Hyperfocus

by Chris Bailey

  Filling the rest of your attentional space with habitual, mindless tasks is often not the best way to use spare attention, so when possible, avoid loading it to the brim.

  3. ONE COMPLEX TASK

  Your most productive tasks—the ones that enable you to accomplish significantly more for every minute you dedicate to them—fall into this category. The more time and attention you spend on these tasks, the more productive you become.

  The amount of attentional space consumed by complex tasks varies over time. While carrying on a discussion with your boss, for example, your attentional space may shrink and expand rhythmically to match the content of the conversation, allowing your mind both to wander and to focus on the conversation when it becomes more complex. In a team meeting you could, in an instant, go from being a passive observer to getting called on for a progress update.

  Having some attentional space to spare during complex tasks allows you to do two things:

  It leaves room to reflect on the best approach to completing the task, so you can work smarter and avoid autopilot mode. You’ll be able to come up with ideas you might not have had if you were filling your attention to the brim—such as the realization that you could scrap the introduction of the presentation you’re going to give and instead dive directly to the point.

  Leaving some space also enables you to work with a greater awareness of where you should be directing your attention in the first place. That means you can better refocus when your mind inevitably wanders from the task at hand. At the same time, you have attentional space to spare if the task suddenly becomes even more complex.

  ATTENTION OVERLOAD

  Fitting the right amount and type of tasks into attentional space is both an art and an investment in productivity. The costs of overloading our attention can be pretty severe.

  Have you ever walked into your kitchen or living room and realized you’ve forgotten why you went there in the first place? You’ve fallen into an attention overload trap. You tried to cram too many things into your attentional space—the TV show that was playing in the background, random thoughts, and the IMDb page you just read—and didn’t have enough space left for your original intention. In this case, you meant to grab the grocery list your partner left on the dining room table.

  The same thing happens when work problems weigh on your mind as you drive home from the office. In this situation, your mind may be even more full: decoding and processing the talk show on the radio while ruminating on what happened at work that day while running through the multiple habit sequences that let you drive home largely on autopilot mode. If you had planned on buying bread on the way, chances are you won’t have enough space to accommodate even that small, simple intention. You’ll arrive home feeling overwhelmed, and only in the morning will you open the bread drawer and remember the previous day’s task.

  We have to work with intention as much as possible—this is especially true when we have more to do than time within which to do it. Intention enables us to prioritize so we don’t overload our attentional space. Doing so also leaves us feeling more calm: just as you likely feel uncomfortable after overeating, stuffing your attentional space with too many tasks can make you feel unsettled.

  At any one time, your attentional space should hold at most two key things that you are processing: what you intend to accomplish and what you’re currently doing. This isn’t possible 100 percent of the time, especially as you become immersed in a task, but by being mindful of your intention, you can be confident that what you’re immersed in is what you’re actually aiming to get done.

  If you find yourself responding to important work in autopilot mode, chances are you’re trying to cram too much into your attentional space. By not stepping back to deliberately manage your attention, you allow it to overflow. Some familiar examples:

  Taking care of your toddler while shopping.

  Trying to walk and text at the same time. Just this morning I watched someone bump into a mailbox because they were trying to do this.

  Rewinding a movie, TV show, or audiobook because someone was talking to you or because you simply zoned out for a while.

  Adding baking soda instead of baking powder to a recipe, because you were ruminating on something or watching TV.

  Leaving a theater with a stomachache, because you didn’t have enough attention left to notice you’d eaten too much popcorn.

  Forgetting to put the divider on the grocery store checkout belt for the next person, like the lady in front of me forgot to do this morning as she flipped through a magazine.

  You’ve probably experienced many similar moments. Some are impossible to avoid, because life often presents us with unexpected surprises. But many are possible to circumvent, and noticing that you’re beginning to feel overwhelmed is a great sign that you should check in to assess what’s occupying your attentional space. Chances are you’re trying to cram too much into it at once.

  The best way to avoid this overload is to be more selective with what you permit into your attentional space. On the drive home, shut off the radio, which will enable you to process the day and also remember your intention to pick up bread. At home, pause or mute the TV so you don’t try to continue processing the show and forget that you’re heading to fetch a note that’s in the other room. Making small changes like these allows you to keep your attention on your intention.

  Simplifying our attentional space lets us maintain enough room to work and live intentionally throughout the day. This lets us spend more time on what’s important and meaningful in the moment. The state of your attentional space determines the state of your life. When your attentional space is overwhelmed, you, in turn, feel overwhelmed. When your attentional space is clear, you also feel clear. The tidier you keep your attentional space, the more clearly you think.

