5 Ways to Improve Focus and Concentration

Given its immense benefits, meditation is one of the highly sought-after ways to help alleviate stress and concentrate better.

There are many studies that have proven that meditation can alter your brain matter to reduce stress which eventually helps increase a person’s cognitive abilities.

Enhanced cognitive abilities mean you’ll be able to sustain a better mood, experience increased verbal and non-verbal reasoning skills and heightened ability to process mental information.

To-do lists keep everything accounted for. It is a great way to objectively analyze what needs to be taken care of on priority on a given day.

It usually helps to write your list the night before. This spares you the chaos of figuring things out in the morning rush and is an efficient way to handle everything that comes your way throughout the day.

Assigning time estimates for each task on your to-do list takes things a notch higher. Setting realistic, reasonable estimates will help you in gauging how much you are able to achieve in a day. 

Also, any task that is repeatedly rescheduled might need your attention - either it is unimportant or it needs more of your time.

The benefits of exercise are manifold: physical, mental & emotional. Numerous studies around the world have confirmed that even a quick 15-20 minute walk can have great health benefits. Besides, it improves mental concentration, focus, productivity, and general well-being.

If you cannot get your mind to settle, exercising for even half an hour beforehand can help you get into the groove to cope up with the more challenging hours. 

From Late Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg, all great entrepreneurs and leaders have time and again advocated exercising and dedicated a part of their success to it.

Studies have shown that clutter decreases the brain’s capacity to process information because it becomes distracted and overwhelmed by the sheer size of the clutter around. Hence, keeping your workplace, home or surroundings tidy is one of the important ways to improve focus and concentration.

The human mind is not built for constant attention. If information is constantly bombarded over it, passivity sets in which leads to further delays in the completion of tasks. Therefore, taking short timely breaks is essential to maintaining and improving focus and concentration.

In other words, temporary deactivation and reactivation of goals helps an individual to stay on track. There’s a famous technique known as the Pomodoro Technique, which proposes that a longer task should be broken up into 25-minute blocks of work, followed by a 5-minute break. After this has been done 4 times, take a longer break of 30 minutes.

The point of taking a break is to just disengage yourself by breaking up your concentration. This recharges your brain to return to what you were doing refreshed.

Following some of these tips can help in improving your focus and concentration, resulting in a calmer, more efficient and productive you. And yes! There’s always coffee!!