How to Focus, Solved

0:00Welcome to solved everybody. My name is Mark Manson and today I have a question for you. Is your focus so shattered that you read the same paragraph four times, understand none of it, and then reward yourself by checking your phone, and now you're three Instagram reels deep into a video of a golden retriever learning to skateboard, and you can't even remember what you were trying to

0:21read in the first place. Me neither. How did I get here? What is this studio? And where's my phone? Well, here's the thing that nobody tells you about focus. The people who are worst at it are usually the ones trying the hardest. They're the ones white knuckling their way through a work session mentally screaming, "Don't check your phone. Don't check your phone." Which, as it turns out, is one of the most reliable ways to make sure you check your phone. The point is, focus is not a test of willpower. It's a system of rules, stages, and failure modes that nobody ever bothered to explain to you. And once you stop treating it like a character flaw and start

0:57treating it like a design problem, the whole issue changes. So in this episode of Solve, we're going to talk about why your brain treats every open browser tab, unfinished task, and unanswered text like an unpaid debt it can't stop thinking about. We're going to talk about the ancient monks who described your exact scrolling problem in the 4th century. We're going to talk about why trying not to be distracted literally makes you more distracted and the psychological experiment that proves it involves a white bear. We're going to talk about what bees hunting for nectar can teach you about why you can't stop watching Netflix. We're going to talk about the single

1:32most distracting thing you keep in your workspace. And hint, it's hurting your focus even when it's turned off and face down. We're going to talk about why flow states are not a mystical gift. They're an engineering problem with a specific set of conditions that you can easily set up in your favor. We'll also talk about the difference between an ADHD brain and a neurotypical brain that explains why someone can play video games for 6 hours but can't fold laundry for 6 minutes. We'll get into the philosophical question no productivity system ever bothers to ask you. You've learned how to focus, but what is your focus actually for? Because that is actually

2:09the only question that matters. In this episode, we are going to dismantle a lot of stories that you are probably carrying around about your own brain and your own attention. Because once you understand how attention actually works, I'm not talking about the motivational poster version of attention, but the real psychological neurological machinery going on, it stops feeling like a moral failing, and it stops feeling like something you're losing. Instead, it feels like something you can finally design and control. My name is Mark Manson. I'm a three-time number one New York Times bestselling author. And this is Drew Bernie, my co-host, producer, lead researcher, and the only man in North America to be formally uninvited from two separate TED conferences. Dude,

2:50get it together. And this is Solved, the most comprehensive podcast in the world, where every episode we aim to solve one question in your life once and for all.

3:07I want to set the stage and this is totally selfish on my part because as you know I'm I am a David Foster Wallace stan uh and he had an absolutely brilliant book called Infinite Jess that I think everybody tries to read at some point and nobody can get get through because it requires too much focus. Uh it's about 1,200 pages. It is extremely long and dense and goes on a million different tangents, but the brilliance of that book is just the format of the book itself is a meta commentary on focus itself and the struggles of focus and modern life. And so I kind of like bringing up the this book as just kind of a backdrop to this episode. I think

3:48it it it's one of those things that he was very prophetic when he wrote it. It came out in 1995. It came out pre- internet, pre social media, pre- cellphone. Uh but the the premise of the book is that there is a piece of entertainment that is so entertaining that when you show it to somebody, they will literally die because they would rather watch this piece of entertainment than eat, sleep, talk to other human beings, bathe, do whatever. And so everybody who sees this piece of entertainment ends up dying from it. As a result, the piece of entertainment and it's funny because in the book it is it is known as the entertainment and the amazing thing is that in the

4:30book the the entertainment becomes an instrument of terrorism and it is leveraged politically by various groups to uh basically terrorize the recipients of it. very prophetic then yes in many ways I mean it's it's I think what what Wallace captures is that technology was ascending to a place where things were so addictive so engaging so mesmerizing that it was starting to destroy us both cognitively and physically and I think he would argue spiritually what's interesting about the book as well and Infinite Jessica kind of has an A story line and a B story What's interesting is nobody ever talks about the B story line which is about a recovering drug addict and his

5:15experience going through all the various rehabs and recovery centers. And it's funny because when you're reading the book it keeps cutting away to this this former addict and like he's in a halfway house and he's like struggling with his addiction and it for like 500 pages you're like what's with this guy? Why do we keep coming back to him? And I think what's interesting is that what I think what Wallace was implicating was that many of the same skills and mindsets necessary in addiction recovery were soon going to be required like a prerequisite for all of us when confronting technology and entertainment in our lives. That might be the real prophetic part then,

5:55huh? It that that's just it's just an interesting point that I'm going to leave out there. Okay. I'll return to the book periodically throughout throughout the episode just because I I do think the book makes some very very salient points around the issues of attention and focus and how it's affecting us and how it how it's affecting society. Uh what's interesting though is that this idea that our attention spans are being destroyed has been pretty much common place for my entire life, your entire life as well, going all the way back to the '9s. I remember being a kid and uh my grandparents telling me that the the television was rotting my brain and how video games were

6:35going to destroy my ability to do anything useful in the world. Not true. When we were young adults, people were saying the same thing about social media and and smartphones. And now people are saying the same thing about AI. It seems to be a prophecy that just never quite comes true. Uh and a lot of people have made a lot of money uh proliferating this prophecy that never comes true. I remember in 2008 there was a book called The Shallows. I don't know if you ever read it by a guy named Nicholas Carr. He was a journalist at the New York Times. And the entire book was

7:07all of the ways that we were becoming stupid and illiterate and uh losing our ability to focus and pay attention to anything. And this was I mean this was really just about Google in the internet much less like I don't even think like Facebook was that big at the time. What's interesting is that if you go back and look at that book now, it is a comprehensive 300page exercise in and in and how correlation is not causation. U there's a lot of like handwaving and and freaking out about things that are are uh various studies of and and indicators that are going on in society, but

7:45um with with the with the benefit of hindsight, we kind of know now that none of the stuff that he was worried about ended up coming true. So this question is our attention spans getting worse? Are we losing our ability to focus? I feel like subjectively we all feel like this is the case. I feel like we're all struggling with it a lot more. There was a famous headline that

8:06came out in 2015 claiming that uh the human attention span was now less than a goldfish. And the goldfish is of course the thing that is most famous for having a lack of attention span. Turns out this was [ __ ] Uh this was based on a marketing report from Microsoft. Um and it leveraged some third party data that they never really specified where it came from, right? never peer-reviewed, never validated in any way. Yeah. And it's what's even funnier, too, is that it turns out that uh goldfish do have long-term memories, which they're used in memory studies, even to like they're used in learning and memory studies. I didn't know that

8:43until we uh researched this episode. You can give them tests just like like rats and mice and stuff like that and they use them in memory and learning studies. They actually have very good memories. Isn't attention span. Just ironic. This is just such a beautiful irony. It's just a sticky idea. is always Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there has been some recent research into our working memories and different cognitive functions and and the truth of the matter is and and this is not a sexy headline. This is not a a super spicy hook that's going to get people like, "Oh my god, I need to listen to the rest of this episode." But it's basically the hard data is showing that

9:18the our fundamental ability to focus, to remember things is not being destroyed. like there's not some inherent destruction happening in our brains due to the technology. And I think that's what everybody's afraid of. I think what's happening, and this is what we're going to discover in this episode, is simply that our brains didn't evolve to be in these environments, and we're in a new environment where the inputs are plentiful and quite different and and so there is an adaptation that has to happen that is simply not happen. And what's interesting is that this experience of us being in a new environment, this has happened with every wave of technology. You can go back,

10:02you know, we talked about TV and video games when we were kids. People, there were moral panics around the radio. But when that came out, when novels were introduced in the 19th century, uh, adults freaked out that children weren't be able weren't going to be able to to pay attention long enough to make important life decisions because their their heads were going to be buried in books the entire time reading some fantastical story about something. I mean, you can go all the way back. There's a fantastic book about depression called the noonday demon and the author talks about medieval Christian monks going back 800 years ago and how they wrote extensively about

10:39a concept called aidia which was like a restless mental state that drove them to constantly check doors and sweep floors and and check in on their their fellow monks because they they couldn't sit still. They like needed to distract themselves constantly. This panic around distraction and the inability to focus. It is as old as humanity itself. It is a struggle that has been everpresent in every different permutation of society, every different kind of technology. What has changed has simply been the intensity of the environment that we've been placed in. And as that intensity of the environment shifts and changes uh the nature of us having to balance our focus versus our distraction

11:25um changes as well. So if we look at the modern age and all the current technology that we have, we simply have to ask ourselves what is different now like what are the challenges and issues that we're confronted with that our parents were or our grandparents were. uh what do we have to to deal with that is particularly unique and difficult? Um and there's plenty of them, right? I mean, I think for the fact is just the the everpresent access to an infinite amount of information in and of itself is a constant issue. There's all sorts of studies that just show that having your

12:00phone in the room removes your ability to focus or pay attention as much as you normally do. I remember there was uh there was one study and I I don't know how reputable this study was, but I remember reading an article about it like 10 years ago. They found that when people had dinner with the phone on the table, they paid less attention to the conversation they were having. Never seen that too. Yeah. Even if they didn't even if they didn't pick up the phone, even if they didn't look at the phone, just the fact that the phone is on the table. Yeah. There's been other studies that have basically said if you if you've got it in view while you're working or

12:30anything like that, you're way more distractable. Yeah. Yeah. So I I just think that the constant presence of the opportunity for distraction makes the distraction more likely, right? There's also a removal of stopping cues, which this is an interesting concept. If you think about media, say pre- internet, pre phone, pre- newswsfeed. Um there was always a clear end that you hit, right? You hit the end of the movie, you hit the last page of the book or the last page of the chapter. Uh you hit the end of a a radio show. These days there's no end. There's like a little container for everything. It's by design, right? It's just like it's just this endless scroll,

13:08this endless feed. This it's as soon as you finish one video, the next video is immediately queued up. And so there's no there's no clear demarcation of for your brain of like, okay, I'm done with Tik Tok now. I can go do something else. Do you remember it was probably I don't know five or six years ago that I think it was Instagram toyed with that a little bit. They're like you would scroll and you would hit a point and they're like, "Okay, you're all caught up." And then, you know, you're like, "Oh, okay." Yeah. Whatever happened to that? Oh, they I think it lasted like a few

13:34months and they were like, "We're we we're losing money." Yeah. Their shareholders clearly did not like that. Yeah. There's a collapse in switching costs, which is interesting. I we're going to talk about switching costs quite a bit later when when we talk about multitasking and and you know, certain practices to avoid when you're trying to focus more and be more productive. A switching cost is is the amount of mental effort that it takes to to move from one paying attention to one task to another task. And the higher the switching cost, the more uh the more friction there is to leave that first task. And so the higher the switching cost, the more likely you are to focus

14:10on the first thing and and to stick with it for a long period of time. So, when switching costs are reduced, when switching from Tik Tok to Netflix is as simple as just closing one app and opening the other, uh, you're much more likely to switch back and forth. I don't know about you, man, but like it's funny, like I remember when I was a kid, you'd kind of just turn on the TV and maybe you flip through like 10 or 12 channels. You just find the best thing that was on and you just leave it there. Whereas like now when I get on Netflix or or or Hulu or Apple or whatever, I I'll start

14:45a show and then I I'll I'll like stress for 10 minutes of like, is this the best show? Is there a better show? Maybe I should go maybe I should go start another show and see how that first 10 minutes is. And then I I'll like I'll actually end up spending an hour and not watch anything just trying to find something. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's such a paradoxical weird thing. And then finally, there's there's a concept called variable reward design. And this is actually speaking of addiction, this is the basis uh you know, this is why why things like gambling become addictive is because you're rewarded, but you're rewarded in in unpredictable time frames and in unpredictable

15:23amounts. And there's just something about our neurological circuitry that like when rewards are unpredictable, we just want to sit there and keep hitting the button and see what comes up next. And then this, of course, doesn't even get into the the algorithmic recommendations, the the autoplay, the personalization. Um it it's just we're we live in such a different attention environment than any other humans uh in in history that it makes sense that we are seemingly struggling more than ever before. But again, people mistake the the increased struggle for focus and attention for an increased inability to focus and attention. And there's nothing fundamental within us that has

16:09broken or been changed or altered permanently. the machinery is all still there. And anybody who's gone through a digital detox or, you know, disconnected, gone on a vacation, maybe gone up to the cabin in the woods, you notice that within a day or two your brain kind of resets and you're you're there's this like relief that happens when you're not constantly being inundated anymore. Yeah. I think there was this guy way back in the 70s actually who kind of called this and and saw this coming. It was this Herbert Simon. um he worked I I believe he worked in uh kind of like the consulting world the business consulting world and what he noticed was that the problem like

16:46you were saying basically was that it it wasn't necessarily information production had become very cheap at that point even even back then in the 70s that was a big trend uh that he saw is like being able to produce information was becoming cheaper easier faster we were just starting to come into this whole society this whole world of cheap and abundant information. That's what changed. Yeah. And so there was all these companies. He said, "All you companies are focusing on producing this information. The real resource now though is going to be the attention needed to process all of that." And we're still living through that over 50 years later, even when he he called that

17:24back in the 70s. So yeah. Yeah. In Silicon Valley, this is known as the attention economy. And it's Yeah. You've written about this before. Yeah. And it it is ultimately like whatever whatever the new scarcity is, that's the driver of value. And so if you can if you can hold and maintain people's attention the longest, then you can monetize it the most. That's that's the it's the new currency of today's Aren't people just weird? We figured out a way to monetize attention. That's just wild. But here we are. Yeah. Here we are. Here we are. So, the best way I've conceptualized this, and this is this is maybe uh again, I think this kind of lays the framework for for where

17:59this episode is going to go, but I wrote I wrote an article way back in 2018 called the attention diet. And I think the metaphor that I found that lands for a lot of people is to think of the information around you like food, right? So it's if you go back 100 years ago, 200 years ago, food was scarce. Uh and you had to actually work for your own food. And because of that, you you didn't see as much obesity. You didn't see as much heart disease. You didn't see as much, you know, uh diabetes and all these other uh problems that come from the modern food system. Well, what

18:33happened was food got industrialized. It no longer became scarce. There was actually an abundance of it. And because there was an abundance, there became a competition to uh make food as pleasing as possible, as as addictive as possible. And so what do you get? You get a rise in obesity. You get a rise in diabetes. You get all these health problems that start emerging because people start eating a bunch of crap and they don't know how to stop. So as a result, people had to learn how to go on a diet. They had to learn how to to control their own urges, stop themselves from indulging on

19:09certain things. They had to learn a little bit about nutrition, about what was good for them, what was bad for them. And then you got the health movement that kind of spawned in response to the industrialized food system. I think the exact same thing is happening with information. For most of human history, information was scarce. You had to work really hard to get it. And so people cognitively speaking were quite lean and healthy. They were just deprived. They didn't have much optionality and they didn't have much abundance. Now information is completely abundant. And because it's abundant, it is now competing all the time for your attention. And

19:44because it's competing all the time for your attention, it becomes it's kind of like the junk food of information, right? It's like super salty and sweet and it's very addictive and you be you start to compulsively consume it. And so the same way we had to develop uh awareness and understanding around our physical health, I think we have to develop an awareness and understanding around ourformational health and our attentional health and understand okay yeah this is like the junk food of information. I need to learn how to cut myself off from it. I have to learn how to control my my impulses, my urges. Maybe understand where they're coming from because otherwise you'll

20:21become mentally and cognitively obese, diabetic, whatever, whatever, how, however far you want to extend this metaphor. And I do think that this is very much what David Foster Wallace was getting at in Infinite Jest is he he said that ultimately you have to take kind of the monklike self-control of a recovery addict and you have to apply that to watching TV or in the these days it would be using

20:54Okay. Well, so I'm glad you brought up the food analogy already, uh, because I think a lot of this episode is going to be, uh, kind of focused around that. Okay. So, to explain kind of how your mind works when we're focused or distracted, right? I first want to talk about bees a little bit here. Okay. All right. I'm excited. And yeah, bees and how they forage for nectar. Let me guess. Our the human attention span is now less than a bees. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not at all. Not at all. So, so, okay, this actually comes from what's called optimal foraging theory. Okay, this is in

21:30biology, right? Basically, like imagine you're a bee in a meadow, okay? And you're flying around and you find a patch of flowers, okay? And you land on a patch of flower. They're full of nectar. You're like, "Hell yeah, [ __ ] yeah." You start just going to town. Yeah. You get nectar drunk, right? You're just you're hammering nectar. First sip's great, second sip's great. You're going for a while. You're hopping around this little patch that's all close together. You're hitting all these. You're draining them all, right? After a little while, though, you start to notice that, oh, okay, it's a little bit harder for me to get nectar out of these flowers here. Mhm. You face a

22:01dilemma at that point. At what point do you leave that little patch and go look for a new patch, okay, of of flowers for nectar? Okay. This is this is what's called the explore exploit dilemma. Okay. Okay, in in animal behavior and biology, okay, the dilemma is when do you leave? If you have a patch of food somewhere, like what's the optimal time to leave that patch and look for another one? Okay, all animals face this dilemma. All animals do, humans included. You know, when we were nomadic tribes, we would go and we would find a patch of berries or or animals even too that we

22:35were following. At what point is it optimal for us to stick around and exploit that patch of food, right, versus leaving? Because if you overh harvest then you potentially destroy the plants and the vegetation and then you like kill the food source for the future. And that's part of it. The other part of it though too is like you already said there's an energy cost. There's a cost to switch, right? There's a cost associated with um do I leave this patch? There's energy that you

23:01have to spend to go off to this other and and find another patch. There's a risk you're taking too. You're like I have a a food source here. it's depleting, but do I keep exploiting it or do I take the risk and go try to find something better? Okay. Okay. So, those are kind of the two the the risk benefit that you're weighing here. Right. Now your brain works much the same way when it's processing information like you were saying like information is food in the environment for us for our brains right in much the same way we come upon a patch of information whether that's looking at

23:34your phone reading a book having a conversation scrolling through social media working on a task that you need to work on. All of those are patches of information, right? And your your brain is going in there and it's either exploiting them and eating it all up just like the bee floating around to these flowers or it's deciding, h okay, not a whole lot here. I'm going to go on to something else. Okay. So, again, in in the information age that we live in now, what's changed is there's all this information out there and we have to decide what to exploit and what to explore. So, it sounds like this is my Netflix dilemma, right? 100% when there's 400 shows, I just

24:12want to keep exploring and I don't want to like sit and exploit any single show. Exactly. Whereas back when I was a kid Exactly. in Texas and we had three channels on, I just exploited the [ __ ] out of each channel, right? Because that's what you had, right? That's what that's what was there. That was your information environment in that case, right? Now, there was this other researcher uh back in the 70s. His name was Eric Charov and he came up with this idea. It's called marginal value theorem. Okay, it doesn't matter the name. You know, all these names are so sexy. Yeah, I'm I'm just going to start adding theorem to the end of everything. Yeah, it makes it sound smart,

24:48right? It's very simple though. Basically, um what he found was that animals in a food patch of any kind, the optimal time to leave is when your uh the marginal reward, which is like the next bite you take or the next berry you find, whatever it is, uh is it drops below the average reward that you're getting. So basically like your brain is comparing even in a in a whether it's whether it's a food patch, whether it's an information patch, whatever it is, it evaluates the entire environment that you're in first. Okay? And it compares whatever you're focused on at the moment to the rest of the environment. Y okay. And if whatever you're focusing on right now isn't as

25:25rewarding as what you would expect from the rest of the environment, you're you're going to you're going to [ __ ] off basically, right? Um and so this again translates very well to the information uh environment that we live in now too. Uh there was another guy this Peter Peroli, he wrote this book called the information forging theory which basically finds the exact same thing. We follow that same pattern that animals do in a in a patch of food in in an information patch that we're rumaging through that we're foraging through. What this really tells us though is that modern distraction, it really is a rational response to what's going on to this

