by Chris Bailey
CREATING A FOCUS RITUAL
By now we’ve covered how to integrate both hyperfocus and scatterfocus into your life and make a habit out of entering each mode daily.
Enter hyperfocus mode at least once a day to deal with your most productive tasks; eliminate distractions and concentrate on one important thing. Enter scatterfocus multiple times a day—particularly habitual scatterfocus mode—so that you can plan for the future, connect ideas, and recharge your ability to hyperfocus. Do the same at home, hyperfocusing on meaningful experiences and conversations and scatterfocusing when you need to plan, rest, or ideate.
Some weeks you may find that you need more of one than the other. One of my favorite weekly routines is a focus ritual, which I schedule for every Sunday evening or Monday morning to plan my week. During it I decide on my three weekly intentions and assess how much I’ll need to hyperfocus and scatterfocus in the days ahead. I’d be lying if I said I spent a lot of time planning how long I’ll dedicate to each mode—no one should do that. But I do consider, briefly, whether my week will benefit from one mode more than the other.
When doing the same for your own schedule, ask yourself questions like these:
How much productivity and creativity will I need this week? Does an upcoming deadline mean I need to hyperfocus more than usual? Or do I have more space to plan for the future and connect ideas?
What commitments do I have coming up that will get in the way of my hyperfocus and scatterfocus time (e.g., travel, a draining conference, or an inordinate number of meetings)? How can I deal with these obstacles in advance?
How many blocks of time can I commit to hyperfocus and scatterfocus? Can I commit to these periods in my calendar?
NOTICING
This final chapter has explored a variety of ideas that will enable you to take even greater advantage of your attention. By investing in your happiness, working around your energy levels, drinking alcohol and caffeine strategically, considering your office environment, and taking into account both hyperfocus and scatterfocus as you plan your week, you’ll be able to take deliberate management of your attention to the next level.
It’s also important not to lose sight of one final concept that’s paramount to managing attention well: awareness.
As you become more aware of what’s occupying your attentional space, how much energy you have, and how full your attentional space is, you’ll become more agile and adjust as conditions change. For example, if you’ve reached an impasse with a problem, awareness will give you the ability to determine whether the problem is more analytical or requires creative insight to solve—you can then enter hyperfocus or scatterfocus accordingly.
One of the best strategies to train your brain to become more aware is the hourly awareness chime I discussed in chapter 3. When the chime dings, reflect on what’s occupying your attentional space, as well as the state of your attention. Odds are you haven’t experimented with every idea in this book, but if you haven’t already, do try this one. In addition to an hourly awareness chime, try picking a few cues you encounter each day, at work and at home, to use as reminders to check your attentional space.
Awareness is the thread that winds its way through most of the tactics in this book. When you’re aware of what has taken hold of your attention, you’re able to direct it back toward more important and meaningful things. You’ll then work with greater purpose, focus for longer, and daydream less—all of which will increase the quality of your attention and the quality of your life.
Awareness is really just a process of noticing things, and there is a lot to notice. I hope you’ve discovered some of the curious ways your own attention works. Maybe you’ve noticed the quality of your attention: how much of your time you spend intentionally, the duration of your focus, and how long your mind wanders before you catch it doing so. Maybe you’ve noticed just how often you automatically pay attention to anything that’s novel, pleasurable, or threatening. Maybe you’ve noticed how quickly objects of attention pass through your attentional space.
Above all, I hope you’ve become more productive, creative, and purpose-driven.
THE POWER OF MANAGING YOUR ATTENTION WELL
The benefits of effectively managing your attention are innumerable.
For starters, you feel more in control as you turn off autopilot mode and manage your attention deliberately. You begin to understand its limits and become better able to work within them—learning when you can and can’t multitask. Your life becomes more meaningful, because you pay greater attention to meaningful experiences and process them more deeply. In this way, meaning isn’t something we try to find—it’s something we make an effort to notice. You get more done, because you’re actually able to focus on important matters. You’re able to think more clearly and become more engaged with your work. You plan for the future and set intentions more frequently. You feel better rested and less guilty about taking a step back. And you connect more ideas, while amassing constellations of them in your mind about topics that drive your curiosity further. This inspires you to become more creative, lets you work smarter and more intuitively, and makes you more productive on creative projects.
Hyperfocus can help you get an extraordinary amount done in a relatively short period of time. Scatterfocus lets you connect ideas—which helps you unearth hidden insights, become more creative, plan for the future, and rest. Together they will enable you to work and live with purpose.
Your attention is the most powerful tool at your disposal to live and work with greater productivity, creativity, and purpose. Managing it well will enable you to spend more time and energy on your most purposeful tasks and to work more often with intention, focus for longer periods, and stumble into fewer unwanted daydreams.
I hope you spend it wisely.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For a book like this to come into existence, dozens of people had to play a part. Their work, summed up, is likely greater than my own.
