Train Your Brain to Focus

isn't so bad. Oh a chat message? I want a gossip. You know you want to gossip. I don't know. I heard the salacious thing about this person we talk about all the time. Let's dissect it together for the next twenty five minutes. It's gonna be juicy and fun. And we'll also talk about work a little bit, so you can justify spending your time chatting with me. Okay, that was fun. That comes is work? Right. While I'm here, I might as well click over to my team's group chat.

We're working on a big project. I bet there are important updates for me in there, dancing. I feel like I'm forgetting something, something important. Oh god, my story and it's almost four I just need to focus. I'm so bad at concentrating on one task, even when I know it needs to get done as soon as possible. But I'm gonna get serious now. I'm gonna sit down and write.

But I wonder what's happening on Facebook. Welcome to Works for Me, the show where we try to fix our workplace problems to find out what strategies will work for you. I'm Francesco Levi and I'm Rebecca Greenfield. This week, it's Beca's turn to take us on a productivity journey. Becca, what is the problem you're trying to solve this week? As you heard in that dramatic reenactment at the top of the show, I cannot focus on my work. I get distracted by Twitter or the Internet or my email

or chat very easily. And it feels like I can never sit down and complete a task without an interruption. How is that possible? I know that you can. You're capable of getting things done. You get things done all the time. In fact, I think you're like a particularly productive person. Like I know people who can't focus, and you're nowhere on that list. Okay, yeah, that is, this

is what people say to me. So when I told Danny, my boyfriend, that I wanted to work on my focus for our next experiment, he had the exact same reaction as you did. But as I explained to him, getting things done is different than being focused on the things you're doing. I don't really understand why you think you need to focus better, because you are way more efficient than anyone I know. You'll be like, all I did was chat all day and then I wrote these four stories.

I'm like, what, I've never written four stars in one day. And also, I don't think we can play this from my employer because I'm not g chatting all day. You're not. You are working while chatting me. Okay, well, I would like to not have that habit. I would like to work really focused and then when I'm done, reward myself with a G chat and then be the best version of myself. Okay, So you're not liking the experience you're

having while you're getting stuff done. I do not like the experience, and this is a common problem that I guess you have. Also, um, I'm far from the only person who can't focus. British Telecom found that people check their phones every twelve minutes, so yeah, this is something a lot of people can relate to. Yeah, I definitely. I mean, my phone just flashed. There's like a new feature where it shows you how much screen time, and my just was like an unwelcome push notification about my

screen time. And I was shocked and horrified at just like the amount of time staring at my phone, because I know I'm not most of the time, I'm not working when I'm staring at my phone. So I've done on a phone. Yeah, okay, so your focus is a problem apparently, and you wanted to fix it. How so I didn't really know how. I looked some stuff up online, and there are all of these brain training websites, but they didn't really get at what I wanted. Like, I

didn't want to get better brain games. I wanted to get better at focusing on my work. So I went out and found a super concentrator, the simone Biles of Concentrating. If you will, it's not unusual for me to do. I can do a five six hour, seven hour day where I'm just working on one thing. That's Cal Newport. He's a computer scientist at Georgetown university. He also happens to be very good at concentrating. He even wrote a book about it. It's called Deep Work Rules for Focused

Success in a Distracted World. Cal got interested in concentrating when he started looking into how people do their jobs. He quickly realized that the answer to that was not very well. He found that the workplace is a very distracting place, and people like us have convinced ourselves that engaging in the distractions like answering emails and slack messages is part of our jobs. But he says, it's just not.

I don't think we're properly valuing uh, concentration, because it's easy to say, you know what, I'm busy, I'm communicating, a lot of messages are moving, I'm on messenger, I'm on my phone, I'm active a lot. So I must be productive. I must be doing something something right. I must be producing value. But I think when you look a little bit closer, you realize actually it's the undistracted, concentrated work that is more valuable to the bottom line

in many different positions, in many different fields. Kel on the other hand, doesn't operate like this at all. In his work life. He gets all of his work done during the hours of nine to five. He doesn't use social media, he ignores his inbox. He's disciplined, so he realized that he had a lot to teach sad distracted sacks like me. The good news is that, according to cal most people don't even know how much they can

really focus because as they're not even trying well. I think physical fitness is a good analogy for thinking about this. A lot of people incorrectly think about the ability to focus as something like a habit, like flossing their teeth, something they know how to do. It's just a matter of doing it more often. That's not actually the case. If you're not actually training your mind to be good at sustained concentration, you're actually not going to get nearly

as much value out of your concentration sessions. So this is not about small tweaks around the edges. Really embracing focus as a core skill in your job and something that you practice and protect can have massive changes to the amount of things you're able to produce in the quality level of those things. Cow says that you have to work out the concentration muscles in your brain, and by working them out you'll get better at using them.

