3-Bullet Summary

You’ll benefit more from reading the article the whole way through. But, if you’re pressed for time, here’s a condensed version of The Ultimate Guide on How to Focus for Maximal Productivity:

• We struggle to focus because we are bombarded with distractions and conditioned to take easy options.
• There are 6 Ds to consider when optimising for focus: distractions, distracting devices, direction, diet, deep rest and delayed gratification.
• Focus is a skill that is trained through consistently following optimal protocols for the 6 Ds and levelling up your ability to resist immediate gratification.

An All-Too Familiar Scenario

It’s 10:00am. The deadline for the really important task looms like an ominous storm cloud. You’re awake but don’t want to be, as you need to do the work you’ve procrastinated up until now.

You sit at your desk and boot up your laptop before a glance out the window. Birds dart past, flocking to their nests.

“I wish I could be them,” you think to yourself. “They’re free of deadlines and responsibilities, and don’t have to listen to boring teachers every week.”

‘Ding!’ goes the laptop, as it initiates start-up. Your gaze suddenly redirects to the screen. You tap in your password, log into your systems and open a blank document.

“Let’s start,” you convince yourself. Words start appearing on the screen. You’re working and getting stuff done!

“Bzzzzzz… Bzzzzzz…”

Your phone’s vibrating on your desk. Your workflow’s been disrupted and you reach for the device. The screen illuminates as you pick it up. “15% off sale!” the screen displays. You also notice an Instagram notification. A TikTok notification, too.

45 minutes later…

You put the phone down after leaving no loops untied.

“Okay, this task ends n—”

“Knock Knock!”

There’s a thudding on your door. It opens. Your friend walks in. She wants to discuss the party from last night.

“It would be rude for me to just ignore her,” you say to yourself. So, you start talking about beer pong and Chad’s wild actions whilst snacking on a cereal bar.

45 minutes later…

She leaves.

“Right, back to work.”

You attempt to resume your workflow but it’s harder than before. You feel groggy — as though there’s a fog rolling over your brain.

You’re unaware but you’re actually having a sugar crash from the cereal bar you ate for breakfast.

The motivation to work wanes as you feel more tired than when you woke up. You try to work, but it’s impossible because your eyes are heavy and you’re craving a break — despite getting no work done in two hours.

Introduction

Can you resonate with the above scenario in any way?

Like many students, you probably can. The focus epidemic is very real.

You don’t need to assess the scientific papers to verify it, either. Just look around you. Everyone’s performing so many tasks at once! One minute someone’s reading, the next minute they’re scrolling. It’s scary, actually.

But why? Why can’t we focus on single tasks with intense concentration?

There are three main explanations:

1. We’re bombarded with distractions.
2. We don’t know what factors contribute to good focus.
3. We’ve never developed a holistic approach to focusing better in our lives.

Simply-put, we don’t have a focus-building framework.

That’s where this guide comes in.

Together, we’re going to develop the ability to focus. Specifically, we’re going to cover the 6 Ds of focus and equip ourselves with the tools to work on important tasks for longer.

The following list of focus-boosting strategies is in ascending order of importance. This means that strategy number one (D1) is less important than strategy number 6 (D6).

But, this doesn’t mean that any strategy on this list is unimportant. If it’s in a Strong Students Ultimate Guide, it’s there because it’s science-based and effective.

But, an ascending list is crucial for one key reason: you’ll have to focus for longer to reap the sweetest fruits on offer. See this article as a challenge: can you make it to the end without checking another device, app or tab?

Let’s get to work and find out.

D1) Distractions

One of the best ways to impede your focus and get nothing done is to design an environment that is inherently distracting.

There are two main types of environmental distraction that we must overcome:

1. Demanding living beings
2. Settings

Demanding Living Beings

Family, friends and (sometimes) pets are demanding living beings because they interrupt and distract. An effortless living being, like a plant in your room, does not interrupt or distract.

An interruption is a stimulus that you respond to, like a friend’s question. A distraction is a stimulus you should ignore but often don’t, like a conversation between your parents.

Research has shown that working memory and productivity are negatively impacted by both interruptions and distractions¹. Because demanding living beings can interrupt and distract, this means that we should try, if we want maximal focus, to work in isolation.

It’s impossible and undesirable to remove people and pets from your life. Further, you might feel hesitant to work in isolation because you don’t want to seem rude.

