How to Achieve So Much in 4 Hours It Feels Unfair

I'm going to show you how to achieve so much in four hours that it feels unfair. And how to build a work routine that allows you to be completely finished by noon every day, because there's more to life than work. In case you don't want to watch the whole video, I'm going to give you the quick just now. Basic idea is that people have a low work efficiency. Work efficiency is the percentage of time across your whole work day that is spent actually working in a fully focused matter. Those people's work efficiency is 20 to 30 percent meaning they have a long work day, yet they work three or so hours of real work within it. But we want to do is flip this. We want to compress the work day and then have our work efficiency go up to 90 percent or more. And then all that excess time can be reallocated to the other things in life you care about. Hey, I'm Riendar's founder and CEO of FlowState.com. We trained everyone from Audi, Accenture and the US Air Force to use neuroscience-based principles to access FlowStates at will. Now years ago, I was internally at the University of Zurich in Switzerland working on research on positive psychology and the work was great, but my routine was not. I'd wake up at about 7am. I'd run through a fairly elaborate morning routine. By the time I actually started working, it was about nine. Then I'd knock at it maybe 90 minutes of decent work, then you'd have lunch, and maybe another hour of real work. Then it's about 4.30. Go home, answer a few more emails, make dinner, and then do a little bit of work after dinner, then wind down and sleep. Now with this routine, I had been in on mode from 7am until 9pm, which is a 14 hour work day, but the actual productive work was about four hours. It was low-density work spread across the entire day. The pain was knowing that I was wasting these large swaths of my life in this gray zone, this half-working in-between mode. Then a few years later, I spent a week and a half in Kauai and Hawaii. The really early time zone forced me into a pattern that I hadn't tried before. I had to wake up at about 5am because I was working with people on much later time zones. I would wake up, bang out the work that I needed to before the calls, and the whole day as a result ended up being compressed into this tight-dense five hour block. Here was the wild thing. By 10am, every morning, I had to finish five hours of work, deep in flow. I worked for the day, was completely done, and I was signed off. I would then spend the rest of the day hiking, then to Paulie Coast, surfing, having a great time. It was confusing. Somehow I was accomplishing an entire work day, a productive work day at that, yet basically being completely off an on vacation from 10am every single day. Now in sleep research, there's a concept called sleep efficiency. In sleep efficiency, simply measures the percentage of time spent in bed where someone is asleep, and there's an identical parallel that's less well known with work. You can think of it as work efficiency. The higher the work efficiency, the more of one's work day is spent in the zone. In Zurich, my work efficiency was awful. There was a 14 hour work day with four hours of real work, which equals to a work efficiency score of 28% whereas in Hawaii, that five hour work day, I would work completely locked in and laser focus for about four hours and 50 minutes. The 10 minutes, I spent grabbing water. Now that leads to a work efficiency of 96.7%. And here's the key. The higher your work efficiency, the more time you have off to live and the higher your work efficiency, the higher quality your work output generally is. Well, there's a specific protocol, and I call it the one moment work day. The one moment work day is a work protocol where you compress all your real work that occurs across a whole work day into a single uninterrupted flow block that lasts between three and six hours and then stop working completely, fully unplugged and fully present for the rest of the day. The one moment work day requires you to reject the modern obsession when being always on yet only partially engaged and replace it with extreme intensity which comes with flow state. You don't measure productivity by hours logged or tasks checked off, you end up measuring it by the output that you produced. So here's how you execute the one moment work day. Now by the way, if you want a detailed checklist to help you execute your first one moment work day tomorrow, I've created a free download the link is in the description. The first step is to compress your work into one flow block. Start with the calendar audit. Look here last few weeks and track the exact amount of high quality critical work time. Not meetings, not email, not slack. Here's the thing, you're likely going to find that in reality you're doing somewhere between one and six hours at the absolute highest end of a real productive work per day. Your job here is to compress that real work time into a single block that is less than six hours long. This is because the upper limit for sustained high intensity focus does sit around five to six hours for most people. So here's how to determine your exact flow block duration. If your calendar audit shows you're doing about four to five hours of real work per day, start with a three hour flow block. If you're doing five to six hours, start with a four hour flow block because you want to feel stretched within your one moment work day. Now step two is to set your flow block start and stop times. This boundary is what separates the one moment approach from the additional work. You're not letting your works sprawl your containing it and you want at the same time