In his book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again, Johann Hari quotes former Google strategist James Williams about what he classifies as three types of focus.

1. Spotlight:

This is when you focus on “immediate actions,” like, “I’m going to walk into the kitchen and make a coffee.” You want to find your glasses. You want to see what’s in the fridge. You want to finish reading this chapter of my book. It’s called the spotlight because as I explained earlier—it involves narrowing down your focus. If your spotlight gets distracted or disrupted, you are prevented from carrying out near-term actions like these.

2. Starlight:

This is the focus you can apply to your “longer-term goals—projects over time.” You want to write a book. You want to set up a business. You want to be a good parent. It’s called the starlight because when you feel lost, you look up to the stars, and you remember the direction you are traveling in. If you become distracted from your starlight, he said, you “lose sight of the longer-term goals.” You start to forget where you are headed.

3. Daylight:

This is the form of focus that makes it possible for you to know what your longer-term goals are in the first place. How do you know you want to write a book? How do you know you want to set up a business? How do you know what it means to be a good parent? Without being able to reflect and think clearly, you won’t be able to figure these things out.

He gave it this name because it’s only when a scene is flooded with daylight that you can see the things around you most clearly. If you get so distracted that you lose your sense of the daylight, James says, “In many ways you may not even be able to figure out who you are, what you wanted to do, [or] where you want to go.” …

You can only find your starlight and your daylight if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind-wandering, and deep thought. James has come to believe that our attention crisis is depriving us of all three of these forms of focus. We are losing our light.