The Ultimate Guide to Focus for Creatives
In the digital age, focus is a superpower that anyone can master to do great work.
This is the ultimate guide to focus and productivity for creatives.
Below, you'll find tactics, frameworks, and a note on how to see like an artist.
In 1890, psychologist William James captured it well: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
Here's our starting point: What you pay attention to determines what you see, and the things you see determine the life you live.
Distractions data📊
The average person is distracted every 40 seconds when working on their computer, according to a 2016 study.
That most people can’t go for a minute without losing attention is unsettling, but it gets worse when you account for a UC Irvine study that found refocusing after a single interruption can take more than 20 minutes.
Since the pandemic removed the separation between work and life, our realities have become a blur of overlapping experiences, with gadgets embedded so deeply in our lives it feels as if we’ve never been without them.
People now are expected to produce great work in the same place they watch their kids, load laundry, and relax with a Netflix film. While the setup affords some new flexibility, it’s become nonetheless increasingly difficult to maintain focus.
Hardwired to lose focus🧠
This proclivity for distraction is built into our biology.
Consider the so-called novelty bias. A pleasure chemical, dopamine, floods our sensory system when we turn our attention to something new. We’re programmed to respond, sometimes in a knee-jerk way, to whatever is pleasurable or novel (or threatening).
An email notification or an Instagram ping is far more enticing than writing an article, for example, but peeking at those notifications stalls creativity and decimates progress.
What once was a survival mechanism — it kept our ancestors on their toes when danger loomed or new threats emerged — it’s now a built-in handicap that keeps us from meaningful work.
How to specify your aim🎯
Before we break down how to minimize distractions, it’s worth noting the importance of specifying your aim. As stated above, what you choose to aim for determines not only what target you can hit, but the things you see.
Improving your focus is important, but it’s a moot endeavor if you don’t have something specific you’re targeting.
Aiming at a specific goal or level of skill development is what gives you a lens to see all other tasks.
The late Kobe Bryant, for example, said he viewed every task, book, film, and relationship exclusively through the lens of one aim: “How can this make me a better basketball player?”
In my own life, everything I do is geared toward my pursuit of becoming the best writer I can be. The idea is top of mind when I read or walk or share a meal. Just about everything I do is considered under that lens.
What becomes specified becomes concrete. And, again, your aim determines what you see, and that determines the life you live.
Ask yourself what you're aiming for, whether it’s something overarching — like my long-term vision for writing or Bryant’s for basketball — or something smaller or short-term, like achieving a weekly running milestone or workplace sales quota.
Then, once your target is set, you can put your energy toward seeing clearly and ramping up focus.
Strategies to minimize distractions⚡
These tactics fall under the umbrella term of “attention management.” Focus takes energy, and you have a finite amount per day. It’s a rare resource.
Frame it as something you need to spend on a budget each day.
1. 'Airplane’ hours: Schedule specific hours in the day to put your phone on airplane mode. The fewer notifications you get (zero is best) the better you can work, and you can accomplish more in a shorter amount of time.
2. Set email boundaries: Not all employers would allow this Harvard Business Review idea, but adding this automatic email signature would streamline work radically:
“I only check email twice a day at 10:30 am and 3:30 pm.”
That sets expectations for yourself and those who contact you. Then, you (hopefully) won’t feel the pressure of your inbox, and you’ll be able to turn off notifications and swap them for a twice-daily alarm instead.
3. Work alone: The best work you can produce demands stretches of peace and quiet. It’s hard to do anything while someone else is talking or otherwise asking for your attention.
This can happen through wearing headphones, putting up a “Do Not Disturb” sign on your door or as a Slack status, or finding a quiet corner of the office away from colleagues. Block out time each day for designated alone time.
4. Single-tasking: It’s no secret that multitasking is a myth that’s been exacerbated by technology. It’s tempting to open a dozen tabs on your laptop and try to do everything at once.
Single-tasking, though, is the best way to power through work or a to-do list. Yes, it is a platitude, but focusing on one thing at a time is a magic bullet for high-level productivity.
One way to get better at single-tasking is to keep a notepad out (with real paper, not an iPad). If you think of something that pertains to a separate task, jot it down on paper rather than pulling up that project or tab. Then, move on to it only when you’ve completed the task at hand.
In the book, Henry Miller On Writing, two of the author’s 11 writing commandments echoed this notion:
“Work on one thing at a time until finished,” Miller wrote, adding: “Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.”
Creativity takes seeing clearly🎨
Georgia O’Keeffe, a 20th century titan of creative spirit, used art to hone her ability to see the world clearly and create lasting, memorable work.
Her critics often insisted that her detailed, magnified paintings of flowers were sexual commentaries, O’Keeffe denied these interpretations and instead explained that they were her way of focusing her attention.
Creating close-ups of already-small items in nature, to her, was a way to teach herself and others to specify aim. As cited in Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, she writes:
“If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small.
So I said to myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New-Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.
Well — I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower — and I don’t.”
In an age when we’re more likely to view the world filtered through a screen or app, seeing is more difficult than ever.
To see something raw, then create something thoughtful, is to reclaim its joy and importance despite existing in a culture obsessed with everything and focused on nothing.
Almost a century before O’Keeffe, writer John Ruskin noted that the priority artists place on observation is what helps them see a richer, more interesting world — which then informs the creative process. In the first volume of The Works of John Ruskin, he writes:
“From the most insignificant circumstance, — from a bird on a railing, a wooden bridge over a stream, a broken branch, a child in a pinafore, or a waggoner in a frock, does the artist derive amusement, improvement, and speculation.
In everything it is the same; where a common eye sees only a white cloud, the artist observes the exquisite gradations of light and shade, the loveliness of the mingled colours — red, purple, grey, golden, and white…”
Conclusion⏰
You won’t have a clear strategy for producing work and tapping your creativity until you specify what you’re aiming for.
Only after you establish a target can you move forward productively.
(Because what you aim for determines what you can and do see).
Distractions pull at our attention more than ever, and while they can’t be eliminated entirely, setting up an environment that allows for blocks of focused work is your best bet. Build systems into your day that are conducive to deep work.
Putting strategies in place to minimize diversions and maximize focus is what yields the most creative and meaningful work.
And to supercharge it all, adopt the ideas of artists who mastered the power of seeing clearly — a practice that becomes both more rare and vital with every new iPhone generation.
Complement this guide with articles on how to turn a passion into your day job, putting yourself on track to do work you actually care about, the three skills that can make you invaluable and marketable as the quiet-quitting trend goes viral, and the ultimate guide to habits.