This article has everything you need to know about how to improve concentration at work.
You sit down to finish one report. Forty minutes later you’ve answered six emails, skimmed a news story, checked a group chat twice and somehow agreed to a meeting on Thursday. The report is still open. It still has the same three paragraphs.
That isn’t a character flaw. Most workplaces are built to pull your attention in ten directions at once, and your brain is doing exactly what brains do when they’re poked every few minutes. Concentration, though, responds well to small, deliberate changes in how you set up your day. You don’t need a cabin in the woods or a new personality.
Below are 12 ways to improve concentration at work, each one tied to real research, plus a section on what to do when your focus falls apart anyway (it will, sometimes).
1. Decide on one priority before you open your inbox
Unfinished tasks are noisy. They keep tapping you on the shoulder while you’re trying to do something else, which is why a vague to-do list can feel heavier than the work itself.
Psychologists E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister looked at this directly in a 2011 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across several experiments, people who were reminded of an unfinished goal had more intrusive thoughts during an unrelated reading task and did worse on an anagram task. Then came the interesting part. When participants were allowed to write a specific plan for that goal (when, where, how), the interference disappeared. The plan seemed to tell the brain it could stop nagging. One limit worth knowing: these were lab tasks with students, so the size of the effect in a real office is unknown.
Think of it like the tabs open in your browser. Every unfinished task is a tab quietly using memory in the background. Writing a plan doesn’t close the tab, but it puts it to sleep until you need it. The comparison breaks down in one way: a browser doesn’t care how honest you were, while Masicampo and Baumeister found the benefit depended on how seriously people meant their plans.
If you tend to circle a big task for hours, these strategies to beat procrastination pair well with this habit.
Start small: before you open email tomorrow, write down your one most important task and a single sentence saying when and where you’ll do it.
2. Put your phone in another room
Silent mode feels like enough. It probably isn’t.
In 2017, Adrian Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin ran experiments with nearly 800 smartphone users, published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. Participants did tests of working memory and fluid intelligence with their phone either on the desk, in a pocket or bag, or in another room. Those whose phones were in another room did significantly better than the desk group and slightly better than the pocket group. Turning the phone off or flipping it face down made no difference. The people most dependent on their phones lost the most.
There’s a caveat, and it’s an important one. A later replication led by Matthias Hartmann at the University of Bern, with 302 participants and published in Consciousness and Cognition (2020), found no overall effect of phone presence on short-term memory. So the “brain drain” effect may be smaller or less reliable than the original headlines suggested. Even so, Hartmann’s team still advised against keeping phones on work desks. Moving the phone costs you nothing, and if notifications are what really derail you, distance removes those too.
If your scrolling has spread well beyond work hours, have a look at these practical steps to stop doomscrolling.
The fix takes ten seconds. Put the phone in a drawer, a bag in another room, or a locker during your most demanding block of the day, and see whether the urge to check fades after the first few minutes.
3. Stop switching between tasks every few minutes
Gloria Mark, a Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has spent about two decades measuring how people actually use their attention at work. In her 2023 book Attention Span, and in interviews with UC Irvine, she describes how the average time people spent on one screen before switching fell from roughly two and a half minutes in her 2003 study to 75 seconds in 2012, and to about 47 seconds in more recent years. Her team also found that once a project is interrupted, it takes around 25 minutes on average to get back to it.
Those are averages across her studies, not a law of nature. They also describe screen behavior, which isn’t the same thing as concentration in general. Still, the pattern is hard to ignore: much of the switching is self-inflicted. Nobody forced the jump from the spreadsheet to the inbox.
Picture this (a hypothetical): you’re drafting a proposal and remember you need to confirm a lunch booking. You switch “just for a second.” The booking takes two minutes. Getting back into the argument you were building takes fifteen.
Once you can stay with one task for longer stretches, you’re closer to the kind of absorption described in this guide on how to enter the flow state.
Next time, do this: keep a notepad next to your keyboard, and when a stray task pops into your head, write it down instead of acting on it. Deal with the list at your next break.
