The Three Levels of Clutter

Convinced your clutter is the result of your own sloppiness, laziness, or incompetence? Not true! Thinking that way inaccurately puts the blame and shame on you—and prevents you from finding the right solution. Most people desperately want to get organized, but are held back by hidden obstacles they don't understand. Clutter is actually caused on three different levels.

Level 1: Technical Problems

All messes can be attributed to at least one technical problem. Technical problems are simple mistakes in your organizing system that can be as easy to fix as changing a light bulb.Try these solutions.

Items Have No Home

Simply put, you can't put things away if there's no place to put them. If items are piles all over the place, it is likely that you never designated a particular spot for them. In other words, the item has no "home."
Solution: Take the time to assign each item a single, consistent home, e.g. hats always go in this basket; scissors always go in this drawer. Label everything so you'll always remember where it belongs and easily find it when you need it.

More Stuff Than Space

If your closets, drawers, cabinets and shelves are all packed full—and you still have lots of surface piles—you've got more stuff than storage space.
Solution: You've got two options: (1) Lighten your load, or (2) Add more storage space. Make sure you're using the space you do have as efficiently as possible. Find hidden pockets of storage between cabinet shelves spaced too far apart, under the hanging clothes in your closet, on the insides of closet doors. Maximize vertical wall space and look for dual function furniture (end tables, coffee tables and ottomans) items that feature storage.

Storage Is Inconvenient

Is it too much of an ordeal to put things away? If you have to go climb a ladder, move a piece of furniture out of the way, or cross the length of your house just to put something away—you'll never do it.
Solution: Store things where you use them to make them easily accessible. For example, if you do your bills in the kitchen, store your financial files and calculator there, not in the spare bedroom upstairs. Look for where your piles are and create storage there.

Organizing Is Boring

Lets' face it—organizing and putting things away everyday is a dull, repetitive chore.
Solution: Make it more appealing and fun by adding a sense of personal style. Get containers you love instead of withering baskets, broken-filing cabinets and leftover moving boxes. Don't underestimate the power of pizzazz—it can make a big difference in whether you feel inspired to use and maintain your organizing system.

Level 2: External Realities

These are environmental forces that limit how organized you can be. Recognizing them empowers you to address the true source of the problem, and stop feeling like there's something wrong with you. Identify the source(s) of your disorganization and use the solutions below to put them into perspective.

The "Other" Person

There's nothing more frustrating than having your organizing efforts undermined or disregarded by someone you live or work with.
Solution: Whether it's your spouse, child, roommate, co-worker, or employer, appeal to their own priorities by finding out what the clutter is costing them—your spouse may hate being late for work everyday, your child may be frustrated by losing game pieces, your boss may be embarrassed in front of visiting clients. Design systems together so you both have ownership—and they'll be more motivated to put things away.

An Unrealistic Workload

Running a home, taking care of kids, helping your aging parents, and holding down a job are huge responsibilities. If you're trying jam 20 hours worth of tasks into a 10-hour day, it's going to be nearly impossible to stay organized. Who has time to clean up?

Solution: Track yourself for a week, noting everything you get done, as well as what you don't. Then take a hard look to see what tasks on your list are superfluous. If everything must get done, get help. Consider delegating tasks to other family members, or hiring an outside service.

Speed of Life/Technology

Technology has sped up the pace of life, allowing us to work faster, learn more, do more, and be reachable 24 hours a day. It's easy to get caught up in the frenzy of pursuing every opportunity, but perpetual motion will burn you out.
Solution: Apply the brakes from time to time, and be willing to say "no" occasionally. Just because emails and calls arrive instantaneously, doesn't mean you need to answer them immediately. Don't be afraid to turn off the ringer on your phone, or the message alert on your email, and slow down to keep your life in order and calm.

During Transitions and Life Changes

Each time we go through a major life change (getting married or divorced, moving, having a family, switching careers, starting a new business, going back to school,) we experience a breakdown of our organizational systems. It's inevitable—we are dealing with a new set of realities—and it takes time to process the information and to actually see what there is to organize.
Solution: Wait for things to settle a bit, so you have a clearer idea of your new priorities and needs, before setting up any new organizing systems.

