Reading time: About 3 minutes
Don’t white-knuckle your way through a first draft. Instead, learn to rehabilitate your attention.
Did you know that school children are having a hard time watching movies in class? Why? Because the movies are too long.
Raised on a diet of 10-second videos and their parents’ glazed-over phone faces, kids no longer see movies as a delightful chance to “escape” schoolwork or have fun. Instead, they see them as 60-or-more minutes of punishment.
The constant exposure to short, fast hits of dopamine on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram has rewired our brains. (Yes, even yours. Even mine. I recently caught myself watching a short video at 2x speed.)
But losing attention is not a personal failure. Instead, it’s something you can learn to deal with. Your attention is like a muscle. It adapts to how it’s used. If you’ve trained it to be distracted, you can also train it to focus.
The biggest mistake many people make is trying to power through writing — or any other task — with willpower. They also tend to set unrealistic expectations: “I’ll just sit here for two hours and write. No problem. I’m basically Hemingway.” The result? Frustration, avoidance and an even shorter attention span.
Good news: You don’t need to white-knuckle your way to a first draft. Instead of forcing yourself to increase your focus, work at building it gradually.
Here are seven strategies:
1-Start smaller than you think
When working with new clients, I advise they reduce their writing goal to no more than 15 minutes a day. And if this message surprises them, they’re often practically falling off their chairs when I suggest it’s perfectly okay to drop the goal to just five minutes if they wish.
Writing is about building a habit. Not about finishing a book in a single day.
2-Use timed focus sessions
I’m a longtime believer in the pomodoro technique — developed by Italian inventor Francesco Cirillo, who wisely named it after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (pomodoro is tomato in Italian) rather than say, “the suffer clock.” It requires you to work to a 25-minute timer, strictly focused on one task, with a ticking clock in the background. Sometimes, I prefer to use forest or water sounds.
I spend every working day going from one pomodoro to the next, and it makes the work so much easier.
3-Remove friction and distractions
Our lives, filled with phones, email and social media, don’t make it easy to concentrate. (If your phone is within arm’s reach right now, it’s already won.) Take some steps to get this stuff out of your way. For example:
- Silence notifications
- Close extra tabs
- Put your phone in another room (let it think about what it’s done)
- Use website blockers like Freedom or Cold Turkey
- Have a clean workspace
But remember, you’re not looking for perfection — just improvement.
4-Build a simple focus ritual
Me? I time-block every day and then use a kitchen timer. When it sounds, I know it’s time to move on to my next task.
You might want to take another approach. Perhaps you write after you’ve poured your first cup of coffee or tea for the day. Or maybe right after you’ve finished exercising. Or possibly opening a specific document is your cue. Some writers even have a specific playlist they use only when writing. That way their brain learns: “Oh we’re doing this now.”
Rituals reduce decision fatigue and signal your brain that it’s time to do something.
5-Train yourself with “slow” activities
Zip-zip-zip and rush-rush-rush. When we’re constantly moving quickly, we become addicted to the fast pace and find it hard to slow down. Counteract all the busyness with some slower, more mindful activities:
- Read a physical book
- Meditate
- Take a long walk, without listening to a podcast
- Watch something longer than three minutes without touching your phone
- Have a conversation without checking your messages mid-sentence
6-Protect your sleep and movement
There is a neurological link between rest, exercise and cognitive focus. We think better when we’re moving (especially walking), and we all need at least seven to nine hours of sleep a night. These are not nice-to-haves — instead, they are must-haves. Yes, even for writers who insist they do their best work on three hours of sleep.
You may think you work better when you write or edit for six hours without a break, but you are wrong. We all need sleep and exercise, and not getting it makes us worse writers and editors.
7-Understand the need for recovery
Even with the best of intentions, you will still get distracted from time to time. You’ll check your phone. You’ll suddenly need to know the capital of Uzbekistan. You’ll reorganize your bookshelf. That’s entirely normal. The skill is noticing and coming back quickly. Recovery is the real marker of strong attention.
The mindset shift
Small changes today can reshape how you think and work. Your attention span isn’t broken, it’s just badly damaged.
But attention is trainable, and it improves with consistency, not intensity. Every time you resist the urge to check your phone, you’re building the muscle you need.
Some days will feel harder — you’ll stare at a blank page until it stares back — but that’s just part of the process. The good news is that small daily habits compound over time. Pick one of the strategies I’ve mentioned above and try it this week.
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My video podcast last week explored whether writers get Shiny Object Syndrome. You can watch the video or read the transcript, and you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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How do you rehabilitate your attention span? We can all learn from each other, so please, share your thoughts with my readers and me in the comments section, below. If you comment on today’s post (or any others) by April 30/26, I’ll put you in a draw for a digital copy of my first book, 8 1/2 Steps to Writing Faster, Better. To enter, please scroll down to the comments, directly underneath the related posts links, below. You don’t have to join Disqus to post! Read my tutorial to learn how to post as a guest. (It’s easy!)
