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

by Chris Bailey

Studies show we can work for an average of just forty seconds in front of a computer before we’re either distracted or interrupted. (Needless to say, we do our best work when we attend to a task for a lot longer than forty seconds.)

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.

Here’s a fun experiment to dive deeper into this idea: over the span of a day or two, pay attention to the number of times you instinctively pull out your phone. How are you feeling, and what compels you to reach for it? Are you trying to distract yourself during a long elevator ride? Are you avoiding a boring task, like updating your quarterly budget? By noting the times you habitually reach for your phone, you’ll gain insight into which tasks you resist the most and how you’re feeling in those moments.

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

(One of the most underrated skills: letting other people finish their sentences before starting yours.)

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.

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.

Unnecessary work includes the tasks that are both unproductive and unattractive—like rearranging the papers on your desk or the files on your computer.

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.

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.

there’s a finite limit to how many things we can focus on. That limit is smaller than you might think.

Realistically we can, at most, do one or two of these things well at the same time.

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.

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,

When it comes to holding information in our temporary memory, though, the magic number of which our brain is capable shrinks from forty to four.

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.

MEET YOUR ATTENTIONAL SPACE “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.

(Technically speaking, researchers refer to this space as our “working memory” and the size of this space as our “working memory capacity.”)*

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.

For all the power it provides, the content of your attentional space is ephemeral; its memory lasts for an average of just ten seconds.

There are two kinds of tasks in our life and work: habits, which we can perform without much thought and require minimal attentional space, and complex tasks, which can be done well only with dedicated focus.

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. Though we may not be able to carry on two conversations simultaneously, we can walk, breathe, and chew bubblegum while we listen to an audiobook—the last task being one that will easily occupy what’s left of our attention.

Habits take up very little attentional space, because they take little thought once we get going with them.

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.

Unlike habitual tasks, we aren’t able to fit two complex activities into our attentional space at the same time. Remember, 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. Since even moderately complex tasks consume most of our attention, we’re at best able to pair something habitual with a more complex task.

In summary, there are generally three combinations of tasks that fit comfortably within your attentional space. 1. A FEW SMALL, HABITUAL TASKS

2. A TASK THAT REQUIRES MOST OF OUR FOCUS, AS WELL AS A HABITUAL TASK

ONE COMPLEX TASK

Having some attentional space to spare during complex tasks allows you to do two things: It leaves room to reflect on the best approach to completing the task, so you can work smarter and avoid autopilot mode. You’ll be able to come up with ideas you might not have had if you were filling your attention to the brim—such

Leaving some space also enables you to work with a greater awareness of where you should be directing your attention in the first place. That means you can better refocus when your mind inevitably wanders from the task at hand.

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.*

According to Sophie Leroy, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Washington, it’s not possible for us to seamlessly switch attention from one task to another. 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:

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.

This chapter has been largely theoretical. In order to put its advice into practice, you’ll need to do several things: 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.

This is counterintuitive but absolutely essential advice: the more demands made on your time, the more essential it becomes to choose what—and how many—things you pay attention to. You’re never too busy to hyperfocus.

When it comes to your most important tasks, the fewer things you pay attention to, the more productive you become.

To hyperfocus, you must choose a productive or meaningful object of attention; eliminate as many external and internal distractions as you can; focus on that chosen object of attention; and continually draw your focus back to that one object of attention.

research shows that our mind wanders for 47 percent of the day. In other words, if we’re awake for eighteen hours, we’re engaged in what we’re doing for just eight of them. It’s normal for our mind to wander, but the key is to center it so we can spend time and attention on what’s actually in front of us.

In addition, it takes an average of twenty-two minutes to resume working on a task after we’re distracted or interrupted. We fare even worse when we interrupt or distract ourselves—in these cases, it takes twenty-nine minutes to return to working on the original task.

The concept of hyperfocus can be summed up in a single tranquil sentence: keep one important, complex object of attention in your awareness as you work.

Attention without intention is wasted energy.

If you haven’t done so already, this is a great time to create a 2 x 2 grid of your work—sorting your standard monthly tasks based on whether they’re productive or unproductive and attractive or unattractive. The ironic thing about investing in your productivity is that it’s almost impossible to do when you’re slogging it out in the office trenches. There’s simply too much to keep up with—meetings, email chains, and project deadlines included. For this reason, the best productivity tactics are the ones that require you to step back and remove yourself from your work so you have the mental space to think critically about how you should approach that work differently. That way, when you return to work, you can do it more intelligently, instead of just harder. Figuring out your four types of work tasks is one of these “stepping back” activities. Now is the best time to do so—especially before you read the very next section. It’ll take just five to ten minutes.

the Rule of 3: at the start of each day, choose the three things you want to have accomplished by day’s end.

If you’re like me, you may also find it handy to set three weekly intentions, as well as three daily personal intentions—such as disconnecting from work during dinner, visiting the gym before heading home from the office, or gathering receipts for taxes.

A second intention-setting ritual I follow is considering which items on my to-do list are the most consequential.

The Hourly Awareness Chime