Difficult work can make you want to quit after a few minutes.

However, the urge to give up is seldom constant. The desire to quit arrives at predictable moments. If you can identify those moments, and you can disable them. If you want to give up before you began, set a time...

Taking a break from a problem for a time can lead to a breakthrough. But looking at your email or Facebook can make it harder to return to the task. If you need a break, it is best to take "smart" breaks. These are activities that are relaxing, not distracting.

• Bri...

A task can be perceived as effortful when we are really calculating opportunity costs. For attention-demanding tasks, the brain needs to focus on one thing and ignore the rest. Yet, it prefers lower-value activities.

A way to discourage getting stuck on low-value activities is to re...

During complex tasks, staying sharp can be difficult. When you desperately need to focus, it can be tricky to stop a wandering mind.

However, there are tools we can use to stay alert and power through.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law is a U-shaped connection between general arousal and execution. Research found that when an individual is too alert or too relaxed, performance suffers. Simpler tasks benefit from high alertness, while high alertness can hurt the performance of challenging t...

It is challenging to stay focused when you are constantly interrupted. Your boss sending regular emails, a deskmate talking, a three-year-old continually interrupting.

The key to improving focus is to negotiate your environment ahead of time. Communicate what you need and m...

When it comes to our focus, we may try a task, realise our mind is wandering and correcting ourselves. Except this makes it even harder to focus.

One solution is mindfulness meditation. Let the distraction come and go without paying too much attention to it.

In his research, Edwin Locke found that specific challenging goals created better performance. However, some limitations apply.

• For complex tasks, a goal-oriented approach may slow down performance. For novel tasks, a playful attitude may be more succe...

At times, you may get stuck. To get out of it, switch to a "meta" task, meaning shift to a more abstract layer of a problem such as figuring out why you're stuck.

For example, if you are writing an essay and don't know what to write, switching to a meta task would mean writing about how...