26:02these environmental changes that you've you've already laid out for us, right? There's all these distorted signals in our environment. They're artificially inflated exploration signals. Ah, specifically of what's going on, right? Gotcha. And so this is like it's just a really good way to frame this is like, okay, is my brain in exploit mode or explorer mode right now? And why? Okay, and I'll we'll get into this a little bit more, but that I think is is kind of keeping the food metaphor going here. This is um this is kind of the modern environmental information landscape that we're in. And this can this can explain a lot of the problems um that we face and show

26:42us a lot of the solutions as well. Yeah. So then it makes sense if you narrow the the opportunities to explore, right? If you like cut yourself off from certain information sources, then it is it is going to just naturally strike your brain as more useful to exploit, right? To go deep on one thing to spend a ton of time, you know, let's just let's watch this entire show or let's read this entire book. Whereas if as you expand your information avo that that calculus that's going on inside of your brain which is really it sounds like it's happening at a very like base motivational level 100% is yes that that it's it's never

27:28going to seem worth it and I dude I run into this all the time like all the time. Uh, so X, formerly known as Twitter, they just launched a like a new al they were very public about it. They they updated their al algorithm to to preference long form articles. And so there's all these long form articles that are popping up on my on my X feed. And so I'm scrolling and I I keep seeing all these articles and I'll click on one and I'll read like two paragraphs and I'm like, I'm going to go back to to scrolling. And like I've I've read like the first two or three paragraphs of so

27:59many articles and I've not finished a single one and it's just because I'm in this environment of like well I know there's like 18 other articles I could read in the next 20 seconds so like why would I waste my time on this one? Right. Yeah. So a lot of what we're going to be talking about is

28:13setting up those limits and and putting containers on things. Yeah. Uh so as to prevent all of that. It's the same type of thing though too or if you have your phone in your environment that's that's a source of information whatever it is. The It's interesting. So, um I was just doing some like light renovations to my house and I didn't have a TV for several months. I was like, I was not watching wa watching a lot of TV anyway. So, I kind of got my living room set back up and I put the TV back up and immediately that's like, you know, it's a source of of uh like

28:42noise in my environment that I can go to for some variable rewards uh for just alternate sources of information environment. And sure enough, like I got distracted a whole bunch. Yeah. Yeah. I've had And your kitchen's still not finished. And my kitchen. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, okay. What exactly is going on in the brain though when we we are in let's say exploit versus explore

29:04mode. Okay. I won't get too far into the weeds of this. I'm going to go high level with it. But there's some really cool stuff. uh back in the mid 2000s there was this uh there were these researchers who um found that this part of your brain the locus uh cerillius which is uh it's it's a midbrain kind of small structure midbrain but it does um direct our attention a lot or it has has a lot to do with direct directing our attention. They found that norepinephrine in this um region kind of regulated that switch between explore and exploit. Okay. At least to some degree. Like um basically when there's like burst of norepinephrine in this part of your brain,

29:41you're more likely to be like kind of locked in on something and and focused on it. Okay. And then when as the you know you're you're into something, you're looking at it and then you know your attention starts to kind of fade a little bit that norepineph those norepinephrine bursts are kind of coming down and you're coming more towards what they call a tonic phase which is kind of a baseline phase and and your mind starts to wander at that point. There's also, of course, dopamine plays a big role in this, too. A lot of people, like there's a misconception out there,

30:09and we've talked about this before. People think dopamine is like the reward chemical. It's not. It's a motivation chemical. It's like what it it's it's motivating you to pay attention to something or to or to um approach something uh out in your environment. Um well, so okay, because there there there was a fad for quite a while. I think it started in the pandemic and it lasted up to maybe a year or two ago, but you saw this on YouTube quite a bit of dopamine detoxes, which was really

30:38just removingformational sources from your own life so that you were more often in exploit mode. Um, it sounds like that that was just a misnomer that you're not actually, you know, by removing your phone and and not using TV or playing video games and just having a stack of books next to you for 5 days, you're not really doing a dopamine detox. You're really just removing opportunities to go into explore mode. like well is it a misnomer or or is it I don't know if I'd say it's necessarily a misnomer because what's going on there like when when you do have kind of higher levels of dopamine especially in your prefrontal cortex which is like executive function and you

31:20know direct you're telling yourself consciously like hey pay pay attention to this thing. Yeah. Um and then dopamine comes in and whether you're motivated to continue to pay attention to that thing or not. If you have your phone out though, what's happening is you're like, I'm going to go search another little dopamine patch over here. Yeah. What you're doing is you're dividing up that dopamine between different sources, I think, is what's going on. So, I guess it's a little bit of a misnomer. Um because Yes. It's not a dopamine detox necessarily. It's that you're you're you're trying to uh generate more uh endogenous forms of of dopamine. Yes. And kind of intrinsic forms of

31:56it rather than all these external forms. I guess that's a useful way to think about it. Yeah. I mean, I was always I was always skeptical of it because I'm like, well, aren't you if if you're training yourself to just be excited and motivated to like sit in a quiet house and read books for a week. That's still a form of dopamine, right? Like, you know, so it's it's not Yeah, I think it's it's not that the dopamine goes away because then you'd probably just be a slug, but like it it's it's being instead of being directed towards a hundred different things, it's being directed towards like two things. That's more accurate, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

32:30so yeah, you have that you have that uh the dopamineergic u factors there. The there's also kind of like two brain networks that all of these different chemicals there's other neurochemicals too. So we're oversimplifying just so you know, but there's kind of two main brain uh networks that map pretty well to explore and exploit mode. Uh the exploit mode is called the task positive

32:53network and it it's that's high focus, high efficiency, your narrowing of your sensory gates. So like any sensory information is coming in. Um if the task positive network is really online, you're focused on something like this is when you shut everything out uh from the outside, sensory cues become really dull. You're not paying attention to temperature or noises or anything

33:12like that, right? Then you have the default mode network. This is like self-referential. You're thinking about yourself. Your your mind's wandering. It's literally distracted. Um it's it's it's trying to find something to latch on to basically in the environment, right? Yeah. So those the your your brain and the brain chemicals kind of map onto those two different networks like that. So obviously when we want to focus, we want to be more in that task positive network and outside of the default mode network. When we get into flow, we'll talk a little bit more about that self-referential thing uh and the default mode network. But yeah, for now, just suffice it to

33:47say, there's kind of these two main networks that are at play here and competing with each other. Okay. Okay. For metabolic resources. Metabolic resources. Yeah. Yeah. Just energy in general. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm I don't want to spoil it, but I'm going to guess, you know, because every people when you experience flow, you kind of lose track of yourself. I'm guessing that that that's not a coincidence. That this probably explains that, right? That's a good little teaser for a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Stay tuned. And then, yeah, last thing I'll mention though, too, um, we're going to revisit a brain reasoning we we actually talked about in the resilience episode,

34:19which is the anterior singulate cortex. If you remember that, that was kind of the I I called that the resilience muscle, if you would, right? And really, what's going on in the anterior singul cortex, one of the functions they we believe anyway, is that it's a costbenefit analysis, right? So like in the resilience episode I talked about how if you are uh engaged in some difficult task the ACC is like is this worth it basically that's it's contributing to that that calculation anyway same thing with focus here right is is this information patch in terms of focus we're in focus terms is it worth it to stick here or not okay um and this is influenced by that the locus

35:02curelius like I said it comes in and it uh there's connections to it that influence whether or not you're going to stick with this task or not. And and the ACC kind of says, "Okay, is it worth it or not for me to stick in this patch, the resilience side of it, you can work this out. It is a little bit like a muscle um where at first you don't think it's necessarily worth it, but if you stick with it, then you find something that is and then it's kind of self-reinforcing and all that. We'll kind of get into that as well, but that's kind of the main overly simplified brain uh the the

35:32neurobiology of focus that for our purposes that we're going to use going forward. Okay. Now, for the exploration mode though, too, this is actually kind of important, too. There's there's different kinds of exploration that not all exploration is made equal, right? They have what they what's called directed versus random exploration. And you can probably already guess which one we kind of want to go towards usually anyway, right? Directed is really just it's intentional. You're like, "Okay, something's not working here. I need to go find some other piece of information, so I need to go explore." That's very intentional. You're like, "I have a goal in mind. I know where

36:05I'm going with it. It's going to help me probably be rewarding in some kind of way, right?" The random is more just like mind wandering. You're like, "This sucks. I have no idea what's next. I'm just going to let my mind wander. I'm going to scroll Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok, whatever." Um, and then, uh, there's there's really just an increase in volatility noise in your in your brain going on at this point, right? We obviously use both. Um, and when when uncertainty is is relatively low, we usually bias towards more the the directed. Okay? So, it's like, okay,

36:41I kind of know what I need to do here, so I'm going to go off and directly explore something. versus when uncertainty is high. Like I said, like I don't know if this is you're you're on Netflix and you're like, I don't know if this is going to be any good next, right? That's kind of the difference. Now, the main thing to take away from that from the random versus directed types of exploration, you can be more intentional about this, right? You can you can really distinguish these in your brain. We talked a little bit about this in the procrastination episode, but like when you are when you do switch a task, ask yourself, am I doing this? Is this teaching me something? Is

37:15this switch actually going to teach me something? Am I actually going to gain or am I just escaping from the uncertainty and all the anxiety that that brings up as well? Okay. Um, you can also kind of design this for intentional cycling too. So, this is the other thing is that not all, like I said, not all exploration is necessarily bad. You know, there's this there's a story of like Charles

37:37Darwin was obviously a very prolific uh scientist and writer. Uh he struggled with focus though too. He struggled with distraction a lot. So he had a routine and we'll get into all the routines and everything like that. But he would have times where he would sit down and he had these deep focus hours and he'd sit at his desk and he'd think through these things and look through data and all of that. And when he got stuck, he would intentionally go on these walks that he had. I think he lived by the ocean. M um and he would go on these walks and um he had this system for like

38:09um he'd do these laps around this one pond I think or whatever it was and he had this system of like stones that would count how many laps he did and all of this where he would didn't have to think about it but he just let his mind wander during this very directed uh exper exploration that he did and then he would come back and a lot of times you know you it's like those shower thoughts you have like oh something popped up in this during this time so it's not necessarily that explore mode is bad I don't want to get to that obviously ly there's a time and a place for it. It's just

38:35that when we need to be in this exploit mode, we need to be able to shape our environments, like you said, uh in a way that puts our brain into that exploit mode that uh pushes out all those other distractions and sources of like cheap dopamine that that will distract us from it. It it's interesting because I I think the key here is actually just the intentionality, right? Like you need you need to be able to exploit, you need to be able to go deep on one task, but you also need

39:02to be able to explore And you also there are times where you want to let your mind wander, right? There there I think there are certain especially if you're doing creative tasks. Yes. It's funny because Beethoven had a similar uh routine which is that he would go on daily walks in the afternoon when and and he believed strongly that that was where a lot of his creative inspiration came from. So I think it's you want to be able to access all these phases. You just you just don't want to feel hijacked, right? like you want to feel like right you what whatever phase you're in it's that's where you want to be. It's really interesting. We're going to talk about ADHD later,

39:39but it's I think one of the paradoxes about ADHD that confuses a lot of people is that ADHD people uh of they're obviously often distracted and uh like can't stay focused on on one thing for a very long time, but then they also get obsessed about stuff, right? an ADHD person will like get fixated on a certain task or a certain hobby or a certain idea and they'll just like go so hard on it that they forget to eat and sleep and they don't do anything else. Uh and what's interesting is that both of those things are the same thing, right? It's a lack of intentionality. In one case,

40:16when you're not able to focus on anything, it's you want to focus on a thing, but your mind just keeps wandering and going back into explore mode. Whereas in another case, it's you actually want to be able to stop doing something, but you can't stop doing that thing. So impulsivity to it. Yeah. Right. So there's like dishes are piling up and you haven't showered in three days and you're just like locked into this one obsessive thing. So jumping ahead a little bit, but I I do think illustrates the point very well. Yeah, I I do think it's all of these modes are normal and healthy. We evolved them all for a reason. Um the issue is the issue is not being being able to

40:57access them intentionally when we want to. Right. No. Exactly. And and even things like boredom and fatigue, those are normal, too. They've been they've kind of been villainized a little bit. Those are normal, too. But they're just they're signals. Yeah. Right. In your environment, just like uh just like a signal for something, okay, this is really rewarding, something that I can dive into and latch on to. if you're bored or fatigued by something that you could treat that as a signal though as well. Um it's not just that you've run out of willpower. It's that hey there they're probably like for whatever reason maybe it's valid maybe it's not your brain

41:31is saying this is not a patch you need to exploit right now. Right. Right. That's what the boredom and and fatigue can often often tell us. Um, so, so lapses in our focus really can be more treated more like diagnostic information, right? It's either there's something going on in the environment or something going on with this task that I need to address. Yeah. Okay. So, really what I want to do is like kind of remove all the moralizing around it for sure. Um, and just start to show that what's really going on here is that the environment again has all of these artificial uh kind of like signals on steroids right now that are pushing us more and more into this

42:13explore mode because it what whatever source is pushing those to usually is incentivized to put us into explore. Don't pay attention to that over there. Pay attention to this over here. No, pay attention to this. Pay attention to this. That's actually what's going on here is that we're just getting pushed. Our brains have these modes for exploiting patches of information, what I keep calling patches of information uh and or exploring new ones. Your environment has so much uh uh sway and which what you pay attention to that that's what a lot of this episode is going to be about

42:44is is tilting that back towards okay when you want to get into exploit mode, how do we do that? a little bit of a curveball I'm going to throw here is that I do think some of this is strangely culturally defined like it was it was interesting being reminded that like people used to freak out about teenagers reading novels like like that that was a moral panic the telegraph too I found some like they were everybody's like oh my god if we can just communicate instantly what are we we're going to stop writing letters or like when the radio came out they're like oh people aren't going

43:16to have conversations anymore because they're just going to listen to the radioact Right. So it it is interesting that uh you know the human mind is incredibly adaptable and the the nature of of explore versus exploit, what ratio it's happening, what what is hijacking and what is not like many of these things are are just kind of culturally predetermined based on what the previous generation was used to. Right? So, it's the today we would look at like today if you met a teenager who couldn't stop reading novels, you you'd probably find that very respectable. You're like, "Wow, look at look at them. Timmy is just crushing book after book. That's amazing. Timmy's going to

43:57go far." Whereas in the 1800s, they were freaking out about it. And it just makes you wonder of like where these definitions of what how much attention we should have for each thing come from. And that that's not to defend like all the all the the technological attention hijacking that goes on today. I do think it is problematic for a few different reasons which we'll discuss in this episode. But I just I think it's worth considering that uh there's no hard set rule around this. Like there's no rule saying that like oh this is your brain's only supposed to pay attention to this this many information patches at any given day or any given time. Uh, a lot of this is just it's

44:39just what we're used to, right? And and when it changes, uh, it scares us. Yeah. You know, we kind of freak out a little bit. Douglas Adams, the guy who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he had this great quote where he said that any technology that's invented before you're 35, you take for granted and assume is normal. Any technology invented after you're 35,

45:00you assume is going to be the end of the world. That checks out. That absolutely checks out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and and not only are like the way your attention is divided up, not only is that culturally determined, I mean mental health in general, ADHD wasn't really there wasn't even a word for it really until what the 20s, 30s, 80s. Yeah. But well, there there wasn't a diagnosis for it until the Right. Right. Right. Yeah. The um and they called it something different before then. Yeah. They they had different names for it in the past. But and that was really only because you look at the way economic change had happened. we were going more and more from uh you know kind

45:35of a manual labor based economy to an information economy. All of a sudden we found all these people who who don't fit well into that. Yep. And so we culturally define that as something different. I'm not saying it doesn't exist obviously. I'm not I'm not one of those people like ADHD isn't real. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying the way we think about it and the way we approach it and the way we treat it. Yes. Is very very culturally dependent. Same thing with uh how we sit down and do our work. It's I so I just did a YouTube video on on ADHD and I talked about

46:01this how a lot of what we consider mental health is culturally determined. I mean homosexuality used to be a mental illness that was diagnosible through the DSM uh yeah through like the 70s or 80s until 1973. I mean, there was back in the late 19th century, uh, they used to diagnose women with quote unquote hysteria because they were being too emotional, and the the primary treatment for that was to essentially lock them in the bedroom and socially isolate them until they calm down. Super

46:32[ __ ] up. But like that was considered normal mental health treatment in the 19th century. There is a cultural element here of like what is quote unquote normal, what is expected, um what is well adapted. I mean ultimately it is not to get too philosophical here but ultimately our goal in any context is to be well adapted to our environment. And I think in the case of technology today, there are situations where like the junk food, right, where we feel overwhelmed with choice, we feel uh we feel compulsive. Um a lot of our executive functioning is is hijacked through various means through marketing and um and just like insanely attractive synthetic food

47:22or content. So we we have to develop new ways to adapt to our environment and and some of that can be just all three in our environment, right? It's like you just don't even buy the junk food in the first place. Uh so you won't be tempted by it. You delete Instagram and Tik Tok so you won't be temp tempted by it. Or you develop systems and and mechanisms for yourself um to to make sure that you you adhere to to what you want. Yeah. Yeah. And we're going to get a lot

47:51So, why the [ __ ] are we so distracted all the time? After combing through tons of psychological research, I have narrowed it down to four factors. They're basically four factors that consistently trigger our distraction. So, if you're a person who struggles to focus on a consistent basis, if you're a person who is always getting distracted, your mind's wandering constantly, you never seem

48:14to be able to get anything done, chances are it is one or more of these four factors. But before we get into the four factors, I do want to touch on one famous study and it actually comes from my main man Dan Gilbert. It's one of my my favorite psychological researcher. I don't know if you have a favorite psychological researcher. He's good. He's good. He's out of Harvard. He's and he's real meticulous and he's very analytical. Yeah, he's good. Dan Gilbert's the man. He's great at he he's great at finding these like little counterintuitive uh things and he just sets up like really fun experiments like this one. So he did this one with Matthew Killingsworth. What they

48:50did is they actually created an iPhone app that would randomly ping people throughout the day and asked them what they were doing and how focused they were while they were doing it. Whether their mind was wandering or not, whether they're engaged with whatever they were doing. And what they found is that people are pretty much distracted all the [ __ ] time. All the time. In fact, they deduced that people spend 47% of their time not thinking about the thing that they're doing while they do it. That sounds that sounds low to me. What year? This was like late 2000s, right? 2010. This was 2010. 2010. Okay. So, that's it's probably even worse. It's probably even higher now. But still,

49:29that's almost half the time. Yeah. That's in itself is And by the way, like they really they had absolutely no prejudice about what they were measuring against. So they they they calculated how distracted people were for each activity that they were doing. They they even found that people were distracted 10% of the time during sex. So it's the bar is low. The bar is very very low.

