by Chris Bailey
However, research also suggests that the most productive music is relative. Music occupies at least some portion of attentional space—but it occupies less when it’s familiar, simple, and also relatively quiet. As a result, music is no competition for a quiet environment when it comes to focus, but of course, music never exists in isolation.
If you’re working in a busy coffee shop, music may help obscure the conversations around you, which are much more complex and distracting than a simple and familiar melody. If a loud coworker in the adjacent cubicle is on a telephone call, it’s much more productive to throw on some noise-canceling headphones and listen to music. (A study found that overhearing one side of a phone conversation is significantly more distracting than overhearing a regular dyadic conversation—your brain works overtime to fill in the missing side of the half-alogue, so the conversation occupies more of your attentional space.)* For me, the quiet serenity offered by music on noise-canceling headphones on a loud flight is much less distracting than the roar of the plane’s engine. When I’m at a coffee shop and they inexplicably switch the soundtrack to talk radio, I’ll listen to music.
Your own experience with how music affects your productivity will vary depending on the nature of your work, your working environment, and even your personality—music impairs the performance of introverts more than extroverts, for example. However, generally speaking, if you’re looking to focus, keep the music you listen to simple and familiar.
CLEARING YOUR MIND
Of course, not all distractions are external, as we also keep a lot of distracting stuff in our heads. When writing a report, we remember we had a meeting that started ten minutes ago; when we arrive home from work, we realize we forgot to stop to pick up bread. Clearing our head of these “open loops” is critical so they don’t distract us in the moment as we’re trying to focus.
It’s impossible to write about focus and productivity without citing David Allen’s work. Allen is the author of Getting Things Done, a book with a simple premise: that our brain is for having ideas, not for holding them. An empty brain is a productive brain, and the more stuff we get out of our heads, the more clearly we think.
You’re already familiar with this idea if you keep a calendar. You’d never be able to think clearly if you tried to keep track of all of your appointments and meetings in your head. You’d forever need to devote some portion of your attentional space to upcoming events, and this would be extraordinarily stressful. Keeping a to-do list has a similar effect: each task you get out of your head and onto the list is a task that won’t pester you as you’re working on something else. You’ll be able to think more clearly—and you’ll experience less guilt about what you’re working on as a result.
Something remarkable happens when you externalize tasks and commitments: you work with almost no guilt, worry, or doubt. You experience guilt when you feel tension about your past; worry when you feel tension about your future; and doubt and stress when you feel tension about the present moment. These feelings evaporate when you set intentions and make a rough plan for how you’ll complete your important tasks. You’ll think more clearly too—externalizing what’s on your mind means tasks and commitments won’t pop into your attentional space as you’re working.
Maintaining a calendar or a to-do list turns internal distractions into external cues. You no longer need to keep in mind that you have a meeting—your calendar app will do that for you. You don’t need to remember to work on what’s important—the task list on your desk acts as a cue to remind you of what you need to get done, especially when you keep your most important daily intentions at the top.
This concept extends far beyond your tasks and appointments. Keeping a distractions list as you focus will remove distractions from your head so you can refocus more quickly and deal with them later (see chapter 0.5). If you’re a worrier, create a list of everything weighing on your mind (while scheduling a time to consider the validity of each of the entries). Capturing ideas that come to you as you let your mind rest and wander will mean you can make use of them later. Regularly reviewing a list of everything you’re waiting for—one that records the important emails, letters, packages, and phone calls you’re expecting—will get these things off your mind, too.
Some people can get by with the bare minimum—keeping a to-do list and a calendar—and find additional lists cumbersome. Others find they think most clearly when they capture every little thing weighing on their minds. I personally fall somewhere in between. Feel out your own threshold: start with setting a few intentions each day, and keep a to-do list and a calendar. Unresolved mental loops can tug at your attention throughout the day, especially when you’re immersed in your most important work. Begin closing these open loops so you can focus, and hyperfocus, more easily on your work.
Continuously capture unresolved commitments and ideas as they come up, and get into a habit of revisiting them at a set time later. This will free up a lot of attentional space to spend on better things.
WORKING WITH PURPOSE
Here is a fundamental truth about focus: your brain will invariably resist more complex tasks, especially when you’re first starting them—and when it does, you’ll look around for more novel and stimulating things to do instead. When you clear your working environment of interruptions, distractions, and cues that will tempt you away from what you intend to accomplish in the moment, you’ll stay on track. This chapter was long for a simple reason: there’s a lot of brush you need to clear before you can hyperfocus.
Recall the three measures we can use to measure the quality of our attention: how much time we spend working with intention; how long we’re able to focus on one task; and how long our mind wanders before we catch it doing so.
All three measures are supported by the tactics in this chapter:
Creating a distraction-free mode lets you carve out time to spend intentionally while eliminating the more attractive objects of attention that would ordinarily derail your focus.
