Transcription
Yo, welcome back to the channel. Previously, I made a video about how I save up to 50 hours a week. But today, I want to talk about when I actually do get to work, how I stay focused for long periods of time, and stop the habit of infinite scrolling.
This was something I struggled with for a really long time, and after testing a lot of different things, I found five simple ideas that really work for me. And since then, I've been able to make progress on all my goals and hobbies. If you're new here, I make videos to help you optimize your life. I used to work in tech consulting before I became a full-time entrepreneur, and I love sharing what I'm testing and learning on this channel.
The first idea starts with removing the two types of distractions. The science of distractions is actually quite interesting, and it's what this book, "Indistractable," talks about. The first type of distraction are known as outer distractions, and it's what you might expect: things that pull at your attention from the environment around you. Usually, these types of distractions are easier to diagnose and fix. Like, for example, if you find that you usually get distracted by your phone notifications when you get to work, you could turn your phone off, put it in a different room, or you could be like me and set up a modern dumb phone to stop yourself from infinite scrolling. Sometimes, just removing this outer distraction will be enough for you to stay focused for a long period of time.
But when I first tried this out, I found that sometimes I would still distract myself with other things, like maybe I would start scrolling through my photo album or cleaning my desk. And this is usually just because the thing that I was doing wasn't as stimulating than something else. And this is the type of distraction that most people miss, which are known as inner distractions. Inner distractions are generated by your thoughts and feelings. You actively go and look for something to distract yourself with because you're not being stimulated enough by the thing that you're actually doing.
They've actually done a bunch of studies on this related to smoking cessation, and the book breaks down a simple four-step process that has been proven to work that can help you block out these inner distractions. You don't have to do these four steps forever, but it's a worthwhile experiment to see if you have these inner distractions. And if you do, you can easily identify them and block them out. Inner distractions are really caused by some sort of discomfort with the thing that you're doing, and so that creates an urge to do something else.
And so the first step is to identify that discomfort. The second step is to take out a journal or some page on a computer, and you can just write down what time it was, what the trigger was, and what you wanted to do. It's sort of like time tracking where you write down a list of distractions that you can go back to. So, for example, the trigger might be you feeling bored, and the urge is to refresh your email or check your notifications. The third step is to write down your sensations or how you're feeling. And this is actually the method that they use for smoking cessation. In one of the studies, it talks about the researchers found that smokers who wrote down how they were feeling when they had the urge quit at double the rate than those who didn't. And the fourth step is called the 10-minute rule, which is just to wait 10 minutes before giving in on your distraction. Like, if you want to check your phone or refresh your feed, the book says it's actually fine to do that, but just not immediately in the moment. Because you wrote the time down, you could just wait 10 minutes, and then you could see if you still wanted to do that. And from my personal experience, in most cases, I don't actually want to do that 10 minutes later. Creating that gap between having the urge to do something and actually doing it will break that habit of infinite scrolling and being distracted when you're trying to do something else. The more you do this habit, you can see over time that you get better at training your brain to stay focused for a long period of time, and you'll find that you'll have less and less inner distractions.
So whenever I'm trying to do this, how I fit this into my workflow is that I'll be working, and I'll have a journal open where I keep track of different times when I get distracted and want to do something else. This could be when I'm like reading or practicing guitar or even just working on my computer. And anytime I feel this inner distraction and I want to do something else, I just write down the time, what the trigger was, and how I was feeling. I think this is actually more powerful than blocking out outer distractions because you become hyper-aware of everything that could be distracting you. Like, I found that even just having my Rubik's Cube on my desk when I'm working could distract me because I'll have the urge to pick it up and solve it.
If you know who Lex Fridman is, I remember seeing a video where he talked about his daily routine, and he actually does something similar. I don't know if he read this book or not, but when he's in a deep work session, he keeps a Google Doc open, and he writes down things that he wants to do later or things that are distracting him, and he doesn't do them in the moment. "If interesting ideas come into my head to try to trick me into pulling on the thread of that idea, I gently set it aside."
