by default your brain is unproductive for 64% of waking hours but what if there's a way it could be productive 24/7 is it possible that there's an entire network in the brain you could use to achieve your goals in a fraction of the time now I'm randar is co-founder and CEO the flow research Collective along with my partner stepen Cotler we've taught thousands of professionals how to access flow States at will now the alarm goes off on the question emerges to hit snooze or not strength prevails and you get up but then another question emerges should I shower or should I stretch you decide to shower and in the shower you're ruminating about whether your friend thinks you're lame because you were wearing Crocs the other day and you wonder whether your boss thinks you're incompetent because they glan at you funny during yesterday's meeting then after drying off you decide to have breakfast and as you eat it you're ruminating about that random person from high school who liked when of your old photo posts on social media you wonder do they want to get back in touch should you message them or might that be a little odd before going to work you wonder should I walk to work instead of driving you glance down at your phone to call on Uber and see a message from your ex you think should I text back right away or might that come across as needy this is the rumination landscape the cognitive landscape most of us have most of the time the trouble is most of that rumination which occurs almost all the time when our Consciousness is not fully engaged and focused in a task is unproductive from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed we're trying to answer minor irrelevant useless trivial questions with our minds we Fritter away precious cognition on micro concerns and clutter that has nothing to do with our goals now let's hold up for a second and replay the previous scenario but this time imagine that the only thing you had to think about was whatever your primary professional Pursuit is that core Focus that mountain you want a summit and your mind cleared of all the Clutter so let's let do the replay the alarm goes off on autopilot you perform an optimal morning routine having made every decision down to the seemingly trivial like determining whether to shower before or after eating and exactly what clothes to wear courtesy of the default mode Network the part of the brain that's active during idle non-focused moments rumination still occurs which means questions do arise in the brain as you unconsciously go about getting ready in your morning but the questions now are of a different quality while showering you ruminate what's our strategy to Triple the business over the next 5 years while brushing your teeth you think is rebranding the business a bigger priority right now or is rebuilding our sales department while stretching you think what does my daughter Suzanne most need from me to make sure she navigates her teenage years in a healthy way these are the kinds of questions we want to occupy our cognitive landscape whilst we ruminate over the long term with a cognitive landscape like this where our mind is ruminating on our most important professional Pursuit and the questions that matter most to us in life about our family who we want to become rather than on triviality all sorts of things become possible the more pointed your rumination becomes the more creative and the better you will solve problems even while not working because most of us equate productivity to when the task positive network of the brain is fired up and we're honed in and actively focusing on a task but what about the default mode Network which is actively engaged when we are idle this is a sort of productivity discrimination we bias and prioritize task positive network-based Focus productivity over default mode network-based diffuse productivity But the irony is that the default mode network-based productivity accounts for more total hours of our waking lives just consider we're awake 112 hours per week for roughly 40 of those hours our tpn our task positive network is engaged in work where we're actually focusing on something that means that for 72 waking hours your attention is dislodged and the default mode network is active with rumination occurring literally 64% of your waking week 20% more than the hours you work you are at the mercy of your default mode Network likely ruminating on something so what is that rumination allocated to and what good do you get out of it leveraging your rumination is a shift that the average knowledge worker rarely makes they go through their entire career squandering most of their brains creative and productive time where the default mode network is active and and rumination is occurring they're like a puppet being pulled by the strings of random triviality whereas the workplace Olympian does something different they become their own puppet master and transform their rumination into a 247 problemsolving supercomputer that tirelessly works on specific pre-programmed goals and this transition from a cluttered cognitive landscape to a clear creative and constructive one has a name we call it upgrading your rumination when you upgrade your rumination you transform mind wandering into problem solving you make your idle thoughts work for you rather than against you with upgraded rumination you redirect your default bone Network to creatively solve your top priorities you can cut down the amount of time you spend actively working with the tpn because the quality of your thinking becomes so high instead of getting stuck in traffic and stressing about emails by default you make your commute a brainstorm for your next business breakthrough you turn your morning routine into a blueprint for execution you enter meetings with gamechanging propos proposals that were conceptualized while washing dishes or folding