The One You Feed - Chris Bailey on Focus, Productivity and Meditation

Episode Date: August 28, 2018

Chris Bailey on Focus, Productivity and MeditationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The state of our attention is what determines the state of our lives. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the

right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

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Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Chris Bailey, who ran a year-long productivity project where he conducted intensive research as well as dozens of productivity experiments on himself to discover how to become as productive as possible. To date, he has written hundreds of articles on the subject and has garnered coverage in media as diverse as the New York Times, the Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Harvard Business Review, TED, Fast Company, and Lifehacker. On this episode, Eric and Chris discuss his new book,

Hyperfocus, How to Become More Productive in a World of Distraction. I wanted to mention too that if you follow the link in the show notes or go to oneufeed.net slash Amazon, you can get the new book there. Of course, that helps the One You Feed podcast out just a little bit, and Chris would be ecstatic. Hi friends, I wanted to remind you of a couple different ways that you can connect with us or get more of One You Feed goodness. The first is our Facebook group. It's a discussion group where people post things that are inspiring to them. They talk about problems or challenges that they're having and get lots of great feedback from the group.

It's a great place to be. And you can get there by going to oneufeed.net slash group. Another great resource is our email list. If you sign up on our website, oneufeed.net today, you get a free guide, top four hacks that make habits stick, and you get a monthly newsletter. And the newsletter, I think, is one of the best things we put out. It talks about all the episodes that happened that month. It has a tip from a listener about how they feed their good wolf. It has my book recommendation for the month, and it's not a guest I've had on. It's something completely different. And there's a section called Meditation Corner

that talks about meditation from a different angle every month. So highly recommend you get that. That's OneYouFeed.net and just subscribe in the right-hand column. And finally, I did a TEDx talk not quite a year ago that talks about how to create good habits. And I think it's one of the better things I've done.

And so you can go to oneufeed.net slash TED to see that. So those are just a couple different ways that you can engage with us. As always, thank you so much for listening and being involved. We're so happy you're here. And here's the interview with Chris Bailey. Hi, Chris. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, man. It's good to're here. And here's the interview with Chris Bailey. Hi, Chris. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, man. It's good to be here. I am happy to have you on. Your book is called Hyperfocus, How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction. Or I should say your most recent book is called Hyperfocus because you've written on productivity topics before. And we will get into all those details, but let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says,

in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second and looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It's funny because I'm at my desk right now. I'm standing up, but to my right, right next to my desk is my meditation cushion, which I go to on breaks in order to focus more deeply and get more done the rest of the day. And it's funny you mentioned greed, hatred, and fear, because greed, hatred, and delusion are

kind of the more toxic things in our life. According to Buddhism, maybe that's where you pulled it from, whereas things like kindness, bravery, and love. And what it reminds me of is what we notice, because I'm a big believer in the idea that what we notice is what we become. If we notice all the things that we have to be grateful for in our lives, that's what we see, and then we live this life of abundance. If we notice all of the things that we don't have and the things that we want and all the things that are different from the way we expected them to be, then we're going to leave a life of suffering behind us in our tracks. And so that's what it reminds me of, where, you know, what we notice we become, if that makes sense.

Absolutely. And that reminds me of a line in your book that says, directing our attention towards 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. And I think we can expand that beyond, I mean, that's a great productivity tip, right? But that's life, right? Is where are we putting our attention and focus? Yeah. And if I've realized one thing in writing that book and looking over all the research about attention, it's that the state of our attention is

what determines the state of our lives. If we go through each moment in a state of distraction, we're trying to pay attention to five or six different things, and we notice our attention is tugged in the moment, those moment-by-moment experiences of distraction are what accumulate to create a life that is distracted. On the converse side, if we pay attention to things that are productive and that move our work forward and also meaningful, you know, conversations like the one with you right now, like when we're at dinner with somebody, a good meal we're eating, a good cup of coffee we're drinking, then our lives become more productive and meaningful because those moments accumulate to make a life. And so it's such a powerful idea and simply noticing

the things in the first place, but then you can kind of direct your attention where it's best for you. Yeah, I often talk about one of the major reasons I started this show was because I noticed what happens to my brain if I just sort of let it go wherever it wants. And it tends towards the, you know, greed, hatred, delusion, insecurity, pick your poison, right? And culturally, right? You and I talked about this a little bit before the show, what how this culture might be different than, than other cultures that you've been to where there's this level of insecurity or hyper sexualization, or, to me, it's towards something external, whether it's the outside of how I look or the outside of how you look or what my car looks like or where I live. And so I started this show really because I just was like, I need a consistent reminder to put my attention on things that matter. And so I thought, well, if I do this show, I'll talk to somebody each

