The most important skill for improving your life

[Music] Despite all the self-improvement content that exists on YouTube or online in general, most people already know exactly what they need to do to improve their lives. Pretty much every day, we have at least one thing that we know we need to do. If we were somehow able to just sit down and do that thing from start to finish, our life would be better because of it.

You know, if you're a student, maybe that sitting down to write a couple hundred words of that giant essay that you need to write. Or maybe if you're just a regular guy and you drive a 2005 Honda Civic, maybe it's making weird noises and you really should bring it into the shop. But for some reason you're not, because it's working now, so you assume it's gonna keep on working. But you really should get it checked out.

It's not that people don't know what to do; that's not the problem. The problem is that people just don't do those things. They put it off, they distract themselves, they do pretty much anything under the Sun—even stuff that is sort of vaguely important in some way, but it's not really important to you. You might use that as a justification, like, "Oh, I'm sweeping the floor and that's productive," and you use that as an excuse to not write the essay, even though the essay is the most important thing that you should be doing.

And I don't want to sound like a boomer or anything like that, but I actually think this is becoming a bigger problem that more and more people are facing as time goes on. And that's because distracting ourselves is easier than it ever has been. Every year, companies spend billions upon billions of dollars to shove ads or products into your face with online marketing that nobody wanted or asked for.

You're just bombarded and assaulted with all these little pop-ups, scattering your attention and distracting you from whatever you were planning on doing when you sat on the computer or opened your phone or whatever.

Anyways, I'll spare you all this woke talk and just cut to the chase. A world of distraction simultaneously creates a huge demand for people who can resist its draw. In other words, the rarest and most important skill you can cultivate in today's information age is the ability to concentrate. The ability to actively concentrate on one thing for long periods of time without getting distracted isn't just one solution for succeeding in the digital age; it's the solution.

But maybe I'm not saying anything new; you probably already know this. It's not like some crazy original idea that I've had that if you can just focus on doing important things, then you're gonna get better at life. But, like I said before, not knowing what we need to do isn't the problem; it's the fact that we just don't do it.

Maybe you've tried to concentrate for long periods of time, but you find it extremely, almost pessimistically difficult. But that's exactly why I'm making this video. I'm probably the most distractible person you ever met. Naturally, I'm very scatterbrained. If a light turns on in any other room, I'm like a moth—I'm like, "Oh, what's that? Let's go check it out." In fact, my mom will tell you I'm the worst procrastinator she's ever raised.

But somehow, even I have managed to find little shortcuts and strategies and little hacks to convert myself into a relatively productive human being who can concentrate on boring things for long periods of time. It's a skill that anybody can learn, and one of the crazy things I've noticed is that you don't need to dive into like eight hours of deep work in order to make progress in your life. The bar is actually way lower than that.

If you could dive in for one hour on the most important thing on your to-do list for the day with a ruthless active concentration, you will make substantial progress in your life. And as you get used to putting in that hour of focus, you can upgrade that to an hour and a half, to two hours, to three hours. And even then, that's so much intense focus that you'll skyrocket past your goals and start living a life that you actually thought you'd be living at this point in your life.

Let's be real, so I'm going to break this video down into three categories. Step one is to properly craft your physical environment.

[Music] You've probably heard it a million times that if you have a messy room, then you're gonna have a messy mind. And if you just clean and organize your room, it's kind of like cleaning and organizing your mind. There's an amazing truth to this. Even if you just look at it from a practical perspective, each room should have a use, and each physical space where you dwell should reduce the friction that's in the way of doing the things that that room was intended to help you do.

So, for instance, in my own home office, I have a video editing PC. It's where I do all my creative stuff, it's where I'm shooting this video behind me—whoops—right there. If I want to help myself succeed and to concentrate and not get distracted, I should clean my desk to be as minimal as possible. The only things on there should help me accomplish my tasks that I've been setting out to do.

This might sound like a total sidetrack rabbit-hole, but I promise it'll make sense in a second. So I bought one of these awesome little wireless chargers for my phone. I bought it off Amazon; it was sleek, it was sexy—kind of fake wood. And I figured, "Hey, this would be a great addition to my desk. I can put my phone on there, I can see when I'm getting notifications, and I'll never run out of juice in my phone throughout the day."

