The most productive people in the world, they don’t rely on discipline and brute force to stay focused. They found hacks to trick their brain into this superhuman level of productivity.
So, I’m going to share with you 10 hacks that will make you more focused, even if you have crippling ADHD like I do. These are the strategies that I use to go from an ADHD mess to a hyperfocused CEO.
You can start using these today to stop fighting against your brain and start using it as a superpower. So with that being said, these are the 10 hacks to unlock insane focus.
Hack #1: Make a Not-to-Do List
Here’s my philosophy: Focus is a filter, not a muscle. Stop trying to brute force yourself into focus.
Decide what you don’t want to do so that you can make decisions quicker. If every new decision comes into your life and you have to sit there with the mental overload and brainpower to try to make a good decision because you haven’t set up a filter, it’s going to drain your energy.
To me, a new yes is a no to your dream, and a no is a yes to your goals. If you think about the most successful people, you see that success is a subtractive process, not an additive process. You don’t do more to win; you do less. But you make the things you say no to the right yeses.
So when people ask me, like, “Hey Dan, what did you do to be successful? To drive those cars or fly around on your plane?” Uh, it’s what I don’t do. I don’t drink. I don’t gamble. I don’t play video games. I don’t vape. I don’t do a bunch of stuff that would impede me from winning, and it requires that to have the level of focus we’re talking about.
The way I think about it, you know that game Plinko? Where you have like these balls you drop at the top, and it hits all these different pins, and it goes all over the place? That’s how most people live their life. What I want you to do is break out all the other options, which are those pins. Drop the ball, go straight to the middle.
If you think about each one of those as being an energy unit of focus, then you would just literally focus and stack and focus and stack instead of spreading yourself thin across so many different options. So, what goes on the not-to-do list?
For me:
Low-Value Tasks
Anything that I can pay anybody else to do for a little amount of money or just use an app to get brought to me or get done, I’m not doing it.
Bad Habits and Vices
Some of you guys have bad habits of not confronting people that say things about you. Some of you have vices like you literally lay in bed and hit the snooze button 15 times before you get out of bed. Those things have to go.
Energy Vampires
When I’m interacting with somebody, they either give me energy or they take my energy. The people that take my energy? See ya.
Hack #2: Create Focus Triggers
Most people wait for inspiration to do work or hope they’ll magically get in the zone randomly to start doing the work. I create a structure to get myself into flow so that it is by design, not random.
See, flow state isn’t random; it’s designed. And when you’re in it, guess what? I don’t think about going to the bathroom. I don’t worry about what other people think of me. I don’t worry if my work’s very good. When I’m in flow state, it produces the best work possible.
The way I quickly get into flow is I create focus triggers.
Location
The chair that I sit in to do my reading, to outline my goals, to ideate. I mean, even when I go off-sites with my wife to plan our quarterly planning, our year-end planning, those are triggers for us to focus on designing our future, not worry about what happened this week or next week or anything like that.
Sound
When I need to focus, I have to have music playing. It’s a vibe; it’s a strategy. For deep work, I’ll sometimes put on playlists that have no words, or I’ll use a special app that uses binaural beats to actually improve my ability to focus. Headphones are a must ’cause I can’t be distracted by other people’s noise.
Routines
When you look at world-class athletes and you think about how they visualize, how they warm up, the way they structure their day, their week, their month—it is a rhythm. It is a rhythm of success, and it is a routine. A lot of people think, “Well, that would be boring.” You know what’s not boring? Having the resources to do what you want, when you want, with who you want. And if that requires some level of routine, sign me up.
Hack #3: Start on Hard Mode
This one is wild. A lot of people try to start easy. “Let’s make it easy, let’s build momentum.” How about stop trying to create momentum with easy wins? I think if you want to focus and get things done, attack it. Like, go all in. Like, literally start on hard mode. Make it hard.
If you do everything that’s easy, it’s kind of like starting your meal with dessert. Sure, you might enjoy it and it might fill you up, but it’s not going to give you the nutrition you need to actually build your body, and you’ll be too full to eat the real food.
So to me, we start with the thing that’s the hardest, not the easiest to do. In many ways, the hardest task is to stop picking the easiest task.