week about it. I'll have to read a book each week about it. And it worked, right? I mean, it works for me. It's just this consistent reminder of what is important. And I'm going to jump ahead in the interview here a little bit to where I was going to go, because it makes me think of something that you talk about in here. And I think it's so useful because I've got my own version of it, but you call it the hourly awareness chime, which is, you know, you set your phone to go off every hour and you ask yourself a series of questions. Mine have always been, you know, where am I kind of trying to get back to the present moment, like ground myself in the moment.

What am I doing? And is it what I want to be doing? You've got a few more and I'll just read them and then I'll let you comment on them. But they're similar, but there's a little bit more diversity. But was my mind wandering? Am I working on autopilot or something I intentionally chose? Am I immersed in a productive task? What's the most consequential thing I could be doing? You know, how full is my attentional space? We'll talk about attentional space in a minute. And then are there distractions that are preventing me from hyperfocus? But I love that. I haven't really seen it anywhere else. Anybody who mentions, you know, sort of that very regular check-in as to what is my mind doing right now? Or what am I doing with my mind? I guess either way.

Yeah, and you know, you rhymed off a few questions. And the thing I always say when it comes to productivity advice is you have a lot of experts who have these, you know, these 10, these 15 step systems that say, okay, do these things in this order and you'll be maximally, you'll be a hundred times more productive.

But if I've realized something in exploring and researching this topic, it's that productivity just doesn't work that way. It's personal productivity. And because of that, we have to take the advice that works for us and leave the rest of it on the table. And so I'll use that as a frame for this conversation is, you know, you might agree with some of the things I'm saying, you might not agree with much of it, you might agree with a few things, but take what works for you and leave the rest. But this hourly awareness chime is something that I've personally found so helpful with regard to the work that I do

because the truth is that we don't check up on what's in our attention that often. We don't notice what's in our mind, what our mind is full of. That's what mindfulness is. It's noticing what your mind is full of. And so, this hourly chime is essentially an hourly prompt at which we notice, okay, where is my mind? How distracted am I? Is it wandering away from what I intended to focus on? And our mind wanders an awful lot without our awareness. The latest research that I've seen, it shows that our mind wanders around 47% of the day, and we only notice around five times each hour that it has wandered away from whatever it is that we wanted to accomplish. And what this means is that it can wander for a long time without us noticing that it has. And it can also wander away from our intention. So, we choose

so often what we do before we focus on something, but then our mind goes to a different place. It tends to a distraction. It tends to something, you know, our mind tends to gravitate to anything that's one of three things. Anything that's pleasurable, anything that is threatening, or anything that is novel. And so and so you know so often when our mind wanders it wanders to something that's one of these three things like like you were talking off the bat but if we notice that we've fallen into one of these distractions we can notice and realign it to what's important too or simply notice that we're working on something productive and give ourselves a well-deserved pat on the back. Yeah. So, a question for you, hourly awareness

chimes. One of the things that I have found is that when I set something, an alert or a reminder to go off very, very regularly, there becomes a point that I start to ignore it. It starts to, you know, so how do you work with that phenomenon? You know, how do you keep that fresh or how do you keep yourself sort of focused on like, okay, you know what, I really do need to stop and do a do a real check in here? Yeah, so I think the best productivity tactics out there, they're self reinforcing. And so in that way, when you do them, and the more you invest in them, the more you end up accomplishing, the deeper you're able to focus, the less your mind wanders for, and the more often you work with intention. And these are actually

the measures that I use to measure the quality of our attention. So, how long we can hold our focus for, how long our mind wanders for before we can catch it, and how much of our time we spend with intention. And so, I think if you look at these measures over time, so it's hard to measure them on a precise scientific level, and doing so probably might not even worth be doing, but, you know, simply notice how these measures change over time. So, as you continue to check up on your attention, and notice also if you make a habit of checking up on where your mind is throughout the day, because then it really becomes a habit, then you can switch over to other cues. So sometimes,

you know, this hourly chime becomes a bit annoying. And so, oh, it's that damn chime again, I'm trying to get some work done. Then you can switch it over to other cues in your environment. So maybe picking up your phone on the third or fourth ring instead of the first and checking up on where your mind is at when it rings. Maybe every time your calendar gives you a notification, checking up on where your mind is then. So introducing these other cues that isn't this annoying hourly chimes because it does kind of wear a bit thin at a certain point. And you might not even find you need it past a certain point, but it's a good way to begin working more mindfully, I think. Yeah, let's talk about productivity for a second, because I think that productivity is one of those things that when people hear it, they tend to think, okay, that's about business. And, you know, I know a lot of listeners on this show will hear that and be like, I'm not,

