Hyperfocus

by Chris Bailey

  How many tasks, commitments, ideas, and other unresolved issues you’re keeping in your head.

  How frequently you practice meta-awareness (checking what’s already consuming your attention).

  As we’ll discuss, even your mood and diet can influence hyperfocus. For these reasons and more, everyone has a different starting point when it comes to entering the mode.

  Ironically, when I first started exploring the research on how we best manage our attention, I could hardly focus for more than a few minutes before becoming distracted. This is often the case when we continually seek novel objects of attention and work in a distracting environment.

  While experimenting with the research, I’ve been able to steadily increase the amount of time I can hyperfocus, and I’ve grown accustomed to working with fewer distractions. I wrote the sentence you’re now reading near the end of a forty-five-minute hyperfocus session—my third of the day. These sessions have enabled me to write exactly 2,286 words in around two hours. (This is one of the fun parts about writing a book about productivity: you can verify that your methods actually work by using them to write the book itself.) The third session was my last hyperfocus block, and between those periods I caught up on email, enjoyed checking social media, and had a quick chat with a coworker or two.

  But right now isn’t one of those times. And focusing on just one thing—writing these words—is what has allowed me to be so productive over the last forty-five minutes. It’ll work for you too.

  CHAPTER

  4

  TAMING DISTRACTIONS

  FORTY SECONDS

  Two fascinating experts I had the chance to speak with while writing this book were Gloria Mark and Mary Czerwinski. Mark is a professor of information science at the University of California at Irvine and is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on attention and multitasking. She has conducted attentional studies in partnership with NASA and with companies like Boeing, Intel, IBM, and Microsoft. Czerwinski, a principal researcher at Microsoft, is one of the leading experts on how people and computers interact.* Her work, and my conversations with her, color most of this chapter. The two scientists have teamed up to conduct scores of studies into our relationship with technology on a daily basis.

  What I love the most about their work is that they specialize in what is called in situ research, conducting studies in actual workplaces on real workers. To measure how stressed participants felt after multitasking or doing email, Mark and Czerwinski strapped monitors to them to wear twenty-four hours a day to chart their heart-rate variability—a scientifically validated measure of stress. With their permission, Mark and Czerwinski installed a logging program on participants’ computers to observe exactly how often they switched between tasks—every forty seconds. Shockingly, we interrupt ourselves even more often when we keep apps like IM and Skype open—every thirty-five seconds.

  Their work is worth calling out for a number of reasons. First, in situ research is much more difficult to conduct—it took Mark six years to find an organization that would let her study employees when they went without email for a week, for example—but the approach is particularly worthwhile. As she explained to me, “As opposed to taking someone into a laboratory and setting up artificial conditions to simulate the world, you’re going into the world, and observing things as they actually are.”

  Second, their research is worth examining because it’s groundbreaking. By far my favorite of the studies they conducted was the forty-second task-switching finding I cited above. So often we go from being totally productive and immersed in our work to interrupting ourselves to do something unrelated and far less important. We interrupt a meaningful conversation with a friend to check our phone; we set aside writing a report to initiate a pointless IM chat; we stop building an Excel worksheet to visit with an office colleague for no good reason.

  Another study they conducted found that we switch between computer applications 566 times during the average workday. This figure includes distractions that have nothing to do with our work itself—we check Facebook, for example, an average of 21 times a day. (This average includes every subject in the study, some of whom didn’t look at Facebook at all. When you calculate the average among people who visited Facebook at least once, it almost doubles, to 38 daily checks.)

  Our work obviously suffers from these distractions, and we fail to enter into a hyperfocused state. We compensate by working faster and more frantically, which affects the quality of what we produce and stresses us out. And perhaps most important, we fail to take control of, and deliberately manage, our attention.

  Interruptions that are in some way related to a project we’re working on don’t derail our productivity as severely—if someone sends us a message with information relevant to a report we’re preparing, for example, we can refocus with relative ease. But we rarely have just one project on our plate—on average, we’re juggling about ten simultaneously.

  Your email and message notifications may be worth keeping on if you and your team are collaborating on the same project in crunch mode, but under most circumstances this isn’t the case. The costs of an unrelated interruption can be massive: it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to resume working on an activity after we’re interrupted, and before resuming that activity, we work on an average of 2.26 other tasks. We don’t simply attend to the distraction or interruption and then return to the original task—we become distracted a second time before doing so.*

  Once you become aware of how frequently you interrupt yourself, it’s hard to go back to working the same way again. This is why it is critical to manage your attentional space wisely. You can focus for so much longer by taming distractions ahead of time.*

  WHY WE LOVE DISTRACTIONS

  There is a simple reason why we fall victim to distractions. Even though we know they’re unproductive, in the moment they are much more enticing than our work. When our brain is even slightly resisting a task, it hunts for more attractive things it could do instead.