Limited Space

Living or working in a tiny home or office with little storage space will challenge even the most organized person. If you are already down to just the essentials—and have utilized every square inch of space—you may have simply run out of room. Trying to store more things than is physically possible will only increase your frustration.

Solution: If the needs of your (growing) family or (changing) job have increased, it may be time to look for a bigger space. Until that's possible, use an off-site storage facility to hold off-season items, memorabilia, and other items you don't need to access daily.

Level 3: Psychological Obstacles

Hidden internal forces may be pulling you towards disorganization—no matter how much you crave control! You may be subconsciously sabotaging your organizing systems and holding yourself back. If you see yourself in the categories below, try one of the solutions to get started.

Need for Abundance

Did you grow up with scarce resources and feel like you never had "enough" (money, clothes, food, attention, or love)? If so, possessing large quantities of stuff now, as an adult, is probably comforting. It gives you a sense of fullness, comfort, and security while the idea of a spare, clutter-free environment makes you feel anxious and empty.

 Solution: Instead of fighting your personality and forcing yourself to throw things out—try celebrating the abundance by organizing everything you own. Once everything is accessible and orderly, it may be easier for you to see what's truly excess and part with items bit by bit. No matter what you'll have the chance to enjoy your belongings, instead of feeling lost under them.

Sentimental Attachment

Do you get so emotionally attached to objects, it's hard to get rid of anything—even if you don't use it anymore? When items symbolize a part of ourselves, a time in our lives, or people we knew, it can be tough to let go. Saving some items is fine, but if you save everything—you won't be able to enjoy any of it.

Solution: Limit how much you keep for sentimental reasons and hold on to only the most important 20 percent in each category: kid's artwork, old clothes, etc. Make letting go of the rest easier by giving it away to a friend or charity. Remember, you can still own all of the memories of your past without holding onto every physical reminder of it.

Conquistador of Chaos

Some people keep their lives or spaces disorganized because they love the thrill of coming to their own rescue and seeing their way through almost impossible situations. Often, people like this grew up under challenging circumstances and more so than anyone know how to handle a crisis. Actually capable of setting up wonderful organizing systems, they are always dismantling them and starting over-in search of an even better solution.
Solution: Instead of constantly rebuilding your organizing systems, direct your talents to a new challenge. Learn a language. Become a better parent. Get involved in your community. Put those expert-problem solving talents to better use than living in constant chaos!

Thriving On Distraction

Clutter can serve as a wonderful and convenient distraction from life's more complex challenges. In other words, as long as you have a closet to clean or a stack of papers to sort, you can avoid thinking about more perplexing problems.

Solution: If you are using clutter to distract yourself from bigger problems, search for a more direct way of coping with major stress. Reach out to a friend or professional who can help you sort out the real issues you're avoiding, and then you'll begin to enjoy your orderly home again.

Need for Retreat

If your disorganization gets so extreme that you won't let anyone into your home or office, or if you frequently turn down social invitations to spend all your time "organizing" and "re-organizing" your stuff, consider whether you are using clutter as a protective shield—a way of insulating yourself from the outside world. It can be okay to want some private space, but living in that chaos may increase your anxiety level.
Solution: Don't organize your whole space all at once. Go slowly. Start by creating one clutter-free room in which you keep nothing but items you use and love. If the experience feels good, create another room like that, then another. Remember, an organized work or living space is a much nicer "retreat" than a cluttered one.

The hardest part of organizing is maintaining your hard work. So try not to make it seem like work. Establish a regular time of day when you spend ten minutes straightening up, and get the whole family involved—create a "declutter playlist" and pump it while you all put away your things.

Source: Oprah.com

Buy a house, sell a house

I bought a lovely cottage last November because my sister promised to rent out the rooms and take care of the house. I live here and the house is there so I couldn't really enjoy it. Still, as a ROI, it looked pretty good.
Now, after 8 frustrating months and only two guests, I've sold the house.
Doing business with family menbers isn't always successful!

Upsize Your Life Through Value Clarity

Your values are the things that you believe are important in the way you live and work.