I'm just not that interested in business, right? Yeah, I'm gonna skip this episode. But really, productivity, it certainly has a lot to do with the work that you do. But I think you could also argue that it's not just a means to an end, but it's an end in itself, in that there's something about the way we feel when we use our time well. Whatever well means to us, there's a well-being inherent in using our time well. It's not just what that produces. Yeah, and I think everybody has a different definition of this term productivity. And when I first started exploring this area, I had a very different definition that I have now. But the definition that I've settled into over time that

I find works regardless of the situation that we're in, is that we're perfectly productive whenever we accomplish what we intend to do. And so if we intend to have a great interview with somebody and then write a report and then update our Excel sheet, and then we do all those things, then we were perfectly productive. And the same is true if we intend to relax on a beach and put up our feet and read a good book and drink a few Corona. And then we do. I would argue we're perfectly productive then too. But the key, and I think the yardstick against which we should measure our productivity, isn't how busy we are. It's not how much we do, but

rather it's the intentions that we set. How many of them do we accomplish? And to what degree do we accomplish them? I find this word, like you said, brings up these connotations as something that's so cold and corporate and all about this efficiency but i don't think it's about that really in practice it's not about doing more more more faster faster faster i think it's about doing the right things and doing those deliberately and with intention that's where productivity lies right and time management by its very nature is a interesting discipline yeah but if we don't start with like, what is a good use of our time, then, you know, I mean, that's to me, that's where it all starts. How do I want to use my time? What's important to me in life? What's important to me this month, this week? And then aligning, you know, our time to that and then using that time well. And again, one of the things that has become so apparent to me is how painful using time wastefully is, at least for me. And I think for a lot of

people, procrastination is a real problem for a lot of people. And it's a problem because A, yes, it stops you from accomplishing what you want to accomplish, which is a cost. But a lot of the people I work with in coaching, the other cost that I would argue is even bigger is what it does to us inside, how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about our ability to impact the world, how we feel out of control. And so again, I don't think that productivity or time management are means to an end. They're also, as I said, an end to themselves because it feels good to use our time well, and it feels bad to not use it well. Back to the wolf example. So some feelings that a lot of people mention coming up when they're not productive are things like guilt and worry and doubt.

But if you deconstruct these feelings a little bit, I come up with so many productivity ideas on the meditation cushion and practicing mindfulness and ideas like that. And this happens to be one of them because it's by deconstructing these feelings that we can really get to the bottom of them, I think. But if you look at guilt, for example, it's kind of this tension about the way we spent our time in the past. This worry is a tension about the future. This doubt is really a tension about how we're spending our time now. And if you work with intention, these emotions are kind of what flood in to fill the vacuum that intentionality leaves when it's not there. And so when you work with intention, there's kind of this purpose, this drive behind what you're doing because you chose to do it. And in that choice is a confidence that what you're doing in the moment, whatever that happens to be, that's exactly where

you need to be. That's what you're put on earth to do. And because you don't feel this guilt, this worry, this doubt, you can become so much more immersed in what you're doing in the present. So, I think you hit the nail right on the head. A lot of people focus on, okay, we need to become two times as productive each day. But I think that feeling is worth chasing even more. The feeling that we get a bit of when we write something on our to-do list that we just did and then cross it off just for the fun of it. It's that feeling of accomplishing what we set out to do. And not only that, but connecting what we intend to do with what's meaningful in our lives, what's actually important in our work that's actually connected to other people and not just

connected to ourselves. And this is what makes a difference. It's what gives us that feeling too, and also erases the other feelings that aren't so savory. The way I describe it is, you know, that one of the most important skills in life is being able to make commitments or promises to yourself and then keep them. And again, whatever those promises or commitments are, that's, that's yours to figure out that's entirely individual. Yeah. But if we can't do that, it eats at us. It erodes us as, as people, because we just, you know, I often say to people who've tried to change something over and over and over again, it we just, you know, I often say to people who've tried to change something over and over and over again, it's like, we, at a certain point, just don't believe ourselves. We're like,

