Hyper Focus By Chris Bailey : Book Summary ~ Upgrade Your Life

Hyper Focus - Cover

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CHAPTER 0: WHY FOCUS MATTERS

"It has been a few years since I first began to explore how we can not only focus better but also think more clearly. While this is tough to admit, especially as someone who was making his living as a “productivity expert,” I started to notice my own increased distraction, especially as I accumulated more devices. I had never been so busy while accomplishing so little. I had grown restless with boredom and a lack of stimulation and was trying to cram as much into every moment as I could. I knew that my brain never functioned well when I was trying to multitask, but I felt compelled to do it anyway."

"Studies show we can work for an average of just forty seconds in front of a computer before we’re either distracted or interrupted. (Needless to say, we do our best work when we attend to a task for a lot longer than forty seconds.)"

CHAPTER 0.5: HOW TO BETTER FOCUS ON THIS BOOK

PUT YOUR PHONE OUT OF SIGHT —out of sight, out of mind. Try to keep it out of arms reach.
MIND YOUR ENVIRONMENT —Control the environment, if u cant then change it.
MAKE A DISTRACTIONS LIST —Take a small notepad and write down all the distractive thoughts of your subconscious mind and later ideas.
QUESTION WHETHER THIS BOOK IS WORTH CONSUMING AT ALL — Is it really needed?? ask it.
CONSUME SOME CAFFEINE BEFORE READING — Have a half-life of 6-8 hours, gives a boost in energy on focusing the task.
GRAB A PEN OR HIGHLIGHTER —Highlight, take notes so that u can visit those ideas whenever u want later on easily.
WHEN YOU NOTICE YOUR FOCUS WAVERING — It's normal to wonder, just take a break so that mind can wander (get up from your desk and just a little bit, look around) then come back again and capture the ideas that came to your mind during the break.

CHAPTER 1:SWITCHING OFF THE AUTOPILOT MODE

"Autopilot mode guides us through actions like these. As many as 40 percent of our actions are habits, which shouldn’t require conscious deliberation. Unless you’re a monk and have the luxury of being able to meditate all day, it’s impossible to live intentionally 100 percent of the time.'

"Just keep a plan what to do, when to do, and how much time will take to do."

"This is the problem with managing your attention on autopilot mode. The most urgent and stimulating things in your environment are rarely the most significant. This is why switching off autopilot mode is so critical. Directing your attention toward the most important object of your choosing—and then sustaining that attention—is the most consequential decision we will make throughout the day. We are what we pay attention to."

Hyperfocus- page 31

"Necessary work includes tasks that are unattractive yet productive. Team meetings and calls about your quarterly budget fall into this quadrant. We usually have to push ourselves to do this type of work."

"Unnecessary work includes the tasks that are both unproductive and unattractive— like rearranging the papers on your desk or the files on your computer. We usually don’t bother with these tasks unless we’re procrastinating on doing something else or resisting a task that falls into the necessary work or purposeful work categories. Spending time on unnecessary work tasks keeps us busy, but such busyness is just an active form of laziness when it doesn’t lead to actually accomplishing anything."

"Distracting work includes stimulating, unproductive tasks and as such is a black hole for productivity. It includes social media, most IM conversations, news websites, watercooler chats, and every other form of low-return distraction. These activities can be fun but should generally be indulged in small doses. The better you become at managing your attention, the less time you’ll spend in this quadrant.'

"Purposeful work—the productivity sweet spot. These are the tasks we’re put on earth to do; the tasks we’re most engaged in as we do them; the tasks with which we make the largest impact. Very few tasks fit into this box— most people I’ve encountered have three or four at most."

'Doing good work in this category usually requires more brainpower, and we are often better at these types of tasks than other people are."

"A perfectly productive person would focus on only the top two quadrants of the above chart."

"More time on purpose full work, less time on necessary work."

Tip; Here’s an immediate way to improve your productivity. Divide up your work tasks based on the four categories in the above grid. This simple activity will give you an incredible awareness of what’s actually important in your work. Because I’ll return to the grid often going forward, divvying up your work activities will be valuable as you make your way through the book.

