by Chris Bailey
The best time to take a break is before you need to. Much as you’re probably already dehydrated when you feel thirsty, your focus and productivity have likely already begun to falter by the time you feel fatigued.
SLEEP
Speaking of rest, it would be remiss of me to not discuss sleep.
I personally have a (granted, somewhat pseudoscientific) rule that I think is worth following when it comes to sleep: For every hour of sleep you miss, you lose two hours of productivity the next day. There’s no scientific backing for this rule—as with breaks, we’re all wired differently—but the amount of sleep we get matters a great deal, especially with regard to knowledge work. We lose more than we gain when we compromise our sleep to work longer hours.
The size of our attentional space can shrink by as much as 60 percent as the result of a sleep deficit—complex tasks can take more than twice as long when we’re tired. We also become less self-aware and survey our attentional space less often. Working with a diminished attentional space is fine for mindless tasks like copying data into a spreadsheet, but our productivity is undercut when we try to focus on something complex. In most cases, we’re better off working fewer hours and getting enough sleep than trying to do a full day’s work while tired. Some people claim they’re able to get by with less sleep than everyone else, but chances are either their work isn’t as complex or they’d be capable of accomplishing even more if they were better rested. Even worse, a sleep deficit makes us perceive our productivity as being higher than it actually is.
Even though we spend about a third of our life in a basically comatose state, we understand very little of what happens during sleep. This is true for a number of reasons: our brains are inordinately complex, brain-scanning equipment is expensive, and the noise of the scanners tends to disrupt participants’ later (and lighter) stages of sleep. The studies that do provide a glimpse into what happens in our brains as we sleep, however, are fascinating—especially the ones that examine the similarities between sleep and scatterfocus.
If you were to place someone who is dreaming and another person who is daydreaming into a brain-scanning machine, you’d notice something peculiar: the two brain scans would be eerily similar. Sleep dreaming and daydreaming in scatterfocus mode activate the same brain regions, though they’re even more active while we’re asleep. On a neurological level, dreaming is scatterfocus mode on steroids.
This makes sense when we consider the two modes. We feel recharged after episodes of both sleep and scatterfocus. Our minds wander to many of the same places whether we’re sleeping or daydreaming—including past regrets, fantasies and anxieties about the future, and our relationships with other people (though our mind jumps among things a lot more when we’re dreaming). The mind has a chance to defragment its thoughts during both sleep and mind-wandering episodes, as well as to consolidate the information it’s been learning and processing. The brain also fires somewhat randomly in each mode, which can lead to breakthrough ideas (as well as to some random, useless material). It’s no wonder countless great ideas have come to people in their sleep—including Paul McCartney’s melody for “Yesterday,” Dmitry Mendeleyev’s idea for the periodic table of elements, and Jack Nicklaus’s new and improved golf swing.
In addition to the productivity toll, the costs of working with a sleep deficit are numerous. Research shows that as we get less sleep, we also
feel more pressure at work;
focus for a shorter duration of time (even less than forty seconds);
fire up social media sites more often;
experience more negative moods;
actively seek less demanding tasks (eliminating those that no longer fit into our shrunken attentional space); and
spend more time online throughout the day.
This holds especially true for those aged nineteen to twenty-nine, a demographic that chooses to go to bed later than any other age cohort—around midnight, on average. Given that most of us need around eight hours of sleep, turning in at midnight doesn’t exactly prepare us to be productive the following day, unless we have the flexibility to wake up late.
One of the best ways to get more sleep, and to increase the quality of your sleep, is to develop a solid nighttime ritual. Because our energy levels are depleted by the end of the day, we tend to spend a large amount of time then on autopilot mode. Establish a set routine that enables you to unwind before bed. Consider adding habits like reading, meditation, disconnecting, drinking a cup of herbal tea, or simply removing the TV from your bedroom. It’s a convenient object of attention infinitely more stimulating than sleep. Getting to bed at a decent hour is the best way to get enough sleep. While most of us need to wake up by a certain time, our nightly routine is usually more flexible.
REST IS NOT IDLENESS
It often doesn’t feel right to step back and rest when you have more work to do than time to do it—you may even feel twinges of guilt. This is usually just self-doubt rearing its ugly head: as you consider the opportunity costs of taking a break, you begin thinking of all the other things you should be working on instead. Taking a break feels less productive than getting real work done, so you feel at fault when you even consider stepping back.
This logic doesn’t hold water in practice. In fact, taking a break is one of the most productive things you can do. As we’ve discussed, your brain has a limited pool of energy, and once that reserve is depleted, so too are your focus and productivity. Breaks not only allow you to recharge—they prevent you from hitting a wall.
Whenever we rest, we exchange our time for energy. This is true regardless of whether we’re resting by taking a break or by getting a good night’s sleep. This time investment doesn’t evaporate into the ether, and in reality, you should feel guilty about not taking breaks.
