SOLVED with Mark Manson - Focus, Solved

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction. So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose.com. Welcome to solved everybody. My name is Mark Manson.

Starting point is 00:00:42 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 your three Instagram reels deep into a video of a golden retriever learning the skateboard. And you can't even remember what you were trying to read 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 worse 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

Starting point is 00:01:23 you check your phone. The point is, focus is not a test of willpower. It's a system of 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 treating it like a design problem, the whole issue changes. So in this episode of Solved, we're going to talk about why your brain treats every open browser tab, unfinished tasks, and unanswered text like an unpaid debt can't stop thinking about. We're going to talk about the ancient monks who described your exact scrolling problem in the

Starting point is 00:01:55 fourth 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 most distracting thing you keep in your workspace, and hint, it's hurting your focus even when it's turned off and face down.

Starting point is 00:02:19 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 six hours, but can't fold laundry for six 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 the 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

Starting point is 00:02:56 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, get 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.

Starting point is 00:03:39 I want to set the stage. And this is totally selfish on my part. Because as you know, I am a David Foster Wallace Stan. And he had an absolutely brilliant book called Infinite Jules. that I think everybody tries to read at some point and nobody can get through because it requires too much focus. 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 in modern life. And so I kind of like bringing up this book as just kind of a backdrop to this episode.

Starting point is 00:04:27 I think 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-cell phone. But 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 known as the entertainment. And the amazing thing is that in the book, the entertainment becomes an instrument of terrorism. And it is leveraged politically by various groups to basically terrorize the recipients of it.

Starting point is 00:05:19 Very prophetic then, yes. In many ways. I mean, I think 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 Just, it kind of has an A storyline and a B storyline. What's interesting is nobody ever talks about the B storyline, which is about a recovering drug addict and his experience going through all the various rehabs in recovery centers. And it's funny because when you're reading the book, it keeps cutting away to

Starting point is 00:06:01 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, huh? It's just, it's just an interesting point that I'm going to leave out there. Okay.

Starting point is 00:06:38 I'll return to the book periodically throughout the episode just because 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's affecting society. What's interesting, though, is that this idea that our attention spans are being destroyed has been pretty much commonplace for my entire life, your entire life as well, going all the way back to the 90s. I remember being a kid and my grandparents telling me that the television was rotting my brain and how video games were going to destroy my ability to do anything useful in the world. Not true.

Starting point is 00:07:19 When we were young adults, people were saying the same thing about social media and, smartphones and now people are saying the same thing about AI. It seems to be a prophecy that just never quite comes true. And a lot of people have made a lot of money 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.

Starting point is 00:07:44 And the entire book was all of the ways that we were becoming stupid and illiterate and 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 300-page exercise in how correlation is not causation. There's a lot of like hand-waving and freaking out about things that are various studies of indicators that are going on in society, but with the benefit of hindsight, we kind of

Starting point is 00:08:27 know now that none of the stuff that he was worried about ended up coming true. So this question, are 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 came out in 2015, claiming that the human attention span was now less than a goldfish. And the goldfish is, of course,

Starting point is 00:08:53 the thing that is most famous for having a lack of attention span. Turns out this was bullshit. This was based on a marketing report from Microsoft, and it leveraged some third-party data that they never really specified where it came from.

Starting point is 00:09:08 Right. Never peer reviewed, never validated in any way. Yeah. And what's even funnier, too, is that it turns out that goldfish do have long-term memories, which they're used in memory studies, even.

Starting point is 00:09:19 I didn't. Like, they're used in learning and memory studies. I didn't know that until we research this episode. You can give them tests just 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 life just ironic? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:34 This is just such a beautiful irony. It's just a sticky idea is all it is. Yeah. Yeah. And there has been some recent research into our working memories and different cognitive functions. And the truth of the matter is, and this is not a sexy headline. this is not a super spicy hook that's going to get people like, oh my God, I need to listen the rest of this episode.

Starting point is 00:09:55 But it's basically the hard data is showing that our fundamental ability to focus to remember things is not being destroyed. Like there is 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 so there is an adaptation that has to happen that is simply not happen.

Starting point is 00:10:33 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, you know, we talked about TV and video games when we were kids, people, there were moral panics around the radio. When that came out, when novels were introduced in the 19th century, adults freaked out that children weren't going to be able to pay attention long enough to make important life decisions because 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 a concept called

Starting point is 00:11:19 acedia, which was like a restless mental state that drove them to constantly check doors and sweep floors and check in on their fellow monks because 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 ever present 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, the nature of us having to balance our focus versus our distraction changes as well. So if we look at the modern age and all the current technology that we have, we simply have to ask yourself, what is doing?

Starting point is 00:12:11 different now? Like, what are the challenges and issues that we're confronted with that our parents were or our grandparents were? What do we have to deal with that is particularly unique and difficult? And there's plenty of them, right? I mean, I think for the fact is just the ever-present 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 phone in the room removes your ability to focus or pay attention as much as you normally do. I remember there was, there was one study, and 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

Starting point is 00:12:56 paid less attention to the conversation they were having. I remember seeing that too, yeah. Even if they didn't pick up the phone, 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 basically said if you've got in view while you're working or anything like that, You're way more distractible. Yeah. So I just think that the constant presence of the opportunity for distraction makes the distraction more likely. Right.

Starting point is 00:13:19 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-news feed, 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. you hit the end of a radio show. These days, there's no end. There's like a little container for everything.

Starting point is 00:13:44 It's by design, right? It's just like, it's just this endless scroll, this endless feed. It's as soon as you finish one video, the next video is immediately queued up. And so there's no clear demarcation of, for your brain of like, okay, I'm done with TikTok 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 were like, you would scroll. and you would hit a point.

Starting point is 00:14:08 They're like, okay, you're all caught up. And then, you know, you're like, oh, okay. Yeah, whatever happened to that. I think it lasted like a few months and they were like, we're losing money. Yeah, their shareholders clearly did not like that. Yeah. There's a collapse in switching costs, which is interesting. We're going to talk about switching costs quite a bit later when we talk about multitasking

Starting point is 00:14:26 and, you know, certain practices to avoid when you're trying to focus more and be more productive. A switching cost is the amount of mental effort that it takes. to move from one, paying attention to one task to another task. And the higher the switching costs, the more friction there is to leave that first task. And so the higher the switching costs, the more likely you are to focus on the first thing and to stick with it for a long period of time. So when switching costs are reduced, when switching from TikTok to Netflix is as simple as just closing one app and opening the other, you're much more likely to switch back and

Starting point is 00:15:05 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'd flip through like 10 or 12 channels. You just find the best thing that was on. You're right. And you just leave it there. Whereas like now, when I get on Netflix or or Hulu or Apple or whatever, I'll start a show and then I'll, like, 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'll actually end up spending an hour and not watch anything. Just trying to find something.

Starting point is 00:15:40 Yeah. Yeah. It's such a paradoxical, weird thing. And then finally, there's a concept called variable reward design. And this is actually, speaking of addiction, this is the basis. You know, this is why things like gambling become addictive is because you're rewarded, but you're rewarded in an unpredictable timeframes and an unpredictable amounts. And there's just something about our. neurological circuitry that like when rewards are unpredictable, we just want to sit there and keep

Starting point is 00:16:11 hitting the button and see what comes up next. And then this, of course, doesn't even get into the algorithmic recommendations, the autoplay, the personalization. It's just we live in such a different attention environment than any other humans in history that it makes sense that we're seemingly struggling more than ever before. But again, people mistake the increased struggle for focus and attention for an increased inability to focus and attention. And there's nothing fundamental within us that is broken or been changed or altered permanently. The machinery is all still there.

Starting point is 00:16:53 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 saw this coming it was this Herbert Simon he worked I believe he worked in kind of like the consulting world the business consulting world and what he noticed was that the problem like you're saying basically was that it wasn't necessarily information production had become very cheap at that point, even back then in the 70s. That was a big trend that he saw.

Starting point is 00:17:36 It's 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 that 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 called that back in the 70s. So yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:04 Yeah. And Silicon Valley, this is known as the attention economy. And it's... Yeah, you've written about this before. Yeah. And it is ultimately, like, whatever the new scarcity is, that's the driver of value. And so if you can hold and maintain people's attention,

Starting point is 00:18:17 the longest, then you can monetize it the most. That'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. Here we are. So the best way I've conceptualized this, and this is maybe, again, I think this kind of lays

Starting point is 00:18:37 the framework for where this episode is going to go. But 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. and you had to actually work for your own food. And because of that, you didn't see as much obesity, you didn't see as much heart disease,

Starting point is 00:19:04 you didn't see as much diabetes and all these other problems that come from the modern food system. Well, what happened 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 make food as pleasing as possible, as addictive as possible.

Starting point is 00:19:26 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 control their own urges, stop themselves from indulging on certain 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.

Starting point is 00:19:59 I think the exact same thing is happening with information. For mostly 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 because it's competing all the time for your attention, it becomes, it's kind of like the junk food of information, right?

Starting point is 00:20:29 It's like super salty and sweet and it's very addictive and you start to compulsively consume it. And so the same way we had to develop awareness and understanding around our physical health, I think we have to develop an awareness and understanding around our informational 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 impulses, my urges, maybe understand where they're coming from, because otherwise you'll become mentally and cognitively, obese, diabetic, whatever, whatever,

Starting point is 00:21:06 however far you want to extend this metaphor. And I do think that this is very much what David Foster Wallace was getting at an infinite jest. He said that ultimately you have to take kind of the monk-like self-control of a recovery addict and you have to apply that to watching TV or in these days it would be using your stupid phone.

Starting point is 00:21:28 This episode is brought to you by Duck Duck Go. We use AI for everything these days. We use it for work, we use it for personal stuff, and we use it for truly unhinged questions that you only ask when you're in a crisis at one in the morning. And the convenience makes it easy to overshare without realizing it. But most of us do not stop to think what happens to all of this data.

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Starting point is 00:22:26 with AI from duck, duck go, where AI is always optional and private. Okay, well, so I'm glad you brought up the food analogy already. Yeah. Because I think a lot of this episode is going to be 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. The human attention span is now less than a bee.

Starting point is 00:23:02 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not at all. So, okay, this actually comes from what's called optimal foraging theory. Okay, this is in biology, 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. Fuck yeah.

Starting point is 00:23:23 You start just going to town. Let's go. 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.

Starting point is 00:23:33 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. You face a dilemma at that point. At what point do you leave that little patch and go look for a new patch of flowers for nectar, okay? This is what's called the explore-exploit dilemma. Okay. Okay. In animal behavior and biology. Okay. The dilemma is when do you leave, if you have a patch of food somewhere, like,

Starting point is 00:24:03 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 animals even, too, that we were following. At what point is it optimal for us to stick around and exploit that patch of food versus leaving. Because if you over harvest, then you potentially destroy the plants and the vegetation and then you like kill the food source for the future. That's part of it. The other part of it though, too, is like you already said, there's an energy cost.

Starting point is 00:24:35 There's a cost to switch, right? Yeah. There's a cost associated with, do I leave this patch? There's energy that you have to spend to go off to this other and find another patch. There's a risk you're taking two. you're like, I have 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.

Starting point is 00:24:54 Okay. Okay. So those are kind of the two, the risk benefit that you're weighing here. Okay. 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 your phone, reading a book,

Starting point is 00:25:16 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 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, okay, not a whole lot here. I'm going to go on to something else. Okay. So again, in the information age that we live in now, what's changed is there's all of this information out there. And we have to decide what to exploit and what to explore.

Starting point is 00:25:47 So it sounds like this is my Netflix dilemma, right? 100% it is, yes. When there's 400 shows, I just want to keep exploring. 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 shit out of each channel.

Starting point is 00:26:06 Right. Because that's what you had, right? That's what was there. That was your information environment in that case, right? Now, there was this other researcher back in the 70s. His name was Eric Charnoff, and he came up with this idea. It's called Marginal Value Theorem. Okay.

Starting point is 00:26:22 It doesn't matter the name. You know, all these names are so sexy. Yeah, I'm just going to start adding theorem to the end of everything I say. Yeah, it makes this sound smart, right? Yeah. It's very simple, though. Basically, what he found was that animals in a food patch of any kind. The optimal time to leave is when you're the marginal reward, which is like the next bite

Starting point is 00:26:43 you take or the next bear you find, whatever it is, is it drops below the average reward that you're getting. So basically, like, your brain is comparing, even in it, 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. Yep.

Starting point is 00:27:03 Okay? And if whatever you're focusing on right now isn't as rewarding as what you would expect from the rest of the environment, you're going to, you're going to fuck off, basically, right? And so this, again, translates very well to the information environment that we live in now, too. There was another guy, this Peter Paroli, 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 patch of food in an information patch that we're rummaging through, that we're foraging through. What this really tells us, though, is that modern distraction, it really is a rational,

Starting point is 00:27:41 response to what's going on. Yeah. So these environmental changes that you've, you've already laid out for us, right? There's all these distorted signals in our environment. There are artificially inflated exploration signals. Oh. Specifically of what's going on, right?

Starting point is 00:27:56 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 we'll get into this a little bit more. But that, I think, is kind of keeping the food metaphor. going here. This is this is kind of the modern environmental information landscape that we're in. And this can explain a lot of the problems that we face and show us a lot of the solutions. Right. So then it makes sense if you narrow the opportunities to explore, right? If you like cut

Starting point is 00:28:33 yourself off from certain information sources, then 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 as you expand your information of law and give yourself more options than 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.

Starting point is 00:29:06 A hundred percent is. That it's, it's never going to seem worth it. And I, dude, I run into this all the time. All the time. So X, formerly known as Twitter, they just launched a, like a new, they were very public about it. They updated their algorithm to preference long form articles. And so there's all these long form articles that are popping up on my, on my X feet.

Starting point is 00:29:28 And so I'm scrolling. 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 scroll in. And like, I've read like the first two or three paragraphs of. so many 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.

Starting point is 00:29:50 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 setting up those limits and putting containers on things. Yeah. So as to prevent all of that. It's the same type of thing, though, too.

Starting point is 00:30:02 If you have your phone in your environment, that's a source of information, whatever it is. It's interesting. So I was just doing some like white renovations. my house and I didn't have a TV for several months. I was like, I was not 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 just like, you know, it's a source of like noise in my environment that I can go to for some variable rewards for just alternate sources of information in my environment.

