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

by Chris Bailey

In one recent survey, 83 percent of Americans responded that they didn’t spend any time whatsoever “relaxing or thinking” in the twenty-four-hour period before they were surveyed. Another study sought to measure exactly how resistant participants were to mind wandering. In the first stage of the study, researchers attached two shock electrodes to participants’ ankles, zapped them, and then asked how much the participants would pay to not receive the shock again. Around three quarters of the group agreed they’d pay to not receive the shock again. In the second stage, participants were left alone with their thoughts for fifteen minutes. The researchers kept the electrodes on during that time, on the off chance anyone wanted to shock himself again, saving himself from his own thoughts. This is where the study gets interesting, and somewhat sad. A full 71 percent of men in the study chose to self-administer an electric shock when left alone with their thoughts. Women fared better: only 26 percent chose to shock themselves again.

Research also suggests that we notice where our mind wanders around half of the time. We don’t work with nearly this much awareness when focused on something. Schooler goes even further than Smallwood, arguing that one of the biggest misconceptions we have about mind wandering today is that “all mind wandering goes on without awareness, without intention.”

I’ve found it helpful to distinguish among a few different styles of scatterfocus: Capture mode: Letting your mind roam freely and capturing whatever comes up. Problem-crunching mode: Holding a problem loosely in mind and letting your thoughts wander around it. Habitual mode: Engaging in a simple task and capturing the valuable ideas and plans that rise to the surface while doing it. Research has found this mode is the most powerful.

Of the three styles, capture mode is best for identifying what’s on your mind; problem-crunching mode is best for mulling over a specific problem or idea; and habitual mode is best for recharging and connecting the greatest number of ideas.

For years I have been scheduling one or two fifteen-minute chunks of time each week to let my mind wander freely, during which I capture any valuable and actionable material. This practice is as simple as sitting with coffee, a pen, and a notebook and waiting to see what rises to the surface of my consciousness. By the end of the process, my notebook is invariably full: I’ve scribbled the names of people I should follow up with, stuff I’ve been waiting to do (and also follow up about), a list of people I should reconnect with, solutions to problems, tasks I’ve forgotten, house chores, intentions I should set, and more. I usually feel energized at the end of this little ritual because I’ve given my mind a break.

As discussed in chapter 4, unresolved tasks, projects, and commitments weigh heavily on our mind, perhaps because our brain views them as threats. In capture mode, any unresolved ideas or projects move to the forefront of your mind, ready to be written down and acted upon later.

Of the three styles of scatterfocus, you’ll probably find capture mode to be the most aversive—at least initially. Many people find the process boring, but this is precisely what leads your mind to wander and creates the space for ideas to rise to the surface of your attentional space. Cutting yourself off from distractions naturally turns your attention inward, as your thoughts become more interesting than anything in your external environment.

Problem-crunching mode is most useful when you’re brainstorming a solution to a specific problem. To enter this mode, hold a problem in your mind and let your thoughts wander around it, turn it over, and explore it from different angles. Whenever your mind ventures off to think about something unrelated or gets stuck on one point, gently nudge your attention back to what you intended to think about, or the problem you intended to solve.

Since you’ll experience the same problem-solving benefits (and then some) when scatterfocusing on a habitual task, I recommend using the problem-crunching mode sparingly—save it for the largest problems you’re processing.

As with the other modes, habitual scatterfocus is fairly easy: you simply do something habitual that doesn’t consume your complete attention. This gives your mind space to wander and connect ideas.

The happier you are in scatterfocus mode, the more benefits you’ll reap. An elevated mood actually expands the size of your attentional space, which leads you to think more expansively.

It’s also easier to stay aware of your thoughts when doing something habitual, as there’s greater attentional space available to house your intention of being more aware of your thoughts. Again, this awareness is key: a creative thought is useless if it goes unnoticed.