And that's actually related to the second idea, which is to do deep work sessions where you train yourself to be indistractable. So, in one of my previous videos, I interviewed my friend Ruri Ohama, who, if you're not familiar with, she's a YouTuber with over 1.3 million subscribers, and she makes anywhere between $50 to $100,000 per month. And one of the things that she really changed my mind and opened my perspective on was that it wasn't really about working long hours to be productive, but more about how efficient you are that really defines your productivity. You could work for two hours a day and have a really successful YouTube channel, or you could grind for 10 hours a day but not really make any progress.
So, what has been useful for me was to do these deep work sessions between 50 to 90 minutes where I train myself to be indestructible. Andrew Huberman actually has some podcasts where he talks about the ideal length of time to be working, and he says it's about 90 minutes based on your circadian rhythm or ultradian cycle. There's a bunch of science behind that, but you can just use it as a guideline. Personally, I still find that 50 minutes to be the best ideal amount of time for a deep work session, and I take a 10-minute break before starting again. And I have this visual timer on my desk that makes it really easy to see how much time's left of my deep work session. I've probably mentioned this like two or three times in different videos, and this has really been super useful in training myself to be indistractable because I can see how much time is left before my break.
During my deep work sessions, I'll have my journal next to me, and I'll write down things that I want to do or different urges to check my phone. And it's usually during my 10-minute break where I'm defocusing that I'll give in and start checking my phone. And I find that this is really useful for breaking the habit of infinite scrolling because you're not compulsively checking your phone; you're writing it down and checking it when you actually want to. Once I actually get into rhythm, I find that I can actually work for multiple hours without taking any breaks. That's pretty much when I enter a flow state where I completely lose track of time and am just fully focused on the thing I'm doing. The more you can train yourself to do these deep work sessions while being indistractable, the easier it is it will be to stay focused for a long period of time.
One app that I found to be super useful for deep work is this website called Focusmate. You basically go there, and you can hop on a one-on-one call with somebody and work for 50 minutes straight. It's super useful with accountability and remembering to stay focused. I'm not affiliated with the company anyway, and they didn't sponsor me to say this at all, but I just genuinely think it's a fun and useful way to stay focused. I think it's cool because you get to meet other people who are in different countries and work alongside them.
The science behind why this works so well is because you get in the habit of setting an intention before you actually start working. And that is the third idea, which is to set an implementation intention. There was one study in 2001 that really showed the power of setting an intention. So, these researchers basically just took two groups of people and had them go through a motivational exercise training. They basically just talked about how important it was to exercise, what would happen, and they stopped exercising and pumped them up to start exercising for the next week or month. For the first group, they just ended the presentation there and told them to go home and exercise for the next week. But for the second group, they continued the presentation by having them write down exactly when they were going to exercise and what they were going to do. So they basically set an intention. It was just one or two sentences, like stuff like, "On Monday, I will run for 30 minutes." But they found that just by doing that simple thing, it made a huge difference. In the first group, only 35% of people followed through with exercising regularly, but in the second group, nearly 91% of people followed through with the plan that they set. That's almost a 3X increase just by saying and writing down what you're going to do.
From that paper, the researchers basically found that motivation itself had a very low impact on behavior, but setting an implementation intention had a really significant effect on behavior. So, one of the keys to working for a long period of time without being distracted is to simply plan what you're going to do and what you're not going to do. I think this is why using social media on a schedule is so powerful because you're basically saying that you're not going to be using social media for this part of the day, and you are going to be using social media for this part of the day. And so it helps with being more intentional with scrolling and not falling into the habit of infinite scrolling. But when it comes to work, you can pre-plan what you're going to do by having your calendar, or you could say what you're going to do before a 50-minute or 90-minute deep work session. This is much better than just sitting down and saying, "It's work time," because you'll probably be just picking random tasks to do.
