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Enhancing Focus: A Practical Strategy for Sustained Attention for Everyone Including Those of Us with ADHD

Tracy Lefebvre • Dec 05, 2023

The ability to focus and hold sustained attention can critically impact our performance in real-world situations and enhance our success in the workplace. Attention and focus are common challenges individuals have with ADHD; I mean, the first two letters of the diagnosis are attention deficit, after all. Yet, what I have discovered is there is a lot of misunderstanding and unrealistic social expectations when it comes to our ability to sustain attention. When clients, individuals, or employers want to discuss strategies around attention and focus, I always ask two questions:

What do you mean by sustained attention and focus?

How long do you feel you should be able to have sustained attention?

There are two important things to remember: 

  • First, sustained attention is “The ability to maintain a stable state of attention while performing a mundane activity.” (1)
  • Second, a growing number of studies indicate that sustained attention is fundamentally a rhythmic process between focused and unfocused times. Our average ability to maintain focus ranges between 20 – 50 minutes. How long an individual can sustain focus depends on many factors, and those with ADHD naturally skew to shorter times. (2)


Think of this rhythm as charging your cellphone battery. You might wake up with a fully charged battery with a green indicator. How quickly your phone goes to yellow, lower power mode. The one where apps are not as efficient, depending on how many apps are being used, left open, and the complexity of each one. If you don’t plug your phone in occasionally during the day then the time evening hits that little indicator reads red and will eventually stop working. Our brains are the same way! We must let our brains toggle between focus and unfocused time to function optimally. 

Setting yourself up for sustained attention success

  1. Start each task with as full of a battery as possible. Poor hydration, diet, and sleep hygiene automatically deplete your attention. Your internal energy is used to stay alive versus the project at hand. The boring basics of life are essential for success.
  2. Eliminate extra apps (a.k.a. distractions) during focus time. Turn off notifications, shut doors, put on headphones, and make yourself comfortable.
  3. Honor your focus and unfocused rhythm each day with compassion and without self-judgment. It will fluctuate, and you can grow your ability to focus over time. Remember, studies have shown that working in periods of focus and unfocused times produces a greater performance than trying to work on a task for a long time. This method is also called the Pomodoro technique. It may be built into a productivity tool you already use, such as Click Up. 
  4. Setting up your day:
  5. Identify a task or tasks that you need to complete.
  6. Set a timer for your focus interval - 25 minutes is a comfortable time for many individuals with ADHD and is recommended by the Pomodoro technique for everyone.
  7. Work on a task(s) with no distractions.
  8. When the alarm sounds, start 5 minutes of unfocused time – take a short walk, stand up and stretch, listen to some music, restart a load of laundry, or refill your water. Try adding some physical movement to this time, and remember it’s unfocused, so no email or Slack checking. You can add that to our next block of focus time if you choose.
  9. Repeat the process 3 more times.
  10. Take a longer 30-minute break and start again.



Over time, you may experiment with longer focus time blocks, but remember your focus block should be no longer than 90 minutes with a 20-minute break. Longer focus time blocks reduce your performance level. Schedule those break times!


Remember, building new habits takes time, on average 66 days, but can range up to 254 days. (3)  So, be gentle with yourself. Look at developing sustained attention as an experiment, play with various strategies that work for you, and celebrate progress, not perfection. At the end of each day, celebrate what worked, acknowledging what didn’t work and why so that you can adjust tomorrow.


Resources

  1. The ability to maintain a stable state of attention while performing a mundane activity is often referred to as sustained attention (SA) or vigilance (Mackworth, 1948; Langner and Eickhoff, 2013; Esterman et al., 2014).
  2. Zhang H, Yang SY, Qiao Y, Ge Q, Tang YY, Northoff G, Zang YF. Default mode network mediates low-frequency fluctuations in brain activity and behavior during sustained attention. Hum Brain Mapp. 2022 Dec 15;43(18):5478-5489. doi: 10.1002/hbm.26024. Epub 2022 Jul 29. PMID: 35903957; PMCID: PMC9704793.

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