I’ve asked you to look back at your work and life quite often in this book, such as suggesting that you think of when you felt the most focused and creative. There’s a reason for this: you can learn a lot through a little introspection. If you want to become more productive, creative, or engaged with your work, the truth is you already have a huge amount of data at your disposal. All you have to do is reflect on when you were the most productive, creative, or happy and consider the conditions that led to that state.
It’s worth doing a similar exercise here. Think back to when you last approached your work with the greatest energy. Maybe there was a stretch of time when you had a habit of exercising at lunch or took more breaks than usual. How much were you able to accomplish on those days?
Taking more breaks will absolutely lead you to work smarter and accomplish more—ironically, the busier you are, the more you need them. During times like this, the likeliness of being overwhelmed is higher, and you will benefit from the perspective scatterfocus provides.
This chapter is one of the shortest in the book, because the main idea is simple: scatterfocus mode helps us to recharge our ability to hyperfocus, in addition to letting us plan for the future and become more creative.
CHAPTER
8
CONNECTING DOTS
It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
—Albert Einstein
BECOMING MORE CREATIVE
As well as enabling you to plan for the future and replenish your supply of mental energy, scatterfocus allows you to become more creative. You can use scatterfocus mode to become more creative in two ways: first, by connecting more dots; and second, by collecting more valuable dots—a topic that will be covered in the next chapter.
Hyperfocus is about focusing on a single thing. This lets your brain become productive, encode information and experiences so that you remember them later, and engage with the world around you. In scatterfocus mode you do the opposite: you zoom out and connect the constellations of “dots” in your head (a “dot” being any piece
of information you hold in your mind).
On a neurological level, our brain is a constellation of dot-filled networks—and we’re constantly adding more with every new experience. We gather dots when we’re creating memories with loved ones, studying history, or reading the biographies of people who lived through it—which helps us understand the sequences of ideas that created the world we live in today. We accumulate dots with each mistake we make (and learn from) and each time we’re open enough to admit that we’re wrong—which replaces the obsolete dots in our mind with new ones. We harvest dots with each enlightening conversation, which permits us to gaze at the constellations of dots that live in the minds of knowledgeable people or ones who see the world differently. Each dot is encoded into our memory and available for later use.
The word that best describes how your brain looks when you enter scatterfocus mode is “random.” Scatterfocus lights up your brain’s default network—the network it returns to when you’re not focused on something.* This network is widely distributed across the brain, as is the information we’ve encoded into memory. One of the many reasons scatterfocus leads to so many creative insights is that while in it, we naturally begin to connect the scattered dots we’ve collected. As we cast a metaphorical net across our minds, fishing for novel connections, we connect ideas while we rest and plan for the future.
We’re not always aware of the ideas our attentional space pans over as we move among our thoughts—like an iceberg that resides mostly underwater, much of this process takes place in the depths of our consciousness. Since we can focus on just a small amount of information at one time, only a few of the active connections in our minds can break into our attentional space. However, these random connections do get our attention when they become sufficiently activated. It’s at this moment that we realize we should hire Cheryl instead of Jim, map the intentions we should set for later, or arrive at a sudden eureka insight.
INSIGHT TRIGGERS
Uncompleted tasks and projects weigh more heavily on our minds than ones we’ve finished—focus comes when we close these distracting open loops. We’re wired to remember what we’re in the middle of more than what we’ve completed. In psychology circles this phenomenon is called the Zeigarnik effect, after Bluma Zeigarnik, the first person to study this concept. The Zeigarnik effect can be annoying when we’re trying to focus, but the opposite is true when we scatter our attention. In fact, it leads to amazing insights into the problems we’re incubating.
Chances are you’ve experienced a few eureka moments yourself. Maybe they struck while you were making breakfast, getting the mail, or walking through an art gallery. Your brain suddenly and unexpectedly found the solution to a problem you hadn’t thought about for a few hours. In an instant, the puzzle pieces satisfyingly slid together and locked into place.
Two things were likely true at that moment: first, at that moment your insight was a response to a problem you were stuck on. Second, your mind was likely wandering while you were doing something that didn’t require your full attention.
Thanks to the Zeigarnik effect, we store any and all problems currently stumping us at the front of our minds. Any open problem—an unfinished report, a decision we’re in the middle of, or an important email we’re responding to—is an open loop that our brain is desperate to close. As a consequence, we connect each new experience to these unresolved problems in order to unearth novel solutions. Habitual scatterfocus brings these connections into our attentional space.
When we’re in habitual scatterfocus mode, potential insight triggers come from two places: our wandering minds themselves and the external environment. It’s best to illustrate this with an example.
