Focus, Solved

Focus is one of those things everyone swears they need more of and almost no one is actually addressing correctly. In this episode, we dig into what the science actually says about attention spans (hint: your brain isn't broken, it's just overwhelmed), why the standard advice to "try harder" is probably making things worse, and what's really driving your inability to sit down and get things done. We get into the neuroscience of explore vs. exploit modes, why flow states feel the way they do, and the four hidden triggers behind most focus problems, none of which have anything to do with your phone. Then we get into the practical stuff: environmental design, deep work frameworks, the maker vs. manager schedule, time boxing, batching, and why a dentist appointment in the middle of your morning can ruin your entire day. If you're the kind of person who opens 14 browser tabs, switches between them for 40 minutes, and calls that "working", well, this one's for you. Get the free guide for this episode: https://solvedpodcast.com/focus/ CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:06 The Attention Crisis (Is It Even Real?) 00:21:55 The Exploit–Explore Dilemma 00:29:57 Your Brain on Explore and Exploit Mode 00:43:48 Technology evolved with Focus 00:50:33 The Psychology of Distraction 00:54:06 Trigger 1: Lack of Importance 00:56:24 Trigger 2: Lack of Clarity 01:00:01 Trigger 3: Lack of Calmness 01:02:49 Trigger 4: Lack of Health 01:07:21 What about Willpower? 01:18:50 Flow States and Hyperfocus 01:25:13 Characteristics of flow state 01:37:36 Mental Health and the Clinical Realities of Focus 01:39:30 ADHD 01:41:56 Hyperfocus vs Flow 01:56:27 Environmental Design for Focus 02:01:15 Foundations 02:06:38 Setting Up Your Workspace 02:14:15 Working with others 02:22:49 Temperature, lighting. air quality 02:27:30 Nature exposure 02:29:22 Ritual as a “trigger system” 02:34:39 Productivity Systems 02:53:17 Maker Schedules vs. Manager Schedules 03:00:10 Using Apps for Focus 03:05:29 The 80/20 of Focus 03:07:51 Is Focus a Skill? 03:11:07 Takeaways ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://go.markmanson.net/cdi1xzha ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://go.markmanson.net/217i5ys5 FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  Welcome to Solved, everybody. My name is Mark Manson, and today I have a question for you. Is your focus so shattered that you read the same paragraph four times, understand none of it, and then reward yourself by checking your phone? And now your three Instagram reels deep into a video of a golden retriever learning to skateboard, and you can't even remember what you were trying to 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 worst at it are usually the ones trying the hardest. They're the ones white knuckling their way through a work session, mentally screaming, "Don't check your phone! Don't check your phone!" Which, as it turns out, is one of the most reliable ways to make sure you check your phone.

• 0:45Mark Manson?

  The point is, focus is not a test of willpower. It's a system of rules, stages, and failure modes that nobody ever bothered to explain to you. And once you stop treating it like a character flaw and start 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 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

• 1:28Mark Manson?

  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. 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 The only question that matters.

• 2:11Mark Manson?

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

• 2:56Mark Manson?

  we aim to solve one question in your life, once and for all.

• 3:07Mark Manson?

  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 Jest 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. I think it's one of those things that he was very prophetic when he wrote it.

• 3:52Mark Manson?

  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...

• 4:07Mark Manson?

  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. Very prophetic then, yes. In many ways. I mean, I think what Wallace captures is that technology was ascending to a place

• 4:50Mark Manson?

  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 Jest, 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 and recovery centers. And it's funny because when you're reading the book, it keeps cutting away to 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?

• 5:33Mark Manson?

  And I think what's interesting is that, 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 an interesting point that I'm gonna leave out there. 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.

• 6:15Mark Manson?

  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. 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

• 6:58Mark Manson?

  in 2008, there was a book called The Shallows. I don't know if you ever read it? Yeah. By a guy named Nicholas Carr. He was a journalist at the New York Times. 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 and 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

• 7:42Mark Manson?

  indicators that are going on in society, but with the benefit of hindsight, we kind of know now that none of the stuff that he was worried about ended up coming true. So this question, is our, 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, 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

• 8:26Mark Manson?

  Really specified where it came from.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Right. Never peer reviewed, never validated in any way.

• 8:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And it's what's even funnier too, is that it turns out that goldfish do have long-term memories. Which.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  They're used in memory studies even.

• 8:40Mark Manson?

  I didn't.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Like they're used in learning and memory studies.

• 8:42Mark Manson?

  I didn't know that until we researched this episode.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:52Mark Manson?

  Isn't life.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  And attention spans.

• 8:53Mark Manson?

  Just ironic.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:55Mark Manson?

  This is just such a beautiful irony.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  It's just a sticky idea. That's all it is. Yeah.

• 9:00Mark Manson?

  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 to the rest of this episode. 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.

• 9:41Mark Manson?

  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 happening. 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 be able, 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.

• 10:26Mark Manson?

  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.

• 10:36Mark Manson?

  Going back 800 years ago and how they wrote extensively about a concept called asidia, 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

• 11:21Mark Manson?

  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 ourselves, what is different now? Like, what are the challenges and issues that we're confronted with that our parents were or our grandparents were? 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.

• 12:06Mark Manson?

  I remember 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 paid less attention to the conversation they were having.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  I've never seen that too, yeah.

• 12:19Mark Manson?

  Even if they didn't pick up-

• 12:20Speaker 01

  I believe it.

• 12:21Mark Manson?

  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.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's been other studies that basically said if you've got it in view while you're working or anything like that, you're way more distractible, yeah.

• 12:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah. So I just think that the constant presence of the opportunity for distraction- Makes the distraction more likely.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:40Mark Manson?

  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-newsfeed, 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.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  There's like a little container for everything.

• 13:04Mark Manson?

  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, there's no clear demarcation of, for your brain of like, "Okay, I'm done with TikTok now. I can go do something else."

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Do you remember, it was probably, I don't know, five or six years ago, I think it was Instagram toyed with that a little bit. They're like, you would scroll and you would hit a point. They're like, "Okay, you're all caught up." And then, you know, you're like, "Oh, okay."

• 13:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah, whatever happened to that?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  I think it lasted like a few months and they were like, "We're losing money."

• 13:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah, their shareholders clearly did not like that.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:40Mark Manson?

  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 and, you know, certain practices to avoid when you're trying to focus more and be more productive. A switching cost is, is the amount of mental effort that it takes to move from one, paying attention to one task to another task. And the higher the switching cost, the more, the more friction there is to leave that first task. And so, the higher the switching cost, 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,

• 14:24Mark Manson?

  you're much more likely to switch back and forth. I don't know about you, man, but like, it's funny. Like, I remember when I was a kid, you'd kind of just turn on the TV and maybe you'd flip through like 10 or 12 channels. You'd just find the best thing that was on.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 14:36Mark Manson?

  And you'd just leave it there. Whereas like now, when I get on Netflix, or Hulu, or Apple, or whatever, I'll start a show and then 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 like, I'll actually end up spending an hour and not watch anything.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Just trying to find something, yeah.

• 15:00Mark Manson?

  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. This is why things like gambling become addictive is because you're rewarded, but you're rewarded in unpredictable timeframes and 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 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.

• 15:44Mark Manson?

  It's just, we live in such a different attention environment than any other humans in history that it makes sense that we are 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. And anybody who's gone through a digital detox or 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 there's this like relief that happens

• 16:30Mark Manson?

  when you're not constantly being inundated anymore.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  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 were 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. 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.

• 17:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  And so there was all these companies, he said, all you companies are focusing on producing this information. The real resource now, though, is going to be the attention needed to process all of that. And we're still living through that over 50 years later, even when he called that back in the 70s.

• 17:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah. In Silicon Valley, this is known as the attention economy.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've written about this before.

• 17:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and it is ultimately like whatever the new scarcity is, that's the driver of value. And so if you can, if you can hold and maintain people's attention the longest, then you can monetize it the most. That's, that's the, it's the new currency of today's.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Aren't people just weird? We've figured out a way to monetize attention? That's just wild. But here we are.

• 17:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah, here we are. Here we are. So the best way I've conceptualized this, and this is, this is maybe, again, I think this kind of lays the framework for where this episode is going to go. But I wrote, I wrote an article way back in 2018 called "The Attention Diet." And I think the metaphor that I found that lands for a lot of people is to think of the information around you like food, right? So it's, if you go back 100 years ago, 200 years ago, food was scarce, and you had to actually work for your own food. And because of that, you, you didn't see as much obesity, you didn't see as much heart disease, you didn't see as much, you know, diabetes and all these other problems that come from the modern food system.

• 18:32Mark Manson?

  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. And so what do you get? You get a rise in obesity, you get a rise in diabetes, you get all these health problems that start emerging because people start eating a bunch of crap and they don't know how to stop. So. As a result, people had to learn how to go on a diet. They had to learn how to to control their own urges, stop themselves from indulging on certain things. They had to learn a little bit about nutrition, about what was good for them, what was bad for them.

• 19:14Mark Manson?

  And then you got the health movement that kind of spawned in response to the industrialized food system. I think the exact same thing is happening with information. For most of human history, information was scarce. You had to work really hard to get it. And so people, cognitively speaking, were quite lean and healthy. They were just deprived. They didn't have much optionality and they didn't have much abundance. Now, information is completely abundant. And because it's abundant, it is now competing all the time for your attention. And because it's competing all the time for your attention, it becomes, it's kind of like the junk food of information, right? It's like super salty and sweet and it's very addictive and you start to compulsively consume it.

• 19:56Mark Manson?

  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, however far you want to extend this metaphor. And I do think that this is very much what David Foster Wallace was getting at in Infinite Jest, is he said that ultimately you have to take kind of the monk-like self-control

• 20:39Mark Manson?

  of a recovery addict and you have to apply that to watching TV. Or in these days, it would be using your stupid phone.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Okay, well, so I'm glad you brought up the food analogy already. Because I think a lot of this episode is gonna 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?

• 21:13Mark Manson?

  All right, I'm excited.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  And yeah, bees and how they forage for nectar.

• 21:17Mark Manson?

  Let me guess, are the human attention span is now less than a bee's?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not at all, not at all. So, so, okay, this actually comes from what's called optimal foraging theory. Okay, this is in 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.

• 21:40Mark Manson?

  Fuck yeah.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  You start just going to town.

• 21:42Mark Manson?

  Let's go.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  You get nectar drunk, right? You're just, you're hammering nectar, first sip's great, second sip's great, you're going for a while, you're hopping around this little patch that's all close together, you're hitting all these, you're draining them all, right? After a little while, though, you start to notice that, oh, okay, it's a little bit harder for me to get nectar out of these flowers here. 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, this is what's called the explore-exploit dilemma. Okay, in animal behavior and biology, okay? The dilemma is, when do you leave, if you have a patch of food somewhere, like, what's the optimal time to leave that patch and look for another one? Okay? All animals face this dilemma, all animals do, humans included, you know?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  When we were nomadic tribes, we would go and we would find a patch of berries or, 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?

• 22:40Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Versus leaving?

• 22:41Mark Manson?

  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 and...

• 22:49Speaker 01

  That's part of it, the other part of it though too is like you already said, there's an energy cost, there's a cost to switch, right?

• 22:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  There's a cost associated with, um, 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 too, 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?

• 23:12Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  So those are kind of the two, the risk benefit that you're weighing here, right? Now... Your brain works much the same way when it's processing information. Like you were saying, like, information is food in the environment for us, for our brains. Right? In much the same way, we come upon a patch of information, whether that's looking at your phone, reading a book, having a conversation, scrolling through social media, working on a task that you need to work on, all of those are patches of information.

• 23:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  And your, your brain is going in there and it's either exploiting them and eating it all up, just like the bee floating around with these flowers, or it's deciding, eh, okay, not a whole lot here, I'm gonna go on to something else. Okay? So, again, in, in the information age that we live in now, what's changed is there's all of this information.

• 24:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Out there, and we have to decide what to exploit and what to explore.

• 24:05Mark Manson?

  So, it sounds like this is my Netflix dilemma, right?

• 24:08Speaker 01

  A hundred percent it is, yes.

• 24:09Mark Manson?

  When there's 400 shows, I just wanna keep exploring, I don't wanna like, sit and exploit any single show.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 24:16Mark Manson?

  Whereas back when I was a kid.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 24:18Mark Manson?

  In Texas, and we had three channels on, I just exploited the shit out of each channel.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Right, because that's what you had, right? That's what, that's what was there. That was your information environment in that case, right? Now, there was this other researcher, uh, back in the seventies, his name was Eric Charnov, and he came up with this idea, it's called marginal value theorem.

• 24:39Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter the name, you know, all these names are so sexy.

• 24:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm just gonna start adding theorem to the end of everything I say.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it makes it sound smart, right? It's very simple, though, basically, um, what he found was that animals in a food patch of any kind, the optimal time to leave is when you're, uh, the marginal reward, which is like, the next bite you take, or the next berry you find, whatever it is, uh, is, it drops below the average reward that you're getting. So, basically, like, your brain is comparing, even in 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.

• 25:16Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  And it compares whatever you're focused on at the moment to the rest of the environment.

• 25:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  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, you're gonna, you're gonna 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 Peroli, he wrote this book called The Information Foraging Theory, which basically finds the exact same thing. We follow that same pattern that animals do in a 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 response to what's going on.

• 26:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  To these environmental changes that you've already laid out for us, right? There's all these distorted signals in our environment. They're artificially inflated exploration signals.

• 26:12Mark Manson?

  Ah.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Specifically of what's going on, right?

• 26:14Mark Manson?

  Gotcha.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  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, this can explain a lot of the problems that we face and show us a lot of the solutions as well.

• 26:42Mark Manson?

  Right. So then it makes sense, if you narrow the opportunities to explore, right? If you, like, cut yourself off from certain information sources, then it is, it is going to just naturally strike your brain as more useful to exploit.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:00Mark Manson?

  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 au revoir, it give yourself more options than 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.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  A hundred percent is, yes.

• 27:25Mark Manson?

  That it's, it's never gonna seem worth it. And I, dude, I run into this all the time, like.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 27:31Mark Manson?

  Uh, so X, formerly known as Twitter, they just launched a, like, a new out, they were very public about it. They, they updated their algorithm, the. To preference long form articles. And so there's all these long form articles that are popping up on my, on my X feed. And so I'm scrolling and I, I keep seeing all these articles and I'll click on one and I'll read like two paragraphs. And I'm like, I'm going to go back to scrolling. And like I've, 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. So like, why would I waste my time on this one?

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. So a lot of what we're going to be talking about is setting up those limits and, and putting containers on things.

• 28:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  So as to prevent all of that, it's the same type of thing though, too. If you have your phone in your environment, that's, that's a source of information, whatever it is. The, it's interesting. So I was just doing some like light renovations to my house and I didn't have a TV for several months. And I was like, I was watching, 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, of like noise in my environment.

• 28:42Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  That I can go to for some variable rewards for just alternate sources of information in my environment. And sure enough, like I got distracted a whole bunch. So, yeah.

• 28:52Mark Manson?

  And your kitchen's still not finished.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  And my kitchen, yeah, exactly.

• 28:55Mark Manson?