First, I have never met in person many of the people who made this book possible. They are the researchers whose shoulders I stood upon in assembling it. Thank you to all those whose work is tucked away in the Notes section and in the pages of this book. Thank you especially to Gloria Mark, Mary Czerwinski, and Shamsi Iqbal, all at Microsoft Research, for meeting with me in person not once, but three times. Thank you also to Jonathan Schooler, Jonathan Smallwood, Peter Gollwitzer, and Sophie Leroy for so generously agreeing to chat.
Lucinda Blumenfeld, my literary agent, believed in the idea for this book from the very start and was once again the best partner anyone could ask for in publishing a book. Lucinda is one of those rare people who are never afraid to tell you what they think, but at the same time will always have your back. I’m thrilled I get to work with an agent as talented and generous as she is. Rick Kot, my editor extraordinaire at Viking, also believed in the idea of Hyperfocus from the very start and let me go wild with it. One of the best parts about writing this book was getting to work with Rick—truly one of the smartest, most talented, and kindest people I’ve met. (And I don’t even need to suck up to him anymore, because he’s already sent me his edits.) Thank you to Craig Pyette, my crazy-talented editor at Random House Canada, who so graciously provided editing notes that helped smooth the book out even further. Thank you also to Diego Núñez, Connor Eck, and Norma Barksdale, who provided invaluable support through the publishing process.
Thank you also to Hilary Duff and Victoria Klassen, who helped me research and edit this book. I have the tendency to write in a long-winded way, and Hilary trimmed literally thousands of words of chaff from this book. She gave you a couple hours of your life back, so you should probably thank her too. Victoria was, for a second time around, an extraordinary help in not just fact checking this book but also—as an especially big relief for me—formatting the Notes section, a task I wouldn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pol
e. Thank you, Victoria!
In addition to those who helped shape this book, there are many others who played a part. Thank you to Hal Fessenden and Jennifer Choi for helping us find such fantastic publishers outside of the United States and Canada—including Robin Harvie at Macmillan in the United Kingdom. And to Carolyn Coleburn, Ben Petrone, Lydia Hirt, Nora Alice Demick and Alex McGill for helping share the idea of this book in the United States and Canada. Thank you also to Luise Jorgensen, whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with for more than four years now. I’m honestly not sure what I’d do without you, Luise (and that’s not hyperbole).
Thank you to my readers, some of whom have been reading my work for many years. I hope you found this book worthy of your time and that this book, and my work that comes after it, pays dividends for you for many years to come.
And finally, thank you to Ardyn. Ardyn is my first reader, and I hope she always will be. I trust her more than anyone not only to strength-test my ideas but also to help me build them up in the first place. But much more important than anything work related, Ardyn is the love of my life who became my fiancée over the course of writing this book. Ardyn, from where I sit you’re one of a kind. Thank you for turning me into somebody loved.
NOTES
CHAPTER 0: WHY FOCUS MATTERS
how interested we are: Shi Feng, Sidney D’Mello, and Arthur C. Graesser, “Mind Wandering While Reading Easy and Difficult Texts,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 20, no. 3 (2013): 586–92.
Studies show we can work: Gloria Mark et al., “Neurotics Can’t Focus: An in situ Study of Online Multitasking in the Workplace,” in Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2016), 1739–44, doi:10.1145/2858036.2858202.
CHAPTER 0.5: HOW TO BETTER FOCUS ON THIS BOOK
coffee or tea: David Mrazik, “Reconsidering Caffeine: An Awake and Alert New Look at America’s Most Commonly Consumed Drug” (third-year paper, Harvard University, 2004), DASH: Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard.
CHAPTER 1: SWITCHING OFF AUTOPILOT MODE
require conscious deliberation: Wendy Wood, Jeffrey Quinn, and Deborah Kashy, “Habits in Everyday Life: Thought, Emotion, and Action,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, no. 6 (2002): 1281–97.
before we do: Erik D. Reichle, Andrew E. Reineberg, and Jonathan W. Schooler, “Eye Movements During Mindless Reading,” Psychological Science 21, no. 9 (2010): 1300–1310.
CHAPTER 2: THE LIMITS OF YOUR ATTENTION
experiences each second: Timothy Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004).
of our attention: TED, “Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the Secret to Happiness,” YouTube, October 24, 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXIeFJCqsPs.
though, is four: Nelson Cowan, “The Magical Mystery Four: How Is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why?” Current Directions in Psychological Science 19, no. 1 (2010): 51–57; Edward K. Vogel and Steven J. Luck, “The Capacity of Visual Working Memory for Features and Conjunctions,” Nature 390, no. 6657 (1997): 279–81; Nelson Cowan, “The Magical Number 4 in Short-term Memory: A Reconsideration of Mental Storage Capacity,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, no. 1 (2001): 87–114.
our conscious experiences: Giorgio Marchetti, “Attention and Working Memory: Two Basic Mechanisms for Constructing Temporal Experiences,” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014): 880.
we need it: Klaus Oberauer, “Design for a Working Memory,” Psychology of Learning and Motivation 51 (2009): 45–100.
chances at survival: Ferris Jabr, “Does Thinking Really Hard Burn More Calories?” Scientific American, July 2012; Cowan, “Magical Mystery Four.”
