by Chris Bailey
consume entertaining information with intention or when we’re running low on energy and need to recharge; and
consume less trashy information.
There are two steps to upping the quality of information you collect:
Take stock of everything you consume.
Intentionally consume more valuable information.
The purpose of consuming more valuable dots isn’t to turn you into a Vulcan automaton who consumes only worthwhile information in your spare time. Where’s the fun in that? The point is to let you step back from the information you do consume so you can determine with more intentionality what to take in. It’s impossible to become more productive or creative without first reflecting on your work and life—this is what makes tactics like defining your most productive tasks, setting intentions, and letting your mind wander so powerful. Defining your most valuable dots is just another of these tactics.
To begin your audit, assign everything that you consume to one of the four categories of information: useful, balanced, entertaining, and trashy. Include the apps you fire up automatically, the websites you routinely visit, the books you read in your spare time, the shows and movies you watch on TV and Netflix, and any other relevant information you take in. It can be helpful to carry a notepad for a few days to list everything you consume (and, if you want, for how long you consume it). Do this at home and at work. If you consume a lot of books, courses, and other information for your job, it can be helpful to make two lists: one for the things you consume professionally and another for what you consume for personal benefit or pleasure.
You’ll likely notice immediately a few things you want to change—the amount of time you spend on social media apps, reading news websites, or watching TV. You may also find patterns that surprise you. For example, the average American consumes thirty-four hours of TV a week. If you’re one of them, that’s a lot of time you could be spending on more useful pursuits. You may also notice what you’re lacking—such as the fact that you don’t read any fiction, even though you’ve always enjoyed it, or that it’s been awhile since you invested in learning a new hobby.
Once you’ve taken stock, here are ten ideas for how you can change your habits to intentionally consume more valuable information. Start by trying two or three that resonate particularly strongly with you.
1. Consume things you care about, especially when few others do.
When listing the information you take in, you may have found you enjoy consuming things that other people tend to underappreciate or shy away from.
Maybe you love taking coding courses in your spare time—an activity that may feel like a chore for most people. Or you love listening to audiobooks about productivity (I plead guilty).
Double down on developing the skills and knowledge that you find entertaining. Also opt for the medium you prefer—if you learn best by listening, try consuming audiobooks instead of physical books; if you prefer visuals, try watching TED talks instead of listening to an audiobook.
2. Eliminate some trash.
Passively consuming pointless trash adds nothing to your life. Choose two items that don’t bring you genuine enjoyment, and eliminate them entirely. Look out for material that, while stimulating in the moment, doesn’t leave you satisfied afterward. Be ruthless in defending your attention. Every time you stop consuming trash, you make room for something useful to add value to your life.
3. Choose a few valuable things to add.
What useful books can you read, courses can you take, or conversations can you have that might prove useful later? Can you consume more complex information about a certain topic to take your expertise to the next level? What about yourself have you been wanting to improve, or what have been eager to know more about at work or at home?
Add something valuable for each worthless thing you eliminate. Push yourself: the most valuable information you can consume is material that challenges you and usually requires your full attention.
4. Notice what you consume on autopilot mode.
Pay special attention to what you pursue when you’re low on energy or as you transition from one task to another. Often these objects of attention are just convenient and don’t add much value to your life.
When a friend you’re dining with leaves the table for a few minutes, what apps do you mindlessly open on your phone? Do you reach for your phone as soon as you wake up? What sites do you visit when you’re surfing the internet on autopilot?
5. Veg out . . . intentionally.
You’re perfectly productive whenever you accomplish what you intend to. This is true whether your goal is to read a chapter of a textbook or watch four episodes of Game of Thrones.
If you’re going to veg out, do so with intention—set the criteria for what you plan to do, such as the number of episodes you’ll get through, what you’ll eat as you watch, what you’ll do afterward, and so on. This not only allows you to act with intention but also leaves you feeling less guilty so that you actually enjoy yourself.
6. Reevaluate what you’re consuming as you’re consuming it.
In addition to being more selective about what you consume, you should reevaluate content as you consume it—skipping or skimming anything that’s not worth your time. The Zeigarnik effect makes us want to finish what we start, but every minute we spend on something useless is a minute we lose working on something useful.
After you begin a book, movie, or TV series, assess along the way whether you should pursue it to the end.
7. Get things to bid for your attention.
View the descriptions of podcasts, TV shows, movies, and books as a pitch for your time and attention.
You don’t have to listen to every podcast that automatically downloads, every show your DVR records, or every book a friend recommends. Deciding whether something merits your attention takes an extra step, but it’s a decision that will save hours you can then devote to something better.
