F
ocus is a peculiar thing. Like silence disappearing the moment you mention it, focus vanishes if you think about focusing -- because now you're thinking about focusing, and not the thing you should be doing.
I've mentioned before that I'm a very verbal person, in the sense of my inner life being highly informed by language. Given time and a good conceptual frame, I'm very good at thinking my way through problems and arguments. But something I am not very good at is maintaining steady concentration on time-limited tasks, especially if they are visual or physical in nature. I come up across this most often when playing Go, in which it is crucial to use your time well coming up with ideas for moves, running through possible lines of play and counterplay of those moves, judging how good they are relative to other lines you've checked, and making decisions. Sometimes words are helpful here; most of the time, they're not, and distraction prevails, leading me to making decisions based not on rigorous understanding of the board state, but on intuition and emotion.
Developing focus is a skill like any other, and it's one I'd like to spend more time on. Focus feels different in different situations, and is kin to the "flow state", in which your whole consciousness is actively and fruitfully engaged in the present task. Great athletes will tell you that being able to get in, and stay in, the Zone is a fundamental part of their success; musicians and writers say the same thing. The Zone, the flow, the state of focus, is so interestingly elusive. It requires teaching your brain to think in a new language, the language of the moment-to-moment needs of the game, the activity, the craft. My own mind has built a powerful habit of linguistic argumentation, and it means that I'm am constantly struggling to keep it from falling back into the track of thinking about what I am doing, rather than doing it.
Maybe enunciating the problem is the first step to solving it. But in this case -- probably not.