well, yeah, I'm going to start exercising again. But at the same moment, there's this part of us, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've said that 1000 times, you know, and it's just, it's an awful feeling. Yeah, it really is. So I think this is why productivity is so important. Exactly. So, let's move on to an idea that you shared in one of your earlier books, and you reference it briefly in this book, but I think it's really useful. You call it the rule of three. This is a great segue, because we were just talking about intention. And so, you know, how do you make that practical on a daily basis? The hourly awareness chime is a good way to do that. So is setting these cues in your environment. So you're walking down the hallway and that reminds you to check up on what's on your

attention, what were you just doing? But probably my favorite productivity ritual of all time is one of the simpler ones as well. And it's called the rule of three and it goes like this. At the start of the day, you fast forward to the end of the day in your head, and you ask yourself that by the time this day is done, what three main things will I want to have accomplished? And three is such a great number, because it's a number that fits comfortably within our attentional space, our attentional

space being just what we're able to focus on in the moment. And we can hold around three or four pieces, chunks of information in our mind at once. And phone numbers are one of my favorite examples of this. We don't say our phone number is 1,613,898,000, whatever. We say our phone number is 1-613-898-2964. And so, you know, we chunk it into these groups of three and four, and we chunk the world into groups of three, especially. We have sayings like good things come in threes, and celebrities die in threes, and the third time's the charm. We award three Olympic medals. We divide a story even, which is a sequence of dozens of events into three parts, the beginning, the middle, and the end. We grow up immersed in stories like, man, the three little

bears, the three blind mice, the three little pigs, then we go to the three musketeers, and the list goes on. And so the idea is that this number three, we can hold it in our attention at once so we can actually recall these things throughout the day when we daydream on what we should do next, but it fits with the way we think. And so I'm a big advocate for doing this every day. I also like to set three weekly intentions, three monthly intentions, three intentions for the year so that I can see my daily goals feeding into these longer term goals that actually matter to me. So I can, you know, there's that deeper connection on a daily basis to what's meaningful for me. And so it's a simple rule, but it's a pretty powerful

rule. And again, it's one of those rules where, you know, take it and see how it works for you. Try it on for size for a week, whenever you happen to be listening to this. Maybe it's a Monday, set three intentions every day this week, and just see how much more you're able to accomplish and how much deeper you're able to focus and how much of your time you spend with intention behind what you're doing. I think you'll notice some good things. I like the rule of three because it feels to me like a middle ground, you know, the middle way. Obviously, you're familiar with a lot of Buddhism, right? That's one of my favorite teachings from Buddhism is the middle way.

There's a lot of stuff out there about just one thing. Pick the one thing for the day. And I'm like, well, that doesn't feel like enough, you know? But if I look at my task list, I'm like, well, that's too much. I like three because it feels, like you said, it's easily held in attentional space, but it just feels like the middle way between like, all right, I'm focused on this one thing and I'm focused on everything. I really like it. And I've started using it since I read your book, and it is, for me, it's very useful. Because about three really major things seem to be the right number

to get done in a day, or at least to spend my time on. Yeah, and some days I'll pick two. Some days I'll, you know, have four important meetings, so I'll make four things. But even looking at the natural rhythm of my work as well, it's usually around three things that are important. Anything more than that, you're trying to prioritize everything. And anything less than that, you're just kind of focusing on too little because you have more time than you're accounting for. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you two? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all.

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And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So now let's move into focus. Your latest book is called Hyperfocus. So tell me, what is hyperfocus? Yeah, hyperfocus is the word that I use to define a state of deliberate attention where wemihalyi refers to as a flow state where we look up at the clock and two hours have gone by and we think it's been 15 or 20 minutes. But the

main thing is that it's this level of deliberate attention. So we choose what we're focusing on ahead of time. I model it after ADHD literature where, you know, there's a state in ADHD where it's called hyperfocus, and it's when we bring our full attention. But I use that definition, but coupled with this deliberate attention, which I think is so critical. It's so critical we choose what we focus on. You get bonus points for attempting to and actually pronouncing the author of Flo's name right. I never even attempted, which you can, if you remember back to our beginning conversation, I tried to pronounce a name to you that I

butchered utterly, which was an easy name. You can imagine what I would do with that name. I'm always impressed by it, though, so kudos. You know, kind of a backstory of the book Hyperfocus is Mihaly and I, Mihaly and I, that sounds like a Romecom, but we have the same, a Hungarian romantic comedy with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. We have the same editor at Penguin Random House. And when we were pitching Hyper hyper-focused to various publishers, I noticed that my current editor, Rick, he had the original book, Flow, the hardcover, on his shelf in his office. And so I said, oh, you have Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book. And he was kind of taken aback like you are. But it's this name you come up to again and again and again if you're into productivity.

