- This video is sponsored by Skillshare.
Every second we're awake,
we're taking in unfathomably large amounts of information.
Together, our five senses process 11 million bits
of it every second.
But while the unconscious mind continuously gathers
these millions of bits, the conscious mind can only handle
about 40 of them at any given moment,
just a tiny fraction of what we take in.
This is just one of the reasons that we so often
find it difficult to concentrate on our work.
There are severe limits to how much
we're able to focus on at once.
And keeping the spotlight on the 40 most important bits
is hard when the other 10.9 million usually contain
more than a few temptations.
So in my constant quest to improve my own ability to focus
on my work, I recently picked up the book "Hyper Focus"
by Chris Bailey to see if it had any new focus-boosting
tricks that I could hide up my sleeves,
which are honestly kind of short so I'm not sure
how many tricks are gonna fit up there.
But for me, this book was a great deep dive
into many topics surrounding focus and concentration.
I took really, really detailed notes in this book
and I've got them in a new book Summary and Notes section
on my website, so I'll link to that in the description
down below, but in this video, I wanna share and summarize
three of the most important ideas that I took away
from the book.
Let's start with the skill of meta awareness,
the state of knowing what you're thinking about.
Our minds love to wander, and they do it a lot,
by some estimates half the time we're awake.
And when your mind is wandering,
you're not really aware of what it's focused on.
And sometimes this is okay but when you're trying
to focus on your work, you wanna reduce the time
your mind spends wandering, and meta awareness
is the tool you use to do that.
When you're aware of where your mind is,
you can consciously guide it back to where it needs
to be after you catch it wandering.
"Hyper Focus" spends a lot of time talking
about ways you can improve this meta awareness skill.
But here's one of the most important tips
that I took away from the book.
Create some kind of regular reminder to simply check
in on the state of your thoughts and the state of your mind.
Bailey's suggestion is to create what he calls
an hourly awareness chime using a timer
or maybe an alarm on your phone.
When it goes off, you ask yourself
where is my mind right now?
Over the past hour, have I been focused
or has my mind been wandering freely?
Have I been working with intention
or maybe just jumping from task to task on autopilot,
as I get bored of one task and then another?
And over the last hour, have I been working
on the most important thing
that I should have been working on?
And by using this external chime and external system
to help govern your internal self discipline,
by using this over time, you get better and better
at continuously exercising this meta awareness as you work.
However, sometimes it's actually a good thing
to let your mind wander.
Throughout the book, Bailey makes reference
to two opposing states, hyper focus and scatter focus.
As you can probably guess, during hyper focus you block out
everything except for one singular object of attention.
Right now since you're watching this video,
that should be my face and not the Twitter feed
and your other monitor,
yes, I can see what you're doing Derek.
During hyper focus, gets blocked out
along with everything else so that you can slip into a state
of flow and actually execute on your intentions.
But as you're probably well aware,
hyper focus is a difficult state to maintain
over a long period of time, especially if you're feeling
bored or stressed or in a distracting environment.
Which is why it's very important to try to go
into your work sessions in a positive state of mind,
but also to create a distraction-free work environment.
By pushing out everything else that could be a distraction,
you enable yourself to focus
on those most important 40 bits.
And if you're curious about how to set up an environment
like that, I've got a whole video on it,
I'll link that down the description below
so you can check it out after you watch this video.
But hyper focus, isn't the best state for every purpose.
Not only is it taxing after awhile, but because it leans
so heavily on your brain's prefrontal cortex,
it's also a state where you're less creative.
So to get the most from it, you need to slip out
of it from time to time in exchange
for it's exact opposite, scatter focus,
a state where you intentionally let your mind wander.
This mode of thought is often terrible
for what we tend to narrowly define as productivity,
immediate work output, but it's great for creativity.
And if we look at a longer timescale than the five seconds
your boss catches you not typing on your keyboard,
we can probably agree that creativity
and productivity go hand in hand, you can't have one
without the other, and scatter focus lets your mind wander
around different thoughts in a more creative fashion,
finding new connections between them.
