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    The Science of Powerful Focus: 23 Methods for More Productivity, More Discipline, Less Procrastination, and Less Stress
    The Science of Powerful Focus: 23 Methods for More Productivity, More Discipline, Less Procrastination, and Less Stress
    The Science of Powerful Focus: 23 Methods for More Productivity, More Discipline, Less Procrastination, and Less Stress
    Ebook143 pages2 hours

    The Science of Powerful Focus: 23 Methods for More Productivity, More Discipline, Less Procrastination, and Less Stress

    By Peter Hollins

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    About this ebook

    Overhaul your approach to concentration and productivity using strategic, science-proven methods to save hours a day and achieve twice as much.

    Your current focus and productivity tactics might be “adequate.” But they will never be great or reach their potential if you don’t understand how your psychology and physiology work together to affect your focus.

    Short circuit your brain into instant focus.

    The Science of Powerful Focus looks at focus in a revolutionary new way, and sheds light on studies both new and old that lead to the path of massive productivity and conquering of goals. It is a holistic view of how focus can be tackled from every angle of a person’s life.

    Other books will tell you to simply ditch your phone, stop multi-tasking, and sleep more. Is that really helpful information, or is it just common sense? Here, even the concept of focus is re-defined, and you will learn a plethora of actionable ways to integrate science into your daily life.

    Clear your mind, sit, and grind.

    Peter Hollins has studied psychology and peak human performance for over a dozen years and is a bestselling author. He has worked with dozens of individuals to unlock their potential and path towards success. His writing draws on his academic, coaching, and research experience.

    Defeat distractions and get “into the zone” on command.

    •Master the foundations of discipline and willpower.
    •Set goals that inevitable.
    •The biological basis behind procrastination.
    •Managing energy, your circadian rhythm, and nature’s schedule.

    Stop procrastinating and do more in half the time.

    •How to effectively “singletask.”
    •How to prime your mental engine.
    •To-do lists, priority lists, don’t do lists, and all you need to keep you accountable and on track.

    Master your focus, master your life.

    Focus is the most important of real life skills - the ability to accomplish what you want and get things done. A life without focus is a life defined by settling for “good enough.” A life with focus is defined by less stress, more success, greater achievements, more money, more goals checked off, and a higher life trajectory.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPatrick King
    Release dateApr 9, 2020
    ISBN9780463467206
    The Science of Powerful Focus: 23 Methods for More Productivity, More Discipline, Less Procrastination, and Less Stress
    Author

    Peter Hollins

    Pete Hollins is a bestselling author and human psychology and behavior researcher. He is a dedicated student of the human condition. He possesses a BS and MA in psychology, and has worked with dozens of people from all walks of life. After working in private practice for years, he has turned his sights to writing and applying his years of education to help people improve their lives from the inside out. He enjoys hiking with his family, drinking craft beers, and attempting to paint. He is based in Seattle, Washington. To learn more about Hollins and his work, visit PeteHollins.com.

    Read more from Peter Hollins

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    Reviews for The Science of Powerful Focus

