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

by Chris Bailey

Setting up your email to receive notifications only for a group of “VIP senders” is also possible in most email applications and lets you decide who can interrupt you throughout the day.

Over time, I’ve changed my relationship with my phone—instead of seeing it as a device that should stay attached to my hip for the entire day, I’ve started to regard it as a powerful, more annoying computer.

Here are a few more strategies to prevent your phone (and other devices) from taking over your life: Mind the gaps. Resist the urge to tap around on your smartphone when you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, walking to the coffee shop, or in the bathroom. Use these small breaks to reflect on what you’re doing, to recharge, and to consider alternate approaches to your work and life.

Do a phone swap. Swap phones with a good friend or significant other when you’re at dinner or hanging out. That way, if you have to look something up, make a call, or take a picture, you’ll have a device to do it with—but one that won’t suck you into a personalized world of distraction.

Strategically use airplane mode.

Buy a second “distractions” device. This may sound a bit silly, but I recently bought an iPad that I use for one sole purpose: as a distractions device. I keep few social media apps (and no email app) on my phone and instead use my iPad for all things distracting.

Create a “Mindless” folder. Try housing your most distracting apps—the ones that pull you into autopilot mode—in a “Mindless” folder on your phone or tablet. The folder’s name will serve as an additional reminder that you’re about to distract yourself.

Prune your list of apps. Scroll through your phone and delete the apps on which you waste too much time and attention—social media and news apps included.

Before you buy another device, ask yourself: What jobs am I hiring it to do that the devices I already own can’t? Thinking about your devices this way forces you to consider why you really own them and, perhaps even more important, enables you to bring devices into your life only with intention.

Check for new messages only if you have the time, attention, and energy to deal with whatever might have come in. This is a simple trigger that lets you make sure you can actually deal with new messages, instead of getting stressed by the new stuff to which you have to respond.

Keep a tally of how often you check for messages.

Predecide when you’ll check. Determining ahead of time when you’ll check for new messages works wonders for reducing the number of times you open your email. Seventy percent of emails are opened within the first six seconds of receipt, so shutting off notifications will help you work in a less agitated and reflexive way.

Hyperfocus on email. If you work in an environment that demands that you be highly responsive to emails, try hyperfocusing while answering your messages. Set a timer for twenty minutes, and in that time, blow through as many emails as you possibly can.

Limit points of contact. It takes only ten seconds to carry out one of the most important productivity tactics: deleting the email app on your phone. I have an email app only on my distractions device and on my computer.

Keep an external to-do list.

Sign up for two email accounts. I have two email addresses: one that’s public facing, and a private one for my closest colleagues. While I check my public facing account once a day, I batch-check the other inbox a few times throughout the day. In select cases, this is a strategy worth adopting.

Take an “email holiday.” If you’re hunkering down on a big project, set up an autoresponder explaining that you’re on a one- or two-day “email holiday” and that you’re still in the office and can be reached by phone or in person for urgent requests.

Use the five-sentence rule. In order to save your time and respect your email recipient’s time, keep each message you write to five sentences or less, and add a note to your email signature explaining that you’re doing so.

Wait before sending important messages. Not every email is worth sending immediately—this is particularly true when you find yourself in an emotionally charged state when drafting a reply. Some responses, you might ultimately decide, aren’t worth sending at all.

Never attend a meeting without an agenda. Ever. A meeting without an agenda is a meeting without a purpose. Whenever I’m invited to a meeting without an agenda, regardless of whom it’s with, I’ll ask for the objective. Very frequently, whoever scheduled it will find that the purpose can be accomplished with a couple of emails or a phone call. Push back on any meeting without an agenda—your time is too valuable.

Question every recurring meeting on your calendar. We often fail to question the value of routine meetings. Sift through the next month or two on your calendar, and consider which recurring meetings are truly worth your time and attention.

Challenge the attendance list. Does everybody invited need to be there? The answer is usually no. If you’re a manager or team leader, or just want to save someone time, let certain participants whose presence isn’t critical know that while they’re definitely welcome, their attendance is optional if they have something else important to work on.

Hyperfocus on meetings. Engaging can be tough when meetings consume more of your time than they do your attention and energy. But if you do decide a meeting is worth attending, or you can’t get out of it, enjoy it!

To modify your environment to be more conducive to working or living, you should eliminate objects of attention that will potentially derail your focus. Doing this is actually pretty simple: Take stock of the distractions around you. This is especially important in the place where you focus on your most complex work. Make a list of all potential distractions—everything from the tablet you keep by your desk to a coworker sharing your cubicle. Then consider: Which of these do you find more attractive than your work?

Distance yourself. Just as with distractions, it’s not possible to tame all environmental cues in advance—but you can control most. Make a plan to remove attractive objects of attention from your environment so you’re not tempted by them.

Introduce more productive cues into your environment. Not all environmental cues are bad, and no one wants to work in a sterile environment. Plants, for example, have been shown to have a calming effect—we evolved to feel good in nature, not in cubicles. Hanging a whiteboard in your environment may prompt you to brainstorm your thoughts and is a useful place to write your three daily intentions. Lining up your favorite books on an office shelf might remind you of idea...

The cleanliness of your environment is also important. Make sure you tidy your space when you’re done with it—coming

Research suggests that the most productive music has two main attributes: it sounds familiar (because of this, music that is productive for you may differ from your coworkers’ choices), and it’s relatively simple.