Values exist, whether you recognize them or not. Life can be much easier when you acknowledge your values – and when you make plans and decisions that honor them.

If you value family, but you have to work 70-hour weeks in your job, will you feel internal stress and conflict? And if you don't value competition, and you work in a highly competitive sales environment, are you likely to be satisfied with your job?

In these types of situations, understanding your values can really help. When you know your own values, you can use them to make decisions about how to live your life, and you can answer questions like these:

• What job should I pursue?
• Should I accept this promotion?
• Should I start my own business?
• Should I compromise, or be firm with my position?
• Should I follow tradition, or travel down a new path?

So, take the time to understand the real priorities in your life, and you'll be able to determine the best direction for you and your

Women who jotted down their values (from religion to relationships to politics) then wrote about the one that was most important to them lost more weight, and had smaller waist circumferences and lower BMIs four months later than women who were also trying to downsize but didn't spend time focusing on their values. Thinking about what matters to us may help us feel more in control of our habits and better about ourselves overall, making it less likely that we'll reach for food when we need an emotional pick-me-up.

Defining Your Values

When you define your personal values, you discover what's truly important to you. A good way of starting to do this is to look back on your life – to identify when you felt really good, and really confident that you were making good choices.

Step 1: Identify the times when you were happiest

Find examples from both your career and personal life. This will ensure some balance in your answers.

• What were you doing?
• Were you with other people? Who?
• What other factors contributed to your happiness?
•  

Step 2: Identify the times when you were most proud

Use examples from your career and personal life.

• Why were you proud?
• Did other people share your pride? Who?
• What other factors contributed to your feelings of pride?

Step 3: Identify the times when you were most fulfilled and satisfied

Again, use both work and personal examples.

• What need or desire was fulfilled?
• How and why did the experience give your life meaning?
• What other factors contributed to your feelings of fulfillment?

Step 4: Determine your top values, based on your experiences of happiness, pride, and fulfillment

Why is each experience truly important and memorable? Use the following list of common personal values to help you get started – and aim for about 10 top values. (As you work through, you may find that some of these naturally combine. For instance, if you value philanthropy, community, and generosity, you might say that service to others is one of your top values.)

Accountability Accuracy Achievement Adventurousness Altruism Ambition Assertiveness Balance Being the best Belonging Boldness Calmness Carefulness Challenge Cheerfulness Clear-mindedness Commitment Community Compassion Competitiveness Consistency Contentment Continuous Improvement Contribution Control Cooperation Correctness Courtesy Creativity Curiosity Decisiveness Democraticness Dependability Determination Devoutness Diligence Discipline Discretion Diversity Dynamism Economy Effectiveness Efficiency Elegance Empathy Enjoyment Enthusiasm Equality

Excellence Excitement Expertise Exploration Expressiveness Fairness Faith Family-orientedness Fidelity Fitness Fluency Focus Freedom Fun Generosity Goodness Grace Growth Happiness Hard Work Health Helping Society Holiness Honesty Honor Humility Independence Ingenuity Inner Harmony Inquisitiveness Insightfulness Intelligence Intellectual Status Intuition Joy Justice Leadership Legacy Love Loyalty Making a difference Mastery Merit Obedience Openness Order Originality Patriotism

Perfection Piety Positivity Practicality Preparedness Professionalism Prudence Quality-orientation Reliability Resourcefulness Restraint Results-oriented Rigor Security Self-actualization Self-control Selflessness Self-reliance Sensitivity Serenity Service Shrewdness Simplicity Soundness Speed Spontaneity Stability Strategic Strength Structure Success Support Teamwork Temperance Thankfulness Thoroughness Thoughtfulness Timeliness Tolerance Traditionalism Trustworthiness Truth-seeking Understanding Uniqueness Unity Usefulness Vision Vitality

Step 5: Prioritize your top values

This step is probably the most difficult, because you'll have to look deep inside yourself. It's also the most important step, because, when making a decision, you'll have to choose between solutions that may satisfy different values. This is when you must know which value is more important to you.

