Rian Doris Hellwatch

A watch of every video on Rian Doris' channel from May 8th 2023 to April 3rd 2025.

* "Focus on command"
- Flow state :: being fully absorbed in a given task
- Blockers :: elements that pull away from focus
- Proneness :: Tendency to access flow state
- Triggers :: Activities which put you in a focused state


- do 2-3 hours of work before touching your phone
- start producing in the first 90 seconds of the day

** Cycle Struggle Phase
- Attention :: Focusing for a long time
- Flow :: Hyperfocus
- Release :: Recovery after session of focused work

* "Reprogram your dopamine"
- Wall stare :: Taking breaks where brain is given minimal stimulus


- Practice "active boredom" between work sessions
- Staying away from dopamine sources to become sensitive to normal activities again
- Focus on a single task at a given moment; do not multitask

* Work after waking up

        Grind for 1-3 hours and do recovery
        Never skip recovery

** Unhelpful
- Absurd morning routines :: Complicated stack of cold showers, touching grass, yoga routines...
- Doom scrolling :: Using a cell phone on social media, youtube, any task which has an infinite potential to easily waste all of your time

** Brainwaves
- Brainwaves of flow state are similar to brainwaves of sleeping
- Sleep and deep focus are close to Theta

** Flow states
- Struggle :: Anxiety and resistance
- Release ::
- Flow :: Working on tasks
- Recovery :: Relaxation before next cycle

* Work hours
- Parksinson's Law :: Work expands to fill the time allotted
- Linearity bias :: Thinking work output scales with amount of effort invested in a linear way
- Flow :: Exceed your ability "by about 4%"
- Productivity guilt :: Ban yourself from working outside of designated work blocks


- Hours do not equal outcomes

** Work Compression
- Setting a limit on work for a day
- Set the work limit aggressively such as a 3-6 hour block for the entire day
- Do not work outside of a designated time box

* Energy on demand

** Workspace
- Motion Board :: Thing to stand on that gets you to fidget about


- Have somewhere to sit, stand, and walk, in your primary workspace
- Have a second and tertiary location to work from for variety
- A varied environment encourages exploration

** Posture
- Poor posture can result in pain and a loss of productivity
- Stand for 5-10 minutes for every half hour of sitting

** Addressing fatigue
- Feeling fatigued :: Move somewhere else to work
- Feeling out of effort :: Change posture

* Hinge theory & scheduling
- Domino Habit :: Habits that make the rest of your day happen automatically

** Temporal Landmarks
- Events which mark a significant period of time
    - Tax season
    - Birthdays
    - Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner
    - Sleep
- Can be as short as a sleep time or meal period

** Hinge theory
*** Setup
- Mark temporal landmarks for the day
- Pick up to six of these to become "hinges."
- Set an alarm for each hinge

*** Working
- Daily alarm cues are your "hinges"
- Work on a project only during its time boxes
- Change activities when a hinge point comes up

*** Corrections
- Avoid trying to "make up" a schedule by blowing other hinges. Change to the appropriate project when a hinge point arrives.

* Caffiene
- Classical conditioning :: Using classical conditioning training to teach yourself that coffee time is work time
- Calibrattion :: Adjust the milligrams of caffeine you drink based on your own performance metrics


- Sleep is always better to caffeinating
- Meditation is not required to relax

** Archetypes
- Reformed :: Used too much and then stopped entirely
- Skeptic :: Never relied on caffiene
- Unmindful :: Just drinks it for fun/flavor
- Mindful :: Strategically uses caffiene as a focus aid

** Timing
- Wait about 30 minutes from waking up
- Avoid drinking within ten hours of sleep time
- Take occasional (multi-day) breaks to restore your sensitivity

** Struggle
- Using caffiene as an aid to power through the struggle phase of starting a task session
- Find some reward to associate with the struggle phase of flow

* Embrace chaos
** Yerkes-Dodson Law

#+begin_quote
Researchers have found that different tasks require different levels of arousal for optimal performance. For example, difficult or intellectually demanding tasks may require a lower level of arousal (to facilitate concentration), whereas tasks demanding stamina or persistence may be performed better with higher levels of arousal (to increase motivation). ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law][Wikipedia]])
#+end_quote

** VUCA
- Volatility
- Uncertainty
- Complexity
- Ambiguity

A complex of issues related to your work product. This is in a sense the tax on attention span required to complete a particular job.

