Hyperfocus Read online

  4. QUESTION WHETHER THIS BOOK IS WORTH CONSUMING AT ALL

  We consume a lot of things out of habit, without questioning their worth—books included.

  Take time to weigh the value of your routine consumption. A tactic I find helpful is to view the descriptions of books, TV shows, podcasts, and everything else as “pitches” for your time and attention. Ask yourself: After consuming one of those products, will you be happy with how you invested your time and attention?

  Just as you are what you eat, you are what you pay attention to. Attention is finite and is the most valuable ingredient you have to live a good life—so make sure everything you consume is worthy of it. As I’ll cover in depth later, bringing awareness to what you consume can provide hours of extra time each day.

  5. CONSUME SOME CAFFEINE BEFORE READING

  If it’s not too late in the day—caffeine takes eight to fourteen hours to metabolize out of your system—consider reading alongside a cup of coffee or tea.

  Caffeine provides an invaluable focus boost, and while you usually have to pay this energy back later in the day as the drug metabolizes out of your system, the costs are often worth it. Caffeine boosts your mental and physical performance in virtually every measurable way (more on this page). Use this energy boost wisely to work on an important task or to read this book.

  6. GRAB A PEN OR HIGHLIGHTER

  There are two ways to consume information: passively and actively.

  One of my (many) habits that bother my fiancée is that I tear out the first page of every book I read to use as a bookmark. (She argues this is sacrilegious; I say there are more copies of the same book at the store.) This is only the start of the carnage; I also read with a highlighter and a pen in hand so I can mark up the book as I read it. The number of highlights and notes on its pages indicates how much I liked it. When I finish that first read, I go through the book a second time, rereading just the highlighted parts so I can really process the most valuable nuggets. If I can, I’ll annoy someone nearby by sharing these bits so I can process them again even more deeply.

  I hope that while reading Hyperfocus you’ll highlight and underline away, pulling the best ideas off its pages and carrying them in your mind to build and act upon later. If I’ve done a good job in writing it, you’ll have made a large number of notes. (Please email me a picture of your finished work of art—I’d love to see it. My email, and other ways to contact me, are at the back of the book.)

  7. WHEN YOU NOTICE YOUR FOCUS WAVERING . . .

  Your ability to focus isn’t limitless—while you can improve your attention span, it’s only a matter of time until it begins to waver. This often takes the form of your mind wandering away from the words on the page to the thoughts in your head. This is perfectly normal and human—and, as we’ll see later, this wandering can be remarkably powerful when harnessed.

  For now, though, when you do notice your focus fading, step back from this book for a few minutes to do something relatively mindless. Whether it’s washing the dishes, people watching, or cleaning the house, you’ll effectively recharge your attention. Once your focus has been reset, return to the book with a fresh mind. And just as you’ve kept a distractions list while you read, make sure you have a place to capture ideas that come to mind during your break.

  PART I

  HYPERFOCUS

  CHAPTER

  1

  SWITCHING OFF AUTOPILOT MODE

  AUTOPILOT MODE

  Right now there’s a good chance that you’re focused on this book. But how did you get here?

  Looking at the books in my own library, I learned about most of them through recommendations from friends, podcast appearances by the author, or having loved a similar book. Most of us don’t deliberately plot out which element of our lives we want to improve before settling on a book that will help us address that issue. We often arrive at those reading decisions because of a confluence of events.

  Take, for example, the last book I read. One day I was riding in a taxi whose driver had the radio on, and I heard an interview with the author. Later, a friend tweeted about that book twice. This accumulation of mentions led to my eventual decision to buy the book. The process as a whole was anything but deliberate.

  Our not plotting out in detail everything we do and every decision we make is, for the most part, a good thing. I made the series of decisions involved in purchasing many of my books in autopilot mode. Autopilot mode enables us to keep up with the demands of our life. For example, imagine if every email response required you to draft your answer in a new Word document. From there, you’d have to reread it several times, send it to your significant other for improvements, and print it once or twice to do line edits, only to arrive several hours later at a final, eloquent “Sure, sounds good!” This might be a productive thing to do for an important project, but for every email? Imagine being just as deliberate buying ketchup, taking out the trash, or brushing your teeth.

  Autopilot mode guides us through actions like these. As many as 40 percent of our actions are habits, which shouldn’t require conscious deliberation. Unless you’re a monk and have the luxury of being able to meditate all day, it’s impossible to live intentionally 100 percent of the time.

  But some decisions are worth making deliberately. How we manage our attention is one of them.

  We typically manage our attention on autopilot. When we receive an email from our boss, we instinctively stop what we’re doing to respond to it. When someone has posted a picture of us online, we check to see how we look, then click to read what the poster said about us. When we’re talking with a coworker or a loved one, we automatically focus on forming clever responses in our head before she finishes her thought. (One of the most underrated skills: letting other people finish their sentences before starting yours.)