A primary reason many of us feel burned out is that we never give our attention a rest. Try this today: don’t bring your phone with you the next time you walk to get a coffee or eat your lunch. Instead, let your mind wander. The effect of this simple decision alone is noticeable.

Deliberately managing your attention also leads you to remember more. This is the second way in which regularly practicing hyperfocus helps: the more information you gather and remember when focused, the better you are at constructing ideas and future events in scatterfocus mode.

how important it is to choose what you consume and pay attention to: just as you are what you eat, when it comes to the information you consume, you are what you choose to focus on. Consuming valuable material in general makes scatterfocus sessions even more productive.

Answer this question honestly: When was the last time you were bored? Really think about it. Can you remember? Chances are it was a long time ago, maybe before welcoming devices into your life. Never in human history have we divided our attention among so many things. In the moment this can feel like a benefit—we always have something to do—but the disadvantage is that distracting devices have basically eliminated boredom from our lives. You might be asking: Isn’t ridding ourselves of boredom a positive change? Not necessarily. Boredom is the feeling we experience as we transition into a lower level of stimulation.

One that made me feel especially uneasy was how, in the absence of stimulation, I instinctively looked for distractions to occupy my attention. Forced to remove the seeds of a strawberry with a pair of tweezers or read Wikipedia articles related to rope, I found myself looking for something, anything to do: a mess to clean, a device to pick up—any pacifier that would distract me from the thoughts in my head. If I had been able to administer myself an electric shock in that moment, I might have done it. Our mind is accustomed to constant stimulation and tends to seek it as if it were a universally good thing. It isn’t.

It’s not a coincidence that so many tactics in this book involve making your work and life less stimulating—the less stimulated you are, the more deeply you can think.

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the blue sky, is by no means a waste of time. —John Lubbock, in The Use of Life

Our energy levels influence how well we’re able to focus.

Research shows that attentional space expands and contracts in proportion to how much mental energy we have. Getting enough sleep, for example, can increase the size of attentional space by as much as 58 percent, and taking frequent breaks can have the same effect. This impacts productivity: when attentional space is approximately 60 percent larger, productivity can grow by just as much, especially when we’re working on a demanding task. The better rested we are, the more productive we become.

In addition to scatterfocus’s other benefits, practicing it provides a pocket of time in which you don’t have to regulate your behavior, which is energy restorative. Practicing scatterfocus, even if just for five to ten minutes, lets your brain rest, which helps replenish your limited pool of mental energy.

Research has shown that a refreshing work break should have three characteristics. It should be low-effort and habitual; something you actually want to do; and something that isn’t a chore (unless you genuinely enjoy doing the chore). In short, your breaks should involve something that’s pleasurably effortless.

Take a break at least every ninety minutes. Break for roughly fifteen minutes for each hour of work you do.

Why is ninety minutes the magic number? Our mental energy tends to oscillate in ninety-minute waves. We sleep in ninety-minute cycles, moving between periods of light, deep, and REM sleep. Our energy continues to follow the same rhythm after we wake: we feel rested for around ninety minutes and then tired for a short period of time—around twenty to thirty minutes. A short break every ninety minutes or so takes advantage of these natural peaks and valleys in energy cycles.

Sleep dreaming and daydreaming in scatterfocus mode activate the same brain regions, though they’re even more active while we’re asleep. On a neurological level, dreaming is scatterfocus mode on steroids.

Research shows that as we get less sleep, we also feel more pressure at work; focus for a shorter duration of time (even less than forty seconds); fire up social media sites more often; experience more negative moods; actively seek less demanding tasks (eliminating those that no longer fit into our shrunken attentional space); and spend more time online throughout the day.

Taking a break feels less productive than getting real work done, so you feel at fault when you even consider stepping back. This logic doesn’t hold water in practice. In fact, taking a break is one of the most productive things you can do.

There’s a reason for this: you can learn a lot through a little introspection. If you want to become more productive, creative, or engaged with your work, the truth is you already have a huge amount of data at your disposal. All you have to do is reflect on when you were the most productive, creative, or happy and consider the conditions that led to that state.