So everyone's trying to multitask because they feel obligated to. But multitasking is the destruction of your work, and you really need to concentrate. And apparently concentrating is something that you have to use it or lose it, right, Yeah, I find this very encouraging. Well, so what are you going to do to improve your concentration? I Am going to work out my brain in an attempt to learn

how to concentrate better. Cal told me about this interval training exercise where you sit down with a timer and do twenty minutes of work focusing on a single difficult task. If I can get through twenty minutes a few times without distraction, I can increase the time by ten minutes. And if I get through that, increase it another ten minutes, and so on. Cal also talked about how it helps to have a ritual before you start doing focused work, like he always takes a walk to get coffee before

getting down to work. So I'm going to walk around the news room and put on music without words to get in the zone. I'll do all of this for a week. Like this, you have like a little workout plan from your personal trainer, except it's for your brain, not your body muscles. But how will you know if you have succeeded. So I am not very confident in my focus ability really at all. Like twenty minutes of

doing one thing uninterrupted sounds completely impossible to me. Like when I'm writing a story, I cannot not click over to something or some other tab, Like I'm writing one sentence and I need to distract myself. So I think I'm going to suck at this. But that said, I want to be able to do thirty minutes of uninterrupted focused time by the end of my experiment. I'm starting off the experiment by doing the ritual, which is walking around the newsroom once before I get started. So that's

what I'm doing. Look, I'm like a crazy person talking to this microphone. This was me on my first day, completing my first ritual lap around the office. Okay, back at my desk, going to find my playlist. I found. I found this playlist called Concentrate at work on Spotify. Going to set a timer or queue up a timer twenty minutes and I have a story that I'm working on. I'm gonna work on that and ready set good the

playlist had a lot of technobis. I sat down to work on my story and it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I was trying really hard to not look at distracting things, and it was working. But soon enough I realized that I wasn't exactly concentrating on my work either. I have five minutes left. I think I'm basically sitting here staring at the page and not concentrating thinking about other things. I'm gonna call this

I fail. Well, this gets into like a a tricky area, right, because you thought you'd have to just eliminate your distractions, but then you find ways to distract yourself with your own mind, even if you're not actually like looking at Twitter or doing whatever else would take you away from being in your word document. Yeah, my brain was distracting itself fine enough on its own. Did not need the two meets. But I did decide to try it again that day. Okay, take two. Gotta in my ritual again.

So I did my ritual again and walked around the news room. Then I sat down to do my work, and again my brain was fighting the concentration. I was reading a story and my eyes were jumping all over the page, just looking for something else to do. But if that weren't bad enough, then something out of my control happened. Becca if Ellen was a woman, yeah, is that the subjects lite? What if he was O? Great technicallymatically,

but it's a subject time, so I think stuff. Okay. So, as you saw, I got interrupted by my boss asking me a question. That's I can't X out her window. She just talked to me. Okay, that's over. Timer is up. Okay, I'm done with this experiment right now. Too much to do. Well, there's a wrench that got thrown into your plan. Yeah, you we work in an open office, like not every

interruption is a self imposed interruption like the internet. It's I'm also, this was your boss talking to you, right, so it was hardly somebody you could ignore or just be like, excuse me, I'm concentrating right now doing an experiment for a podcast to improve myself. Yeah. No, I couldn't do that. And cal had warned me about the stuff about my brain fighting it, but he didn't really warn me about the realities of working in a modern open office and how that could interfere with my experience.

So I tried one more time on that first day, and I failed yet again. Fifty seconds left and I clicked away man. So that not a very successful first day of focusing. Huh. No, my first day was a bust. It sucked. I failed like hard every single time, and I was really feeling bad, really bad about myself. But I had to keep going with the experiment. So on day two I soldiered on and after the break, we'll see how I did. After my day of failures, on day two, I decided that the playlist was the reason

for my failed first day. I really hated the music. I am just really not into techno. It felt like being inside and urban outfitters or a Burning Man themed co working space. It was not for me. I don't alienate our techno loving listeners. Sorry, it's just awesome for me. But I found something I liked better called chill lo fi steady beats. I don't have to play for you, but I can if you want, I can imagine what