8. In the moment, zoom out.
Try zooming out to a larger time frame if you’re having trouble deciding in the moment between a few different things to consume.
If you spend any time on social media sites, you may be familiar with those oddly satisfying cooking videos that show an entire meal being made in half a minute. Spinach is reduced to one fifth its size in a second, and small chunks of chicken cook in two seconds. You can zoom out on the material you’re considering consuming in a similar way. Let’s say you find yourself with an hour to spend however you want. Take a step back to observe your life from afar. How would you want to see yourself occupying that time if it were sped up into a thirty-second video?
Would you want to see yourself lying like a blob on the couch watching Sherlock on Netflix or mindlessly tapping on your tablet? Or would you rather watch a video of yourself poring over a hundred pages of a book? Zooming out to observe the impacts of your actions will nudge you to consume more valuable information.
9. Invest in serendipity.
Consume challenging things outside the boundaries of your expertise, ones that force you to make more disparate connections. The more disparate the dots you connect, the more valuable the connections often end up being.
Set your browser’s homepage to open with Wikipedia’s “random article” bookmark. Look through the AMA (Ask Me Anything) section on Reddit, where world-renowned experts answer popular questions from everyday people. Go see a band you’ve never heard of. Read a book on a topic you know nothing about. Take a class in a subject you’ve always been curious about—like quilting, dancing, or public speaking. Pick up a biography about a historical figure whose name you know but whose life story you don’t. I signed up for an online course on coding iPhone apps several few months back. Today it’s one of my favorite things to do in my spare time.
10. Double down on what’s valuable.
There are some topics you
know more about, and some things you’re better at, than almost anyone in the world. The more dots you collect around these particular topics or skills, the more of an expert you’ll become.
For each worthless thing you eliminate, consider doubling down on something you’re already good at or a subject you know a lot about. If you’re a teacher, for example, instead of firing up Netflix on autopilot mode after work, consider taking a course to invest in new professional skills. When you double down on what you’re already accomplished at, you’ll be surprised by how much more productive and creative you become.
LIKE MAGIC
As we continue to assemble a constellation of dots around a certain topic, ideas begin to build upon one another. Eventually ideas become magic.
I love this quote from British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I’d take this a step further to argue that any sufficiently complex decision or idea is also indistinguishable from magic. Whenever we don’t understand the complex network of dots that contribute to some result, we ascribe it to magic or genius.
I’ve had an obsession with magic tricks since I can remember, but I find figuring out the workings behind a complex illusion far more satisfying than seeing the trick itself. Illusions stop being magical the moment you discover how they’re done—but learning how they’re done feels like a eureka moment in and of itself, as a set of jumbled puzzle pieces locks into place.
Like a magician’s, the methods of a genius are mysterious—until you untangle the web of connections that leads to them. These individuals usually have more experience, have put in more hours of deliberate practice, and, most important, have connected more dots than anyone else. As author Malcolm Gladwell wrote: “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”
Albert Einstein was undoubtedly a genius—he connected more dots, in more unique ways, than almost any other human. At the same time, he was bound by the same mental limits that we all are. To conceive of an idea like the general theory of relativity, he had to collect and connect an incredible number of dots so he could bridge ideas from nature and mathematical concepts, forming connections others hadn’t. To let his mind wander habitually, he played the violin for hours on end.* Einstein worked to attain his genius. As he put it, “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.” Asking questions like “What would it be like to race alongside a light beam?” he spun complex webs of dots to formulate his theory of relativity. Despite his accomplishments, even Einstein was afflicted with imposter syndrome, once telling his wife, Elsa, while listening to the cheers of a thousand people outside his hotel room, “I’m afraid we’re swindlers. We’ll end up in prison yet.”
While we often find the story of a lone, driven genius compelling, all geniuses have put in time and effort to achieve greatness. That includes Mozart, who wrote his first symphony at the age of eight. Daniel Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music, proposed a theory to account for Mozart’s musical genius. “We don’t know how much Mozart practiced,” Levitin writes, “but if he started at age two and worked thirty-two hours a week (quite possible, given his father’s reputation as a stern taskmaster) he would have made his first 10,000 hours by the age of eight.” The “ten-thousand-hour rule” is a popular one—it’s the length of effortful practice, some suggest, that it takes to acquire an expert level of performance at a certain skill. While the rule doesn’t apply in every case—you could probably become a world-class master chocolate bar eater in less time—it’s a fairly reliable yardstick. Ten thousand hours is enough time to build a rich constellation of dots around a certain topic or skill.
