CHAPTER

2

THE LIMITS OF YOUR ATTENTION

Without selective interest, experience is utter chaos.

—William James

Your focus determines your reality.

—Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace

THE BOUNDARIES OF YOUR ATTENTION

Our attention is the most powerful tool we have to live a good life and get stuff done, but our ability to focus is constrained in two main ways.

First, there’s a finite limit to how many things we can focus on. That limit is smaller than you might think. If we could actually focus on more tasks simultaneously, we’d be able to do far more in the moment: memorizing someone’s phone number while playing the piano, carrying on a conversation with two people, and responding to an email on our phone. Realistically we can, at most, do one or two of these things well at the same time.

Our environment sends a steady stream of information to our brain every second. Think about the sights, sounds, and other information coming at you in this moment, and you’ll realize there is a nearly infinite number of items at which you could direct your focus. Timothy Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, estimates that our brain receives eleven million “bits” of information in the form of sensory experiences each second.

But how many of these eleven million bits can our minds consciously process and focus on at once? Just forty of them. Not forty million or forty thousand, but forty.

When we choose what to focus on, we’re effectively sipping from a fire hose. One conversation, for example, consumes the majority of our attentional bits, which is why we can’t carry on two at once. According to renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, simply decoding a conversation (so we can understand it) consumes more than half of our attention. As well as interpreting a person’s words, you have to parse the meaning behind what he or she is saying. While you’re conversing, there are countless other places to direct your remaining attentional bits: your work tasks for tomorrow, random thoughts in your head, the lamp behind your partner, the timbre of her voice, or what you’re going to say next—but extracting the meaning of what you’re hearing is the best use of your focus.

The second way that our attention is limited is that after focusing on something, we can hold only a small amount of information in our short-term memory. The ability to temporarily store information in our minds is practically a superpower, as it’s what enables us to think about what we’re doing as we’re doing it, whether that involves problem-solving tasks (e.g., carrying over digits when doing arithmetic) or planning for the future (e.g., plotting the best sequence of exercises at the gym). Without this temporary mental scratch pad, we’d be mindlessly reacting to whatever was happening in the world around us.

When it comes to holding information in our temporary memory, though, the magic number of which our brain is capable shrinks from forty to four. Try to memorize the following list of names and then write them down:

We can use this concept of “chunking” things together to better remember any number of practical things throughout the day. This morning I was listening to an audiobook while getting groceries—a difficult combination to do simultaneously. I needed to buy three things: celery, hummus, and crackers. When I walked into the store, I visualized a triangle with the location of each of the three items as one of its points. Instead of struggling to remember my grocery list independently, I was able to walk the triangle. Visualizing a meal consisting of the same three ingredients would have done the trick too and is probably an even simpler idea.

When asked to write the names they remember, some people are able to recall only three, while others can manage five, six, or even seven. The average number, though, is four.

In this context the number four refers to unique chunks of information. For example, if you can find a way to connect a few of the names into such chunks—such as visualizing a few friends who have the same names as the ones on the list—you’ll be able to process them more deeply and remember more. In my case, I can remember all ten names and still have room to spare. I’m not some supergenius, though—to create the list I picked the names of the ten people I emailed the most this week, which enabled me to effortlessly group them together for memory’s sake.

Our lives are generally structured around the fact that we’re able to hold, at most, seven pieces of unique information in our short-term memory. You need look no further than the world around you to see evidence of how we organize data into mentally orderly units. Start with the number two—there are countless examples in pop culture that show the power of the pair. We can easily hold two things in memory at once, so it’s no accident that combinations of two are found everywhere, from dynamic duos like Batman and Robin to Bert and Ernie to Calvin and Hobbes. The number three also fits comfortably in our attentional space: we award three Olympic medals and grow up with stories like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “The Three Blind Mice,” and “The Three Little Pigs.” The list goes on: we divide these stories into three parts (the beginning, middle, and end) and have sayings like “Good things come in threes,” “Celebrities die in threes,” and “Third time’s the charm.” We also group ideas into fours (the four seasons), fives (the five “love languages”), sixes (the six sides of a die), and sevens (days of the week, deadly sins, and Wonders of the World). Even most phone numbers fit comfortably within this attentional limit: one set of three numbers (or maybe four, if you’re in the United Kingdom), followed by another four digits, making the full number easy to hold in your mind as you dial. You have to dig deep to find common examples of groups larger than seven.