Choose the One Thing
So to dial this in and really get your focus, we have to do a few things. First off, we have to choose the one thing. What’s the one thing? For most business owners, it’s marketing. For most individuals, it’s working out. But what’s the one thing that if you do first, as soon as you wake up or you sit down at your desk, that it will set you up to win? That it will build that confidence to create momentum? That will give you the vibe of success?
That one thing, if you just nail it out of the park every time, it’s kind of like that first domino that you know if you get that right, the rest of the dominoes will fall down. That’s where we start.
Deep Work Blocks
Then what we do is we do deep work blocks. For me, it’s first thing in the morning. I used to be a late-night guy, and you can do that too, but as soon as I had human alarm clocks (a.k.a. kids), my mornings became my most precious time.
That’s when I create, connected to my Creator. When I think of like writing, outlining these articles, creating articles, coming up with new AI companies to start, strategy work—it has to happen first thing in the morning in my deep work blocks. And it all happens before checking my email, social media, or anything else.
I can’t tell you how my energy is affected by the things I consume. And if I accidentally go down a rabbit hole and see stuff or check things and all of a sudden, ah, I have this like, “Oh crap” feeling. And now I’m supposed to go dream, ideate, design something cool, but I’m in this headspace of like, “No,” you know what I mean?
My day is going from bad meeting to bad meeting. I love the people I work with, but nobody brings me anything other than problems to try to resolve, so I can’t check my email before I do the right work. You can’t be like, reading comments on your social media feed about what people think of you before you go sit down and create more articles to help people. ‘Cause you’re going to be like, “Oh, screw that person. I’m not even doing this article anymore.” See the challenge with that?
Hack #4: Be Hard to Reach
When I was sitting down and editing my book Buy Back Your Time, I had my buddy Chris, and we got in my car and we drove to the mountains. There was no internet, there was no connectivity, and we stayed in a cabin. And we got our laptops out and we edited literally for 16 hours a day.
We did it for 5 days. We had a rhythm of working out, editing, lunch, editing, dinner, editing, pass out. The reason we were able to do that is ’cause we were disconnected from distractions. See, some of you make it too easy to be interrupted. The notifications are going off, the phone’s going off, your inbox is like blowing up. I mean, your inbox is nothing more than a public to-do list of other people’s priorities on your time.
My philosophy is: You want to be easy to find all over the internet but hard to reach.
The only way to make that work is to use these strategies.
Turn Off All Your Notifications
I mean, go into the app under notifications, and I dare you to swipe them off. The only two people in my life that can get through to me are my wife and my assistant. Other than that, everybody else can wait.
Schedule Time to Respond
See, I do reply to people, text messages, etc. I have it in my calendar, so it’s dedicated. That way, it’s a forcing function. If I’ve got 60 minutes, I’m spending that 60 minutes heads down. I was standing in the hot tub behind me earlier, replying to all my text messages. So call that NET time—no extra time. Post-workout, hot tub, sitting there, text messaging, creating momentum in my life. Figure out how to put both of those together.
Use Focus Signals
So for me, if I have my headphones on, please don’t talk to me unless it’s an emergency. I do have a rule that if you come in my office and I’m on a call, you then have to present on the call. So my kids have been on board meetings, they’ve been on pitch meetings. They literally—if you’re in the room and you’re asking me a question, I’m going to introduce you to the people I’m talking to. My kids are my priority, but they know if the door’s closed and unless it’s an emergency, they don’t come in. It is so hard for me to focus, to get in the zone, that when I’m in it, I got to protect myself.
Remove Yourself
I have team members that choose on certain days, “I don’t want to come to work ’cause I’m going to sit at home.” No distractions, no conversations, no taps on the shoulders, no “got a seconds,” no nothing. Just boom, get it done. Other people, they go to coffee shops. Here’s an advanced move: don’t take your power cable with you. That way when you’re there and you know your battery is slowly dying, slowly down, slowly down, it’ll force you to get that work done. But coffee shops are great. Other offices are great. You can literally go to your buddy’s office and say, “Hey man, can I hang out in your conference room?”
Hack #5: Turn Up the Pressure
So imagine this: you’ve got to move out of your place, but you’ve got 3 months to move out. Think about how you would approach that. You would probably take your time, walk around slowly, get distracted easily, pack sometimes. You wouldn’t move with a sense of purpose.
