Hyperfocus: How to Manage Your Attention in a World of Distraction

by Chris Bailey

1. PUT YOUR PHONE OUT OF SIGHT When your mind is even slightly resisting a task, it will look for more novel things to focus on.

Start seeing your smartphone for what it really is: a productivity black hole that sits in your pocket.

2. MIND YOUR ENVIRONMENT

Modifying your environment is one of the top ways to cultivate your focus. The most focus-conducive environments are those in which you’re interrupted and distracted the least. If possible, move yourself to one of these places—whether

3. MAKE A DISTRACTIONS LIST Distractions will always be present,

Whenever I have to focus, I adopt the two tactics mentioned above—and I also bring a pen and a notepad with me. In the notepad I write every distraction that makes its way into my mind—things I need to follow up on, tasks I can’t forget, new ideas, and so on. Maintaining a distractions list as you read will capture the important things that float to the surface of your consciousness. Writing them down to make sure they don’t slip through the cracks will let you refocus on the task at hand.

4. QUESTION WHETHER THIS BOOK IS WORTH CONSUMING AT ALL

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?

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

6. GRAB A PEN OR HIGHLIGHTER There are two ways to consume information: passively and actively.

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?

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.

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.

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.).

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 bette...

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 req...

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.

Without selective interest, experience is utter chaos. —William James Your focus determines your reality. —Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace

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.

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.

Our lives are generally structured around the fact that we’re able to hold, at most, seven pieces of unique information in our short-term memory.

You have to dig deep to find common examples of groups larger than seven.

“Attentional space” is the term I use to describe the amount of mental capacity we have available to focus on and process things in the moment. Our attentional space is what we’re aware of at any given time—it’s the scratch pad or clipboard in our brain that we use to temporarily store information as it’s being processed. Attentional space allows us to hold, manipulate, and connect information simultaneously, and on the fly. When we choose what to pay attention to, that information occupies our short-term memory, and our attentional space ensures it’s kept active so we can continue to work with it. Together, our focus and attentional space are responsible for most of our conscious experiences. If your brain were a computer, your attentional space would be its RAM. (Technically speaking, researchers refer to this space as our “working memory” and the size of this space as our “working memory capacity.”)*

WHAT’S FILLING YOUR ATTENTIONAL SPACE? Let’s do a quick check-in. What’s occupying your attentional space at this moment? In other words, what’s on your mind? Are this book and your thoughts about it consuming 100 percent of your attentional space? If so, you’ll process it faster and better. Are you devoting a third of your attention to thinking about the smartphone by your side? Is part of your mind planning what you’ll do after completing this chapter or distracted by something you’re worried about? Are these concerns or anxieties popping out of nowhere? Directing your mental gaze to what is currently occupying your attentional space can be an odd exercise, as we rarely notice what has taken hold of our attention but spend most of our time totally immersed in what we’re experiencing. There’s a term for this process: meta-awareness. Becoming aware of what you’re thinking about is one of the best practices for managing your attention. The more you notice what’s occupying your attentional space, the faster you can get back on track when your mind begins to wander, which it does a remarkable 47 percent of the time.

This is essentially what mindfulness is—noticing what your mind is full of: what you’re thinking, feeling, and perceiving at any given moment. Mindfulness adds another important dimension to the mix: not judging what you’re thinking about. When you become aware of what is occupying your mind, you realize it can come up with some pretty crazy stuff, not all of which is true—like the negative self-talk that sometimes takes root in your head. Everyone’s mind does this on some level, so you shouldn’t sweat it too much or take all of your thoughts too seriously. As one of my favorite writers, David Cain, puts it, “All thoughts want to be taken seriously, but few warrant it.”

Simply noticing what is occupying our attentional space has been shown to make us more productive.

Our attentional space can process even more when we’re working on unrelated tasks.

we use different brain regions to process them, the tasks aren’t competing for the same mental resources. There is a tipping point to attentional space, of course—doing too many habitual tasks at the same time will cause your attentional space to become overloaded. This is especially true if what you’re doing isn’t totally automatic and requires frequent mental intervention. Ultimately the point is this: the number of habitual tasks we can fit into our attentional space is much higher than the number of demanding ones.

you’ll notice that your most necessary and purposeful tasks can’t be done out of habit.* This is exactly what makes these tasks so productive. You accomplish more in doing them because they require focus and brainpower and take advantage of unique skill sets.

we can focus only on forty bits of information, and a single complex task requires most of these bits—and on top of this limit, we can process only so much at one time.

In summary, there are generally three combinations of tasks that fit comfortably within your attentional space. 1. A FEW SMALL, HABITUAL TASKS We’re able to breathe while we run, pay attention to our heart rate, and enjoy music—all at the same time.

