Hyperfocus

by Chris Bailey

  2. Your Most Consequential Tasks

  A second intention-setting ritual I follow is considering which items on my to-do list are the most consequential.

  If you have the habit of maintaining a to-do list (which I highly recommend and whose power I will discuss later in the book), take a second to consider the consequences of carrying out each task—the sum of both its short-term and long-term consequences. The most important tasks on your list are the ones that lead to the greatest positive consequences.

  What will be different in the world—or in your work or in your life—as a result of your spending time doing each of the items on your list? What task is the equivalent of a domino in a line of one hundred that, once it topples over, initiates a chain reaction that lets you accomplish a great deal?

  Another way to look at this: when deciding what to do, instead of considering just the immediate consequences of an activity, also consider the second- and third-order consequences. For example, let’s say you’re deciding whether to order a funnel cake for dessert. The immediate consequence of the decision is that you enjoy eating the cake. But the second- and third-order consequences are quite a bit steeper. A second-order consequence might be that you’ll feel terrible for the rest of the evening. Third-order consequences might include gaining weight or breaking a new diet regimen.

  This is a powerful idea to internalize, especially since the most important tasks are often not the ones that immediately feel the most urgent or productive. Writing a guide for new hires may not, in the moment, feel as valuable as answering a dozen emails, but if that guide cuts down on the time it takes to bring each new employee on board, makes her feel more welcome, and also serves to make her more productive, it is easily the most consequential thing on your list. Other consequential tasks might include automating a task that’s annoying and repetitive, disconnecting so you can focus on designing the workflow for an app you’re building, or forming an office mentorship program that lets employees easily share their knowledge.

  If you have a lot of tasks on your to-do list, ask yourself: which are the most consequential? This exercise works well in tandem with the four types of tasks in your work. Once you’ve separated them into the four quadrants of necessary, purposeful, distracting, and unnecessary, ask yourself: Out of the necessary and purposeful tasks, which have the potential to set off a chain reaction?

  3. The Hourly Awareness Chime

  Setting three daily intentions and prioritizing your most consequential tasks are great ways to be more intentional every day and week. But how can you ensure you’re working intentionally on a moment-by-moment basis?

  As far as productivity is concerned, these individual moments are where the rubber meets the road—it’s pointless to set goals and intentions if you don’t act toward accomplishing them throughout the day. My favorite way to make sure I’m staying on track with my intentions is to frequently check what’s occupying my attentional space—to reflect on whether I’m focusing on what’s important and consequential or whether I’ve slipped into autopilot mode. To do so, I set an hourly awareness chime.

  A key theme of Hyperfocus is that you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself when you do notice your brain drifting off or doing something else weird. Your mind will always wander, so consider how that might present an opportunity to assess how you’re feeling and then to set a path for what to do next. Research shows that we are more likely to catch our minds wandering when we reward ourselves for doing so. Even if you minimize one or two distractions and set just one or two intentions each day, you’re doing better than most. If you’re anything like me, your hourly awareness chime may at first reveal that you’re usually not working on something important or consequential. That’s okay—and even to be expected.

  The important thing is that you’re regularly checking what’s occupying your attentional space. Set an hourly timer on your phone, smartwatch, or another device—this will easily be the most productive interruption you receive throughout the day.

  When your hourly chime rings, ask yourself the following:

  Was your mind wandering when the awareness chime sounded?

  Are you working on autopilot or on something you intentionally chose to do? (It’s so satisfying to see this improve over time.)

  Are you immersed in a productive task? If so, how long have you spent focusing on it? (If it was an impressive amount of time, don’t let the awareness chime trip you up—keep going!)

  What’s the most consequential thing you could be doing right now? Are you working on it?

  How full is your attentional space? Is it overflowing, or do you have attention to spare?

  Are there distractions preventing you from hyperfocusing on your work?

  You don’t have to answer all of these questions—pick two or three prompts that you find most helpful, ones that will make you refocus on what’s important. Doing this hourly increases all three measures of attention quality: it helps you focus longer because you spot and prevent distractions on the horizon; you notice more often that your mind has wandered and can refocus it; and you can, over time, spend more of your day working intentionally.

  When you first start this check-in, you probably won’t fare so well and will find yourself frequently working on autopilot, getting distracted, and spending time on unnecessary and distracting tasks. That’s fine! When you do, adjust course to work on a task that’s more productive, and tame whatever distractions derailed you in that moment. If you notice the same distractions frequently popping up, make a plan to deal with them. (We’ll do this in the next chapter.)