If a loud coworker in the adjacent cubicle is on a telephone call, it’s much more productive to throw on some noise-canceling headphones and listen to music. (A study found that overhearing one side of a phone conversation is significantly more distracting than overhearing a regular dyadic conversation—your brain works overtime to fill in the missing side of the half-alogue, so the conversation occupies more of your attentional space.)*

Allen is the author of Getting Things Done, a book with a simple premise: that our brain is for having ideas, not for holding them. An empty brain is a productive brain, and the more stuff we get out of our heads, the more clearly we think. You’re already familiar with this idea if you keep a calendar. You’d never be able to think clearly if you tried to keep track of all of your appointments and meetings in your head. You’d forever need to devote some portion of your attentional space to upcoming events, and this would be extraordinarily stressful. Keeping a to-do list has a similar effect: each task you get out of your head and onto the list is a task that won’t pester you as you’re working on something else. You’ll be able to think more clearly—and you’ll experience less guilt about what you’re working on as a result. Something remarkable happens when you externalize tasks and commitments: you work with almost no guilt, worry, or doubt.

All three measures are supported by the tactics in this chapter: Creating a distraction-free mode lets you carve out time to spend intentionally while eliminating the more attractive objects of attention that would ordinarily derail your focus. Working with fewer distractions in general lets you eliminate novel objects of attention throughout the day and reclaim more of your attention for what’s important. Utilizing both of these working modes helps you train your brain to wander less and focus longer. Simplifying your working and living environments eliminates a slew of tempting distractions. Clearing your head of distracting open loops lets you work more clearly and frees even more attentional space for your most productive tasks.

WHAT MAKES OUR MINDS WANDER

we’re feeling stressed or bored; we’re working in a chaotic environment; we’re dealing with and thinking about a number of personal concerns; we’re questioning whether we’re working on the most productive or meaningful task; or we have unused attentional space—the more we have, the more prone we are to mind-wandering episodes.

Thinking about personal concerns: Capturing our mind’s “open loops”—through a task list, a waiting-for list, or even a worry list—prevents unresolved items from weighing on our mind as we try to focus. This helps us deal better with chaotic environments and set aside personal concerns. Switching tasks less frequently also helps us think more clearly—we experience less attentional residue, which can take a toll on our limited attentional space.

Questioning whether we’re working on the best thing: Working with intention is the best way to experience fewer feelings of doubt about what we should or could be doing in any one moment. These feelings lead our minds to wander from what we’re trying to focus on.

Amount of unused attentional space: Deploying hyperfocus to work on our most complex tasks will consume more attentional space by default, which will in turn prevent our mind from wandering. The smaller the object ...

Depending on their complexity, tasks will require varying amounts of your attentional space. If you’ve ever tried to meditate and focus only on your breath for a few minutes, you might have noticed your mind wanders more than usual—far more than when you’re going for a run,

Consciously making your tasks more complex, and taking on more complex ones, is another powerful way to enter into a hyperfocused state, as they will consume more of your attention. This will keep you more engaged in what you’re doing and lead your mind to wander less often.

we’re most likely to enter into a flow state: when the challenge of completing a task is roughly equal to our ability to do so, and we become totally immersed in the task. When our skills greatly exceed the demands of a task—such as when we do mindless data entry for several hours—we feel bored.

If you’re frequently bored, consider whether your job takes advantage of your unique skill set. If your mind is still frequently wandering, even after implementing the ideas in the previous chapters, it’s a pretty good sign your tasks aren’t complex enough and don’t consume enough of your attentional space.*

Our work tends to expand to fit the available completion time—in productivity circles, this phenomenon is known as Parkinson’s law. But by disabling distractions in advance, you may find the same thing I did: your work no longer expands to fit the time you have available for its completion, and you discover how much work you truly have on your plate.

To measure if you have enough work in general, assess how much of your day you spend doing unproductive busywork. If you’re high on the busywork scale, you may have room to take on significantly more tasks—and become more engaged and productive in the process.

Practices like meditation and mindfulness are also powerful because they train you to practice holding a single intention in your mind for a given period of time. During your meditation, you sit with the intention of being with your breath until your timer goes off. The same is true when you practice mindfulness: until the coffee cup is empty (or half full), your shower is finished, or you’re done walking to where you intend to go, you focus on what you’re doing then and there. When you keep a single intention in mind, you’re able to live and work more intentionally for the rest of the day too. And because both meditation and mindfulness increase the size of your attentional space, both practices make you more likely to maintain intentions.

The research is clear: mindfulness and meditation improve virtually every aspect of how you manage your attention.

how to battle your inevitable resistance to the mode. Assuming you’ve already given hyperfocus a try, even if only for ten minutes, you may have felt what I did at first: a mental resistance to focusing on just one thing. This was probably a mixture of restlessness, anxiousness, and succumbing to novel distractions. You likely found yourself craving these distractions more than usual in the initial stage of entering the hyperfocused state. This resistance we feel toward complex and productive tasks isn’t distributed evenly across working time—it’s usually concentrated at the beginning of when we start these tasks:

When we begin a new task, working on it for at least one minute with purposeful attention and limited distractions is critical. Here are my four favorite strategies for battling this initial resistance:

Shrink your desired hyperfocus period until you no longer feel resistance to the ritual. Minimize the amount of time you’ll dedicate to focusing on one task until you no longer feel mental resistance to it. Even setting a mental deadline of five minutes will likely be enough to get you started.

Notice when you “don’t have time” for something. You always have time—you just s...

Continually practice hyperfocus. Incorporate at least one hyperfocus interval each day. You’ll experience less resistance as you get accustomed to working with fewer distractions and appreciate how productive you’ve become.

Recharge! Hyperfocus can be oddly energizing: you spend less energy regulating your behavior when you don’t have to continually resist distractions and push yourself to focus on what’s important. That said, resisting the ritual can also be a sign you need to recharge.