In the book, Bailey is very clear about one thing.
Scatter focus is not the same thing
as unconscious mind wandering, the type of mind wandering
that we usually engage in.
The key difference here is intentionality.
In scatter focus, you intentionally let your mind wander
in one of three different modes.
First, there's capture mode.
In this mode Bailey says you get out a piece of paper,
or you open up a new note on your computer,
and then you just let your mind wander freely
for 10 or 15 minutes, writing down observations
and thoughts as they come.
And by the end of the capture mode session
you might find yourself with a list of projects
you wanna check in on, or people you wanna reconnect with,
maybe just a list of random ideas.
I know personally when I do this, I always end up
with more than a few different video ideas.
Secondly, there is problem crunching mode.
In this mode, instead of letting your mind wander
completely free, you pick an object of focus,
maybe a problem that you're stuck on and you let your mind
wander around that in a sort of nonlinear, relaxed fashion
as you maybe go for a walk or a bike ride,
which I try to do pretty much every day.
This is actually very similar to the walking meditations
that Cal Newport talks about in his book, "Deep Work"
or the diffused mode style of thinking and problem solving
that Barbara Oakley talks about in her book,
"A Mind for Numbers" that sort of a lot
of common threads around here.
And what's really great about this mode
is you are thinking about the problem
that you were working on during hyper focus,
but you're thinking about it in a much more relaxed state,
allowing your entire brain to sort of mull over the problem.
The illustration that Barbara Oakley gives
in "A Mind for Numbers" is of a pinball table.
If you're using that hyper focus mode,
it's almost like a tightly gripped cluster, those bouncers,
that keeps the ball bouncing around in one
very specific area of table.
Whereas in the diffused mode or in scatter focus,
using the entire table, it's like a very loosely-grouped,
spaced out group of those bouncers
so the ball can go basically wherever it needs to go.
And in these modes, you often find that new insights
come that wouldn't have come during hyper focus.
Finally there's habitual mode where you, again,
let your mind wander freely but you do so well
doing the dishes, or doing something that doesn't take
a whole lot of mental effort.
And personally on a pretty much daily basis,
I tend to combine capture mode and habitual mode,
often go for a walk or I'll go for a bike ride,
not really doing problem country mode and only thinking
about a specific thing most of the time,
but when thoughts come to me, I've got the voice memos app
on my watch or my phone so I can record the thoughts
and insights that come to me.
And I find that again, when I'm out on these walks
and I'm out of these bike rides, I often get ideas
that I would have never gotten if I was just sitting
at my desk trying to write.
And that's really the purpose of this scatter focus state.
Because you're more relaxed, you think
in a less linear fashion and you get more ideas as a result.
And then when you switch back to hyper focus,
you can take action on those ideas,
especially if you can learn how to set stronger intentions
at the outset of a hyper focus session,
this is my third big takeaway from this book.
Just as my friend Charles Cornell stressed
that intentionality is the most important element
to deliberate practice, setting strong and specific
intentions is also a key element
to actually getting well, really any work done.
So what makes an intention a good one?
Well, for me there is one key question to ask here.
When you sit down to work, ask yourself if the intention
that you've set is specific enough to make
your next action an obvious one.
Here are a few examples, write a video script.
I literally did this just this morning.
Well, that's actually not a very good intention
because it leaves a lot of room for interpretation
and writing a video script might be a multi-day process.
So instead I could rephrase that as write a rough draft
of the first main body point of this script.
Again, it's a multi-day process, so if I know I'm writing
on one point, I'm much more likely to get started quickly.
And additionally, this might even be more important,
I know that I'm writing a rough draft, that's my intention.
And that's gonna stop me for making edits
which will slow down the initial writing process.
Edits are much better made during a second pass through
after I've already gotten the rough draft onto the page.
A second example, go to the gym.
