In 2010, two Harvard psychologists pinged 2,250 volunteers on their iPhones at random moments and asked what they were doing and what they were thinking. On average, the volunteers' thoughts were somewhere other than on the task 46.9 percent of the time, according to Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert in Science.

That number changes how to think about focus. A realistic goal is not a mind that never wanders. It is a mind that comes back to one useful thing, the way you call a puppy back to your side. This article covers what research says about where to aim your attention, how much of that research to trust, and how to build a one-cue routine for your next match night.

Can you train unshakeable focus?

Not in the sense of a mind that never drifts. A large study of everyday attention found that wandering is common. What you can try to practice is the return: one simple cue that you come back to before every shot. The research on which cue works best is mixed, as the next sections show.

Three bodies of work fit together here. Minds drift often. Where you aim your attention is debated, with the target a reasonable default. And a steady final look at the target goes with expertise. These studies pool many tasks and sports rather than focusing on pool, so treat the routine at the end as an experiment to run, not a guarantee.

How often does a mind wander, and does it matter?

In Killingsworth and Gilbert's study, volunteers reported thoughts off their task in 46.9 percent of samples, and in at least 30 percent of samples in every activity but one. People were also less happy when their minds wandered. The timing analysis suggested wandering came first, but it is not an experiment, and it did not study sport.

The volunteers ranged in age from 18 to 88, and the app collected roughly 250,000 data points, as the Harvard Gazette reported at the time. Mind wandering accounted for about 10.8 percent of how happy people felt in a given moment, while the activity itself accounted for 4.6 percent. The authors' time-lag analyses suggested that wandering tended to come before unhappiness rather than after it.

Notice what the study measured: mood, not performance. It tells you nothing about whether a wandering mind costs you a game. What it does tell you is that drifting is common in daily life. If you treat every drift as a personal failure, you add frustration to the distraction. Expect the wander, and plan the return.

Should you think about your stroke or the target?

A large 2021 meta-analysis favored the target. Chua and colleagues pooled 73 studies and found that an external focus, on the effect of a movement, beat an internal focus, on body parts. A 2024 reanalysis argues that publication bias inflated that edge, and that it nearly vanishes once corrected. The fair answer is that the target is a reasonable default, not a proven rule.

Here are the numbers. Chua, Jimenez-Diaz, Lewthwaite, Kim, and Wulf (Psychological Bulletin, 2021) combined 73 studies with 1,824 participants for performance and found an advantage for an external focus (Hedges' g = 0.264). For learning, 40 studies with 1,274 participants showed larger gaps at later retention tests (g = 0.583) and on new versions of the task (g = 0.584). The authors reported that age, health status, and skill level did not change the pattern. By common rules of thumb, that is a small effect for performance and a moderate one for learning.

Then came the challenge. McKay, Corson, Seedu, De Faveri, Hasan, Arnold, Adams, and Carter (Psychological Bulletin, 2024) reanalyzed data from earlier meta-analyses with robust Bayesian methods. They found moderate to strong evidence of publication bias, which means studies that found no difference were less likely to appear. After correcting for it, the estimated effects shrank to g = 0.01 for performance, 0.15 for retention, and 0.09 for transfer. Bayes factors favored no effect in every analysis, though the strength of that evidence varied. The authors wrote: "Our results contradict the existing consensus that an external focus is always more effective than an internal focus." They also found clear differences between studies, which suggests the effect may depend on conditions nobody has pinned down.

For a player, the useful reading is modest. The claim that thinking about the target always helps has weakened. A cue that points at the table, such as the contact point on the object ball, costs nothing to try. Tracking your own results over several weeks is a sensible check.

What do strong shooters look at before they hit the ball?

Experts hold a steady last look at the target before they move, a habit researchers call the quiet eye. A 2016 meta-analysis of 27 studies found a large gap between experts and novices (d = 1.04). Nine training studies found that teaching it improved performance (d = 0.84). The studies span many sports, so treat the result as promising.

Lebeau and colleagues (Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2016) also found a moderate difference within the same person: quiet-eye timing differed between successful and unsuccessful attempts (d = 0.58). In the nine intervention studies, training the quiet eye produced a very large change in the gaze itself (d = 1.53) and a large change in performance (d = 0.84). The gap between experts and novices is a link, not proof that the look causes the skill, because experts differ from novices in many ways.

The quiet eye also gives focus a physical job. Instead of telling yourself to concentrate, which is vague, you point your eyes at one spot and keep them there. That is a cue you can check. You either held the look or you did not. Our earlier article on the money ball covers how this habit fits into a full pre-shot routine.

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