3 Hours of Hyperfocused Work A Day For 3 Months Will Change Your Life
The Amplified Impact Podcast
February 4th, 2023
Unlock your full potential with just three hours of hyper-focused work each day for three months. Find out more about this productivity strategy.
On today’s episode, Anthony dives into the top three strategies that will help you accomplish more in less time.
These are only a few tools in the vast toolbox of productivity. Discover the power of environment design, time blocking, and mental preparation.
Whether you’re trying to improve your productivity or simply seeking a better focus, this episode has got you covered.
Get ready to revolutionize your work and take control of your time.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“What’s the point of having rituals and these routines that no longer serve you? Just recognize that there’s different seasons of growth that we all go through. And so what works for you now might not work for you in the future. ” – Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony: [00:00:00] And welcome back to the podcast everybody. It’s so good to have you here. Today we’re going to talk about how three hours of hyper-focused work every single day for three months will fundamentally change your life. And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to break down three techniques, three tactics, three strategies, whatever you want to call them, that are going to help you get more done in less time, which is, one of the great things about being hyper-focused and productivity.
Anthony: So, Now, full disclaimer, this is not an exhaustive list. Obviously these are not like the only three things that you could do. There’s just, there’s so many and in the world of like achieving productivity productivity or hyper-focused and getting, like milking your potential for everything it’s worth. Understand that like we’re, we’re trying to stack as many tools and tool chest as possible so that you have them there when you need them.
Anthony: And it’s not that like every project is going to demand that you go and pull out all the tools. Like sometimes you just need a screwdriver, sometimes you just need a hammer. [00:01:00] And so we want to have a robust tool chest to be able to pull from, because one of the things I’ve really come to realize about myself, and I think this probably holds true for the majority of people out there, is.
Anthony: Things only work for me for a limited period of. And, and this could just be like the hedonic treadmill, which is saying that humans are really great at adapting to different levels of stimuli to adapt to their environment. So, like, you know, when times are good and you start making really good money, you know, you’re going to feel the impact of that initially as it starts, as it first impacts your life.
Anthony: Now you’re driving the nicer car, now you’re eating the better food, but it’s, you’re, you’re really going to quickly adapt to that new quality of. Right, and now it’s not going to be as pleasurable as it once was. And in the reverse way then, you know, the hedonic treadmill works and reversed. So like if you take a step back from that quality of life, it’s going to really suck for a little bit.
Anthony: Like maybe now you’re driving not the nicest car, maybe you’re living in the nice, not nicest, location, [00:02:00] but eventually you adapt to it and it just becomes the new normal. And that’s the hedonic treadmill. I mentioned this because for me, in the pursuit of focus and productivity is that like I get really adapted to different techniques sometimes and they stop being becoming as effective.
Anthony: And for a long time I thought that was a failure on my part and that the answer was, well that’s just me. I just need to keep doing the thing. I need to keep pushing through. And so for a 450 days straight, I meditated every single. Every single day. That’s a lot of meditation. And somewhere around day 200, I probably stopped benefiting from it because now I was just going through the motions.
Anthony: I was sitting down, I was doing the work, I was putting it in the time, but I didn’t really come out of those meditation sessions anymore. Feeling more focused, more clear, better or anything. I felt more frustrated and like I had checked a box. And the same with gratitude journaling. For a long time, I was grad, I was doing my gratitude journal.
Anthony: I was listening out to three things every day. I was grateful for. [00:03:00] And at a certain point, I, I realized that no matter how hard I tried, like I, I couldn’t feel grateful like I was writing the things down, but I just couldn’t summon like the feeling of gratitude. And I was like, what’s the point of having these rituals and these routines when they no longer serve you?
Anthony: And, and just recognize that like there’s different seasons of growth that we all go through. And so what works for you now might not work for you in the future. And interestingly enough, it might come back around. I, I recently discovered meditation again. And it’s, it’s powerful again. And so sometimes you just need to have the tools and the, the wherewithal to say, this is no longer the right tool for this task.
Anthony: I’m going to put it on the shelf. I’m going to try a different one. And you start having more that you can mix into your life. And so all that’s to say this is not the entire toolbox, but these are three ways that. You can really improve the quality of your work, quality of your focus. So number one is environment design.
