How To Focus: Optimise Your Work & Life By Developing Laser Focus

Hey everyone. It’s Connor Marriott here. And welcome to the second module inside the personal performance training and today’s module is tiled focus. So in the previous module, we spoke about stability and that is the first of the four pillars of personal performance. Today is all about focus. So why this focus map?

So stability creates energy, but focused energy is what creates momentum. So you can have a lot of energy, but if it’s not focused, you’re not going to move forward. And so you might be busy. You might even get a lot done, but you won’t progress because you’re not focused and you’re doing the wrong things.

And the entire world lucks. The few people who know how to harness focus have an incredible advantage. And focus is basically a superpower. Once you learn how to use focus, you’ll have an extreme advantage over everyone else. So today we’re exposed to more information in a single day, then someone who was living in the 15th century would have been exposed to in their entire lifetime.

That is how much information we are exposed to every single day. And not only are we exposed to more information and more distracted. But our brains have actually been trained to seek out and find destruction. So our brains are looking for the destruction and there’s more destruction now than ever. So this is an environment that is very, very difficult to focus in.

And so on average, our brain will focus or try to find distraction every 40 seconds. And basically what that means is every 40 seconds on average, your brain will try to seek out something too. And once it finds something that distracts it, it will reward you with dopamine. And this is your feel-good hormone in your mind.

And basically what your brain is doing is looking for something new. And there’s something called the novelty bias. And what that means is when there’s something new, your brain likes that it likes finding new things. And so your brain is searching for new things and when it finds it, it rewards you with dopamine.

And so you feel. And so what happens is before long your brain starts associating the action of looking for something new with the reward of actually finding something. So what that means is your brain will release dopamine when you start looking for something new. So even if you don’t find something new, your brain will reward you for looking.

So this creates a pretty big problem. You’re basically training your brain to look for destruction. And this is why focus is so difficult because we’re training our brains to be distressed. And the human brain is a learning machine and whatever you practice, you get good at. And so most people practice being distracted 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

So you can imagine if you’re practicing something that often you would get pretty good at it. And this is what our brain does. And this is what most people do. They practice being distracted every single minute of every single day or their entire life. And so they’re really, really good at being distracted.

And that means they’re very, very bad at focusing. So this is a problem. Because we’ve trained our bright minds not to focus and we’ve never been shown how the focus. So we’re just very good at being distracted. And so that is what this training module is going to solve for you. So overstimulation is the killer of focus.

And so the answer is not to do more, which most people think most people think that the answer to success is to be more productive and get more done and try to do more things and squeeze more things into your schedule. But the answer is actually to do that. We need to reduce stimulation and reteach our brains to focus.

And this is quite difficult, especially if you’ve been training distraction for many years, seven days a week, you’re going to find this hard, but this is the super power you must develop. So the good news is with training. You can reshape your brain. So even if you’re very distracted at the moment, it doesn’t need to be that way.

You can retrain your mind. So by practicing focus, you’ll strengthen and grow your prefrontal cortex, leading to better focus, concentration memory, and then. So your brain will, will change and you can train your brain to be more focused. So if you’re someone right now, who’s watching this and you’re checking your phone or looking at social media, you’re finding it difficult to focus on a video.

Then that’s a problem and you need to train your brain to focus. And the best time to start is now. So if you’re doing anything other than focusing on this start, just focusing on this, remove everything else and practice focusing. And whilst it’s important to focus on this video. It will train you to focus in every area of your life.

And that’s really where you get the benefit. So when it comes to learning focus, there are two areas you need to pay attention to. Number one is decisions. And number two is attention. So decisions that is your ability to determine where to focus. So you decide where to focus and then your attention is how much or how well you can focus.

So how much attention you have is basically how well, how long you can. The quality of your decisions will determine where you focus. So both of these things are important. It doesn’t matter if you can focus very well. If you’re focusing on the wrong things, if you’re making the wrong decisions and it doesn’t matter if you’re making the right decisions, if you don’t have the attention to focus on those things.

So both of these things are important and that’s what we’re going to cover today. So let’s start off talking about removing decisions every day. You must protect your decisions. And if you make too many decisions, you’ll reach what’s called decision. So every day you have a finite amount of decisions that you can make.