Starting point is 00:30:31 And sure enough, like, I got distracted a whole bunch. So, yeah, and your kitchen's still not finished. And my kitchen, yeah, yeah, exactly. Got it. Exactly. Yeah. So, okay, what exactly is? going on in the brain though when we we are in let's say exploit versus explore mode 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 back in the mid 2000s there was this there were these researchers who found that this part of your brain the locust uh serilius which is uh it's it's it's a midbrain kind of

Starting point is 00:31:02 small structure midbrain but it does um direct our attention a lot or it has has a lot to do with directing our attention they found that nor epinephrine in this region kind of regulated that switch between explore and exploit. Okay. At least to some degree. Like basically when there's like burst of noraphynephrine in this part of your brain, you're more likely to be like kind of locked in on something and focused on it. Okay.

Starting point is 00:31:27 And then when as the, you know, you're into something, you're looking at it and then, you know, your attention starts to kind of fade a little bit. That nor epineph, there's no nor epinephrine burst are kind of coming down and you're coming more towards what they call a tonic phase, which is kind of. of a baseline phase. Okay. And your mind starts to wonder at that point. There's also, of course, dopamine plays a big role in this too.

Starting point is 00:31:48 A lot of people, like there's a misconception out there, and 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's motivating you to pay attention to something or to approach something out in your environment. So, okay. Because there was a fad for quite a while.

Starting point is 00:32:10 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. Okay, yeah. Which was really just removing informational sources from your own life so that you were more often in exploit mode. It sounds like that that was just a misnomer, that you're not actually, you know, by removing your phone and not using TV or playing video games and just having a stack of books next to you for five days. you're not really doing a dopamine detox. You're really just removing opportunities to go into Explorment. Like, is it a misnomer or is it? I don't know if I would say it's necessarily a misnomer because what's going on there,

Starting point is 00:32:55 like when you do have kind of higher levels of dopamine, especially in your prefrontal cortex, which is like executive function and, you know, you're telling yourself consciously like, hey, pay attention to this thing. Yeah. 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

Starting point is 00:33:20 that dopamine between different sources, I think is what's going on. So I guess it's a little bit of a misnomer because, yes, it's not a dopamine detox necessarily. It's that you're, you're trying to generate more endogenous forms of dopamine. Yes. And kind of intrinsic forms of it 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 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. Yeah. 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's, it's been, 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. So yeah, you have that, the dopaminergic factors there. There's also kind of like two brain networks that all of these different chemicals, there's other neurochemicals too.

Starting point is 00:34:22 We're oversimplifying here just so you know. But there's kind of two main brain networks that map pretty well to explore and exploit mode. The exploit mode is called the task positive network. And it's that's high focus, high efficiency. You're narrowing of your sensory gates. So like any sensory information is coming in. If the task positive network is really online, you're focused on something like, this is when you shut everything out from the outside. Sensory cues become really dull.

Starting point is 00:34:51 You're not paying attention to temperature or noises or anything like that, right? Then you have the default mode network. This is like self-referential. You're thinking about yourself. Your mind's wandering. It's literally distracted. It's trying to find something to latch on to basically in the environment. right?

Starting point is 00:35:08 Yeah. So those, 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 the flow, we'll talk a little bit more about that self-referential thing on the default mode network. But for now, just suffice it to say there's kind of these two main networks that are at play

Starting point is 00:35:31 here and competing with each other. Okay. Okay. For metabolic resources. Metabolic resources. Yeah, yeah, just energy in general. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:40 I don't want to spoil it, but I'm going to guess, you know, because people, when you experience flow, you kind of lose track of yourself. I'm guessing that that's not a coincidence. Right. This probably explains that. Right. That's a good little teaser for a little bit. Yeah, for sure.

Starting point is 00:35:53 Stay tuned. And then, yeah. Last thing I'll mention, though, too. We're going to revisit a brain reasoning we actually talked about in the resilience episode, which is the anterior cingulate cortex. If you remember that, that was kind of the, I called that the resilience muscle, if you would, right? And really what's going on in the anterior single cortex, one of the functions, we believe anyway, is that it's a cost-benefit analysis, right?

Starting point is 00:36:16 So like in the resilience episode, I talked about how if you are engaged in some difficult task, the ACC is like, is this worth it? Right. Basically, that's contributing to that calculation anyway. Same thing with focus here, right? Is this information patch in terms of focus? Right. in focus terms, is it worth it to stick here or not? Okay.

Starting point is 00:36:40 And this is influenced by that, the Locus Cyrillus, like I said, it comes in. And there's connections to it that influence whether or not you're going to stick with this task or not. And the ACC kind of says, okay, is it worth it or not for me to stick in this patch? The resilient side of it, you can work this out. It is a little bit like a muscle 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.

Starting point is 00:37:06 We'll kind of get into that as well. But that's kind of the main overly simplified brain, the neurobiology of focus for our purposes that we're going to use going forward. Now, for the exploration mode, though, too, this is actually kind of important to. There's different kinds of exploration. Not all exploration is made equal, right? They have what's called directed versus random exploration. And you can probably already guess which one we kind of want to go towards.

Starting point is 00:37:34 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 I'm going with it. It's going to help me probably be rewarding in some kind of way, right?

Starting point is 00:37:50 The random is more just like mind wondering. 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, TikTok, whatever. And then 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 is relatively low we usually bias towards more of the

Starting point is 00:38:20 the directed okay so it's like okay i kind of know what i need to do here so i'm going to go off and directly explore something versus when uncertainty's 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 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 this switch actually going to teach me something? Am I actually going to gain? Or am I just

Starting point is 00:39:00 escaping from the uncertainty and all the anxiety that that brings up? up as well. Okay? 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 Darwin was obviously a very prolific scientist and writer.

Starting point is 00:39:24 He struggled with focus, though, too. He struggled with distraction a lot. So he had a routine, and we'll get into the old 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'd live by the ocean. And he would go on these walks and he had this system for like he'd do these laps around this one pond, I think, whatever it was. And he had this system of like

Starting point is 00:39:55 stones that would count how many laps he did and all of this or we didn't have to think about it. But he'd just let his mind wander during this. It's a very directed exploration that he it. And then you would come back and a lot of times, you know, it's like those shower thoughts you have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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, there's a time and a place for it. It's just that when we need to be in this exploit mode, we need to be able to shape our environments, like you said, in a way that puts our brain into that exploit mode that pushes out all those other distractions and sources of, like, cheap

Starting point is 00:40:30 dopamine that will distract us from it. It's interesting because, I think the key here is actually just the intentionality, right? Like, you need to be able to exploit, you need to be able to go deep on one task, but you also need to be able to explore. And you also, there are times where you want to let your mind wander, right? I think there are certain, especially if you're doing creative tasks. Yes. It's funny because Beethoven had a similar routine, which is that he would go on daily walks

Starting point is 00:40:57 in the afternoon when, 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 whatever phase you're in, that's where you want to be. It's really interesting. We're going to talk about ADHD later, but it's, I think, one of the paradoxes about ADHD that confuses a lot of people is that ADHD people, they're obviously often distracted

Starting point is 00:41:30 and, like, can't stay focused 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. And what's interesting is that both of those things are the same thing. It's a lack of intentionality. In one case, when you're not able to focus on anything, it's you want to focus on a thing,

Starting point is 00:42:02 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 it's 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 do think that.

Starting point is 00:42:25 Illustrates the point very well. Yeah, I do think it's all of these modes are normal and healthy. We evolved them all for real. reason. The issue is not being able to access them intentionally when we want to. Right. No, exactly. 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, there's signals. Yeah. Right. In your environment. Just like, just like a signal for something, okay, this is really rewarding something that I can dive into and latch onto. If you're bored or

Starting point is 00:42:59 fatigued by something. You can treat that as a signal, though, as well. It's not just like you've run out of willpower. It's that, hey, they're probably, like, for whatever reason, maybe it's valid, maybe it's not. Your brain is saying this is not a patch you need to exploit right now. Right. Right. That's what the boredom and fatigue can often tell us. So lapses in our focus really can be more treated more like diagnostic information, right? It's either there's something going on in an environment or something going on with this task that I need to address. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 00:43:34 So really what I want to do is like kind of remove all the moralizing around it for sure and just start to show that what's really going on here is that the environment again has all of these artificial kind of like signals on steroids right now that are pushing us more and more into this explore mode because whatever source is pushing those to us usually is incentivized to. put us into explorer. 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 push. Our brains have these modes for exploiting patches of information, what I keep calling patches of information, and we're exploring new ones. Your environment has so much sway in which, what you pay attention to that that's what a lot of this episode is going to be about. It's 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

Starting point is 00:44:35 strangely culturally defined. Like, it was interesting being reminded that, like, people used to freak out about teenagers reading novels. Yeah. Like, that was a moral panic. The telegraph, too, I found some of it, like, they were, everybody was like, oh, my God, if we can just communicate instantly, what are we, we're going to stop writing letters.

Starting point is 00:44:54 Yeah. Or like, when the radio came out, they're like, oh, people aren't going to have conversations anymore because they're just going to listen to the radio. Right. So it is interesting that, you know, the human mind is incredibly adaptable. And the nature of explorer versus exploit, what ratio it's happening, what is hijacking and what is not. Like, many of these things are just kind of culturally predetermined based on what the previous generation was used to. Right?

Starting point is 00:45:23 So it's the, today we would look at, like today, if you met a teenager who couldn't stop reading novels, you'd probably find that very respectable. You're like, wow, look at them. Timmy is just crushing book after book. That's amazing. Timmy's going to go far. Whereas in the 1800s, they were freaking out about it. And it just makes you wonder of like, where are these definitions of what, how much attention

Starting point is 00:45:46 we should have for each thing come from? And that's not to defend, like, all the, all the, the, all the, the, that. 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 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,

Starting point is 00:46:13 many information patches at any given day or any given time. A lot of this is just, it's just what we're used to. Right. And when it changes, it scares us. 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, you assume is going to be the end of the world. It checks out.

Starting point is 00:46:44 That absolutely checks out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, and not only are like the way your attention is. 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 80s. The 80s, yeah. Well, there wasn't a diagnosis for it until the 80s.

Starting point is 00:47:04 Right, right, right, yeah. And they called it something different before that. Yeah, they had different names for it in the past. And that was really only because you look at the way economic change had happened. We were going more and more from, you know, kind of a manual labor-based economy to an information economy. Yes. Oh, all of a sudden we found out of these people who don't fit well into that. Yep.

Starting point is 00:47:23 And so we culturally define that as something different. I'm not saying it doesn't exist. Obviously, I'm not one of those people who's 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 is very, very culturally independent. Same thing with how we sit down and do what work. It's, so I just did a YouTube video on ADHD and I talked about this, how a lot of what we consider mental health is culturally determined. I mean, homosexuality used to be a mental,

Starting point is 00:47:50 illness that was diagnosable through the DSM. Yeah, through like the 70s or 80s, right? Until 1973. I mean, there was back in the late 19th century, they used to diagnose women with, quote, unquote, hysteria because they were being too emotional. And the primary treatment for that was to essentially lock them in the bedroom and socially isolate them until they calm down. Super fucked up.

Starting point is 00:48:14 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 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 we feel compulsive. A lot of our executive functioning is hijacked through various means, through marketing and just like insanely attractive synthetic food or content.

Starting point is 00:49:04 So we have to develop new ways to adapt to our environment. And some of that can be just altering our environment, right? It's like you just don't even buy the junk food in the first place. So you won't be tempted by it. You delete Instagram and TikTok. so you won't be tempted by it, or you develop systems and mechanisms for yourself to make sure that you adhere to what you want.

Starting point is 00:49:28 Yeah, yeah, and we're going to get a lot of those. Yep, so yeah. This episode is brought to you by I Am 8. You know that feeling when you're trying to be healthier, but it turns into a second full-time job. You've got your little stack of vitamins, you've got all your smoothie ingredients, you've got all this mystery green powder stuff going on

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Starting point is 00:51:06 is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. So why the fuck are we so distracted all the time. After combing through tons of psychological research, I have narrowed it down to four factors. There are 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 to 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. It actually comes from my main man, Dan Gilbert.

Starting point is 00:51:53 It's one of my favorite psychological researcher. I don't know if you have a favorite psychological researcher. He's good. He's out of Harvard. He's out of Harvard. And he's real meticulous and he's very analytical. Yeah, he's good. Dan Gilbert's the man.

Starting point is 00:52:04 He's great at finding these little counterintuitive things. And he just sets up like really fun experiments like this one. So he did this one with Matthew Killingsworth. What they did is they actually created an, iPhone app that would randomly ping people throughout the day and ask 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're doing. And what they found is that people are pretty much distracted all the fucking time, all the time.

Starting point is 00:52:35 In fact, they deduce that people spend 47% of their time not thinking about the thing that they're doing while they do it. That sounds low to me. This was like late 2000s, right? 2010. This was 2010. Okay. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:50 So that's, it's probably even worse. It's probably even higher now. But still, that's almost half the time. Yeah. That's in itself as far. And by the way,

Starting point is 00:52:57 like they really, they had absolutely no prejudice about what they were measuring against. So they, they calculated how distracted people were for each activity that they were doing. They, and they even found that people

Starting point is 00:53:10 were distracted 10% of the time during sex. So it's the bar is low. The bar is very, very low. But the point of all of this, it's actually a very faint. So hold on, hold on, wait now. I'm just going through my head. So people, they would, they had this app. Yes.

Starting point is 00:53:33 And when people were having sex, people would check the app and respond to it. Well, I think they probably got a notification. Oh, okay. And then what you're supposed to do is when you get. What were you immediately doing before this? Yeah. What were you doing and were you engaged and focused on it? Right.

Starting point is 00:53:46 Okay. And apparently 10% of people having sex were not paying attention to the sex that they were having. Okay. That might say more about their relationships than their distractibility. But that's another podcast. This ended up being a pretty, it's become a pretty famous study. You see it get posted quite a bit. Great title.

Starting point is 00:54:08 Dan Gilbert has great titles for his. He's a good marketer for an academic. He is. He's got great titles for his papers. 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, the less happy and satisfied they were with whatever they were doing. But I only bring this up to say that distraction is the norm.

Starting point is 00:54:30 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 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 actually boiled down until a lack of four different things. The first one is a lack of importance.