Again, a lot of room for interpretation there.
So things are gonna be a lot better if I know
what I'm gonna do when I get to the gym.
I know which exercises I'm gonna do,
what order I'm going to do them in,
how many sets and how many intended reps.
This is actually part of the reason why I work
with an online coach who sets that programming
for me ahead of time.
But even if I wasn't, I would always make sure
to go into the gym with a plan.
Now for me, the absolute most important element
to getting my work done is still interest,
care, wanting to do the work that is in front of me.
But the reality is, all of us have things that we sometimes
have to do that we don't wanna do,
and this applies to people who overall their job.
Personally, I love being a YouTuber,
I love being a content creator.
There's a lot of freedom involved,
there's a lot of creativity involved
but still there are small parts of the job
that I still just don't wanna do sometimes.
Or sometimes my brain wants to put my main job
on the back burner because of some other current obsession.
And this, this is where intentionality really shines
because when you get specific when you make
your next actions completely obvious.
And when you're tailor your environment for focus,
that's when your self discipline comes in and allows you
to get your work done, even if it's not exactly
what you wanna do in the moment.
And that is the crux, the main part of this lesson
that I took from this book.
Now, one thing that can really help you
to set these intentions when you're working
is having a well-maintained productivity system.
As David Allen famously put it,
"our brains are for having ideas not for holding them"
which is why you wanna have a well-maintained,
organized external system, a single source of truth,
if you will, for recording the details of all of your tasks,
your events and your ideas.
It's the system that allows you to make sure
nothing ever slips through the cracks in your life.
I call this a productivity system.
And over on Skillshare, I created a class
that will teach you exactly how to build one,
or to improve yours if you have one already.
In the class, we go over several different categories
of apps, your Task Manager, your Calendar,
or your note taking app, plus file management methods
for both digital and physical documents.
We talk about how to set these apps up so they're organized,
so that they work together in harmony,
and so that you reduce the friction involved
in getting things into them.
Additionally, we talk about some methods
and some interesting meta skills for making sure
the system doesn't become a jumbled mess over time,
which would challenge its status
as that single source of truth.
More than 88,000 people have already taken this class,
with one reason review was saying it was one of the best
online classes they've ever taken.
And if you wanna take it for yourself, if you wanna
give it a try, you can actually do so for free
by being one of the first 1000 sign up for a free trial
on Skillshare at the link down below.
When you get that free trial,
you're gonna have unlimited access
to Skillshare's entire platform, which means you can take
my class then go take my other classes on Skillshare,
or take any of the thousands of additional classes
that could teach you practical skills like
audio engineering, video editing, marketing and tons more.
After that, Skillshare is still a very affordable platform
with our annual plans starting less than 10 bucks a month,
which is just one of the many reasons
why I really like Skillshare,
why I have three classes on the platform already,
and why I have a fourth class coming out in January
of next year, which is really gonna help
my fellow creatives, YouTubers, entrepreneurs
and content creators.
So check it out with a link down below and as always,
thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this episode
and being a supporter of my show.
If you enjoyed this video, definitely hit that Like button
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so already, so you can get more videos
like this when they come out in the near future.
Something that I'm committing to for 2021,
just to give you a heads up, is fewer videos
but more production quality, more writing time.
So my schedule is gonna get a little bit more sparse
and you're gonna wanna have that notification bell on
so you don't miss out on videos
when they come out in the future.
I'm very excited for the stuff that we're cooking
up in 2021, both here and on my new channel,
Thomas Frank Explains.
Right now there's a lot of notion tutorials on there
and we may branch out into additional productivity software
if my interest goes in those directions.
So check out that channel if you're curious.
Otherwise, I'll have a couple of additional videos
here and here which you can smash your face
onto your phone screen to check out for extra style points.
Or if you don't wanna do that, don't go punch windows
or I don't know, like eat a bunch of cake or whatever
it is, I didn't write a joke for the end of this video,
but as always, I'm not your dad.