How to Focus on Your Work - 3 Lessons from "Hyperfocus"

- This video is sponsored by Skillshare.

Every second we're awake, we're taking in unfathomably large amounts of information.

Together, our five senses process 11 million bits of it every second.

But while the unconscious mind continuously gathers these millions of bits,

the conscious mind can only handle about 40 of them at any given moment,

just a tiny fraction of what we take in.

This is just one of the reasons

that we so often find it difficult to concentrate on our work.

There are severe limits to how much we're able to focus on at once.

And keeping the spotlight on the 40 most important bits is hard

when the other 10.9 million usually contain more than a few temptations.

So in my constant quest to improve my own ability to focus on my

work,

I recently picked up the book "Hyper Focus" by Chris Bailey to see

if it had any new focus-boosting tricks

that I could hide up my sleeves,

which are honestly kind of short

so I'm not sure how many tricks are gonna fit up there.

But for me, this book was a great deep dive into many topics surrounding

focus and concentration.

I took really, really detailed notes in this book

and I've got them in a new book Summary

and Notes section on my website,

so I'll link to that in the description down below, but in this video,

I wanna share and summarize three of the most important ideas

that I took away from the book.

Let's start with the skill of meta awareness,

the state of knowing what you're thinking about.

Our minds love to wander, and they do it a lot,

by some estimates half the time we're awake.

And when your mind is wandering,

you're not really aware of what it's focused on.

And sometimes this is okay but when you're trying to focus on your work,

you wanna reduce the time your mind spends wandering,

and meta awareness is the tool you use to do that.

When you're aware of where your mind is,

you can consciously guide it back to where it needs to be after you

catch it wandering.

"Hyper Focus" spends a lot of time talking about ways you can improve this

meta awareness skill.

But here's one of the most important tips

that I took away from the book.

Create some kind of regular reminder to simply check in on the state of

your thoughts and the state of your mind.

Bailey's suggestion is to create what he calls an hourly awareness chime using a

timer or maybe an alarm on your phone.

When it goes off, you ask yourself where is my mind right now?

Over the past hour,

have I been focused or has my mind been wandering freely?

Have I been working with intention

or maybe just jumping from task to task on autopilot,

as I get bored of one task and then another?

And over the last hour,

have I been working on the most important thing

that I should have been working on?

And by using this external chime

and external system to help govern your internal self discipline,

by using this over time,

you get better and better at continuously exercising this meta awareness as you work.

However, sometimes it's actually a good thing to let your mind wander.

Throughout the book, Bailey makes reference to two opposing states,

hyper focus and scatter focus.

As you can probably guess,

during hyper focus you block out everything except for one singular object of attention.

Right now since you're watching this video,

that should be my face and not the Twitter feed and your other monitor,

yes, I can see what you're doing Derek.

During hyper focus, gets blocked out along with everything else

so that you can slip into a state of flow

and actually execute on your intentions.

But as you're probably well aware,

hyper focus is a difficult state to maintain over a long period of time,

especially if you're feeling bored or stressed or in a distracting environment.

Which is why it's very important to try to go into your work sessions

in a positive state of mind,

but also to create a distraction-free work environment.

By pushing out everything else that could be a distraction,

you enable yourself to focus on those most important 40 bits.

And if you're curious about how to set up an environment like that,

I've got a whole video on it,

I'll link that down the description below

so you can check it out after you watch this video.

But hyper focus, isn't the best state for every purpose.

Not only is it taxing after awhile,

but because it leans so heavily on your brain's prefrontal cortex,

it's also a state where you're less creative.

So to get the most from it,

you need to slip out of it from time to time in exchange for

it's exact opposite,

scatter focus, a state where you intentionally let your mind wander.

This mode of thought is often terrible for what we tend to narrowly define

as productivity,

immediate work output, but it's great for creativity.

And if we look at a longer timescale than the five seconds your boss

catches you not typing on your keyboard,

we can probably agree that creativity and productivity go hand in hand,

you can't have one without the other,

and scatter focus lets your mind wander around different thoughts in a more creative

fashion,

finding new connections between them.

In the book, Bailey is very clear about one thing.

Scatter focus is not the same thing as unconscious mind wandering,

the type of mind wandering that we usually engage in.

The key difference here is intentionality.

In scatter focus, you intentionally let your mind wander in one of three different

modes.

First, there's capture mode.

In this mode Bailey says you get out a piece of paper,

or you open up a new note on your computer,

and then you just let your mind wander freely for 10 or 15 minutes,

writing down observations and thoughts as they come.

And by the end of the capture mode session you might find yourself with

a list of projects you wanna check in on,

or people you wanna reconnect with, maybe just a list of random ideas.

I know personally when I do this,

I always end up with more than a few different video ideas.

Secondly, there is problem crunching mode.

In this mode, instead of letting your mind wander completely free,

you pick an object of focus,

maybe a problem that you're stuck on

and you let your mind wander around

that in a sort of nonlinear,

relaxed fashion as you maybe go for a walk or a bike ride,

which I try to do pretty much every day.

This is actually very similar to the walking meditations

that Cal Newport talks about in his book,

"Deep Work" or the diffused mode style of thinking

and problem solving that Barbara Oakley talks about in her book,

"A Mind for Numbers" that sort of a lot of common threads around here.

And what's really great about this mode is you are thinking about the problem

that you were working on during hyper focus,

but you're thinking about it in a much more relaxed state,

allowing your entire brain to sort of mull over the problem.

The illustration that Barbara Oakley gives in "A Mind for Numbers" is of a

pinball table.

If you're using that hyper focus mode, it's almost like a tightly gripped cluster,

those bouncers, that keeps the ball bouncing around in one very specific area of

table.

