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What happens if you give your brain two options? Do the work or stare at a wall?
Cormac Taylor tests a simple productivity hack for a year, removing distractions to boost focus, fitness, and personal growth.
Key Takeaways
- Limiting choices to work or boredom can force the brain to focus and reduce procrastination.
- Removing online entertainment drastically increases available time and productivity.
- Consistent physical activity, especially when enjoyable, enhances motivation and progress.
- Discipline and removing distractions can lead to surprising achievements, even with ADD.
- Sustained focus and lifestyle changes compound to exponential personal growth over time.
Summary
- Cormac Taylor experiments with a productivity hack where he can only work or do nothing, eliminating procrastination and distractions.
- He forbids himself from using technology for entertainment when alone, forcing focus on goals or boredom.
- Initial weeks are challenging, but after two weeks, his focus improves dramatically, allowing hours-long concentration.
- He applies the hack to his business initially, then adds weightlifting as a side project to avoid boredom.
- He adopts a monk mode with daily cold exposure, clean eating, and workouts, pushing consistency.
- He starts running to complement weightlifting but suffers a knee injury, refocusing on lifting and business.
- Cormac trains for and completes a marathon despite severe cramping, marking a major achievement.
- He sets a goal to run a marathon every month, becoming addicted to the progress and discipline.
- The experiment leads to improved mental clarity, physical fitness, and a new lifestyle free from online distractions.
- Cormac reflects on the unlimited human potential unlocked by removing distractions and focusing on meaningful goals.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to the Productivity Hack
- 00:48Rules of the Experiment
- 01:33Initial Challenges and Focus Improvement
- 02:24Applying Hack to Business
- 03:10Adding Weightlifting as a Side Project
- 03:55Monk Mode: Cold Exposure, Clean Eating, and Workouts
- 04:37Starting Running and Injury Setback
- 05:21Training for and Running a Marathon
- 06:07Reflection and Future Goals
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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For the last year, I tried this incredibly simple productivity hack. And the results were scary. I'm obsessed with answering one question: How much can a human achieve if they remove distraction and execute every day? In a world full of distractions, I wanted to
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see what would happen if I removed them entirely. Now, throughout my entire life, I've really struggled with procrastination. I couldn't focus. My attention span was terrible. It got to the point where it was so bad I was diagnosed with ADD. Now, I was given
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medication and told, "Okay, you need to take these pills for your brain to work normally if you want to stop procrastinating, if you want to stop getting distracted, and you want to focus." But I wanted to see what would
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happen if I just didn't give my brain the option to procrastinate. Now, there are a few rules for this experiment. The first one is that I can either do the work that I plan to do or I can do
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nothing. There is no other choice. Do the work or stare at a wall. The second one is that when I'm by myself, I [snorts] cannot use technology to entertain myself. There is no online entertainment allowed by myself at any
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point. And the third rule is that the majority of the time I spend by myself, I have to spend working towards a goal.
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Now, for the last year, I followed those rules very, very strictly. And here's what happened. Now, this first week was the most challenging week of the entire year. I had no idea how I was going to maintain this for an entire year because
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it just seems so different from my lifestyle. After about 2 weeks, what I noticed is that my focus got really good. If you have the choice between doing the work or doing nothing and being bored, your brain is going to
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revert to the work. What I noticed is that if I decided not to do the work and just sit there and do nothing, I might be able to last a minute or two, but after a while, my brain would be so, so
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angry that I was bored. It hated it so much that I would rather just be doing the work itself than being bored. So these periods of boredom, these periods of staring at a wall rarely lasted more than about 2 minutes without me going,
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"Okay, I just want to do work now." Historically, I probably couldn't focus on an individual task for more than, well, 20 minutes. But now, because I had no choice, I was able to focus on single tasks for hours on end. And I was pretty
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shocked by this because if you're someone who's told you have ADD, this is nearly impossible to do. So, that was quite surprising. Now, for about the first month, I exclusively used this to work on my business. I thought, okay,
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this is just going to be a great tool to be able to focus better, to put more time into growing my business. And this was great. But by about week three, week four, I'm sitting at my desk going, "Oh
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god, 24 hours is actually a really long time when you're not filling it with junk." I'm sitting at my desk going, "Well, what do I do now? I have no idea what to do." Because when you're not wasting your time, you realize how much
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time you actually have. And I went, I need another quest here. I need another side quest because if I just spend my days working, I'm going to be bored to death. So around the end of the second month, I decided to really get into
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weightlifting. Now, I'd been going to the gym on and off for about 5 years before this, but I decided, all right, let me really lock this in. Let me add this as a project and try and get in
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pretty damn good shape. Now, because I didn't really have any entertainment options when I was by myself, I could either work, stare at a wall, or work out. The workouts ended up becoming the most fun part of my day. I really,
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really had a lot of fun. And because of how much fun I was having, I was able to make pretty good progress because, of course, if you're enjoying the gym, if you're having a lot of fun, you're going
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to rock up. So, my consistency was really damn good. And because my consistency was great, I started making pretty good progress. Now, about halfway through that second month, I decided to take on a monk mode project, which essentially meant that I had to do some
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sort of cold exposure every day. I had to eat clean every day, and I had to work out every day. Now, about a week into this monk mode project, what I realized is that I'm going to the gym and
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lifting weights seven days a week. This is my only physical endeavor. Do I think that this is optimal, the best way of getting in great shape, going to the gym every single day? No. Then the only reason I'm doing this is to make sure
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that I'm ticking boxes for the monk mode project. So, I thought, okay, I need some sort of other physical endeavor.
