The Art of Concentration: Focusing Without Planning or Judging

Concentration: I barely know what this word means anymore. Some days, I really feel like you’d be hard-pressed to find someone more distracted than me. Case in point: not too long ago, I couldn’t find my phone. I looked and looked and looked for it. I turned my office upside down, left no stone unturned. I felt myself growing frustrated and angry, even frightened. What will I do without my phone? I’m almost (actually, completely) embarrassed to admit that it had been in my hand the entire time. It was a definite “OMG” moment. It brought a flood of unsettling thoughts: am I that distracted? How could something like this happen? Am I, in fact, so far removed from the present moment that I can lose something in my own hand? Needless to say, I felt slightly unnerved for the rest of the day.

Once I got over my initial shock concerning my staggering lack of concentration, I began thinking about what had occurred. In that stressful moment, my mind had turned to judging: “I can’t believe I lost my phone. This stinks. What a hassle this is going to be.” I then immediately began planning: “I can use my old phone for the time being. I can email people to let them know I lost my phone.” A busy and agitated mind is no help in solving a problem or completing a project. In that moment, I had been blinded by my inability to uncover the mystery of the lost phone. A positive way of dealing with derailed concentration is to actually accept it. In fact, according to Psychologist Ronald D. Siegel, concentration practice teaches us to “focus the mind so as to be able to observe mental phenomena clearly,” thus leading to sharper focus on the job you are doing and less focus on peripheral concerns.

Without a doubt, acceptance would have been a more helpful reaction than panic. I could have labeled and accepted my internal distress: “ok, I’m worried,” a statement of the simple reality, without any judgment or planning. Now, while this wouldn’t have located the missing device, it would have at least allowed me to compartmentalize that feeling while maintaining my focus on the primary task; I had (until then) actually been working through a new ACT practice test. The phone debacle ended that endeavor pretty quickly, ultimately leading to me having more work to do later.

So let’s apply this to studying: you have 50 pages of The Scarlet Letter to read by tomorrow. You can judge it: “I hate this book. This book stinks. Hawthorne writes really long, boring sentences.” Or you can plan: “If I read 25 pages in the next hour, I can take a Netflix break. I can finish reading this on the bus tomorrow morning. I can skim this and look up the summary online.” Or (drumroll please) you can accept it. Once you’ve accepted it without judgement or planning, there’s no other option left but to do it. Learning to cultivate the ability to notice and label where and when your mind goes when it drifts away from the task at hand can lead to doing great things— or just doing all the stuff you’ve been putting off.

Written by Phil Lane