  Let your mind be for a few seconds, and you’ll find that it gravitates to more captivating (and usually less important) objects of attention than what you should be focusing on.

  We can’t even go to the bathroom anymore without mindlessly distracting ourselves. I’d genuinely love to see how the duration of our bathroom breaks has changed over time—I’d wager a guess that they’ve at least doubled now that we carry around smartphones.*

  Our drive toward distractions is made worse by our brain’s built-in novelty bias and the fact that the websites and apps we frequent offer a hit of mindless stimulation and validation each time we visit them. You probably have a few notifications waiting each time you open Twitter—who shared your last post, new people who have followed you, and so on. It’s hard to resist the urge to check the site throughout the day, knowing another small hit of validation is just a click away. Even if you have no messages waiting, the possibility that you could have some draws you back. I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago for this very reason.

  I’m typing these words in one window on my computer screen, but I know that, in no time at all, it’s possible to open another that could provide hours of distraction. Writing is a difficult task that my brain resists. I love the result, but the process takes a lot more focus and energy than checking social media, answering email, or checking the news. If I don’t disable computer distractions ahead of time, I might as well wave good-bye to my productivity.

  As a small experiment, I didn’t block any distractions on my computer this morning. Left to my own devices, I bounced around an endless loop of stimulating websites for thirty minutes. Looking at my browsing history, I had visited

  Twitter;

  Reddit (specifically the mechanical keyboard “subreddit”);

  several news websites, including Feedly, The New York Times, CNN, The Verge, and MacRumors;

&nb
sp; my second Twitter account;

  email (I have three email accounts and checked them each a time or two); and

  the Amazon page for my first book, to check how well it was selling and to see if it had any new customer reviews.

  It’s also worth noting that I checked these websites after meditating for twenty-five minutes—a ritual that usually enables me to act with more intention. Chances are you have your own list of distracting websites and apps you frequent when you’re resisting a task.*

  The above anecdote alone should dispel any notion that, as a productivity expert, I have a superhuman level of self-control. What I am better at is managing my impulses ahead of time. After choosing how long you’ll focus, eliminating distractions is the second step of hyperfocus. Eliminating distractions before you hunker down on a task makes focusing infinitely easier, as important tasks fill your attentional space quite naturally when there is nothing competing with them. Given that distractions have the potential to derail our productivity so frequently, and for so long, it’s imperative that we deal with them ahead of time—before we have to expend precious willpower to resist their allure.

  THE FOUR TYPES OF DISTRACTIONS

  In chapter 1 I introduced the four types of work tasks: productive tasks that are either necessary or purposeful, and unproductive tasks that are either unnecessary or distracting. In this section, we’ll focus on the distracting tasks that are fun and unproductive.

  I define a “distraction” as anything that can direct us away from our intentions. In this respect, distractions and interruptions are much the same thing, because they both distance us from what we intend to accomplish. Some interruptions are essential—such as a piece of information you receive that’s related to what you’re working on in that moment. But most of them are worth taming ahead of time.

  If we zoom in on the “distracting work” quadrant back in the first chapter, we can divide it up based on two criteria: whether or not we have control over the distractions and whether we find them annoying or fun.

  If you allocated your professional activities into the four-typesof-work grid in chapter 1, use the tasks in the distracting quadrant as a starting point to fill out the grid on the next page. There will be a number of items to add—your distractions grid should contain every single thing, no matter how small, that draws you away from your intentions in the moment. It should also include distractions that aren’t specifically work related—such as the news and social media websites you visit as you work. I won’t ask you to do many exercises as you read this book, but when I do include them, it’s definitely for a good reason. (I’ve uploaded printable versions of both charts to this book’s website: hyperfocusbook.com.)

  To illustrate what a filled-out grid looks like, here are the typical distractions that throw off my intentions throughout the course of a day:

  Let’s start with the top two quadrants—how to deal with distractions and interruptions that we can’t control.

  There are two places from which distractions originate—ourselves and others—and both are important to deal with ahead of time. We can’t prevent all distractions from arising—even if we closed our office door with the intent to hyperfocus for a couple of hours, we’d still receive phone calls and the occasional knock at the door. Many distractions are preventable, but many aren’t, at least not without incurring large social costs. Research shows, however, that we interrupt ourselves just as much as we are interrupted by other people.* As Gloria Mark expressed it, “Simply looking at how we can break off external interruptions really only solves half the problem.”