Inverse relationship between work and home: high VUCA job requires low complexity home life, low VUCA job allows complex hobbies at home.

** Coping
- Reduce outside influences (shutting out the world) to free up attention
- Simplify personal life to leave bandwidth for a hard job or adopt complex hobbies to consume excess bandwidth from a boring job

* Laziness
Laziness as a form of friction within yourself, your environment, and the tasks

** Distractions
- Annoying distractions like alerts and login tokens
- Distractions are a source of friction

** Friction
- Amount of energy required to do work
- Prevents effective work
- Add friction to behaviors you want to remove from your routines
- Reduce friction to behaviors you want to include in your routines

** Systemic friction
- Friction created by the background of your life

* Allostatic load
- Load on the nervous system
- Amount of demands for your attention
    - Like being buried under notifications

** Relaxation
- Is not "recovery"

** Active recovery
- Activities that intentionally stress or soothe the nervous system in strategic ways
- Breath work
    - 4-7-8 box breathing
- Meditation
- Cold exposure
- Heat exposure
- Touching grass
- Sleeping


Proper recovery improves heart rate variability

* Crave hard things
** Extrinsic motivation
- Money, food, sex
- Are resources which can become exhausted
- Have a tendency to override intrinsic motivators

** Intrinsic motivation
- Autotelicity :: Enjoyment of an activity by itself
- Mastery :: Enjoyment of being good at the activity
- Curiosity :: Enjoyment of learning something new
- Purpose :: Enjoyment of what the work is useful for
- Autonomy :: Enjoyment of having control, making one's own decisions

Intrinsic motivators are more likely to result in a flow/hyperfocus state

** Action items
- Observe how your workspace contributes to intrinsic motivators
- Consider finding a new career if your job is not activating enough intrinsic motivators

* Insane focus
** Cartainty
- Knowing what to do
- A goalpost that is "certain" is one that does not move
- Uncertainty creates stress and anxiety

** Certainty Window
- Creating scenes of set time windows where the goals and cirumstances are assumed to be fixed in place
- Goals and circumstances may be re-evaluated between these windows

** Micro missions
- Composing a single "certainty window" to complete some kind of task
- Set goals with a defined, concrete end condition
- The world outside your working group is blocked out and ignored until some end condition is met

** Urgency
- An urgent task that is not done will result in long-term harm (such as ongoing maintenence loads, paying fees) but the problem can be cured down the line
- Might miss out on a profit opportunity or increase workload until dealt with later

** Criticality
- A critical task that is not done will result in damage being taken to the company. The harm is irreparable (or close enough to it.)
- Might get a project cancelled, bankrupt the division, completely cock up a high profile PR event

* hard work should feel easy
- Compounds losses :: Amygdala is found to have grown in individuals with burnout
- Redlining :: Doing the maximum work load on each day
- Allostatic Load :: Putting high demands on the body

TBD Christian Moslac scale of burnout

- Choose a job where you do not have to "fight" the work
- Push difficulty towards the end of jobs and build momentum
- Avoid rewards getting crushed by the amount of effort

** Burnout
- Stops the average worker from success
- Success reduces burnout

*** Triggers
- Loss of Control
- Values Conflict
- Insufficient Reward
- Work Overload
- Unfairness
- Breakdown of Community

** Hermetic stress
- Harm that results in a calming response
- Massages, sauna, temperature stress, weight training

* System 2 thinking
- Default Mode Network
- Schedule time to be social

** Rumination Landscape
- Rumination is thinking about various topics throughout the day
- Avoid new but irrelevant things; conserve rumination for valuable topics
- Retrain rumination about contemplating strategy

