Whether your mind keeps wandering more as you get older, or you’re a young student whose super-active brain is more suited to TikTok than your assigned reading, sustained singular focus can be a challenge for everyone—and yet (alas!) it remains a required skill for so much in life.

Today’s edition of 10Almonds presents a nifty trick to get yourself through those tasks! We’ll also be taking some time to reply to your questions and comments, in our weekly interactive Q&A.

First of all though, we’ve a promise to make good on, so…

How To Stay On The Ball (Or The Tomato?) The Easy Way

For most of us, we face three main problems when it comes to tackling our to-dos:

1. Where to start?
2. The task seems intimidating in its size
3. We get distracted and/or run out of energy

If you’re really not sure where to start, we recommended a powerful tool in last Friday’s newsletter!

For the rest, we love the Pomodoro Technique:

1. Set a timer for 25 minutes, and begin your task.
2. Keep going until the timer is done! No other tasks, just focus.
3. Take a 5-minute break.
4. Repeat

This approach has three clear benefits:

1. No matter the size of the task, you are only committing to 25 minutes—everything is much less overwhelming when there’s an end in sight!
2. Being only 25 minutes means we are much more likely to stay on track; it’s easier to defer other activities if we know that there will be a 5-minute break for that soon.
3. Even without other tasks to distract us, it can be difficult to sustain attention for long periods; making it only 25 minutes at a time allows us to approach it with a (relatively!) fresh mind.

Have you heard that a human brain can sustain attention for only about 40 minutes before focus starts to decline rapidly?

While that’s been a popular rationale for school classroom lesson durations (and perhaps coincidentally ties in with Zoom’s 40-minute limit for free meetings), the truth is that focus starts dropping immediately, to the point that one-minute attention tests are considered sufficient to measure the ability to focus.

So a 25-minute Pomodoro is a more than fair compromise!

Why’s it called the “Pomodoro” technique?

And why is the 25-minute timed work period called a Pomodoro?

It’s because back in the 80s, university student Francesco Cirillo was struggling to focus and made a deal with himself to focus just for a short burst at a time—and he used a (now “retro” style) kitchen timer in the shape of a tomato, or “pomodoro”, in Italian.

If you don’t have a penchant for kitsch kitchenware, you can use this free, simple Online Pomodoro Timer!

(no registration/login/download necessary; it’s all right there on the web page)

Mobility As A Sporting Pursuit

As we get older, it becomes increasingly important to treat life like a sporting event. By this we mean:

As an “athlete of life”, there are always events coming up for which we need to train. Many of these events will be surprise tests!

Such events/tests might include:

• Not slipping in the shower and breaking a hip (or worse)
• Reaching an item from a high shelf without tearing a ligament
• Getting out of the car at an awkward angle without popping a vertebra
• Climbing stairs without passing out light-headed at the top
• Descending stairs without making it a sled-ride-without-a-sled

…and many more.

Train for these athletic events now

Not necessarily this very second; we appreciate you finishing reading first. But, now generally in your life, not after the first time you fail such a test; it can (and if we’re not attentive: will) indeed happen to us all.

With regard to falling, you might like to revisit our…

Fall Special

…which covers how to not fall, and to not injure yourself if you do.

You’ll also want to be able to keep control of your legs (without them buckling) all the way between standing and being on the ground.

Slav squats or sitting squats (same exercise, different names, amongst others) are great for building and maintaining this kind of strength and suppleness:

(Click here for a refresher if you haven’t recently seen Zuzka’s excellent video explaining how to do this, especially if it’s initially difficult for you, “The Most Anti-Aging Exercise”)

this exercise is, by the way, great for pretty much everything below the waist!

You will also want to do resistance exercises to keep your body robust:

Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)

And as for those shoulders? If it is convenient for you to go swimming, then backstroke is awesome for increasing and maintaining shoulder mobility (and strength).

If swimming isn’t a viable option for you, then doing the same motion with your arms, while standing, will build the same flexibility. If you do it while holding a small weight (even just 1kg is fine, but feel free to increase if you so wish and safely can) in each hand will build the necessary strength as you go too.

As for why even just 1kg is fine: read on

About that “and strength”, by the way…

Stretching is not everything. Stretching is great, but mobility without strength (in that joint!) is just asking for dislocation.

You don’t have to be built like the Terminator, but you do need to have the structural integrity to move your body and then a little bit more weight than that (or else any extra physical work could be enough to tip you to breaking point) without incurring damage from the strain. So, it needs to not be a strain! See again, the aforementioned resistance exercises.

That said, even very gentle exercise helps too; see for example the impact of walking on osteoporosis:

Living near green spaces linked to higher bone density and lower osteoporosis risk

and…

Walking vs Osteoporosis

So you don’t have to run marathons—although you can if you want:

Marathons in Mid- and Later-Life

…to keep your hips and more in good order.

Want to test yourself now?

Check out:

Building & Maintaining Mobility

Take care!