CHAPTER 2: LIMITS OF YOUR ATTENTION

Without selective interest, the experience is utter chaos. —William James

Your focus determines your reality. —Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace

First, there’s a finite limit to how many things we can focus on.

Timothy Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, estimates that our brain receives eleven million “bits” of information in the form of sensory experiences each second. But how many of these eleven million bits can our minds consciously process and focus on at once? Just forty of them. Not forty million or forty thousand, but forty. After focusing on something, we can hold only a small amount of information in our short-term memory.

Your attentional space would be its RAM. (Technically speaking, researchers refer to this space as our “working memory” and the size of this space as our “working memory capacity.”)*

"Meta-awareness. Becoming aware of what you’re thinking about is one of the best practices for managing your attention."

"This is essentially what Mindfulness is—noticing what your mind is full of: what you’re thinking, feeling, and perceiving at any given moment. Mindfulness adds another important dimension to the mix: not judging what you’re thinking about. When you become aware of what is occupying your mind, you realize it can come up with some pretty crazy stuff, not all of which is true—like the negative self-talk that sometimes takes root in your head. Everyone’s mind does this on some level, so you shouldn’t sweat it too much or take all of your thoughts too seriously. As one of my favorite writers, David Cain, puts it, “All thoughts want to be taken seriously, but few warrant it.”"

Stanislas Dehaene, author of Consciousness and the Brain, “If you think of habits such as playing the piano, dressing, shaving, or driving on a familiar route, these are so automatic that they do not seem to prevent any conscious thought.” He says that while habits like these may require some level of conscious initiation, once we begin the behavior, the rest of the process takes care of itself.

Hyperfocus- page 42

WHEN WE CAN MULTITASK

A few small habitual tasks. - listing music and running or cleaning home etc.
A task that needs most of our focus, as well as, a habitual task. - listening to a podcast or audiobook while doing maintenance tasks, or playing a simple, repetitive video game on a phone while listening to an audiobook.

Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at Stanford, explained to me, “When we learn while we multitask, we rely more heavily on the basal ganglia, a brain system that’s involved in the learning of skills and habits.” However, “when we encode information in a more focused state, we rely more heavily on our brain’s hippocampus—which actually lets us store and recall the information.”

"Needless to say, our best work happens beyond this forty-second mark—nearly every single important task takes more than forty seconds of focused attention to do well."

Sophie Leroy, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Washington, it’s not possible for us to seamlessly switch attention from one task to another. Leroy coined the term “attention residue” to describe the fragments of the previous task that remain in our attentional space after we shift to another activity: “It could be that you’re sitting in a meeting and your mind keeps going to a project you were working on right before the meeting or something you anticipate doing right after the meeting. It’s having that divided attention, where part of your brain is thinking about those other ongoing projects that you have. This is what makes it so difficult to devote yourself to what you’re supposed to be doing in the present.”

Hyperfocus- page 54

"Our work takes 50 percent longer, compared with doing one task from start to completion."

Choosing where your attention is focused and maintaining a clear attentional space accomplishes several things at once. You will

accomplish what you intend to much more often;
focus more deeply, because you become a better defender of your attentional space;
remember more, because you’re able to more deeply process what you’re doing;
experience less guilt and doubt, knowing you’ve worked with intention;
waste less time working on unimportant things;
fall victim to fewer distractions—both external and internal;
experience greater mental clarity, reduced stress, and fewer feelings of being overwhelmed;
feel a stronger purpose behind your work, because you’ve chosen what’s worthy of your attention (working with intention also prevents you from experiencing feelings of “dullness,” which stem from having a lack of purpose); and
develop deeper relationships and friendships as you spend more attention, not just time, with people.

CHAPTER 3: POWER OF HYPER FOCUS

"When you hyperfocus on a task, you expand one task, project, or other objects of attention. It fills the attentional space completely."

"You’re never too busy to hyperfocus."

Hyper Focus - page -63

"The most important aspect of hyperfocus is that only one productive or meaningful task consumes your attentional space."

