“A good analogy, when thinking about becoming better at focusing, is a triathlon. If I said, “I am going to prepare you to become a pretty good triathlete”, you would expect there to be two different things involved. First there would just be general fitness, I would say “Look, we’ve got to overhaul your diet, you’ve got to get more sleep, you’ve got to drink more water, you have to be a healthier person.” That’s the foundation on which you can expect to actually be able to compete in a triathlon. The other thing we would do is actual training for the specific activities that make up that event, so we would swim, we would ride our bikes, we would go for runs. The same holds for doing concentration or focus activities at a very high level. You have to work on your general cognitive fitness, and you have to specifically train your ability to focus on the type of things that you hope to be focusing on: general training, specific training. So how do you do general cognitive fitness? Well, there’s a lot of different things that could help. I think embracing boredom is useful, and what I mean by embracing boredom is getting used to this idea that on a regular basis you will find yourself bored and seeking novel stimuli, something to bust the boredom. But instead of pulling out your phone, or putting an earbud in your ear, you just remain bored. I’m not saying you have to do this all the time, I’m not saying that you should constantly be bored, but I think you should be bored on a regular basis. How come? Because if you don’t participate in this type of training your mind is going to form a Pavlovian connection that says “boredom means stimuli, boredom means stimuli”. And then when it comes time to actually concentrate on something hard, let’s say in your professional life, you’re going to be unable to do it because your mind says “Hey this is boring, there is no novel stimuli. We’re doing the same thing again and again. I don’t like this. Come on, let’s look at our phone, let’s look at social media, let’s look at email.” So you have a very hard time focusing when the time comes if your brain never gets any practise of being bored. I think reading is, let’s say, the cognitive equivalent of eating really well. So the more time you spend reading, it could be fiction, it can be non-fiction, the better it is for your cognitive health, especially when it comes to wanting to do elite level concentration. It just really forces a lot of different areas of your mind to come together to sustain concentration, to do interconnected processing: the image centre is talking to the verbal centre, which is talking to the memory bank, which is talking to the sensory memory. They’re all working together. It’s exercising these different connections. It’s building comfort with sustaining your focus on one target. All that’s very useful. So if you’re bored on a regular basis, and read as absolutely much as you can tolerate or fit into your schedule, your base cognitive fitness is going to get where you need it to be to do some elite level focusing. Okay, second category of activities: how do we now train you on the specific focus activities you want to do. One thing I would recommend is what in my book, Deep Work, I call Teddy Roosevelt sprints. So it’s a technique inspired by the way that Teddy Roosevelt attacked his deep work. What you want to basically do is practise working on something as intensely as possible for a very limited amount of time. Use a timer, I think it’s a great way to actually build up to this. … Set a timer for 20 minutes and during those 20 minutes I’m going to give this the Teddy Roosevelt treatment which means laser-like, unbroken, intense, focus. If I wander off and do something else, glancing at a phone, social media, whatever, it doesn’t count. Start over, the timer. So it’s high stakes, but not a lot of time. What happens is you get used to what it feels like operating your mind at a very high level of intensity, so most people just aren’t used to it. Just like if you go outside right now and sprint as fast as you can, you are not going to get very far. … Sprint a little bit everyday, and then you add more distance, add more distance, six months from now you can be doing 400 metre intervals at the track. So if you haven’t been training you’re not going to be used to it. Focusing incredibly hard on something cognitive is like sprinting incredibly hard on the track. We can absolutely do it, it’s good for us to do, but if we don’t train for it, it’s not going to go well at first. So I would recommend these timed Teddy Roosevelt sprints. … Your goal should be to get to about 90 minutes. If you can do 90 minutes at sustained peak focus, and at the same time you have your general cognitive fitness going really well, you’re comfortable with boredom, you’re reading all the time, I think you could have a remarkable turn-around in your concentration abilities in, let’s say, a six month period. It’s hard work, but it’s hard work absolutely worth doing.”
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