Focus Exercise

Having a hard time focusing?  Finding your mind wandering as you interview a potential client or take a deposition?  Try this exercise (from the Communication Nation blog) that “will help you heighten your attention and improve your awareness of your surroundings”:

1. Get a digital camera or sketchbook. If you don't have either one, you can use a stack of index cards and a paper clip. The digital camera is my favorite for this: one of the reasons I love digital cameras is that there's no such thing as wasted film -- you can take a thousand pictures for virtually the same price as one.

2. Choose a subject -- something you intend to notice that day. Your subject should be something you will be likely to see several times during the day, but that you rarely pay attention to. It could be windows, or letters of the alphabet, or triangles -- anything that you can search for in your immediate surroundings.

3. For the rest of the day, keep your eye out for your subject. Whenever you see it, take a close look at it and see what you notice. If you have a camera, take a picture of it. If not, draw a quick sketch or make some notes about what you noticed.

You will find that if you choose a new subject each day, you will quickly become far more finely tuned to your surroundings, and you will notice many things that other people simply don't see.

This is great advice.  I’d highly recommend it to lawyers about to start a trial.