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

by Chris Bailey

We should also be more deliberate about how we respond to the fun distractions we can’t control. Of all the advice I offer in this book, this is the tactic I’ve struggled with the most. I’m often so gung-ho in accomplishing my intentions that I become rigid and grumpy when I’m interrupted—regardless of how enjoyable the interruption might be.

Fretting over things you simply can’t control is a waste of time, energy, and attention. I’ve gradually learned to use these interruptions as a cue to lighten up a bit and embrace whatever fun derailed my productivity—while periodically recalling my original intention so I can get back on track when I have the opportunity.

Treat yourself. After I’ve completed a hyperfocus session and I leave my distraction-free mode, I’ll occasionally treat myself to an all-you-can-eat buffet of distractions. Research shows that the more impulsive you are, the more stressed you become by blocking yourself from distractions.

A distraction-free mode also allows you to conserve energy. When you eliminate distractions, your energy goes further, and you can work for longer periods without needing a break.

Breaks are energizing for this same reason—they’re a pocket of time in which we can press pause on regulating our behavior. You may find that even though you intended to hyperfocus for only a short amount of time, you have the energy to keep going long after.

Email is a great example of a distraction that’s important to tame but not eliminate. Email is a weird beast: it consumes a lot more attention than it does time. (Meetings are the opposite, generally consuming more time than attention.) Eliminating email would obviously not be realistic, but try to become more deliberate about when you check for messages.

Setting a specific time to focus on distractions like email, meetings, your smartphone, and social media transforms them from distractions into merely other purposeful elements of your work and

research shows we’re less likely to multitask when we end our daily activities and go to bed early the night before. If enabling airplane mode feels too drastic, consider enabling your phone’s “do not disturb” mode while you work.

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. In these moments, mindlessly burning time on the phone isn’t worth it—doing so eliminates the valuable space in your schedule.

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.

The average knowledge worker checks his email eleven times per hour—eighty-eight times over the span of a day. It’s hard to get any real work done with so many interruptions. The same study found that employees spend an average of just around thirty-five minutes on email per day—which means that email consumes much more attention than it does actual time. Once you become aware of how often you check for new messages, you’ll likely want to reduce that amount of time because of the high cost of interruptions.

Eighty-four percent of workers keep their email client open in the background as they work, but closing it will help you focus beyond the forty-second mark.

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. Even if you receive an extraordinary number of messages, hyperfocusing on your inbox for twenty minutes, even as often as at the top of each hour, will enable you to get back to people quickly and allow you to still accomplish meaningful work the rest of the time. Plus, at most, the senders will have to wait only forty to sixty minutes for a response.

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.

One study that had participants go without email observed that after a period of just one week, their heart-rate variability changed as they became significantly less stressed. The subjects interacted more often with people, spent longer working on tasks, multitasked less, and became much more focused. The absence of email allowed people to work slowly and more deliberately. When the experiment ended, participants described the experience as liberating, peaceful, and refreshing. While it would be impossible to get rid of email completely, try the tactics above and experiment with what works best for you.

A recent study found that, on average, knowledge workers spend 37 percent of their time in meetings—which means that if you work an eight-hour day, you typically spend three hours daily in meetings.

Never attend a meeting without an agenda. Ever. A meeting without an agenda is a meeting without a purpose.

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.

If you ask people in what places they’re most productive, few will answer “The office.” In fact, most people will name any place but the office—including their favorite coffee shop, an airport, the train, or their home office.

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

The same applies when you finish working for the day: tidy the papers on your desk, close the windows on your computer, sort files on your desktop, and act on and archive each email you received that day.

There are an awful lot of factors in the environment that affect focus—even office temperature influences productivity to some degree.* Before getting to how your internal, mental environment influences your productivity, I want to zero in on one more external factor. It may be something you work with already: music.

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.

However, research also suggests that the most productive music is relative. Music occupies at least some portion of attentional space—but it occupies less when it’s familiar, simple, and also relatively quiet. As a result, music is no competition for a quiet environment when it comes to focus, but of course, music never exists in isolation.

(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.)*

It’s impossible to write about focus and productivity without citing David Allen’s work. 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.

Something remarkable happens when you externalize tasks and commitments: you work with almost no guilt, worry, or doubt.

This concept extends far beyond your tasks and appointments. Keeping a distractions list as you focus will remove distractions from your head so you can refocus more quickly and deal with them later (see chapter 0.5). If you’re a worrier, create a list of everything weighing on your mind (while scheduling a time to consider the validity of each of the entries). Capturing ideas that come to you as you let your mind rest and wander will mean you can make use of them later. Regularly reviewing a list of everything you’re waiting for—one that records the important emails, letters, packages, and phone calls you’re expecting—will get these things off your mind, too.

