CHAPTER

6

YOUR BRAIN’S HIDDEN CREATIVE MODE

Not all those who wander are lost.

—J. R. R. Tolkien

INTRODUCING SCATTERFOCUS

The second part of this book is devoted to the power of mind wandering and directing your attention inward.

Yes, you heard that right—after encouraging you in the first part of the book to rid yourself of that style of thinking, I’m about to explain the strengths of mind wandering. Part of its bad reputation is warranted: when our intention is to focus, daydreaming can destroy our productivity. But daydreaming is immensely potent when our intention is to solve problems, think more creatively, brainstorm new ideas, or recharge. As far as boosting our creativity is concerned, mind wandering is in a league of its own.

Think back to your last creative insight—chances are you weren’t hyperfocusing on one thing. In fact, you probably weren’t focused on much at all. You may have been taking an extra-long shower, having a walk during a lunch break, visiting a museum, reading a book, or relaxing on the beach with a drink or two. Maybe you were sipping your morning coffee. Then, like a flash of lightning, a brilliant idea struck out of nowhere. Your brain mysteriously chose this moment, when you were resting and recharging, to connect a few of the constellations of dots—let’s consider a “dot” to be any idea or piece of information you remember—swirling in your head.

Just as hyperfocus is your brain’s most productive mode, scatterfocus is its most creative.

Entering scatterfocus mode is easy: you simply let your mind be. Just as you hyperfocus by intentionally directing your attention toward one thing, you scatterfocus by deliberately letting your mind wander. You enter this mode whenever you leave attentional space free around what you’re doing in the moment—whether going for a run, biking, or investing time in anything that doesn’t consume your full attentional space.

When it comes to productivity and creativity, scatterfocus enables you to do three powerful things at once.

First, as I’ll discuss in this chapter, it allows you to set intentions and plan for the future. It’s impossible to set future intentions when you’re immersed in the present. By stepping back and directing your attention inward, you’re able to switch off autopilot and consider what to do next. Your brain automatically plans for the future when you rest—you just need to give it the space and time to do so.

Second, scatterfocus lets you recharge. Focusing on tasks all day consumes a good deal of mental energy, even when you’re managing and defending your attentional space using the tactics set out in part 1. Scatterfocus replenishes that supply so you can focus for longer.

Third, scatterfocus fosters creativity. The mode helps you connect old ideas and create new ones; floats incubating thoughts to the surface of your attentional space; and lets you piece together solutions to problems. Scattering your attention and focusing on nothing in particular supercharges the dot-connecting powers of your brain. The more creativity your job or a project requires, the more you should deliberately deploy scatterfocus.

WHY WE’RE AVERSE TO SCATTERFOCUS

Despite the productive and creative benefits of scatterfocus, most of us are somewhat hesitant to engage this mode. While it’s easy to get excited about becoming highly productive and hyperfocused, scattering our attention is less exciting, at least on the surface. When we’re surrounded by so many novel and stimulating objects of attention, most of us don’t want to be left alone with our thoughts.

In one recent survey, 83 percent of Americans responded that they didn’t spend any time whatsoever “relaxing or thinking” in the twenty-four-hour period before they were surveyed. Another study sought to measure exactly how resistant participants were to mind wandering. In the first stage of the study, researchers attached two shock electrodes to participants’ ankles, zapped them, and then asked how much the participants would pay to not receive the shock again. Around three quarters of the group agreed they’d pay to not receive the shock again. In the second stage, participants were left alone with their thoughts for fifteen minutes. The researchers kept the electrodes on during that time, on the off chance anyone wanted to shock himself again, saving himself from his own thoughts. This is where the study gets interesting, and somewhat sad. A full 71 percent of men in the study chose to self-administer an electric shock when left alone with their thoughts. Women fared better: only 26 percent chose to shock themselves again. (Take from these findings what you will.) This pattern held true regardless of age, education, economic status, and distraction level of the participants. The results are especially depressing when you consider that researchers allowed participants to proceed to this second stage only if they agreed to pay to not receive the shock again—anyone who didn’t mind the shock was rejected.

If you read a lot of books like this one, you’re probably familiar with the concept that our brains are wired for survival and reproduction—not to do knowledge work day in and day out. We focus on certain objects of attention by default, and doing so is what has allowed the human species to survive. We’ve already discussed the first type of object of attention that draws us in: anything that’s novel. This is what makes our smartphones and other devices so enticing, while we find less novel tasks—like writing a report—boring, regardless of how much they lead us to accomplish.

