Intensify focus

"Your ability to work single-mindedly on your most important task will contribute as much to your success as any other discipline you can develop." -Brian Tracy

Attention span in Humans is about an average of 20 minutes. After that concentration starts to drop sharply. That’s when you see the students dozing in the class or just sit glass eyed.

In the last chapter, Build hunger for learning, we learnt techniques for generating interest which helps students to focus. In this chapter, we will fully focus on focus. 

Prepping your mind, physically

Honestly, I don't do all of the following, every time. However, I do deep breathe frequently (Point 4) and use fists (5 and 6). It really is magical.

1. Remember a positive success experience
2. Intensify in as much detail as possible. See, hear, feel with the body.
3. Choose one word that sums up the key event. e.g. power, winner, success, yes.
4. Close eyes and take a deep breath. Use your stomach to breathe.
5. Clench fist
6. Unclench fist
7. You can also do ohms to massage your nervous system. 

When you close your eyes and say the keyword, all those memories will come in floating. This will turn your mind on for receiving new ideas and new successes. Doing this also turns your subconscious mind which is affected by pictures and emotions. 

You can also activate your conscious mind by recitations positive which also seeps down to your unconscious mind. 

This is a very useful skill throughout life, not only for learning but relaxing, and relieving stress as well.

Note: One thing to note here is that please don’t think this through too much logically. Just trust it will work. Have faith like religious people do. Oxymoronically, there are parts of your brain that only respond to emotion, not logic. Hence, they have to be dealt in the same way – through emotion.

Long term Mind hygiene for learning (and living)

• Negative thoughts will shut your learning mind. You need to overpower the negative thoughts and build positive thoughts. 
• Remember the past successes. Write them down. This will build up a positive mental fort for you.
• Focus on what didn’t work as a learning method for negative learning. Learn from the negative experience of what didn’t work. Modify your learning plan accordingly. 
• You should be in a relaxed state of mind. Failing which information is not processed in the way you would like it to. 
• Meditate - 90% of all successful people meditate, and I am not talking only about Indians. No reason why you shouldn't
• Exercise

Create a learning space

This can mean a physical space or even a mental space. When you tell people around you that you are going into a learning retreat for the next one hour, they are less likely to disturb you. 

A separate room is great, but even a table works just as well. People also use thinking caps to create learning space. Once they have the cap on, they are in the zone. 

The primary idea here is to signal yourself and others that learning time has started and is not to be interfered with.

Raise the stakes

Nothing makes you focus more when the stakes are high. That's why students suddenly start to learn and understand more in the exams. So the question is:

How can we artificially raise the stakes when there is no external pressure?

Put yourself out in the public. If you are learning French, declare on facebook and tell everybody that you will be an expert in French within 9 months. The risk of being publicly humiliated will sure make you focus more. 

Gamify and try to utilize flow state

We all know how games can make us focus. It's easy to ignore hunger, sleep, and even someone yelling right at you when you are playing games.

If you make learning game like, students will obviously focus more. I have written in detail about this in the Gamifying education and Flow for education.

Switch off distractions

In the fear of being disconnected, too often, we stay connected. That means anybody can distract you whenever they want. Since we practically give a free pass to everybody by allowing game notifications, Facebook notifications, email notifications and phone calls, it's a miracle how we get any work done. 

Put your mobile on silent mode, and do what needs to be done. You will notice that you will do much more in far lesser time. 

If you don't reply immediately to that facebook comment, nobody is going to sue you. If you reply after one hour to that unimportant mail, it doesn't matter. Just try it. 

Mono-Tasking [Batching]

It's proven - There is no such thing as multi-tasking. You basically rapidly switch between the tasks. Yes, it works when you are driving and talking or cooking and talking but if you think you can learn something new while talking on the phone, it's not going to happen.

The fact is after you tune out from a learning session due to a distraction, when you tune back in it can take as much as 15 minutes to reach a point where you left off. If you think you can afford that, multi-task.

Batching has one more advantage. If you like to use Facebook, twitter etc, you can batch time for them as well where you spend a dedicated time for social media. This way you won't miss on your social fix as well. You will read about Monotasking learning technique in a later chapter .

Focus on the process

The Bhagavad Gita says – “Karma kar, fal ki chinta mat kar” i.e. Focus on work, the results will follow. I found the saying very compelling even as a kid and as I grew up, it became more relevant by the day. 

When we think about scaling Everest, it’s hard. But when you take the first step, you remove the biggest obstacle – your stillness. Once you start to move, momentum takes over and you continue to take one step at a time – scaling the Everest. 

When you focus on the process – you don’t think about the end actively. You know you are going to reach to the end in the back of your mind. But your eyes are on the road.

So here’s what you need to do: 

Focus on the goal. When I say focus on the goal, don’t focus on the full ordeal that you have to go through to achieve it. Just focus on what you will get after achieving the goal. Focus on how you will feel. Focus on all the good stuff that would happen after you achieve your goal.

Then focus on the baby steps and just immerse yourself in that. Don’t think about the whole journey. Think now, think present. Don’t time travel in the future and the past. The joy that comes from it is immense.

Focussing on the process also makes it easy as the fear of not achieving something goes away. Examples of process-oriented thinking would be:

1. I am going to study for two hours every day starting at 5 pm, if I feel like it or not.
2. I am going to sit to study for 10 minutes at 2 pm. If I feel like continuing, I will. If I don’t feel like it, I will play for 10 minutes and I will again study for 10 minutes.

I know it gives an excuse to check out for games and not study at all. But it’s better than not being able to start at all. Giving time like this also generates a feeling of – if I am going to spend time like this, I may as well learn something. 

Examples of product orientation would be – I am going to finish my assignment.

What’s odd about the two approaches is that even though initially, the process approach seems vague and it may appear that you  aren’t going to finish the assignment. What really happens is that as you get into the process, inertia takes over and you will often find that you sat far longer than expected and may even finish the assignment. 

On the other hand, when you set on taming the tiger (product approach), in many cases, you just don’t get started.

Oh and focus on the Process has very awesome benefits too. Here’s an article on how the process focus helps weak students become at the top of their class.