  Got it.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  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 locus coeruleus, which is a, it's, it's a midbrain, kind of small structured midbrain, but it does direct our attention a lot. Or it has, has a lot to do with directing our attention. They found that norepinephrine in this region kind of regulated that switch between explore and exploit.

• 29:34Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  At least to some degree, like basically when there's like burst of norepinephrine in this part of your brain, you're more likely to be like kind of locked in on something and, and focused on it.

• 29:44Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  And then when as the, you know, you're, you're into something, you're looking at it. And then you know, your attention starts to kind of fade a little bit. That norepinephrine, there was no norepinephrine burst are kind of coming down. And you're coming more towards what they call a tonic phase, which is kind of a baseline phase.

• 29:59Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  And your mind starts to wander at that point. There's also, of course, dopamine plays a big role in this too. A lot of people, like, there's a misconception out there, 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.

• 30:23Mark Manson?

  Well, so, okay. Because there was a fad for quite a while. I think it started in the pandemic, and it lasted up to maybe a year or two ago, but you saw this on YouTube quite a bit.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:34Mark Manson?

  Of dopamine detoxes.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:36Mark Manson?

  Which was really just removing informational sources from your own life, so that you were more often in exploit mode.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:45Mark Manson?

  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 exploit mode. Like, is it a misnomer, or is it?

• 31:09Speaker 01

  I don't know if I would say it's necessarily a misnomer, because what's going on there, 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.

• 31:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  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, hmm, I'm gonna go search another little dopamine patch over here.

• 31:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  What you're doing is you're dividing up that dopamine between different sources, I think, is what's going on. So I guess it's a little bit of a misnomer. Because, yes, it's not a dopamine detox necessarily. It's that you're trying to generate more endogenous forms of dopamine.

• 31:52Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  And kind of intrinsic forms of it, rather than all these external forms. I guess that's a useful way to think about it.

• 31:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I mean, 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.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:11Mark Manson?

  Like, you know, so 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 100 different things, it's been directed towards like two things.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  That's more accurate, I would say. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, you have that, you have that, the dopaminergic factors there. The, there's also kind of like two brain networks that all of these different chemicals, there's other neurochemicals too, that 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, your narrowing of your sensory gates. So like any sensory information's 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, you're not

• 33:09Speaker 01

  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, your mind's wandering, it's literally distracted. It's, it's, it's trying to find something to latch on to basically in the environment, right? So those, the, your, your brain and the brain chemicals kind of map onto those two different networks like that. So obviously when we want to focus, we want to be more in that task positive network and outside of the default mode network. When we get into flow, we'll talk a little bit more about that self referential thing and the default mode network. But for now, just suffice it to say, there's kind of these two main networks that are at play here and competing with each other.

• 33:50Mark Manson?

  Okay. For metabolic resources.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Metabolic resources, yeah, yeah, just energy in general. Yeah, yeah.

• 33:57Mark Manson?

  I'm, I don't want to spoil it, but I'm going to guess, you know, because every people, when you experience flow, you kind of lose track of yourself. I'm guessing that that, that's not a coincidence. This probably explains that.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Right, that's a good little teaser for a little bit, yeah, for sure.

• 34:10Mark Manson?

  Stay tuned.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  And then, yeah. Last thing I'll mention though, too, we're going to revisit a, a brain region we, we actually talked about in the resilience episode, which is anterior cingulate cortex. If you remember that, that was kind of the, I, I call that the resilience muscle, if you would, right? And really what's going on in the anterior cingulate cortex, one of the functions that we believe anyway, is that it's a cost benefit analysis, right? 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? Basically, that's. It's contributing to that that calculation anyway. Yeah. Same thing with focus here, right? Is is this information patch in terms of focus? We're in focus terms. Is it worth it to stick here or not?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Okay. And this is influenced by that. The locus coeruleus, like I said, it comes in and it 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. We'll kind of get into that as well. But that's kind of the main overly simplified brain. The neurobiology of focus. Okay. For our purposes that we're going to use going forward. Okay. Now for the exploration mode, though, too. This is actually kind of important, too.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  There's there's different kinds of exploration. Not all exploration is made equal. Okay. They have what they what's called directed versus random exploration. And you can probably already guess which one we kind of want to go towards usually anyway. Right? Directed is really just it's intentional. You're like, okay, something's not working here. I need to go find some other piece of information. So I need to go explore. That's very intentional. You're like, I have a goal in mind. I know where I'm going with it. It's going to help me probably be rewarding in some kind of way. Right? The random is more just like mind wandering. You're like, this sucks. I have no idea what's next. I'm just gonna let my mind wander. I'm going to scroll Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok, whatever. And then there's there's really just an increase in volatility noise in your in your brain going on at this point. Right?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  We obviously use both. And when when uncertainty is is relatively low, we usually bias towards more of 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 is high, like I said, like, I don't know if this is you're you're on Netflix. And you're like, I don't know if this is going to be any good next. Right? That's kind of the difference. Now, the main thing to take away from that, from the random versus directed types of exploration, you can be more intentional about this. Right? You can, you can really distinguish these in your brain. We talked a little bit about this in the procrastination episode, but like when you are, when you do switch a task, ask yourself,

• 37:11Speaker 01

  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 escaping from the uncertainty and all the anxiety that that brings 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. He struggled with focus though too. He struggled with distraction a lot. So he had a routine and we'll get into all the routines and everything like that, but he would have times where he would sit down and he had these deep focus hours and he'd sit at his desk

• 37:54Speaker 01

  and he'd think through these things and look through data and all of that. And when he got stuck, he would intentionally go on these walks that he had. I think he lived by the ocean 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, or whatever it was. And he had this system of like stones that would count how many laps he did and all of this where he didn't have to think about it, but he'd just let his mind wander during this. It was very directed exploration that he did. And then he would come back and a lot of times, you know, it's like those shower thoughts you have. 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

• 38:35Speaker 01

  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 dopamine that that will distract us from it.

• 38:50Mark Manson?

  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? There, I think there are certain, especially if you're doing creative tasks.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:10Mark Manson?

  It's funny because Beethoven had a similar routine, which is that he would go on daily walks in the afternoon when, and, and he believed strongly that that was where a lot of his creative inspiration came from. So I, I think it's, you want to be able to access all of these phases. You just, you just don't want to feel hijacked, right? Like you want to feel like.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:31Mark Manson?

  You, whatever phase you're in, it's, that's where you want to be. It's really interesting, we're going to talk about ADHD later, 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 and like can't stay focused on, on one thing for a very long time, but then they also get obsessed about stuff, right? An ADHD person will like get fixated on a certain task or a certain hobby or a certain idea and they'll just like go so hard on it that they forget to eat and sleep and they don't do anything else. And what's interesting is that both of those things are the same thing.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:13Mark Manson?

  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, 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.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  There's some impulsivity to it, yeah.

• 40:31Mark Manson?

  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.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Illustrates the point very well.

• 40:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I do think it's, all of these modes are normal and healthy. We evolved them all for a reason. The issue is, the issue is not being, being able to access them intentionally when we want to.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Right, no, exactly. And, and even things like boredom and fatigue, those are normal too. They've been, they've kind of been villainized a little bit. Those are normal too, but they're just, they're signals.

• 41:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  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 on to. If you're bored or fatigued by something, that, 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, 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.

• 41:33Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  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 the environment or something going on with this task that I need to address.

• 41:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Okay? 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 explore. Don't pay attention to that over there. Pay attention to this over here. No, pay attention to this, pay attention to this. That's actually what's going on here, is that we're just getting pushed. Our brains have these modes for exploiting patches of information, what I keep calling patches of information, or exploring new ones.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  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, is tilting that back towards, okay, when you want to get into exploit mode, how do we do that?

• 42:47Mark Manson?

  A little bit of a curve ball I'm going to throw here, is that I do think some of this is strangely culturally defined. Like, it was, it was interesting being reminded that, like, people used to freak out about teenagers reading novels.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:03Mark Manson?

  Like, that was a moral panic.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  The Telegraph, too, I found, some of 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.

• 43:12Mark Manson?

  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.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:18Mark Manson?

  So it is interesting that The human mind is incredibly adaptable and the the nature of of explore versus exploit, what ratio it's happening, what what is hijacking and what is not like many of these things are just kind of culturally predetermined based on what the previous generation was used to, right? So it's the today, we would look at like today, if you met a teenager who couldn't stop reading novels, you'd probably find that very respectable. You're like, wow, look at look at them. Timmy is just crushing book after book. That's amazing. Timmy's gonna go far. Whereas in the 1800s, they were freaking out about it. And it just

• 44:00Mark Manson?

  makes you wonder of like, where are these definitions of what how much attention we should have for each thing come from? And that's not to defend like all the all 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 this 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. And and when it changes, it scares us. You know, we kind of freak

• 44:45Mark Manson?

  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 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.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Checks out. Absolutely checks out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and not only are like the way your attention is divided up, not only is that culturally determined, I mean, Mental health in general, ADHD wasn't really, there wasn't even a word for it really until what?

• 45:17Mark Manson?

  The 80s.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  80s, yeah.

• 45:19Mark Manson?

  Well, there wasn't a diagnosis for it until the 80s.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, yeah. And they called it something different before that.

• 45:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah, they had different names for it in the past.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:37Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Oh, all of a sudden we found out these people who don't fit well into that.

• 45:41Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  And so we culturally defined that as something different. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, obviously, I'm not, 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.

• 45:51Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Is very, very culturally dependent. Same thing with how we sit down and do our work.

• 45:56Mark Manson?

  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 illness that was diagnosable through the DSM.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, through like the 70s or 80s, right?

• 46:13Mark Manson?

  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 calmed down. Super fucked up, but like, that was considered normal mental health treatment in the 19th century. There is a cultural element here of like, what is quote-unquote "normal," what is expected, 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.

• 46:54Mark Manson?

  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 compulsive, a lot of our executive functioning is hijacked through various means, through marketing, and just like insanely attractive synthetic food or content. 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.

• 47:37Mark Manson?

  Or you develop systems and mechanisms for yourself to make sure that you adhere to what you want.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and we're gonna get a lot of those.

• 47:47Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 47:52Mark Manson?

  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. And it actually comes from my main man, Dan Gilbert. He's one of my favorite psychological researcher. I don't know if you have a favorite psychological researcher.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  He's good, he's good. He's at Harvard, and he's real meticulous, and he's very analytical. Yeah, he's good.

• 48:40Mark Manson?

  Dan Gilbert's the man. He's great at finding these little counterintuitive things. And he just sets up 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. In fact, they deduced that people spend 47% of their time not thinking about the thing that they're doing while they do it.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  That sounds low to me. This was like late 2000s, right? 2010?

• 49:25Mark Manson?

  This was 2010.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  2010, okay. So it's probably even worse.

• 49:28Mark Manson?

  It's probably even higher now. But still, that's almost half the time.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's in itself is.

• 49:34Mark Manson?

  And by the way, like, they really, they had absolutely no prejudice about what they were measuring against. So they calculated how distracted people were for each activity that they were doing. And they even found that people were distracted 10% of the time during sex. So it's, the bar is low. The bar is very, very low. But the point of all this, it's actually a very.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  I'm just going through my head. So people, they would, they had this app.

• 50:10Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  And when people were having sex, the people would check the app and respond to it.

• 50:13Mark Manson?

  I think they probably got a notification. And then what you're supposed to do is when you.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  What were you immediately doing?

• 50:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and then you have to say exactly what were you doing and were you engaged and focused on it?

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Right, okay.

• 50:23Mark Manson?

  And apparently 10% of people having sex were not paying attention to the sex that they were having.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:30Mark Manson?

  That might say more about their relationships than their distractibility, but that's another podcast.

• 50:38Mark Manson?

  This ended up being a pretty, it's become a pretty famous study. You see it get posted quite a bit. Great title. Dan Gilbert has great titles for his.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  He's a good marketer for an academic.

• 50:49Mark Manson?

  He is, yeah. 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. 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 into a lack of four different things. The first one is a lack of importance.

• 51:33Mark Manson?

  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 salience 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? 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, think is kind of pointless, or B, if there's a lack of clarity

• 52:15Mark Manson?

  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. 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 explorer mode because part of exploration is trying to find something that is meaningful, trying to find something that is salience, something that's worth paying attention to. So if you don't have, if you don't have a clear prioritization of this thing matters, then you're going to really, really struggle to focus on it.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  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 explore exploit kind of paradigm I was talking about. That's a survival mechanism, right? Like if you're not looking for something in your environment, you're dead at some point, right?

• 53:12Mark Manson?

  Right, yeah. I mean, if nothing, if nothing important is going on, then why should you waste? You know, if you, 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. 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 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.

• 53:54Mark Manson?

  Trigger two is it not being clear whether something's important or not. 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. Again, from an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense that if you feel stymied or blocked in some way,

• 54:39Mark Manson?

  you transition out 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. 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.

• 55:22Mark Manson?

  Like, it is when you need to go into explore mode to kind of reset your brain, reevaluate 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 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.

• 56:03Mark Manson?

  And it is pretty crazy how often, if you just stop working on it, and go sleep, and take a couple of days 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."

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:23Mark Manson?

  Done.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:24Mark Manson?

  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.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  You get too locked in on maybe some detail or something like that, you need to detach from that, yeah. Psychologists actually call, psychologists who study creativity anyway, they call this incubation.

• 56:42Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  To, you know, go off and you just let it simmer, sit.

• 56:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:56Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Right. And it's when there's a certain direction to it, at least, yeah.

• 56:59Mark Manson?

  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?

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:10Mark Manson?

  It's really only when mind wandering becomes chronic, in unintentional or uncontrolled.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Or as a coping mechanism, too, yeah.

• 57:19Mark Manson?

  Exactly, which we'll get to that.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  We'll get to that, yeah.

• 57:22Mark Manson?

  Okay, so that's trigger number two. Trigger number three, lack of calmness. This is basically, the more emotionally aroused you are, the worse you're going to be able to focus on something. Generally speaking, when you are extremely agitated, or upset, or worried, or anxious, you are...

• 57:44Mark Manson?

  It's not so much that you're not gonna be able to focus, it's you're not gonna have that clarity of what to focus on. So for example, like if a person is highly anxious, what happens when you're anxious is that you tend to over perceive threats or over perceive importance. Basically, tons of things that aren't actually important start to appear to you to be important. And so you try to worry about all of them simultaneously and worrying about everything simultaneously is the 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

• 58:29Mark Manson?

  tend to find nothing important, but the result is the same, is an inability to focus, feeling very scatterbrained, mind wandering all the time, not being able to really complete a task or follow anything through to completion.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that actually bears out too in the neuroscience as well. And I don't think I mentioned this, but with the whole norepinephrine story in the locus cerullius, you know, when it's those pulses of the norepinephrine 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, inverted U curve to that. Kind of like you're saying, there needs to be a certain level of arousal.

• 59:09Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Not too low, not too high. It's gotta be kind of that sweet spot. And like depression and anxiety are kind of the two extremes of those.

• 59:16Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  You might see it as that way too. That's one way to look at it.

• 59:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah. It's also probably worth briefly mentioning too, any sort of trauma or grief is gonna play into this, right? Like if you are kind of chronically stuck on a negative emotion, trying, unable to process some negative experience, it's gonna ultimately affect your ability to focus.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  It's like a heightened vigilance, right? Your brain is, that's again, it's a survival mechanism, like looking for solutions in the environment.