We’re also more likely to focus on anything that’s pleasurable or threatening. This is where the survival instinct kicks in. Pleasures like sex and overeating have enabled us to reproduce and store fat for when food inevitably became scarce. Focusing on the threats in our environment, like the snake slithering nearby as our early ancestors built a fire, enabled us to live another day. We’ve crafted the world around us to cater to these cravings for novel, pleasurable, and threatening objects of attention. Consider this the next time you turn on the TV, open YouTube, read a news website, or check social media—these outlets provide a steady fix of all three.

Today the balance of these three objects of attention has been tipped. We’re continually surrounded by novel distractions, pleasures are plentiful, and legitimate threats are few and far between. The wiring in our brain that in our evolutionary past led us to store sugars and have sex as a survival mechanism now leads us to overindulge in fast food and pornography. Continually scanning for threats is what compels us to dwell on that one negative email or overthink a careless offhand comment from our boss. What once aided our chances at survival now sabotages our productivity and creativity in the modern world. It makes our most urgent tasks feel a lot more important than they actually are.

We’re also prone to falling prey to what’s novel, pleasurable, and threatening when we let our mind wander and turn our attention inward. Our greatest threats, worries, and fears no longer reside in our external environment but within the depths of our own consciousness. When our mind wanders, it slips into a pattern of ruminating on the stupid things we’ve said, the arguments we’ve won and lost, and worries about work and money. This is also true of pleasurable thoughts—we daydream of memorable meals, recall memories from a great vacation, or fantasize about how great we’d feel if we had come up with a witty retort to something said earlier. The next time you meditate (if you’ve begun to do so), pay attention to how your mind is naturally drawn to the threats, pleasures, and novel ideas floating in your head.

But in practice we don’t actually experience negative mind-wandering episodes that often. Our mind primarily wanders to the negative when we’re thinking about the past, but we wander to the past just 12 percent of the time—the remainder is spent thinking about the present and the future, which makes scatterfocus remarkably productive. While our evolutionary history leads us to think about the novel and the negative, it has also wired our brain for profound creativity whenever we turn our attention inward. I’d argue that our ability to do so is practically a superpower.

Compared with other mammals, our ability to think about something that’s not immediately in front of us is fairly unique.* It affords us the ability to plan for the future, learn from the past, and have daydreams that spawn remarkable insights. It helps us search inwardly for solutions to external situations—whether we’re solving a math problem or telling the server how we usually take our eggs. Most remarkable, scatterfocus enables us to step back from life and to work and live more intentionally.

OH, THE PLACES OUR MIND GOES

In writing Hyperfocus I’ve had the opportunity to read hundreds, if not thousands, of studies related to attention management. Of all the research I encountered, my absolute favorite study looks at where our mind goes when it wanders. It was conducted by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler from the University of California at Santa Barbara and Jonathan Smallwood from the University of York. Their work is absolutely fascinating and provides scientific evidence for what makes scatterfocus so fruitful.

When your mind wanders, it visits three main places: the past, the present, and the future. This is precisely why scattering your attention allows your creativity to flourish as you travel through time and connect what you’ve learned to what you’re doing or what you want to achieve. This enables you to work with greater intention as you consider your future and think about what you should be doing in the present to make it a reality.

Even though we spend just 12 percent of our scatterfocus time thinking about the past, we’re more likely to remember these thought episodes, compared with when we think about the present or future. (Fun fact: 38 percent of our past-related thoughts connect with earlier-in-the-day events, 42 percent relate to the previous day’s, and 20 percent involve ruminating on what happened in the more distant past.) Our mind is wired to not only perceive but also remember threats, like that one negative email that we can’t forget. (It does this so we learn from our mistakes, though it becomes annoying when it throws random memories at us throughout the day.) On some level, these past thoughts speak to the power of scatterfocus: when we daydream, we often experience our thoughts as if they were real. Cringeworthy memories strike from out of the blue, hijack our attention, and lead us to tense up at the stupid stuff we’ve said and done.*

In addition to thinking about the past, our mind wanders to the present 28 percent of the time. While we’re not moving our work forward during these wanderings, they can still be productive. Thinking abstractly about what’s in front of us lets us consider alternate approaches to the problems we’re facing—like how we can best approach an awkward conversation to tell a coworker that he should be wearing deodorant. Wandering thoughts about what we’re currently working on usually prove to be fairly productive—we need to reflect on our tasks in order to work more deliberately. Neurologically speaking, it’s impossible to both focus on something and reflect on that thing at the same time. This makes entering scatterfocus critical. Without entering scatterfocus mode, you never think about the future. It’s only once you step back from writing an email, drafting a paper, or planning your budget that you can consider alternative approaches to the task.

