Transcription
This is me staring at a wall. And believe it or not, this helped me have one of the most productive weeks of my life. But the trick doesn't actually have much to do with the wall. It's the fact that I'm not doing something else. I'm not scrolling on my phone or checking my email. Instead, I'm just sitting here either working on the task at hand or doing nothing. This is the first rule in a super simple protocol that by the end of this week would teach me a totally new way of thinking about focus. That that piece of paper took me a week to figure out. So, I'm going to take you through 5 days of my wall staring progression and the key moments where I'd be picking up the pieces to this puzzle.
Walking into work for the first time since holiday break, 7:39, a little early, but I don't got nothing else going on. So, typically I'd be working on videos before work, but this week I'm not editing. I'm not going on Spotify or even using the calculator app because in this challenge, less is more. And the second rule is no non-essential screens during or outside of work. Seems simple, but I would quickly realize there are distractions everywhere. In the first couple hours here, I got hungry and had to make my little smoothie. And then I'm chatting with my wife and there's a dermatology appointment I got to schedule. So yeah, pretty sure all that breaks the first rule. So I really don't feel like I'm doing it yet. I also think I'm missing standup right now. Yep. And I was already missing a meeting. This is kind of the pattern today. I was not prepared for this. This sucks. This kind of sucks. I don't know if my brain is broken or what, but I had gotten used to letting myself get distracted at work. There's a point in my day where I kind of slow down, turn on a video or listen start listening to a podcast. Can't do none of that. This is kind of a dumb challenge, dude. But I'm doing this for a reason. There are moments in life where we have to get serious. In my work right now, I'm working on an extremely difficult important project that's supposed to solve one of the biggest problems in my whole company. A lot of important people are depending on me to pull through on this. This project has been going on for months and before the end of the year, stuff got kind of crazy. It got really messy and right now the sentiment is not good. People are nervous. So, if I'm going to make this happen, I have to lock in right now.
And whenever I think about focus, I remember this guy, Riend Doris. He talks about how focus works in the brain and how you can harness the same dopamineergic system that makes you addicted to your phone to actually work in your favor and make you more productive. He also looks like he's in the Matrix, so I trust him. He has three principles to follow. One, take boring breaks. This is where I directly got the wall staring from. "A favorite of mine is wall staring. Stare at a wall for 20 minutes and I'll salivate. Your brain needs to rest and recover if you want it to focus, and it can't do that if you're just ingesting content all the time. Do nothing on your breaks to actively rest and get back to work." Two, inhabit the in between. Don't pull out your phone every time you have 30 seconds. Just wait for them to come back from the bathroom. Stand in line, drive home without music on. Just sit and exist in these in between moments. And three, do one thing at a time. Stop trying to multitask or have a video plan in the background all the time. Don't schedule an appointment while you're working. If you're having a conversation with somebody, just talk to them. Stop splitting your focus. And if you do all these things, they have an extremely powerful effect on the brain, apparently. And if you haven't noticed, I'm basically applying all of these in a roundabout way. And in the middle of this stressful workday, it's the perfect time to try out this wall staring thing for the first time. I'm going to set a timer for 10 minutes, and I have to look at this wall until it's up. Somehow this is going to make me ready to work again. I wish I could tell you this had as strong of an effect as it would later in the week. But today we're just barely scratching the surface. It's two-dimensional. Just you and a wall. It's kind of hard to know what to do when you're just staring at the wall. Like how intently do I look at it? For now, just stick it out. Don't look away. And you'll open the door to something much deeper next time. The second level. That's all today is about. Oh, and the actively resting thing. I think I'm supposed to be ready to get back to work now. And I kind of just want to keep staring at the wall. Well, okay. I'll tell you what, it did not help that much. I kind of just survived the rest of my really stressful day at work. Made it day one with work finally done. This is about where I was compared to a normal week. So, we got a ways to go, but we're done. And it's something I've been itching to do today, but I haven't been able to do it until now.
