Sustaining a Flow State for Typing Concentration

Flow states are easy to access, but sustaining it over 300 seconds is very different. Because of the cognitive fatigue and cognitive load that make you easily mess up simple words, developing this long term typing concentration takes both the mental conditioning and attention-governing strategies.

Psychology of the 4-Minute Dip

For tasks that take 5 minutes, consistency tends to drop significantly around the fourth minute. During this time, you may even feel your mind start to wander or your eyes start to dry. In order to maintain long term typing concentration, you should generally break the block up into a series of 5 smaller 1 minute blocks.

Try to block the distraction of the timer or the number of words left to complete and concentrate on just this sentence. And when you are about to hit the spacebar to complete the sentence, take a smaller than a second to blink and breathe. This tiny pause allows your brain to clear the visual buffer that has been built, which is the cause of cognitive fatigue, and your concentration and your accuracy will remain unchanged and will be maintained for the remaining minute.

Soft Focus Technique for Long Term Concentration

Typing a single character can build a lot of visual strain, and you should focus your attention and spiral your vision to take in more than just the character that you’re currently typing. When you use this ‘visual soft focus’ you can type and read the three or more words that are this or before the next to the next character that you’re about to type.

With this method you can help make the text appear smoother and less intimidating. Avoid the sudden pauses that you might encounter by the typist when he doesn’t recognize the word in time.