Finally, our mind wanders to think about the future 48 percent of the time—more than our past and present thinking combined.* We usually think about the immediate future: 44 percent of our future thoughts concern a time later the same day, and 40 percent tomorrow. Most of this time is spent planning. Because of this, scatterfocus enables us to act more intelligently and more intentionally.

Every moment of our lives is like a Choose Your Own Adventure story—continually offering different options that allow us to define our future path. Scatterfocus lets us better imagine these paths: Should we talk to the good-looking person sitting alone across the coffee shop? Should we accept that job offer? How should we order our eggs? This mode also enables us to better weigh the consequences of each decision and path. In thinking about the future, we flick off autopilot mode and have the space to step back and consider how we want to act before our habits and routines make the decision for us.

Researchers refer to our mind’s propensity to future-wander as our “prospective bias.” This tendency is what leads us to spend half of our scatterfocus time planning.* We spend hardly any time thinking about the future when we’re focused, while in scatterfocus mode we’re fourteen times more likely to have these thoughts. Scatterfocus lets us work with greater intention because our mind automatically contrasts the future we desire against the present we need to change to make that future a reality. We consider our goals only about 4 percent of the time when we’re immersed in what we’re doing, while in scatterfocus mode we think about them 26 percent of the time. The more time you spend scatterfocusing between tasks—rather than indulging in distractions—the more thoughtful and productive your actions become.

As well as helping you plan for the future, recharge, and connect ideas, research suggests that scatterfocus mode also leads you to

THE THREE STYLES OF SCATTERFOCUS

In one respect scatterfocus is an odd mental mode to write about, as you need few instructions for how to let your mind wander. While hyperfocusing can be difficult, we already spend 47 percent of our day in something similar to scatterfocus mode without any effort, whenever our focus lapses and our attention wanders.

There are two ways your mind wanders: unintentionally and intentionally. Unintentional wandering takes place without your awareness, when you don’t choose to enter into the mode. This is where I draw the line between mind wandering and scatterfocus. Scatterfocus is always intentional.

It may sound odd to release your grip on your attention intentionally. But in practice, there are other mental states in which you have even less control over your attention—including in hyperfocus.

Two of the most preeminent researchers in the field of mind wandering are Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan Schooler, and they both agree on this point. When I chatted with him, Smallwood gave the example of watching a movie: “Let’s say you sit down to watch Pulp Fiction. Quentin Tarantino has organized the entire movie to constrain your thoughts. You don’t need to do anything as you watch the film—this is what makes the experience so relaxing. He controls your train of thought.”

Research also suggests that we notice where our mind wanders around half of the time. We don’t work with nearly this much awareness when focused on something. Schooler goes even further than Smallwood, arguing that one of the biggest misconceptions we have about mind wandering today is that “all mind wandering goes on without awareness, without intention.”

Intention is what makes scatterfocus so powerful. This mode is always deployed deliberately—and involves making a concerted effort to notice where your mind goes.

I’ve found it helpful to distinguish among a few different styles of scatterfocus:

  1. Capture mode: Letting your mind roam freely and capturing whatever comes up.

  2. Problem-crunching mode: Holding a problem loosely in mind and letting your thoughts wander around it.

  3. Habitual mode: Engaging in a simple task and capturing the valuable ideas and plans that rise to the surface while doing it. Research has found this mode is the most powerful.

Of the three styles, capture mode is best for identifying what’s on your mind; problem-crunching mode is best for mulling over a specific problem or idea; and habitual mode is best for recharging and connecting the greatest number of ideas.

Capture Mode

As I mentioned in chapter 5, clearing your mind of open loops is a powerful productivity tactic. The fewer to-dos, calendar appointments, and unresolved commitments you keep stored in your mind, the fewer things there are to fill your attentional space as you try to focus.

