Have you ever finished a workday feeling completely exhausted, yet struggled to point to what you actually accomplished?
I have worked long hours and long days, and I can guarantee it did not enhance my life. It became harder to focus on single tasks, I became worn out, and it did not really enhance my career either. When I eventually had some “free time,” I found myself walking around in circles without a clear path forward - ending up with more unfinished things than when I started. This is my journey of learning to focus, and discovering that the principles I needed were hiding in plain sight.
The multitasking myth
I learned the hard way that multitasking is a myth. You can only be in one meeting at a time, at one customer at a time, focusing on one task at a time. If you claim otherwise, I will argue you do not have focused attention on what you are doing.
What I used to call multitasking is actually “shift-tasking” - rapidly switching between tasks while giving none of them my full attention. Watching TV with the kids while reading emails? You are not present with either. That is not multitasking - that is doing two things badly at once.
One meeting. One task. One moment. One human.
That is not a limitation - it is liberation.
You might have experienced this yourself: you get interrupted, handle the interruption, and then sit there trying to remember where you left off. You backtrack through your memory, re-read what you wrote, and try to rebuild the mental context you had before. Research from Gloria Mark at UC Irvine suggests it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption. Twenty-three minutes - gone - every single time.
As a techie, I have a professional passion to stay updated - things move fast in this field, and falling behind is not an option. But that passion often pulls me toward the next interesting thing before I finish what I started. The result? Procrastination disguised as curiosity. As the book “One Second Ahead” explains, every new task or notification triggers a small rush of dopamine. Our brains are wired to chase that hit, which makes shift-tasking feel productive even when it is not.
Performance culture, they call it - But we have to make peace with the fact that real performance comes from focused attention, not from juggling everything at once.
The go-to person dilemma
I always felt big pride in being the go-to person. The urge to help, to be involved, to get things done - it is a dilemma I know well. But being constantly available comes at a cost that I did not fully understand until I became worn out and lost my ability to focus.
The expectation that you should always be reachable creates a cycle that is hard to break. Every notification, every quick question, every “do you have a minute” chips away at your ability to do deep, meaningful work.
Here is the second dilemma: if you are struggling to focus, how do you manage your focus time and choose what to focus on? Email focus? Learning focus? Task or follow-up focus? Sometimes protecting the time is only half the battle - deciding what deserves that time is the other half.
Training refocus
I recently came across an online training by Dr. Mike Gervais that changed my perspective: losing focus is not the problem - it is what you do after you lose it that matters. High performers are not the ones who never lose focus - they are the ones who get it back faster.
This shift from “never lose focus” to “recover focus quickly” made me realize that refocusing is a trainable skill. There are at least three proven ways to strengthen it.
Mindfulness is perhaps the most fundamental. Your mind naturally wanders - that is the design. Each time you notice that drift and guide your attention back to a single anchor - maybe it is your breath, a sound, or a point of contact - you are strengthening the neural pathways responsible for attentional control. You do not need to meditate for an hour. Even short practices of noticing and returning build the muscle.
Locking in is the real-world version. This is about bringing your attention fully to whatever you are doing in the moment, without drifting or half-presence. It could be washing the dishes, tying your shoes, or talking with a friend. Give yourself a target - ten seconds, thirty seconds - and commit fully to that task. The activity does not matter. The quality of attention does. What makes this powerful is that it is portable. When you are tired, lock in. When you are bored, lock in. You can practice it anywhere - in traffic, on a walk, during a meeting, at the dinner table.
High-stakes environments teach focus by necessity. When you step on stage in front of hundreds of people, or present a strategy to a board of directors, divided attention is not an option. You cannot half-listen, half-prepare, or drift off mid-sentence. The environment itself becomes the teacher - it demands your full presence. Those moments have taught me more about focus than any technique or timer ever did. The principle carries over: when you create or recognize situations where focus is genuinely required, you sharpen your ability to be present.
Over the years, I experimented with all three approaches without always realizing it. Some stuck more than others, and some combinations worked better than I expected. What follows is the journey that helped me find my way back to focused work.
From Pomodoro to flow
When I first learned about the Pomodoro Technique - working in focused 25-minute intervals followed by short breaks - I thought I had found the answer. The concept made perfect sense: beat procrastination and improve your focus one pomodoro at a time.
Pomodoro Technique is named after a tomato‑shaped kitchen timer
(“pomodoro” is Italian for tomato).
But honestly? It did not click for me. I understood the theory, I tried the timers, but something was missing. The technique felt like another thing to manage rather than a path to flow.
