If focus strategies aren’t working, ask yourself why you don’t want to focus
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Professionally speaking, August of 2020 was easily the least productive month I’ve ever dragged my way through. And that’s including months when I was on vacation or out of work—at least then I was recharging my batteries. Not so during August of 2020. I labored. I toiled. You might say I was ‘on that grind,’ if that’s your linguistic pleasure. But when September rolled around, I had almost nothing to show for all that exertion. My malady was anything but rare: I simply couldn’t focus. Not for long anyway. My eyes would glaze over at a certain point and I’d lose the plot entirely. Wait, what was I just doing? It was constant. It took a heroic amount of effort to leash my attention like a dog and haul it—nails scrabbling for purchase on the sidewalk in my mind—back to the task at hand, over and over and over.
This problem, I’m happy to report, has been resolved. And though I’ve adopted some focus-optimizing strategies, the strategies themselves would’ve accomplished zilch if it weren’t for a somewhat enigmatic (on the surface, anyway), internal shift. To focus, it turns out, you have to become willing to focus.
Do you want to focus? Do you really?
Stay with me. I realize that what I’m proposing may sound preposterous, insulting even. You’re having trouble focusing, and I’m suggesting that your real problem might be that you don’t actually want to focus at all. For the record, “I just want to focus!” was pretty much my mantra throughout that wildly unproductive August, so I understand how counterintuitive this whole thing sounds. But what if what you desperately want consciously is at odds with what you want subconsciously? What then?
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Near the end of this New York Times article outlining external strategies for getting focused is a gold nugget from “Indistractable” author Nir Eyal: “The reason we lose focus most of the time is because we are looking to escape some kind of discomfort, such as stress, anxiety, loneliness or boredom.” Which got me thinking. What if I’m just miserable on account of… well, 2020, and because that’s not a comfortable way to feel, I lose focus and get all spacey—a psychological version of physically moving away from, say, a hot stove or an awful smell—but the need to focus remains, and the arduous effort of forcing myself to (metaphorically) get closer to someone with a serious case of BO only ratchets up the misery, further inducing loss of focus. It’s a vicious cycle. I wanted to focus. I didn’t want to focus. And according to French psychologist Émile Coué—with supporting anecdotal evidence by Yours Truly—in a contest between the conscious will and the subconscious desire, the latter always wins.
The challenge, then, is not to strong-arm yourself into focusing, but to ferret out the reason you don’t want to. You already know the reasons you do want to: you’ve got work to do, you need your paycheck, accomplishing things feels good. Etcetera. But if you secretly also would rather sit in a stupor than focus on your work, there’s a reason. And it’s probably a good one.
By way of example, let’s continue the person-with-body-odor metaphor and assume that in order for me to accomplish my work, I must stand very close to someone who’s just completed the Boston Marathon and hasn’t yet showered or changed clothes. They. Are. Ripe. Standing next to them is uncomfortable. I want very much to put some distance between us, which, I think you’ll agree, is understandable. That understanding is key. Armed with some initial self-compassion, I can ease up on myself and consider ways to ameliorate the real problem, which, at the risk of stating the now-obvious, is gnarly BO, not a lack of willpower.
Why willpower won’t help
I’d wager that one of the most popular and enduring ‘alternative facts’ still making the rounds today is that willpower is limitless. Too fat? Eat less than you want to forever. Don’t like your job? Find a better one. When you do something that you don’t want to do, you are using willpower. So if, for example, you have a low-wage job working in a toxic environment, you spend forty hours a week relying on willpower. There isn’t any left with which to learn new skills, polish your resume, and hit the job boards. So it is with focus. If you’re struggling to focus, and, like I did in August, you try to muscle your way through, you are not only creating more discomfort from which you long to escape, you are also depleting your willpower, ensuring that as the day goes on, you’ll have less and less to help you focus. Not particularly useful, is it?
Here’s what is: Quit fighting it.
Anthony de Mello, who was a Jesuit priest and a psychotherapist, remarked of bad habits, “When you renounce something, you’re tied to it. The only way to get out of this is to see through it. Don’t renounce it, see through it. Understand its true value and you won’t need to renounce it; it will just drop from your hands.” In my particular case, the value of my inability to focus was that it distanced me from the dread I felt regarding the state of the world in this hellscape of a year. My disquietude about 2020 was the pungent marathon runner, but instead of addressing that, I kept trying to make myself do something I didn’t want to do—get as close as possible to it.
It’s crystal clear now why the willpower method won’t work for anyone but masochists, right? And even if you are one (no judgment here), leveraging willpower to force yourself to focus treats the symptom, not the disease, and you’ll never have enough medicine. If BO is our metaphor for the discomfort that drives us to lose focus—and, really, I think it’s an apt one—then that’s the disease you have to diagnose.
Any discomfort qualifies, provided it’s strong enough to create a desire in your subconscious that competes with your conscious will to focus: irritation about a micromanaging boss, moral dissonance about quasi-ethical company practices, resentment over poor compensation, the list goes on. These are the things which must be addressed if you are to focus comfortably again.
Reduce the pain of focusing
But how, right? I cannot resolve the many miseries that 2020 has wrought any more than you can turn a micromanaging boss into a good manager or a morally ambiguous company into an ethical corporate role model. I wonder if we can reduce our discomfort about those things, though? Not perfectly, not immediately, and, in all likelihood, not without help, but reduce it we must—as long as focusing is more painful than not focusing, this struggle will continue.
Essentially what this comes down to is identifying what you can and can’t control and investing your energy in the former rather than the latter. For me, that took some dark-night-of-the-soul level searching that eventually led to practices aimed at reducing my particular brand of angst. I considered all of my options. And I do mean all. Would moving to Canada relieve me of my angst? (I decided it probably wouldn’t.) What if I swore off all news media? (This turned out to be helpful until I could get my head on straight.) Meditation? 12-Step meetings? Less caffeine? More exercise? I seriously considered every option available to me that I had reason to believe might chip away a little of my existential dread. I chose the ones that seemed most likely to have an impact and put them into practice.
Only after getting some relief could I employ focus strategies.
Focus strategies only work when we’re willing to focus
I have a sneaking suspicion that most strategies—weight loss strategies, time management strategies, money management strategies, etc.—are useful to at least some people, if only for a period of time. Success in any endeavor seems to me to be less about finding the right strategy and more about clearing away the obstacles. Once you’ve cleared the path, it’s easier to try out different strategies and make informed decisions. But if you’re fighting your subconscious, there is no perfect strategy. You’ll always be outmatched by your own conflicting desires.
What’s in your way? What can you do about it?