And so you figure, okay, I should probably learn to pronounce this. It's also one of those names where you type it into Google every time. Google always says, did you mean Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi? Or did you mean Schwarzenegger? Or whatever the name happens to be. It's, thank you, Google. I really appreciate it. Well, you know, what's amazing to me is, you know, I read a lot of books, you know, at least one a week, as we talked about on well-being, mental health, productivity, meditation. And I think his book is perhaps the most cited book. I mean, it's everywhere. I mean, I feel like every book I open, I'm like, there it is again.

Unlike you, I have not bothered to learn the pronunciation. So maybe one day. Have you heard of the app Text Expander on the Mac? Oh, it's my favorite. Oh, I have a snippet for Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. That's it. So I type in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and then it expands that text, so it says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

And I use it, I only mentioned his name once, I think, in hyper focus because I didn't want to overdo it. But use it often. Yeah, well, it's pretty seminal work. And I love TextExpander. So listeners, if you're on a Mac, and you don't know what TextExpander is, and you spend a lot of time typing, that's worth this entire conversation on its own just to go investigate and get that. I love that thing. I can't even imagine life before it, particularly as poor a typer as I am. Yeah, typing in things like an animal. Oh, man, those, no thank you. Yeah, and things like, I use it so much for things like my home address. So as somebody

who gets emails all day long, all the time, like, can I send you a book? Can I send you a book? You know, just for me to be able to have a shortcut key to put my home address in. I mean, it's just so many of those different things. I love it. Anyway. Even for like book titles, because I, you know, the name of this book is Hyperfocus, but the subtitle is longer. Hyperfocus, how to be more productive in a world of distraction. And I always forget whether to capitalize words. I know of you don't capitalize, but how to be more, you know, what about be?

And so I just type an HF title and then it expands to be perfect every time. And so it's less embarrassing for you too. If these things, you know, you just have to decide once. This is totally off topic, but I have to mention it. TextExpander ProTip. You can insert fields and numbers into the document. So you type in a number and then it pre-populates the form. So I have a pack list, TextExpander snippet. So I type in all one word pack list and it expands to fill all of the possible things that I could possibly pack on any trip, whether I'm doing a keynote somewhere, whether I'm traveling for leisure, whether I'm going to the cottage for the weekend. And what it does before it expands is maybe we could cut this out of show.

Maybe it'll be valuable. But it asks me, it sends up a little window saying, how many days will you be gone? And I'll type something like seven and that'll pre-populate all the fields. So it'll say pack seven pairs of socks, seven pairs of underwear, seven this, seven that, seven toothpick things, because I don't like tooth floss. So like different things like that. And so it saves me a ton of time. I just go through and delete all the things that I won't be packing because maybe I'm just going to the cottage and I don't need to pack my passport for an example. But because of this, I never forget anything. And whenever I'm able to travel somewhere, I'm able to pack in 30 minutes tops. Wow, you are a power user. Oh, yeah. That's heavy stuff. Yeah, yeah. I just pulled up the

text expander statistics. And I've only been on this new computer for a month, but it has saved me typing 12,000 characters in that time frame. That's a lot of tweets. Yeah, it is. All right, back on to hyperfocus. Back to focus. Yeah, let's focus here, yes. Yeah, geez, man. What are the four stages of hyperfocus? I have to preface this by saying that I'm averse to any four-step thing. Because you like three? Yeah, you know, three is

a nice, round, sexy number. But any system, you know, anything where you should, you know, follow things a certain way. So, I have to preface this by saying that these ideas are modeled after the natural rhythm of our attention. So, the natural rhythm of our attention works like this. We're focused on something, then our attention gets distracted either by something internal inside our own mind, we seek out something that's pleasurable or threatening or novel or external to us, and then we bring it back. So this happens again and again and again. It's a pattern that repeats. We focus on something, our attention gets distracted, we bring it back. We're having a conversation, we start talking

about text expander, then we bring it back to focus. And so what we can do is model on top of this essential framework with how our attention works, a few steps by which we're able to focus more deeply on what's important throughout the day. So we start by focusing on something. Well, if intention matters so much with regard to our productivity, maybe we can choose something productive or meaningful on which we can direct our attention. If we then get distracted, usually, maybe we can eliminate as many of these external and internal distractions as we possibly can, then focus on something naturally, and then bring our mind back to it whenever our mind wanders or gets distracted, and we notice that it's been wandering away to something else. And so, choosing something to

