You’re in the Hyperfocus Zone! How To Protect Yourself And Avoid Burnout

Imagine this, you get to work one day and your brain opens up and you find yourself ready, able, and actually going after all the things you have to do and more.

You check off a bunch of emails that have been sitting in your inbox forever.

You will read a bunch of unread Slack notifications, Teams reminders, and get all that stuff out of the way.

You read through a bunch of different documents that you've been asked to take a look at and provide comments on them.

You find yourself in that

Nirvana state of focus.

Even at home, you can find this hyper-focused state.

When you finally fold all the laundry, it's been sitting in the corner of your room for a couple of days, you take out all the trash that is sitting around your home, you are able

to organize stuff, and your brain just knows exactly what to do.

It clicks into place.

And then at the end of the day, you go home, you just flop onto the couch, and you conk out for a couple of hours and do nothing.

You indulge in whatever is going to help you recharge your brain again and gear up for whatever is coming next.

Maybe to you hyper-focus isn't the ability to do lots of different things, but it could be focusing on one thing for hours at a time.

You were able to zero in, visualize what has to happen and find everything coming together for you to just stare and focus and immerse yourself in one single task for hours at a

time.

Hyperfocus takes lots of different forms and it can be really drilling down into one specific task.

It can be spreading yourself out across lots of different tasks.

Whatever form it takes, hyperfocus can really be an asset to you to help you get stuff done, accomplish things and zero in and lock in and fully understand and accomplish what

has to happen.

But it doesn't mean that hyperfocus isn't without its trade-offs and caveats.

Sure, you may be able to focus on something for hours at a time, but are you remembering to get something to eat or drink?

Are you standing up, stretching, able to take a break?

What is the cost to your ability to hyper-focus?

What are you not able to do when you're so locked in?

Compare hyperfocus to driving a car down a highway.

You've got cruise control, which allows you to set and lock in your speed at a certain point, versus being able to use the gas pedal and the brake pedal and control your speed

manually.

You could think of hyperfocus as being able to set the cruise control at a high speed and focus on other things.

You are able to move quickly, but still maintain your ability to respond to something on the highway.

Maybe the car ahead of you is slowing down, so you have to slow down too.

Maybe you need to go get gas, you gotta find a rest area.

Maybe you have to move past cars that are moving slowly, so you're changing lanes.

You also have to be able to respond to unexpected events, emergencies, things that are sudden and really quick.

And you got to be able to figure that out.

Whether it's a car that suddenly slows down, that pulls out with almost no notice, if there's an obstacle in the road, if there are potholes, there's a road closure, you have

to be able to respond to that in a car.

The faster you're going and the more unattentive you are in the car, the harder it is for you to be able to respond to expected or unexpected events.

And hyperfocus is an extremely similar concept to this.

You could be hyperfocusing by reading through a document you've been assigned to read.

And there might be an unexpected event happening, maybe a fire alarm goes off and you find yourself deeply planting roots in this document and saying, no, I just got to read one

more paragraph.

Because you know that if you pulled yourself away from this document, it may be really hard for you to get back into that focus state.

It's such a rare thing for you.

And you know that if you get pulled away from it for a couple of minutes, it might be really hard for you to understand, what was I doing in the first place?

Some signs that you're hyper focusing might be that you just forget to eat.

You might realize that time is going by way quicker than you realize.

you might ignore physical needs like having to go to the bathroom, you might be hunched over.

There's lots of different signs that you're hyper-focusing and unintentionally causing yourself harm or putting yourself into a situation that's going to be harmful without even

realizing it.

And when anything interrupts you for any reason, your focus might be a kingdom of cards that blows away the slightest puff of breeze and collapses.

And then you become grouchy or angry or upset that your focus was interrupted.

You might also find yourself having a tough time context switching or moving from one task to another or a proportionately assigning the right amount of time or energy onto certain

tasks.

That document you might be reading might be a description for a new feature you're working on.

This might be the most exciting thing you've ever worked on your company and you want to spend all of your time on this one feature.

But you might have a couple of other projects you're working on and you can't neglect those projects which have different timelines just because this one project calls to you

the most.

This is where it helps to really reflect internally on what your hyperfocus looks like to you.

Do you find that you can really hyperfocus on certain tasks and know that you need the reinforcement to pull yourself out of it?

And what can other people on your team or in your life do to help you with this hyperfocus state when they know you're in it?

Let's start with you.

Pulling yourself out of that hyper-focused state might be like ripping up a plant by its roots, but it is necessary fixture of being able to enter and exit that hyper-focused

state when you know you have to.

It requires acknowledging to yourself, okay, now I have to move on to the next thing.

What is the easiest path for me to take to do that that's going to cause the least amount of stress and friction for me?

Because you know you've got to do something else.