  Time for a quick check-in: what’s occupying your attentional space at this moment? Take stock of everything that’s on your mind. If you find that your attentional space is a bit too full, simplify what’s in it, either by writing down these things so you can deal with them later or by refocusing on the book in your hands.

  Simplifying what we focus on in the moment may feel counterintuitive: when we have so much to get done, our natural impulse is to focus on as much as possible. Compounding this is the fact that the brain’s prefrontal cortex—the large part of the forebrain that lets us plan, think logically, and get work done—has a built-in “novelty bias.” Whenever we switch between tasks, it rewards us with dopamine—that amazing pleasure chemical that rushes through our brain whenever we devour a medium-sized pizza, accomplish something awesome, or have a drink or two after work. You may have noticed that you instinctively reach for your tablet when you sit down to watch TV, that you can’t resist keeping your email open in another window as you work, or that you feel more stimulated when your phone is by your side. Continually seeking novel stimuli makes us feel more productive—after all, we’re doing more in each moment. But again, just because we’re busier doesn’t mean we’re getting more accomplished.

  Almost every book in the wellness space has an obligatory section discussing how the brain is primitive, and that we have to learn to rise above the impulses it gives rise to. This book is no exception. An unfortunate truth is that the brain is not built to do knowledge work—it’s wired for survival and reproduction. We have evolved to crave things that provide us with a surge of dopamine, which reinforces habits and behaviors that have historically aided our chances at survival. Our brain provides a hit of dopamine after sex as a reward for procreating. It does so when we consume sugar, which is energy-dense and enables us to survive longer with less food, which was useful early in our evolution, when conditions weren’t as bountiful as they are today.

  Our brains also reward us for poorly managing our attention, because for our early ancestors, seeking novel threats in the environment a
ided their chance of survival. Instead of focusing so deeply on stoking a fire that they were not alert to a prowling tiger, early humans were constantly scanning for potential dangers around them. If that made them a bit less efficient in attending to the fire, they survived to see another day (and start another fire!).

  Today the only nearby tigers are at the zoo, and the novelty bias that once benefited us now works actively against us. The devices we own—our TV, tablet, computer, and smartphone included—are infinitely more stimulating than the other productive and meaningful things we could be focusing on, and so with fewer predators to worry about, we naturally focus on our electronics instead.

  After years of researching the topic, I’ve found that “productivity” has become a bit of a loaded term. What it usually connotes is a condition that feels cold, corporate, and overly focused on efficiency. I prefer a different (and friendlier) definition: productivity means accomplishing what we intend to. If our plan today is to write three thousand words, rock a presentation with our leadership team, and catch up on our email, and we successfully accomplish all of those, we were perfectly productive. Likewise, if we intend to have a relaxing day and manage to do absolutely nothing, we’re again perfectly productive. Being busy doesn’t make us productive. It doesn’t matter how busy we are if that busyness doesn’t lead us to accomplish anything of importance. Productivity is not about cramming more into our days but about doing the right thing in each moment.

  THE COSTS ADD UP

  It bears repeating that there is nothing inherently wrong with multitasking. It’s entirely possible to multitask, especially when it comes to the habitual tasks in our work and life. But it’s important to make a distinction between shifting our attention and multitasking. Multitasking means concurrently trying to focus on more than one thing at a time. Shifting our attention is the movement of our attentional spotlight (or our attentional space) from one task to another. Shifting attention throughout the day is necessary; if we focused on just one thing all day long, no matter how important it was, we probably wouldn’t have a job. Still, too much shifting can be dangerous, especially when we’re surrounded by more novel objects and distractions than our brain is capable of handling.

  While slipping into autopilot mode is the largest cost of attention overflow, there are other disadvantages as well. For starters, letting your attentional space overflow affects your memory. You may have noticed that when you watch TV or a movie with your phone by your side, you recall much less of what you’ve seen. In fact, I’ve noticed that as I’ve allowed more devices into my life, I remember less in general. Technology speeds up time by tempting us in each moment to fill our attention to the brim. This leads us to remember less, because it is only when we pay attention to something that our brain actively encodes it into memory.*

  When we make our attentional space juggle too many tasks, we fail to notice and remember the details of our most important work. When we multitask, we even process our work with an entirely different part of our brain. Take studying as an example. As Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at Stanford, explained to me, “When we learn while we multitask, we rely more heavily on the basal ganglia, a brain system that’s involved in the learning of skills and habits.” However, “when we encode information in a more focused state, we rely more heavily on our brain’s hippocampus—which actually lets us store and recall the information.”