• 59:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Out of survival, basically.

• 59:51Mark Manson?

  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. It comes from a healthy emotional regulation. And then finally, trigger number four, I just put lack of health. And this is part of the episode. We do this almost every episode. This is the part of the episode where I look into the camera and I bore the viewers by saying, "You should sleep eight hours a night. You should eat a well-balanced diet." Eat your veggies. Eat your veggies, get some exercise, because it affects everything. It affects absolutely everything and focus is no different.

• 1:00:36Mark Manson?

  If you are, we talked a little bit about attention as metabolically expensive. If you're underslept, underfed, malnourished, 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. 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

• 1:01:21Mark Manson?

  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 not controllable in terms of effort, right? Like, I think when people think about, like, "Oh, I need to focus more." It's kinda like the willpower thing, right? Or like, it's when people wanna 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 effective way to go about change. It's the same with focus. It's not about, like, sure, effort's nice,

• 1:02:05Mark Manson?

  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, 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,

• 1:02:50Mark Manson?

  because then that's gonna 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 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 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...

• 1:03:35Mark Manson?

  So much of this battle is won outside of your own mind. Like, if you're finding yourself consistently sitting at your desk, struggling to focus, always distracted, mind is wandering, chances are, the failure happened long before that moment.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  You don't need to try harder right there.

• 1:03:53Mark Manson?

  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?

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:58Mark Manson?

  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, 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. Like, you're, you're gonna be locked in. If it was that simple, then, I don't know, man, we, we wouldn't have a podcast.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. Okay, so, so you, you brought up willpower a little bit there and like ego depletion. You know, there's some debate around all of that, right? If willpower is a thing, let's just say, okay, let's assume it is for a minute, okay?

• 1:04:53Mark Manson?

  Even if ego depletion is not a thing, I still think willpower is, is, is the least effective way to go about

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  100%.

• 1:05:01Mark Manson?

  Being disciplined and making a change, right?

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:12Mark Manson?

  Build the systems.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  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, 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, ideally, that is not, now, sometimes you gotta just grit through it, I get that. And, and willpower does come in, in that case, but... I think the real takeaway is, yeah, use your willpower in the highest leverage points and only use it once if you can.

• 1:05:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  And not in that moment when you're failing to focus or failing to pay attention to something.

• 1:05:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and I gotta give a shout out to a good friend of mine, Nir Eyal. 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.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:13Mark Manson?

  And he argues, he's like, you can attack this from both angles, right? There's kind of the internal, uh, personal development side of it, which is just try to manage your emotions better, put yourself in fewer situations where you're agitated or anxious or worried, because the less you're agitated, anxious or worried, the less you're gonna 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 your, all of your screens at 9:00 PM. Make sure you get a good night's sleep. You know, set up the systems. Basically, don't, don't, don't even put yourself in the situation where you have to make these decisions.

• 1:06:58Mark Manson?

  But again, to even do that in the first place, like, you have to know what you want out of your life. You have to know what matters to you. Like, what, what is worth giving up your phone for? Right? Like, if you can't easily answer that, then you're probably gonna have a really hard time.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, your phone looks a lot better than anything you're doing.

• 1:07:18Mark Manson?

  Everything, right? So it's, if you're, if the default state is a wandering mind, which it is, then, and your phone is kind of the ultimate wandering mind tool. So it makes sense that you're, you're gonna default back to that. The more you're lacking each of these four things.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:44Mark Manson?

  I'm aware.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe there's no such thing as it, but I think it's over, definitely overstated. Um, for one, I mean, think about it. Yeah. If you go to a job you don't like and you're just around people you don't want to be around all day. And it sucks. And yeah, you're depleted by the end of it, but then you go home and you focus on a video game for two or three hours at a time. Your ego has not been depleted. It's just you've, you've, you've found something that your brain can latch on to for a little while. Which in the work situation, you haven't.

• 1:08:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  So, yeah, your brain is a big comparison machine. We say this all the time too. Your brain is a comparison machine. And this, 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, right? 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. Um, 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?

• 1:08:44Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:08:58Mark Manson?

  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 in terms of passion, which I think is really funny because passion is like, I think a lot of the conversations around passion and productivity are like kind of misplaced.

• 1:09:19Mark Manson?

  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. 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.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:09:44Mark Manson?

  And then there are aspects of this job that like, I sit down and I could do it for like 10 hours and I have like pulled myself away from it. And so much of that really just comes down to, am I enjoying myself? Does this feel valuable? Does it feel important? Is there an urgency behind it?

• 1:10:00Mark Manson?

  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 bust cycles, where I think it's, what the chronic procrastinators need, or what they crave, is that heightened sense of importance that comes with a deadline, right? It's like, oh my God, the deadline's in two days, I haven't even started yet. There's such this like panic and frenzy that they're able to get locked in and focused 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 for the prior two weeks, they could probably do just as good of work the entire two weeks, but instead they were fucking

• 1:10:45Mark Manson?

  around because they just, for whatever reason, they didn't feel...

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  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 are gonna happen. Whereas, I think what you're saying is find something where it's like, oh, this is just inherently rewarding for me.

• 1:11:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah, but it's hard.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  It's still hard, yeah, it's still hard, yeah.

• 1:11:09Mark Manson?

  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.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:11:22Mark Manson?

  Out of these four, what do you think you struggle with the most?

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Um, let's see, I'll run through them again, let's see. I wasn't paying attention, Mark. No.

• 1:11:32Mark Manson?

  Lack of importance, lack of clarity, lack of calmness, and lack of health.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  I think clarity is usually my, my big one, anyway. Sometimes the important thing, but I think clarity definitely is. This is why, and we'll get into this a little bit later, too, this is why I 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? And I'm gonna, we're gonna talk about flow here in a little bit and I'll talk about this a little bit more too. But having a clear sense of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it to. Attaching it to maybe a larger goal that I have.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  But also like, okay, today I'm getting this done, this part of this thing done and being real super clear about it.

• 1:12:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:12:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Which I think most people would struggle with that.

• 1:12:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  I, okay, I'll also say too, the health thing does come into play, definitely. We've talked about my struggles with sleep before. I'm sleeping better lately, which is great.

• 1:12:46Mark Manson?

  Good.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46Mark Manson?

  Good.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  Um, but that like, I still, a lot of times I'll have an afternoon lull.

• 1:12:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Uh, and that's definitely not a time, and we'll, we'll talk about structuring your time around these kind of, around your energy and all of that.

• 1:12:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  If I try to get anything done when I'm like having, having a crash in the afternoon.

• 1:13:02Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  No, not gonna happen.

• 1:13:04Mark Manson?

  I'm actually gonna say, I think I struggle the most with lack of importance.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:10Mark Manson?

  I tend to get interested and excited about so many things. You know, as we've discussed, I have intense shiny object syndrome and we're gonna talk about my ADHD in a minute. But when I'm excited about like six or seven different things, it's really, I struggle often to prioritize and systematize the different things that I'm focusing on. I don't know, it's hard for me to, to find the highest leverage thing and just focus on that and let the other things go. Like, that's always been my, my struggle. And it's funny too, the clarity thing, one of the things I'm definitely learning, I've learned recently, and this is one of my goals in 2026 with the team, uh, is to over communicate.

• 1:13:51Mark Manson?

  Like I, I, I've learned that I have a tendency to not share enough or like, share what I'm thinking enough with you guys. And so then you guys kind of sit around 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 the, my goal is individually. And I think that's, that's demotivating for people. And so I, I often have this tendency of just like, I just kind of assume people telepathically understand what I understand.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  That's interesting. No, because just recently you sent us like a new brand document, right?

• 1:14:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  And it had been a while. You used to, every now and then you would send us kind of a state of the business. This was back when the team was way smaller.

• 1:14:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  And I always enjoyed, I don't think I've ever told you this, but I always enjoyed reading those, which sounds crazy. Like, here's the state of the business, here's what you're doing. But you would get very clear on things. Going back to the clarity thing here. You would get very clear on things like, okay, this is what we've been doing. This is why we were doing it. It's not 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 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.

• 1:15:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Was that a clarifying for you, writing that? I'm sure it was.

• 1:15:13Mark Manson?

  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. I would also argue that it becomes more important, right? Because it's, 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 two people and kind of deduce what we're doing.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Mark Manson?

  Whereas when there's 20 of us, it's like, what the hell is going on?

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:15:56Mark Manson?

  We've, we've got a kidney smuggling wing of the business that I never told you about.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  Highly profitable.

• 1:16:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah, the YouTube videos are just a, just a front.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  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, advice we get, especially online about this is about kind of effort, right? How to, how to expend your effort on getting things done and how to like grit and sit down and you've just got to get this done. This thing you might not want to even do, like you need to sit down and do this. Okay, great. All of us, I think though, at some point at least, 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.

• 1:16:44Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  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 this psychologist called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  I looked it up several times, how to, oh yeah, Csikszentmihalyi.

• 1:17:13Mark Manson?

  Csikszentmihalyi. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. His, his name is like an alphabet soup.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  It's, it's a, he's a Hungarian psychologist.

• 1:17:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's like 20 letters long.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  And most of them are Cs and Cs and S's. And so it's impossible for English speakers to announce. Anyway, he wrote this great book called Flow. So a lot of people are probably somewhat familiar, at least with this concept of flow, like I just described, 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 would check in with people, you know, what are you doing? And are you paying attention to what you're doing? Basically, are you focused on what you're doing? When they said, no, they weren't very happy. This is like the opposite of that. Like you're so into what you're into.

• 1:17:52Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  There's so many like downstream effects on happiness and wellbeing and all of this with flow.

• 1:17:58Mark Manson?

  It's, it's one of the core tenets of positive psychology is flow.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Finding states of flow in your life. Okay. So some, just some examples. I got a very, very long list. I'm not going to go through all of them, but you can find flow in just about anything you do. But some common ones are like in. In physical movement, it could be in individual sports, like runners often talk about this, swimmers, Michael Phelps has talked about this before, I might mention him in here a little bit, cyclists, there's skill sports too, mind-body practices, like yoga, could do it.

• 1:18:27Mark Manson?

  Dancing.

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  Dance is a big one, dance is a huge one. People who do martial arts too, then there's creative work, the visual arts, of course, painting, music, all of that kind of stuff. Writers, writing, sometimes you get into 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.

• 1:18:58Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  You can get into flow when you're cooking, or cleaning, or gardening, yard work, that kind of stuff. You can, is really the, one of the biggest factors is like, are you completely focused on what you're doing in front of you? Okay. So, okay, obviously we want to get into these states more.

• 1:19:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  Obviously. There's a little bit of a paradox though, because a lot of times, to get into a state of flow, you have to be somewhat competent, which requires some practice. And a lot of times that deliberate practice is not a flow state, and it's not very enjoyable.

• 1:19:32Mark Manson?

  It's not fun, yeah.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  So there's a little bit of a paradox there where, that we have to navigate. So, you know, because deliberate practice, it involves like, they're structured, it involves a high structure, 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 conducive to that, to those flow states. And then, once we kind of get into better practice of it, I think it's easier to slip into those states anyway, but yeah. Well, before we get any, get going

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  any further though, do you experience a lot of flow in your life these days? I should ask that.

• 1:20:20Mark Manson?

  I do, actually.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:20:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I mean, especially, especially around writing.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23Mark Manson?

  Like, I fall into flow with writing pretty quickly and easily, for the most part.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:32Mark Manson?

  But yeah, that's the biggest place.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:20:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah, what about yourself?

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Well, okay, you do surfing though too. Do you ever get in surfing? I wonder, because that's one of those more physical activities, or you're not good enough yet?

• 1:20:42Mark Manson?

  I'm not good enough.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  You're not good enough to get into the state of flow?

• 1:20:44Mark Manson?

  Definitely not good enough.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I'm trying to think of, I mean, running, I've definitely gotten there. The fun thing, 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.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  You're distracted. Yeah, definitely.

• 1:21:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and it's also like, you're just like, I don't know. It's, in the beginning, you're kind of focused on the things that don't feel right. You know, like, ah, my foot kind of hurts, or my legs are a little sore, or whatever. 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.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, probably by that point, your brain has figured out you have nothing else to focus on.

• 1:21:25Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  But what you're doing right in front of you. And so you enter that flow state.

• 1:21:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  And I think that's with any activity you start doing. Probably when you sit down to write too, the first few paragraphs are the hardest, right?

• 1:21:34Mark Manson?

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:35Mark Manson?

  For sure.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Same with me, where like, when I go into my, if I go into my woodworking shop and I start doing that, it's like the first, oh, everything's a fucking mess. Why didn't I clean this up last time?

• 1:21:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  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 all kind of starts to fall together.

• 1:21:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I would say like, a lot of my focused strategy is just tricking myself into getting into flow states.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:22:01Mark Manson?

  Right? It's just like,

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah.

• 1:22:03Mark Manson?

  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.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:22:16Mark Manson?

  So what I'll do is I'll kind of bargain with myself. Well, I'll be like, you know what? Open up the Google Doc and let's just, let's just write the intro. That's all you have to do. And then by through the act of writing that intro, I I start to get into a flow state and I start to like naturally want to do more.

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, yeah. So some of the the characteristics of flow states, let me go over those because we've already mentioned a bunch of them. One of them is clear goals. Okay, so like you said, if you sit down to write and you you don't, you're thinking about the whole project that you have to do. That's not a clear goal.

• 1:22:50Mark Manson?

  Or you don't even know what you want to write.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. Once you get clear on that, that's one precondition for flow to to kick in. Immediate feedback too is usually a pretty 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 you're you're making progress towards your goal too. This gets a little bit tricky, I think, especially with knowledge work a lot of times because you don't get a lot of immediate feedback.

• 1:23:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  You might have some internal feedback on like, oh, this is interesting. And so that that can be feedback too. But just in terms of like, am I making any progress on this or not? So you can actually artificially create those feedback loops, checklists, you know, like I said, when I sit down and I time box something, I'm I have like a when I'm most focused is when I have a specific, okay, I'm going to do this much exactly.

• 1:23:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Even if it's not, doesn't translate into progress for me outside of myself. It's it's at least it's like, I can check that box. And that's at least something I can tell it to, right?

• 1:23:51Mark Manson?

  I think you can use gamification for yourself.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:55Mark Manson?

  You know, I used to use this writing software called Scrivener, which was designed for authors writing books and it it sets up. You can set all these benchmarks for yourself with like, how many words do you want to write a day? How many? How many do you want to write each week? How long do you think your book's going to be? And then it sets up all these progress bars for you across the software.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:14Mark Manson?

  So you so every day you get to get on and like as you're writing, you get to see your progress bar move from left to right. And

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  And you have that daily goal right in front of you.

• 1:24:23Mark Manson?

  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 video games, huge gamer, like video games are

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 1:24:40Mark Manson?

  Completely optimized to generate flow state in 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.

• 1:24:53Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, and one of the reasons, the last kind of factor that goes into flow is a balance between challenge and skill.

• 1:25:02Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  Video games have this figured out for sure, right? Like you start off in the beginner mode and you get a little bit better and then it gets harder and harder.

