Hyperfocus: How to Work Less to Achieve More

Just as you are what you eat, you are what you pay attention to. Attention is finite and is the most valuable ingredient you have to live a good life—so make sure everything you consume is worthy of it. As I’ll cover in depth later,

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. The opposite is true when it comes to the problems you’re in the middle of solving: recording them on paper helps you to better clarify, process, and remember them.

Surprisingly, I learned that one of the best practices for fostering my creativity and productivity was learning how to unfocus. By paying attention to nothing in particular and letting my mind wander—as I did on my way to the Kingston diner—I found that I became better at making connections between ideas and coming up with new ones.

magic stops being magic the moment you know how it’s done.

the more often we fill our attention to the brim, the longer it takes us to switch between tasks, the less we’re able to filter out irrelevant information on the fly, and the poorer we become at suppressing the urge to switch between tasks in the first place.

One of my favorite weekly routines is a focus ritual, which I schedule for every Sunday evening or Monday morning to plan my week. During it I decide on my three weekly intentions and assess how much I’ll need to hyperfocus and scatterfocus in the days ahead.

When I finish that first read, I go through the book a second time, rereading just the highlighted parts so I can really process the most valuable nuggets. If I can, I’ll annoy someone nearby by sharing these bits so I can process them again even more deeply.

only when we pay attention to something that our brain actively encodes it into memory.

Hyperfocus is about focusing on a single thing. This lets your brain become productive, encode information and experiences so that you remember them later, and engage with the world around you. In scatterfocus mode you do the opposite: you zoom out and connect the constellations of “dots” in your head (a “dot” being any piece of information you hol