4. Work in short, timed sprints
In the late 1980s, an Italian university student named Francesco Cirillo started timing his study sessions with a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. That’s where the name comes from: pomodoro is Italian for tomato. His method was simple. Work for 25 minutes, take a 5 to 10 minute break, and after four rounds take a longer break of 20 to 30 minutes. Decades later, it’s one of the most widely copied time-management methods in the world.
Why would a timer help you concentrate? One clue comes from Sophie Leroy, whose 2009 paper in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes introduced the idea of “attention residue.” When people moved from one task to the next, thoughts about the first task kept leaking into the second and hurt performance. Finishing under time pressure helped people let go of the earlier task more cleanly. A timer adds a mild, self-made version of that pressure, and it gives each sprint a clear ending. That’s a reasonable inference from Leroy’s work, though she didn’t test pomodoros directly.
You also don’t have to stick with 25 minutes. Some people find it too short for writing or coding and do better with 45 or 50. The rhythm matters more than the number. And if starting is your real problem, these practical ways to stop procrastinating might help you get the first sprint going.
Give it a go: set a timer for 25 minutes, work on one thing only, and when it rings, stand up, even if you feel like continuing.
5. Check email in batches, not all day
Email feels urgent because it arrives looking urgent. Most of it isn’t.
Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia tested this in a study published in Computers in Human Behavior (2015). They recruited 124 adults, a mix of students and working professionals in fields such as health care, finance and IT. For one week, participants limited themselves to checking email three times a day. For the other week, they checked as often as they liked. Daily surveys showed people felt less stressed during the limited week. The researchers also noticed something telling: many participants found it hard to stick to only three checks.
Lower stress isn’t the same as better concentration, and this was a two-week study. Still, fewer inbox visits means fewer of the switches Gloria Mark describes in point 3, so the two findings fit together.
Test it this week: pick three fixed times (say 9:30, 1:00 and 4:30), close your email client between them, and turn off desktop notifications. If your job truly needs faster replies, try every hour on the hour instead of every few minutes.
6. Protect focus time on your calendar like a meeting
At the start of 2023, Shopify took a blunt approach to meeting overload. In an internal memo reported by CNN on 3 January 2023, chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian announced that all recurring meetings with three or more people would be removed from employees’ calendars, with no re-adding allowed for two weeks. Meetings with more than 50 people were limited to a six-hour window on Thursdays, and no-meeting Wednesdays came back. According to CNN, about 10,000 calendar events were deleted, freeing up more than 76,500 hours. Shopify hasn’t published hard data on whether concentration improved, so treat this as an example of what’s possible, not proof that it worked.
The problem Shopify was reacting to is widespread. Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index, which surveyed 31,000 people in 31 countries, found that 68% said they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday. The same report named inefficient meetings as the top disruptor of productivity.
You probably can’t delete your company’s meetings. You can, though, block time before other people fill it. For more ideas on structuring your day, this guide on how to be more organized at work is packed with them.
Your move: book two 90-minute “focus” blocks in your calendar for next week, give them a real title, and decline anything that lands on top of them unless it’s genuinely urgent.
7. Take a short break before your focus runs out
During the Second World War, British radar operators spent hours staring at screens, waiting for a faint blip that might never come. Psychologist Norman Mackworth built a test to simulate those long watches, now known as the Mackworth Clock, and published his findings in 1948. Participants watched a pointer move around a dial and had to spot occasional double jumps. Over a two-hour session, their accuracy dropped noticeably after about the first 30 minutes. This pattern, called the vigilance decrement, has been studied ever since.
For decades, the standard explanation was that attention is a fuel tank that runs dry. Atsunori Ariga and Alejandro Lleras at the University of Illinois challenged that in a 2011 paper in Cognition. They had 84 people do a dull computer task for about 50 minutes. Most groups got worse over time. But one group, which was asked to briefly respond to some memorized digits twice during the task, showed no drop at all. Lleras’s interpretation: people perform worse because they stop paying attention to the task, and a brief switch helps reset it. One small lab study can’t settle the debate, but it supports the case for short, planned breaks.
