# Hyperfocus by Chris Bailey - Blinkist

What’s in it for me? Learn to take control of your attention for good.

Do you even remember a time when your attention span was longer than a few minutes?

A time when you could breeze through tasks without getting distracted, and take hours to accomplish something that now takes you days?

Realistically, you probably can remember a time like that – but it was probably back when smartphones didn’t exist, and Facebook had yet to be invented.

In other words, it’s been a while.

That’s where these blinks come in.

By rediscovering a few simple principles and implementing some straightforward techniques, you can enhance your ability to concentrate – and foster your creativity to boot.

In these blinks, you’ll learn  why an hourly alarm might help you focus; how daydreaming can help you plan; and what scatterfocus is.

Train yourself to enjoy hyperfocus more.

Think back to the last time you had an unusually productive day at work – when you were on your A game, getting things done with uncharacteristic ease?

Days like that might not come too often, but when they do, they're worth examining.

But what’s so different about them?

How do you manage to get so much done so quickly?

Well, part of the answer lies in your ability to focus on the task at hand.

Instead of seeming like a chore, your work becomes compelling – meaning that every time you look at the clock, another hour has passed.

When you’re in that mood, your mind’s engaged, undistracted, and incisive; in other words, you’re hyperfocused.

The key message here is: Train yourself to enjoy hyperfocus more.

Like most people, you’ve no doubt experienced hyperfocus from time to time, but how can you harness it and make it a regular occurrence?

How can you turn it from something unpredictable into something reliable and frequent?

To answer that question, let’s look at what you actually do when you hyperfocus.

For a start, you tend to give one single task your sustained attention.

You don’t multitask.

Rather than working frantically and jumping from one job to another, you focus your attention on one thing, and you keep it there until the task is finished.

You also avoid all distractions.

On normal days, it’s all too tempting to open your social media accounts and browse for 20 minutes, but when you hyperfocus, you nix time-wasting behaviors before they even start.

That doesn’t mean you never notice your mind wandering nor feel tempted to check your phone: you do.

After all, you’re still human.

But rather than succumbing to these temptations, your hyperfocused mind finds it easier to return to the task at hand.

Simply put, there are four stages in entering and maintaining a state of hyperfocus.

First, choose a single, meaningful object of attention.

Second, eliminate all possible distractions – including internal ones, like daydreaming.

Then, focus your attention on the task you’ve chosen to work on, and, finally, consciously redirect your mind every time it wanders.

If that seems like a tall order, don’t worry.

In the blinks to come, we’ll discuss several concepts and techniques that make hyperfocus easier to attain.

Meta-awareness and intentional focus are key to managing your attention.

Most things that you do in life require some form of attention.

If you want to perform at your best, you have to pay close attention to whatever task is at hand.

But there’s a problem: your attention is severely limited.

First of all, there’s a limit to the number of things you can pay attention to at any one time.

Timothy Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, estimates that the human brain picks up about eleven million bits of information every second.

But the number you can consciously process at one time?

A mere 40.

If that limitation wasn’t serious enough, there’s an even lower ceiling on what you can retain in your short term memory.

At a push, it’s about seven items – including names, dates, or tasks that you need to complete.

So knowing these natural limits, how can you work at your best?

The key message here is: Meta-awareness and intentional focus are key to managing your attention.

It’s useful to think about your attention as a small, circumscribed area that can easily be filled – a kind of attentional space.

Given the size of this space, it makes sense to carefully control what goes into it.

When you’re in a meeting, for example, your colleague’s presentation should occupy your attentional space – not thoughts about what you’re going to have for lunch.

The problem is that you get so absorbed in your own thoughts that you rarely stop to evaluate them.

You unconsciously yield your attentional space to every wandering thought that piques your interest.

That’s where meta-awareness comes into play.

Meta-awareness refers to the ability to step outside your thoughts, and become aware of what you’re thinking.

In this case, you might catch yourself  dreaming about your lunchtime sandwich, and consciously redirect your attention to your coworker instead.

As this example suggests, every time you need to focus, you should have an explicit intention that you can stick to.

Whether it’s listening to your colleague, finishing a report, or just reading a novel, you should know exactly where you want your attention to be at any given time.

That’s why meta-awareness and intentions go hand in hand.

Meta-awareness acts as a reminder to check in on your attentional space, intentions show you where to redirect your attention when you need to.

Set an alarm to go off every hour and when you hear it, ask yourself, What was in my attentional space just now?

Was it in line with my intentions?

