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

by Chris Bailey

I knew that my brain never functioned well when I was trying to multitask, but I felt compelled to do it anyway. Working with my email client open and my smartphone on my desk was simply more appealing than trying to concentrate on one or two simple things.

Surprisingly, I learned that one of the best practices for fostering my creativity and productivity was learning how to unfocus. By paying attention to nothing in particular and letting my mind wander—as I did on my way to the Kingston diner—I found that I became better at making connections between ideas and coming up with new ones.

While trying to do more tasks simultaneously, we prevent ourselves from finishing any one task of significance.

And I began to discover that by focusing deeply on just one important thing at a time—hyperfocusing—we become the most productive version of ourselves.

When we invest our limited attention intelligently and deliberately, we focus more deeply and think more clearly.

Productivity research is great—but pretty useless when you don’t act upon it.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Autopilot mode guides us through actions like these. As many as 40 percent of our actions are habits, which shouldn’t require conscious deliberation.

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

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Here’s an interesting example: you even blink in accordance with where your attention is directed. You normally blink fifteen to twenty times a minute but do so during natural breaks in your attention—such as at the end of a sentence when reading, when someone you’re speaking with pauses, or at breakpoints when watching a video. This blinking rhythm happens automatically—all you have to do is pay attention to what you’re reading, and your brain’s attentional space takes care of the rest.

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.

“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.

You’ll also find that your attentional space expands and shrinks depending on your mood.

Many experts argue that we can’t multitask, which is often true for tasks that require focus to do properly and thus occupy a larger amount of attentional space. But the same is not true for habits—in fact, we’re able to multitask surprisingly well with habits.

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. Anyone can do mindless work out of habit. This is one of the many reasons why distracting tasks are so costly: while these tasks are attractive and stimulating (think watching Netflix after a long day at the office instead of grabbing dinner with a friend), they steal precious time from your most productive work.

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.

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.

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

Our brains also reward us for poorly managing our attention, because for our early ancestors, seeking novel threats in the environment aided their chance of survival.

productivity means accomplishing what we intend to.

Being busy doesn’t make us productive. It doesn’t matter how busy we are if that busyness doesn’t lead us to accomplish anything of importance.

Productivity is not about cramming more into our days but about doing the right thing in each moment.

Technology speeds up time by tempting us in each moment to fill our attention to the brim. This leads us to remember less, because it is only when we pay attention to something that our brain actively encodes it into memory.

As I mentioned back in chapter 0, 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).

it’s not possible for us to seamlessly switch attention from one task to another.

“It could be that you’re sitting in a meeting and your mind keeps going to a project you were working on right before the meeting, or something you anticipate doing right after the meeting. It’s having that divided attention, where part of your brain is thinking about those other ongoing projects that you have. This is what makes it so difficult to devote yourself to what you’re supposed to be doing in the present.” 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.

set intentions more often, modify your environment to be less distracting, overcome the mental resistance you have to certain tasks, eliminate distractions before they derail you, and clear the distractions inside your own head.

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

How to measure the qality of your attention

Hyperfocus is many things at once: it’s deliberate, undistracted, and quick to refocus, and it leads us to become completely immersed in our work.

Hyperfocus means you’re less busy, because you’re permitting fewer objects into your attentional space. Picking which tasks to work on ahead of time lets you focus on what’s actually important in the moment.