focus on, eliminating the things that will get in the way of that focus, then focusing, then drawing our attention back gently. And I think that, you know, that's just something to mention quickly is we're so hard on our minds when we notice they're distracted or that they've wandered to something that isn't really important, that isn't what we've intended to accomplish. But it's so critical that we be kind to our mind. Our minds are built to wander. They wander for half of the day. They're wired to pay attention to anything that's more pleasurable, more threatening, more novel than what's important in front of us. And so it's so critical that we be kind to our

mind as we do, because that's just the way our mind is wired to work. And there is your number one meditation tip for the day also, listeners, kindness when your mind wanders. Yeah, and you know, what helps me in meditation too is approach it with a genuine curiosity, because our mind wanders to such fascinating places, and where it wanders to can inform us on the state and the patterns that we've trained our mind in. So, if it keeps wandering to a problem, a difficult conversation we had a week ago, maybe it's trying to tell us something that we should act upon that conversation maybe a bit differently. Maybe we should follow up

on it. If it keeps wandering uh what we have to do after work today maybe we have to do some errands maybe we should schedule that in our calendar and make a pre-decision for how we're going to spend our time there so it's you know i think a lot of people um you know they they're not kind of their mind first of all so you know be kind to your mind treat it a little bit maybe ask okay where do you want to wander today, mind? And then let it roam free for a few minutes. Let it get it out of its system. Then have a great meditation for the rest of your time on the cushion. You know, I think that idea is so critical.

You could write a whole book about that idea alone. Yeah, and it makes me think of something, which is, you mentioned one of the things to do when you are in hyper-focus mode. And this is something that I do also when I'm trying to like focus on one thing is, you know, you have a little piece of paper there. And when something distracting comes up, just write it down. And then back on to what you're doing. Because what happens to me is, and I'm sure it happens to all of us to some degree is happens a lot when I'm reading a book for an interview, because you or any other author will mention someone else or some idea. And I'll go, huh, that's interesting. And so then I'll hop over to that person's website, which 40 minutes later,

and not that that stuff isn't interesting or useful. But it's a lot better for me just to write down that person's name on a list that I've got next to me, and then I can go back to it later. But I'll let you expand on that. And I also want to pose a different question related to it, which is, do you do that during meditation? Have you heard of people who do that during meditation? Because as we're talking, it occurs to me that's exactly what happens in meditation all the time. And on one hand, it seems like it would be counterproductive to stop and write something down. And yet we know that what that does is, in a sense, allow our minds to relax and refocus

easier. That's such a good question. And I've grappled with that question for years. And I've looked at the research about that idea for years. And I think I've finally settled on an answer for it. But that's, you know, in terms of a distractions list, this is a great example of distractions that are internal. And so, there are a lot of external ones, and those ones are usually obvious. A lot of people talk about those.

I think enough books have been written about external distractions. Of course, we should leave our phone in another room. It's kind of, you know, an essential part of focus. But the internal distractions that we have, we're reading a book and then our mind throws some cringeworthy memory that happened a few weeks ago. Where does that memory come from? Why does it present us with that memory in that moment when we're trying to focus on something? And so, the idea of keeping a distractions list, whenever an idea is externalized in this way where we get it out of our mind and into some external system, that frees up more attentional space for whatever we want to give our attention to in the moment. And so, this is where the power

of that idea lies is that we externalize these things, we can get back on track. And I think in the book, I forget what I called the chapter because it's, you know, chapter names don't really mean much to me. I forget what I called it, but it's like seven or 10 things that you should do before reading hyperfocus. And I think number one is keep a distractions list. Anything that comes up as you read, you know, maybe write it down in the back of the book and cross things off there. If you're not one of those people who's protective of books. Maybe keep a separate list. And so, this way, you're able to refocus more quickly. But on capturing things during meditation, I've had

at least a 30-minute meditation practice every day for years. And I say at least because my Zafu and Zabitana are right here next to my desk in my office and whenever I find my attention waning a bit, I'll often sit on it and see, okay, where's my mind at today? And I think sometimes if I'm going through a lot and I find that I'm juggling a lot of ideas and some things are slipping through the cracks, I'll often keep a notepad in front of me with a little pen just to jot down, much like a distractions list, these ideas so I can realign myself to focus on my breath. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all baffling questions like... We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

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Bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you done any meditation retreats before? I have. Yep, I've done several.