But if you think about it, that's a really stupid idea. Why do I need to be notified when somebody's texting me or when somebody comments on something on the Facebook page or something like that? I'm literally inviting more distraction into my life, and it's dumb. So how did I get around this?

Well, there's a little shelf next to me—this one—and I just put my wireless phone charger there behind me so that when I'm video editing into a flow state, it doesn't distract me. Little fixes like this seem really small, and you might think, "Oh, Joey, you're making like a 15-minute video about little dumb tricks like this." Yes, believe me, when it comes to your focus, it is everything.

And this doesn't just apply to the workspace, too. There are other little ways that your environment dictates the amount of focus that you have. For instance, if you usually keep your phone on your nightstand next to your bed, then that's kind of dumb if your plan for that room is to go to sleep.

I personally found that I was spending way too much time on my phone before I went to sleep, and it was becoming a real problem. It was affecting my sleep, and I couldn't get into a deep sleep, so I woke up in the morning feeling really groggy all the time, every single day. So what I did is I bought a cheap little Google Nest Mini, and I leave my phone on a charging station outside of my bedroom. It's great! Every night, I say, "Okay, Google, set an alarm for 8:00 a.m. tomorrow."

"At 8:00 a.m.," said, "Thank you, Google. Good night!"

"Good night, Google."

All right, that's okay; you don't need to say it back. So your bedroom is for sleeping, your office is for working, your kitchen is for cooking, your private bowling alley in your basement is for bowling. Okay, moving on to section two. This is all about designing your digital environment.

Just like your physical environment, it is integral that you design your digital environment to also promote focus. You know, I'm not Thomas Frank, but I do have a couple tricks up my sleeve that helped me focus on stuff. Here's a bunch of things that helped me focus online.

So, a lot of these are Chrome extensions, I think they're available for Firefox as well. So number one is to download News Feed Eradicator for Facebook. What this does is it replaces your Facebook homepage with a motivational quote, and it gets rid of your scrolling everywhere. So if you actually do stumble on Facebook, especially when you're working, the only thing you can really do is see if you have any notifications or respond to messages. You won't get caught in the trap of just absorbing all this meaningless hotel nightmares—kitchen nightmares. Is hotel nightmares one?

Another awesome Chrome extension, and I think it's also for Firefox as well, is DF YouTube, which stands for Distraction Free YouTube. Shoutout to my friend Alex for showing me this one! If you're like me, YouTube is probably the biggest time suck of all, but what DF YouTube does is it eliminates the classic homepage, so you're not bombarded with all these huge thumbnails of all these different recommended videos. It just wipes it clean.

You know, you still get the trending tab if you're into that kind of thing—I don't know who would be, probably just Lele Pons and the late-night hosts. My favorite part about it is that it also keeps the subscriptions tab so that the people you're actually subscribed to show up there.

Another thing that it does is that it actually eliminates the sidebar of all these recommended videos so that when you're watching the video of a channel that you actually meant to watch, you're not sucked into watching another channel, and you know, you go down the rabbit hole. You're just intentionally watching what you set out to watch.

Another thing I did—this is a little bit more extreme, but it worked really well for me—is that I deleted social media apps off my phone in general. And when I want to use a particular app, I actually have to physically type it in on Safari or whatever.

Okay, section number three: this is all about training your mind.

[Music] Sorry, that's probably a bit much. The first two sections were all about eliminating little traps and attention-sucking succubus, but this whole section is all about developing a philosophy and a mindset of intentionality. And this is one of the most important and powerful mindsets you can adopt to promote concentration.

You need to train your mind to be more intentional with your time. You might think I'm coming at this from a hustle culture perspective where every single ounce of your time needs to be dedicated to working on your craft or grinding or something like that. But that's actually—I don't believe that at all.

