Ask HN: Focus and concentration

I can get into spells of this as well. What I try to do is to set high level goals (maybe 1-6 months out), break those goals down, and break those goals down, and really scope out the big things into a lot of small things. Only look at a day or week's worth of small things at a time (to not get overloaded in the quantity of small tasks). Set milestones at which you can assess your perfection, and if its not to your standards, revise your goals.

You got to find something thats interesting to you, then it will be easier to stick to it. My friend and I have worked on various projects from start to end, but sometimes he comes up with good ideas that have nothing to do with his interests. You can get motivated for a day or two, but it drops off afterwards.

Find something you like, and force yourself to work on it in your free time. Don't give yourself to much time either, if you have 8 hours a day there is much more to waste. Once you got a good base you can spend more time (8 hours a day) cause you'll be invested by that point.

I used to. Then in '99 I bought an old Volkswagen microbus. That old rolling pile of junk was the coolest thing on the road (when she was in fact, on the road).

When I bought the VW I planned to restore her to showroom condition.

Never happened.

What did happen is that I developed an appreciation for "good enough". She'd just barely top 55 mph - good enough. She had rattles, a fuel gauge that never worked, a steering system that really kept me on my toes, and to balance it all out she had a ragtop - all in all, good enough.

You see, I had wanted a 21-window VW since I was like twelve years old. And when I finally got one I was determined to drive it. And I drove it all over the country - for years...

And maybe that's all you need to do - determine that you're going to "drive" your projects (even if they leak oil and rattle while you drive).

One word: passion. If you are not emotionally attached to your idea, which passion is, then you are going to drop it when another idea pops up. Finding something you are passionate about and connecting that to a business or project will allow you to focus on whatever goals you have set. If not then the project will be just another thing in a sea of great ideas...

Is there anything bugging you that won't let you focus and concentrate?

When I used to suffer from this(no longer, touch wood) I found this extract from Steven Pressfied's "The War of Art" inspiring

"In my late twenties I rented a little house in Northern California; I had gone there to finish a novel or kill myself trying. By that time I had blown up a marriage to a girl I loved with all my heart, screwed up two careers, blah blah, etc., all because (though I had no understanding of this at the time) I could not handle Resistance . I had one novel nine-tenths of the way through and another at ninety-nine hundredths before I threw them in the trash. I couldn't finish 'em. I didn't have the guts. In yielding thusly to Resistance, I fell prey to every vice , evil, distraction, you-name-it mentioned heretofore, all leading nowhere, and finally washed up in this sleepy California town, with my Chevy van, my cat Mo, and my antique Smith-Corona.

A guy named Paul Rink lived down the street. Look him up, he's in Henry Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. Paul was a writer. He lived in his camper, "Moby Dick." I started each day over coffee with Paul. He turned me on to all kinds of authors I had never heard of, lectured me on self-discipline, dedication, the evils of the marketplace. But best of all, he shared with me his prayer, the Invocation of the Muse from Homer's Odyssey, the T. E. Lawrence translation. Paul typed it out for me on his even-more-ancient-than-mine manual Remington. I still have it. It's yellow and parched as dust; the merest puff would blow it to powder.

In my little house I had no TV. I never read a newspaper or went to a m o v i e . I just worked . One afternoon I was banging away in the little bedroom I had converted to anoffice, when I heard my neighbor's radio playing outside. Someone in a loud voice was declaiming " . . . to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." I came out. What's going on? "Didn't you hear? Nixon's out; they got a new guy in there." I had missed Watergate completely.

I was determined to keep working. I had failed so many times, and caused myself and people I loved so much pain thereby, that I felt if I crapped out this time I would have to hang myself. I didn't know what Resistance was then. No one had schooled me in the concept. I felt it though, big-time. I experienced it as a compulsion to self-destruct. I could not finish what I started. T h e closer I got, the more different ways I'd find to screw it up. I worked for twenty-six months straight, taking only two out for a stint of migrant labor in Washington State, and finally one day I got to the last page and typed out: THE END.

I never did find a buyer for the book. Or the next one, either. It was ten years before I got the first check for something I had written and ten more before a novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was actually published. But that moment when I first hit the keys to spell out THE END was epochal.

I remember rolling the last page out and adding it to the stack that was the finished manuscript. Nobody knew I was done. Nobody cared. But I knew. I felt like a dragon I'd been fighting all my life had just dropped dead at my feet and gasped out its last sulfuric breath. Rest in peace, motherfucker.

Next morning I went over to Paul's for coffee and told him I had finished. " Good for y o u , " he said without looking up. "Start the next one today."

"

So now I just work. Decoupling work from one's emotional state is just a habit more than anything else. A few "Rest in Peace MF er " moments of my own taught me that.

