It's boring, but this is how you focus on anything for 10+ hours

The Anatomy of Deep Focus

00:00When was the last time you hit a genuine flow state? A period of your life where focus came easy. You were able to focus for several hours at a time, working away at the seemingly endless list of responsibilities, projects, and tasks that you had previously left unattended, but now you're getting it done.

00:17You're starting to gain traction in your life, and that progress is addicting. You don't want it to stop, but it did at some point, which is why you're probably watching this video. Maybe it's been a while since you've felt like the type of person who's able to focus easily, who's able to at the drop of a hat engage with the things that are most important to you.

00:41As a lifelong procrastinator, impulsive person, somebody who's been diagnosed with ADHD in the past, I know this struggle all too well. But I also know what it feels like to hit that flow state. And I've learned a lot of concepts over the years that help me flip a switch in my mind.

00:57If I have to grind, if I have to enter a period of my life where I'm maximally productive, I know how to approach that so that it happens. So, in this video, I just want to go over some of those concepts so that if you're in a period of your life where you need to get things done, you crave the feeling of not just not being behind, but being ahead on your projects, then hopefully these concepts

The Power of Incentive Structures

01:23help you out. Okay, so the number one most important concept to understand if you want to be able to focus for 10 plus hours in a day is the idea of incentive structures. And if you understand the concept of what I call incentive structures and how to plug yourself into the proper incentive structure, then you'll find that focus becomes a natural byproduct of that correct alignment.

01:46Now, what the heck am I talking about? Okay, so here's an example. I used to play a lot of this video game called Rust. It's one of the most degenerate video games of all time because it's so addicting. So, when you're playing a game like Rust, you're hunting around the map trying to gather resources, kill other players to take their loot, and then bring it back to your base and fortify your base so that you don't get raided for the loot that you spent all day accumulating.

02:11That situation in and of itself is incredibly immersive. It takes the totality of your attention to play. It's a game that taps into some type of fight orflight survival mode, so it's incredibly engaging. But the most addictive part of Rust isn't what happens on the game.

02:29It's what happens when you're off the game. When you try to take a break from Rust, when you know that online in the game, you have a base, you're constantly worried about, is my base getting raided right now. Are my neighbors accumulating rockets so that they're going to blast into my base and take all my loot?

02:47I really need to get back on the game so I can start gathering explosives so I can kill them before they kill me. This is the type of internal dialogue that's happening when you're not even playing the game. That's a good example of being totally roped in to the incentive structure of the Rust video game.

03:06When you're in that loop with something, when something like that has its hooks in you, other things become very cumbersome and foreign to try to deal with. things like doing your laundry and making sure it's folded and organized, cleaning your house, staying on top of your taxes, going to the gym and trying to be healthy.

03:27All of these things feel very awkward and difficult because you fail to see the motivation behind it. You don't understand what would be in it for you because you're locked in to a different incentive structure. Fast forward to now. I, Joey Schwitzer, in the year of our Lord 2026 don't think about Rust pretty much ever.

03:49I do think about it as a concept, but I'm not tempted to dive into it for 10 plus hours a day. Why is that? Well, it's not because Rust is any less fun, right? It's the same video game. I bet I could find a way to make that exciting for me again, but I'm currently outside of that incentive structure.

04:10I'm not thinking about Rust problems. I don't have a base on a server right now that I'm worried about getting raided. You are motivated by what you think about often, what you

The Illusion of Absolute Value

04:21occupy your mind with. And this leads directly into the second key concept, which is create contrast in your brain. I don't think your brain sees absolute value. It only sees relative value. And what I mean by that is nothing is objectively fun.

04:37Nothing is objectively motivating to do. It's only relatively motivating compared to a different option. So why is this important? Almost everybody, in fact, I'm just going to say that every single person on the planet has been in a situation where they procrastinate until 2 hours before that thing is due.

04:57And the consequences of not doing that thing become so scary. They are so afraid of the negative consequences that are coming their way if they don't do the thing that they finally ride the wave of cortisol and end up doing the thing in a stressed out freakout state.

05:13But the thing gets done and you have this big sigh of relief. Why do I keep doing this to myself? Because up until the point where the deadline is right there staring you in the face, the idea of doing the work feels scarier and less happy than not doing the work.