Starting point is 00:54:56 Now, you and I, we spend a lot of time talking about values. We spend a lot of time talking about knowing what to give a fuck 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 sailing. of how important is the thing in front of you? Is there a clear goal or objective you're trying to accomplish? Is there something valuable that is being added to the world?

Starting point is 00:55:24 Is this going 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 bullshit that you find to think is kind of pointless, or B, if there's a lack of clarity around what is meaningful, like if there's a lot of stuff that's going on that feels very meaningful, 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.

Starting point is 00:55:52 So again, 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, something that's worth paying attention to. So if you don't have a clear prioritization of this thing matters, then you're going to really, really struggle to focus on it. Yeah, and part of that, that's like a survival mechanism too. I think that's probably something I should have mentioned back in the Explorer Exploit kind of paradigm I was talking about.

Starting point is 00:56:27 Yeah. That's a survival mechanism, right? Like if you're not looking for something in your environment, you're dead at some point, right? Right. Yeah, I mean, if nothing important is going on, then why should you waste, you know, if you think about your mind in metabolic terms, right? It's like your brain is expensive. Attention is expensive. Executive function is expensive from an energy point of view.

Starting point is 00:56:54 It makes sense that we evolved minds that if there's nothing really important in front of us, why waste the energy? Why not just kick back and let your mind wander and, you know, fall into it. to your 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.

Starting point is 00:57:21 It turns out that when you introduce ambiguity to people, they kind of don't know what to do anymore. 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 start 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 start to get distracted.

Starting point is 00:57:56 Again, from an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense that if you feel stymied or blocked in some way, you transition out of it. of exploit mode into explore mode, right? Because now you need to find a new solution. You need to find a new way around whatever the block is, right? And so Darwin with his walks, it's a way to let your mind wander in a very intentional way 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.

Starting point is 00:58:30 It is worth reiterating that intentional mind wandering, like, there is a cognitive benefit to letting your mind wander a little bit. There is a cognitive benefit to letting yourself be a little distracted on occasion. And it's in moments like this. It is when you need to go into explore mode to kind 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. I can tell you just personally from like working on a number of books, I mean, when you're

Starting point is 00:59:17 writing a book, there's so many moments where you just get completely stuck 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. is off and then come back to it, it's pretty crazy how like often within 20 or 30 minutes you immediately see the solution. You're like, oh, just delete this section and move this over here. Right. Done.

Starting point is 00:59:47 Yeah. But if you didn't take that time and go away, you wouldn't have given your brain time to like, you know, process it or restore itself. You get too locked in on maybe some detail or something like that. You need to detach from that. Yeah. The psychologist actually called it the psychologist who studied creativity and you way they call this incubation.

Starting point is 01:00:05 Yes. To, you know, go off and you just let it simmer sit. Yeah. You'll make horizontal connections from other parts 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 mind wandering and distraction isn't all bad. Yes.

Starting point is 01:00:19 Right. When there's a certain direction to it at least. Yeah. And in a way you could look at it as kind of like a certain amount of mind wandering is an attempt to solve some like solve the lack of importance problem or solve the lack of clarity problem. Right. Right.

Starting point is 01:00:32 It's really only when mind wandering becomes chronic in unintentional or uncontrolled. Or as a coping mechanism too. Yeah. Exactly. Which we'll get to that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 01:00:45 So that's trigger number two. Trigger number three. Lack of calmness. This is basically the more emotionally aroused you are. The worst you're going to be able to focus on something. Generally speaking, when you are extremely agitated or upset, set or worried or anxious, you are, it's not so much that you're not going to be able to focus. It's, you're not going to have that clarity of what the focus on.

Starting point is 01:01:14 So, for example, like, if a person is highly anxious, what happens when you're anxious is that you tend to overperceive threats or overperceive 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 result is the same as not worrying about anything. Like you just, you end up not being able to focus. You just become very scatterbrained and freaked out. Interestingly, depression kind of has the inverse effect on people, which is that they tend to find nothing important. But the result is the same. Is an inability to focus, feeling very, very,

Starting point is 01:01:59 scatter brains, mind wandering all the time, not being able to really complete a task or follow anything through to completion. Yeah, and that actually bears out too in the neuroscience as well. And I don't think I mentioned this, but with the whole noroprenephrine story in the Locusteryllus, you know, when it's those pulses of the norapinephrine in that area, you get more focused. When there's less of it, you don't. But there's actually a sweet spot. There's a little bit of a U, invert a U curve to that.

Starting point is 01:02:29 Like you're saying, there needs to be a certain level of arousal. Yes. Not too low, 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 see it as that way too. That's one way to look at it. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:42 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, try and unable to process some negative experience, it's going to ultimately affect your ability to focus. It's like a heightened vigilance, right? Your brain is, again, it's a survival mechanism, like looking for solutions in the environment out of survival, basically.

Starting point is 01:03:13 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 then finally, trigger number four, I just put lack of health.

Starting point is 01:03:35 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 eat a well-balanced diet. Get your veggies. Eat your veggies. Get some exercise.

Starting point is 01:03:53 Because it affects everything. It affects absolutely everything. and focus is no different. If you are, you know, we talked a little bit about attention as metabolically expensive. If you're underslept, underfed, unnourished, 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 that you have available. focusing your attention intentionally is a luxury, biologically speaking.

Starting point is 01:04:29 Like it is something that if anything else is going wrong in your body, it's going to get first priority and 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 think this is missed by most people 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 of effort, right? Like, I think when people think about like, oh, I need to focus more, it's kind of like,

Starting point is 01:05:07 it's kind of like the willpower thing, right? Or like it's when people want to make 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 of effective way to go about change. It's the same with focus. It's not about, like, sure, efforts nice, but ultimately your focus exists in a network of systems. Some of that is your environment. Some of that is your values and your beliefs. Some of that is your relationships.

Starting point is 01:05:39 And then some of that is how you are physically treating your own body. And you can control all of those systems, right? Like you can build 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'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,

Starting point is 01:06:12 because then that's going to clarify in so many contexts what you should actually be paying attention to. If you feel like you're lacking clarity, there's a lot of work you can do around planning, coming up with backup plans, scheduling certain activities, that you just remove a lot of the decision fatigue that comes from a day-to-day existence

Starting point is 01:06:35 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, to put yourself at ease and feel like you have more control

Starting point is 01:06:50 over what you're doing. And then, of course, if you feel like you have a lack of health, there are many things you can do to have a healthier lifestyle. So it's like so much of this battle is won outside of your own mind. Like if you're finding yourself consistently sitting at your desk, struggling the focus, always distracted, mind is wandering. Chances are the failure happened long before that moment. You don't need to try harder right there.

Starting point is 01:07:15 You don't need to. If you're trying harder right there, it's probably because you already fucked up in three other places, right? Like, you're in the wrong job, you're with the wrong people, you are stuck in a situation that is, that is triggering you consistently. There's, there's emotional baggage that you haven't worked through. There's a crisis in your life that you're not paying enough attention to. Or you're just not fucking sleeping well. Like 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 like, oh, well, do this and it will fix your focus.

Starting point is 01:07:55 Like you're going to be locked in. If it was that simple, then I don't know, man, we wouldn't have a podcast. Right. Yeah. Okay. So 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.

Starting point is 01:08:15 Okay. Even if ego depletion is not a thing, I still think willpower 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. Get rid of the distractions that you need to get rid of. Change your career job. perspective on life, whatever it is. That's where you should leverage your willpower. Not when you're sitting down to try to do something. That's not that.

Starting point is 01:08:53 Ideally, that is not, now sometimes you've got to just grit through it. I get that. And willpower does come in in that case. But I think the real takeaway is, yeah, use your willpower in the highest leverage points

Starting point is 01:09:05 and only use it once if you can. 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. And not in that moment when you're failing to focus or failing to pay attention to something.

Starting point is 01:09:18 Yeah. And I got to give a shout out to a good friend of mine, Niraiel. He wrote his book, he's got a book called Indistractable that's very much about this. I mean, he really characterizes focus and distractibility as fundamentally an issue with emotion or an issue with discomfort. Right. And he argues, he's like, you can attack this from both angles, right? There's kind of the internal personal development side of it, which is just trying to try to manage your emotions better, put yourself in fewer situations where you're agitated or anxious or worried.

Starting point is 01:09:51 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. You know, don't turn off all your screens at 9 p.m. Make sure you get a good night's sleep. you know, set up the systems. Basically, don't, don't even put yourself in the situation where you have to make these decisions. But again, to even do that in the first place, like you have to know what you want out of your life.

Starting point is 01:10:27 You have to know what matters to you. Like what is worth giving up your phone for? Right. Like if you can't easily answer that, then you're probably going to have a really hard time. Yeah, your phone looks a lot better than everything. Everything. Yeah. Everything, right?

Starting point is 01:10:42 So if the default state is a wandering mind, which it is, then your phone is kind of the ultimate wandering mind tool. So it makes sense that you're going to default back to that the more you're lacking each of these four things. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of in the camp anyway, if we're taking sides. I'm in the camp that there's no such thing as ego depletion. I'm aware. Maybe there's no such thing as it, but I think it's definitely over. stated for one. I mean, think about it. Yeah, if you go to a job you don't like and you're

Starting point is 01:11:16 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'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 too. Your brain is a comparison machine. And this is really highlighted in this on this topic because 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.

Starting point is 01:11:49 And in that, and 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. But, yeah, if you don't have all those kind of foundational, like, am I doing something I give a shit about, first of all? Right. Which nobody ever talks about. You're right. Everybody always talks about the mechanical, hard, tactical side of this. And it's like, well, okay, yeah, you need to sit down in the chair and get it done. But what about just stepping back even further and taking like the bigger view out of it?

Starting point is 01:12:21 Yeah. And I think this is probably, I think this side of the conversation often, it isn't even considered focus. It's often talked about it in terms of passion, which I think is really funny because passion. Okay. Yeah. Like I think a lot of the conversations around passion and productivity are like kind of misplaced. 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 fucking lock in, bro and like slam another Red Bull. I think passion, not even passion.

Starting point is 01:12:53 I think I think simply something that you enjoy and find important is is the 80-20 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 can do it for like 10 hours. And I've like pulled myself away from it and so much of that really just comes down to Am I enjoying myself? Does this feel valuable?

Starting point is 01:13:19 Does it feel important? Is there an urgency behind it? It's and I think this is, you know, we talked about on the procrastination episode, we talked about chronic procrastinators and how they kind of, they go through these boom and bus cycles Where I think it's what the chronic procrastinators need or what they crave, you know, what they crave, is that heightened sense of importance that comes with the deadline, right? It's like, oh my God, the deadlines in two days

Starting point is 01:13:46 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 importance

Starting point is 01:14:02 for the prior two weeks, they could probably do just as good of work the entire two weeks, but instead they were fucking 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 outcome, right? That's why it's important to them. Like, oh, if I don't do this, then bad things

Starting point is 01:14:20 are going to happen. Whereas I think what you're saying is find something where it's like, oh, this is just inherently rewarding for me. Yeah. But it's hard. I mean, I... It's still hard. Yeah. That's still hard. Yeah. And I think it would lend itself to the point that 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. Yeah. Out of these four, what do you think you struggle with the most? Let's see.

Starting point is 01:14:50 Run through them again. Let's see. I wasn't paying attention, Mark. Went through them again. No. Lack of importance, lack of clarity, lack of calmness, and lack of health.

Starting point is 01:15:02 I think clarity is usually my big one anyway. Sometimes the important thing, but I think clarity definitely is. This is why, we'll get into this a little bit later too. This is why a time box though. 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, what am I doing it. And I'm going to, we're going to talk about flow here in a little bit. And I'll talk about this a little bit more too.

Starting point is 01:15:33 but having a clear sense of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it too, attaching it to maybe a larger goal that I have, 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 I don't have a good idea of what I'm actually trying to get done. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:15:56 Which I think most people would struggle with that. Yeah. I will, okay, I'll also say too, the health thing does come in to play definitely we've talked about my struggles with sleep before I'm sleeping better lately which is great yeah good but like I still a lot of times I'll have an afternoon lull yeah and that's definitely not a time and we'll talk about structuring your time around these kind of around your energy and all that yeah if I try to get anything done when I'm like having having a crash in the afternoon right no not going to happen I'm actually going to say I think I struggle the most with lack of importance.

Starting point is 01:16:32 I tend to get interested and excited about so many things. You know, as we've discussed, I've 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 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 to the clarity thing one of the things

Starting point is 01:17:04 I'm definitely learning I've learned recently and this is one of my goals in 2026 with the team is to over communicate like 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 and 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 my goal is individually. And I think that's, that's demotivating for people. And so I often have this tendency of just like, I just kind of assume people telepathically understand what 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 had sent us kind of a state of the business. This was back when the team was way

Starting point is 01:17:55 smaller. And I always enjoyed. Yeah. I don't think I've ever. 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:18:11 It's not working. 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.

Starting point is 01:18:23 And that helps focus our attention on what needs to, what's important in the business. and our work too, 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.

Starting point is 01:18:36 Oh, it's super clarifying for me. It is super clarifying for me. And it is, I would say, as the team grows, it becomes harder to communicate clearly to everybody, right? It becomes more complicated to communicate clearly to everybody. But I would also argue that it becomes more important, right? Because it's, you know, when there was like four. of us, you could kind of look at the, even if I wasn't around, you could look at the other

Starting point is 01:19:03 two people and kind of deduce what we're doing. Yeah. Whereas when there's 20 of us, 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 that. We've, we've got a kidney smuggling wing of the business that I never told you about. Highly profitable.

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Starting point is 01:20:28 Save the Everyday with Amazon. All right, Mark, so you just went over kind of the psychology of distraction, okay? And we mentioned, too, that the most of the advice we get, especially online about this, is about kind of effort, right? How to expend your effort on getting things done and how to like grit and sit down and 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.

Starting point is 01:20:57 All of us, I think, though, at some point at least, we 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. 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 flow. All right, so back in the early 90s, there was the psychologist called Mihai Czech sent mihaei. I looked it up several times how to, oh yeah, Czech sent mehaii.

Starting point is 01:21:36 Checks sent me hi. Mihail Checksit mihai. His name is like an alphabet soup. He's a Hungarian psychologist. Yeah, it's like 20 letters long. And most of them are season zes and s's. And so it's impossible for English people to announce. Anyway, he wrote this great book called Flow.

