In my previous blog post I mentioned how I, like many others, ruined my ability to concentrate for long periods of time by overusing social media and content aggregation sites. This of course led to decimating my productivity. I spent a lot of time trying out different ways to improve my attention span. Recently I figured out a method that drastically improved my concentration on everyday tasks and allowed me to do much more in a day than I thought I could do. If it worked for me, it might work for you too.
The reasoning
Inspired by chefs
I’m a big fan of the cooking show Masterchef. It is a television competition show, where in each episode the contestants are tasked to cook a dish (or several) in an amount of time that usually leaves the contestants grabbing their heads and panicking. How the hell are they going to cook 2 dishes and a dessert in 60 minutes? Much to their surprise, they usually succeed in their assignments, often with great results. This pattern is exactly why I find the show so inspiring. It has led me to notice that the amount of time it takes to do a particular task is mostly determined by the amount of time you assign to it. Whatever preconceptions you have about how fast you can do a particular task are most probably very wrong. Most likely you are working below your actual full capacity, based on limits that you set yourself. And those limits are ultimately an illusion.
Now, I realize that your work environment is most likely very different than that of an amateur chef in a cooking show. It is much more difficult to push yourself to your limit when the things you have to do are boring and there really is no incentive to do them quickly. But in itself cooking is not a particularly captivating activity either, as evidenced by the fact that you could easily do 100% of your cooking while listening to an audiobook, like many do. How is it then, that Masterchef contestants deliver amazing results in a ridiculously short amount of time? Well they are obviously very focused on what they do. I’ve never seen any of them scroll their Instagram while flipping steaks. The key to their productivity is their concentration. And the source of it, is intensity.
Speedrunning intensity
Tasks of a typical knowledge worker can usually be best described as very boring. This is why it’s so difficult to focus on them — you get an urge to check social media because it is more stimulating than whatever you’re supposed to do. If we could artificially add intensity to our daily tasks, we would be able to effortlessly concentrate on them, because alternatives would stop being more engaging. Luckily for us, there is already a group of people who can give us inspiration on how to add intensity to activities that are not designed for it: speedrunners.
Speedrunning is the process of trying to finish a video game in as small amount of time as possible. The player splits the game into parts, then finishes the game as fast as they can, noting down how much time it took them to finish each part. Then, they play the game again, trying to beat their previous run, using the previous times as a guide to how well they’re doing. They repeat this again and again. The ultimate goal of speedrunning is to beat the current record holder, and establish a new quickest time of completion for a particular game.
The type of the video game does not matter — it could be the most laid-back game in the world and you would still be able to find someone who wants to finish it the fastest. This is a good framework for us, because we want to artificially increase intensity in a non-intensive activity just like speedrunners did.
The method
Here is how you can add speedrunning intensity into your everyday to-do list.
Set target times
The difference between playing a game and working on any project is that a game is repeatable and the same every time you play it, while a project’s tasks are usually unique. This means that you don’t have access to previous completion times to compare yourself to — no target to chase. The best alternative I found is to treat each task like a new video game with a different world record. You can do this by estimating a very optimistic time of completion of each task and setting it as your target. For example, if you think writing an email would take you about 10 minutes, set your target time to 4. Setting target times is much easier, when your todo’s are relatively small, so split big tasks into multiple smaller ones. Instead of “Write the blog post”, try “write the first draft of the introduction”, for example.
Get ready
Before getting to work, it is important to get your environment ready. Each external distraction has potential to break your chain of thought, ruining your concentration and your current time. Try to create a distraction-less environment to the best of your ability. A good practice would be creating designated “focus hours” in your calendar and pausing all your notifications for that time. Most team-collaboration tools that have integrated calendars support this feature and automatically assign you a status that you are temporarily unavailable. Put your phone on silent too.
Additionally, bring coffee and water, so you won’t have to get up when thirsty. For added immersion and noise cancellation, put on headphones and play your preferred intense music playlist.
Get to work
When you’re ready, grab the first task on your to-do list, make a mental note of the target time, and start your stopwatch. A wrist watch with a stopwatch works best, as it is easily available and is separated from any screens, saving valuable real estate on your screen and keeping you away from notifications that appear on your phone.
Do the task as fast as possible, aiming to beat your target time.
Don’t get discouraged in case you exceed it. Keep in mind that this method is carrying a risk of producing low quality work if you don’t keep yourself in check, although from my experience, people (especially programmers) naturally tend towards perfectionism, and a slight decrease in the quality of their work is a very good price for the increase in how much they produce.
When you’re done, write down the time it took you to finish the task, restart your stopwatch and immediately start working on the next task on the list. Repeat this cycle as long as you can — it’s easy to keep working, but much harder to start.
Just like the Masterchef cooks, you will be surprised how much you can really do in an hour if you have a plan and enough concentration.
The results
The first time I tried this I wrote my to-do list for tasks that I estimated would take me an entire day to complete. But because I didn’t interrupt work by checking social media or by making coffee out of boredom, I stopped wasting time. I also achieved an intense level of concentration, the type that I last felt when I still had a working attention span. I finished my day’s work in less than 2 hours.
Often when I program, whenever I hit a wall or become distracted by something, I get an urge to go to Twitter or Youtube. Using this method kept my mind intensely occupied, eliminating the craving. It also kept me from multitasking — sometimes when I am writing code for a feature, I notice a small thing that needs a quick fix so I start working on that. Then another thing comes up and I start doing that too. But doing three things at once is always accompanied by a feeling of chaos and anxiety. It is also slower than doing 3 tasks one after another, because then you have an advantage of undivided brain power. Speedrunning a to-do list solves the problem of unintended multitasking. Because you are measuring time for one task at a time with the intention of finishing it as fast as possible, it forces you to concentrate on one task only, as working on anything else will mess up your time for the current one. It also forces you to clearly define what you are going to work on — if something comes up, it’s just going to have to wait for it’s turn.
TL;DR
Here’s the step by step guide on how to leverage speedrunning for focused work:
📝 Write out your to-do list: Create task cards for each planned activity. Try to break each task down into as many small to-do’s as possible.
🎯 Set target times: Set optimistic target completion times for every task.
☕ Get ready: Pick your music playlist and grab your coffee, whatever you need for the next focus session.
🏁 Start the task: Start a timer. Try to finish your task as fast as you can.
✅ Complete the task: Note down the completion time for a completed task, then immediately move on to the next one. Repeat as long as you can.
I encourage you to try out speedrunning your own to-do list. If you find it effective, you might be interested in a tool I created specifically for using this method in an organised way: the To-Do List Speedrunning Board
I sincerely hope this method helps you control your attention and be more productive.
