How to focus better, by knowing what focus is

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If focus is a topic that interests you, chances are one of these statements is true:

• I have a really hard time focusing

• I am super awesome at focus, but not always on the right stuff

• I am super awesome at focus, always on the right stuff (and you might be wrong, but you might not know it yet)

As will always be the case with this newsletter, we’re going to start with understanding what we’re even talking about. There's a whole lot of advice about focus and productivity out there, and almost none of it does the groundwork of even defining what focus and productivity even are. A lot of people seem to think that being busy and getting a lot of things done is focus, and there are a bunch of problems with that perspective. Obviously, focus is some measure of attention and output, but beyond that, people don’t understand focus well enough to give good advice, in my opinion. And they certainly don’t understand it well enough to help people who struggle with focus in various ways.

Fortunately, understanding focus correctly is super easy. We’re only going to get into the first part of this to keep the newsletter short and actionable, and we’ll keep going over time.

Focus is simply a measure of the intensity of your brain activity. Your brain, at almost all times when you’re awake, is in one of three modes, called alpha, beta, or gamma.

Alpha is daydreaming. It’s when the mind is very close to idle. I like to tell people that alpha sort of feels like being in your house late at night, when you can hear the house itself. You notice things you’d never hear during the day, like little pops of the house shifting, the wind outside, or water running through the plumbing. In your head, it’s sort of the same thing. There are little sounds you can’t hear most of the day…because your brain is too noisy. In alpha, you hear those sounds, which is why ideas come to you out of nowhere when you’re in the shower, driving, on a walk, cycling, gardening, etc.

Beta is productivity. My business partner likes to call it “get shit done mode.” Beta is built for getting a lot of shit done, and it likes to be efficient, balancing speed and quality, feeling the positive feelings of being in motion, productive, useful, and moving forward. There are a lot of people out there who are addicted to beta, thinking it is the focus level we should use for everything. It isn’t.

Gamma is deep focus. It’s when your brain’s intensity is at its highest, and it can feel like you’ve gone into a different dimension where the world around you has ceased to exist. Gamma is common when learning difficult material, solving complex problems, or really pushing your brain to think harder than you normally do about something. You can even feel gamma when you get in the zone in sports, as time slows down, the crowd disappears, and you are completely connected to what you are doing. In our work, gamma is where deep comprehension, invention, detailed vision, accurate problem solving, and deep analysis come from.

And that’s it. That’s focus.

At almost all times, your brain is in alpha, beta, or gamma about something. But is it in the right mode, and is it focused on the right something?

Let’s talk about how we can use this information.

The most important questions to answer about focus are the ones that give us self awareness and the ability to be intentional with our focus, rather than letting our brains choose focus on autopilot. We want to ask:

1. Which one of these do I prefer?

2. Which one of these do I have the hardest time with?

3. Which one of these is the best for what I’m trying to do?

For a lot of people, the answer to the first question is beta. Beta feels right because we have so much to do in our lives, and beta feels good because getting a lot done creates a pretty real dopamine reaction in most of us. Crossing tasks off of our list feels great to a lot of people.

For other people, gamma feels the best. When a person is high in openness (have you taken our personality test to know how your mind works, yet?), gamma is usually the preferred level of focus. These people love complex problems, abstract and philosophical thinking, getting deep into creative and imaginative thoughts, and crave a systems-level understanding of things.

And alpha? Daydreaming? That can feel unproductive. But just think about the breakthrough thoughts you’ve experienced in your own life. The ones that seemed to come out of nowhere. Alpha can have real value.

One of these will stick out as your favorite, and that also means you might have one or two types of focus that are hard for you, or that you actively dislike. Maybe it’s hard to get your brain to daydream or to focus more deeply than “get shit done mode.” Maybe it’s hard for you to feel like it’s even okay to focus in those ways when there’s so much beta work to do.

Take a minute to think or even jot down a few thoughts about this. What focus modes are hardest for you? Do you dislike them? Do you distrust them? What do you really think?

This will give you the ability to really ask that third question with intellectual honesty: Which one of these levels of focus is objectively best for what I’m trying to do right now?

Every single thing on your to do list might look like it can be done in beta, but some things are much better done in gamma, or even in alpha. If you have a real problem in your business, like with customer churn, employee engagement, or wasteful resource usage, those are gamma problems, not beta problems.

Applying “get shit done mode” to these problems is how we solve them shallowly, and usually end up with “get it done…oh shit.” We look up how to solve customer churn on Google, or hire some consultant with a playbook they’ve recycled from their last 5 clients, rather than actually thinking, actually understanding the causes of our unique customer churn issues, and actually coming up with a powerful and brilliant solution.

If you are self-aware enough to know you are prone to solving problems in beta when they would be much better solved in gamma, that is great. A lot of people have no idea that beta is a terrible way of solving big, important problems, and in pursuit of efficiency, they end up solving problems 20 times over the course of years (and often pass it off as “continuous improvement”), rather than solving problems (or preventing them) well.

Heading into this week…

As you go into this week, give some thought to which type of focus is best for the work you and your team are about to do. Simply ask yourself, is this an alpha thing, a beta thing, or a gamma thing? If your team learns this language (I have no problem with you forwarding this to your team, go for it), it can even become a completely natural part of discussing tasks and projects, as in, “Hey, I really think this is a gamma thing…let’s not do beta work here…let’s actually get this really, really right.”

Similarly, you might take gamma-prone team members and tell them, “Bill, I need you out of gamma on this. Beta it up, bro, and get it done. This does not need to be the Sistine Chapel.”

This language is huge for your own mind and for getting on the same page about how we focus as a team.

And if you’re the person who has difficulty focusing at all, we’ll help you more in the coming weeks. Start here, and we’ll dive deeper in the future on the hurdles your brain might be facing.

For now, get really intentional and give your mind permission to focus at its best level. That might sound crazy, but permission is a really big deal to your brain. If your brain thinks it needs to focus on 50 things, or you think you need to focus on something in the wrong way, you are robbing your brain of permission to actually focus on ONE THING THE CORRECT WAY. Your brain can’t focus on 50 things (as you’re already seeing in your own life), so start asking yourself for permission to make the other 49 things go away long enough for you to actually focus on 1 well.

Have a great week. Love you awesome humans.

Feedback? Questions? Hit me up on twitter.

And if this is the first post you’ve read, be sure to check out the featured posts as they lay some foundation.

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