• 1:25:07Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  And as you go, you progress, but your, your skillset is slightly challenged.

• 1:25:13Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Right? So like when you sit down to write something, you're like, okay, I'm going to write this. I haven't quite figured it out yet. Then you get a clear goal. Okay. This is how I'm going to write it. Oh, I'm making progress. There's your immediate feedback. And it might be something that's just a little bit, maybe a 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.

• 1:25:30Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  Those are kind of the three big things of, that are required for flow to happen. I'm 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.

• 1:25:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Mark Manson?

  I do think there is something very inherent about certain activity. Like I do think there's something very personality based around various activities.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  Like there's- Something I want to bring up with you. Yeah.

• 1:25:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Like there are some things in my life that I just find that like I, it's writing, for instance, it's very easy for me to get into a flow state writing. Very easy. It just, it comes extremely naturally. It happens very quickly. And it's, 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 off.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  You would lose a finger. Yeah.

• 1:26:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Different activities scratch people's itches slightly, slightly differently.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Well, you, for example, you mentioned the gamification thing. I, I'm not real responsive to that.

• 1:26:27Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  You're, you're a more competitive person. You can, you can like to compete with yourself too.

• 1:26:32Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  I, 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.

• 1:26:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  But I don't need to. 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.

• 1:26:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  Or I'm making progress on this cabinet that I'm building or whatever it is.

• 1:26:54Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  Right? I think there is definitely a personality based 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.

• 1:27:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  And so that's why, like even checklist and checkboxes for me, like checking off, I did this, I did this, like seeing that.

• 1:27:18Mark Manson?

  Gotcha.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  Or like, something that's physical, just in nature, like I'm building this thing in front of me.

• 1:27:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  I get, that's where I get my feedback. But I think there are people like the gamification thing. I mean, you love video games, but you also like to gamify your work too.

• 1:27:32Mark Manson?

  I gamify everything.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which, yeah, to each their own again.

• 1:27:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:27:51Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  To like, increase the likelihood that you'll engage in these flow states. So one of those is matching the challenge to the skill, like I just talked about. They actually found that there's like this, it's a, I don't know how they actually came up with this number, but about 4% beyond your ability is like the sweet spot.

• 1:28:07Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  It's a very specific number. Yeah.

• 1:28:09Mark Manson?

  That sounds very.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  I'm pretty sure that's an average. Okay. So, but if, if it's, the task is too easy, you get bored.

• 1:28:15Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  Obviously, if it's too hard, you get, you give up. 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 into smaller parts. You've heard this a million times too, right? But that gives you the clarity. That's your clear goal. You're gonna 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. When you sit down to do some work, have an idea of exactly what you need to get done. And that's just gonna 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.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  The immediate feedback part, we set up two activities that give you real time information about how you're doing. So, you know, like programmers, your code either it's gonna compile. I'm not a programmer, so it's either gonna 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. Now, there's a lot of activities that don't lend to that though, too. Writing might be one of them.

• 1:29:22Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Don't know if that's, if it's good or not, but at least like you have the, the goal of a word count or something like that, right? And then a lot of what this is eliminating distraction. You can't get into a flow state if you're distracted, okay? It's impossible to be in a flow state if your mind is on something else. Literally the definition is being focused on one thing.

• 1:29:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  Uh, which is what basically your, your brain can handle. There might be some kind of like environmental and psychological triggers you can kind of work with too. Novelty slash complexity, like kind of like varying how novel or complex the task is that you're working on. Risk too, they've found that actually if you're taking either like a physical or even a creative risk of some kind, that kind of like helps you focus on something like, okay, I'm gonna do something a little bit different and put it out. That tends to get people to really focus.

• 1:30:13Mark Manson?

  That makes sense.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  Doesn't it? Yeah. I thought you would like that one, actually.

• 1:30:17Mark Manson?

  Cause I, I love risk.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:30:20Mark Manson?

  And there is something clarifying about risk, right?

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  When you would send me articles or something like that too, and you were like, ah, this one's a little different. I don't know. Those are usually the best ones. You're like, I'm kinda like, I'm, I'm sticking my neck out here a little bit. Those are usually the better ones that you wrote, yeah, for sure.

• 1:30:34Mark Manson?

  And I'm thinking about skydiving too. Like if you, if you ever skydive, like it, it goes by in two seconds.

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, really?

• 1:30:41Mark Manson?

  Right? Like you, you're in free fall for like 90 seconds, but it feels like five.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:45Mark Manson?

  And it's...

• 1:30:48Mark Manson?

  I think there's something that's just so clarifying and like

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  You better not be focusing on anything else.

• 1:30:54Mark Manson?

  Can you imagine if your mind was wandering while skydiving? It's just kind of inconceivable.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  Part of that too, like a deep embodiment.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  The more you can get your body engaged too. Now, this isn't always like with some creative tasks. It's not always possible. I get that sitting in programming, you're not going to be doing a whole lot of exercise. It's like painters too can get it. Painters, musicians, you know, when they're they they focus a lot on posture and body movement when while they're producing or while 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 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. That kind of helps keep your brain engaged as well.

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

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

• 1:32:20Mark Manson?

  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.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, self reference.

• 1:32:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  Ego identity. Yes, very much so. Yeah, the ego is very strong.

• 1:32:36Mark Manson?

  Versus the online. The, what was it? The task.

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Task positive network.

• 1:32:40Mark Manson?

  The task positive network, right? Where you're Where you're very much focused on a single thing, you're trying to get something done. You're very goal and task oriented, but 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. Like, 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, you know, ego taking a backseat. You're like, you're focused on a single task at hand. Your ego takes a backseat. 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, there's a beautiful coherence.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Again, it's really hard to measure flow states themselves. I mean, you can do self-report and all that, but like during flow states. 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 that's probably pretty true about it, though, is that, that shutting down of the default mode network. So it's 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.

• 1:34:00Mark Manson?

  Right, right.

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? But it's the timing of it that's important. It's that when you're in the flow state, you don't, you really kind of lose your sense of self. Everybody can probably relate to this on some degree.

• 1:34:10Mark Manson?

  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.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Fuck, yeah, give me more.

• 1:34:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah, right. And it's, and that becomes something that you identify with very strongly.

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 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.

• 1:34:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  And happier with your, your work life, for sure.

• 1:34:58Mark Manson?

  You know what's funny about flow, though, is because and maybe this is a nice segue into talking about ADHD, but I think a lot of people assume that flow is synonymous with focus. But you can actually get in the flow doing a lot of stupid shit, like fucking around and 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

• 1:35:38Mark Manson?

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

• 1:36:21Mark Manson?

  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, it's really a lack of executive function around focus and flow, rather than just of a complete inability to fall into focus and flow.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, that hyper focus. So there's like a compulsivity to it.

• 1:36:45Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  Like, and like you said, the real goal is intentionality.

• 1:36:50Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  If you're being compulsive, you're not being intentional, right?

• 1:36:52Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  Okay. Okay. So that's interesting. You framed it like this. So let's, 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?

• 1:37:08Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:37:19Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  It's just that it's, it's very hard for you to regulate your attention.

• 1:37:23Mark Manson?

  I, I would describe, yeah, I would describe it more as a, it's a, it's a difficulty. It's an issue with interest.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  Ah, okay.

• 1:37:31Mark Manson?

  More than attention. I can definitely pay attention to things. It's just that like, I usually don't fucking care. So it's, it's hard for me to care about certain things. And, and then other times it's hard for me to stop caring about something.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  Okay, that's interesting you bring that up because there is, 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 PUNCH. 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 PUNCH acronym stands for passion, interest, novelty, competition, or hurry, basically a deadline, right? And I went through this and I'm like, this is Mark.

• 1:38:19Mark Manson?

  This is so fucking accurate.

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:38:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  And I, I like, I've seen you before, I'm working on something. You're just like, if that's the case, you're just like, I can't even start on this. And I know other, other people in my life, my girlfriend has ADHD too. We were talking about this, she's like, if I'm not interested in it, you're, you're not.

• 1:38:45Mark Manson?

  It just doesn't happen.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  It's just not going to happen, right?

• 1:38:47Mark Manson?

  And, and the funny thing is too, is that like, at least for me, like the consequences, the repercussion, like I, I don't care about those either.

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  Right, that's what, okay, that, that I think is one of the big points about ADHD. Like I've had, I had an ex-girlfriend too, who had it, had ADHD. And she was just like, I, I just don't, like whatever.

• 1:39:08Mark Manson?

  Who cares?

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  Like what the, the house is clean.

• 1:39:11Mark Manson?

  These people are going to be mad, you're going to be.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  Don't care.

• 1:39:13Mark Manson?

  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.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  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, the main difference is kind of compulsivity. When you get into one of these hyper-focus things though. You can't pull yourself away? Well, like, what's going on here? Like, it's just something that interested you, whether it's important or not, and then you go deep on it and you get in this like rabbit hole? How does this work?

• 1:39:44Mark Manson?

  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.

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  It's so strange.

• 1:40:01Mark Manson?

  We procrastinated recording that episode for like four months. The shame episode, we fucked that research up so hard. You and I felt so bad about it. It's like it's a miracle that that episode even turned out decently. The resilience episode, I did like a 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 through 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, we've had quite a bit of turnover. We've got a reorg going on and I, as part of this reorg process, I have found myself absolutely obsessed with fucking AI automations.

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Processes.

• 1:40:46Mark Manson?

  Oh my God, like I literally can't, I was up till 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 that at that point I was working on an automation that just like didn't even really matter for the business. But I just, it felt, there was like this compulsivity to like get it done. 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.

• 1:41:29Mark Manson?

  Like it's all day, every day. It's all gas, no brakes. And what happens is I go so hard on it that you, 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 basically spent. Four days of my life only doing this thing. But then at that point, I think some sunk cost fallacy kicks in where it's like, well, I just dumped 50 hours into this. I should probably see it through and finish it. And, and then I just kind of make myself miserable for like, I guess, the last stretch of it.

• 1:42:14Mark Manson?

  That's kind of where I'm at now. But yeah, it is, 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, 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, it is this weird switch that gets flipped on and off.

• 1:42:57Mark Manson?

  And when it's off, you're, 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 lift 2,000 pound boulders and smash any task in front of you.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of my friends call it their superpower in a way.

• 1:43:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's a double inch sword, but it's their superpower.

• 1:43:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it just needs to be like wielded in the right direction.

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  Right, okay.

• 1:43:24Mark Manson?

  Cause it's, if it's not, if you, if it gets wielded in the wrong direction, then it, then it becomes like a huge handicap.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  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, you were diagnosed as a teenager, right?

• 1:43:47Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. So that's the other thing people need to understand, I think, too. ADHD is a developmental disorder.

• 1:43:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  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 twenty-some people at this point.

• 1:44:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  Like, how have you managed to cobble together in your frantic brain?

• 1:44:17Mark Manson?

  Uh...

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  This whole system?

• 1:44:18Mark Manson?

  Systems and guardrails.

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:44:20Mark Manson?

  And this is gonna be a lot of the advice that we give in the next section.

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:24Mark Manson?

  But like, my brain really needs guardrails, like, really needs parameters. Really needs like, set limits in terms of, you know, I just kinda create rules for myself, right?

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  Well, okay, this is, so you're saying structure?

• 1:44:36Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:44:45Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  I think. It's like, you need it, but you also hate it.

• 1:44:48Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  Explain that to me.

• 1:44:50Mark Manson?

  Uh...

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  Cause I still don't think I get that.

• 1:44:53Mark Manson?

  Well, your brain hates it because you need novelty all the time.

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:44:57Mark Manson?

  But you need it because if you just, if you let an ADHD brain just do whatever it wants, like, god knows where you're gonna end up.

• 1:45:05Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 1:45:05Mark Manson?

  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.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:18Mark Manson?

  I like my own structure.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  Gotcha, okay.

• 1:45:20Mark Manson?

  So, it's like, I know my brain and I know where the tripwires are, and I know where the pitfalls are, and so if I get to build the guardrails, it's gonna fit my brain really well, whereas like, if I just adopt somebody else's guardrails,

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:45:34Mark Manson?

  then I'm probably gonna end up being very annoyed and just telling them to fuck off.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:45:39Mark Manson?

  So, I'll give you a simple example. I realized about seven years ago that I can play video games, I can't play multiplayer games. If I play multiplayer game, I get so competitive, and I get so obsessed, that I, I... It's a problem. Like, it's a real problem. I get addicted. I start practicing. I start, I'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. 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.

• 1:46:23Mark Manson?

  It was like, warm-up routine. Dude, it was, it was a bunch of like fucking high schoolers. 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. Cause 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 realized, I'm like, I'm just not allowed to play multiplayer games. Like, cause 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, one more game. No, no, I, I'm gonna kick this guy's ass one more time. Well, let's go.

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  Okay. Okay. Is that one of your guardrails?

• 1:47:07Mark Manson?

  Yes, it's one of my guardrails.

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  None of those, okay. You know, you talked about the structure that you need. 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 like 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 gonna work within this and there's a lot of freedom within it, but there's still some bounds around.

• 1:47:46Mark Manson?

  I think ADHD people tend to be very good creatives.

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:47:51Mark Manson?

  Because again, it's just this constant need for novelty, stimulation. And creativity is one means of giving that to you. But yeah, the challenge is always putting the parameters around that creativity. Like if you just let, if you just let a creative run wild, then they're never gonna 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 of months. And I think a lot of that's just my personality.

• 1:48:34Mark Manson?

  My brain's default is to always improvise. And my brain likes to improvise.

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  Right, and experiment, try something new, yeah, the novelty you get on that, okay, okay.

• 1:48:46Mark Manson?

  So yeah, 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, it's a little bit of a Goldilocks thing where it's like you need to give them some structure, otherwise they're just gonna flail, but if you give them too much structure, then they're just gonna lose interest and shut down. So it's kind of like you have to be very, a little bit delicate.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:14Mark Manson?

  We're flowers, Drew, we're very delicate.

• 1:49:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:49:35Mark Manson?

  I know.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  But that kind of stuff though, when you do sit down, you need to, you're like, okay, I need to focus.

• 1:49:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  How do you approach that, say differently than like maybe a neurotypical person would?

• 1:49:46Mark Manson?

  I, so tasks, we've talked about task switching and how it's like incredibly detrimental to focus. I personally find task switching improves my focus.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:49:56Mark Manson?

  In moderate doses.

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:58Mark Manson?

  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 totally makes sense.

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:50:08Mark Manson?

  And I think what it comes down to is that if I do the same task for too long, I get bored. And of course, my brain craves novelty stimulation, 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've found is that if I, if I, say I pair one long-term task with

• 1:50:35Mark Manson?

  A couple of 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, 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, the way I discovered this was, in, in university, I would sleep through almost all my lectures. I couldn't, I just couldn't stay awake. And, and then one day I, I brought a Sudoku from the, the, the college newspaper and, and I did the Sudoku. And I realized that I stayed awake the entire lecture and I took great notes.

• 1:51:20Mark Manson?

  And I was like, I don't know why that happened, but I'm gonna 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, I had something else to focus on, some sort of novelty or stimulation. And then I could like, kinda do that and, you know, a crossword puzzle or Sudoku, it, it's not too cognitively demanding, so you can kinda 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 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.