You know you've got to

Go home.

Maybe you've been working on this thing the entire day and you blink and you're like, whoa, it's 5 p.m.

I gotta go home and make dinner.

I have to feed the cats.

I have to do other things that don't involve this project, no matter how interesting it is.

You need to reflect to yourself what that transition is going to look like.

It doesn't have to be as forceful as yanking yourself out rudely and abruptly.

It can be a transition process.

Maybe you start to slow down on the work.

Maybe rather than reading the document or answering questions on it, maybe you start to work other things that you're doing into your workflow that are not related to this

project.

That way it's less of a full blast ripout.

Maybe you can set reminders to yourself or calendar events or alarms to remind you, hey, in 30 minutes, you have to go hop in the car to go home because if you don't go in the car

now, there might be a lot of traffic or there might be really busy on the subway.

So watch out, you're gonna have to leave soon.

You can also set up automated things such as browser extensions, apps.

Slack settings and other things that will automatically do things for you to facilitate in this slow transition out of your work day and into the rest of your life.

I set very aggressive Slack reminders and alarms on my phone to remind me when I have to do something, when I need to transition from one project to the other.

Setting calendar events to myself also helps me say, okay, I'm going to spend three hours on this and then I know that I have to go ahead and do something else.

And maybe to help that, I coincide the transition between projects with something else.

Maybe I go to the kitchen and get a snack.

or I get lunch, or I do something else.

That way I can balance out the frustration with ending work on something with something else that I look forward to.

You can also trick your brain into doing that.

If I spend three hours on this task, then I can go to the kitchen and have some trail mix or have some &Ms or whatever is going to help motivate you to get to the other side of

that and end your work when you said you would and when you needed to.

You might be wondering to yourself, how am going to end something?

Because if I come, if I end it now and I come back to it tomorrow, I may not know what I actually did.

Great question.

You can leave your work in a state where it's easy for you to pick up tomorrow.

If you're coding, you can just commit things to your repository, push it and move on.

You can write notes to yourself in a Google doc or send reminders to yourself in the future.

I love this actually.

My autistic brain can be forgetful and it often happens that I will work on something, come back to it later and completely not remember what happened.

I love to send scheduled messages to myself, scheduled reminders, something which allows me to encapsulate information, put something into a box, a message in a bottle, and then

send it into the future because I have all this knowledge in my brain.

I don't want to lose it.

I don't want to lose track of it, but I need to make sure that it stays in as raw a form as possible.

to myself in a way that I will understand.

It's basically doing a message in a bottle into the future, and then you can come back and find it later when you're ready for it.

You can receive the message in a bottle tomorrow, but you might not work on this project tomorrow.

You might work on it in a few days from now, in a week.

Whatever it is, that message in a bottle is the rawest, most pure form of information for you to be able to understand how did I leave this project off on and just

open it up and come back to it like you never even left.

This can take any different forms.

It could be an email, it could be a voice memo, it could be a video recording.

Whatever you want to do to encapsulate this information and make it easy for you to understand in whatever way that you know you'll want to receive it, that's going to be the

message in a bottle that you want to send into the future.

Now you're in your focus state, you're driving down that highway, you've got a team though.

They may not know how you work in your hyper-focus state and they may interrupt you or bother you and get you out of that hyper-focus state unintentionally.

You know in your head that you have to protect this time, that it is extremely important for you to preserve all this time that you can get while balancing it with other meetings.

When you're on a team of other people, it's a collaborative effort.

So you as a part of your job is going to have to work with other people and you'll have to make some compromises to your calendar.

But you don't have to compromise everything.

Something that I do on my calendar is I set aside focus time.

I say, for three hours on these days, I will not accept meetings.

Please find another day on my calendar that you can book time on.

And I will aggressively deny people

if they try to book time over my calendar on these times.

For instance, Fridays, I have Focus Fridays.

I try as much as possible not to take meetings on Fridays.

Every once in a while, I will have to.

But I would say 90 % of the time, I will not take meetings on Fridays.

And if somebody needs to meet with me and they want a book on top of my focus time, I ask that they reach out to me first.

That way I can plan around it.

I can say, can you do this other time instead, like towards the beginning or towards the end of the focus time?

It's on my calendar and my calendar within my company is public.

What that means is that other people can see the event names that are on my calendar.

They can say from nine to 10 a.m.

Shay has focus time and then he has a meeting and then he's free.

And on Fridays, it says, focus Friday, please reach out to me before you book on a Friday.

Make it easy for people to understand if they need to grab time with you, what's the contract?

What are the expectations?

You are setting these expectations very clearly by saying you are allowed to book time with me on any available time you see is free.

If you have to book on a Friday,

please ask me first because I may be planning to spend a lot of time on a specific thing that isn't documented here, but I don't have to put that on my calendar.