And if you use all those decisions, if you reach that limit, then your ability to make good decisions will decline. And your ability to make rational judgment will decline. And sometimes you’ll completely shut down cognitively and you won’t be able to make any decisions. And so you’ve probably noticed this.

If you’re trying to eat healthy, if you’re going to cheat on your diet, typically it will happen at the end of the day. The reason is because as you go throughout your day, you’re making decisions. You’re saying no to certain. And you drain that decision fatigue muscle, and it’s just like any muscle. If you work it over and over, it will fatigue.

And this is basically what happens. And there’s a very famous study. It’s called the judge study. Basically what they did was they looked at judges who were deciding whether or not prisoners should be granted prop. And if the prisoner came in at the start of the day, there was a 65% chance that the judge would grant them.

However, if the prisoner came in towards the end of the day after the judge has already made many decisions and they’ve reached decision fatigue, the likelihood that they get granted parole is almost 0%, because what happens is, as you make more decisions, your ability to rationally look at things to clients.

And so you just fall back into the easy answer. And so this, these judges were like, the default answer is yes. But that’s at the detriment to these prisoners. And so simply having their parole meeting earlier in the day, I’m a higher chance of gain ground Cipro. Cause the judge could make it a good decision.

He could look at the facts logically. However, if it was later in the day, he couldn’t because he was fatigued or she, so this is how decision fatigue works and it impacts every area of it. So a good way to imagine this is by imagining you have 10 decisions you can make each day 10 good decisions. Now it might be more, it might be less, but for the sake of this exercise, let’s say you have 10.

So look, where are your decisions going for most people, they use all of their decisions in the first few minutes of their day on meaningless, meaningless things, things like what to wear, what to eat for breakfast, what song to listen to as they drive to work, what to do when they get to work. What to respond to different emails and what’s supply that messages on social media and you can see very, very quickly, all of your good decisions are wasted in the first few minutes of the day.

And then you have no willpower, no decision-making power left to make important decisions that ultimately move you forward. So to maximize her ability to focus on the right things, you must ruthlessly eliminate automate or delegate every decision that doesn’t move. So, what does that mean? Well, eliminate means get rid of, so if there are decisions that you’re making each day that you don’t need to make, eliminate them, just get rid of them.

So things like checking your emails or social media, or if there’s certain commitments, you need to say yes or no to just remove them. Um, if you can’t remove things, then you should look to see if you can automate them. So are there certain things that you could automate certain example of this would be your food?

So a lot of people decide what they’ll eat for breaks. And then they decided what they’ll eat for lunch. And then they decided what they eat for dinner. And then they do that every single day. These are a lot of decisions you’re making that are wasted. You could make one decision to get milk delivery, for example, or hire a chef, or just create a meal plan.

And then that one decision has now been automated and you don’t need to make that decision again. So there are a lot of opportunities in your day-to-day life where you can automate decisions. Another example would be what you were instead of deciding what’s where each day, why not just get one out. And where that, that one decision will now last two years.

And then finally, if you can’t eliminate it or you can’t automate it, you can delegate it. And so delegating is basically giving it to someone else. So an example of this might be cooking or cleaning or customer support. If you’re replying to customers to end customer support, and that’s taking a lot of attention, uh, it’s making you make a lot of decisions each day.

Well, then you could, you know, you can’t really automate that. You can’t really eliminate that, but you could delegate it. You could hire someone to do that. So automating decisions. So some decisions that you can automate are things like meal delivery. So instead of deciding what to buy the shops, what you’re going to eat, how are you going to cook it three times a day for the rest of your life?

You can make one decision and get meal delivery. And then that decision is done. I used to make the decision of what time I would drive to the shops. And then when I’m at the shops, I’m just, yeah. What types of food I’m going to get. And then when I come home, I decide when I’m going to cook it and how I’m going to cook it and then not eat it.

And I wash it up and then four hours later, I need to make that decision again. And this is basically in Sammy. You can decide once to start getting meal deliveries, and then you don’t need to think about this ever again. And he can set a time to eat each day and then this entire process of eating food.

Which probably for most people uses 50 decisions every single day. You can now completely automated and you know, you make it that decision again. And I can tell you that getting meal delivery was probably one of the biggest things I’ve done in terms of removing mental bandwidth or freeing up mental bandwidth, because you might not realize it.

