Imagine going to the gym for 8 hours trying to be as “productive” as possible. You would try to max out on main exercises like the nervous system taxing deadlift, then go on to do accessory movements. In one day, you would run out of exercises to do. 

Would you be able to come back and give it your all the next day? How about 5 days in a row? Would you be able to tough it out until you can use your paid vacation time to recover and do it all over again?

Your body would be decimated without rest and recovery.

While corporate culture is handing you a pretty paycheck to incentivize sustained intensity, we must push back.

Intensity isn’t sustainable. It’s not rocket science. Sustainability, consistency, and creativity must be prioritized before we even mention the word “productivity.”

Your psyche is wired for survival. If you have attachments to the external world — relationships of any form — that threaten your identity when the relationship is challenged, then you will not be able to act authentically. That is to say, you will have difficulty opening your mind to reality to leverage nature. Your attachments — or perceived needs — will act as obstructions that slow the flow of your productive and creative energy.

You cannot be your true, authentic self if you need something that you do not already have.

Productivity is related to the balance and degree to which you engage in deep play, deep rest, and lastly deep work.

For value creators, those that intend to put good out into the world, you must adopt the habit of conscious study. Without expanding your worldview, mind, and knowledge through exposing yourself to novel perspectives; how do you plan to create? Creativity, in some aspects, is about pulling from multiple sources and mashing them together. Like deconstructing a topic, learning about its parts through study, and building your own creation as you would playing with legos.

When aligned with your vision, values, and goals you can consume information with the intention to understand and apply. This can begin to act as a vessel for raising your consciousness. You start to gain clarity on your life’s work through exposure to the information that aligns with you the most. If you don’t know where to start, re-read the book that changed the way you think, it will do it again.

Aside from movement and exercise being great for your health, there is something unique about walks. Ancient masters swore by it, industry leaders took them religiously, and the world’s most respected creatives made them a part of their everyday routine.

The ideas flow in a steady stream. From the  subconscious to conscious. Sometimes you just need that one word, letter, sound, example, anecdote, or story to bring up a thought that leads you down a rabbit hole of questioning and exploration.

When you get out of the house you become less prone to familiar distractions that will impact your study just by being in that environment. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to block out the distractions. You know they are there and they will occupy creative energy.

Filling your mind can be done at any time, and may be scattered throughout your day, but for the sake your own experimentation and clarity; start with doing this in the afternoons. If you do not have time to do this in the afternoon, sprinkle it throughout your day. I will give personal examples below.

In psychology, there is something called the Default Mode Network.

From the book Rest, this default mode network is “a series of interconnected sections that activate as soon as people stop concentrating on external tasks, and shifts from outward-focused to inward-focused cognition.”

When “activated” through restful, meditative, or open activities the brain is not any less active than it would be when engaged in something like focused work, or something that demands narrow focus and concentrated attention.

 When your focus is open, your subconscious mind is still working hard and munching on problems. Many programmers understand this well. They will often work on a project, encounter a bug, struggle to fix it, “give up,” and go about their day. At the most unexpected time, the perfect solution will pop into their head and the excited programmer will rush to open their code base to test it out. Shower thoughts is another example of this.

How do you empty your mind?

By immersing yourself in the present moment. Flowing with the river of life and the highs and lows that it presents.

There are many ways to make this easier on you to grasp, but understand that all of these means lead to the same end:

1. The Gym
2. Nature
3. Meditation
4. Physical mediums

Gym bros talk a lot about “mind-muscle connection” and other things that are just short for anchoring your attention in the present. When you are at the gym, be a silent observer. Observe the voice in your head that tells you to quit. Observe how the muscle feels as it contracts. Observe the blood flowing quicker through your body.

This works for any exercise, not only the gym. Elevated bodily functions that are easily observable make it easier to treat the gym as a meditation practice.

From a psychological lens, nature presents the perfect formula for flow. On a hike, you order your consciousness by having a vision of how you want the hike to go. You construct a hierarchy of goals in your mind that allow you to gain clarity on the climb. You may have a water intake goal, distance goal, health goal, or just the goal to have a good time in nature.

From there, you begin your ascent up the trail and are faced with a challenge. Even better, you planned the hike to match your skill level and you don’t have to incessantly think. Hiking becomes an art form and you kick into flow.

Conscious meditation (obviously), conscious walks, conscious listening during a conversation, conscious writing, and conscious creating.

When you are just starting out, and even when you are deep into the space, you are just doing the activities that people tell you to do. Most people are meditating unconsciously, which is a funny example. They are mechanically going through the motions because it has become habitual.

They aren’t getting the benefits they would get if they simply prioritized consciousness at any given moment — not just during meditation.

 Everything that is not absolute truth (unknowable or unspeakable with words alone) is relative. Relative means that there is a relationship. Cause and effect. Polarity. One thing cannot exist without the other. During meditation, can you follow a thought to another thought to an event until the lines are blurred and you glimpse into Infinity?

Another way to order consciousness or create clarity is to express the unorganized thoughts that are in your head. This is done through writing or speaking.

One such method is brain dump journaling. How do you brain dump journal? First, by writing out every single thing that you can bring your attention to in your mind. Once you have all your thoughts, reactions to feelings, emotions, and tasks written in a chaotic fashion on your paper — you can start to organize them.

This is where connections are made and clarity is gained. 

Using your mind comes last as we have filled and emptied our minds. By filling our minds we have expanded them, broadening our awareness and allowing The Law of Inspired Action to come into play. This gives us fresh creative firepower for when we use our mind. By emptying our mind we have allowed the Default Mode Network to come into play.

Our subconscious mind will deliver insight to our conscious mind and we can order said consciousness through brain dump journaling.

There are 3 main things that come into play when getting into deep, focused work:

• Leveraged familiarity
• Ordered consciousness
• Connection to The Unknown

Our goal with focused work is to eliminate distractions, get into flow, and produce quality work in the short amount of time that our finite creative energy allows.

Leveraged familiarity is a soft morning routine. The human brain loves to conserve the energy wasted on familiar things. Hence why habit formation is so popular, like putting certain and preferably beneficial aspects of your life on autopilot. As with most things, there is depth to the term habits. There are mental, emotional, physical, and financial habits that could each be broken down even further to take a peek into how robotic we truly are in our unconscious lives.

There are 3 steps to unlocking deep focus:

1. Goal (direction)

2. Plan (clarity)

3. Reduced friction (action)

A desired outcome + knowing how to get there + simple execution will put you into a distraction-numbing state of flow.