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, that makes absolutely no sense to me, but I've heard very similar things from, from my friends, too. They're like, I'll do it like, they need a doodle during a lecture or something boring, or, 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.

• 1:52:27Mark Manson?

  So this is a good example of guardrails. This is a good, good example of both. So when I was in school, I realized that if I went home, if I went back to my dorm.

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  Okay. I'm gonna get into this, too, yeah.

• 1:52:37Mark Manson?

  To study, this gets into environmental design. If I went home to study, I wouldn't, like, no studying would get done. I'd be watching TV with my roommate, I'd be playing a video game, I'd be goofing off with the guys down the hall. Nothing got done. So I created a rule for myself, which was that every single day, I had to go to the library. And I had to spend as much time in the library that day as I did as I had classes. So if I had three classes 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. No exceptions. And sure enough, once you're in the library and there's nothing to do, you start finding

• 1:53:20Mark Manson?

  shit to do because it's boring. And so then I started getting ahead on my classes. I would start studying like, you know, two weeks ahead. I'd start preparing for a project that was, wasn't going to be due for another month. And it was, it was amazing. I mean, this, I basically went from, when I first started college, I was like a C and D student and then by my third year, I was a straight A student. And, and a lot of these tactics are, are the reason why. I mean, we're kind of already talking about it. We might as well just segue straight into the back end of the episode, which is the practical advice and takeaways. It's funny because when we started working on this episode, my, my initial thought was

• 1:54:04Mark Manson?

  like, it's values and environment. Like that's, that's pretty much what it's been for me. It's like, A, find something you really care about and feels important to you. And then B, build those guardrails, set up your environment correctly. Like that's where I've gotten the most mileage. But you've gone much deeper into all the different techniques and tactics and, and exercises and implementation. So why don't you kick us off?

• 1:54:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. No, I'll lead us into this. So you're right, environmental design, like it's just a pillar of getting, getting shit done, basically, right? We've mentioned a few of these though, too. So before we get into kind of the nitty gritty of it, I think like part of your environment is actually what I'm calling like operating system level factors. Okay. It's super succinct and sexy, I know.

• 1:54:52Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:54:53Speaker 01

  But you know, we've mentioned this a little bit already, your sleep, exercise and nutrition. We, we mentioned this in every episode, I know, I know. So I'm not going to get into the weeds on why you should.

• 1:55:01Mark Manson?

  I just felt 100,000 people rolled their eyes.

• 1:55:04Speaker 01

  Everybody knows.

• 1:55:05Mark Manson?

  I know, Drew.

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  Yes, everybody knows these are important. But I want to tell you why they're important, especially for focus real quick.

• 1:55:11Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:55:11Speaker 01

  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? 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 17 to 18, 19 hours of sleep, like you've been awake for that long, okay?

• 1:55:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  It's very similar to a blood alcohol content of 0.05%,

• 1:55:48Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:55:49Speaker 01

  which is like a good buzz, right?

• 1:55:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  Like a pretty good buzz going on. After 24 hours, that that doubles to about 0.1% blood alcohol content, which is above like legal driving limit.

• 1:55:58Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  You're drunk.

• 1:55:59Mark Manson?

  You're officially drunk.

• 1:56:00Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. So like that, that's where, that's kind of like the baseline of where you're starting out from and when you're sleep deprived, right? The, the interesting twist is, and this was actually a replicated study. I saw the old study for this, this is people, when they're sleep deprived, don't realize how cognitively impaired they are.

• 1:56:19Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  They'll tell you like, oh yeah, like yesterday.

• 1:56:22Mark Manson?

  A drunk person.

• 1:56:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Oh yeah, no, I'm fine. I can drive. Oh, I can go talk to that person.

• 1:56:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  Why not, they won't know. Yeah, that, it's very much, it, it, it covers up, your executive function is diminished.

• 1:56:34Mark Manson?

  Your ability to evaluate your own choices and decisions is out the window.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  It's very poor, yeah. And so like that old study was, you know, people, they would give them, they would sleep deprived 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, I've caught back up. I'm good to go. I've adjusted, when they're doing just as poorly.

• 1:56:52Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:56:52Speaker 01

  Okay, so you're not above your own biology, just, okay?

• 1:56:57Mark Manson?

  You're not a superhuman.

• 1:56:59Speaker 01

  You're not.

• 1:56:59Mark Manson?

  Only needs to sleep four hours a night or whatever it is.

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. Uh, one other little detail I'll mention is about chronotypes. So like night owls versus morning people. This is a real thing.

• 1:57:09Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:57:10Speaker 01

  Like they've scientifically validated, yeah, some people are, are night owls, some people are morning birds, right?

• 1:57:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  Morning, early birds, early birds.

• 1:57:16Mark Manson?

  Early birds, there you go.

• 1:57:17Speaker 01

  Morning birds. 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.

• 1:57:35Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  Or vice versa. However, like the synchrony does matter. So like, if you're a night owl and you're trying to get stuff done early in the morning, you're kind of screwed. And if you're an early person and you're trying to do this at night, it's not going to work either. So matching that is actually really important.

• 1:57:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  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. 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, to your, your, your biological rhythms. Okay.

• 1:58:14Mark Manson?

  The fun thing about chronotypes too, is it, it naturally shifts over your lifespan.

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:58:19Mark Manson?

  So people's chronotypes change over time. In my twenties, I was a hardcore night owl.

• 1:58:25Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:58:26Mark Manson?

  And now I'm up at like 5:45 with no alarm.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah. And they do show that generally speaking, the older you get, the more morning person type you are.

• 1:58:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:34Speaker 01

  Not for everybody, but generally speaking, sure. 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 getting a full workout in, 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, your focus a little bit by that point. I don't know if you've noticed this, but I definitely do. If I don't get my workout in, I actually schedule my workouts usually midday because that's when my lull is.

• 1:59:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:13Speaker 01

  And if I get that workout in, then my afternoons are a lot better.

• 1:59:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  For sure. But then if you regularly exercise over time too, though,

• 1:59:23Speaker 01

  we talked about this kind of in the resilience episode. You do have a more resilient brain with, with a 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, uh, kind of a double dose of that and metabolic stability. Okay. Which brings me to nutrition.

• 1:59:44Mark Manson?

  I just feel like you should be wagging your finger this whole time, Drew.

• 1:59:47Speaker 01

  I am.

• 1:59:48Mark Manson?

  This entire section, just, just sit here and wag.

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  My mind is wagging at you.

• 1:59:51Mark Manson?

  Wag your finger. Your nutrition, listeners.

• 1:59:55Speaker 01

  Nutrition.

• 1:59:56Mark Manson?

  Let's talk about your nutrition.

• 1:59:57Speaker 01

  So there, I don't know if you remember that, you remember those studies where it's like, oh yeah, they, they gave people like lemonade and then they gave them a, um, a cognitive task, like a memory task and they performed better after drinking lemonade. Cause they're like, oh glucose, you know, the, the brain's fuel is glucose. That's its only fuel source.

• 2:00:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  And so if you just give people glucose, they're going to be smarter, I guess, or more focused.

• 2:00:18Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  Not true. This is not, they found that this is actually not the case. What you want is a stable blood glucose. The spikes and the crashes actually lead to worse focus. And so avoiding high sugar foods, high glycemic load foods, um, you know, complex carbohydrates, uh, 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, is definitely paramount there too. And then, uh, high inflammation prone diets as well. So basically like a standard Western diet.

• 2:00:50Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  Terrible, terrible for, uh, focusing and cognitive impairments. Yeah. Depression, anxiety symptoms are more common with those two, which as we discussed a little bit too, that, that impedes on your focus as well.

• 2:01:02Mark Manson?

  I definitely notice, so I don't know if you've done like a glucose monitor.

• 2:01:08Speaker 01

  And I never have. Yeah. Have you done one of these?

• 2:01:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I've done, I've done a couple. They're, they're interesting. It's funny cause like when you first put them on, you're just glued to the app. You're like, oh my God, this is so interesting that this food did this and that food didn't do this. After a while, you kind of notice the patterns and it, it starts just telling you what you already know. But, um, I will say like when my blood sugar is severely spiked.

• 2:01:33Mark Manson?

  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 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.

• 2:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you chronically feel that, like, look at your diet.

• 2:02:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Yeah. Again. If that's the story of your life.

• 2:02:06Speaker 01

  It's huge though too. No, I like a few years ago, I started cleaning up my diet as well. And I just didn't have those crashes like, like you're talking about too.

• 2:02:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:14Speaker 01

  Related to this too, so part of nutrition is hydration as well. This was interesting that even a one to 2% of your body weight, like dehydrating yourself by one 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 and reaction times. So this I notice big time, especially like, instead of doing coffee in the afternoons or any caffeine in the afternoons, I usually will like focus more on hydration. Maybe do some electrolytes then too. And it's almost like drinking a cup of coffee for me. So I'm probably chronically dehydrated in some way. But yeah, I think they, they recommend about 250 milliliters every hour, hour and a half.

• 2:02:55Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 2:02:56Speaker 01

  To keep yourself well hydrated. You know, the, the brain will literally shrink when it's dehydrated. And that, that taxes metabolic processes in the brain. It's just harder to focus, so.

• 2:03:07Mark Manson?

  Keep wagging my finger. Drink, drink more water, Drew.

• 2:03:10Speaker 01

  I'm done wagging my finger.

• 2:03:11Mark Manson?

  Drink more water.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  I'm done, yeah. Get some sleep, get some exercise, don't eat shit, need some water. Like that's what it comes down to.

• 2:03:18Mark Manson?

  Isn't it crazy how simple?

• 2:03:20Speaker 01

  I know, I know.

• 2:03:21Mark Manson?

  Like, like you could, you could do the, probably the craziest productivity. If you looked at the research on like, the craziest productivity hack that people do, like a Pomodoro or something like, it's, the effect size is probably smaller than just drinking more water.

• 2:03:35Speaker 01

  That's why I wanted to start, I wanted to start with this line. These are operating system level. Like I said, this is your operating system. Like you have to get this because all the other stuff we're going to talk about. They're great and they do help, but it's on the margins for sure.

• 2:03:48Mark Manson?

  And, and if you don't have this stuff figured out.

• 2:03:51Speaker 01

  None of that matters.

• 2:03:52Mark Manson?

  Right. If you're eating Big Macs for breakfast and, and sleeping five hours a night.

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  A Pomodoro isn't going to do shit for you at that point. Yeah. It's not going to save your Big Mac. Yeah, no, no. Okay. But that said, let's do get into some of this more tactical stuff and, and environmental design around setting up. A workspace that you're going to use. This is obviously going to be different for different professions and whatever.

• 2:04:13Mark Manson?

  Different people, different personalities.

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  People for sure. Here's just, I'm going to go over some, some general principles, implement them as you see fit. Experiment with these. This, 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 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.

• 2:04:37Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  Okay. No surprise to anybody, 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, 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. Just having a phone in, within your field of view. Put it in the other room. Or if you're like at a coffee shop or whatever, put it in your bag, put it, just get it out of sight, period. Okay. Kind of related to this though too is clutter in your workspace is really a tax on attention as well.

• 2:05:23Speaker 01

  So again, this is the container you have for your environment, right? Anything you can see in there is a possible source of distraction.

• 2:05:29Mark Manson?

  Wow, this, this just made my wife really happy.

• 2:05:31Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, you, she's neat and tidy and you're kind of a slob. So.

• 2:05:36Mark Manson?

  I am totally a slob. She's always bugging me. She's like, you should clean your desk. I'm like, ah, it's fine. I have like, I have like 60 books on my desk.

• 2:05:45Mark Manson?

  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, "I'm fine."

• 2:05:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I've had to kind of come to terms with this one too. 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.

• 2:06:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:03Speaker 01

  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. 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? And I got a lot done.

• 2:06:44Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 2:06:45Speaker 01

  I got a lot done.

• 2:06:46Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 2:06:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:06:53Mark Manson?

  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.

• 2:07:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:01Mark Manson?

  And they swear by them. And, 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, which means.

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:23Mark Manson?

  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'm the same. I personally find it distracting. I'm more than happy to work on my, it actually is very funny. So as you know, I was going to the Purpose office. For people listening who don't know, Purpose is the app that I built last year, the AI 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

• 2:08:05Mark Manson?

  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 open the screen. And there were so many times where they were like, dude, we'll get you, we have extra monitors, we can get you a setup. It's gonna be like so. And I'm like, I'm good, man. I'm like, I'm totally good. It's actually probably better this way.

• 2:08:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:08:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:30Speaker 01

  Laptop. That's all I worked off of.

• 2:08:32Mark Manson?

  Me too.

• 2:08:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:08:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:40Speaker 01

  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. Cause 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.

• 2:08:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:58Speaker 01

  But when I really wanna focus and I need to do precision work.

• 2:09:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:02Speaker 01

  I'm going tiny screen for sure. Yeah, yeah. That is 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? A little bit of, whereas accuracy and precision don't.

• 2:09:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:09:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I like to be around people when I'm doing creative work.

• 2:09:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:36Mark Manson?

  I don't when I'm doing. I guess, rote, 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, then that, those are the few times I go to a coffee shop. Just to kind of get into a new environment. Feel, feel some of the novelty, right? Like, get the juices going.

• 2:10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there are two, I mean, you think about working from home, working, like, coworking, coworking space maybe, or like, coffee shop.

• 2:10:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:14Speaker 01

  And then, just your regular office environment, whatever. I don't know, for me, I've, I've found, a lot of times, like, when I, when I work from home, what I need to do, I have a separate space for it, okay? And, I have, there's certain times where I go into there, and there's certain things, kind of rituals, which I'll get into in a little bit more here, too. That kind of signal, there's a separation between home and work. Because I think the thing about working from home, for me anyway, is like, oh, there's some project I need to work on at home, that's gonna be going on in the back of my mind. Or, I need to clean this, or I could clean this, or, I'm gonna go to the kitchen, or, all of that kind of stuff, right? So, I, I think experimenting with your, just your, your work environment,

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  period, is a good way to figure out where, what kind of work you need to do where.

• 2:11:04Mark Manson?

  This goes all the way back to Peter Drucker, he wrote about this. That, 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, I knew people who would get up, get dressed, walk around the block, come back in to their apartment, and then go into their, 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. Right, there's like, a ritual aspect to it. The other thing that you, you mentioned in passing, that we, we would be remiss not to talk about, is, working with other people. Like, it is, talk about environmental factors, right?

• 2:11:49Mark Manson?

  Like, I think a lot of people feel like they're more productive in a coffee shop, or in a coworking 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 it's, 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 with somebody, like finding a friend, coworker, being like, hey, can we block off 2 to 4pm to work on this thing? I'll keep you accountable. You keep me accountable.

• 2:12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:24Mark Manson?

  And so on and so forth.

• 2:12:25Speaker 01

  No, definitely. That, that's a good point. 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.

• 2:12:36Mark Manson?

  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.

• 2:12:44Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 2:12:45Mark Manson?

  Because it's like now you don't want to look like a, like a lazy asshole. So you-

• 2:12:50Speaker 01

  Leverage those things though. Like actually take advantage of that kind of stuff. Like, no, if you know your best, like I know, I, yes, I succumb to social pressure, like-

• 2:12:57Mark Manson?

