Hyperfocus

by Chris Bailey

  Hyperfocus on email. If you work in an environment that demands that you be highly responsive to emails, try hyperfocusing while answering your messages. Set a timer for twenty minutes, and in that time, blow through as many emails as you possibly can. Even if you receive an extraordinary number of messages, hyperfocusing on your inbox for twenty minutes, even as often as at the top of each hour, will enable you to get back to people quickly and allow you to still accomplish meaningful work the rest of the time. Plus, at most, the senders will have to wait only forty to sixty minutes for a response.

  Limit points of contact. It takes only ten seconds to carry out one of the most important productivity tactics: deleting the email app on your phone. I have an email app only on my distractions device and on my computer.

  Keep an external to-do list. Your email application is the worst possible place to keep a to-do list—it’s distracting and overwhelming, and new stuff is constantly popping up, which makes it difficult to prioritize tasks and tell what’s truly important. A task list—where you simply keep a tally of what you have to get done today, preferably with your three daily intentions at the top—is simpler and much more powerful. While it takes an extra step to move your actionable emails to a separate list, doing so will leave you feeling much less overwhelmed and will enable you to better organize what’s on your plate.

  Sign up for two email accounts. I have two email addresses: one that’s public facing, and a private one for my closest colleagues. While I check my public facing account once a day, I batch-check the other inbox a few times throughout the day. In select cases, this is a strategy worth adopting.

  Take an “email holiday.” If you’re hunkering down on a big project, set up an autoresponder explaining that you’re on a one- or two-day “email holiday” and that you’re still in the office and can be reached by phone or in person for urgent requests. People are far more understanding of this strategy than you may think.

  Use the five-sentence rule. In order to save your time and respect your email recipient’s time, keep each message you write to five sentences or less, and add a note to your email signature explaining that you’re doing so. If you feel the urge to write anything longer, use that as an opportunity to pick up the phone. This may save you from engaging in an unnecessarily protracted email exchange.

  Wait before sending important messages. Not every email is worth sending immediately—this is particularly true when you find yourself in an emotionally charged state when drafting a reply. Some responses, you might ultimately decide, aren’t worth sending at all. For important messages, heated exchanges, or emails that require more thought, give yourself time to respond—and let your mind wander to let new, better, and more creative ideas rise to the surface.

  However we deal with it, email remains one of the most stressful elements of our work. One study that had participants go without email observed that after a period of just one week, their heart-rate variability changed as they became significantly less stressed. The subjects interacted more often with people, spent longer working on tasks, multitasked less, and became much more focused. The absence of email allowed people to work slowly and more deliberately. When the experiment ended, participants described the experience as liberating, peaceful, and refreshing. While it would be impossible to get rid of email completely, try the tactics above and experiment with what works best for you.

  Meetings

  After email, meetings are one of the biggest distractions we face throughout the day. They also consume an inordinate amount of time. A recent study found that, on average, knowledge workers spend 37 percent of their time in meetings—which means that if you work an eight-hour day, you typically spend three hours daily in meetings.

  Meetings are remarkably costly—gather even a small group of people in a conference room for an hour, and you can easily lose an entire day’s worth of work. That’s not counting the time it takes everyone to switch his or her attention to and from what’s being discussed. There’s nothing inherently wrong with such gatherings, but pointless meetings are one of the largest productivity drains in the modern office.

  Here are four of my favorite ways to reel in the number of meetings you attend and make the ones you do take part in more productive:

  Never attend a meeting without an agenda. Ever. A meeting without an agenda is a meeting without a purpose. Whenever I’m invited to a meeting without an agenda, regardless of whom it’s with, I’ll ask for the objective. Very frequently, whoever scheduled it will find that the purpose can be accomplished with a couple of emails or a phone call. Push back on any meeting without an agenda—your time is too valuable.

  Question every recurring meeting on your calendar. We often fail to question the value of routine meetings. Sift through the next month or two on your calendar, and consider which recurring meetings are truly worth your time and attention. Some may be more valuable than they seem on the surface, especially when they enable you to connect and learn more about what your team is doing, but just as many aren’t. Some may be difficult to get out of, but taking a few minutes to gracefully ease your way out will save hours later on.

  Challenge the attendance list. Does everybody invited need to be there? The answer is usually no. If you’re a manager or team leader, or just want to save someone time, let certain participants whose presence isn’t critical know that while they’re definitely welcome, their attendance is optional if they have something else important to work on.

  Hyperfocus on meetings. Engaging can be tough when meetings consume more of your time than they do your attention and energy. But if you do decide a meeting is worth attending, or you can’t get out of it, enjoy it! Leave your phone or your computer behind and focus on what everyone is saying, contribute what you can, and whenever you can, help move things along so that everyone can leave early. You may end up getting a lot of value out of the meeting after all.

