by Chris Bailey
2. Write out the problems you’re trying to crack.
I hit a major impasse when I pored through the 25,000 words of research notes I had collected for Hyperfocus: How could I reorganize these digital scribbles into something resembling a book? My outline document was essentially a 25,000-word problem statement. I printed and reviewed it regularly—noting at the top of the pages my biggest challenges, such as how I’d make the book practical, structure the manuscript, and present the research so that it was interesting.
Regularly reviewing these problems and the document itself kept the project fresh in my mind. Frequently entering habitual scatterfocus mode (including one afternoon during which I scanned the tables of contents of about a hundred books to see how they were structured) surrounded me with potential solution cues—I was scattering my attention in a richer environment. Eventually the answers came.
Writing down the detailed problems you’re tackling at work and at home helps your mind continue to process them in the background. When you capture the tasks, projects, and other commitments on your plate, you’re able to stop thinking about them and focus on your other work. The opposite is true when it comes to the problems you’re in the middle of solving: recording them on paper helps you to better clarify, process, and remember them.
This same technique works for large projects—making an outline for how you’ll write your thesis, remodel your kitchen, or staff your new team helps you process these ideas in the background so you can continue to collect and connect new dots related to the project.
Another powerful idea for the smaller nuts you’re trying to crack: in addition to setting three next-day intentions at the end of the workday, note the largest problems you’re in the middle of processing. You’ll be surprised how many you figure out by the next morning.
3. Sleep on a problem.
As I mentioned earlier, dreaming is scatterfocus on steroids: while you’re sleeping, your mind continues to connect dots.
There are countless examples of eureka insights that have struck people as they dreamed. To harness the power of sleep, Thomas Edison would go to bed holding a handful of marbles, and Salvador Dalí would doze off with a set of keys in his hand, dangling over a metal plate. Both men would continue holding the items during the lighter stages of sleep but drop them once they hit a deeper stage, which woke them up. This allowed them to capture whatever insight was on their mind in that moment. Edison put it memorably when he purportedly urged that you should “never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”
Deep and freeform connections come especially strongly as you dream during the REM stage of sleep. One study that had participants incubate a problem found that during REM sleep, participants “showed enhanced integration of unassociated information,” which helped them find a solution.
Sleep also helps you remember more—it consolidates the dots you’ve accumulated over the course of the day into long-term memory and intentionally forgets the less important and irrelevant dots you encountered. You absorb a lot of “noise” over the course of the day, and sleep gives your brain the chance to dispose of dots that don’t have a valuable connection to the others in your mind.
To invest in a good night’s sleep and to use this tool to your advantage, review the problems you’re facing, as well as any information you’re trying to encode into memory, before you head to bed. Your mind will continue processing these things while you rest.
4. Step back.
If you followed the tactics in the first half of the book—and especially if you’ve started to meditate—chances are the size of your attentional space has expanded. As this happens, it becomes increasingly important that you enter scatterfocus mode in order to intentionally scatter your attention.
Research suggests that the larger your attentional space, the more likely you are to continue stubbornly hammering away at complex tasks on which you’re stuck. This is where scatterfocus trounces hyperfocus—scatterfocus is much better at piecing together solutions to complex, nonlinear problems. The better you’re able to focus, the less prone you are to mind wandering and the more important it is that you purposefully unfocus.
It’s also worth taking your time in solving the problems presented by creative tasks. Purposefully delaying creative decisions—as long as you don’t face an impending deadline—lets you continue to make potentially more valuable connections. For example, the longer you wait before sending an important email response, the better and more articulate your reply is likely to be. The same is true for tasks like deciding between a few potential hires, brainstorming a revamped design for your company’s logo, or outlining a course you’re teaching.
5. Intentionally leave tasks unfinished.
The more abruptly you stop working on a creative task, the more you’ll think about it when you switch to another. Leave some residue in your attentional space for your mind to continue processing the initial task. For example, try stopping work on a complicated report midway through a sentence.
Leaving tasks partly completed helps you keep them front of mind as you encounter external and internal solution cues.
6. Consume more valuable dots.
We are what we consume. You can take deeper advantage of scatterfocus mode when you become deliberate about the information you take in. Consuming new dots exposes a wealth of new information and triggers that you can use to solve complex problems.
I’ve devoted the next chapter to exploring this idea. These dots have an enormous effect on what we focus on, can make or break our creativity and productivity, and are the lens through which we view the world.
