Chris Bailey is a Canadian writer and speaker whose entire body of work grew out of an unusual decision made at the start of his career. After finishing a business degree, he turned down two full-time job offers to spend a year running productivity experiments on himself full time, documenting the results publicly on a blog he called A Life of Productivity. The experiments were often extreme — living in total isolation, working ninety-hour weeks against twenty-hour weeks, waking at half past five every morning, cutting his sleep to six hours, giving up his smartphone for a month — and the year produced both a substantial readership and his first book, The Productivity Project, which became a Canadian bestseller in 2016.
Hyperfocus, published by Viking Penguin in 2018, is his second book and marks a shift in his thinking from managing time toward managing attention. It arrived during a wave of related work on concentration in a distracted era, sitting alongside Cal Newport's Deep Work and just ahead of Nir Eyal's Indistractable. Bailey's research method involves reading extensively across scientific literature and then testing the findings on himself, which gives the book its characteristic mix of laboratory studies and firsthand reporting. Readers consistently praise how actionable his recommendations are and how unpretentious his voice is. The most common criticisms are that portions overlap with his first book, that he coins his own terminology for concepts that already have accepted names, and that he sometimes assumes readers have more control over their own schedules than many people actually do. He has since continued writing about attention, stress, and calm, and remains a widely read voice on how knowledge workers can do meaningful work in an environment designed to prevent it.
