Tim Ferriss once said that two hours of real focus per day will put you in the top 1% of performers. I believe that completely, because I’ve lived it. Almost all my output comes from a small window of time where I’m genuinely locked in. The rest of the day is spent on regular, everyday stuff: meetings, Slack, email, kid stuff, logistics.
Those two hours are where everything that matters in my 7- figure business gets built.
When I tell people that, most of them react the same way: “Oh, that’s nice, you have two hours to dedicate to your business. I certainly don’t. Must be nice.”
The reality is that, even though I am the boss, I still have to fight tooth and nail for that time.
Those two hours exist in your day, too. I promise you they do. However, they’re currently being consumed by things that may feel productive but aren’t, or by distractions so automatic you don’t even register them as distractions anymore.
The good news is that getting those two hours back doesn’t require waking up at 4am or overhauling your entire life.
It requires just three changes, and none of them are hard.
You don’t need more time. You don’t have more time. You need to protect the time you have. Here are three ways I do it.
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1. Stop letting algorithms dictate your attention
Open YouTube, and what is the first thing you see? A wall of recommendations. X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, same thing. Every one of those recommendations has been tuned by some of the most sophisticated psychological and technological engineering on the planet to do one thing: keep you scrolling. Billions of dollars and thousands of engineers have gone into making sure that when you open one of these apps, you stay longer than you intended to.
And it works. You open your phone to check one thing, and forty-five minutes later, you’re watching a video you never planned to watch, on a topic you didn’t care about five minutes ago.
And you are left wondering where the time went.
I’m not going to tell you to delete all your apps or go cold turkey on social media. That advice doesn’t stick for most people. It doesn’t work for me. I’m a content creator. I live on these platforms. But we all know that our phones sap our energy and free time.
So how do we avoid the time suck without completely shunning the amazing technology at our fingertips?
Here’s the rule I follow: I only consume content I’ve chosen in advance.
If I want to watch a specific YouTube video, I will search for it and watch it. If someone sends me a link, I’ll check it out.
But what I don’t do is open YouTube and browse.
I don’t scroll my home feed.
I don’t let the algorithm tell me what I’m going to do for the next forty-five minutes.
The difference is intent. When you choose what you consume, you’re in control of your time. When you let an algorithm choose for you, you’ve handed control to a system whose only goal is to keep you engaged for as long as possible. You’re going to lose that battle. That system doesn’t care about your two hours of focus. It’s designed to consume them.
This applies to your computer, too. The recommended articles in your browser’s new tab page. The suggested posts in your LinkedIn feed. The “you might also like” section at the bottom of every article. All of it is engineered to turn a five-second glance into a fifteen-minute detour.
And it won’t stop at fifteen minutes, forty-five minutes, or two hours. It will take all the time you give it.
You don’t have to stop enjoying content. Just make sure you go looking for it rather than having it served to you. That one rule alone has probably saved me at least two hours a day.
What to do: Next time you pick up your phone or open a new tab, notice whether you have a specific intention or if you’re just opening it out of habit. If you don’t have a specific reason to be there, close it. You’ll be surprised how many times a day you open apps with no purpose at all.
2. Batch everything
In Cal Newport’s book A World Without Email, he cites research suggesting the average office worker checks their email and notifications once every six minutes. That is, every six minutes, they break whatever they’re doing to look at something new.
In a two-hour window, that’s twenty interruptions.
And it’s not just the time spent reading the notification. It’s the recovery time. Research on context-switching suggests it can take over twenty minutes to get back to the same depth of focus after an interruption. If you’re checking every six minutes, you’ll never reach any real depth at all. You’ll spend your whole day skimming the surface.
The fix is batching. Instead of responding to things as they come in, collect them and handle them in dedicated blocks.
I batch my email into two checks a day, once in the morning after my focus block and once in the late afternoon. Slack gets the same treatment, but I add a midday check. My phone stays on silent during my focus hours except for calls from my contacts. If something is truly urgent, they will call.