It says Focus Friday.

That is my Focus Friday to do with whatever I want to.

You just got to tell people that Focus Friday means don't talk to me unless you need to.

If you are on a very collaborative team, you might get notifications on a constant basis, hourly, daily, every minute, and you have to protect your brain from what might be a

onslaught of notifications, of emails, of Slack notifications, Teams, huddles, Zooms.

It might overwhelm you even when you're in a focused state.

Most of the collaboration apps these days have do not disturb and snooze modes.

which allow you to say, don't send me notifications except under these circumstances.

For instance, on my Slack, I actually have it looking at my calendar with an app called Clockwise.

I absolutely recommend Clockwise to people.

It actually plugs into my calendar.

And when it sees that I am in a focus state, which is a specific thing you can do in Google Calendar, or you can just read the title of the calendar event.

If Clockwise knows that I'm in a focus state,

it will set my Slack status and say, I am in a focused time, do not reach out to me.

And it will mute my Slack notifications and it will change my Slack status to indicate that.

It's such a brilliant thing that really automates a lot of that process.

If your company uses clockwise, you should absolutely 100 % wire it up to your calendars.

I cannot recommend that highly enough.

It's automatic.

It takes care of so many executive functioning things that would normally get over my head because I don't have to do anything other than set the focus time in my calendar and then

clockwise and Slack take care of the rest.

You can still do this manually, obviously, but it helps to automate that part away.

That way you don't forget to do it.

And then somebody books on your calendar, they send you a message, they do something that

disturbs your focus state.

If you're in an office environment where it's more in person than it is digital, they actually have desk placards which allow you to specify what kind of state you're in for

your mind.

You might have something which says, hello, come talk to me.

I'm happy to be collaborative right now.

You might have another placard which says, I am in focus mode.

Don't talk to me unless there's like free pizza or cookies or puppies or something.

Or there might be another one which says, I'm in a meeting.

I'm in the office, but I'm not physically here at the moment.

Come find me later.

This is a really excellent way to visually communicate this information and keep it really concise.

At my last in-person job, I had this on my desk and it was really brilliant to tell people, this is the kind of state that I'm in right now.

We did have Slack too, but most of us were in person.

So was a great way for me to be able to tell people that without them having to look at Slack.

they're like, I'll come back later.

I'll send you a Slack for later.

If you have the right relationship with your teammates, you can also empower them to meaningfully and tactfully pull you out of that state when it's ready for it.

You may say to your team, okay, I'm going to work on this thing for a couple of hours.

At this time, I am politely asking you to let me know it's time to go do something else or to go to a meeting or to collaborate on something else.

But don't bother me until this time has...

Approached.

This depends a lot on the relationship that you have with your teammates, but in a perfect world, they would be able to do so in a way that is respectful to you.

They say, okay, at 12 o'clock we have a meeting.

So at that time or right before, I'm gonna let you know, hey, we gotta move to this meeting.

And assuming that you have good terms of them, this shouldn't be a big deal.

And you're like, okay, I will wrap this up and we can move on.

You may also need a transition time from before.

So you may ask your teammate to say, okay.

10 minutes before the meeting, need you to tell me.

That way I can wind this work down and then go to the meeting.

That way I'm not whipping this plant up by the roots.

The central theme to all of this is that hyper focus is something that

A recurring theme throughout this is hyperfocus can be spontaneous and it can be scheduled and structured.

When you know you're going to be able to really focus and lock in on something, it actually makes it a little bit easier for you to pull out of it because you're able to set

boundaries and expectations for how long you're going to be spending, what you're going to be doing, and what your on and off ramps look like.

The on ramp is you being able to say, okay, I'm ramping up to do this work, I'm prepping for it, I'm ready to go.

Then you fire away and you're hitting that cruise control.

And then you say, okay, in 10 minutes I have to ramp up.

So I'm going to go ahead and start winding things down.

I'm going to write a message to myself in the future.

I'm going to commit all my code.

I'm going to write these documents for later.

And then you off ramp and you are able to slowly, but carefully pull yourself out of the work.

That way you can go move on to the next thing.

Hyperfocus is not a flaw.

It's a feature, an amazing one at that.

And you just really need the right operating instructions, not just for you, but for your team.

Plan for your hyperfocus state and understand what it takes.

What do you need to get into it?

What do you need to get out of it?

What do you have to say to yourself?

What do you have to tell your team?

And how do you know when you're thriving in that state, when it really resonates?

And what does it look like when it doesn't?

Really think about this to yourself as you go about your work day and say, oh wow, I'm really vibing here.

And I know that I gotta wrap this up soon.

And I don't wanna let it go, but you will have to eventually.

So think to yourself about that, your hyper-focused state.