To my surprise, it was after work that I noticed the first real effect of this routine. Can't listen to music on this, but that doesn't mean I can't play music. After a day of nothing to occupy myself besides work, I was just itching to get over and play the drums, which is cool because I haven't even played much in months. I think this is just the first time I felt like I had the space for it. And the same goes later when I went on a walk with Kate. "Go ahead, boy. Go quick. Quick, go. I want to get a shot of you." I had nothing else to be preparing for or any problems to be working on. I was just there with her and had the space to just enjoy myself on this walk. And suddenly I realized how long it's been since I felt like this. It's really nice to have a single work to do and then enjoy your life outside of that. Just have space. And I kind of missed it. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I don't think I can have this right now. Having a full-time job and trying to grow this YouTube channel just takes a lot. So, I should just enjoy this week while I have it.
I guess Tuesday, I woke up almost nervous to go back to work. I frankly did not get as much done as I wanted to yesterday. I was just getting pulled all over the place. And I'm really hoping today I can actually get work done on this project. So, here we go. We got our work cut out for us. And I was still fighting the temptation of distractions. This thing is calling my name right now. I'm so tempted to do anything but work. Oh, I should just play drums for a minute. Oh, I should write something down. Oh, I got my walking pad. You can't see it. It's too hard to take the camera off the stupid tripod today. It's just this. And I got to get used to that. But then something amazing happened. I learned that I just had to trust the process. Sit down and it does not feel like you're going to focus at all. But all of a sudden, what's up? It's been like hours and I'm now completely locked in. Turns out you just focus on work and all of a sudden it's the most interesting thing ever. "You recording yourself carrot?" "This carrot's really gross." "I can smell it." I'm feeling quite a bit better today. It's day today. I don't have many other thoughts. I kind of just thinking about work, which I guess is kind of the goal. And I can't help but be a little bit excited for something in particular. I have a new friend that I think I'm going to meet again after lunch is a real energy lull. So, I'm taking a quick break. Last time we did a short 10 minutes. Let's do 12 today. My second time wall steering hit me like a ton of bricks or plaster. For some reason, my head started feeling really weird. It was like throbbing and it was hard to keep it upright. But eventually, I totally relaxed and I focused on the light on the wall and I could see it creeping across the wall ever so slowly. And the longer I looked at it, the more it warped. Like the strip of light was flexing and breathing. It was like the wall was pulling me in and it got intense enough that I had to look away. I don't know what you're supposed to be thinking about when you do that, but I'm not sure if I'm doing it right. Either way, something worked. I just absolutely locked in for a couple hours. Now I'm already past time I'm supposed to clock out. Did some really good work though. Making a really cool thing. I got a baseline of something that could solve one of the biggest issues on this project. All you got to know is this is real progress type stuff. So, feeling good about that.
Yet again, after work, something happened that changed my perspective on this whole challenge. You see, Sunday, I went to the gym and decided not to listen to music. I drove home in silence and it was beautiful. It was really nice. Just hearing the natural sounds and enjoying being present in the world reminded me of the peace I felt working at camp and going to the gym tonight. I was looking forward to having a similar moment again. But when I drove there and when I got there and I'm working out, there was no bliss to be felt. It it was kind of dull. And I realized I guess I expected things to be different cutting out the screens and making things simpler, but it was just becoming a new baseline. It's just a quieter baseline. The moments might be cool or they might be boring and you're just more susceptible to feeling that and you're more available to notice the smaller things. That's kind of an interesting piece of the puzzle.
On Wednesday, I started hitting my groove. I'm kind of excited to work today. I got some ideas, so I might clock in just a little early here. I definitely feel like I'm starting to get used to this. It's feeling less like work. And the work I did this morning set me up perfectly for a meeting I was going into. Basically, a bunch of important leadership people were talking about this big issue that we're having and how we have to figure out what we're going to do. And it just so happened to be the exact thing I had been working on since yesterday. So, I showed them this form I made working and everybody loved it. So, work is going really well, which is great. But something else really interesting is happening simultaneously. Just last night, I'm having a conversation with Kate, "and I immediately had a much more opinionated response than I normally do. And she noticed this as well, but I felt like I had mental clarity and was just able to process things live in a much better way. So, I feel like I have more just mental bandwidth from not plugging up my brain maximum capacity with all this stuff all the time. All these inputs from email and YouTube metrics and podcasts. And right now, I don't even desire to use anything digital at all. Even if I could open up my laptop, like I don't really want to. I'm kind of good where I'm at right now."
