2 awesome hours

Summary of
TWO AWESOME HOURS
Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time
and Get Your Most Important Work Done
By
Josh Davis
Introduction

Does your typical workday look like this? First, you wake up tired and anxious about how you will finish your work and who will let you down today. Second, you go to work and grab your first cup of coffee. You check your email inbox to see if any new tasks have been added to your already long to-do list.
Third, your stress starts building as you read one email after the other. Your colleagues call you for lunch. You realize you have spent all morning answering emails and getting no actual work done.
Whether you love or hate your job, the amount of work most of us do nowadays is almost unsustainable. Too many things need to get done, but you spend most of your days stuck in loops of useless tasks, wasting your mental energy, being unable to focus, and getting easily distracted.
In this book, you will learn how to make two awesome hours of productivity and get things done. You will learn how to recognize the decision points throughout your day, prioritize your tasks according to your mental energy levels, and reshape your environment to avoid getting distracted.
If you struggle to accomplish tasks, this book will help you prioritize and reorganize your routine.

Strategy 1: Recognize Your Decision Points

Most of the things we do daily are done automatically. We act, feel and think following unconscious routines that the mind has already learned and does not need to waste mental energy on. That does not mean that our actions are thoughtless. They need a small amount of conscious focus.
In some aspects, our brains function like computers. They perform predictably and consistently over and over again. Tasks like brushing your teeth every morning or sending emails are done following neural routines, which are the human equivalent of computer programs that control our thoughts and actions. Most of the time, we engage with these routines automatically without even considering whether doing them makes sense. Like computers, we do not stop until we are done or interrupted.
When you are done brushing your teeth, you probably won't realize the number of steps that it took. When you answer an email, you just use your neural routines and not really think about your next step. Because it is the easiest choice to make, you keep answering one email after the other. You forget your other plans that morning until you get interrupted for a lunch break.
Doug is a scenario-planning consultant. One of his responsibilities is to write a monthly report about the latest developments in the industry. It is a job that he loves because it allows him to be creative and learn more about a topic he likes.
When working on his report, Doug loses awareness of anything other than his screen and typing noise. His eyes drift to the clock to realize that it is late at night. He needs to stop working and answer an email before the end of the day.
When Doug opened his inbox, he noticed a few new emails from his colleague. He started answering one email after the other until his alarm rang, reminding him of a meeting with the company's CEO in ten minutes. Doug had to start preparing for the meeting, but he was stuck in a loop of neural routines and just kept answering emails.
His brain has tricked him into thinking that he can answer the emails and prepare for the meeting in that short amount of time. As a result, he didn't finish the emails and went to the meeting, tired and unprepared.
Throughout the day, Doug was moving from one task to another automatically and not making smart strategic decisions about the best way to use his time. He needed to snap out of his autopilot mode. The way to do it is to recognize the decision points between every task you finish. You need to decide whether doing what you are doing is a good use of your time or whether you should switch to a more beneficial task.
Just like computers, we always respond with the same thing when the right cues trigger us. While driving to the supermarket, you don't give much thought to your actions, like how hard you should press the brakes or when to look around. You can do all of that while entirely focusing on something else, such as trying to remember your shopping list. On your way home, you will automatically look for your keys, following a habit that is always there.
A lot of what you do throughout the day is guided by habits, requiring very little conscious awareness, which is not a bad thing but a necessary mental energy saver. We need to save that mental energy to solve new problems as they come up. Once you learn how to dance, you can do it easily by habit, and you can use your mental energy on something else, like having a conversation while dancing.
If you are learning to play the piano for the first time, you won't really be able to talk. You need to reserve all of your mental energy for solving that puzzle. You will not accomplish much if you focus consciously on every action you do. Imagine thinking about where you should put your feet on every step you take! That would be exhausting.
Our days are mostly a chain of habitual neural routines called "tasks", such as brushing our teeth, walking to our office, and eating lunch. We often jump from one task to another based on the cues we face. We respond to the signals that follow our impulses and desires, however misguided. As a result, many of our days are wasted daily.
To stop wasting your time, you need to learn how to recognize the few moments where you need to pick how to spend the rest of your time. Those moments are when a task ends, like when you are done answering an email. Should you automatically start answering the next one? Or should you start preparing for a meeting?
We tend to rush through these moments to go back to doing something that feels productive. Hurrying through decision points or in between tasks might save 5 minutes, but starting the wrong task might waste the whole day.
The five minutes hurt more because you are aware of every second of making a decision. Spending the entire day on the wrong task hurts less because you are mostly on autopilot, working on something that feels productive. That leads most people to waste hours a day doing meaningless jobs.

