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

by Chris Bailey

I went from viewing multitasking as a stimulating work hack to regarding it as a trap of continuous interruptions. 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. This is an essential skill in today’s world, when we are so often in distracting environments doing brain-heavy knowledge work.

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.

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.

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.).

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.

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.

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.

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

Habits take up very little attentional space, because they take little thought once we get going with them. As cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, author of Consciousness and the Brain, told me, “If you think of habits such as playing the piano, dressing, shaving, or driving on a familiar route, these are so automatic that they do not seem to prevent any conscious thought.” He says that while habits like these may require some level of conscious initiation, once we begin the behavior, the rest of the process takes care of itself.

Our attentional space can process even more when we’re working on unrelated tasks. Take sorting and putting away the laundry while talking on the phone, for example. These activities tap into several senses—sorting laundry into our motor and visual senses; the phone call into our auditory sense. Because 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.

If you divided your work tasks into the four categories I described in chapter 1 (this page)—an activity I highly recommend because I’ll be referencing it later—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. 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.

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 as the realization that you could scrap the introduction of the presentation you’re going to give and instead dive directly to the point. 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. At the same time, you have attentional space to spare if the task suddenly becomes even more complex.

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.

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.

you find yourself responding to important work in autopilot mode, chances are you’re trying to cram too much into your attentional space. By not stepping back to deliberately manage your attention, you allow it to overflow.

The best way to avoid this overload is to be more selective with what you permit into your attentional space. On the drive home, shut off the radio, which will enable you to process the day and also remember your intention to pick up bread. At home, pause or mute the TV so you don’t try to continue processing the show and forget that you’re heading to fetch a note that’s in the other room. Making small changes like these allows you to keep your attention on your intention.

The state of your attentional space determines the state of your life. When your attentional space is overwhelmed, you, in turn, feel overwhelmed. When your attentional space is clear, you also feel clear. The tidier you keep your attentional space, the more clearly you think.

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 amazing pleasure chemical that rushes through our brain whenever we devour a medium-sized pizza, accomplish something awesome, or have a drink or two after work.

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.

It bears repeating that 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. Shifting attention throughout the day is necessary; if we focused on just one thing all day long, no matter how important it was, we probably wouldn’t have a job. Still, too much shifting can be dangerous, especially when we’re surrounded by more novel objects and distractions than our brain is capable of handling.

“When we learn while we multitask, we rely more heavily on the basal ganglia, a brain system that’s involved in the learning of skills and habits.” However, “when we encode information in a more focused state, we rely more heavily on our brain’s hippocampus—which actually lets us store and recall the information.”

What use is our time if not to create memories—of conversations, meals, vacations, and other experiences? When we fail to focus deeply on any one thing, we focus instead only on the “highlights” of what we’re doing and, as a consequence, later forget how we spent our time. Letting our attention overflow makes our actions less meaningful, because we don’t remember how we spent our time in the first place.

This affects our productivity in the long run: we make more mistakes because we don’t properly encode the lessons we learned the first time we messed up. We also accumulate less knowledge, which, when we do kn...

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:

Switching becomes easier only once we finish a task—especially when time pressure, like a deadline, motivates us to get the task done. “By contrast,” Leroy explains, “if you work on something and you don’t really have to rush, but you get it done, your brain can keep thinking about ‘What else should I have done?’ or ‘Is there another way to do this task?’ or ‘Maybe I could have done better.’ Even though the task is completed, it’s hard for your brain to get closure in general.” Since our brain is no longer motivated to complete these loose-deadline tasks, Leroy found that “the mental activation of the goal [diminishes].” Time pressure narrows our focus on the task, restricting us from considering a number of more creative ways to complete

Intention is the bouncer of your attentional space—it lets in the productive objects of attention and keeps the distractions out. Few things will benefit your overall quality of life more than focusing with intention.

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.

You enter this mode by managing your attention deliberately and purposefully: by choosing one important object of attention, eliminating distractions that will inevitably arise as you work, and then focusing on just that one task. 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. It also makes us immensely happy.

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. This has never been more crucial than in our knowledge-work environments, where not all tasks are created equal. You’ll often accomplish more in one hour of hyperfocus than in an entire day spent filling your attentional space to the brim with multiple—and often undeliberate—concerns. 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.

To put it bluntly, your walking performance suffered.* Or maybe the last time you went bowling you found yourself thinking about why you were scoring more points than usual—what exactly you were doing well. But then your opponents started pulling ahead and eventually won. You choked, and your performance suffered by your bringing your full attention to a game you usually play out of habit. Studies analyzing skilled typists found this same phenomenon: the more attention they brought to their typing, the slower they typed and the more mistakes they made. When doing such habitual tasks, it’s best to not focus completely on what you’re doing.

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.

Setting an intention for what we plan to focus on is the most important step—the more productive and meaningful the task, the more productive and meaningful your actions become. For example, if you set your intention to focus on mentoring a new employee, automating a repetitive task, or brainstorming a new product idea, you’ll be infinitely more productive than if you work intention-free and in autopilot mode. This same idea applies at home: the more meaningful our objects of focus, the more meaningful our life becomes.

This first step to reaching hyperfocus mode is essential—intention absolutely has to precede 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.

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.

This is a powerful idea to internalize, especially since the most important tasks are often not the ones that immediately feel the most urgent or productive. Writing a guide for new hires may not, in the moment, feel as valuable as answering a dozen emails, but if that guide cuts down on the time it takes to bring each new employee on board, makes her feel more welcome, and also serves to make her more productive, it is easily the most consequential thing on your list. Other consequential tasks might include automating a task that’s annoying and repetitive, disconnecting so you can focus on designing the workflow for an app you’re building, or forming an office mentorship program that lets employees easily share their knowledge.

While we often achieve our vague intentions, specific intentions greatly increase our odds of overall success.

This effect, which subsequent studies validated further, was positively staggering. Setting specific intentions can double or triple your odds of success.

As Gollwitzer and Brandstätter put it, “action initiation becomes swift, efficient, and does not require conscious intent.” In other words, we begin to act toward our original goal automatically.

“We did studies with tennis players, and they made plans on how they want to respond with the problems that might come up in the game. Some of the tennis players were specifying ‘when I get irritated’ or ‘when I get nervous.’ That is not very specific or concrete, but it worked brilliantly because they knew what they meant with ‘nervous.’ Specific means the person can identify the critical situation.”

There are two notable caveats to setting specific intentions. First, you have to actually care about your intentions. Implementation intentions don’t work nearly as well for goals that don’t especially matter to you or that you’ve long abandoned.

Second, easy-to-accomplish intentions don’t have to be as specific. Deciding in advance when you’ll work on a task is significantly more important for a difficult one than when your intention is to do something simple.

“When the goals are tough, or when you have so many goals and it’s hard to attain them all, that’s when planning works particularly well,” Gollwitzer adds.

Anticipate obstacles ahead of time.

Based on how averse you are to what you intend to accomplish. The more aversive you find a task or project, the more important it is to tame distractions ahead of time. You’re most likely to procrastinate on tasks that you consider boring, frustrating, difficult, ambiguous, or unstructured, or that you don’t find rewarding or meaningful. In fact, if you call to mind something you’re putting off doing, chances are it has most of these characteristics.

Once you become aware of how frequently you interrupt yourself, it’s hard to go back to working the same way again. This is why it is critical to manage your attentional space wisely.

Research shows, however, that we interrupt ourselves just as much as we are interrupted by other people.* As Gloria Mark expressed it, “Simply looking at how we can break off external interruptions really only solves half the problem.”