Deliberately practicing concentration dramatically improves ALL meditation.

Some of the old Buddhist training manuals treat concentration practice as a prerequisite to any other meditation. Nowadays, I think that's solid advice for most people, especially since every app, smartphone, and email ding is designed for distraction.

This method trains granular focus (something I’ll describe in more detail later in the article) and incorporates several accelerated learning and behavioral strategies.

Practicing Granular Focus

• Get a stop watch. Make sure it has a physical button so you don't have to check to see if you've started or stopped the timer.

• Set up a log book. I use Google sheets. Set columns for the date and/or the day, 3 separate columns for times, and one last column for a daily average.

• Select an object of meditation. There are a lot of traditional ones. I'd select something that is really clear. Objects in the mind tend to morph, and you want one where there’s a clear delineation between being “on target” vs muddling it into something else.
  
  I also like selecting a visual object, rather than focusing on the breath (though if that works for you, be clear to isolate what you mean - is it the breath near the nose? The movement of your chest?). I like images because there are other practices that use visualization - I find those very helpful, so I'd rather kill two birds with one stone here.
  
  I imagine a candle flame.

• Go somewhere quiet. While mindfulness can be trained by including distractions as a part of the meditation, this is a targeted practice that actually does, to start with at least, require some amount of solitude.

• Do the practice. Summon the object to mind and focus on it. Hit the timer. As soon as your focus changes or shifts or morphs in ANY WAY from that object, hit the timer again. Record your time. Repeat 2 more times. Average the times and record that.

• Tips and comments. You will probably average a few seconds per try…. Like 2 seconds. That is completely normal. We are training super fine attention here.

  Do NOT follow the normal advice when doing this type of training, which is to "focus, and then gently bring the attention back".
  It's 3 discrete, separate sessions, done back to back with a clear beginning and ending. Also, don't worry about forcing it. As long as you're consistent your mind will adapt.

I trained in this for several months and got some really awesome results. Every other meditation technique was just easier.

But why does this work so well?

MEASURING CONCENTRATION

For one, that which we observe, we change. I think it's a pretty clear tendency used a lot in gamification and the quantified self movement.

The problem with meditation and focus is that there usually isn't a clear metric of improvement.

Here you've got one, and you can even graph it.

ACCELERATING LEARNING

Secondly, deliberate practice accelerates learning. Studies on elite practitioners across many fields suggest that those who focused on what they already knew performed worse than those who practiced on the point at which they were making mistakes. It’s the difference between generally playing a song over and over again and painstakingly drilling problem sections.

Zoning in on the moment when focus shifts is the inflection point you’re training with concentration, something that's glossed over when you just "focus on the breath and gently bring attention back" - which is the equivalent of just generally playing a song again and again. Sure, you'll get better just from sheer practice, but the skill graph will be be steeper when you hit and track your problem areas.

TINY HABITS

Third, this type of practice is incredibly short. When I first started, the entire thing took a minute or two per day tops - and that’s including recording. Behavioral scientist B.J. Fogg has done a lot of research on the power of small behaviors, showing how they boost our ability to stick to routines across time.

Starting with a ludicrously small meditation habit like this increases the chances of making it a part of your life.

THE BENEFITS OF CONCENTRATION PRACTICE

Mindfulness practitioners sometimes report feelings of immense anxiety and depression arising in practice.

This makes total sense to me - some practices like choiceness awareness (observing whatever comes up in the mind in a non-judgmental manner) are like opening the floodgates of the subconscious. If you are prone to mental health issues, that’s not a good thing. Developing granular focus is one method to bypass such anxiety because it builds up the skills needed to focus on the other aspects of the technique.

As someone with extreme anxiety, this never became a problem for me, and I believe it was because I started out training granular focus, which prevented me from being swept away by the torrent of my own mind.

I also noticed that other practices just got easier. Whether you’re sending out loving-kindness, summoning gratitude, or visualizing your negativity turning to light, they all require control.

Concentration practice is like lifting weights; it makes all other mental endeavors easier.

I can’t help but find many parallels to such practice and the work of Cal Newport, especially in his book Deep Work. Newport is one of my favorite thinkers - he talks about how our tendency to multitask doesn’t actually accomplish much, and one of the great capacities to develop these days is this type of focus.

One of my students trained with this method and I could see her change before my eyes. She was generally quite scattered - any distraction in a conversation and the thread was lost. After a few months it was startling how much she would circle back to the open threads and actually focus in daily life. It was like watching someone get cured of ADHD before my eyes.

THE SECRET TO CONCENTRATION

A long time ago when I was a kid I came across this technique from, of all people, children's author Roald Dahl. In The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar the titular character uses a stop watch to time granular concentration. As I mentioned before, the practice is very different from the normal focused attention instructions in a few key ways.

We usually use the term “concentration” to describe generally getting absorbed in a book, or a TV show. But at a minute level, our minds are moving quickly from one thought to the next. So while we might be reading, we’ll also notice the cars outside, or the ticking of a clock, or even a small worry about a deadline. Our mind will shift from the book to the clock back to the book again incredibly fast.

Preventing the mind from manically shifting and focusing the mind to stick on whatever you choose is the granular attention that I’m referencing.

I finally ended up trying Dahl’s technique, I've taught it to others, and it's improved our focus dramatically. Try it out yourself, and let me know how it goes.