49:59But the point of all this, it's actually a very So hold on. Wait. I'm just going through my head. PE people people they would they had this app. Yes. And when people were having sex, people would check the app and respond to I I think they probably got got a notification. And then what you're supposed to do is when you get what were you immediately doing? Yeah. And then you have to say exactly what what were you doing and were you engaged and focused on it. Right. Okay. Uh

50:22and apparently 10% of people having sex were not paying attention to the sex that they were having. Okay. Okay. that might say more about their relationships than than their distractability, but that that's another podcast. Um, this ended up being a pretty it's it's become a pretty famous study. You see it get posted quite a bit. Uh, great title. Dan Gilbert has great titles for his He's a good marketer for for an academic. Yeah, he is. Yeah, he's got great titles for his papers. Um it was called a wandering mind is an unhappy mind because what they found is that generally that the more people's the more distracted people were uh the less happy and satisfied they were with

51:01whatever they were doing. But I only bring this up to say that distraction is the norm. It's almost the default in many ways. Like it is what we'll see when we go through these four triggers is that what we'll find is that it you're not distracted because something's happening to you. you're actually distracted because of a lack of something going on. Okay. So, these four triggers I've

51:25actually boiled down into a lack of four different things. The first one is a lack of importance. Now, you and I, we spend a lot of time talking about values. We spend a lot of time talking about uh knowing what to give a [ __ ] about, prioritization. What's interesting about the focus research is that a lot of your ability to focus comes down to what's often referred to as salience of how important is the thing in front of you? Is there is there a clear goal or objective you're trying to accomplish? Is there is there something valuable that is being added to the world? Is this

52:00going to be meaningful to you in some way? And it turns out that if A you're not doing something meaningful, if you're just doing some [ __ ] that you find it think is kind of pointless or b if there's a lack of clarity around what is meaningful, like if there's uh a lot of stuff that's going on that feels very meaningful um or it feels like nothing's meaningful, then you're probably going to have a lot of distraction. Your mind's going to wander quite a bit. So again in

52:28this in in this context the way to think about it is that the default is for your mind to wander. It is for you to be in that explore mode because part of exploration is trying to find something that is meaningful. Trying to find something that is salient, some something that's worth paying attention to. So if you don't have if you don't have a clear prioritization of this thing matters, then you you're going to really really struggle to focus on it. Yeah. part of that that that's like a survival mechanism too. I think that's probably something I should have mentioned back in the

53:01explore exploit kind of paradigm I was talking about, but that's a survival mechanism, right? Like if you're not looking for something in your environment, you're you're dead at some point, right? Right. Yeah. I mean, if nothing if nothing important is going on, then why should you waste, you know, if you if you if you think about your your mind in in metabolic terms, right? It's like your your brain is expensive, attention is expensive, executive function is expensive from an energy point of view. Uh it makes sense that we evolve minds that if there's nothing really important in front of us, why waste the energy? Why not just kick back and

53:38let your mind wander and you know fall into your the default mode network? Trigger number two is a lack of clarity. So trigger one is not knowing what's important or not having anything important in front of you. Trigger two is it not being clear whether something's important or not. Turns out that when you introduce ambiguity to people uh they kind of don't know what to do anymore. This can this can also happen if you do you know you mentioned the story about Darwin earlier like if you do have something if you do have some sort of objective or value that you're pursuing but you get stuck and it's not immediately obvious what to do next that's another moment that your mind can

54:20start to wander because you're like okay well I want this thing but I don't know how to get there and it doesn't seem like there's any obvious way to do it so then you you start to get distracted again from an evolution utionary point of view, it makes sense that if you feel stymied or blocked in some way, you transition out of exploit mode into explore mode, right? Because now you need to find a new solution. You need to find uh a new way around whatever the block is, right? And so, uh Darwin with his walks, it's a way to let your mind wander in a very intentional way

54:54um and and potentially find a way around whatever the blockage is. The other interesting thing, you know, we talked a little bit about intentional mind wandering earlier. Um, it is worth reiterating that intentional mind wandering like there is a cognitive benefit to letting your mind wander a little bit. There there is a cognitive benefit to letting yourself be a little distracted on on occasion and it's in moments like this like it is when you need to go into explore mode to

55:25kind of reset your brain, re-evaluate a situation, try to figure out what the next step forward is. By disengaging your focus on something, you kind of almost let your mind recover a little bit, recover its effort and its energy and approach a problem with a new perspective or a new point of view. Um, I can tell you just personally from like working on a number of books. I mean, you you when you when you're writing a book, there's so many moments where you just get completely

55:56stuck where a chapter is just not working. You have no idea why. It's incredibly frustrating. And it is pretty crazy how often if you just stop working on it and go sleep and take a couple days off and then come back to it, it's it's pretty crazy how like often within 20 or 30 minutes you you immediately see the solution. You're like, "Oh, just delete this section and move this over here. Done." Yeah. But if you didn't take that time and go away, you wouldn't have given your your brain time to like, you know, process it or or you get too locked in on maybe some detail or

56:34something like that. You need to detach from that. Yeah. The psychologists actually call psychologists who study creativity anyway, they call this incubation. Yes. To you know, you go off and you just let it simmer, sit, you'll make horizontal connections from other parts. What when you're not so focused on one thing, so you're kind of letting some of that back in. So again, you know, the the mind wandering and distraction isn't all bad. Yes. Right. When there's a certain direction to it, at least. Yeah. And and in a way, you could look at it as kind of like a certain amount of mind wandering is is an attempt to solve some like solve the lack of importance

57:06problem or solve the lack of clarity problem, right? It's it's it's really only when mind wandering becomes chronic in and unintentional or uh uncontrolled or as a coping mechanism, too. Yeah. Exactly. Which we'll get to that. Yeah. Okay. Uh, okay. So, that's trigger number two. Trigger number three, lack of calmness. Um, this is basically the more emotionally aroused you are, the the the worse you're going to be able to focus on something. Um, generally speaking, when you are extremely agitated or upset or worried or anxious, um, you are it's not so much that you're not going to be able to focus. it's it's you're not going to have that clarity of what to focus on. So,

57:50for example, like if a person is highly anxious, um what happens when you're anxious is that you tend to overperceive threats or over perceive importance. Basically, tons of things that aren't actually important start to appear to you to be important and so you try to worry about all of them simultaneously. And worrying about everything simultaneously is the the result is the same as not worrying about anything. Like you just you end up not being able to focus. You you just become very scatterrained and and freaked out. Um, interestingly, depression kind of has the inverse effect on people, which is that they tend to find nothing important, but the result

58:31is the same is an inability to focus, um, feeling very scatterrained, mind wandering all the time, um, not being able to to uh, really uh, complete a task or or follow follow anything through to completion. Yeah. And that actually bears out too in the in the neuroscience as well. I didn't I don't think I mentioned this, but with the whole norepinephrine story in the locus, you know, when it's those pulses of of the norepinephrine in that area, you get more focus. When there's less of it, you don't. But there's actually a sweet spot. There's there's a little bit of a U inverted U curve to that. And like you're saying, there needs to be a certain level of arousal. Yes. Uh not too

59:09low, not too high. It's got to be kind of that sweet spot. And like depression and anxiety are kind of the two extremes of those. You might you might see it as that way, too. That's one way to look at it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's also probably worth briefly mentioning too any sort of trauma or grief is going to play into this, right? Like if you are kind of chronically stuck on a negative emotion, um trying unable to process some negative experience. Um it's it's going to ultimately affect your ability to focus. It's like a heightened vigilance, right? There your your

59:42brain is that's again it's a a survival mechanism like looking for solutions in the environment. Yeah. Out of survival basically. Yeah. I think people tend to discount the importance of emotional regulation. And we did an entire episode last year on emotional regulation and all of the benefits and the importance of it and how to approach it. The ability to focus and get things done is just yet one of many benefits that comes from a healthy emotional regulation. And

1:00:08then finally, trigger number four. Uh I just put lack of health. And this is part of the episode. We do this almost every episode. This is the part of the episode where I look into the camera and I bore the viewers by saying you should sleep eight hours a night. You should you should eat a well-

1:00:24balanced diet. Eat your veggies. Eat your veggies. Get some exercise because it affects everything. It affects absolutely everything and focus is no different. Uh if you are, you know, we we talked a little bit about uh attention as metabolically expensive. If you're if you're underslept, underfed, malnourished, right, you're just not going to have that surplus energy to expend on attention, like everything else in your body is going to be demanding all of the energy

1:00:57that you have available. Focusing your attention intentionally is a luxury biologically speaking. like it is something that if anything else is going wrong in your body, it's going to get first priority and your your attention and your mind is going to go on autopilot. And so, yeah, if you're not taking care of your physical body, then a lot of everything else in this episode is just going to be kind of incidental. Now, what's interesting about all four of these triggers, and I I I think this is this is missed by most people when they when they try to improve their focus, is that all four of these are quite controllable, but they're just they're not controllable in terms

1:01:36of effort, right? Like I think when when people think about like, oh, I need to focus more. It's kind of like it's kind of like the the willpower thing, right? Or like it's when people want to make a a change or become more disciplined, they think it's all about effort. They're like, "Oh, I should just try really hard to go to the gym." And of course, as we've talked about a million times, that's probably the least effective way to go about change. It's the same with focus. It's not about like, sure, effort's nice, but ultimately your focus exists in a network of systems. Some of that is your environment, some of that is your uh your values and your beliefs, some of that is

1:02:14your relationships. And then some of that is how you are physically treating your your own body. And you can control all of those systems, right? Like you can you can build a a scaffolding around your attention and focus to make it as easy as possible to give you the best chance of success without having to expend all of this mental effort all the time just because that that that's not that's not sustainable, right? So if you are experiencing a lack of importance in your life, then it's probably useful to get very clear on your values and your goals and what you actually want for yourself because then that's going to clarify so many in so many contexts what you

1:02:52should actually actually be paying attention to. If you feel like you're lacking clarity, there's a lot of work you can do around planning, uh, coming up with, uh, you know, backup plans, scheduling certain activities that you just remove a lot of the decision fatigue that comes from a a a day-to-day existence with a lot of stuff going on. If you feel like you're lacking calmness, there's a lot of work you can do to help regulate your own emotions, to remove you from environments where you're easily triggered, um to put yourself at ease and and feel like you have more control over what you're doing. And then of course, if you feel like you have a lack of health,

1:03:30there are many things you can do to have a healthier lifestyle. So there it's like so much of this battle is won outside of your own mind. Like like if you're finding yourself consistently sitting at your desk struggling to focus, always distracted, mind is wandering. Chances are the failure happened long before that moment. You don't need to try harder right there. You don't need to. If you're trying harder right there, it's probably because you already [ __ ] up in three other places, right? Like you're in the wrong job. You're with the wrong people. You are uh stuck in a situation that is that is triggering you consistently. Um there's there's emotional

1:04:07baggage that you haven't worked through. There's a crisis in your life that you're not paying enough attention attention to or you're just not [ __ ] sleeping well. Like it it's just there's something else that has already happened hours, days, weeks before that moment that has set you up to fail in that moment. And there's not really any advice that you and I can give somebody in that moment of

1:04:28like, oh well, do this and it'll it will fix your focus. Like you're you're going to be locked in. Um, if it was that simple, then I don't know, man. We we wouldn't have a podcast, right? Yeah. No. Okay. So, so you you brought up willpower a little bit there and like ego depletion, you know, there's some debate around all of that, right? If willpower is a thing, let's just say, okay, let's assume it is for a minute. Okay. Yeah. Go. Even if ego depletion is not a thing, okay, I still

1:04:55think willpower is is is the least effective way to go about being disciplined and making a change. Right. But I think you've said this before, but there is a way to leverage willpower that does work. But I think it's exactly what you're saying, which is not in that moment. It's setting up all these systems. When you have the willpower to do it, go and build these systems. Set up your environment. Uh get rid of the distractions that you need to get rid of. Change your career, job, perspective on life, whatever it is. Yeah. That's where you should leverage your willpower. Not when you're sitting down to try to do something. That's not that ideally that is not. Now,

1:05:30sometimes you got to just grit through it. I get that. Um, and and willpower does come in in that case. But I think the real takeaway is, yeah, use your willpower in the highest leverage points and only use it once if you can. You know, set up your environment once and then it's set up for you for forever. Well, you know, for as long as you can maintain it anyway. Yeah. And not in that moment when you're failing to focus or failing to pay attention to something. Yeah. And I got to give a shout out to good friend of mine, Near Ael. He wrote his book. He's got a book called

1:06:00indistractable that's very much about this. I mean, he he really characterizes focus and distractability as fundamentally an issue with emotion or an issue with discomfort, right? And he argues he's he's like, you can attack this from both angles, right? There's kind of the internal uh personal development side of it, which is just try to manage your emotions better, put yourself in fewer situations where you're agitated or anxious or worried because the less you're agitated, anxious, or worried, the less you're going to look for something to distract you from those uncomfortable feelings. But then also from the environmental side, just give yourself fewer opportunities to indulge in these things, right? Leave the phone in the other room. Um, you know,

1:06:43don't turn turn off your your all your screens at 900 PM. Make sure you get a good night's sleep. Um, you know, set up the systems basically. Don't don't don't even put yourself in the situation where you have to make these decisions. Um, but again, to to even do that in the first place, like you have to to know what you want out of your life. You have to know what matters to you. Like what what is worth giving up your phone for, right? Like if you can't easily answer that, then you're probably gonna have a really hard time. Yeah. Your phone looks a lot better than

1:07:16anything you're doing. Yeah. Everything, right? So it's it's if you're if the default state is a wandering mind, which it is, then and your phone is kind of the ultimate wandering mind tool. So it makes sense that you're you're going to default back to that the more you're lacking each of these four things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I'm kind of in the camp anyway if we're taking sides. I'm I'm in the camp that there's no such thing as ego depletion. I'm aware. Maybe maybe there's no such

1:07:45thing as it, but I I think it's over definitely overstated. Um for one, I mean, think about it. Yeah. If you go to a job you don't like and you're just around people you don't want to be around all day and it sucks and yeah, you're depleted by the end of it, but then you go home and you focus on a video game for two or three hours at a time, your ego has not been depleted. It's just you you've found something that your brain can latch on to for a little while, which in the work situation you haven't. Yeah. So, yeah, your brain is a big comparison machine. We say this all the time,

1:08:12too. Your brain is a comparison machine. And this this is really highlighted in this on this topic because uh what your brain is doing is it's taking your entire environment and saying what are my options and then it's selecting from that. Right. And in that in the the cases you're describing here, if you create an environment where it's almost inevitable that you're going to focus on something that you want to focus on, then that's probably going to happen. Um, but yeah, if you don't have all those kind of foundational like, am I doing something I give a [ __ ] about first of all, right, which nobody ever talks about. You're right. Everybody always talks about the mechanical

1:08:46hard tactical side of this. And it's like, well, okay, yeah, you need to sit down in in the chair and get it done, but what about just stepping back even further and taking like the bigger view out of it? Yeah. And I think this is probably I think this side of the conversation often is it isn't even considered focus. It's often talked about in terms of passion, which I think is really funny because passion like like I think a lot of the conversations around passion and productivity are like kind of misplaced. Um whereas when people talk about focus they tend to talk about it just in terms of like pure grit and willpower and like you know just [ __ ] lock in bro and like

1:09:25slam another Red Bull. I think passion not even passion I think I think simply something that you enjoy and find important is is the 8020 there. I mean we're getting ahead of ourselves but I mean there are aspects of this job that I struggle to force myself to do for more than 10 minutes at a time. Sure. And then there are aspects of this job that like I sit down and I could do it for like 10 hours and I and and I have to like pull myself away from it. And so much of that really just comes down to am I enjoying myself? Does this feel valuable? Does it feel important? Is there an

1:09:56urgency behind it? Um it's and I think this is, you know, we talked about on the procrastination episode, we talked about chronic procrastinators and how they they kind of they go through these boom and bust cycles. um where I think it's what the the chronic procrastinators need or what they crave is that heightened sense of importance that comes with the deadline, right? It's like, "Oh my god, the deadline's in two days. I haven't even started yet." There's such this like panic and frenzy that they're able to get locked in and focus for 48 hours. And in that brief period, they're able to do extremely good work. But if they could experience that sense of heightened

1:10:37importance for the prior two weeks, they could probably do just as good of work the entire two weeks, but instead they were [ __ ] around because they just for whatever reason they didn't feel well. Yeah. The target of their heightened importance there is more of a negative uh outcome, right? That's why it's important to them like ah if I don't do this then bad things are going to happen. Whereas what I think what you're saying is find something where it's like, oh, this is just inherently uh rewarding for me. Yeah. Yeah. But it's hard. I mean, I It's still hard. Yeah, that's still hard. Yeah. And I think it it would lend itself to the point

1:11:10that if you feel like you're always having to rely on deadlines to get you to sit down and focus, then that's an indicator that maybe this thing is not actually very important to you. Yes. Yeah. Out of these four, what do you think you struggle with the most? Um, let's see. I run through them again. Let's see. I was I wasn't paying attention, Mark. Run through them again. No. Lack of importance, lack of clarity, lack of calmness, and lack of health. Um I think clarity is usually my uh my big one anyway. Um sometimes the importance thing, but I think clarity definitely is. This is why,

1:11:45and we'll get into this a little bit later, too. This is why I time box though. Uh that's what I figured out. That's one of the lessons I learned from all this. I'm like, "Oh, this is actually what time boxing is doing for me." Is it gives me a very clear like this is what I'm working on. And not only that, but I need to attach a like a little bit of a metric to it, even if it's just checking a box or something like that. Having like a clear what am I doing? And I'm going to we're going to talk about flow here in a little bit, and we'll talk about this a little bit more,

1:12:09too. But having a a clear sense of what what I'm doing and and why I'm doing it, too. Uh attaching it to maybe a larger goal that I have. Uh uh but also like, okay, today I'm getting this done, this part of this thing done and being real super clear about it. Yeah. If I don't do that, man, I'm just all over the place. All over the place. If if I don't have a good idea of what I'm actually trying to get done. Yeah. Which I think most people would struggle with that. Yeah. I would Okay. I'll also say too, the health thing does come into play definitely. We've talked about my struggles with

1:12:42sleep before. I'm sleeping better lately, which is great. Yeah. Good. Um, but defin like I still a lot of times I'll have an afternoon lull. Yeah. Uh, and that's definitely not a time and we'll we'll talk about structuring your time around these kind of around your energy and all that, but if I try to get anything done when I'm like having a crash in the afternoon, right? No, not

1:13:02going to happen. I'm actually going to say I think I struggle the most with lack of importance. Okay. Um, I tend to get interested and excited about so many things. You know, as we've discussed, I have intense shiny object syndrome, and we're going to talk about my ADHD in a minute, but when I'm excited about like six or seven different things, it's really I struggle often to prioritize and systematize the different things that I'm focusing on. I don't know, it's hard for me to to find the highest leverage thing and just focus on that and let the other things go. Like, that's always been my my struggle. And it's funny, too, the clarity thing. One of the things I'm definitely learning,

1:13:42I've learned recently and this is one of my goals in 2026 with the team uh is to overcommunicate. Like I I I've learned that I have a tendency to not share enough or like share what I'm thinking enough with you guys. And so then you guys kind of sit around be like, "Well, Mark says he wants to do this, but I don't really know why we're doing it or what we're supposed to do next or like what the my goal is individually." Um, and I think that's that's demotivating for people. And so I I I often have this tendency of just like I just kind of assume people telepathically understand

1:14:19what I understand. That's interesting. Yeah. No, because just recently you sent us like a new brand document, right? Yeah. And it had been a while. You used to every now and then you would send us kind of a state of the business. This was back when the team was way smaller. And I always enjoyed reading this. I don't think I've ever told you this, but I always enjoyed reading those, which sounds crazy. Like, here's the state of the business. Here's what you're doing. But you would get very clear on things. So, going back to the clarity thing here, you would get very clear on things like, okay, this is what we've been doing. This is why we were doing it. It's not

1:14:47working. This is why it isn't working. Here's what we're going to do. Here's why we're going to do it. And so like when I was reading through this brand document, it kind of brought me back to that space and I was like, "Oh yeah, okay, some clarity going forward." That helps us a lot and that helps focus our attention on what needs to what's important in the business and our work,

1:15:04too. It kind of reinvigorates us that way. So yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Was that a clarifying for you writing that? I'm sure it was. Oh, it's super clarifying for me. It is super clarifying for me. And it is I would say as the team grows it it becomes harder to communicate clearly to everybody right it becomes more complicated to communicate clearly to to everybody but I would also argue that it becomes more important right because it's it's you know when there was like four of us uh you could kind of look at the even if I wasn't around you could look at the other two people and kind of deduce what we're doing. Yeah. Whereas when there's 20

1:15:42of us, it's it's like what the hell is going on? Dark pockets of this business. I have no idea what's going on right now, Mark. Which is Yeah. But no, I Yeah, we're I I fully agree with you. We We've uh we've got a kidney smuggling wing of the business that I never told you