For years I have been scheduling one or two fifteen-minute chunks of time each week to let my mind wander freely, during which I capture any valuable and actionable material. This practice is as simple as sitting with coffee, a pen, and a notebook and waiting to see what rises to the surface of my consciousness. By the end of the process, my notebook is invariably full: I’ve scribbled the names of people I should follow up with, stuff I’ve been waiting to do (and also follow up about), a list of people I should reconnect with, solutions to problems, tasks I’ve forgotten, house chores, intentions I should set, and more. I usually feel energized at the end of this little ritual because I’ve given my mind a break.

As discussed in chapter 4, unresolved tasks, projects, and commitments weigh heavily on our mind, perhaps because our brain views them as threats. In capture mode, any unresolved ideas or projects move to the forefront of your mind, ready to be written down and acted upon later. Our mind’s propensity to wander toward these unresolved ideas is, in part, what makes scatterfocus so valuable—the open loops become much more accessible.

By way of example, I just put my computer to sleep, set a timer for fifteen minutes, and captured everything that rose to the surface of my mind. In that short period I noted the following to-do items:

In addition to capturing these tasks, my mind mainly wandered to places you’d expect: mostly to the future and to the present, with some time pondering the past too. It’s worth noting that I repeated this same capture ritual only a few days later and still managed to fill a few pages.

Of the three styles of scatterfocus, you’ll probably find capture mode to be the most aversive—at least initially. Many people find the process boring, but this is precisely what leads your mind to wander and creates the space for ideas to rise to the surface of your attentional space. Cutting yourself off from distractions naturally turns your attention inward, as your thoughts become more interesting than anything in your external environment.

Problem-Crunching Mode

Problem-crunching mode is most useful when you’re brainstorming a solution to a specific problem.

To enter this mode, hold a problem in your mind and let your thoughts wander around it, turn it over, and explore it from different angles. Whenever your mind ventures off to think about something unrelated or gets stuck on one point, gently nudge your attention back to what you intended to think about, or the problem you intended to solve.

Problem-crunching mode enables you to solve complicated problems more creatively—providing nonlinear solutions you wouldn’t necessarily arrive at while logically brainstorming with a pen and a sheet of paper. Since you’ll experience the same problem-solving benefits (and then some) when scatterfocusing on a habitual task, I recommend using the problem-crunching mode sparingly—save it for the largest problems you’re processing. For example, it may be worth deploying when you’re

I went into problem-crunching mode constantly when coming up with the structure for this book; I would do so while canoeing, or I would walk around town with only a small notepad in my pocket. Once I had my structure, and before pitching the book to my publisher, I had around 25,000 words of research notes that weren’t organized in the slightest. In my head the ideas were just as jumbled. I decided to put the research to the test and scatter my attention, hoping to give my mind the space it needed to connect the ideas I had captured. I printed my research notes—it’s helpful to review problems before entering into problem-crunching mode—and then let my mind wander around them for an hour or two at a time on nature walks, while listening to music, or on airplanes. I slowly untangled my notes over the course of several weeks, shaping them into something that resembled a book.

Problem-crunching mode gives your mind the space and freedom to make these large leaps in your thinking. Try entering this mode if you haven’t been able to solve a specific, nonlinear problem in a traditional way. I usually enter problem-crunching mode for thirty to sixty minutes at a time—I get restless if it’s any longer. Test it and see what works for you.

Habitual Mode

Habitual scatterfocus is the most powerful style of this mode, and it’s the one I recommend practicing the most often. (I’m covering it last in case you’re tempted to gloss over the others, which are fruitful, but in different ways.)

As with the other modes, habitual scatterfocus is fairly easy: you simply do something habitual that doesn’t consume your complete attention. This gives your mind space to wander and connect ideas. Doing this is beneficial for countless reasons.

For starters, scatterfocus mode is actually fun when you’re engaged in a habitual activity you find pleasurable. Wandering your mind around one idea or capturing your thoughts can sometimes feel tedious, but when you do something habitual that you enjoy—like walking to get a coffee, woodworking, or swimming laps—scatterfocus becomes significantly more enjoyable. The happier you are in scatterfocus mode, the more benefits you’ll reap. An elevated mood actually expands the size of your attentional space, which leads you to think more expansively. Your attentional space is just as essential in scatterfocus mode as it is in hyperfocus mode—it’s the scratch pad your brain uses to connect ideas. A positive mood also allows your mind to wander more productively, as you’re dwelling less on the negative past. You also think about the future more frequently when doing something pleasing—your brain’s prospective bias grows even stronger. In addition, since doing a simple, pleasurable activity takes so little effort (and self-regulation), you can recharge at the same time you scatter your attention.

