How to get your brain to focus | Chris Bailey | TEDxManchester

The latest research is clear: the state of our attention determines the state of our lives. So how do we harness our attention to focus deeper, get distracted less, and even become more creative? Chris Bailey, author of the recent book Hyperfocus, talks about how our ability to focus is the key to productivity, creativity, and living a meaningful life.

Follow Chris on @chris_bailey Chris Bailey was recently described by TED as possibly “the most productive man you’d ever hope to meet.” He is the international bestselling author of Hyperfocus and The Productivity Project, which have been published in sixteen languages. Chris works with organisations around the globe on how they can become more productive without hating the process.

To date, Chris has written hundreds of articles on the subject of productivity, and has garnered coverage in media as diverse as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, The Huffington Post, Harvard Business Review, TED, Fortune, Fast Company, and Lifehacker.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

A few years ago,

I began to observe
something in my own behavior

that made me a bit uncomfortable.

And that was that from the moment
that I woke up to the end of the day,

my life was a series of screens.

I started the day

with the thing that woke me up
first thing in the morning, my phone,

and so I sat there in bed watching
various cooking videos on Instagram

and bouncing around between a bunch
of different applications.

But then it was time
to get out of bed and cook breakfast,

and so the thing that I focused then on,

in addition to the omelette in the pan,

was the iPad that was
right next to the oven.

And then it was time to do some work,

and so I went to a different screen

which was attached
to another screen itself.

All the while,

this little devil on my wrist

was tapping and beeping
and blooping and distracting me

as I was trying
to get important stuff done.

But there was one particular offender
out of all of these different devices

that I wasted more time on
than anything else.

That was this dastardly thing: my phone.

I could spend hours
on this thing every single day.

And so I decided to essentially,
for all intents and purposes,

get rid of the thing for a month.

As an experiment, I thought,

"I'm going to live on this thing
for just 30 minutes every single day

at a maximum."

And so this is the amount
of time I have for maps,

this is the amount of time
to call my mother,

this is the amount of time I have

for everything that I could
possibly want to do,

to listen to music, to listen to podcasts,

and I observed what happened
during this time.

It took about a week

to adjust downward into a new,
lower level of stimulation,

but once I did,

I noticed that three
curious things began to happen.

First, my attention span grew.

It was like I could focus on things,

not effortlessly,

but with much more ease than I could
before this experiment started.

In addition to this, though,
as I was going about the world

and especially when my mind
wandered a bit,

I had more ideas that my mind arrived at,

and on top of this,

I had more plans and thoughts
about the future.

Getting rid of one simple device
led to these three effects.

Why?

Noticing this a few years back
led me on this long journey

to get to the bottom of what it takes
to focus in a world of distraction.

I pored over hundreds of research papers
from front to back at my office.

I don't know if you've ever watched
one of those crime shows

where somebody's solving a murder.

And so they have this big Bristol board,

and there's string attached to papers

attached to memos
attached to newspaper clippings -

this is like what the state
of my office was.

I flew out to meet experts
around the world who study focus;

I conducted more experiments on myself

until the point I had
25,000 words of research notes

about why this is the case.

How does technology influence
our attention and our ability to focus?

I want to start

with the attention spans that we have.

This is how we pay attention
to the world around us

and how much control
we have over our focus.

The research around
this particular area is fascinating.

It turns out that when we do work
in front of a computer,

especially when our phone is nearby,

we focus on one thing for just 40 seconds

before we switch to doing something else,

and when we have things like Slack open
as we're doing some work,

this lowers to 35 seconds.

But the reason that this is the case
is not what we might think,

after looking at the research.

We think the problem
is that our brains are distracted.

But after looking at the research,

this is what I've come to know
as a symptom for the deeper problem,

which runs much more deeply -
it's the root cause of this distraction.

It's not that we're distracted;
it's that our brains are overstimulated.

It's that we crave distraction
in the first place.

Our brains love these tiny little nuggets

of information and social media and email

and these things that we do
over the course of the day.

