If you had Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in the same room, what would you ask them? One person had that chance and asked both men to write down the secret to their success in one word. Both men wrote down the same thing: focus..
There are lots apps that promise to increase your ability to concentrate and focus, but the vast majority, science has found, will not. But, according to Dr. Stefan Van Der Stigchel’s book Concentration, there are two types of apps that can actually help your ability to concentrate no matter the task: fitness and meditation apps.
Fitness
Even a single bout of exercise, like 30 minutes of cycling or running, can help with cognitive tasks. Having a sustained exercise practice can improve a whole host of cognitive processes - memory, focus, and thinking speed among them. And it seems like the more you do (or the more intense your exercise) the more benefit you get.
Physical exercise works at multiple levels to improve your mental abilities. It helps your neural systems in ways that benefit your and mind, and it improves your body at cellular and molecular levels in ways that help your thinking. Studies have been conducted with young adults, those at middle age and the elderly. All ages have been found to benefit, cognitively, from exercise. Anyone can benefit mentally from exercise, and at multiple levels.
Should you focus on aerobic workouts or resistance training? Either or both. Each has been shown to help people cognitively. The important thing is to have intense workouts & to be able to stick with it. If you hate running, don't run. Maybe rucking while listening to a podcast or a group activity like pickleball is better for you. Actually liking your exercise is the ultimate cheat code for getting fitter - if you can't find anything you really like, take whatever you hate the least and see if you can add something to make it palatable - like a podcast or tv show set aside just for exercise time.
This is another reason why workplace fitness programs can be good for workers and for a business - not only do they decrease medical costs and missed work, but they can improve employees mental fitness too. If you're a manager who doesn't think that you can convince your company to incentive exercise you can still help your employees physically and mentally. Giving time for walking breaks will help your people get exercise. It can also break up sedentary office time - another benefit with physical and mental upsides.
Meditation
Apps like Insight Timer, HeadSpace and Waking Up may aim at bringing enlightenment (or at least a greater understanding of what is happening in your head), but their benefits can be a lot more grounded and useful. One of the benefits to regular meditation is an increase in the ability to concentrate.
Two kinds of meditation have been found to improve concentration: focused attention meditation and mindfulness meditation. Focused Attention meditation is probably what most Westerners think of as meditation, focusing on one thing (like the breath) and trying to keep out everything else. Mindfulness meditation is more relaxed, you are simply trying to really notice and keep track of what is happening inside your mind. Both types have been found to have positive effects on focus, so if Focused Attention meditation seems daunting you can instead work on Mindfulness meditation.
Why does meditation train concentration in general? A large part of concentration is applying your attention to something, which is exactly what meditation asks you to do. Having greater control of your attention gives you greater control over your concentration. Meditators will often talk about this as being mindful or responsive to your mental processes rather than just reacting thoughtlessly to what is happening in your environment and your head.
Meditation apps often have you focus on different things while you meditate - some times it might be on your breath, but other sessions might have you focus on the sounds around you or the feelings of your body. This helps train your attention's ability to attend to different things. Finally, a lot of meditation training ramps up the difficulty and duration of the meditation practice, which may be helpful in training your concentration.
One big caveat, most of the research that's been done on meditation and concentration has been with interested participants who have dedicated a substantial amount of time to it, including going away on meditation retreats. A relatively recent study found slight improvement on a reading test (though not statistically significant) after one 10-minute meditation session with new meditators. Triangulating between the research that has been done, there is good reason to expect cognitive benefits from a regular mediation practice, even if it's just 10 minutes a day, though that exact question still needs to be studied.
One more way to build focus on anything
The last way to build concentration on any task is to simply work more and concentrate more on that specific task. Bill Gates focused a lot on computer programming in his teens and twenties, so got very good at focusing on it. Warren Buffett spent a lot of time focusing on reading business' financial documents, so got very good at focusing on that. Whatever it is that is most important to your success, focusing on it will help you focus on it more.
People who are new to the violin don't get much benefit practicing more than one hour a day, but expert violinists can practice up to four hours a day (cut into two two-hour chunks). Even if you don't feel like your are making enough progress on a task remind yourself that the work you are putting in now will help you put more work into it in the future (and better work to boot).
You can improve your concentration and focus. Investing in your physical fitness and in a meditation practice can help a lot (and have tons of other benefits). And even those times you work and work at something and none of it seems to have gone right, you can remind yourself you got a little bit better at concentrating on that task, even if nothing else went the way you wanted.