focus is a muscle
training is hard
Every time I sit down to work on music, I face two paths: Am I going to go deep, or am I going to skim the surface?
It doesn’t always feel like a choice. In a world engineered to fracture our attention, focus can feel like something that happens to us—something rare, fleeting, an accident. One moment we’re dialed in, playing chords on the piano, shaping a sound, making something real. The next, we’re scrolling, checking, switching tabs, tweaking an EQ for no reason.
And suddenly, an hour is gone.
I’ve spent a good part of my adult life believing I just wasn’t built for certain kinds of focus. Writing anything longer than an email felt like it required the perfect cocktail of free time, mental clarity, and caffeine—too little or too much of any one thing and the whole structure would collapse. My focus felt fragile, conditional, something I had to catch in the right mood rather than something I could cultivate. There was a quiet shame in that—an ambient sense that I lacked some inner discipline or cognitive strength other people seemed to have without trying. It was easier to call it a personality flaw than to imagine it might be trainable.
If you zoom out, it’s clear that this isn’t just a personal struggle—it’s a structural one. We live inside a system that treats our attention as raw material to be harvested. Every app, every algorithm, every frictionless dopamine hit is a force pulling us away from sustained thought and deep work. The economy has changed. Our labor is no longer just what we produce; it’s the act of being engaged itself. Our focus is capital, and we are the ones giving it away.
It’s tempting to think of this as a technological problem—social media, notifications, an overload of information. But the deeper issue is cultural. A world that values speed over depth, reaction over reflection, efficiency over artistry. A world where an artist’s worth is measured by output, engagement, and visibility rather than by the depth of their process.
This is why I keep returning to the idea that focus is a muscle. Not a talent, not a personality trait, but something that strengthens or weakens depending on how we use it. If the modern world is a gym for distraction, then training focus requires deliberate, intentional resistance.
The Attention Economy vs. Creative Work
There’s a paradox at the heart of making music in the 21st century: the very tools that allow us to create also invite endless distraction. The DAW is a creative space, but it’s also a labyrinth. The internet is an archive of influence, but it’s also a black hole of comparison and noise.
We don’t just have to fight against external distractions—we have to fight against the ones embedded in our own creative process. The itch to check, to tweak, to second-guess. The compulsion to consume before we create. The fear of missing out on some better idea, some better workflow, some new plugin that might unlock everything.
This isn’t a new struggle. Artists have always had to guard their attention against the world. The difference now is that distraction isn’t just ambient—it’s optimized. Designed. The platforms we rely on for connection, inspiration, and even livelihood are the same platforms that make deep work feel impossible. The attention economy is designed, not just to distract us, but to addict us to that distracted experience.
So the question becomes: how do we resist?
Training the Focus Muscle
The first thing to understand is that focus is not about willpower. You can’t brute-force your way into deep work any more than you can will yourself into running a marathon without training. Focus is a practice, and like any practice, it relies on small, deliberate actions repeated over time.
It starts with how you enter your creative space. If you sit down to work with your phone in reach, with twenty browser tabs open, with notifications lurking in the background, you are already fighting an uphill battle. The first step to protecting focus is reducing the number of ways it can be broken.
This can be as simple as putting your phone in another room. Closing everything except the one thing you’re working on. Creating a ritual that signals to your brain: this is when we go deep.
But beyond environmental shifts, there’s a deeper restructuring that has to happen. We have to retrain our nervous systems to tolerate slowness. To resist the twitch toward distraction. To get comfortable with the discomfort of sustained work. This means letting boredom in instead of numbing it with input. It means recognizing that real creative breakthroughs don’t happen in the first ten minutes of a session but in the long, quiet stretches where nothing seems to be working.
The ability to focus is directly linked to the ability to sit with discomfort. The discomfort of not knowing. The discomfort of repetition. The discomfort of making something that doesn’t yet feel good or finished. And this is where the deeper cultural shift needs to happen—because we are conditioned to seek immediate feedback, immediate validation, immediate results. But the best creative work doesn’t function that way.
Resistance as Ritual
I think often about the idea of monasticism in art—the idea that focus isn’t just a skill, but a way of being. Something that has to be actively cultivated and protected. I love the stories of artists who built entire systems around their attention, who treated their work like something sacred.
Leonard Cohen retreating to a Zen monastery. Agnes Martin living in the desert, painting the same lines over and over again. Writers like Murakami structuring their days with obsessive precision—writing at the same time every morning, running in the afternoons, maintaining a rhythm that allows for depth.
Of course, most of us don’t have the luxury of disappearing into the mountains to make work. But the principle remains: art needs boundaries. Focus needs constraints.
Maybe that means setting strict time limits on your creative sessions so you work with urgency instead of drifting. Maybe it means carving out a dedicated space for music that is free from the contamination of daily life. Maybe it means learning to say no—not just to distractions, but to the entire culture of constant availability.
The hardest thing to accept is that no one is going to protect your focus for you. The world is not designed to encourage deep work. If anything, it’s actively designed to prevent it. Which means the responsibility falls on us—not just to find focus, but to fight for it.
A Challenge for This Week
If focus is a muscle, the only way to strengthen it is through deliberate reps. So here’s something to try:
Pick one session this week to go fully deep. No distractions, no split attention, no checking anything else.
Observe what happens. How long can you stay locked in before your mind pulls away? What breaks your focus?
Adjust accordingly. Make small changes. Move your phone. Change your environment. Experiment with structure.
Every time you choose to actively protect your focus, you are training your ability to go deeper. And over time, that depth compounds.
Let me know how it goes. Reply to this message or here or leave a comment—what’s the biggest thing pulling you out of deep work? And how do you fight it?
Talk to you next week.
PS:
If this resonated with you, share it with someone else who’s struggling with focus. And if you want more on this, stay tuned—I’m working on something for you.