In my entire career, the number of things that couldn’t wait two hours has been close to zero.
The same principle applies to meetings. A day with six meetings scattered across eight hours gives you zero focus time. Every gap between meetings feels too short to start anything meaningful, so you fill it with email and Slack and browsing. But if those same six meetings are pushed into a single afternoon block, this will give you an entire morning of unbroken time.
Batching works because it consolidates the reactive parts of your day, thus allowing the focused parts to remain focused. Email, Slack, meetings, all of it can be grouped together.
The key is that you’re choosing when to be reactive instead of letting other people’s timelines dictate your day.
People check their devices constantly because they’re afraid they’ll miss something important. (That, and to receive the little dopamine hit that comes from checking.) But the fear of missing out is almost always unfounded. Most messages can wait two hours. Most meetings can be moved. The cost of responding later is almost nothing.
But the cost of never having two unbroken hours is enormous.
What to do: Tomorrow, try three things. First, don’t check email or Slack for the first two hours of your work day. Do your actual work first. Second, schedule short blocks to check your Slack and email and process your messages in a batch. Third, look at your calendar for the rest of the week and see if you can push your meetings together into a single block on at least one day. Then observe what happens to your output when you give yourself a clean stretch of time.
3. Go somewhere that means focus and only focus
When I was at Amazon and I needed to do deep work, I’d go to the Amazon Spheres, three large, glass-domed, spherical conservatories located at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, accessible only to employees. Something about walking into a completely different physical space flipped a switch in my brain. I wasn’t at my desk, where Slack was pinging and people were stopping by. I was somewhere else, and that somewhere else meant one thing: head-down work.
Now that I’ve left Amazon, I rent a studio. We film all of our videos there, but that’s not the only reason I have it. I could easily work from home. But when I walk into the studio, I’m all business. There’s no laundry to notice or kids to check on. The physical space removes a category of distraction that willpower alone cannot handle.
Here’s the key, though. The space works only if you keep it clean, in a behavioral sense. The studio is for work. I don’t browse social media there. I don’t watch videos unless they relate to my channel. I don’t do anything in that space that isn’t the focused work I came to do.
That rule is what makes the environment powerful. If I were to start scrolling through X at my studio desk, my brain would quickly learn that the studio was a place where scrolling was acceptable, and the magic of the space would disappear.
Your brain associates environments with behaviors. If you do everything at the same desk, your brain has no environmental cue to signal when it’s time to focus versus when it’s time to check Slack or browse Reddit. You will sit down, and your brain will pick whichever mode has the strongest pull in that moment. And focus usually loses that fight.
Change the location and you change the mode. Go to a coffee shop for your focus block. Book an empty conference room. Go to a library or a park bench. Even moving to a different room in your house works.
But wherever you go, make a rule: that space is for focus work only. Nothing else gets done there. No email, no Slack, no browsing, no algorithms. Over time, your brain will associate that location with deep work, and getting into focus mode will require less and less effort.
You don’t need to rent a studio. I’ve noticed that the location doesn’t even have to be particularly comfortable or nice. It just has to be different from where you do everything else, and you have to be disciplined about it.
What to do: This week, try doing your focus work somewhere other than your usual desk. Wherever you go, commit to one rule: nothing but focus work happens in that space. See what it does to your output.
Two Hours Is Enough
I’m not a productivity guru. I don’t have a strict morning routine. Like most people, I have a busy, messy life with a lot of competing demands. But two hours of focus a day is what makes all of it work for me.
The newsletter you’re reading right now was written in one of those two-hour blocks. So was most of my book. So were the podcast questions that led to some of the best conversations I’ve had this year.
Two hours of focused work, consistently protected, will compound into something you won’t believe when you look back at it a year from now.
You have the time. You just have to stop giving it away to algorithms, reactive habits, and environments that are working against you.
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