  Try setting an hourly awareness chime for one workday this week. While at first the interruptions will admittedly be annoying, they’ll establish a valuable new habit. If you don’t like the idea of an awareness chime, try using a few cues in your environment that trigger you to think about what’s occupying your attentional space. I no longer use an hourly awareness chime, though I found it to be the most helpful method to get into the practice. Today I reflect on what I’ve been working on during a few predetermined times: each time I walk to the washroom, when I leave my desk to get water or tea, or when my phone rings. (I answer the call after a few rings, once I’ve reflected on what was occupying my attentional space.)

  HOW TO SET STRONGER INTENTIONS

  Over the last few decades Peter Gollwitzer has been one of the most renowned contributors to the field of intention. He’s perhaps best known for his groundbreaking research on the importance of not only setting intentions but also making them very specific. While we often achieve our vague intentions, specific intentions greatly increase our odds of overall success.

  Let’s say, for example, you rushed to set your personal intentions this morning and came up with this list:

  Go to the gym.

  Quit working when I get home.

  Get to bed by a reasonable time.

  I’ve deliberately made these intentions vague, but how can we make them more specific and likely to stick?

  First, it’s worth considering how effective these intentions are as I’ve formulated them. They will certainly prove to be more effective than doing nothing. In fact, Gollwitzer’s research discovered that even vague intentions like these boost your odds of successfully carrying them out by around 20 percent to 30 percent. So, if you’re lucky, you might cross another one or two off the list. Not bad!

  Setting more specific intentions, however, does something remarkable: it makes our odds of success much higher. In one study, Gollwitzer and his research colleague Veronika Brandstätter asked participants to set an intention to complete a difficult goal over Christmas break—such as completing a term paper, finding a new apartment, or settling a conflict with their significant other. Some students set a vague intention while others set what Gollwitzer calls an “implementation intention.” As he explain
s the term: “Make a very detailed plan on how you want to achieve what you want to achieve. What I’m arguing in my research is that goals need plans, ideally plans that include when, where, and which kind of action to move towards the goal.” In other words, if a student’s vague goal was to “find an apartment during Christmas break,” his implementation intention could be “I will hunt for apartments on Craigslist and email three apartment landlords in the weeks leading up to Christmas.”

  Comparing Gollwitzer and Brandstätter’s two participant groups is where things get interesting. A remarkable 62 percent of students who set a specific implementation intention followed through on their goals. The group that did not set an implementation intention fared a lot more poorly, following through on their original intention a third as often—a paltry 22 percent of the time. This effect, which subsequent studies validated further, was positively staggering. Setting specific intentions can double or triple your odds of success.

  With that in mind, let’s quickly turn my three vague intentions into implementation intentions:

  “Go to the gym” becomes “Schedule and go to the gym on my lunch break.”

  “Quit working when I get home” is reframed as “Put my work phone on airplane mode and my work laptop in another room, and stay disconnected for the evening.”

  “Get to bed by a reasonable time” becomes “Set a bedtime alarm for 10:00 p.m., and when it goes off, start winding down.”

  Implementation intentions are powerful in much the same way as habits. When you begin a habit, your brain carries out the rest of the sequence largely on autopilot. Once you have a game plan for an implementation intention, when you encounter the environmental cue to initiate it—your lunch break rolls around, you get home after a stressful day at work, or your bedtime alarm goes off—you subconsciously get the ball rolling to accomplish your goals. Your intentions take almost no effort to initiate. As Gollwitzer and Brandstätter put it, “action initiation becomes swift, efficient, and does not require conscious intent.” In other words, we begin to act toward our original goal automatically.

  Gollwitzer told me that the intentions do not necessarily have to be precise if they are specific enough for a person to understand and identify the situational cues: “We did studies with tennis players, and they made plans on how they want to respond with the problems that might come up in the game. Some of the tennis players were specifying ‘when I get irritated’ or ‘when I get nervous.’ That is not very specific or concrete, but it worked brilliantly because they knew what they meant with ‘nervous.’ Specific means the person can identify the critical situation.”

  There are two notable caveats to setting specific intentions. First, you have to actually care about your intentions. Implementation intentions don’t work nearly as well for goals that don’t especially matter to you or that you’ve long abandoned. If you had a goal in the 1990s to amass the world’s largest collection of Furbys, you’ll probably be a lot less motivated to achieve that goal today.

  Second, easy-to-accomplish intentions don’t have to be as specific. Deciding in advance when you’ll work on a task is significantly more important for a difficult one than when your intention is to do something simple. If it’s the weekend, and your intention is to go to the gym at least once, you don’t need to be as definite about when you’ll do so. If you’re trying to accomplish something more challenging, though, like saying no to dessert at the restaurant on Saturday, setting a more specific intention is essential. That vague intention can become more specific by planning, when you see the dessert menu, to politely decline and treat yourself to a decaf coffee instead. This caveat works well for intentions at home, but when Monday rolls around, you may need to again set more thoughtful intentions. “When the goals are tough, or when you have so many goals and it’s hard to attain them all, that’s when planning works particularly well,” Gollwitzer adds.

