Hyperfocus
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fifty-two minutes of work: Julia Gifford, “The Rule of 52 and 17: It’s Random, but It Ups Your Productivity,” The Muse, no date.
when we’re tired: Kuriyama et al., “Sleep Accelerates the Improvement in Working Memory Performance.”
space less often: James Hamblin, “How to Sleep,” Atlantic, January 2017.
than it actually is: Bronwyn Fryer, “Sleep Deficit: The Performance Killer,” Harvard Business Issue, October 2006; Paula Alhola and Päivi Polo-Kantola, “Sleep Deprivation: Impact on Cognitive Performance,” Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 3, no. 5 (2007): 553.
stages of sleep: G. William Domhoff and Kieran C. R. Fox, “Dreaming and the Default Network: A Review, Synthesis, and Counterintuitive Research Proposal,” Consciousness and Cognition 33 (2015): 342–53.
mode on steroids: Ibid.
throughout the day: Gloria Mark et al., “Sleep Debt in Student Life: Online Attention Focus, Facebook, and Mood,” in Proceedings of the Thirty-fourth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2016), 5517–28, doi:10.1145/2858036.2858437.
midnight, on average: 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.
your focus and productivity: Trougakos and Hideg, “Momentary Work Recovery.”
CHAPTER 8: CONNECTING DOTS
encoded into our memory: J. Gläscher et al., “Distributed Neural System for General Intelligence Revealed by Lesion Mapping,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107, no. 10 (2010): 4705–9.
field of neuroscience: Randy L. Buckner, “The Serendipitous Discovery of the Brain’s Default Network,” Neuroimage 62, no. 2 (2012): 1137.
study this concept: E. J. Masicampo and Roy F. Baumeister, “Unfulfilled Goals Interfere with Tasks That Require Executive Functions,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47, no. 2 (2011): 300–311.
unearth novel solutions: Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan W. Schooler, “The Restless Mind,” Psychological Bulletin 132, no. 6 (2006): 946–58.
number of mistakes: Ibid.
“on cocktail napkins”: Jonah Lehrer, “The Eureka Hunt,” New Yorker, July 2008.
in that moment: S. Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (London: Vision Press, 1976); David Harrison, “Arousal Syndromes: First Functional Unit Revisited,” in Brain Asymmetry and Neural Systems (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2015).
find a solution: Denise J. Cai et al., “REM, Not Incubation, Improves Creativity by Priming Associative Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, no. 25 (2009): 10130–34.
dots you encountered: Carl Zimmer, “The Purpose of Sleep? To Forget, Scientists Say,” New York Times, February 2017.
you purposefully unfocus: Marci S. DeCaro et al., “When Higher Working Memory Capacity Hinders Insight,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 42, no. 1 (2016): 39–49.
through a sentence: Colleen Seifert et al., “Demystification of Cognitive Insight: Opportunistic Assimilation and the Prepared-Mind Hypothesis,” in The Nature of Insight, ed. R. Sternberg and J. Davidson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
CHAPTER 9: COLLECTING DOTS
they’re linked together: Nelson Cowan, “What Are the Differences Between Long-term, Short-term, and Working Memory?” Progress in Brain Research 169 (2008): 323–38.
don’t consciously retrieve: Annette Bolte and Thomas Goschke, “Intuition in the Context of Object Perception: Intuitive Gestalt Judgments Rest on the Unconscious Activation of Semantic Representations,” Cognition 108, no. 3 (2008): 608–16.
supports what you know: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” New Yorker, February 2017.
more useful pursuits: “The Cross-Platform Report: A New Connected Community,” Nielsen, November 2012.
writer Arthur C. Clarke: “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination,” in Profiles of the Future: An Enquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper & Row, 1962, rev. 1973), 14, 21, 36.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote: Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2008).
connections others hadn’t: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 352.
“only passionately curious”: Isaacson, Einstein, 548.
theory of relativity: Ibid.
“in prison yet”: Ibid., 307.
“how much Mozart practiced”: Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2008).
came to him: Nick Mojica, “Lin-Manuel Miranda Freestyles Off the Dome During 5 Fingers of Death,” XXL Mag, October 2017.
between hyperfocus and scatterfocus: John Kounios, The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain (New York: Random House, 2015), 208.