Whereas in the diffused mode or in scatter focus, using the entire table,

it's like a very loosely-grouped,

spaced out group of those bouncers

so the ball can go basically wherever it needs to go.

And in these modes,

you often find that new insights come that wouldn't have come during hyper focus.

Finally there's habitual mode where you, again,

let your mind wander freely but you do so well doing the dishes,

or doing something that doesn't take a whole lot of mental effort.

And personally on a pretty much daily basis,

I tend to combine capture mode and habitual mode,

often go for a walk or I'll go for a bike ride,

not really doing problem country mode

and only thinking about a specific thing most of the time,

but when thoughts come to me,

I've got the voice memos app on my watch

or my phone so I can record the thoughts

and insights that come to me.

And I find that again,

when I'm out on these walks and I'm out of these bike rides,

I often get ideas

that I would have never gotten

if I was just sitting at my desk trying to write.

And that's really the purpose of this scatter focus state.

Because you're more relaxed,

you think in a less linear fashion

and you get more ideas

as a result.

And then when you switch back to hyper focus,

you can take action on those ideas,

especially if you can learn how to set stronger intentions at the outset of

a hyper focus session,

this is my third big takeaway from this book.

Just as my friend Charles Cornell stressed

that intentionality is the most important element to deliberate practice,

setting strong and specific intentions is also a key element to actually getting well,

really any work done.

So what makes an intention a good one?

Well, for me there is one key question to ask here.

When you sit down to work,

ask yourself if the intention

that you've set is specific enough to make your next action an obvious one.

Here are a few examples, write a video script.

I literally did this just this morning.

Well, that's actually not a very good intention

because it leaves a lot of room for interpretation

and writing a video script might be a multi-day process.

So instead I could rephrase

that as write a rough draft of the first main body point of this

script.

Again, it's a multi-day process,

so if I know I'm writing on one point,

I'm much more likely to get started quickly.

And additionally, this might even be more important,

I know that I'm writing a rough draft, that's my intention.

And that's gonna stop me for making edits

which will slow down the initial writing process.

Edits are much better made during a second pass through after I've already gotten

the rough draft onto the page.

A second example, go to the gym.

Again, a lot of room for interpretation there.

So things are gonna be a lot better

if I know what I'm gonna do

when I get to the gym.

I know which exercises I'm gonna do,

what order I'm going to do them in,

how many sets and how many intended reps.

This is actually part of the reason why I work with an online coach

who sets that programming for me ahead of time.

But even if I wasn't,

I would always make sure to go into the gym with a plan.

Now for me, the absolute most important element to getting my work done is

still interest,

care, wanting to do the work that is in front of me.

But the reality is,

all of us have things

that we sometimes have to do

that we don't wanna do,

and this applies to people who overall their job.

Personally, I love being a YouTuber, I love being a content creator.

There's a lot of freedom involved,

there's a lot of creativity involved

but still there are small parts of the job

that I still just don't wanna do sometimes.

Or sometimes my brain wants to put my main job on the back burner

because of some other current obsession.

And this, this is where intentionality really shines

because when you get specific

when you make your next actions completely obvious.

And when you're tailor your environment for focus,

that's when your self discipline comes in

and allows you to get your work done,

even if it's not exactly what you wanna do in the moment.

And that is the crux,

the main part of this lesson that I took from this book.

Now, one thing that can really help you to set these intentions

when you're working is having a well-maintained productivity system.

As David Allen famously put it,

"our brains are for having ideas not for holding them"

which is why you wanna have a well-maintained,

organized external system, a single source of truth, if you will,

for recording the details of all of your tasks, your events and your ideas.

It's the system that allows you to make sure nothing ever slips through the

cracks in your life.

I call this a productivity system.

And over on Skillshare,

I created a class that will teach you exactly how to build one,

or to improve yours if you have one already.

In the class, we go over several different categories of apps, your Task Manager,

your Calendar, or your note taking app,

plus file management methods for both digital and physical documents.

We talk about how to set these apps up so they're organized,

so that they work together in harmony,

and so that you reduce the friction involved in getting things into them.

Additionally, we talk about some methods

and some interesting meta skills for making sure the system doesn't become a jumbled

mess over time,

which would challenge its status as that single source of truth.

More than 88,000 people have already taken this class,

with one reason review was saying it was one of the best online classes

they've ever taken.

And if you wanna take it for yourself,

if you wanna give it a try,

you can actually do

so for free by being one of the first 1000 sign up for a

free trial on Skillshare at the link down below.

When you get that free trial,

you're gonna have unlimited access to Skillshare's entire platform,

which means you can take my class

then go take my other classes on Skillshare,

or take any of the thousands of additional classes

that could teach you practical skills like audio engineering,

video editing, marketing and tons more.

After that, Skillshare is still a very affordable platform with our annual plans starting

less than 10 bucks a month,

which is just one of the many reasons why I really like Skillshare,

why I have three classes on the platform already,

and why I have a fourth class coming out in January of next year,

which is really gonna help my fellow creatives, YouTubers, entrepreneurs and content creators.

So check it out with a link down below and as always,

thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this episode

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when they come out in the near future.

Something that I'm committing to for 2021, just to give you a heads up,

is fewer videos but more production quality, more writing time.

So my schedule is gonna get a little bit more sparse

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that notification bell on

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when they come out in the future.

I'm very excited for the stuff that we're cooking up in 2021,

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Right now there's a lot of notion tutorials on there

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if my interest goes in those directions.

So check out that channel if you're curious.

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out for extra style points.

Or if you don't wanna do that,

don't go punch windows or I don't know,

like eat a bunch of cake or whatever it is,

I didn't write a joke for the end of this video, but as always,

I'm not your dad.