1:15:58about. Highly profitable. Yeah. The the YouTube videos are just a just a front. Yeah. Yeah. All right, Mark. So we just you just went over kind of the psychology of distraction. Okay. And we mentioned too that the most of the advice advice we get especially online about this is about kind of effort, right? How to how to expend your effort on getting things done and how to like grit and sit down. You just got to get this done and this thing you might not want to even do like you need to sit down and do this. Okay, great. All of us I think though at some point at least

1:16:36we know kind of the opposite of that. We've felt the opposite of that, which is when you sit down, you completely lose track of time. Yes. You are so highly engaged in what you're doing, you kind of lose track of yourself even too. Um the action kind of just flows out of you without really having to think about it. You're very absorbed in your work, right? This is what psychologists call

1:17:01flow. All right. So, back in the early 90s, there was this psychologist called Mihi Czech sent Mihi. I don't looked it up several times how to Oh, yeah. Czech sent Mihi. Check Mihi. Mi Czech sent me Mihi. Uh, his god. His name is like an alphabet soup. It's It's a He's a Hungarian psychologist. It's like 20 letters long and most of them are C's and Z's and S's and so it's impossible for English speakers to announce it. Anyway, he wrote this great book called Flow. So, a lot of people are probably somewhat familiar at least with this concept of flow like I just described that that deep sense of absorption in your work and uh loss of time and all of that, right? That

1:17:38study you brought up with Dan Gilbert where they would check in with people, you know, what are you doing and are you paying attention to what you're doing? Basically, are you focused on what you're doing? When they said no, they weren't very happy. This is like the opposite of that. Like, you're so into what you're into, right? There's so many like downstream effects on happiness and well-being and all of this with flow. It's it's one of the core tenants of positive psychology is is flow. Finding states of flow in your life. Okay. So, some just some examples. I got a very very long list. I'm not going to go through all of them, but you can find flow in just about anything you do, but some

1:18:11common ones are like in in physical movement. It could be in individual sports like runners often um talk about this. Swimmers, Michael Phelps has talked about this before. I might mention him in here a little bit. Cyclists. There's skill sports too. Mind body practices like yoga could do it. Dancing. Dance is a big one. Dance is a huge one. People who do martial arts, too. Uh, then there's creative work, the visual arts, of course, painting, music, all of that kind of stuff. Um, writers, writing, sometimes you get a state of flow as well. I'm sure you're aware of this. Uh, woodworking. I I've I've experienced this when I've been in my shop. For sure. Programmers

1:18:45though, too. You have this cognitive and and digital work. Programmers um when they're like debugging even too, they can get into states of flow. But then there's even just like everyday mundane tasks. You can get into flow when you're cooking or cleaning or uh you know gardening, yard work, that kind of stuff. You can is really the one of the the biggest um factors is like are you completely focused on what you're doing in front of you? Okay. So, okay, obviously we want to get into these states more. Obviously, there's a little bit of a paradox though because a lot of times to get into a state of flow, you have to be somewhat competent which requires some practice

1:19:26and a lot of times that deliberate practice is not a flow state and it's not very enjoyable. It's not fun. Yeah. So, there's a little bit of a paradox there where that we have to navigate. So, you know, because deliberate practice it involves like there structured uh it involves a high structure, a high amount of structure. uh a lot of feedback uh about your weaknesses. That's not a whole lot of fun. And so there's just there's a little bit of a cost to it. And so there's a little bit of a barrier to get into flow. But understanding that what we can do over time anyway is kind of set up

1:19:58our environments to be uh more inducive to that uh to those flow states. And then once we kind of get into better practice of it, I think it's easier to slip into those states anyway. But yeah, what before we get go get going any further though. Um, do you experience a lot of flow in your life these days? I should ask that. I do actually. Really? Yeah. I mean, especially especially around writing. Yeah. Like I I I fall into flow with writing pretty quickly and easily

1:20:26for the most part. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but yeah, that that that's the biggest place. Okay. Yeah. What about yourself? Well, okay. Uh, do you you do surfing though, too? Do you ever get in surfing? Wonder because that's one of those more physical activities. Are you not good enough yet? I'm not good enough. You're not good enough. Definitely not good enough. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think of I mean running I've definitely gotten there. Mhm. The fun the funny thing about run distance running is that it's it's like the first few miles even though you're like the most fresh in

1:20:55the first few miles. They're they're kind of the least fun. You're distracted. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And it's also like you're just like I don't know. It it's in the beginning you're you're kind of focused on the things that don't feel right. you know, like, ah, my my foot kind of hurts or my my legs are a little sore or whatever, but then it's once you get to like miles three, four, five,

1:21:14six, that's where the flow kicks in. At least for me, and then and then they just blow by. Yeah. Yeah. Well, probably that by that point your brain has figured out you have nothing else to focus on. Yes. But what you're doing right in front of you and so you enter that flow state. Yeah. And I think that's with any activity you start doing. Probably when you sit down to write too, the first few paragraphs are the hardest, right? Oh, for sure. Yeah. For sure. And same with me, like when I go into my if I go into my wood woodworking shop and I start doing that, it's like the first,

1:21:39oh, everything's a [ __ ] mess. Why didn't I clean this up last time? Yeah. What am I actually doing? But then when you're like, oh, okay, I'm making some progress on something. I'm I have an a clear idea of what I'm going to be doing. And then it all kind of starts to fall together. Yeah. I would say like a lot of my focused strategy is just tricking myself into getting into flow states, right? is just like ah yeah for example if I need to write a script or an outline or do research for an episode like it just it's if I sit there and think about the entire thing I I

1:22:13I'll never start. Mhm. So what I'll do is I'll kind of bargain with myself. Well, I'll be like, you know what? Open up the Google doc and let's just let's just write the intro. That's all you have to do. And then by through the act of writing that intro, I I start to get into a flow state and I start to like naturally want to do more. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So some of the the characteristics of flow states, let me go over those because we've already mentioned a bunch of them. One of them is clear goals. Okay. So, like you said, uh if you sit down to write and you you don't you you're

1:22:46thinking about the whole project that you have to do, that's not a clear goal or you don't even know what you want to write. Exactly. Once you get clear on that, that's one precondition for flow to to kick in. Immediate feedback, too, is usually a pretty um a pretty big factor in flow. So, you're

1:23:03getting some sort of feedback on whether or not you're making progress on it. You're doing well. you're you're you're making progress toward your goal too. Um this gets a little bit tricky I think especially with knowledge work a lot of times because you don't get a lot of immediate feedback. Yeah, you might have some internal feedback on like oh this is interesting and so that that can be feedback too but just in terms of like am I making any progress on this or not. So you can actually artificially create those feedback loops, checklists, you know, like I said, when I sit down and I time box something, I I have like a when I'm most focused is when I have a specific, okay,

1:23:39I'm going to do this much exactly. Yeah. Even if it's not doesn't translate into progress for me outside of myself, it's it's at least it's like I can check that box and that's at least something I can tie it to, right? I think the you can use gamification for yourself. Yes. You know, I used

1:23:55to use this writing software called Scrivener, which was designed for authors writing books. And it it sets up you can set all these benchmarks for yourself of like how many words do you want to write a day? How many how many do you want to write each week? How long do you think your book's going to be? And then it sets up all these progress bars for you across the so you so every day you get to get on and like as you're writing you get to see your progress bar move from left to right and uh and you have that daily goal right in front of you. And then you get that dopamine

1:24:23hit of like yes thousand words, right? And I feel like everybody or like most software and products are getting better about that gamification. Uh I can't believe I haven't mentioned yet video games. I'm a huge gamer. Like g video games are oh yes completely optimized to generate flow state in people. Like that is pretty much entirely how they're engineered is is to generate as much flow state as possible. And they're amazing at it. It's it's it's so much fun. Yes. Well, and one of the reasons the last uh kind of uh uh factor uh that goes into flow is a balance between challenge and skill. Video games have this figured out for sure. Right. Like you start off in the beginner mode

1:25:03and you get a little bit better and then it gets harder and harder and as you go you progress. But uh your your skill set is slightly challenged. Yep. Right. So like when you sit down to write something you're like, "Okay, I'm going to write this. I haven't quite figured it out yet." Then you get a clear goal. Okay, this is how I'm going to write it. Oh, I'm making progress. There's your immediate feedback. And it might be something that's just a little bit maybe a a topic or a concept or maybe a writing style, whatever it is, that's a little bit foreign to you or a little bit

1:25:28challenging. Yeah, those are kind of the three big things of of that that that are required for flow to happen. Not it's not saying that they will happen because of those three things, but you're much more likely to get into a flow state if you have those. Yeah. Yeah. I I do think there's something very inherent about certain activity. Like I I do think there's something very

1:25:47personality based around various activ like there something I want to bring up with you. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's some things in my life that I just find that like I I it's writing for instance it's very easy for me to get into a flow state writing very easy. It just it comes extremely naturally. It happens very quickly and it's h and it's been that way my entire life. Uh there are other things like if I tried to do woodworking I'm pretty sure I would never be in a flow state whatsoever. I

1:26:11would be terrified I was going to saw my fingers. I was just going to say you would lose a finger. Yeah. Yeah. Different activities scratch people's itches slightly slightly differently or slightly different. Well, you for example, you mentioned the gamification thing. I I'm not real responsive to that. Okay. You're you're more competitive person. You're you can like to compete with yourself, too. Yes. I I'm not as much into that for what. So, woodworking is actually there's not a whole lot of gamification I can do. I don't I guess I could. Yeah. But I don't need

1:26:38to. Um and there's it doesn't lend itself well to gamification necessarily and I'm okay with that. there is like just a lot of like I don't know aesthetic feedback to it. Right. I like what I see. Yeah. Or I'm making progress on this cabinet that I'm building or whatever it is. Right. Right. I think there is definitely a personality based component to it that um if you're going to leverage flow states, you need to find those levers for yourself. For sure. Yeah. Mine's mine

1:27:04I think is just it's a little more physical as in like I need to be able to see my progress. Yeah. Um, and so that's why like even checklist and check boxes for me, like checking off I did this, I did this, like seeing that. Gotcha. Um, or like something that's physical just in nature, like I'm building this thing in front of me. Yeah. I get that's where I get my feedback. But I think there are people like the gamification thing. I mean, you you love video games, but you also like to gamify your work, too. I gify everything. Yeah. Which Yeah, to each their own again. Yeah. But,

1:27:34um, there is definitely a personality component to that, but Yeah. Yeah. Um, so yeah, we've mentioned a lot of these, but um, how to get into these flow states if you keep those three things in mind, the clear goals, the immediate feedback, and a balance between challenge and skill. You can kind of set up your again set up your environment, right, to like increase the likelihood that you'll engage in these flow states. So, one of those is matching the challenge to the skill. Like I just talked about, they actually found that there's like this it's I don't know how they actually came up with this number, but about 4% beyond your ability is like the sweet spot. Okay. This

1:28:06is a very specific number. Yeah, that sounds very I'm pretty sure that's an average. Okay, so um but if if it's the task is too easy, you get bored obviously. If it's too hard, you get you give up. Yeah. Yeah. Um so adjusting the difficulty. This is again where you get real clear on things. If you do have this huge giant project in front of you, break it down into smaller parts. You've

1:28:27heard this a million times too, right? But that gives you the clarity. There's your clear goal. Um you're going to get some immediate feedback on whether or not you're working on it. But then also too, the the challenge of it is no longer this giant task. It's this one little task in front of you that you can do. Okay. Uh clear and specific goals. When you sit down to do some work, have an idea of exactly what you need to get done. And that's just going to keep you focused on it. Not only that, but I think your brain is just like, "Oh, okay. Once I'm done with this,

1:28:53I'm off the hook, right?" And I and then you can let your mind wander or go do something else or look for something else as well. The immediate feedback part we set up to activities that give you real-time information about how you're doing. So you know like programmers your code either it's going to what is it compile I don't I'm not a programmer so it's either going to compile or it's not or you did did it right or you didn't. So the the more you can set up like that the better. Now there's a lot of activities that don't lend to that though too. Writing might

1:29:20be one of them like right don't know if that's if it's good or not but at least like you have the the goal of a word count or something like that. Right. And then a lot of what this is eliminating distraction. You can't get into a flow state if you're distracted. Okay. It's impossible to be in a flow state if your mind is on something else. Literally, the definition is being focused on one thing. Yeah. Uh which is what basically your your brain can handle. There might be some kind of like environmental and psychological triggers you can kind of work with too. Novelty complexity,

1:29:54like kind of like varying how novel or complex the task is that you're working on. Risk too. They've found that actually if you're taking either like a physical or even a creative risk of some kind that kind of like helps you focus on something like, "Okay, I'm going to do something a little bit different and put it out." That tends to get people to really focus. That makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah. I thought you would like that one actually. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz I I love risk. Yes. And there is something clarifying about risk, right? That it when when you would send me articles or something like that too and you were like, "All right, this one's a little

1:30:24different. I don't know." Those are usually the best ones, too. You're like, I'm kind of like I'm I'm sticking my neck out here a little bit. Those are usually the better ones that you wrote. Yeah, for sure. And I'm thinking about skydiving, too. Like if you if you ever skydive, like it it goes by in two seconds. Yeah. Really? Right. Like you you're in freef fall for like 90 seconds, but it feels like five. Yeah. And it's I think there's something that's just so clarifying and like you better not be focusing on anything else when you're skydiving. Can you imagine if your mind was wandering while skydiving? Like it's just kind of inconceivable. Uh part of that too though

1:30:58like a deep embodiment um it the more you can get your body engaged too. Now this isn't always like with some creative tests it's not always possible I get that sitting in programming you're not going to be doing a whole lot of exercise. It's like painters too um can get it painters musicians you know when they're they they focus a lot on posture and and body movement when while

1:31:18they're producing or while they're they're uh writing music or or creating a painting too. So there's um an element of that and then like a little bit of unpredictability too. Now we talked about uncertainty and how that can throw your focus off but like throwing in a little bit of uh uncertainty of element of surprise in your work if you can somehow uh that kind of helps keep your

1:31:40brain engaged as well. Um so that's basically like yeah what's the opposite of distraction? It's flow, right? And again, there are various studies. This this concept was developed in the 80s and 90s and it's been pretty well validated. There's a lot of debate around the nuances of it, but everybody agrees that it's a real phenomenon. Measuring it is very hard. That's that's where a lot of the debate comes in, but it's a real thing, and we find it in all cultures all around the world. And it's a huge correlation to, like we said, well-being. There's there's it it's just it can it can help make you live a happier, more fulfilled life if you're in these states more

1:32:18often. We talked at the top of the show about the default mode network, right? Which is kind of the wandering mind, but also interestingly uh very much correlated with I guess what you call like ego identity, right? Self- reference. Yeah, self identity. Yes, very much so. Yeah, the ego is very strong online. The what was it? The task uh task positive network. The task positive network, right? where you're where you're very much focused on a single thing. You're trying to get something done. You're very goal and task oriented, but that that the interesting side effect is that you kind of lose that sense of self along with it. And it's just fascinating that those two things are

1:32:53also associated with unhappiness and happiness. Like it I just feel like it kind of ties together a lot of the themes of solved episodes over the last six months where you've got kind of this this uh you know ego taking a backseat. You you you're like you're focused on a single task at hand. your ego takes a back seat. Um you're like there's a lack of distraction in your environment. Um there's your emotions are very aligned with what you're doing. Um yeah, it's just kind of there's like a there's a beautiful coherence that happens. It again it's really hard to measure flow states themselves. I mean you can do self-report and all that but like during flow state. So they've tried

1:33:33to do some neuroscience around it and you know it's they have some suggestive things in there. Sure. One of the things they that's probably pretty true about it though is that that shutting down of the default mode network. So less about self uh referencing, less about um your your ego taking over in that point and more about the task at hand. What's interesting though is that after flow states you have a very strong sense of self after that too almost like a pride in it. You know what I mean? But it's the timing of it that's important. It's that when you're in the flow state, you don't you really kind of lose your sense of self. Everybody can probably

1:34:06relate to this on some degree. Um, but I can also relate to it solidifying my sense of self, right? Because it's like when you come out of that flow state generally, you look back at what you did and you're like, that was awesome. Like, [ __ ] yeah, give me more. Yeah. Yeah. And it's and that becomes something that you identify with very strongly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's flow. The more you can get into it, the more you can set up your environment uh really to increase the likelihood of it. Again, those three factors, the clear goals, the immediate feedback, and the balance between challenge and skill. Mhm. Um the more you can kind of turn those dials up and and

1:34:43integrate this into your life, the more likely you are to get into these flow states and just kind of just be a happier person. Yeah. Um and happier with your your work life, for sure. Yeah.

1:34:57You know what's funny about flow though is because and maybe this is a nice segue into talking about ADHD, but I think a lot of people assume that flow is synonymous with focus. Um, but you can actually get in the flow doing a lot of stupid [ __ ] like [ __ ] around and, you know, playing a dumb video game on your phone and um being completely distracted about something. And in fact, a lot of the the strongest distractions in your life probably are so distracting because they quickly put you into a flow state. So, it's I think there's a little bit of a flow's had a

1:35:37moment over the last five or five or 10 years. I think especially uh during the pandemic, but it's flow is not always necessarily a good thing. Like losing yourself in an activity can be detrimental as well as beneficial. It just really depends on the activity and like what your intention. Again, it comes back to intention. But this is the funny thing about ADHD is that you will often, and it's a bit of a paradox that I think people don't get, which is that you people with ADHD, they'll like jump between eight different things and then they'll become obsessed with one thing and do it for like 14 hours straight. And I think what people don't realize is that that

1:36:11is the same problem just in different different formats, right? like it's when you're hopping between eight different activities, you want to be able to focus on something, but you can't stick to it. And then when you go deep on something for 14 hours, uh chances are you probably want to break away from it, but you also can't. You can't. So, it's just it's really a lack of executive function around focus and flow. Um rather than just of a complete inability to

1:36:40fall into focus and flow. Okay. Yeah. That hyper focus. So, there's like a compulsivity to it. Yes. Uh like and like you said, the the real goal is intentionality. Yes. If you're being compulsive, you're not being intentional. Right. Right. Okay. Okay. So that that's interesting you framed it like this. So let's let's get into the ADHD ADHD just a little bit here. One of the things when I was going through this, I think a good framing is that the whole deficit part of ADHD, right? Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Right. Right. That's a little bit of a misnomer, right? Because it's not that you have a deficit of attention. It's like you just said, there's like a

1:37:12regulation problem of attention more than anything because you can go really really deep on it. There's no deficit of attention there, right? It's just that it's it's very hard for you to regulate your attention. I I would describe Yeah, I would describe it more as a it's a it's a difficulty. It's an issue with interest more than attention. I can definitely pay attention to things. It's just that like I usually don't [ __ ] care. So, it's it's hard for me to care about certain things and And then other times it's hard for me to stop caring about something. Okay, that's interesting you bring that up because there is this when I was doing some more research on this too. There's this

1:37:50guy William Dodson back in 2016, he came up with this framework um for kind of like why ADHD brains operate the way they do. And he came up with what this acronym called pinch. And he said for an ADHD brain, you had to have at least one of these to really even start an activity. Basically, it's the pinch acronym stands for passion, interest, novelty, competition, or a hurry. Basically, a deadline, right? And I went through this and I'm like, "This is Mark. I can't accurate." I know. It's so crazy. Whereas, you know, the quote unquote neurotypical brain, it's usually we can usually prioritize by uh importance, right? Like even if it's boring or whatever, like I need to

1:38:29get this done, so I'm going to sit down. I'm going to power through it. Yeah. And I I like I've seen you before working on something. You're just like if that's the case, you're just like, I can't even start on this. And I know other other people in my life, my girlfriend has ADHD, too. We were talking about this. She's like, if I'm not interested in it, you're you're just happen. It's just not going to happen. Right. And and the funny thing is, too, is that like at least for me, uh like the consequences, the repercussion, like I I don't care about those either. Right. That's what

