Ask HN: How do I develop focus?

Meditate. Expose yourself to the feeling of letting go.

Meditate: Literally train your mind to focus. It's going to the gym. Won't happen in a day, week, even month. Consistently do it and you'll eventually see progress.

Letting go: I have a long track record of starting while not going deep. Eventually, I just had to jump in the cold water and start letting things go. Literally put away physical gear for hobbies I wasn't actively engaging in but that took up a bunch of emotional and mental space and energy. Store it away and move on. Part of that process was telling myself this doesn't mean I failed or gave up or even that I would never do XYZ again. Just not now. I started learning the drums a bit ago then I also decided to try to get good at golf. Amongst other things, something had to go. Bye bye drums. Closed all the drums-related tabs. Put away the training material. It's golf time. Maybe in the cold months I'll pick back up, but for now, I'm relieving myself of the self-prescribed duty to practice drums. After doing that for a while, you feel a weight lift.

For some people, starting a bunch of things might be a way to protect against failure (or hard work) since they never actually commit to pushing something live. For others, like me, it's a lot of fun to learn something new (learn, not master).

I can definitely relate to the way you described yourself and have been in a very similar position in the past. What helped is to chunk whatever I am doing in smaller chunks, for example getting to know the very basics when learning a new technology before diving into the more complex stuff and build upon that. This had the nice side-effect of multiplying the number of gratification moments.

Also, I've noticed I learn best when I actively try to limit the number of times I switch context within a day, this might require you to plan whatever it is you want to deep-dive beforehand, but your mileage might vary.

Practice.

Treat focus like a skill you develop, or a muscle that you train to be stronger. If you wanted to improve your weightlifting you would schedule regular gym visits and create a plan to do a certain amount of lifting each day with slightly more weight each week. If you wanted to improve your running you’d set aside time to run and try to run incrementally farther over time. Focus is the same: You need to start small, schedule time for it, and work your way up. You can’t expect to run a 6-minute mile or benchpress 400 lbs without practice, so you shouldn’t expect to sit down and focus through completing multiple side projects quickly without building your way up to it.

Start with incremental goals. If you only consider goals that are too far out of reach for your current focus conditioning (finishing multiple entire projects) then you’re only going to get frustrated. Break projects down into incremental milestones and set intermediate goals to reach each milestone. Decompose into individual features and track them in a simple project management software if it helps.

You want to get to the point where you can sit down at your computer, know what task you can work on next, and have that task be small enough that you can finish it in one sitting or one evening. Practice breaking down your problems into smaller and smaller portions until you reach this goal.

Use a timer. Time how long you can stay focused on a task. Strive to achieve longer blocks... but don't take this too far. You can achieve a lot in few 1 hour blocks. That being said, if you check your email every 5 minutes... yeah, that's a problem :)

Deep work is one of my favorite books of all time. Also highly recommend 'Getting Things Done' by David Allen