Working with fewer distractions in general lets you eliminate novel objects of attention throughout the day and reclaim more of your attention for what’s important.
Utilizing both of these working modes helps you train your brain to wander less and focus longer.
Simplifying your working and living environments eliminates a slew of tempting distractions.
Clearing your head of distracting open loops lets you work more clearly and frees even more attentional space for your most productive tasks.
One final benefit of eliminating distractions in advance is gaining the freedom to work at a slower, more purposeful pace. One study, for example, found that when we text while reading something, it can take us anywhere from 22 percent to 59 percent longer to read the same passage. It doesn’t matter if you work at a slower, more deliberate pace if you’re continuously working in the right direction. What you lose in speed you make up for in intentionality.
Carving out more attentional space for what you’re doing also enables you to work with greater awareness—of what distractions you’re resisting, how you feel about your work, how much energy you have, and whether you need to recharge. In addition, you will actually notice temptations and impulses that arise, so you’ll fall victim to them less often in the future.
So far we’ve covered the four stages of hyperfocus: choosing an object of attention, eliminating distractions, focusing on a task, and getting back on track.
Now let’s talk about how you can make a habit out of setting the stage for this superproductive state of mind by increasing the size of your attentional space and overcoming your resistance to hyperfocus.
CHAPTER
5
MAKING HYPERFOCUS A HABIT
WHAT MAKES OUR MINDS WANDER
There is a wealth of research that examines why our mind wanders at the exact time we’re trying to focus. It does so signif
icantly more when
we’re feeling stressed or bored;
we’re working in a chaotic environment;
we’re dealing with and thinking about a number of personal concerns;
we’re questioning whether we’re working on the most productive or meaningful task; or
we have unused attentional space—the more we have, the more prone we are to mind-wandering episodes.
Conveniently, we’ve already discussed these factors:
Feeling stressed or bored: We experience stress when the demands of a situation exceed our ability to cope with them. By preventing attentional space overload, we ensure we have the resources needed to cope with such conditions.
Working in a chaotic environment: I define boredom as the restlessness we feel as we transition from a state of high stimulation to a lower one. In becoming accustomed to experiencing less stimulation over time—by enabling our distraction-free mode whenever we hyperfocus, and by working with fewer distractions in general—we face this stimulation gap less often, experience boredom less frequently, and make our environment less chaotic by default.
Thinking about personal concerns: Capturing our mind’s “open loops”—through a task list, a waiting-for list, or even a worry list—prevents unresolved items from weighing on our mind as we try to focus. This helps us deal better with chaotic environments and set aside personal concerns. Switching tasks less frequently also helps us think more clearly—we experience less attentional residue, which can take a toll on our limited attentional space.
Questioning whether we’re working on the best thing: Working with intention is the best way to experience fewer feelings of doubt about what we should or could be doing in any one moment. These feelings lead our minds to wander from what we’re trying to focus on.
Amount of unused attentional space: Deploying hyperfocus to work on our most complex tasks will consume more attentional space by default, which will in turn prevent our mind from wandering. The smaller the object of attention, the more likely mental wandering will occur.
The tactics in this book work for a few main reasons: while they all enable you to focus more deeply, they also safeguard your mind from wandering in the first place. Later in the book we’ll examine a few other factors that lead your mind to wander, including how tired you are and how happy you feel. (Your happiness level can impact your attention in many curious ways.)
For now, though, let’s dive deeper into the mind-wandering factor I personally find most interesting: the attentional space we have to spare.
THE POWER OF MAKING YOUR WORK HARDER
Depending on their complexity, tasks will require varying amounts of your attentional space. If you’ve ever tried to meditate and focus only on your breath for a few minutes, you might have noticed your mind wanders more than usual—far more than when you’re going for a run, carrying on a deep conversation, or watching a movie. These latter tasks are more complex and fill more of your attentional space by default.*
Consciously making your tasks more complex, and taking on more complex ones, is another powerful way to enter into a hyperfocused state, as they will consume more of your attention. This will keep you more engaged in what you’re doing and lead your mind to wander less often.
In his groundbreaking book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers intriguing insights about when we’re most likely to enter into a flow state: when the challenge of completing a task is roughly equal to our ability to do so, and we become totally immersed in the task. When our skills greatly exceed the demands of a task—such as when we do mindless data entry for several hours—we feel bored. When the demands of a task exceed our skills—such as when we’re unprepared to give a presentation—we feel anxious. When the demands of a task are roughly equal to our ability to do that task—when we’re playing an instrument, immersed in a book, or skiing down a freshly powdered slope—we’re a lot more likely to be fully engaged in what we’re doing.