Man, I'm having a trouble focusing right now. And you know what? So, I'm going to do 20 minutes. You can't see it. The neural reset happens much quicker the third time. As the wall pulls you in, you become more relaxed, but you kind of come in and out because your consciousness wants to fight back. But the longer you go, the less you resist. Until you're in a half conscious, half unconscious state, almost perfectly fused with the wall. Thoughts dulled almost to the point of being dreams. And it feels like if you keep going, you could I still don't know how to describe how it feels afterwards, but I proceeded to go into absolute lockin flow state mode for hours. All right, it worked again. The wall steering is like a magic trick. I thought it would be more of a gimmick. I' I'm like 20 minutes over when I probably should have clocked out. Cooking up some good stuff. I'm quickly coming up with solutions to all of the rest of the problems with this project. And what I just did now and what I did yesterday would both be big accomplishments for any week. Typically, it's only Wednesday, so that feels good. I was starting to feel pretty confident about this whole thing. The super focused routine was starting to feel easy. But he who is not prepared for battle is doomed to fail. I just made that up. But those overconfident thoughts would screw me over. Before we get to what happens next, here's some vital wisdom about this routine that I learned tomorrow, but I want you to see now. So, I think what I'm finding is there are peaceful times. There are very boring times. There's fun times, exciting times, good times, bad times. It just changes how available you are to experience them. So, I kind of made this little chart. You have more mental bandwidth overall cuz you're not filling up your brain with random stuff, which makes you more available to experience whatever's going on. Notice all the little things, which makes you more present when those moments arise. And I think that just makes your experiences richer, right? So, remember this as we go into tomorrow. And before things got crazy, I was having a nice little morning. "I wanted to say thank you very much for all the support. I've gotten some of the nicest comments I've ever gotten recently. And um I'm not stopping. I'm not leaving. If you're enjoying this one, the best way to help other people see it is to push the like button. So do that if you want. But I love creating this stuff wherever it goes. Thank you for being a part of it."
But Thursday, woke up with some ideas what I want to do. So, let's do them. I just spilled coffee on my pants. Come here. Like I said, I was getting a little too comfortable cuz I was about to severely mess up this challenge for the first time. Okay, I got to be honest. I just maybe stumbled for real for the first time after my first phase of work was going well. I was like, "Oh, I gotta order something for the thumbnail." So, I went online and while I was doing that, I ended up checking my email. I ended up checking my YouTube stats. Saw a bunch of comments and in my email, I had a pretty interesting message from a brand who wants to use some of my footage. So immediately I'm jumping on that trying to email them back, do some business, but all of a sudden it's been like 20 minutes in the middle of a work day. So I don't know. I kind of messed up a little bit. A lot of bit. I had no idea how severely this would impact my brain. Now I just got to see if I can set all that aside, go back to work, cuz now I'm thinking about that business deal. I've just introduced so many more thoughts. So, probably a mistake. I've now had to fight the urge to check my email again and follow up. Haven't quite got done as much work as I want to. So, I'm going to delay lunch right now and try to just focus for a while to balance it out. It was a real struggle trying not to keep thinking about this stuff that I had just seen. But going through this actually led to one of the most important breakthroughs in understanding focus from this whole routine. So, it's kind of like you got a little brain. Is that what a brain looks like? Brain/mind. And when you focus on something, it takes up some of the space. And what I'm finding is the more of this extra space you have, the more available and present you can be. But also, when you introduce other things like business email, YouTube studio, you think, "Ah, I'll just let these in for a second." But guess what? They don't go away. They stay there. Even if you stop focusing on them, they're in the back of your mind all day. This is now your mind for the day. So now these are competing with the work, your main task, and your mental bandwidth uh gets smaller. That's how it feels anyway. Once you open a door, it's open. You can't close it again. So be careful what you focus on because you welcome whatever you focus on. I had all the pieces and I was starting to put them together. I was also starting to push it. I think too far with the wall staring. "Okay, I have no choice but to stare at the wall. Dude, we could probably do 25 minutes. Right. Right. But hey, what's the worst that can happen?" As you get used to wall staring, you go through the reset process quicker. But today, the throbbing came back with a vengeance. My head was almost in pain. You can see me trying to communicate what parts of my head were hurting at different times and the process just felt more aggressive. As I looked at the wall, I stopped seeing details on it and I realized I was almost looking through it. I wasn't looking at a 2D surface. It was just a pain that I was already on the other side of. But then all of a sudden, I was back in my chair. With 9 minutes left, I was totally out of it. It was over. And I was just sitting there. And after what felt like far too long. I can't imagine doing it much longer than that. I'm legitimately excited to go back to work this time. Please let me do something. I don't know why it feels like my head is full of sand after I do this. All right. But I once again entered a flow state for hours. All right, winding up a little late again, but I finished a full mockup of this thing I'm working on and showed it to my manager who was pumped about it. He said, "This is gas." That's what I want to hear. I agree.