As well as being more fun, 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. This holds especially true when you’re stepping back from a problem—whether you’re stumped on how to conclude a short story or considering the phrasing of an important report. It’s also easier to stay aware of your thoughts when doing something habitual, as there’s greater attentional space available to house your intention of being more aware of your thoughts. Again, this awareness is key: a creative thought is useless if it goes unnoticed.

Habitual tasks also encourage your mind to continue wandering. When you let your mind rest and wander, chances are you’ll want to continue this scatterfocus exercise until you’ve finished whatever you started. A habitual task acts as a sort of “anchor” that guides your mind until you’ve completed the work. This enables you to keep going for longer.

To practice habitual scatterfocus, pick something simple that you enjoy doing. Then carry out that one task—and nothing else—until your mind wanders. The simpler the task, the better—going for a walk will unearth greater insights and connect more ideas than listening to music or reading a book. Good ideas will rise to the surface of your mind so long as you have attention to spare.

If you notice your mind has wandered to the past or to another unproductive place, allow it to wander (or, if you want, guide it to think of something else if it has gone to an unproductive place). This is where problem-crunching and habitual scatterfocus differ: in problem-crunching mode, you bring your thoughts back to the problem you’re tackling; in habitual mode, you pretty much let your mind roam free.

You can also practice habitual scatterfocus with mandatory tasks that are already part of your day. There is a beautiful simplicity in doing one easy thing at a time, like drinking a cup of coffee, walking to work, or doing the laundry. Scatterfocus becomes most important in the moments between tasks. Stimulating devices and distractions don’t only derail our focus—like water, they seep into the gaps in our schedule, stealing the valuable time and attention we would normally spend planning for the future and connecting ideas.

A primary reason many of us feel burned out is that we never give our attention a rest. Try this today: don’t bring your phone with you the next time you walk to get a coffee or eat your lunch. Instead, let your mind wander. The effect of this simple decision alone is noticeable. If you don’t check your phone each time a dinner date gets up from the table to go to the restroom, that meal will become more meaningful and memorable. By giving your attention a break, you’ll have the attentional space to reflect on the conversation you’ve been having and what the other person means to you.

At the risk of repeating this too often, the key to practicing habitual scatterfocus is to frequently check what thoughts and ideas are in your attentional space. This is especially important with habitual scatterfocus, since more things are vying for your attention simultaneously. Keep this advice in mind when it’s easy to become engrossed in the habitual task you’ve chosen. Sometimes I’ll enter habitual scatterfocus by playing a simple, repetitive video game on my iPad. The game frees my mind to wander and think positively, and I come up with a remarkable number of ideas in the process. (Who said video games have to be unproductive?) Because I can play the game out of habit, I have some attention to spare—but I absolutely have to remember to continue to check what’s occupying my attentional space, since the game is such a novel and pleasurable object of attention. Without this regular check-in, the experience is largely a waste of time and attention.

As with the other two styles of scatterfocus, make sure you have a notepad nearby when you enter habitual scatterfocus. You’ll need it.

If you haven’t already, schedule time to experiment with these scatterfocus modes. This book is useful only if you try out its advice. Block a time in your calendar to enter capture or problem-crunching mode, or choose something simple you love doing every day, or something enjoyable you have to do, to let your mind wander in habitual scatterfocus mode. Then capture the valuable material that comes up and the ideas you connect. While your mind may already wander throughout the day, chances are most of that time is neither fun nor intentional. Set a goal to enter into the mode intentionally today, even if just for a few minutes. Jonathan Schooler supports this idea. As he told me, “I wish everyone knew how to experiment with the idea themselves. Each one of us has such a unique relationship to mind wandering—and mind wandering can serve every one of us differently. We all need to figure out how it helps us in our own life, so we can take even more advantage of it. The beautiful thing is that it is a private experience that you can watch and introspect on yourself.”