CHAPTER
9
COLLECTING DOTS
CLUSTERING
Unresolved problems aren’t the only things that sit at the front of our minds. All of the other dots we’ve accumulated matter just as much, if not more. This knowledge is what helps us become more creative in scatterfocus mode: the more valuable the dots we collect, the more we have to connect.
In practice, the dots we consume and connect are so important because our focus is always filtered through what we already know. Gazing at the ocean, a biologist might ponder all the creatures that lurk beneath its surface, an artist might consider the colors she’d use to paint it, a sailor might take note of the condition of the wind and the waves, while a writer might try to think about the words he’d use to describe it.
People become experts on particular subjects by accumulating and connecting enough dots related to them, in the form of experiences, knowledge, and best practices. Our brains are naturally programmed to cluster related dots. As a simple example, think back to when you first learned to write. You likely began by learning the letters of the alphabet—how they were shaped, what they sounded like, and so on. These were the first dots you accumulated on the topic:
d, s, c, h, s . . .
At this point your brain started connecting these dots, clustering them into alphabetical order, distinguishing the consonants from the vowels, and learning how to pronounce different syllables:
doe, sa, ha, sh . . .
You then began clustering these dots further to form words. To process the new ideas more deeply, you likely connected them to various pictures, as well as to objects in the world around you:
dog, sat, cup, seven, had, shatter . . .
After this point, you began clustering words and concepts together into phrases, sentences, and paragraphs:
The dog sat on the shattered cup and had to get seven stitches.
As you read this book, your knowledge of phrases, sentences, and paragraphs is so embedded in your mind that the act of reading has become implicit: you no longer have to think about it.
Reading is a compelling example of the power of collecting and connecting dots. By learning something new, you transfer dots from your external environment to your memory so you can link them and make use of them la
ter. From the moment you’re born to the day you die, your brain is always engaged in this process.
As we cluster more and more dots about a given topic, we naturally develop expertise, which in turn helps us better manage our attentional space. Curiously, the more we know about a subject, the less attentional space that information consumes. Recall that our attentional space can hold around four chunks of information at once. The more dots we’re able to cluster, the more efficiently we’re able to use that space, as we can accommodate and process a lot more pieces of information when they’re linked together. We read more efficiently by processing words and sentences than by processing individual letters. An expert pianist can process all the elements of a piece of music—the melody, harmony, tempo, and so on—better than someone who has been playing for only a few weeks, which means she can make more efficient use of her attentional space, and maybe even daydream while she plays.
We do the same by collecting more dots related to our own work and investing in building relevant knowledge and skills. This lets us make more efficient use of our attentional space, whether we’re using that accumulated information to hyperfocus on a task or piecing together new ideas in scatterfocus mode. We can work with more expertise and creativity because we’ve already done the due diligence to cluster this information together.*
Working with more information at our disposal also helps us make more intuitive decisions, because we’re able to subconsciously summon preexisting knowledge in our memories. This information prompts us to respond appropriately in a situation, even if we’re not consciously aware that we’re doing so. For example, during a conversation we can intuit that a member of our team is upset and that there’s something she’s not telling us. We know this to be the case because we’ve experienced the same situation in the past and, on some level, remember the signs that indicated that she was unsettled. This is how intuition works: it’s the process of acting on information we remember but don’t consciously retrieve.
We are what we pay attention to, and almost nothing influences our productivity and creativity as much as the information we’ve consumed in the past. Accumulating many valuable dots helps us in innumerable ways. We become able to connect our challenges with the lessons we’ve learned. Our scatterfocus episodes become more productive as we link valuable ideas, especially as we become more responsive to new insight triggers by exposing ourselves to new dots. And our hyperfocus episodes become more productive, since we’re able to make more efficient use of our attentional space, avoid mistakes, see opportunities for shortcuts, make better high-level decisions, and approach our work with more knowledge in hand.*
THE VALUE OF A DOT
Just as there are limits to how well we’re able to focus, the same can be said about how much information we can collect. While our brain has nearly limitless storage space, our attention is far more restricted. Getting information into our brain is akin to filling an Olympic-sized swimming pool with a garden hose. While we’re able to hold a huge amount, we can fill it up only gradually.
This makes it essential that we deliberately consume dots.