As the week went on, the nights got less interesting. Not in a bad way. They're just a little simpler, less to show. Man, those pancakes are going to be good. I will say at this point in the week, my brain was getting pretty fried. So much intense focus. I tried to do an ad read and uh did not go well. And you want money. You want to manage your money good. Yikes. This morning I woke up cooking. All the pieces were falling into place in my head after what we were talking about yesterday with the mental bandwidth and the brain. I think this is sauce. This is really important stuff cuz let me allow me to draw you some more pictures. So this is that mental bandwidth again. Here's what I kind of thought it looked like before this routine. Dang it. So, I used to tell Kate that I would work on YouTube stuff. I would get up at 5:00 a.m. and I'd work on YouTube stuff. Then I would clock into work, work all day, and then I might come back and do more YouTube stuff after work. But seems like a pretty even split. Still got plenty of space for whatever else I want to do. Maybe some like household chores, going to the gym. But that feels pretty close to what I wanted. There's a split between YouTube and work. My two kind of major things I'm working on. However, this is what it probably actually was. Hey, it's slightly better. So, like I said, what I would call working on YouTube stuff I thought was just working on the channel was actually checking email, checking YouTube studio, which is just where you see all your channel analytics and comments and everything. Working on editing, researching, maybe even Photoshop, working on a thumbnail. And then I would clock into work. And at that point, my brain's already fragmented thinking about so many things, not just YouTube. No wonder it's hard to get work done. Plus, I'm introducing more things like YouTube videos, podcasts. That's what that's supposed to be. And basically, when I thought my bandwidth was this, it was actually this. Barely enough to do anything meaningful with Kate, think proactively about anything. By default, I was just loading my mind up with all this stuff. So, no wonder work was suffering a little bit and I was kind of spread thin all over the place. I was taking up my mental real estate. Had almost no bandwidth left. I think this might be where we focus our solution to how we implement this going forward. You don't I don't need you anymore. We'll figure that out later cuz I got to work. Like I said, at this point in the week, my brain was a little tired. So, I focus more on just communicating and sharing more what I've been working on. I sent a video of what I made yesterday to the team and everybody loves it. The CPO, chief product officer, sent this GIF GIF and said, "So cool. I am very excited about this. Just lots of positive feedback." And you don't normally get really great responses on any random stuff that you post. It's just cool to be seeing some results of this work already. And I was noticing positive effects in another really important area of my life. Something interesting I didn't know would happen is I feel like I've been enjoying my time with Kate more this week. "Yeah." "Like I knew there would be more time together probably just cuz I'm less busy, but I'm more entered in and it feels like we just have a little bit more fun together. Um, which is cool. It's why we got married. So, how have you experienced me doing this this challenge this time?" "It feels like a little bit nicer. Like the vibe in the house feels like more relaxed. It's like I would recommend it for other people. It's inspiring me a little bit more to be on my phone less. I've had like a couple days where I'm like, "Okay, I don't need to like immediately hop on my phone." "Oh, yeah." "So, it's like that's kind of nice cuz it's more quiet even in like my own head. I feel like I can like better adapt to other like stressors or things going on." "I know. It's been a good one. Very good vibes." "Yeah. Cool." "Bye, friends."
