Ask HN: Any scientifically proven techniques to boost concentration?
Let yourself work.<p>---<p>By analogy, say you&#x27;re a manager at a scientific-lab.  You&#x27;re already behind on deadlines for publishing papers; you&#x27;re getting flack for it.  You need the folks in lab-coats to write those papers, but they keep procrastinating... no matter what you freakin&#x27; do, no matter how many times you physically drag them to the computer to type their papers, every time you walk away for 10 minutes and come back, the scientists are back at their labs doing experiments and whatnot.  How do you get them to stop it with the distractions and do their work?<p>As crazy as it may sound, maybe you should let the scientists do their experiments.  Because, maybe, those experiments are somehow more conducive to writing papers than typing the papers is.<p>And it is weird, right?  I mean, if you want papers, you type them!  Obviously, right?!  Everything else is just a distraction.. and maybe that&#x27;s okay when you&#x27;re not behind-schedule, but right now they should really be writing instead of experimenting.<p>---<p>You&#x27;re a scientist in a lab.  You&#x27;re trying to do your work, but your manager&#x27;s freaking out about missed publication deadlines.  Every time you&#x27;re trying to get some data <i>to</i> write about, they keep demanding that you just get to writing!<p>They don&#x27;t understand.  You try to tell them that you need to do other things before writing, and they ask why: you explain how the significant of the quadrangle isn&#x27;t 7-epsilon beta invariant boson electric guitar, but they act like you&#x27;re saying gibberish.  Stressed, they impress upon you the fact that they need you to write stuff up and quit it with the distractions.<p>What do you do?<p>Your manager, frustrated, asks other managers what to do to make you work.  The other managers suggest that your manager go exercise, have a beer, or take a vacation.  Your manager doesn&#x27;t see exactly how those things might help, but they try it.  ...conveniently, they&#x27;re not bugging you anymore and now you can work!<p>---<p>Point:  You&#x27;re not doing all of the work.  Much of it&#x27;s being done by, e.g., subconscious parts of your brain.  And sometimes there&#x27;s more to it than you might consciously experience.<p>If you want to be a good manager, there&#x27;s some learning how to help the rest of yourself work.  And perhaps even to realize that you might not even know how to do your own work.. sometimes you&#x27;re leaning on other intelligences, even if they&#x27;re within your own brain, and sometimes the work you&#x27;d want them to do might be more involved than you may appreciate.<p>So don&#x27;t Ctrl+Alt+Del the OS-updates, disk-defrags, virus-scans, garbage-collector, backup-transfers, etc. -- at least, not as a standard practice.  But also try to avoid stressing the same already-stressed processes while you&#x27;re waiting; don&#x27;t have the scientists fix the fax-machine, nor start moving a lot of big files around while the drive&#x27;s defragging.<p>And if it helps, imagine that your brain is a country, and you&#x27;re a non-authoritarian top-level executive (like a US president).  Sometimes raising&#x2F;lowering all taxes might help a bit, but those are rather blunt, unrefined tools to address some specific performance-concern.  Instead, if you want to be an effective-leader -- whether if it&#x27;s of a country or of your own mind -- you&#x27;ve got to grow your awareness of what&#x27;s going on inside and apply more nuanced tactics to help things along.<p>Because even when it&#x27;s &quot;<i>you</i>&quot;, it&#x27;s not all just the conscious-you doing the work -- you&#x27;re more akin to a manager than a laborer, if you&#x27;re an executive of your own mind.<p>---<p>Bonus analogy:  You&#x27;ve bought a self-driving car from, say, Tesla.  You told it to be nearby, so that it can pick you up when your meeting finishes.  However, it&#x27;s now late.  Should you, say, take remote-control of it and hit the gas?  Because, surely, it should just drive to you -- and if it&#x27;s not doing that itself, then it&#x27;s buggy and you should hit the gas.  Not like it could be delayed due to something beyond your awareness, like it being stuck in traffic, and what&#x27;s the harm in hitting the gas when it&#x27;s going too slow?<p>---<p>In short, sometimes working means doing things that might not seem like work to your conscious-mind, or at least letting your brain do those things while you support it, like a good manager supports their employees.<p>Generally speaking, the more advanced&#x2F;involved a process is, the more non-deterministic the run-time will tend to be.  Constant-time operation might be more plausible for the simplest tasks, and a manager might more reasonably try to get employees to keep doing their job when it&#x27;s a simple task, like pulling a lever in a factory.  But just like complex distributed optimizations can be far more variable (and even unpredictable) in their run-times compared to, say, adding two primitive-integers, more complex creative&#x2F;involved work can be more non-deterministic in its run-times.