  Yes, we all do.

• 2:12:58Speaker 01

  Breaking news, right? Yeah, we all do. Leverage that to your advantage though. Use it in a way that's going to help you with this. One of the things we didn't talk about when we were talking about your ADHD system. I know you like to listen to music.

• 2:13:09Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:13:10Speaker 01

  When you work. Sometimes you listen to loud music.

• 2:13:14Mark Manson?

  Pretty much always.

• 2:13:15Speaker 01

  Metal, like some hardcore stuff, right?

• 2:13:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I think this is, this is another thing that I think is very common with ADHD people is

• 2:13:24Mark Manson?

  not just music, but very intense.

• 2:13:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:13:27Mark Manson?

  Music. That's like extremely stimulating. I find it narrows my focus. Like if I put on death metal, it like narrows my focus. It makes it easier to focus on whatever's in front of me. Whereas if I put on like classical or something, chances are my mind's going to wander and kind of tune it out. But it's, yeah, there's, it's a huge part of my productivity routine.

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  A lot of people use, 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.

• 2:14:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:03Speaker 01

  In the past, anyway, was I'd find like a Spotify playlist that was focused for work or something like that. And then kind of pick a genre that I like, you could do lofi or rock or whatever it is. But they're, they're supposed to kind of be curated for that.

• 2:14:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:15Speaker 01

  For focus and work, right?

• 2:14:17Mark Manson?

  It's funny, I feel like so much, so much of that is arbitrary, like I.

• 2:14:20Speaker 01

  It is.

• 2:14:21Mark Manson?

  It's like, what's that lofi beats channel on YouTube? It's like, it's funny that just like the whole world just decided that that's the productivity 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, 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 brainwaves in a way that increases focus and, and like, there's something to that.

• 2:14:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:14:55Mark Manson?

  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. And it's like, like when I use it, I definitely feel something like it's, it's, you know, I'd say probably at least 50% of the time I put on a Brain FM track, like, I notice, I notice there's like, there's like a tangible, noticeable experiential difference.

• 2:15:19Speaker 01

  It's almost like a light trance.

• 2:15:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:21Speaker 01

  That you kind of get into, yeah, for sure.

• 2:15:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:23Speaker 01

  But what you said about it though, too, those playlists, those curated playlists, they are usually fairly arbitrary. Or it's just like, people are like, ah, this works for me.

• 2:15:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:32Speaker 01

  Doesn't work for you. That's, there's an arbitrariness to it a little bit. And it's like, okay, yeah, there's no lyrics in it and it's just, you know, just instrumental. But what Brain FM has actually found, you're absolutely right, is that there are certain brainwaves that are associated with different kind of mental states.

• 2:15:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:50Speaker 01

  Obviously, right? So for example, theta waves, like four to eight hertz, that's memory, mind wandering, navigation type stuff. Alpha waves is like filtering out distractions. Beta waves are the ones that they've kind of figured out. So what, what Brain FM has actually done though, instead of just like kind of shooting in the dark.

• 2:16:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:08Speaker 01

  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 is they start from a hypothesis of, okay, these are the brainwaves that we know are associated with deeper focus.

• 2:16:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:22Speaker 01

  And how can, how does sound influence that? Or how can sound get you into that same brainwave state?

• 2:16:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  And they figured 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, their, their music library and testing this all the time. Okay. So what they found is that that those beta waves can actually be induced by music. And the thing is about music is that the, a lot of music is, is actually designed to catch your attention like and pull it off of whatever else you're doing.

• 2:17:06Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:17:06Speaker 01

  That's the whole point of it. Like a lot of times that's what the point of music is. They've started from the, the other way and said, okay, how do we not do that?

• 2:17:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:14Speaker 01

  But keep you kind of locked into those, those beta wave mind states.

• 2:17:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:18Speaker 01

  And also too, there's just larger, there's, there's a synchrony of neural oscillations in different parts of your brain. Okay. Basically like large populations 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 they, you, you get on there, you can, 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.

• 2:17:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  So they have all these different kind of like, not really genres, but kind of goals, I guess.

• 2:17:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It's funny, they, they do have genres of music, but then they also have genres of, of like desired.

• 2:17:55Speaker 01

  Mental states.

• 2:17:57Mark Manson?

  Mental states.

• 2:17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:58Mark Manson?

  Right? Cognitive states. It is super interesting. By the way, people listening, there's, we have 30 day free trial. It's in the description. Brain.fm/solve. They sponsor the show all the time. So we're not just talking about them randomly.

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:11Mark Manson?

  It is funny though, like, I don't know, way back in the day, there was this period where like binaural beats became a big thing in meditation. Right? So you used to put these headphones on while you meditated and then they would like. They make these like kind of weird sounds in your ears.

• 2:18:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:18:28Mark Manson?

  And it was funny because I remember, I remember trying those way, way back in the day. And you would get these like 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, but it was cool when, uh, when I found Brain FM. It was, it was like, okay, there's music around this like it kind of like softens. And the fact that you're like focusing on task, I think it like softens the blow a little bit.

• 2:18:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:19:01Mark Manson?

  But yeah, super interesting stuff. Do you listen to music while you?

• 2:19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, 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 of day, that would actually encourage my mind to wander more. And so I started to listen to music and I was using like Spotify playlists. Those, uh, that was kind of hit and miss though. That's what I found is that they could help, they could, they, they might, they might not. And I think part of that was is because again, there's just an arbitrary, well, this might help you.

• 2:19:32Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:19:32Speaker 01

  Go and try it. Again, though, what Brain FM has done is reverse engineered that and say, actually, this is probably what helps us. Let's test it out. Yes, that helps iterate on that, make it a little bit better. So whenever I've used Brain FM's, uh, like I'll sit down to do it. It's, it's pretty wild because you do, it's like a light trance you almost get in sometimes.

• 2:19:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:49Speaker 01

  Not saying this is a bulletproof, it's not magic. It's not gonna, you know, again, if you don't have all these other things set up.

• 2:19:55Mark Manson?

  It's a cool tool.

• 2:19:56Speaker 01

  It is a cool tool and there's like a little bit of a, a little bit of a game, a marginal gain you can get from it. So yeah, definitely check it out.

• 2:20:04Mark Manson?

  So yeah, before we move on, anybody who wants to try Brain FM, you can go to brain.fm/solved. You can get a 30 day trial. Link is in the description. Check it out. So what else?

• 2:20:14Speaker 01

  A few just other things too, that also help on the margins. Are gonna be things like temperature, light and air quality. Okay. So the, the temperature, the, what they found is the ideal, uh, your ideal performance and like offices that they found are workspaces is around 21 to 22 degrees Celsius, which I think is a tad warm.

• 2:20:36Mark Manson?

  72 Fahrenheit?

• 2:20:37Speaker 01

  72, yeah, 72 Fahrenheit, which I think is a tad warm.

• 2:20:41Mark Manson?

  I feel like we're gonna spawn hundreds of office arguments.

• 2:20:44Speaker 01

  That's, yeah.

• 2:20:44Mark Manson?

  With this section.

• 2:20:45Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, absolutely.

• 2:20:46Mark Manson?

  Or too hot, it's too cold.

• 2:20:47Speaker 01

  Or if you and your spouse work from, from home and yeah, you're probably fighting that too as well. But I mean, you know, if it's too hot, too cold.

• 2:20:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:56Speaker 01

  That's gonna just distract you from everything. Lighting too, this is kind of interesting and I actually do this. The 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.

• 2:21:18Mark Manson?

  The whole, yeah, the early morning sunlight thing.

• 2:21:21Speaker 01

  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. But like if I have that kind of like low intensity light, but it's mimicking the day, you know?

• 2:21:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:21:54Mark Manson?

  No.

• 2:21:55Speaker 01

  I feel like I'm super sensitive to light.

• 2:21:57Mark Manson?

  My wife is really sensitive to it. She has our house set up so that like all the lights dim.

• 2:22:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:02Mark Manson?

  Nine o'clock.

• 2:22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:04Mark Manson?

  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.

• 2:22:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't.

• 2:22:16Mark Manson?

  Don't care. Like it just.

• 2:22:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:22:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:26Speaker 01

  Big sleep researcher. And they're finding out too, that it's not necessarily like light exposure itself, like blue light exposure. It probably was a little bit overhyped for a while.

• 2:22:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:39Speaker 01

  It's actually not as detrimental, but light exposure in general, like intensity probably does matter for sure.

• 2:22:45Mark Manson?

  I could see that. I definitely sleep worse if the lights are on.

• 2:22:49Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah. Or you like have a TV on or something like that.

• 2:22:53Mark Manson?

  I definitely notice that.

• 2:22:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:54Mark Manson?

  But it is, again, it is very personal. Like, like I said, my wife is really sensitive to this type of stuff.

• 2:23:01Speaker 01

  I have me too, yeah.

• 2:23:02Mark Manson?

  I'm not. I could sleep in the middle of a busy airport.

• 2:23:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:23:06Mark Manson?

  And be fine.

• 2:23:08Speaker 01

  That's crazy, but okay.

• 2:23:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:23:20Mark Manson?

  So I felt this when I lived in Asia.

• 2:23:22Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 2:23:23Mark Manson?

  My, um, there is, I lived briefly in Vietnam and in, in Hong Kong. And there are period, there are parts of the year that the, the smog and pollution is just much worse than other parts. And, um, and it was interesting because I, I noticed that my ADHD symptoms got way worse.

• 2:23:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:43Mark Manson?

  Certain parts of the year. And then I couldn't figure out what it was. Couldn't focus on anything. I started sleeping poorly. Like, it was, it was really bad. And then I started getting like a scratchy throat. And then that's when I looked up the air quality and it was, there was tons of pollution. So I definitely noticed it. My ability to focus and with a lot of pollution. So air is quality is something I'm very sensitive to.

• 2:24:05Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah. I backed up by the research too. That just, uh, pollutants in the air.

• 2:24:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:10Speaker 01

  Diminish, uh, in, in like acutely diminish, uh, your cognitive capabilities around working memory, around fluid intelligence, um, and executive function too. So, yeah.

• 2:24:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I remember seeing some kind of education related studies around this of like children who are in highly polluted parts of the city, um, but then move to a different school in a different part of the city where there's not a lot of pollutants. Like their test scores go up considerably. Just from like moving from a polluted part of town to a less polluted.

• 2:24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And controlling for socioeconomic status and quality of education, all that.

• 2:24:47Mark Manson?

  Same kids. You just take them across town and they like score better on tests because they're not breathing fucking smog all day.

• 2:24:52Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. That checks out.

• 2:24:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:25:02Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 2:25:02Speaker 01

  Now, this is a little bit, um, there's this whole theory called attention restoration theory, which is getting exposure to nature.

• 2:25:12Speaker 01

  Uh, these natural settings kind of restore your directed attention. And they, they think the mechanisms, mechanism by which this operates is like what they call a soft fascination. So when you're in nature, your mind just naturally kind of has this whole like soft fascination with 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, it's a little bit loosey goosey. I know, I know.

• 2:25:42Mark Manson?

  This is like the green therapy stuff.

• 2:25:43Speaker 01

  Right. This, this came back in the nineties. This was back in the nineties. Since then, they've found a lot of nuance to it. 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.

• 2:25:55Mark Manson?

  I mean, the, 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 de-stresses people. I think it's probably just a little bit of that bleeding over into increased executive function.

• 2:26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:15Mark Manson?

  Lack of stimulation. Again, like if you're not looking at screens and answering phones all day and you're like sitting there staring at a tree, like, yeah, you're probably going to be able to focus a little bit better. So.

• 2:26:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:26:26Mark Manson?

  Common sense packaged as scientific theory strikes again.

• 2:26:30Speaker 01

  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. There might be something to it there as well. So if that works for you, great.

• 2:26:39Mark Manson?

  Then you gotta water them.

• 2:26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:41Mark Manson?

  Then you gotta stress about watering them.

• 2:26:42Speaker 01

  I know. 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, the operating level, the operating system level, your sleep, your exercise, nutrition, the setting up your workspace. I think the last thing I want to touch on though too is, and we already mentioned it a little bit, was the ritual side of things, right? You know, you mentioned the, the demarcation between work life and, and home life.

• 2:27:06Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 2:27:07Speaker 01

  And especially with a lot of people working from home now, that, that, that line's blurred. There's research out there that shows though, that people who separate work from, from home life are a lot happier, both in their jobs and they're more productive as well. And also just in their, in their home life as well.

• 2:27:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:20Speaker 01

  So having that clear demarcation, I, I struggle with this just because like I live alone. And I've worked remotely forever and it's all just kind of blends together.

• 2:27:30Mark Manson?

  I struggle with this too.

• 2:27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it, so it seems like you're just constantly thinking about work.

• 2:27:35Mark Manson?

  But it makes sense. I mean, if you think back to the episode about boundaries, right? And setting boundaries for yourself, like, it makes sense. Because it's, boundaries provide clarity, clarity provides focus.

• 2:27:44Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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, it'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.

• 2:28:19Speaker 01

  So, but, but, you know, these habits, they're, they're contextually cued, right? So, that just signals to your brain, like, oh, this is the spot for work. Even if you have a home office, like, this is a whole separate thing over here, and it gets you kind of into that, 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, I'm like, I time box, that's when I time box, I'll sit down and like, this is, 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, is the same closing routine as well. So like a shutdown routine.

• 2:29:04Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 2:29:04Speaker 01

  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. It's a kind of, again, that demarcation between work and, and home life. When you're done with it, he has this whole like shutdown routine that he tries to get people to do. And he even says, he says out loud, he's like, "Shut down, complete."

• 2:29:27Speaker 01

  That's a very Cal move, but...

• 2:29:28Mark Manson?

  What a nerd.

• 2:29:29Speaker 01

  I know, right?

• 2:29:30Mark Manson?

  Such a nerd, Cal.

• 2:29:33Speaker 01

  But it's just the like having a routine that that is specifically designed to again demarcate that work from from home life and again just signals to your brain like oh this is this is focus time 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 your work environment that makes you so productive?

• 2:30:11Mark Manson?

  No, I for me it's it's it's more it's funny it's it's less about the environment. I mean, it is important to have a good work environment, but for me, it's just a lot about personal rules and guidelines and you know.

• 2:30:24Speaker 01

  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, and this isn't where you want to start, I don't think.

• 2:30:41Mark Manson?

  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 I travel and I lose everything.

• 2:31:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 2:31:05Mark Manson?

  And I'm like, oh, this sucks. Like if I'm stuck in some dark hotel room, you know, like at an uncomfortable desk, I'm just like, this sucks.

• 2:31:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I like again, building the habit and that ritual and that routine, a lot of it is place based. 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 work or, you know, they'll they'll have their computers set up in a certain way that again, you still have that trigger. You know what I mean? So, yeah, there's some mitigating factors. Again, though, these aren't going to be like these aren't going to get you like 50% gains in productivity or anything. These are on the margins, for sure.

• 2:31:46Mark Manson?

  These definitely are on the margins. I just think we we hear about them the most because they are the most easily replicated and communicated.

• 2:31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they're they're simple to grasp, too. Right, like you can you can go out and do these very easily.