This is a good question, and one I've been thinking about myself.

I don't have a direct answer, but this is what's helped me.

(1): 4x3 Dry Erase Board nearby Computer, it might be because of having ADD but I find I do the best idea-refinement/drawing stuff out on a dry erase board, both because you can erase it easily and it involves some walking around. Thinking about it aloud and gesticulating helps me a lot as well, but I gesticulate quite a bit normally so that might be more specific to me.

(2): Quiet place to work, best situation is to reserve a room your house/apartment/etc specifically devoted to working. I would say an office but office normally includes taxes, finances, faxes, etc

(3): Have water within arms length and drink it often

(4): Have a clear mind, vent out your mind before you get started and it will make it easier to be productive.

Start with the dry erase board, it really helps to get started focusing.

When I was a teen/young adult, I felt like this. I read a lot of interesting stuff, some useful but a lot not. Then I was diagnosed late in life with a medical condition. For me, inability to focus is usually rooted in my health issues. Working on my underlying health issues has been the main thing that has improved my ability to focus.

The other thing that comes to mind is something I read in my twenties about individuals having specific types of "doing" energy which needs to be expended and you can't effectively stop it until it's used up and you can't effectively push much beyond that once it is used up. On HN, people sometimes talk about either being unable to work a full-time job doing X and also do it on the side or you hear people talk about things like "the need to code" -- that they just have to do a certain amount of X. Another example is folks who do cross-word puzzles at bedtime to help them sleep and they can't sleep until they have had a certain amount of a certain type of mental stimulation. If you can figure out what your mix of "doing" energy is and consciously direct it into productive outlets, rather than frittering it away for personal satisfaction, you will get more done.

Concrete personal example: I like writing but probably spend too much time frittering that interest away posting on forums like this one rather than developing my websites. That's in part due to my health: It is far easier to respond to something someone has said than to write up something from scratch without having something to respond to. When healthier, I am more able to do the kind of writing that I want on my websites. (In fact, my first website started while I was quite ill was basically an edited collection of emails of mine or excerpts from emails.) I have left a number of lists related to the topics of my websites, in part because I am so controversial in certain circles and in part because I felt that I need to put my energy into developing my websites rather than trying to chit chat with people on email lists. Chit-chatting with people on email lists feels very productive to me but it's not that productive. There is a "live" audience that can respond and interact with me and I just feel like I am doing so much more than I really am because of the responses. This is a personal issue that I am aware of and have been trying to work on for some time. I recently unsubbed from a health list in large part so I can move on to doing more productive kinds of writing about health issues.

As for "dysfunctional perfectionism": After nearly dying and finally getting a serious diagnosis late in life, I promptly returned to college while still very ill with the attitude "A sick person like me needs to make more B's if I am ever going to get a degree." I've also done volunteer work at a homeless shelter and went down in flames horribly in various online forums while publicly withdrawing from all kinds of prescription medication. I'm a lot thicker skinned than I used to be and much more okay with failure as a productive means to learn what not to do, what my limits are and so on.

Good luck with this.

Regular exercise works wonders.

Try the Pomodoro technique... set a timer for a period of time (between 15 to 30 minutes long) and focus on working on a project constantly. Once the timer sounds, stop working (even if you feel like you could keep going) and have a 5 minute break).

There's also the (10+2)*5 technique were you work for 10 minutes, stuff around for 2 minutes then repeat 5 times. After an hour you've had 50 minutes of productive time and 10 minutes of "play time".

Here's what helped me:

1. LOVE what you do. Figure out how to love what you do. 2. For the stuff you aren't as crazy about:

- If you're on a Mac, download SelfControl. It permanently blocks websites in all browsers for a certain period of time, making it appear pretty nonreversible. I block facebook, twitter, and of course, hacker news. (:

- Use a to-do list. Make it consist of a reasonable number of bite-sized tasks.

- Take care of yourself - get sleep, eat right, exercise.

- Give yourself a time limit so you HAVE to let go. Transfer the perfection from the task itself, to getting the task done efficiently. If you're on a Mac, download Vitamin-R. It forces you to chunk out blocks of time, and explain exactly what you're going to accomplish in the 45 minutes of focus you probably have. Read the Vitamin-R manual, it's actually really helpful.

- Study the Pomodoro technique. That's something you can do on Win/offline; Vitamin R makes it dead-easy.

- Make a chart for yourself. Mine's big, neon, and plastered on the wall in front of my desk where I'm reminded of it. Every day, give yourself a mark about how focused you were, and whether or not you accomplished everything on your to-do list. This'll help you learn what realistic to-dos are.

Good luck, you can do it! (: