Faster

Sometimes, you do better when you increase difficulty.

I occasionally play Flight Commander when taking a quick break. It's a simple game - direct aircrafts to airstrips by drawing a path and make sure the planes don't crash into each other. Each plan landed gives you a point.

I was terrible at it, till I noticed the ">>" button at the bottom. It doubles the speed of the game, technically making it twice as hard to play. I started using it to get through the easy initial stages, and slowed the game down again once there were too many planes in the air. I was still terrible at it.

One day, I decided to play an entire game at double speed and see how far I could go. I tripled my high score. Every time I played at double speed, I scored 3-4 times my normal scores.

That got me thinking, and I think a couple of factors are at play here 

1. I lack patience and get distracted easily hence losing focus. 

2. I get into flow when I make the game faster. Hence gaining focus. 

Sometimes, to increase output, we need to tweak our tasks and impose constraints on them to convert them to optimal difficulty so we reach a state of flow. And time seems to be a very good tool to achieve this.