Lack of concentration is a growing problem in an age of distraction. Find out how you can manage your time to restore your concentration.
Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.
– Alexander Graham Bell
Distractions are everywhere.
To do the important work that will give our lives meaning, we need to be able to shut out noise, interruptions, and naysaying.
But the lack of concentration might signal deeper issues.
If you find yourself thinking or doing any of the following, you may have a problem with concentrating:
- My mind wanders during the work day
- I can’t finish anything
- I procrastinate a lot
- I can’t get motivated
- I can’t wake up without caffeine
Sometimes lack of concentration is a sign of depression or illness. But more often than not, I believe lack of concentration is a symptom of the age we live in and the world of work that we’ve been born into.
If your work were truly meaningful and engaging, would you have trouble concentrating?
Lack of Concentration & Burnout
Lack of concentration is a symptom of burnout.
Overworking leads to exhaustion, shoddy thinking, and lack of energy. Is it any wonder you can’t concentrate?
In a culture that fetishizes time spent over value added, burnout syndrome is a common and persistent threat. Burnout saps your creativity and your motivation. Burnout preys on your mental focus and concentration. Burnout works on you until you can barely function at all.
A reader contacted me to let me know that she and her husband had found Agile Lifestyle. She thanked me for my articles on burnout. What’s fascinating is that they had already recognized the signs of burnout in themselves. They only needed to see it reflected somewhere else before accepting it themselves.
If your head is feeling fuzzy and you can’t concentrate at all, you might be experiencing a harbinger of full-blown burnout.
Dr. David Ballard of The American Psychological Association explained to Forbes that our cognitive system is designed to narrow our focus and pay attention to threats:
but our bodies and brains are designed to handle this in short bursts and then return to normal functioning. When stress becomes chronic, this narrow focus continues for a long time and we have difficulty paying attention to other things.
If you can’t concentrate anymore, your mental reserves may be depleted.
Leaving Nothing in the Tank
Agile processes promote sustainable development.
The sponsors, developers, and users should be able
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
What do centenarians from Okinawa know about living at a sustainable pace that you don’t?
Justin Jackson is an entrepreneur and father of four. Like many high achievers, Jackson was a workaholic. He displayed all the classic signs of burnout, until he finally hit his limit:
You see, I had no reserves. The problem with being maxed out is you can’t deal with anything new. I couldn’t fit anything else in. I’d squeezed my schedule, my finances, my energy, and my family to the absolute limit.
And then a crisis: the business I’d invested in went bad. I had no extra room to deal with a crisis: all those plates I’d been spinning came crashing down.
Once he recovered from this setback, Jackson needed a new way to organize his life.
The principle he settled on is hara hachi bu.
This is a Confucian idea that roughly translates to “eat until you are 80% full.” The extremely long-lived residents of Okinawa, Japan use this principle, as documented in the Blue Zones research. In a surprise to no one, Okinawans are longer-lived, less obese, and less likely to succumb to cancer than your average American.
Jackson turned the power of hara hachi bu on his time management systems. He made sure that at the end of each working day, he’d have at least 20% left in the tank for the next day. That way, small shocks to his lifestyle wouldn’t send his system crashing. He’d also have something in the tank for the following instead of trying to run on empty.
Justin Jackson embraced an Agile Manifesto principle known as sustainability. You can work yourself ragged, but that makes you fragile and prone to sloppier work. Your lack of concentration might be stemming from a lack of mental energy. If you’re working yourself to the bone everyday, there will be nothing left for future work.
Do like the Okinawans do: Work until you’re 80% full, then stop for the day.
Flow Is the Antidote
There were probably about five games in my career where everything was moving in slow motion and you could be out there all day, totally in the zone, and you don’t even know where you are on the field, everything is just totally blocked out.
– Lawrence Taylor, Hall of Fame linebacker
The natural remedy to a lack of concentration is flow.
As defined by Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his groundbreaking book Flow, the state of flow is when your mind and your body are totally absorbed by the task at hand. Flow is so powerful that nothing other than the activity seems to matter while you’re experiencing it.
Athletes call flow “being in the zone.”
It’s when a basketball shooter can’t seem to miss a 3-pointer.
It’s when a pitcher throws a perfect game.
It’s when a running back makes every cut a split-second before getting tackled.
The problem of concentration goes away when you’re in the flow state. Your attention is completely occupied, sometimes to the exclusion of necessities like eating or going to the bathroom.
Csikszentmihalyi says the key to reaching flow is for the challenge of the task to match the skill level of the performer. You can’t reach flow by doing easy things. Conversely, you can’t reach flow by doing something too difficult either.
If you lack concentration, it might be because the activity you are engaging in isn’t worthy of you.
How many people are really challenged every day at their jobs?
What will you do to regain your focus and concentration?
Image by Thomas Leuthard.
In this free guide, I reveal the top 7 apps that make my career and personal life run smoothly. Hint: 5 of the apps I use every day are totally free! Sign up to receive blog updates, exclusive content, and the resource guide FREE!
I have all the symptoms and cannot bring myself to do the easiest tasks…
My mind wanders during the work day
I can’t finish anything
I procrastinate a lot
I can’t get motivated
I can’t wake up without caffeine
I try to go to gym 4 times a week listen to meditation cd before bed and eat healthy food, drink lots of water. I work on a mine site and work 12 hours/day 6days/ week and work 8/11 weeks at the time…
I have an anxiety of missing on news and can check news website 10 times in an hour….
I do not know what else to do… I am considering seeking help from a psychologist…
Hey MH, seeking help from a psychologist might be a fine next step. But it doesn’t sound like you’re suffering from anything uncommon. I had many of these issues when I was working at my corporate law job including procrastination, caffeine near-addiction, and anxiety. You’re working a ton of hours. If I were in your shoes, I’d use my next vacation time to work through issues and take a real break. Just remember that you are not alone.