The next idea is related to energy management. I read about this in the Harvard Business Review, and it completely changed how I went about planning my day. The title of the paper is actually called "Energy Management Over Time Management," and it talks about the idea that you have way more control when it comes to trying to manage your energy levels than trying to squeeze out more time to work. When I was working my full-time job in consulting, I still had many side projects that I was working on, like I had a language learning podcast that I was doing every single week, and I was trying to launch a software app. But I quickly realized that two hours after work was really different than two hours before work. At night, I had completely depleted my willpower energy, and all I wanted to do was just to scroll on YouTube or watch a Netflix show. But in the morning, I found that it was way easier to be motivated and efficient for two hours.
So, what I did at the time to try to manage my energy levels was I sort of shifted my sleeping schedule so that I would wake up a couple hours before 9:00 AM, so I had a solid amount of time to work on things before I actually had to get to work. That way, I was actually using my brainpower for things I was passionate about and not just sitting in random meetings. And then at night, I could scroll without feeling any guilt because I had already maximized everything I wanted to do for that day.
If you start optimizing your energy levels, one of the first things you'll notice is that based on your circadian rhythm and chronotype, you'll have natural highs and lows throughout the day. So, there's an ideal time for you to be doing focus work, exercising, and chilling out. There are a bunch of quizzes online that you can take to figure out your chronotype, and it kind of just estimates, uh, based on an average, when might be an optimal time for you to be exercising and working. Like, for example, it says that I'm a bear type, which means that the best time to do focus work is two to three hours after waking, and I definitely feel like that is the case.
But even beyond that, the paper identifies four dimensions of energy that you can optimize to increase your levels of focus, and they are optimizing your body, mind, emotion, and spirit. Among these four, the biggest impact that I've felt is when I've optimized my body through improving my sleep, diet, exercise, and nutrition. I've made a ton of videos about this topic, like how I optimize my sleep, biohacking, and a few protocols to feel focused if I'm feeling tired that day. So, if you're interested, you can check that out.
One underrated habit that's helped me with optimizing my energy levels is meditating consistently. Whenever I've meditated consistently for a few weeks of doing about 20 minutes a day, I found that I've been able to focus for longer periods of time and get distracted less often. The specific type of meditation that I've done is called mindfulness meditation, and you basically just pay attention to something like your breath or something else. And there are a lot of studies about this of how it can help increase gray matter in your brain and change your brain waves. There are a bunch of other types of meditation like gratitude or breathwork or visualization, but from what I've found, mindfulness meditation is most like going to the gym and doing deliberate training on your brain. So, if you have ADHD, maybe this form of meditation can be really helpful for you.
The final one is, I think, one of the most powerful ways to stay focused for a long period of time, and that's to create a routine. I think the routine itself doesn't actually matter as much as just having one, because just having a routine that you do before you start doing focus work helps put your brain in the same state. From a literal perspective, from a brainwave standpoint, it's what has unlocked the most amount of focus for me, and it's why I've been so interested in breaking down the tools and routines used by high performers on this channel. I studied some entrepreneurs who work literally one minute after waking, and there's other people who are more like an athlete, and they go through an elaborate morning routine before they get started. And so I think it's worth testing different ones to see what works the best for you.
And part of having a routine is also having a consistent workspace, because one of the things I found to be able to consistently drop into a flow state is to have some predictability about where you're working and where you're at. For example, I always thought that it would be cool to be traveling and working, sort of like a digital nomad. So, even though I can't, I can do that now since I quit my job, um, whenever I've tried traveling and working, I've not been able to have that really high levels of focus because there's too many things that are stimulating, and I get distracted by working in a cafe. From personal experience, I found that having a set workspace that you work at, or even the same spot in a cafe, helps more than you think in consistently staying focused for a long period of time and not falling into bad habits.
But yeah, that's it. If you enjoyed this video, consider subscribing to see more videos like this. And I'll put up a video of my daily routine if you want to watch that. I'll see you there. Let's get [Music] yeah.