** Switching cost
- Being "pulled" in multiple directions wastes productivity
- Having to re-acclimate to a project every time you change what you are doing

** Choice fatigue
- Becoming tired due to making multiple choices
- Losing time answering the question "what do I do now?"
- Avoid choice fatigue by not making choices.
    - ex. steve job's daily black turtleneck
- Decision re-use
    - Decisions used repeatedly in various situations
    - Heuristics

** Routines
- Morning, afternoon, and evening
- A set of activities you regularly intend to do (and perhaps wish to make autonomous)

* Chronotypes
- Body rhythms persist even in the absense of light
- Peaks and dips of focus potential throughout the day

** "Dan Pink" chronotypes
*** Lark
- Midpoint 3:30am
- Works from 4 to 9am

*** Owl
- Midpoint 5:30am
- Works best from 4pm to 9pm

*** Third Bird
- Midpoint 4:30am
- Works best from 8am to 11am

** Trough
- Part of your circadian rhythm where productivity is naturally lower
- Prioritize creative, recovery, and relaxation activities here

** Zone
- Period of particularly high productivity in your chronotype
- Prioritize "heavy work" blocks in these zones

** Midpoint
- Given a number of days where you have no external demands on your time; figure out when you would naturally wake up and sleep on these days
- Your midpoint is the middle of that 16-hour period of being awake

* Procrastination
- Clear goals :: A concrete target that can be observed to be completed
- Challenge-skill balance :: Difficulty should be near the edge of your ability


- High motivation but inability to execute
- Avoiding the "engage" stage of flow prior to the "struggle"

** Procrastinations
- Inertia :: Unable to start a job
- Distractibility :: Losing focus after starting a task
- Chronic delay :: Perpetually delaying tasks to the "someday" pile


- Reducing resistance to "engage" phase to defeat procrastination

** Momentum
- Work from smaller tasks to bigger ones
- When you are already doing work, it is easier to complete the task in to a harder task than to do the harder task

** Defining scope
- Find the "score" of tasks
- Ask why the task even needs to be done

** Response inhibition
- Act ahead of your emotional response to escape avoidance
- "Acting before thinking"
- Pondering about the task gives your emotions the chance to become scared of actually doing the job

** Flow
- Add or remove time constraints to make a task easier or harder
    - Remember flow channel is between too hard and too easy, so messing with time constraint is a cheap way to alter these boundaries.
- Payoff
    - Harder to enter a flow state if it seems that a situation is too volatile or not worth the effort
    - i.e. environments where bosses keep changing priorities every five minutes
- Maximize the size of time blocks set aside for flow
- Fragmenting time blocks kills focus
    - iirc there is also some statistic it takes 23 minutes to fully enter a deeply focussed state

* Trick to achieve anything
- Hysterical Strength :: when a human demonstrates superhuman strength (especially without apparent injury)
- lowering capacity for boredom :: training to get reward from work instead of dopamine prisons like facebook
- increasing capacity :: raising difficulty without failing entirely to frustration
- stress hormone limits :: there is a limit of maximum stress despite the total amount of oncohiuy mental stress
- William james :: most people live their lives (lmao incomplete quote)


- you develop traits by training them
- Sink or swim-tolerance for stress increasing out of pure necessity

Overload -> Adapt -> Deload -> Recover

- Overload :: take on a large degree of load in your profession of choice. Set a single large goal to achieve should be an exponent amount have difficulty than usual
- Adapt :: modify your environment to adapt to the overload and crunch to make the overloaded goal
- Deload :: return to a healthy and comfortable workload
accelerated promotion- subjecting a prospective prohotee to a trial by fire

* DMN Method
"Default Mode Network."