  Some of the best productivity strategies you’ll adopt will seem obvious in hindsight, and I’d include the above suggestions in that category—each of them is a matter of common sense. However, the great benefit of any productivity book (though, granted, I’m a bit biased) is that it allows you to step back from your work to notice what you could be doing differently. As the saying goes, common sense isn’t always common action.

  The Internet

  Quite a few of the distractions I’ve discussed in this section have something in common: they stem from the internet. As powerful a tool as the internet is, it distracts and interrupts us and can lead us to spend a lot of time on autopilot mode. Just as our mind wanders while we work, we often surf the internet in active daydreaming mode, switching among websites and apps without intention.

  While reducing distractions and creating a distraction-free mode will go a long way toward helping you work with more intention, it’s often worth taking this even a step further and disconnecting from the internet entirely. This can be beneficial not only at work. Being disconnected from the internet for a twelve-hour period at home is nothing short of refreshing. When you’re traveling, you’ll never be so productive and invigorated as after you decide not to buy access to the internet on a bus or a plane. You spend about half of your online time procrastinating—the benefits of being connected often simply aren’t worth how much longer everything takes.

  Don’t just take my word for it: try disconnecting completely for a period of twenty-four hours this Sunday, and encourage your family to do the same. Instead of ponying up for internet access on the plane the next time you travel, work on an offline project that is important but not urgent. Reflect afterward: How restored do you feel? How much were you able to accomplish? If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably be motivated to limit your access to the internet in the future too.

  SIMPLIFYING YOUR ENVIRONMENT

  Several years ago I worked in the recruitme
nt department of a large company. One of my coworkers, Penny, kept a small bowl of jelly beans on her desk. This in and of itself wasn’t remarkable—but what I did find remarkable was the fact that she ate almost none of them. It’s not that she didn’t like jelly beans—she just wasn’t tempted that much by food. Each day she’d nibble at a few, leaving the rest for anyone who happened to stop by.

  I probably ate 90 percent of those jelly beans. Every time I walked by Penny’s office, I’d grab a small handful of candy—an amount that was always, at least in my eyes, asymptotically close to the socially acceptable limit. If I had a similar bowl in my office, I don’t think it would have lasted the afternoon. (This past Friday, my fiancée and I hosted a party, and we had two bags of chips left over. I ate both within two days.)

  My friends are often surprised when I share stories like this—as someone who researches and experiments with productivity as a full-time job, I’m pretty sure some of them expect me to have a superhuman level of self-control. But much as I do to resist digital distractions when writing, I try to deal with other temptations in my life ahead of time. Because food is my biggest weakness, I modify my external environment to avoid keeping any unhealthy snacks in the house, and if they are around, I ask someone to hide them.

  Whether with food or distractions, we’re highly influenced by our external environment. Takeout menus stuck on your refrigerator are a reminder that tasty, unhealthy food is only a call away—just as keeping cut-up vegetables and hummus in the fridge will remind you to eat healthier. Posting your three daily intentions in a visible place will remind you to work on what’s actually important throughout the day. Keeping a TV in your bedroom will remind you that a world of news and entertainment can be accessed with just the press of a button—an object of attention much more enticing than sleep. Facing your couches and chairs toward the TV, instead of toward one another, will have a similarly tempting effect. Leaving your phone on the table when eating breakfast will introduce an environmental cue that reminds you a world of distraction awaits.*

  External environmental cues can affect us in remarkable ways. One study observed coffee shop patrons conversing with one another and discovered that those who kept their phone in front of them checked it every three to five minutes, “regardless of whether it rang or buzzed.” As the study put it, “Even when they are not in active use or buzzing, beeping, ringing, or flashing, [our phones] are representative of [our] wider social network and a portal to an immense compendium of information.” Another study concluded, somewhat sadly, that the “mere presence of a cell phone placed innocuously in the visual field of participants was found to interfere with closeness, connection, and relationship quality.”

  So often these cues in our environment pull us away from what we intend to accomplish—and, on a personal level, make our experiences less meaningful. Environmental cues don’t actively interrupt us, like notifications, but they can do just as much harm to our productivity and personal life. This is especially the case when we look around for a novel distraction from a complex task. Our working environment should hold as few of these distracting cues as possible. When we keep our phone, tablet, and television in another room, we are derailed less often, become accustomed to working in a less stimulating environment, and ensure the environment around us is not more attractive than what we intend to focus on.