  What use is our time if not to create memories—of conversations, meals, vacations, and other experiences? When we fail to focus deeply on any one thing, we focus instead only on the “highlights” of what we’re doing and, as a consequence, later forget how we spent our time. Letting our attention overflow makes our actions less meaningful, because we don’t remember how we spent our time in the first place. This affects our productivity in the long run: we make more mistakes because we don’t properly encode the lessons we learned the first time we messed up. We also accumulate less knowledge, which, when we do knowledge work for a living, sets us back in the long run.

  Constantly shifting our attentional spotlight to focus on one thing and then another and then another not only prevents the formation of memories but also undermines our productivity. Research shows that the more often we fill our attention to the brim, the longer it takes us to switch between tasks, the less we’re able to filter out irrelevant information on the fly, and the poorer we become at suppressing the urge to switch between tasks in the first place.

  As I mentioned back in chapter 0, when we’re working in front of a computer—a device that’s obviously chock full of novel things to focus on—on average, we work for just forty seconds before we’re either interrupted or distracted (or in other words, interrupt ourselves). This number becomes even more concerning when you consider the fact that our phone is by our side and interrupting us as well. Needless to say, our best work happens beyond this forty-second mark—nearly every single important task takes more than forty seconds of focused attention to do well.*

  I’ve devoted an entire chapter later in the book to dealing with these distractions and interruptions, but here’s a quick tip: one of the best things you can do for your productivity is launch the settings app on your phone and scroll through the notification settings for each app. Shut off all the ones that aren’t absolutely necessary. Do the same on your computer and tablet if you frequently find your focus derailed as you use these devices. Which interruptions are truly important, and which are preventing you from getting past this forty-second mark? Most of them aren’t worth it—this is why I’ve deleted email on my phone entirely.

  On top of the obvious productivity toll of continually interrupting ourselves, we’re also not that good at shifting our attention. Even when our attentional space is relatively clear and focused on just one task, there are deep costs associated with switching quickly to another. According to Sophie Leroy, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Washington, it’s not possible for us to seamlessly switch attention from one task to another. Leroy coined the term “attention residue” to describe the fragments of the previous task that remain in our attentional space after we shift to another activity: “It could be that you’re sitting in a meeting and your mind keeps going to a project you were working on right before the meeting, or something you anticipate doing right after the meeting. It’s having that divided attention, where part of your brain is thinking about those other ongoing projects that you have. This is what makes it so difficult to devote yourself to what you’re supposed to be doing in the present.” This attention residue keeps our mind continuing to evaluate, problem-solve, reflect, and ruminate about a previous task long after we’ve transitioned to the next.

  Switching becomes easier only once we finish a task—especially when time pressure, like a deadline, motivates us to get the task done. “By contrast,” Leroy explains, “if you work on something and you don’t really have to rush, but you get it done, your brain can keep thinking about ‘What else should I have done?’ or ‘Is there another way to do this task?’ or ‘Maybe I could have done better.’ Even though the task is completed, it’s hard for your brain to get closure in general.” Since our brain is no longer motivated to complete these loose-deadline tasks, Leroy found that “the mental activation of the goal [diminishes].” Time pressure narrows our focus on the task, restricting us from considering a number of more creative ways to complete it. We don’t question our approach as much, because we haven’t stepped back to consider the alternatives. This makes it easier to switch.

  All this raises a question: Just how severe is the productivity cost of switching? Switching does make your work more stimulating, and its costs may be worth bearing if your work takes only 5 percent longer and you make only the occasional mistake. In practice, though, the cost is usually much greater. One study found that when we continually switch between tasks, our work takes 50 percent longer, compared with doing one task from start to completion. If you
’re working on a pressure- or deadline-free project, consider taking a break before starting something else so more of that attentional residue can dissipate. As far as your productivity is concerned, the best time to take a break is after you’ve finished a big task.

  THE QUALITY OF YOUR ATTENTION

  Intention is the bouncer of your attentional space—it lets in the productive objects of attention and keeps the distractions out. Few things will benefit your overall quality of life more than focusing with intention. It isn’t possible to work and live with intention 100 percent of the time—demands get in the way, our focus shifts, and our attentional space overflows—but we can maintain our intention for enough of the day to accomplish a lot more than we would otherwise.

  This chapter has been largely theoretical. In order to put its advice into practice, you’ll need to do several things: set intentions more often, modify your environment to be less distracting, overcome the mental resistance you have to certain tasks, eliminate distractions before they derail you, and clear the distractions inside your own head. The subsequent chapters cover each of these ideas in turn, but understanding the principles behind them is essential.

  Choosing where your attention is focused and maintaining a clear attentional space accomplishes several things at once. You will

  accomplish what you intend to much more often;

  focus more deeply, because you become a better defender of your attentional space;

  remember more, because you’re able to more deeply process what you’re doing;