it sounds like. I'll ever every one second. That's how a creepy Okay, well that's that sounds like haunted music box in the haunted house. But whatever works for you, sleepy wow, right, well, to me, it's neither sleepy nor creepy. I like it. And with this new playlist in hand, I did my walk around the newsroom ritual again. Can I just point out that, like, it's kind of funny that every single time you decide you're going to get ready to focus in a given day, you now have

to get up and walk around. It's so much walk. I guess you're getting your steps in, that's right. So I walked around the newsroom again, and then I settled into another focus session. Need to close tab? Wasn't my email? Was that? Twitter? Minimized chat, setting my timer, and here we go. That day, I was working on preparing for a big interview I had coming up. I was researching the people I was interviewing and then writing a list of questions to ask them. It was feeling pretty good,

and then before I knew it, time was up. I did it. I successfully focus for twenty minutes straight, no interruptions. Wait, already on your second day? Yeah that's awesome, considering you felt like you could never achieve focusing for more than one sentence of writing at a time. Yeah, it was. If I dare say, I'm miraculous, I felt I felt great, and so I thought maybe the playlist was the problem. But then came my next try and I failed. So wait, the playlist wasn't the problem. No, I mean I think

it helped. I think you have to make your environment as optimal as you possibly can, Like I can't escape from our open office, but at least I don't have to torture my ears with techno music. But after control for that, I realized that the culprit the reason I was still struggling was the type of work I was doing. So cal talked about two kinds of work. There's deep

work and there's shallow work. Shallow work has to happen in order for just an organization to function, but deep work has to happen if you actually want to advance your organization or advance your career. Shallow work is necessary. Deep work pays to bills. Shallow work is the stuff we have to do to function in the workplace, like checking emails, attending meanings, making lists. And deep work is the meat of your job, which in my world is

reporting and writing. And the deeper the work, the harder it is to focus on. Yeah, deep and shallow is a really apt analogy for that because I look at like the shallow work, the stuff that you can take off your list, and it's just basically easy, but it makes you happy when you actually get around to getting it done, like that feels so good, But it's not. It's not hard. So if you just set aside the time for it and commit to doing it, you can

do it. But the deep work, it is like staring into an abyss, Like you're just like, I have to make something out of nothing. I have to write a story, or I have to write a script for a podcast. I just got shells. It's it's so hard to just stare into the abyss and it's just the ugly depths. But I also think that there's the spectrum of work in between, stuff that contributes to deep work, but isn't

actually that deep. It's like deep adjacent. So for me, that's researching and writing up questions for an interview, right, you actually have to think about that, right, it's not like writing an email. But it's not like writing a story either, And that's why I think I got through that focus session because it was this medium work adjacent that's right, So it's not as hard as writing a story. So I zoomed right through it. But so the deep work. Does CAL have any suggestions for how to get through

the deep work? Yes, but it's not a satisfying answer. It's not just change your playlist, he said. I had to keep practicing. So I just kept trying and failing and trying and failing again. But then eventually, on day four, sorry if you did it, I got through twenty minutes and it wasn't a fluke. I'd broken through some wall and kept succeeding, and by day five I was comfortably getting through twenty minutes. So I decided to go for the holy grail thirty minutes. I've been training for this

moment all week. I get up from my desk to walk around the room to get in the optimal mindset. After a brisk clock I'm feeling good. I sit down, put in my earbuds and switch on chillow by study beats. My brain feels primed. I set my timer and then I get to work on a story. I'm in the zone, writing complete sentences about taking a break. I think about checking Twitter, but I tell myself, no, stay strong, and before I know it, okay, I didn't the thirty minutes.

It was torture and they did it. There you're okay, and I can procrastinate throw Wow, wow, thirty minutes the holy grill, you hit your gold, I know. And it really felt amazing. And I feel so freaking good, like it's just doing thirty minutes of writing where you just get through it, you focus. I feel like a queen. I know. I know this sounds like I'm over exaggerating, but it really felt good. I mean, usually it's so hard for me to get stuff done, like three pm

on any day, and wow, this is crazy. I feel so good, Like my brain felt different, I swear, and from then on I was untouchable. I did thirty minute blocks of focus work for the rest of the week, no problem. I was getting so good at thirty minutes that on my last day, day seven, I decided to try for forty minutes. WHOA, we didn't. Honestly, it was hard, um, but I kind of what done. Finished one task, started another. Honestly, feel like I could do more time. Oh from zero

