Hyperfocus

by Chris Bailey

  Every idea in Hyperfocus is designed to help you more deliberately manage your attention—an essential idea when our attention is so limited and in demand.

  Let’s recap a few of these ideas:

  Understanding the four types of productive and unproductive work tasks lets us step back and figure out what’s actually important so we can stop working on mindless autopilot mode.

  Recognizing the limits of our attention enables us to become aware of how few things we’re able to focus on in the moment.

  Hyperfocusing on our most complex, productive tasks lets us activate the most productive mode of our brains and get a large amount accomplished in a short amount of time.

  Setting strong daily intentions lets us work on our most productive tasks.

  Creating a personalized distraction-free mode, and a reduced-distractions mode, lets us work with more focus and clarity while directing our time and attention away from needless distractions.

  Simplifying our working and living environments lets us think more clearly by taking stock of the distractions that surround us.

  Clearing our minds using waiting-for, task, and worry lists lets us work with clarity and prevents unresolved mental loops from interrupting our focus throughout the day.

  Becoming good custodians of our attentional space—by making our work more complex when necessary and by expanding the limits of our attention—helps us properly manage our limited attention.

  In the beginning of this book you may recall that I made a few lofty claims about how transformative it can be to purposefully manage your attention. If you’ve acted upon the advice so far, I think you’ll find what I did: that your work and your life have been positively changed as a result of this practice.

  As you’ve acted upon the advice in the first five chapters, I hope you’ve already become more productive, more engaged with your work and life, and a clearer and calmer thinker. You probably also remember more and view your work and life as more meaningful. All three measures of the quality of your attention have also likely increased—you spend more of your time deliberately; you are able to focus longer in one sitting; and your mind doesn’t wander from your intentions nearly as much.

  There is a wealth of research on how we can best focus, and in the first five chapters I’ve done my best to summarize it in a way that is both practical and tactical. I hope you’ll agree: attention is the most important ingredient we have to living a good, productive life.

  THE POWER OF MIND WANDERING

  To this point in the book I’ve discussed only the negative effects of a wandering mind. At times when we need to focus, these mental strolls can undermine our productivity.

  However, this mind-wandering mode—when we scatter our attention and focus—can also be immensely powerful. In fact, it’s so powerful that I’ve devoted the second part of Hyperfocus to it. I call this mode “scatterfocus,” because in it, our attention scatters to focus on nothing in particular. While hyperfocus involves directing your attention outward, scatterfocus is about directing it inward, inside your own mind.

  Just as hyperfocus is the most productive mode of the brain, scatterfocus is the most creative. Scatterfocus can derail our productivity when our original intent is to focus, but when we’re coming up with a creative solution to a problem, planning for our future, or making a difficult decision, it is just as essential as hyperfocus. We can harness the remarkable benefits of scatterfocus by practicing intentional mind wandering.

  Learning how to use each mode intelligently will make you more productive, creative, and happy.

  Let’s dive into this second mental mode now. As you’ll quickly see, hyperfocus and scatterfocus can work hand in hand in some truly remarkable ways.

  PART II

  SCATTERFOCUS

  CHAPTER

  6

  YOUR BRAIN’S HIDDEN CREATIVE MODE

  Not all those who wander are lost.

  —J. R. R. Tolkien

  INTRODUCING SCATTERFOCUS

  The second part of this book is devoted to the power of mind wandering and directing your attention inward.

  Yes, you heard that right—after encouraging you in the first part of the book to rid yourself of that style of thinking, I’m about to explain the strengths of mind wandering. Part of its bad reputation is warranted: when our intention is to focus, daydreaming can destroy our productivity. But daydreaming is immensely potent when our intention is to solve problems, think more creatively, brainstorm new ideas, or recharge. As far as boosting our creativity is concerned, mind wandering is in a league of its own.

  Think back to your last creative insight—chances are you weren’t hyperfocusing on one thing. In fact, you probably weren’t focused on much at all. You may have been taking an extra-long shower, having a walk during a lunch break, visiting a museum, reading a book, or relaxing on the beach with a drink or two. Maybe you were sipping your morning coffee. Then, like a flash of lightning, a brilliant idea struck out of nowhere. Your brain mysteriously chose this moment, when you were resting and recharging, to connect a few of the constellations of dots—let’s consider a “dot” to be any idea or piece of information you remember—swirling in your head.

  Just as hyperfocus is your brain’s most productive mode, scatterfocus is its most creative.

  Entering scatterfocus mode is easy: you simply let your mind be. Just as you hyperfocus by intentionally directing your attention toward one thing, you scatterfocus by deliberately letting your mind wander. You enter this mode whenever you leave attentional space free around what you’re doing in the moment—whether going for a run, biking, or investing time in anything that doesn’t consume your full attentional space.