There's even a mechanism in our mind
called the "novelty bias,"

by which our mind rewards us
with a hit of dopamine,

one of those wonderful pleasure chemicals,

the same one we get when we eat and order
a whole medium pizza from Domino's,

you know, the same one
that we get when we make love.

We get that same stimulation
when we check Facebook.

We get this dopamine
coursing through our mind.

And so we not only crave distraction,

but our mind rewards us

for seeking out and finding
distraction in the first place.

So, this is the state of our minds today.

We're at this hyperstimulated state

where we bounce around

between these bunch
of different objects of attention

that are very, very
stimulating for our mind.

And so I thought, "Okay, if the phone
had this impact on my attention span,

what if I lowered how stimulated
I was even more, still?"

And so, you know,
this feeling that we experience

when we go from being
in a state of high stimulation

into a state of low stimulation,

it has a name.

That name is called "boredom,"

(Laughs)

you know, this restlessness that we feel
when we have this super busy week

and then we're lying on the couch
on a Sunday afternoon, thinking,

"Alright, well, what am I doing now?"

So, I put out a call to the readers
of my website and I asked them,

"What is the most boring thing
that you can think of doing?

I'm going to make myself bored
for an hour a day, for a month."

And so I did some stuff that I still am
upset about from my readers, to this day.

Day one, I read the iTunes
terms and conditions for one hour.

(Laughter)

It's actually shorter and more readable
than you might think.

Day four, I waited on hold with
Air Canada's baggage claims department.

It's very easy -

This is the trick:

if you want to make yourself bored,

don't call the reservations department,
call the baggage claim people

because you're going to wait hours,
if you ever get through at all.

Day 19, I counted
all the zeroes that I could

in the first 10,000 digits of pi.

Ugh.

Day 24, I watched a clock

tick, tick

for one hour.

And 27 other activities this month.

Jeez.

I still think back.

But curiously,

I noticed the exact same effects
as I did during the smartphone experiment.

It took about a week
for my mind to adjust downward

into a newer, lower level of stimulation,

and this maps, curiously,
on top of research

that shows that it takes
our mind about eight days

to fully calm down and rest,

like when we're on vacation,
as an example.

Our vacations need to be longer
than they are today.

But I also noticed
that my attention span expanded.

I was able to focus
even more effortlessly

because I wasn't surrounded
by fewer distractions,

but my mind was so much less stimulated

that it did not seek the distraction
in the first place.

But the fun part were these ideas
and plans that struck me

that didn't before,

and the reason that this is the case

is because my mind had a chance
to wander more often.

There's a great quote that I love
that you might be familiar with

from J. R. R. Tolkien,

where he says that
"not all those who wander are lost,"

and the exact same thing is true,
it turns out, with regard to our focus,

with regard to our attention.

If you think back to when your best,
most brilliant ideas strike you,

you're rarely focused on something.

Maybe this morning
you were taking a shower,

or maybe some morning in the past,

and then your mind had a chance to connect
several of the constellations of ideas

that were swirling around in your mind

to create an idea that would
never have materialized otherwise

if you were focused on something else,

on your phone, for example.

This is a mode,

especially when we do this deliberately,
when we deliberately let our mind wander;

I call this mode "scatter focus."

And the research shows

that it lets our mind come up with ideas,
it lets our mind plan

because of where our mind wanders to.

This is fascinating.

It turns out that when we just
let our attention rest,

it goes to three main places:

We think about the past,
we think about the present,

and we think about the future.

But we think about the past
less than we might think,

only about 12% of the time,

and often we're recalling ideas
in these thought-wandering episodes.

But the present, which is a much more
productive place to wander -

we wander to think
about the present 28% of the time.

And this is, you know, something
as simple as you're typing up an email

and you can't find a way
to phrase something

because it's very delicate,
maybe it's political,

you go and walk to another room,
to another room of the house, the office,

and the solution hits you

because your mind
had a chance to approach it

and prod at that problem
from different directions.

But here's the thing:

our minds wander
to think about the future

more than the past
and the present combined.

Whenever our mind is wandering,
we think about the future 48% of the time.

This is why when we're taking a shower,
we plan out our entire day,

even though it hasn't started yet.