However, consider this: research has also indicated that by working alone, you prevent yourself from displaying negative reactions to interruption, such as anger and frustration². In turn, making the conscious choice to tell others we don’t want to be distracted for a few hours per day and desire work in peace will cultivate better relationships because we won’t snap at our loved ones when they disrupt us.

Moreover, if we work effectively on our own and finish what we need to complete, we can spend time with our family, friends and pets that isn’t disturbed by the thought of work. This permits us to be mindful and present with them when we’re done working and forge better relationships.

Practical Considerations

To facilitate uninterrupted work, leave a notice outside wherever you work that notifies people about when you don’t want to be interrupted or distracted. This could be a timetable that says when you’re available for conversation taped to your door. Cheap and effective.

Alternatively, you could purchase a cheap door stop. The reason this is such a good investment is because you can use it as a signal. If the door is open via the doorstop, you’re telling people that they can come in. If the door’s closed, people will know you aren’t available. This is a frictionless way to signpost to those around you that you don’t want to be disturbed. Simply use the doorstop when you’re ready to talk, and remove it and shut your door when you want peace.

Settings

Your setting refers to your tangible environment. It’s what you can see, hear, touch and smell.

As humans, we are innately programmed to respond to our environment. For instance, if we see a tiger, we’ll run in the opposite direction because it’s a potential threat. Likewise, studies have illustrated that if we are exposed to constant streams of artificial noise and visual distractions, our productivity decreases³ and our performance on cognitive tasks is impaired⁴ because we inevitably have our attention diverted.

Practical Considerations

Beautifully, however, we can manipulate our biological programming by designing our environments in ways that are conducive of our goals. For example, a study into consumer behaviour by van Ittersum and Wansink found that we’ll consume 30% more of a food that blends in with our plate because we can’t perceive it as effectively as if it was on a different-coloured plate⁵. Hence, if we wanted to lose fat, we could use plates that are coloured green to increase vegetable intake.

This principle of environment design applies to focus, also. If you know that you can’t work with any noise, for example, consider going to bed and waking earlier. This will allow you to work in the morning when there are fewer people awake to distract you.

Although this guide can’t cover exactly how to design all the elements of your environment for focus, here’s a list of environmental factors you can act on today:

• Noise — Do you work better in complete silence, with natural noise like birdsong, or with ambient noise like conversation? Whichever option works for you, engineer your environment so that you experience your preferred choice whilst you work
• Sight — Can you see anything that impacts your focus? Common distracting items include mobile phones, games consoles and snacks — remove these from your workspace immediately. Further, make sure you have a view of nature, like a garden outside a window or a potted plant. Seeing natural things for just 40 seconds has been shown to improve concentration, reduce moment-to-moment variability in attention control, and boost task performance⁶.
• Light — Is the space you’re working in too bright or too dark? Moreover, is your screen causing you eyestrain because it’s too bright?
• Touch — Is there something distracting that’s within reaching distance? If you can touch something that will disrupt your workflow, it’s got to go.
• Smell — is there a distracting smell nearby? If you smell something delicious near your workspace, you’ll get hungry. If you smell something awful near your workspace, you’ll be too disgusted to work. A highly effective solution that will also benefit the quality of the air you’re breathing is an air purifier.
• Physical Comfort — Do you feel as though you could work for hours at a time without any discomfort? Adjust your chair to an appropriate height for your build, as being in too much or too little hip flexion (i.e., having the knee too close or too far from the chest) will cause pain. If you’re using a screen, ensure it’s at least 20 inches (51cm) away from your eyes. Moreover, don’t make your room super hot or cold, as this will prevent deep work.

D2) Distracting Devices

One of the most common ways we destroy our focus is with non-work-related technological devices.

For example, we spend over 2.5 hours per day on our smartphones alone, on which we make 101 daily app switches⁷. Furthermore, we check them 85 times per day (about once every 11 minutes)⁸ and 27.8% of us are genuinely addicted to our smartphones — a statistic that is progressively increasing every year⁹. Scarily, this excludes games consoles, television and Netflix.

Why This is Bad for Focus

Some people may look at this and cope by saying they work well despite using their devices.

Even if you believe you belong to this bucket, science shows that you’d be better off detaching from distracting devices.

This is because activity switching exposes us to attention residue. This refers to the lingering effects that tasks have on our brains.

Picture yourself working away. You then hear a phone notification and respond to it. You then try to get back to the original task. Inevitably, you’ll find it difficult to resume your workflow.

In fact, this simple lapse in concentration has prevented you from getting back into deep work for approximately 23 minutes and 15 seconds¹⁰. In other words, the notification check left an attention residue of 23 minutes and 15 seconds.