Hello,
I do have the same. I don’t use caffeine to wake up. I struggle. I run away from doing things. I don’t know what to do. More, I feel that I don’t want to do anything, even anything that will help me. I don’t want to do any activity except fun ofcourse. Is there some thing wrong with me as a person? Is there something wrong with my mental structure? Do I like something? Am I a bad person who is lazy and hate doing any work, hate taking any responsibiltiy, who just wants to relax and set back do nothing? I have a family to take care of! I have my self to take care of! I have a social life that I have to take care of? I have responsibilties I have to take care of? What can I do with all of this? I even don’t defend my right and just want to walk out of any thing whatever the resuls would be!! All that is not correct, and there must be something that can help me get out from the situation I have been in since long time ago.
Omar, I’ve been there. I went through a rough period in my twenties questioning whether there was something wrong with me or my personality that made it difficult for me to work with other people at my first corporate job. But all the psychological research suggests that context matters. A lot. I know I act very differently (more relaxed, focus, and happy) depending on the people I’m around and where I’m at. If you have serious challenges here, it might be that you need a change. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you Tony, to your consideration, to your time you spent to reply, your thoughts and sharing.
First and utmost, I’d like to thank Tony.
Receiving a feedback,comments and reply fire up the subject again. It’s like we need to grasp the habit of concentration. We need to learn it. For my case for example, I think it is like I am afraid to concentrate or I don’t know how to do it. May be I am afraid. May be I can’t. May be I don’t konw. May be I don’t know what the act of concentraion is? I didn’t learn it, so I don’t know it; I don’t sense it! When I have an issue I find my self incline to walk or drive while my mind wonders in the thoughts, and I feel I works. No it doesn’t. Because at the end I find my self just released and come out with nothing, and I thought in my thought that everything is fine, while nothing was solved and I reached to nothing, no action to be taken. And here is why we need concentration. We need to learn how to control our thoughts and concentrate on the issue in hand. Furher, leaving things this was will accumulate ideas and thoughts to the level the mind will be croweded and get more occupied and busy that it is difficult to concentrate and the cycle goes on and on. Though I said all of this and I see it sounds, I still do nothing about my situation. May be I will.
Thank you folks for reading.
I totally lost my concentration reading this article from all the advertisements on it.
I really hope you are kidding. That would be a serious concentration problem!
I NEVER FOCUS I can’t… I’m always moving, shuffling, shifting, or fidgeting… I speak to much and too quickly because I never seem to be able to get all I want out because by the time I do so, something new has popped into my mind. My sentence, paragraph, and essay structure has worsened significantly. I procrastinate all the time- and I’m always full of energy. I have random moments of utter last minute anxiety and those are the only moments I can truly focus. I can’t go to sleep. I’ve tried to count sheep… It goes something like this
“One sheep, why the f*** am I counting sheep, i wonder who started this, why sheep? Why do I see sheep jumping in my mind? Where did I see that? why am I seeing an image? does the brain work with images? why not horses? sheep’s hooves look funny I wonder if they could be painted red…. could they hide behind poppies as well? Poppies are such pretty flowers! I think they are wild. yeah they must be because we’ve never planted any and grandma has planted every type in her garden… she has a green thumb!… which makes my thumb brown! Well, If you think about it its; closer to brown than green anyway! I wonder why? Poppies truly are beautiful though, their blood red color and their very fragile look makes them sacred, pure…. as if they have a tragedy to tell. I guess thats how the story with bleeding Jesus and poppies came from, such a beautifully tragic story… Why are tragic stories more beautiful?( Ok the ones with happy endings…)… why? I would much rather like a tragedy and a happy ending than a perfectly boring life in a Utopia… challenge, hardships and tragedies make life so much more beautiful because we suffer to live the good and are therefore more thankful,,, But why is the though of thankfulness even normal? that requires a need for tragedy.. Because you feel bad in order to truly be thankful and acknowledge feeling good….. Then man is a masochist. Man is stupid and lives on instincts, and so man lives a tragedy…. So man is beautiful. Man is not a Cat. Cats are what we feel is supposed to be our ideal. No conscience, not emotionally attached…. a cat can do anything. A cat as a man would succeed in this world because this world is built for man-cats. (this modern world) a world in which physical abuse is considered the lowest of the lowest abuses possible and yet emotional and verbal abuse, parts of our daily lives are normal, sometimes accepted… taught from parents to children. It spreads like a disease….. and a united nations made up of nations that each care solely for their own benefit is trying to selfishly solve the unethical world. THis, by being unethical. WHERE WAS I? Oh, yeah… two sheep three sheep….”
Only I think like this right?
Yeah my life sucks /-_-/….
I can never do something productive!
I couldn’t even read this article fully!
Hey
I want to thank you for this blog. I have some issues with myself. I have trouble concentrating and focusing even in school. I have been a great student since primary, secondary and for a levels. I’m from Singapore and have done well for studies. In university, especially during the last semester and this semester, I have trouble concentrating and completing stuff. I can’t even read a few sentences without skipping a few words and there, and I got to read it again, wasting time.
I have experienced the symptoms that you have mentioned. Problem is this is the first time I’m facing such a problem. That’s why I googled and found your page. Have serious trouble concentrating and as a result, school results have been on a free-fall. I have a scholarship but I can’t afford to mess up anymore. I have to admit I went through some serious family issues and personal issues which I’m trying to reconcile and cope with. I don’t know if this is depression or should I seek any external help. Any advice?
Thanks 🙂
Dan
i am writing a project work on lack of concentration and i need some literature review to support my work