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So, I thought, okay, what could I do? Well, I guess running would be an interesting thing to do. So, I picked up running. Now, going into this, I had zero running experience. The most I'd run in my entire life was 10ks. I had
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very little experience. I wasn't a very good runner, but I thought, "Okay, I need some sort of other physical endeavor." So, I cut my workouts back to about 4 days a week and I started running 3 days a week. And what happened
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is I was progressing pretty well. I kept pushing my distances further and further, but after about 6 weeks, I developed an injury, a knee injury, which put me out of running for 2 months. This wasn't good. So, in those
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two months, I focused my attention back to weightlifting. I kept working on my business. I noticed that my focus was getting really good. I was starting to get used to living without this online entertainment. I was starting to get
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used to having to do the work. I had no other option. So, I was kind of getting used to this lifestyle and I was really enjoying it because I was making pretty fast progress. Finally, I could get back
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into running and rather than learning from my mistakes and slowly progressing back into it, I said, "All right, let's run a marathon. I'm gonna run a marathon in six weeks," which retrospectively thinking about it was a stupid decision.
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But anyway, I went about it and I started really training for the marathon. I went back to running 3 days a week. It was going well and I was really loving running. In this time, running became my favorite thing in the
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world because by myself, my options were either working on my business, lifting weights, or running. Running quickly became my favorite thing to do. I was having a lot of fun while I was running.
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I think the fact that it was a new thing for me and I was making newbie gains really quickly very much excited me. So, six weeks rolls around and it is marathon day. This was my last day of
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monk mode as well. It was a huge day for me. Time to take on this huge challenge.
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Now, I was really confident. I thought I'm going to do this so quickly. This is going to be great. About 20ks in, which is around the halfway mark of the marathon, and [music] I started cramping. And this cramping got worse
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and worse and worse. It progressed all over my body. And by about kilometer 25, I had full body cramps.
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Cramping in the forearms, both forearms right now and in the right hamstring. So pure pain. Now I had to push this through for the last 17ks and run the marathon with full body cramps. It was a brutal day, but also a day of a great
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achievement. I got my first big milestone done since starting this project. Now, this was easily the hardest thing I'd done in my life, but it was also probably one of the biggest achievements. So, I really thought, "This is an amazing feeling. I'm going
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to keep chasing this feeling." So, I decided to run a marathon a month. I said, "This is my new goal. I'm going to run a marathon every single month." Now, this was around the 6 month mark. And this is where I got addicted. I
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realized, "Wow, I am loving this. I'm having a lot of fun. I'm finally starting to see the results of the efforts I'm putting in." And I got comple
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cramping. It was pretty ugly, but we got it done. Around this point, I started getting very, very confident with the trajectory of my business, and I decided to take the next [music] big step.
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Together with my friend Toby, we decided that we were going to become digital nomads. So, we booked flights for April of 2026 to fly to South America. We booked 8 months worth of accommodation, all paid for and returned flights. So,
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was locked in. There was no going back. We were heading to South America. Now, South America seems like an incredibly interesting place, but it's not going to be so interesting if you can't talk to anyone. We realized that basically every
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single country in South America speaks Spanish. So, it would probably be a good idea to speak the language, too. So, this started the next big project. I realized that my free time was either being spent working on my business,
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running, or working out. But maybe we should take on another mental endeavor, probably one that's going to help us in the future. So, it was time to take on Spanish. Now, I had 7 months from that date until the date that we're leaving
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[music] for South America to learn Spanish. I chose a specific language learning method that meant that I would need to receive 1,000 hours of Spanish [music] input to make it to conversational fluency. So, that became my goal. In the next 7 months, you're
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going to get in 1,000 hours of Spanish. Now, based on my very limited Spanish background, this meant that I would have to spend 4 hours every day learning the language. Now, a year ago, there is not a chance on earth I would try and take
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on a challenge that ambitious because I knew there's just no way I could follow through with that. But now that my options were either work on your business, run, work out, or learn Spanish, it became a viable option. And
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it actually became quite an enticing option because I just had to watch Spanish content. This was almost like reintroducing binge watching except I was binge watching and learning languages at the same time. I use this just how I would have used any other
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entertainment in the past. Scrolling became watching Spanish. Binge watching YouTube videos became watching Spanish.
