Name: 17 Micro-Habits to Improve Your Focus
Uploaded: 2026-02-10T23:43:26.000Z
Duration: 10 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the channel.

Adverbs of degree

In this video, we're going to talk through 17 microhabits that you can incorporate into your life to try and fix your attention span before it's too late and the robots come for us all.

The first five minutes of any task are the ones where we are the most prone to getting distracted.

There's an absolute peak of this just before we start doing the task.

And then usually you find that about five minutes into the task, it's like it's actually a lot easier to stay focused than you were at the start.

What that leads to is something really popular in the productivity space, the five minute rule.

If you are struggling with staying focused on anything at all, just tell yourself you're going to do it for five minutes.

Or if you're in the middle of a focus session and you're finding yourself getting distracted, tell yourself, I'm just going to do it for another five minutes.

If you can sit through the discomfort of just doing it for five minutes, you'll usually find that it's a lot easier to stay focused and for your attention span to stay on task with that particular thing.

I'm not saying you have to cut out all forms of entertainment, but

in general, the more you're consuming things that are longer form like books or audiobooks or movies rather than TikToks and Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts, the more you are able to train your attention span to focus on stuff for a little bit longer.

One of the biggest time sinks in the world is when we are scrolling on our phone for no reason at nighttime.

This is just terrible for our attention span, it's terrible for our focus, and

it's also really terrible for our sleep and for our mood and for all of the things in life.

So ideally you'd be charging your phone, not in your bedroom and so you can say goodnight to your phone before you go to bed.

But if your phone absolutely has to be in your bedroom, it's worth setting up the charger across the bed so that you're not tempted to reach for it.

If you can't get to sleep, set your phone to automatically block offending apps after a certain time at night.

I'm a big believer of building a system rather than requiring your own willpower to do sensible things like training up your attention span or training your ability to focus.

If you are watching a TV show or a movie, do it without reaching for your phone.

This is another example of being Able to consume long form content which is still entertainment in various ways without having to do something else at the same time.

If you're watching a TV show or movie, try watching it without the subtitles on.

I know sometimes it's difficult to follow what's being said and sometimes it genuinely difficult to follow the plot to figure out, like wait, who is that character again?

But by forcing yourself to watch stuff without the subtitles, you're actually training your attention span, which means you can get entertained and also be running this training program at the same time.

Change up the environment in which you work.

Yes, it's all well and good having a nice productivity desk set up where you've got everything like arranged as you like it.

But there's also something about being able to take your laptop into a very crowded, very busy coffee shop and training yourself to be able to focus in that particular environment.

When I was at university, I found that in my first year of med school I was only really able to focus when I was in my own room, but

And so from my second year onwards I found that going to different libraries and different coffee shops A was way more enjoyable, which meant I just had a better time.

But B, what it did was that it forced me to train my attention span and my focus so that I actually could focus in those coffee shops.

And especially if you're using stuff like noise canceling headphones, this is really not as hard as it can sometimes appear.

And the benefit of this is that it means you can then train yourself to focus in almost any environment.

Oh, by the way, if you're interested, we actually have a completely free seven day focus crash course, which is a free email course.

You just enter your email and then basically every day for seven days you get some very detailed emails with some amazing strategies on how to improve your focus.

That'll be linked down below if you want to check it out.

To be honest, a lot of the tips in this video are about the damn phone.

Because the damn phone tends to be the thing that is stealing our attention span more so than anything else.

And so all modern phones these days have built in screen time limits like limit yourself to Instagram for 10 minutes, 15 minutes.

And if you can do that, I can guarantee that your attention span is going to be way better compared to someone who's like got eight hours of screen time on Instagram or on TikTok while you are trying to focus on something.

Ideally you would have it in a different room altogether.

Silver standard would be that it's in the same room, but

it's in some kind of do not disturb focus mode.