laundry when we view productivity through the lens of both the tpn and the dmn it becomes whole brain 360° productivity and you weaponize your idle cognition now let's upgrade your rumination in these three phases so let's start with reclaiming your rumination and we'll do this by eliminating one of the most Insidious blockers of flow flow being that state of optimal Consciousness where we feel our best and we perform at our Peak and that flow blocker it's called dispersion dispersion refers to losing focus on the main Pursuit that once occupied you fully which leads to the diversion of cognitive resources effort and attention across multiple Pursuits projects or goals that do not directly build upon or compound upon each other in simpler words dispersion is going a mile wide but an inch deep and you know how this goes you decide coding is your thing so for years you're taking courses honing your skills and making real forward progress but then you decide you also want to build an audience so maybe start a substack and a YouTube channel oh and your cooworker ropes you into working on his startup on the side a little bit then after hearing about a friend hitting it big you start dabbling a little bit in crypto trading some nights it's all you can ruminate about wondering which tokens are most likely to pop next bit by bit new shiny objects pull your attention away from coding which was the primary focus you've got a dozen mental tabs open that don't build on each other at all it's easy to think you can just split your focus 20 hours on your main J 20 hours on a side hustle let's say but in reality as you split Focus rumination time on the most important project goes down it gets scattered it's too much to Grapple with and it dramatically degrades your rumination when your unconscious can't locate a clear goal to focus on ironically you will work even less though you have more work to do spread across multiple Pursuits you often don't end up ruminating on productive or professional Pursuits at all and your incubation and creativity gears get all jammed and clogged up so when the gears get jammed like this the default mode Network tends to latch onto the simplest and stickiest stuff that it sees social media pointless social interactions the news and other trivialities that aren't related to your goals at all even a sliver of dispersion any investment of time energy attention money leads to attachment of some kind which heavily downgrades our rumination and degrades the productivity we can yield from the default mode Network once you understand how the dmn works and the nature of rumination you realize there is no such thing as just a few hours on an additional project here or there because every commitment of task positive network based focused work has a default mode network based rumination Consequence the default mode Network produces either signal or noise depending on how dispersed you are noise is unavoidable if you are dispersed I learned this the hard way I built my training company into an eight-figure business through years of Relentless singular Focus but with success came opportunities that led me astray within a year I went from Total singular Focus to being dispersed across five major projects there was the original training company then launching two new companies pursuing a PhD writing a book and building a whole content ecosystem suddenly it became challenging to focus at the task positive Network level on anything I could no longer See Clearly what the priority was across all of the different Pursuits so I was paralyzed progress stalled on everything I had to become a dabbler jack of all trades master and none and I noticed that my once productive shower time evaporated where I used to get specific insights on granular elements of business growth my mind now bounced around aimlessly like a pingpong ball all of that precious rumination was thrown down the drain and when I managed to sit down to work on one thing my efforts were all over the map it was the psychological equivalent of doing one task in Japan that having to fly to Croatia for a second task and then fly across to California for the third the level of cogn of distance that I had to travel was overwhelming most of my time and energy was spent climatizing to the project versus actually working on the damn thing and moving it forward and this dispersion led to another invisible enemy decision fatigue I thought allotting one day per Pursuit would reduce my decision load Monday for the training company Tuesday for the PHD and so on and so on kind of like I heard Elon does but I underestimated the volume of daily decisions each Pursuit would still require it was like juggling five full-time jobs demanding five weeks of mental bandwidth in one week the Relentless decision load torpedoed my focus and my rumination squandering both the task positive Network and the default mode Network's ability to yield productivity for me and I realized I had fallen into the damn dispersion trap assuming that opportunity comes with breath of Pursuits rather than depth in one so I slashed everything down refocused on the most important thing within a month I progressed more on that one thing than I would have on all five things combined in a year and that's because the focus began to compound the priorities became clear stress fell through the floor I got more access to Flow State and my rumination upgraded dramatically and the lesson was clear dispersion is the enemy The Golden Rule of progress is to do one thing for longer than you think our biology pulls us to explore and pursue the new and the shiny but the biggest rewards come from exploiting the gold mine right in front of us so the solution here is simple do do one thing focus on a single professional Pursuit and cut out everything else and once we cut out everything else we significantly upgrade our rumination