 You've got to completely eliminate, eliminate, eliminate one thing and one thing only that's going to change your life. Today we're going to be talking about the seven steps to maximize your focus. And the reason why I want to dive into this is all too often from people I hear, I don't have enough time to do this. I don't have enough time with my children because of the fact that I work too much. I don't have enough time with my side business because I have children because I have another job. I don't have time to build my dream. And in reality, we all have the exact same 24 hours every single day. A bum and a billionaire all have the exact same 24 hours. The only difference is what we do with the 24 hours that we have. And so if we want to get more productivity, more work out of ourselves to create the life that we want, we're going to have to figure out a way to focus more to be more productive. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. And the first step to maximizing your focus, simple one, is to stay away from your phone as long as possible. And most, to be even more specific, in the morning is really the time to stay away from your phone as much as possible. I always say there is Rob before the phone and then there's Rob after the phone. And so for me, when I wake up in the morning, I turn my alarm off on my phone. My phone is on airplane mode. I keep it on airplane mode. And I turn it off and then I go about my day. And I personally tried to keep my phone off for two hours waking up. Now you might have that time to do that. You might not have that time. You might not have any time to yourself right now in the morning. And maybe you need to wake up 30 minutes earlier so that you can have time to yourself. You can have a morning routine. And the reason why is because when you look at your phone, they've actually found that when you look at your phone, it is actually an addiction. It releases dopamine and it releases serotonin in your brain and our brain gets addicted to those things. So if we go and look at our phone, then we're going to have constantly, and I know you've probably been there before. I know I've definitely been there where you're not looking at your phone, but you still get this pull to your phone like I should look at my phone. I should check my phone. I should see what's going on. Maybe I got a text message. Maybe I got a phone call. And you get this pull to your phone. And so what you're trying to do is you're trying to start your day. You can either start your day proactively or reactively. And if you wake up and you go immediately to your phone, you're immediately going to reaction mode, text messages, emails, miss phone calls, checking your Instagram, checking your Facebook. That's all reactive. We want to be proactive as soon as we wake up in the morning. And the most important thing to work on first thing in the morning is yourself. If you don't have time to do that right now, I recommend you wake up earlier 30 minutes, an hour earlier, whatever it is for you to work on yourself and only yourself. Because the better that you are, the better that everybody else is going to be. And the second part that I'll give you key to that, that has to do with this as well, is to turn off all the notifications on your phone that you can. There's too many notifications. The only time that my phone actually ever lights up is when you call me. That's the only time my phone goes from black to lit up. It doesn't tell me when I've got a text message. It doesn't tell me when I get a Facebook message, when I get a like on my Instagram post, when I get someone that comments on my Instagram, when my favorite people post on Instagram, none of those things. That doesn't go off when I get an email. And so I recommend if you want to be hardcore focused, first off, wake up and stay away from your phone as long as you possibly can. Focus on yourself. The second thing is once you do finally look at your phone and you do go into the day after you've worked on yourself, have been proactive and now you're switching into reacting to things. And hopefully you can stay as proactive as possible throughout the day. What you do is you try to stay away from your phone as much as possible. The phone is an addiction. So many people are addicted to their phone. They spend four or five, six hours on their phone sometimes throughout the entire day, right? So if you want to be more focused, just put your phone away. Don't ever look at your phone if possible. That's the number one key that I can give you right now, but we still got six more keys. So let's dive into them. The second one is to prepare your brain. When you're about to go into something and you need to focus don't just go from one task to another and just immediately switch. Take six deep breaths. If you've been following me for a while, you know how big I am on six deep breaths. You do six deep conscious breaths and through the nose out through the mouth. And if you really want to take it to another level, you breathe in through the nose, you hold for four seconds and then you breathe out through the mouth. And it's just a and you do six of those. There's a study in Japan that found out that when you do six deep breaths, it changes your state completely. And so what you're doing is you're preparing your brain. You're bringing your brainwaves down just a little bit to be able to focus more. Because if you go from one task where your brain is just hardcore, it's all over the place to another task, you're going to be at a higher brainwave. What you're trying to do is you're trying to calm your brain down so that you can be more focused going into this next next task. So the second thing you want to do is you want to prepare your brain before you do any important task. The third thing that you want to do if you're going, let's say that we're going into this task that we're working on now is you want to eliminate all distractions. OK, we've already talked about eliminating the distraction of your phone. You know, flip it upside down, turn off all the notifications that you can. All of those things. Let's talk about all of the rest of the distractions. What other distractions could you possibly have? Well, maybe you got kids. Is there a way to eliminate the distraction of kids? That'll mean eliminate your kids. But is there a way to eliminate that