Anthony: Now, when I think about environment design, I think about it in a couple different ways. [00:04:00] Number one is thinking about like your physical workspace, which is your office, it’s your desk, and how you set it up so that it’s maximally conducive for focus. So for me, you know, I have a window over there. I have a window back here, and I’m not looking at either one of them when I’m doing my work.
Anthony: I have books in front of me. This whole wall in front of me is covered with books, and books back there. I love books. They’re everywhere cuz those inspire me. When I look at a book, it, it jogs a memory of where I was and what I was doing. When I was reading that book and the content’s there within, and sometimes, you know, creativity is the ability to take two disparate ideas and connect them in new novel ways.
Anthony: And I find that my creativity is vastly enhanced when I can just look at that book and I go, oh yeah, that book and that book, and then I can combine them. And so environment and design is very important that we are eliminating distractions because as we’ve pointed out in in past episode, Focus is the ability to resist distractions.
Anthony: And one of the things that we can do there to make that even easier, to make it more [00:05:00] likely that we can focus, is to make it so that the distractions never appear in the first place. And that’s where environment design is really at its core. so important. So designing your desk in such a way, laying it out so that it’s not.
Anthony: Full of distractions and knickknacks and things that could pull you out of the zone. The other areas that I find are really important to think about in terms of environment design is your computer, like your, your actual desktop, your laptop, and then your phone. Making sure that these are set up in a way that.
Anthony: When you’re using your, your phone, it is a tool for effectiveness, not a tool for distraction or sucking your focus away from you. And same with your computer, is that you’re probably going to be doing the vast majority of your, your thought work on a computer. And so if it’s not set up in terms of like tabs that you have open on your computer, the use of, you know, keeping a clean decluttered workspace, then your work is going to suffer.
Anthony: That’s just a. And then last I think about vibe design, which is designing a vibe [00:06:00] like, and when I’m talking about the office and the books and everything, I’m trying to create an environment that’s friendly and inviting for work. I love coming in here and doing work in my office. It feels awesome. It’s like my fortress of focus.
Anthony: It’s, it’s great. Other places that people can really enjoy, like coffee shops, like really nice coffee shops. Here’s a hidden hack. Somebody shared with me the other day, which is that you can go and work in the lobby of hotels. They have coffee, they have food, they have everything that you need. They’re open all the time, and they won’t kick you out, and you can meet new people, but you can also just go into deep focus there.
Anthony: I was like, that’s really cool. So think about how you’re designing your vibe when you’re trying to get your work done. And make sure that you’re matching it for the type of tasks that you’re doing. This was something that was really interesting. I was reading the book Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, which is his second book.
Anthony: followed up his first book, which was Influence and it was like a really big bestseller. It’s really great book. Both of them actually. Fantastic. But he was talking about how when he was first writing Influence, he was on Sabb. And he was riding it in two different places. One was [00:07:00] his apartment, which his desk was sitting in front of a window overlooking a coffee shop in a, a hustling, bustling street.
Anthony: The other location is, was in his, his office at his university, which was like this very Cambridge-esque, lots of brick, very stodgy, very academic, right? And what he found was that when he was writing in his academic setting, his writing took on a more formal academic. And when he was writing in his more informal setting over the coffee shop, his writing took on a more informal tone.
Anthony: And that was really important because he was trying to write a book that would be popular for the layperson to consume on the topic of persuasion and influence. So writing in an academic stodgy voice wasn’t going to help him. So think about, okay, is my environment conducive for the type of work I’m asking of.
Anthony: Am I trying to do really deep creative work right now, or am I trying to do analytical organizational work? And like, those are going to put you into two, two different places. So pick your environment accordingly. All right, so number two that I want to talk about [00:08:00] here is gamification. So gamification. If it’s interesting, if you’ve ever observed like a pack of kids playing basketball, like if they’re just sitting on the court, shooting around like it, the game has a certain level of energy that is not present.
Anthony: When they suddenly decide to keep score, like as soon as the kids decide that they’re not just horsing around and just like shooting the ball willy-nilly, as soon as there’s a score being kept in that as soon as there’s a competition, the game fundamentally changes the energy in which they’re playing.
