CHAPTER

1

SWITCHING OFF AUTOPILOT MODE

AUTOPILOT MODE

Right now there’s a good chance that you’re focused on this book. But how did you get here?

Looking at the books in my own library, I learned about most of them through recommendations from friends, podcast appearances by the author, or having loved a similar book. Most of us don’t deliberately plot out which element of our lives we want to improve before settling on a book that will help us address that issue. We often arrive at those reading decisions because of a confluence of events.

Take, for example, the last book I read. One day I was riding in a taxi whose driver had the radio on, and I heard an interview with the author. Later, a friend tweeted about that book twice. This accumulation of mentions led to my eventual decision to buy the book. The process as a whole was anything but deliberate.

Our not plotting out in detail everything we do and every decision we make is, for the most part, a good thing. I made the series of decisions involved in purchasing many of my books in autopilot mode. Autopilot mode enables us to keep up with the demands of our life. For example, imagine if every email response required you to draft your answer in a new Word document. From there, you’d have to reread it several times, send it to your significant other for improvements, and print it once or twice to do line edits, only to arrive several hours later at a final, eloquent “Sure, sounds good!” This might be a productive thing to do for an important project, but for every email? Imagine being just as deliberate buying ketchup, taking out the trash, or brushing your teeth.

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.

But some decisions are worth making deliberately. How we manage our attention is one of them.

We typically manage our attention on autopilot. When we receive an email from our boss, we instinctively stop what we’re doing to respond to it. When someone has posted a picture of us online, we check to see how we look, then click to read what the poster said about us. When we’re talking with a coworker or a loved one, we automatically focus on forming clever responses in our head before she finishes her thought. (One of the most underrated skills: letting other people finish their sentences before starting yours.)

Here’s a simple exercise that’ll take you thirty seconds. Come up with an honest answer to this question: throughout the day, how frequently do you choose what to focus on? In other words, roughly how much of your time do you spend deliberately and with intention, deciding in advance what you want to do and when you’ll do it?

Most people don’t fare too well with their answers. We lead busy lives, and at most we only occasionally choose to focus on something intentionally—when we catch ourselves daydreaming, sense that we’ve been procrastinating, fall into the trap of bouncing around the same several apps or websites, or realize we’ve zoned out while watching our kids.

After we snap out of autopilot mode, we consider what we really ought to be doing and make the effort to realign our neurons to focus on that instead.

While falling into autopilot mode can help us keep up the pace of work and life, attention is our most limited and constrained resource. The more we can manage our attention with intention, the more focused, productive, and creative we become.

A DAY IN AUTOPILOT MODE

The environments in which we live and work, unfortunately, have their own agenda for claiming our attention, bombarding us with alerts, notifications, beeps, and buzzes. This steady stream of interruptions prevents us from diving into any one thing properly; after all, it isn’t long before we’re presented with another email that feels just as urgent.

If you’re still here, you’re probably better at focusing than the average person. Reading a book requires a good deal of attention—and with attention becoming a rare commodity, fewer people are able to devote themselves to reading without distraction. But it’s worth quickly asking: How much of your attention are you directing to this paragraph in this moment? Are you focused on it 100 percent? 85 percent? 50 percent? How has your level of focus changed over time, especially as you moved from one environment to another? How frequently has your mind wandered from the words on this page to the thoughts in your head—eyes skimming focus free until you caught yourself and tuned back in?* Even the most experienced, focused readers have these mind-wandering episodes.

It’s not unusual to have a hard time focusing. There are countless everyday examples of how little control we have over our attention in our daily lives. Take, for example the following:

As you read Hyperfocus and learn to focus more deliberately, these lapses will make a lot more sense, and you’ll even learn how to prevent them.

THE FOUR TYPES OF TASKS

In many ways, managing your attention is like choosing what to watch on Netflix. When you first launch the website, you’re presented with a landing page highlighting just a few of the many shows that are available. The Netflix homepage is like a fork in the road—only instead of two paths forward, there are thousands. Taking some of those paths will leave you feeling happy, some will mindlessly entertain you, and others will teach you something useful.

Deciding where to direct our attention presents a similar fork in the road—only the pathways lead to the innumerable things on which we can choose to focus. Right now you’re absorbed in this book. But if you look up from this page or your e-reader, you’ll see many alternative objects of attention. Some are more meaningful and productive than others. Focusing on this book is probably more productive than focusing on your smartphone, the wall, or the music in the background. If you’re grabbing breakfast with a friend, focusing on him or her is infinitely more rewarding than watching the football highlights playing in the background.

When you tally up all of the potential things on which you could focus in your external environment, there is truly an overwhelming number of options. And that’s not even counting the trivia, ideas, and memories in your own head.

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.

To make sense of all of the things bidding for our focus, it’s helpful to divide our tasks into categories. I’ll discuss focus here largely as it pertains to work, but these rules apply just as much to your life at home, as several sections later in the book will explore.

There are two main criteria to consider when categorizing what to focus on: whether a task is productive (you accomplish a lot by doing it) and whether a task is attractive (fun to do) or unattractive (boring, frustrating, difficult, etc.).

I’ll refer to this grid quite often, so let’s quickly take a look at each of the four categories of tasks.

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.

The remaining box on the chart is 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. An actor’s most purposeful tasks might be to rehearse and perform. A financial adviser’s purposeful tasks might be to make investments, meet with clients, and educate herself on industry trends. A researcher’s most important tasks might include designing and running studies, teaching, and applying for funding. My most important tasks are writing books and blog articles, reading research to encounter new ideas, and giving talks. In your personal life, your purposeful tasks might include spending time with your kids, working on a side hustle, or volunteering with a local charity.

A perfectly productive person would focus on only the top two quadrants of the above chart. If things were that simple, though, you wouldn’t need this book. As you’ve no doubt experienced, sticking within the borders of necessary and purposeful work is much easier said than done. Every day, tasks from all four quadrants compete for our attention. Working on autopilot means we are more prone to falling prey to the unnecessary and distracting ones and often spend time on necessary and purposeful work only when we’re on deadline.

I noticed something interesting as I applied the research in this book to my own life: as time passed, I began to spend less time on autopilot and focused more attention on my most purposeful and necessary tasks. As you become more deliberate about managing your attention, I think you’ll find the same to be true for your work.

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.