05:31Having a little bit of fun and going on your phone doom scrolling feels a lot more fun than writing the essay. Your brain is comparing two different options. When the deadline stares you in the face, then your brain makes a different comparison.

05:44It's no longer comparing writing the essay with going on your phone and looking at some memes. The comparison it's making is writing the essay versus experiencing the consequences of not writing the essay. everybody being mad at you, dropping out of school, getting bad grades, failing the class, whatever it is.

06:00And when you make that comparison, writing the essay seems like the happier option. So, if you inundate yourself with doomcrolling all the time, then yeah, writing your essay is a little bit more boring in comparison to doom scrolling, but it's not a boring activity in and of itself.

06:20In fact, if your other option was doing absolutely nothing, and I'm talking nothing, nothing, a isolation chamber, and they put you in there for 3 hours and you're starting to lose your mind, you just want something to read or something to do, your essay would become a lot more fun, and it would become more fun acutely, like right away.

06:38You wouldn't need a 21-day dopamine detox for your essay to seem fun again because your brain needs things to be fun. It requires entertainment and it wants to deploy those entertainment and good feeling chemicals, but it's up to you to choose what activities your brain deploys those onto.

07:03I don't know. I feel like I'm kind of off my rocker with this one. On a practical note for this one, if you have been caught in a doom scroll and you have been avoiding your work, don't just try to do your work out of thin air. Put the phone away.

07:14Go do something extremely low stimulus. Go outside, take a deep breath, stare at a tree, look at a bird, smell the grass, really slow your mind down, and intentionally try to relax yourself. Then with peace and tranquility, visualize yourself doing the very first part, the very first step in the process of doing your work.

07:39If that's an essay, imagine yourself writing the first line. What is that line? Maybe even come up with the second line or the third line. But stop there and know that when you sit down, you're going to write those lines. And that's it. That's the process.

07:57This might sound like woo woo garbage, but there's actually been a scientific study that shows that that is one of the most reliable ways to beat procrastination.

The Science of Implementation Intentions

08:10The study I'm referring to is a 1997 study called implementation intentions and effective goal pursuit. And the summary is basically that researchers gave a 100 students a essay to write over the Christmas break or a report. Half the students only formed a general goal intention.

08:28So they said something like, "I intend to write and mail the Christmas Eve report." And that's how most people kind of set goals. It's like, "Yeah, I want to write the essay. I want to do my work." The other half of the students were given if then plans specifying the exact when, where, and how they would initiate the task.

08:48Eg. If I finish breakfast on December, wait a minute. If I finish breakfast, what's going to happen to you? If I finish breakfast on December 27th, then I will sit at my father's desk and write the report. The students with if then plans had a 71% completion rate of the reports compared to only 32% when they had just vague sentiments.

09:14They had good intentions of writing the report. But it genuinely makes a difference when you say, "When I walk into the kitchen, I will sit down on the chair and I will write whatever." That's what I'm getting at. The next tip is all about burning bridges.

09:28But before we get into that, I just want to do a quick test. Most people think that dopamine is the pleasure chemical, but it's so much more than that. It's responsible for one motivation, two movement, three learning, four focus, and five the anticipation of award.

09:51Wait, did I say award? I meant reward. This is the result from Whisper Flow, which is a very smart voice detect tool that I can use inside of any app compared to the built-in dictation tool on my phone, which apparently doesn't understand the concept of bullet points, or the number two for that matter.

10:10I also timed how long that took me to type on my keyboard, and I'm a pretty fast typer, and on my phone, which is how I usually jot down ideas. And in both cases, Whisper Flow beat them by a mile, and I don't have to spend as much time fixing my mistakes.

10:24To use it on my laptop, all I have to do is hold down the function key, and I can start dictating into Slack, Docs, Gmail, or wherever I'm working. Whisper Flow is free to use, but you can get 1 month of Whisper Flow Pro with unlimited words if you use the link in the description below, or by typing in the promo code better ideas in the settings on desktop.

10:45Thank you to Whisperflow for sponsoring this video. Now, let's get back into things. Hi, welcome to the evening portion of the video. I want to load you up with as much practical information as I can so that once you have entered a flow state, you can stay focused and it doesn't feel so stressful.

11:03Well, I have a lot of thoughts on that and here you go. Number one has to do with your physiology. While you're focused, it's very important to not be tense. This is supposed to be a fun situation. It's a wonderful, glorious feeling. You're finally getting work done.