If you feel drained by mid-morning most days, it might be worth reading about the signs of quiet cracking.
So when the timer from point 4 goes off, actually step away from the screen for five minutes, refill your water, look out of a window, then come back.
8. Move your body, even briefly
The 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee Scientific Report, prepared for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, reviewed the evidence on exercise and brain health. One of its conclusions is directly useful at work: single episodes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity bring short-term improvements in executive function, the set of mental skills behind planning, organizing and self-monitoring. The committee wrote that a single bout can “improve cognition on the day that it is performed.” In a 2019 commentary in Sports Medicine, Yu-Kai Chang, Kirk Erickson and colleagues pointed out that these acute effects are transient and that we still don’t know exactly how long they last.
That’s a fair warning against overselling it. A brisk walk won’t turn a foggy afternoon into your best work of the year. It may, though, give you a better hour than another coffee and more scrolling.
Say you have a tough meeting at 2 p.m. (a hypothetical). Instead of eating lunch at your desk, you take a 15-minute fast walk around the block first. You’re not training for anything. You’re just giving your brain the kind of short bout the committee described.
A quick experiment: for one week, take a 10 to 15 minute brisk walk before your hardest task of the day and note, honestly, whether the first half hour of that task feels any easier.
9. Get away from background conversation
Plenty of people can work through traffic noise or a humming air conditioner. A colleague’s phone call two desks away is different. Why?
The reason lies in how your brain handles speech. When you read, write or plan, you use a verbal part of working memory, sometimes described as an inner voice that rehearses words and ideas. Speech sounds seem to get automatic access to that same system. So when someone nearby is talking clearly, their words compete with the words you’re trying to hold in your head. You can’t decide to stop processing them, which is why it feels so draining. The effect is well established in lab experiments on memory for word lists, and it’s widely accepted as a cause of distraction, though how much it hurts real office work varies by task and person.
Acoustics researchers back this up. In a 2017 paper in Frontiers in Psychology, Valtteri Hongisto and colleagues summarized earlier experimental work showing that the harm caused by irrelevant speech depends on how intelligible the speech is, not on how loud it is. A quiet, clear conversation can be more disruptive than a louder, muffled hum, which is also why sound-masking systems in offices aim to make speech less intelligible rather than make the room silent.
If noise is one of several things wearing you down, these tips on how to stop overstimulation go further.
Here’s a simple way in: when you need deep focus, move away from the chattiest part of the office, or use headphones with steady, wordless sound (brown noise, rain, instrumental music) to cover nearby voices.
10. Get enough sleep, because you can’t tell when you’re short
This one sounds obvious. The research behind it is less obvious, and more worrying.
In 2003, Hans Van Dongen and colleagues published a study in the journal Sleep that followed 48 healthy adults aged 21 to 38 in a lab. Participants were limited to 4, 6 or 8 hours in bed per night for 14 days in a row, and a separate group went without sleep for three nights. The Van Dongen 2003 sleep restriction study found that people sleeping six hours or less a night for two weeks built up cognitive deficits comparable to up to two nights of total sleep deprivation. The part that matters most for your workday: their own sleepiness ratings barely changed after the first few days. They felt only slightly sleepy while their performance kept sliding.
In other words, “I’m used to six hours” might be exactly what someone with a growing deficit would say. The sample was small and the setting artificial, but the core finding has been influential in sleep research for over two decades.
If you lie awake for ages before dropping off, these ways to get to sleep faster are a good place to start.
Tonight, count backwards seven to eight hours from your alarm, set a reminder for that time, and treat it as your real deadline for getting into bed.
11. Train your attention with a few minutes of mindfulness
Can two weeks of practice really change how well you focus? Michael Mrazek and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara put that to the test with 48 undergraduates, in a paper published in Psychological Science in 2013. Students were randomly assigned to a mindfulness class or a nutrition class, each meeting for 45 minutes four times a week for two weeks. The mindfulness group also practiced for 10 minutes a day outside class. Compared with the nutrition group, they improved on a reading comprehension section from the GRE, an exam used for graduate school admissions, by the equivalent of about 16 percentile points. Their minds also wandered less during testing. You can read Mrazek’s 2013 mindfulness study in full. It’s a single study with a small sample, and the working memory result was only borderline significant, so I’d treat the exact numbers with some caution.
