How to Use AI to Work Around Poor Concentration
Five down-to-earth ways AI can help you function when you can't concentrate.
Many of us struggle with concentration. Perhaps you have ADHD, depression, or anxiety that robs your focus. Maybe high demands at work are overloading you, or you care for young children who need your attention every few minutes. Maybe a world of "shorts" is shortening your concentration span.
Whatever the reason your concentration is fragmented, here we'll explore ways to use AI as an assistive technology.
Note: This post isn't for people who are productivity or optimization enthusiasts. It's for people who need to function in their personal and work lives.
1. Load Context
Do you sometimes feel like you need several hours of unbroken focus to tackle a particular task?
In some cases, tasks need a long window because of physical constraints, like you have to set up equipment, and just that takes an hour.
Other times, the reason is mental. We need to "load context." We need to familiarize or refamiliarize ourselves with the background we need.
Often, AI can load or keep track of this context for us. For example, you can ask it where you left off a project you last worked on months ago. Or you can ask it for an audit of the current status, such as if you're cleaning up a hacked website, organizing your digital life, or your finances.
2. Get Over the Finish Line with Projects
It's human nature to "project hop" when you hit a hard point or get tired.
You might've been working on something you got partially done, but when you started to feel drained or frustrated, you decided to hop over to work on another idea.
This pattern can leave a trail of partially completed projects. Consider using AI to get at least some working version of your projects operational.
For example, you wanted a calendar of reminders for re-ordering vitamins, changing air conditioner filters, oil changes, and all sorts of basic recurring maintenance. Your aspirational self wanted something slick and complete, but realistically, you get a system that handles 10 of your maintenance items. Much better than nothing!
Personally, I've got several dozen little tools I've created with AI. Most are a little bit broken in some way, but still working enough to be useful the next time I need them.
3. Offline Tasks
While it seems obvious that AI can help you keep track of tasks where there's a digital paper trail, it can potentially help you manage fragmented focus for offline tasks too.
For example, let's say you're good at keeping on track with cleaning tasks that need to be done daily or weekly, but anything that's done less frequently than that, you don't manage well. Maybe you've got two years of dust accumulated in various hard-to-reach spots.
In that case, to cut down on decision fatigue, you might ask AI to assign you one five-minute rarely-gotten-around-to task.
4. Let It Help You Scale Down Overly Ambitious Plans
Imagine this: You'd like to spend the next hour concentrating on a task and doing the version you imagine. Instead, you ask AI what you could do in 10 minutes that's better than not doing it at all. What is it?
Here, I'm not talking about one step that only matters if you do the other steps later; I'm talking about vastly scaled-down versions that are still meaningful.
For example:
- You'd like to spend the next hour getting ready for the week ahead, but you're tired, and it's 9 PM on Sunday. What could you do?
- The seasons are changing, and you need to swap out your children's clothing and assess what they've grown out of. What's the 10-minute version of this, not the hour version?
- You want to check how your child's math learning is going. You tell the AI your child's age and ask it for one question a day. You could ask your child that question in the car to help assess their number sense.
Note: AI tends to default to giving you one step. Getting scaled-down versions takes some tinkering.
5. Workarounds for Poor Organization
People who struggle with concentration often think the solution is being better organized, but if organization isn't a strength for you, then there is no need to keep trying to push uphill.
If you are never going to be any more organized than you are now, what strategies would overcome the problems that poor organization causes you?
If organization is hard for you, options to consider include not organizing at all (use search-based strategies instead) or letting AI organize for you. For example, you could ask it to find all the academic papers in your downloads folder and rename them with the year and title. Or ask it to pull the feed for a podcast or blog you follow and write the notes you wish you had written after reading or listening, but don't.
You Don't Have to Be an AI Enthusiast or Power User to Benefit
AI is a divisive topic. A lot of people have valid concerns or fears, or no interest. This post isn't intended to push any people in those camps into using technology that's outside their ethics or comfort zone. However, if you're interested and comfortable managing risks like privacy, then consider how you could use AI as an assistive technology, like you'd use reading glasses.
As I said in the intro, there are various reasons you might be struggling with concentration. This post intends to provide some down-to-earth strategies to smooth your path a little and help you get done what you need, without giving AI all your personal data or needing to become a power user.
Everyone has their own way of managing themselves. Our systems don't need to be perfect for us to benefit from having some form of system. Pick a concept and make it your own.
If this article benefited you, I'd love to hear how. You can email [email protected].