• Write down your top values, not in any particular order.
• Look at the first two values and ask yourself, "If I could satisfy only one of these, which would I choose?" It might help to visualize a situation in which you would have to make that choice. For example, if you compare the values of service and stability, imagine that you must decide whether to sell your house and move to another country to do valuable foreign aid work, or keep your house and volunteer to do charity work closer to home.
• Keep working through the list, by comparing each value with each other value, until your list is in the correct order.

Step 6: Reaffirm your values

Check your top-priority values, and make sure they fit with your life and your vision for yourself.

• Do these values make you feel good about yourself?
• Are you proud of your top three values?
• Would you be comfortable and proud to tell your values to people you respect and admire?
• Do these values represent things you would support, even if your choice isn't popular, and it puts you in the minority?

When you consider your values in decision making, you can be sure to keep your sense of integrity and what you know is right, and approach decisions with confidence and clarity. You'll also know that what you're doing is best for your current and future happiness and satisfaction.

Some of life's decisions are really about determining what you value most. When many options seem reasonable, it's helpful and comforting to rely on your values – and use them as a strong guiding force to point you in the right direction.

Action Exercises

 
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action:

First, clarify your core beliefs and your unifying principles. Write them down and compare your life today with the values that are really important to you. How are you doing?

Second, organize your values in order of their importance to you. Which of your values is most important? Which is second? And so on. Do your current choices reflect this order of values?

Test your values by looking at the decisions they produce. This test will work in either real or imagined decision-making situations. Say you value independence, and you're considering moving in with your significant other. What sorts of options are available to you, given your value? If you value rest and spontaneity, but you work a job that requires 70-hour weeks, how will you avoid stress and internal conflict? In these types of situations, understanding your values can really help make creative decisions that reflect your own self-care.

Be aware that you will be able to see your value in action most powerfully while making a real decision. Sometimes we are so enamored with a particular value that we imagine it will always lead us to the best decisions when this is not necessarily the case.

Minimize & Organize

I’ve been working on my downsize project for years now. Let’s say it’s an on-going construction site. Since I have many ideas, I have learned to be more (not perfectly) realistic about what I can really put into practice.

Yesterday, at the END of the school year (International School), I started organizing my teaching materials into one binder. This year, I had a pile of paper in the lesson room that I was constantly shuffling through in search of … whatever. Next year, everything is going to be in ONE place so that I just reach for the binder and pull out whatever I need. I’ll email the music to the parents to print out. I’ll have one copy myself so that if (mostly when :-( ) a student has forgotten his notes, I’ll have the piece right there. Always hoping that the student remembers what he was supposed to have practiced!

The war against piles (of things) is ongoing. They sneak up on me during intense work phases. And, all of a sudden (ahem), they’ve taken over my apartment. Learning to dispose of shiny, inviting magazines has been really difficult. They look so new! I have started donating them to doctors and physical therapists for their waiting rooms. At least I’ll have something I like to read while waiting.

Here are some tips I’ve found useful for getting my act together:

MINIMIZE

How much stuff do you own? How many pieces of clothing or shoes? How many books? How many movies, or video games? How much makeup, or how many tools? What all do you possess? (I checked my eyeliner pencils the other day – I have (had) 10!!)

How many of those things do you use regularly? Do you use all of what you own? Are there some things you NEVER use?

What about that dress or suit in the back of your closet that you haven’t worn in two years? Or those jeans you’ve been hanging onto because “you might fit into them if you just lose a little weight?” (I had a brand new pair of jeans which, instead of sending them back, I kept them until I hoped to have the correct weight. Two years later, the jeans were still unworn. I gave them to my slender daughter.)

What about that book you keep because you “love it so much,” even though you have so many new things to read? The ski equipment you bought a few years ago, but never seem to find the time to get out to the slopes? What about the ice skates? If you don’t use it, why do you own it?

Sentimentality and nostalgia are powerful forces. Things become precious to us for all sorts of reasons, some of them genuine, some of them imagined.

Think about some of the things you own. Would your life be less enjoyable if you didn’t own those things? When you find yourself tempted to buy something, that filter will help you; it makes you ask “Do I need this?” and “Will I be using this in six months?” and “Am I buying this to please myself or am I buying it to please someone else?”