But if I told you you had 3 days to get out of your place or lose all your stuff, you wouldn’t waste a minute. That’s what it means to turn up the pressure. There’s two ways that you can do this to yourself before the world does it to you.
Shorten the Timeline
You see, there’s this thing called Parkinson’s Law that states the work will expand to the available time given to it. Which means if you give yourself a lot of time, you’ll take a lot of time. When I’m talking to people on my team and they’re like, “Yeah, I’ll get that to you at the end of the day, or the end of the week, or the end of the month,” I’m like, “No, no, no. Why not 3 PM? Why not Wednesday? Why not the 10th of the month?” Most people default to just giving themselves arbitrary timelines that don’t force the creativity and the focus to get more done.
Increase the Stakes
What happens if you don’t? See, then you don’t have an out. There’s this woman on my team, Jen, who wanted to lose weight. She was sick of it. She told the whole team. She asked me for my help. I said, “Do you want the real stake?” She said, “Yes.”
I said, “Cool, this is how it works. If you don’t hit your goal by a certain date, you can’t stay on the team. Shake my hand.” Make it a non-negotiable. And she went, “Oh, no…”
“Well, that’s what I’m saying is, like, I care about you. I want to see you win. You asked me for my help.” That’s real stakes. See, most people don’t have any downside if they don’t do, and because of that, they don’t do.
Hack #6: Train Your Algorithm
What I find fascinating is the billion-dollar tech companies, these giants, hire the world’s best psychologists to design software with one purpose: to distract you, to get you to come back in the app.
I’m talking they run split tests on the red for the notification jewel. They’ll run A/B tests on the message of the notification they send to your phone, all to get you back and distract you. However, you can fight against it. See, I actually use my social media feed to feed my brain, and this is how I do it.
Teach It My Preferences
First off, I teach it my preferences. I search for things I want to learn about. I leave a comment on the posts that I find interesting, and that tells the algorithm I’m engaged.
Unfollow or Mute
Second is I unfollow any account or mute friends that are not contributing to the areas I want to learn or get better at. And I’m unapologetic about it because my feed works for me; I don’t work for it.
Integrate What I Learn
And the third is integrate what I learn. So, there’s one thing to learn something, see something, save something. I’m saying share it and, more importantly, teach it. When you teach other people, you will learn completely differently.
Hack #7: Design Your Perfect Week
This one is going to shatter some of your beliefs, but multitasking doesn’t work. It’s crazy, but it takes 23 minutes on average to refocus after a distraction. So when you’re doing work, you got to fight for that focus.
The funny way I like to think about it is multitasking… it just means screwing up multiple things at once. So this is what I suggest to create your perfect week.
Start With the Big Rocks
The first area is to start with the big rocks. These are the non-negotiables. These are the things that you know that if you get done, everything else will be good. This is the date nights, the workouts, the reading time, the strategy meetings, the weekly rhythms with your teams—the best practices for the best life.
Theme Your Days
The second area is understanding that theming your days for different things like marketing, sales, strategy, one-on-ones will help you understand where to put things in your life on what days, so it’s not a decision every time.
Batch and Block Tasks
The third area is to batch and block tasks together. That ability to take your content creation or all your conversations and batch them together and block it in your calendar into 30 or 45-minute meetings is a game-changer.
Plan Around Your Energy
And the most important is to plan around your energy, not just your time. I know there’s certain types of tasks I do in the morning that fuel me to the next level of tasks, that fuel me to the afternoon, that fuel me to the nighttime with my family. And if I did them out of sequence, I wouldn’t be good for anybody.
I wasn’t going to do this, but it would be probably petty of me not to do it. Essentially, if you want my perfect week template, what I use to structure my week every day, just find me on Instagram, message me the word “perfect,” and I’ll send you the direct link to the doc. No opt-in, no email—my gift to you.
Hack #8: Gamify Your Work
The reason why video games are so addictive is because they have levels, and you visually see your progress when you’re playing them. And what I’ve learned in life: new levels, new devils. And it’ll make you want to progress when you understand you’re getting better.
So design your life where you can measure the wins. You don’t get distracted because you’re bored; you get distracted because you can’t see your progress. Progress is happiness. Anybody that’s struggling in life right now, I know that if they made a little bit of progress in their life, they would just feel better. So let’s gamify our work so that we show up with focus and attention.