Starting point is 01:21:53 So a lot of people probably somewhat familiar, at least with this concept. of flow like I just described that. Right. That deep sense of absorption in your work and loss of time and all of that, right? That study you brought up with Dan Gilbert where they were checking 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 one of the core tenets of positive psychology is flow. Finding states of flow.

Starting point is 01:22:26 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,

Starting point is 01:22:32 but you can find flow in just about anything you do. But some common ones are like in physical movement. It could be an individual sports. Like runners often talk about this. Swimmers. Michael Phelps has talked about this before.

Starting point is 01:22:44 I might mention him in here a little bit. Cyclists, there's skill sports too. Mind body practices like yoga. It could do it. Dancing. Dance is a big one. Dance is a huge one. People who do martial arts too.

Starting point is 01:22:55 Then there's creative. work, the visual arts, of course, painting, music, all of that kind of stuff. Writers, writing, sometimes you can know a state of flow as well. I'm sure you're aware of this. Woodworking, I've experienced this when I've been in my shop for sure. Programmers, though, too, you have this cognitive and digital work programmers 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 gardening, yard work. that kind of stuff.

Starting point is 01:23:26 You can, it is really one of the, the biggest factors is like, are you completely focused on what you're doing in front of you? Okay.

Starting point is 01:23:36 So, okay, obviously we want to get into these states more. Yeah. Obviously. There's a little bit of a paradox, though, because a lot of times

Starting point is 01:23:43 to get into a state of flow, you have to be somewhat competent, which requires some practice. And a lot of times that deliberate practice is not a flow state and it's not very enjoyable. It's not fun, yeah.

Starting point is 01:23:56 So there's a little bit of a paradox there that we have to navigate. So, you know, because deliverable practice, it involves like they're structured, it involves a high structure, a high amount of structure, a lot of feedback 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 our environments to be more induceive. to that, to those flow states.

Starting point is 01:24:29 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. Well, before we get going any further, though, do you experience a lot of flow in your life these days? I should ask that. I do, actually. Really?

Starting point is 01:24:44 Yeah. I mean, especially around writing. Yeah. Like, I fall into flow with writing pretty quickly and easily, for the most part. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, that's the, biggest place. Okay. Yeah. What about yourself? Well, okay, you do you do surfing though, too. Do you ever get it in surfing?

Starting point is 01:25:02 I 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. I'm definitely not good enough. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think of it. I mean, running, I've definitely gotten there. The funny thing about distance running is that it's like the first few miles, even though you're like the most fresh in the first few miles, 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'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.

Starting point is 01:25:35 But then it's, once you get to like miles three, four, five, six, that's where the flow kicks in, at least for me. And then, and then they just blow by. Yeah. Yeah. Well, probably 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.

Starting point is 01:25:51 Yeah. And I think that's with any activity you start doing. Probably when you sit down to right, too, the first few. paragraphs are the hardest, right? Oh, for sure. Yeah. For sure. I same with me. When I want to go into my, if I go into my woodworking shop and I start doing that, it's like the first thing, oh, everything's a fucking mess. Why didn't I clean this up last time? Yeah. What am I actually doing? But then we're like, oh, okay, I'm making some progress on something. I'm, I have a clear idea of what I'm going to be doing. And then it kind of starts to fall together. Yeah. I would say,

Starting point is 01:26:17 like, a lot of my focused strategy is just tricking myself into getting into flow states. Right? It's just like, 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'll never start. 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 through the act of writing that intro, I start to get into a flow state and I start to like, like naturally want to do more. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So some of the, the characteristics of flow states,

Starting point is 01:27:01 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, if you sit down to write and you don't, you're thinking about the whole project

Starting point is 01:27:11 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 kick in.

Starting point is 01:27:20 Immediate feedback, too, is usually a pretty big factor in flow. So you're getting some sort of feedback on whether or not you're making progress on it. You're doing well. You're making progress towards your goal too. This gets a little bit tricky, I think especially with knowledge work a lot of times

Starting point is 01:27:40 because you don't get a lot of immediate feedback. You might have some internal feedback on like, oh, this is interesting. And so 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 have like a,

Starting point is 01:28:00 when I'm most focus is when I have a specific, okay, I'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 at least it's like I can check that box and that's at least something I can tie it to, right? I think you can use gamification for yourself. Yes. You know, I used to use this writing software called Scrivener, which was this. for authors writing books. And it sets up, you can set all these benchmarks for yourself with

Starting point is 01:28:27 like, how many words do you want to write a day? 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 software. 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 you have that daily goal right in front of you. Yeah. And then you get that dopamine hit of like, yes, thousand words, right? And I feel like everybody or like most software and products are getting better about that gamification. I can't believe I haven't mentioned yet

Starting point is 01:28:58 video games. I'm a huge gamer. Like video games are completely optimized to generate flow state and people. Like that is pretty much entirely how they're engineered is to generate as much flow state as possible and they're amazing at it. It's so much fun.

Starting point is 01:29:16 Yes. Well, and one of the reasons the last kind of factor that goes into flow is a balance between challenge and skill. Video games have this figured out for sure. Right. Like you start off on the beginner mode and you get a little bit better and then it gets harder and harder. And as you go, you progress. But your skill set is slightly challenged.

Starting point is 01:29:35 Yep. Right. So like when you sit down to write something, you're like, okay, I want 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.

Starting point is 01:29:44 And it might be something that's just a little bit maybe 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 challenging. Yeah. Those are kind of the three big things of, of that, that are required for flow to happen. 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.

Starting point is 01:30:05 I do think there's something very inherent about certain activity. Like, I do think there's something very personality based around various activities. Like there's some I want to bring up with you. Yeah. Yeah. Like there are 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.

Starting point is 01:30:23 It comes extremely naturally. It happens very quickly. And it's been that way my entire life. 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 would be terrified. I was going to saw my fingers. I was just going to lose a finger.

Starting point is 01:30:40 Different activities scratch people's itches slightly differently. For example, you mentioned the gamification thing. I'm not real responsible. to that. Okay. You're a more competitive person. You can, you can be like to compete with yourself too.

Starting point is 01:30:55 Yes. I'm not as much into that. So woodworking is actually, there's not a whole lot of gamification I can do. I don't know. I guess I could. Yeah. But I don't need to.

Starting point is 01:31:04 And there's, it doesn't lend itself well to gamification necessarily, and I'm okay with that. But there is like just a lot of like, I don't know, aesthetic feedback to it, right? I like what I see. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:31:13 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 the base component to it that if you're going to leverage flow states, you need to find those levers for yourself for sure. Yeah, mine's, mine I think is just, it's a little more physical as in like I need to be able to see my progress. Yeah. And so that's why like even checklist and

Starting point is 01:31:37 check boxes for me, like checking off, I did this, I did this like seeing that. Gotcha. Or like something that's physical just in nature, like I'm building this thing in front of me. Yeah. That's where I get my feedback. But I think there are people like the game of application thing. I mean, you love video games, but you also like to gamify your work to. I gamify everything. Yeah. Which, yeah, to each their own again. Yeah. But there is definitely a personality component to that. But yeah. So yeah, we've mentioned a lot of these, but 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

Starting point is 01:32:13 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, 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 is a very specific number, yeah. That sounds very important. I'm pretty sure that's an average.

Starting point is 01:32:33 Okay. So, but if it's, the task is too easy, you get bored. Obviously, if it's too hard, you get, you give up. Yeah. Yeah. So adjusting the difficulty, this is, again, we get real clear on things. If you do have this huge giant project in front of you. break it down in a smaller parts.

Starting point is 01:32:51 You've heard this million times too, right? But that gives you the clarity. That's your clear goal. You're going to get some immediate feedback on whether you're not or you're working on it. But then also, too, 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. Clear and specific goals.

Starting point is 01:33:08 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, okay, once I'm done with this, I'm off the hook. Right. 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 compile. I'm not a programmer. It's either going to compile or it's not. Or you did it right or you didn't. So the more you can set up like that, the better. There's a lot of activities that don't lend to that though, too. Writing might be one of them. Right. Don't know if that's if it's good or not. But. At least like you have 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. Right.

Starting point is 01:33:59 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. Which is what basically your brain can't handle. There might be some kind of like environmental and psychological triggers you can kind of work with to. novelty slash complexity, like kind of varying how novel or complex to 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.

Starting point is 01:34:36 That makes sense. Doesn't it? Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Because I love risk. Yes. And there is something clarifying about risk, right?

Starting point is 01:34:45 that it... When you would send me articles or something like that too, and you were like, this one's a little different, I don't know. Those were usually the best ones too. You're like, I'm kind of like I'm sticking my neck out here a little bit.

Starting point is 01:34:54 Those were usually the better ones that you wrote. Yeah, for sure. And I'm thinking about skydiving too. Like, if you ever skydive, like it goes by in two seconds. Yeah,

Starting point is 01:35:03 right? Right? Like you're in free 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.

Starting point is 01:35:15 anything else. You can you imagine if your mind was wandering while skydiving? It's just kind of inconceivable. Part of that, too, though, like a deep embodiment, the more you can get your body engaged, too, now this isn't always, like with some creative test, it's not always possible. I get that sitting in programming. You're not going to be doing a whole lot of exercise.

Starting point is 01:35:34 It's like painters, too, can get it. And painters, musicians, you know, when they're, they focus a lot on posture and body movement while they're producing or why they're writing music or creating a painting too. So there's an element of that. And then like a little bit of unpredictability too. And then we talked about uncertainty and how that can throw your focus off. But like throwing in a little bit of uncertainty, an element of surprise in your work, if you can somehow.

Starting point is 01:36:03 That kind of helps keep your brain engaged as well. So that's basically like, yeah, what's the opposite of a distraction? It's flow, right? And again, there are various studies. 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's very hard. That's where a lot of the debate comes in.

Starting point is 01:36:28 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. Right. It's just, it can help make you live a happier, more fulfilled life. in these states more often. We talked at the top of the show about the default mode network, right, which is kind of the wandering mind, but also interestingly, very much correlated with, I guess, what you call like ego identity.

Starting point is 01:36:53 Yeah, self-reference. Yeah, self-referencing. Yeah, the ego is very strong. Versus the online. What was it? The task positive network. The task positive network, right? Where you're very much focused on a single thing.

Starting point is 01:37:07 You're trying to get something done. You're very goal and task-oriented. but 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 also associated with unhappiness and happiness. 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, you know, ego taking a backseat. You're like, you're focused on a single task at hand. Your ego takes a backseat.

Starting point is 01:37:35 You're like, there's a lack of distraction in your environment. There's, your emotions are very aligned with what you're doing. Yeah, it's just kind of, there's like a, there's a beautiful coherence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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.

Starting point is 01:37:56 So they've tried to 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-referencing, less about 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, I guess, you know what I mean? But it's the timing of it that's important. It's not when you're in the flow state, you don't, you really kind of lose your sense of self.

Starting point is 01:38:30 Everybody can probably relate to this on some degree. 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, fuck yeah, give me more. Yeah, right. And it's, and that becomes something that you identify with very strongly. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:38:49 Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's flow. The more you can get into it, the more you can set up your environment, really to increase the likelihood of it. Again, those three factors, the clear goals, the immediate feedback and the balance between challenge and skill. The more you can kind of turn those dials up and,

Starting point is 01:39:07 and integrate 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. And happier with your work life for sure. You know what's funny about flow, though, is, because maybe this is a nice segue into talking about ADHD, but I think a lot of people assume that flow is synonymous with focus.

Starting point is 01:39:36 But you can actually get in the flow doing a lot of stupid shit, like fucking around. You know, playing a dumb video game on your phone and being completely distracted about something. In fact, a lot of 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 moment over the last five or ten years, I think especially during the pandemic. But it's, flow's not always necessarily a good thing. Like losing yourself in an activity can be detrimental as well as beneficial.

Starting point is 01:40:13 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 of 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 is 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, chances are you probably want to break away from it, but you also can't. You can't. So it's just,

Starting point is 01:40:56 it's really a lack of executive function around focus and flow rather than just of a complete inability, the fall into focus and flow. Okay, yeah, that hyper focus. So there's like a compulsivity to it. Yes. Like, and like you said, the real goal is intentionality. Yes. If you're being compulsive, you're not being intentional, right? Right.

Starting point is 01:41:15 Okay. Okay. So it's interesting. You framed it like this. So let's get into the 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?

Starting point is 01:41:31 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 regulation 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 very hard for you to regulate your attention. I would describe it.

Starting point is 01:41:47 Yeah, I would describe it more as a, it's a difficulty. It's an issue with interest. Ah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can definitely pay attention to things. It's just that like, I usually don't fucking care. Okay. So it's hard for me to care about certain things.

Starting point is 01:42:04 And then other times it's hard for me to stop caring. Okay. 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 guy, William Dodson back in 2016. He came up with this framework 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.

Starting point is 01:42:41 This is so fucking accurate. I know. It's so crazy. Whereas, you know, the quote unquote neurotypical brain, it's usually, we can usually prioritize by importance, right? Like, even if it's boring or whatever, like, I need to get this done so I'm going to sit down. I'm going to power through it.

Starting point is 01:42:56 And 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 people in my life, my girlfriend has 80. too when you're talking about this she's like if I'm not interested in it you're you're just doesn't happen it's just not going to happen yeah right and and the funny thing is too is that like at least for me uh like the consequences the repercussion like I don't care about those either right that's what okay that that that I think is one of the big points about ADHD's 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

Starting point is 01:43:31 who cares like what the those people are these people are getting these people are getting be mad. You're going to be fined all this 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 hyper focus versus flow for a second here. So like you said, the main difference is kind of compulsivity. When you get in one of these hyperfocus things, though, you can't pull yourself away. Well, like what, like what's going on here? We're like, it's just something that interested do 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?

Starting point is 01:44:07 That rabbit hole is a good way to put it. It's ironic because I'm actually going through this right now. By the way, you and I talked about this a little bit off air. You and I seem to be doomed to experience whatever the topic is, right? Like the procrastination episode. It's so strange, yeah. We procrastinated recording that episode for like four months. The shame episode, we fucked that research up so whole.

