What Sports like Tennis and Cricket taught me about Concentration and Focus
The play-break-play structure of Tennis & Cricket can teach us about “focussing on one thing at a time”.
We’ve all been told that we should focus on only one thing at a time in order to be productive. Trying to multi-task, or trying to make two(or more) decisions at a time would lead to low quality decision-making on them all.
For me personally, having a “productive day” would mean one where I am able to decide on the task(s) to work on for the day, and manage to only focus on one task at a time throughout their execution(deciding on what tasks to work on itself is a task of its own).
But how do we do this? Dandapani gave a TED talk(which I highly recommend) where he tells us to imagine our concentration as a glowing ball of light that goes around this big room which constitutes the universe of all possible stuff we could think about. We control this ball and decide which corner of the room it goes to, and we can make it go to the topic/task that we want to focus on at the moment. This will take time and practice to master though.
But for this article, I want to talk about how sports like Tennis, Cricket, Badminton, etc. gave me an idea into being productive. One thing that sets sports like Tennis, Cricket, Badminton, Baseball, etc. apart from other sports(like Football, Formula 1, etc.) is that they have defined intervals of play and break.
A tennis match will pause for 20–30 seconds once a point is complete. In cricket, once a delivery is completed the game pauses until the bowler goes back to their starting mark to begin delivering the following delivery. During these “paused” moments, nothing is happening in the match. The players are simply getting into position for the next point/delivery, giving them(and the spectators) a short, quick break to refocus their mind.
What this means, is that players and spectators have those few precious seconds to “forget” what happened in the previous point/delivery(irrespective of whether they did well or not) and regain their “tunnel vision” to focus solely on this next point that will be served.
Imagine losing a match point in Tennis, and having to win two points in a row to win the match now. You will be devastated, but the game is paused for 20 seconds during which you can recollect your thoughts and remind yourself to focus on the next point. Those 20 seconds allow you to regain your composure, forget the previous point, and get rid of the emotional disappointment you might be going through at having lost it, to simply focus on hitting the ball well in the next point.
Imagine not playing a delivery well, and almost losing your wicket in a cricket match. Commentators and pundits are predicting that you will not last long as you aren’t batting well, and the opposition can smell blood as they’re close to getting you out. You will be disappointed and nervous, but the bowler will take a few seconds to walk back to the starting point for their delivery. During those precious seconds, you can regain your composure, forget the fact that your batting has been crap so far, and simply focus on doing well in this upcoming delivery.
I realised that these concepts can also be applied to our daily life. When you sit down to work on a personal coding project or maybe a certificate on Coursera, treat that project as a single point in a match and focus your attention on that project alone. If you get distracted and start drifting towards Facebook or YouTube, it’s kinda like losing a point or two in a match. All you need to do is get your focus back and concentrate on the project for the next 20–30 minutes. Don’t fret about having lost the previous point(it’ll do you more harm). If players like Rafa, Federer, Djokovic did that, they wouldn’t have won so many matches and tournaments in their career.
Feeling bad about not being able to focus on a task is a normal thing as do we need to vent out our frustration/disappointment and the “bad” feeling we get when we realise we haven’t done well. But if it affects the rest of the day, we’ve made it even worse. It’s obviously better to regain composure, and make sure the next half-hour of the day is well executed, for if you do so, you’ll feel good about yourself again and the positive emotions come back.
I know it’s hard, in fact right now as I’m writing this paragraph I was distracted by a random trail of thoughts for the past 10 minutes! I had to pull my concentration back here.
Take another couple of examples. Say you gave in to your temptations to sleep longer and skipped the gym this morning. It broke your daily gym routine, and an hour later when you wake up you’ll feel bad about yourself for missing gym that day. It can affect the rest of your day as you’ve started the day in a bad mood. However, if you apply the above logic and forget about the bad start to the day and simply look forward to the next point for the day, the rest of your day will be much better. Isn’t that better than being in a bad mood for the entire day!? Simply focus on working on your job well and forget that you missed the gym that day.
Say you gave in to your temptations and had a “cheat” meal for lunch, which broke your diet. You might feel bad post-lunch, but if you allow the bad mood to linger on you’ll have a bad dinner as well. But if you forget about it, and simply focus on the next few hours of the day and how to spend them well, come dinnertime you wouldn’t feel so upset anymore, and will be able to get back on diet.
To conclude, sports like Tennis and Badminton emphasis this point strongly. We see players playing poorly for a number of points in a match, and suddenly start playing well. We are seeing them regain their composure to focus purely on just hitting the ball well over the net and into the opponents court. They are not concerned that they are a break down or a set down or anything.
I’m not an expert at this(I lost concentration quite a few times while writing this article!), but am getting there. Having this viewpoint of simply “focusing on the next point” has definitely helped me regain composure during work and have a more fulfilling and productive day. It helps me block out negative thoughts and disappointments of not having done well so far.
