Hyperfocus

by Chris Bailey

  experience less guilt and doubt, knowing you’ve worked with intention;

  waste less time working on unimportant things;

  fall victim to fewer distractions—both external and internal;

  experience greater mental clarity, reduced stress, and fewer feelings of being overwhelmed;

  feel a stronger purpose behind your work, because you’ve chosen what’s worthy of your attention (working with intention also prevents you from experiencing feelings of “dullness,” which stem from having a lack of purpose); and

  develop deeper relationships and friendships as you spend more attention, not just time, with people.

  There are numerous ways to measure the quality of your attention, but I’ve developed three measures to track my own progress. You can use these yardsticks to measure your progress as you adopt the tactics in this book into your life:

  How much of your time you spend intentionally

  How long you can hold your focus in one sitting

  How long your mind wanders before you catch it

  Now it’s time to get tactical.

  CHAPTER

  3

  THE POWER OF HYPERFOCUS

  INTRODUCING HYPERFOCUS

  Think back to your last uber-productive work day, one when you accomplished a huge amount. On that day, chances are a number of things were true.

  For starters, you were probably focusing on only one thing—maybe out of necessity, driven by a deadline. This one task filled your attentional space.

  You were also likely able to dodge distractions and quickly got back on track every time an interruption did come up. While you were working with intense focus, you weren’t working frantically, constantly switching between tasks. When your attention wandered—which it still did often, but less than usual—you quickly brought it back to the task at hand.

  Your work was probably also at a comfortable level of difficulty: not so hard as to be intimidating; not so easy that it could be done out of habit. Because of this, you may have even become completely engrossed in your work, entering a “flow” state, where each time you looked at the clock another hour had flown by, even though you experienced that time as only fifteen minutes. Miraculously, you managed to accomplish the equivalent of several hours of work in each of them.

  Finally, once you overcame the hurdle of getting started, you experienced little resistance to continuing. Even though you were working hard, you weren’t exhausted afterward; curiously, you were less tired than after slower workdays. Your motivation remained strong even if you had to stop working because you got hungry or had a meeting or it was time to head home.

  On this day you activated your brain’s most productive mode: hyperfocus.*

  When you hyperfocus on a task, you expand one task, project, or other object of attention . . .

  . . . so it fills your attentional space completely.

  You enter this mode by managing your attention deliberately and purposefully: by choosing one important object of attention, eliminating distractions that will inevitably arise as you work, and then focusing on just that one task. Hyperfocus is many things at once: it’s deliberate, undistracted, and quick to refocus, and it leads us to become completely immersed in our work. It also makes us immensely happy. Recall how energized you were by your work the last time you found yourself in this state. In hyperfocus you might even feel more relaxed than you usually are when you work. Allowing one task or project to consume your full attentional space means this state doesn’t make you feel stressed or overwhelmed. Your attentional space doesn’t overflow, and your work doesn’t feel nearly as chaotic. Since hyperfocus is so much more productive, you can slow down a bit and still accomplish an incredible amount in a short period of time.

  This mode may feel like an elusive luxury in the on-the-go environments in which we work and live today. But nothing could be further from the truth. Hyperfocus means you’re less busy, because you’re permitting fewer objects into your attentional space. Picking which tasks to work on ahead of time lets you focus on what’s actually important in the moment. This has never been more crucial than in our knowledge-work environments, where not all tasks are created equal. You’ll often accomplish more in one hour of hyperfocus than in an entire day spent filling your attentional space to the brim with multiple—and often undeliberate—concerns. This is counterintuitive but absolutely essential advice: the more demands made on your time, the more essential it becomes to choose what—and how many—things you pay attention to. You’re never too busy to hyperfocus.

  When it comes to your most important tasks, the fewer things you pay attention to, the more productive you become.

  HYPERFOCUSING ON HABITS

  The most important aspect of hyperfocus is that only one productive or meaningful task consumes your attentional space. This is simply nonnegotiable. Here’s why: the most critical tasks, projects, and commitments benefit from every bit of extra attention. They’re usually not habits, which by default don’t often consume your full attentional space.

  This is not to say it’s impossible to hyperfocus on a habit. There is no task too small to consume your attention—if you tried hard enough, you could commit your complete attention to watching paint dry. But there are two reasons why this mental mode is best preserved for complex tasks, rather than habits.

  First, hyperfocus requires willpower and mental energy to activate, drawing from the limited supply we have to make it through the day. Because habits consume so little of our attentional space, there’s really no need to hyperfocus on them.

  Second, and more interesting, while your performance on complex tasks benefits when you focus more completely, your habitual-task performance actually suffers when you focus with your total attention.