  By eliminating the novel cues in our working environment, we give ourselves the ability to focus for much longer. It’s worth becoming deliberate about the cues you allow into your environment and questioning how they might affect your productivity.*

  Since observing how much time and attention I waste on devices like my tablet and smartphone, I’ve rarely kept them in my external environment, unless they serve a purpose. My tablet is currently in another room, and my phone is on a table across my office, well out of reach.* There’s a lot of stuff in front of me: a meditation cushion, a pair of adjustable dumbbells, several plants, a cup of matcha tea, pictures of family, a fidget cube, a whiteboard, and my turtle, Edward, basking on her* rock. These things won’t derail my attention for long—they simply aren’t that complex—so, unlike a smartphone, they can’t completely hijack my attention. If I do get distracted by them, it’s much easier to notice that my mind has wandered, and it’s easier for me to get back on track.

  Novel objects of attention threaten to invade your attentional space and prevent you from focusing completely on any one thing.

  To modify your environment to be more conducive to working or living, you should eliminate objects of attention that will potentially derail your focus.

  Doing this is actually pretty simple:

  Take stock of the distractions around you. This is especially important in the place where you focus on your most complex work. Make a list of all potential distractions—everything from the tablet you keep by your desk to a coworker sharing your cubicle. Then consider: Which of these do you find more attractive than your work?

  Distance yourself. Just as with distractions, it’s not possible to tame all environmental cues in advance—but you can control most. Make a plan to remove attractive objects of attention from your environment so you’re not tempted by them.

  Introduce more productive cues into your environment. Not all environmental cues are bad, and no one wants to work in a sterile environment. Plants, for example, have been shown to have a calming effect—we evolved to feel good in nature, not in cubicles. Hanging a whiteboard in your environment may prompt you to brainstorm your thoughts and is a useful place to write your three daily intentions. Lining up your favorite books on an office shelf might remind you of ideas as you work. Keeping a fidget cube by your side is a cue to occasionally take a break, daydream, and consider new ideas. Having a book on your nightstand, instead of your phone, will encourage you to read more. Storing your fruit in a bowl on the table, instead of in your refrigerator, will prompt you to eat healthier.

  If you ask people in what places they’re most productive, few will answer “The office.” In fact, most people will name any place but the office—including their favorite coffee shop, an airport, the train, or their home office. The reason for this, I’d argue, is that these environments contain fewer cues for all we have to get done: we don’t overhear coworkers chatting about the projects we’re working on; we don’t walk by the meeting rooms where we regularly share progress reports. Mixing up where we work often lets us focus on what we intend to accomplish, without distracting cues.

  The cleanliness of your environment is also important. Make sure you tidy your space when you’re done with it—coming home to a mess of dishes in the sink and random objects strewn all over the floor will instantly stress you out, reminding you of all the things you still have to do. The same applies when you finish working for the day: tidy the papers on your desk, close the windows on your computer, sort files on your desktop, and act on and archive each email you received that day. When you sit down at your desk the next morning, you’ll be able to focus immediately on your intentions, instead of becoming stressed about the previous day’s progress. Decluttering your digital environment is just as important as decluttering your physical one.

  As you’ve probably found, environmental cues can also help our future selves. After I set my three overarching intentions for the following day at the end of the day prior, I write them on my whiteboard so they’re what I see first thing in the morning. If I need to remember to bring a few documents to a meeting, I’ll put them by the door so I see them as I leave.

  MUSIC

  There are an awful lot of factors in the environment that affect focus—even office temperature influences productivity to some degree.* Before getting to how your internal, mental environment influences your productivity, I want to zero in on one more external factor. It may be something you work with already: music.

  While researching Hyperfocus, I interviewed one of the most renown
ed musicians of our time, one who has sold more music than Prince, Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, or Bob Dylan. The man has almost single-handedly crafted the soundtrack to countless childhoods, and his videos easily attract millions of YouTube views.

  However, while you may recognize his music, you likely won’t know Jerry Martin’s name. Jerry composed the music scores for video games such as The Sims and SimCity—games that have collectively sold well over 100 million copies worldwide. He’s also created soundtracks for Apple, General Motors, and NBA commercials. Jerry’s music is the perfect place to start when looking at how music influences productivity, as he has created some of the most productive soundtracks in existence.

  Research suggests that the most productive music has two main attributes: it sounds familiar (because of this, music that is productive for you may differ from your coworkers’ choices), and it’s relatively simple. Jerry’s music hits both of these notes. It sounds comfortably familiar, since it’s heavily influenced by famous composers like George Gershwin. It contains no words to distract you, and it’s simple. As Martin told me, “When you put too much structure in music, you tend to focus on it. The best kind of music exists in the background—there’s really not much going on when you listen closely. The music is linear, changing without you knowing it, and is supporting your work in the game.” For my own part, I love writing to songs on repeat and have been listening to the same depressing Ed Sheeran tune for the last hour.