“a short-term memory”: Marchetti, “Attention and Working Memory.”
watching a video: Ibid.
of the rest: Shi Feng, Sidney D’Mello, and Arthur C. Graesser, “Mind Wandering While Reading Easy and Difficult Texts,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 20, no. 3 (2013): 586–92.
47 percent of the time: Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan W. Schooler, “The Science of Mind Wandering: Empirically Navigating the Stream of Consciousness,” Annual Review of Psychology 66, no. 1 (2015): 487–518; Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” Science 330, no. 6006 (2010): 932.
minds had wandered: Jonathan Smallwood, Merrill McSpadden, and Jonathan W. Schooler, “When Attention Matters: The Curious Incident of the Wandering Mind,” Memory & Cognition 36, no. 6 (2008): 1144–50.
mind is wandering: Jennifer C. McVay, Michael J. Kane, and Thomas R. Kwapil, “Tracking the Train of Thought from the Laboratory into Everyday Life: An Experience-Sampling Study of Mind Wandering Across Controlled and Ecological Contexts,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16, no. 5 (2009): 857–63.
just ten seconds: Adam D. Baddeley, Essentials of Human Memory (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 1999).
same mental resources: Daniel J. Levitin, “Why the Modern World Is Bad for Your Brain,” Guardian, January 18, 2015.
built-in “novelty bias”: Robert Knight and Marcia Grabowecky, “Prefrontal Cortex, Time, and Consciousness,” Knight Lab, Cognitive Neuroscience Research Lab, 2000.
it into memory: Marchetti, “Attention and Working Memory.”
the first place: Eyal Ophir et al., “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, no. 37 (2009): 15583–87.
interrupting us as well: Gloria Mark et al., “Neurotics Can’t Focus: An in situ Study of Online Multitasking in the Workplace,” in Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2016), 1739–44, doi:10.1145/2858036.2858202.
before becoming distracted: Gloria Mark, Yiran Wang, and Melissa Niiya, “Stress and Multitasking in Everyday College Life: An Empirical Study of Online Activity,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM 2014), 41–50, doi:10.1145/2556288.2557361.
transitioned to the next: Sophie Leroy, “Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work? The Challenge of Attention Residue When Switching Between Work Tasks,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 109, no. 2 (2009): 168–81.
ways to complete it: Ibid.
start to completion: Mark et al., “Neurotics Can’t Focus.”
before you catch it: Killingsworth and Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.”
CHAPTER 3: THE POWER OF HYPERFOCUS
mistakes they made: Gordon D. Logan and Matthew J. C. Crump, “The Left Hand Doesn’t Know What the Right Hand Is Doing: The Disruptive Effects of Attention to the Hands in Skilled Typewriting,” Psychological Science 20, no. 10 (2009): 1296–300; Sian L. Beilock et al., “When Paying Attention Becomes Counterproductive: Impact of Divided Versus Skill-Focused Attention on Novice and Experienced Performance of Sensorimotor Skills,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 8, no. 1 (2002): 6–16.
one thing intentionally: Shi Feng, Sidney D’Mello, and Arthur C. Graesser, “Mind Wandering While Reading Easy and Difficult Texts,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 20, no. 3 (2013): 586–92.
our mind has wandered): Jonathan W. Schooler et al., “Meta-awareness, Perceptual Decoupling and the Wandering Mind,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, no. 7 (2011): 319–26.
object of attention: Wendy Hasenkamp et al., “Mind Wandering and Attention During Focused Meditation: A Fine-Grained Temporal Analysis of Fluctuating Cognitive States,” Neuroimage 59, no. 1 (2012): 750–60.
47 percent of the day: Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” Science 330, no. 6006 (2010): 932.
the original task: Gloria Mark, Victor Gonzalez, and Justin Harris, “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors i
n Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2005), 321–30, doi:10.1145/1054972.1055017.
for doing so: Claire M. Zedelius et al., “Motivating Meta-awareness of Mind Wandering: A Way to Catch the Mind in Flight?” Consciousness and Cognition 36 (2015): 44–53.
by around 20 percent: Peter M. Gollwitzer and Veronika Brandstätter, “Implementation Intentions and Effective Goal Pursuit,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73, no. 1 (1997): 186–99; Peter M. Gollwitzer, “Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans,” American Psychologist 54, no. 7 (1999): 493–503.
odds of success: Gollwitzer and Brandstätter, “Implementation Intentions and Effective Goal Pursuit,” Gollwitzer, “Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans.”
original goal automatically: Gollwitzer and Brandstätter, “Implementation Intentions and Effective Goal Pursuit.”
do something simple: Gollwitzer, “Implementation Intentions.”
rewarding or meaningful: Allan Blunt, “Task Aversiveness and Procrastination: A Multi-dimensional Approach to Task Aversiveness Across Stages of Personal Projects” (master’s thesis, Department of Psychology, Carleton University, 1998).
CHAPTER 4: TAMING DISTRACTIONS
every thirty-five seconds: Gloria Mark et al., “Neurotics Can’t Focus: An in situ Study of Online Multitasking in the Workplace,” in Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2016), 1739–44, doi:10.1145/2858036.2858202.