Hyperfocus: How to Work Less to Achieve More

by Chris Bailey

We feel the most resistance at the very start and search instead for more attractive alternatives. When we begin a new task, working on it for at least one minute with purposeful attention and limited distractions is critical. Here are my four favorite strategies for battling this initial resistance:

Shrink your desired hyperfocus period until you no longer feel resistance to the ritual.

Notice when you “don’t have time” for something. You always have time—you just spend it on other things. When you find yourself saying this familiar statement, try doing a task swap. For example: if you “don’t have the time” to catch up with a friend over coffee, ask yourself whether you’d have an equal amount of time to watch the football game or surf Facebook.

Continually practice hyperfocus. Incorporate at least one hyperfocus interval each day. You’ll experience less resistance as you get accustomed to working with fewer distractions and appreciate how productive you’ve become.

Recharge! Hyperfocus can be oddly energizing: you spend less energy regulating your behavior when you don’t have to continually resist distractions and push yourself to focus on what’s important. That said, resisting the ritual can also be a sign you need to recharge.

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.

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.

Second, scatterfocus lets you recharge.

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.

We’re also more likely to focus on anything that’s pleasurable or threatening. This is where the survival instinct kicks in.

Continually scanning for threats is what compels us to dwell on that one negative email or overthink a careless offhand comment from our boss. What once aided our chances at survival now sabotages our productivity and creativity in the modern world. It makes our most urgent tasks feel a lot more important than they actually are.

Our greatest threats, worries, and fears no longer reside in our external environment but within the depths of our own consciousness. When our mind wanders, it slips into a pattern of ruminating on the stupid things we’ve said, the arguments we’ve won and lost, and worries about work and money. This is also true of pleasurable thoughts—we daydream of memorable meals, recall memories from a great vacation, or fantasize about how great we’d feel if we had come up with a witty retort to something said earlier.

But in practice we don’t actually experience negative mind-wandering episodes that often. Our mind primarily wanders to the negative when we’re thinking about the past, but we wander to the past just 12 percent of the time—the remainder is spent thinking about the present and the future, which makes scatterfocus remarkably productive.

While our evolutionary history leads us to think about the novel and the negative, it has also wired our brain for profound creativity whenever we turn our attention inward.

(Fun fact: 38 percent of our past-related thoughts connect with earlier-in-the-day events, 42 percent relate to the previous day’s, and 20 percent involve ruminating on what happened in the more distant past.)

Our mind is wired to not only perceive but also remember threats, like that one negative email that we can’t forget. (It does this so we learn from our mistakes, though it becomes annoying when it throws random memories at us throughout the day.) On

In addition to thinking about the past, our mind wanders to the present 28 percent of the time.

Finally, our mind wanders to think about the future 48 percent of the time—more than our past and present thinking combined.27 We usually think about the immediate future: 44 percent of our future thoughts concern a time later the same day, and 40 percent tomorrow.

This mode also enables us to better weigh the consequences of each decision and path.

Researchers refer to our mind’s propensity to future-wander as our “prospective bias.”

Intention is what makes scatterfocus so powerful. This mode is always deployed deliberately—and involves making a concerted effort to notice where your mind goes.

Capture mode: Letting your mind roam freely and capturing whatever comes up. 2. Problem-crunching mode: Holding a problem loosely in mind and letting your thoughts wander around it. 3. 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.

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.

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.

To practice habitual scatterfocus, pick something simple that you enjoy doing. Then carry out that one task—and nothing else—until your mind wanders. The simpler the task, the better—going for a walk will unearth greater insights and connect more ideas than listening to music or reading a book. Good ideas will rise to the surface of your mind so long as you have attention to spare.

This is where problem-crunching and habitual scatterfocus differ: in problem-crunching mode, you bring your thoughts back to the problem you’re tackling; in habitual mode, you pretty much let your mind roam free.

There is a beautiful simplicity in doing one easy thing at a time, like drinking a cup of coffee, walking to work, or doing the laundry.

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.

You can use scatterfocus mode to become more creative in two ways: first, by connecting more dots; and second, by collecting more valuable dots—

We’re not always aware of the ideas our attentional space pans over as we move among our thoughts—like an iceberg that resides mostly underwater, much of this process takes place in the depths of our consciousness.

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.

Thanks to the Zeigarnik effect, we store any and all problems currently stumping us at the front of our minds. Any open problem—an unfinished report, a decision we’re in the middle of, or an important email we’re responding to—is an open loop that our brain is desperate to close. As a consequence, we connect each new experience to these unresolved problems in order to unearth novel solutions. Habitual scatterfocus brings these connections into our attentional space.

When we’re in habitual scatterfocus mode, potential insight triggers come from two places: our wandering minds themselves and the external environment.

But if you want to level up even further, here are six ways to do so. 1. Scatter your attention in a richer environment.

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. Adopt a mix of such activities—some that give your mind the space to wander and connect dots and others that expose your mind to new ideas you can connect later.

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

Writing down the detailed problems you’re tackling at work and at home helps your mind continue to process them in the background. 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.

6. Consume more valuable dots.

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.

By learning something new, you transfer dots from your external environment to your memory so you can link them and make use of them later. From the moment you’re born to the day you die, your brain is always engaged in this process.

Curiously, the more we know about a subject, the less attentional space that information consumes.

This is how intuition works: it’s the process of acting on information we remember but don’t consciously retrieve.

Our scatterfocus episodes become more productive as we link valuable ideas, especially as we become more responsive to new insight triggers by exposing ourselves to new dots. And our hyperfocus episodes become more productive, since we’re able to make more efficient use of our attentional space, avoid mistakes, see opportunities for shortcuts, make better high-level decisions, and approach our work with more knowledge in hand.

Getting information into our brain is akin to filling an Olympic-sized swimming pool with a garden hose. 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.

No two pieces of information are created equal. Consuming a book or having an engaging conversation with someone smarter than you will enable you to collect more valuable dots than doing something like watching TV or reading a gossip magazine.

So how do you measure the value of a dot? First, the most valuable dots are both useful and entertaining—

Useful information is typically actionable and helps you reach your goals.

Consuming information adjacent to what you’ve taken in before allows you to develop a constellation of dots around a single idea.

At the same time, it’s also immensely valuable to consume dots that are unrelated to 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.