> The phone has replaced the television set, and Facebook is the channel guide that tells you what content to consume.
This popped out to me given that this article (http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/is-facebook-luring-you-into...) about social media effects on mental health popped up on HN today and still lingers in my mind.
Always some sort of chat or something in the background. I really don't know what to do, should I get counselling or something?
I think the ability to concentrate on one task singularly is really a gift the young get. I can't think of a single friend who has ever said it has gotten better over time. Enjoy the positive changes that come with age though. The ability to reason more objectively, the ability to control your emotions, the ability handle defeat and disappointment with grace, and the ability to plan larger things. Your body and mind change with age.
I started out by trying the pomodoro thing again. 25 minutes of uninterrupted time. Ringer off, chat off, focused on the task at hand. I played around with a few different tools, but I've got at least a handful of machines that I work on, and it was a pain in the ass to try to find a cross-platform solution.
What I ended up settling on was to use my phone as the timer, and a spreadsheet to keep a list of what I'd accomplished and what I had left to do. I used Smartsheets, but google docs or whatever would work fine too. And here's where the interesting part came in!
For the first week or two, I followed it pretty closely. 25 minutes of work, 5 minute rest, repeat. And then... one day I realized that my phone was upstairs, I was feeling pretty good about doing some work, and so I figured I'd start a task and just keep an eye on the clock. Hour and a half of productive time goes by before I even look down at the clock again! On crappy days, I'm not anywhere near the point where I can stay focused for long stretches, and in those cases I fall back onto the 25-5 routine, but for good days I seem to have gotten my ability to focus back quite well!
First, don't worry too much if you think your attention and focus is not good or it's getting worse because this act of (constant) worrying itself keeps you in the very same (worry) loop you want to avoid/escape at the very first place. Just keep in mind, an average amount of lack of attention is common as it happens to most of us because of our aging, work, life style, and the environment (both real and digital). Try to avoid doing unnecessary tasks as much as you can and don't push yourselves too hard. Focus on the progress and not the results alone to improve your chances.
Second, exercise and meditate besides having good sleep and a balanced diet (this part is pretty common advice as most of us already know about it). In addition, I would suggest you also include some sports performance psychology books in your reading list as they often contain some really good applied research to improve the performance of professional sport-man. I think, in some way, a technical (or business) person is not very different from those sport-men when it comes to attention, focus and performing under pressures in work/business settings. The visible aspects of tasks and their execution (a sport-man and technical/business person perform) are different but the mental aspects of these tasks are very similar to those tasks one has to carry out in a technical/business context.
Last, you can consider counseling and more serious help, if above-mentioned self-help methods doesn't work in your case. Most of the time we don't need to think about this step if we keep working on the first two points regularly unless we've some strong evidence that we must consider this last step.
---
Note:
I'm not an expert in any mental health and performance related field (like psychology etc.). I'm just a normal technical person like most of other HN community member.
If meditation practices fail at helping improve your focus, there's always stimulants. I enjoy brewing up the beans from Stumptown.