distraction? Can you go into an office? Can you go into another room? Can your spouse take care of the kids for an hour, two hours, three hours so that you can get done what you need to get done? Maybe you're at work and you're trying to be hardcore productive and you don't have a whole lot of space. Maybe you're in a cubicle. They've actually found that if you put headphones on, people are much less likely to come up to you and start talking. So maybe even if you don't have music on, which that's going to be part of another one in the future, I'm going to tell you one of the tips is music. But even if you don't have music on and you just have headphones on, that's going to eliminate the distractions of someone coming up to you and bothering you. So if you're in a cubicle and you're out in the middle and there's a whole bunch of people all around you, how can you eliminate that distraction? Put on headphones. People less distractions, less likely to actually come up to you. How about every notification that's on your computer? So you've got email notifications. You've got Slack notification. You've got all those notifications. Can you turn those notifications off permanently? If you can, that'd be beautiful. If you can't, can you get an app to turn them off for the time that you need to focus for an hour, for 45 minutes, for even just 20 minutes? Can you just eliminate all of those distractions? And what you do is you literally just focus on that one task. Turn off all your notifications and make a list of all of your distractions throughout the day, coworkers, your phone, all the notifications on your phone, your emails, all of the stuff that can come up and look at it as if you're making a business plan and say, how can I eliminate these distractions? Your kids, you know, how can you eliminate the distraction of your kids so they don't bother you? What can you do to plan out your distractions and plan out how you can get rid of those distractions so that you can be more focused? Once again, you only get 24 hours in the day. Let's figure out how to be as productive as possible with those 24 hours. So eliminate as many distractions as you can because one of the things that people don't realize is that literally, let's say it's your hardcore working on your computer, you're in the zone, you've got your headphones in, you're listening to music, you're cranking and you get a little notification that pops up that says you got a text message. There's studies that have found that if you just take your note, your, what the hell I'm trying to say, if you just take your eyes and go over to your text message and look at that, even if you don't look at the text message but you see and it takes a second, two seconds of your focus from what you were doing, it could take up to 10 to 15 minutes, sometimes even 20 minutes to get your focus back to where it was before you got distracted for two seconds. So if you really want to be focused, have absolutely no distractions or eliminate as many distractions as you possibly can, go into an office, close the office door, do whatever you can to actually eliminate your distractions. So that's tip number three. Tip number four is to stop multitasking. There's a study that was done that actually found out there's no way to multitask. Multitasking is actually completely impossible for the human brain. The human brain can only do one thing at a time. Your conscious brain can do one thing. So when you're quote unquote, multitasking, you're actually doing what they call task switching. You're switching from one task to another, one task to another, one task to another. They've actually found that if someone is doing task switching, which I think is multitasking, even though they think they're saving time, it's actually taking them longer because they're not getting their full productivity for every single thing that they're doing. So if you are multitasking, if you have this one thing that you're doing and you have another thing that you're doing at the exact same time, you'll be number one, you'll actually do better work. If you just do one of them and you'll get both of them done faster, if you do one at a time. So just eliminate all of your multitasking. Also in this study, they found out that multitasking actually makes you appear dumber. And the reason why is because your quality of work is actually worse when you're doing this multitasking because you're not 100% in it, you're 75% in it, you're 50% in it, you're not 100% in it. So if you want to have higher quality work and get stuff done quicker, you've got to completely eliminate, eliminate, eliminate multitasking. Most people are like, oh yeah, but I'm a really good multitasker. No, you're not, nobody is. There's studies that have been done that have proven that you're a worse multitasker than you are single-tasker. So single-tasker means you find one task, you work on one task for an amount of time, and you work on that thing and only worry about that thing for an amount of time. Cool, actually looks like we have eight things. So we have eight keys. Actually, now that I'm looking at this to maximize your focus, I actually put two twos on here. So number one, two, two. Stop multitasking was number four is what it should be. So number five is have a notepad. Bring a pen and paper with you. And so here's what you want to do. Whenever you are working on something and you get an idea, write it down with pen and paper. That's it. One of the things that really happens with me a lot that I've found is that I'll be working on my computer and as I get an idea, I'll go, oh, I can't forget this and I'll open up another tab so that I don't forgive it and now, forget it. So now I have 15 tabs that are open and the problem with having 15 tabs open is that little bit of time that it took to open another tab, type in what I was thinking so that I would be able to pull it up, distracted me and now I've got to go and try to focus again. So one of the things that's really important is to actually write it down. Write that thing down so you don't have to worry about it. Pen and paper, you go back to what you were doing. And one of the main reasons why you want to use pen and paper and to not actually use anything else is so that you can, there's two reasons actually. Number one is because your brain now sees it as something physical and