How to Focus

From just-sitting to just-chess, a natural relaxed focus technique.

In his 1245 essay “Existence-Time”, Dogen postulates that we ‘are’ time: “Each individual and each object in this whole universe should be glimpsed as an individual moment of time”. What is that supposed to mean, that we are time? I understand it as our awareness being the continual unfolding of now. The future is always a thought in the ‘now’, and the past is always a memory we bring up in the ‘now’. Dogen says we can't apprehend a duration like the 24 hours in a day: “We can never measure how long and distant or how short and pressing [twenty-four] hours is”. I must admit it's puzzling, but he has a thought-provoking point: if I try to think of a long day, I must think of the memory of being tired. Like fish in water, our experience of time is too intimate to separate it from our thoughts and feelings.

If we are the continuous unfolding of now, then we are the present content of our awareness. Your attention is your life. What you hold in your mind moment by moment is your life, no more and no less.

The problem is that we feel that better managing the contents of awareness will ‘improve’ us and make us better players. Our time and, therefore, our lives are being ‘stolen’: We can’t focus on training, and we can’t focus on our game. 

How to Focus according to Productivity Bros 

Pop productivity books have more or less the same content: they want you to try “harder” to concentrate. Greg McKeown’s book Hyperfocus describes an ‘attentional space’ that we need to ‘manage’ carefully, matching the ‘size’ of the task with that of the ‘attentional space’.  

From Hyperfocus. There are no circles and disks in my actual experiences of doing a task.

The underlying theme of this productivity advice is to liken awareness to a flashlight that you shine on the task. Need more focus? Make the beam of light stronger. Or narrower. Make it like a laser! People talk of ‘laser-focus’ after all. Very important advice in these books is to block any possible distraction (more on this later), and avoid the dreaded ‘task-switching’. In a nutshell, hold the content of awareness in one arbitrary attentional space, block the distractions, and avoid task switching.

This approach works, but the bad news is that

• The focus created is brittle.

• It is tiring 

The good news is that we can address these two points.

Putting the Just into just-sitting

Bodhidharma was quite the “based” meditator. In the ninth century, he traveled from India to China, met the emperor with whom he had a very terse conversation, and without explaining much further, went to a mountain monastery and spent nine years sitting in front of a wall.  

Dogen brought this practice of just-sitting from China to Japan, which relies on, you would have guessed,  JUST SITTING and doing nothing else. No counting the breath, no thinking, no observing and letting thoughts go. Now you may ask, if you don’t think, then what do you do? Dogen calls it ‘not-thinking’ or ‘beyond-thinking’, just being there and doing nothing single-mindedly. In the words of DT Suzuki: “You have to sit like a frog”. 

Practice:

Just sitting. Sit for 5 minutes, doing absolutely nothing but sitting. 

This is the opposite of the flashlight approach: there is no separation between you and the task. There is no ‘you’ doing the sitting.  No “thinker” focusing, no careful management of your attentional space, just full single-minded sitting. Let's be very clear: this isn't about “oh, I'm just sitting here”, it's about JUST sitting and nothing else, sitting there as if you were a frog. It’s the most straightforward and cheapest practice, no material required. You can experiment with other just-activities: ‘just doing the dishes’. Just running (no music, no podcasts). When you’re on the train, just be on the train, no tiktok.

The place for just-sitting

Tiredness

Tiredness comes from ‘holding the flashlight’, constantly thinking of yourself as separate from the task at hand, in a fight of ‘you versus the task’. This arbitrary separation of the content and the context of experience is energetically costly. Just being naturally doing the task is not tiring. Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche  advise us to “keep even tension, as of a string”, not too slack and not too tight:

“What is truly tiring is the state of deluded mind that creates completely pointless activity from one moment to the next. [...] spinning the wheel of anger, desire and dullness is tiring.[...] Relax from deep within, destroy the effort hat is making us tired.” 

Tulku Urgyen, Tiredness essay in Rainbow Painting.

Just drop the flashlight. Instead of thinking of yourself as the ‘doer’ of thing, just actually do the thing without concept or notion of focus. The just-sitting practice should help you with this. 

Blocking Distractions

Have we reached peak ‘distraction blocking’ yet? Blocking distractions is an arms race you cannot win. Yet it has sprouted a whole economy - from web browser extensions that will block websites for a subscription to the phone locking box to put your phone in. Some are worth a hundred dollars, some even have a subscription. Pro tip: put your phone in a drawer (for free). If you feel the urge to open a new tab, stop and ‘surf’ the urge for a few seconds. 

Who or what is wanting to open this new tab?

What feeling am I trying to avoid by opening this new tab?

Blocking distractions is like putting a plaster on a broken bone. For more details, please see my dedicated article on the subject.

Just-Chess

Can you spend time with just one book, course, game, or even one position/study, doing ‘just-chess’ in an uncomplicated way? You can preface your session of just chess with a session of just-sitting.

Practice:

Prepare ahead one course or book.

Do the just-sitting practice for 5 minutes.

Then do just-chess for 25 minutes. Read or solve, not doing anything else.

No need to think about focus itself. 

Repeat the entiner 5/25 split as many times as convenient.

We are time, and our life is our attention. Regular focus advice creates brittle attention and tiredness by having a ‘focuser’ do the focusing and introducing these extra thoughts about the focusing process itself. To counteract this, we can just do things, as the just-sitting meditation exemplifies. Try the just-chess practice to uncover a deep, natural, and relaxed focus.