MEET YOUR ATTENTIONAL SPACE

“Attentional space” is the term I use to describe the amount of mental capacity we have available to focus on and process things in the moment. Our attentional space is what we’re aware of at any given time—it’s the scratch pad or clipboard in our brain that we use to temporarily store information as it’s being processed. Attentional space allows to us hold, manipulate, and connect information simultaneously, and on the fly. When we choose what to pay attention to, that information occupies our short-term memory, and our attentional space ensures it’s kept active so we can continue to work with it. Together, our focus and attentional space are responsible for most of our conscious experiences. If your brain were a computer, your attentional space would be its RAM. (Technically speaking, researchers refer to this space as our “working memory” and the size of this space as our “working memory capacity.”)*

We’ll discuss attentional space in considerable depth in Hyperfocus. Given that this space is so small and can hold only a few things at once, it’s essential we manage it well. Even when we’re daydreaming and focusing on nothing in particular, we fill our attentional space. When we focus on a conversation we’re having, that conversation claims our complete attentional space (at least when it’s interesting). Streaming a video while cooking dinner crams both these tasks into our attentional space. When we retrieve a memory or fact (like a friend’s birthday or the name of a song) from our long-term memory, this information is temporarily loaded into our attentional space for when we need it. The space holds everything that you’re aware of—it’s your entire conscious world.

I find reading—and the science that studies how it fills attentional space—a particularly fascinating subject. If you’re truly paying attention to the words on this page, you have almost no attentional space remaining for other tasks. Just as you don’t have sufficient attentional space to both text and drive, you can’t text while you read—either of these two tasks alone requires too much focus to fit comfortably in your attentional space. At best, you might be able to drink a cup of coffee while reading, but there’s a chance it could get cold if you become too immersed in the text—or you might spill some on the book when you try, and fail, to do both.

As you read, your brain is hard at work converting the raw bits of perceptual information into facts, stories, and lessons that you remember and internalize. After your eyes register the waves of light emanating from the page, your mind generates words from them. These words temporarily fill your attentional space. You then begin connecting the words to form syntactic units and clauses—the fundamental building blocks of sentences. Finally, using your attentional space as a scratch pad, your brain groups those combinations of words together into complete ideas so you can extract their higher-level meaning.

Sentence structure can influence this process and slow down or speed up how quickly you read. Much as the world doesn’t combine many groups of data into sets greater than seven, every book is structured to accommodate a reader’s restricted attentional space. Sentences have a limited length and are punctuated by commas, semicolons, and dashes. According to one study, the period at the end of a sentence is the point when our attentional space “stops being loaded, and what has been present in it up to that moment, must be in some way stored in a summarized form in a short-term memory.”

Your attention is constantly synced to what you’re reading or doing. Here’s an interesting example: you even blink in accordance with where your attention is directed. You normally blink fifteen to twenty times a minute but do so during natural breaks in your attention—such as at the end of a sentence when reading, when someone you’re speaking with pauses, or at breakpoints when watching a video. This blinking rhythm happens automatically—all you have to do is pay attention to what you’re reading, and your brain’s attentional space takes care of the rest.

WHAT’S FILLING YOUR ATTENTIONAL SPACE?

Let’s do a quick check-in. What’s occupying your attentional space at this moment? In other words, what’s on your mind?

Are this book and your thoughts about it consuming 100 percent of your attentional space? If so, you’ll process it faster and better. Are you devoting a third of your attention to thinking about the smartphone by your side? Is part of your mind planning what you’ll do after completing this chapter or distracted by something you’re worried about? Are these concerns or anxieties popping out of nowhere?

