-do list as you switch between tasks. But if you come to the end of the week and you're no closer to your goal (or, worse, you can't tell if you're getting closer or further away), you'll start to wonder if it's all worth it. Because you can't tell which chores are more important, the temptation is to work on whatever is easy or throw up your hands and go watch Netflix.

Emotional procrastination

Many of our procrastination problems are thinly veiled attempts to escape unpleasant situations. Theoretically, we know we can do whatever task is in front of us; anyone who has ever had to meet a tight deadline can attest to that. The problem isn't one of capability. It's our emotional triggers that keep us from being uncomfortable. Without the correct ways to handle them, we're often only able to get started when the discomfort of not doing anything outweighs the benefit of procrastinating on it.

Motivational Deficit

You're not alone if you've left a trail of incomplete projects in your wake. A lack of motivation can hit when it's time to start focusing (leading to procrastination) or when we're trying to stay concentrated until the job is completed.

Remember that our brains are programmed to want immediate gratification. That is why it is so simple to eat the entire box of chocolates right now; the future is a mystery. This preference for immediate gratification might make it difficult to stay motivated over the course of a job that will take days, weeks, or months. The same can be said for the crucial duties of preparing and honing your craft. Customers and your manager will not be impressed with that kind of work right away. Due to a lack of feedback, we are forced to make educated guesses about our own development, making it even more difficult to stay on track.

Excessive Multitasking

Multitasking is a common side effect of being overworked. When you're scared that your to-do list will evolve into the next War and Peace, it's difficult to stay focused long enough to complete one task. It's tempting to go from activity to task, working on that spreadsheet while answering phone calls and responding to emails. It's easy to fool ourselves into thinking that a flurry of activity equals productivity. Meanwhile, the costs of switching continue to rise.

Problems with Time Management

If done unwittingly, the manner we organize our days shows our proclivity to avoid unpleasantness. Rather than forcing ourselves to face that difficult but high-priority activity first thing in the morning, we schedule it for later in the day. Then we're perplexed as to why it never seems to get finished. Another common issue is estimating the length of time it will take to complete a task. It's all too tempting to try to cram too much in and then become angry when we don't achieve our unrealistic deadlines. Finally, allowing too much unstructured time takes away our ability to use goal-driven, top-down selective attention and instead trains us to respond to whatever stimulus is vying for our attention at the time.

Problems with Physical Health

Our bodies and thoughts are inextricably linked. As a result, it's a tragedy that physical health is often overlooked as an important component of the attention puzzle. Sleep deprivation affects one out of every three adults, disrupting communication between brain cells and impairing cognition. We also have a habit of missing meals or having light snacks when we should be eating something substantial, which has been shown to affect our ability to concentrate. We also don't drink enough water, which is another attention killer. It's no surprise that our bodies respond in the only manner they know how: by bombarding us with internal impulses.

Problems with Mental Health

Mental health concerns, like physical health issues, can make it difficult to focus. Anxiety and sadness can remodel our brains as well as modify our mental habits. Consider how much more difficult it would be to complete your next coding sprint if your stress hormones were rushing because your brain perceived a major threat (anxiety) or if motivation was impossible since the activity seemed meaningless (depression). Mental health difficulties are pervasive and can have a cascading influence on the other topics covered in this section.

Distraction

Distraction isn't about being unable to concentrate; it's about allowing yourself to become preoccupied with something other than the activity at hand. This is infuriating because it causes tasks to take significantly longer than they should. Because your brain is always scrambling to reposition itself, it has the same switching costs as multitasking when it happens frequently. Notice how quickly you can find anything else to do whenever your project becomes difficult? This is because distractions provide brief respites from discomfort. That fast Instagram scroll is like a stress reliever at the end of a long day.

Struggling to focus is a frustrating and layered problem that that affects everyone at some point. Whether you’re struggling to find motivation or having trouble prioritizing – chances are your lack of focus is pointing to something more complicated beneath the surface. Luckily, with a better understanding of our biology, behaviors, and a few practical techniques, we can begin to tackle our issues with concentration so that we can give our attention and focus to the things that matter most.

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