"But there are two reasons why this mental mode is best preserved for complex tasks, rather than habits. First, hyperfocus requires willpower and mental energy to activate, drawing from the limited supply we have to make it through the day. Because habits consume so little of our attentional space, there’s really no need to hyperfocus on them."

"Second, and more interesting, while your performance on complex tasks benefits when you focus more completely, your habitual-task performance actually suffers when you focus with your total attention."

"When doing such habitual tasks, it’s best to not focus completely on what you’re doing."

"In any given moment you’re focused on either your external environment, the thoughts in your head, or both. Engaging solely with your external environment means you’re effectively living on autopilot. You slip into this mode as you wait for the traffic light to change or find yourself bouncing around a loop of the same apps on your phone. When you’re engaged only with the thoughts in your head, you’re daydreaming. This can happen when you go on a quick walk without your phone, your mind wanders in the shower, or you go for a jog. You enter into hyperfocus when you engage both your thoughts and your external environment and direct them at one thing intentionally."

To hyperfocus, you must

choose a productive or meaningful object of attention;
eliminate as many external and internal distractions as you can;
focus on that chosen object of attention; and
continually draw your focus back to that one object of attention."

"Distractions are infinitely easier to deal with in advance—by the time they appear, it’s often already too late to defend our intention against them."

"Hyperfocus becomes possible when we focus on our chosen object of attention for a predetermined amount of time."

"Finally, hyperfocus is about drawing our attention back to the original object of attention when our mind wanders."

"Research shows that our mind wanders for 47 percent of the day. In other words, if we’re awake for eighteen hours, we’re engaged in what we’re doing for just eight of them. It’s normal for our mind to wander, but the key is to center it so we can spend time and attention on what’s actually in front of addition, it takes an average of twenty-two minutes to resume working on a task after we’re distracted or interrupted."

"Attention without intention is wasted energy."

The Rule of 3: at the start of each day, choose the three things you want to have accomplished by day’s end.

The Hourly Awareness Chime

When your hourly chime rings, ask yourself the following:

Was your mind wandering when the awareness chime sounded?
Are you working on autopilot or on something you intentionally chose to do? (It’s so satisfying to see this improve over time.)
Are you immersed in a productive task? If so, how long have you spent focusing on it? (If it was an impressive amount of time, don’t let the awareness chime trip you up—keep going!)
What’s the most consequential thing you could be doing right now? Are you working on it?
How full is your attentional space? Is it overflowing, or do you have attention to spare?
Are there distractions preventing you from hyper-focusing on your work?

Gollwitzer calls an “implementation intention.” As he explains the term: “Make a very detailed plan on how you want to achieve what you want to achieve. What I’m arguing in my research is that goals need plans, ideally, plans that include when, where, and which kind of action to move towards the goal.”

"Setting specific intentions can double or triple your odds of success."

“When the goals are tough, or when you have so many goals and it’s hard to attain them all, that’s when planning works particularly well,” Gollwitzer adds.

STARTING A HYPER FOCUS RITUAL

Start by “feeling out” how long you want to hyper-focus.
Anticipate obstacles ahead of time.
Set a timer.
Hyperfocus!

When you should hyperfocus:

Whenever you can!
Around the constraints of your work.
When you need to work on a complex task.
Based on how averse you are to what you intend to accomplish.

Your ability to hyperfocus depends on a few factors, all of which affect the quality of your attention:

How frequently you seek out new and novel objects of attention. (This is often why we initially resist a hyperfocus ritual.)
How often you habitually overload your attentional space.
How frequently your attention is derailed by interruptions and distractions.
How many tasks, commitments, ideas, and other unresolved issues you’re keeping in your head.
How frequently you practice meta-awareness (checking what’s already consuming your attention).

CHAPTER 4: TAMING DISTRACTIONS

"Once you become aware of how frequently you interrupt yourself, it’s hard to go back to working the same way again."

HYPER FOCUS - page 81

"By removing every object of attention that’s potentially more stimulating and attractive than what you intend to do, you give your brain no choice but to work on that task."