  Distractions from others aren’t quite as damaging as the times we interrupt ourselves. It takes us an average of twenty-nine minutes to resume a task after we have interrupted our own work—however, we get back on track around six minutes more quickly if we’re interrupted by someone else. Whether it’s twenty-nine minutes or twenty-three minutes, we’re still missing out on a lot of productivity. This is one of myriad reasons why periodically checking what’s occupying our attentional space is so helpful. When we notice distractions have veered us off course, we waste less time on distracting tasks and get back on track more quickly.

  While we can’t prevent interruptions from arising, we can control how we respond to them. The best way to deal with annoying tasks that we can’t keep from hijacking our attentional space—office visitors, loud colleagues, and unnecessary meetings included—is to keep our original intention in mind and get back to working on it as soon as possible.

  We should also be more deliberate about how we respond to the fun distractions we can’t control. Of all the advice I offer in this book, this is the tactic I’ve struggled with the most. I’m often so gung-ho in accomplishing my intentions that I become rigid and grumpy when I’m interrupted—regardless of how enjoyable the interruption might be. As I’ve found, though, the best possible way to respond to pleasurable, controllable distractions—like team lunches and calls from loved ones when I’m in the middle of something—is to make a concerted effort to embrace and actually allow myself to enjoy them but still get back on track when I’m able. Fretting over things you simply can’t control is a waste of time, energy, and attention. I’ve gradually learned to use these interruptions as a cue to lighten up a bit and embrace whatever fun derailed my productivity—while periodically recalling my original intention so I can get back on track when I have the opportunity.

  DISTRACTION-FREE MODE

  Most distractions fall into the category of ones we actually can control, which should therefore be tamed in advance.

  Over time, I’ve developed two modes of working:

  A distraction-free mode, which I enter whenever I’m about to hyperfocus.

  A regular, reduced-distraction working mode, where I work with a manageable number of distractions throughout the day.

  Over the course of the day, we alternate between doing two types of work: focus work and collaborative work. Focus work benefits from all the attention we can bring to it—the less we’re distracted, the more deeply we’re able to focus, and the more productive we become. This allows us, as author Cal Newport has put it, to do “deep work.”

  The breakdown of how much focus and collaborative work you do varies depending on your job. If you’re an administrative assistant, your work may involve 90 percent collaboration and 10 percent focus work. If you’re a writer, your work may require 90 percent focus work and 10 percent collaboration. Ask yourself: Roughly what breakdown does your job have overall?

  Collaborative work, on the other hand, involves interacting with other people and being available in case you’re needed. The more you and your team are available for one another, the more productive your team as a whole becomes. When engaged in collaborative work, it’s best to enter into reduced-distraction mode, in which you’ve tamed your largest distractions but are still accessible when you’re needed.

  Let’s tackle the more intense, distraction-free mode first.

  Creating a distraction-free mode enables you to eliminate almost every controllable distraction in advance so you can hyperfocus on your most important tasks. By removing every object of attention that’s potentially more stimulating and attractive than what you intend to do, you give your brain no choice but to work on that task.

  I’m writing these words in my own distraction-free mode. To enter this mode and hyperfocus, I . . .

  launch a distraction-blocking app on my computer, which prevents me from accessing the websites that derail my productivity—email, social media sites, Amazon, and every other app and website I’ve specified on a block list. I specify the duration of time I want to hyperfocus, and if I do want to access any blocked sites during that period, I have to physically restart my computer. Since most of my work is done on a computer, this is easily the most important measure I take. I also put my computer in “do not
disturb” mode so I’m not distracted as notifications come in;

  put my phone in “do not disturb” mode and keep it out of sight or in another room so I’m not tempted to check it;

  grab a coffee if I’m not going to bed in the next ten hours (again, it takes caffeine an average of eight to fourteen hours to metabolize out of your system); and

  put on noise-canceling headphones so I’m not distracted by sounds in my environment. I don’t always use them in my office or if I’m working out of a hotel room, but I’ll do so without fail if I’m hyperfocusing on a plane or at a coffee shop.

  Which distractions derail your productivity over the course of a day? How many of them can you disable simultaneously with a blocking app or some other tactic? Write a quick plan, like the one above, that will guide you in dealing with these distractions ahead of time. When you find your attention getting derailed, reflect on what caused it so you can disable that distraction the next time around—for example, when I’m distracted by a new website or app while in my distraction-free mode, I’ll immediately add that site to my block list.

  Here are a few more suggestions for creating your distraction-free mode:

  We’re only beginning to understand how traits such as conscientiousness, neuroticism, and impulsiveness work together to determine how distractible we are. These traits also determine how much stress the use of distraction blockers may cause. If you find you become anxious with a blocker enabled, you may decide that you want to resort to using it only when you’re working on a task that’s especially onerous or when you have less energy (and therefore less of an ability to resist distractions).