What did work was something unexpected. I discovered Carl Franklin’s “Music to Code By” - a collection of 25-minute instrumental tracks specifically designed to induce a state of flow. Franklin, a developer himself, later rebranded it to “Music to Flow By,” which better captures what it actually does.
Franklin chose 25 minutes deliberately to coincide with the Pomodoro Technique. He created what he calls a “groove chill” approach: real instruments combined in loops with melodic elements placed on top. The pieces change enough to not be boring, but not so much as to demand your attention. According to research, music between 50 and 80 BPM is perfect for helping you focus, letting your brain generate those wonderful alpha waves.
It took a few weeks to adjust. But then something magical happened. I found myself fully immersed for hours, forgetting most things around me. The music became my signal to focus, my pathway into deep work. I was practicing Pomodoro without the friction of timers and task lists - the music did the work for me.
One second ahead
A few years back, a colleague recommended the book “One Second Ahead” by Rasmus Hougaard. I am not really into mindfulness, but I decided to give it a go. The first time, I read the words without connecting the dots.
Recently, I picked it up again as an audiobook during a long drive. This time, something clicked. I highly recommend the book - it offers easily adaptable principles for optimizing your time and focused attention, even for someone not fully sold on mindfulness.
Here is the surprising part: many of the principles were things I had already started practicing. The Pomodoro concepts did stick after all - I just needed music and technology to help me apply them without realizing it.
What actually works for me
After all this experimentation, here is what has made a real difference:
A notebook for follow-up tasks - I keep a small notebook where I write down tasks as they come up. When focus time arrives, I do not have to juggle tasks in my head - I just open my notes and pick up where I left off. The notebook becomes my external memory, freeing my brain to do the work rather than track it.
OneNote for quick brain dumps - Random ideas pop up constantly - blog post topics, new functionality for a solution I am working on, things I want to explore. If I do not capture them, they hijack my focus. OneNote lets me dump these thoughts quickly, clearing my mind so I can stay present. The widget on my phone was a game-changer: driving, walking, and running are great places to think, rethink, and design - and now I can capture those moments with speech-to-text without breaking stride.
Focus time in my calendar - I have become a devoted user of Focus and Learning time blocks. Calendar entries are law - they set expectations for myself and my peers. If your calendar is free, you are inviting distractions - an empty slot signals availability. For bigger tasks like preparing a presentation or conference session, I add focus time with a clear label - like “Prepare presentation X”. If it involves collaborating with others, that time becomes even more important and non-negotiable.
Music as a focus trigger - Whether it is Music to Flow By or similar instrumental tracks, having an audio signal that tells your brain “it is time to focus” has been transformative.
Disabling notifications - During focus blocks, notifications are the enemy. Turn them off. The world will survive without your immediate attention. In Windows, press Win + N and click the Focus tile to start a 30-minute focus session - Windows will automatically silence notifications. For more control, press Win + I and navigate to System > Focus to configure your preferences.
Setting availability expectations - Microsoft Teams status and out-of-office messages serve different audiences. For internal colleagues, I update my Teams status when I need uninterrupted time - even if I am not on holiday. For external contacts and customers, I use targeted out-of-office replies to set expectations: I may not return your call immediately, but I will get back to you. The key is being upfront rather than leaving people wondering.
Protecting time from back-to-back meetings - I need blocked time not just for deep work, but also for mundane essentials: mileage reports, expense claims, mandatory training. If I do not protect this time, evenings and weekends disappear - and as I mentioned, that does not enhance my life. Beware: once you start working outside hours regularly, you are quietly moving the dial on what “normal” looks like.
Being selective with meetings - I politely decline or ask for more information when a meeting invite arrives without a clear agenda or precise location. If I cannot figure out whether I should attend or how to get there, the meeting is not ready for me yet.
Could I be better at it?
Could I be better at it? Absolutely. I might give “One Second Ahead” another listen on my next long drive. The principles are worth revisiting, and I expect to discover something new each time.
It all boils down to expectations. When you protect your focus time, you are not being unavailable - you are being intentional about delivering your best work. If you work as part of a team, aligning on this together matters just as much. When everyone understands and respects focus time, it becomes part of the culture rather than a personal battle.
Sometimes the best learning happens when you are not trying to learn at all.
One last rabbit hole…
Speaking of procrastination disguised as curiosity - while writing this post and mentioning Music to Flow By, I discovered that Spotify has a public API for searching music. Granted, it is much easier to just search for “Music to Flow By” in Spotify, but once you know there is an API, why not explore that rabbit hole? And I did - because of course I did. You can find the result in the solution/scripts folder of the hello-world repository I use when sharing my learnings on Getting started with GitHub, Git and Visual Studio Code.
–Jesper
Header image attribution: Image created with help from Adobe Firefly