Strategy 2: Manage Your Mental Energy

Every task lessens your mental energy. You have a limited amount of brain power. That's why you feel your mind is exhausted at the end of the day. Every task you finish will leave you with emotions, making the next task either more exciting or exhausting to work on.
Everyone has a limited amount of mental energy, so you need to create hours of productivity where you strategically choose the right tasks to do. Then remove the tasks you don't need from your to-do list.
There are multiple types of tasks. Every type has a different effect on the brain, using your mental energy differently and leaving you with emotions that will affect your productivity. You will be the most productive when your priorities align with your brain's priorities.
At the start of every new day, you must list your priorities and the stuff you need to complete. You need to figure out if you have urgent tasks to finish at a specific time. Should you respond to emails from your best client or start working on the big project you need to deliver in a few months?
Studies say you should start with your top priorities first because you may not have time to do them. These studies are mostly right, but they miss the essential element: you have limited mental energy, and each task affects it differently.
Tom works as a marketing director for a sports equipment company. He wanted to relaunch the first equipment line that had started with the company. The night before the pitch, Tom thought about how he would pitch the idea to the CEO and the management team. He kept fantasizing about how the CEO would love the idea and how he would be the guy known for bringing the company back. After a while, he fell asleep, totally excited and happy about the next day.
In the morning, while Tom was driving to his office, he thought about what he should do. The meeting with the CEO was at 11 AM, and he didn't know how to organize his morning before the meeting. He wanted to spend the hour before the meeting preparing his pitch and polishing the ideas he had come up with the night before.
Tom remembered the last time he checked his email was at 2 PM yesterday. So, he was worried if anything needed his attention. When he got to his office, he immediately started answering his emails, thinking that if he finished working on them first, he would be free to work on his pitch.
Two hours later, he finished answering the last email, opened the documents regarding the new projects, and did nothing. He forgot all of his great ideas from last night. What he could remember was messy. Tom only has 10 minutes to convince the company of his new project, but even he is not sure about it anymore. He doesn't know if he should start the pitch by showing the customers' feedback that he collected or data about the competitor companies. Tom felt like all the brilliant ideas he thought of last night were stupid. At that moment, he was unsure about this new project, and considered calling the project off.
Tom could not pull off the pitch. His brain was exhausted because he spent all of his mental energy answering emails. He had no energy left to finish what he needed to do.
Without knowing it, Tom emptied his mental energy reserve for the day. He overused what psychologists call his "executive functions”, which is the mental process that enables us to plan, focus and remember instructions to finish a task.
The executive functions that exhaust the brain include decision making (should you wear a white or a black t-shirt?), planning (I will first go to the hospital, then stop to pick up lunch), and memorizing an idea for a short amount of time (I need to remember a person's phone number while I get a piece of paper and write it down).
Self-control is one of the most tiresome executive functions the brain can perform. When you keep engaging in self-control, you will get to a point where your mental energy is used, and you can't control yourself anymore. If you spend the day trying to control what you eat or manage your anger, you will most likely get to a point where your brain feels exhausted and can't control yourself anymore.
The brain engages in self-control all day long. Things like fighting the urge to waste time eating another slice of cake, or oversleeping on a cold morning will drain your mental energy. As you use the executive functions to self-control, it will be harder to fight your urges later in the day.
Strategy 3: Stop Fighting Distractions

