Why Sudoku Improves Focus and Concentration
I thought it was a gimmick. Turns out doing a few a day did something. Could be the puzzles, could be something else. Either way.
I think I'd have said two years ago that the Sudoku page in the morning paper was unlikely to ever grab my attention. When the paper stopped circulation though I ended up starting to do Sudoku on my phone during my commute. A Sudoku puzzle is very binary — you're either solving it in your head or you're just guessing and clicking numbers in from one of the other spaces in the hope of getting lucky. It's not really a multi-tasking experience — you can't be half-way working on a real task and plan to come back and do the Sudoku later, nor can you intend to finish it off later and get on with your actual work in the meantime. You just have to sit there and do nothing until it's done or until you give up.
Every number either fits or it doesn't. Scrolling doesn't work like that. Nothing ever finishes. You don't get a clear yes or no. You're used to getting a ton of small completed moments at once in Sudoku. I'm not sure why, but this feels different.
My normal is in the morning with coffee. I'll probably also have one at night if I didn't do one in the morning. It took a bit of perseverance to get into the habit of doing one every day but by the end of the first week I was leaving it out occasionally and having to open the app to do one because I'd forgotten. I'm now doing it at the start of work because I'm expecting to have done my daily exercise when I opens the app and at the end of work because I'm thinking of needing to open the app in order to do my exercise. Some people are supposed to do them as a warm up but that doesn't work for me. One a day is enough.
Try it with just one. I have, and the result has been astonishing. Normally, I find that my concentration rate tends to increase as I work on any task. Yet on Sunday, when I did a Sudoku, my concentration rate shot up enormously in what I would estimate to be less than 30 minutes. The puzzle was only moderately hard. Perhaps the activity itself was what worked. Or perhaps it was just allowing myself to do this one activity in this one moment. Either way, the result was certainly there. One activity a day = ?