    4/5

    36 ratings9 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      This is an amazing book slam crammed with useful and actionable steps. As an aspiring author, I tip my hat to you sir!
    • 3/5
      I read this book over the course of a few days, and plan to experiment with some of the things that I learned/took from this book. I read it because I saw it and thought that it looked interesting. In my opinion some of the topics/studies in this book are really interesting and can possibly depending on the individual be very practical, but I did also think that there were multiple attempts at oversimplifying things which are much more complex than a short book like this one are able to explain, which is of course granted. Other than a few things, it was a great read. And as I always say in my Scribd(Everand) reviews is thank you for publishing on this site/app, because it is one of the best apps for reading/audiobooks . It allows people to find good books for free, and let's them download books for consuming offline, which is something almost no-one in the industry can achieve free for users.
    • 4/5
      It is a short reading but this book contains a lot of good information that you can apply immediately to improve your focus
    • 2/5
      Nothing new, just the old wine in a new bottle.
    • 4/5
      A book that is easy to read and bring some good insights
    • 5/5
      Great book with a lot of useful tips to stay focused!
    • 1/5
      Terrible at best. The table of contents is like this: chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3.
      2. Referencing the same old marshmallow study
      3. Basics about discipline, goals.
      4. Starting each chapter with what is x, why is x good for us, like we are stupid and we don't know what disciplines or goals are.
      5. Referencing some studies like they are the holy grails, like they are 100% empirically right. They are just some studies, sometimes with very low differences between the results, not to mention that they are made by a few tens of participants... And not to mention that not all the world is the same as the participants of that particular study.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Very detailed explanation and simple techniques to follow...will read again
    • 4/5
      The book is structured well. The suggestions are easy to implement.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    The Science of Powerful Focus - Peter Hollins

    The Science of Powerful Focus:

    23 Methods for More Productivity, More Discipline, Less Procrastination, and Less Stress

    By Peter Hollins,

    Author and Researcher at petehollins.com

    Click for your FREE Human Nature Cheat Sheet: 7 Surprising Psychology Studies That Will Change The Way You Think.

    Table of Contents

    Chapter 1.

    Chapter 2.

    Chapter 3.

    Chapter 4.

    Chapter 5.

    Chapter 6.

    Chapter 7.

    Chapter 8.

    Chapter 9.

    Chapter 10.

    Chapter 11.

    Summary Guide

    Introduction

    When I was in university, I eventually gained quite a reputation. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the type of reputation I could impress the opposite sex with, or even be proud of.

    My reputation was that of the person who procrastinated until the last moment before assignments were due and got them done at any cost. And this is in a literal sense: I would hand in assignments at 8:59 p.m. if they were due at 9:00 p.m. on a given day. I wouldn’t sleep for the 48 hours prior to the deadline and managed to pull off ridiculous feats of focus time after time.

    Only once did I fail to meet the deadline. It was a paper about the spread of Confucianism in Asia, and for whatever reason, I simply could not muster the willpower to dive into Chinese proverbs that all required philosophical analysis. To solve the problem, I had a friend corrupt my Word document and I sent the file, which would never work for my professor. This bought me another night of frantic work, and I didn’t sleep a wink.

    By my senior year, this was a habit I had largely grown out of. It simply wasn’t a sustainable way of getting through college, especially as assignments grew longer and harder and were held to higher standards.

    I had to find better ways to actually focus, and it dawned on me that I had never really learned study skills. Instead, I had depended on my all-nighters. I felt intense feelings of dread as I was assigned a 50-page term paper on the philosophical teachings of Karl Marx. This wasn’t something I could hammer out in under a week.

    The same friend who intentionally sabotaged the Word document for me introduced me to the concept of the Pomodoro Technique. In essence, you focus intensely for 25 minutes and then take five minutes off. Then you repeat this process, ideally, eight times. At the end, it’s typical that putting periodic breaks into your working schedule will exponentially increase your output, and that’s exactly what happened to me.

    I was able to finish the term paper on Karl Marx well ahead of schedule and discovered what it felt like to turn tasks in ahead of time and actually sleep before they were due. This simple technique started me on the path to discovering what about human focus makes us want to procrastinate so much, and what we can do about it.

    I was focused on focus and dug into the science of achievement, evolutionary biology, behavioral economics, and anything else you can think of. Focus is a product of our willpower and other subconscious drives, so you can imagine that just about every desire we have plays a role in it.

    At least, that’s the best way to approach it. You see, it’s not always possible to just pull an all-nighter like I was known for in college. Real life doesn’t give you that opportunity or liberty, so learning to focus is really learning the biggest ability of all—to achieve what you set your mind to. Getting more done in less time. Being able to achieve your goals.