  STARTING A HYPERFOCUS RITUAL

  The next chapter focuses on taming the external and internal distractions that inevitably derail hyperfocus. However, before discussing these, I want to offer a few simple strategies to begin hyperfocusing on your intentions. These will become infinitely more powerful as you learn to tame the distractions in your work in advance.

  Let’s first cover how to focus, and then when. Both ideas are pretty simple.

  How to hyperfocus:

  Start by “feeling out” how long you want to hyperfocus. Have a dialogue with yourself about how resistant you feel toward the mode, particularly if you’re about to hunker down on a difficult, frustrating, or unstructured task. As an example: “Do I feel comfortable focusing for an hour? No way. Forty-five minutes? Better, but still no. Thirty minutes? That’s doable, but still . . . Okay, twenty-five minutes? Actually, I could probably do that.” It’s incredibly rewarding to experience your hyperfocus time limit increase over time. Push yourself—but not too hard. When I started practicing hyperfocus, I began with fifteen-minute blocks of time, each punctuated by a five- to ten-minute distraction break. Hyperfocusing all day would be a chore, and a few stimulating distractions are always fun, especially at first. You’ll soon become accustomed to working with fewer distractions.

  Anticipate obstacles ahead of time. If I know I have a busy few days coming up, at the beginning of the week I like to schedule my hyperfocus periods—several chunks of time throughout the week that I’ll use to focus on something important. This way, I make sure to carve out time to hyperfocus, instead of getting swept up in last-minute tasks and putting out proverbial fires. Such planning lets my coworkers and assistant know not to book me during these times, and it also reminds me when I’m committed to focus. In weeks like these, a few minutes of advance planning can save hours of wasted productivity.

  Set a timer. I usually use my phone for this, which might sound ironic, given the distractions it can bring. If these phone distractions will cause a focus black hole, either put it on airplane mode or use a watch or other timer.

  Hyperfocus! When you notice that your mind has wandered or that you’ve gotten distracted, bring your attention back to your intention. Again, don’t be too tough on yourself when this happens—this is the way your brain is wired to work. If you feel like going for longer when your timer rings—which you probably will because you’ll be on a roll—don’t stop.

  That covers the how. Here are a few suggestions that I have found work for deciding when you should hyperfocus:

  Whenever you can! Naturally, we need time for the little things, but the more you can hyperfocus, the better. Throughout the week, you should schedule as many blocks of time to hyperfocus as your work will allow, and for as long as you personally feel comfortable. We’re the most productive and happy when we work on one meaningful thing at a time, so there’s no reason not to spend as much time in this mode as we possibly can. Whenever you have an important task or project and a window in which you can work on it, don’t pass up the opportunity to hyperfocus—you’ll be missing out on a lot of productivity if you do. Naturally, because of the nature of our jobs, we often have to do a lot of collaborative work, which necessitates our being available to our colleagues. But when you’re working on a task that only you can do, it’s the perfect time to enter into hyperfocus mode.

  Around the constraints of your work. Most of us don’t have the luxury of hyperfocusing whenever we wish. Productivity is often a process of understanding our constraints. On most days we will be able to find a few opportunities to hyperfocus, and on others it simply won’t be possible. I find the latter to be especially the case while traveling, when I’m at a conference, or when I have a day full of exhausting meetings. Make sure you account for time and energy constraints—and if possible, work around these obstacles when you’re planning your week.

  When you need to work on a complex task. While I started hyperfocusing by scheduling blocks
of time into my calendar, I now enter into the mode whenever I’m working on a complex task or project that will benefit from my full attention. If I’m just checking my email, I won’t set an intention to hyperfocus, but if I’m writing, planning a talk, or attending an important meeting, I invariably do.

  Based on how averse you are to what you intend to accomplish. The more aversive you find a task or project, the more important it is to tame distractions ahead of time. You’re most likely to procrastinate on tasks that you consider boring, frustrating, difficult, ambiguous, or unstructured, or that you don’t find rewarding or meaningful. In fact, if you call to mind something you’re putting off doing, chances are it has most of these characteristics. The more aversive a task, the more important it is that we enter into a hyperfocused state so we can work on the task with intention.

  BUILDING YOUR FOCUS

  Over the next several chapters, I’ll give you the tools you need to develop your focus. As you’ll find, your ability to hyperfocus depends on a few factors, all of which affect the quality of your attention:

  How frequently you seek out new and novel objects of attention. (This is often why we initially resist a hyperfocus ritual.)

  How often you habitually overload your attentional space.

  How frequently your attention is derailed by interruptions and distractions.