But a lot of mental energy goes into deciding what to eat when to eat Halloween, whether we, you can get meal delivery and then you don’t have to worry about it. Another thing is closed. So instead of deciding what you’re going to wear, decide on one outfit that you like and the other 20 of them, and just wear that, that way.

You don’t need to wake up and think, what should I wear today? You can just wear the same thing. Another really simple one is bills. So if you’re paying bills or invoices and they’re reoccurring each month just set up automatic payments. So that way you don’t need to worry about them, you know, they just come out automatically.

Then you think about it, that will save you a lot of decisions, uh, exercise. So decide on a workout program or pay someone to make one. And then decide on a time to exercise and then just follow it. So remove the decision. Don’t decide. Should I work out today? What should I do? You know, what should I wear to the gym?

How am I going to train? How long am I going to train? Where am I going to try and make this decision once? And then you never need to make that decision again and also meetings. So rather than if you have meetings that you have regularly with your team or clients, rather than every time, trying to figure out when and where to meet and sending emails like, Hey, when are we going to meet this week?

Just set up a reoccurring. Meeting and stick to it. So for us, we have a daily huddle at seven 15, sorry, 7 45 each morning, and it’s on zoom and we don’t need to talk about it. We just know that that’s my, this, so that one decision is the same. Every single day, no one needs a email saying, Hey, what time are we meeting today?

We all know that we meet at the same time every single day. So one decision has now. And so if you can’t eliminate and automate decisions, you might want to delegate them. And if you’re not sure what decisions or what tasks you should delegate, this is a really good exercise because sometimes you’re doing things and you think, oh no, this is fine.

I can keep doing it. It’s not a problem, but this exercise will help you figure it, but realize that a lot of the things you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing so the way this works is step one, based on your goal of where you want to be, how much do you want to be paid for a day? So an example of this would be, let’s say you wanted to make $365,000 a year, then you would want to be paid $1,000 a day.

Right. So think of what your goal is, how much you want to make each year or each month, and then break that into a daily salary. Like how much would you want to be paid for one day of work? So this example would be a thousand dollars. Then once you know that number, you can divide it by eight and this would be eight hours a day.

Okay. And you get your minimum hourly wage. So in this example, it would be $125 an hour. So if I wanted to make a thousand dollars a day, then my hourly rate would be $125. Now, now this is, this could be very low. You might want to make 10 times more, more than this an hour, but just for the purpose of this example, let’s say it’s $125.

Now next, look at everything you do and your. And see if there’s anything that you’re doing consistently, that you could hire someone else to do for less than that, hourly rage. So an example would be cooking or cleaning or gardening or support or admin, because you know that if your goal hourly rate is $125 an hour, and you’re doing a task that you could pay someone $20 now for then every time you do that task, you’re essentially losing 105.

So step four says if your hourly rate is $125 and you spend an hour doing a task that someone else could have done for $25, you just wasted a hundred dollars because your hourly rate is $125. And so you could have paid someone $25 to do that thing. And you would have got that hour back and that hour is worth 185.

So you see how this works. So very quickly, when you do this exercise, you can see, there are a lot of things that you’re probably doing, that you could pay someone a lot less than what you would pay yourself for an hour spent elsewhere. And by doing that, you free up your time. You free up your decisions, and then you can actually put your time and effort into the things that will get you to that alley.

Right? And so this is a very powerful exercise and we really put a lot of things into perspective. Like, do I need to be cooking? Do I need to be cleaning? So I need to be doing gardening. Do I need to be doing. These are the things that you can pay someone a lot less than what you would probably pay yourself.

And by doing that, you have the time to actually grow your business and start paying yourself what you want to be paid. So I suggest you pause this video and quickly work this out, and then look at all the tasks you do, like often, at least once a week. But you know, there’s probably things you do every single day that you could pay someone substantially less to do for you.

So now let’s talk about increasing attention. The human brain processes information one bit after another, not in parallel, that means it’s impossible to multitask. Most people think that they can multitask. They think that they can do two things at once, but that’s not how the brain works. The brain processes information one bit after another, which means it can’t do two things at once.

So when you’re trying to multitask, you’re not doing two things at once. All you’re doing is switching between treaties. So keep that in mind, anytime you think you are multitasking, you’re not, you’re just rapidly switching between three things. And so when your brain has to switch from one task to another, there’s a lag time of approximately half a second, where your ability to focus and taking information basically goes offline.