Starting point is 01:44:30 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 fucking endurance race for it. The purpose episode, I shared like basically what's been my entire purpose for the last year. Well, now with the focus episode, total transparency to the audience, I've been really struggling to focus on recording this episode. There's a lot going on in the business right now. We've had quite a bit of turnover. We've got a re-org going on. And I, as part of this reorg process, I have found myself absolutely obsessed with fucking AI automations. Processes, yeah.

Starting point is 01:45:09 Oh, my God. Like, I literally can't. I was up to like 10.30 last night working on them. 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. And I was really struggling to pull myself away. And the funny thing was at that point I was working on an automation that just like,

Starting point is 01:45:29 didn't even really matter for the business, but I just, it felt there was like this compulsivity to like get it done. 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's all gas, no breaks. And what happens is I go so hard on it that you,

Starting point is 01:46:01 inevitably I reach a point of diminishing returns where it's like every marginal hour I spend on it is basically delivering almost no extra value. And then I start getting resentful. I'm like pissed that I'm like focused on this thing. And I've basically spent four days in my life only doing this thing. But then at that point, I think some 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 then I just kind of make myself miserable for like, I guess, the last stretch of it.

Starting point is 01:46:37 That's kind of where I'm at now. But yeah, it is, it is an inability to tear myself away from it. Very much in the same way of like getting hooked on a really good video game or addicted to a really good TV show and like binging an entire season. 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,

Starting point is 01:47:03 it's AI automations. I've felt it in the past with like writing scripts. I've felt it in the past with putting together like a talk for a speaking tour. It's happened in all sorts of different places. So yeah, it's a,

Starting point is 01:47:17 it is this weird switch that gets flipped on and off. And when it's off, you feel useless. You feel it feels like you're not able to get anything done. And then when it's flipped on, you feel like, it's like you're the incredible Hulk, right? You can just like

Starting point is 01:47:31 lift 2,000 pound boulders and 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 double-edged sword, but it's their superpower. Yeah, it just needs to be like wielded in the right direction. Right, okay. Because if it's not, 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 of this frantic energy 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 all these things. How have you over the years, because you were diagnosed as a teenager, right? Right. Yeah. Okay. So that's the

Starting point is 01:48:12 other thing people need to understand, I think, to ADHD is a developmental disorder. Yeah. And we can get into some of the weeds on that, but maybe not. I don't know if you want to. But essentially how have you managed over the years to, I mean, you've written three books at this point, four books at this point. You run a business, you have a team of 27 people at this point. Yeah. Like how have you managed to cobble together in your frantic brain? This whole system. Systems and guardrails.

Starting point is 01:48:42 Okay. And this is going to be a lot of the advice that we give in the next section. Yeah. 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, so you're saying structure in a way, right? And this is, I've talked to, I've talked to my girlfriend about this, my other friends with ADHD. And it's, you kind of have this weird relationship with structure.

Starting point is 01:49:08 Yes, I think. It's like you need it, but you also hate it. Yes. Explain that to me. Because I still don't think I get that. Well, your brain hates it because you need novelty all the time. Okay. But you need it because if you just, if you let an ADHD brain just do whatever it wants,

Starting point is 01:49:26 like God knows where you're going to end up. So what I personally find, and it's funny because there's an extremely high correlation with people with ADHD and entrepreneurship. And I think this is probably one of the reasons where it's I hate other people's structures. I like my own structure. I got you. Okay. So it's like I know my brain and I know where the trip wires are and I know. where the pitfalls are.

Starting point is 01:49:49 And so if I get to build the guardrails, it's going to fit my brain really well. Whereas if I just adopt somebody else's guardrails, then I'm probably going to end up being very annoyed and just telling them the fuck off. Okay. So I'll give you a simple example. I realized about seven years ago

Starting point is 01:50:08 that I can play video games, I can't play multiplayer games. If I play multiplayer games, I get so competitive and I get so obsessed that I it's a problem like it's a real problem

Starting point is 01:50:23 I get addicted I start practicing I start I'm like I'm gonna I'm gonna rank on the leaderboards and I'm gonna become a grandmaster in this game and all this stuff I got addicted to the game Overwatch back like 10 years ago

Starting point is 01:50:36 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 with It was like warm-up routine Dude, it was a bunch of like fucking high schoolers Okay

Starting point is 01:50:50 It was a bunch of kids like half my age And I'm like sitting there spinning like half my day Playing with a bunch of 17 year olds On this stupid video game Because I wanted to reach Grandmaster And I did that for like two months It was such it was such a colossal waste of time And so I finally just realize I'm like

Starting point is 01:51:10 I'm just not allowed to play multiplayer games Because 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, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to kick this guy's ass one more time. Well, let's go.

Starting point is 01:51:27 All right. Okay. Okay. It's one of your guard rails. Yes, it's one of my guard rails. None of those. Okay. You know, you talked about the structure that you need.

Starting point is 01:51:36 I've heard people tell me too. They're like, okay, for a job for somebody with ADHD. they're not good when there is that repetitive structure, especially, like, you're doing the same thing over and over again, and then a lot of paperwork, that kind of stuff. But if you have more like project-based work to do where you 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 I've seen from you anyway is you set up, okay, we have this project we're working on and we're going to work within this and there's a lot of freedom within it, but there's still some bounds around. Yeah. I think ADHD people do.

Starting point is 01:52:10 tend to be very good creatives. Yes. Yeah. Because, again, it's just this constant need for novelty and stimulation. And creativity is one means of giving that to you. Yeah. But yeah, the challenge is always putting the parameters around that creativity. Right.

Starting point is 01:52:26 Creativity. Like if you just let, if you just let a 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. That's something I've become very aware of in the last couple months.

Starting point is 01:52:55 And I think a lot of that's just my personality. My brain's default is to always improvise. And my brain likes to improvise. Right. And experiment. Try something new. Yeah. The novelty you get on that.

Starting point is 01:53:06 Okay. Okay. So yeah. It's, it is, I think it's, there's certain professions that are much better suited for people with ADHD. And there's, if you're working with somebody with ADHD or if you have 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 little bit delicate.

Starting point is 01:53:36 Yeah, yeah. We're flowers, Drew. We're very delicate. Well, okay. But, okay, so when you are sitting down to work, though, like, what are some of the things that really help you, like, to get something done? I've heard you talk before. Like, when you were in university, you would, like, have two things going on at once, which makes no sense to a neurotypical person. That kind of stuff, though, when you do sit down and you're like, okay, I need to focus. How do you approach that, say differently than, like, maybe a neurotypical person would? I So we've talked about task switching and how it's like incredibly detrimental to focus I personally find task switching improves my focus Okay

Starting point is 01:54:18 In moderate doses Yeah yeah And it's funny because everybody I say this to Who is not ADHD they think this is insane But then people with ADHD are like oh yeah No that that totally makes sense Right And I think what it comes down to is that if I do the same task for too long

Starting point is 01:54:35 I get bored And of course, my brain craves novelty, stimulation. And I have a very low tolerance for boredom. So if I get bored, I'll eventually just find something else to do. But what I found is that if I say I pair one long-term task with a couple short-term tasks, 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, there's a little bit of novelty there. It feels new.

Starting point is 01:55:10 It's a new challenge. It's like, okay, cool, this is something different. And there's a little bit of stimulation and I can focus again. And then as soon as that second task starts to get boring, I switch back to the first. And then that first task feels normal again. The way I discovered this was in university, I would sleep through almost all my lectures. I couldn't stay awake. And then one day I brought a Sudoku from the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

Starting point is 01:55:36 college newspaper 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 happened, but I'm going to keep doing it. And so I started bringing Sudoku's and crossword puzzles to all my classes. And I fucking 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 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 crossword puzzle or Sudoku, 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 important or interesting, again, I could

Starting point is 01:56:19 put the crossword 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. Yeah, that makes absolutely no sense to me. But I've heard very similar things from my friends, too. They're like, all. do it like they need to doodle during a lecture or something boring or the crosswords, the Sudoku's, whatever it is, or they have some other light task that they're working on. Just to keep, yeah, just to keep focus like online and not go too far into mind wandering. So this is a good example of guardrails. This is a good example of both. So when I was in school, I realized that if I went home, if I went back to my dorm.

Starting point is 01:56:58 Oh, okay. I'm going to give in this too. Yeah. To study, this gets in the environmental design. Yeah, 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.

Starting point is 01:57:10 I'd be goofing off with the guys down the hall. Nothing got done. So I created a rule for myself, which is 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 that, 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.

Starting point is 01:57:38 No exceptions. And sure enough, once you're in the library and there's nothing to do, you start finding shit to do because it's boring. And so then I started getting ahead on my classes. I would start studying like two weeks ahead. I'd start preparing for a project that wasn't going to be due for another month. And it was amazing. I mean, 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.

Starting point is 01:58:06 And a lot of these tactics 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 is the practical advice and takeaways. It's funny because when we started working on this episode, my initial thought was like, it's values and environment. Like, 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. Like, that's where I've gotten the most mileage.

Starting point is 01:58:43 But you've gone much deeper into all the different techniques and tactics and exercises and implementation. So why don't you kick us off? Yeah, sure. No, I'll listen to this. So you're right. Environmental design, like, it's just a pillar of getting shit done, basically, right? We've mentioned a few of these, though, too. So before we get in kind of the nitty-gritty of it, I think part of your environment is actually what I'm calling, like, operating system-level factors.

Starting point is 01:59:12 Okay. It's super succinct and sexy, I know. Yes. But we've mentioned this a little bit already. Your sleep, exercise, and nutrition. We mentioned this in every episode. I know, I know. So I'm not going to get into the weeds on why you should.

Starting point is 01:59:24 I just felt 100,000 people roll their eyes and say, 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 dwell on it, but I do want to give you some interesting statistics here. So for sleep, first of all, obvious, it's pretty obvious to most 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?

Starting point is 01:59:51 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 they found that after about seven, to 18, 19 hours of sleep, like you've been awake for that long, okay? Yeah. 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.

Starting point is 02:00:15 After 24 hours, that doubles to about 0.1% blood alcohol content, which is above like legal driving limit. Right. You're drunk. You're officially drunk. Yes. Yeah. So like that's where, that's kind of like the baseline of where you're starting out from when you're sleep deprived, right?

Starting point is 02:00:32 The interesting twist is, and this was actually a replicated study, I saw the old study for this, is people when they're sleep deprived don't realize how cognitively impaired they are. Yes. They'll tell you like, oh, yeah, like yesterday. Like a drunk person. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 02:00:46 Oh, yeah, no, I'm fine. I can drive. Oh, I can go talk to that person. Yeah. They won't know. Yeah, that it's very much, it covers up. Your executive function is diminished. Your ability to evaluate your own choices

Starting point is 02:00:59 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, no, I've caught back up. I'm good to go.

Starting point is 02:01:13 I've adjusted when they're doing just as poorly. Right. Okay. So you're not above your own biology. Just, okay. You're not a superhuman. You're not. Get some sleep.

Starting point is 02:01:23 Sleep four hours a night or whatever it is. Exactly. Owls versus morning people. This is a real thing. Like they've scientifically validated. Yes. Some people are night owls. Some people are morning birds. Early birds. Early birds. Early birds. Early birds. Morning. That's a, that's a real thing. Okay. Interesting, though, this 2025 review that came out, it showed 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 early bird or vice versa. How.

Starting point is 02:01:59 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, it's not going to work either. So matching that is actually really important. So like for me, I'm pretty alert in the mornings. 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.

Starting point is 02:02:26 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 your biological rhythms. Okay. The fun thing about chronotypes, too, is it naturally shifts over your lifespan. Yeah, that's true. So people's chronotypes change over time.

Starting point is 02:02:45 In my 20s, I was a hardcore night out. Right, right. And now I'm up at like 545 with no alarm. Yep. Yeah, and they do show that. Generally speaking, at the older you get, the more morning person type you are. Yeah. Not for everybody, but generally speaking.

Starting point is 02:02:59 taking care. Okay. All right, let's move on to exercise real quick here too. There's actually, so two different ways you can look at this. There's acute exercise for focus and then the chronic effects of exercise on your focus, right? Acute exercise, just like going for a walk or even get a full workout and whatever, that actually does have measurable slight, but measurable effects on your ability to focus, working 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 focus a little bit. at 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 lull is. And if I get that workout in, then my afternoons are a lot better for sure. But then if you regularly exercise over time too, though, we talked about this kind of in the resilience episode. You do have a more resilient brain with longer exercise, like chronic exercise, I guess we're calling it. Better vascular health, obviously, mood regulation. Sleep quality improves too, so that you get a double, kind of a double dose of that.

Starting point is 02:04:03 And metabolic stability, okay? Which brings me to nutrition. I just feel like you should be wagging your finger this whole time, Drew. I am. This entire section, just sit here and wag. Just know my mind is wagging at you. Just wagg your finger. Your nutrition, listeners.

Starting point is 02:04:18 Nutrition. Let's talk about your nutrition. So I don't know if you remember that. You remember those studies where it was like, oh, yeah, they gave people like lemonade and then they gave them a cognitive task, like a memory task, and they performed better after drinking lemonade. So they're like, oh, glucose, you know, the brain's fuel is glucose. That's its only fuel source.

Starting point is 02:04:35 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 glucose. The spikes in the crashes actually lead to worse focus. And so avoiding high sugar foods, high glycemic load.

Starting point is 02:04:54 foods, you know, complex carbohydrates, or 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 definitely paramount there too. And then high inflammation prone diets as well, so basically like a standard Western diet. Sure. Terrible, terrible for focusing and cognitive impairments. Yeah. Depression, anxiety symptoms are more common with those two, which as we discussed a little bit

Starting point is 02:05:23 too that impedes on your focus as well. I definitely notice, so I don't know if you've done like a glucose monitor. And I never have, yeah. You've done one of these? Yeah, I've done a couple. They're interesting. It's funny because when you first put them on, you're just glued to the app. You're like, oh my God, this is so interesting.

Starting point is 02:05:40 This food did this and that food didn't do this. After a while, you kind of notice the patterns and it starts just telling you what you already know. But I will say, like when my blood sugar is severely spiked. massive impairment, my ability to pay attention and focus. Like I'm just, I feel like a slug. I can't, I can't really get into a flow state. I feel antsy. Sometimes I'm like, I need to like go drink something, I need some caffeine, or I need to go

Starting point is 02:06:12 for a walk or I need to take a 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. Again. If that's the story of your life. It's huge though, too. No, like a few years ago, I started cleaning in my diet as well.

