How you can use Hyperfocus and Scatterfocus to boost productivity and creativity.

When was the last time you were in a frenzy? The state where you’re highly concentrated, so engrossed in a task that you forgot the world around you while time flew by? Or to put it another way, when was the last time you were hyper-focused?

You probably know the exhilarating high. And you probably know you can reach that state. You may even suspect that you can consciously create it, and that it has something to do with turning off distractions like Social Media and your smartphone overall. But you don’t know exactly how. And that’s exactly where this article comes in.

This article translates current research findings into concrete practical tips on how to achieve this hyper-focused state. I will explain which form of focus is beneficial in which situation — and how you can actively control it. At the end, this will help you increase your productivity and creativity. At it’s bare minimum, you will feel more conscious about your attention which is immensely valuable in times where distractions are all around us.

My writing is based on a book I just finished reading, called “Hyperfocus — How to Work Less and Achieve More” by Chris Bailey. I can highly recommend you read it yourself, because there are so many valuable informations inside this book to really grasp the mechanisms around the types of focusses. This book is life-changing in the way that you will not easily return to your usual style of working. You will become more aware of your attention and the environments that influences your focus.

When was the last time you were really productive? When were you at your best, when you effortlessly mastered even the most demanding and complex tasks? Days like that are not a matter of course — and that’s precisely why they’re worth exploring. What makes them so special? Why does your work come so easily to you?

One thing is certain: It has something to do with your ability to concentrate fully on your task. It has to do with the fact that on such days, you don’t experience it as an agonizing burden but as a state of exhilaration. To the fact that every time you look at the clock, another hour has passed.

In this state, your mind is fully engaged. Undistracted. In focus. In other words, you’re hyper-focused.

First of all, you concentrate permanently on a single task. You don’t multitask. You don’t manically jump from one challenge to the next. No. You focus your entire attention on one thing. And you do it until it is done. There seems to be a magical endurance involved. One, that doesn’t even tire you as much as mindlessly scrolling through your Instagram feed for 30 minutes.

No, this time, you avoid distractions. On an ordinary day, you succumb to the temptation to browse social media aimlessly for twenty minutes easily. But with hyperfocus, you resist wasting time in the first place.

Of course, you’ll notice your mind wandering now and then. You’ll continue to feel the impulse to pull out your smartphone. After all, you are and will remain a human being in the age of digitalization, there is no problem with that. But your hyper-focused mind is stronger than the temptation. It’s easier for it to return to the task at hand.

I am certain that you know this feeling and this situation that I just described and if you read until this point, I suppose you want to know how to actively trigger such state.

So ultimately, it only takes four steps to permanently dive into hyperfocus.

First, you find a single, meaningful task.

Second, you eliminate all potential distractions.

Third, you focus all your attention on the chosen task.

Fourth, you consciously shift your focus back every time your mind wanders.

That’s it, there is no magic involved here. Well, of course, there is some more detail to really understand how to leverage these seemingly easy principles. But yes, fundamentally, this is how it works — and the best part is that it is trainable!

“Attention without intention is wasted energy.”

Let me explain these different steps.

Your consciousness has a limited attentional space of a certain size. You are free to choose to fill it with whatever tasks you like, for example, like this:

First of all, you can only take in a limited amount of stimuli at any given time. University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy Wilson estimates that the human brain registers up to eleven million bits of information per second. That sounds huge. But do you know how many of them you can consciously process? Around 40. Not to mention the amount of information you will be able to remember — our brain is programmed to filter information to a bare minimum.

That means that each and every one of us has a limited capacity for what to focus on. Now, you can choose to fill your attentional space with multiple low-minded, habitual tasks or with a complex task that fills your attentional space entirely.

“Fitting the right amount and the right type of tasks into your attentional space is both an art and an investment in productivity. The costs of overloading our attention can be pretty severe.”

Any additional task might overload your attention and we usually fail to do both, any examples needed?

• Rewinding a TV show, an audiobook or a movie because someone was talking to you or because you simply zoned out for a while
• Trying to walk and text at the same time
• Taking care of a toddler while shopping

The first takeaway here is that if you want to leverage hyperfocus you have to fully concentrate on one task, the most meaningful task there is.

Now, most of the time this is easier said than done simply because our environment is usually crammed with potential distractions. Without knowing you, I’d say there are a handful of common distractions at your working desk. If I need to guess, your mobile phone, certain websites you like to visit when you’re stuck at work like Youtube and Instagram, maybe some random sticky notes, a book, etc.

The second key to success is to get rid of all those potential distractions before you buckle down and focus on your most meaningful task. You can do this by first identifying what you’ll do after you lose focus, say visiting websites. Use a browser extension to block exactly those websites during working hours (for me Youtube and LinkedIn), or “unhook” your Youtube recommendation engine so the algorithm does not recommend any video to you when you open Youtube. That way you’ll be forced to use Youtube intentionally by searching for a tutorial etc.. Same for your physical workspace. Clean your desk and take away all physical, material gadgets that simply cram your workspace.

After achieving this, you’ll be ready for the third step. You can buckle down and focus on your one, single task. My most valuable recommendation for you at this point is to “feel out” how long you want to hyperfocus. You don’t have to try it right away for 2–3 hours straight. Start with 20–30 minutes. Set an alarm once every hour to check if your attention is still on the task.