This is called
our mind's prospective bias,

and it occurs when our mind wanders.

If you're good with math,

or maths, I should say -

not in Canada anymore -

these numbers don't add up to 100.

It's because the rest of the time,
our mind is dull, it's blank,

or it doesn't have an idea inside of it
that is rooted in time.

But whatever it is for you
that lets your mind wander,

something that's simple,

something that doesn't
consume your full attention.

Mine happens to be something

that is not necessarily stereotypic
of my age and gender demographic,

but I love to knit.

Knitting is one of my favorite hobbies;

I knit in planes, I knit on trains,
I knit in hotel rooms.

I was knitting in the hotel room
before this event today

because it helps calm you down,
it helps settle your nerves.

And I come up with so many ideas
when I knit, I have a notepad next to me.

But whatever it is for you -

it might be taking that extra long shower,
it might be taking a bath,

upgrading your shower to a bath

so you can soak not just with your body
but with your ideas as well.

It could be simple;

if you're at work walking
from one room to another in the office -

very simple change -

but if you don't use your phone
during that walk,

your mind will go to the meeting
that you're about to attend,

it'll go to the call
that you were just on,

it'll wander to the ideas
that are circulating,

and it'll make you
more creative in this way.

It could be something
as simple as waiting in line

and just, I don't know, waiting in line.

It could be getting a massage.

You know, whatever it is
that lets your mind -

I love this picture so much -

(Laughter)

whatever you love doing.

Here's a pro tip:

Ask your masseuse to let you
have a notepad in the session

because ideas always come to you
and you're always incubating things,

so capture them

so you can act upon them later.

But I think, after doing
this deep dive into the research,

we need to make two fundamental shifts

with regard to how we think
about our attention.

We think that we need to fit more in -

you know, there's all this talk
about "hustling."

I'm an anti-hustler.

I'm one of the laziest people
you'll ever meet,

and I think that's what gives me
so many ideas to talk and write about.

We don't need to fit more in.

We're doing enough; we're doing too much.

We're doing so much
that our mind never wanders anymore.

It's sad.

This is when our best ideas
and plans come to us.

We need more space.

If you look at what allows traffic
to move down a highway,

what allows it to move forward
isn't how fast cars are moving,

as you might expect,

it's how much space
exists between the cars

that allows traffic to move forward.

Our work and our life are the same way.

The second shift:

we like to think of distraction
as the enemy of focus.

It is not.

It is a symptom of why
we find it difficult to focus,

which is the fact
that our mind is overstimulated.

I have a challenge for you.

It's a two-week challenge,

but it's a challenge to make your mind
a bit less stimulated

and simply notice:

what happens to your attention?

How many ideas do you get?

How does your focus change?

How many plans do you make?

So, for two weeks,
make your mind less stimulated.

There are so many great features
on phones, on devices

that'll let us eliminate a lot of the time
we waste on our devices.

Use those features,

not only to become aware
of how you spend your time

but how you can spend less
so you have more ideas.

Have a disconnection ritual every evening.

One of my favorite daily rituals:

I disconnect from the Internet completely

from 8pm to 8am.

My fiancée and I, we have
a weekly disconnection ritual,

a technology Sabbath every Sunday,

so we can disconnect
from the digital world

and reconnect with the physical world,
the real, actual world.

Rediscover boredom -
you don't have to do it for an hour.

Please don't call Air Canada.
It's just a world of hell.

But rediscover boredom,
just for a few minutes.

Lay on the couch,
and where does your mind go?

And scatter your attention.

You'll find some
remarkably fruitful things

in that attentional zone.

If there's one thing
that I have found to be true

after doing this deep dive
into this world on how we focus,

it's that the state of our attention
is what determines the state of our lives.

If we're distracted in each moment,

those moments of distraction
and overstimulation

build up and accumulate

to create a life that feels
more distracted and overwhelming,

like we don't have a clear direction.

But when we become less stimulated,
when we make our mind more calm,

we get the benefits of added productivity
and focus and ideas and creativity,

but we also live
a better life because of it.

Thank you so much.

(Applause)