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Despite having the capacity to do great things, most self-employed professionals and business leaders fall short because their cognitive energy is scattered.

Imagine using a magnifying glass to start a fire. You don’t add energy to the mix. You simply refocus energy into a single point to catalyze a literal transformation in every sense of the word.

The same principle applies to anything in life - work, health, relationships, etc. When your attention is scattered across notifications, emails, meetings, task-switching, and life obligations, you produce mediocre results across the board.

But channel your focus into singular things, and you will force transformational breakthroughs in the area of work or life that energy is focused on.

So for today’s “Encrypted” message I’m giving you a simple playbook for channeling your energy to accomplish more in a single day than most could do in a month.

Sounds impossible, I’m sure. But keep reading. I’ll show you how it’s done.

Today, most self-employed professionals and business leaders are drowning in distractions. Notifications, emails, meetings, and scattered life priorities.

The result? High input, low output. You don’t need to be an engineer to know that’s a terribly inefficient system.

The antidote? Strategically incorporate days into your schedule where you channel scattered cognitive energy into a single focal area. Get more done in a single day than most can do in a month.

Keep reading to learn how…

I recommend a maximum of 2 days per week, because it is extremely cognitively demanding, and your brain needs downtime.

If you want to spend a full day working on something non-work related, then you’ll probably need to do it on the weekend, or on an off day.

If it is work-related, then it’ll need to align with a work day that is not populated with endless meetings and other disturbances.

So, you’ll need do some advanced planning here to make sure you pick the right day that is most suitable for your objective.

Mondays are typically lighter than Tuesday-Thursday for meetings. Friday’s are also relatively light meeting days, but you’ll have to contend with end of week cognitive drop-off.

Weekends are great for personal projects but may conflict with social and family obligations.

My recommendation is Mondays as the perfect opportunity to start the week off strong, and Saturdays for personal projects. But this varies greatly from person to person.

This is important.

By focusing on one single thing, you eliminate task-switching which typically accounts for about a 40% cognitive energy loss (American Psychological Association). This means that for a standard 8-hour work day, you’re potentially losing 3+ hours each day from multitasking.

So killing task switching is probably the lowest-hanging fruit and highest leverage thing you can do. This means on the day that you set aside for deep focus, there can be no random meetings, no jumping from issue to issue.

Pick your SINGLE area of focus, and pause everything else.

It must be something that a reasonable person who is driven would typically accomplish in about a month’s time:

Consider your obvious sources of distraction, and take steps to eliminate or minimize them.

Temporarily hide or delete necessary apps, unplug the TV, set your OOO or DND email message, let anyone who may contact you know that you wont be responding tomorrow unless it’s an emergency.

This is a short term sprint, so more extreme mitigation steps are necessary for taking full advantage of the day.

Give yourself the cognitive space to fully lock in.

You know this already, but sleep is essential for making sure your cognitive battery is fully charged in the morning. Adequate sleep is a non-negotiable.

When the sun goes down, turn off all bright or blue lights. Use dimmers, or smart bulbs to switch to warmer lighting that signals to your body that it’s time to shut things down.

After 8 pm: Silence your phone and store it outside of the bedroom. Turn off all digital entertainment. No food or drinks except water or herbal tea. Keep the room cool (below 70 deg F).

Your circadian cycle follows the earth’s 24-hour rotation. It plays a major role in regulating sleep and wakefulness throughout the day.

Most people will follow a cycle that looks something like this:

Generally you’ll start your day off with high mental energy, followed by a mid-day trough, and then a second wind towards the end of the day.

You may also notice from your own experience that you’re better with analytical work in the mornings while your creativity peaks in the evenings.

Use this understanding to sequence your day at the macro level.

Your ultradian cycle follow’s the brain and body’s natural 90-120 minute deep focus periods followed by short 20-30 minute mental recovery breaks.

It’s also responsible for sleep cycles, but we won’t cover that here.

Using your understanding of the ultradian cycle, you’ll want to leverage time blocking throughout your day to take advantage of these peaks and recovery periods.

Front load your deep work blocks during the morning period of peak focus (prioritize analytical work).

Account for a mid-day cognitive rest.

Close the day strong with shorter windows of deep work (prioritize more creative work).

Let the schedule become your execution bible.

Use your calendar app of choice to schedule four 120-minute and/or 90-minute focus blocks throughout the day with rest periods in between.

Here’s my suggested schedule:

Copy this exactly, or modify it as needed into your scheduling app of choice.

Pull up your music app and type in 40hz “gamma wave” binaural beats. If you have noise canceling headphones, then use those to listen while working.

The 40hz frequency is associated with extreme brain activity and hyperfocus

Binaural music played at this frequency is known to prime the brain for hyper focus.

Do not take your deep work blocks and focus blocks as suggestions. You must follow the schedule exactly as you designed it.

This means stopping work when you hit your 90 or 120 minute limit. Even though you feel like you can keep going, you MUST take cognitive breaks in their entirety to avoid burnout.

This also means not cutting your breaks short and jumping back into work when you feel energized. Take your time. Follow your process.

At this point you should be locked in. All you need to do is execute.

Follow the structure. ONE singular area of focus. Two 120-min blocks. A large mid-day rest. Two 90-min blocks.

Watch magic happen.

Like with anything else in life, the first time you follow this protocol, it will be difficult.

But the more you practice it, the more your brain will adapt for tuning into a state of hyper focus.

You can use this as life hack whenever you’ve hit a plateau, or whenever you want to overcome inertia and build overwhelming momentum.

Using this technique, I’ve gone from having undeveloped business ideas in my head to generating revenue from my first paying customer within 24 hours.

It’s also how I read books cover-to-cover in a single day now, instead of dragging it out, starting and stopping, losing context along the way.

In 2026 I have a goal of becoming conversational in Portuguese, and I’ll most certainly be allocating full days of practice to rapidly acquire the language.

If you apply this framework to your own life wherever you struggle to make meaningful progress, then I can genuinely guarantee that once you apply it, you’ll change your life forever.

Steal my playbook.

Click here to download a one-page execution manual.

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