CHAPTER 10: WORKING TOGETHER
In one study: Gabriele Oettingen and Bettina Schwörer, “Mind Wandering via Mental Contrasting as a Tool for Behavior Change,” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013): 562; Gabriele Oettingen, “Future Thought and Behaviour Change,” European Review of Social Psychology 23, no. 1 (2012): 1–63.
on something mundane: Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” Science 330, no. 6006 (2010): 932.
experience all three: Michael S. Franklin et al., “The Silver Lining of a Mind in the Clouds: Interesting Musings Are Associated with Positive Mood While Mind-Wandering,” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013): 583.
mode you’re in: Jonathan Smallwood et al., “Shifting Moods, Wandering Minds: Negative Moods Lead the Mind to Wander,” Emotion 9, no. 2 (2009): 271–76.
and accomplish more: F. Gregory Ashby, Alice M. Isen, and And U. Turken, “A Neuropsychological Theory of Positive Affect and Its Influence on Cognition,” Psychological Review 106, no. 3 (1999): 529–50.
the risky kind: Ibid.
front of you: 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.
took place then: Jonathan Smallwood and Rory C. O’Connor, “Imprisoned by the Past: Unhappy Moods Lead to a Retrospective Bias to Mind Wandering,” Cognition & Emotion 25, no. 8 (2011): 1481–90.
think of them more: Jonathan W. Schooler, interview with the author, November 28, 2017.
“recovering depressive individuals”: Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan W. Schooler, “The Restless Mind,” Psychological Bulletin 132, no. 6 (2006): 946–58.
negative or neutral state: Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work (New York: Currency, 2010).
which to work: Karuna Subramaniam et al., “A Brain Mechanism for Facilitation of Insight by Positive Affect,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21, no. 3 (2009): 415–32.
thousands of subjects: Killingsworth and Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.”
bolster your happiness: Shawn Achor, “The Happy Secret to Better Work,” TED.com, 2011, www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work.
number of ideas: Mareike B. Wieth and Rose T. Zacks, “Time of Day Effects on Problem Solving: When the Non-optimal Is Optimal,” Thinking & Reasoning 17, no. 4 (2011): 387–401.
naturally more tired: Ibid.
engaged on Fridays: Gloria Mark et al., “Bored Mondays and Focused Afternoons: The Rhythm of Attention and Online Activity in the Workplace,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2014), 3025�
�34, doi:10.1145/2556288.2557204.
drinks in the process: Andrew F. Jarosz et al., “Uncorking the Muse: Alcohol Intoxication Facilitates Creative Problem Solving,” Consciousness and Cognition 21, no. 1 (2012): 487–93.
mind has wandered: Michael A. Sayette, Erik D. Reichle, and Jonathan W. Schooler, “Lost in the Sauce: The Effects of Alcohol on Mind Wandering,” Psychological Science 20, no. 6 (2009): 747–52.
pretty much anything: Jarosz, Colflesh, and Wiley. “Uncorking the Muse.”
a jigsaw puzzle: Tom M. McLellan, John A. Caldwell, and Harris R. Lieberman, “A Review of Caffeine’s Effects on Cognitive, Physical and Occupational Performance,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 71 (2016): 294–312.
performance becomes impaired: Ibid.
often as well: Laura Dabbish, Gloria Mark, and Victor González, “Why Do I Keep Interrupting Myself? Environment, Habit and Self-Interruption,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2011), 3127–30, doi:10.1145/1978942.1979405; Gloria Mark, Victor Gonzalez, and Justin Harris, “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2005), 321–30, doi:10.1145/1054972.1055017.
in your mouth: McLellan et al., “A Review of Caffeine’s Effect.”
energy to refocus: Mark, Gonzalez, and Harris, “No Task Left Behind?”
fell by 30 percent: R. van Solingen, E. Berghout, and F. van Latum, “Interrupts: Just a Minute Never Is,” IEEE Software 15, no. 5 (1998): 97–103; Edward R. Sykes, “Interruptions in the Workplace: A Case Study to Reduce Their Effects,” International Journal of Information Management 31, no. 4 (2011): 385–94.
and less costly: van Solingen, Berghout, and van Latum, “Interrupts.”
hyperfocus or scatterfocus accordingly: Claire M. Zedelius and Jonathan W. Schooler, “Mind Wandering ‘Ahas’ Versus Mindful Reasoning: Alternative Routes to Creative Solutions,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 834.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
INDEX
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.
