If you clicked on the title expecting to find tips on how to focus in a grad school setting, you're out of luck! Because I sure as heck don't know how. One of the challenges of grad school is that it forces you to manage intangible resources such as energy, time, and attention. If you don't have much experience doing so, this can be very difficult as all three play into your ability to focus on your work. In practice, the general crux of the issue is the difficulty in moving from one task to another and maintaining a high level of focus for each task. From conversing with others in academia, this is a problem for undergrads, grad students, faculty, and everyone in-between. One issue that can exacerbate focus and concentration is having too much on your plate, something that should be very familiar for most reading this. I especially first noticed it during my Master's program, where my job entailed reporting to several different people--my advisor, faculty on my committee, the professor for the course I TA'd for, the students in that course, and members of my cohort. Because any one person that you work with or report to doesn't have a great sense of the rest of your duties at any given time, it means that different tasks can pile up without any good sense of how much work you can realistically get done. The sheer amount of work can make it difficult to sit down and focus on just one task, as more work often means more stress, as this post from Brightside Blog notes.
The blog post I linked to also notes some of the symptoms that are associated with difficulty concentrating, which can include:
Making careless mistakes
Difficulty sitting still
Inability to make choices
Lack of mental energy
Losing things
Forgetting things that just happened
I can safely that I experience virtually all of these symptoms on a daily basis, and I'm sure I'm not alone among grad students. But why is this an issue for grad students? The post on Brightside Blog goes on to note factors that contribute to an inability to concentrate, including having too much going on, lack of sleep/tiredness, a rough emotional state, and mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety. Again, checking off all the boxes here. Digging a bit deeper, why and how do these factors affect concentration? This article on the neuroscience behind issues with concentration explains a bit about what might be going on in the brain when one's having trouble focusing. Of particular importance is the amygdala, or the structure in the brain that helps regulate threats. These threats can also include negative emotions, which can be an issue for concentration as they have been found to interfere with working memory. Essentially, anxiety and worry can chip away at working memory, which in turn affects your ability to focus. The article notes that students in Quebec during the start of the pandemic reported significant issues with focusing on work, which I can say was also a problem for myself--attempting to work on a manuscript in my free time during the early months of pandemic was an arduous task, likely made more difficult than it would have been otherwise due to the constant deluge of news about COVID-19.
This difficulty focusing makes much of what I do here at Western fairly difficult. Writing this blog post, for one. Getting through journal articles is a struggle, especially the more wordy and technical papers. And having periods of just an hour between meetings can induce a sense of turmoil over the best way to effectively use that time, often resulting in indecision and little accomplished in that interval.
So what's the best way to overcome these issues? I have a few tips that I try to stick to, such as:
1. Getting enough sleep. Often easier said than done.
2. Cutting off sources of distraction during work hours. These can include not having my Outlook email page up, and/or turning off my phone.
3. Being particular about the hours of the day that I work--I find I'm most productive and focused during the morning hours, especially the earlier I come in.
4. Making a list of "to-do" items for the day, trying to stick to as few as possible.
I'd like to end with this picture I took in the lobby of the hotel I stayed at during the Dragonfly Team Meeting last week. I think it's a nice photo with a great message, maybe one relevant to this topic.
Some nice prose about ducks.
If you've had issues with focus and concentration, what advice would you have?