After you have learned how to identify the decision points in your day and choose your next task the right way based on your mental energy reserves, you need to learn how to make those awesome work hours as productive as possible. You need to learn how to stay focused longer, which is not an easy thing to do.
A typical work day for Amanda, a freelance web developer, looks something like this. At around 10 AM, she is frustrated because she spent all morning going through her customer's invoices, including one who refused to pay. After she spending 2 hours doing paperwork, Amanda started working on her real priorities, which were projects she needed to deliver to three different companies by the end of the day.
Amanda looked at the clock and realized she did not have time to finish the three projects. She decided to delay one of them but didn't know which two to focus on. She got annoyed at herself because she did nothing productive that day, and started working on one project randomly.
But Amanda could not let go of her anger over the invoices of the client who refused to pay. She needed to reread her project notes multiple times because she was lost in her thoughts. She tried so hard to stay focused.
After half an hour of struggling, Amanda finally got into a rhythm and started making progress. An ambulance drove by, and she snapped out of that rhythm. She remembered the nearby hospital. She remembered when she broke her leg and had to walk the stairs to her office hundreds of times with a cast on. She was pleased that she didn't need to do that anymore. She remembered her mother, who had difficulty walking because of old age. Amanda didn't want the same thing to happen to her when she got older. She should start going to the gym or doing yoga! What is wrong with you, Amanda? She thinks. Focus!
Ten minutes later, she got back to work. After 5 minutes, her husband walked into her office to ask a "quick question" that ended up being 20 minutes long. He talked about his stomach problems, and Amanda felt her precious time slipping away.
Throughout the rest of the day, she struggled to keep her focus. Every few minutes, she got distracted by an email notification, a useless phone call or a random noise coming from outside. She promised herself to stay focused on her work until the projects were done. By the end of the day, she had completed only one of the three projects she had to deliver. As a result, she wasted more time on the phone explaining to her clients why the projects were not done yet and tried to buy more time.
Amanda certainly had the time and the talent to finish what she needed to do, but she failed to deliver. She needed more discipline to fight the urge to waste time. She commands herself to have more willpower to stay focused, but she has been demanding that of herself for years and it never worked.
Willpower will not help you stay focused. The attention system has evolved to switch focus to multiple things surrounding you. We could not have survived if we focused on just one thing and ignored other people, animals, food and potential threats.
One of the most critical parts of getting things done correctly is the ability to sustain attention on a task. Finding focus, which is maintaining attention without getting distracted, is very difficult because the brain is wired to respond to distractions and environmental changes. Workspaces nowadays have never been more distracting: email notifications, smartphones, meetings, the internet, and social media.
To stay focused on a task, you must remove all distractions and learn more about how the brain and the attention system work. Our brains are distraction-finding machines, which makes focusing for a long time nearly impossible. To stay focused, you need to remove all the potential distraction sources surrounding you. Instead of keeping your notifications on and trying to force yourself not to get distracted, you need to remove them.