Starting point is 02:06:32 And I just didn't have those crashes like you're talking about too. Yeah. Related to this too. So part of nutrition is hydration as well. This was interesting that even a 1 to 2% of your body weight, like dehydrating yourself by 1% to 2% of your body weight, which you don't even notice as like you're not thirsty at that point. That actually impairs attention working memory. reaction times. So this, I notice big time, especially like instead of doing coffee in the

Starting point is 02:07:01 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, so I'm probably chronically dehydrated in some way. But yeah, I think they recommend about 250 milliliters every hour, hour and a half to keep yourself well hydrated. You know, the brain will literally shrink when it's dehydrated. and that taxes metabolic processes in the brain.

Starting point is 02:07:27 It's just harder to focus. So keep wagging my finger. Drink more water, Drew. I'm done wagging my finger. Drink more water. I'm done. Yeah. Get some sleep.

Starting point is 02:07:37 Get some exercise. Don't eat shit. I need some water. Like that's what it comes down to. Isn't it crazy? How simple. I know. I know.

Starting point is 02:07:44 Like you could do probably the craziest productivity. If you looked at the research on like the craziest productivity hack that people do like a homodoro or something. something like it's probably 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.

Starting point is 02:08:08 They're great and they do help, but it's on the margins. Right. And if you don't have this stuff figured out. None of that matters. Right. If you're eating Big Macs for breakfast and sleeping five hours a night and a pomeodoro isn't going to do shit for you at that point. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:08:22 It's not going to save your Big Macs. Yeah, no, no. Okay, but that said, let's do get into some of this more tactical stuff and an 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. And different people, for sure. Here's just, I'm going to go over some general principles, implement them as you see fit,

Starting point is 02:08:44 experiment with these. This takes a lot of trial and error for people, I think. But there are some general principles and some research that they've found where some 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.

Starting point is 02:09:03 But, you know, probably one of the more famous experiments. This was a 2017 experiment 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, if it's face down, if it's not going on, 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 within your field of view.

Starting point is 02:09:30 Put it in the other room. Or if you're at a coffee shop or whatever, put in your bag. Just get it out of sight, period. Kind of related to this, though, too, is clutter in your workspace is really a tax on attention as well. So again, this is the container you have for your environment, right? Anything you can see in there is a possible source of distraction. Wow, this just made my wife really happy. Well, yeah.

Starting point is 02:09:56 She's neat and tidy and you're kind of a slob. I am totally a slop. She's always buggy me. She's like, you should clean your desk. And I'm like, ah, it's fine. I have like, I have like 60 books on my desk. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:10:07 I couldn't even tell you. I mean, some of them have been there for like two years. And 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 of this one too.

Starting point is 02:10:20 So I built myself a desk and it's like a big L desk and so I could put a whole bunch of shit on it. Yeah. And now in my office, like it's 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 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 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.

Starting point is 02:10:48 having like an extra monitor what I found because so it was just it was recently the power went out where I was there was high winds and they were worried about wildfires 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 inch MacBook Pro right

Starting point is 02:11:05 and I got a lot done interesting I got a lot done interesting and I did have to switch between tabs every now and then and stuff like that but 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 at the purpose office, the software engineers, they all have multiple monitors. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:11:24 And they swear by them. And I get it, right? Like you're compiling code in all these different spots. You're talking to Claude over here. And like, so I understand, I personally find it distracting. Because I feel like when I have all this monitor space, I feel like I need to fill it with something. Yes. Which means.

Starting point is 02:11:45 Yeah. So I'm like, okay. well, I'll have Slack open over here and my email open over there and then 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'm the same I personally find it distracting I'm more than happy to work on my life It actually is very funny So as you know I was going to the purpose office

Starting point is 02:12:12 For people listening who don't know purpose is a that the app that I built last year the AI a coach, I would go to that office and like a bunch of nerds. They all have these like crazy monitor setups with like their laptops on stands and all sorts of like voice to text systems set up and all this stuff. And I would just go there with my little MacBook and like just to open the screen. And there are so many times where they're like, dude, we'll get you, we have extra monitors. We can get you a setup. It's going to be like so safe.

Starting point is 02:12:40 And I'm like, I'm good, man. I'm like, I'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 laptop. That's all I worked off of. Me too. 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 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 loosey-goosey work, sure, 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.

Starting point is 02:13:21 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 actually is a good transition into how you should match kind of the setting to the cognitive demands. Creativity, you know, it likes a little bit of chaos, right?

Starting point is 02:13:40 A little bit of, whereas accuracy and precision don't. Yeah. Right? And so, like when I went to the coffee shop 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.

Starting point is 02:13:59 Yeah. I don't, what I'm doing, I guess, repetitive, busy work. 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 just need to slog through this for a few hours.

Starting point is 02:14:18 Right. Then those are the few times I go to a coffee shop. Just to kind of get into a new environment. Feel some of the novelty, right? Like get the juices going. Yeah. I think there are two, I mean, you think about working from home, working, like, co-working, a coworking space maybe or like coffee shop.

Starting point is 02:14:35 Yeah. And then just your regular office environment, whatever. I don't know. For me, I've found a lot of times, like, when I work from home, what I need to do, I have a separate space for it. Okay. 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 it 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, there's like, oh, there's some project I need to work on at home. that's going on in the back of my mind.

Starting point is 02:15:10 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 think experimenting with just your work environment period is a good way to figure out what kind of work you need to do where. This goes all the way back to Peter Drucker. He wrote about this, that there needed to be a very clear demarcation between your home life and your work life. And it's funny because, I mean, I remember even as far back as the mid-2000s, people who worked from home. Like, I knew people who would get up, get dressed, walk around the block, come back in to their apartment, and then go into their workspace or their office or whatever. And then when they were done, they'd go outside, walk around the block, come back in, change clothes.

Starting point is 02:15:59 Right? There's like a ritual aspect to it. The other thing that you mentioned in passing that we would be remiss not to talk about is working with other people. 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 something useful. Like I feel like kind of a piece of shit if I'm not doing something useful. So there's a little bit of a implied accountability that happens. And then, of course, you can take that even further with, like, actually consciously co-working

Starting point is 02:16:36 with somebody, like finding a friend, a coworker being like, hey, can we block off 2 to 4 p.m. to work on this thing? I'll keep you accountable. You keep me accountable. Yeah. And so on and so forth. No, definitely. That's a good point.

Starting point is 02:16:49 I do try to leverage that social pressure a little bit. 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. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's like now you don't want to look like a like a like a lazy asshole. So you leverage those things though. Like actually take advantage of that kind of stuff. Like no if you know your brain like I know I yes I subcom to social pressure like yes. Like we all do breaking news right. Yeah. 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, almost, yeah. Some hardcore stuff, right? Right. Yeah, I think this is, this is another thing that I think is very common with ADHD people is, um, not just music, but very

Starting point is 02:17:48 intense. Okay. Music. 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 Whereas if I put on like classical or something, chances are my mind's going to wander and kind of tune it out. Yeah. But it's, yeah, there's, it's a huge part of my productivity routine. Yeah. A lot of people use, like ADHD people or otherwise, a lot of people will use music as a form of focus. And usually kind of what we do, I don't know, in my case, what I do is all like what I've been doing. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:18:25 In the past anyway was I'd find like a Spotify playlist that was focus for work or something like that. kind of pick a genre that I like, you could do lo-fi or rock or whatever it is. But they're supposed to kind of be curated for that for focus and work, right? It's funny. I feel like so much of that is arbitrary. Like, it is. It's like, what's that lo-fi beats channel on YouTube? It's like, it's funny that just like the whole world just decided that that's the productivity

Starting point is 02:18:50 work. But the funny thing is, is that there's actually like very real research around sound frequencies and sound waves and the ability to focus. 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 that do alter your brain waves in a way that increases focus. And like there's something to that. I don't totally understand how it works. But like, you know, we've been through the research on it. There's something to it.

Starting point is 02:19:25 And it's 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. Yeah. But what you said about it, though, too, those playlist, those curated playlist, they are usually fairly arbitrary.

Starting point is 02:19:52 Or it's just like, people are like, ah, this works for me. Yeah. It doesn't work for you. 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 instrumental. But what Brain FM has actually found, you're absolutely right, is that there are certain brain waves that are associated with different kind of mental states, obviously, right? So, for example, theta waves, like four to eight hertz, that's memory, mind-wondering navigation

Starting point is 02:20:20 type stuff. Alpha waves is like filtering out distractions. Beta waves, though, are the ones that they've kind of figured. out. So what brain FM has actually done, though, instead of just like kind of shooting in the dark or like letting, like I go out and pick my own music, what they've done is they've, they've kind of used the scientific method. They start from a hypothesis of, okay, these are the brain waves that we know are associated with deeper focus. And how can, how does sound influence that or how can sound, get you into that same brainwave state, right?

Starting point is 02:20:54 And they figure that out through, like, doing actual rigorous studies on this, and then they iterate from there, like, okay, this worked, this didn't, and then they iterate from there. And they're constantly updating their music library and testing this all the time. Okay. So what they found is that those beta waves can actually be induced by music. And the thing is about music is that a lot of music is actually designed to catch your attention, like, and pull it off of whatever else you're doing, right? That's the whole point of it.

Starting point is 02:21:30 Like a lot of times that's what the point of music is. They've started from the other way and said, okay, how do we not do that? Yeah. But keep you kind of locked into those beta wave mind states, I guess. And also, too, there's just larger, there's a synchrony of neural oscillations in different parts your brain. Okay, basically like large populations

Starting point is 02:21:50 of neurons firing 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 you get on there,

Starting point is 02:22:01 you 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. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:22:07 So they have all these different kind of like, not really genres, but kind of goals, I guess. Yeah, it's funny. They do have genres of music, but then they also have genres of like,

Starting point is 02:22:17 desired mental states, mental states, right? cognitive states. It is super interesting. By the way, people listening, there's 30-day free trial, it's in the description. Brain.fm. slash solve. They sponsor the show all the time. So we're not just talking about them randomly. It is funny though. I don't know, way back in the day, there was this period where like binaral beats became a big thing in meditation. Right. So you used to put these headphones on

Starting point is 02:22:45 while you meditated and then they would like they'd make these like kind of weird sounds in your ears and it was funny because I remember I remember trying those way way back in the day and you would get these like

Starting point is 02:22:56 really intense meditation sessions and some people swore by them they swore that it like accelerated your like path to enlightenment or whatever it was I actually found them too intense I didn't like them they were like way too intense

Starting point is 02:23:10 but it was cool when I when I found Brain FM it was like okay there's music around this like it kind of like softens and it's in the fact that you're like focusing on task I think it like softens the blow a little bit yes but yeah super interesting stuff do you listen to music while you yeah I actually started to this year more because I usually just like sit in silence and then I realized that like oh and 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

Starting point is 02:23:42 and I was using like Spotify playlist. Yeah. Those, that was kind of hit and miss, though, is what I found, is that they could help, they could, 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 and try it.

Starting point is 02:23:56 Again, though, what Brain FM has done as 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 Brain FM's, like I'll sit down to do it, it's pretty wild because you do, it's like a light trance you almost get in sometimes. I'm not saying this is a bulletproof. It's not magic.

Starting point is 02:24:15 It's not going to, you know, again, if you don't have all these other things set up, it's a cool tool. It is a cool tool. And there's like a little bit of a little bit of a game, a marginal gain you can't 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 slash solved. You can get a 30-day trial.

Starting point is 02:24:34 Link is in the description. Check it out. So what else? A few just other things, too, that also help on the margins. are going to be things like temperature, light, and air quality. Okay? So the temperature, what they found is the ideal, your ideal performance and, like, offices that they found are workspaces is around 21 to 22 degrees Celsius,

Starting point is 02:24:57 which I think is a tad warm. 72 Fahrenheit? Yeah, 72 Fahrenheit, which I think is a tad warm. I feel like we're going to spawn hundreds of office arguments. That's, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Starting point is 02:25:09 Too hot, too cold. Or if you and your spouse work from home, and yeah, you're probably fighting that too as well. But, I mean, you know, if it's too hot, too cold, that's going to just distract you from everything. Lighting too, this is kind of interesting. And I actually do this. Dynamic lighting throughout the day is actually associated with better productivity and focus. So like in the morning, you do bright lights, more blue, kind of like a natural light. You know, I'll even go out in the mornings to try to get outside for a few minutes.

Starting point is 02:25:40 the whole, yeah, the early morning sunlight thing. Early morning sunlight, sure. But then I have this lamp 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 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 have usually a pretty good session. It's usually more creative work that I'm doing looser stuff.

Starting point is 02:26:05 But like if I have that kind of like low intensity light, but it's mimicking 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. No. I feel like I'm super sensitive to light. My wife is really sensitive to it.

Starting point is 02:26:21 She has our house set up so that like all the lights dim at 9 o'clock. Yeah. I don't. Like I, dude, honestly, like I wake up, sometimes I wake up 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, I can't. I can't do that.

Starting point is 02:26:39 I think some people are more sensitive than others, too. They are finding too, I was recently listening to a podcast with Matthew Walker, the guy who wrote Why We Sleep, a big sleep researcher. And they're finding out, too, that it's not necessarily like light exposure itself, like blue light exposure probably was a little bit overhyped for a while. Yeah. It's actually not as detrimental. But light exposure in general, like intensity probably does matter for sure.

Starting point is 02:27:08 I could see that. I definitely sleep worse if the lights are on. Sure, yeah. Or you have a TV on or something like that. Yeah, I definitely notice that. But it is, again, it is very personal. Like I said, my wife is really sensitive to this type of stuff. I have me too. Yeah. I am not. I could sleep in the middle of a busy airport and be fine. That's crazy, but okay. And like some air quality stuff too. They've done studies on this. just, I don't know, I have a little air purifier in my office. So I felt this when I lived in Asia.

Starting point is 02:27:45 Oh, okay. My, there is, I live briefly in Vietnam and in Hong Kong. And there are periods, there are parts of the year that the smog and pollution is just much worse than other parts. And it was interesting because I noticed that my ADHD symptoms got way worse. Yeah. Certain parts of the year. And then I couldn't figure out what it was.