Directing your mental gaze to what is currently occupying your attentional space can be an odd exercise, as we rarely notice what has taken hold of our attention but spend most of our time totally immersed in what we’re experiencing. There’s a term for this process: meta-awareness. Becoming aware of what you’re thinking about is one of the best practices for managing your attention. The more you notice what’s occupying your attentional space, the faster you can get back on track when your mind begins to wander, which it does a remarkable 47 percent of the time.

Whether you’re writing an email, taking part in a conference call, watching a TV show, or having dinner with your family, you’re essentially spending half of your time and attention on what’s not in front of you, lost in the past or calculating the future. That’s a lot of time and attention to waste. While there is immense value in letting your mind scatter, most times we’d do better to focus on the present.

This is essentially what mindfulness is—noticing what your mind is full of: what you’re thinking, feeling, and perceiving at any given moment. Mindfulness adds another important dimension to the mix: not judging what you’re thinking about. When you become aware of what is occupying your mind, you realize it can come up with some pretty crazy stuff, not all of which is true—like the negative self-talk that sometimes takes root in your head. Everyone’s mind does this on some level, so you shouldn’t sweat it too much or take all of your thoughts too seriously. As one of my favorite writers, David Cain, puts it, “All thoughts want to be taken seriously, but few warrant it.”

Simply noticing what is occupying our attentional space has been shown to make us more productive. One study asked participants to read a detective novel and try to solve the crime. It compared readers whose minds wandered without awareness with those whose minds wandered consciously. Solve rates were substantially higher for the group that was aware that their minds had wandered. We perform significantly better on every task when we’re aware that our mind is wandering.

If you pay attention to what’s on your mind—which is admittedly hard to do for more than a minute or so—you’ll notice that the content of your attentional space is constantly changing. You’ll understand that it truly is a scratch pad, with thoughts, tasks, conversations, projects, daydreams, conference calls, and other objects of attention continually passing through. You’ll also find that your attentional space expands and shrinks depending on your mood. Objects of attention fade from this space just as quickly as they came—usually without your awareness. For all the power it provides, the content of your attentional space is ephemeral; its memory lasts for an average of just ten seconds.

TASKS THAT PAIR WELL

So what exactly can fit comfortably within attentional space?

Tasks take different amounts of attentional space depending on their complexity. A meaningful conversation (as opposed to a casual one) fills up most, if not all, of it. That conversation will suffer as a result of trying to cram too many other things into your attentional space. When you leave your phone on the table during a conversation, for example, you’re bound to be distracted by the possibility of incoming messages.

Not all tasks require this much attentional space. There are two kinds of tasks in our life and work: habits, which we can perform without much thought and require minimal attentional space, and complex tasks, which can be done well only with dedicated focus. Many experts argue that we can’t multitask, which is often true for tasks that require focus to do properly and thus occupy a larger amount of attentional space. But the same is not true for habits—in fact, we’re able to multitask surprisingly well with habits. Though we may not be able to carry on two conversations simultaneously, we can walk, breathe, and chew bubblegum while we listen to an audiobook—the last task being one that will easily occupy what’s left of our attention.

Habitual tasks like cutting your nails, doing the laundry, archiving emails you’ve already read, and grocery shopping don’t require nearly as much attention as more complex tasks. This makes it possible to multitask without compromising the quality of your actions. Every Sunday I like to lump my personal, relatively rote “maintenance tasks” together—tasks that help me maintain who I am, like preparing meals, trimming my nails, and cleaning the house—and do them all in an allotted period of time while listening to podcasts or an audiobook. It’s easily one of my favorite weekly rituals. You can do the same, for example, on your daily commute: if you listen to an audiobook during that routine, hourlong trip, you’ll be able to read an extra book each week by utilizing the attention freed by a habitual task.

Habits take up very little attentional space, because they take little thought once we get going with them. As cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, author of Consciousness and the Brain, told me, “If you think of habits such as playing the piano, dressing, shaving, or driving on a familiar route, these are so automatic that they do not seem to prevent any conscious thought.” He says that while habits like these may require some level of conscious initiation, once we begin the behavior, the rest of the process takes care of itself. We may need to make conscious decisions occasionally—such as when we’re getting dressed and our usual Tuesday outfit is in the wash—but after that intervention we can switch back to the rest of the habit sequence without much thought. Dehaene believes that this process is “presumably driven by sequence-related activity” in the brain. The brain even assists when we try to do more than one habitual thing simultaneously, by rerouting blood flow away from the prefrontal cortex—the brain’s logic center—to the basal ganglia, which helps us run through the habitual sequences of daily routines.