This is because you’ll be thinking about the notification you just responded to. You might be considering how you could’ve worded your response differently, what the response may be, etc.

Devices can also hurt focus because they promote withdrawal symptoms. This is known as the checking habit¹¹, underpinning how devices encourage us to check them continuously. This also exacerbates attention residue, creating a vicious circle (check device —> stop using device —> become anxious about checking device —> attention residue and inability to focus —> increased likelihood of checking device when not focused —> check device).

See, devices aren’t designed for our health and success. They’re engineered to keep us hooked for hours. Companies pay good money to craft apps and websites that appeal to us so that we’ll invest our time and money into them.

Simply put, we’re at war with Silicon Valley wizards — and they’re winning every time you get distracted.

Practical Considerations

To prevent non-work-related devices from being the limiting factor to your focus, follow these 3 steps:

• Off — Ensure that the devices you are prone to using are off when you want to work. This means completely off. Unplug power supplies, shut the devices down and make it so they cannot display any lights or produce any sounds. The same applies to notifications if you need to have a device on whilst you work. Only turn the devices and/or notifications on once you’ve completed your big-hitting tasks. When they’re on, only use them as a reward for a sustained duration rather than every few minutes to avoid attention residue.
• Relocate — The simplest way to prevent devices from disrupting your productivity is to keep them away from your workspace. If your phone, games console or TV is a genuine distraction, don’t work in the same room as it! If you can’t move to another room, then move the device to another room and make it really effortful to access. For years, I (Sam, the writer) have left my phone in a zipped bag outside my room. This not only makes it difficult to use, as it’s in another room, but also keeps it out of sight if I leave my room for whatever reason.
• Reframe — Instead of mindlessly indulging on your device every 11 minutes, make it a proper reward you can have after you’ve put in the hard work. This not only makes using it more satisfying, but also causes your brain to produce dopamine whilst you work in order to obtain the reward (i.e., your phone), which will subsequently increase your motivation.

D3) Direction

Hardly anyone addresses the importance of goals in promoting focus.

To emphasise the importance of clear direction in driving focus, imagine two students:

• Student A knows the exact content they’re going to be assessed on. They’ve designed themselves a revision schedule that pinpoints their weaknesses and tells them when they should revise each topic. Moreover, each topic is assigned specific practice questions that they need to answer by a certain date, holding them accountable to studying in order to prepare.
• Student B doesn’t know what they need to do. They aimlessly drift through the year and study without consistency or structure. They have no idea what to do for each topic they’re going to be assessed on and don’t have a plan to improve their knowledge.

Which student do you think will be more likely to get distracted and lose focus?

Obviously, it’s Student B. They don’t know what they need to do, nor have an action plan which, if followed, will drive them to success. This contrasts Student A, who has the whole academic year planned. With this clear structure, all they have to do is turn up, do what the structure tells them to do, and make progress.

Why You Must Have Direction

Besides the anecdote, there is good data that supports goal setting and planning for learning how to focus. Studies have illustrated how setting ambitious goals to be achieved in a given time frame (outcome goals) can improve performance on cognitive tasks by 21% relative to not setting goals and performing the same tasks¹².

This is because outcome goals act as rules. When we proactively assign standards to our everyday lives, we seek to meet those standards. For example, if we set the goal to achieve an A* in our end-of-year statistics exam, we’ll be forced into living the persona of an A* statistics student. This means we’ll have a clear outline of all the content that needs covering for the exam, practice questions and textbooks pertaining to the content, and a hunger to study effectively every day.

If we fail to embody this persona, then we won’t achieve the goal and we’ll feel guilty. This means that we’ll be less inclined to browse social media all day and skip studying to play video games.

Moreover, outcome goals can be made even more effective if they’re coupled with process goals. Process goals are essentially the everyday actions we need to accomplish if we are to achieve the outcome goal.

In the example of the A* statistics student, the process goals would be everything we just spoke about that leads to A* grades: studying every day, planning out what needs to be studied, etc.

Research has shown that holistic process goals that cover all the elements required to achieve an outcome goal improve learning (by providing a clear path to success), boost performance (because of the learning) and facilitate performance under pressure (because of the confidence gained from consistency)¹³.

This relationship between outcome goals (visions of a better future) and process goals (the steps to get to the better future) is key to inducing focus.

For those with mathematical brains: ideal future scenario + plan to get there + fear of not getting there = improved daily focus.