2. A TASK THAT REQUIRES MOST OF OUR FOCUS, AS WELL AS A HABITUAL TASK Our attentional space is powerful but it’s also very limited. At best, we can do one small, habitual task plus one other activity that requires most of our attention. Two examples: listening to a podcast or audiobook while doing maintenance tasks, or playing a simple, repetitive video game on a phone while listening to an audiobook.

3. ONE COMPLEX TASK Your most productive tasks—the ones that enable you to accomplish significantly more for every minute you dedicate to them—fall into this category. The more time and attention you spend on these tasks, the more productive you become.

ATTENTION OVERLOAD Fitting the right amount and type of tasks into attentional space is both an art and an investment in productivity. The costs of overloading our attention can be pretty severe.

We have to work with intention as much as possible—this is especially true when we have more to do than time within which to do it. Intention enables us to prioritize so we don’t overload our attentional space. Doing so also leaves us feeling more calm: just as you likely feel uncomfortable after overeating, stuffing your attentional space with too many tasks can make you feel unsettled. At any one time, your attentional space should hold at most two key things that you are processing: what you intend to accomplish and what you’re currently doing. This isn’t possible 100 percent of the time, especially as you become immersed in a task, but by being mindful of your intention, you can be confident that what you’re immersed in is what you’re actually aiming to get done.

Time for a quick check-in: what’s occupying your attentional space at this moment? Take stock of everything that’s on your mind. If you find that your attentional space is a bit too full, simplify what’s in it, either by writing down these things so you can deal with them later or by refocusing on the book in your hands.

Simplifying what we focus on in the moment may feel counterintuitive: when we have so much to get done, our natural impulse is to focus on as much as possible. Compounding this is the fact that the brain’s prefrontal cortex—the large part of the forebrain that lets us plan, think logically, and get work done—has a built-in “novelty bias.” Whenever we switch between tasks, it rewards us with dopamine—that

Continually seeking novel stimuli makes us feel more productive—after all, we’re doing more in each moment. But again, just because we’re busier doesn’t mean we’re getting more accomplished.

there is nothing inherently wrong with multitasking. It’s entirely possible to multitask, especially when it comes to the habitual tasks in our work and life. But it’s important to make a distinction between shifting our attention and multitasking. Multitasking means concurrently trying to focus on more than one thing at a time. Shifting our attention is the movement of our attentional spotlight (or our attentional space) from one task to another.

when we’re working in front of a computer—a device that’s obviously chock full of novel things to focus on—on average, we work for just forty seconds before we’re either interrupted or distracted (or in other words, interrupt ourselves). This number becomes even more concerning when you consider the fact that our phone is by our side and interrupting us as well. Needless to say, our best work happens beyond this forty-second mark—nearly every single important task takes more than forty seconds of focused attention to do well.*

I’ve devoted an entire chapter later in the book to dealing with these distractions and interruptions, but here’s a quick tip: one of the best things you can do for your productivity is launch the settings app on your phone and scroll through the notification settings for each app. Shut off all the ones that aren’t absolutely necessary. Do the same on your computer and tablet if you frequently find your focus derailed as you use these devices. Which interruptions are truly important, and which are preventing you from getting past this forty-second mark? Most of them aren’t worth it—this is why I’ve deleted email on my phone entirely.

Leroy coined the term “attention residue” to describe the fragments of the previous task that remain in our attentional space after we shift to another activity:

This attention residue keeps our mind continuing to evaluate, problem-solve, reflect, and ruminate about a previous task long after we’ve transitioned to the next.

One study found that when we continually switch between tasks, our work takes 50 percent longer, compared with doing one task from start to completion. If you’re working on a pressure- or deadline-free project, consider taking a break before starting something else so more of that attentional residue can dissipate. As far as your productivity is concerned, the best time to take a break is after you’ve finished a big task.

Choosing where your attention is focused and maintaining a clear attentional space accomplishes several things at once. You will accomplish what you intend to much more often; focus more deeply, because you become a better defender of your attentional space; remember more, because you’re able to more deeply process what you’re doing; experience less guilt and doubt, knowing you’ve worked with intention; waste less time working on unimportant things; fall victim to fewer distractions—both external and internal; experience greater mental clarity, reduced stress, and fewer feelings of being overwhelmed; feel a stronger purpose behind your work, because you’ve chosen what’s worthy of your attention (working with intention also prevents you from experiencing feelings of “dullness,” which stem from having a lack of purpose); and develop deeper relationships and friendships as you spend more attention, not just time, with people.

There are numerous ways to measure the quality of your attention, but I’ve developed three measures to track my own progress. You can use these yardsticks to measure your progress as you adopt the tactics in this book into your life: How much of your time you spend intentionally How long you can hold your focus in one sitting How long your mind wanders before you catch it