Effective techniques to boost your ability to focus on tasks

Last time, I showed two approaches to train up willpower that is a source of the power of concentration in order not to get easily distracted. One of them is to make unconscious actions conscious ones, such as to spend a day with your opposite dominant hand using. Another way is to save willpower by reducing time to think too much about one decision. Then, I’m going to talk about several applicable techniques so that you can focus on working on one task for a long time.

•Fatigue of determination 

The true reason why we feel tired is closely related to fatigue of determination. I stated that too many choices gradually deprive your willpower. Consequently, lack of willpower makes it harder for you to make a decent decision and makes you reluctant to do tasks. When getting procrastinated,rest of bunch of tasks are always in your corner of the brain forever, which is frustrating. This is called fatigue of determination. In one famous experiment called jam experiment, there are two corners in a supermarket , one of which has 6 sorts of jams and another had 24 sorts of jams, and see how many customers will stop by those corners and buy jams. As you can expect, at the corner with 6 jams, 40% of customers dropped in on there. On the other hand, 60% of customers stoped by the corner with 24 sorts of jams. But that’s what you thought. However, the surprising fact is that the number of customers who actually bought a jam is totally different, which means that 30% of customers bought it at the corner with 6 types of jams while only 3% of them bought it at the corner with 24 sorts of jams. It is because of fatigue of determination. That means customers who dropped in on the corner having plentiful jams actually felt impressed at various types of jams, but they became too exhausted to buy it due to too many choices.

•Countermeasure against fatigue of determination 

Whenever you experience fatigue of determination, you put off doing your tasks because you feel like “I know I have to get this done, but I want to watch YouTube, so do it later. Therefore, you have to make a system that enables you to make a quick decision.

•Batch Processing 

When there is a need for doing bunch of small tasks, batch processing is one of the effective techniques. Batch processing is to deal with all of them at once after writing all of them in your notepaper. All you need is only one a bit big paper to write down what you have to do. If coming up with what you should do while studying, it is required that you quickly write it down your paper and go back to your studying immediately without coping with the task because while focusing on your task, it is important not to keep other things in your mind.