Our attentional space can process even more when we’re working on unrelated tasks. Take sorting and putting away the laundry while talking on the phone, for example. These activities tap into several senses—sorting laundry into our motor and visual senses; the phone call into our auditory sense. Because we use different brain regions to process them, the tasks aren’t competing for the same mental resources. There is a tipping point to attentional space, of course—doing too many habitual tasks at the same time will cause your attentional space to become overloaded. This is especially true if what you’re doing isn’t totally automatic and requires frequent mental intervention. Ultimately the point is this: the number of habitual tasks we can fit into our attentional space is much higher than the number of demanding ones.

Tasks that we can’t do out of habit—such as reading a book, having a deep conversation, or preparing a progress report for our boss—consume significantly more attentional space, because doing them well demands that we consciously manipulate information on the fly. If we tried carrying on a conversation with our significant other out of habit, we’d probably not process or remember it and find ourselves falling back on statements like “Yes, dear.”

If you divided your work tasks into the four categories I described in chapter 1 (this page)—an activity I highly recommend because I’ll be referencing it later—you’ll notice that your most necessary and purposeful tasks can’t be done out of habit.* This is exactly what makes these tasks so productive. You accomplish more in doing them because they require focus and brainpower and take advantage of unique skill sets. Anyone can do mindless work out of habit. This is one of the many reasons why distracting tasks are so costly: while these tasks are attractive and stimulating (think watching Netflix after a long day at the office instead of grabbing dinner with a friend), they steal precious time from your most productive work.

Spending time on our most productive tasks means we usually have very little attention to spare—if there’s any left at all.

Unlike habitual tasks, we aren’t able to fit two complex activities into our attentional space at the same time. Remember, we can focus only on forty bits of information, and a single complex task requires most of these bits—and on top of this limit, we can process only so much at one time. Since even moderately complex tasks consume most of our attention, we’re at best able to pair something habitual with a more complex task.

There is no easy way to predict how much attentional space a task will consume—for example, driving will demand much less if you’re an expert than if you’re a driver’s ed student. You’re better able to chunk together information on the fly when you have experience with a given task, which provides more freedom to focus on other things. Another variable is the actual size of your attentional space—a measure that’s different for everyone.

In summary, there are generally three combinations of tasks that fit comfortably within your attentional space.

1. A FEW SMALL, HABITUAL TASKS

We’re able to breathe while we run, pay attention to our heart rate, and enjoy music—all at the same time. As mentioned earlier, initiating these habits requires attention, and then another attention boost if we need to intervene to stay on track (or, if we’re listening to music, to change the track).

2. A TASK THAT REQUIRES MOST OF OUR FOCUS, AS WELL AS A HABITUAL TASK

Our attentional space is powerful but it’s also very limited. At best, we can do one small, habitual task plus one other activity that requires most of our attention. Two examples: listening to a podcast or audiobook while doing maintenance tasks, or playing a simple, repetitive video game on a phone while listening to an audiobook.

Filling the rest of your attentional space with habitual, mindless tasks is often not the best way to use spare attention, so when possible, avoid loading it to the brim.

3. ONE COMPLEX TASK

Your most productive tasks—the ones that enable you to accomplish significantly more for every minute you dedicate to them—fall into this category. The more time and attention you spend on these tasks, the more productive you become.

The amount of attentional space consumed by complex tasks varies over time. While carrying on a discussion with your boss, for example, your attentional space may shrink and expand rhythmically to match the content of the conversation, allowing your mind both to wander and to focus on the conversation when it becomes more complex. In a team meeting you could, in an instant, go from being a passive observer to getting called on for a progress update.

Having some attentional space to spare during complex tasks allows you to do two things:

It leaves room to reflect on the best approach to completing the task, so you can work smarter and avoid autopilot mode. You’ll be able to come up with ideas you might not have had if you were filling your attention to the brim—such as the realization that you could scrap the introduction of the presentation you’re going to give and instead dive directly to the point.