Yeah, me too. We should go on one. We should have like a... Have you ever done a podcast like meditation retreat? You should do that. You know, funny, when you feed Facebook group recently, that idea of doing a retreat together is being thrown around some. That's cool.

I'm down for that. Assuming the book launch stuff doesn't get in the way of the schedule. Well, believe me, your book will be well launched andunched, and you'll probably be halfway through your next one before I get this organized. Exactly. You know, if you're ever on a retreat, at least if you do the kind of Vipassana retreats that I do, they'll always say, you know, your ideas will come to you. You know, if you're a poet, your poetry is going to come to you. If you're an accountant, some ideas about work and things will come to you. And they always say, don't write those down. Don't keep a diary. Don't

jot down these ideas. Don't try to capture these things because this is a time that you can become more wholly embedded within your practice, which is great overall. It's great for the quality of your attention and ultimately, I think, for your productivity, for how much meaning you have in your life because you're able to focus on stuff to move things forward. But I often find myself capturing these ideas at the same time. And I think, for me, it's about a balance. And so, you know, sometimes ideas will be flowing nonstop. And so, I'll just capture them because I'm okay with that. But I think when you capture these ideas in the short term,

this leads to more short-term productivity. But in the long term, your attention will suffer because you're not getting the full benefits out of the meditation practice. And so, you know, I think you have to look at things over two time frames. Capturing things will make you more productive in the short term with a meditation practice. But in the long term, your practice might suffer a little bit. Does that make sense? I think that's an idea that I've arrived at. Totally.

Yeah, well, here's what's interesting is I've done some Vipassana-style insight meditation-type retreats where literally all you do is meditate. Pretty much you eat, sleep, and you meditate. Just, you know, you sit, you walk, you sit, you walk. And I've done those. But the last two retreats I've been on have been one-week retreats. They're silent retreats. They're with a spiritual teacher named Adyashanti. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's less meditation. It's more like six hours a day, which is not an insignificant amount of meditation, but is not like an insight meditation or Vipassana or a Zen

retreat. What I like about that is, one, it feels less like an endurance contest. But secondly, your feet aren't destroyed at the end, where your legs are just cramped. is one is it feels less like an endurance contest. But secondly is... Your feet aren't destroyed at the end, where your legs are just cramped. But I get lots of time. I still take the instructions very seriously around, like, don't read books, don't distract yourself, right? But what I find is that I get lots of time.

What I do with that free time to a larger extent is I walk in the woods. And what I have found is that, boy, do I get great ideas when I am meditating five or six hours a day, and then the rest of the time, you know, I'm still trying to stay sort of attentionally focused in the present moment. But, boy, the ideas come, and what I like about that format a little bit is that I feel like I can write them down without it being a detriment to the meditation practice. The fascinating thing that that idea reminds me of is the greater control we have over our attention. The research shows that when our mind is wandering, it wanders in a more productive way.

Yes. It wanders to the future more often when we have more control over our attention. Same with when we're happier. When we're happier, our mind wanders to the future more often. If you just let your mind be a little bit, maybe you're woodworking, maybe you're going for a run, maybe you're just walking around town, maybe you're walking from one room in the office to another, your mind will wander to the future on average, if you're average, around 48% of the time. But when you're happier and when you have a meditation practice, because you're able to focus that much more deeply and the quality of your attention goes up, it wanders to the

future so much more. And it wanders also more to the present while thinking less about the past. And so it wanders to better and more fruitful—fruitful is a better word than productivity in a lot of these cases—it wanders to better places so that those sessions become more meaningful and provide us with greater insights. Yeah, I want to do another sort of more the insider Vipassana or Zen meditation retreats where it's the crazy amount of meditation. I want to do that again to compare it, but boy, these last couple of retreats I've done with Adyashanti have been way more profound for me than any meditation retreat where I was

meditating for 12 hours a day. There's a lot of variables that could go into that, right? It's the less meditation time in nature. It's because it's with Adyashanti. It's because I am further along in my practice and, you know, whatever they are. But yeah, I just found that to be an interesting thing. But what I do notice is that, you know, when I meditate more regularly, I meditate pretty much every day, you know, I'd say it's, you know, I'm not 100%, but I'm well above, you know, probably 97%. But the time varies. But when I'm really doing, you know, longer meditations very consistently, my brain just works better. And it's not the reason I do it, because I actually have things that feel a little bit deeper to me that drive me to do that.

