The 10 Commandments of Hyperfocus
The Hyperfocused Entrepreneur
December 31, 2022
Read time: 10.5 minutes
There’s a war being fought daily for the most precious resource on this planet: Your Attention.
Trillions of dollars and countless man-hours are spent trying to separate you from your attention, and when they succeed… they get paid.
Or, put another way: When they succeed, you lose.
Most of us are losing this war.
We’re outgunned by the army of behavioral psychologists, computer programmers, and marketers working around the clock to devise new ways of sucking you into staying on their social media platform for just a second longer.
Not only are we outgunned, but most of us made it out of basic training (high school) and nobody bothered showing us how to actually wield our most powerful weapon:
Our Focus.
Most people are squandering their focus… and therefore their lives.
I used to be one of these people. (Okay, in truth… more often than not, I’m still one of these people).
I’ve been battling severe ADHD my entire life. Throughout my twenties I struggled to tap into the potential I felt inside. Somehow I always managed to come up short.
My inability to focus, to show up consistently and do the work, completely sabotaged my life.
It got so bad that one day, I woke up at 28 years old, living in the back of a van with $80k of debt, and realized I was wasting my life.
Ya know what?
Forget ADHD. This is a problem we ALL struggle with.
And in that struggle I discovered some things that actually helped. Some things that enabled me to make meaningful progress towards my greatness.
Today, I’m going to share a framework that helped me turn the tide of the attention-war. In the process, you’ll learn how to overcome:
- Distraction
- Procrastination
- Mixed Priorities
- Muddy Thinking
- Mental Exhaustion
- Feelings of Overwhelm
Well do this by unpacking The 10 Commandments of Hyperfocus.
Are you ready to turn your hyperfocused attention into a weapon of mass destruction?
Great. Then let’s get to it!
The 10 Commandments of Hyperfocus
1. Never Forget Your Most Valuable Asset
This is one of the most common misconceptions in the world.
If you ask 100 people on the street, “What’s your most valuable asset?”, the majority of them will likely say Time.
But that’s completely wrong.
First, one of the fundamental aspects of an asset is that it’s something you own or can control.
Time is neither.
If I come to you and ask for a minute of your time, you give me an actual unit of time that you’ve stockpiled in the corner.
Second, (and this might come as a surprise), but your time actually has ZERO value. To anyone.
Which flies in the face of the idea that: Time is money.
If this were true, you could simply show up to work, pass out, and still get paid.
You put in your time, right?
Sure, but that doesn’t matter. ‘Cause what you’re actually paid for is your presence and how present you are is a matter of how focused you are.
So our first commandment of hyperfocus is to never forget that FOCUS is your most valuable asset.
2. Always Know Where Your Focus Is Best Spent
The first step in mastering your focus is to understand where it’s being stolen from you.
Most of us are terrible at tracking what we do and how long we do it throughout the day. In my experience, we overestimate how much time we spend on useful tasks by around 50%.
For example:
If you tell me you spent 3 hours today working on your book, then I can be reasonably certain you actually only spent around 1.5 hours writing, and the other 1.5 hours getting up for bathroom breaks, checking your phone, email, social media, and generally doing a whole lot of things that aren’t writing.
Here’s the first rule of improving at anything in life:
That which gets measured, gets managed.
To manage our focus we must first measure it. We do this by creating a Focus Audit.
To create a Focus Audit, open a spreadsheet and pause at the top of each hour to track exactly what you worked on in the previous 60 minutes.
For the more tech-savvy, use a time tracking app like Toggl or Harvest.
Do this for an entire week and you’ll have a pretty good sense for how much time you’re actually wasting in a day.
That’s good. It means we now understand where we’re leaking attention and can start plugging the holes.
3. Energy Fuels Focus
It’s simple:
No Energy = No Focus
This is not a revolutionary concept. I mean, we all know this, right?
And yet, raise your hand if you’re guilty of trashing your body with zero exercise, poor sleep, and even worse nutrition?
For those sitting in the back who can’t see, both of my hands are in the air.
The truth is, when life gets busy the first thing that often goes out the window is our self-care.
We compromise our sleep schedule.
We eat for convenience, not nutrition.
We exercise less, because let’s face it… You’re busy and just don’t have the time to carve out an hour in the gym everyday.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that the quality of your work is going to decline.
So we’ve got to ask ourselves the question:
Is the goal to be busy or to be effective?
When viewed through this lens, we see that true success is never determined by how much you get done, but by WHAT you get done.
Focus on the right things and the right things will fall into place.
The three most right things that you should never compromise are your 3 Levers of Energy:
- Sleep
- Exercise
- Nutrition
Get’em dialed and keep’em dialed.
I promise future-you will thank you.
4. Close Cognitive Loops
You can only juggle so many thoughts at a time.
Personally, I have a terrible short-term memory.
In fact, here’s a funny side story:
I was re-diagnosed with ADHD at 27 years old. To do this, they administered an “IQ” test called the Woodcock-Johnson.
It takes hours to administer this test which is brutal, but by the end you’ll have a pretty good gauge for all your cognitive strengths and weaknesses.
My results were wildly variable (which is what you’d expect from somebody with ADHD).
I scored extremely high (2-standard deviations above the norm) in three categories, and ridiculously low (2-standard deviations BELOW the norm) in two categories.
One of the categories I tested poorly in is short-term memory.
The moral of the story: Things pretty much go in one ear and right out the other for me
To combat this I’ve created systems to get thoughts and ideas out of my head as quickly and effectively as possible.