Anthony: Changes. And so this is the same thing in your, in your work life is when you are doing your work, if you do not gamify it, if you do not have a way of quantifying the score and actually like trying to continually, pursue improvement, then chances are you’re just going to go through the motion. And I know this is the case because I want you to think about how fast you are as a typist.
Anthony: Think about how fast you can type. [00:09:00] Depending on how old you are. I’m 38, so I can still remember taking typing classes in like eighth, ninth, and 10th grade. And at that time I was the fastest kid by far, and this was like early days computers. And so at that point I was writing like 80 words per minute or typing 80 words per minute.
Anthony: That was like lightning compared to people like everybody else who was struggling to get like 40 words. Okay. Nowadays, because you’ve probably lived with a computer in a, in a keyboard for many, many, many years, you could probably do 60, 70, 80 words per minute, but have you improved beyond? Like, when was the last time that you saw a meaningful improvement in your ability to type and the speed and the accuracy in which you do it?
Anthony: Currently I write about a hundred and I can, I can type about 125 words per minute with like 97% accuracy, and I’ve been more or less plateaued there for the past. TE decade, I would say maybe even longer, like I haven’t budged. And it’s because you type every single day, you type thousands of characters every single day, but you’re not doing it with intentionality.
Anthony: You’re not turning it into a game where you’re [00:10:00] trying to improve. And as a result, You’re going through the motions, but you’re not getting everything that you could out of the task. And so whether it’s driving a car or it’s typing, like these are activities that you do so much, but you’re not necessarily getting better at.
Anthony: So repetition is not leading us to mastery. It’s intentional repetition. And so when we sit down to do a task, when we gamify it, when we create. And when we chalk the field and say, okay, here’s how I’m playing it. Here’s how I’m planning to try and improve, and here’s my strategy for doing it. As we start doing that for really menial tasks like emails, then you start to get through those tasks faster and faster, and it makes it more fun.
Anthony: Like everybody likes playing games, so if your emails suck or doing the laundry sucks, like turn it into a game and it’s going to pass that much faster and you’re going to get much better at it. Number three. I find is one of the easiest ways for pretty much zero work to improve the quality of your work and also the quantity of your work.
Anthony: It’s simply just [00:11:00] define what winning looks like before you start the task. Just define what winning looks like. We’ve talked about this in past episodes that most people live their life or live their day never having defined what’s it mean to win the day. As a result, they finished their day and they have their to-do list, and it was really long and maybe got a little bit shorter, but then they added a couple more things onto it and they don’t really feel like they made progress despite having gotten a lot done.
Anthony: And it’s because they didn’t sit down at the beginning of the day and say, Hey, this is what winning looks. If I do X, Y, Z, if I finish this, this, and this, if I put in this much time and energy into this, this, and this, that’s a. Regardless of how much else I get done, all I got to do is do these things and doing them in this way.
Anthony: And just by doing that one thing, by chalking the field and saying, this is what winning looks like, setting a goal for the task that you’re about to perform is going to, one, improve the likelihood that you actually achieve that goal. Because we know that [00:12:00] having goals is like, like setting a goal is step one to achieving.
Anthony: But number two is that you’re going to leave at the end of the day feeling accomplished, like you made progress because you did the thing that you said you’d do. You won the game that you made for yourself. So these are very basic, very basic, but very powerful principles of environment design, gamification and defined winning.
Anthony: You do these three things, and I guarantee you do these for like, for in just three months. I’m, I’m, I’m going to guarantee that you’re going to see remarkable results. So if you’re cur, if you’re curious in like learning even more about the tool chest of like hyper-focused productivity, all of those things, and like how you can get out of your own way, get more things done, cut through, distraction, all that noise.
Anthony: check out the Hyperfocus Masterclass. I think it’ll bring you a ton of value. Go to beyond the apex.com/hyperfocus. Check that out. It’s literally all the tools that I’ve acquired over my 30 plus years of battling daily with adhd. [00:13:00] I think it can serve you. So go check that out now. As always, people, I love the heck out of you.
Anthony: I appreciate you taking your time to join me. It’s, it’s a gift. I, and, and it’s not lost on me, so thank you. I appreciate it. And as always, Stay great.
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