Why bother training it at all? Because your mind drifts far more than it feels like it does. In 2010, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert used an iPhone app to ping 2,250 volunteers at random moments, publishing the results in Science. People were thinking about something other than what they were doing 46.9% of the time. Almost half of waking life.
Mindfulness at work doesn’t need incense. It’s mostly the skill of noticing that your attention has drifted and bringing it back without a fuss. That same skill helps when stress makes it hard to think, which is where these quick resets to calm your nervous system come in handy. And because attention and memory are closely linked, these science-backed methods to improve your memory work nicely alongside it.
Give it a go: sit for five minutes before your first focus block, breathe normally, and count each out-breath up to ten. Every time you lose count, start again at one. Losing count is the exercise, not a failure.
12. Use caffeine with some strategy
Coffee is the default concentration tool for a reason. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) assessed caffeine in its 2011 health claim opinions and found that it increases alertness and attention at doses above about 75 mg. For scale, a 200 ml filter coffee contains roughly 90 mg, and a 60 ml espresso about 80 mg, according to the European Food Information Council.
EFSA’s 2015 safety opinion adds the limits. For healthy adults, up to 400 mg spread across a day is unlikely to cause harm, and single doses up to 200 mg raise no safety concerns. Doses of 100 mg or more close to bedtime can disturb sleep, which, as point 10 showed, is a bad trade for tomorrow’s focus. People who are pregnant, have heart conditions or are sensitive to caffeine should follow their doctor’s advice instead.
So one well-timed cup before a demanding task is a sensible tool. Five cups spread through the day, with the last one at 6 p.m., are working against you, and the most practical change is usually to keep your caffeine for the morning and the early afternoon, then switch to water or decaf.
What to do when your concentration slips anyway
Some days you’ll do everything right and still spend the afternoon rereading the same email. Meetings run over. A family worry follows you to work. That’s normal, and how you react matters more than the slip itself.
Researchers Michael Wohl, Timothy Pychyl and Shannon Bennett at Carleton University studied 134 first-year students between two sets of midterm exams, published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2010. Students who forgave themselves for procrastinating before the first exams felt less negative in the weeks between and procrastinated less before the second exams. They also performed better on the second set. Beating yourself up, it seems, makes the next slip more likely. This was a correlational study with students, so it doesn’t prove self-forgiveness causes the change, but it lines up with what many people notice in themselves.
There’s also encouraging data on habits. Phillippa Lally’s team at University College London published a habit-formation study in the European Journal of Social Psychology in 2009. On average it took 66 days for a new daily behavior to become automatic, and missing a single opportunity didn’t significantly harm the process. Being very inconsistent did. One bad day won’t undo your progress. A month of “I’ll start again on Monday” might.
A few things that help in the moment:
- Name it plainly. “I’ve lost focus” is more useful than “I’m hopeless.”
- Shrink the next step until it’s almost silly: open the file, write one sentence.
- Take an actual break (point 7), not a scrolling break.
- If the whole day has gone sideways, these steps to get over a bad day can help you reset for tomorrow.
Next time you notice yourself drifting, say “okay, back to it” without any commentary, and restart a fresh 25-minute timer. Over weeks, the small repeated restarts are what turn focus into one of the good habits to have rather than a lucky streak.
Conclusion
Concentration at work isn’t a fixed trait you either have or don’t. It depends heavily on your setup: where your phone is, how often you open your inbox, whether you slept, who’s talking near your desk, and whether your calendar leaves room for real work. Some of the evidence here is strong (sleep, the costs of switching), and some is promising but limited (mindfulness, the phone effect). None of it requires a big overhaul.
Pick two ideas from this list, not twelve. Try them for two weeks. Keep what works and drop what doesn’t. If you want more ideas for working calmer and smarter, browse the rest of our Work section.