Starting point is 02:28:08 I couldn't focus on anything. I started sleeping poorly. Like, it was really bad. And then I started getting like a scratchy throat. And then that's when I looked up the air quality. And there was tons of pollution. So I definitely notice it. My ability to focus and with a lot of pollution.

Starting point is 02:28:25 So air quality is something I'm very sensitive to. Okay. Yeah. Backed up by the research too. That just pollutants in the air diminish in, like acutely diminish your cognitive capabilities around working memory, around fluid intelligence, and executive function, too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember seeing some kind of education-related studies around this of, of like, children who are in highly polluted parts of the city, but then move to a different school

Starting point is 02:28:56 and a different part of the city where there's not a lot of pollutants, like their test scores go up considerably, just from like moving from a polluted part of town to a less polluted part of town. 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 fucking smog all day. Right, yeah, yeah. Makes sense.

Starting point is 02:29:17 That checks out. Yeah. Well, 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, there's this whole theory called attention restoration theory, which is getting exposure to nature, these natural settings kind of restore. your directed attention.

Starting point is 02:29:39 And they think the mechanism by which this operates is 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 whatever around you. And that they think kind of gives your executive control a little bit of a rest and time to recover. Okay. A little bit. Sure.

Starting point is 02:30:02 Whatever. I know. I know. This is like the green therapy stuff. Right. This came back in the 90s. This was back in the 90s. Since then, they've found a lot of nuance to it.

Starting point is 02:30:11 They're like, yeah, it can't help in certain contexts. But 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, 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 does seem to increase happiness and these stresses people. I think it's probably just a little bit of that bleeding over into increased executive function. Yeah. Lack of stimulation.

Starting point is 02:30:38 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. Right. Right. So common sense packaged as scientific theory strikes again. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, if you throw some plants in your office too, that helps with the air quality too. So I don't know.

Starting point is 02:30:59 There you might be something to it there as well. So if that works for you agree. Then you got to water them. Yeah. Then you got to stress about watering them. I don't. Well, you 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 operating

Starting point is 02:31:12 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? You know, you mentioned the demarcation between work life and home life. And especially with a lot of people working from home now, that lines blurred. There's research out that shows, though, that people who separate work from from home life are a lot happier, both in their jobs and they're more productive as well and also just in their home life as well.

Starting point is 02:31:43 So having that clear demarcation. I struggle with this just because I live alone and I've worked remotely forever and it's all just kind of blends together. I struggle with this too. Yeah. So it seems like you're just constantly thinking about work. But it makes sense.

Starting point is 02:31:58 I mean, if you think back to the episode about boundaries, right? And setting boundaries for yourself. 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 talked 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 go for a walk or some people I know even go for a quick drive to and then come back, go to their workspace. What I do is I have a room in my house that's just my office. I go in there. 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 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. But these habits, they're, they're contextually cute, right?

Starting point is 02:32:47 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. And it gets you kind of into that mindset. A bit of a simple model for this, which is you have the same start time, okay, the same place, the same two to three minute kind of opening sequence. What I do is I sit down in like, I time box,

Starting point is 02:33:10 that's when it's I time box. I'll sit down and like, this is going to be my day. That's my little ritual. And then again, gets my brain into that work mode. And then kind of interestingly, interestingly too,

Starting point is 02:33:21 is the same closing 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 advises people to do this.

Starting point is 02:33:34 It's a kind of, again, that demarcation between work and home life. When you're done with it, he has this whole like shutdown routine that he tries to get people to do. And he even says, he says out loud, he's like, shut down complete. That's a very cow move. What a nerd. I know, right? Such a nerd cow.

Starting point is 02:33:56 But it's just the, like having a routine that is specifically, designed to, again, demarcate that work from home life. And again, just signals to your brain like, oh, this is, this is focus time. Like setting that up and working out that muscle really does seem to help a lot of people. And it increases focus, increases working memory, executive function 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 to set up your work environment that makes you so productive? No, for me, it's more, it's funny.

Starting point is 02:34:38 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. 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. There will be a measurable increase in your focus if you do these things. I think a lot of people start here though.

Starting point is 02:35:02 And this isn't where you want to start. I don't think. Yeah. It's the sort of thing. It's funny because when I, 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 never noticed a huge uptick in productivity, but what I notice now is when

Starting point is 02:35:24 I travel and I lose everything. Oh, yes. And I'm like, oh, this sucks. Like if I'm stuck in some dark hotel room, you know, like at a, you know, I know, uncomfortable desk. I'm just like, this sucks. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So I like, again, building the habit and that ritual and that routine. Yeah. A lot of it is place based. Yeah. And so yeah. 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

Starting point is 02:35:53 work or, you know, they'll, they'll have their computers set up in a certain way 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 get you like 50% gains in productivity. No. These are on the margins for sure. These are on the margins. I just think we hear about them the most because they are the most easily replicated and communicated. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:36:16 Yeah. They're simple to grasp. Yes. Right. Like you can go out and do these very easily. Yeah. Cool. There's more to life than finding the perfect car.

Starting point is 02:36:29 But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from. drop off to off road, and the car that hulls groceries and hockey teams, or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family. Whatever you want, wherever you're going, start your search at ototrater.ca. Canada's car marketplace. So I mention that I tend to find the system stuff. I mean, environmental design is a huge part of it, but for me, it's really the rules and guidelines

Starting point is 02:37:08 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. 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, productivity is very personal. Yes.

Starting point is 02:37:26 We've talked about this before, right? It's a very personal thing. You have to figure out what works for you. There are some guidelines, though, and some systems out there that I think you can pull some things from. The most useful one I've ever come across is Cal Newport's deep work. his framework around that. Great book. If you haven't read it, go out and read it.

Starting point is 02:37:43 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. The definition of deep work for him are activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration. And it pushes your cognitive capabilities basically to their limits, more or less. Compare that to shallow work, right? Send an email.

Starting point is 02:38:08 going to meetings, doing admin work. Both of them need to be done. They're both necessary, obviously. But especially with somebody like Cal, he really wants to optimize his life around that deep work phase. And so he does programming. 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.

Starting point is 02:38:31 And he's a big systematic kind of like, he approached 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 he came on the show a couple years ago. Yeah. But as I recall, it's like he got his email down to like an hour a week or something or eliminated entirely for majority of his of the year.

Starting point is 02:38:51 I forget exactly what he did. Yeah, he's pretty ruthless with what he considers to be shallow tasks. Yeah. Yeah, he's gotten a 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 core principles actually is like cutting back all of that stuff. So, but really what, you know, deep work for him, the core premise really is that focus and

Starting point is 02:39:16 deep work. It's a skill. Right. Right. It's not just a mood that you get into. And so he's kind of designed this, I guess you would call this 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 to, like we talked about.

Starting point is 02:39:34 Yeah. Which is a big component of well-being. And so he's come up with these like, four rules for deep work. If we can go through those. The first one is, is work deeply. So what he means by this, I know, it was a little like, come on the nose, a little on the nose, I know.

Starting point is 02:39:51 But what he means is build the systems and the rituals. Yeah. And 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, he would agree with pretty much all of that. But, you know, having a fixed time and place to do your work, clear goals for each session. Rules, the rules and guidelines too really come into play here. What's allowed, what's not allowed.

Starting point is 02:40:19 Get your phone out of there. Right. You know. So by work deeply, you mean distraction-free. Distraction-free. Okay. Yes. Yes.

Starting point is 02:40:26 I think that's clear. Right. Also, like, it's been, I read this book when it came out, but it's been like 12 or 13 years now. My understanding is that deep work is specific to highly creative, high problem solving work. So like

Starting point is 02:40:42 high cognitive load. Right. So you wouldn't do deep work to like catch up on your taxing. Right. Right. Right. Right. It's, you're writing a book. You're creating software. You are doing a design schematic or drawing a blueprint or whatever. It's like things that

Starting point is 02:41:03 demand tons of your cognitive energy, you make space for them. Yes. And they are challenging, too. Yeah. There's a lot of overlap with flow here, actually. In some ways, anyway. So the cognitive demand, it's something that's maybe just a little bit beyond your skill level at that moment.

Starting point is 02:41:20 There's a huge creative component to it, though, too. Like I said, he's a programmer and a writer to really creative tasks or professions that he's involved with. And so, yeah, this is, it's mentally taxing. He acknowledges that, too, 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 other the day. And in my experience, you tend to tap out of deep work at three or four hours.

Starting point is 02:41:48 Yes. Yeah. And he acknowledges that as well. His whole system, too, which we can kind of go through because I follow a not psychotic version of it, I would say. But he even's like, you need to take a break from him. He's like, he works a nine to five. He keeps banker hours, basically.

Starting point is 02:42:03 And so he doesn't do it on the weekends. He's going to take the weekends off. This is mentally demanding. It's 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 that whole thing around it too. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:42:16 Okay. So that first rule worked deeply, basically set up a repeatable system for yourself. That's what that means. Embracing boredom, though, too. So this is another removing distractions that kind of don't allow your mind to enter that board state, right? So like your phone, reflective phone use. He uses a phone, but it's just like he doesn't keep it in his workspace. He doesn't have social media, which is we'll get into that here in a second. Practicing the focus without having that novelty, I think this might be a little

Starting point is 02:42:49 bit harder for people with like ADHD or who are very novelty driven. Cal does not have ADHD. I can tell you that right now. For sure. 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 that of boredom. So that's his next rule. The author Neil Gaiman talks about this, how a big part of his writing process is allowing himself to be bored for extended periods of time because boredom is a big part of his working strategy. Shocker, it's not for me. Wasn't it Neil Gaiman too? Didn't he, one of his systems, I guess you could say was he would go into his office.

Starting point is 02:43:32 office to write. No distraction, no phones, no other tech or anything like that. And he gave himself two options. You can do nothing or you can write. That was it. That was him, right? That's it. Yeah. Yes. Yes. So that's the embracing bored thing. Right. Because for him being bored was so painful that he would just write instead. Right. Yeah. 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 was bored.

Starting point is 02:44:05 Really? Yeah, I was thinking about this recently. Like, how often are you bored these? 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

Starting point is 02:44:19 raw dog and you raw dog flight. Yeah, yeah. Like parts of it, not all of it, parts of it. Dude, I'm so productive on flight. I'm so productive. It can be like, I, seriously, if I could just work on a plane for the rest of my life, I would. Yeah. I know there's a lot of people 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 often. Are you seeing any benefits to that?

Starting point is 02:44:43 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 benefit of bored of them, I think, too, is your mind will start wondering and start making those horizontal connections with disparate parts of your life. Right. So I've definitely noticed that a few times. Okay. Which is just kind of fun. I don't know if anything productive necessarily always comes out of it, but it's just kind of, it's mentally stimulating for you at least.

Starting point is 02:45:06 Yeah. And I think helps a little bit. It's that incubation period we talked about for creativity. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Should maybe try it a little bit, Mark. I don't know.

Starting point is 02:45:14 You talk about how you're glutton for pain, you know, and you have a high pain tolerance. Bortem might be your kryptonite. Well, that's the thing is that pain is not boring. Bortem. Bortem isn't painful for you? I'd rather be in pain than bored. So, okay. you know, the whole, the studies where they put people in a room to do nothing and they would shock themselves.

Starting point is 02:45:32 You'd just be shocked on the shit on yourself. I can totally see you doing that. Yes. Okay. Well, embrace boredom. I don't know. Maybe try it out over the next few weeks. I'll let you back to you.

Starting point is 02:45:42 Okay. His third rule, I've already jumped the shark on this one, but quit social media use. He's famously not on social media. Cow. It's funny hearing these again because. It was a long time ago when he wrote this. This is probably 10 years ago where you were with this book. No, because this book was so, I don't want to say shocking, but it really was kind of seminal when it came out.

Starting point is 02:46:05 It was like a cultural moment for it. Right. Especially if you were online. Yeah. Because it's a lot of these ideas at the time where they, I remember they struck everybody as very radical and shocking of like, wow, you don't use social media. You don't answer email four days a week. I remember having 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

Starting point is 02:46:32 in 2026. And you're like, it actually sounds obvious. You're like, oh, of course you get off social media when you're trying to work. Like, who wouldn't do that? Now, 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 a new data that was like teenagers are still spending five hours plus per day on social media. Yeah. So I think this is still going to be a problem. You're right. There are a lot more people who are like they're getting off social media. I mean, 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.

Starting point is 02:47:05 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 information tech or even social media necessarily. It's more about the intentionality behind it. And what he was arguing about like when the people would bring up, well, that's just not feasible. Yeah. Right. His response to that was, well, so you're saying the default is you have to be on social

Starting point is 02:47:28 media and he rejected 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. And I've noticed this to a lesser extent, I won't to my horn too much, but I've noticed this to a lesser extent with subtle art.

Starting point is 02:47:46 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. Yeah. And then 10 years later, people turn around and they're like, well, that's really obvious. Why did you even bother writing a book about that? 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,

Starting point is 02:48:08 this guy like doesn't get on email. Yeah. What the fuck? I, though there's still people out there who are still addicted to social media. Of course, of course. But I'm just saying that this is standard. Yes, now we all know this. There's nobody who hasn't heard this stuff before.

Starting point is 02:48:22 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 thought leadership. Yeah. Well, yeah, 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.

Starting point is 02:48:38 For sure. Well, okay. His fourth rule 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 meetings. But being intentional and like really scheduling those out.

Starting point is 02:49:01 I know for me anyway, too, and this is part of his whole process is the whole energy matching. Yeah. Energy matching thing we talked about. I try to schedule as many meetings or appointments or whatever as late in the day as I can. Yeah. Because I know my most productive part of the day is in the first half of the day. Yep. And so, you know, you, he actually is like, get really, really intentional about that stuff.

Starting point is 02:49:24 So instead of just mindlessly checking your email all the time, 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 media, 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 it as like, do I really need to be doing this? Can I delegate it? Can I just stop doing it?

Starting point is 02:49:46 Yeah. One example is, I'm really bad. email. I'm bad at responding to emails and that's intentional. I just don't want people emailing me all the time. They can think 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, but like in my situation I can. So that's one thing I've been able to choose consciously to do. Yeah. So yeah. I will say like one system for me that I'm religious about is batching. Okay. Yeah. It's going to bring this up. Yeah, which is similar to this. but it is as much as I talked about, you know, doing, kind of thriving, doing two things simultaneously,

Starting point is 02:50:22 if it's, if I'm doing eight or nine things in the same day, I just notice that my brain starts the flag and there's like an exhaustion that sets in. So I'm, I'm a huge fan of batching very intensely. So 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 be at the purpose office and help with the app, I block that entire day to be at that office 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.

