CHAPTER
1
SWITCHING OFF AUTOPILOT MODE
AUTOPILOT MODE
Right now there’s a good chance that you’re focused on this
book. But how did you get here?
Looking at the books in my own library, I learned about most
of them through recommendations from friends, podcast
appearances by the author, or having loved a similar book.
Most of us don’t deliberately plot out which element of our
lives we want to improve before settling on a book that will
help us address that issue. We often arrive at those reading
decisions because of a confluence of events.
Take, for example, the last book I read. One day I was riding
in a taxi whose driver had the radio on, and I heard an
interview with the author. Later, a friend tweeted about that
book twice. This accumulation of mentions led to my eventual
decision to buy the book. The process as a whole was
anything but deliberate.
Our not plotting out in detail everything we do and every
decision we make is, for the most part, a good thing. I made
the series of decisions involved in purchasing many of my
books in autopilot mode. Autopilot mode enables us to keep up
with the demands of our life. For example, imagine if every
email response required you to draft your answer in a new
Word document. From there, you’d have to reread it several
times, send it to your significant other for improvements, and
print it once or twice to do line edits, only to arrive several
hours later at a final, eloquent “Sure, sounds good!” This might
be a productive thing to do for an important project, but for
every email? Imagine being just as deliberate buying ketchup,
taking out the trash, or brushing your teeth.
Autopilot mode guides us through actions like these. As many
as 40 percent of our actions are habits, which shouldn’t
require conscious deliberation. Unless you’re a monk and have
the luxury of being able to meditate all day, it’s impossible to
live intentionally 100 percent of the time.
But some decisions are worth making deliberately. How we
manage our attention is one of them.
We typically manage our attention on autopilot. When we
receive an email from our boss, we instinctively stop what
we’re doing to respond to it. When someone has posted a
picture of us online, we check to see how we look, then click
to read what the poster said about us. When we’re talking with
a coworker or a loved one, we automatically focus on forming
clever responses in our head before she finishes her thought.
(One of the most underrated skills: letting other people finish
their sentences before starting yours.)
Here’s a simple exercise that’ll take you thirty seconds. Come
up with an honest answer to this question: throughout the day,
how frequently do you choose what to
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focus on? In other words, roughly how much of your time do
you spend deliberately and with intention, deciding in advance
what you want to do and when you’ll do it?
Most people don’t fare too well with their answers. We lead
busy lives, and at most we only occasionally choose to focus
on something intentionally—when we catch ourselves
daydreaming, sense that we’ve been procrastinating, fall into the
trap of bouncing around the same several apps or websites, or
realize we’ve zoned out while watching our kids.
After we snap out of autopilot mode, we consider what we
really ought to be doing and make the effort to realign our
neurons to focus on that instead.
While falling into autopilot mode can help us keep up the pace
of work and life, attention is our most limited and constrained
resource. The more we can manage our attention with
intention, the more focused, productive, and creative we
become.
A DAY IN AUTOPILOT MODE
The environments in which we live and work, unfortunately,
have their own agenda for claiming our attention, bombarding
us with alerts, notifications, beeps, and buzzes. This steady
stream of interruptions prevents us from diving into any one
thing properly; after all, it isn’t long before we’re presented with
another email that feels just as urgent.
If you’re still here, you’re probably better at focusing than the
average person.
Reading a book requires a good deal of attention—and with
attention becoming a rare commodity, fewer people are able to
devote themselves to reading without distraction.
But it’s worth quickly asking: How much of your attention are
you directing to this paragraph in this moment? Are you
focused on it 100 percent? 85 percent? 50 percent?
How has your level of focus changed over time, especially as
you moved from one environment to another? How frequently
has your mind wandered from the words on this page to the
thoughts in your head—eyes skimming focus free until you
caught yourself and tuned back in
?* Even the most
experienced, focused readers have these mind-wandering
episodes.
It’s not unusual to have a hard time focusing. There are
countless everyday examples of how little control we have over
our attention in our daily lives. Take, for example the following:
 How our mind refuses to shut off when we’re lying in bed
at night. While a large part of us wants to sleep because we
have things to do in the morning, our mind insists on reliving
the entire day.
 How our mind brings up cringeworthy memories at the
worst possible times.
Where do these thoughts come from?
 How incredible ideas and insights come to us while our
mind is wandering in the shower, but the same insights don’t
strike when we need them the most.
 How we find ourselves having forgotten our reason for
entering the kitchen or bedroom. Why did we lose our grip on
our original intention?
 How we can’t focus on something when we want to—like
writing a report that’s not on a deadline. Or why we
procrastinate and focus on things that aren’t productive instead
of spending our time productively.
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 How we find ourselves in bed bouncing around a loop of
the same five smartphone apps, checking for updates again and
again until we snap out of our trance. We may fall into a
similar mindless loop on the internet—
switching between news websites, IM conversations, and social
media.
