How to Focus Better and Increase Your Attention Span

Can you remember the last five articles you read? More importantly, do you remember how they ended? Studies show that a reduced attention span is formed and enhanced by companies like Facebook & Google, SnapChat, and their peers((University of Applied Sciences: The effect of daily internet usage on a short attention span and academic performance)). Instead of relying on expensive marketing, they link their services to our daily routines and emotions. What do you do when you feel a tad bored? Do you instantly open Twitter or Instagram?  Today, tech companies can profoundly change our behavior by guiding us through a series of hooks. The hooked model was developed by Nir Eyal in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products , typically consists of four phases:

1. Trigger

Imagine a friend of yours is uploading a picture to Instagram (external trigger). You see it and click on it. Over time you form an internal trigger, which you attach to your behavior or emotions. 

2. Action

You like the post. Maybe you click on it and see the whole album of your friend’s holiday. 

3. Variable Reward

You’ll see more pictures of your friend. You don’t know what you will see when you scroll down your feed. Many pictures, status updates, and ads may bore you to death, but there are some rare gems that you really enjoy (or hate).

4. Investment

Finally, you leave a comment on the picture, and you don’t know if your friend will reply or like your comment.  When you invest time and effort into an app, it’s more likely that you'll pass through the hooked cycle again in the future, which will reduce your ability to focus. 

How to Stay Focused and Increase Your Attention Span

If you are wondering if you can learn how to focus and increase your attention span, you want to inject awareness before you form negative habits.

1. Be More Aware of Your Actions

For this, a simple approach developed by Martin Boeddeker to overcome our internet addiction((Find Focus: How to Overcome Internet Addiction)) works to respond to the reason for your reduced attention span and increase your focus.   How far away is your mobile phone right now? Most people are within one arms length away from their phones 24/7. In one experiment((Forbes: iPhone Separation Anxiety Hinders Cognitive Abilities, Says Study)), researchers found that anxiety levels of many people increase drastically after just 10 minutes of not being able to use their phone, and their level of anxiety continued to decrease in the next 60 minutes as well. Another study((University of Southern Maine: The Mere Presence of a Cell Phone May be Distracting)) points out that “simply the presence of a cell phone and which it might represent (i.e., social connections, broader social network, etc.) can be similarly distracting and have negative consequences in a social interaction." Rightfully, Larry D. Rosen commented on this experiment in his book The Distracted Mind:

"If the presence of a mobile phone can negatively affect social connections and feelings of closeness during a short conversation with a stranger, what does that imply about how it can impair our real relationships?"

2. Write Down the Things that Distract You

If you're feeling overwhelmed with tasks and unable to focus, keep a little piece of paper and a pen/pencil with you and write down the things you check often, putting a mark next to those things each time you check them((Zen Habits: When You’re Drowning in Tasks, Overwhelm & Stress)). If you use this technique of noting when you use your cell phone you raise your awareness. That's the first step to increase your attention span. If this does not work for you, there are several apps and softwares you can download that will track your usage of various websites, helping you to see where you're spending your time.  The goal is to get you an accurate picture of the distractions taking your focus from the important tasks in front of you.  The best way to work on your attention is to raise your awareness, notice when you get distracted, and create a mental pause for just one second. During this mental pause, simply ask yourself, “Am I distracted again, and why?” Try to catch yourself as often as possible when you get distracted. This will tremendously help in your pursuit of increasing your attention span. If you find this difficult, try working with meditation for five minutes each day. This will increase your awareness of your thoughts, which can help you identify when your mind wanders.

3. Reduce Proximity and Exposure by Design

Ideally, you want to reduce proximity to all kinds of distractions that will lower your attention span by changing your environment. This will reduce the need to use willpower or to "remember it." It’s the same for losing weight and changing your eating habits where it’s recommended to throw out all tempting junk food. That’s why the best way to increase your attentionspan is to reduce your proximity and exposure to your smartphone. This will remove most of the triggers that start the hooked model.  To do this, simply start by putting your cell phone in another room while you're working. It will likely be difficult at first, but after a few hours, you likely won't even remember that you don't have it.

4. Delay Discounting

Delay discounting is a trick that Kelly McGonigal presents in her book The Willpower Instinct. It is also a mind hack recommend by behavioral scientists. Researchers found that the longer you have to wait for a reward (e.g. checking Instagram or Twitter), the less it is worth to you((Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology: Delay Discounting of Real and Hypothetical Rewards)). Your brain chooses immediate gratification at the cost of future rewards because immediate rewards trigger the old reward system in your brain.  To increase your attention span and delay gratification, the prefrontal cortex has to be forced to cool off the promise of the reward. Therefore, even small delays can dramatically lower the chance that you distract yourself. It only takes a moment of resistance to stay focused. As soon as there is any distance between you and the temptation, the rational part of your brain takes over and it becomes easier to stay focused.

How to Inject a Small Pause

Put your smartphone on airplane mode and put it into another room or into a drawer. Take note of which apps you use most often. Is it Instagram? Facebook? Youtube? Quora? Twitter?  You know what your digital kryptonite is.  Ideally, when you feel the urge to check something, pause for just one second. During this pause, simply ask yourself, “Do I really want to do this, and why?” While this will help dramatically, you'll see a real breakthrough when you don’t use willpower to “remember it” but to use apps to change your environment. To do this, try the following:

Step 1: Identify Potentially Addictive Apps on Your Phone

Action Step

1. Write down the apps that you want to use on a piece of paper.
2. Rate the addictiveness of these apps on a scale from 1 to 10.

Use these 3 questions as guidelines to decide which websites and apps to use: 

• What’s the best possible outcome if I stop using this app?
• What’s the worst possible outcome if I stop using this app?
• What’s the most likely outcome if I stop using this app?

Step 2: Block Everything That Increases Your Internet Addiction

Action Steps:

1. Delete every app that is potentially addictive from your phone.
2. Download apps like AppDetox and add times for apps that you have to use less often but cannot delete completely.
3. Download the app AppLock for Android to block the play store and your internet browser.

Step 3: Prepare for Emergencies with the Password-Photo-Hack

Action Steps:

1. Take a photo of a complicated password.
2. Use this password in the AppLock-App.

This will force you to look at the photo and write down the complicated password with a pen and paper when you want to access a specific app or website. 

Final Thoughts

In today's world of constant contact with technology and social media, pausing to reflect on the way we use it and how it affects our focus and attention span is more important than ever. Analyze your distractions and act on them in order to find your focus and complete more of your important tasks.

More Tips on Learning How to Focus

• How to Focus and Maximize Your Productivity (the Definitive Guide)
• 10 Hacks to Increase Your Brain IQ, Focus and Creativity
• 7 Tips To Improve Your Attention Span And Focus Instantly

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