So if you’re swapping from one thing to another, like every second, 50% of your time is wasted because your brain is literally offline, not taking in new information as you’re switching to up. This is why multitasking is a very bad idea and you should always do one thing at a time. So one thing at a time, instead of trying to multitask and do more, do one thing at a time and practice doing less, and another tip is practice mindfulness or meditation.

So spending a few minutes each day, focusing on one thing, for example, your breath, when you meditate, we’ll train your brain to focus on one thing. And again, if you’re training your brain to be distracted, you’re going to be distracted. But if you train your brain to focus, then you’ll focus. So in everything you do.

Consciously make the effort to just do that one thing. So as you’re watching this training, just watch this training, ignore everything else. And you’ll know this, you have impulses. You’ll probably want to check different things and your brain will search for distraction, but don’t let it focus or practice focusing because that will put, that will carry over into every area of your life.

And another thing is using the what’s got my attention. So before starting work, or before going to bed, write down everything that has your attention, and this will help clear your thoughts and allow you to focus on the work at hand. So to do this every morning and night, I write down, what’s got my attention and I’ll just list all the things and just by getting them off my mind, it frees up my mental bandwidth to focus on the things that are important.

So really important. Keep in mind, multitasking doesn’t exist. It’s a lie. If you think you’re multitasking, you’re fooling yourself. You’re just switching between tasks and you’re also training your brain not to focus. So in everything you do. Even the small things, focused on doing one thing at a time and focus just on that in everything you do focus on doing one thing at a time.

So when you’re focusing on something important, for example, working on a project and something takes you out of focus, for example, a notification on your phone, it can take up to 15 minutes for your brain to get back into that level of focus. So when you’re in deep work or flow and you’re really focusing on something in your inbox, And you get taken out of that.

It can take 15 minutes, sometimes even longer for your brain to get back to that level of focus. Basically what happens is when you focus on one thing for long enough, your brain will realize that this is important and it’ll start to allocate more mental resources through that task. But that only happens after about 15 minutes, sometimes even longer.

So if you get to that point where you’re starting to focus on something and then you’ll find buses and it takes you out, well, it’s going to take you 15 minutes to get back. So that one notification just costs you 15 minutes. And so if we go back to the hourly rate exercise, and you realize that your hourly rate is $125, and you let a notification distract you while you’re working well, that one notification just cost you 15 minutes.

And so it costs you $30. So you can see like how foolish it is to allow yourself to be distracted. Because if you know, you get paid X amount per hour, and you’re letting things that structure for 15 years, And even if you don’t think it’s distracting you for 15 minutes, if you focused, it will take you 15 minutes to get back to that level of focus.

So it is then that’s costing you quite a lot of money and these things stack up. And when you consider that on average people receive over 80 notifications per day, 18 notifications per day, then it’s no wonder why so many people are stressed, overwhelmed, and broke because they’re not ever focusing on anything.

And so they’re just losing money. Every time they get notification, their ability to focus, their ability to produce the ability to perform is rapidly decline. Because they’re not focused. They’re multitasking. They’re looking at notifications, they’re doing a million different things, but they’re not actually doing anything.

And then it gets to the end of the day and they realize, well, they feel busy. They feel like they did a lot, but they didn’t actually achieve anything. And they’re like, wow. Business is tough. I’ve tried so hard. I haven’t done anything. Yeah. Well it’s because you haven’t done anything because you’re allowing yourself to get structured.

Instead, practice focus, focus on one thing and actually get it. So below this video, you can download the removing distraction checklist, and this is a distraction detox. And so I’ve created this for you and you can go through it one level at a time and start to remove the distractions, the taking me from focus.

And long-term, I suggest you go through all five levels, but you can start at level one and overtime workups level 2, 3, 4, and five. And so I’ll show you what this looks. And you can download this below this video. And if you click here, you can open that in Google docs and you can then go file and make your own copy and you can save it.

And then you can tick off these checklists. Right? So level one is quite simple. Level five is a bit more extreme, but if you want extreme results, you might want to be a bit extreme. So starting with level one, turn off email, push notifications from you. And basically what that means is if you’re right now getting notified, when you get an email, turn that off, there’s no need for that to happen.

