# Chapter 173

An astonishing day yesterday. I basically locked myself in the basement for four hours so that I could focus focus focus, and I even added noise-canceling earbuds to limit all visual and auditory inputs. The results were awesome. So turn off your phones, close your Slack channels, halt your notifications, stop all interruptions and soar. Experience the thrill of progress and success and deep work, the flow of ideas, the depth of what you are capable of producing. It will never happen under other circumstances. There is not enough room in your brain to manage all the channels of input seeking your attention. No one can handle all those attention seekers in a productive manner. Honestly, if you can’t turn off all those distractions, then that is a decision to hop from email to tweet to facebook to web browser to text message and to not get anything important done.

Group all those attention seekers into one single hour long space in your morning and perhaps one more in your afternoon, and then box them out, turn them off, silence them, refuse to bow down to their alerts and notifications, beeps and pings and vibrations. Have enough adult in you to restraint your dopamine desires, to get to the important stuff, the world changing stuff, the value producing stuff, the stuff that can really make a difference in the world, rather than the loud the urgent and the noisy.

Have an astonishing day!