ORGANIZE

Have a Welcome Zone at the door of your house or flat. It doesn’t have to be elegant but it does need to be functional. Establish an area or hook for your keys and purse, a bowl or container for change and your wallet, a surface (like a small side table) to sort the mail and other items (newspapers, books, magazines, purchases) as you bring them in. You might add a small wastebasket to hold your discarded incoming materials to be recycled, and a mirror for last minute checkups.

Your goal here is to create a space that you'll want to really use each time you come in to your home to sort through the stuff you're carrying in your bags, pockets and hands upon arrival, so you stay ahead of the mail, bills and items coming in to your home and also, have smoother sailing on your way out. This also avoids the morning panic looking for keys, purse, wallet, etc.

Once the mail, reading material and items from delivered packages are sorted, put away anything else you've brought home: groceries, purchases, empty lunch containers, dry cleaning, etc. Put them away, right away! Don’t have undesignated piles messing up your Welcome Area.

Research proves that clutter not only affects our physical space, but our mental/emotional space as well. It can lead to more stress, depression, and lack of focus.

Tidy Up 10 Minutes a Day: You can divide these up into two five-minute Tidy-Tornados or a full ten-minute Whirlwind. Swiftly speed through your home and put away all those little things that you left out, opened, or tossed somewhere throughout the day or evening. This way you can reset your home each evening and start fresh each morning. Eventually, you’ll start tidying up as you finish something.

Use vertical storage:

Instead of cluttering your floor space, use vertical storage. Shelving, and wall storage solutions will help you gain more floor space and keep everything in plain eyesight. Use highest shelving for seldom used seasonal items, so you don’t have to climb a ladder or step stool often. Remember not to store things you don’t use anymore! Assess your reason for keeping, and be able to have a physical place for everything you keep. If the only place your items fit is in a box in the garage, you probably don’t need it.

Where focus goes, energy flows.

We need Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Concentrated work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep, focused concentration will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep—spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way. Instead of choosing the most important tasks, THE ONE (most important) THING to work on, most people go the line of least resistance and pick shallow work to fill their time.

In the bestseller Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four “rules,” for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.

A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work gives no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored.

TIME BLOCKING

Time Blocking is dedicating ten to twenty minutes every evening to building your schedule for the next day. During this planning process you consult your task lists and calendars, as well as your weekly and quarterly planning notes. The goal is to make sure progress is being made on the right things at the right  pace for the relevant deadlines.

This type of planning is like a chess game, with blocks of work getting spread and sorted in such a way that projects big and small all seem to click into completion with (just enough) time to spare.

Three Concerns

Such a detailed level of planning generates a massive amount of productivity. A 40 hour time-blocked work week produces an estimated same amount of output as a 60+ hour work week pursued without structure.

Sometimes people ask how time blocking can work for reactive work, where you cannot tell in advance what obligations will enter your life on a given day. The answer is again simple: periods of open-ended reactivity can be blocked off like any other type of obligation. Even if you’re blocking most of your day for reactive work, for example, the fact that you are controlling your schedule will allow you to dedicate some small blocks (perhaps at the schedule periphery) to deeper pursuits.

(Another smart strategy in this context is to give open-ended reactive blocks secondary purposes: e.g., “process client requests; if I have downtime during this block, work on project X.”)

Sometimes people ask if controlling time will stifle creativity. If you control your schedule: (1) you can ensure that you consistently dedicate time to the deep efforts that matter for creative pursuits; and (2) the stress relief that comes from this sense of organization allows you to go deeper in your creative blocks and produce more value.

Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day

Fixed-Schedule Productivity

The system work as follows:

1.    Choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.

2.    Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule. The door is open to colleagues for established and known times, and other periods where you isolate yourself to focus completely and without distraction on a single IMPORTANT task.

This sounds simple but it is not easy. If you took your current projects, obligations, and work habits, you’d probably fall well short of satisfying your ideal work schedule. Here’s a simple truth: to stick to your ideal schedule will require some drastic actions. For example, you may have to:

• Dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are working on.
• Ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule.
• Risk mildly annoying or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom.
• Stop procrastinating.