Before long, you’ll find this kind of thinking has become a habit – bringing you one step closer to frequent hyperfocus.

Achieve hyperfocus by ridding your environment of distractions.

Picture this.

You’re at your desk.

You’re working.

Your attentional space is zeroed in on your task, and you’re on the brink of hyperfocus.

Then, suddenly, your phone beeps.

If you’re like most of us, you’ll reach over instinctively and check the notification.

But even if you don’t, your flow has been interrupted – your phone has intruded on your attentional space, and brought a whole host of irrelevant thoughts along with it.

Interruptions and distractions like these are some of the key obstacles to achieving hyperfocus.

Now, you obviously can’t safeguard against every potential diversion.

But that doesn’t mean you should throw up your hands and succumb to every distraction that comes your way.

Here’s the key message: Achieve hyperfocus by ridding your environment of distractions.

Rather than trying to resist distractions in advance, save yourself the trouble and remove the risk ahead of time.

So how do you identify a risk?

It’s simple: scrutinize your environment and identify anything that’s more stimulating and appealing than the work you need to do.

The word “environment” here doesn't just refer to your physical surroundings.

If your browser homepage suggests social media sites, consider blocking them – or just changing your homepage.

If your phone distracts you, consider leaving it in another room.

Understandably, not everyone can afford to ignore their phone for hours at a time.

Sometimes clients and coworkers call.

Sometimes your family needs to get in touch.

If that’s the case for you, consider switching your phone to airplane mode and re-connecting at regular intervals.

That way, you remain contactable – but you won’t reach for your phone like an automaton anytime it beeps.

The same goes for your emails.

If you’re collaborating with coworkers, it’s just not feasible to neglect your inbox all day.

Instead, make a habit of checking your email at regular intervals – say, every hour, or every half-hour if you must.

Again, the point is to put yourself beyond the reach of annoying buzzes and beeps that might interrupt your hyperfocus.

And if you find that you’re being derailed by irrelevant thoughts, pause for a minute and write down everything that’s on your mind.

You might produce nothing more than a to-do list, or maybe you’ll jot down an interesting idea.

Either way, the act of putting distracting thoughts on paper helps to get them out of your head – freeing your attentional space for the task at hand.

Hyperfocus is a powerful tool.

Scatterfocus helps you plan and think creatively.

The ability to give sustained, intense attention to whatever task you’re engaged in, gives you an edge in a wide variety of situations.

But, despite its usefulness, hyperfocus alone isn’t enough.

Your mind needs time to rest and refresh every now and then – and even more importantly, you need to give yourself the opportunity to be creative.

You see, hyperfocus is ideal for powering through lengthy, challenging work – but it’s most effective when you’ve already decided on a line of attack.

When the situation calls for inventiveness and originality, then, you need to adopt a different approach: scatterfocus The key message in this blinks is: Scatterfocus helps you plan and think creatively.

By now, you probably see daydreaming as the enemy.

And that makes sense – hyperfocus and a wandering mind can’t coexist.

But daydreaming isn’t always bad; in fact, it’s got a lot in common with scatterfocus, the kind of creative and diffuse thinking you can use to plan for the future and generate new ideas.

One of the main differences between scatterfocus and hyperfocus is time; where hyperfocus helps you to attend to tasks in the present, scatterfocus very often addresses the future.

In fact, when your mind wanders, it dwells on the future 48 percent of the time.

This prospective bias, or tendency to be future-oriented, is what makes scatterfocus so helpful when it comes to formulating plans.

In order to get to grips with scatterfocus, it’s worth breaking it down into three specific types of thinking.

The first is capture mode.

Capture mode is the most basic, and for many people, the most boring.

It consists of taking stock of whatever’s on your mind.

Once or twice a week, it’s worth sitting down with a pen and paper, and capturing whatever turns up; unresolved tasks, neglected chores, and unanswered messages are common.

By making a note of these thoughts, you tie up important loose ends and free your mind for more important matters.

Then there’s problem-crunching mode.

This is more or less what it says on the tin.

It involves holding a single issue in your mind and letting your thoughts circle it, searching for new angles, ideas, and solutions.

The final type of scatterfocus is habitual mode.

This comes into play whenever you perform a simple, repetitive task, which engages part of your attention but still leaves ample space for reflection.

If you’ve ever mulled things over while you wash the dishes, then habitual scatterfocus is nothing new to you.

Have you ever paid attention to the flow of your thoughts while meditating or trying to fall asleep?

