Expand Your Focus: Tips for Growing Your Attentional Space

Benefits of expanding your attentional space

Let’s have a look at the benefits of expanding your attentional space. There are quite a few:

Allows you to take on more complex tasks
Reduced mind wandering when you’re focused on complex tasks
When your mind does wander, it actually wanders more productively
You’ll be more likely you are to think about—and plan for—the future
Extra attention to think about what you’ll work on next, while keeping your original intention in mind
Easier to get back on track after your mind wanders or you become distracted

As you can see, there are a lot of benefits coming with it. Of course, it’s not something you will adapt from one day to the next but the sooner you start growing your attentional space, the sooner you will reach this state of mind.

Techniques for growing your attentional space

Let us give you some guidance for growing your attentional space and you’ll see how easy it actually is in the end.

If you have read our other articles about productivity in a remote set-up, you surely realised that most of the strategies were aiming at how to become a better custodian of your attentional space. In addition to managing it more deliberately, you can also increase the size of your attentional space

To recap, the size of your attentional space is determined by “working memory capacity.” This is a cognitive psychology term referring to how many pieces of data you can hold in your mind simultaneously. The greater your working memory capacity, the more information you can hold at the same time, and the greater your ability to process complex tasks.