The little tricks to gain concentration

I’ve been doing self-improvement project lately, and I’ve noticed that I’ve always had this serious trouble of concentrating. You see, I am a day-dream gal who spends most of my time wondering and worrying while doing my thing. And that’s maybe why I always ended up having difficulty to complete countless list of task and finished it behind schedule. This problem has consumed my time and energy, so I begin to googling and read couples of articles allied with that.

We all familiar with NO PHONE ZONE that Oprah have been campaigning lately, because there’re too many stories about the traffic accident that happened for the reason of distracted driving. It’s just one of the reasons why we need to learn to establish concentration as a life habit. I observe that many people (especially girls) have the same problem on concentrating; they tend to do multi-tasking when dealing with daily work. From what I’ve read from the articles, that’s just mistaken assumption that we’d finished the task efficiently by multi-tasking. In fact, multi-tasking will increase your errors and divide your attention so you’ll have to perform revision (imaging time-consuming you need to spend to mend that error).

Since concentration leads to efficiency in every work, I am thrill to share what I’ve learned from the articles for you; who have difficulty to concentrate. 

I quote, summarized, combining all articles that I had and do some adjustment to re-write it. Hopefully this could do you a favor.

Preparation:

·         Get Relaxed, Get Your Rest

All great mental achievement has been preceded by periods of absolute rest or relaxation. During this time fatigue-disappears the nervous forces because if you are restless, your mind will be easily scattered. In order to get relaxed, you need to let go.

·         'Mental Freedom

This is crucial thing to aid concentration, if you failed to do this you won’t be able to concentrate. Without harassing the three devils; hurry, worry, and fear, your mind will never have a chance to center on anything. Not only the three devils, but you should get anything that troubles you and disturbs your serenity and peace of mind goes away.  Once you are free from all of this distraction, promise me you wouldn’t indulge yourself in day-dreaming or mental driving.

·         The Proper Environment

Some people can concentrate a mental problem above easily (even while walking down on crowded street), in the other hand for other people concentration is difficult enough even under the best conditions. The suggestion is to seek a quite place to free from all distractions (noise is terrible distraction) , a place where you can be alone free from all outside influences and interruptions which may break your train of thought (telephone is terrible interrupter).

You could also find or create an atmosphere (differ with the individual) that suit you the best; inspires you, put you at your best, strongly conductive to good mental work, and has much to do with your success in your concentration.

Choosing your own place for concentration, but remember that solitude has always been, in all the history of mental achievement, a requisite for great work. Solitude calls forth the mood of receptivity because great things are worked out in silence.

·         Exercise

The body has pent up energy that needs to be used. If you don’t exercise regularly, this energy can manifest itself in the form of distracted mind. The best way to improve your concentration all day long is by exercising first thing in the morning. This will clear your head, give you a chance to reflect on day ahead, and allow your body to sweat out the impurities. Afterwards, you’ll feel rejuvenated, cleansed, and ready to take on tough problems.

How to do it:

·         Make A Plan (Task List)

You can make daily schedule or just simply make to do list that’d help you to devoting all your attention to important task. By making such thing you can save an incredible amount of time and energy because your mental energy is allocated instead of allowing to be dispersed randomly. Make this as a habit and do not forget to do just one thing at a time. The reason is –as I was saying earlier- multi-tasking will increase your errors and divides your attention so you’ll have to perform revision, so by doing one thing at a time is the easy way to do countless tasks and save a lot of energy. You can break down hard tasks into small pieces task and do it one by one, one thing at a time.

·         Motivation

Concentrating is a hard work and if you are this close to giving up, you could try to boost yourself with motivation. A little incentive will work to motivate you to accomplishing your task. Offer yourself incentives whenever you’ve completed a task, this will improve your motivation which in turn improve your concentration too.

·         Do It Now

The temptation to delay your task will always be strong (often happened to me), to counter this will to succeed must be stronger. Whenever this occurs, ask yourself; why postpone and do something tomorrow if the same task can be done today?

The fact that the task isn’t going away, delaying will only cause you the guilt.

·         Remove All Possible Distraction

I have been explaining some things that cause mind distraction, but there’re some subliminal distractions. Examples of such distractions are talking to someone on the topic that interests you, watching a movie while working, etc.

When you’re exercising those steps to concentrate above, you may want to use some of tips:

Five More Rule

Instead of just quitting the task all together, tell yourself to do only five more things before you quit. When these have been accomplished you promise yourself again to only do five more things (such writing only five more pages, solving only five more math problems, read only five more chapter, etc). The keyword here is the “only”; by decreasing the size of the task cognitively you feel less hesitant to abandon it altogether.

Blinkers Hands

This is the fastest way to get you concentrate in challenging situations. By putting both of your hand on the side of your face around your eyes, blocks out surroundings so they’re literally out of sight, then out of your mind.

Take Breaks

Boredom and fatigue are other factors that can negatively affect concentration. Don’t work yourself too hard. Try to take a walk or relaxation time in order to lose the nervous energy. It can also be helpful to work in different places to increase your motivation to work.