Practical Considerations

The Ultimate Guide on How to Set and Achieve Goals walks you through setting outcome and process goals step-by-step.

However, the focus of this guide is… well… focus; going away and reading another article right now would be counterintuitive.

So, to give you an actionable takeaway, here’s a condensed version of the exact framework that the guide covers:

• Set the outcome goal — In one sentence, note the exact goal you want to achieve.
• Describe the joy of completion — Write down exactly how you’d feel if you achieved the goal. Think about all the positive emotions you’d experience and the pride that would overcome you.
• Describe the negativity of failing to complete the goal — Write down the opposite of what you just wrote for the previous step. Detail the pain you’d feel if you failed to achieve your goal.
• Reverse engineer your outcome goal — Break the outcome goal down into its constituent process goals. Spend time studying those who’ve already achieved your goal and understand the daily habits they practiced that you must also practice. Once you know what you need to do, integrate the relevant habits into your daily/weekly routine and follow it consistently.
• Make contingency plans — Note down all the things that could cause you to not complete a process goal and come up with solutions. This makes it so you have no excuse to not execute the process.
• Evaluate whether you’re making progress — Check in with yourself once a month and monitor whether what you’re doing is working. If it is, keep moving forwards. If it’s not, understand the problem and devise a solution.

D4) Diet

When you came here to discover how to focus, you probably weren’t expecting diet to be a factor.

Ironically, the quickest way to improve your focus by far is to utilise the secret dietary study hack:

Intermittent Fasting

“Fasting?” you may be thinking. I hear you. When I first started intermittent fasting, which refers to shortening your daily eating window, I also thought it was purely a dietary tool. However, I soon realised that the biological mechanisms it triggered literally skyrocketed my productivity.

See, when we eat, our plasma (blood) glucose levels increase as our livers convert the food to energy. This energy is either sent to our muscles to be utilised immediately, or stored in adipose tissue (fat) to be used later¹⁴.

To counteract this spike, the pancreas secretes insulin, which then brings our blood glucose levels back to baseline. Larger spikes demand more insulin to be released and therefore facilitate a larger ‘sugar crash’.

Glucose levels are increased the most by simple and starchy carbohydrates (white bread, potatoes, pasta and rice, cereal, sugary foods, etc.). Fats, proteins and fibrous carbohydrates do not shoot up glucose levels and slow digestion. This is the exact reason why you feel tired an hour after eating a carbohydrate-dense breakfast, like cereal or toast, but could go all morning on a bowl of eggs and vegetables.

The Benefits of Fasting for Focus

When we don’t consume food and enter a fasted state, we don’t spike our plasma glucose levels at all and reap a host of focus-boosting benefits:

• Increased cortisol levels¹⁵ — Foods, especially carbohydrates, reduce cortisol. Why is this detrimental for focus? In essence, cortisol is a glucocorticoid (steroid hormone). This means that it acts like a steroid and increases alertness by putting our bodies into a sympathetic ‘fight’ mode. If we want to focus and be sharp, ditching food (temporarily) and embracing the cortisol produced by fasting is key.
• Increased catecholamine levels¹⁶ — These neurotransmitters, like dopamine and adrenaline, are released in response to stress. They signal to our bodies to take action. Whereas our bodies want us to direct this action towards finding food, we can use it to work harder and focus for longer.
• No glucose crash — If we’re not eating, our pancreases receive a break from producing insulin. This is great because we then don’t have to experience the negative effects of a sugar crash: brain fog, tiredness, boredom, etc. With higher energy levels, focusing becomes so much easier!

Practical Considerations

When it comes to diet, there are two areas we need to optimise for focus: fasting and eating.

Fasting

Students, in our experience, operate best when fasting from 14 to 16 hours per day.

For 8–10 hours of this fasting window, you’ll be sleeping. That leaves you with a good 4–8 hours of fasted wakefulness, depending on the fasting window you select and how long you sleep for. This is when you want to attack your most mentally demanding challenges.

For example, I fast from 8pm to 11am the next day. I start working at about 8:30am, which gives me 2.5 hours of fasted, focused work in the morning. These are by far my most productive hours of the day.

A great place to start is simply pushing your normal breakfast time back by 2–3 hours. If you work fasted during these hours, you’ll notice a huge difference in your focus.