In the abstract, these all seem like hard things to do. But when you have the focus of a specific goal — “I do not want to work past 5 on week days!” — you’d be surprised by how much easier it becomes deploy these strategies in your daily life.

Let’s look at an example…

To reach my relatively small work hour limit, you have to be careful with how you go about your day.  Here are some of the techniques you can regularly use to remain within the confines of a fixed schedule:

• Serialize your projects. Keep two project stacks. At any one moment you are only working on the top project from each stack. When you finish, move on to the next. This focus lets you churn out quality results without the wasted time of constantly dancing back and forth between multiple efforts.
• Be ultra-clear about when to expect results from yourself. And it’s not always soon. If someone (boss-grr) slips something onto your pile, make an honest evaluation of when it will percolate to the top, then communicate this date.  Make it happen when the time comes. You can get away with telling people to expect a result a long time in the future, if — and this is a big if — you actually deliver when promised.
• Refuse. If your stack is too crowded for a potential project to get done in time,  turn it down.
• Drop projects and quit. If a project gets out of control, and starts to sap too much time from your schedule: drop it. If something demonstrably more important comes along, and it conflicts with something else in your stack, drop the less important project. If an obligation is taking up too much time: quit. Here’s a secret: no one really cares what you do on the small scale. In the end you’re judged on your large-scale list of important completions.
• Don’t be available. Perhaps you can work in hidden nooks of the office or in libraries. Check and respond to work e-mail only a few times a day. People have to wait for responses from you. You can set up an auto-respond that tells the writer when you’ll be working on emails. Don’t be easy to find.  People generally don’t really need immediate access.  Always respond within a reasonable timeframe and get them what they need. So they adjust. And you get things done.
• Batch and habitatize. Any regularly occurring work gets turned into a habit — something you do at a fixed time on a fixed date. For example, I write blog posts on Sunday morning. I do work/planning/reading for my seminars on Sunday and Monday mornings. Habit-based schedules for the regular work makes it easier to tackle the non-regular projects. It also prevents schedule-busting pile-ups.
• Start early. Sometimes real early. On certain projects that you know are important,  don’t tolerate procrastination. If you need to start something 2 or 3 weeks in advance so that your stack proceeds as needed,  do so.

Why This Works

You could fill any arbitrary number of hours with what feels to be productive work. Between e-mail, and “crucial” web surfing, and to-do lists that, in the age of David Allen, grow to lengths that rival the bible, there is always something you could be doing. At some point, however, you have to put a stake in the ground and say: I know I have a never-ending stream of work, but this is when I’m going to face it. If you don’t do this, you let the never-ending stream of work push you around like a bully. It will force you into tiring, inefficient schedules. And you’ll end up more stressed and no more accomplished.

Fix the schedule you want. Then make everything else fit around your needs. Be flexible. Be efficient. If you can’t make it fit: change your work. But in the end, don’t compromise. No one really cares about your schedule except for yourself. So make it right. Make it work.

Jumpstart Your Concentration with a Depth Ritual

Develop rituals that lead into a high performance action for the most priority. Don’t do shallow (routine/unimportant) work in your most attentive and productive times!

In Search of Deep Concentration

Aaron is a PhD student. This requires him to spend a significant fraction of his time thinking about hard things.

To accommodate the necessity of depth in his working life, Aaron developed a ritual he uses to quickly shift his brain into a state of concentration.

Here’s how it works:

• Aaron puts on headphones and plays non-distracting meditative music.
• He launches a stripped-down text editor that hides all the features of his computer.
• He loads up a template that contains seven questions about the deep task he’s about to begin. These questions force him to specify why the task is important and how he’s going to tackle it.

Getting through these steps takes around five minutes. As soon as Aaron’s done typing in his final answer he turns immediately to the scheduled deep task.

The Results of Ritual

Here’s how Aaron describes the impact of this ritual:

“Every time I have done this (well, nearly every time) I [entered] a deep thinking phase quite effortlessly. I think the reason why it works is that the barrier to entry is quite small (filling out the template) and the returns (clarity on session objective, momentum) are tangible.”

Achieving unbroken concentration is a mindset: and a non-natural one at that! To slip into a concentrated, focused state, we need all the help we can get.