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 hyperfocus 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 going to 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 summaries and notes section on my website so i'll link that in the description down below but in this video i want to 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 want to 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 hyperfocus 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 on 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 an 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 hyperfocus 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 hyperfocus that gets blocked out along with everything else so you can slip into a state of flow and actually execute on your intentions but as you're probably well aware hyperfocus 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 in the description below so you can check it out after you watch this video but hyperfocus isn't the best state for every purpose not only is it taxing after a while 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 its 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 time scale 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 a capture mode session you might find yourself with a list of projects you want to check in on or people you want to reconnect with or 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 non-linear 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 kyle 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 there's 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're 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 into mind for numbers is of a pinball table if you're using that hyper focus mode it's almost like a tightly gripped cluster of those bouncers that keeps the ball bouncing around in one very specific area of the table whereas in the diffused mode or in scatter focus you're 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'll 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 while 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 the time but when thoughts come to me i've got the voice memos app on my watch or on 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 on 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 hyperfocus you can take action on those ideas especially if you can learn how to set stronger intentions at the outset of a hyperfocus 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 it'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 going to stop me from 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 gonna 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 want to do and this applies to people who overall love 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 want to 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 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 want to 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 want to 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 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 this 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 recent review saying it was one of the best online classes they've ever taken and if you want to take it for yourself if you want to give it a try you can actually do so for free by being one of the first 1 000 people to 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 can teach you practical skills like audio engineering video editing marketing and tons more after that skillshare is still a very affordable platform with their annual plans spreading 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 going to help my fellow creatives youtubers entrepreneurs and content creators so check it out and 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 to show the youtube algorithm what's up and make sure you're subscribed to this channel if you haven't done 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 going to get a little bit more sparse and you're going to want to have that notification belt 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 under your phone screen to check out for extra style points or if you don't want to 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