Here are a few more suggestions for creating your distraction-free mode:

There are many apps available that cut you off from distractions.
Get out of the office.
Be thoughtful and don’t underestimate (or overestimate) the social costs of your distraction-free mode.
Treat yourself.
Create a distraction-free mode for your team.

Notifications - Turn it off

Using THE PHONE

Mind the gaps.
Do a phone swap.
Strategically use airplane mode.
Buy a second “distractions” device.
Create a “Mindless” folder - Housing for all distracting apps
Prune your list of apps.
Check for new messages only if you have the time, attention, and energy to deal with whatever might have come in.
Keep a tally of how often you check for messages.
Pre-decide when you’ll check.

Hyperfocus on email.

Limit points of contact - reduce no of devices
Keep an external to-do list.
Sign up for two email accounts - business and personal
Take an “email holiday.”
Use the five-sentence rule - message, not more than 5 sentences - If more then Call
Wait before sending important messages.

Meetings

Never attend a meeting without an agenda.
Question every recurring meeting on your calendar.
Challenge the attendance list.
Hyperfocus on meetings.

“Even when they are not in active use or buzzing, beeping, ringing, or flashing, [our phones] are representative of [our] wider social network and a portal to an immense compendium of information.” Another study concluded, somewhat sadly, that the “mere presence of a cell phone placed innocuously in the visual field of participants was found to interfere with closeness, connection, and relationship quality.”

To reduce distractions —

Take stock of the distractions around you
Distance yourself
Introduce more productive cues into your environment.

"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 focusing, but of course, the music never exists in isolation."

"You’ll think more clearly too—externalizing what’s on your mind means tasks and commitments won’t pop into your attentional space as you’re working. "

All three measures are supported by the tactics in this chapter:

Creating a distraction-free mode lets you carve out time to spend intentionally while eliminating the more attractive objects of attention that would ordinarily derail your focus.
Working with fewer distractions in general lets you eliminate novel objects of attention throughout the day and reclaim more of your attention for what’s important.
Utilizing both of these working modes helps you train your brain to wander less and focus longer.
Simplifying your working and living environments eliminates a slew of tempting distractions.
Clearing your head of distracting open loops lets you work more clearly and frees even more attentional space for your most productive tasks

CHAPTER 5: MAKING A HYPER FOCUS HABIT

"To measure if you have enough work in general, assess how much of your day you spend doing unproductive busywork."

"The researchers guided participants through a forty-five-minute meditation exercise twice a week and encouraged them to meditate at home. A few weeks later they discovered something incredible in the working memory capacity of everyone who meditated: it increased by an average of more than 30 percent."

"Here’s a statement that might sound strange: you’ve never really taken a shower. While you might stand there while the water washes over you, your mind is usually elsewhere—at the office, running through your daily checklist, thinking about what you need to buy for dinner, or brainstorming about a problem you’re facing at work. While a small part of it runs through the habit sequence of taking a shower, your mind isn’t with you, present with what you’re experiencing. A mindful shower is one in which you focus on the sights, sounds, and sensations of the present, which enables you to train your brain to better focus on what’s in front of you."

"Don’t be hard on yourself when your mind wanders—remember, your brain was built to do this."

"Here’s the key: the smaller the object of attention, the more your mind will wander, but the more you’ll expand the size of your attentional space as you focus on it. The more quickly you’re able to get back on track after your mind ventures off during a mindfulness or meditation session, the better you’ll become at focusing at work and at home."

Battling against 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.
Continually practice hyperfocus.
Recharge!

Let’s recap a few of these ideas:

Understanding the four types of productive and unproductive work tasks lets us step back and figure out what’s actually important so we can stop working on mindless autopilot mode.
Recognizing the limits of our attention enables us to become aware of how few things we’re able to focus on at the moment.
Hyper focusing on our most complex, productive tasks lets us activate the most productive mode of our brains and get a large amount accomplished in a short amount of time.
Setting strong daily intentions lets us work on our most productive tasks.
Creating a personalized distraction-free mode, and a reduced-distractions mode, lets us work with more focus and clarity while directing our time and attention away from needless distractions.
Simplifying our working and living environments lets us think more clearly by taking stock of the distractions that surround us.
Clearing our minds using waiting-for, task, and worry lists lets us work with clarity and prevents unresolved mental loops from interrupting our focus throughout the day.
Becoming good custodians of our attentional space—by making our work more complex when necessary and by expanding the limits of our attention— helps us properly manage our limited attention.