The longer a thought swirls around my brain, the more likely it is I’m just gonna lose it.
And this makes sense if you think about your brain like a computer running multiple applications simultaneously.
Your system likely isn’t going to strain to run 2-3 programs simultaneously, but if you open 30 programs at a time, then the whole system bogs down.
The solution that’s worked for me is to keep a Second Brain.
Simply put, this is a software or a journal I use to brain dump my squishy organic mind into an external resource every single day.
Here’s more on the topic for those interested in diving deeper:
Free Download: The 3 Step Millionaire Productivity System
5. Set Clear Priorities
“There is no greater waste than to do with excellence that which shouldn’t be done at all.” – Peter Drucker
This might be my all-time favorite quote given how often I reference it.
But the reason I reference it so damn much is because in my experience, most people are fail to achieve their goals because they simply waste time doing things that don’t matter.
As a good rule for life:
Don’t waste time doing stupid shit.
Okay, so it’s one thing to say that, but obviously nobody wakes up in the morning thinking they should twiddle it away on silly things that don’t matter.
Life just kind of happens and sometimes you get sucked into the weeds..
I get it. I lived in the weeds for the better part of two decades.
Here’s how I got out:
I created a Priority Management System like this one:
(I walk through exactly how to use this system in the resource mentioned earlier (The 3 Step Millionaire Productivity System).
6. Never Set A goal Without A System
Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, said something that might ruffle some feathers in his book, How to Fail At Practically Everything and Still Win Big:
But here’s the truth… He’s absolutely right.
Here’s what he said:
“Goals are for losers. Winners use systems.”
Okay, maybe this isn’t THAT controversial, but it is worth unpacking, because in my experience people are far better goal-setters than they are goal-getters.
The reason? They suck at creating systems.
A number of psychology studies have shown the most effective system for achieving goals is to create an Implementation Intention.
Simply put, you write down:
What are you going to do?
When are you going to do it?
I know this seems incredibly basic, perhaps even remedial, but remember…
Fundamentals executed at an exceptional level win championships.
So, whenever you set a goal for yourself (which is very timely given we’re waltzing into the New Year any day now), you must document exactly what you plan to do to achieve that goal and then you must put it on the calendar.
Because here’s a truth that took me way too many years to figure out:
Either you own your schedule, or your schedule owns you. There is no third option.
7. Guard Your Intention
Your brain is a miracle. But it’s also incredibly lazy.
Its only job is to keep you alive while using as little energy as possible.
If left to its own devices your brain would keep you zoned out, eating sweets, and scrolling media from the safety and comfort of your couch.
Problem is, YOU are not your brain, and I’m guessing your grand goal in life is not to simply survive.
You want to thrive.
So you see how you and your brain are inherently at odds?
Who wins this battle on any given day determines whether you make progress towards your greatness or whether you fall into a 6-hour Netflix binge.
No shame. We’ve all been there.
But if you don’t want to go back to that place, you need to create an Intention Maintenance Strategy.
8. Lift Mental Weights Daily
Focus is a muscle.
And like all muscles, to strengthen it, you must stress it beyond its current capacity.
This is why you need to develop a daily Thinking Time practice (which is just another way of saying: make time each day to do some mental weightlifting).
Not only will this increase the clarity of your thoughts, but it’ll improve the quality and intensity of your focus.
Here are some of the most common ways to get a mental workout:
- Prayer
- Journaling
- Meditation
- Long walks
- Long showers
Now, the truth is, going to the gym is hard. It never gets easier, you just get better.
The reason most people can’t stick with regular mental workouts is because it’s really hard to see progress..
You can’t see your focus muscle getting bigger and more well-defined, and so we default to thinking… “Well, I must be wasting my time.”
You’re not. Keep with it.
Remember, some of the most important things in life cannot be measured. This is one of them.
Just keep showing up and moving the weights. It’ll be worth it. I promise.
9. Optimize Your Environment
Here’s one way to define focus:
Focus is the ability to resist distractions.
This is a good definition for our purposes, so let’s run with it.
One way to develop laser-like focus is through sheer force of will. Do a lot of mental weightlifting and increase your ability to resist distractions.
We just discussed how to do that, but there’s another way to increase the quality of our focus:
Instead of trying to resist distractions…just avoid them all together.
We do this by designing our work environment with intention.
Here’s a bit more on that topic.
10. Create a Focus Ritual
Every all-star athlete performs a thorough warm-up routine before stepping onto the field of play..
So should you.
Before stepping onto the Field of Focus, you should execute your Focus Ritual.
Here’s mine:
- Clear the Desk
- Set a Timer
- Light a Candle
- Put on Noise Canceling Headphones
- Turn on Brain.FM
- Stare at the point of a pen at arms’ length for 30 seconds
- Take a Sniff of BOOM BOOM
- AND GO!
Seriously, it takes less than 30 seconds, but it primes my subconscious and puts me in a place of readiness to go into a deep state of focus.
Create a Focus Ritual for yourself and then get out onto the field and dominate!
TLDR
The 10 Commandments of Hyperfocus
1. Your Most Valuable Asset
2. Time Audit
3. Energy Fuels Focus
4. Close Cognitive Loops
5. Set Clear Priorities
6. Create Systems
7. The Power of Intention
8. Lift Mental Weights
9. Optimize Your Environment
10. Focus Ritual
Thanks for reading!
Want to become a master of Hyperfocus so you can cut through distractions, kill procrastination, and dominate your day?
Check out the Hyperfocus Masterclass. More info linked below.
In the meantime,
Stay Hyperfocused, My Friends.
AV
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