HOW HYPERFOCUS HELPS YOU SCATTERFOCUS

There are numerous ways to guide your mind to wander even more productively when practicing intentional scatterfocus. Luckily, you learned them all in the first part of the book!

In many ways, hyperfocus and scatterfocus couldn’t be more different. Hyperfocus is about focusing on one thing; scatterfocus is about focusing on nothing in particular. With hyperfocus you direct your attention outward; with scatterfocus you direct your attention inward. One is about attention; the other is about inattention. On a neurological level, the two mental modes are even anticorrelated—when the brain network that supports scatterfocus is activated, activation in your hyperfocus network plummets, and vice versa.* All that said, the two modes of your brain reinforce each other—especially as you enter into each mode with intention. This makes it important to deliberately practice both modes.

Practicing hyperfocus—and deliberately managing your attention—provides a host of benefits: expanding your attentional space so you can focus on more tasks simultaneously, improving your memory, and letting you become more aware of the thoughts flying around your head. As it turns out, all three of these are beneficial in scatterfocus mode.

The size of your attentional space is one of the biggest determinants of how fruitful your scatterfocus episodes will be. The bigger the better, as it will allow you to keep more in mind while scatterfocusing. Attentional space is integral to both mental modes: in hyperfocus, what you’re working on fills it; in scatterfocus mode, it lets you construct new ideas and think cohesively about the future.

Deliberately managing your attention also leads you to remember more. This is the second way in which regularly practicing hyperfocus helps: the more information you gather and remember when focused, the better you are at constructing ideas and future events in scatterfocus mode. As a recent review in the scientific journal Nature put it, it’s “helpful to think of the brain as a fundamentally prospective organ that is designed to use information from the past and the present to generate predictions about the future. Memory can be thought of as a tool used by the prospective brain to generate simulations of possible future events.”

Remembering the past helps us imagine the future, as it’s impossible to piece together ideas and information we haven’t paid attention to in the first place. The better we manage our attention when we’re focused, the more information we’ll have to draw upon when we’re not. A later chapter is devoted to how important it is to choose what you consume and pay attention to: just as you are what you eat, when it comes to the information you consume, you are what you choose to focus on. Consuming valuable material in general makes scatterfocus sessions even more productive.

A third idea we’ve already covered is the importance of meta-awareness and continually checking what’s consuming your attentional space. This not only enables you to focus more deeply but also helps you to scatterfocus.

As you might have experienced, it can take a few minutes to notice your mind has wandered, even during meditation. A study conducted by Jonathan Schooler found that we notice our mind has wandered, on average, just 5.4 times every hour. Remember the earlier figure that indicated that our mind wanders 47 percent of the time. Taken together, these figures show just how long our mind can wander without our awareness. There’s an interesting reason that it takes us awhile to realize that our mind has wandered. As one study put it, its doing so “can hijack the very brain regions that are necessary for recognizing its occurrence.” This makes a regular check of what’s occupying our attention doubly important.

The more often you do this check, the more productive your mind-wandering episodes will be. You will be better able to move your thoughts away from the past and instead think about current ideas and the future. As with expanding the size of your attentional space, practicing meta-awareness has been shown to make scatterfocus mode significantly more positive and constructive.

RETHINKING BOREDOM

Answer this question honestly: When was the last time you were bored?

Really think about it. Can you remember?

Chances are it was a long time ago, maybe before welcoming devices into your life. Never in human history have we divided our attention among so many things. In the moment this can feel like a benefit—we always have something to do—but the disadvantage is that distracting devices have basically eliminated boredom from our lives.

You might be asking: Isn’t ridding ourselves of boredom a positive change? Not necessarily. Boredom is the feeling we experience as we transition into a lower level of stimulation. It most often appears when we are suddenly forced to adapt to this lower level—when we find ourselves looking for something to do on a Sunday afternoon or switch from writing an email to sitting in a grueling meeting:

It’s no wonder that boredom eludes us when we always have a device to reach for or a distracting website to visit—there is always something to amuse us in the moment. As a consequence, we don’t often find ourselves having to adjust to a lower level of stimulation. In fact, we frequently have to yank our focus away from these devices when it’s time to actually get something done.

I’m a big fan of experimenting with my own advice, because many tips that sound good on the surface don’t actually work in practice. I recently did so to determine, once and for all, whether boredom is, in fact, a positive thing. Is boredom productive in small doses? How does it differ from scatterfocus? Are we right to resist it?