Achor, Shawn, 203, 204–5
ADHD, 51n, 139n
age, 75n
alcohol, 207–8
Allen, David, 107
Archimedes, 176
attention, 1–3, 5, 149, 184, 185
alcohol and, 208
blinking and, 29
choosing where to direct, 19
decisions about, 193
limits of, 23–49
managing well, power of, 214–15
measuring quality of, 48–49, 109
overflow of, 38–42, 43, 44
quality of, 47–49
shifting of, 44, 45, 47
attentional space, 26–29, 110, 173, 183
age and, 75n
checking in on, 29–31, 41, 80, 150, 213
complex tasks and, 34–35, 37–38, 112
conversations and, 24, 27, 31, 34, 37, 149
habitual tasks and, 32–34, 36–37
hourly awareness chime and, 63–65, 213–14
hyperfocus and, 50–55; see also hyperfocus
intention in, 38–39, 47, 48
memory and, 31, 43
meta-awareness and, 30
mood and, 202–3
movement of, 43, 44
reading and, 28–29
simplifying, 40–41
size of, 31, 112–14, 117–23, 148, 152, 160, 166, 180, 202–3, 208
sleep and, 160
tasks in, 31–38
attention residue, 45–46
attractive or unattractive tasks, 20, 21
Augsburger, David, 125
autopilot mode, 15–22, 37, 39, 43, 55, 59, 67, 140, 168, 192
awareness, 110, 213–14
mindfulness, 30, 120–23, 203
awareness chime, 63–65, 213–14
Baird, Benjamin, 138
bathroom breaks, 76, 90, 149
Biological Prime Time (BPT), 205–7
blinking, 29
books, 15, 103
see also reading
boredom, 111–12
rethinking, 153–58
brain, 69, 107, 152, 185
attention residue and, 46
“bits” of information processed by, 24, 34
complex tasks and, 109
default network of, 139n, 172
and different types of tasks, 33
distractions and, 76, 82–83
dopamine in, 41–42, 186–87, 202
energy consumption by, 27n, 42, 169
evolution and, 41–42, 136–37
habits and, 33, 67
hyperfocus and, 151, 171, 198
memory and, 43
multitasking and, 43–44
novelty bias in, 41, 42, 136–38
prefrontal cortex in, 33, 41
prospective bias in, 140–41, 148
scatterfocus and, 151, 167, 172, 198, 199, 206
sleep and, 167
training apps and, 117–18
Brandstätter, Veronika, 66, 67
breaks, 159, 160, 169–70, 177, 198
frequency and length of, 163–66
more refreshing, 161–63
ninety-minute rule for, 164–65
phone use during, 76, 90, 149
see also recharging
busyness, 21, 42, 116
caffeine, 10, 83, 208–10
Cain, David, 30
calendars and schedules, 60–61, 107–8
capture mode, in scatterfocus, 143, 144–45, 198
chewing gum, 76n
caffeinated, 210n
chime, hourly awareness, 63–65, 213–14
Christensen, Clayton, 92
“chunking” technique, 25, 35–36
Clarke, Arthur C., 195
cleanliness, 101n, 103–4
coffee and tea, 10, 83, 85, 208–10
collaborative work, 82
complexity, 34–35, 37–38, 112
hyperfocus and, 54, 55, 70–71, 112
increasing, 113–16
computer:
in classroom, 106n
Disk Defragmenter in, 157–58
distraction-blocking apps on, 83, 84
and distractions and interruptions, 5, 44–45, 76–77, 83
notification settings on, 45, 88–89
RAM in, 27n
switching between applications on, 74
Consciousness and the Brain (Dehaene), 32
consequences of tasks, 61–62
constraints, 70
conversations, 57
attentional space and, 24, 27, 31, 34, 37, 149
hyperfocus in, 124–25
phone, overhearing, 106
Creative Prime Time (CPT), 206–7
creativity, 4, 47, 96, 185n
alcohol and, 207
delaying decisions and, 180
environment and, 101n
scatterfocus and, 133, 134, 171–73, 199
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 24, 56n, 113–14
cues, 177, 214
Czerwinski, Mary, 73–74
Dalí, Salvador, 179
daydreaming, see mind wandering
deadlines, 18, 22, 46–47, 50, 115, 124, 164
decisions:
delaying, 180
magic and, 195
deep work, 82
defragmenting, 157–58, 167
Dehaene, Stanislas, 32–33
delaying decisions, 180
DeskTime, 165
devices:
assessing usefulness of, 92
see also computer; phone
Disk Defragmenter, 157–58
distracting work, 20–22
distractions and interruptions, 3–5, 8, 17, 48, 58, 63, 64, 72, 156, 212
age and, 75n
annoying vs. fun, 78–81
appeal of, 76–78
brain and, 76, 82–83
computer and, 5, 44–45, 76–77, 83
control over, 78–81
costs of, 75
definition of, 78
environment modification and, 8–9, 48, 99–104, 109
four types of, 78–81
hyperfocus and, 56, 57, 69
impulse management and, 77–78, 85
internal, 107–8
list of, 9
related to work, 75
scatterfocus and, 149
secondhand, 106n
self-interruption, 75, 80
and social costs of distraction-free mode, 85
space between impulse and action in, 102n
taking stock of, 103
taming, 73–110
teams and, 85–86
treating yourself to, 85
working with reduced distractions, 87–99
see also specific types
dopamine, 41–42, 186–87, 202
dots, see information, information dots
Edison, Thomas, 179
Einstein, Albert, 171, 196
electric shocks, 135–36, 156
email, 3, 17, 41, 45, 57, 59, 75, 77n, 87–88, 93–96, 116
checking, 93, 94
dealing with, 93
five-sentence rule for, 95–96
hyperfocus on, 94
notifications of, 88–89, 94–95
stress and, 73–74
taking holiday from, 95
two accounts, 95
waiting before sending, 96, 180
energy, 159, 213
Biological Prime Time and, 205–7
borrowing from the following day, 208
brain and, 27n, 42, 169
Creative Prime Time and, 206–7
focus and, 159, 169
hyperfocus and, 160
nighttime ritual and, 168