You can check your emails at a set time. You can batch it. You don’t need a notification because that will take you out of focus. And that will potentially take you out of focus for 15 minutes, if you are focused. And so that’s quite foolish to have that. So turn that off. Also turn off email, push notifications on your phone.

So computer and phone, turn it off. You don’t need notifications. If you want to check your emails, you can check it. You don’t need to be notified when you get an email emails are not that important that you need to check them. Next is turn off notifications for likes comments on social media. So if you get likes and comment notifications on social media, that’s kind of crazy because like it’s, I mean, I hope you understand why this is crazy.

I don’t need to explain why this is crazy by this point. It just is. And I’m happy to explain it, but if I need to, then this is probably, I mean, you should be aware of why this, this type of thing. If someone likes your photo, when you’re stopping what you’re doing to check that someone liked you. And now you’re not achieving your dreams because someone like your father, I mean, it just speaks for itself.

So that’s number three. And then number four is audit your work environment and remove anything that distracts you from doing work. For example, if you’ve got a TV in your office or a PlayStation or alcohol, remove those things, because they’re going to distract you. And there’s this saying, which I like a lot, it basically says if you have a bowl of M and M’s on your desk, you’ll be very likely to eat the M and M’s, if it’s on the other side of the room, you’ll be less than.

If it’s in the cupboard, you’ll be even less likely. But if it’s not in the house, you won’t eat any other. And so that’s how you want to think of these negative things. But if they’re not new, you won’t look at them. You can’t watch TV. If you don’t have a TV, you can’t play PlayStation. If you don’t have a PlayStation, if you have a PlayStation and you have a TV and it’s next to you, while you work, you’re probably going to play and watch those things instead of working so remote.

So that’s level one, and these are all pretty simple to do. In fact, you should definitely do all of these right now. Level two. Is a little bit more difficult, but still like very simple. And I would strongly suggest you do them. So number one, remove emails from your phone entirely. So if you work from your computer, normally, then you don’t need email was on your phone and you can remove that entirely.

That way you won’t check it when you first wake up or when you’re out, there’s only two have emails on your phone. Number two is turn off notifications from all apps on your phone. So not just likes and comments, all apps, any time an app gives you a notification, turn off, just turn them all off. Uh, number three is desktop purge.

So organize your desktop and delete anything that’s not required. So a lot of people have very messy desktops. They’ve got a million saved things and folders just delete everything. You’re not using cleanup, uh, email, this purge. So go to your email and unsubscribe from any mailing list that you don’t love.

So if you’re on a bunch of email lists and you don’t love them, unsubscribe, that’s taking a focus. You can turn it off and then put your phone on airplane mode. So you should be doing this anyway, because I’m like, why would you want to be woken up for a text message or like on social media, but this is practicing detaching yourself from your fine and removing notifications.

So that’s level two level three is delete all social media apps off your phone. So don’t even have them just delete them. If you want to check social media, you can still go to the browser and go to the facebook.com or instagram.com. But if you have the app, like the app is designed to keep you on.

Whereas, if you go to facebook.com or instagram.com on the browser, it’s not very user-friendly and it’s kind of frustrating. So you won’t stay there very long. So it’s better to check that if you need to check it there, because it won’t suck you in, but if you’re on the app, the app is designed to basically keep you there for a very long time.

So don’t even use it next commit to working with your phone in another room, turned on airplane mode for a minimum of one hour. So, this is a great way to learn how to focus, put your phone on airplane mode, put in not the room and for one hour a day work without your phone. Uh, next is create a schedule for checking emails and stick to it.

So for example, check it three times a day, maybe at 9:00 AM midday and 4:00 PM, and then only check it at those times. So don’t check it any other time. Next is put your phone on airplane mode and in a different room while you sleep. So even if your phone is on airplane mode in the room that you sleep in, your brain’s still going to associate that to distraction because you use your mind a lot and it’s true.

Well, it’s associates your phone with distraction. So put it in a different room while you sleep. You’ll get better sleep and you weren’t, what would it be impossible for you to check it? And then practice mindfulness for five minutes a day. So meditation and just focus on your breath and nothing else for at least five minutes a day that’s level three, level four is an app purge.

So delete all non-essential apps off your phone. On my phone. I have, I think two apps and one. When I use it to meditate. And one is the thing that controls my, uh, although, which is basically my reverse electric electric blanket on my bed. And that’s it. I didn’t have social media or anything. So you can do that next commit to working with your phone on airplane mode in another room for two hours a day.

