Executive Functioning and the Limits of Hyperfocus

The second in a series on executive functions, under the umbrella of “Why is it hard to do small things?”

Many years ago, I first learned about the Pomodoro method. I’m not sure if I discovered it under its official name and rules, but I immediately took to the general idea of working with a timer. I had an app on my computer that I’d set to count down in 25 or 30 minute intervals, and during that time I’d work on only one task.

It was great! As someone who was prone to distraction, it was very helpful to set a timer and work in sprints to get something done.

I remember being jet lagged after arriving in Sri Lanka, my 100^th country, and staying up most of the night to draft sections of an ebook on self-employment that I’d later sell. It felt victorious to see the sun rise and notice how the word count had grown throughout the night. 

I then wrote most of my first “real” book the same way the next year, although not in a single night. 

But over time, I felt discouraged with this working style. Or maybe frustrated is a better word—I liked it, but it wasn’t working as well as it first did.

It turns out I had missed two key things: 

1. The recovery portion is at least as important as the focus phase 

There are variations, but the traditional Pomodoro technique calls for a 25-minute work session followed by a 5 minute break. Sometimes, if I was in the flow of creative work, I’d ignore the end of the timer and just keep going. Why interrupt creativity? I thought.

Well, it turns out that the break is as crucial as the work period. Just as you “force” yourself to focus for the 25 minutes, you should stop focusing on a task to recover a bit before starting again. By skipping the recovery, you’re setting yourself up to much more fatigued. 

(And I also found that I tend to need a lot more time than just a 5-minute break. Sometimes it’s more like 10-15, or even 25 minutes—an even mix of focus and recovery—depending on the task.) 

But it was the second learning point that helped me even more.

2. Most of us have a hard limit on the number of focused sessions we can do each day. 

I did not know this! I figured that once you learned to work with timers, you could simply spend the whole day that way. 

So for example, I used to imagine that if I had an ten-hour day, I could just crush out writing sprints over and over from morning to night. Pretty soon I’d be writing several books a year! 

Alas, that’s not how it works for most authors. (There are exceptions, but they tend to be in genre fiction, repeatedly writing the same kinds of books. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what I do.) 

For me, I found that I could only get 3-4 cognitively focused work sessions at the most every day. I could do a few more sessions for other kinds of work—like on my podcast or another project—but not writing.  

In fact, this second lesson, on how most of us have a very real cognitive limit every day, is probably at least as important as the ability to focus at all. Once you know it exists, you want to protect your time and use it well.

To restate the points simply:

We need more recovery time than we think. 

We can’t focus indefinitely, even with a lot of breaks. 

(Note: the story was about me, but I deliberately wrote that summary in first-person plural. It probably applies to you, too!) 

What does this have to do with executive functioning?

This post is part of a series on why it’s so hard to do small things.

And it turns out that we usually need to learn things in stages. We need reinforcement of what we learn, but we also tend to build on knowledge in a way that advances the plot, to use a book metaphor. 

In the case of hyperfocus: 

1. If you’ve never learned to work with a timer—try it! It’s very helpful. 

2. If you love working with timers but often find yourself tired afterwards—you need to learn to rest. 

3. If you’re not skipping the rest periods but still find yourself frustrated at your inability to be a hyper focusing ninja throughout the day—you need to understand cognitive limits. 

Learning about focus in stages isn’t just about improving your work productivity. Relationships, wellness, personal goals—all these things can be improved. 

And then you can apply this concept elsewhere, to other executive functions such as:

• Emotional regulation

• Task initiation 

• Impulse control

• Working memory

All of these skills offer lessons in a series of stages. 

You don’t learn them in school (sadly), yet they turn out to be pretty essential skills for making it through life. 

We can cherry-pick and learn something that might be useful (like when I first learned to work with timers), but there’s usually a key point or two that we miss at first. Often, the deeper insights arrive over time and with more investigation.

In the next post(s) of the series, we’ll consider one of the other functions. Stay tuned! And thank you, as always, for reading. 💚

See also

Why Is It So Hard to Do Small Things?