MAKING SCATTERFOCUS A HABIT
I hope that by now I’ve sold you on the remarkable benefits of scatterfocus mode. Scatterfocus lets you find useful connections between disparate ideas and experiences, recharge, and plan for the future. To reap these benefits, you simply have to let your mind rest and wander—preferably while doing something habitual.
How frequently you should scatter your attention will depend on a host of factors. For one, it will be tied to how often you use (and need to recharge) your ability to hyperfocus. Hyperfocus consumes mental energy, while scatterfocus is energy restorative.
Scattering your attention will be particularly beneficial when your work demands that you connect more complex, disparate ideas. For example, you should scatter your attention more often if you’re a researcher responsible for designing experiments or a video game designer who constructs story lines. The more creativity your job requires, the more often you should scatter your attention. In most cases, the knowledge work of today benefits from as much creativity as we can bring to it.
Finally, the frequency with which you scatter your attention should reflect how important it is that you find the right approach to your work. Another of my favorite quotes is from Abraham Lincoln, who said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Whether we’re planning a home renovation project, allocating our team’s budget, or designing a research study, the approach we take to the task at hand matters. The more scatterfocus time we schedule as we’re putting together a plan, the more time we’ll save later.
The brain needs a few minutes to switch between hyperfocus and scatterfocus. Therefore, taking scatterfocus breaks that are at least fifteen minutes long will yield better results than trying to take advantage of tiny chunks of time throughout the day. But even brief breaks will help you become more creative, for while they may not leave sufficient time to piece together complex eureka insights, they’ll definitely enable you to set intentions for what to do next, rest, and capture the open loops at the top of your mind. All three flavors of scatterfocus—habitual, capture, and problem-crunching—work in both small and large periods of time, though they’ll provide you with more benefits at longer durations.
As well as entering scatterfocus mode on work breaks, there are countless other opportunities to apply scatterfocus during the day:
Disconnect from the internet between 8:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m.
Notice when you finish a task, and use that as a cue to scatter your attention for a bit.
Buy a cheap alarm clock so you’re not immediately distracted by your phone when you wake up.
Walk to get a coffee carrying only a notepad.
As a challenge to yourself, leave your phone at home for an entire day.
Take an extra-long shower.
Make yourself bored for five minutes and notice what thoughts run through your head.
Tame distractions and simplify your environment to make sure your attention doesn’t overflow the next time you do a creative hobby.
Cook with music playing instead of watching something entertaining.
Go for a nature walk.
Visit an art gallery.
Work out without music or a podcast.
Objectively speaking, scatterfocus might seem fairly unproductive. You’re on a bus staring out the window. You’re walking through nature or jogging without headphones. You’re in a waiting room writing in a notepad instead of tapping on your phone. Though you don’t look busy, your mind certainly is.
Scatterfocus is the most creative mode of your brain. Just as with hyperfocus, it’s worth spending as much time as you possibly can practicing it.
CHAPTER
10
WORKING TOGETHER
BLENDING HYPERFOCUS AND SCATTERFOCUS
In many ways hyperfocus and scatterfocus are complete opposites. At any given moment, we’re either doing something (with external attention) or thinking about something (with internal attention). We’re unable to be in both hyperfocus mode and scatterfocus mode at the same time.
For all of the ways they d
iffer, though, there are a lot of useful opportunities for the two modes to work together. When we focus, we consume and collect dots; when we scatter our attention, we connect these dots. Hyperfocusing allows us to remember more, which leads to more valuable connections made in scatterfocus mode. Scatterfocus lets us recharge, which in turn provides more energy to hyperfocus. The insights we unearth in scatterfocus help us work smarter later. In these ways and others, deliberately managing our attention is a practice with compounding benefits.
There are several strategies you can deploy that let you take greater advantage of both hyperfocus and scatterfocus. These strategies will help regardless of which mode you happen to be in.
INVEST IN YOUR HAPPINESS
If you wade through the many books, articles, and other works of research on the subject of happiness, you’re likely to become depressed only by the sheer amount of advice that exists. Some of it is useful, but a lot of empty promises are also made.
It’s important to make a distinction between legitimately investing in happiness and merely thinking more positively. To put it bluntly, positive thinking does not work to make you more happy or productive. In fact, research has shown it’s counterproductive. In one study, the more an overweight woman fantasized about being skinny, the less weight she lost over a year. In another, the more postsurgery patients fantasized about their recovery, the slower the improvement in their condition. In other studies, fantasizing positively about the future made participants perform worse on tests, decreased people’s odds of entering new romantic relationships, prompted a lower mastery of everyday life, and even led people to contribute less to charity.