3 Ways to Harness the Power of Your Unfocused Mind

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Modern productivity culture is obsessed with focus. Here's why this is sub-optimal.

• Most of us only have a few hours of focused concentration each day. If you don't master the power of your unfocused mind to get things done, you leave a lot of productivity on the table.
• Knowing how to utilize your unfocused mind productively makes you more resilient. You can still get things done when you can't block out distractions, or are unfocused for other reasons, such as days when your mental health is poor.
• Your unfocused mind, which I often refer to as your drifting mind, is better at some mental activities than your focused mind.

1. Let Your Drifting Mind Help You Decide How to Approach a Problem

This is a research-backed technique I wrote about in Stress-Free Productivity: When you're given a cognitively demanding task, do an unrelated, easy task for five minutes before starting. During that time, allow your mind to drift, but don't force or direct it. Your easy task should be one that allows your mind to wander, like folding a few pieces of laundry. When you do this, you'll typically approach your main task in a smarter way. Even if you're not aware of it, your unfocused mind has been working in the background, planning possible approaches to your main task.

2. Let AI Keep You Organized for Seemless Task Switching

Typical productivity advice is to limit your open loops. Don't start new projects until you finish others. AI tools make this advice less relevant now. Why? They make it much easier to keep track of where you are in a project. They make it possible to pick up where you left off without that being inefficient or burdensome. Used skillfully, they allow for more task switching, and make shiny object syndrome (when you get distracted by a new interest) less problematic.

The following is a key, but not widely discussed, benefit of working through your tasks in collaboration with an AI tool: At the end of a work session, or anytime you want to consolidate your progress, ask the tool to write a knowledge document detailing what you've done so far and the remaining steps.

The exact process for most easily doing this differs by tool. For example, with the paid version of Claude, you can use the projects feature. You simply hit a button to add your knowledge document to your project's persistent base. With free versions of AI tools, you can accomplish the same ends, but you'll need to copy and paste the knowledge documentation the AI writes for you into your new chats.

Even if you don't need an AI tool for your task, this tracking feature alone can make it worth incorporating into your workflow. This is especially true if you have focusing challenges due to mental health concerns, like depression, anxiety, or ADHD.

3. Utilize Your Tired Mind to Explore Connections Between Concepts

When we're tired, our cognitive defenses are lowered, and the mental guardrails that help us think in a straight line are weaker. This is ideal for creative thinking, and even exploring our “unknown unknowns” — the things we haven’t even considered yet. Innovation arises when we purposefully seek out and explore unknown unknowns.

When you're tired, try this prompt with ChatGPT or your favorite AI Chatbot:

• "I've got a vague sense that [Concept 1] is related to [Concept 2]. What might the connections be? Think outside the box. What mental models might help me see the connections?"

Here's a similar prompt for creative problem-solving:

• "I've got a vague sense that [Concept 1] might help me solve a problem. The problem is [describe a work-related problem]. What might the connections be? Think outside the box. What mental models might help me see the connections?"

If you have a specific mental model in mind already, you can ask:

• "Help me apply the mental model of [Insert name of a mental model] to the following problem: [Describe your problem in a few words]. Engage me in a guided discovery interview. Ask me 10 questions, one at a time, then summarize what we learned."

Productivity Essential Reads

The Hidden Advantage of Ultra-Successful People

AI and the Attention Crisis at Work

The following mental models are particularly useful for seeing problems from new angles: first principles, re-framing, challenging assumptions, scale dynamics, blue ocean thinking, resourcefulness within constraints, niche exploration, opportunity-cost thinking, systems thinking, emergent properties, reverse engineering, empathy mapping, trade-off analysis, and contrarian thinking.

Focus Isn't the Only Way to Get Important Things Done

Focused, deep work is a great way to get things done, but it's not the only way. When you know the strengths of your unfocused mind, and strategies for getting things done when you're unfocused, you open yourself up to new possibilities. You also make yourself a lot more resilient when being totally focused isn't an option, or you've exhausted your focused capacity for that day.