Episode summary
One YouTube problem, five hours, and a whole day gone before he looked up. Tayvin on hyper-focus, ADD, and the fine line between being locked in and losing the big picture entirely.
T.E.A. Time is hosted by English teacher Tayvin Bayless. Read the full transcript.
Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless. If you’re here for the first time, I’m glad you’re here. I hope you decide to stick around. To my returning listeners, it’s great to have you here with me again.
Have you ever lost track of time while trying to complete a task? I know I have.
It’s pretty likely that I have ADD. That stands for attention deficit disorder. I’ve never been diagnosed by a doctor, but it’s something that runs in my family. My mother, my grandfather, and a few of my uncles have it, and I have many of the indicators of it. In some ways, I’ve been able to structure my life to deal with the biggest quirks of having ADD, but in many ways I’m still learning how to live a healthy, balanced life.
There are two seemingly contradictory ways ADD can show up. One of the most well-known is distractibility, meaning trouble focusing and being easily pulled away by whatever’s happening around you. The other is hyper-focus, being extremely locked onto one task. I’ve experienced both, but today I’m talking about hyper-focus. When I hyper-focus, I can disappear into a task for hours without noticing my tea’s gone cold, or that someone’s been talking to me for the last five minutes. It’s not that I’m ignoring people on purpose. I just genuinely don’t register that anything else is happening. This brings me to the phrase for the day: tunnel vision. Tunnel vision.
Here’s the thing about that phrase: it almost always carries a negative connotation, meaning a feeling of disapproval, when people use it. If someone says you have tunnel vision, they’re not complimenting you. They’re saying you’ve gotten so focused on one thing that everything else, the people, the deadlines, the dinner getting cold, has disappeared from view.
The phrase started out as a literal medical description: a real loss of peripheral vision, where everything outside a narrow center point goes dark, as if you’re looking down a tunnel. By the middle of the twentieth century, English speakers had borrowed that image for the mind. If your attention narrows the way your eyesight does in a tunnel, you have tunnel vision, and you’re probably about to walk right past something important.
To have tunnel vision means to focus so completely on one thing that you fail to notice everything else around you.
I have a feeling I’m going to give you a pretty good example of that today.
Yesterday I was talking with a student about the podcast, and he asked me if I was going to start a YouTube channel. I immediately told him no. I don’t like recording myself on video, I don’t enjoy taking photographs or videos, and I don’t want to add video editing as yet another thing to take up time in my day. It seemed like an easy answer. I’d keep recording episodes of my podcast, teaching students on italki, and leave YouTube for the enthusiastic videographers, meaning people who genuinely love filming and editing.
This morning I was brainstorming ideas to research and write about. I started thinking about the different audiences I have from all around the world, and what tools they use to listen to educational content. A quick Google search forced me to confront a harsh truth. Across Apple Podcasts and Spotify, there are hundreds millions of people listening to podcasts all around the world. That’s a lot of people!
YouTube has nearly 3 billion users. That’s a massive difference in market share. I realized that if I really want to help as many people as possible, I needed to start thinking differently. I still don’t want to do video recording. I still prefer not to do much video editing. But instead of thinking about all the reasons I can’t do YouTube, I began to think about what I can do.
I suddenly had a new goal: figure out how to convert my podcast audio and transcripts into videos I could post on YouTube. And that’s when the tunnel vision kicked in.
I spent every moment between classes doing research. I started exploring AI tools for adding dynamic captions to videos. None of them worked the way I wanted. One kept misspelling my own name in the captions. Another rendered everything in a terrible font I couldn’t change no matter what I tried. I looked into other options and found some programs I could run locally, meaning directly on my own computer instead of online, to get the job done. I figured out how to set them up. I worked through a few bugs, meaning small errors in the program, but by the end of it I had a working video. Not just a working video. I had five. I converted episodes one through five of Season 2 into videos, and set things up so future episodes would be simple to convert.
Excited to have solved the problem I’d set out to solve, I looked up from my computer and realized it was 8 o’clock at night. My back ached from sitting in the same position for hours, and my stomach growled loudly enough that I’m fairly sure it was trying to file a formal complaint. I hadn’t written my podcast episode yet, and I’d hardly interacted with Emma and Eliana all day.
There’s not much I can do about the lost time. As I said before, I’m still discovering how best to live with my ADD. Just like anything, there’s good and there’s bad to it.
Earlier I mentioned that the tunnel vision kicked in. Let’s flip that idea over and look at a few of its relatives: phone it in, in the zone, and locked in. All three are about effort and focus too, but they don’t all land in the same place.
“Phone it in” sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from tunnel vision. If you’re phoning it in, you’re doing the bare minimum, going through the motions without putting in real effort. The image comes from calling into a meeting instead of showing up in person, technically present, but not really there. If tunnel vision is too much focus pointed in the wrong direction, phoning it in is barely any focus at all.
“In the zone” sits closer to the middle, and in a much better spot. It’s strongly associated with basketball, and many people trace it to Michael Jordan describing his own play that way in the late 1980s. Sports psychologists later gave the same feeling a more formal name, flow, in research from the 1990s: a state where your skill and the challenge in front of you line up so well that the activity feels almost automatic.
“Locked in” describes something close to the same thing, just younger and more casual. It’s internet slang, with roots going back to around 2009, that exploded into mainstream use through social media in just the last few years. If you’re locked in, you’ve committed your full attention to a task, and nothing is pulling you away from it.
So here’s the spectrum: “phone it in” is too little effort. “Tunnel vision” is too much focus pointed at the wrong target. “In the zone” and “locked in” sit in the middle, full effort, full focus, still pointed at the right thing. The line between “locked in” and “tunnel vision” isn’t really about how focused you are. It’s about whether you can still see the big picture, even while you’re zoomed all the way in on one piece of it.
Today, I was locked in on solving a problem I’m genuinely proud of solving. Nobody could have accused me of phoning it in. But somewhere in those five hours, locked in turned into tunnel vision, and I lost track of the people I was working for in the first place.
So, the next time you catch yourself completely absorbed in something, ask where you actually are on that spectrum. In the zone, locked in, or tunnel vision? Sometimes the only difference between them is whether you remember to look up.
When things like this happen, I think it’s important not to get hyper-focused on what I should have done differently, and instead do what I can now. So when I finally realized I’d been spending more time than I’d intended on this project, I got up, walked into the living room, gave Emma a long hug, and told her how much I love her. She hugged me back and didn’t ask where I’d been all day. She already knew.
It’s exciting to learn new things and solve new problems. But I also want to do my best to give my family the time and attention they deserve. I don’t want to phone it in with the people I love most. I just need to figure out how to stay locked in without losing the big picture entirely.
And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.
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