1:38:56Okay, that that I think is one of the big points about ADHD. Like I've had I had an ex-girlfriend too who had it uh had ADHD and she was just like I I just don't like whatever. Who cares? Like what the people these people are going to be mad. You're going to be you're going to be fined all

1:39:12this money for reporting this late to the IRS. It's like okay whatever. I don't want to do it. Right. Yeah. But so okay, let's let's talk just a little bit about that hyperfocus versus flow for a second here. So like you said the the main difference is kind of compulsivity. When you get into one of these hyperfocus Mhm. things though, you can't pull yourself away. Like what what like what's going on here? Like it's just something that interests you whether it's important or not and then you go deep on it and you get in this like rabbit hole. How does this work a little bit? That a rabbit hole is a good way to put it. Uh it's ironic because I'm actually going through

1:39:47this right now. By the way, you and I talked about a little this a little bit off air. You and I seem to be doomed to experience whatever the topic is, right? Like the procrastination episode. So strange. Yeah. We we procrastinated recording that episode for like 4 months. The shame episode, we [ __ ] that research up so hard. You and I felt so bad about it. It's like it's a miracle that that episode even turned out decently. The resilience episode, I did like a [ __ ] endurance race for it. The purpose episode, I shared like basically what's been my entire purpose for the last year. Mhm. Well, now with the focus episode, uh total transparency to the audience, I've been

1:40:27really struggling to focus on recording this episode. There's a lot going on in the business right now. Uh we we've had we've had quite a bit of of turnover. We've got a reorg going on and I as part of this reorg process, I have found myself absolutely obsessed with [ __ ] AI automations processes. Yeah. Oh my god. Like I literally can't I was up till like 10:30 last night working on them. I I can't stop. And it's so funny because last night I was sitting there and I'm like, I need to go to bed. I need to shoot a podcast tomorrow. Uh and I I was really struggling to pull

1:41:01myself away. And the funny thing was at that point I was working on an automation that just like didn't even really matter for the business, but I just it felt there was like this compulsivity to like get it done. Mhm. And my experience of it is there's like I'll stumble upon some new and exciting thing that seems very very important and interesting. I'll start going really hard on it, really really really hard. Like it's all day every day. It it's all gas, no breaks. And what happens is I go so hard on it that you I inevitably I reach a point of diminishing returns where where it's like every marginal hour I spend on it is basically delivering almost no extra value. And

1:41:47then I start getting resentful. I'm like pissed that I'm work I'm like focused on this thing and I' I've basically spent four days of my life only doing this thing. But then at that point, I think some sunk cost fallacy kicks in where it's like, well, I just dump 50 hours into this. I should probably see it through and finish it and and then I I just kind of make myself miserable for like I guess the last stretch of it. That's kind of where I'm at now. Um, but yeah, it is it is it is an inability to tear myself away from it. it very much in the same way of like getting hooked on

1:42:22a really good video game or addicted to a really good TV show and like binging an entire season. Uh I often it's the exact same feeling but it will be with like a very sometimes obscure part of work right and in this case it's AI automations. I've felt it in the past with like writing scripts. Um, I've felt it in the past with um putting together like a talk for a speaking tour. It's happened in all sorts of different places. So, yeah, it's it is this weird switch that gets flipped on and off. And when it's off, you're you feel useless. You feel it feels like you're not able to to get

1:43:01anything done. And then when it's flipped on, you feel like it's like you're the Incredible Hulk, right? You can just like lift 2,000lb boulders and uh smash any task in front of you. Yeah. A lot of my friends call it their superpower in a way, too. You know, it's a it's a double-edged sword, but it's their superpower. Yeah. It just needs to be like wielded in the right direction, right? Okay. Cuz it's if it's not if you if it gets wielded in the wrong direction, then it then it becomes like a huge handicap. Okay. Well, let's get into some of that. Like, how do you direct all

1:43:32of this frantic energy that that is usually like it's putting you more in explore mode. Like you said, you're thinking about eight different things or you're fascinated by the all these things. How have you over the years? Because you were you were diagnosed as a teenager, right? Yeah. Okay. So, uh that's the other thing people need to understand, I think, too. ADHD is a developmental disorder. Yeah. Um and we can get into some of the weeds on that, but maybe not. I don't know if you want to. But like essentially, how have you managed over the years to I mean, you you've written three books at this point, four books at this point. Um you run a business, you have a team

1:44:08of 20ome people at this point. Yeah. like how have you managed to cobble together in your in your frantic brain uh this whole system systems and guardrails. Okay. And and this is this is going to be a lot of the advice that we give in the next se section is but like my brain really needs guardrails like really needs parameters really needs like set limits in terms of you know I just kind of create rules for myself right well okay this is this so you're saying structure in a way right and this is I've talked to um I talked to my girlfriend about this my other friends with ADHD

1:44:40and it's you kind of have this weird relationship with structure yes I think it's like you you need it but you also hate it. Yes. Explain that to me. Uh because I still don't think I get that. Well, your brain hates it because you need novelty all the time. Okay. Um but you need it because if you just if you let an ADHD brain just do whatever it wants, like God knows where you're going to end up. So what I personally find and and it's funny because there's a extremely high correlation with people with ADHD and entrepreneurship. And I think this is probably one of the reasons where it's I

1:45:15hate other people's structures. I like my own structure. Gotcha. Okay. So, it's like I know my brain and I know where the trip wires are and I know where the pitfalls are and so if I get to build the guard rails, it's going to fit my brain really well. Whereas, like if I just adopt somebody else's guard rails, then I'm probably going to end up being very annoyed and and just telling them to [ __ ] off. Okay? So, I'll give you a simple example. I realized about seven years ago that I can play video games. I can't play multiplayer games. If I play multiplayer games,

1:45:51I get so competitive and I get so obsessed that I I It's a problem. Like, it's a real problem. I get addicted. I start practicing. I start I I'm like, I'm going to I'm going to rank on the leaderboards and I'm going to become a grandmaster in this game and all this stuff. I got addicted to the game Overwatch back like 10 years ago. I got addicted so hard, dude. I had I had like practice regimens. I had like a daily warm-up routine. I found a team that I was playing

1:46:21with. It was a like warm-up routine, dude. It was a It was a bunch of like [ __ ] high schoolers. It was a bunch of kids like half my age. Yeah. And I'm like sitting there spending like half my day playing with a bunch of 17-year-olds on this stupid video game cuz I wanted to reach

1:46:37grandmaster. And I did that for like two months. It was such it was such a colossal waste of time. And so I I finally just realized I'm like I'm just not allowed to play multiplayer games. Like cuz when I play single player games I seem to like I'm able to turn it off. I'm able to like be like, "Okay, it's time for bed. I'll come back to this tomorrow." When it's a multiplayer game, I'm like,

1:46:58"No, no, one more game. No, no, no. I I'm gonna kick this guy's ass one more time. Let's go." All right. Okay. Okay. One of your guard rails. This is one of my guard rails. None of those. Okay. You know, you talked about uh the structure that you need. I' I've heard people tell me too, they're like, "Okay, for a job for somebody with ADHD, um they're not good when there is that like repetitive structure, especially like you're doing the same thing over and over again, uh and that a lot of paperwork, that kind of stuff." But if you have more like projectbased Yeah. work to do where

1:47:30you can kind of set your own structure within that container at least, that seems to be a lot better. And I think that's what what I've seen from you anyway is you set up, okay, we have this project we're working on and we're gonna work within this and there's a lot of freedom within it, but there's still some bounds around. Yeah. Yeah. I I think ADHD people tend to be very good creatives. Yes. Yeah. Uh because again, it's just this constant need for novelty and stimulation and creativity is one means of giving that to you. Yeah. Um, but yeah, the challenge is always putting the parameters around that creative c creativity. Like if you just let if you just let

1:48:05a creative run wild, then they're never going to turn anything in. So you have to set parameters, deadlines, structure around it. Objectively speaking, I think if a business consultant came in and looked at our business, the number one piece of feedback that they would give is they would say there's not enough structure. There's not enough guidelines. There's not enough like repeatable processes. Mh. Um, that's something I've become very aware of in the last couple months. Mhm. And I think a lot of that is just my personality. My brain's default is to always improvise. Mhm. And my brain likes to improvise, right? And experiment. Try something new. Try

1:48:40Yeah. The novelty you get on that. Okay. Okay. Um, so yeah, it's it is I think it's there's certain professions that are much better suited for people with ADHD. Um, and there's if you're working with somebody with ADHD or if you have a a child who's in school, like I think it's generally speaking, you it's a little bit of a Goldilocks thing where it's like you need to give them some structure, otherwise they're just going to flail, but if you give them too much structure, then they're just going to lose interest and shut down. So, it's kind of like you have to be very a little bit

1:49:11delicate. Yeah. Yeah. We're flowers, Drew. We're very delicate. Well, okay. But but okay. So when when you are sitting down to work though, like what are some of the things that really help you like to to get something done? I I've heard you talk before like when you were uh in university, you would like have two things going on at once, which makes no sense to a neurotypical person. Okay. That kind of stuff though when you do sit down and you need to you're like, "Okay, I need to focus." Yeah. How do you approach that say differently than like maybe a neurotypical person

1:49:43would? I so task we've talked about task switching and how it's like incredibly detrimental to focus. I personally find task switching in improves my focus. Okay. In in moderate doses. Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny because everybody I say this to who who is not ADHD, they think this is insane, but then people with ADHD are like, "Oh, yeah. No, that totally makes sense." Right. Um and I think what it comes down to is that if I do the same task for too long, I get bored. And of course, my brain craves novelty, stimulation, uh, and and I I have a very low tolerance for boredom. So,

1:50:22if I get bored, um, I'll eventually just find something else to do. But what I found is that if I if I say I pair um one long-term task with a couple short-term tasks, um I'm able to when I switch back and forth, when I start getting bored with the first task and I move to the second task, it it there's a little bit of novelty there. It feels new. It's a new challenge. It's like, okay,

1:50:48cool. This is something different. And there's a little bit of stimulation and I can focus again. And then as soon as that second test starts to get boring, I switch back to the first. and then that first task feels normal again. The the way I discovered this was in in university I would sleep through almost all my lectures. I couldn't I just couldn't stay awake. And and then one day I I brought uh a sudoku from the the the college newspaper and and I did the sudoku and I realized that I stayed awake the entire lecture and I took great notes and I was like I don't know why that

1:51:21happened but I'm going to keep doing it. And so I started bringing sudokus and crossword puzzles to all my classes and I [ __ ] took amazing notes and paid attention to everything. And I think the reason was was that as soon as I got bored with the lecture, I I had something else to focus on, some sort of novelty or stimulation and then I could like kind of do that and you know a cross word puzzle or sudoku. It it's not too cognitively demanding. So you can kind of still pay a little bit of attention in the background and then as soon as the lecturer would start saying something

1:51:52important or interesting again I could put the cross word down and go back to the lecture and so by ping ponging back and forth between two stimuli it like allowed me to stay awake. Okay that yeah that makes absolutely no sense to me but I've heard very similar things from from my friends too. They're like, I'll do like they need to doodle during a lecture or something boring or or the crosswords, the sudokus, whatever it is, or they have some other light task that they're working on just to keep Yeah. just to keep focus uh like online and not go too far into mind wandering. Yeah. So, this is a good example of guardrails. This is a good good example of

1:52:29both. So, when I was in school, I realized that if I went home, if I went back to my dorm, okay, I'm going to get into this, too. Yeah. To study, this gets into environmental design. Yeah. If I went home to study, I would like no studying would get done. I'd be watching TV with my roommate. I'd be playing a video game. I'd be goofing off with the guys down the hall. Nothing got done. So, I created a rule for myself, which was that every single day I had to go to the library and I had to spend as much time in the library that day as I did as I had classes. So, if I had three classes

1:53:03that three hours of classes that day, I had to go to the library for three hours. Didn't matter if I had homework or not. Didn't matter if I had stuff to study or not. I had to go to the library for three hours. No exceptions. And sure enough, once you're in the library and there's nothing to do, you start finding [ __ ] to do because it's boring. And so then I started getting ahead on my classes. I would start studying like, you know, two weeks ahead. I'd start preparing for a project that was wasn't going to be due for another month. Uh and it was it was amazing. I mean

1:53:34this I basically went from when I first started college I was like a C and D student and then by my third year I was a straight A student and and a lot of these tactics are are the reason why I mean we're kind of already talking about it. We might as well just segue straight into the back end of the episode which which is the practical advice and takeaways. It's funny because when we

1:53:58started working on this episode, my my initial thought was like it's values and environment. Like that's that's pretty much what it's been for me. It's like a find something you really care about and feels important to you. And then b build those guardrails, set up your environment correctly. Um like that's where I've gotten the most mileage. But you you've gone much deeper into all the different techniques and tactics and and exercises and implementation. So why why don't you kick us off here? Yeah, sure. No, I'll lead us into this. So you're right, environmental design like it's just a pillar of getting getting [ __ ] done basically, right? We've mentioned a few of

1:54:38these though, too. So before we get into kind of the nitty-gritty of it, I think like part of your environment is actually what I'm calling like operating system level factors. Okay. It's super sin succinct and and sexy. I know. Yes. But you we've mentioned this a little bit already. your sleep, exercise, and nutrition. We We mention this in every episode. I know. I know. So, I'm not going to get into the weeds on why you should I I just felt a hundred thousand people roll their eyes. Everybody knows. I know, Drew. Yes. Everybody knows these are important, but I want to tell you why they're important, especially for focus real quick. Okay? Won't

1:55:10dwell on it, but I do want to give you some interesting uh statistics here. So, for sleep, first of all, obvious people like if you're tired, you're not going to focus very well, right? And that's because sleep deprivation does impair the exact faculties you're trying to use while you're focusing, right? Like sustained vigilance, working memory, executive function, all of that kind of thing, right? There was this interesting study back in I think it was around 2000 where

1:55:35they found that after about 17 to 18 19 hours of sleep, like you've been awake for that long. Okay. Yeah. Uh it's very similar to a blood alcohol content of 0.05%. Okay. Which is like a good buzz, right? like a pretty good buzz going on. After 24 hours that that doubles to about.1% blood alcohol

1:55:55content, which is above like legal driving limit in most you're drunk. You're officially drunk. Yeah. Um so like that that's where that's kind of like the baseline of where you're starting out from when you're sleepd deprived, right? The the interesting twist is and this was actually a replicated study. I saw the old study for this. This is people when they're sleepd deprived don't realize how cognitively impaired they are. Yes. They'll tell you like, "Oh, yeah, like yesterday." Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. No, I'm fine. I can drive. Oh, I can go talk to that person and not They won't know. Yeah, that it's very much uh it it it covers up your executive function is is

1:56:32diminished. Your ability to evaluate your own choices and decisions is out the window. It's very poor. Yeah. And so, like that old study was, you know, people they would give them they would sleep deprive them. They would give them these cognitive tasks. The first day they were like, "Oh, yeah. I'm not doing so well on this." By the second or third day, they're like, "Oh,

1:56:47no. I've I've caught back up. I'm good to go. I've adjusted when they're doing just as poorly. Okay. So, you're not above your own biology. Just Okay. This you're not a superhuman only need sleep four hours a night or whatever. Uh, one other little detail I'll mention is about chronotypes. So, like night owls versus morning people. This is a real thing. Like they've scientifically validated.

1:57:10Yes. Some people are are night owls, some people are morning birds, right? Morning early birds. Early birds. Early birds. There you go. Morning birds. that that's a that's a real thing. Okay. Um interestingly though, this 2025 review um that came out, it showed there there wasn't there's no difference in like the cognitive faculties between these two groups though. Like a night owl isn't any better off than an an early bird, right? Or vice versa. However, like the synchrony does matter. So like if you're a night owl and you're trying to get stuff done early in the morning, you're kind of screwed. And if you're an early person and you're trying to do this at night,

1:57:45it's not going to work either. So matching that is actually really important. Yeah. So like for me, I'm pretty alert in the mornings. Um and I try to do like the work that needs to be done with a high degree of alertness then. By the evenings, I've kind of come back around my mind's a little bit loose and it's actually pretty good for like creative work for me, but nothing that needs like precision work or anything like that. I save that all for the morning. Okay. So yes, match your energy levels to uh to your your your biological rhythms. Okay. The fun thing about chronotypes, too, is it it naturally shifts over your lifespan. Yeah, that's true. So, people's chron types change

1:58:20over time. In my 20s, I was a hardcore night out, right? And now I'm up at like 5:45 with no alarm. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And they do show that generally speaking, um, and the older you get, the more morning person type you are. Not for everybody, but generally speaking. Sure. Okay. All right. Let's move on to exercise real quick here, too. Um, there's actually, so two different ways you can look at this. There's uh acute exercise uh for focus and then the chronic effects of exercise on your focus, right? Acute exercise just like going for a walk or even getting a full workout in whatever that actually does have measurable slight but measurable effects on your ability to focus,

1:58:56working memory, executive function. So like if you do have a midday drag, like going and doing a workout and coming back to it, it usually boosts your your focus a little bit by that point. I don't know if you've noticed this, but I definitely do. If I don't get my workout in, I actually schedule my workouts usually midday because that's when my LOL is. Yeah. And if I get that workout in, then my afternoons are a lot better. Yeah. For sure. But then if you regularly exercise over time too, though, uh we talked about this kind of in the resilience episode. You you do have a more resilient brain with with uh longer exercise, like chronic exercise, I guess we're

1:59:30calling it. Better vascular health obviously, mood regulation, sleep quality improves, too. So that you get a double uh uh kind of a double dose of that and metabolic uh stability. Okay, which brings me to nutrition. I just feel like you should be wagging your finger this whole time, Drew. This entire section just just sit here and my mind is wagging it as you

1:59:50wag your finger. Your nutrition listeners, nutrition, let's talk about your nutrition. So there I don't know if you remember that. You remember those studies where it was like, "Oh, yeah." They they gave people like lemonade and then they gave them a um a cognitive task, like a memory task, and they performed better after drinking lemonade. So, they're like, "Oh, glucose." You know, the the brain's fuel is glucose. That's it only fuel source. Yeah. And so, if you just give people glucose, they're going to be smarter, I guess, or more focused. Sure. Not true. This is not They found that this is actually not the case. What you want is a stable blood

2:00:22glucose. The spikes and the crashes actually lead to worse focus. And so avoiding high sugar foods, high glycemic load foods, um you know, complex carbohydrates, uh the carbohydrates that are going to make your blood sugar go up and down. Avoiding those when you really need to get stuff done is is definitely paramount there, too. And then, uh high inflammation diets as well. So basically like

2:00:47a standard western diet. Sure. Terrible terrible for uh focus and and cognitive impairments. Yeah. depression, anxiety symptoms are more common with those two, which as we discussed a little bit too, that impedes on your focus as well. I definitely notice. So, I don't know if you've done like a glucose monitor. I never have. Yeah. Have you ever done one of these? Yeah, I've done I've done a couple. They're they're interesting. It's funny cuz like when you first put them on there, you're just glued to the app, you're like, "Oh my god, this is so interesting that this food did this and that food didn't do this." After a while, you kind of notice the patterns and it it starts just

2:01:22telling you what you already know. But, um, I will say like when my blood sugar is severely spiked, massive impairment, my ability to to pay attention and focus, like I've just I feel like a slug. I can't I can't really get into a flow state. Um, I feel antsy sometimes. I'm I'm like I need to like go drink something. and I need some caffeine or I need to go for a walk or I need to take

2:01:49a nap like it's just there's this like latent dissatisfaction that is burbling in my body. Yeah. So if you chronically feel that like look at your diet. Yeah. Yeah. If that's the story of your life it's huge though too. No I like a few years ago I started cleaning up my diet as well and I

