How to Improve your Concentration

Concentration is an important virtue if you want to accomplish any job. No matter if your job is small or large, without concentration, you cannot do it to perfection. No one can explain the need for concentration better than students studying for a degree or a qualification where they have to read and learn thousands of words, facts and figures.

Learning without concentration is not possible at all. If you do not focus or concentrate, you might make silly but costly mistakes. Moreover, your tasks will take longer to complete than expected and you may have to give up some important things due to lack of time.

You might be suffering from a lack of concentration. But you need not worry because, here, I am sharing a few tips to improve your concentration.

Keep yourself physically fit

Concentration is directly affected by your physical state. Even a small disturbance in your daily routine may alter your ability to concentrate. For instance, if you had a bad night and a disturbed sleep, you might not able pay attention to the work at hand.

Even having a heavy or spicy lunch may disturb your way of working. Thus, the important thing is to keep your body fit and healthy to improve your concentration.

A few tips to maintain a healthy lifestyle are to have enough sleep of, say, 6-9 hours. Eat what suits your body and eat sensibly. Have a balanced diet in the right proportions; overeating is a cause of lost focus. Exercising regularly also helps to improve your concentration. Performing Yoga and meditation helps hugely when it comes to improving your concentration.

Avoid things that distract you

Most of the time, you do not concentrate because people like colleagues or roommates keep coming to you for different reasons and disturb you. Or there may be other things, like constant noise, that may distract you. Even a small disturbance means spending several minutes to get back to your work.

You can avoid distraction by following certain tips like closing your office door. You may wear headphones (just to pretend) to prevent people talking to you.

Cut yourself off from modes of communication: maybe switch off your mobile phone, or close your email and chat programs. If you find it difficult to focus in your home office, you can think of a temporary relocation also to a café or library.

So improve your concentration by avoiding things that distract you.

Do not get tempted to do multitasking

Avoiding multitasking is one of the ways of improving your concentration. If you want perfection in each of your jobs, focus on only one job at a time.

Like every other busy person on this planet, you might also have a long list of tasks to be done and you might get tempted to multitask. However, believe me, you can get faster results if you concentrate on one task at a time.

The one way to avoid multitasking is to prioritize your tasks according to their importance. Have a list of things to be done on a particular day and mark important ones to be done first. Try to achieve success in chunks and you will see how your productivity increases.

Immerse yourself in whatever you are doing. To improve your concentration in whatever you are doing, it is important that you engage yourself and fully immerse yourself in the job.

For instance, if you are listening to a lecture, get a pen and paper to take notes. Or, if you are reading a book, get a highlighter to highlight the parts that seem interesting. It keeps your mind focused on the job at hand.

Avoid unproductive thoughts

Since our mind is always full of irrelevant thoughts, they keep coming in to disturb the flow of work at hand. While you are working on a particular project, you might be tempted to think about things like food, family, money, friends, facebook . . . blah blah blah (though everything is important to you, but not at this moment). Dismiss all these thoughts for now or make a list of these thoughts to deal with them later.

Read more on negative thoughts at our blog – negative thoughts can drain your energy