  When it comes to productivity and creativity, scatterfocus enables you to do three powerful things at once.

  First, as I’ll discuss in this chapter, it allows you to set intentions and plan for the future. It’s impossible to set future intentions when you’re immersed in the present. By stepping back and directing your attention inward, you’re able to switch off autopilot and consider what to do next. Your brain automatically plans for the future when you rest—you just need to give it the space and time to do so.

  Second, scatterfocus lets you recharge. Focusing on tasks all day consumes a good deal of mental energy, even when you’re managing and defending your attentional space using the tactics set out in part 1. Scatterfocus replenishes that supply so you can focus for longer.

  Third, scatterfocus fosters creativity. The mode helps you connect old ideas and create new ones; floats incubating thoughts to the surface of your attentional space; and lets you piece together solutions to problems. Scattering your attention and focusing on nothing in particular supercharges the dot-connecting powers of your brain. The more creativity your job or a project requires, the more you should deliberately deploy scatterfocus.

  WHY WE’RE AVERSE TO SCATTERFOCUS

  Despite the productive and creative benefits of scatterfocus, most of us are somewhat hesitant to engage this mode. While it’s easy to get excited about becoming highly productive and hyperfocused, scattering our attention is less exciting, at least on the surface. When we’re surrounded by so many novel and stimulating objects of attention, most of us don’t want to be left alone with our thoughts.

  In one recent survey, 83 percent of Americans responded that they didn’t spend any time whatsoever “relaxing or thinking” in the twenty-four-hour period before they were surveyed. Another study sought to measure exactly how resistant participants were to mind wandering. In the first stage of the study, researchers attached two shock electrodes to participants’ ankles, zapped them, and then asked how much the participants would pay to not receive the shock again. Around three quarters of the group agreed they’d pay to not receive the shock again. In the second stage, participants were left alone
with their thoughts for fifteen minutes. The researchers kept the electrodes on during that time, on the off chance anyone wanted to shock himself again, saving himself from his own thoughts. This is where the study gets interesting, and somewhat sad. A full 71 percent of men in the study chose to self-administer an electric shock when left alone with their thoughts. Women fared better: only 26 percent chose to shock themselves again. (Take from these findings what you will.) This pattern held true regardless of age, education, economic status, and distraction level of the participants. The results are especially depressing when you consider that researchers allowed participants to proceed to this second stage only if they agreed to pay to not receive the shock again—anyone who didn’t mind the shock was rejected.

  If you read a lot of books like this one, you’re probably familiar with the concept that our brains are wired for survival and reproduction—not to do knowledge work day in and day out. We focus on certain objects of attention by default, and doing so is what has allowed the human species to survive. We’ve already discussed the first type of object of attention that draws us in: anything that’s novel. This is what makes our smartphones and other devices so enticing, while we find less novel tasks—like writing a report—boring, regardless of how much they lead us to accomplish.

  We’re also more likely to focus on anything that’s pleasurable or threatening. This is where the survival instinct kicks in. Pleasures like sex and overeating have enabled us to reproduce and store fat for when food inevitably became scarce. Focusing on the threats in our environment, like the snake slithering nearby as our early ancestors built a fire, enabled us to live another day. We’ve crafted the world around us to cater to these cravings for novel, pleasurable, and threatening objects of attention. Consider this the next time you turn on the TV, open YouTube, read a news website, or check social media—these outlets provide a steady fix of all three.

  Today the balance of these three objects of attention has been tipped. We’re continually surrounded by novel distractions, pleasures are plentiful, and legitimate threats are few and far between. The wiring in our brain that in our evolutionary past led us to store sugars and have sex as a survival mechanism now leads us to overindulge in fast food and pornography. Continually scanning for threats is what compels us to dwell on that one negative email or overthink a careless offhand comment from our boss. What once aided our chances at survival now sabotages our productivity and creativity in the modern world. It makes our most urgent tasks feel a lot more important than they actually are.

  We’re also prone to falling prey to what’s novel, pleasurable, and threatening when we let our mind wander and turn our attention inward. Our greatest threats, worries, and fears no longer reside in our external environment but within the depths of our own consciousness. When our mind wanders, it slips into a pattern of ruminating on the stupid things we’ve said, the arguments we’ve won and lost, and worries about work and money. This is also true of pleasurable thoughts—we daydream of memorable meals, recall memories from a great vacation, or fantasize about how great we’d feel if we had come up with a witty retort to something said earlier. The next time you meditate (if you’ve begun to do so), pay attention to how your mind is naturally drawn to the threats, pleasures, and novel ideas floating in your head.

  But in practice we don’t actually experience negative mind-wandering episodes that often. Our mind primarily wanders to the negative when we’re thinking about the past, but we wander to the past just 12 percent of the time—the remainder is spent thinking about the present and the future, which makes scatterfocus remarkably productive. While our evolutionary history leads us to think about the novel and the negative, it has also wired our brain for profound creativity whenever we turn our attention inward. I’d argue that our ability to do so is practically a superpower.

