10 checked facts

Focus

Everything on this site about focus — each one naming the study behind it.

The complexity of a task makes you procrastinate less.
Parkinson's Law of Triviality states that the time spent on any item of an agenda is in inverse proportion to the amou…
Moderate background noise actually improves your creative thinking performance.
A 2012 study found that 70 decibels of ambient noise enhances performance on creative tasks, while 85 decibels proves …
You actively block your own goals to focus.
Goal shielding is the process where the activation of a target goal inhibits the accessibility of competing goals.…
The scent of your environment dictates your ability to focus.
A 2003 study found that exposure to peppermint odor significantly improves performance on tasks requiring sustained at…
You pay a steep cognitive price for multitasking.
Switching between tasks significantly increases error rates and lowers processing speed compared to focusing on one ta…
You think life changes more based on one factor.
People systematically overestimate the impact of a single variable on their overall life satisfaction.…
You fail to notice the obvious in plain sight.
Inattentional blindness occurs when an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight because thei…
You miss the obvious when your focus is occupied.
Participants often fail to notice a prominent stimulus, like a person in a costume, when they are engaged in a simple …
The more you try not to think, the more.
A 1994 study revealed that instructions to suppress a specific thought result in that thought becoming more cognitivel…
Unfinished tasks linger in your memory much longer.
A classic 1927 study found that people remember interrupted tasks roughly twice as well as completed ones.…