Focus session for practising an instrument: 45 minutes, white noise, when you cannot concentrate on anything else

1 Before you start

• Put your phone in another room, or in a drawer you cannot reach without standing up.
• Remember that motivation usually arrives after starting, not before.
• Go to the toilet first. It sounds trivial until you are mid-sentence.
• Accept that the first five minutes will feel like wading. Wading counts.
• Dim the screen slightly. Bright screens make long sessions harder than they need to be.

2 While the timer runs

• When you notice you have drifted, do not restart the block. Just come back and carry on counting from where the timer is.
• If a thought will not leave, give it one line on the page and return to the task.
• Notice the moment your hand moves toward your phone. That moment is the whole skill.
• If the task suddenly feels impossible, make it smaller rather than stopping. One paragraph. One function. One row.

3 When it ends

• Look out of a window for thirty seconds. Your eyes have been at one distance for a while.
• Write down the question you could not answer, so it has somewhere to live.
• Stand up and move for at least two minutes. The break is part of the method, not a reward.

4What to put on

white noise — Flat across all frequencies and very effective at covering speech. Some people find it harsh after an hour; keep the volume low.