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Video games became watching Spanish. Netflix podcast [music] music, it all became consuming Spanish. My world by myself became working, running, working out, or learning Spanish. There's no other options. It's either those four or stare at a wall.
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And for the last 6 months, that has been my reality. So, fast forward 6 months of me staring at my work, staring at Spanish content, running or lifting weights. Where are we today, one year after starting this experiment? Well,
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the confidence continues to grow as the business continues to grow. We were able to book all 8 months of our accommodation, flights, and everything.
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Cash paid for upfront, all done. We kept lifting weights very consistently, and that allowed us to get in the best shape of our entire life. Now, this was very easy because lifting weights quickly became one of my favorite things to do
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in my life. We've made it to eight marathons in eight months. Now, it hasn't been an easy journey. They haven't been pretty marathons, but we've battled through and got them done. And finally, we're about to make it. We are
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a few weeks away from accomplishing on average 4 hours a day of Spanish for 7 months to become conversationally fluent. 2 weeks from today, I grab my bags and I head to South America to start the next chapter of what is
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becoming a very, very interesting life. There are a few lessons I learned from this experiment that were absolutely life-changing for me. The first one is that 24 hours is a long time. I used to have this issue of thinking, I just
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don't have time for anything. The days go by so quickly. I don't have time to do all of these things. When I stripped myself in my life from literally everything, what I realized is there is so much time in the day, I'd just been
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filling it with useless activities. I had so much time back and because I had this frame of mind that I have a lot of time in the day, there's a lot I can accomplish. I kept adding things to my
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plate. That's why I was able to add the weightlifting and then the running and then the language learning because I knew I actually have a lot of time to accomplish these things. and it gave me a really really positive frame of mind
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to start taking on new projects and seeing them through. Second big thing I learned is that I now have so much more drive and ambition back and I realized that I'd been channeling all my drive and ambition into my devices into my
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technology. Now I was a bit of a gamer. I was definitely playing a lot of video games back in the day and I realized that a lot of this drive for progress, status and achievement, this was all going into the video games. All of my
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time and my energy was getting sucked into the screens. the scrolling, the binge watching. When I got all of this time and energy back, all of this drive, ambition, motivation, and channeled it all into the goals, into the goals that
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I had for my life, I realized that all of this was actually possible. All of this energy that I had, all of this positive energy was getting sucked from my life. And getting this back was a huge unlock. And I really started to
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realize just how much this stuff was taking from me, just how much this was taking from my ambition as a person. The third almost philosophical take I have from this experiment is that when the resources of the modern world are used
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intentionally, the human potential is becoming unlimited. The power that we have in our fingertips from modern technology is just insane. But the problem I think we have is that the power that we gain from modern technology, we actually lose more from
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how much it's taken from our life. But if you can remove the taking entirely and only get the benefit from the technology, the potential becomes pretty insane. Now, I have to say that this is only a year. There's only so much you
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can achieve in one year, but this was the compounding effects of consistently executing on a daily basis for a year.
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I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in 2 years, 3 years, 5 years. This has been a good start, but I think it's going to get better and better. So, I'm going to continue running this experiment and seeing how this goes. I
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suspect that over time the compounding effects of these actions are going to give me exponential returns. We'll see what happens. But I've been very very shocked by this experiment. If you guys want to give it a go, I would definitely
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recommend it. It's been pretty life-changing. Now, if you guys want to go deep into how to create systems that allows you to execute consistently on a daily basis without relying on motivation or willpower whatsoever, you can join the Modern Monk community. I'll
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leave a link in the description below for that. Now, if you guys found this video interesting, I have a video about how cheap modern dopamine is impacting our brain. If you want to see that, I'll leave it up here somewhere. I will
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either see you in the modern monk community or in that video.
Topics:productivity hackfocusprocrastinationADDmonk modeweightliftingrunningmarathondigital detoxpersonal growth