- task mode network :: conscious attention and reasoning
- default mode network :: background thinking while not thinking of the task

- Percieved problem :: what you think the problem is
- root problem :: the reason you are having the percieved problem.
- silent operator :: Sending questions to the subconscious to work on in the background. the subconscious is called the "silent operator" and responds in the form of indescribable sensations.
- exformation :: data observed but consciously discarded
- reticular activation system :: attention focussing system


- Dissolution of self in some meditative states
- Decisions are the selection of a solution to a specific problem

** Daniel Kaneman
System one and two thinking

- System one :: intuitional, fast, gut feeling
- System two :: analytical, effortful, deliberate, tiring

* productivity types
- explorer :: cycles trough projects and explores hang leads, but does not master anything
- exploiter :: hyper focuses on a single idea and yield to mastery
- captain :: switches between the explorer and exploiter


- say no to everything and focus on the core project
- procrastination stops beginners from getting into the game
- dispersion affects people who have access to many opportunity

** biases
- novelty bias :: valuing the new
- present bias :: valuing immediate rewards
- scarcity bias :: fear or hissing out

the goal is to minimize influence Of the biases to achieve compounding focus

** primary pursuit
- primary pursuit :: a single field chosen to obtain mastery

activities that do not enable the primary pursuit are abandoned
"will it make the boat go faster?"

** Temporal audit
- "heavy cargo" :: parts of the business that do not contribute to the primary pursuit

Studying projections of your future life

- list current activities
- list desired activities
- project over 30 years

deciding what not to do is as important as what to do

** Serial entrepreneur
- bring a business to profitable before starting new ones
- Use of the business for dopamine results in dallying with the business for fun.
- use the primary pursuit to get dopamine and flow states

* Workspace Setup
- distraction :: any stimulus not related to the current goal
- anchoring bias :: attributes of your work "anchor" to parts of your environment
- sensory gating :: ability to filter out unwanted stimulus during focus
- eliminate friction :: the amount of minor annoyance in a workplace
- disruption :: triggers that wholly break concentration


- make the room desirable to be in
- design the workspace for the self that is tired and unmotivated
- suppressing distractions is an active process which consumes energy
- optimizing workspace to avoid breaking focus, and optimally inspiring it
- Rian once used a bathroom of a posh house as his "flow dojo"

** Workspace issues
- constant interruptions breaking focus
- location is haphazard and a mess
- cluttered environment informs typos, irritable mood, and procrastination


** Maintaining cleanliness
- putting things away, not down

** Multitasking
- switch cost :: the time taken to spool up for a new task
- grey zone :: half working and half talking to people


- batch all communication to time between periods of focus
- become unreachable and add friction to disturb you at work

** Physical comfort
- Use ergonomic equipment
- noise cancelling headphones if noise is a concern

** Inbox
- notepad to dump intrusive thoughts

* Investing in Yourself
- Minimalism :: reducing item ownership to what is necessary
- George Miller :: people can hold 7+1-2 symbols at a time
- John Swelter :: concept of cognitive load


- Everything that most be tracked in some way increases cognitive load
- Minimalism increases intrinsic Motivations
- to become wealthy requires to become autotelic, or someone who does the work for internal reasons and needs the wealth less

** Minimalism
- aggressive minimalism :: extreme optimization of possessions to your specific enterprise
- tempered minimalism :: some comfort possessions, but primarily task based
- Mild minimalism :: can own many things, but are all deliberate, aware of cognitive load of possessions


- severity of minimalism determines question of what to keep and what to do when getting new posession

* ten minute rule
- effortless exertion :: labors made with no perception of exercion
- transient hypo frontality :: lowered activity of prefrontal cortex, reduced "sense of self"
- time slippage :: time lost to hyper focus on unproductive endeavors
- momentum :: likelihood to continue behavior once started


- time logging can require writing a goal, which the brain prefers to outcomes
- write tasks out as specific actions
- carve out strict time blocks to work, and protect them from meetings

** calendar for each category
- work tasks :: 1000$, 100$ and 10$ priorities
- active recovery :: resetting nervous system
- relationships :: socializing
- recreation :: fun things
- junk :: tedious things, social media