So you can see these are getting more difficult. So two hours a day work with your phone on airplane mode. Next change a voicemail to ask people to send you an email instead of leaving a message. So my voicemail, if you call me, it just says mean. And that way people wouldn’t expect you to call them back.

And that will allow you to work with your phone on airplane mode and you feel better about it because you won’t be thinking that people are expecting you to call back and then turn off text message notifications on your phone. So same with emails. Like you can check the text message when you’re ready.

You don’t need a notification for it. A text message is not urgent. If it was urgent, they would call you so you can turn off notifications. So my phone there’s no notifications. You can text me, you can call me it won’t make any. So I suggest doing that that’s all before. And then finally, level five is create a new email address.

So if you get a lot of emails, just a new email address that will remove that completely next or that you’re home and throw up or move anything that you don’t love. And look at anything that distracts you from doing the things that move you forward. So look at different objects in your house or in your office and ask yourself, do I love this?

And if you don’t get rid of it next, turn off all notifications on your phone. And if you get more than 10 calls a day, consider getting a new phone. So, if you get a lot of random calls from random people, consider getting a new phone number, if not, just turn off, call notifications that way. If someone calls you, you don’t need to know, and you can white list numbers.

So if you have like family members that if they call you, it’s important, you can have it. So it rings for them, but you can turn off the random numbers calling you. And then lastly, practice mindfulness for 20 minutes a day. So this is the checklist. You can download it. I suggest you go through level one, level, two level three, work your way out.

If he wants level four and level. And you’ll notice that you have a lot more focus here, a lot less distracted, and you’ll feel a lot better. You’ll have less anxiety, less stress, and you’ll get a lot more done. So I suggest you download this and work through this at your own pace. Um, little by little removing, more and more destruction from your life.

So now let’s talk about building your working here. So, if you look at the picture on the left, this is how old zoos used to look. And there’s a lot of black and white for those on the internet. If you look at old news in the 1920s and thirties, there were basically concrete enclosures and the animals were very unhappy and they look nothing like the animal’s natural habitat.

And what they found is that if animals live in an environment that is too unlike their natural habitat, like a concrete prison, their health, happiness, and life expectancy will plummet. Not really. That’s okay. But what I realized, and you might realize this too, is that my office used to look a lot, like these animals habitats, it was basically just an empty room.

And so we know that these animals are very unhappy in these fake habitats and that’s why they today’s zoos look very different. But if you’re in your office for 6, 8, 10, 12 hours a day, and it looks similar to. Like a concrete room then guess what you are going to be unhappy. You’re on that train environment is not a concrete room either.

And your energy, health, happiness, and life expectancy will also plummet. So to perform at your peak, you need to optimize your environment to be more reminiscent of a homosapiens natural habitat. And that is outdoors. That is in nature. That is with light, not in a dark concrete room. And yeah, that is not how we have evolved.

So we know this is not good for animals and you are. And so it’s not good for you. So you should build a habitat like your natural habitat or a homosapien, its natural habitat. So how do we do that? Well, a good environment. Sorry. A good person in a bad environment will lose you. Can’t outwork your biology.

It’s impossible. And you might think you’re okay, but long-term, it will get you. And the bad environment is like death by a thousand cuts. Even though these are small things they add up and have very bad negative long-term impacts. So what do we do? Well, number one is like, make sure your work environment gets a lot of that.

The old office I was in, I got almost knowing natural light. And I noticed that pretty quickly that my output really, really was reduced. Um, now my office has a lot of natural light. It’s a lot better. Next is, sounds so sound from things like cars and highways has been shown to reduce test scores. They’ve done tests and studies where they show that kids doing a test by a highway actually score lower because these things are structured.

So if you work in an environment that’s noisy, you can play by the rule beats, right? You can go to the brain FM, that’s a website and they play, you can play like focus music, and that will kind of sound out or block out. Those sounds you can also use noise, canceling headphones. Next is nature. So if you can’t bring your work outdoors, bring the outdoors to your work.

So add plants in your office, and this will help you a lot. Again, think of the, like go to a zoo and look at the animals habitat there’s plants in there. There’s nature. That’s for a reason, without those things, these animals are. And so I look at your work environment. If it doesn’t have those things, you’re probably going to be unhappy clutter.