like a magnifying glass distilling the sun's power to burn a hole in a single piece of paper and that's the first step to upgrading our rumination the second is to reboot your rumination now that you've reclaimed your rumination by eliminating dispersion and going all in on that one thing it's time to clear out all the accumulated junk that might will be rattling around your cognitive landscape cluttering your internal headp space because sometimes to truly upgrade your rumination you have to rebooted entirely over time half-baked thoughts and ideas open Loops worries the need to do and should do and wonder if iids accumulate like junk which Rob us of precious and productive rumination think of all the missed opportunities that this cluttered rumination represents the solution is to purge all of it by externalizing the Clutter there's a simple way to do this sit down with a piece of paper and pen and write out every single thought that comes to mind doesn't matter what it is every nagging concern every major worry every dumb idea every conversation not had every soft and hard regret all of it get them all externalized out of your mind the act of articulating and capturing free mental bandwidth enormously the bulk of the benefit comes just from the externalizing itself not even from taking action on the things you're externalizing when thoughts are transferred onto paper it reduces the need for the brain to expand energy to retain and juggle the information this is known as cognitive offloading which frees up mental resources allowing for improved focus and more importantly for our purposes here upgraded rumination think of it kind of like Excavating a clogged ditch or Scavenging for intruders in your mind much like antioxidants scavenge for free radicals in the body dig deep to uproot the suppressed flutter you're carving out space for your best thinking and if you want to take this to another level we can add Solitude into the equation if you pull yourself away from the day-to-day to do this all alone you minimize new inputs and external stimuli so that the accumulated internal junk can Surface and dissolve with less coming in what's already there comes up to the surface and gets cleared out personally I like to go on a 10day silent Meditation Retreat ideally at least once a quarter to get a rumination reboot on these Retreats I'm actually not supposed to journal it goes against the principles of the the zen teacher but I like to do it a little bit anyway because offloading everything that comes up at the end and throughout that Retreat massively frees up my cognitive landscape allowing my rumination to upgrade tremendously by the way part of why Solitude works so well is because you are reducing social stimuli as well in solitude humans evolve to be inherently social this makes social signals particularly Salient and sticky and likely to occupy a disproportionate amount of space in our cognitive landscape this is called brooding I'm sure you can relate to it it's a subtype of rumination which is a passive comparison of one's current situation with some unachieved standard that you see someone else live up to one way to ensure brooding doesn't clog your rumination is to reduce your opportunities to compare yourself to others less social media being a simple example another way though is to ensure honesty and cander in your interactions with others if you aren't straightforward and you underdue cander and directness within your communication you risk social rumination degrading the quality of your rumination and increasing the degree to which that rumination capacity will go to brood it so for upgraded rumination aim to live a life free of loose end social question marks and open loops and when you take out the pen and paper to dump everything out of your cognitive landscape that you've had floating in there for years you want to spend hours and hours and hours doing this sometimes it takes multiple days days just to scavenge and excavate all of those things that are floating in there from a tax return you're not sure you properly paid 4 and 1/2 years ago to a conversation you've been meaning to have with your uncle from 13 years ago to immediate pressing work concerns that you're dealing with right now get it all out there and watch as your rumination upgrades now the third step is to make sure that we maintain this upgraded rumination now that we've stopped dispersing and we've rebooted our rumination we want to make sure that this higher quality rumination is intact over time to do this we have to address how we handle decisions you've heard the stats it's estimated that the average adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day with researchers at Cornell University estimating that we make 226 decisions each day just on food and we all know making too many decisions depletes our willpower but decision- making also increases cognitive load and tilts our attention from Divergent and creative to convergent and Jagged which blocks flow we usually view decisions as nothing because they sort of appear automatically in our minds but decisions are actually resource intensive tasks we underestimate this because they aren't necessarily time intensive or they don't seem to be or feel like they are and they aren't physically intensive so the key here is to first off reframe how we think about decisions we want to think of and treat decisions more like we do physical tasks almost as if each decision is the equivalent of having to bend down and pick up a heavy box seen this way it encourages us to minimize the number of decisions we have to make to minimize the number of times we have to bend down and pick up that box and we can set things up once and let them run indefinitely without exerting additional cognitive energy this is how we maintain an upgraded rumination landscape there are two tools for this first