- plan optimal work week & recurrence
- prioritize tasks to fill time boxes tomorrow
- record what did happen each hour

* One Month Day
- average knowledge worker does real work only 2.3 hours per day
- isolate target: specify the specific product to be crunched to completion
- break outcome in to individual, clear, objectively completable actions
- prepare the plan a day ahead
- avoidance of open loop controls and activity


- prepare decisions prior to the day, such as clothes, prepared goods
- "flow dojo" prepared for work the night before
- use discrete blocks for each activity, such as a dedicated e-mail period. breaks should be and stay a hard break where no work is done
"one month days" should be kept special and distinct from others or discipline will be lost

** pacing of crunches
- acceleration :: one one-month day per month
- turbo :: one one-month day per week
- lightspeed :: do give one month days once per quarter

* Life Maintenance & Habits
- life maintenance load :: work spent to keep your tide running just so you can work
- auto-telic activity :: somethig you enjoy for the sake of doing it
- dumb optimizer :: optimizing around life maintenance tasks which should be removed entirely


- demands of daily living took up too much time to keep a hard 6/6 hour schedule on University and running a business
- "exotelic"


- audit
   - list autotelic activities enjoyed
   - list exotelic activities to stay afloat


- remove whatever exotelics you can
- optimize around what you cant remove
"life maintenance is a liability that is worth paying down"
beware or regression to higher life Maintenance

* Brain fog
- "Lunch Brain" :: brain fog induced by poor diet, foods that clog the brain
- Chrono nutrition :: study of the relationship of good and the circadian rhythm
- intermittent :: eat nothing one day per week, or 8 hours per day and not for 10


- Cravings -> Consumption -> Lethargy
- dietary intake and insulin issues can cause unstable cognitive efficiency
- eat flow heals during your peak hours, not at the trough (digestion takes time)
- find flow treaty by trial and error; find what makes you tired then ban them
- bio hackers "major in minor things" and make stressful plans out of simple rules
- chewy food is more satisfying to consume

** flow meals
- Fuel Meals :: diet for optimal productivity
- Ritual Meal :: diet for special occasion or recreation
- fasting :: eat nothing eventually results in a reset of ghrelin hormone sensitivity


- cravings persist for 3 and more days

* Sleep
- exhaustion ceiling :: the limit you can perform without adequate recuperation
- sleep first mindset :: sleep is a primary component of productivity and high priority
- impulse to compress sleep :: the belief that you can use sleep as a flex time when you want more sleepktime
- power down ritual :: end Of day rival to export working he may and possibly planning it


** Scheduling
- powering through work on a lack of sleep and strung out on caffiene will backfire eventually
- Sleep should push all else on the calendar

** Going to bed
- 35% of people will experience insomnia
- do not use the bed for anything but to sleep
- reduce fluids near bed
- eat four hours prior to sleep
- get comfy bedding

** Duration
- best alarm times are close to your natural sleep times
- Use sleep trackers to find amount of time actually asleep, then limit time in bed to that amount of time

** Environment isolation
- 'deaf, blind, cold, and hungry' at the same time every night
- noise as low as 33dB can stimulate and partly wake from sleep
- isolate light; prepare room or wear a sleepy mask
- 1,000 lux upon morning time is optimal

* Transition to Leadership
- self bottle necking :: taking over tasks and making yourself the bottleneck for a process


- avoidance of tasks that would accelerate other tasks
- transition from a Tasker to someone who tends to the systems of the working group
- do not do the work of your employees; ensure they have resources and systems to do their own work

** Musicians and Conductors
- "Musician" :: does the work
- "conductor" :: guide, the musicians, the audience does not see you


- musicians graduate to being conductors
- irony that when the musician ascends they no longer do what they were good at
- the right team makes you enjoy "conducting" the group

** Team flow
- team flow is when a working group experience flow states simultaneously and together
- autonomy encourages autotelic activity
- prioritize tasks based on how they bring you closer to a goal, and how they align with autotelic activities
- basically eliminate and delegate tasks that you hate doing