• 2:31:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:00Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 2:32:06Mark Manson?

  So I mentioned 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 that drive everything home. So like, how would you describe the most common or useful systems around improving your focus?

• 2:32:22Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I've tried them all.

• 2:32:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:32:33Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:32:34Speaker 01

  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. 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 frame is deep work. 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.

• 2:33:13Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:33:13Speaker 01

  Compare that to shallow work, right? Sending emails, going to meetings, doing admin work.

• 2:33:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:18Speaker 01

  Both of them need to be done. They're both necessary, obviously. But with, especially with somebody like Cal, he really wants to optimize his life around those, that deep work phase. And so he does programming. He writes. It's a lot of creative work that demands a lot of deep focus. And so he's come up with his own system around this. And he's a big systematic kind of like, he approaches things very systematically, too.

• 2:33:42Mark Manson?

  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 of years ago.

• 2:33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:49Mark Manson?

  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, I forget exactly what he did.

• 2:33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's pretty ruthless with what he considers to be shallow tasks. Yeah, yeah, he's gotten it way down and he's he's famously not on social media. I mean, he has a YouTube channel and stuff like that, but yeah, that's actually one of his 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 deep work. It's a skill, right? It's not just a mood that you get into. And so he he's kind of designed this. I guess you would call this a 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, which is a big component of well being.

• 2:34:43Speaker 01

  And so he's he's come up with these like four rules for deep work. If we can go through those.

• 2:34:48Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 2:34:49Speaker 01

  The first one is is work deeply. So what he means by this, I know it was a little like.

• 2:34:55Mark Manson?

  Come on.

• 2:34:55Speaker 01

  A little on the nose, a little on the nose, I know.

• 2:34:59Speaker 01

  What he means is build the systems and the rituals.

• 2:35:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:02Speaker 01

  And to so that you're more likely to get into these deep work states. So everything we've been talking about at this point, that whole environmental design section, 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 to really come into place here into play here. What's allowed, what's not allowed, get your phone out of there.

• 2:35:27Mark Manson?

  Right. You know, so by work deeply, you mean distraction free?

• 2:35:31Speaker 01

  Distraction free.

• 2:35:32Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 2:35:32Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 2:35:33Mark Manson?

  I think that's clear.

• 2:35:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:35:35Mark Manson?

  I'll also like it's I read this book when it came out, but it's it's been like 12 or 13 years now. Isn't is my understanding is that deep work is is specific to highly creative, high problem solving work. So like high cognitive load, right? So you wouldn't do deep work to like. Catch up on your taxing.

• 2:35:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:35:57Mark Manson?

  Taxes or whatever.

• 2:35:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:35:59Mark Manson?

  It's you're writing a book, you're creating software, you are

• 2:36:04Mark Manson?

  doing a design schematic or drawing a blueprint or whatever. It's like things that demand tons of your cognitive energy. You make space for them.

• 2:36:14Speaker 01

  Yes, and they're and they are challenging too.

• 2:36:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:17Speaker 01

  There's a lot of overlap with flow here.

• 2:36:19Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 2:36:19Speaker 01

  Actually, in some ways, anyway, so the cognitive demand is something that's maybe just a little bit beyond your skill level at that moment. There's a huge creative component to it, though, too. Like I said, he's a programmer and a writer to like really creative tasks or professions that he's 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.

• 2:36:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:49Speaker 01

  At the end of the day.

• 2:36:50Mark Manson?

  And in my experience, you tend to tap out of deep work.

• 2:36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:36:54Mark Manson?

  At three or four hours.

• 2:36:55Speaker 01

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

• 2:37:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:10Speaker 01

  And so he doesn't do it on the weekends. He's like, 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 there's that whole thing around it, too.

• 2:37:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 2:37:24Speaker 01

  So that that first rule, work deeply, basically set up a repeatable system for yourself. That's what 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 bored state, right? So like your phone reflects reflects a 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 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.

• 2:38:03Mark Manson?

  For sure.

• 2:38:04Speaker 01

  But, but definitely like an emphasis on training your focus like a muscle, which means like letting yourself be bored in a way and figuring out how to handle that type of boredom. So that's his next rule.

• 2:38:17Mark Manson?

  The, 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, his working, working strategy. Shocker, it's not for me.

• 2:38:32Speaker 01

  Wasn't it Neil, Neil Gaiman too? Didn't he, one of his systems, I guess you could say was, he would go into his office to write.

• 2:38:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:38:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:46Speaker 01

  That was it. That was him, right?

• 2:38:47Mark Manson?

  That's it, yes.

• 2:38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:38:48Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:38:48Speaker 01

  So that's the embracing boredom thing.

• 2:38:50Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:38:51Speaker 01

  Because for him, being bored was so painful that he would just write instead.

• 2:38:54Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:38:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Which I relate to that.

• 2:38:56Speaker 01

  That.

• 2:38:56Mark Manson?

  I definitely relate to that part of it. But he would also let himself be bored to like, that would kind of spawn the new set of ideas.

• 2:39:07Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 2:39:07Mark Manson?

  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.

• 2:39:12Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:39:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I was thinking about this recently, like, how often are you bored these days?

• 2:39:17Speaker 01

  Well, okay, I'm intentional about it. I like, I force myself to be bored sometimes.

• 2:39:20Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 2:39:20Speaker 01

  So like, you know, on planes these days too.

• 2:39:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:23Speaker 01

  About half the time I'll just take my headphones off and I'll do the whole raw dog in the flight.

• 2:39:27Mark Manson?

  You raw dog flights.

• 2:39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Like parts of it, not all of it, parts of it.

• 2:39:30Mark Manson?

  Dude, I'm so productive on flights. So productive.

• 2:39:33Speaker 01

  It can't be.

• 2:39:34Mark Manson?

  It's like, I, I, seriously, if I could just work on a plane for the rest of my life, I would.

• 2:39:38Speaker 01

  I, 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.

• 2:39:48Mark Manson?

  Are you seeing any benefits to that?

• 2:39:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:39:55Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 2:39:56Speaker 01

  Which that's a benefit of boredom, I think, too, is your your mind will start wandering and start making those horizontal connections with disparate parts of your life.

• 2:40:04Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:40:04Speaker 01

  So I've definitely noticed that a few times.

• 2:40:06Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 2:40:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:40:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:13Speaker 01

  And I think helps a little bit. It's that incubation period we talked about for creativity.

• 2:40:18Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 2:40:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:18Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 2:40:19Speaker 01

  Should maybe try it a little bit more. I don't know. You talk about how you're glutton for pain, you know, and you have a high pain tolerance. Boredom might be your kryptonite.

• 2:40:26Mark Manson?

  Well, that's the thing is that pain is not boring.

• 2:40:28Speaker 01

  Boredom boredom isn't painful for you?

• 2:40:30Mark Manson?

  I'd rather be in pain than bored.

• 2:40:34Speaker 01

  So, okay, you know, the whole this, the the studies where they put people in a room to do nothing and they would shock themselves. You'd just be shocking the shit out of yourself. I can totally see you doing that.

• 2:40:43Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:40:44Speaker 01

  Well, embrace boredom. I don't know. Maybe try it out over the next few weeks.

• 2:40:48Mark Manson?

  I'll let you back to you.

• 2:40:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:40:52Speaker 01

  His third rule, I've already jumped the shark on this one, but quit social media use. He's famously not on social media. Cal.

• 2:41:01Mark Manson?

  It's funny hearing these again because.

• 2:41:03Speaker 01

  It was a long time ago when he wrote this. It's probably 10 years ago when he wrote this book.

• 2:41:06Mark Manson?

  No, like, because this book, this book was so, I don't want to say shocking, but it really was kind of seminal when it came out.

• 2:41:12Speaker 01

  It was like a cultural moment for it.

• 2:41:13Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:41:14Speaker 01

  Especially if you were online.

• 2:41:16Mark Manson?

  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. Like, 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 in 2026. And you're like, it actually sounds obvious, right? You're like, oh, of course you get off social media when you're trying to work. Like, who wouldn't do that?

• 2:41:49Speaker 01

  Now, I thought the same thing whenever this, I was like, oh, that seems a little dated. But then I also, just this week, saw new data that was like teenagers are still spending five hours plus per day on social media.

• 2:41:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:59Speaker 01

  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. 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 check or even social media necessarily. It's more about the intentionality behind it. And he, what he was arguing about, like when the people would bring up, well, that's just not feasible.

• 2:42:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:30Speaker 01

  Right? His response to that was, well, so you're saying the default is you have to be on social media? And he rejected that.

• 2:42:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:37Speaker 01

  You know, he rejected that idea that we're just doing it. We're accepting this is just the way things are.

• 2:42:42Mark Manson?

  He was way ahead of the curve on a lot of this stuff. It's always interesting to me to see, and I've noticed this to a lesser extent, I won't toot my own horn too much, but I've noticed this to a lesser extent with subtle art. Like there are things that are shocking when they come out, but then they get integrated into the culture and they just become conventional wisdom. And then 10 years later, people turn around and they're like, well, that's really obvious. Why, 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, this guy like doesn't get on email. What the fuck?

• 2:43:19Speaker 01

  Though there's still people out there who are still addicted to social media.

• 2:43:23Mark Manson?

  Of course, of course. But I'm just saying that this is standard.

• 2:43:25Speaker 01

  Yes, now we all know this.

• 2:43:26Mark Manson?

  There's nobody who hasn't heard this stuff before. Like it's, you have high school teachers probably telling their students this stuff. Whereas 10 years ago, it was this like cutting edge radical.

• 2:43:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:43:37Mark Manson?

  Thought leadership.

• 2:43:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:43:43Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:43:44Speaker 01

  Which was pretty wild at the time. Yeah, for sure. Well, okay, what is, 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. I know for me anyway, too, and this is part of his whole process is the whole energy matching, 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, because I know my, my most productive part of the day is in the first half of the day.

• 2:44:26Speaker 01

  And so, you know, you, he, he actually is like get really, really intentional about that stuff. So instead of just mindlessly checking your email all the time, 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. Have a time period for it and hack back as much of that as you can. Look at is like, do I really need to be doing this? Can I delegate it? Can I just stop doing it? One example is I'm, I'm really bad at email. I'm bad at responding to emails and that's intentional. I just don't want people emailing me all the time thinking they can do that and take up my time. I just don't.

• 2:45:03Mark Manson?

  How dare you.

• 2:45:04Speaker 01

  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. So, yeah.

• 2:45:12Mark Manson?

  I will say like one system for me that I'm religious about is batching.

• 2:45:18Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. I was gonna bring this up.

• 2:45:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It, which is similar to this, but it is.

• 2:45:24Mark Manson?

  As much as I talked about, you know, doing, kind of thriving, doing two things simultaneously. If it's, if, if I'm doing eight or nine things in the same day, I, I just noticed that my brain starts to flag and there's like an exhaustion that sets in. So I'm, I'm a huge fan of, of batching very intensely. So if, 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, and help with the app, I block that entire day to be at that office and, and help those guys. If we're shooting, right, it's like we batch these shoots. We shoot multiple episodes at a time.

• 2:46:06Mark Manson?

  We batch YouTube videos in with these shoots like it's we just take three, four days and just shoot very intensely all day, every day, and then we're done for like a month. So it's, I'm a huge, huge fan of batching.

• 2:46:19Speaker 01

  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, the methods you can do it, but he has these kind of four modes of implementation, I guess I would call them. One of them is what he calls the monastic mode, which is you just eliminate most of the shallow obligations entirely and just focus on deep work stuff, not super practical for most people, I would say. The bimodal, which is I think is kind of more what you do, which is alternate between deep work and shallow work.

• 2:46:52Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 2:46:52Speaker 01

  Like, like, and batching is part of that too.

• 2:46:54Mark Manson?

  The two.

• 2:46:55Speaker 01

  Don't mix the two. Yeah.

• 2:46:57Mark Manson?

  And I will say that when I'm in deep work, I don't, I don't multitask.

• 2:47:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:47:01Mark Manson?

  It's like if I'm writing, I'm only writing.

• 2:47:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:47:04Mark Manson?

  If I'm working on a book, I'm only working on a book. 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.

• 2:47:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:47:17Mark Manson?

  Three or four small things at once.

• 2:47:18Speaker 01

  Okay. Another one is rhythmic though. So same deep work hours every day. I lean more towards this actually. Like I'll set my, my days up. It's usually try to get at least two to three hours of deep work done in the mornings.

• 2:47:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:30Speaker 01

  Is what I, why, 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. I don't know, but you'd fit deep work in whenever time permits, basically, which is really hard and like.

• 2:47:53Mark Manson?

  Sounds awful.

• 2:47:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:48:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:48:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:09Speaker 01

  So most people are going to probably fall in that bimodal to rhythmic type of deep work schedule. Now, the way he does it though, and this is kind of, I follow some version of this. I actually use his, 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 time to get something done. You put it on your schedule. You're like, this is what I'm from 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM. This is what I'm doing. And you only work on that for that amount of time.

• 2:48:54Speaker 01

  I build some flexibility into it. If something comes up, then I just, I have another column and I, I move things around fine. Okay. But like I said before, time boxing 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. It, 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 like realistic with my time too. So it's like, oh, okay, I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonna write a 10 or 12 page thing in an hour. That's probably not gonna happen.

• 2:49:33Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:49:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:49:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:43Speaker 01

  So I did time boxing is like a big, it's big in the productivity world. 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.

• 2:49:53Mark Manson?

  It feels too rigid to me.

• 2:49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:54Mark Manson?

  Because what I often notice is I'll get, you know, let's say I set aside two hours for research. But then I get two hours in and I'm like finding all this really interesting stuff. You know, I like having the flexibility of like, okay, maybe I go three hours.

• 2:50:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50:11Mark Manson?

  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 checklist 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.

• 2:50:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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, that's Cal's framework in a very small nutshell. Okay.

• 2:50:49Speaker 01

  Some of the other things that kind of come up from this, though, this is one that you brought to my attention. I didn't know about with the maker schedule and the manager's 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 deep work stuff.

• 2:51:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:06Speaker 01

  Right? Do you want to talk, you want to talk a little bit about it or?

• 2:51:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's been a while since I've read it, but it's, it's. So basically the maker's schedule is optimized around more deep work. It's creative work, problem solving, your, you know, your coding for long stretches at a time, you're writing a book, you're writing articles or whatever. So you want to, you basically kind of want to create like a container and then give yourself freedom within that container to really explore and think deeply and be distraction free. The manager's schedule is much more rigid and structured like it's.

• 2:51:41Speaker 01

  It's more like hour blocks.

• 2:51:43Mark Manson?

  Right. It's all that admin work. That's it. There's lots of batching, right? So you probably want to have all your one-on-one meetings on the same day each week so that you don't have to like, feel like you're jumping back and forth all the time. Like any sort of sorts of reviews or approvals or board meetings or whatever. It's like the same time every month. So it's like very structured, rigid, predictable.

• 2:52:04Mark Manson?

  Which is in many ways, kind of the opposite of the maker's.

• 2:52:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:52:08Mark Manson?

  And then, and then it's weird because then sometimes if you're in a creative industry like us, you need to find a way to balance the two, right? So I'm similar to you. I 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. So it's hard. It's, it's hard finding the balance if you need to like, feel like you do both.