So remove any clutter from your office and desk, your brain will pay attention to it and it will distract you. So just make it clean and your desk. So if you sit down for several hours each day, consider buying a standup desk. And that way you can switch between standing and sitting. And this is really good for posture.

It’s also good for you. Uh, it’s good for your muscles. You’ll feel better. And it’s more like your natural habitat. You know, we’re not really designed to sit down for 12 hours a day, so that’s a good idea. And finally smell. So using an air diffuser can help trigger your mind into a state of work and focus on flow.

So I have an air diffuser in my office and I’ll use different incentive. And different smells when I’m working and your brain associates, different things to different activities. So if you have a certain smell, every time you work, your brain will associate that smell with work. And so when you use that smell, use those incense or the air diffuser, your brain will automatically go into a state yeah.

Of what can fuck focus. So, uh, these are some tips to improve your environment. And then finally, let’s talk about optimizing your output. So if you want to optimize your output, you must optimize the tools you use. And the work tools you use will impact how much you produce each day and making 1% improvements to the speed and efficiency in which you work will have a huge impact longterm.

And as we covered in the previous module in stability, if you spend six and a half minutes doing something each day over a year, that will add up to an extra week. So if you can become six and a half minutes more efficient, then you’ll gain an extra week each year of production time. And as a huge advantage, and there are so many places that you can improve.

Your efficiency by six and a half minutes a day, it will kind of blow your mind and I’ll show you what they are. And then you can start doing these things. And again, it might seem like a very small thing, but if you compound these things over and over, like the results are extreme. So first of all, your computer, so I suggest if you can afford it, purchasing a fully specked out computer to save time in every function you perform.

If you have an old slow computer and every button you click takes like half a second longer than. That will, without a doubt, add up to six and a half minutes, probably more each day. So just by getting a quicker computer, you can gain an entire extra week of work each year just by having a faster computer.

Next is the mouse. So if you have a laptop, get a mouse, don’t use a track pad. A mouse is faster, it’s more efficient. It’s been proven and you’ll get more done. Next is the mouse speed. So just having a mouse, isn’t enough to make sure your mouse speed is fast too. And turn it up to the max. How this works.

So you just basically go into system preferences and then you can go to mouse and here’s your tracking speed. You can see it’s full, uh, and it’s faster. Most people like some people have it down here and you can see like, this is smart and efficient. So pull it to fault. And at the start, it might be a bit too fast.

You need to get used to it, but long-term, it’s going to save you seconds every single time you do it. Next is your keyboard. So use a keyboard or get a keyboard that has the number pad. And that looks like this. Nope, that looks like this. This is the number PAB, because as a business owner, you’re probably going to do a lot of math.

And so this will allow you to do calculations quicker. And again, that small thing will save you minutes every day. And that can add up to weeks by the end of the year. So something as small as it. We’ll potentially gain you an extra week of production time over your competition. Next we have typing speed.

So on average, the average typing speed is 40 words point permanent, but if you practice your typing speed, you can increase it through 70 or 80 words per minute. I got mine up to 82 words a minute. And so that’s two times faster than average. So what that means is if you type for an hour a day and you can get it from 42.

That means you’re now typing for half an hour a day. That means you saved half an hour and saving half an hour each day. If you do that everyday for a year, we’ll gain you an extra month of production. So again, these might sound like small arbitrary things, but just by improving your typing speed from 40 to 80 words, a minute, you’ll gain an extra month of production each year.

And then you combine that with a faster computer. That’s another week, a faster mouse. That’s another week, the first keyboard. Like before, you know, it, you’ve got months on your competition just by doing these small things, these small things stack up. And so you can do a typing test. You can just type in typing speed tests in Google.

And I use this one and you can see what your typing speed is. And then what you can do is every day or every week, you can spend time practicing. And I did this every day, five minutes a day for about three weeks. I got my typing speed up to 82 words a minute. So these seem like small things, but again, they accumulate.

And what we’re doing here is we’re trying to find every single one. Of your life and your business that you can squeeze out that little bit more of efficiency because like typing speeds really obvious if you type for two hours a day and you can double that you’ve saved an hour, that’s two months by the end of the year, you can see how these small things really, really suck up.