every day to build consistency. One option is to make your start time the same as your wake time. We call this protocol wake up and flow. You wake up and immediately get to work, ideally within about 90 seconds of opening your eyes instantly go straight into your highest priority task. It requires you having prepared that at the end of your flow block from the prior day with the task being defined and clear goals being mapped out for it and your laptop ideally being open ready and loaded so that every barrier between you and the work is removed and the reason we do this is to leverage your biology because cognitive load, which is the amount of information you're holding and you're working memory at any time is lowest. As soon as you wake up in the morning, low cognitive load allows attention to be better funneled into a single channel which is critical to trigger flow. And second, your brain waves upon waking are naturally primed for flow. You're transitioning out of delta and theta waves from sleep and these slower waves are close neighbors to the brain waves that we believe shows up in flow state which is on the alpha theta borderline. Now next you want to set the finish time. If your flow block is five hours and you start at 6am your hard stop is 11am. When it hits you stop completely even if you're mid-sentence and here's why a researcher L. Dar Shafir found that when any resource is scarce whether it's food, money or time the brain is hijacked by a mechanism called tunneling. Tunneling is the brain's aggressive reallocation of mental bandwidth. The scarcity makes the distractions go away and this is why the one-month work day works. When you give yourself 12 hours to do a job with a 12 hour low work efficiency work day you're operating in a state of destructive time abundance but when you artificially induce scarcity when you force the window down you trigger the tunneling mechanism. Your brain realizes time is the scarce resource it involuntarily inhibits the processing of stimuli that's in your periphery otherwise known as distraction because the scarcity forces you to tunnel. Now the next step is to rearrange your day around that single flow block. Now that you've got your flow block locked in you need to pull everything out of it that isn't focus work. The typical professional schedule is like Swiss cheese. Meeting scattered throughout the day workouts, errands, lunches, all peppered in and out of work. It's this gray zone all day long. The problem is that each meeting creates what we call a calendar choke point, a constraint that chokes off your ability to enter deeply focused work. Instead batch everything outside your block. So start by collapsing meetings wherever possible. Can this in person meeting with a Zoom call? Can the Zoom call become a phone call? Can this phone call become an email? You also set them at the boundaries of your flow block. Stacked after your deep, singularly focused work in flow is complete. The key is protecting the continuity of your flow block while keeping all work including meetings within this single work period. You don't necessarily have to tell them that you're only working one four hour block but you do want to tell them when you're available within that block. Now step four is to avoid letting this one flow block break into two blocks or more. When we have it set up as one block behavioral adherence goes through the route. When you only have one flow block per day, you can't waste time on gray zone work. Your brain pre-filters everything through the lens of is this worth my one flow block. Most tasks fail that test so you cut them, delegate them or ignore them completely. Now here's the other key thing. From behavioral change standpoint, it is infinitely easier to consistently hit one target versus two. Very commonly I've seen people try and do two or three flow blocks a day and their attempt results in them doing none per day. Whereas when you have one, it's much easier to nail it and to nail it with consistency. Now the next step is to run your power down ritual the night before. It takes about 60 seconds. You want to write down tomorrow's single highest priority task then break it down to clear goals so that your brain knows exactly what to lock onto as soon as you begin work within your one flow block and then write down anything that's still nagging at you so your brain knows it's captured. Schedule any unfinished task into your calendar then close your laptop and create a clear mental boundary between work mode and recovery mode. Step six is to choose and set up your flow dojo. You need a consistent place where you do your one-man work days. A depressing space repels you. An incredible environment draws you in when will powers down your environment determines behavior. You must set up barriers that make it impossible for interruptions to reach you during your flow block. So here's a quick checklist for your flow dojo. Firstly location wise you want to use the same desk and the same chair if possible. You do not want to decide where you're going to work every day. That's going to add friction and cognitive load which will decrease the speed with which you can access flow. Next you want your phone off and away and at a reach. Ideally all your browser tabs are cleared and you've got some kind of app blocker on your desktop then from an ergonomic standpoint you want your workstation to be set up for sitting standing and walking because when you rotate positions you reset your perceived effort which boosts energy and allows you to sustain flow for a longer. Now step seven is to eliminate friction before you start. Your one-man work day depends on starting fast and staying in flow. Friction is the