a zero congratulations, Becca, thank you you really triumphed. Yeah, it felt amazing, as not to restate the point, but it felt amazing. It feels amazing. I had been worried that it would be harder for me to get through the time when I had hard work like writing to do, But it wasn't. I not only wrote my story, but I liked it. It got addictive. I wanted more and more. Cal are focus afficionado predicted that that would happen if

you do this pretty aggressively for a week. By the end of the week, you'll feel you know, this is not only a little bit easier, but my work feels a little bit different. I feel like I'm achieving a new level of concentration on producing sharper words or more words per minute or whatever the metric is, but that I'm better at concentrating than I was. The other feeling you should be looking for is also the sort of an emergent attraction to concentration is something that you start

to crave more. So many parallels with exercise, right like you, It takes discipline, you have to work out your muscles, and then when you do it, you feel really good, and then you get kind of predicted to it. I'm curious, do you think your work were sharper like did the writing you did during those concentrated times actually turn out better. So it's very hard to measure this, but it was during a time of intense productivity for me. It was

like a crazy couple of weeks I had there. Also, the story I wrote one of those times was a story that this does not happen often. But my editor was like, oh, this is really good, and so I don't know, you know, you can't really measure it, but yes, I guess. Well, it definitely sounds like you succeeded at your experiment, right, you sailed past that thirty minute goal. Yeah, I did. I did it. After my week long experiment. I was an enthusiastic focus supporter. I am so into

this and I hope I can keep doing it. It feels so good to just sit down and do work. And I also was really scared that when I got to writing stories, because writing it's so hard and torturous, and you want to just like write a sentence, look at Twitter, write a sentence, check your email. That that would be so hard. But when I was doing the concentrating thing, it just wasn't it. Just I think you psych yourself out, but you can sit down and write a story and yeah, it's not perfect, but you can

do it, So that was awesome. The downsides I think are when you come back, you feel like you can just go crazy not focusing. Yeah, I wonder if if you don't keep this up, it goes back to being just as hard. If the exercise analogy holds, then it would, right. Yeah, I read somewhere about exercise like if you don't do it for two days, you're back to your base. So maybe it's the same for brain, Like I can't I got to go back to twenty minutes and not being able to do it. But you're addicted to it at

this point, so it shouldn't be a problem. Let's just keep doing these sessions focusing forever um. But yeah, I think there are a couple of caveats, Like I said you do, there's like still a lot of procrastination evolved, like those does not have anything to be procrastinate, and like it took me a long time sometimes to get to the focus session. And I think you in a way procrastinate more before and after because you are anticipating all of your focus. You're like, I gotta get into

my internet time now like a crazy person. And then I also think like not everyone can do this if you have a type of job where you can't shut the world out for chunks of time at the day. But I think a lot of people think their job is like that, but it's not. They think that they can't shut the world up if they can, like I think a lot of people can take twenty minutes and

not answer emails. Yeah, and presumably if your job really is one of those jobs that you can't shut out the world, like like you're an air traffic controller, then don't do that. By not shutting out the world, you're actually doing your job, So you would still feel accomplished even if you're just like listening to all the inputs and you know, taking in lots of outside feedback, because that's still good work. Like you never would need to check Twitter. You might need to respond to an but

you're right, probably not as quickly as you think. So I really strongly suggest people try this. UM. And the big lesson that I'm taking from this is I thought of myself as somebody who thrived in the chaos, like I'd optimized working with distractions, and now I know that they're I don't have to do that, Like there's a better way, and it not only helps me get work done,

but it really made me feel a lot better. It's like, I don't want to say there's a simple trick that will turn you into some superhuman worker, but sometimes you just have to like try something different and you'll feel less stuck. Um. Next time on Works for Me, Francesca takes on the dreaded team meeting. Oh, did anyone have any general announcements? Um ered. Thanks for listening to another

episode of Works for Me. If you like this show, please go over to Apple Podcasts and take a second to rate review, and of course subscribe to our show and tell your friends, Tell all your friends or your best friend at least. You can also find all of our shows and are very cool illustrations on Bloomberg dot com slash quirks for Me. Are there any problems in your work life that you're dying to fix? We would

love to hear about them. Call us and leave us a voicemail at two one to six one seven zero and we might use it on the air, Or you can tweet at us I'm at Francesca today and I'm at RZ Greenfield. This show was hosted and recorded by me Becca Greenfield and me Francesca Leavie. This show was produced by Tobrah Foreheads. Jordan's Spear did the illustrations on our show page, and we want to give us special things to Ebban Noby Williams, Liz Smith and Erica Parpinello.

Francesca Leavy is Bloomberg's head of Hot. How see you next week. Bye,