** Oversight
- "never tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their ingenuity"
- supervision is for training new talent and integration. once they are ready you let them free to work

** Scheduling
- Maintain schedule to keep your men in uninterrupted flow work time
- protect them from uncertainty and interruptions

* Goal Oriented Behavior
- psychic entropy :: when the mind degrades in to random topics when is not focused
- internal :: meditation, mastery Of self
- external :: setting up rewards from the outside world
- goal direction :: setting and focussing on goals with dgined and concrete success or win states


desire for certainty is a common blocker, setting and following goals at all is most important

** goal stack
- goal stack should break down goals in to smaller and more completable pieces.
- each goal should build upon the previous.
- belief that a goal is possible inspires figuring out how to hake it happen

*** the stack
- purpose
- high hard goals
- annual goals
- quarterly goals
- monthly goals
- weekly goals
- daily goals

* Possibility spaces
- Social contagion :: your friend group expanding what you believe you can do
- brute force :: simply ask about if the goal could not fail, or if the goal was 10 or 100 times harder set goals beyond your current means.
- self efficacy :: your belief in your ability to complete goals
- power down ritual :: debrief tasks and ensure planning for the next days is in order


- ruminating within the possibility space
- reverse engineering goals in to discrete steps and milestones
- design goal plans as the waterfall method, but be prepared to re-plan based on what you learn along the way
- expert performers spend their whole life going to a destination while average people drive in circles.
- Using goal planning to avoid "what do I do now?" and act with intentionality for more of the day
- clear separation of planning and doing segments.
- "draft consciousness" theory
- goals should be broken to week, day, individual hour or pomodoro segments

* Recruiting Teams
- when all members of a team are in a flow state and become a form of unified organism

** Team flow triggers
- Collective ambition ::  sake goals and drive
- Open communication :: efficient data transfer
- High skill integration :: everyone knows how to use one another
- psychological safety :: circle or safety encloses the whole team itself


- Choose compatible people

** Recruiting
- referral :: someone you hired recommends a friend
- deep outreach :: find where the people you want tend to hang out
- outbound headhunting :: looking out profiles of people you want


- Define what a business needs to determine how to recruit
- recruit for specific roles, then add optional duties to generalize later
- high value employing are in demand or independent, thus are not on basic job boards.
- do not ask who is looking for a job but ask who the best they know is and if they can put you in touch
- write job ads in a plain way to explain main job role and help people select the job themselves
- interview someone in a similar role to learn what the role likes and how to appeal to them
- interviews are a poor way to gauge a workers competence; they are for selling candidate on your company

** Trialing
- discovery project :: have a candidate do a trial by fire job in the core competency to hire. pay them for the project
- 'leaving the keys to the bank account" employees :: people who are considerably trustworthy.


- find problems quickly
- trust intuition when doubting they should be in your working group
- people who enjoy their work outside of their jobs
- hire as though someone one will never improve but lead as though they can improve infinitely


* Doom scrolling
- Severing your relationship with your smartphone to protect your attention span
- Disable all notifications, dots, and counters, such that you hurt check accounts deliberately
- Grayscale makes a phone feel less stimulating
- App and site blockers to stop distracting sites
- Stop using phones except when they are tools relevant to your task

* Calendar Leeches

- Rationing of effort :: Meetings on the schedule pushing away from work because the flow state will be interrupted shortly.
- immersion runway :: a consecutive block of days where planning was done in advance and distractions are honed out of the way.
- "Calendar choke point" :: a known time commitment that saps focus as you prepare for the event.

- pushing through struggle becomes pointless because there will be no payoff for the effort.
- Up to 70% of meetings are unnecessary.
- Batch all communications and meetings.
- Ban undesired activities by use of general policy, such as rejecting all parties until finished writing your book.
  - This is so people don't think you are rejecting them specifically--you are rejecting everyone until some nearby goal is achieved.