Starting point is 02:51:01 Like, 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 I'm a huge, huge fan of batching. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's, so Cal has like a few different modes of implementing all of these things. I don't think there's, he doesn't prescribe necessarily one way to do it. Batching is kind of like one of the methods you can do it, but he has these kind of four modes of implementation, I guess I would call them.

Starting point is 02:51:30 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 bimodal, which is I think is kind of more what you do, which is all. alternate between deep work and shallow work. Yep. Like, and batching is part of that too.

Starting point is 02:51:48 Don't mix 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. Right. Right. 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.

Starting point is 02:52:00 It's when I've got to do email and accounts and deal with sponsors and fucking plan a trip. Like, that's when I'm juggling. Right. Three or four small things at once. Okay. Another one is rhythmic though, so same deep work hours every day. I lean more towards this, actually.

Starting point is 02:52:17 Like I'll set my days up. Usually try to get at least two to three hours of deep work down in the mornings. Yeah. Is what I aim for. I think most people would benefit from that as well. I do the bimodal thing too, kind of, which is the batching and the not mixing the two types of work. The fourth one he had, though, too is what he called journalistic, which is, I guess journalists would maybe work this way.

Starting point is 02:52:40 I don't know, but you'd fit deep work in whenever time permits, basically, which is really hard. Sounds awful. It sounds terrible to 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 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 bimodal to rhythmic type of deep work schedule.

Starting point is 02:53:08 Now, the way he does it, though, and this is kind of. kind of, I follow some version of this. I actually use his planner, though, his notebook. I think I mentioned this in the procrastination episode, but I use his planner, which is kind of very much centered around time boxing, which we've talked about before. 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

Starting point is 02:53:37 time to get something done. You put it on your schedule. You're like, this is what I'm from 8 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 move things around. Fine.

Starting point is 02:53:53 Okay. But like I said before, timeboxing is the thing that gives me its 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. There's a specific kind of like outcome associated with that too. maybe some sort of like metric that I've attached to it or even just a checkbox, whatever it is. And it also like it makes me get really, really, really like realistic with my time too. So it's like, oh, okay, I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to write a 10 or 12 page thing in an hour.

Starting point is 02:54:25 That's probably not going to happen. Right. 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. So time boxing was like a. a big, it's big in the productivity world.

Starting point is 02:54:40 I know, I know you don't use it because you hate it. You hate the idea of like having a box around your time. It feels too rigid to me. Yeah. Yeah. Because what I often notice is I'll get, you know, let's say I set aside two hours for research. Ah.

Starting point is 02:54:53 But then I get two hours in and I'm like finding all this really interesting stuff. You know, 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, as you know, I'm big on checklists because I like the flexibility of checklist. 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.

Starting point is 02:55:27 Again, I think this is very personal. Productivity is personal. Everybody's got their way. Like you need to just experiment a lot to figure out what's what works best for you. But yeah. Yeah, it's Cal's framework in a very small nutshell. Okay. Some of the other things that kind of come up from this, though,

Starting point is 02:55:45 this is one that you brought to my attention. I didn't know about it, 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 before, but it makes total sense. And it actually fits pretty well with Cal's like DeepWorks stuff.

Starting point is 02:55:59 Yeah. Right. Do you want to talk a little bit about it? Yeah, I mean, it's been a while since I've read it, but it's, so basically, Basically, the maker's schedule is optimized around more deep work. It's creative work, problem solving. You're coding for long stretches at a time.

Starting point is 02:56:16 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 be distraction-free. The manager's schedule is much more rigid and structured. Like it's more- like hour blocks. Right.

Starting point is 02:56:36 It's all that admin work. 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 sorts of reviews or approvals or board meetings or whatever. It's like the same time every month. So it's like very structured, rigid, predictable, which is in many ways kind of the opposite of the maker scale. Yes.

Starting point is 02:57:01 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 usually like block off the mornings for creative work and then I leave the afternoons for meetings, admin, you know, whatever, catching up on Slack, email, all that stuff.

Starting point is 02:57:24 So it's hard. It's hard finding the balance if you need to like feel like you do both. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And another one of Graham's 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.

Starting point is 02:57:41 Yeah. You know, like if you're a maker, you pretty much need like a half a day to do anything meaningful. 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 half a day, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm definitely one of those people, too, or it's like, if I got a dentist appointment in the afternoon, I'm like, well, there goes my afternoon.

Starting point is 02:57:59 I'm not getting anything else done pretty much. But I think the takeaway I took from that was, is if you are somebody who's in like a more creative industry or you know programmers writers 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'll say too in my experience, people who work in media and entertainment, they have like agents, managers,

Starting point is 02:58:36 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 big deadline's coming up or if they sense that you're flailing.

Starting point is 02:59:00 and you need a push, then they'll start exerting pressure on you to get you more focused and locked in. But they also understand that it's, if you try to put too much structure around it, it kind of kills the golden goose. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think that's one of the big takeaways from all of this is that there is kind of a a Goldilocks zone here of structure versus freedom, structure versus chaos. Yes. So, yeah, I was thinking about this and I just don't know, like, what is your product

Starting point is 02:59:29 to be system, Mark, do you really have one? Or is it, like, I feel like it is kind of a goalie lock zone that works for you. Right. Because you do, like you said, you need that structure, but you hate certain types of structure. And then I know you use checklists, but you just run everything by checklist? Is that all you do? You also have, like, we have a team of people who we help schedule everything and we've got to coordinate things. I get that.

Starting point is 02:59:54 I will say, I think I feel myself begrudgingly being pulled more into a manager. schedule. Yeah. So I, out of necessity this past year, especially with the second business, I have found myself relying way more on my calendar and less on checklist. I think the checklist was a little bit of a luxury of spending most of my time in creative work and deep work. So things are getting more structured, especially doing more video and shoots and everything.

Starting point is 03:00:25 It's like, you can't just wake up and like text the team and be like, 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 fucking fly out here, right? So it's everything needs to be planned out weeks, months 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 are, when's the research going to get done?

Starting point is 03:00:48 When is the social content going to get done? So it is getting a lot more regimented. I mean, granted, there is a team to help with all this stuff and they handle most of that. but my life is becoming more, more regimented, more manager-like. A lot more meetings, a lot more check-ins, a lot more approvals. And 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, three days a month for like just really pure creative work

Starting point is 03:01:23 or deep work, like lots of writing. And I find like when I am able to do it. that, it feels so liberating, like very freeing and satisfying. I'm like, ah, I miss this. So I think the next, one of the challenges this year is to find ways to get me more of that time to kind of systematize up and create various systems and operations to like free up that deep work time. But generally speaking, I would say over the last 10 or 12 years,

Starting point is 03:01:58 it's very similar to what you described. Mornings were always deep creative work. That's when the writing got done. That's when I wrote the newsletters. That's when I wrote YouTube scripts. That's when I wrote books. And then afternoons was meetings, admin, follow-up, strategizing all that stuff.

Starting point is 03:02:17 These days, it feels like I'm either shooting or doing management. 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, especially like blocking apps? What's your general take on those,

Starting point is 03:02:40 and do you think you'd ever go back to those? So for people listening, what you're referring to, are like the apps that like block websites, social media, YouTube, you know, Netflix, whatever your distraction du jour is, like these apps will block it out for you. I use them a lot when I wrote books. Since I stopped writing books, I kind of got away from them.

Starting point is 03:03:01 I didn't feel, I don't really feel like I need them anymore. And I think it's because 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. But when you're writing a book, like 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 buzz in the phone, yeah. It can, it can derail like an entire morning.

Starting point is 03:03:37 It's, it can often take days to get through a section of a book to kind of figure out what it is, what it should be, what it means. So you really, really need a lot of that uninterrupted time. And it is a lot more stressful and difficult. Like it's once you're, once you're six months into a book, you're so emotionally invested. You've, I mean,

Starting point is 03:04:03 you've told the whole world that you're writing it. 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 not going very well.

Starting point is 03:04:19 That's the point where you're like, why am I doing this? Yeah. You're probably like 70, 80 pages in. It's total shit. 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.

Starting point is 03:04:32 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. So it is, in my experience, that's when you have to bring out the big guns. Okay. Yeah. Like tie yourself down. Like clockwork or orange style.

Starting point is 03:04:54 Yeah. Write the fucking book. Yeah. I mean, I've definitely used them too on and off. But I would agree. It's only like if I'm really like, okay, I've got these couple of weeks or whatever where 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.

Starting point is 03:05:08 I do know. Like my girlfriend, like I've mentioned has ADHD and she uses one of them for her phone. that it's I think it's like a little animal or something that takes over the screen and it's knitting. Oh yeah, it's called Focus Friend.

Starting point is 03:05:24 Focus friend. That's the one, yeah. It's really cool. Yeah, yeah. And if you interrupt it, then the knitting little animal gets sad

Starting point is 03:05:31 and you don't get your sweater finished or whatever it is. They've gotten very clever with them. Since I used them, like back when I used them, they were just these annoying block. Yeah, just a block, yeah.

Starting point is 03:05:40 But now they've got one that's like a tree that you water. Like so the longer you go. go without picking up your phone, the more the tree gets water, the more it grows. And then you see how many trees you can grow in each month and it like tracks for you. And, you know, it's, they've gotten very, very smart about it. Empathy hijacking kind of there. Yeah. Gameification. So it's, yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff. Okay. Well, yeah. 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

Starting point is 03:06:11 any of them is a magic bullet. There's no one system fits all for. for sure. I think these guided principles, though, I'm putting the guardrails around yourself, know yourself well enough to know 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 can give a lot of individual advice on that. Yeah, I honestly think the systems themselves are kind of arbitrary, like what matters is the principles. Right. So it's understanding that, you know, for deep creative work or problem solving work, you want as few distractions as possible. You want to create the container or without distraction.

Starting point is 03:06:45 For admin work, managerial work, you want to batch aggressively, 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. For people listening, Pomodoro's is supposedly the optimal amount of chunks to work in is 50 minutes and take 10 minute breaks.

Starting point is 03:07:10 That's bullshit. 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, and you should let your mind wander periodically is dead on.

Starting point is 03:07:24 Like that is actually optimal productivity. It does help you focus if you like give your mind to rest periodically. So I think all these principles are true and important. It's the implementation into your actual day-to-day work life. going to look completely different based on your personality, your profession, what you're trying to accomplish, what your goals are, and so on. So what would you say, Drew, is the 80, 20 of your focus? I mean, I think two big things, I think we maybe already gave this one away. But

Starting point is 03:08:04 kind of values alignment. Yeah. Like, what are you choosing to focus on? That's probably the biggest one. Yeah. 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. Right. And then just the environmental design stuff. Just getting conscious about that. A lot of that, like I said, each one of those individual ones are kind of on the margin. They'll help you on the margins.

Starting point is 03:08:33 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, these are your only options right now. Yeah. I think that's really just, that's the 80-20 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.

Starting point is 03:08:58 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 very different. Yeah. But we usually wind up in very similar spots. So just having that, having that intentional container that you create for your, yourself and really getting like self-aware around why you might be getting distracted or procrastinating or whatever it is.

Starting point is 03:09:23 Go back and listen to the procrastinate episode or the emotions episode too is a really good one. A really good compliment to this one as well. Yeah. But I think those two things are are by and large going to get you just about everything that you need. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:09:38 I agree. Values, environment, health, and creating guardrails. I mean, for me, it's just like really getting clear about what I can trust myself, what, what situations I can trust myself in and which situations I can't trust myself in. 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

Starting point is 03:10:17 address, do you think focus is a skill? Hmm. Yeah, I do. Okay. In what sense? I think in the sense that you can, well, you can get better at it by practicing at it. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:10:33 By noticing the triggers that distract you and doing something about those triggers, 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. 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

Starting point is 03:11:01 on for 10 minutes at that time. We'll start 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 do to an extent. Yeah. Right? Because like you 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 for most people. There's probably some freaks out

Starting point is 03:11:26 there that can get a six to eight hour day and have deep focus. But yeah. So I got a spicy take. Okay. I don't think it's a skill. You don't think it's a skill. Like when I think back to parts of my life where I would characterize myself 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.

Starting point is 03:11:58 Like the capabilities in there is 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 attention and awareness. Right. So attention is kind of like whatever 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.

Starting point is 03:12:41 And 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... You're always...

Starting point is 03:13:04 You're always... You're always focusing on something. You're just... But whether you're aware of it or not. Whether it... 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.

Starting point is 03:13:15 Okay. And this segues 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.

Starting point is 03:13:25 I like it. Yeah. All right. Biggest takeaway. So I mentioned this briefly earlier. the value of clarity on focus. I always kind of knew this. Like, yeah, okay, when I sit down,

Starting point is 03:13:40 I kind of 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 to, I tend to see a big project in front of me and get overwhelmed. A lot of people have this problem.

Starting point is 03:14:00 You have all this stuff you have to do. Where do I even start? Oh my God, I get overwhelmed and then just shut down. Yeah. What I found is that the like clarity around, well, it's really two parts of the clarity. It's like the time I'm going to spend, I have a clear definition of the time 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 kind of just mitigates all of that anxiety you have around like a big, hairy project.

Starting point is 03:14:30 like where do I even start? Like how do I eat this elephant, 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 not going to continue this metaphor. I'm sorry. No, okay.

Starting point is 03:14:44 You get what I'm saying, though, is that 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 kind of an aha moment throughout 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, I need to just, I really need to double down on that. Yeah. 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 I spend on anything. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:15:17 So that was a real big one for me. I would say the big thing for me is just kind of the, it's not even a reframe, but just the realization that a lack of focus is really just down. of a lack of other things, right? Like, when I think about my own productivity and desire to focus on things to be present in certain situations, I tend to always think of it as, like, I, there's something present that is distracting me or overwhelming me, 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.

Starting point is 03:15:57 Whereas, like, it was very interesting going into the research and really just trying to like, you know, what I tend to do for these episodes. I don't do as much research as you and the research team do. But like my goal with these episodes is.

SOLVED with Mark Manson - Focus, Solved

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