If you find it difficult to become immersed in your work throughout the day, it’s worth questioning whether your tasks are difficult and complex enough. If you’re frequently bored, consider whether your job takes advantage of your unique skill set. If your mind is still frequently wandering, even after implementing the ideas in the previous chapters, it’s a pretty good sign your tasks aren’t complex enough and don’t consume enough of your attentional space.* On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you find you’re anxious at work even after taming distractions and working with more intention, consider whether your current skills are a good match for the tasks at hand.
Outside of questioning individual tasks, it’s also worth reflecting on how challenging you find your workload in general. The tactics in Hyperfocus will allow you to accomplish more in less time, but you may then find you don’t have enough work remaining to fill that extra time. This can manifest itself in some odd ways.
Our work tends to expand to fit the available completion time—in productivity circles, this phenomenon is known as Parkinson’s law. But by disabling distractions in advance, you may find the same thing I did: your work no longer expands to fit the time you have available for its completion, and you discover how much work you truly have on your plate. Some executives I coach find they’re able to accomplish a full day’s work in just a few hours when they focus on only their most consequential tasks.
I discovered this phenomenon firsthand with my last book. After handing in the eighty-thousand-word manuscript, which I wrote in a relatively short amount of time, I continued to be just as busy—even though I had substantially less work. My remaining projects expanded to fit the time I had available. Instead of planning for speaking engagements a few weeks before they were scheduled, I began to think about them much further in advance, far earlier than I needed to. I logged into my social media accounts more often, when I should have been working. I stopped following my own advice and checked for new emails constantly instead of once a day. I enabled more notifications and alerts so I would have more tasks to tend to. And I agreed to more meetings, many of which I didn’t need to attend in the first place. I experienced a dreaded feeling of guilt whenever I wasn’t busy, which, of course, disappeared as soon as I did more busywork.
Little did I know that this guilt had two sources: a lack of working with intent and my work expanding to fill how much time I had for it. It took several months before I finally stepped back to tame the novel distractions that were flooding my available time. In doing so I discovered how little work I actually had on my plate. In response I intentionally took on more meaningful tasks—writing more for my website, thinking about this book, and ramping up my speaking and coaching sessions. Because I think of myself as a pretty productive guy, my failure was tough to admit to myself, but it taught me an essential lesson: doing mindless stuff at work or at home is not only unproductive but also a sign you don’t have enough important work. This also accounts for why busywork gets set aside when you’re on deadline: there’s no time available to contain its expansion.
To measure if you have enough work in general, assess how much of your day you spend doing unproductive busywork. If you’re high on the busywork scale, you may have room to take on significantly more tasks—and become more engaged and productive in the process.
This advice is counterintuitive, and the very idea may turn you off if you already feel you’re working at capacity. But it’s worth considering. When we do knowledge work for a living, we procrastinate, spending time and attention on email and social media, tasks that make us feel productive in our work but lead us to accomplish little.
A note on rote tasks. While rote work is often less productive than complex tasks, it is redeeming in one way: it’s usually more fun. Studies show we prefer mundane tasks like data entry over more complex tasks like writing reports. In writing this book, I visited Microsoft’s research
department, which conducts many studies on how we manage our attention. On each of my three trips there, the staff was adamant in confirming that we’re happier doing tasks that don’t consume our complete attention. This makes sense: while our productive tasks are important, they’re usually also more aversive, which is why we’re usually well compensated to do them—they take advantage of our unique mental resources. At the same time, mindless work can give us immediate feedback and the sense of having accomplished something. If certain rote tasks bring you genuine enjoyment, don’t let a productivity book make you stop doing them. But do eliminate some to carve out more time and attention for significant tasks.
INCREASING THE SIZE OF YOUR ATTENTIONAL SPACE
Most of the focus strategies I’ve discussed so far involve becoming a better custodian of your attentional space. In addition to more deliberately managing it, you can also increase its size.
To recap, the size of attentional space is determined by a measure that cognitive psychology refers to as “working memory capacity”—how many pieces of data you can hold in your mind simultaneously (usually about four chunks of information). The greater your working memory capacity, the more information you can hold at the same time and the greater your ability to process complex tasks.
As well as allowing you to take on more complex tasks, expanding your attentional space offers other benefits. A higher working memory capacity has been shown to reduce mind wandering when you’re focused on complex tasks. When your mind does wander, it actually wanders more productively—the larger the size of your attentional space, the more likely you are to think about (and plan for) the future. Even better, a larger attentional space means you’ll have extra attention to think about what you’ll work on next, while keeping your original intention in mind. A larger attentional space also helps you get back on track quicker after your mind wanders or you become distracted. One study expressed this memorably when it stated that possessing a greater working memory capacity “enables [you] to take full advantage of these underutilized resources and return to [your] favored mental destination.”*