2:02:08just didn't have those crashes like like you're talking about too. Yeah. um related to this too. So part of nutrition is hydration as well. This was interesting that even a 1 to 2% uh of your body weight like dehydrating yourself by 1 to 2% of your body weight which you don't even notice as like you you're not thirsty at that point that actually uh impairs attention working memory and reaction times. Um so uh this I notice big time. Uh especially like instead of doing coffee in the afternoons or any caffeine in the afternoons, I usually will like focus more on hydration, maybe do some electrolytes then too. And it's almost like drinking a cup of coffee for me,

2:02:45so I'm probably chronically dehydrated in some way. But yeah, I think they they recommend about 250 milliliters every hour, hour and a half. Okay. Um to keep yourself well hydrated. You know, the brain will literally shrink when it's dehydrated, and that um that taxes uh metabolic processes in the brain, so it's just harder to focus. So, keep wagging my finger. Drink drink more water, Drew. I'm done wagging my finger. Drink more water. I'm done. Yeah. Get some sleep. Get some exercise. Don't eat water. Drink some water. Like, that's what it comes down to. Isn't it crazy how simple I know some of the stuff like like you could you could do the probably the craziest

2:03:23productivity if you looked at the research on like the craziest productivity hack that people do like a pomodoro or something like it's pro the effect size is probably smaller than just drinking more water that's why I wanted to start I wanted to start with this like these are operating system level like I said this is your operating system like you have to get this because all the other stuff we're going to talk about they're great and they do help but it's on the margins And and if you don't have this stuff figured out, none of that matters, right? If you're eating Big Macs for breakfast and and sleeping 5 hours a night, a pomodoro isn't going to do [ __ ] for

2:03:56you at that point. Yeah. It's not going to save your Big Mac. Yeah. No. No. Okay. But that said, let's do get into some of this more tactical stuff and and environmental design around setting up a workspace that you're going to use. This is obviously going to be different for different professions and whatever you're different people, different personalities. Different people for

2:04:14sure. Here's just I'm going to go over some some general principles. Implement them as you see fit. Experiment with these. This takes a lot of trial and error for people, I think. Um, but there are some general principles and some research that they found where setting up your environment and doing these sorts of things will definitely help you. Number one I'm going to put up here is put your phone in another room. Yep. Okay. No surprise to anybody, but uh, you know, probably one of the more famous experiments. This was a 2017 experiment uh where they found that just having a smartphone present, we already mentioned this a little bit, even if it's face down on your desk,

2:04:51if it's face down and if it's not going, you got it on silent, no buzzers, no nothing, that actually impairs your executive functioning, it significantly reduced available working memory capacity and fluid intelligence. Wow. Just having a phone in within your field of view. Put it in the other room. Uh um or if you're like at a coffee shop or whatever, put it in your bag. just get it out of sight period. Okay. Kind of related to this though too is um clutter in your workspace is really a tax on attention as well. So again, this is the container you you have for

2:05:23your environment, right? Anything you can see in there is a possible source of distraction. Wow. This this just made my wife really happy. Well, yeah. You she's neat and tidy and you're kind of a slob. So I am totally a slob. She's always bugging me. She's like, "You should clean your desk." desk and I'm like, "Ah, it's fine." I have like I have like 60 books on my desk and and uh I couldn't even tell you. I mean, some of them have been there for like two years and uh she's always nagging me. She's like, "Clean your desk. You'll be more productive." I'm like, "Ah, I'm fine." Yeah. No, I've had to kind of come to terms with this one, too. So, I I built myself

2:05:57a desk and it was a it's like a big L desk and so I could put a whole bunch of [ __ ] on it. And now in my office, like it's a a monitor and a keyboard and that's it. and it just looks really bare and I have to just live with that at this point. But it it does because if I have a book there or I have anything really laying there, I'll fidget with it. I'll get distracted with it very very easily. So yeah. What do you think though about this is something I'm going back and forth on lately and it has to do with kind of like visual field having like an extra monitor. M what what

2:06:28I found because so it was just it was a recently the the power went out where I was there was high winds and they were worried about wildfire so they just shut the power off for a day. Okay. So I went down to a coffee shop and I just had to work on my little 13-in MacBook Pro. Right. And I got a lot done. Interesting. I got a lot done. And and I did have to switch between tabs every now and

2:06:47then and stuff like that, but I I think I was just less likely to switch back and forth between them. I think it depends on the type of work you're doing. So like Okay. at the purpose office, the software engineers, they all have multiple monitors and they swear by them and and I I get it, right? Like you're you're compiling code in all these different spots. You're talking to to Claude over here and like it. So I I understand I personally find it distracting because I feel like

2:07:15when I have all this monitor space, I feel like a need to fill it with something, which means Yeah. So I'm like, okay, well, I I'll have Slack open over here and my email open over there and then the the document I'm working on here or like the research I'm reading here, when really I should just be reading the research or writing the document. I shouldn't even be looking at all that other stuff. So I I I'm the same. I personally find it distracting. I'm more than happy to work on my It actually is very funny. So, as you know, I was going to the Purpose office. Um uh for

2:07:48people listening who don't know, Purpose is a the app that I built last year, the AI uh coach. Um I would go I would go to that office and uh like a bunch of nerds. They all have these like crazy monitor setups with like their laptops on stands and all sorts of like uh voiceto text systems set up and all this stuff. And I would just go there with my little MacBook and like just open the screen. And there was so many times where they were like, "Dude, we'll get you. We have extra monitors. We can get you a setup. It's going to be like so." I'm like, "I'm good, man. I'm like,

2:08:18I'm totally good. It's actually probably better this way." Yeah. Yeah. For the longest time, like in when I think probably for the first like eight or nine years I worked with you, I just did it off a 13-inch Yeah. laptop. That's all I worked off of. Me, too. Uh like all the writing we did, everything like that was all off of this one tiny little screen. And some people are like, "Oh, that's crazy." And I'm like, "No, it it just helps keep me focused." I switched over to the monitor, but now I'm much more intentional about when I do that. If I'm doing more creative kind of

2:08:44loosey goosey work, sure, I'll I'll like throw it all up there, look at things simultaneously, have multiple tabs because I got this big monitor, so I'll have like two or three tabs that I can look at all at once. Then I have my laptop over here. Yeah. But when I really want to focus and I need to do precision work, Yeah. I'm going tiny screen for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That is actually uh is a good transition into how you should match kind of the setting to the cognitive demands. Um creativity, you know, it likes a little bit of chaos, right? A little bit of uh whereas accuracy and precision don't. Yeah. Right. And so like when I went to the the coffee

2:09:23shop the other day, I did need to do some kind of like creative bigger bigger picture thinking and it worked out really well. You have a little bit of a hum in the background. Yeah. I like to be around people when I'm doing creative work. Yeah. I don't when I'm doing I guess wrote repetitive

2:09:39busy work. Like like if I'm doing a spreadsheet, I want to be at home. I want to have a big monitor. I don't want to be bothered. I want to put on some good music, whatever. But yeah, if I'm working on a book and I'm just like, I I just need to slog through this for a few hours. Then that that those are the few times I go to a coffee shop just to kind of get into a new environment, feel feel some of the novelty, right? Like get the juices going. Yeah. I I think there there are two I mean you think about working from home, working like co-working a co-working space maybe

2:10:10or like coffee shop. Yeah. Um and then just your regular office environment, whatever. Um I don't know. For me, I've I've found a lot of times like when I when I work from home, what I need to do, I have a separate space for it. Okay. uh and and I have there's certain times where I go into there and there's certain things kind of rituals which I'll get into in a little bit more here too that kind of signal there's a separation between home and work because I think the thing about working from home for me anyway is like oh there's some project I need to work on at home that's going

2:10:44to be going on in the back of my mind or I need to clean this or I could clean this or I'm going to go to the kitchen or all of that kind of stuff right so I I think experimenting with your just your your work environment period is a good way to figure out where what kind of work you need to do where. This goes all the way back to Peter Ducker. He wrote about this that that there needed to be a very clear demarcation between your home life and your work life. And it it's funny because I mean I remember even as far back as the mid 2000s people who work from home like I I knew people who would

2:11:20get up, get dressed, walk around the block, come back in to their apartment and then go into their their work space or their office or whatever and then when they were done they'd go outside, walk around the block, come back in, change clothes, right? There's like a ritual aspect to it. The other thing that you you mentioned in passing that we we would be remiss not to talk about is working with other people like it it is talk about environmental factors, right? Like I think a lot of people feel like they're more productive in a coffee shop or in a co-working environment just because it's like you feel like all these people in the room with me are working or doing

2:11:58something useful. Like I feel like kind of a piece of [ __ ] if I'm not doing something useful. So, it's there's a little bit of a uh implied accountability that happens. And then, of course, you can take that even further with like actually consciously co-working with somebody, like finding a friend, a co-orker, being like, "Hey, can we block off 2 to 4 p.m. to work on

2:12:18this thing? I'll keep you accountable. You keep me accountable." Yeah. And so on and so forth. Yeah. No, definitely. That that that's a good point. I do try to leverage that social pressure a little bit. Um, like if you're at a coffee shop, you're not going to be like, you know, browsing social media or YouTube or whatever as much. Um, and it comes back to lack of importance, right? Like an easy way to add importance is to put another person next to you and tell them that you're going to work on something, right? Yeah. Because it's like now you don't want to look like a like an like a lazy [ __ ] So, leverage those things though. Like actually take advantage of

2:12:51that kind of stuff. like know if you know your like I know I yes I succumb to social pressure but like yes like we all do breaking news right yeah we all do leverage that to your advantage though use it in a way that's going to help you with this one of the things we didn't talk about when we were talking about your ADHD system I know you like to listen to music yes when you work sometimes you listen to loud um music pretty much always metal like some hardcore stuff right yeah I think this is this is another thing that I think is very common with ADHD people is

2:13:21um not just music but very intense okay music that that's like extremely stimulating um I find it narrows my focus like if I put on death metal it like narrows my focus it makes it easier to focus on whatever's in front of me whereas if I put on like classical or something chances are my mind's going to wander and kind of tune it out but it's yeah there's it's a huge part of my productivity routine yeah I a lot of people use that like ADHD or otherwise. A lot of people will use music as a as a form of focus. And usually kind of what we do um I don't know in my case what I do is I'll

2:13:59like what I've been doing. Yeah. Uh in the past anyway was I'd find like a Spotify playlist that was focused for work or something like that and then kind of pick a genre that I like. You could do lowfi or rock or whatever it is. But they're they're supposed to kind of be curated for that

2:14:14for focus and work, right? It's funny. I I feel like so much so so much of that is arbitrary. Like I it it's like what's that lowfi beats channel on YouTube? It's like it's funny that just like the whole world just decided that that's the productivity work. Um, but the funny thing is is that there's actually like very real research around uh sound frequencies and sound waves and the ability to focus. Like like our friend of the show, one of the sponsors of the show, Brain FM, like they specialize in doing music that there's like sound waves embedded into the music um that do uh alter your brain waves in a way that increases focus and and I like there's

2:14:53something to that. I I don't totally understand how it works, but like um you know, we've been through the research on it. There's something to it. Um and it's like like when I use it, I definitely feel something like it's it's you know, I'd say probably at least 50% of the time I put on a Brain FM track, like I notice I notice there's like a there's like a tangible noticeable experiential difference. It's almost like a light trance. Yeah. That you kind of get into. Yeah, for sure. But what you said about it though too, those those playlists, those curated playlists,

2:15:26they are usually fairly arbitrary or it's just like people are like, "Ah, this works for me." Yeah. Doesn't work for you. That's there's an arbitrariness to it a little bit. And it's like, okay, yeah, there's no lyrics in it and it's just uh, you know, just instrumental. But what Brain FM has actually found, you're absolutely right, is that there are certain brain waves uh that are associated with different uh kind of mental states. Yeah. Obviously, right? So, for example, theta waves like 4 to 8 hertz, that's memory uh mind wandering, navigation type stuff. Alpha waves is um like filtering out distractions. Beta waves though are the ones that

2:16:01they've kind of figured out. So what what Brain FM has actually done though instead of just like kind of shooting in the dark or like letting let like like I go out and pick my own music the what they've done is they've they've kind of used the scientific method to they start from a hypothesis of okay these are the brain waves that we know are associated with deeper focus. Yeah. And um how can

2:16:22how does sound influence that or how can sound uh uh get you into that same brainwave state. Right. And they figure that out through like doing actual rigorous studies on this and then they uh iterate from there like okay this worked uh this didn't and then they iterate from there and they're constantly updating their their um their music library um and and testing this all the time. Okay. So what they found is that that those beta waves can actually be induced by music. And the thing is about music is that the a lot of music is is actually designed to uh catch your attention like and and pull it off of whatever else you're doing, right? That's the whole point of it. Like

2:17:06a lot of times that's what the point of music is. They've started from the the other way and said, "Okay, how do we not do that?" But keep you kind of locked into those those beta wave um mind states, I guess. And also too, there's u just larger there's um there's a synchrony of neural oscillations in different parts of your brain. Okay, basically like large populations of neurons firing uh at the same time and they can induce that. They figured out a way to induce that with music. And so that's what their whole platform is about. So they you you get on there, you can

2:17:37you can pick, okay, this is what I want to do. I want to deep focus. I want to do creative work. I want to do flow like try to get into flow states even too. So they have all these different kind of like uh uh not really genres but kind of goals I guess. Yeah, it's funny. They they do have genres

2:17:50of music but then they also have genres of of like desired mental states. Mental states, right? Cognitive states. Um it is super interesting. By the way, people listening, there's we 30-day free trial. It's in the description. brain.fm/solve. They sponsor the show all the time, so we're not just talking about them randomly. Um, it is funny though like I don't know way back in the day uh there was this period where like binaural beats became a big thing in meditation right so you used to put these headphones on while you meditated and then they would like they make these like kind of weird sounds in your ears and it was funny cuz I remember I remember trying those way way back

2:18:30in the day and you would get these like really intense meditation sessions um and some people swore by them. They swore that it like accelerated your like path to enlightenment or whatever it was. Um I actually found them too intense. I didn't like them. They were like way too intense. But it was cool when it when uh when I found Brain FM, it was it was like, okay, there's music around this like it kind of like softens and and the fact that you're like focusing on task, I think it it like softens the blow a little bit. Yes. Um but yeah, super interesting stuff. Do you listen

2:19:01to music while you Yeah, I I actually started to this year um more because I usually just like sit in silence and then I realized that like oh that actually during certain tasks anyway in certain times a day that would actually encourage my mind to wander more and so I started listening to music and I was using like Spotify uh playlists. Yeah, those uh that was kind of hit and miss though is what I found is that they could help they could they they might they might not. And I think part of that was is because again there's just an arbitrary well this might help you right go

2:19:31and try it. Again though what brain FM has done is reverse engineered that and say actually this is probably what helps us let's test it out. Yes that helps iterate on that make it a little bit better. So whenever I've used uh brain FM's uh like I'll sit down to do it. It's it's pretty wild because you do it's like a light trance you almost get in sometimes. Not saying this is a bulletproof. It's not magic. It's not going to you know again if you don't have all these other things set up this it's a cool tool. It is a cool tool and there's like a little bit of a a little bit of a gain a marginal

2:19:59gain you can get from it. So yeah, definitely check it out. So yeah, before we move on, anybody wants to try Brain FM, you can go to brain.fm/solved. You can get a 30-day trial. Uh link is in the description. Check it out. So what else? A few just other things, too, that also help on the margins um are going to be things like temperature, light, and air quality. Okay. So the the temperature the what they found is the ideal uh your ideal performance and like

2:20:29offices that they found are workspaces is around 21 to 22 degrees C which I think is a tad warm. 72. 72. Yeah. 72 Fahrenheit, which I think is a tad warm. I feel I feel like we're going to spawn hundreds of office arguments. That's the section. Oh yeah, absolutely. Or too hot, it's too cold.

2:20:46Or if you and your spouse work from from home and Yeah. You're probably fighting that too as well. Uh but there I mean you know if it's too too hot, too cold, yeah, that's going to just distract you from everything. Lighting too, this is kind of interesting and I I actually do this the

2:21:00um dynamic lighting throughout the day is actually associated with better productivity and and focus. So like in the morning you do bright lights, more blue, uh kind of like natural light. Um you know, I I'll even go out in the mornings to try to get outside for a few minutes. Um, the whole Yeah, the early morning sunlight thing. Early early morning sunlight. Sure. Um, but then I have

2:21:22this lamp uh on my desk too that I can change the hue of it and the intensity throughout the day. And I tend to do that. So at night I'll I'll do it on like the warmest setting possible and the lowest intensity possible. And I can still get some usually like in the evenings I actually

2:21:36have usually a pretty good session. It's usually more creative work that I'm doing looser stuff. But like if I have that kind of like low inensity light but it's mimicking the the day, you know, that that tends to help me. Anyway, too. I don't know. Have you found anything with lighting? Really? You don't seem to be real sensitive to that kind of stuff? I feel like I'm super sensitive to light. My wife is really sensitive to it. She she has our house set up so that like all the lights dim at 9:00. Um I I I don't like I dude honestly like I I wake up sometimes I wake

2:22:07up at 5:30 and immediately start playing a video game. don't care. I'll sit on my phone until like two seconds before I fall asleep. Yeah, that I can't that don't care. Like it just I think some people are more sensitive than others too. Um they are finding too I was recently uh listening to a podcast with Matthew Walker, the guy who wrote Why We Sleep, a big sleep researcher. Um and they're finding out too that it's not necessarily uh like light exposure itself, like blue light exposure, probably was a little bit overhyped for um a while. Yeah. Uh it's actually not as

2:22:39uh detrimental, but light exposure in general, like intensity probably does matter for sure. I I I could see that. I definitely sleep worse if the lights are on. Sure. Yeah. Or you like have a TV on or something like that. I definitely notice that. But it it it is again it is very personal. Like like I said, my wife is really sensitive to this type of stuff. Yeah. Me, too. Yeah. Uh I'm not. I could sleep in the middle of a busy airport and be fine. That's crazy, but okay. Um, and then like some air quality stuff too. They've done studies on this just I don't know. I have

2:23:15a little um air purifier in my office. So I I felt this when I lived in Asia. My um there was I live briefly in Vietnam and in in Hong Kong and there are period there are parts of the year that the the smog and pollution is just much worse than other parts. And um and it was interesting because I I noticed that my ADHD symptoms got way worse uh certain parts of the year. And then I I couldn't figure out what it was. Couldn't focus on anything. I started sleeping poorly. Like it was it was really bad. And then I started getting like a scratchy throat. And then that's when I looked

2:23:53up the air quality and it was there was tons of pollution. So I definitely notice it. I my ability to focus and and with a lot of pollution. So air quality is something I'm very sensitive to. Okay. Yeah. I backed up by the research too that just uh pollutants in the air diminish uh in in like acutely diminish uh your cognitive capabilities around working memory around fluid intelligence um and executive function too. So yeah. Yeah. I remember seeing some kind of education related studies around this of like children who are in highly polluted parts of the city um but then move to a different school in a different part of the city where there's not a lot of pollutants

2:24:34like their test scores go up considerably just from like moving from a polluted part of town to a less polluted part. Yeah. And controlling for socioeconomic status and quality of education and all that. Yeah. Right. You just take them across town and they like score better on tests because they're not breathing [ __ ] smog all day, right? Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. That checks out. Yeah. Well, that that also kind of is related to the last thing I want to talk about here with that, which is a little bit of nature exposure. Okay. Now, this is a little bit um there's this whole theory called attention restoration theory, which is getting exposure to nature. uh these natural

2:25:12settings kind of restore your directed attention and they they think the mechanisms mechanism by which this operates is like what they call a soft fascination. So when you're in nature your mind just naturally kind of has this whole like soft fascination with what'sever around you and that they think kind of gives your executive control a little bit of a rest and time to recover. Okay. Little bit it's little bit loosey goosey. I know. I know this is like the green therapy stuff, right? This this came back in the 90s. This was back in the 90s. Since then, they've found a lot of nuance to it. They're like, "Yeah, it can't help in certain context,

2:25:49but I don't know. I know a lot of people who like having plants like in their office or space or something like that." I think that's great. I mean I mean the green therapy thing, I do think there's something to it, which is that like just being in nature, being around plant life, it it does seem to increase happiness. It d-stresses people.

