

Ask HN: Focus and concentration - gdberrio

Maybe it's just me, but anyone else has troubles dealing with lack of Focus and concentration, ending in not getting things done and getting stuck in a "disfuncional perfectionism" with lots of ideas but zero execution? [It's doesn't help having fear of failure]<p>How did you deal with it?<p>PS: I know it may sound a) dumb question, b) lack of discipline. 
"I Have Met the Enemy, and It's Me" comes to mind.
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plinkplonk
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.

~~~
stevetjoa
This excerpt is fantastic -- refusing to let Nixon's impeachment derail his
path toward writing a novel.

When I find myself about to lose focus, I ask myself, "Ten years from now, are
you going to remember that crappy TV show you watched for one hour on a
Tuesday, or are you going to remember the moment your advisor kicked you out
of his group?"

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katieben
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! (:

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Jarred
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.

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thatusertwo
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.

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wmboy
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".

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adziki
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.

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gschill21
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...

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

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jackkinsella
Regular exercise works wonders.

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Mz
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.

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stray
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).