tangible inside the world. And so the good thing about that is that when you write something and it takes the time to actually write it down, pen and paper, use your hands, see it, is your brain is actually more likely to remember it. Number one, and it's also more likely to what they call release it. So it doesn't have to focus on it anymore. It's there, it's, you know, oh my gosh, I got to pick the kids up at five o'clock. I got to pick the kids up at five o'clock. Now that it's there, I'm more likely to remember it and my brain is more likely to release it because it knows that it's always on that pen and paper, that notepad that I have that's right next to me. So what you do is you literally write it down, your brain can release it. And reason why this is super important is because I know a lot of people have a lot of tabs open in their brain. There's a million things working at once. And because of the fact that there's a million things working at once, they can't be hyper focused on one thing. And so what I recommend that you do is you literally meditate for 30 seconds, a minute, whatever it is, and you just brain dump every single thing that you need to brain dump on that piece of paper, whatever has to be done for the day, it could be the most important thing or it could be the least important thing. It could be do the laundry, it could be scrub the pots and pans, whatever it is. Put everything that you possibly can that you can think of, any distraction, anything that needs to be done, your to-do list, all of those things on a piece of paper, any ideas, put them on a piece of paper. And what you realize is that your brain has more bandwidth to focus because why? You've already put everything on a piece of paper. Your brain can release it. And now that your brain's releasing it, it allows you to be hyper-focused on the one thing that you're actually trying to do because once again, we're trying a single task. So have a notepad with you. Hey, if you're enjoying this video, do me a favor and hit that like button down below. It helps with the YouTube algorithm so that more people can see this message because it helps us get it out organically. So hit that like button and I appreciate you. Next tip, which is super, super important. And I recommend this for everybody is always have headphones. Always have a set of headphones with you no matter where I go. If I have my computer, I always have my headphones. And the reason why is because I have trained my brain over time, I didn't even realize this was a thing, but over time I've trained my brain, I read an article and realized that I did this to myself. I put my headphones in and I listened to one song and one song only. And that one song is binarial beats. I just go to YouTube, I type in binarial beats, focus, and with binarial beats, there's no singing, there's no words. It's just melodic background noise that lasts for an hour. So it's an hour long song that I listen to. And if you wanna find it, you can go to YouTube, type in binarial beats, focus. It's the one that looks like a bird or a neon owl. And I just listen to that song. I think it's an hour, it's two hours, whatever it is. And I just listen to that song. And what I've done is I've trained my brain to actually know when that song comes on, it's time to focus. And I didn't mean to do that. I just did it because it was just a simple thing. I just wanted to listen to that song, not have to think about anything. But what it does is if a car drives by or a siren goes by, it doesn't pull my focus. If I hear people talking in the different distance or if my phone rings and it's upside down so I can't see the notifications, it doesn't pull my focus. It's literally blocking out the external world for me, which is super, super important because I wanna focus on this one thing. And so I put my headphones in, I listen to the same song which is by Narrow Beaster, it's absolutely no music. And they've done studies that found that if you listen to the same song over and over and over and over and over again, when you're performing a very specific task, it actually trains your brain to know that it needs to focus on that one specific task. It's the same way that you look at Pavlov's dogs. You know, if you don't know about Pavlov's dogs, the way that he trained and he did classical conditioning with his dogs is he would have a little bell and he would ring the bell and then he'd give the dog a treat. And he'd ring the bell and he'd give it to him. And he'd ring the bell and he'd give it to him. Over time and time and time and time and what they realized is that he would ring the bell and the dogs would start to salivate. And the reason why was because that bell trained their brain to know that they were about to be fed. So it literally trained their brain which trained their body to go ahead and eat whatever it is that he was giving them. It works exactly the same for you. You turn on the music, your brain knows we've got to switch this task. And so it's an interesting thing but when you know these little tiny hacks, you can really master focus and focus on just one thing. And that brings me to my next technique which if you've listened to me for a long time, you've heard me talk about this before. It's the Palmadoro technique. The Palmadoro technique is absolutely 100% the best technique that I could possibly recommend for being hyper focused. If you use all of these other techniques, it just makes it even better. The Palmadoro technique, if you wanna go back and listen to other episodes or look at me on YouTube, type in Palmadoro Technique Rob Dile, you'll see the videos that are gonna pop up. And the Palmadoro technique is this. I'll just give you a real quick, simple example of what it is. It's 25 minutes of work on one specific topic, nothing else. 25 minutes on, five minutes off. 25 minutes on, five minutes off. And then you can take a 20 minute break. The reason why is because they found that a human's brain peaks in focus at about 10 minutes. And then it slowly drops and drops and drops and drops and drops until you stop working on it. So if you work for, let's say an hour and a half on one specific topic, your brain is going to peak about 10 to 15 minutes in and then it's gonna slowly, slowly, slowly throughout the rest of the hour and a half get worse and worse and worse and worse. With your