2:26:06I think it's probably just a little bit of that bleeding over into increased executive function. Yeah. Lack of stimulation. Again, like if you're not looking at screens and answering phones all day and you're like sitting there staring at a tree, like yeah, you're probably going to be able to focus a little bit better. So, right. Uh common sense packaged as scientific theory strikes again. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, if you throw some plants uh in your office, too, that helps with the air quality, too. So, I don't know. There might be something to it there. So, if that works for you, great. Then you got to water them. Yeah. Then you got to stress about watering them. I know. Well,

2:26:41you can get some fake plants. Maybe. I don't know. They won't clean the air, but yeah. All right. We went over that. The the operating level, the operating system level, your sleep, your exercise, nutrition, the setting up your workspace. I think the last thing I want to touch on though too is, and we already mentioned it a little bit, was the ritual side of things, right? Um, you know, you mentioned the the demarcation between work life and and home life, and especially with a lot of people working from home now that that that line's blurred. There's research out there that shows though that people who separate work from from home life are a lot happier both in

2:27:14their jobs and they're more productive as well and also just in their in their home life as well. So, having that clear demarcation, I I struggle with this just because like I live alone um and I've worked remotely forever and it's all just kind of blends together. Yeah, I struggle with this too. Yeah. So, so you're it seems like you're just constantly thinking about work, but it makes sense. I mean, if you think back to the episode about boundaries, right, and setting boundaries for yourself, like it makes sense because it's boundaries provide clarity, clarity provides focus. Exactly. Yeah. So, setting up kind of a ritual anyway, like you've already

2:27:47talked about, one way to do it that some people do it is Yeah. They'll get up, they'll get dressed like they're going to go commute, they'll even uh go for a walk or some people I know even go for a quick drive. Yeah. too and then come back, go to their workspace. What I do is I I have a room in my house that's just my office. I go in there, I've I've done my morning routine. I go in there, I shut the door. That's like my cue for work, right? And there's as for as much as possible in my office, it's only stuff that's related to work. There's not a bunch of distractions in there. Um

2:28:17so, but but you know, these habits, they're they're they're contextually cued, right? So, that just signals to your brain like, "Oh, this is the spot for work." Even if you have a home office, like this is a whole separate thing over here. Yeah. And it gets you kind of into that that that mindset. A bit of a simple model for this, which is you have the same start time. Okay. The same place, uh the same two to three minute kind of opening sequence. What I do is I sit down, I'm like I time box. That's when I I time box. I'll sit down and like this is this is going to

2:28:50be my day. That's my little ritual. And then again gets my brain into that work mode. And then kind of interestingly interestingly too is the same closing uh routine as well. So like a shutdown routine. Interesting. Cal Newport and we'll talk a little bit more about him in a little bit, but Cal Newport really uh uh advises people to do this. It's a kind of again that demarcation between work and and home life when you're done with it. He has this whole like shut down routine that he he tries to get people to do. And he even says, he says out loud, he's like, "Shut down complete for this cow." That's very cow move. But yeah, what a nerd. I know, right? Such

2:29:29a nerd cow. Um, but it it's just the like having a routine that that is specifically designed to again demarcate that work from from home life. And again, just signals to your brain like, "Oh, this is this is focus time." Mhm. Like setting that up and working out that muscle really does seem to um help a lot of people and it increases focus, increases uh working memory, executive

2:29:57function while you're in that space. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's what I have for environmental design. Anything else you want to add? Anything else you do that um to set up your your work environment that makes you so productive? No, I for me it's it's it's more it's funny. It's it's less about the environment. I mean it is important to have a good work environment but for me it's just a lot about personal rules and guidelines and you know it's I do think those are actually like those are foundational those are like where you should start for sure this kind of stuff like I said it helps on the margins it it there will be a measurable increase in your focus if you do these

2:30:36things I think a lot of people start here though and this isn't where you want to start I don't think yeah it it's the sort of thing it's funny because when I over Over the years, I've slowly added each of these environmental things and they they help a lot. You know, air quality and seeing light in the morning, a little bit of a morning routine or whatnot. I would say I I never noticed a huge uptick in productivity, but what I notice now is when I travel and I lose everything. Oh, yes. Okay. And I'm like, "Oh, this sucks." Like if I'm stuck in some dark hotel room, you know,

2:31:08like at a uncomfortable desk, I'm just like, "This sucks." Yep. Yeah. So I like again building the habit and that ritual and that routine. A lot of it is placebased. Um and so yeah, I I think you can mitigate that a little bit though too. I know some people like if when they travel they always do the same workout routine or whatever it is before they get to work or um you know they'll

2:31:31they'll have their computer set up in a certain way uh that again you still have that trigger. Yeah. You know what I mean? So yeah, there's some mitigating factors. Again though, these aren't going to be like these aren't going to get you like 50% gains in productivity or anything. These are on the margins for sure. These definitely are on the margins. I just think we we hear about them the most because they are the most easily replicated and communicated. Yeah. Yeah. There's

2:31:53they're simple to grasp, right? Like you can you can go out and do these very easily. Yeah. Cool.

2:32:04So I mentioned that I I tend to find the system stuff. I mean I environmental design is a huge part of it, but for me it's it's really the rules and guidelines that drive everything home. So like how would you describe the most common or useful systems around improving your focus? Well, I mean I've tried them all. Yeah, I've I've mentioned this before. I've tried everything there is out there. And I think you're right. I think using like a particular system um productivity is very personal. Yes, we've talked about this before, right? It's a very personal thing. You have to figure out what works for you. I there are some guidelines though and some systems out there that

2:32:40I think you can pull some things from. The most useful one I've ever come across is K Newport's Deep Work, his framework around that. Great book. If you haven't read it, go out and read it. Um he really talks about kind of like the philosophy behind like getting actual high quality work done versus just busy work. He really delineates between those two. That's actually a big framing for him is deep work. The definition of deep work for him are activities performed in a state of distractionfree concentration and it pushes your cognitive capabilities basically to to their limits more or less, right? Compare that to shallow work, right? Sending emails, going to

2:33:15meetings, doing admin work. Both of them need to be done. They're both necessary obviously, but with especially with somebody like Cal, he really wants to optimize his life around those that deep work uh phase and so he's he does programming uh he writes a lot of creative work that demands a lot of deep focus and so he's come up with his own system around this and he's a big systematic kind of like he approaches things very systematically too. He's pretty extreme with this too as I recall. It's been a long time since I read his books and and he came on the show a couple years

2:33:46ago, but as I recall, it's like he he got his email down to like an hour a week or something or or eliminated entirely for majority of his of the year. I I forget exactly what he did. Yeah, he's pretty ruthless with what he he considers to be shallow tasks. Yeah. Yeah. He he's gotten it way down and he's he's famously not on social media. I mean, he has a YouTube channel and stuff like that, but yeah, that's actually one of his his core principles actually is like cutting back all of that stuff. Um, so, but really what you know, deep work for him, the core premise really is that

2:34:21focus and deep work, it's a skill, right? Right. It's not just a mood that you get into. And so he he's kind of designed this I guess you would call it ai system but really it's more like guidelines for setting up your your life really to have more of these experiences in deep work and flow too like we talked about which is a big component of well-being. Um and so he's he's come up with these like four rules for deep work if we can go through those. Y um the first one is is work deeply. So what he means by this I know it was a little like come on little on the nose. a little on the nose,

2:34:56I know. But um what he means is build the systems and the rituals. Yeah. And to so that you're more likely to get into these deep work states. So everything we've been talking about at this point, that whole environmental design section, um he would agree with pretty much all of that. Um but you know, having a fixed uh time and place to do your work, uh clear goals for each session. Rules,

2:35:19the rules and guidelines too really come into plays here into play here. What's allowed? What's not allowed? Get your phone out of there, right? You know. So, so by work deeply, you mean distraction free? Distraction free. Okay. Yes. I think that's clearer, right? I also like it's been I I read this book when it came out, but it's it's been like 12 or 13 years now. Um isn't isn't my understanding is that deep work is is specific to highly creative, high problem solving work. So like high cognitive load, right? So you wouldn't do deep work to like catch up on your taxing, you know, taxes or whatever, right? It's you're writing a book, you're creating software, you are

2:36:01um uh doing a design schematic or drawing a blueprint or whatever. It's like things that demand tons of your cognitive energy, you make space for them. Yes. And and they're and they are challenging too. Yeah. There's a lot of overlap with flow here. Okay. actually um in some ways. Anyway, so the the cognitive demand, it's something that's maybe just a little bit beyond your your skill level at that moment. Um there's a huge creative component to it, though, too. Like I said, he's a programmer and a writer, two like really creative tasks or professions that he's he's involved with. And so, yeah, this is it's mentally taxing. He he he acknowledges that,

2:36:40too, is that you can't always be in a state of deep work. like as much as you'd want to. It's just not feasible, nor is it probably desirable at the end of the day. And in my experience, you you tend to tap out of deep work at 3 or four hours. Yes. Yeah. And he acknowledges that as well. He his his whole system too, which I can we can kind of go through because I follow a not psychotic version of it, I would say. But um he even like you need to take a break from he's like he's he works a 9 to5. He keeps banker hours basically. And so he doesn't do it on the weekends. He's like

2:37:10take the weekends off. This is mentally demanding. is mentally tasking. He doesn't expect anyone let alone himself to like follow it all the time. He kind of works in seasons as well. So there's there's that whole thing around it too. Yeah. Okay. So that that first rule uh work deeply basically set up a repeatable system for yourself. That's what that's what that means. Um embracing boredom though too. So this is another uh removing distractions that kind of uh don't allow your mind to enter that bored state. Right? So like your phone, reflect reflexive phone use. He uses a phone, but it's just like he doesn't keep it in his workspace. Uh he doesn't have social media,

2:37:47which is we'll get into that here in a second. Um practicing the focus without having that novelty. I think this might be a little bit harder for people with like ADHD or who are very novelty driven. Um Cal does not have ADHD. I can tell you that right now. For sure. Um but but definitely like an emphasis on training your focus like a muscle which means like letting yourself be bored in a way and figuring out how to handle that type of boredom. So that's his his next rule. The the author Neil Gin talks about this how a big part of his writing process is allowing himself to be

2:38:22bored for extended periods of time because boredom is a big part of his his working working strategy. Shocker. It's not for me. Um, wasn't it Neil Neil Gaming too, didn't he? One of his systems, I guess you could say it was he would go into his office to write. Yeah. No distractions, no phones, no other tech or anything like that. And he gave himself two options. You can do nothing or you can write and that was it. That was him, right? That's it. Yeah. That's the embracing boredom

2:38:48thing. Yeah. Right. Because for him being bored was so painful that he would just write instead. Right. Yeah. Which I relate to that. I definitely relate to that part of it. Um, but he would also let himself be bored to like that would kind of spawn the new set of ideas. Okay. Okay. I think Cal talks about that as well. I don't like being bored. I couldn't tell you the last time I

2:39:10was bored. Really? Yeah. I was thinking about this recently. Like how often are you bored these days? Well, okay. I'm intentional about it. I like I force myself to be bored sometimes. Okay. So, like, you know, on planes these days, too. Like about half the time I'll just take my headphones off and I'll do the whole raw dog in the flight. Raw dog flight. Yeah, like parts of it. Not all of it. Parts of it. Dude, I'm so productive on flights. So productive. It's like I I seriously if I could just work on a plane for the rest of my life. I Yeah, I I know there's a lot of

2:39:38people like that. I guess I'm not one of them. If I'm waiting in line somewhere, I make a conscious effort not to pull out my phone. I'm trying to like force myself to be bored more more often. Are you seeing any benefits to that? There's been several times when I've intentionally been doing this where I'll have an idea for something else that pops up during that time. Yeah. which that's a a benefit of boredom, I think, too, is your your mind will start wondering and start making those horizontal connections um with disperate parts of your life, right? So, I've definitely noticed that a few times. Okay. Um which is just kind of fun. I don't know if anything productive

2:40:08necessarily always comes out of it, but it's just kind of it's it's mentally stimulating for you at least. Yeah. And I think helps a little bit. It's that incubation period we talked about for for creativity. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Should maybe try a little bit, Mark. I don't know. You talk about how you're glutton for pain, you know, and you have a high pain tolerance. Boredom might be your

2:40:24kryptonite. Well, that's the thing is that pain is not boring. Boredom boredom isn't painful for you. I'd rather be in pain than bored. So, okay. You know the the whole this the the studies where they put people in a room to do nothing and they would shock themselves. You just be shocking the [ __ ]

2:40:39out of yourself. I can totally see you doing that. Okay. Okay. Well, embrace boredom. I don't know. Maybe try it out over the next few weeks. I'll get back to you. Okay. His third rule. Um, I I've already jumped the shark on this one, but uh, quit social media use. Uh, he's famously not on

2:40:57social media. Cal, it's funny hearing these again because it was a long time ago when he wrote this. Probably 10 years ago when he wrote this book. Yeah. Knowing like because this book this book was so I don't want to say shocking, but it it really was kind of seinal when it came. There was like a cultural moment for it. Yeah. Right. Especially if you were online. Yeah. because it's a lot of these ideas at the time were they I remember they struck everybody as very radical and and shocking of like wow you don't use social media you don't answer email four days a week like I remember

2:41:31having conversations with people with people just being like that's completely impractical that's unrealistic nobody's going to do that but it's funny now hearing all this in 2026 and you're like it actually sounds obvious right you're like oh of course you get off social media when you're trying to work like who who wouldn't do that? No, I I thought the same thing when I read this. I was like, "Oh, that seems a little dated." But then I also just this week saw new data that was like teenagers are still spending 5 hours plus per day on social media. Yeah. Um so I think this is still going to be a problem there. You're right. There are a lot more people who are like they're getting

2:42:01off social media. I mean it it's becoming more media and less social like you've talked about before and so a lot of people are just like well I don't want to participate in this anyway. I'm I'm in that camp for the most part. I use social media a little bit, I guess, but just I'm not a compulsive user anymore. Anyway, he's not wholesale against uh information tech or even social media necessarily. It's more about the intentionality behind it. And he what what he was arguing about like when the people would bring up well that's just not feasible. Yeah. Right. He his response to that was well so you're saying the default is you have to be on social media and he

2:42:34rejected that. Yeah. You know, he rejected that idea that we're just doing it. We're accepting this is just the way things are. He was way ahead of the curve on a lot of this stuff. It's just it's always interesting to me to see I' and I've noticed this to to a lesser extent. I won't toot my own horn too much, but I' i've noticed this to a lesser extent with with subtle art. Like there are things that are shocking when they come out, but then they get integrated into the culture and they just become conventional wisdom and then 10 years later people turn around and they're like,

2:43:02"Well, that's really obvious. Why why did you even bother writing a book about that?" And and this I'm definitely kind of feeling that here. But I also remember when Cal's work came out and how shocking it was of like, "Oh my god, this guy like doesn't get on email. What the fuck?" I I though there's still people out there who are still addicted to social media course. But I'm just saying that this is standard. Like there's now there's nobody who hasn't heard this stuff before. Like it's you have high school teachers probably telling their students this stuff whereas 10 years ago it was this like cutting edge radical, right? Thought leadership. Yeah. Well,

2:43:37yeah. because everybody was out there saying, "Oh, like how do you optimize your social media?" And he was saying, "You don't." Right. Which was pretty wild at the time. Yeah, for sure. Um Well, okay. But his his fourth rule uh was to drain the shallows as well, too. Like I said, he's just ruthless about like, okay, if you of course we all need to do email at some point. We all need to do some admin. We all need to write that memo. We all need to go to those uh meetings, but being intentional and like really scheduling those out. I know for me anyway too and this is

2:44:08part of his whole process is uh the whole energy matching energy matching thing we talked about um I try to schedule as many meetings or appointments or whatever as late in the day as I can because I know my my most productive part of the day is in the first half of the day. Um and so you know you he he actually is like get really really intentional about that stuff. So instead of just mindlessly checking your email all the time, this I know this sounds obvious as well too, but like block that off. Take an hour and you're like, you can do email, you can look at social

2:44:39media, you can do whatever, do that, but block it off in your schedule on your planner. Yeah. Have a time period for it and hack back as much of that as you can. Yeah. Look at like, do I really need to be doing this? Can I delegate it? Can I just stop doing it? Yeah. One example is I'm I'm really bad at email. I'm bad at responding to emails and I that's intentional. I just don't want people emailing me all the time. think they can thinking they can do that and take up my time. I just don't. How dare you? I know. I know. And I know not everybody can do that,

2:45:04but like in my situation, I can. So, that's one thing I've been able to choose consciously to do. So, yeah. I will say like one system for me that I'm religious about is batching. Um Okay. Yeah. I was going to bring this up. Yeah. it which is similar to this but it it is uh as much as I talked about you know doing kind of thriving doing two things simultaneously if it's if if I'm doing eight or nine things in the same day I I just notice that my brain starts to flag and it there's like an exhaustion that sets in. So I'm I'm a huge fan of of batching very intensely. So,

2:45:42if if I have a bunch of writing that I need to do, I will try to set aside an entire day and only do that writing. If I have a day that I need to uh be at the purpose office and and help with the app, I block that entire day to be at that office and and help those guys. If we're shooting, right, it's like we batch these shoots. We shoot multiple episodes at a time. We batch YouTube videos in with these shoots. like it it's we just take three four days and just shoot very intensely all day every day and then we're done for like a month. So it it's I'm a huge huge fan

2:46:17of batching. Yeah. Yeah. Uh yeah. And that's so Cal has like a few different modes of implementing all of these things. I I don't think there's he doesn't prescribe necessarily one way to do it. Uh batching is kind of like one of the the methods you can do it, but he has these kind of four modes of implementation. I guess I would call them. One of them is what he calls the monastic mode, which is you just eliminate most of the shallow obligations entirely and just focus on deep work stuff. Not super practical for most people, I would say. The biodal, which is I think is kind of

2:46:48more what you do, which is alternate between deep work and shallow work. Yep. Like like and batching is part of the two. Don't mix the two. Yeah. And I will say that when I'm in deep work, I don't I don't multitask deep work. It's like if I'm writing, I'm only writing, right? If I'm working on a book, I'm only working on a book. Mhm. It's when I've got to do email and accounts and deal with sponsors and [ __ ] plan a trip like that's when I'm juggling right three or four small things at once. Okay. Another one is uh rhythmic though. So same deep work hours every day. I I lean more

2:47:22towards this actually. Like I'll set my my days up usually try to get at least two to three hours of deep work done in the mornings. Yeah. Is what I why what I aim for. I think most people would uh benefit from that as well. I do the biotal thing too kind of which is the batching and the not mixing the two types of work. Uh the fourth one he had though to is what he called journalistic which is um I guess journalists would maybe work this way. I don't know but you'd fit deep work in whenever time permits basically which is really hard and like sounds awful. It it sounds terrible

2:47:53to me too. I think it's more like, you know, but a journalist just has to be like on whenever they need to be, you know, like something happens and they got to run off and Yeah. I guess that's where he gets the name for it. He acknowledges this is the hardest one and the highest skill and probably the one that takes the longest to develop. Yeah. So, most people are going to probably fall in that biodal to rhythmic type of uh deep work schedule. Now, the way he does it though, and this is kind of kind of I follow some version of this. I actually use his his planner though,

2:48:20his notebook. I think I mentioned this in the procrastination episode, but um I use his planner, which is kind of um very much centered around time boxing, which we've talked about before. Um but the time boxing for anybody who doesn't know, is you plan out your day in blocks of time. So basically 30 minute chunks, I'll usually string together like one to three hour chunks of time to