CHAPTER 6: YOUR BRAIN'S HIDDEN CREATIVE MODE

Scatter focus -

It allows you to set intentions and plan for the future.
Second, scatter focus lets you recharge.
Third, scatter focus fosters creativity.

that scatter focus mode also leads you to

become more self-aware;
Incubate ideas more deeply;
Remember and process ideas and meaningful experiences more effectively;
Reflect on the meaning of your experiences;
show greater empathy (scatter focus gives you the space to step into other people’s shoes); and
Become more compassionate.

HYPER FOCUS - page 125

Scatter focus is always intentional. (You have to make it)

Different style of scatter focus

Capture mode: Letting your mind roam freely and capturing whatever comes up.
Problem-crunching mode: Holding a problem loosely in your 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.

"Habitual tasks have been shown to yield the greatest number of creative insights."

"Habitual tasks also encourage your mind to continue wandering."

"The key to practicing habitual scatter focus is to frequently check what thoughts and ideas are in your attentional space."

CHAPTER 7: RECHARGING WITH INTENTION

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.

HYPER FOCUS - page 140

Here are a few other break activities that have worked for me, and for the people I’ve coached:

Going on a nature walk.
Running outside or visiting the gym at work (if your company has one) or offsite
Meditating (especially if your office has a relaxation room)
Reading something fun and not work-related
Listening to music, a podcast, or an audiobook
Spending time with coworkers or friends
Investing time in a creative hobby like painting, woodworking, or photography

Research on the value of breaks points to two simple rules:

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

"For every hour of sleep you miss, you lose two hours of productivity the next day."

REST IS NOT IDLENESS

CHAPTER 8: CONNECTING DOTS

It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer. —Albert Einstein.

To connect dots more easily —

Scatter your attention in a richer environment. — You can also use cues to capture everything you need to get done.
Write out the problems you’re trying to crack.
Sleep on a problem.
Step back.
Intentionally leave tasks unfinished.
Consume more valuable dots.

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

CHAPTER 9: COLLECTING DOT

"We are what we pay attention to, and almost nothing influences our productivity and creativity as much as the information we’ve consumed in the past."

HYPER FOCUS - page 161

As a rule, we should

consume more useful information, especially when we have the energy to process something denser;
consume balanced information when we have less energy;
consume entertaining information with intention or when we’re running low on energy and need to recharge; and
consume less trashy information.

There are two steps to upping the quality of information you collect:

Take stock of everything you consume.
Intentionally consume more valuable information.

How you can change your habits to intentionally consume more valuable information.

Consume things you care about, especially when few others do.
Eliminate some trash.
Choose a few valuable things to add.
Notice what you consume on autopilot mode.
Veg out . . . intentionally.
Reevaluate what you’re consuming as you’re consuming it.
Get things to bid for your attention.
At the moment, zoom out.
Invest in serendipity.
Double down on what’s valuable.

As author Malcolm Gladwell wrote: “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

“I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.” — Albert Einstien

CHAPTER 10: WORKING TOGETHER

Blending HYPER FOCUS & SCATTER FOCUS
Invest in your HAPPINESS

Shawn Achor (author of The Happiness Advantage) offers a few science-backed strategies to bolster your happiness. A few of his top suggestions:

Recalling three things you’re grateful for at the end of each day
Journaling at the end of each day about one good experience you had
Meditating
Performing a random act of kindness

a positive mood expands the size of your attentional space, a negative mood shrinks the size of your attentional space.

Drink alcohol and caffeine strategically
CREATING A FOCUS RITUAL.
NOTICING

"Understand the power of your attention well."

Upgrade Your Life

Hyper Focus By Chris Bailey : Book Summary