11:20Isn't that amazing? What took you so long? It literally feels good to be making progress on the things that you've been avoiding for 13 years. So, relax into it. Enjoy yourself. And by doing that, you will subconsciously signal to your brain that this is a fun activity.

11:41You'll be able to find the benefit in it. You'll be able to find the enjoyment. And if you can do that inside of the process, then the motivation becomes ongoing and inherent. It's not something that you need to propagandize yourself with and try to look at it the right way.

11:59You're feeling it in real time, right? It's a wonderful thing. So, give yourself permission to enjoy doing the work. Okay. Now that you understand the importance of having a

The Four Killers of Your Flow State

12:12zen-like mental and physical posture towards doing your work, now let's address the only four things that could ever get you to stop the flow state. There are only four flow state enders. Number one is distraction. You get a notification on your phone.

12:26It's Domino's Pizza saying that there's 50% off bread sticks if you order now. So you open up your phone and it leads to doom scrolling. That's not good. And once you start doomcrolling, all of a sudden you have a contrast problem. Your phone is now kind of fun and your work is now kind of boring out of the blue.

12:46So go into your phone right now. Go into the settings app and go into notifications and one by oneclick notifications for apps that you don't want notifications for. Domino's Pizza should not be texting you at 11 p.m. when you could be burning the midnight oil and genuinely moving your life forward because you finally hit that flow state, but Domino's Pizza robbed you of happiness.

13:11Another type of distraction is hunger and going to the bathroom. So, make sure you are wellfed. Um, and when you go to the bathroom, which you're going to have to do, don't take out your phone because your phone will lead to doom scrolling and you're going to have a contrast issue again.

13:29When I am absolutely dialed in and I am in a state of flow, I make a profound effort to not pick up my phone because I know I might find it fun. I actually know I will get some amusement out of it, but right now my work is at least a little bit fun, and that's way more than normal.

13:48So don't taint that. Stay in the flow. Ride it as long as you can because if you're going to have to do the work anyways, it might as well have those dopamines deployed onto it. Right? So that covers distraction, which is the first thing. The second thing is fatigue.

14:03You physically cannot and mentally cannot work forever. Unfortunately, actually, that's super fortunate. What am I talking about? That's like the most corpo overlord thing. Unfortunately, you cannot be working all the time. Isn't that sad? And the number one thing that determines your mental stamina is sleep by far.

14:20I did a whole experiment on this where I blind tested the effect of sleep on my overall productivity. It blew me away. I I couldn't believe the onetoone relationship between the amount of sleep I got just by pure hour amount and how productive I was during that experiment.

14:41There was never a day where I got uh a little bit of sleep and I was really productive. It was always a lot of sleep, really productive. A little bit of sleep, a little bit productive. Basically, no sleep, didn't do anything every single time.

14:55So, make sure to give yourself more sleep opportunity. Be extremely gluttonous with your sleep. But not everybody can get perfect sleep. Maybe you have a newborn child in your house. Maybe you're getting kind of old in age and you're woken up by your enlarged prostate.

15:13My dad told me that one time. He's like, you know, you know how old people always wake up early? They're not disciplined. They just have an enlarged prostate. So, if you're somebody who just can't practically get between 8 and 9 hours of sleep opportunity, one of the best supplements for that is creatine.

15:31There's been some really cool breakthrough studies that show that taking more than five grams of creatine, I think it's like 10 or 15, can really aid or balance out a lack of sleep. Obviously, before you take any supplement, ask your doctor, but I've had a lot of success on days when I have had lackluster sleep.

15:51I supplement it with creatine. is not a replacement for sleep, but it can help you feel a little bit more mentally with it acutely, not long term. Don't be a dumb dumb. The third thing that can stop a flow state is if somebody physically removes you from your work.

16:09The fourth thing that can stop a flow state is when the work is done. So try to aim for that fourth thing. That is the type of flow state ender that you actually want. Do it until it's done and it will feel incredible. more work will come eventually.

16:23But now that you've learned that it can feel good to do your work, that it's not that big of a deal, it can actually be genuinely enjoyable, then hopefully this whole video encourages you and gives you some ideas to enter the flow state more often and stay in the flow state longer.

16:39Thanks for coming, guys. If you like the video, hit like. It's always a huge help. Comment below what you liked about this stupid video. Uh, and thank you so much for watching and we'll catch you in the next