You sit at your desk for eight hours while email and chat keep pinging. A colleague stops by with a quick question.
At the end of the day you were busy, but you didn’t get much done. So you ask yourself: how can I focus better at work?
This article follows your workday. You’ll see how much focus it really holds and where to put it. You’ll also see how to keep people and messages out and how to end the day.
Eight focused hours aren’t the goal
Focusing for a whole workday isn’t realistic, so don’t make it your goal. Aim for a few good blocks. A block is one bounded stretch of concentrated work with one goal, usually 45 minutes.
You’re at work for eight hours, and you expect yourself to be focused the whole time. Try that, and you burn yourself out and are exhausted the next day. If you want to be more focused at work, aim for fewer hours of full focus.
The realistic upper limit for highly concentrated work is four to six hours a day. Some manage less, some more.
What counts as focused work, and what is enough, is covered in how many hours of deep work per day. And if you want to spread your blocks across the whole day, read how to stay focused all day.
The rest of the day still has room for email, meetings and routine work.
Match your tasks and blocks to your energy
If only a few hours of your workday can be fully focused, the question is which ones. Not every hour is equal, so match the work to your energy. Wasting energy on an easy task is just as inefficient as tackling a hard task without energy.
- Tasks to your energy: demanding tasks when you have energy, easier ones when it fades. That can be at any time of your day.
- Block length to your state: set each block by how you feel right now. Maybe that’s 45 or 90 minutes, maybe only 25.
- Email and chat in blocks of their own: not as a background all day, and not in your breaks.
If meetings fill much of your calendar, start with deep work with a full-time job. Beyond that, your energy follows your own rhythm. Finding it is a big topic of its own, covered in the best time for deep work.
How do you stay focused when colleagues and messages interrupt you?
Once your blocks have a place in the day, protect them. To maintain focus at work, close the channels people use to reach you. At work, that includes your colleagues.
The workplace analytics company Insightful surveyed 1,200 U.S. employees and leaders for a 2024 report. About 71% of respondents named coworkers as the main reason they can’t focus.
Before each block:
- Turn your phone off and put it out of sight.
- Tell the people who contact you regularly when you can’t be reached.
- Close the door to your workspace, if you have one.
- Close email, Slack and every other app the task doesn’t need.
- Turn on Do Not Disturb mode, so no notifications appear.
Telling people in advance removes the lingering expectation that someone might be writing to you. For colleagues who come to your desk anyway, read deep work when everyone is bothering you.
The researcher Gloria Mark gave an interview to Gallup in 2006. She said her team had shadowed 36 people at work, from managers to software developers.
About 44% of their interruptions were self-initiated: the people started them themselves. So closing the channels covers other people, but much of the pull comes from you.
When the urge to check comes, write it down
Much of the pull at work comes from your own thoughts about other work. There’s the urge to see whether someone wrote, or a reply you still owe. There’s a task for later or an idea for another project.
Your brain repeats these thoughts because it’s afraid of forgetting them, and it pushes you to act. If you wonder how to keep focused on work, get them out of your head.
In my own blocks, it’s usually other tasks that come to mind. As soon as the thought is on paper, my brain settles down, and I can return to the task.
Write it in a few keywords on your thought sheet, a second page just for stray thoughts. It lies next to your protocol sheet, the page with your goal and your steps. Then go back to the task.
Don’t think the thought through; a keyword is enough to find it again later. Sometimes you lose track of the task itself inside a block. Then the steps in how to stay focused bring you back.
By the end of the workday, your thought sheet holds a list of tasks.
End the workday clean
Your last block is over, and your thought sheet is full. The end of the workday means the end of the workday.
Recovery in the evening is as much a part of your productivity as the work itself. Evening work costs you the next morning. Before you stop, close out the day with five steps:
- Review your protocol sheet: what did you get done today?
- Clear your desk, then sort the thought sheet. Move each item into your task system, handle it right away, or cross it out.
- Write down, in one sentence, what you’ll start with tomorrow.
- Stop: no quick email check, no last small to-do.
- Acknowledge what you got done, whether it was three blocks or six.
At the end of my workday, I finish the task and look back at what I got done. Then I tidy my desk and go for a walk outside to switch off.
When you arrive at a clean workspace tomorrow, the barrier to the first block is much lower. Over time, the review shows what you can realistically do in a day. Build these five steps into your own end-of-day routine.
Tomorrow, your first block starts with that one sentence and a clean desk. Three focused 45-minute blocks are worth more than eight hours of half-focused work. See how it works →
FAQ
How do you stay focused at work after lunch?
To stay focused at work after lunch, keep lunch small to medium: enough not to be hungry, and no more. A full meal between blocks kills the next block. If you’re still not fully fit afterwards, choose a shorter block.
How do you stay focused at work on a task you don’t enjoy?
To stay focused at work on a task you don’t enjoy, set a timer for the block. It tells your brain the work has an end, which makes starting easier. When in doubt, start shorter; you can always keep going past the timer.
Do headphones help you stay focused at work?
To stay focused at work, use headphones as a shield against noise, not as entertainment: no music. Music takes up mental capacity you need for the task. Earplugs are a cheap alternative, and for maximum protection you can combine both.