But boy, having a brain that works well is certainly a nice benefit. It's kind of important, eh? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we're nearing the end of time here. You and I will have a post-show conversation where we talk about some different things, talking about techniques to increase focus. We'll probably talk a little bit about how to balance focus versus breaks and relaxation. But let's real quick hit on what scatter focus is before we wrap up. There are two attentional modes that our mind has. There's the focused mode, where we bring our attention to something, it fires up the task

positive network in our mind. And then there's the unfocused mode. So in any moment, we're either focused or we're unfocused. In this unfocused mode, this daydreaming mode, the mind-wandering mode, activates the default mode of our mind, which there's so much fascinating research coming out about now. It's such a great field of neuroscience to be in. But the words that I use, I like making up words for stuff to make it more accessible. You know, when we bring our complete deliberate attention to something that's hyper-focused. But when we deliberately let our mind wander, I like to call that scatter focus. So, in other words, we get into this mode not that often. Usually, we don't let our mind

wander deliberately. It's wandering against our will when we're trying to focus on writing a report or an important email or meditating, for example. But the research on where our mind wanders to is absolutely fascinating. And it totally illuminated the way that I saw this topic. One of the other topics that I'm a big nerd about is traffic flow. So how traffic flows down a highway. And if you look at what allows cars to continue moving forward, it's not how fast the individual cars are moving, but rather it's how much space exists between the cars that allows them to continue flowing forward. And I think our work is much the same way, where distraction and kind of filling it with mindless things,

distractions fill our day like water, where they prevent this time, this attention between different tasks. We go to focusing on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter on our phone or the latest news before we switch to focusing on something else. And because of this, there's really no room between the things that we do. But the research on where our mind wanders to is so fast, I touched on it a bit, where our mind is wired with this prospective bias. So it wanders to think about the future 48% of the time. And this is time in which we're planning, we're setting intentions, we're thinking about what we're going to do next. And so in this way, daydreaming, even though we're doing nothing, allows us to shut off this autopilot mode. We think about the present in this mode 28% of the

time. So we think of alternative and strategic approaches to what we're doing and conversations we're having and problems we're solving. And we think about the past around 12% of the time. And so, you know, a lot of us think the number is higher than that, but usually we're planning in this mode. And the reason they don't add up to 100 is because the rest of the time our mind is dull or blank. And in this mode, our mind wanders to three main places. The first is it wanders to these three places. But this allows us to do three things. It allows us to rest up because we only expend mental energy when we regulate our attention in one way or another.

And it allows us to plan because our mind wanders to the future 48% of the time. And we actually think about ideas when our mind is wandering 14 times as much as when we're focused on something. And so, this alone is a reason to have some more space between what you're doing. is a reason to have some more space between what you're doing. And the third benefit is that it allows us to come up with ideas. It allows us to connect the information that we consumed last month in a book we were reading to a problem we're facing at work and have this brilliant eureka insight in the shower

or when we're walking to work. And so these three ideas is what makes the mode so powerful. Yeah, I agree. And so what are ways to get into a scatter focus mode? The best way is doing something that's habitual. And so anything that is simple and habitual doesn't consume our full attention. So this is things like taking a shower in the morning, swimming laps, it's having our morning coffee with just a notepad to capture our thoughts without focusing completely on anything. And when we do something habitual, this has been shown to lead us to the greatest number

of creative insights because it makes it fun. And so we wander to the future more often. We're able to rest better because we regulate our attention less often. And the idea that we only do one thing, this anchors our attention in the moment so that we can keep scatter focusing for longer, all while checking up on where our attention is at. We can use the mode to also chew over problems. Keeping one problem in mind while we go on a nature hike, for example, can allow us to see it from different angles and approach it from different sides. But we can also use it to capture what's on our mind, just laying down somewhere with a notepad and a pen and seeing where our mind wanders off to.

But it's this habitual mode where we're doing something that doesn't consume our full attention, but yet anchors us into the moment so that our mind can wander while we do it, largely on autopilot mode, that we get our best ideas and that we plan more and rest more too. Wonderful. Well, Chris, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. I really appreciate it. I've really enjoyed this conversation. We'll have links in the show notes to where people can find you, find your book. And as I mentioned, you and I will continue this conversation. Listeners, if you want to hear the post-show conversation, oneufeed.net support, and you can get ad-free episodes there. You can get these post-show conversations. You can get mini episodes, and you can listen to them all right within your podcast player. So whenyoufeed.net slash support. Chris, again, thank you so much.

I really enjoyed it helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500,

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