Leaving some space also enables you to work with a greater awareness of where you should be directing your attention in the first place. That means you can better refocus when your mind inevitably wanders from the task at hand. At the same time, you have attentional space to spare if the task suddenly becomes even more complex.

ATTENTION OVERLOAD

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

Have you ever walked into your kitchen or living room and realized you’ve forgotten why you went there in the first place? You’ve fallen into an attention overload trap. You tried to cram too many things into your attentional space—the TV show that was playing in the background, random thoughts, and the IMDb page you just read—and didn’t have enough space left for your original intention. In this case, you meant to grab the grocery list your partner left on the dining room table.

The same thing happens when work problems weigh on your mind as you drive home from the office. In this situation, your mind may be even more full: decoding and processing the talk show on the radio while ruminating on what happened at work that day while running through the multiple habit sequences that let you drive home largely on autopilot mode. If you had planned on buying bread on the way, chances are you won’t have enough space to accommodate even that small, simple intention. You’ll arrive home feeling overwhelmed, and only in the morning will you open the bread drawer and remember the previous day’s task.

We have to work with intention as much as possible—this is especially true when we have more to do than time within which to do it. Intention enables us to prioritize so we don’t overload our attentional space. Doing so also leaves us feeling more calm: just as you likely feel uncomfortable after overeating, stuffing your attentional space with too many tasks can make you feel unsettled.

At any one time, your attentional space should hold at most two key things that you are processing: what you intend to accomplish and what you’re currently doing. This isn’t possible 100 percent of the time, especially as you become immersed in a task, but by being mindful of your intention, you can be confident that what you’re immersed in is what you’re actually aiming to get done.

If you find yourself responding to important work in autopilot mode, chances are you’re trying to cram too much into your attentional space. By not stepping back to deliberately manage your attention, you allow it to overflow. Some familiar examples:

You’ve probably experienced many similar moments. Some are impossible to avoid, because life often presents us with unexpected surprises. But many are possible to circumvent, and noticing that you’re beginning to feel overwhelmed is a great sign that you should check in to assess what’s occupying your attentional space. Chances are you’re trying to cram too much into it at once.

The best way to avoid this overload is to be more selective with what you permit into your attentional space. On the drive home, shut off the radio, which will enable you to process the day and also remember your intention to pick up bread. At home, pause or mute the TV so you don’t try to continue processing the show and forget that you’re heading to fetch a note that’s in the other room. Making small changes like these allows you to keep your attention on your intention.

Simplifying our attentional space lets us maintain enough room to work and live intentionally throughout the day. This lets us spend more time on what’s important and meaningful in the moment. The state of your attentional space determines the state of your life. When your attentional space is overwhelmed, you, in turn, feel overwhelmed. When your attentional space is clear, you also feel clear. The tidier you keep your attentional space, the more clearly you think.

Time for a quick check-in: what’s occupying your attentional space at this moment? Take stock of everything that’s on your mind. If you find that your attentional space is a bit too full, simplify what’s in it, either by writing down these things so you can deal with them later or by refocusing on the book in your hands.

Simplifying what we focus on in the moment may feel counterintuitive: when we have so much to get done, our natural impulse is to focus on as much as possible. Compounding this is the fact that the brain’s prefrontal cortex—the large part of the forebrain that lets us plan, think logically, and get work done—has a built-in “novelty bias.” Whenever we switch between tasks, it rewards us with dopamine—that amazing pleasure chemical that rushes through our brain whenever we devour a medium-sized pizza, accomplish something awesome, or have a drink or two after work. You may have noticed that you instinctively reach for your tablet when you sit down to watch TV, that you can’t resist keeping your email open in another window as you work, or that you feel more stimulated when your phone is by your side. Continually seeking novel stimuli makes us feel more productive—after all, we’re doing more in each moment. But again, just because we’re busier doesn’t mean we’re getting more accomplished.

