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🧠 How To Keep Your Mind From Wandering

(Plus: The Interactive Bit! Our Weekly Q&A With 10Almonds Subscribers)

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The 10almonds Team
February 08, 2023

Whether your mind keeps wandering more as you get older, or you’re a young student whose super-active brain is more suited to TikTok than your assigned reading, sustained singular focus can be a challenge for everyone—and yet (alas!) it remains a required skill for so much in life.

Today’s edition of 10Almonds presents a nifty trick to get yourself through those tasks! We’ll also be taking some time to reply to your questions and comments, in our weekly interactive Q&A.

First of all though, we’ve a promise to make good on, so…

TODAY’S TITBIT

How To Stay On The Ball (Or The Tomato?) The Easy Way

For most of us, we face three main problems when it comes to tackling our to-dos:

  1. Where to start?

  2. The task seems intimidating in its size

  3. We get distracted and/or run out of energy

If you’re really not sure where to start, we recommended a powerful tool in last Friday’s newsletter!

For the rest, we love the Pomodoro Technique:

  1. Set a timer for 25 minutes, and begin your task.

  2. Keep going until the timer is done! No other tasks, just focus.

  3. Take a 5-minute break.

  4. Repeat

This approach has three clear benefits:

  1. No matter the size of the task, you are only committing to 25 minutes—everything is much less overwhelming when there’s an end in sight!

  2. Being only 25 minutes means we are much more likely to stay on track; it’s easier to defer other activities if we know that there will be a 5-minute break for that soon.

  3. Even without other tasks to distract us, it can be difficult to sustain attention for long periods; making it only 25 minutes at a time allows us to approach it with a (relatively!) fresh mind.

Have you heard that a human brain can sustain attention for only about 40 minutes before focus starts to decline rapidly?

While that’s been a popular rationale for school classroom lesson durations (and perhaps coincidentally ties in with Zoom’s 40-minute limit for free meetings), the truth is that focus starts dropping immediately, to the point that one-minute attention tests are considered sufficient to measure the ability to focus.

So a 25-minute Pomodoro is a more than fair compromise!

Why’s it called the “Pomodoro” technique? 

And why is the 25-minute timed work period called a Pomodoro?

It’s because back in the 80s, university student Francesco Cirillo was struggling to focus and made a deal with himself to focus just for a short burst at a time—and he used a (now “retro” style) kitchen timer in the shape of a tomato, or “pomodoro”, in Italian.

If you don’t have a penchant for kitsch kitchenware, you can use this free, simple Online Pomodoro Timer!

(no registration/login/download necessary; it’s all right there on the web page)

Q&A WEDNESDAYS

Your Questions and Comments

We love to hear from you, and your questions and comments help us know where to put our focus! Here’s the bit where each Wednesday we’ll take a moment to reply publicly to some of the messages we got in the past week:

Q: What kind of lentils are best in the shchi recipe you gave? It says “other kinds of lentils will work too” but you never said which you recommended!

 

A: Red lentils! It did get mentioned later in the recipe, but you’re right that that was a misprint up top, it should have been mentioned in the ingredients list!

Q: L-theanine doesn’t seem like a popular supplement in local stores, do you have any reputable online vendors you can recommend? I’m afraid of getting scammed online!

 

A: There are a few good vendors out there! Whilst we won’t specifically recommend any, a few of our team use supplements from Jarrows (you can see their Theanine here), and some use products from the Life Extension Foundation (see their l-theanine product page here ). Life Extension may not be the cheapest source though, but they’ve been around for more than 40 years, and l-theanine indeed has many benefits.

Q: Could you do a piece on PS100, please! I’ve had a few friends recommend it.

 

A: Absolutely! We love suggestions. We’ll add phosphatidylersine to our content calendar 😊 

Q: If Spiders Georg eats 10,000 spiders a day, that’s 365,000 a year, to make it look like the average person eats 3 spiders a day, that’d mean a world population of only 1,095,000 people!

 

A: We’re glad you took the advice to heart about not blindly believing statistics! We suspect that this could be a case of extrapolating from a population sample of 1,095,000 that just happened to contain Spiders Georg (Spiders Georg is real, right? They wouldn’t lie to us? But it’s a fun example, anyway 😉 )

Q: Thanks so much for the demystification! BTW, I put cabbage on the shopping list based on yesterday’s email :) Rabbit yoga is just my style!

 

A: We’re glad you’re enjoying it! Let us know if there’s anything (related to health and/or productivity) you’d like us to dive into!

For anyone who missed those bits: the demystification / the cabbage / the rabbit yoga!

Have a question, comment, suggestion, or just an urge to get in touch? Reply to this email! It’s as easy as that.

ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Calm For Surgery - by Dr Chris Bonney

As a general rule of thumb, nobody likes having surgery. We may like the results of the surgery, we may like having the surgery done and behind us, but surgery itself is not most people’s idea of fun, and honestly, the recovery period afterwards can be a pain in every sense of the word.

Dr. Chris Bonney, an anesthesiologist, gives us the industry-secrets low-down, and is the voice of experience when it comes to the things to know about and/or prepare in advance—the little things that make a world of difference to your in-hospital experience and afterwards.

Think of it like “frequent flyer traveller tips” but for surgeries, whereupon knowing a given tip can mean the difference between deeply traumatic suffering and merely not being at your usual best. We think that’s worth it.

Keep calm,

The 10almonds Team

DISCLAIMER: None of this is medical advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not medical advice or a solicitation to buy any supplements or medications, or to make any medical decisions. Always be careful. Always consult a professional. Additionally, we may earn a commission on some products/services that we link to; but they’re all items that we believe in :)