Hyperfocus

by Chris Bailey

  * If you can do your most productive tasks out of habit, it’s a sign you should probably delegate them to someone else, eliminate them entirely, or make a conscious effort to spend less time and attention on them.

  * This is why you should deliberately pay more attention to tasks you recently forgot—shutting off the oven, for example. Studying works for the same reason: by paying attention to information multiple times, you are more likely to remember it.

  * Another study looked at how often fifty people switched between tasks and examined the average focus duration of the ten most and least distracted participants. The most distracted multitaskers switched between tasks every twenty-nine seconds, and the least distracted participants switched between tasks every seventy-five seconds. In other words, the most focused participants barely worked for a minute before becoming distracted.

  * This term originates in ADHD literature and describes the phenomenon when a single task consumes one’s full attention, whether or not that task is important. It’s not that those with ADHD can’t focus—it’s that it’s more difficult for them to control when they do. I’ve adapted the term to have a similar meaning—intense focus, but coupled with deliberate attention. It doesn’t matter how deeply you focus if what you’re focusing on is not important.

  * This effect is partly due to what, in psychology circles, is known as the spotlight effect—where you think everyone’s watching you when really, they couldn’t care less.

  * In this way, hyperfocus is the state that precedes what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a “flow” state—the state where we’re entirely absorbed in what we’re doing and time passes at a much faster speed. As Csikszentmihalyi explains in Flow, when we’re immersed in this state, “nothing else seems to matter.” This is yet another reason why focusing on only one thing is essential: our odds of experiencing flow rise exponentially when several things aren’t competing for our limited attention. Hyperfocus is the process that leads us to flow.

  * Microsoft does a surprising amount of research—at this writing, it employs over two thousand people who do, and publish, research full time.

  * Distractions become even costlier after the age of forty. Your attentional space shrinks as you age, which makes it more difficult to get back on track. Impressively, though your attentional space shrinks as you get older, your mind actually wanders less. The system in our brain that processes information dwindles as we age—this makes us less likely to fall victim to one distraction after another.

  * One question that comes up frequently in attentional research is how women and men differ when it comes to multitasking. Women experience fewer interruptions and interrupt themselves less overall. And they do so while working on more projects at once. Compared with men, women are also happier and more engaged in the workplace.

  * Something that’s gone down since the introduction of the smartphone? Chewing gum sales. Since 2007—the year the iPhone was introduced—gum sales have plummeted 17 percent. Obviously correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does make you wonder.

  * Curiously, the distractions you’re most likely to fall victim to differ depending on what you’re working on. When you’re doing rote work, you’re significantly more likely to visit Facebook or initiate a face-to-face interaction with a coworker. When you’re focused on more complex work, you’re more likely to check your email.

  * This isn’t the case if you’re a manager or team leader, however—in this case, 60 percent of your interruptions come from others.

  * This is the irony of using our smartphone when we’re socializing with another person. We largely use the device to cultivate relationships with other people, but no smartphone experience will ever be as meaningful as a face-to-face encounter.

  * Environmental cues are powerful—even the cleanliness of your office has an impact on your productivity. Research shows that neat environments are more conducive to focus, and messy environments are more conducive to creativity. For this reason, if you want all the participants in a meeting to focus on a project, invite them into a clean conference room with few distractions. If you want to break with convention, effect change, or have a more creative brainstorming session, hold the meeting in a messier environment. If there isn’t a cluttered meeting room at the office, mix things up and have a meeting off-site, such as outdoors in nature, where everyone is exposed to new insight triggers. (Though be wary of walking meetings. Walking—including while you work, such as on a treadmill desk—has been shown to decrease cognitive performance. Performance increases after a walk, however.)

  * One study found that when a distraction is about twenty seconds away from us—when it takes twenty seconds to retrieve a bag of chips from the basement, unlock a drawer to get our cellphone, or restart our computer to access distracting websites—it provides enough of a temporal distance for us to not fall victim to these distractions, and we’re better able to control our impulses. It’s in this space between impulse and action that we regain control over our attention—and introducing a twenty-second delay gives us the awareness to resist the impulses we naturally have.

  * Long story . . .

  * One study found that 70–72°F (21–22°C) is the ideal temperature for productivity. Lower temperatures increase the number of errors we make and how often we call in sick, and higher temperatures, above 86°F (30°C), decrease our productivity by about 10 percent. We’re all wired differently, of course, so your mileage may vary.

  * Secondhand distraction is a real phenomenon: another experiment found that students who focused on a lecture were likely to score significantly worse if they could see a classmate multitasking on a laptop in front of them—these distracted students averaged 56 percent on a follow-up test, while those who weren’t distracted scored 73 percent. That can be the equivalent of going from a D to a B grade. For this reason, some researchers advocate developing an “attention-aware classroom” in which students can be mindful of the cost of distractions. On the flip side, excessive classroom computer use can also be symptomatic of a larger problem—like that the lecture is boring and students aren’t engaged.

