Single-minded focus is difficult for me.
Memory tells me I could once focus for hours on a single task. Perhaps memory is telling the truth. Perhaps not. I don’t necessarily trust memory, because it is just a story I tell myself, a story subject to change.
But still.
“Focus harder!” is a useless admonition. Yet, that’s my solution.
Tools and productivity techniques are beside the point. They merely polish the turd. They treat the symptoms, not the disease.
Don’t reject tools out-of-hand. Work Cycles, for instance, is a tool that has revealed self to self for me: how I consistently overestimate my ability to get a task done in a given amount of time. Freedom, for instance, helps me break the nervous tic of checking to see if there is something new on the internet that I must read.
What do I do with these observations? How do I stop asking The Overestimater for his opinion? How do I let The Magnet Mind go search for iron filing by himself, leaving me to my simple tasks?
Every effect has a cause. Seek the cause.