Setting an alarm every now and then is useful simply because no human can avoid getting distracted and loosing focus. Your attention will wander if you want it or not. But like I said at the beginning of this article, in hyperfocus you’ll quickly return your attention to your task.

So the fourth, any maybe the most important key to succeed with hyperfocussing is to bring your attention back as quickly as possible when your mind starts to wander. It is all about noticing as soon as possible and returning your focus.

Studies on attention span have been conducted with NASA, Boeing, Intel, IBM, and Microsoft that led to the result that on average every 40 seconds our attention shifts to something unrelated and less meaningful than the intentional task. That means, that you don’t have to worry about your mind wandering, it is a totally natural thing to do. The only thing you have to do now, for starters, is to notice when you loose focus. Recognize when your mind starts wandering. This will be a process, you are not going to master it instantaneously.

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

Now, say you practice these steps, and you’ll improve your attentional span over time. You will be able to work in hyperfocus intentionally and in a controlled manner to be more productive, and to achieve the same amount of work in less time. Hyperfocus is a powerful tool. The ability to concentrate fully and permanently on a specific task is an advantage in almost all situations in life. But as useful as it is, it’s not enough on its own.

Why? Because your mind needs a breather in between. You can’t maintain hyperfocus indefinitely. Most importantly, it leaves no room for creativity.

Hyperfocus is the ideal state of mind for completing time-consuming and complex tasks. But it has its greatest effect when you have already decided on a strategy. So you already know what task you want to master and how.

But sometimes ingenuity and originality are required, and in these situations you need a different approach, the so-called:

Scatterfocus — your brains hidden creative mode

Earlier in this article, when discussing the attentional space and how your mind naturally wanders the concept of daydreaming seems to be the enemy of hyperfocus. In fact, you can’t hyperfocus if your mind wanders aimlessly.

But daydreaming is not always bad. In contrary, it has a lot in common with scatterfocus. Scatterfocus describes that open state of mind in which you make plans for the future and develop new ideas.

One of the key differences between hyperfocusing and scatterfocusing is the time component. In hyperfocus, you accomplish tasks in the present — and in scatterfocus, you tend to think about the future. Fun Fact: When our thoughts wander, 48% of the time they are about times to come. That’s because we naturally tend to focus on the future when we’re mentally distracted and tend to focus on the present when we’re not distracted / focused. And that’s exactly why scatterfocus is so useful when it comes to making plans.

So, how exactly does scatterfocus work? It involves three modes of thinking: the first is the so-called capture mode. This is the simplest and possibly most mundane technique. Here, it’s just a matter of becoming aware of all the thoughts in your head.

Once or twice a week, take pen and paper, sit somewhere like a coffee shop or a park and let your mind wander. Capture everything that comes to your mind: most people think of unfinished tasks, repressed chores, and unanswered messages. By writing them down by hand, you’re literally holding the thoughts (be aware of using mobile phones in capture mode since they can easily catch you in a mindless, idea-destructive mode in front of your social media feed!). By writing down your thoughts, you tie up loose ends and make room in the attention space for more important tasks since you write down the tasks floating around in your head, so your mind can “forget” about them and has more attentional space left.

In the second mode, the so-called problem-solving mode, the name says it all. You consciously focus your attention on a specific problem and let your thoughts circle around this topic. This differs from hyperfocussing on a specific problem by keeping that problem in mind and letting your mind wander around it. You don’t have to get stressed out if you loose focus here. Albert Einstein was a master at doing this. He was able to connect so many ideas, so many dots in his head by letting his thoughts float around a topic, and asking some genuinely curious questions that popped up when thinking about certain problems. This associative thinking opens up new perspectives for you and helps you find useful ideas and solutions.

The third and last type of thinking is habitual scatterfocus. It becomes active whenever you perform simple and repetitive tasks that take up some of your attention but leave plenty of room for reflection. You’ll know the feeling of brooding while riding a bike or doing the dishes. This is why people like Bill Gates like to wash their dishes. It creates some of the best ideas you could get, unlike scrolling though your mobile phone.

“Habitual tasks have been shown to yield the greatest number of creative insights when compared with switching to another demanding task, resting or taking no break whatsoever.”

To blend hyperfocus and scatterfocus into each other, try to make scatterfocus a habit whenever you need a break from hyperfocus. At the start of a day, list down the three most important, most demanding task of the day. Then buckle down to solve these tasks by enhancing your hyperfocus mode. When feeling tired, and noticing that you loose focus too often, take a break and enjoy the pleasures of scatterfocus for a while.

At the end of this article, I want you to emphasize to invest in serendipity. Go out and consume challenging things outside the boundaries of your expertise, ones that force you to make more disparate connections. The more disparate the dots you connect, the more valuable the connections often end up being.

I hope that you feel encouraged to read this book since it offers potentially life-changing informations. I wouldn’t want to miss the informations of this book in my head and this book in my book shelf.

Hopefully you enjoyed this article. I’d be curious to read what you think about it. Leave a comment with suggestions for improvement or with recommendations on what I should write about next.

Cheers, Chris.