2:48:43get something done. You put it on your schedule. You're like, "This is the what I'm from 8:00 a.m. to 11 a.m. this is what I'm doing." and you only work on that for that amount of time. I build some flexibility into it. If something comes up, then I just I have another column and I I I move things around. Fine. Okay. But um like I said before, time boxing is the thing that gives me it's clarity. It gives me clarity of what I need to be working on and like what I tell myself that I'm going to be doing. Um it there's a specific kind of like outcome associated with that too. Maybe

2:49:14a some sort of like metric that I've attached to it or even just a checkbox, whatever it is. Um, and it also like it makes me get really really like realistic with my time too because it's like, "Oh, okay. I'm gonna Yeah, I'm gonna write a 10 or 12 page thing in an hour. That's probably not

2:49:31going to happen." Right. And I need to get like really really practical and realistic about it. And it's made me realize that, oh, I can probably only get one or two important things done per day. Yeah. Um, so I Time boxing is like a big It's big in the productivity world. I know. Oh, I know you don't use it um because you hate it and you hate the idea of like having a box around your time. It feels too rigid to me because what I often notice is I'll get, you know, let's say I set aside two hours for research, but then I get two hours in and I'm like finding all

2:50:02this really interesting stuff. You know, I I like having the flexibility of like, okay, maybe I go three hours. Yeah. You know, maybe I push this thing back to this afternoon or maybe I do it tomorrow instead. So, I I as you know, I'm big on checklists because I like the flexibility of checklists. I'll have like an entire week's checklist open at the same time and then I'll just kind of liberally move checkbox items back and forth between days based on like the flow of that particular day or how the week's going. Yeah. Again, I think this is very person productivity is personal. Everybody's got their way like you need to just experiment a lot to figure out what's

2:50:40uh what works best for you. But yeah, that's Cal's framework in a very small nutshell. Okay. Uh, some of the other things that that kind of come up from this though, this is one that you brought to my attention. I didn't know about, but the maker schedule and the manager schedule. This is Paul Graham. You know about this? You brought this up to me and I hadn't really I'd never heard of this

2:51:00before, but it makes total sense. And it actually fits pretty well with Cal's like deep work stuff. Yeah. Right. Um, do you want to talk you want to talk a little bit about it or Yeah. I mean, it's it's been a while since I've read it, but it's it's um so basically the maker schedule is is optimized around more deep work. It's creative work, problem solving, you're you know, you're coding for long stretches at a time, you're writing a book, you're writing articles or whatever. So, you want to you basically kind of want to create like a container and then give yourself freedom within that container to really explore and think deeply and and be distraction

2:51:34free. Uh the manager schedule is is much more rigid and structured. Like it's it's more like hour blocks. It's all that admin work that's there's lots of batching, right? So you probably want to have all your one-on-one meetings on the same day each week so that you don't have to like feel like you're jumping back and forth all the time like any sort of sorts of reviews or approvals or board meetings or whatever. It's like the same time every month. So it's like very

2:51:59structured, rigid, predictable. um which is in many ways kind of the opposite of the maker scale. Yes. Yes. And then and then it's weird because then sometimes if you're in a creative industry like us, you need to find a way to balance the two, right? So I'm similar to you. I I usually like block off the mornings for creative work and then I leave the afternoons for meetings, admin, um you know, whatever, catching up on Slack, email, all that stuff. Um so it's hard. It's

2:52:30It's hard finding the balance if you need to like feel like you do both. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And one another one of Graham's uh points about that though too is like when when the maker and the and the manager like have to link up, it's usually like they have two very different ways of approaching it. Yeah. Uh you know like if you're a maker, you pretty much need like a half a day to do anything meaningful. Uh so if somebody comes in and say, "Hey, can we have a meeting right in the middle of that?" You've blown up the whole day, right? Yeah. I'm I'm definitely one of those

2:53:01people too where it's like if I got a dentist appointment in the afternoon, I'm like, "Well, there goes my afternoon. I'm not getting anything else done pretty much." Um, but I I think the takeaway I took from that was if you are somebody who's in like a more creative industry or, you know, programmers, writers, uh, anything like that, and you have these managers coming at you a lot, like you could maybe be a little more intentional with him about that, being like, "Hey, can we figure this out a little bit here?" Because it's like wrecking my the what I need to get done in a way that is is most useful for me anyway. Yeah. And I I'll say too, in my experience,

2:53:37people who work in media and entertainment, they have like agents, managers, publishers, editors, like they have kind of an intuitive understanding of that. Like they know, if you're the creative, they know to leave you alone and they know to like just when they check in, it's like a very gentle check-in. It's like, "Hey, wondering how it's going." Yeah. You know, like zero pressure, right? And then it's really only if a if a big deadline's coming up or if they sense that you're flailing and you need a push, then they'll then they'll start exerting pressure on you to to get you more focused and and locked in. But but they also understand that it's if you try to put

2:54:17too much structure around it, it kind of kills the golden goose. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think that's a one of the big takeaways from all of this is that there is kind of a Goldilocks zone here of of structure versus freedom, structure versus chaos even too. Um, so yeah, I don't I was thinking about this and I just don't know like what is your productivity system, Mark? Do you really

2:54:37have one or is it like I I feel like it is kind of a Goldilock zone that works for you, right? Um because you do, like you said, you need that structure but you hate certain types of structure. Mhm. Um, and then I know you use checklists, but do you just run everything by checklist? Is that all you do? You also have like you have a team of people who we help schedule everything and we got to coordinate things. I will say I I think I feel myself begrudgingly being pulled more into a manager's schedule. Yeah. Um, so I out of necessity this past year, especially with

2:55:10the second business, I have found myself relying way more on my calendar and less on checklists. I think the checklist was a little bit of a luxury of spending most of my time in creative work and deep work. Um, so it is things are getting more structured, especially doing more video and shoots and everything. It's like you can't just wake up and like text the team and be like, "Hey, let's shoot a thing at 1:30 today." Like it just No, you have to like put it on the calendar weeks in advance. I mean, you [ __ ] fly out here, right? So, it's everything needs to be planned out weeks,

2:55:46months in advance. There needs to be a clear understanding of like when certain things are going to get done, when are the scripts going to get done, when when's the research going to get done, uh when is the social content going to get done? Um so, it is getting a lot more regimented. I mean, granted, there is a team to help with all this stuff and and they handle most of that, but my life is becoming more more regimented, more more manager-l like, a lot more meetings, a lot more check-ins, a lot more approvals. Um, and it's it's hard. It's funny because it's like these days I would say I probably am able to carve out maybe two days a month,

2:56:24three days a month for like just really pure creative work or deep work like lots of writing. Um and I find like when I am able to do that, it feels so liberating. It's like very freeing and satisfying. I'm like ah I miss this. Um, so I I think the next one of the challenges this year is to find ways to get me more of that time to to kind of systematize up and and uh create various systems and operations to like free up that that deep work time. But generally speaking, I would say over the last 10 or 12 years, it's very similar to what you described. Mornings were

2:57:06always deep creative work. That's when the writing got done. And that's when I wrote the newsletters. That's when I wrote YouTube scripts. That's when I wrote books. Uh and then afternoons was meetings, admin, followup, strategizing, all that stuff. Um these days it feels like I'm either shooting or doing management. Okay. Yeah. That's probably 90 95% of my time. So, we'll see. Trying to get more creative time back into my life. Do you think you're going to go back to any like I know you've used some productivity apps before es especially like blocking apps. Um what do you what what's your general take on those and do you think you'd ever go back to those? So for people listening

2:57:49what you're referring to are like the the apps that like block websites, social media, YouTube, uh you know Netflix, what whatever whatever your distraction duour is like the these apps will block it out for you. Um, I used them a lot when I wrote books. Since I stopped writing books, I kind of got away from them. I didn't feel I don't really feel like I need them anymore. And I think it's because it's it's when I find myself flagging or losing interest in something, there's usually something else that needs to get done that's pretty urgent and so I can kind of do that little task switch that keeps my brain engaged. Um, but when you're writing a book,

2:58:27like what you said about the dentist appointment, like when you're writing a book, it is such deep deep work that Yeah. one like a phone call in the middle of the morning, like buzzing the phone. Yeah. It can it can derail like an entire morning. Um, it it's it can often take days to

2:58:46get through a section of a book to kind of figure out what it is, what it should be, what it means. Um, so you really really need a lot of that uninterrupted time and it is it is a lot more stressful and difficult. Like it's once you're once you're 6 months into a book, you're so emotionally invested. You've I mean you've told the whole world that you're writing it. You you're probably on a deadline. You've probably signed a big contract. It's a lot of pressure. It's very intense. And also chances you're six months in. Chances are it's it's not going very well. That's that's the point where you're like, why am I doing this? Yeah. You're like you're probably like 70 80

2:59:28pages in. It's total [ __ ] You're like, this is this was such a better idea when it was in my head. Why isn't this working out? Like you're just you're in the pits. And so in those moments, like falling into a YouTube rabbit hole or sitting and scrolling Instagram for an hour and a half, like it's really appealing. It's really, really, really, really appealing. And so it it is in my experience that's when you have to to bring out the big guns. Okay. Yeah. Like tie yourself down like Clockwork Orange style. Like write write the [ __ ] book. Yeah. I mean I've definitely used

3:00:03them too on and off, but I I would agree. It's only like if I'm really like, okay, I've got these couple of weeks or whatever where I've really got something big I need to get done, then I'll bust them back out. But I don't use them regular either anymore. I do know like uh my girlfriend like I've mentioned with has ADHD and she uses one of them for her phone uh that it's um I think it's like a it's like a little animal or something that takes over the screen and it's knitting. Oh yeah. It's called the one focus friend. Focus friend. That's the one. Yeah. It's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. And uh if you interrupt it then the the knitting little

3:00:36animal gets sad and Yeah. you don't get your sweater finished or whatever it is. You know they've gotten very clever with them since I used them. Like back when I used them, they were just these annoying block apps. Block app. Um but now they they've got one that's like a tree that you water. Like so the longer you go without picking up your phone, the more the tree gets watered, the more it grows. And then you see how many trees you can grow and each month and it like tracks for

3:00:58you. And you know, it it's they've gotten very very smart about it. Empathy hijacking kind of. Yeah. Gamification. Um so it it's Yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of cool stuff. Okay. Well, yeah. Um, so like I'm not going to get too deep into like a whole bunch of different systems. Like I said, I've tried them all. I don't think any of them is a magic bullet. There's no one system fits all for sure. I think these guided principles though and putting the guardrails around yourself, know yourself well enough. Yeah. To to know that which guardrails you need to put up. I think that's a good place to start anyway. It just takes a lot of experimentation. So I don't know if we

3:01:33can give a lot of individual advice on that. Yeah. I I honestly think the the systems themselves are kind of arbitrary. like what matters is the principles right so it's understanding that um you know for deep creative work or problem solving work you want as few distractions as possible you want to create the container without distraction for admin work managerial work you want to batch aggressively um kind of coming back to what we talked about earlier you know letting the mind wander so for example I think the pomodoro technique is stupid um for people listening pomodoro bros is supposedly the optimal amount of chunks to work in is 50 minutes and

3:02:14take 10-minute breaks. Uh that's [ __ ] But the principle which is that you should take periodic breaks. You should get up and walk around. You should go have a glass of water. You should stretch. Um and you should let your mind wander periodically is dead on. Like that is actually optimal productivity. Um it it does help you focus if you like give your mind a rest periodically. Um, so I I think all of these principles are true and important. It's the implementation into your actual day-to-day work life that's going to look completely different based on your personality,

3:02:51your profession, what you're trying to accomplish, what your goals are, and so on. So what would you say, Drew, is the 8020 of your focus? I mean, I think two big things. I think we maybe already gave this one away. Um, but kind of values alignment. Y like what are you choosing to focus on? Uh, that's probably the biggest one. Yeah. Uh, and like getting really clear on why you're focusing on that, why you value it, why it's important to you. That's going to like sharpen your focus 80% right there probably. And then just the environmental design stuff. Um, just getting conscious about that. A lot of that, like I I said, each one of those individual ones are

3:03:35kind of on the margin. Uh they'll they'll help you on the margins, but together like having the right container for work, getting all the distractions out of that container and kind of tricking your brain almost into saying this is this is where we are right now. This is what this is. These are your only options right now. Yeah. I think that's really just that's the 8020 right there. And again, it's it's personal. It's it's it's highly individual. I think it's what works for me doesn't work for you. That's why we don't give all this like really detailed advice about these little tactics or hacks or apps or whatever is because everybody's a little bit different. You and I are

3:04:11very different. Um but we usually wind up in very similar spots. Um so just having that having that intentional container that you create for yourself uh and really getting like self-aware around why you might be getting distracted or procrastinating or whatever it is. go back and listen to the procrastin episode or the emotions episode 2 is a really good one. A really good compliment to this one as well. Yeah. But I think those two things um are are by and large going to get you just about everything that you need. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Um values, environment, health, and creating guard rails. I mean, for for me, it's just like really getting clear about what I can trust myself,

3:04:56what what situations I can trust myself in and which situations I I can't trust myself in. And then and then just keeping myself out, you know, the same way an alcoholic doesn't go hang out in bars. Like I just I've learned which situations and circumstances that I cannot trust my brain to to focus or get anything useful done and then I stay away from them. Question. So something that we did not address and I think people might be surprised we didn't address. Do you think focus is a skill? Uh yeah I do. Okay. In what sense? Um I think in in the sense that you can well you can

3:05:34get better at it by practicing at it. Yeah. Um by noticing the triggers uh that distract you and doing something about those triggers. Uh so whether it is like a phone in your environment or whatever distraction it is and social media or Netflix or whatever by getting very self-aware around those types of things and addressing those you can get better at focus. Yeah. Um you I don't know I don't know if it's so much you can treat it like a muscle I guess. Sure. I think you can start out where it's like okay I can really only focus for anything on for 10 minutes at a time. We'll

3:06:08start there. Yeah. And then if you practice at it more, then it goes up to 15 minutes and 20 minutes and pretty soon you're at a couple of hours where you have a pretty good run of focus going. So I I do to an extent. Yeah. Right. Because like you've already mentioned, you probably really only get two to three maybe four hours a day of like deep work in. Right. That's probably a limit for almost mo for most people. There's probably some freaks out there that can get a six to eight hour day and of deep focus, but yeah. So I got a spicy take. Okay. I don't think it's a skill. You don't think

3:06:39it's a skill? Like when I think back to parts of my life where I would characterize myself as as deeply unfocused. I was still incredibly focused on something. It was just not what I wanted to be focused on. And kind of coming back to the research at the top of the show, it's like the technology is not destroying our ability to focus. It's just complicating our ability to focus. like the the the capabilities in there. It's just are we able to access it? And a lot of this came up because I was looking at some philosophy about focus, attention, mindfulness. And it's interesting because a number of philosophers differentiate between

3:07:23uh attention and awareness, right? So attention is kind of like whatever you're you're consciously putting effort or energy towards whereas awareness is a separate thing like you can be aware of what you're putting attention on. You can also not be aware of what you're putting your attention on. And okay I think awareness is the skill or mindfulness is the skill. you can build your mindfulness skill like a muscle which can then help you have a better sense of if you're focusing on the right thing or not and how much you're focusing on the right thing or not. Okay. So, you're almost saying like focus is almost just automatic. You're always

3:08:08you're always you're always paying attention to something. You're always focusing on something. You're just but whether you're aware of it or not whether Yeah. The question is are you focusing on what you want to be focusing on and are you aware of what you're focusing on. That's a good one. Okay. And this segus perfectly into our next episode, which is on mindfulness. Ah, which is really why I brought this up. I see what you did there. Yeah, you like that. Yeah, that's a good little promo there. I like it. Yeah. All right. Biggest takeaway. So, I mentioned this briefly earlier, the the value of clarity on focus. I always kind of knew this like,

3:08:44yeah, okay, when I when I sit down, I kind of need you need a goal, right? you need something to kind of latch on to. But for me, this is why I time box. I think too, this is what I've realized is why it's so useful for me is because it gives me that clarity of what I tend to do too. I I tend to see a big project in front of me and get overwhelmed. A lot of people

3:09:04have this this problem. You have all this stuff you have to do. Where do I even start? Oh my god. I get overwhelmed and I just shut down. Yeah. What I found is that the like clarity around uh well, it's really two parts of of the clarity. It's like the time I'm going to spend. I have a clear definition of the time uh around which I'm going to spend on this particular thing and also what I plan to get done during that. That to me like it it it kind of just mitigates all of that anxiety you have around like a big hairy project like where do I even start? Like how do I eat this

3:09:39elephant? Right. Yeah. Well, it's one bite at a time. And once you define that bite, you know, I'm going to start on the toe or something. I'm gonna I'm not gonna continue this metaphor. I'm sorry. No. Okay. You get what I'm saying though? Is that that the the clarity that you gain by like clearly defining the time that I'm going to spend on this and my goal for what I'm going to get out of this. That for me was like a kind of an aha moment through all this. Like I'd been doing it, but I wasn't aware that I was doing it before. And now that I am, I'm like, "Oh,

3:10:10I need to just I really need to double down on that." Yeah. and and find even more ways to get clear about what I'm going to do and what I want to get out of any block of given time that that I spend on anything. Yeah. So, that was a real big one for me. I would say the the big thing for me is just kind of the it's not even a reframe, but just the the realization that uh a lack of focus is really just downstream of a lack of other things, right? Like I when I think about my own productivity and desire to focus on things to be present in certain situations, I tend

3:10:45to always think of it as like I there's something present that is distracting me or overwhelming me. Um that there's I don't have the right software. I don't have the right system. I don't have the right calendar. Like it's always some like there's something additive to be done. Whereas like it was very interesting going into the research and and really just trying to like you know what I tend to do for these episodes. I don't do as much research as as you and the the research team do but like my goal with these episodes is always to kind of take all the research that you guys do

3:11:18and just really like how can I compress this into like the simplest concepts as possible and that realization of like it's it's actually a lack of something. Like if you're if you're lacking focus, it's because you're either lacking a sense of what's important, you're lacking clarity on what you should be doing, you're lacking uh calmness, you're feeling like hijacked by your emotions, or or there's a lack of health, right? There's like you're just biomechanically not ready to to be focused on something. So yeah, that that was just like that was very interesting for me cuz I I I tend to think of things like focus and productivity is almost this this separate category

3:12:02of what we usually talk about which is like values and purpose and direction and all this stuff. Um but yeah, no it's it's it is kind of downstream, right? It's like if you are in a job that you absolutely [ __ ] hate and you're working with a bunch of people you don't like, like there's there's no productivity system that's going to fix that. Like you're never your mind is going to be consumed with fixing that instead of Exactly. Like you're never going to be locked in. You're never going to find flow. You're never going to have like satisfying deep work sessions. So yeah, it is it is I I guess my biggest takeaway is that focus is is a downstream effect of getting the

3:12:42other stuff right. And it's conversely, I think what we'll see in next episode is that mindfulness or awareness is upstream. And it's funny that we tend to conflate those two concepts all the time, right? Like we think that we tend to think of like meditation as building your ability to focus, but actually what it's building is your awareness and your your mindfulness of yourself and and so the the awareness is upstream of everything. The awareness is like what tells you like, "Oh, I actually hate my job. Oh, I don't respect the people I work with. Oh, I should probably find a better situation. Then I'll be able to do good work." Whereas focus is just kind of

3:13:19like that that pure rubber meets the road. Am I getting the thing done that I want to get done? Okay. Yeah. And that's where all the systems and everything come in. And Yeah. Yeah. No, I I would definitely agree that um we we try it's we try to add something in when we're trying to like be more productive or get focused. Really what we need to do is subtract. Yes. We need like get ruthless and subtract. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. It sets us up real nice for next time. I like it. That is all for our episode this week. As always, if you want to

3:13:53get a summary PDF with everything that we talked about here, you can go to solvepodcast.com/focus. Congratulations, you focused for the entire episode. You clearly did not need to listen to it. But thank you for listening to it. We will see you next time.