  Here’s a simple exercise that’ll take you thirty seconds. Come up with an honest answer to this question: throughout the day, how frequently do you choose what to focus on? In other words, roughly how much of your time do you spend deliberately and with intention, deciding in advance what you want to do and when you’ll do it?

  Most people don’t fare too well with their answers. We lead busy lives, and at most we only occasionally choose to focus on something intentionally—when we catch ourselves daydreaming, sense that we’ve been procrastinating, fall into the trap of bouncing around the same several apps or websites, or realize we’ve zoned out while watching our kids.

  After we snap out of autopilot mode, we consider what we really ought to be doing and make the effort to realign our neurons to focus on that instead.

  While falling into autopilot mode can help us keep up the pace of work and life, attention is our most limited and constrained resource. The more we can manage our attention with intention, the more focused, productive, and creative we become.

  A DAY IN AUTOPILOT MODE

  The environments in which we live and work, unfortunately, have their own agenda for claiming our attention, bombarding us with alerts, notifications, beeps, and buzzes. This steady stream of interruptions prevents us from diving into any one thing properly; after all, it isn’t long before we’re presented with another email that feels just as urgent.

  If you’re still here, you’re probably better at focusing than the average person. Reading a book requires a good deal of attention—and with attention becoming a rare commodity, fewer people are able to devote themselves to reading without distraction. But it’s worth quickly asking: How much of your attention are you directing to this paragraph in this moment? Are you focused on it 100 percent? 85 percent? 50 percent? How has your level of focus changed over time, especially as you moved from one environment to another? How frequently has your mind wandered from the words on this page to the thoughts in your head—eyes skimming focus free until you caught yourself and tuned back in?* Even the most experienced, focused readers have these mind-wandering episod
es.

  It’s not unusual to have a hard time focusing. There are countless everyday examples of how little control we have over our attention in our daily lives. Take, for example the following:

  How our mind refuses to shut off when we’re lying in bed at night. While a large part of us wants to sleep because we have things to do in the morning, our mind insists on reliving the entire day.

  How our mind brings up cringeworthy memories at the worst possible times. Where do these thoughts come from?

  How incredible ideas and insights come to us while our mind is wandering in the shower, but the same insights don’t strike when we need them the most.

  How we find ourselves having forgotten our reason for entering the kitchen or bedroom. Why did we lose our grip on our original intention?

  How we can’t focus on something when we want to—like writing a report that’s not on a deadline. Or why we procrastinate and focus on things that aren’t productive instead of spending our time productively.

  How we find ourselves in bed bouncing around a loop of the same five smartphone apps, checking for updates again and again until we snap out of our trance. We may fall into a similar mindless loop on the internet—switching between news websites, IM conversations, and social media.

  How we’re unable to stop worrying about certain things until they’re resolved or vanish into the ether.

  As you read Hyperfocus and learn to focus more deliberately, these lapses will make a lot more sense, and you’ll even learn how to prevent them.

  THE FOUR TYPES OF TASKS

  In many ways, managing your attention is like choosing what to watch on Netflix. When you first launch the website, you’re presented with a landing page highlighting just a few of the many shows that are available. The Netflix homepage is like a fork in the road—only instead of two paths forward, there are thousands. Taking some of those paths will leave you feeling happy, some will mindlessly entertain you, and others will teach you something useful.

  Deciding where to direct our attention presents a similar fork in the road—only the pathways lead to the innumerable things on which we can choose to focus. Right now you’re absorbed in this book. But if you look up from this page or your e-reader, you’ll see many alternative objects of attention. Some are more meaningful and productive than others. Focusing on this book is probably more productive than focusing on your smartphone, the wall, or the music in the background. If you’re grabbing breakfast with a friend, focusing on him or her is infinitely more rewarding than watching the football highlights playing in the background.

  When you tally up all of the potential things on which you could focus in your external environment, there is truly an overwhelming number of options. And that’s not even counting the trivia, ideas, and memories in your own head.

  This is the problem with managing your attention on autopilot mode. The most urgent and stimulating things in your environment are rarely the most significant. This is why switching off autopilot mode is so critical. Directing your attention toward the most important object of your choosing—and then sustaining that attention—is the most consequential decision we will make throughout the day. We are what we pay attention to.

  To make sense of all of the things bidding for our focus, it’s helpful to divide our tasks into categories. I’ll discuss focus here largely as it pertains to work, but these rules apply just as much to your life at home, as several sections later in the book will explore.

  There are two main criteria to consider when categorizing what to focus on: whether a task is productive (you accomplish a lot by doing it) and whether a task is attractive (fun to do) or unattractive (boring, frustrating, difficult, etc.).