Strategy 4: Leverage Your Mind-Body Connection

It would be great if you could control your schedule to work only during the hours your brain functions best. Sadly, you won't always have the flexibility to work on a project when you have the right mental energy. You will feel anxious, overwhelmed and tired, but the job must be done anyway. Your calendar will often be filled with presentations and meetings planned weeks ago or deadlines that your boss or clients set. How can you be at your best at specific times or previously set dates?
To be at your best mental abilities under any circumstances, you must learn how to leverage the connection between your body and your brain. In other words, learning how physical activities and foods will affect your mental energy.
Jennifer was the head of human resources for a ten-thousand-person company. She had to meet the Japanese owners of the parent organization. Thirty minutes before the meeting, her stomach was hurting from drinking too much coffee that morning. Her neck was sore from repeatedly reviewing the data on her computer. She was feeling very distracted and exhausted.
Five minutes before the meeting, Jennifer stood in front of a mirror in the bathroom. She noticed the bags under her eyes that were not there an hour ago. Her body was showing what she felt like.
If Jennifer had gone on a walk instead of worrying, her body would show lightness and mental clarity rather than exhaustion.
The effect of our physical state on our mental state is often overlooked. It is obvious to anyone that your mind will be clear and sharp when you feel physically good. Your mind will be foggy if your body is sick or not in a great state, like if you overate food or have a hangover. Those are the effects of your body on your ability to think.
Nowadays, the idea of the mind and the body influencing each other is an assumption. The mind is treated as separate from the body, and the body is treated as just a life support system for the brain. That is why companies expect people to function the same all day and look at exercise as a luxury.
Nelson Mandela said that he worked better when he was physically healthy. That exercise one of the essential parts of his life. Even in jail, he ran in place for forty-five minutes and did push-ups and sit-ups every day. That for sure helped with Mandela’s discipline and resilience in his fight for freedom.
The long-term benefits of exercise on your health and fitness are obvious. People don't talk about what Nelson Mandela understood deeply, which is the immediate effect that exercise will have on your mental performance.
Only one exercise session will help you think better, stay focused, clear your thoughts and lower your stress. This is the key component of staying productive.
For example, exercising for ten to forty minutes immediately improves "executive functions''. As you have learned in Strategy 2, the brain’s executive functions help you stay focused, plan and remember.
If you can't add exercise to your daily schedule, there are other ways to make your body achieve maximum productivity. Eating and drinking are things you do every day, even at your office. If you optimize them, they will have a significant effect on your energy level, mood, and executive functions.
Foods are mainly composed of carbs, fats, and protein. Studies have found that carbs can boost mental energy that lasts for a few minutes. They found that in the minutes after eating carbs, attention and executive functions improve massively. Other studies have found that high-protein meals boost memory for hours afterwards.
Fats also positively affect your cognitive functions that last more than three hours. Studies have found that pure fats like olive oil, soybean oil and palm oil fuel your body without changing the blood sugar level, which keeps your energy level balanced over time.
Glucose is the primary fuel for the brain and body. Foods that are high in carbs will rapidly increase the glucose level in the blood, which will increase your mental performance. The amount of glucose in different kinds of foods varies. Most vegetables and fruits have less glucose than bread, cereals, cakes, candy and sugar.
Maintaining a high blood sugar level is the best for a stable mood and better cognitive function performance. In a study, a group of people ate breakfasts with different glucose levels. They found that people with more glucose were more agreeable and happier, and the effects stayed visible hours after the meals.
The amount you eat at once also affects your energy level. A study had two groups, the first had a regular meal, and the second group had the same meal divided over four plates, and they had to take a five-minute rest after finishing each one.
The two groups' mental functions were tested an hour after the meal. The group that had their meal divided into four plates performed way better. That was because the second group ate their meals over an extended period of time, which gave the stomach more time to consume the meals. That resulted in a higher blood sugar level, increasing cognitive function performance.
What you drink is as important as what you eat. The body is made of more than 50% water, and staying hydrated is critical to your energy level and mental performance. Even mild dehydration will harm your brain and body. A 2% drop in hydration level will massively hurt your attention and short-term memory.