And it's like, away from your desk and like bronze standard, which admittedly is the one that I do, is that you have it on some kind of do not disturb focus mode, so you don't get any notifications and you also have it turned face down so you're not, like, tempted to look at the phone.

Get good at understanding your internal triggers for distraction.

There is a wonderful book by my friend Nir Eyal called Indistractable, which is basically about how to take control of your attention span.

And the research that he summarizes in that book, what it basically suggests is that in around 80% of cases, the key trigger for our distraction is not actually something like an external notification, but

it's actually some kind of internal emotional state that we are seeking to escape.

Something like boredom or something like anxiety or fear or insecurity or perfectionism.

And so we have those kind of feelings, those internal bodily sensations that come up as a result of us trying to, I don't know, do some work that might be tricky.

And instead of recognizing the feeling and sitting with the feeling and just sort of like experiencing the feeling, we feel so uncomfortable with what is just ultimately an internal bodily sensation that's not really going to harm us that we have to reach for the phone to try and distract us from that internal experience.

So if you recognize this and you actually want to train your attention span, one thing that's useful to do is when you feel that internal trigger, it's helpful to take a step back and to try and name what emotion you're feeling.

And secondly, in that moment, if you close your eyes and you try and just really fully feel the feeling.

So rather than trying to escape the feeling of discomfort, actually, what does it feel like?

If you just lean into that feeling of discomfort?

And usually you find if you do that, that the feel feeling has not actually killed you, it's actually not harmed you in any way at all.

And then the more practice you have of doing this thing where you recognize the emotion and allow yourself to fully feel it, the more it trains your brain and your body to not try and run away from what might seem to be Unpleasant emotions on the surface.

The more you can do that, the less likely you are to get distracted by stuff.

And therefore you have just trained your attention span to be able to focus for longer.

Now, another way to increase your attention span is to minimize friction when you are doing deep work.

Now, just like you, a lot of my work is done on the computer, and

one of my favorite ways of getting in the zone is to spend speak out my ideas instead of typing them.

So there's an app that I've been using pretty much every day lately, and

that is Whisper Flow, who are very kindly sponsoring this video.

You install it on your Mac and then you hit a keyboard shortcut and then you just speak whatever you want.

And it will do an amazing job of transcribing the stuff that you've said and putting it into wherever you've got your cursor.

And it also adapts the tone and the formatting based on where you're writing.

So whatever I say then becomes either a casual message or a properly formatted email or a structured document, depending on the context.

So, for example, over the weekend I was working on some changes to the Lifestyle Business Academy curriculum, which is this online business school that we're working on.

But at the end of the day I was like, ah, I need to type out all of these different changes I've made so I can communicate them to the team and to our students.

And so instead of having to like painstakingly type out everything and sort of format it and structure it appropriately, I just spoke out a spiel into Whisper Flow and it did an amazing job of formatting things exactly how I wanted.

So in my case, all of my work is actually downstream of writing so ideas and courses and newsletters and YouTube videos and books.

And so having my thoughts recorded and accurately transcribed when I'm using my computer is a massive, massive unlock for me.

So if you're still manually typing things out, you might like to give Whisper Flow a go.

Head over to WhisperFlow AI Ali and use the code ALI to get one month completely for free.

And that link will also be down in the video description.

So thank you again to Flow for sponsoring this video.

Track your progress with whatever task you're doing.

Almost every writer who writes for a living will find some kind of way of tracking their word count.

This is the principle that video game designers tap into as well.

Like whenever you're like, killing the monsters in World of Warcraft or Whatever.

You can see your experience bar going up and you can see yourself leveling up.

And this is often what would make what, what is otherwise an a grindy, unenjoyable activity into something that feels genuinely good.

Because we as humans are hardwired to seek progress when we can experience and feel ourselves making progress in whatever the thing is, even if it's something arbitrary, like killing a number of bears in World of Warcraft, or if you're a salesperson, like putting beads into a jar for every sales call you make, that feeling of progress is profoundly motivating to encourage us to continue doing the thing.