The other night I sat down in front of my laptop to finish an upgrade on my site – but it could have been anything. A task. A project. A book. In this case, I had the finished page in mind with the basic layout in place, but had a problem with a simple card flip on my Resource page.
I figured one hour max to get it done. I made good progress and got close, really close, but no matter what code I tried, I couldn’t get it right. The planned hour came and went. It got late. Then later. Then really late. But the goal was in sight, and since this was the second session on the upgrade, I kept going. A little before two in the morning, success!
When I was reflecting on this the next day, “hyperfocus” is the first word I wrote in my Rocketbook. I was diagnosed as an adult with ADD, though I suspect every teacher I ever had already knew. ADD keeps me bouncing around a lot, and it’s funny that the B-side of ADD is a laser focus on something. I remember spending an hour one night in a hotel room in Mexico trying to fix an ironing board that wouldn’t close. I tune out everything when it clicks on, even tuning out things that may be more important, like sleep. In my hyper-focused state, all my carefully constructed systems and discipline tend to take a back seat.
The real problem for me isn’t that I lose track of time. It’s that I lose track of priorities. Hyperfocus doesn’t care whether I’m building a website, writing a report, or fighting with an ironing board in a hotel room in Mexico. It just hijacks every bit of brainpower and aims it at whatever is right in front of me at the time.
Hyperfocus can be a superpower that has taken me to some amazing places. It has also left me standing in hotel rooms arguing with ironing boards. Kryptonite.