How to Increase Attention in a Specific Way

i actually tend to believe that attention is woefully misunderstood, or not well understood. And i think that it underlies a lot of other phenomena that we notice. Like when a person thinks about developing a skill, their first thought isn't how do i learn to cultivate my attention in a specific way and notice specific features of this task such that i can improve more rapidly than otherwise i would? If we had some mechanism, meditation is something that could work this way. But if people were just better at sinking into those flow states, i bet they wouln't be recognizable after two or three years.