So you got the job. Now what? Join me, Eleni Mata, on HBR's new original podcast, New

Here, the Young Professionals Guide to Work, and how to make it work for you. Listen for

free wherever you get your podcasts. Just search New Here. See you there!

Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast. I'm Allison Beard.

Today, we're going to tackle a problem that's going to hit home for a lot of people right now.

How to stay focused. And honestly, it couldn't be coming at a better time for me. I don't know

whether it's the pandemic, my fully digital work life with its constant barrage of emails,

texts, suites, or just family concerns. But over the past few weeks, it's been so hard for me to

buckle down, ignore the noise, and just work. I bet a lot of you are feeling the same way. And

today's guest is here to help. She has spent decades studying the science of attention. She's also

worked with a bunch of professionals who don't have the luxury of losing their focus from soldiers,

to sports stars, to surgeons. And after lots of experiments involving brain scans,

she's figured out how they, and we, can stop our minds from wandering in unproductive ways.

She's going to tell us how we can train our brain to maintain or regain focus,

even when we're feeling tired, burnt out, or overwhelmed. Dr Amishi Jha is a neuroscientist and

professor of psychology at the University of Miami, and she's the author of the book Peak Mind.

Amishi, thank you so much for being on the show today. It's great to be here.

So why do so many of us feel so distracted so much of the time? Even when we know where our focus

should be, why do we have trouble putting it there? Great question. And I think you are absolutely

not alone in that feeling of, you can't quite catch your full attention, even if you have every

intention to. But it ends up that our brain was actually built for distractability.

So the fact that we have this wandering mind that kind of roams around everywhere

...