• 2:52:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And one, 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.

• 2:52:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:52:59Mark Manson?

  Oh, it's yeah.

• 2:53:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm definitely one of those people too, where it's like, if I got a dentist appointment in the afternoon, I'm like, well, there goes my afternoon. I'm not getting anything else done, pretty much. But I think the takeaway I took from that was if you are somebody who's in like a more creative industry or 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 them about that being like, hey, can we figure this out a little bit here because it's like wrecking my, what I need to get done in a way that is most useful for me anyway.

• 2:53:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and I'll say too, in my experience, people who work in media and entertainment, they have like agents, managers, publishers, editors, like they have kind of an intuitive understanding of that, like they know if you're the creative, they know to leave you alone. And they know to like, just when they check in, it's like a very gentle check in. It's like, hey, wondering how it's going.

• 2:53:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:59Mark Manson?

  You know, like zero pressure, right? And then it's really only if a big deadline is coming up or if they sense that you're flailing and you need a push, then they'll, then they'll start exerting pressure on you to get you more focused and locked in, but, but they also understand that it's if you try to put too much structure around it, it kind of kills the golden goose.

• 2:54:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think that's one of the big takeaways from all of this is that there is kind of a Goldilocks zone here of, of structure versus freedom, structure versus chaos even too. So, yeah, I don't, I was thinking about this and I just don't know, like, what is your productivity system? Mark, do you really have one or is it like, I feel like it is kind of a Goldilocks zone that works for you.

• 2:54:43Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:54:44Speaker 01

  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?

• 2:54:57Speaker 01

  You also have like, we have a team of people who we help to schedule everything and we got to coordinate things.

• 2:55:01Mark Manson?

  I will say, I think, I feel myself begrudgingly being pulled more into a manager's schedule.

• 2:55:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:55:08Mark Manson?

  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.

• 2:55:27Mark Manson?

  So it, things are getting more structured, especially doing more video and shoots and everything. It's like, you can't just wake up and like, text the team and be like, "Hey, let's shoot a thing at 1:30 today." Like, it just, no, you have to like, put it on the calendar weeks in advance. I mean, you 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 gonna get done. When are the scripts gonna get done? When's the research gonna get done? When is the social content gonna 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.

• 2:56:12Mark Manson?

  Lot more meetings, lot more check-ins, lot more approvals. And it's, it's hard. It's funny, because it's like, these days, I would say, I probably am able to carve out

• 2:56:25Mark Manson?

  maybe two days a month, three days a month, for like, just really pure creative work or deep work, like lots of writing. And I find like, when I am able to do that, it feels so liberating. It's like, very freeing and satisfying. I'm like, "Ah, I miss this."

• 2:56:43Mark Manson?

  So I, 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, and create various systems and operations to like...

• 2:56:58Mark Manson?

  Free up that that deep work time. But generally speaking, I would say over the last 10 or 12 years, it's very similar to what you described. Mornings were 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.

• 2:57:25Mark Manson?

  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.

• 2:57:37Speaker 01

  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 do you, what's your general take on those? And do you think you'd ever go back to those?

• 2:57:49Mark Manson?

  So for people listening, what you're referring to are like the the apps that like block websites, social media, YouTube,

• 2:57:57Mark Manson?

  you know, Netflix, whatever, whatever your distraction du jour is, like these apps will block it out for you. I used them a lot when I wrote books. Since I stopped writing books, I kind of got away from them. I didn't feel, I don't really feel like I need them anymore. And I think it's because it's it's when I find myself flagging or losing interest in something, there's usually something else that needs to get done. That's pretty urgent. And so I can kind of do that little task switch that keeps my brain engaged.

• 2:58:27Mark Manson?

  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.

• 2:58:39Speaker 01

  Buzz in the phone, yeah.

• 2:58:40Mark Manson?

  It can, it can derail like an entire morning. It's, it can often take days to get through a section of a book, kind of figure out what it is, what it should be, what it means.

• 2:58:55Mark Manson?

  So you really, really need a lot of that uninterrupted time. And it is, it is a lot more stressful and difficult. Like it's once you're, once you're six months into a book, you're so emotionally invested. You've, I mean, you've told the whole world that you're writing it. You're probably on a deadline. You've probably signed a big contract. It's a lot of pressure. It's very intense. And also chances, you're six months in, chances are it's, it's not going very well.

• 2:59:26Speaker 01

  That's, that's the point where you're like, why am I doing this?

• 2:59:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah, you're like, 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. 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, to bring out the big guns.

• 2:59:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:59:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Like tie yourself down.

• 3:00:00Mark Manson?

  Like Clockwork Orange style.

• 3:00:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:00:02Mark Manson?

  Write, write the fucking book.

• 3:00:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I've definitely used them too on and off, but I, I would agree. It's only like, if I'm really like, okay, I've got these couple of weeks or whatever, where really got something big I need to get done, then I'll bust them back out. But I don't use them regularly either anymore. I do know, like, uh, my girlfriend, like I've mentioned, has ADHD, and she uses one of them for her phone, uh, that it's, um, I think it's like a, it's like a little animal or something that takes over the screen and it's knitting.

• 3:00:29Mark Manson?

  Oh, yeah. It's called a Focus Friend.

• 3:00:31Speaker 01

  Focus Friend, that's the one, yeah.

• 3:00:32Mark Manson?

  It's really cool.

• 3:00:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, uh, if you interrupt it, then the, the knitting little animal gets sad and

• 3:00:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:39Speaker 01

  you don't get your sweater finished or whatever it is.

• 3:00:41Mark Manson?

  They've gotten very clever with them. Since I use them, like back when I used them, they were just these annoying block.

• 3:00:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a block, yeah.

• 3:00:48Mark Manson?

  But now they've, they've got one that's like a tree that you water, like, so the longer you go without picking up your phone, the more the tree gets watered, the more it grows. And then you see how many trees you can grow and each month, and it like tracks for you and, you know, it's, they've gotten very, very smart about it.

• 3:01:04Speaker 01

  Empathy hijacking kind of.

• 3:01:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah, gamification. Um, so it's, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of cool stuff.

• 3:01:11Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, yeah. Um, so like, I'm not going to get too deep into like a whole bunch of different systems. Like I said, I've tried them all. I don't think any of them is a magic bullet. There's no one system fits all for sure. I think these guided principles though, and putting the guardrails around yourself, know yourself well enough.

• 3:01:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:27Speaker 01

  To, to know that which guardrails you need to put up. I think that's a good place to start anyway. It just takes a lot of experimentation. So I don't know if we can give a lot of individual advice on that.

• 3:01:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I honestly think the 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 without distraction. For admin work, managerial work, you want to batch aggressively.

• 3:02:00Mark Manson?

  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.

• 3:02:09Mark Manson?

  For people listening, Pomodoro is supposedly the optimal amount of chunks to work in is 50 minutes and take 10 minute breaks. 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. Like, that is actually optimal productivity. It does help you focus if you like give your mind a rest periodically.

• 3:02:41Mark Manson?

  So I think all these principles are true and important. It's the implementation into your actual day to day work life. That's going to look completely different based on your personality, your profession, what you're trying to accomplish, what your goals are, and so on.

• 3:03:02Mark Manson?

  So what would you say, Drew, is the 80/20 of your focus?

• 3:03:07Speaker 01

  I mean, I think two big things, I think we maybe already gave this one away. But values alignment.

• 3:03:13Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 3:03:13Speaker 01

  Like, what are you choosing to focus on? That's probably the biggest one.

• 3:03:19Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 3:03:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:03:29Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:03:29Speaker 01

  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, 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 where we are right now. This is what, these are your only options right now.

• 3:03:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:55Speaker 01

  I think that's really just, that's the 80/20 right there. And again, it's personal, it's highly individual, I think. What works for me doesn't work for you. That's why we don't give all this like really detailed advice about these little tactics or hacks or apps or whatever. It's because everybody's a little bit different. You and I are very different.

• 3:04:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:14Speaker 01

  But we usually wind up in very similar spots. So just having that intentional container that you create for yourself and really getting like self-aware around why you might be getting distracted or procrastinating or whatever it is. Go back and listen to the procrastination episode or the emotions episode too is a really good one, a really good compliment to this one as well.

• 3:04:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:37Speaker 01

  But I think those two things are by and large going to get you just about everything that you need.

• 3:04:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:46Mark Manson?

  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 situations I can trust myself in and which situations I can't trust myself in.

• 3:05:02Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah.

• 3:05:03Mark Manson?

  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 focus or get anything useful done and then I stay away from them. Question, so something that we did not address and I think people might be surprised we didn't address, do you think focus is a skill?

• 3:05:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do.

• 3:05:29Mark Manson?

  Okay. In what sense?

• 3:05:32Speaker 01

  I think in the sense that you can, well, you can get better at it by practicing at it.

• 3:05:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:39Speaker 01

  By noticing the triggers that distract you.

• 3:05:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:05:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:01Speaker 01

  I don't know, I don't know if it's so much, you can treat it like a muscle, I guess, sure. I think you can start out where it's like, okay, I can really only focus for anything on for 10 minutes at a time. We'll start there.

• 3:06:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:06:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:23Speaker 01

  Right? Because like you already mentioned, you probably really only get two to three, maybe four hours a day of like deep work in.

• 3:06:30Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:06:30Speaker 01

  That's probably a limit for almost, for most people. There's probably some freaks out there that can get a six to eight hour day and have deep focus, but.

• 3:06:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah. So I got a spicy take.

• 3:06:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:06:39Mark Manson?

  I don't think it's a skill.

• 3:06:41Speaker 01

  You don't think it's a skill?

• 3:06:42Mark Manson?

  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.

• 3:06:55Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 3:06:56Mark Manson?

  And kind of coming back to the research at the top of the show, it's like the technology's not destroying our ability to focus, it's just complicating our ability to focus. Like the capabilities in there, it's just, are we able to access it? And a lot of this came up because I was looking at some philosophy about focus, attention, mindfulness. And it's interesting because a number of philosophers differentiate between attention and awareness, right? So attention is kind of like whatever you're, you're consciously.

• 3:07:37Mark Manson?

  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.

• 3:07:48Speaker 01

  Hmm, okay.

• 3:07:49Mark Manson?

  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.

• 3:08:06Speaker 01

  Okay, so you're almost saying like focus is almost just automatic.

• 3:08:09Mark Manson?

  You're always.

• 3:08:10Speaker 01

  You're always, you're always paying attention to something.

• 3:08:11Mark Manson?

  You're always focusing on something.

• 3:08:13Speaker 01

  But whether you're aware of it or not.

• 3:08:15Mark Manson?

  Whether, yeah, the question is, are you focusing on what you want to be focusing on? And are you aware of what you're focusing on?

• 3:08:21Speaker 01

  That's a good one, okay.

• 3:08:23Mark Manson?

  And this segues perfectly into our next episode, which is on mindfulness.

• 3:08:26Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 3:08:27Mark Manson?

  Which is really why I brought this up.

• 3:08:29Speaker 01

  I see what you did there.

• 3:08:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah, you like that?

• 3:08:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good little promo there, I like it.

• 3:08:35Mark Manson?

  All right, biggest takeaway.

• 3:08:37Speaker 01

  So I mentioned this briefly earlier. The, the value of clarity on focus. I always kind of knew this, like, yeah, okay, when I, when I sit down, I kind of need, you need a goal.

• 3:08:49Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:08:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:09:00Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:09:01Speaker 01

  What I tend to do too, I, I tend to see a big project in front of me and get overwhelmed. A lot of people have this, this problem. You have all this stuff you have to do, where do I even start? Oh my God, I get overwhelmed and then I just shut down.

• 3:09:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:13Speaker 01

  What I've found is that the, like clarity around, uh, 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. Like where do I even start? Like, how do I eat this elephant? Right?

• 3:09:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:09:50Speaker 01

  No, 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 a kind of an aha moment through all this. Like I'd been doing it, but I wasn't aware that I was doing it before. And now that I am, I'm like, oh, I need to just, I really need to double down on that.

• 3:10:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:14Speaker 01

  And, and find even more ways to get clear about what I'm going to do and what I want to get out of any block of given time that I spend on anything.

• 3:10:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:24Speaker 01

  So that was a real big one for me.

• 3:10:25Mark Manson?

  I would say the, the big thing for me is just kind of the, it's not even a reframe, but just the, the realization that a lack of focus is really just downstream of a lack of other things. Right? Like I, when I think about my own productivity and desire to focus on things, to be present in certain situations, I tend 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. Whereas like, it was very interesting going into the research and really just trying to like,

• 3:11:10Mark Manson?

  you know, what I tend to do for these episodes, I don't do as much research as, as you and the, the research team do. But like, my goal with these episodes is always to kind of take all the research that you guys do and just really like, how can I compress this into like the simplest concepts as possible? And that realization of like, it's, it's actually a lack of something. Like if you're, if you're lacking focus, it's because you're either lacking a sense of what's important. You're lacking clarity on what you should be doing. You're lacking calmness. You're feeling like hijacked by your emotions or, or there's a lack of health, right? There's like, you're just biomechanically not ready to, to be focused on something. So.

• 3:11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:11:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah, that, that was just like. That was very interesting for me because I tend to think of things like focus and productivity. It's almost this separate category of what we usually talk about, which is like values and purpose and direction and all this stuff. But yeah, no, it's, it's, it is kind of downstream.

• 3:12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:12:13Mark Manson?

  It's like if you are in a job that you absolutely fucking hate and you're working with a bunch of people you don't like, like there's, there's no productivity system that's going to fix that. Like you're never-

• 3:12:24Speaker 01

  Your mind is going to be consumed with fixing that instead of-

• 3:12:27Mark Manson?

  Exactly. Like you're never going to be locked in.

• 3:12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:12:30Mark Manson?

  You're never going to find flow. You're never going to have like satisfying deep work sessions. So yeah, it is, it is, I guess my biggest takeaway is that focus is, is a downstream effect of getting the other stuff right. And it's conversely, I think what we'll see in the next episode is that mindfulness or awareness is upstream. And it's funny that we tend to conflate those two concepts all the time, right? Like we think that, we tend to think of like meditation as building your ability to focus. But actually what it's building is your awareness and your mindfulness of yourself. And so the, the awareness is upstream of everything. The awareness is like what tells you like, oh, I actually hate my job. Oh, I don't respect the people I work with.

• 3:13:15Mark Manson?

  Oh, I should probably find a better situation, then I'll be able to do good work. Whereas focus is just kind of like that, that pure rubber meets the road. Am I getting the thing done that I want to get done?

• 3:13:27Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. And that's where all the systems and everything come in and yeah. Yeah. No, I would definitely agree that we, we tried, it's, we try to add something in when we're trying to like be more productive or get focused.

• 3:13:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:40Speaker 01

  Really what we need to do is subtract.

• 3:13:42Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:13:42Speaker 01

  Like get ruthless and subtract.

• 3:13:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's a good one. And sets us up real nice for next time. I like it.

• 3:13:51Mark Manson?

  That is all for our episode this week. As always, if you want to get a summary PDF with everything that we talked about here, you can go to solvedpodcast.com/ focus. Congratulations, you focused for the entire episode. You clearly did not need to listen to it. But thank you for listening to it. We will see you next time.