 How we’re unable to stop worrying about certain things
until they’re resolved or vanish into the ether.
As you read Hyperfocus and learn to focus more deliberately,
these lapses will make a lot more sense, and you’ll even learn
how to prevent them.
THE FOUR TYPES OF TASKS
In many ways, managing your attention is like choosing what
to watch on Netflix. When you first launch the website, you’re
presented with a landing page highlighting just a few of the
many shows that are available. The Netflix homepage is like a
fork in the road—
only instead of two paths forward, there are thousands. Taking
some of those paths will leave you feeling happy, some will
mindlessly entertain you, and others will teach you something
useful.
Deciding where to direct our attention presents a similar fork in
the road—only the pathways lead to the innumerable things on
which we can choose to focus. Right now you’re absorbed in
this book. But if you look up from this page or your e-reader,
you’ll see many alternative objects of attention. Some are more
meaningful and productive than others. Focusing on this book
is probably more productive than focusing on your smartphone,
the wall, or the music in the background. If you’re grabbing
breakfast with a friend, focusing on him or her is infinitely
more rewarding than watching the football highlights playing in
the background.
When you tally up all of the potential things on which you
could focus in your external environment, there is truly an
overwhelming number of options. And that’s not even counting
the trivia, ideas, and memories in your own head.
This is the problem with managing your attention on
autopilot mode. The most urgent and stimulating things in
your environment are rarely the most significant. This is why
switching off autopilot mode is so critical. Directing your
attention toward the most important object of your
choosing—and then sustaining that attention—is the
most consequential decision we will make throughout
the day. We are what we pay attention to.
To make sense of all of the things bidding for our focus, it’s
helpful to divide our tasks into categories. I’ll discuss focus here
largely as it pertains to work, but these rules apply just as
much to your life at home, as several sections later in the
book will explore.
There are two main criteria to consider when categorizing what
to focus on: whether a task is productive (you accomplish a lot
by doing it) and whether a task is attractive (fun to do) or
unattractive (boring, frustrating, difficult, etc.).
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I’ll refer to this grid quite often, so let’s quickly take a look at
each of the four categories of tasks.
Necessary work includes tasks that are unattractive yet
productive. Team meetings and calls about your quarterly
budget fall into this quadrant. We usually have to push
ourselves to do this type of work.
Unnecessary work includes the tasks that are both
unproductive and unattractive—
like rearranging the papers on your desk or the files on your
computer. We usually don’t bother with these tasks unless
we’re procrastinating on doing something else or resisting a
task that falls into the necessary work or purposeful work
categories.
Spending time on unnecessary work tasks keeps us busy, but
such busyness is just an active form of laziness when it
doesn’t lead to actually accomplishing anything.
Distracting work includes stimulating, unproductive tasks and
as such is a black hole for productivity. It includes social media,
most IM conversations, news websites, watercooler chats, and
every other form of low-return distraction. These activities can
be fun but should generally be indulged in small doses. The
better you become at managing your attention, the less time
you’ll spend in this quadrant.
The remaining box on the chart is purposeful work—the
productivity sweet spot.
These are the tasks we’re put on earth to do; the tasks we’re
most engaged in as we do them; the tasks with which we
make the largest impact. Very few tasks fit into this box—
most people I’ve encountered have three or four at most.
Doing good work in this category usually requires more
brainpower, and we are often better at these types of tasks
than other people are. An actor’s most purposeful tasks might
be to rehearse and perform. A financial adviser’s purposeful
tasks might be to make investments, meet with
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clients, and educate herself on industry trends. A researcher’s
most important tasks might include designing and running
studies, teaching, and applying for funding. My most important
tasks are writing books and blog articles, reading research to
encounter new ideas, and giving talks. In your personal life,
your purposeful tasks might include spending time with your
kids, working on a side hustle, or volunteering with a local
charity.
A perfectly productive person would focus on only the top two
quadrants of the above chart. If things were that simple,
though, you wouldn’t need this book. As you’ve no doubt
experienced, sticking within the borders of necessary and
purposeful work is much easier said than done. Every day,
tasks from all four quadrants compete for our attention.
Working on autopilot means we are more prone to falling prey
to the unnecessary and distracting ones and often spend time
on necessary and purposeful work only when we’re on
deadline.
I noticed something interesting as I applied the research in this
book to my own life: as time passed, I began to spend less
time on autopilot and focused more attention on my most
purposeful and necessary tasks. As you become more deliberate
about managing your attention, I think you’ll find the same to
be true for your work.
Here’s an immediate way to improve your productivity. Divide
up your work tasks based on the four categories in the above
grid. This simple activity will give you an incredible awareness
of what’s actually important in your work. Because I’l return to
the grid often going forward, divvying up your work activities
will be valuable as you make your way through the book.