Hyperfocus

Chris Bailey has been intensively researching and experimenting with productivity since he was a young teenager, in an effort to discover how to become as productive as humanly possible. To date, he has written hundreds of articles on the subject, and has garnered coverage in media as diverse as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, The Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Harvard Business Review, TED, Fast Company, and Lifehacker. The author of The Productivity Project, Chris lives in Kingston, Canada.

Chapter 0

Why Focus Matters

Attention Is Everywhere

I'm writing these words over the sounds of clanging cutlery and muffled conversation at a small diner in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

I've always been a fan of people-watching. There's so much to take in--how they dress, walk, converse, and act when they're either around or not around others. At a busy café, or at a diner like this, it's fun to see personalities collide like particles in an accelerator; to observe a guy's personality change when he switches from talking to his friend to chatting up the waitress; to watch the personalities of waitstaff shift when serving each table, adapting to large families, young couples.

In focusing on other people, I've made a lot of observations about what those people are focusing on. In any given moment, we are all focusing on something, even if we're just lost in our internal thoughts. Let's take a glance through the diner.

I turn my attention first to the two twentysomething girls at the table to my left, who are mostly focusing on their smartphones instead of each other. Between bouts of texting, they flip their phones facedown on the table. This, it seems, is a pretty pointless gesture--they've picked them back up thirty seconds later. While I can't make out their every word, I can tell they're skimming the surface of the conversation they could be having. They're with each other in person, but their attention is elsewhere.

Or take the couple across the room. They're engrossed in a conversation fueled by hot coffee and buttermilk pancakes. They were engaged in relatively quiet small talk when they arrived, but their conversation soon became more animated. Unlike the girls, this couple has focused only on each other since sitting down.

A catchy Ed Sheeran song comes on over the restaurant's speakers, and my attention is drawn to the two guys sitting a few tables over from the couple. One of them subtly taps his foot to the beat while his friend orders. The foot tapper is presumably spreading his attention across three things: the song, what his friend is ordering, and his own breakfast decision. After he orders the Three Egg Express, when the server asks how he'd like his eggs prepared, he directs his attention inward, seemingly recalling how he usually takes them. He orders scrambled.

At the bar are a few strangers making idle conversation while watching last night's football highlights. I find it especially fascinating that millions of people around the world, including these three guys, are fixated on an eleven-inch piece of tanned cowhide. As I watch, one of the guys cocks his head, lost in thought. Then, as though a shock wave was traveling through his body, he rushes to capture an idea in his pocketed notepad. While he was lost in a daydream, and to the tune of football highlights, an insight struck from out of the blue. He had a eureka moment.

Or take me, sitting here with my laptop. This morning, as I sip coffee and nibble home fries, I've been able to focus more deeply on my work and have more energy to burn. My morning meditation may have helped--I find I'm able to write more words when I take part in this ritual (40 percent more, by my calculations). I left my phone at home so I could write distraction free, and so my mind could rest on the walk to the diner, and wander. As I'll discuss later, disconnecting is one of the most powerful ways to spark new and innovative ideas. The music playing on the restaurant speakers is catchy, but not enough to be distracting. I'm not here for the soundtrack, though, and also chose this diner over my favorite café because there's no wi-fi--constant connectivity is one of the worst disruptions to our focus and productivity. As the last few paragraphs demonstrate, I am a bit distracted by the environment and the people it's hosting, but they're serving as good fodder f