    When we think about what we want out of life, it’s only made possible through focus and perhaps a small amount of luck. Focus is the end game for much of self-improvement, even though we might think of it in other names.

    I’ve implemented every single one of the scientifically proven methods in this book myself to great results. Not every one stuck, but they all impacted me in some way. Best of all, you don’t have to believe me—believe the research scientists who ran the research studies!

    At work these days, people would never guess that I had a reputation for cutting it extremely close to deadlines. I find that with just a few of the focus techniques in this book, I can consistently work ahead of schedule. Of course, don’t let them know that, because then I might get assigned more to do!

    Best,

    Peter

    Chapter 1. Discipline and Willpower

    When you think of the word discipline, what image comes to mind? Chances are good that you thought of something negative—being spanked or sent to your room as a child or receiving a warning for some infraction at work. Most people tend to think of discipline as a punishment, but in actuality, the definition refers to training that corrects, molds, or perfects mental capacity or moral character. True, many parents achieve this outcome by using various forms of punishment, so the negative association is well founded.

    However, discipline is also a trait celebrated and revered in many circles, especially athletics. Any pro athlete will tell you that it takes discipline to make it in the majors. Michael Jordan, acknowledged as possibly the greatest basketball player of all time, once remarked that he wasn’t out there sweating on the court three hours a day just to find out what it feels like to sweat. He understood the need to train his mind and his body to perform to the best of his ability, even on days when he would have preferred to stay in bed.

    Willpower is a companion to discipline. It is the mindset of energetic determination that allows discipline to manifest. Many people view willpower as a mechanism of failure, because it is closely associated with avoiding temptation. At the end of a long work day, it’s a lot easier to sit down and watch TV than to go for a run, but for those with a desire to optimize their health, the combination of discipline and willpower win out. More often than not, they find themselves lacing up their sneakers and heading out the door.

    These two traits are what we aspire to because we tend to feel that we aren’t doing as much as we can. In the face of hardship, simply not acting is the easiest path of all. But deep down, we realize that we simply aren’t going to get what we want in life if we can’t muster the will to do what we don’t love from time to time. Indeed, on some level it comes to the costs (anything worth working hard for) being compared to the benefits (the hard work itself). Clearly these have cache when attempting to focus better on a task at hand.

    Pushing the Boulder

    Sometimes there’s no way of avoiding a task, and you just have to grind through it. You hate it, it makes you miserable, and there’s simply no spinning it into something positive. This is the reality-changing power of discipline and willpower, because it allows you to toil in the darkness despite any type of emotional objection. Tasks with no glory or redeeming qualities are inevitable; ditches must be dug by somebody, and sometimes you can’t avoid it.

    If you experience a lack of motivation or focus, discipline and willpower are effective substitutes for pushing past the misery. Like Sisyphus in the ancient Greek myth, cursed forever to roll a boulder uphill, sometimes a task feels endless. Many people, especially those in creative fields, believe that they must rely on motivation, inspiration, or their muse in order to create. That notion is dead wrong and generates a false narrative that leads people to sit around waiting for something that rarely, if ever, appears. During those periods when the muse is silent, when there is no flash of creative genius, true artists rely on discipline to move past the block and keep the work flowing.

    Prolific author Stephen King recalls a time when he was affected by writer’s block during college. He ceased work on a particular novel because it wasn’t quite right and he didn’t know how to fix it. That led to a four-month period during which he drank beer and watched soap operas. Disgusted by his lack of motivation, King decided to write something every day, even if it was garbage. He just set the goal of writing a few pages every day, something that at the time took tremendous willpower.

    Eventually, inspired by the continuous soapy tragedies unfolding before him, King finally hit on a solution—throw more problems at his characters, not fewer. He decided to stop trying to patch up the bad with the good. Instead, he chose to make it worse for his characters and then sit back and watch them extricate themselves from the mess. It worked like a charm. As soon as he allowed the characters to act naturally instead of imposing

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