During a monthlong experiment I intentionally made myself bored for an hour a day. In that period I shut off all distractions and spent my time and attention on an excruciatingly boring task, based on the thirty weirdest ideas suggested by my website readers:

  1. Reading the iTunes terms and conditions

  2. Staring at the ceiling

  3. Watching C-SPAN 3

  4. Waiting on hold with Air Canada’s baggage claim department

  5. Watching C-SPAN 2

  6. Watching my turtle, Edward, swim back and forth in her tank

  7. Staring at a slowly rotating fan blade

  8. Painting a tiny canvas with one color

  9. Watching paint dry

  10. Looking out my office window

  11. Removing and counting the seeds on a strawberry with a pair of tweezers

  12. Watching grass grow

  13. Staring out a train window

  14. Watching an online chess tournament

  15. Watching one cloud in the sky

  16. Waiting at the hospital

  17. Watching a dripping faucet

  18. Ironing every piece of clothing I own

  19. Counting the 0s in the first 10,000 digits of pi

  20. Watching my girlfriend read

  21. Making dots on a sheet of paper

  22. Eating alone in a restaurant, without a book or phone

  23. Reading Wikipedia articles about rope

  24. Watching a clock

  25. Watching every file transfer from my computer to an external hard drive (and back)

  26. Peeling exactly five potatoes

  27. Watching a pot boil

  28. Attending a church service in Latin

  29. Watching C-SPAN

  30. Moving small rocks from one place to another, repeatedly

A few times each hour I randomly sampled what was going on in my head: whether my thoughts were positive, negative, or neutral; whether my mind was focused on something or was wandering; how constructive the thoughts were; how I felt; and how much time I estimated had passed since the previous sample.

Some of the findings from this experiment were unsurprising. As soon as my external environment became less stimulating, I naturally turned my attention inward, where my thoughts were infinitely more interesting and stimulating. In this sense, boredom is really just unwanted scatterfocus. I still found my mind planning for the future, processing ideas, and bouncing between the past, present, and future, just as it does in habitual scatterfocus mode, but I didn’t enjoy the process as much or have the desire to keep going.

The experiment also yielded a few unexpected side effects. One that made me feel especially uneasy was how, in the absence of stimulation, I instinctively looked for distractions to occupy my attention. Forced to remove the seeds of a strawberry with a pair of tweezers or read Wikipedia articles related to rope, I found myself looking for something, anything to do: a mess to clean, a device to pick up—any pacifier that would distract me from the thoughts in my head. If I had been able to administer myself an electric shock in that moment, I might have done it. Our mind is accustomed to constant stimulation and tends to seek it as if it were a universally good thing. It isn’t.

It’s not a coincidence that so many tactics in this book involve making your work and life less stimulating—the less stimulated you are, the more deeply you can think. Each time we eschew boredom for stimulation, we fail to plan, unearth ideas our mind has incubated, or recharge so we can work later with greater energy and purpose.

This is not to say boredom is totally useful. Unlike habitual scatterfocus, boredom makes us anxious, uneasy, and uncomfortable—feelings I constantly had during the experiment. More boredom is not something that I’d wish on anyone—but more mind wandering is. Fortunately our mind wanders to the same places during episodes of either scatterfocus or boredom, so scatterfocus is just as positive—it lets our mind wander while we become less stimulated, but it does so with purpose.

There used to be an app called Disk Defragmenter that came preinstalled on all Windows computers, back when every PC shipped with a slow, spinning hard disk. If your computer was running sluggishly, the program would dutifully rearrange the discontiguous blocks of files so they would be physically closer on the drive. This significantly sped up the computer, because the drive would no longer have to spin like crazy to search for the elements of a given file scattered across its platter.

Regardless of how technical you were, using the app was always oddly satisfying, and even visually pleasing, as it displayed an image of blocks strewn across a rectangle, which would be dutifully rearranged and cleaned up during the running of the program.

Our mind works in a similar way. We defragment our thoughts when we carve out space between tasks. This helps us think clearly and gives us extra attention to process relationships, experiences, ideas, and problems we can’t figure out. In these moments, boredom and scatterfocus are powerful because they enable useful self-examination.

As I hope you’ll agree, these activity gaps are just as valuable as the activities themselves. It’s time to reclaim them.