A Guide to Making Your Attention Span Work for You

It’s hard to accomplish a task when you’re always distracted by something else. You may have a paper due for school the next day, but tonight, it feels like the most important thing for you to accomplish is clearing that kitchen off the dishes and the clutter. You have a presentation for work, but somehow it feels more pressing that you clear your inbox of hundreds of promotional emails.

It’s not that you feel lazy; it’s just that you need to prioritize better. Here’s a guide to make your attention span work for you:

Batch similar tasks together

If you need to clear your inbox, do this after you send all the emails you need to send. If you need to edit one project, make sure you plan to do it together with another editing task. When you get in the zone of what you’re currently doing, it will be easier to get yourself to do another similar task. However, make sure you’re still getting enough breaks in between. The pomodoro method is touted for productivity and frequent but small breaks–it’s exactly what you need for those random social media checks where you just mindlessly scroll over everything.

Assign a productive reward to your goal

Once you’ve accomplished the biggest task of the week, you definitely deserve a reward. Go ahead and take yourself on a face mask online shopping haul. Find the biggest deals and allow yourself to experience that luxurious feeling of just buying what you need for self-care. Stop at checkout so that you can still evaluate whether you really want to push through with the purchase, but up to that point, you’ve already enjoyed the serotonin boost, so you’ve already won.

You can also do something better when assigning rewards to goals. Rather than choosing a reward that’s frivolous or temporary, do something productive. For example, if you finish your report before 10pm, you can watch a lesson in that online class you enjoy. Or after clearing the dishes, you get to have 30 minutes to reply to your emails. Reframe the tasks as little ways to care for your future self, and building some excitement towards them can help you clear everything off your checklist with ease.

Change your notification settings

When you have a meeting, the default notification may come with some time to spare. Thirty minutes could be the default for many calendar apps. The problem with this is it gives you plenty of time to forget about the meeting. Two minutes should be enough. Change the default setting in your calendar so that you get notified two minutes before an event, giving you plenty of time to wrap up what you’re doing and show up. This also brings a sense of urgency, which you know works for you if your buzzer-beater projects are anything to go by.

It’s hard to get things done when you always get distracted, but this doesn’t mean you’re a hopeless case. You just need to trick yourself into being more productive in a way that works for the limited attention span.