Concentration: the New Luxury

Mélanie, 42, is an engineer who has planned her working day down to the last detail. Her morning goal: to finalise a technical concept that is crucial to a major client project.

At 8:15, she opens her document. By 8:23, the first Teams message arrives. At 8:41, a phone call, then two emails flagged 'urgent'. In between, she drifts onto a news website and checks train times for a day trip planned for the weekend.

When she glances at her watch in the afternoon, she realises she has barely worked on her original task for an uninterrupted hour. 'By the evening I'm exhausted,' she says. 'Not because I've got a lot done, but because I've spent the whole day jumping from one thing to the next.'

Mélanie is far from alone. Where the focus once fell on physical strain or excessively long hours, a growing number of employees are now grappling with a different problem altogether: the loss of concentration.

Digitalisation isn't helping

In the digital age, more information has never been available more quickly. People have never been easier to reach. And it has never been harder to work without interruption for any meaningful stretch of time.

The rise of working from home has had an unintended side effect: more meetings on the days people do come into the office. And it is harder to switch off when your living room doubles as your desk.

Yet every message, every email, and every additional meeting stakes a claim on our attention. These interruptions are particularly damaging because, once pulled away from a task, the brain needs time to find its way back.

Knowledge workers bear the brunt

Professionals whose work depends on analysis, creativity, or complex thinking are especially affected. More often than not, what they need is not another meeting, but time to work through a problem.

Paradoxically, the working world frequently confuses activity with productivity. An employee with a packed calendar looks engaged. But working with deep focus on a demanding task – and being difficult to reach as a result – can come across as a lack of commitment to colleagues.

Yet it is often precisely during these uninterrupted stretches that real value is created. Perhaps that is why concentration has become the new luxury of the working world – not because it is inherently scarce, but because it has to be constantly defended.

The concept of deep work

'Deep work', as defined by Cal Newport of Georgetown University in the United States, describes a state of intense focus in which you engage your full cognitive capacity to produce high-quality output.

Our current working environments, however, tend to promote a culture of constant availability: persistent notifications, instant replies via messaging apps, and relentless demands on our attention. The more we flit between tasks, the more the brain loses its ability to sustain concentration over time.

The benefits of deep work

Making deep work a regular practice allows you to work more efficiently, raise the quality of your output, learn faster, and draw greater personal satisfaction from what you do. The goal is to reach a state of flow – a state of total immersion in the present moment in which the hours simply disappear.

Getting into flow requires blocking out uninterrupted working time (two to four hours devoted to a single task), with your phone ideally out of reach and your email closed if at all possible.

Batching and condensing shallow tasks

According to Newport, deep work stands in contrast to 'shallow work': the low-demand tasks that fill so much of our day – managing emails, scrolling through social media, or sitting through meetings of questionable value. These tasks are a necessary part of how any organisation functions, but they generate relatively little added value. Structuring your day so they do not expand to fill all available time is key. One practical example: schedule two dedicated slots a day for working through your inbox.

So what will Melanie do differently?

From now on, she will set aside two mornings a week for work that requires deep concentration. She will block this time in her calendar and let her colleagues know she will not be taking non-urgent calls during those periods. She cannot stop new emails from arriving, but she will deal with them first thing in the morning or after her lunch break.

Mélanie's realisation is one that many organisations would do well to take on board: productivity does not always flourish where responsiveness is greatest. It flourishes where people have the time to concentrate, develop their thinking, and see it through.

Tools and methods to sharpen your focus

With these approaches, Mélanie can take her concentration even further:

The Pomodoro Technique

A well-established method in the world of productivity, the Pomodoro Technique breaks long tasks into 30-minute sessions: 25 minutes of focused work followed by a compulsory 5-minute break – one that should not be spent rushing to check personal emails. According to Newport, the brain needs to be trained to 'be bored', that is, to tolerate a few minutes without constant stimulation, in order to rebuild its capacity for sustained attention.

The Hemingway Method

The celebrated American author maintained that when writing, he always stopped mid-flow – whilst he still had energy and knew exactly where the story was heading. This reserve of momentum made starting again the following day effortless: no staring at a blank page, no anxiety, just a natural continuation.

His method has gained traction because it works particularly well for creative professions or roles that demand significant intellectual effort. Mélanie often stops work in a state of exhaustion, only when everything is finally wrapped up. Beyond the accumulated stress, this makes it considerably harder to pick things up again the next morning.

Apps designed for focus

The smartphone is often the ultimate distraction machine. Surprisingly, it can also become a tool for better concentration. Apps such as Freedom or Refocus allow you to configure your devices to block access to certain sites for the duration of your working time. You can select the websites and social media platforms you tend to visit compulsively and block them between, say, nine and five. Some of these apps also offer playlists featuring music specifically designed to aid concentration.