How to Stay Focused at Work for a Full 8-Hour Day

Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has timed how long office workers look at one screen before switching. In 2004 the average was about two and a half minutes. By 2012 it was 75 seconds. In her recent studies it is 47 seconds. If you are searching for how to stay focused at work, you are in good company, and the fix is mostly about structure: fewer switches, a phone you can't reach, short timed blocks, and a clear signal that a block has started.

Every switch leaves something behind

In 2009 management researcher Sophie Leroy published a paper in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes with the title "Why is it so hard to do my work?" She called the problem attention residue. When you leave a task unfinished and jump to another one, part of your mind stays on the first, and people in her experiments did worse on the second task as a result.

Mark's numbers show how often that happens. In her interviews with UC Irvine, she said people spend about 10.5 minutes on a project before switching, and it takes about 25 and a half minutes to get back to an interrupted project.

How to stay focused at work, one block at a time

Eight hours of deep focus is rare. Commenters on a 2021 Ask a Manager thread put a normal day at four to six productive hours, and one said a senior executive expected about six hours of actual work from an eight-hour day. So the goal is a handful of good blocks, placed well.

1. Pick two or three tasks for the day before you open your inbox.
2. Give each one its own block, with a start time and a stop time.
3. Do one thing per block. Close the tabs that belong to other tasks.
4. Write a one-line note on where you stopped, so the next block starts fast.

The written note closes the loop on the old task, so less of it follows you into the new one.

Put the phone in another room

In 2017 Adrian Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin tested nearly 800 smartphone users on memory and reasoning tasks. Phones were on the desk, in a pocket or bag, or in another room. The people whose phones were in another room did best, and turning the phone off or face down made no difference. A drawer across the room or a bag in the car beats a phone face down beside the keyboard.

Work in sprints with a hard stop

Block length is personal, and the research gives a range more than a rule. In 2014 the time-tracking company DeskTime looked at its top 10 percent of users and found they worked about 52 minutes, then stepped away for about 17. When DeskTime reran the numbers with 2021 data, the average for its best users had stretched to 112 minutes of work and a 26-minute break. Psychologist Anders Ericsson found that top violinists practised in sessions of 90 minutes or less with breaks between. That matches the roughly 90-minute rise and fall in alertness that sleep researcher Nathan Kleitman called the basic rest-activity cycle.

A 25-minute Pomodoro timer is a fine place to start. If you keep blowing past it, move to 50 minutes. If 50 feels like a slog by minute 35, drop back.

Give every block a start signal

The hardest minute of any block is the first one. A short reset ritual marks the line between one task and the next. Some people refill a glass of water. Plenty use a coffee run, which costs ten minutes and a queue.

Ours is one spray of Dragon Breath. You spray it at the desk, onto the tongue, and within about 10 seconds a bright, electric buzz spreads across the tongue and mouth. The mouth floods with water. The taste is earthy and a little peppery for a second before the tingle takes over, then a clean, fresh feeling stays for a while. You come out of it switched on, start the timer, and open the one task that block is for.

The spray comes from chilcuague (Heliopsis longipes), a root from Central Mexico, also called golden root. The tingle comes from affinin, also called spilanthol. We wrote up the plant's history and chemistry in our guide to chilcuague root and where it comes from.

The bottle lives in a drawer or a jacket pocket. No kettle, no queue, and it is sugar free. One customer, filmed trying it for the first time, said "Definitely energized." moments after a single spray. Start with one spray. Once you know the feeling, you can go up to five. A 50 ml bottle holds 250+ sprays.

Dragon Breath – Chilcuague Extract

50 ml mouth spray. Wild-harvested chilcuague root, dual-extracted. 250+ sprays.

Add to bag

It doubles as a quick fresh-mouth moment before a meeting, which is a nice bonus when the next block is a call.

Afternoon focus

Mark's research found two daily peaks in attention for most people, mid-to-late morning and again around 2 to 3 p.m. Put the hard task in one of those windows and save email and admin for the dip after lunch. If the post-lunch dip is your main problem, our piece on what to do about the afternoon slump covers it in more detail.

Three small things belong in that window. Drink water: in a 2012 University of Connecticut study of 25 women, published in The Journal of Nutrition, losing about 1.5 percent of normal body water was enough for them to report difficulty concentrating and to find tasks harder. Walk: in 2014 Stanford researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz found people's creative output rose by about 60 percent on average while walking, and it made no difference whether they walked outdoors or on a treadmill facing a blank wall. A five-minute lap of the building between blocks counts. Last, move closer to a window if you can, so daylight reaches your desk.

Working from home makes the phone rule harder

At home there is no commute to start the day and no colleague to notice you drifting. Two changes do most of the work. Sit at the same spot every morning, so the place itself says work. Then put the phone in another room and open each block with the same reset you would use at the office. Mark's advice to set "hooks", outside cues that pull you back out of a rabbit hole, fits home work well. A calendar alarm at the end of each block is the simplest one.

Dragon Breath considerations

The recommendation on the product page: "If you're pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or allergic to plants in the daisy family, ask your doctor before using it."

Questions people ask

How can I stay focused at work for 8 hours?

Aim for three or four timed blocks of 50 to 90 minutes on your hardest tasks, with breaks between, and fill the rest of the day with lighter work.

Why can't I concentrate at work?

Frequent switching is a common reason. Gloria Mark's research puts the average screen attention span at 47 seconds, and Sophie Leroy's 2009 work showed that part of your attention stays behind on the task you just left.

What is the best time of day to focus?

Mark found most people peak mid-to-late morning and again around 2 to 3 p.m. Schedule your hardest block in one of those windows.

How fast does Dragon Breath kick in?

The buzz arrives within about 10 seconds of one spray, across the tongue and mouth, and the mouth starts watering straight away.