Concentration Made Easy

Have you ever checked email without meaning to? Or found yourself on Twitter without intending to be there?

That happens to me once in a while occasionally far too often, too. What I came to realize was that, as frustrating as it was, it was just a series of habits and reflexes at work. I meant to open Backpack, and instead my hand instinctively went to Gmail. Of course, I often realized that I didn’t mean to be there way after the fact. So the quest then was to find a way to override those habits and reflexes.

Serendipitously, Brian Cooke contacted me a couple months ago for some coaching. When he explained what he was working on, I was pretty excited, because he described exactly the program I was needing. It didn’t do a lot, but it did exactly what I needed it to: it kept my reflexes from overriding my intentions.

He launched this application (Concentrate) today, but I’ve been using it for a few weeks – hey, coaching has some perks. Here’s basically how it works:

1. You create a new Activity.

I created two activities for myself right off the bat: “Create Something Awesome!” and “Email Correspondence.” But, for ease of explanation, I’ll just talk about the “Create Something Awesome” activity.



2. You drag actions to perform while concentrating

My problem was that my fingers were reflexing opening email or that I ended up on Twitter, so I chose the “Block Websites” action. I added the domains for Gmail and Twitter and pressed “Save.”



3. Select the activity you want to concentrate on

Clicking the concentrate button in the activity panel lets Concentrate do its thing, which for me, is blocking Twitter and Gmail. If I mistakenly try to open Gmail or Twitter, I get an error saying that my browser can’t connect to the server. What I’ve found is that that’s just enough to keep me from ending up in The Loop, and, furthermore, after repeated uses of Concentrate, I don’t even try to open those sites when I’m concentrating.

4. When you’re done, click “Done”

Unsurprisingly, pressing “Done” stops whatever action Concentrate is doing.

So what’s the big deal? Most of my work is done via the internet, and we’ve thankfully reached the point in which it’s super easy to open applications and websites, yet that ease of use also makes it easy for habits and reflexes to kick in. At the same time, there are times in which I want the ease of use.

I now don’t have to think about not opening my distractors or have to correct those reflexes – when I make a mistake, I get the error screen, the rational part of me kicks in, and I go about doing whatever I meant to be doing. I also don’t have to change my dock and bookmark bar so that I don’t have those applications and websites handy, which was a hack I periodically had to institute to retrain my reflexes and habits.

You could do more with Concentrate – for instance, you could define an activity such that some applications opened and others closed, but those weren’t what I needed so I didn’t do much playing around there. Concentrate keeps me working on the things the smarter part of me wants to work on when I want to work on them while giving me access to the full use of my computer when I want it. Simply put, this is a must-have application for web workers.

Head on over and check it out – you can download and use it for free for 60 hours. (It’s a Mac app.)

The links to Concentrate in this post are affiliate links and this review falls under my review guidelines. Please purchase Concentrate by using my link if this review helps you make an informed purchase. Thanks!