  I’ll refer to this grid quite often, so let’s quickly take a look at each of the four categories of tasks.

  Necessary work includes tasks that are unattractive yet productive. Team meetings and calls about your quarterly budget fall into this quadrant. We usually have to push ourselves to do this type of work.

  Unnecessary work includes the tasks that are both unproductive and unattractive—like rearranging the papers on your desk or the files on your computer. We usually don’t bother with these tasks unless we’re procrastinating on doing something else or resisting a task that falls into the necessary work or purposeful work categories. Spending time on unnecessary work tasks keeps us busy, but such busyness is just an active form of laziness when it doesn’t lead to actually accomplishing anything.

  Distracting work includes stimulating, unproductive tasks and as such is a black hole for productivity. It includes social media, most IM conversations, news websites, watercooler chats, and every other form of low-return distraction. These activities can be fun but should generally be indulged in small doses. The better you become at managing your attention, the less time you’ll spend in this quadrant.

  The remaining box on the chart is purposeful work—the productivity sweet spot. These are the tasks we’re put on earth to do; the tasks we’re most engaged in as we do them; the tasks with which we make the largest impact. Very few tasks fit into this box—most people I’ve encountered have three or four at most. Doing good work in this category usually requires more brainpower, and we are often better at these types of tasks than other people are. An actor’s most purposeful tasks might be to rehearse and perform. A financial adviser’s purposeful tasks might be to make investments, meet with clients, and educate herself on industry trends. A researcher’s most important tasks might include designing and running studies, teaching, and applying for funding. My most important tasks are writing books and blog articles, reading research to encounter new ideas, and giving talks. In your personal life, your purposeful tasks might include spending time with your kids, working on a side hustle, or volunteering with a local charity.

  A perfectly productive person would focus on only the top two quadrants of the above chart. If things were that simple, though, you wouldn’t need this book. As you’ve no doubt experienced, sticking within the borders of necessary and purposeful work is much easier said than done. Every day, tasks from all four quadrants compete for our attention. Working on autopilot means we are more prone to falling prey to the unnecessary and distracting ones and often spend time on necessary and purposeful work only when we’re on deadline.

  I noticed something interesting as I applied the research in this book to my own life: as time passed, I began to spend less time on autopilot and focused more attention on my most purposeful and necessary tasks. As you become more deliberate about managing your attention, I think you’ll find the same to be true for your work.

  Here’s an immediate way to improve your productivity. Divide up your work tasks based on the four categories in the above grid. This simple activity will give you an incredible awareness of what’s actually important in your work. Because I’ll return to the grid often going forward, divvying up your work activities will be valuable as you make your way through the book.

  CHAPTER

  2

  THE LIMITS OF YOUR ATTENTION

  Without selective interest, experience is utter chaos.

  —William James

  Your focus determines your reality.

  —Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace

  THE BOUNDARIES OF YOUR ATTENTION

  Our attention is the most powerful tool we have to live a good life and get stuff done, but our ability to focus is constrained in two main ways.

  First, there’s a finite limit to how many things we can focus on. That limit is smaller than you might think. If we could actually focus on more tasks simultaneously, we’d be able to do far more in the moment: memorizing someone’s phone number while playing the piano, carrying on a conversation with two people, and responding to an email on our phone. Realistically we can, at most, do one or two of these things well at the same time.r />
  Our environment sends a steady stream of information to our brain every second. Think about the sights, sounds, and other information coming at you in this moment, and you’ll realize there is a nearly infinite number of items at which you could direct your focus. Timothy Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, estimates that our brain receives eleven million “bits” of information in the form of sensory experiences each second.

  But how many of these eleven million bits can our minds consciously process and focus on at once? Just forty of them. Not forty million or forty thousand, but forty.

  When we choose what to focus on, we’re effectively sipping from a fire hose. One conversation, for example, consumes the majority of our attentional bits, which is why we can’t carry on two at once. According to renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, simply decoding a conversation (so we can understand it) consumes more than half of our attention. As well as interpreting a person’s words, you have to parse the meaning behind what he or she is saying. While you’re conversing, there are countless other places to direct your remaining attentional bits: your work tasks for tomorrow, random thoughts in your head, the lamp behind your partner, the timbre of her voice, or what you’re going to say next—but extracting the meaning of what you’re hearing is the best use of your focus.

  The second way that our attention is limited is that after focusing on something, we can hold only a small amount of information in our short-term memory. The ability to temporarily store information in our minds is practically a superpower, as it’s what enables us to think about what we’re doing as we’re doing it, whether that involves problem-solving tasks (e.g., carrying over digits when doing arithmetic) or planning for the future (e.g., plotting the best sequence of exercises at the gym). Without this temporary mental scratch pad, we’d be mindlessly reacting to whatever was happening in the world around us.