Let’s say I invite you to my secret productivity-experiment lair. I offer you a seat, set a timer for thirty minutes, and ask you to solve this seemingly simple problem: The number 8,549,176,320 is probably the single most unique ten-digit number in the world. What makes it unlike any other number? Let’s imagine you can’t solve the problem in the allotted time—not unreasonable, given that this is a particularly tricky one. You leave frustrated, and the question continues to weigh on your mind: What is so unusual about 8,549,176,320?
By now you’ve reached an impasse and have encoded the problem into memory. You’ve started to see those digits whenever you close your eyes. (Naturally, the better you remember a complex problem, the greater your odds of coming up with a creative solution.) This particular brain teaser would probably never actually cause a high level of torment. But for the sake of this example, let’s say it does.
Thanks to the Zeigarnik effect, your mind will automatically connect your new experiences to this problem, whether you realize it or not. You return to work, still frustrated, with the number imprinted on your brain. You find your mind returning to it periodically, sometimes even against your will. In fact, odds are that your mind will wander more often than usual—our thoughts drift more often when we’re in the middle of solving a complex problem—which will cause you to make a higher-than-normal number of mistakes in your work.
Later in the day, you work on an activity that takes you into habitual scatterfocus mode: organizing your bookshelf in alphabetical order. You’re putting away the book The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch. As you do so, your mind processes where the book will be shelved.
Okay, ignore the word “the.”
First value is 8, so I’ll put it with the other books that start with a number.
Huh, the number in Chris’s experiment was also an 8.
Like a lightning bolt, the solution hits you. You feel dozens of puzzle pieces sliding and locking into place in your mind.
8,549,176,320.
Eight, five, four, nine . . .
A, B, C, D, Eight, FIve, FOur, G, H . . .
The number in the experiment has every digit, arranged in alphabetical order!
As far as insight triggers go, this is a fairly straightforward one—usually they are more subtle, nudging your mind to think in a different direction and restructuring the mental dots that represent a problem. I designed this example to illustrate a simple concept: habitual scatterfocus lets our minds connect the problems we’re tackling with what we experience, as well as where our minds happen to wander.
Insight is a notoriously difficult subject to study. To do so, you have to lead people to an impasse on a problem and maintain sufficient interest in it to make them want to solve it later. Luckily, you don’t need the results of research to support these findings—you probably have enough data at your disposal in the form of your own past experiences.
I can’t stress enough how remarkable insight triggers are. You may see a bird picking at a chip packet, which leads you to realize you should clear the chips you’ve been snacking on out of the kitchen so you can lose those final ten pounds. Intentionally daydreaming during your morning shower, you recall how you resolved a past work dispute and realize you can use the same technique today. Walking through a bookstore, you notice a cookbook, which reminds you that you were planning on replacing your kitchenware set—and that there’s a store around the corner that sells them. The richer our environment, and the richer our experiences, the more insights we’re able to unearth.
Look back at some of the greatest eureka moments in history. In addition to reaching an impasse with their problems, the famous thinkers arrived at solutions to them after being spurred by an external cue. Archimedes figured out how to calculate the volume of an irregular object when he noticed his bathwater overflowing. Newton came up with his theory of gravity when he saw an apple fall from a tree—probably the best-known insight trigger in history. For his habitual scatterfocus routine, renowned physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman would sip 7UP at a topless bar, where he could “‘watch the entertainment,’ and, if inspiration struck, scribble equations on cocktail napkins.”
CONNECTING EVEN MORE DOTS
Simply entering
habitual scatterfocus mode will enable you to experience the remarkable benefits I’ve covered so far. But if you want to level up even further, here are six ways to do so.
1. Scatter your attention in a richer environment.
Being mindful of and controlling your environment is one of the most productive steps you can take. In addition to creating a focus-conducive environment (using the steps discussed in the first part of this book), you can also help surface scatterfocus insights by deliberately exposing yourself to new cues.
Immersing yourself in a setting that contains potential insight triggers is a powerful practice. A rich environment is one where you’re constantly encountering new people, ideas, and sights. Break activities like walking through a bookstore or people-watching at a diner are far more valuable than those that don’t carry any new potential cues. Adopt a mix of such activities—some that give your mind the space to wander and connect dots and others that expose your mind to new ideas you can connect later.
You can also use cues to capture everything you need to get done. Walk around your house with a notepad and draw up a list of tasks that need to be completed. This list represents your external cues. You’ll be able to capture just as much—if not more—valuable information if you do the same at the office or while browsing each folder on your computer. While this might feel overwhelming at first, you’ll be able to better organize and prioritize everything on your plate. If you want to deepen your relationships with friends, scroll through the contacts app on your phone and take note of whom you haven’t connected with in a while. If you want to develop deeper professional relationships, scroll through your LinkedIn contact list. Deliberately exposing yourself to new cues can help in these ways and more.