  You may have experienced this the last time you noticed someone watching you walk, and you brought your focus to making sure you walked like a perfectly normal human being. Chances are you immediately started moving like a full-blown mechanical robot, feeling as if you were flailing all over the sidewalk. To put it bluntly, your walking performance suffered.* Or maybe the last time you went bowling you found yourself thinking about why you were scoring more points than usual—what exactly you were doing well. But then your opponents started pulling ahead and eventually won. You choked, and your performance suffered by your bringing your full attention to a game you usually play out of habit. Studies analyzing skilled typists found this same phenomenon: the more attention they brought to their typing, the slower they typed and the more mistakes they made. When doing such habitual tasks, it’s best to not focus completely on what you’re doing.

  Save hyperfocus for your most complex tasks—things that will actually benefit from your complete attention, such as writing a report, mapping your team’s budget, or having a meaningful conversation with a loved one.

  A few marvelous things happen when you do so. First, because you’re focusing on a single task, you likely have some attentional space to spare—enough that you are also able to keep your original intention in mind. As a result, you are less likely to be derailed by distractions and interruptions, because you have enough awareness to notice that they are about to derail you. And maybe most important, you have enough attention to also think deeply about the task as you work. This allows you to remember and learn more, get back on track when your mind wanders, and consider alternative approaches as you solve problems. All of this will save you an immense amount of time in completing the task. One of the best ways to get more done—and done faster—is by preventing yourself from focusing on things that aren’t important.

  THE FOUR STAGES OF HYPERFOCUS

  In any given moment you’re focused on either your external environment, the thoughts in your head, or both. Engaging solely with your external environment means you’re effectively living on autopilot. You sli
p into this mode as you wait for the traffic light to change or find yourself bouncing around a loop of the same apps on your phone. When you’re engaged only with the thoughts in your head, you’re daydreaming. This can happen when you go on a quick walk without your phone, your mind wanders in the shower, or you go for a jog. You enter into hyperfocus when you engage both your thoughts and your external environment and direct them at one thing intentionally.*

  So How Do We Enter Hyperfocus Mode?

  The science suggests we pass through four states as we begin to focus. First, we’re focused (and productive). Then, assuming we don’t get distracted or interrupted, our mind begins to wander. Third, we make note of this mind wandering. This can take awhile, especially if we don’t frequently check what is consuming our attentional space. (On average, we notice about five times an hour that our mind has wandered.) And fourth, we shift our focus back to our original object of attention.

  The four stages of hyperfocus are modeled on this framework.

  To hyperfocus, you must

  choose a productive or meaningful object of attention;

  eliminate as many external and internal distractions as you can;

  focus on that chosen object of attention; and

  continually draw your focus back to that one object of attention.

  Setting an intention for what we plan to focus on is the most important step—the more productive and meaningful the task, the more productive and meaningful your actions become. For example, if you set your intention to focus on mentoring a new employee, automating a repetitive task, or brainstorming a new product idea, you’ll be infinitely more productive than if you work intention-free and in autopilot mode.

  This same idea applies at home: the more meaningful our objects of focus, the more meaningful our life becomes. We experience the benefits of hyperfocus mode by setting such simple intentions as being present in a conversation with our partner or fully enjoying a meal with our family. We learn more, remember more, and process our actions more deeply—and our lives become more meaningful as a result. This first step to reaching hyperfocus mode is essential—intention absolutely has to precede attention.

  The second step to reaching hyperfocus is eliminating as many internal and external distractions as possible. There’s a simple reason we fall victim to distraction: in the moment, distractions are more attractive objects of attention than what we really ought to be doing. This is true both at work and at home. Email alerts that pop into the corner of our screen are usually more tempting than the task we’re doing in another window; the TV behind our partner at the pub is usually more enticing than focusing on the conversation.

  Distractions are infinitely easier to deal with in advance—by the time they appear, it’s often already too late to defend our intention against them. Internal distractions must be tamed as well—including random (and sometimes cringeworthy) memories and thoughts that bubble up as we’re trying to focus, the mental resistance we have to unappealing tasks (like doing taxes or cleaning the garage), and the times we want to focus but our mind wants to wander.

  Third, hyperfocus becomes possible when we focus on our chosen object of attention for a predetermined amount of time. This involves hunkering down for a set period that is both comfortable and feasible. The more groundwork we lay in the first two steps of hyperfocus, the more deeply and confidently we can accomplish step three.