You know, for instance, I am a big fan of video games. I think video games are a great way to take a breather and escape and engage with either a work of art or a multiplayer experience. But my point is, if you're gonna play video games, play the crap out of video games for like an hour or two after you've already put in the tremendous amount of focus on something else.

You've been productive; you put in your time, you were intentional with it, so that you can fully immerse yourself in a video game with no guilt. Being present and fully engaged with whatever you're doing, whether that's having fun, having a conversation with a friend, whether it's working on something extremely creative and fulfilling, I feel like this is the key to a happy and fulfilling life.

One of the best ways that you can develop more intentionality in your life in order to promote focus, but also just to have a more fulfilling life in general, is to create a schedule for your day. And the schedule shouldn't be seen as something like the super ruthless, iron-fisted, limiting concoction that you trap and imprison yourself in.

The fulfilling of your schedule is your own; you can design your day in a way that is fulfilling to you. You know, before you design your schedule, you can really ask yourself, "What could I do day to day that I would truly feel happy and fulfilled with?" How much time would I dedicate to working? And be realistic with that. How much time should I dedicate to socializing? And be realistic.

If gaming is important to you, or something like that, or working out or whatever, you have the freedom to design your day in a way that's most fulfilling to you. But once you do that, be absolutely ruthless with being engaged and intentional with every single thing on your schedule. That way, when you're working, you get way more work done because you're concentrated. When you're playing, you have a lot more fun because you're right there, not guiltily playing because you didn't actually do work and you shouldn't actually be playing.

And to develop focus specifically, start off by scheduling one hour of focus on a very specific thing that you really need to get done. Pretty much everyone can manage one hour. Once you enter a flow state, you know, try to break past that 20-minute mark so you can enter that flow state. After a couple of weeks of getting used to doing an hour of deep focus, ramp it up to an hour and a half, then to two hours, maybe two and a half hours, three if you're really getting the hang of it.

I find that three hours is sort of the point of time that I'm the most productive, and after that, it's sort of diminishing returns. As you get better at developing the skill of concentration, you'll find that you get stuff done a lot quicker. You know, you only put three hours into work, and you're really concentrated, and you can get more done in those three hours than you typically did in your entire week.

If you have a high-intensity workout, you can usually spend that hour and a half you spend at the gym checking your phone and taking 10-minute breaks for sets. You can reduce that time to like 45 minutes. So basically, you free up all this time in your day for something else.

And if you're looking for another something else, then I'd highly recommend checking out my boy Thomas Frank's brand new class on Skillshare all about developing habits. A big thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video! Skillshare is an online learning community that offers membership with meaning. With so much to explore, real projects to create, and the support of fellow creatives, Skillshare empowers you to accomplish real growth.

Skillshare offers classes designed for real life, so you can move your creative journey forward without putting your life on hold. You can learn and grow with short classes that fit your busy schedule. Thomas Frank's first class, his productivity master class, fits the digital environment topic of today's video quite well. So I'd also highly recommend checking out that one as well.

And the awesome thing is all these classes I'm talking about and that I'm recommending, you can check out today for free if you click the link in the description. It gives you two months of Skillshare premium absolutely free. And after that, it's still extremely affordable. If you pay for the annual membership, it comes in at less than $10 a month.

So once again, click the link in the description to get two months of Skillshare premium absolutely free and explore your creativity. If you like this video, make sure to hit like because when you hit like, the algorithm blesses me and it shoves this video in front of other people's faces, helping them out, and it also helps me out. So it's a complete win-win for everybody involved.

If you like videos like this in general, definitely hit subscribe and hit the bell icon so that you don't miss future videos that I put out. I actually just created a second channel, so I'm gonna put the link in the description for that as well. I want to upload more regularly, but a usual Better Ideas video definitely takes a lot of time and effort, so it's not like I can be posting these every single day even though I want to be.

So that's why I created a second channel for more off-the-cuff, meme-y stuff. Well, you know, do live streams. Maybe I'll start a podcast on there. Click the link in the description to subscribe to the second channel, and I think it will be—actually, I know, I know it'll be an awesome time. But anyways, that is all for today. I'm really excited about the next video, so yeah, we'll see you in that one. Later!