I'm less excited about this today, but we've come this far and 30 minutes is the longest break I can probably possibly take at work. This is pushing it. And this time I didn't come to play. At this point I could look at the wall and instantly dial in to the deepest level. I had no thoughts and my body was completely numb. It felt like I had fully realized what wall staring can be. However, really dulls the brain. 30 minutes probably overkill. I had once again come to with like 10 minutes left. Just sitting there waiting for it to be over. Somehow it takes a lot out of you. It's like overstaying your welcome. I can firmly say you don't need to do it that long and after another chill but productive afternoon. Okay, work is done for the week. And I'll tell you what, at the beginning of this week, people were nervous, uncertainty, people didn't know what was going to happen, how this was going to go. And after all the work I did this week and sharing it with everybody, everyone is excited. The sentiment has totally changed. People are like, "When can we get this thing out?" And I think that is a huge win is that people feel good about the project and I feel confident that it's going to be really good. But I think this really was an important moment and I showed up for it. So, I'm happy about that. And this experiment has been much bigger than just this week of work, too. So, we'll talk about that. But for tonight, it's date night, so I'll talk to you later.
So it is the end of the week. What's this model for focus? It all comes back to the concept of mental bandwidth. Your total capacity to focus on anything. And every time you devote your focus to something, it takes some of that up and then you have less bandwidth left. And things you focus on can take the form of inputs and outputs. Think of inputs as like reading and outputs as writing. Things where you're receiving information and things where you're expressing and creating information. We'll come back to that later, but for now, you've got this mental bandwidth and it kind of resets every day, more or less. And the trick is the more mental bandwidth you still have left, the better your focus is cuz there's less other things competing for that focus. And the other thing that happens if you preserve more mental bandwidth is you're more present. Having more mental bandwidth left makes you more available for any other little stuff that comes up and a lot of little stuff comes up in life turns out and being there to experience it is presence. It's richness of life. So the key is preserve your mental bandwidth as much as you can cuz it's going to positively affect your productivity and just your quality of life in general. It's all kind of tied together in my head. I just spilled water on myself. So, with that in mind, and after everything I've learned this week, here's four things I would recommend to pretty much anybody. One, don't work on anything before your most important work. The first thing you devote your focus to gets absolute prime real estate in your brain. There's no competition. So, give that to the top thing that you want to focus on that day. I'm still going to get up at 5:00 a.m. and I'm going to work on videos first thing in the morning. But I'm going to choose a single focus and that's all I'm going to work on that day. If I'm editing, I'm just in the editing software. One focus. That's my first suggestion. And my second one is if you don't feel like working, stare at a wall for 10 minutes. I actually would recommend doing that. Probably cap it off at 15 minutes. Definitely diminishing returns after that. But this is kind of like a hack to reset your mental bandwidth. It's the closest thing to starting the day over. This and power naps are both kind of like little brain resets. And you'll be surprised how easy it is to work afterwards. It works. What could I say? Third suggestion, use pen and paper whenever possible to preserve mental bandwidth. So going back to the inputs outputs idea, screens tend to have a lot of inputs. Notifications, nice looking colors and icons. Screens are pretty much the hub for most of the inputs that we get. Email, video, podcast, social media, news, these inputs all just grab and leech away at your mental bandwidth versus pen and paper. No inputs at all. So, if you're doing something that you could use a screen or pen and paper for, using pen and paper is a good way to preserve your mental clarity. These mini composition books are a dollar at Walgreens. Highly recommend just to have instant thoughts. No rules on what you put in your brain here. And that kind of leads into my fourth suggestion, which is delay non-essential inputs for as long as you can. The longer you can go without letting all this extra stuff in, taking pieces of your bandwidth, the more present you can be for everything before that. However, I will probably still watch that stuff at lunch. Just being real, I don't really want to sit silently at lunch every day. That's a concession I think I can make. And one bonus, all of Ryan Doris's suggestions, rules are great. I followed all of those this week and I don't disagree with any of them. Inhabiting the in between is like my favorite thing. I enjoy thinking and I come up with interesting ideas. It makes a shockingly big difference. And filling that space up with just checking your socials actually feels like a pretty big loss. That's special time. I believe that. So, let me know if you try any of this stuff or if you do it already, leave a comment. But I'm about ready to watch some garbage again. "The tiredness." "Dang, you made it all the way to the end. If you're here, consider subscribing. You can check out that one, which is another similar video. There are many more to come. You're early." "Out." The thing is is that you either die or you adapt. That's it. And if you don't get injured and you don't die, you get better.