Almost every book in the wellness space has an obligatory section discussing how the brain is primitive, and that we have to learn to rise above the impulses it gives rise to. This book is no exception. An unfortunate truth is that the brain is not built to do knowledge work—it’s wired for survival and reproduction. We have evolved to crave things that provide us with a surge of dopamine, which reinforces habits and behaviors that have historically aided our chances at survival. Our brain provides a hit of dopamine after sex as a reward for procreating. It does so when we consume sugar, which is energy-dense and enables us to survive longer with less food, which was useful early in our evolution, when conditions weren’t as bountiful as they are today.

Our brains also reward us for poorly managing our attention, because for our early ancestors, seeking novel threats in the environment aided their chance of survival. Instead of focusing so deeply on stoking a fire that they were not alert to a prowling tiger, early humans were constantly scanning for potential dangers around them. If that made them a bit less efficient in attending to the fire, they survived to see another day (and start another fire!).

Today the only nearby tigers are at the zoo, and the novelty bias that once benefited us now works actively against us. The devices we own—our TV, tablet, computer, and smartphone included—are infinitely more stimulating than the other productive and meaningful things we could be focusing on, and so with fewer predators to worry about, we naturally focus on our electronics instead.

After years of researching the topic, I’ve found that “productivity” has become a bit of a loaded term. What it usually connotes is a condition that feels cold, corporate, and overly focused on efficiency. I prefer a different (and friendlier) definition: productivity means accomplishing what we intend to. If our plan today is to write three thousand words, rock a presentation with our leadership team, and catch up on our email, and we successfully accomplish all of those, we were perfectly productive. Likewise, if we intend to have a relaxing day and manage to do absolutely nothing, we’re again perfectly productive. Being busy doesn’t make us productive. It doesn’t matter how busy we are if that busyness doesn’t lead us to accomplish anything of importance. Productivity is not about cramming more into our days but about doing the right thing in each moment.

THE COSTS ADD UP

It bears repeating that there is nothing inherently wrong with multitasking. It’s entirely possible to multitask, especially when it comes to the habitual tasks in our work and life. But it’s important to make a distinction between shifting our attention and multitasking. Multitasking means concurrently trying to focus on more than one thing at a time. Shifting our attention is the movement of our attentional spotlight (or our attentional space) from one task to another. Shifting attention throughout the day is necessary; if we focused on just one thing all day long, no matter how important it was, we probably wouldn’t have a job. Still, too much shifting can be dangerous, especially when we’re surrounded by more novel objects and distractions than our brain is capable of handling.

While slipping into autopilot mode is the largest cost of attention overflow, there are other disadvantages as well. For starters, letting your attentional space overflow affects your memory. You may have noticed that when you watch TV or a movie with your phone by your side, you recall much less of what you’ve seen. In fact, I’ve noticed that as I’ve allowed more devices into my life, I remember less in general. Technology speeds up time by tempting us in each moment to fill our attention to the brim. This leads us to remember less, because it is only when we pay attention to something that our brain actively encodes it into memory.*

When we make our attentional space juggle too many tasks, we fail to notice and remember the details of our most important work. When we multitask, we even process our work with an entirely different part of our brain. Take studying as an example. As Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at Stanford, explained to me, “When we learn while we multitask, we rely more heavily on the basal ganglia, a brain system that’s involved in the learning of skills and habits.” However, “when we encode information in a more focused state, we rely more heavily on our brain’s hippocampus—which actually lets us store and recall the information.”

What use is our time if not to create memories—of conversations, meals, vacations, and other experiences? When we fail to focus deeply on any one thing, we focus instead only on the “highlights” of what we’re doing and, as a consequence, later forget how we spent our time. Letting our attention overflow makes our actions less meaningful, because we don’t remember how we spent our time in the first place. This affects our productivity in the long run: we make more mistakes because we don’t properly encode the lessons we learned the first time we messed up. We also accumulate less knowledge, which, when we do knowledge work for a living, sets us back in the long run.

Constantly shifting our attentional spotlight to focus on one thing and then another and then another not only prevents the formation of memories but also undermines our productivity. Research shows that 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.