Strategy 5: Make Your Workspace Work for You

Most people have very little control over their workspace. Unless you are a freelancer or self-employed, you will probably be at the mercy of your employer's office design decisions. But you can always make some changes to perform at your best with what you have.
Just like food and exercise, the environment surrounding you will noticeably affect your brain. Learning to control the environment involves knowing why the brain reacts to external stimulations, thus working to avoid them.
After half a year in her new position, Samantha felt like she was swimming against the current and getting nothing done. She was a newly hired CFO at a startup company, feeling lost in the long list of tasks assigned to her. Every new day adds new challenges to the already long to-do list.
One day, Samantha woke up determined to make progress on her tasks. After a meeting with the CEO, she planned to sit down at her desk and get some work done. Like many startups, the company is an open floor where all the employees share the same space, with their offices separated by movable cubicles.
The past few weeks have been difficult, which made her desk cluttered and messy, with multiple documents stacked up in her small space. Samantha sat on her desk, stared at the cubicle divider two feet from her face and pushed a stack of paper aside to find a space for her coffee cup.
Desperately needing to focus, Samantha tried to ignore the voice of her teammates chatting, phones ringing and keyboard moving. She puts her head over her arms next to the computer screen so she can't see what's surrounding her. I will never get anything done here, Samantha thought.
Your environment may be ruining your productivity. Therefore, the final strategy for making two awesome hours of productivity is to make smart choices to control the stimulations in your work environment such as lights and noises. Choices that will make you able to focus and think.
Studies have found that environmental noises like – music, city sounds, people talking or white noise like the humming of the air conditioner – harms most people’s performance. The source of noise that has the worst effect on productivity and is the hardest to ignore is called Intermittent speech. Intermittent speech is when you hear a few words here and there with silence between them, like when your coworkers talk to each other occasionally.
Intermittent speech is the most common type of noise in the office. When it comes to cognitive tasks like reading, working with numbers or staying focused, studies have found that Intermittent speech decreases performances even more than normal continuous speech, where people talk with the same rhythm and volume.
If you can’t control your environment and can’t stop the noise, your second-best option is to play white noise. White noise is not ideal, and it will have a small effect on your productivity. But if you can’t make your environment quiet, listen to white noise to cover other sounds.
Light also affects your cognitive abilities. The eyes are not just for vision. Studies have found that the eyes are also connected to the part of the brain that controls circadian rhythms. The circadian rhythm guides the sleeping, waking, eating and energy cycle. It responds well to the blue light at the end of the visual spectrum, like the one we see in the sky on a clear morning.
We do not fully understand why, but bright white light with a blue tint positively affects your cognitive abilities and emotions. It enhances your alertness and ability to think clearly and decreases feelings of mental fatigue. White Blue light also affects the ability to imagine 3D objects, an essential skill for engineers, designers and scientists.
Another study has found that dim light has a positive effect on creativity. Researchers have found that, for some reason, people feel freer in dimmer lights, which leads to more creativity. The light itself does not affect creativity, but people feel safer in them as if they were in their homes, which lowers alertness and helps the mind wander around.

Conclusion

In this book, Josh Davis teaches you how to get your work done by creating two awesome hours of productivity in your day.
First, you learned how to identify the decision points throughout the day. By finding the spots where you can pick your next task, you avoid getting stuck in a routine and working on auto-pilot mode.
Second, you have learned the effects of tasks on your mental energy reserve. You learned that starting your day by answering emails will drain your mental energy and leave you too tired to work on your important tasks.
Third, you learned that the attention system is designed to keep switching focus from one thing to the other. The way to not get distracted is not by trying to use your willpower to stay focused but by simply removing the things distracting you.
Fourth, you learned how to leverage the connection between your mind and body. By understanding that your body has immediate effects on your brain, you can increase your mental energy level by exercising and eating healthier foods.
Fifth, you learned the effects of your environment on your productivity levels and how you can maximize your focus by making simple adjustments. You now understand the effects of different wavelengths of light on your cognitive abilities and creativity and how you can reduce the impact of environmental noises on your productivity.
Finally, after you integrate these strategies into your life, you will be able to focus as you have never done before and use your time in the most effective way possible. You will learn that only two hours of real productivity daily will be more than enough to get all of your work done.
Why should you read this summary?
Are you stuck in a loop of procrastination and not doing what you need to get done?
Do you feel mentally exhausted whenever you want to start working on your real tasks?
Are you finding difficulties focusing and keep getting distracted by the smallest thing?
Is your environment harming your productivity level?
In this book, the author Josh Davis will teach you how to get your work done by making two awesome hours of productivity. You will learn how to identify decision points throughout the day, pick your next task according to your mental energy, and increase that mental energy reserve by learning about the connection between your mind and body.
You will also learn how to stop getting distracted and control your attention system. You will learn the changes you can apply to your environment, so it'll become the perfect workspace for you.

Who should read this summary?

Employees
Entrepreneurs
Team Leaders

About the Author
Josh Davis is a writer, film producer, and co-founder of Epic Magazine.
He also is the lead professor at the NeuroLeadership Institute, where he works on connecting scientific studies to the business and leadership world. Josh also teaches productivity and public speaking