Eating

Nevertheless, there comes a time when you must eat. Here are some principles that you can follow to make your eating window better for focusing:

• Breakfast should be high in protein and fat with moderate–low carbohydrates. This will reduce the glucose spike you experience early in the day and promote fullness, preventing you from craving snacks and driving better focus after you eat.
• Save carbohydrates for later. Try to make dinner the time when you consume most of your pasta, bread and potatoes by dedicating breakfast and lunch to foods rich in protein, fat and fibrous vegetables. This means that the earlier hours of wakefulness, when you’re most likely more switched on, won’t be ruined by the glucose rollercoaster.
• 80% of the calories you consume should be from whole foods. These are foods with just one ingredient. Eggs are whole foods because they consist of one ingredient: eggs. Cereal bars, conversely, are laced with many ingredients, meaning they’re a highly processed food. Whole foods are good because they’re rich in micronutrients that fuel our bodies and promote fullness. Highly processed foods are worse because they’re sparse in micronutrients and rich in added sugars that spike glucose and inhibit focus.
• Don’t snack — Set yourself 3–4 meal times and stick to them. If you’re snacking, you’re unnecessarily increasing your glucose levels. If you feel hungry during your fasting window, this means one of two things: you should drink more water, or you didn’t eat a final meal the night before that was rich in protein, fat, fibre and micronutrients.

D5) Deep Rest (Sleep)

Have you ever tried to work, let alone focus, without a night of sufficient sleep?

It’s so hard that it’s borderline impossible. You feel ill and rely on caffeine to perform the most basic tasks with half the efficiency you would have with a rested brain.

This is because sleep has so many benefits that directly relate to productivity.

For example, research has emphasised how sleep boosts cognitive performance, the ability to effectively divert attention to specific tasks, and the rate at which tasks get completed¹⁷.

In fact, a really cool article in the journal Trends in Neuroscience suggested that ‘sleep and attention may have coevolved as brain states that regulate each other’¹⁸, meaning one cannot exist without the other.

The authors explain that whilst we are awake, we utilise the brain’s ability to selectively focus in order to learn. Focused learning then facilitates tiredness. In turn, we sleep to recharge our focus batteries, as well as cement the day’s learning lessons so we don’t have to divert more precious time, energy and focus to learning the same ones again.

The Problem

Sleep is therefore key if we want to learn how to focus. In fact, it is a driver of focus; without sleep, focus cannot happen.

Yet, research has shown that up to 60% of all university/college students have poor sleep quality, with 7.7% suffering from an insomnia disorder¹⁹. In the week before final exams, barely 10% of students get the recommended 8 minimum hours of sleep during ²⁰.

Thus, students who struggle to focus, the ones who often also resort to caffeine, willpower and motivational videos to get work done, are probably missing a totally free, incredibly important component of it: sleep!

Practical Considerations

We need to optimise our sleep if we are to focus better and be more productive.

The Ultimate Guide on How to Sleep Better gives you a set of actionable principles to follow for improved sleep immediately.

However, before you check that guide out, there’s one more D to cover (the most important one).

So, here’s a brief summary of the 7 steps you can take to better your sleep for improved focus:

1. Get into a consistent sleep-wake cycle that you could follow every day for the rest of your life.
2. Optimise bodily temperature by taking a warm shower or bath before bed and sleeping in a cool room.
3. Use light and dark to regulate your circadian rhythm. Aim for sun exposure in the morning and dark exposure in the evening.
4. Only consume caffeine in the 1–2-hour window after waking.
5. Exercise during the day, but don’t perform intense exercise later than 1–2 hours before bed.
6. Dedicate your bed to sleeping only. Do not eat, game, scroll, read, etc. on your bed. This will build an association between your bed and sleep.
7. Don’t eat or drink much 2–3 hours before bed.

D6) Delayed Gratification Mindset

The most important change you can make in your life to focus like a monk, which will make all the other advice in this document easier to implement, is to develop a delayed gratification mindset. It is the unknown secret behind uncovering how to focus.

What Is Delayed Gratification?

Delayed gratification means working for your future self. It is a mindset that you must develop if you desire to be successful in any avenue of life.

Psychologist Walter Mischel brought this concept to life in his famous marshmallow study conducted in 1972. (His book is a highly recommended read for any student who wants to boost their grades.)

Children from the Bing Nursery School at Stanford University, aged around 4 and 5, were individually taken into a private room with an experimenter, who had previously asked the children regarding their favourite treat out of a marshmallow or pretzel. The experimenter placed the preferred treat on a table between them and the child. You could imagine the child’s elation at the prospect, the dopamine rushing through their innocent bodies, ushering them towards the candy.

