In general, I find any advice on how to be more productive insulting and somewhat morally repugnant, as though every message we’ve received in late 20th and early 21st century American society isn’t already about how to squeeze as much monetizable output in as little time as possible from every single living person.
Hyperfocus: How to Manage Your Attention in a World of Distraction
Tech companies are good at getting you to stop what you’re doing and spend time on whatever dumb app or website they’re making money on
- Our brains are constantly overstimulated
- By learning to live with more boredom, Bailey argues, it’s easier to feel present in every aspect of your life
Hyperfocus was published in paperback on August 27; the following interview has been edited and condensed.
How did you realize that you were a productive person who should write about productivity?
Social media companies are good at predicting our behavior and what we want to do with our time
As a society, we need to be very concerned
- Companies such as Google and Facebook and Twitter are making money off of the fact that we lose control of our behavior when we use their applications. Our attention is theirs
Productivity
The best productivity advice out there allows us to accomplish everything we want to do in a smaller amount of time, so we have more time for what’s actually meaningful to us
- Hyperfocus is when one task fills our full attention
- Scattering is when we deliberately let our mind wander
- When our minds wander, we actually think about the future 48 percent of the time
- It also reflects on the meaning in our life
How to Do Nothing
Get rid of unnecessary distractions that are making you unhappy so you can focus on the things that matter
- Doing nothing is one of the best ways to be productive because you rest your mind and think about your future
- We think about our goals 14 times as often when our mind is at rest versus when we’re focused on something
Evolution rewarded us for focusing on what’s new and novel in our environment
Instead of hyperfocusing on building a fire, we noticed the rustling of the trees off to our side.
- We dealt with that threat, which maybe was a saber-tooth tiger.
You do an experiment where you intentionally make yourself bored to learn something
After 40 seconds of being bored, your mind settles down to a lower level of stimulation, and you have more of an attention span for whatever is in front of you
- The problem is overstimulation
- What’s most stimulating in our environment doesn’t make us the happiest
- Try and change your social media apps, download a distraction blocker for your computer, put your phone in another room, and try not to be so distracted