As I mentioned back in chapter 0, when we’re working in front of a computer—a device that’s obviously chock full of novel things to focus on—on average, we work for just forty seconds before we’re either interrupted or distracted (or in other words, interrupt ourselves). This number becomes even more concerning when you consider the fact that our phone is by our side and interrupting us as well. Needless to say, our best work happens beyond this forty-second mark—nearly every single important task takes more than forty seconds of focused attention to do well.*

I’ve devoted an entire chapter later in the book to dealing with these distractions and interruptions, but here’s a quick tip: one of the best things you can do for your productivity is launch the settings app on your phone and scroll through the notification settings for each app. Shut off all the ones that aren’t absolutely necessary. Do the same on your computer and tablet if you frequently find your focus derailed as you use these devices. Which interruptions are truly important, and which are preventing you from getting past this forty-second mark? Most of them aren’t worth it—this is why I’ve deleted email on my phone entirely.

On top of the obvious productivity toll of continually interrupting ourselves, we’re also not that good at shifting our attention. Even when our attentional space is relatively clear and focused on just one task, there are deep costs associated with switching quickly to another. According to Sophie Leroy, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Washington, it’s not possible for us to seamlessly switch attention from one task to another. Leroy coined the term “attention residue” to describe the fragments of the previous task that remain in our attentional space after we shift to another activity: “It could be that you’re sitting in a meeting and your mind keeps going to a project you were working on right before the meeting, or something you anticipate doing right after the meeting. It’s having that divided attention, where part of your brain is thinking about those other ongoing projects that you have. This is what makes it so difficult to devote yourself to what you’re supposed to be doing in the present.” This attention residue keeps our mind continuing to evaluate, problem-solve, reflect, and ruminate about a previous task long after we’ve transitioned to the next.

Switching becomes easier only once we finish a task—especially when time pressure, like a deadline, motivates us to get the task done. “By contrast,” Leroy explains, “if you work on something and you don’t really have to rush, but you get it done, your brain can keep thinking about ‘What else should I have done?’ or ‘Is there another way to do this task?’ or ‘Maybe I could have done better.’ Even though the task is completed, it’s hard for your brain to get closure in general.” Since our brain is no longer motivated to complete these loose-deadline tasks, Leroy found that “the mental activation of the goal [diminishes].” Time pressure narrows our focus on the task, restricting us from considering a number of more creative ways to complete it. We don’t question our approach as much, because we haven’t stepped back to consider the alternatives. This makes it easier to switch.

All this raises a question: Just how severe is the productivity cost of switching? Switching does make your work more stimulating, and its costs may be worth bearing if your work takes only 5 percent longer and you make only the occasional mistake. In practice, though, the cost is usually much greater. One study found that when we continually switch between tasks, our work takes 50 percent longer, compared with doing one task from start to completion. If you’re working on a pressure- or deadline-free project, consider taking a break before starting something else so more of that attentional residue can dissipate. As far as your productivity is concerned, the best time to take a break is after you’ve finished a big task.

THE QUALITY OF YOUR ATTENTION

Intention is the bouncer of your attentional space—it lets in the productive objects of attention and keeps the distractions out. Few things will benefit your overall quality of life more than focusing with intention. It isn’t possible to work and live with intention 100 percent of the time—demands get in the way, our focus shifts, and our attentional space overflows—but we can maintain our intention for enough of the day to accomplish a lot more than we would otherwise.

This chapter has been largely theoretical. In order to put its advice into practice, you’ll need to do several things: set intentions more often, modify your environment to be less distracting, overcome the mental resistance you have to certain tasks, eliminate distractions before they derail you, and clear the distractions inside your own head. The subsequent chapters cover each of these ideas in turn, but understanding the principles behind them is essential.

Choosing where your attention is focused and maintaining a clear attentional space accomplishes several things at once. You will

There are numerous ways to measure the quality of your attention, but I’ve developed three measures to track my own progress. You can use these yardsticks to measure your progress as you adopt the tactics in this book into your life:

  1. How much of your time you spend intentionally

  2. How long you can hold your focus in one sitting

  3. How long your mind wanders before you catch it

Now it’s time to get tactical.