Improve Your Focus

If you work a white-collar job long enough, you'll inevitably become obsessed with focus. Not by choice, but by necessity. Your days become a constant battle with your own attention span: staring at your laptop, realizing you've just spent 20 minutes scrolling through Instagram or Twitter while your brain bounces between dozens of open tabs.

So, like any reasonable person in 2025, you turn to the internet for help. What you end up finding is an endless sea of productivity advice: 'Time-block your way to success!' 'Meditate for exactly 10 minutes!' 'Drink mushroom coffee!' 'Take cold showers!'

@civtrial

9 Things I Learned from Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World Part 3. 1️⃣ Create routines that av... See more

Eventually, your desk becomes a graveyard of abandoned focus tools, a pomodoro timer, noise-canceling headphones that couldn't quite cancel your wandering thoughts, a fidget cube that only gave you something else to be distracted by.

@saradietschy

This #pomodoro timer helps me FOCUS. #productivity #timer #vocoo #everydaycarry #edc

The advice can become almost comical in its complexity. Yet millions desperately consume it. Focus-hack videos rack up millions of views. Self-improvement podcasters see their numbers spike whenever they tackle concentration techniques. Everyone, from students to workers to CEOs, seems to be chasing this state of deep focus. (1, 2, 3, 4).

When these techniques inevitably fall short, and they do, people turn to chemical solutions. The numbers tell the story:

• ADHD diagnoses up 123% in past decade

• Adderall prescriptions increased 88% since 2008

• Energy drink market reached $86B in 2023

• Nicotine pouch sales growing 40% annually

• Never ending Coffee shops

Why does it feel like our brains are constantly at war with distractions? And why are we all so desperate for hacks, chemicals, and tools to fix something that, for most of human history, wasn't even considered a problem?

Focus is a Modern Problem

If you go through historical literature, you won't find much on 'focus' as a standalone concept. No ancient philosophers penned treatises on concentration hacks. Renaissance thinkers didn't debate the merits of time-blocking. For most of human history, focus wasn't a skill to be mastered; it was simply how life worked. But today is different.

Our world is engineered to shatter attention. Work has become abstract and knowledge-based, forcing us to juggle multiple tasks while navigating a minefield of interruptions.

Work has shifted. It’s abstract, knowledge-based, a circus act of tasks and interruptions. Technology, the great tool of progress, turned into a weaponized distraction machine. Social media. Streaming platforms. Notifications. They profit from ripping your attention into shreds.

What we call an ‘attention deficit’ might just be a sane response to an insane environment. When your day is packed with shallow tasks, pointless meetings, and digital noise, losing focus isn’t some personal flaw. It’s your brain opting out of what it knows doesn’t matter.

Notice how this 'deficit' mysteriously disappears when you're doing something genuinely engaging or meaningful? That's not coincidence. The problem isn't your brain, it's an environment that's fundamentally hostile to deep focus.

The real question isn’t whether we can adapt to this. It’s whether we should. Ultimately, until we rewrite our relationship with technology and work, we’re left to navigate the mess.

Maybe AI will come save us? The machines will do all the work and we would just focus on things that interest us. You should probably not trust people trying to sell you utopias. They never turn out the way you think.

In This Newsletter

I’ve compiled a list of underrated tactics everyone can learn to help focus better. All of these techniques have a historical precedent.

1) Lindy Ways to Focus

• Deadlines

• Do Something You Like

• Cognitive Reset

• Introduce Mild Distraction

• Lower The Ceiling

Cognitive Resetting: An Old Solution to a Modern Problem

While our focus crisis may be modern, one of its most effective solutions has deep historical roots. The practice of 'cognitive resetting' is one form of deep concentration to restore our ability to focus on other tasks appears across cultures and time periods.

Roman philosophers spoke of 'otium' - periods of engaged leisure that would restore the mind's capabilities. Medieval monks structured their days around alternating forms of deep work. Einstein played violin when stuck on physics problems. All understood intuitively what neuroscience now confirms: our brains need not just rest, but different forms of deep engagement to maintain focus.

Take Elon Musk, for instance. Despite running multiple companies, he’s known to play video games to reset his mind. By immersing himself in a completely different task, he gives his brain the break it needs to return to work with renewed focus.

Modern research calls this 'attention restoration.' When you engage in an activity that naturally captures your full attention, you're giving your deliberate focus systems a chance to recover.

Here’s a specific criteria that make cognitive resetting effective:

1. The activity must demand complete attention

2. It should be different from your primary work

3. It needs to be inherently engaging (not forced)

4. You must fully commit without multitasking

This is why activities like gaming can be surprisingly effective cognitive reset tools. When you're fully absorbed in a game, you're giving your work-related attention systems a complete break while engaging different neural pathways. The same goes for playing an instrument, solving a puzzle, or practicing a sport.

This explains why some of history's most focused individuals often had seemingly unrelated 'hobbies' they pursued intensely.

Deadlines: The Ancient Art of Pressure

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