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

by Chris Bailey

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.