  Compared with other mammals, our ability to think about something that’s not immediately in front of us is fairly unique.* It affords us the ability to plan for the future, learn from the past, and have daydreams that spawn remarkable insights. It helps us search inwardly for solutions to external situations—whether we’re solving a math problem or telling the server how we usually take our eggs. Most remarkable, scatterfocus enables us to step back from life and to work and live more intentionally.

  OH, THE PLACES OUR MIND GOES

  In writing Hyperfocus I’ve had the opportunity to read hundreds, if not thousands, of studies related to attention management. Of all the research I encountered, my absolute favorite study looks at where our mind goes when it wanders. It was conducted by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler from the University of California at Santa Barbara and Jonathan Smallwood from the University of York. Their work is absolutely fascinating and provides scientific evidence for what makes scatterfocus so fruitful.

  When your mind wanders, it visits three main places: the past, the present, and the future. This is precisely why scattering your attention allows your creativity to flourish as you travel through time and connect what you’ve learned to what you’re doing or what you want to achieve. This enables you to work with greater intention as you consider your future and think about what you should be doing in the present to make it a reality.

  Even though we spend just 12 percent of our scatterfocus time thinking about the past, we’re more likely to remember these thought episodes, compared with when we think about the present or future. (Fun fact: 38 percent of our past-related thoughts connect with earlier-in-the-day events, 42 percent relate to the previous day’s, and 20 percent involve ruminating on what happened in the more distant past.) Our mind is wired to not only perceive but also remember threats, like that one negative email that we can’t forget. (It does this so we learn from our mistakes, though it becomes annoying when it throws random memories at us throughout the day.) On some level, these past thoughts speak to the power of scatterfocus: when we daydream, we often experience our thoughts as if they were real. Cringeworthy memories strike from out of the blue, hijack our attention, and lead us to tense up at the stupid stuff we’ve said and done.*

  In addition to thinking about the past, our mind wanders to the present 28 percent of the time. While we’re not moving our work forward during these wanderings, they can still be productive. Thinking abstractly about what’s in front of us lets us consider alternate approaches to the problems we’re facing—like how we can best approach an awkward conversation to tell a coworker that he should be wearing deodorant. Wandering thoughts about what we’re currently working on usually prove to be fairly productive—we need to reflect on our tasks in order to work more deliberately. Neurologically speaking, it’s impossible to both focus on something and reflect on that thing at the same time. This makes entering scatterfocus critical. Without entering scatterfocus mode, you never think about the future. It’s only once you step back from writing an email, drafting a paper, or planning your budget that you can consider alternative approaches to the task.

  Finally, our mind wanders to think about the future 48 percent of the time—more than our past and present thinking combined.* We usually think about the immediate future: 44 percent of our future thoughts concern a time later the same day, and 40 percent tomorrow. Most of this time is spent planning. Because of this, scatterfocus enables us to act more intelligently and more intentionally.

  Every moment of our lives is like a Choose Your Own Adventure story—continually offering different options that allow us to define our future path. Scatterfocus lets us better imagine these paths: Should we talk to the good-looking person sitting alone across the coffee shop? Should we accept that job offer? How should we order our eggs? This mode also enables us to better weigh the consequences of each decision and path. In thinking about the future, we flick off autopilot mode and have the space to step back and consider how we want to act before our habits and routines make the decision for us.

  Researchers refer to our mind’s propensity to future-wander as our
“prospective bias.” This tendency is what leads us to spend half of our scatterfocus time planning.* We spend hardly any time thinking about the future when we’re focused, while in scatterfocus mode we’re fourteen times more likely to have these thoughts. Scatterfocus lets us work with greater intention because our mind automatically contrasts the future we desire against the present we need to change to make that future a reality. We consider our goals only about 4 percent of the time when we’re immersed in what we’re doing, while in scatterfocus mode we think about them 26 percent of the time. The more time you spend scatterfocusing between tasks—rather than indulging in distractions—the more thoughtful and productive your actions become.

  As well as helping you plan for the future, recharge, and connect ideas, research suggests that scatterfocus mode also leads you to

  become more self-aware;

  incubate ideas more deeply;

  remember and process ideas and meaningful experiences more effectively;

  reflect on the meaning of your experiences;

  show greater empathy (scatterfocus gives you the space to step into other people’s shoes); and

  become more compassionate.

  THE THREE STYLES OF SCATTERFOCUS

  In one respect scatterfocus is an odd mental mode to write about, as you need few instructions for how to let your mind wander. While hyperfocusing can be difficult, we already spend 47 percent of our day in something similar to scatterfocus mode without any effort, whenever our focus lapses and our attention wanders.