off decision recycling second off decision autopilot first we want to eliminate as many medium-sized should I or should ey decisions as we possibly can we call this decision recycling you decide once and you reuse that decision endlessly average knowledge workers tend to face repeat scenarios they also tend to have predictable preferences and they tend to opt for similar outcomes both all the same they spend their time and energy making a unique decision to get to that same outcome every time they hit one of those repeat scenarios simple example is booking flights formatting a document or setting a wakeup alarm instead you make one decision and recycle it across all future outcomes when you decide once and repeat forever you set and forget optimal choices if you always spend 5 to 10 minutes deciding whether to fly direct or have a stop over recycle your decisions make one call where for example you decide no matter what the price is I'm always going to fly direct if you spend 2 minutes setting your alarm clock every night for a slightly different morning wakeup time recycle your decision always wake up at 7:30 a. m. or whatever it is for you if you go back and forth about whether to attend a social event during the week recycle your decision decide that you only socialize on week nights on a Wednesday for example you can treat this as a decision-making rule book mental shortcuts for making optimal decisions with minimal cognitive burden start with five scenarios you frequently encounter where you find yourself making unique decision for each time you hit that scenario and instead make the decision one more time right now and then apply it endlessly thereafter leveraging the decision across multiple scenarios and then to further free up your cognitive landscape of triviality put routine decisions on autopilot decision recycling works on a macro level across life you make one decision up front and you reuse it forever it eliminates recurring should I or shouldn't I mediumsized decisions decision autopod on the other hand eliminates what's next micro decisions within a known workflow or routine like getting ready in the morning recycling addresses what should I do each time Auto pilot handles what's next in this routine so decision autopilot is like a script you can run for your routine so that your upgraded rumination is free to diverge never interrupted by the need to stop converge and devote cognitive energy to making inconsequential choices like whether you should shower before stretching or fast or have breakfast or car poool or walk to work instead you map those little decisions out in advance consider Emanuel K responsible for much Western philosophy he had a daily routine that he stuck to religiously and every detail of each routine was dialed in and preset in advance at 5:00 a.
m. servant of 9 years Martin lamp would wake up Kat the old Soldier was under orders to never let Kat sleep longer Kat found it hard to get up early but he had made the decision once and applied it to all of his mornings after getting up K would drink some tea afterward and never before he smoked a pipe always only one of tobacco his smoking time was devoted to meditation he then prepared lectures and worked on his books until 7:00 a. m.
he lecture until 11:00 a. m. with the lectures finished he worked again on his writings until lunch after lunch he'd take a walk and spend the rest of the afternoon with his friend green after going home he would do some light work and reading how was K able to have such profound novel original thoughts that he literally shaped the fabric of reality within which science was born and we now all live well it's partly because he devoted no time to making recurrent decisions with recurring rituals the details of his daily routines were explicit and he ran decision autopilot to make that happen and this may sound rigid but it's actually what's known as a liberating constraint you're bounding your life in in one domain to unlock increased freedom and creativity in another for Kant he kept his routine dialed in down to the details so he had the freedom to wrestle with civilization shaping ideas that would bend most people's minds decision autopilot eliminates micro uncertainty and those jaggedy halting moments that are semi subconscious where we kind of wonder what what what's next so here's how to set up these liberating constraints so you can maintain your upgraded rumination over time take the routines you're already doing and make the micro decisions within them explicit you can start with any repeated routine your morning ritual your afternoon workout or your evening windown now determine the details and the sequence for these routines then write these details down they can be changed if needed but what you want is to remove all should ey or shouldn't die from the routine it's the clusters of decisions within one routine that you're automating here for example during your morning ritual do you get water before or after meditating or do you get water before you shower so that you can urinate after showering do you have a quick snack in between showering and meditating these are the micro decisions with a routine that we're making explicit and deciding on in advance the more explicit the sequence the smoother it is to perform the routine without clogging up your upgraded rumination and degrading it intuitively we think that these micro decisions are trivial but they do add up the amount of information processing required goes up unnecessarily cumulatively they deplete cognitive energy increase cognitive load and block flow so list every micro decision within the routine that way your cognition doesn't have to converge constantly this allows your mind to diverge to get creative and get more flow life's trivialities are handle so your mind is free to dream explore and create now a quick example 9:00 a.
m.
