“Complexity means distracted effort. Simplicity means focused effort.”
Books about focusing are invaluable guides for many of us, especially these days. In our world of instant information and snappy forms of entertainment, many experts now claim that overstimulating and overloading our brains has led to our attention spans shortening. And it is certainly true that having so much available at our fingertips can make us feel like our ability to focus is suffering. But, focusing is a skill that can be exercised and learned. Plenty of strategies, habits and lifestyle changes can be taken advantage of to help us stay on point and get things done more efficiently. Which is why we here at What We Reading thought we would take a look across the board at the best focus books. These picks are all designed for readers to learn more about why they struggle with focusing, and how they can remedy it.
Deep Focus: Rules For Focused Success In A Distracted World – Cal Newport
First up on our list of books about focusing is Cal Newport’s acclaimed Deep Focus. In it, he coins the term ‘deep work’. Deep work is the ability to focus without distractions on a demanding task. By being able to quickly decipher complicated information in quicker time, deep work makes you better at what you do, produces better results and provides a sense of fulfilment. In short, it is a superpower in our competitive twenty-first-century world of emails and social media.
A mix of cultural commentary and actionable advice, author and professor Newport splits the book into two parts. The first half is a case that any profession in the world requires a deep work ethic and the benefits it will bring. The second serves as a rigorous training regime broken down into four ‘rules’ that help readers transform their minds and habits to better help support this skill.
Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – And How To Think Deeply Again – Johann Hari
In the United States, teenagers can only focus on one task for just sixty-five seconds at a time. In the office, workers can only average three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari found himself jumping from device to device, tab to tab, in what was becoming a depressing way to live. After trying and failing at all manner of self-help tutorials, he set off on an epic adventure across the world to interview leading experts on human attention – learning that everything we thought we knew was wrong.
In his bestselling focus book Stolen Focus, Hari claims that our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us vulnerable to corporate greed. Taking readers from favelas in Brazil to Silicon Valley dissidents hacking human attention, he runs through the twelve deep causes of this crisis. An empowering call to action, Stolen Focus changes the debate about attention and shows how we can reclaim our focus, if we’re prepared to fight for it.
Indistractable: How To Control Your Attention And Choose Your Life – Nir Eyal And Julie Li
Nir Eyal is a former Stanford lecturer, behavioural design expert and bestselling author of Silicon Valley’s handbook for making technology habit-forming. After publishing Hooked, Eyal reveals the Achilles’ heel of distraction in his 2019 book about focusing, Indistractable.
Across Indistractable, Eyal reveals the hidden psychology driving us to distraction. He outlines how solving the problems of distractions goes much further than just switching off our devices, explaining how abstinence often just makes us want something more. Instead, he offers a research-backed four-step model that overturns conventional wisdom on how to get the best out of technology.
Hyperfocus: How To Be More Productive In A World Of Distraction – Chris Bailey
The most recent neuroscientific research on attention reveals that our brains have two powerful modes that are unlocked when we use attention well; a more focused mode (hyperfocused), the foundation of being productive, and a creative mode (scatterfocus), which allows us to connect ideas in novel ways.
Chris Bailey’s Hyperfocus is one of the best books about focusing for readers unlocking both these aspects of the brain so that they can concentrate more deeply, think more clearly and both work and live more deliberately. Unveiling how focus is more of a balance between two frames of mind, Bailey mixes his approachable voice and ability to dissect theories and science to make this one of the most accessible guides to building up our attention spans.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals – Oliver Burkeman
Nobody needs to tell us that we don’t have enough time in our lives. Assuming we each live to be eighty years old, we all have just over four thousand weeks. Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks takes aim at the overfilled inboxes, work-life balance and battle against distraction, and exposes how the conventional techniques for becoming more optimised, productive and effective usually make things worse.
Drawing on insights from both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists and spiritual teachers, Four Thousand Weeks is an entertaining, practical and profound guide to time, time management and how to make the most of our four thousand weeks. Rather than focusing on how to get everything done, Burkeman introduces readers to the tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing making your own choices.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit Of Less – Greg McKeown
Greg McKeown introduces the concept of the ‘Way of the Essentialist’ in his book about focusing, Essentialism. In it, he explains how the Way of the Essentialist’ isn’t about getting more done in less time. Rather, it is about getting only the right things done. Neither a productivity technique nor a time management tool, McKeown demonstrates how it is a systematic discipline for understanding what is absolutely essential and eliminating everything else that isn’t.
By focusing on applying more selective criteria for what counts as ‘essential’, Essentialism helps readers reclaim control of our choices behind where we spend our time and energy. One of the most important reads for anyone looking to do less, but better, in every area of their lives.
Focus: The Hidden Driver Of Excellence – Daniel Goleman
Psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman delves into the science of attention, in all its forms, and how this underrated mental asset matters so much in how we navigate life in his book about focusing, Focus.
Goleman boils down attention research into three: inner, other and outer focus. A well-lived life requires us to be nimble at each of these. Featuring a combination of case studies from across sports, art, education and business, cutting-edge research and practical findings, he explains how attention is like a muscle in how it can grow or decline depending on how we use it. To thrive in a distraction-filled, complex world, Focus calls upon readers to keep their attention on what matters most to them as well as the pressing problems across the wider world and arms them with the practices needed to accomplish this.
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The 80/20 Principle: The Secret To Achieving More With Less – Richard Koch
In his book about productivity and focus, Richard Koch introduces readers to the ‘80/20 principle’, one of the best-kept secrets behind highly effective people and organisations. Koch unveils how readers can achieve better results by honing their time, energy and efforts on the twenty per cent of a task that actually matters.
Whilst the principle has traditionally been applied to the business world, Koch reveals how the principle works and demonstrates how we can use it in a systematic and practical way to increase our effectiveness, improving our careers and companies in the process. Another one of the best books to improve focus, it is a great guide for understanding where we should be spending our time and energy.
18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction And Get The Right Things Done – Peter Bregman
Based on his Harvard Business Review columns, Peter Bregman’s 18 Minutes is one of the best books on focusing for showing how busy people cut through the daily clutter to find a way of spending their attention on their top priorities.
18 Minutes works off the premise that the best way of combatting constant interruptions is by creating our own productive distractions. Through snappy chapters, Bregman’s approach helps readers navigate through the chatter of social media, emails, texts, phone calls and meetings that take up the bulk of our time. Blending first-person insights with unique case studies, 18 Minutes is an insightful book of pathways which helps guide readers onto the right path in eighteen minutes or less.
Make Time: How To Focus On What Matters Every Day – Jake Knapp And John Zeratsky
In a world where information refreshes endlessly and working feels like a race to react to other people’s priorities, ‘distracted’ has become our default position. As creators of Google Ventures’ renowned ‘design sprint’, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky have helped hundreds of teams combat this reality by changing the way in which they work.
From Gmail to YouTube, they spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines, searching for ways in which they could help people optimise their energy, focus and time. Make Time is a collection of their most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework that anyone can use to design their days. Unlike other books about focus, this is not a one-size-fits-all guide. Rather, Make Time uses bite-size tips and strategies that can be tailored to individual habits and routines. Knapp and Zeratsky’s book is for readers looking for more hours in the day and the ultimate resource for helping you stop passively reacting to the demands of the modern world, and start intentionally making time for the things that matter.
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Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