  Fourth, and finally, hyperfocus is about drawing our attention back to the original object of attention when our mind wanders. I’ll repeat this point frequently, as it’s one of the most important ideas in this book: again, research shows that our mind wanders for 47 percent of the day. In other words, if we’re awake for eighteen hours, we’re engaged in what we’re doing for just eight of them. It’s normal for our mind to wander, but the key is to center it so we can spend time and attention on what’s actually in front of us.

  In addition, it takes an average of twenty-two minutes to resume working on a task after we’re distracted or interrupted. We fare even worse when we interrupt or distract ourselves—in these cases, it takes twenty-nine minutes to return to working on the original task. The more often we assess what’s occupying our attentional space, the quicker we’re able to get back on track. Don’t stress too much about this right now—we’ll get to specifics later in the book.

  The concept of hyperfocus can be summed up in a single tranquil sentence: keep one important, complex object of attention in your awareness as you work.

  Choosing What to Focus On

  Attention without intention is wasted energy. Intention should always precede attention—in fact, the two ideas pair perfectly. Intention setting allows us to decide how we should spend our time; focusing our attention on that task gets it done efficiently. The best way to become more productive is to choose what you want to accomplish before you begin working.

  When we set intentions, it’s important to remember that not all work tasks are created equal. Some tasks enable us to accomplish an incredible amount with every minute we spend on them. These include such goals as setting aside time to plan what main tasks you want to accomplish each day, mentoring a new employee who joined your team a month ago, and writing that book you’ve been meaning to for years. These tasks fall into the “necessary” and “purposeful” quadrants discussed in chapter 1. When you measure work in these quadrants against unnecessary and distracting tasks like attending useless meetings, catching up on your social media feeds, and repeatedly checking for new email, it’s not hard to see which are more productive. When we don’t choose which quadrants of tasks to spend time on, we fall into autopilot.

  This is not to say that we can’t “get by” in autopilot mode. By being ultraresponsive to the work that comes our way, we can stay on top of most of it and probably be productive enough to not lose our jobs. But autopilot also fails to progress our work in any meaningful way. I suspect you don’t get paid simply to play the role of “traffic cop” by moving emails, conversations, and instant messages around. Such tasks, and answering unanticipated demands that come your way, are always necessary. But whenever possible, you should take an active role in choosing where you spend your time and attention.

  If you haven’t done so already, this is a great time to create a 2 x 2 grid of your work—sorting your standard monthly tasks based on whether they’re productive or unproductive and attractive or unattractive. The ironic thing about investing in your productivity is that it’s almost impossible to do when you’re slogging it out in the office trenches. There’s simply too much to keep up with—meetings, email chains, and project deadlines included. For this reason, the best productivity tactics are the ones that require you to step back and remove yourself from your work so you have the mental space to think critically about how you should approach that work differently. That way, when you return to work, you can do it more intelligently, instead of just harder. Figuring out your four types of work tasks is one of these “stepping back” activities. Now is the best time to do so—especially before you read the very next section. It’ll take just five to ten minutes.

  In researching attention and intention over the last few years, I’ve developed a few favorite daily intention-setting rituals. Here are my top three.

  1. The Rule of 3

  You can probably skim this section if you’re familiar with material I’ve written in the past. If not, allow me to introduce the Rule of 3: at the start of each day, choose the three things you want to have accomplished by day’s end. While a to-do list is useful to capture the minutiae of the day, these three intention slots should be reserved for your most important daily tasks.

  I’ve done this little ritual every morning for several years, ever since learning about it from Microsoft’s director of digital transformation, J. D. Meier. The Rule of 3 is deceptively simple. By forcing yourself to pick just three main intentions at the start of each
day, you accomplish several things. You choose what’s important but also what’s not important—the constraints of this rule push you to figure out what actually matters. The rule is also flexible within the constraints of your day. If your calendar is packed with meetings, those commitments may dictate the scope of your three intentions, while an appointment-free day means you can set intentions to accomplish more important and less urgent tasks. When unexpected tasks and projects come your way, you can weigh those new responsibilities against the intentions you’ve already set. Because three ideas fit comfortably within your attentional space, you can recall and remember your original intentions with relative ease.

  On days when your schedule is set—such as when you’re attending a conference—you may not be able to determine how you spend your time and attention. You can, however, change how you relate to what you have to get done. For example, instead of making an intention to “attend conference talks,” opt instead to “connect with five new people at the cocktail reception.”

  Make sure to keep your three intentions where you can see them—I keep mine on the giant whiteboard in my office or, if I’m traveling, at the top of my daily to-do list, which is synced between devices in OneNote. If you’re like me, you may also find it handy to set three weekly intentions, as well as three daily personal intentions—such as disconnecting from work during dinner, visiting the gym before heading home from the office, or gathering receipts for taxes.