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including how tired you are and how happy you feel. (Your happiness level can impact
your attention in many curious ways.)
For now, though, let’s dive deeper into the mind-wandering factor I personally find
most interesting: the attentional space we have to spare.
THE POWER OF MAKING YOUR WORK HARDER
Depending on their complexity, tasks will require varying amounts of your attentional
space. If you’ve ever tried to meditate and focus only on your breath for a few minutes,
you might have noticed your
mind wanders more than usual
—far more than when
you’re going for a run, carrying on a deep conversation, or watching a movie. These
latter tasks are more complex and fill more of your attentional space by default.
*
Consciously making your tasks more complex, and taking on more complex ones, is
another powerful way to enter into a hyperfocused state, as they will consume more of
your attention. This will keep you more engaged in what you’re doing and lead your
mind to wander less often.
In his groundbreaking book
Flow
, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
offers intriguing insights
about when w
e’re most likely to enter into a flow state: when the challenge of
completing a task is roughly equal to our ability to do so, and we become totally
immersed in the task. When our skills greatly exceed the demands of a task
—such as
when we do mindless data entry for several hours
—we feel bored. When the demands
of a task exceed our skills
—such as when we’re unprepared to give a presentation—we
feel anxious. When the demands of a task are roughly equal
to our ability to do that
task
—when we’re playing an instrument, immersed in a book, or skiing down a freshly
powdered slope
—we’re a lot more likely to be fully engaged in what we’re doing.
If you find it difficult to become immersed in your work throughout the day, it’s worth
questioning whether your tasks are
difficult and complex enough. If you’re frequently
bored, consider whether your job takes advantage of your unique skill set. If your mind
is
still frequently wandering, even after implementing the ideas in the previous chapters,
it’s a pretty good sign your tasks aren’t complex enough and don’t consume enough of
your attentional space.
*
On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you find you’re anxious
at work even
after
taming distractions and working with more intention, consider
whether your current skills are a good match for the tasks at hand.
Outside of questioning individual tasks, it’s also worth reflecting on how challenging
you find your workload
in general
. The tactics in
Hyperfocus
will
allow you to accomplish
more in less time, but you may then find you don’t have enough work remaining to fill
that extra time. This can manifest itself in some odd ways.
Our work tends to expand to fit the available completion time
—in productivity circles,
this phenomenon is known as Parkinson’s law. But by disabling distractions in advance,
you may find the same thing I did: your work no longer expands to fit the time you have
available for its completion, and you discover how much work you truly have on your
plate. Some executives I coach find they’re able to accomplish a full day’s
work in just a
few hours when they focus on only their most consequential tasks.
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I discovered this phenomenon firsthand with my last book. After handing in the
eighty-thousand-word manuscript, which I wrote in a relatively short amount of time, I
continued to be just as busy
—even though I had substantially less work. My remaining
projects expanded to fit the time I had available. Instead of planning for speaking
engagements a few weeks
before they were scheduled, I began to think about them
much further in advance, far earlier than I needed to. I logged into my social media
accounts more often, when I should have been working. I stopped following my own
advice and checked for new emails constantly instead of once a day. I enabled more
notifications and alerts so I would have more tasks to tend to. And I agreed to more
meetings, many of which I didn’t need to attend in the first place. I experienced a
dreaded
feeling of guilt whenever I wasn’t busy, which, of course, disappeared as soon
as I did more busywork.
Little did I know that this guilt had two sources: a lack of working with intent and my
work expanding to fill how much time I had for it. It took several months before I finally
stepped back to tame the novel distractions that were flooding my available time. In
doing so I discovered how little work I actually had on my plate. In response I
intentionally took on more meaningful tasks
—writing more for my website, thinking
about this book, and ramping up my speaking and coaching sessions. Because I think
of myself as a pretty productive guy, my failure was
tough to admit to myself, but it
taught me an essential lesson: doing mindless stuff at work or at home is not only
unproductive but also a sign you don’t have enough important work. This also accounts
for why busywork gets set aside when you’re on deadline: there’s no time available to
contain its expansion.
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