Use scatterfocus to connect the dots between seemingly unrelated bits of information.

If you have, then you probably realized that randomness is a key characteristic of the resting mind.

When your mind’s relaxed, unrelated memories, images, and ideas bubble to its surface unsummoned – and often without any discernible logic or pattern.

If you’re trying to doze off or focus on your breathing, these random thoughts can be annoying.

But if you’re trying to think creatively, they can sometimes prove a godsend.

This unpredictable chain of thoughts is a product of your brain’s default network – the system that’s activated when your mind isn’t focusing on any one thing in particular.

When the default network’s engaged, a vast neural system, transversing many parts of the brain, begins to work in tandem.

The result?

Very good ideas.

The key message here is: Use scatterfocus to connect the dots between seemingly unrelated bits of information.

One of the reasons that scatterfocus can lead to novel ideas and creative breakthroughs is because of something called the Zeigarnik Effect.

In short, this describes the brain’s tendency to brood on works in progress rather than on completed tasks.

You mull over present problems, not long-resolved ones.

In practice, the Zeigarnik Effect means that whenever you leave a problem unsolved, your mind works away at it in the background.

If you then encounter a relevant piece of information, you unconsciously slot it into the equation – sometimes with startling results.

Take Archimedes.

In a famous story, he got into a bath and saw the water level rise – and immediately realized how to measure the volume of irregular objects.

Thanks to the Zeigarnik Effect, the problem dwelt in his mind, unsolved – until a new observation helped him crack it.

So how can you make use of this phenomenon?

Do you just wait for inspiration to strike?

Not necessarily.

Make a habit of writing out any problems you’re trying to solve and review the list regularly.

Reading over it’ll help keep your concerns at the forefront of your mind, in close contact with new thoughts and experiences.

So, scatterfocus helps you to establish insightful connections between diverse observations and ideas.

Nourish your mind to make the most of scatterfocus.

It allows you to relate new experiences to old problems – and sometimes even leads you to solutions.

But it’s not simply a matter of mulling things over and hoping your environment will trigger a eureka moment.

If scatterfocus is about connecting dots, then it stands to reason that collecting dots matters too – because the quality of the information you absorb determines the quality of your subsequent insights.

Put simply, scatterfocus needs good raw materials in order to produce good ideas.

The key message here is: Nourish your mind to make the most of scatterfocus.

Unlike your phone, which runs out of memory from time to time, your brain has nearly unlimited storage space.

But unfortunately, in order to form memories, you need to draw on a far more limited resource: your attention.

As you’ve already discovered, your attention is embarrassingly finite; on any given day, there are only so many things you can focus on.

If you want to nourish your mind then you need to be discriminating about the media you consume.

One good strategy is to discover more about your area of interest and create a constellation of related dots in your mind.

If you’re an architect, then studying the designs, biographies, and working methods of famous historic architects makes a lot of sense.

That said, be careful not to allow a single subject to monopolize your attention.

The beauty of scatterfocus is, after all, the way it combines diverse types of information.

What’s most important is that the informational dots you consume are high-quality, whatever their domain.

Reading biographies and taking online courses are two sure-fire ways to nourish your mind – binge-watching TV and scrolling through social media sites, less so.

One way to get more selective about the information you consume is to consider every option as a bid for your attention.

If that TV show had to make a pitch, what would it say – and how would it compare to the bid the podcast would make?

Which would enrich your scatterfocus to a greater degree?

Just as you choose nutritious foods for the sake of your health, for the sake of your creativity, you should ensure that what you read, watch, and listen to possess real intellectual value.

Final summary

There are two key things to remember from these blinks: The first is that you can keep your attention on an important task by adopting hyperfocus.

When you hyperfocus, you rid your environment of distractions, and become aware of what’s occupying your mind.

What’s more, every time your attention strays, redirect it.

The second thing to remember is that scatterfocus can help you with tricky problems that require creative solutions.

With scatterfocus, you allow the mind to wander and make unusual connections.

You can help create scatterfocus by nourishing your mind and allowing time to reflect.

Actionable advice:  Have a cup of coffee to help you hyperfocus.

Caffeine and hyperfocus are a match made in heaven.

Caffeine keeps you alert and focused.

It helps you persevere when work gets boring.

And perhaps most importantly, it can improve your performance on a number of cognitive tasks.

So the next time you need a burst of intense concentration, make sure you’ve got a cup of coffee to hand – if nothing else, it tastes wonderful.

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