On a neurological level, our brain is a constellation of dot-filled networks—and we’re constantly adding more with every new experience.

Uncompleted tasks and projects weigh more heavily on our minds than ones we’ve finished—focus comes when we close these distracting open loops. We’re wired to remember what we’re in the middle of more than what we’ve completed. In psychology circles this phenomenon is called the Zeigarnik effect, after Bluma Zeigarnik, the first person to study this concept. The Zeigarnik effect can be annoying when we’re trying to focus, but the opposite is true when we scatter our attention. In fact, it leads to amazing insights into the problems we’re incubating.

1. Scatter your attention in a richer environment.

Immersing yourself in a setting that contains potential insight triggers is a powerful practice. A rich environment is one where you’re constantly encountering new people, ideas, and sights. Break activities like walking through a bookstore or people-watching at a diner are far more valuable than those that don’t carry any new potential cues.

2. Write out the problems you’re trying to crack.

Regularly reviewing these problems and the document itself kept the project fresh in my mind. Frequently entering habitual scatterfocus mode (including one afternoon during which I scanned the tables of contents of about a hundred books to see how they were structured) surrounded me with potential solution cues—I was scattering my attention in a richer environment. Eventually the answers came.

When you capture the tasks, projects, and other commitments on your plate, you’re able to stop thinking about them and focus on your other work. The opposite is true when it comes to the problems you’re in the middle of solving: recording them on paper helps you to better clarify, process, and remember them.

This same technique works for large projects—making an outline for how you’ll write your thesis, remodel your kitchen, or staff your new team helps you process these ideas in the background so you can continue to collect and connect new dots related to the project.

Edison put it memorably when he purportedly urged that you should “never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”

The better you’re able to focus, the less prone you are to mind wandering and the more important it is that you purposefully unfocus.

Purposefully delaying creative decisions—as long as you don’t face an impending deadline—lets you continue to make potentially more valuable connections.

For example, try stopping work on a complicated report midway through a sentence. Leaving tasks partly completed helps you keep them front of mind as you encounter external and internal solution cues.

People become experts on particular subjects by accumulating and connecting enough dots related to them, in the form of experiences, knowledge, and best practices. Our brains are naturally programmed to cluster related dots.

As we cluster more and more dots about a given topic, we naturally develop expertise, which in turn helps us better manage our attentional space. Curiously, the more we know about a subject, the less attentional space that information consumes. Recall that our attentional space can hold around four chunks of information at once. The more dots we’re able to cluster, the more efficiently we’re able to use that space, as we can accommodate and process a lot more pieces of information when they’re linked together. We read more efficiently by processing words and sentences than by processing individual letters.

While we’re able to hold a huge amount, we can fill it up only gradually. This makes it essential that we deliberately consume dots.

First, the most valuable dots are both useful and entertaining—like

As well as being actionable and beneficial, useful dots are also either related to what you’ve consumed in the past or completely unrelated to what you already know.

The more expansive your constellation of dots, the more valuable connections you’re able to make. Your brain even releases more dopamine, a pleasure chemical, when you consume information that supports what you know.

Taking in novel data gives you an opportunity to question whether you’re consuming only information that confirms your existing beliefs, and it may provide an insight trigger. Again, your brain is attracted to and wired to remember novel information.

The purpose of consuming more valuable dots isn’t to turn you into a Vulcan automaton who consumes only worthwhile information in your spare time. Where’s the fun in that? The point is to let you step back from the information you do consume so you can determine with more intentionality what to take in. It’s impossible to become more productive or creative without first reflecting on your work and life—this is what makes tactics like defining your most productive tasks, setting intentions, and letting your mind wander so powerful. Defining your most valuable dots is just another of these tactics.

1. Consume things you care about, especially when few others do. When listing the information you take in, you may have found you enjoy consuming things that other people tend to underappreciate or shy away from.