No two pieces of information are created equal. Consuming a book or having an engaging conversation with someone smarter than you will enable you to collect more valuable dots than doing something like watching TV or reading a gossip magazine. This is not to say that consuming popular culture isn’t fun—life would suck without the occasional Netflix binge. And you’d probably get more than a little bored if you spent every spare minute reading dense books and academic journals.
At the same time, it’s worth auditing and increasing the quality of dots you consume regularly. The most creative and productive people defend their attentional space religiously, allowing only the most valuable dots to be encoded.
So how do you measure the value of a dot?
First, the most valuable dots are both useful and entertaining—like a TED talk. Useful dots stay relevant for a long time and are also practical. Their entertainment value makes you more engaged as you consume them. While it’s fairly easy to tell if something’s entertaining, there are several ways to measure how useful it is.
Useful information is typically actionable and helps you reach your goals. For example, listening to a few talking heads argue about political issues on TV probably isn’t actionable or conducive to your personal goals. It also sucks up time that you’d otherwise spend consuming more important dots.
Reading a science book or a biography about a historical figure is much more valuable. Works like these can inspire you with a new perspective, are (relatively) practical, are nonspeculative, and can help you reach your personal goals in the short and long term. The information they contain also has a longer shelf life.
As well as being actionable and beneficial, useful dots are also either related to what you’ve consumed in the past or completely unrelated to what you already know.
Consuming information adjacent to what you’ve taken in before allows you to develop a constellation of dots around a single idea. If you’re a software engineer, taking a course to learn a new programming language or reading a book on managing engineers is obviously a productive use of your time, attention, and energy. Any piece of information that supports your existing skills is a good use of time. The more expansive your constellation of dots, the more valuable connections you’re able to make. Your brain even releases more dopamine, a pleasure chemical, when you consume information that supports what you know.
At the same time, it’s also immensely valuable to consume dots that are unrelated to what you know. Taking in novel data gives you an opportunity to question whether you’re consuming only information that confirms your existing beliefs, and it may provide an insight trigger. Again, your brain is attracted to and wired to remember novel information.
If you’re in doubt about consuming something, ask yourself: How do you think your life will be different knowing this piece of information? The tactics in this book are all intended to help you manage your attention deliberately. The same principle applies here—when your creativity is effectively the sum of the dots you connect, consuming information on autopilot mode is one of the least useful activities to engage in.
COLLECTING MORE VALUABLE DOTS
Generally speaking, practicality does not always equal entertainment:
This isn’t always the case—you may, for example, find some serious books more entertaining than reality TV shows—but most of what you consume will follow this trend.
We can further separate the most useful things we consume from the least useful:
On the left side of this chart are the most useful dots we consume. This information is actionable, is accurate, helps us reach our goals, and remains relevant for a long time. It may also be related to what we already know—so it allows us to connect and cluster more valuable dots—or unrelated to what we know, leading to more serendipitous connections. For me, things like nonfiction books, online courses, and journal articles about productivity are in this category.
Useful information is typically the densest of the three categories. Books are a good illustration: while a book can sometimes take less than ten hours to read, it can take decades to write and may contain a lifetime of lessons that the author has learned and summarized. Books provide access to the highest-quality thinking and most useful dots on pretty much any topic.
Having an unlimited amount of energy to consume useful information throughout the day would be ideal, but this obviously isn’t possible, even if we frequently replenish our supply of mental energy. However powerful our brains are as dot-connecting machines, consuming exclusively nonentertaining material can quickly become a chore. That’s why it’s also important to seek out balanced dots—information that is both useful and entertaining. Countless things fit into this category, including novels, podcasts, documentaries, and TED talks. The entertainment value of this information makes it easier to
become engrossed in it, and as a result, we’re more likely to continue consuming it and become actively involved with the information it provides.
Finally, there’s the bottom third of what we consume: information that’s entertaining or, at worst, trashy. Though, like junk food, it can be fun to consume in the moment, this information is the least dense, isn’t practical, and won’t help you live your life or reach your goals. This category includes the TV shows we binge-watch, the mindless books we read, and most social media websites. We usually consume this material passively on autopilot mode. While some of it is genuinely entertaining—the top 50 percent or so—the bottom half is trash information and is usually some combination of novel, pleasurable, and threatening, characteristics that make it easy to crave.
As a rule, we should
consume more useful information, especially when we have the energy to process something more dense;
consume balanced information when we have less energy;