  * The power of meditation is that reining your mind to focus on a small and simple object of attention makes focusing on more complex things easier. As a result, your mind wanders less often, you’re able to focus more deeply and for longer periods, and the quality of your attention increases dramatically. Meditation practices are less intimidating than you may think and are worth trying.

  * The larger your attentional space, the more your mind wanders when you work on something simple. This is further evidence that the smartest members of your team should be assigned the most challenging work.

  * There is a strong relationship between working memory capacity and intelligence—an 85 percent correlation. Intelligence is the single best predictor of job performance.

  * There are exceptions to this rule: one study has observed that the western scrub jay tends to cache food for future meals because of its previous experience of having food stolen. This, according to the study’s authors, “challenges the hypothesis that [the ability to future plan] is unique to humans.” And another study found that “antelope and salamanders can predict the consequences of events they’ve experienced before.” Whatever ability animals have to plan for and think about the future, however, seems rudimentary and limited.

  * Our brain’s default network—the network that we fire up as we enter into scatterfocus—is extraordinarily powerful, and not just because it leads us to experience thoughts as if they were real. Abnormal activity in the network—in particular an inability to suppress the network—is associated with depression, anxiety, ADHD, posttraumatic stress, autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. Generally, more activity in this region of your brain is beneficial: one study found that “when people with higher IQ scores [rest their attention,] the [default mode] connectivity in their brains, especially for long-ra
nge connections, is stronger than that measured in the brains of people with average IQ.”

  * You may have noticed these percentages don’t add up to 100 percent—the remaining 16 percent of the time our mind is somewhere else, like when it’s connecting ideas or is dull or blank.

  * This prospective bias may be another reason we prefer distracting ourselves with Facebook over letting our mind wander. It’s what makes us want to understand and predict the future. Seeing status updates from friends helps us understand the future much better—mind-wandering researchers say this is one of the reasons we fill our daydreaming time with stimulating distractions instead.

  * If you’re curious, your brain’s “task-positive” network supports hyperfocus, and your “task-negative,” or “default mode,” network supports scatterfocus. Your task-positive network is activated when you’re paying attention to something external, while your default mode network is activated when your internal focus is high.

  * This book would be more than a thousand pages long if I covered every topic that contributed to promoting focus, but it’s worth highlighting spending time in nature to help you feel rested and recharged. This activity makes you up to 50 percent better at creative problem-solving tasks, lowers levels of stress hormones in your body by around 16 percent, makes you calmer, and elevates your mood. One study even discovered that “[t]hose living on blocks with more trees showed a boost in heart and metabolic health equivalent to what one would experience from a $20,000 gain in income.” We evolved to thrive in nature—not concrete jungles.

  * An interesting observation: the less a person is motivated by money, the more money they end up making in the end. Money, fame, and power are extrinsic goals—they’re external to you and far less motivating than intrinsic goals, such as growth, community, and helping others.

  * In a strange bit of irony, the default network, which supports scatterfocus, was discovered serendipitously as well. At first the network was ignored. Then it was dismissed as an experimental error—mere background noise in the brain-scanning machines. Eventually scientists discovered the error of their ways, and it has since emerged as a major topic of study in the field of neuroscience.

  * If you’ve ever felt like a fraud or an impostor in your field, you’re not alone. The next time you do, simply consider how many dots you’ve accumulated and connected about a given topic relative to everyone else. Chances are you understand the nuances and complexity of the topic just as much as whomever you’re comparing yourself with.

  * Through this lens, intelligence and creativity are very similar constructs. Both intelligence and creativity involve connecting dots, but in different ways. Intelligence involves connecting dots so we understand a given topic more intricately. Creativity also involves connecting dots—but in new and novel ways. Seen this way, intelligence and creativity aren’t something we’re born with—they’re something we earn as we collect and connect enough dots about a given topic.

  * There are countless examples of others who let their mind wander to connect ideas. To write Hamilton, arguably the best Broadway show ever created, composer Lin-Manuel Miranda would make musical loops in a computer program and then walk around in scatterfocus mode until the lyrics came to him.

  * The way researchers measured this in a lab was by having participants listen to either happy or mournful music while saying either positive or negative statements. Some participants heard uplifting music like Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik while uttering statements like “I have complete confidence in myself.” Others listened to sadder music like Barber’s Adagio for Strings while uttering statements like “Just when I think things are going to get better, something else goes wrong.”

  * Another random, fun finding from this study: we do the greatest number of rote tasks on Thursdays (about a third of the routine tasks we do throughout the entire week). If you find you fall into this pattern, it might be worth seeing Thursdays as your “Maintenance Day”—when you do all the tasks you’d rather not focus on during the rest of the week.

  * If you’re looking for a near-instantaneous boost, try caffeinated gum. Your body absorbs caffeine most quickly through the buccal tissue in your mouth.

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