invisible enemy that prevents both. Friction is anything that creates resistance. between you and your objective. Think about your data routine and then identify where this friction lies, finding untangling, tidying, sorting, returning. All of the maintenance tasks that don't progress you in a real way. Each of these moments are almost like tiny zaps of irritation that spike cortisol and chip away with the cognitive resources that you need to be able to focus. Now the next step is to implement flight mode to finish line. From the moment you start your one-mo orte, until the moment you stop, your phone is on full flight mode. No quick checks. Now step nine is to maximize flow hang time. Flow hang time is the total duration. You can sustain flow in your one-mo orte, and flow stamina works like physical endurance. When you first start running, you might only sustain a mile, but if you run consistently, your cardiovascular system adapts six months later, you can run 10 miles. When you first attempt a three-hour flow block it may feel impossible, your attention wanders. But if you practice consistently, your brain will adapt. Now there's three key levers that I want to encourage you to pull to maximize your flow hang time. The first one is taking boring breaks. When you finish a subtask within your flow block, take a boring break for anywhere between one and 10 minutes. Don't do anything that plunges dopamine into your system. Do something that is more boring than the work itself. If you do something more boring, the dopamine seeking part of you will actually crave going back to the work. Level two is to rotate your position. As I said, effort is heavily anchored to the position you're in. The third lever is flow before food, either fast through the entire thing or eat something light that you know just not inhibit flow in one of your boring breaks. Our brains are wired to prioritize immediate survival needs like finding food. But modern food highdecks this survival instinct and spikes dopamine and drowns out the quieter rewards of focus. After you eat your body releases insulin to move sugar from your blood into your cells. And when you eat a big meal or foods that spike blood sugar your pancreas releases a surge of insulin which often causes blood sugar to crash. Flow gets compromised and now you're just foggy and tired. Now here's why building up your flow stamina matters so much. In 2022, researchers at the Paris Brain Institute proved that the wall that you hit after singular focus isn't actually a lack of motivation but biological self poisoning of a sort. Intense focus causes glutamate, the excitatory neurotransmitter that you need in order to think effectively, to accumulate in the prefrontal cortex until it reaches a toxic concentration which triggers a safety valve that shuts down your neural circuits until sleep flushes the toxins out. Your brain's clearing crude, the lymphatic system doesn't work well in short bursts. It needs deep prolonged recovery to scrub the neurons clean. So when you spread your workout across 12 hours you keep your brain in a state of this kind of low level toxicity all day. Whereas the one moment work day from a neurobiological standpoint is a peak in flush protocol. You push the glutamate tolerance to the limit in one aggressive sprint and then you stop completely which gives your brain a massive 19 hour window to flush the system. Now the 10th step is to embrace time richness and active recovery. After your one moment work day you're going to experience what researchers call time affluence which is the subjective sense of having abundance of time. Unlike time scarcity which creates chronic stress and impairs decision making, time richness, reduces cortisol and allows your nervous system to fully recover. At first many high performers feel guilt in that space. If you finish by 10 a.m. your mind whispers that you haven't done enough and this is productivity guilt, the chronic feeling that you're not working enough despite evidence to the contrary. It makes rest feel like the trail of your goals. But productivity guilt is toxic to flow. Your brain needs to replenish the costly neurochemistry it just burned. Without recovery you can't re-enter flow tomorrow. Look at your output not the clock that you execute the critical tasks. If yes, you are done over time the guilt fades and is replaced by the satisfaction of impact and quality of life. The fix is threefold. First, honor your work finish line. This is that non-negotiable point in your day after which you are banned from working. Second, you've already run your paradigm ritual at the end of your flow block within your one moment workday. That created a mental boundary between work mode and recovery mode. And third, engaging active recovery. Don't collapse on the couch and scroll. You still want to spend the rest of your time on autotomic activities, songwriting, hanging out with your kids, drawing, surfing. Part of this is engaging active recovery which provides genuine restoration. Active recovery exercises include breath work, cold exposure, sauna, exercise, activities that clear your allostatic load, accumulate of wear and tear, of stress so that you're primed at a nervous system level for extreme focus in your one moment workday. The one moment workday changes the way you think about time. You stop measuring yourself by hours work and start measuring yourself by output generated. Now, by the way, if you want a detailed checklist to help you execute your first one moment workday tomorrow, I've created a free download, the link is in the description. And if you want more protocols for accessing flow at will, click the video on screen and you'll learn how right now.