Here is a fundamental truth about focus: your brain will invariably resist more complex tasks, especially when you’re first starting them—and when it does, you’ll look around for more novel and stimulating things to do instead. When you clear your working environment of interruptions, distractions, and cues that will tempt you away from what you intend to accomplish in the moment, you’ll stay on track.

Recall the three measures we can use to measure the quality of our attention: how much time we spend working with intention; how long we’re able to focus on one task; and how long our mind wanders before we catch it doing

One final benefit of eliminating distractions in advance is gaining the freedom to work at a slower, more purposeful pace. One study, for example, found that when we text while reading something, it can take us anywhere from 22 percent to 59 percent longer to read the same passage. It doesn’t matter if you work at a slower, more deliberate pace if you’re continuously working in the right direction. What you lose in speed you make up for in intentionality.

Working in a chaotic environment: I define boredom as the restlessness we feel as we transition from a state of high stimulation to a lower one. In becoming accustomed to experiencing less stimulation over time—by enabling our distraction-free mode whenever we hyperfocus, and by working with fewer distractions in general—we face this stimulation gap less often, experience boredom less frequently, and make our environment less chaotic by default.

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.

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.

In his groundbreaking book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers intriguing insights about when 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. When the demands of a task exceed our skills—such as when we’re unprepared to give a presentation—we feel anxious.

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. Some executives I coach find they’re able to accomplish a full day’s work in just a few hours when they focus on only their most consequential tasks.

To recap, the size of attentional space is determined by a measure that cognitive psychology refers to as “working memory capacity”—how many pieces of data you can hold in your mind simultaneously (usually about four chunks of information). The greater your working memory capacity, the more information you can hold at the same time and the greater your ability to process complex tasks.

A larger attentional space also helps you get back on track quicker after your mind wanders or you become distracted.

There is, however, one practice that has been proven in study after study to increase working memory capacity: meditation. Meditation gets a bad rap and often conjures images of a monk meditating in a cave. In practice it’s actually quite simple. Like hyperfocus, meditation involves continually returning your focus to a single object of attention—usually

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.

With enough awareness, you might even notice your mind has wandered to somewhere productive and you want to continue that train of thought. For example, a higher working memory capacity means your mind is more likely to make plans and set intentions for the future.

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

“Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.”

Whether at work or at home, the quality of your attention determines the quality of your life. At work, the more attention you give to what’s in front of you, the more productive you become. At home, the more attention you devote to what’s in front of you, the more meaningful your life becomes.

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:

However, this mind-wandering mode—when we scatter our attention and focus—can also be immensely powerful. In fact, it’s so powerful that I’ve devoted the second part of Hyperfocus to it. I call this mode “scatterfocus,” because in it, our attention scatters to focus on nothing in particular. While hyperfocus involves directing your attention outward, scatterfocus is about directing it inward, inside your own mind. Just as hyperfocus is the most productive mode of the brain, scatterfocus is the most creative. Scatterfocus can derail our productivity when our original intent is to focus, but when we’re coming up with a creative solution to a problem, planning for our future, or making a difficult decision, it is just as essential as hyperfocus.

But daydreaming is immensely potent when our intention is to solve problems, think more creatively, brainstorm new ideas, or recharge.

When it comes to productivity and creativity, scatterfocus enables you to do three powerful things at once. First, as I’ll discuss in this chapter, it allows you to set intentions and plan for the future. It’s impossible to set future intentions when you’re immersed in the present. By stepping back and directing your attention inward, you’re able to switch off autopilot and consider what to do next. Your brain automatically plans for the future when you rest—you just need to give it the space and time to do

Second, scatterfocus lets you recharge. Focusing on tasks all day consumes a good deal of mental energy, even when you’re managing and defending your attentional space using the tactics set out in part 1. Scatterfocus replenishes that supply so you can focus for longer. Third, scatterfocus fosters creativity. The mode helps you connect old ideas and create new ones; floats incubating thoughts to the surface of your attentional space; and lets you piece together solutions to problems.

Despite the productive and creative benefits of scatterfocus, most of us are somewhat hesitant to engage this mode. While it’s easy to get excited about becoming highly productive and hyperfocused, scattering our attention is less exciting, at least on the surface. When we’re surrounded by so many novel and stimulating objects of attention, most of us don’t want to be left alone with our thoughts.