Next is a charger. So if you work on a laptop and you work at multiple locations, maybe you’ve got like two different desks, get a charge of each location because if you move location and you’re working in your. Computer starts to run out charger or battery and you need get up and go and get your charger and plug it back in.

Like, that seems like a small thing. Ma might just take a minute, but if you’re focused, it’s now taking you out of focus. That’s 15 minutes wasted. And if you’re doing that every day, again, this is stacking up to a lot. So a small investment of an extra charger can save you like weeks, each year, bookmarks.

So you should, if you have tabs that you use often you should bookmark them. So you need to search for them. So that looks like this. You can see my bookmarks here. And these are all the important things I use and I can just click into them really quickly. That saves seconds every single time. So bookmark your common tabs, uh, learn the shortcuts.

So memorize the shortcuts that you use. So for example, command C has copy command P is paste command B makes things bold command. I make things italic come on. Zed is undo quad pluses, zoom, come on, minuses, zoom, zoom out, come on. Tabs switches between your hands. These small things, again, saving moments, saving seconds, these things add up.

And then finally we have mental math. So I hired a mental math tutor to learn the mental math, and I also have taken online courses and this has helped me do math faster in my mind. So you can see like the extreme that I’ve gone through here. I’ve really looked at every single. That I do and try to optimize it by a little bit each state, because I do quite a few calculations in my mind for just general business, just working out, but sense of things and addition, subtraction, multiplication.

So if you have to go to a calculator and like go and type it, when you can just learn how to do that in your mind, that’s going to shave seconds off that calculation every single time. And if you’re doing lots of these calculations each day, or very quickly, that can add up. And so again, this might seem like really small arbitrary.

Mundane things, but they really do make a big difference. And I’ve tried to look at everything and I suggest you look at everything in your life. Look at the things that you do each day. And just try to squeeze a little bit more efficiency out of them. Because like, if you spend five minutes a day practicing mental math for a month, you memorize all your shortcuts.

You bookmark the tabs. You make sure you’ve got a charger. You increase your typing speed from 40 minutes to 80 minutes. Sorry. 40 words to 80 words. You got to keep bored with a mouse, a number pad, you increase your mouse speed to the max, you get a mouse and you get that fully spec computer. Like that’s going to give you probably close to an additional six months of production time each year.

And that is insane. Like without working more working the same amount of hours, you’ll get an additional six months of production each year. That is a huge advantage. And that is how you, when you look at these little things and you do the things that no one else is willing. I guarantee you not many people are willing to learn mental math or like improve their typing speed because I think it doesn’t make a difference, but the ducks, these things make a difference.

They add up and if you do this and you take the time to improve these areas of your life, you will see a huge improvement long-term and it won’t be overnight. Like, you’ll be, you won’t notice it tomorrow, but in a year, three years, five years, there’ll be an exponential increase in everything you do, because you take the time to pay attention to a small thing.

So look at everything. You do try to find these lumps and improvements and improve them, and you’ll see a huge difference. So here are your action items. Number one decisions. So audit the decisions you make each day, pay attention to what decisions you keep having to make daily. And see which ones you can eliminate, see which ones you can automate and then see which ones you can delegate.

And I suggest using the minimum hourly wage exercise to figure out what your ideal hourly wage is, and then any tasks that you’re doing, that you could pay someone less than that hourly wage to do. I would suggest you consider doing that next is attention. So use the distraction, detox checklist to limit distraction, and remove as many distractions as you can.

You’ll see a huge increase in your focus and. And then finally environment. So all that your work environment and optimize the tools you use to trade the space that is optimized for better work. And look at the little things you do, which say the small functions, the short cuts on your keyboard, and really optimize all of these areas.

Uh, you’ll get an insane improvement. So that’s it for this module. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this, uh, this like the previous one is one. You can watch a few times. You might want to come back every month or so, and add a new thing or subtract a new thing. If you’re doing the distraction detail. But again, you don’t need to do all these things today because there are quite a few things here I’ve covered.

Basically everything that I can think of that will help you optimize your focus and your output. So do some of these things and add over time, build it up. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. You do everything tomorrow, but understand that these are how you get these small advantages. And ultimately success is finding these 1% improvements and focusing on them and doing the things that no one else as well.

And so hopefully you’ve enjoyed this, uh, good luck implementing this and I will see you in the next one.