focus. The reason why the Palmadoro Technique is amazing is because there's a huge spike and then it drops off and then you take a break and then there's a huge spike and then it drops off and you take a break and then there's a huge spike and then it drops off and you take a break. So you hit three in that hour and a half time instead of hitting one peak, you hit three different peaks of maximum focus. And they find that an average human brain takes about, I mean, if you're talking about hardcore focus about 25 minutes is the amount of time that you have for hardcore focus. So what you do is you have one thing and one thing only that you focus on for 25 minutes. If something comes into your brain, what did I say? Have a notepad next to you, just write it down real quick. It's gonna pull a little bit of your focus, but if it's so important, you just write it down, you go back to exactly what you're doing, your brain can release it. And what I do is I literally do exactly this. I'm gonna give you all of my secrets. Here we go. I put on that Binaural Beat Song and I put on the last 25 minutes. So it's like an hour, an hour and a half, an hour or two hours. I don't know how long exactly it is because I only listened to the last 25 minutes of the song. And I just allow that song to eventually end. And when it ends, I know that I can switch to something else. And the reason why I recommend that you have the song just end at 25 minutes. So I think it's actually two hours long and I rewind it back to one hour and 35 minutes. So I've got 25 minutes left of it. The reason why this is important is because I used to use my phone and I would wait for my phone's alarm to go off at 25 minutes. I'd set the timer and it would go off, but it's so weird. You've probably done this before, but I noticed if you've ever had like, you feel the buzzing in your pocket of your phone and you realize that your phone's not even in your pocket, it's kind of the same thing where if I'm waiting for my, if I'm waiting for my phone to go off, the timer to go off, I'll think that the time went off when it didn't go off. And so it's just easier for me and my brain keeps going, oh, it just went off. Oh, it just went off. Oh, it just went off. When in reality, it didn't. It's like the phantom phone that just goes off. And so if I know, okay, my phone's out of the way, all my notifications are off, my headphones are in. I have the last 25 minutes of this song. As soon as the song ends, I can take five minutes. I can do whatever the hell I want for those five minutes. I can go to the bathroom. I can look on Instagram. I can do whatever brain numbing thing that I want to it. If whatever it is that I want to do, I can do for five minutes. But for 25 minutes, I can do one thing and one thing only. So when I'm planning these podcast episodes, I put in my headphones, I listened to the last 25 minutes of it and I crank out a podcast episode. And what do I do? It takes about an hour and a half. And literally I plan three episodes in a row. Boom, I'm done. Now I gotta go and record them. But it allows me to be hyper focused because I've got one thing and one thing only to work on, which makes my life so much easier. And believe me, things will pop up, but a lot less things pop up when you do a massive brain dump before, which is what I told you about. And then last but not least, if you really want to get hardcore, for those people that are out there and you're hardcore, analytical person, tracking yourself, trying to figure out exactly what the best thing is to do and to try to track, like really, really track or journal through everything, have an alarm on your phone. I know most people aren't gonna do this. I understand, but some people are and it's gonna change your life. What you do is this. I don't know if I've ever even actually told this before is the last tip is every hour, have your phone go off and rate your focus from one to 10 every single hour throughout the day and log it for an entire week, Monday through Friday. And see if you start to notice any times that you are more focused or less focused. And what you do, so let's say you log it from seven to eight, from eight to nine, from nine to 10, throughout the entire day. You'll start to notice that at certain times, you're rating yourself higher than other times. And you might be like, for me, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., 2 p.m. around those times are usually my best time where I'm most focused. Just the way that I've found out, yours might be early in the morning, yours might be later in the evening, whatever it is. But my focus is really good from about 10 to two. So I do my most important tasks when I know my brain is at its absolute best. And so what you do is you have an alarm go off in your phone every few minutes, I'm sorry, every hour for a week and then you literally log it, write it down. You rate your focus every single day, every single hour for a week and see if you start to notice anything as far as like certain times where you're less focused and certain times where you're more focused. I know that by about five o'clock, six o'clock, my brain is fried. And so I hate recording after that time because I don't feel like I'm at 100%. So I try to record in the afternoon, noon, one o'clock around those times because I know that from 10 o'clock until two o'clock is my most focused time. So that's usually when I plan episodes. That's usually when I record episodes. My most important tasks are between 10 and two. You might be the same way, you might be different. But if you log it, you'll figure it out and you can get better from it. So those are the, I thought they were seven, but I didn't realize that actually is eight keys to maximum focus. Number one, stay away from your phone as long as possible and remove all of your notifications on. Number two, prepare your brain with a quick breathing exercise before you dive into a topic. Number three, eliminate all your distractions as much as you can. Number four, stop multitasking. Number five, have a notepad with you at all times to write things down. Number six, put your headphones in. Number seven, use a Pomodoro technique. And number eight, for those of you that are hardcore focused, rate your focus every hour from one to 10. The main reason why is because you have let your mind win most of your life.