But there was a catch…

The experimenter proposed to the children that they could have the treat now and savour the sugary goodness of one of their desired treats, or they could wait 15 minutes whilst the experimenter left the room and be entitled to two treats.

The results? Over two thirds of the children were unable to delay gratification and ate the treats before the experimenter returned. Immediate gratification, referring to favouring your present self whilst sabotaging your future self, was doubly as common as delayed gratification.

Why Does This Matter?

Mischel also conducted longitudinal research. Essentially, he completed the initial study but then analysed how the children fared later to assess delayed gratification’s long-term impacts.

To do this, he basically categorised the children into two groups based on the decisions made during the marshmallow test: immediate gratifiers or delayed gratifiers. Over the course of the next 40 years, he interviewed the teachers, parents, and classmates of individuals from both groups to establish how the ability to delay gratification correlated with success and wellbeing.

He concluded that there was a strong correlation between whether a child could delay gratification and their later SAT scores. The children able to delay gratification performed better at school and entered higher-paying careers²¹. Moreover, delayed gratifiers were also much more adept at coping with stressful situations and being responsible, self-regulatory adults²². They devised practical solutions to the problems they encountered, stayed focused under pressure and prioritised behaviours that benefited their long-term success.

It makes perfect sense as to why the delayed gratifiers were more resilient. Imagine being a child staring at a sweet. Your urges would be uncontrollable. Hence, as Mischel noted, delayed gratifiers were more likely than immediate gratifiers to employ coping mechanisms that enabled them to last the full 15 minutes and delay gratification, like humming and singing.

So, when they turned to adults, these children already had the toolkits available to silence their minds and do the uncomfortable tasks in the present to benefit their future selves.

How Does This Link to Focus?

This is the exact reason why focus is a tool of the delayed gratifier.

Focus is incredibly hard in contemporary society. We’re encouraged to always take the easy, comfortable options, which are also designed to be addictive and prevent delayed gratification.

We prefer convenient junk foods at the expense of nutritious whole foods. The time we spend observing Instagram stories and TikTok surpasses that spent improving our lives through hard work and learning. Exercise that benefits the body and mind has been deemed a punishment in comparison to a Netflix binge.

Hence, if you can do hard things and make delayed gratification your default, you won’t be as susceptible to the immediate gratification actions that destroy focus.

You won’t skimp out on sleep. Nor will you eat the foods that corrupt your energy levels. You won’t even want to check your phone as much because you’ll become addicted to the progress that comes with focused work and delayed gratification.

You’ll actively actively integrate this guide’s principles into your life, and you won’t do so to punish yourself, but rather to set yourself up for an amazing, focused future!

How Do I Delay Gratification?

To develop a delayed gratification mindset, you need to ask yourself one question before you act on something:

“Will this benefit future me?”

If the answer is yes, then that activity will be challenging and train your ability to focus, which is great!

If the answer is no, then that activity will be very comfortable and hurt your ability focus. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it has its place and shouldn’t comprise the bulk of your daily actions.

Will 45 minutes spent on social media at the end of a hard day of focused work shatter your productivity?

No.

Will eating carbohydrate-rich processed foods around the clock, checking your notifications every 15 minutes, and prioritising a content binge rather than sleep shatter your productivity?

100% yes.

Immediate gratification is the reward for focus. Delayed gratification is the motor powering it.

Immediate gratification is always optional. Delayed gratification is always essential.

Final Thoughts: The Ultimate Guide on How to Focus for Maximal Productivity

If you know how to focus, nothing is stopping you from conquering any goal.

Your value as a student is based on your outputs. You are judged according to your grades, traits and experiences.

Because of this, you must master the skill of focus. This skill is the foundation on which outputs are built.

You can have all the technology, revision strategies and motivation in the world, but they will amount to nothing if you can’t fully leverage your brain power and focus on the tasks that would benefit from them.

If you genuinely struggle to focus, don’t be ashamed or scared.

As I’ve emphasised repeatedly, focus is a skill.

When you first started walking, you weren’t good, were you? Yet, over time, as you put in the reps, you soon learned how to walk. Walking is therefore a skill you’ve developed with effort.

Focus is walking. You may not be able to focus for very long at first, just like how you couldn’t walk. But, as you progressively implement the practical considerations outlined in this guide into your life and start to delay gratification more naturally, you will transition from a slow crawl to a smooth stroll.

Your focus is completely under your control. Master the 6 Ds and you’ll soon be legions ahead of the immediate gratifiers around you.