Track Your Streaks
Number one, we got to track our streaks. Jelly Roll came out with this great song about winning streaks, and I just love that philosophy. That if you measure yourself doing something and you can go day after day after day and just make it a simple win that day. If it’s 10 sales calls a day, how many days can you go in a row? My buddy Ben has been working out, I think he said the other day, 1,200 days in a row he’s worked out, and he’s done his unrequired workout. That’s wild.
Create Milestones for Rewards
The second is you got to create milestones for the rewards. This is my favorite ’cause I like to buy things and go on trips. I like to use milestones as a marker for rewarding myself, like vacations with my family or my friends as a way to have something to build towards.
Make It Visual
The third is to make it visual. I’m a fan of technology, but I will tell you, when you have that in front of your face as a poster, on your backdrop on your computer, put it on your whiteboard—I don’t care where it is, but get it outside of your brain and put it out in front of you so you can see it every time. That makes it fun.
Do It Together
The fourth is do it together. The more people you can enroll into the process of winning, you will create focus around your outcome like you’ve never felt. Because the truth is, you’ll do more for other people, especially if you’re the person that got them to start that competition or that weight loss thing, than you will do for yourself. So having that group of people to do it together with is a pro move.
Hack #9: Manage Your Energy
Exhaust the body, tame the mind.
If you follow me on Instagram (and if you don’t, you should, because I’m a good time), you will see me post almost daily: exhaust the body, tame the mind. For me, my energy is a byproduct of my habits. And if I’ve got things going on in my mind and I need to focus, I got to first exhaust my body.
Proactive Energy Boost
My morning routine is where I create my proactive energy boost. The first thing I do is focus on my process for how I wake up. What I’ve decided to do, it’s in my calendar. I move my body, I read my books, I ramp up my focus so that I can get my best work done. I’m all about energy, and there’s two ways that I make sure that my day gets the best of me. First off is a proactive energy boost. That is how I proactively start my day. This is my morning routine. This is the philosophy of prioritizing the pump, getting it on the calendar, making sure my stuff’s prepped. If I got to work out, I put that stuff out the night before so when I wake up, it’s ready to go. I don’t have to have decision fatigue.
Reactive Energy Boost
The other one is a reactive energy boost. This is when I feel drained. Maybe my eyeballs hurt. I don’t know why sometimes that happens, and I just got to reset. I mean, the other day I was giving a talk and a guy asked me, he’s like, “Hey man, how do you deal with like, feeling lethargic and tired and like you’ve got the weight of the world on you?” And I’m like, “Dude, get up front, do some push-ups.” And I did the push-ups with him, and we sat there and I said, “Keep going, keep going, keep going,” until he failed. And when he failed, I said, “On your knees.” And he went on his knees and then we were all done. I said, “Now how do you feel?” He’s like, “9 out of 10.” I said, “That took 46 seconds.”
Most people don’t realize they can reset their energy because you don’t have energy, you create energy. I can prove it. If I told you you had $10 million cash in the bank, taxes paid, how would you feel? That feeling, where’d that come from? Up here.
The other thing I love to do is walking meetings or scooter meetings. All my one-on-ones are done on a scooter. Why? A lot more fun.
Hack #10: Find Your Flow
You see, I grew up thinking I was broken. I was told I was broken, needed medication, put on Ritalin when I was 11. And what I’ve realized is it wasn’t that my mind was broken, it’s that I just needed to find a different way to work that worked for me.
So here’s what I know: your journey will be very unique. Nobody else can tell you how to do it. I can give you some thoughts, but you got to figure it out for you.
Take the time to reflect. Journal what you’re thinking about, what’s working, what’s not. “When I did this, I felt really good.” And then constantly tweak. That’s what I do. I look at my calendar because it’s designed. I say, “That felt good.” And some things used to give me energy that was very productive, and all of a sudden now, based on where I’m at in life, it doesn’t work for me anymore.
And you’re allowed to iterate. You’re allowed to take stuff out and try new things on like new clothes. Does it fit well? If it doesn’t, take it off, go find something different.
The big idea, though, is don’t give up. Don’t give up on you. I know that if you master the ability to find your energy, your focus, and your flow, your dreams exist on the other side of that.
Now, if you want to learn the eight habits that will fix 98% of your problems, check out this article, and I’ll see you on the other side.
