PDF Summary:Two Awesome Hours, by Josh Davis

Imagine doing more in two hours than you usually do in eight. Leadership expert and life coach Josh Davis says that if you create the right conditions for yourself, you can enjoy two hours a day of peak mental performance—two hours when you can easily handle your most important and challenging tasks. In Two Awesome Hours, Davis presents five simple, flexible strategies to create these windows of maximum productivity for yourself.

This guide will explore each of Davis’s strategies for creating two hours a day of peak performance, including boosting your energy, working smarter, and optimizing your environment. Additionally, we’ll compare Davis’s ideas with those in other popular productivity books such as Willpower Doesn’t Work and At Your Best. We’ll also provide scientific information and data to support Davis’s points when relevant. Finally, we’ll offer some concrete advice to help you get started implementing Davis’s system.

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Strategy 3: Create Your Optimal Workspace

The next of Davis’s strategies is to set up your workspace in a way that supports your performance as much as possible. Factors ranging from background noise and lighting to how your workspace is organized can all influence your productivity, so try to create the conditions that work best for you.

In this section we’ll discuss three key aspects of your workspace that can help or hinder your productivity:

• Background noise
• Lighting
• Decoration

Keep Things Quiet

The first thing Davis discusses is background noise. Quiet environments consistently lead to the best performance on mentally demanding work. If you can’t make your workspace quiet, consider investing in earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones.

He adds that the most intrusive kind of background noise is intermittent talking, such as the random bits of conversation you overhear in an office setting. Background music is preferable, especially since it can elevate your mood and boost your energy, but it also disrupts reading comprehension and analytical thinking. Even white noise is distracting and has been shown to impact people’s ability to process and retain information.

(Shortform note: The reason background noise hinders mentally intensive work goes back to the limited mental resources we discussed in Strategy 2. As productivity expert Chris Bailey explains in Hyperfocus, we have a limited working memory capacity; we can only focus on a limited number of things at a time. So, when you get distracted by background noise, what’s really happening is that new information (the sounds you hear) enters your working memory and forces out information related to whatever task you’re working on. This is also why any kind of noise can be intrusive: Regardless of whether it’s someone talking or your favorite song, it further strains your working memory.)

Choose the Right Lighting

Davis also asserts that lighting influences your alertness, mood, and thought patterns in measurable ways. Therefore, try to adjust your workspace’s lighting based on whether your current tasks require analytical precision or creative exploration.

Bright light enhances alertness and supports focused analytical work, especially light enriched with blue wavelengths to resemble natural daylight. This is because your brain assumes that bright, blue light must mean it’s daytime, and therefore it’s time to be awake and energized.

(Shortform note: The brain’s natural sensitivity to blue light is also why experts recommend that you avoid screens near bedtime, because their blue light will make it harder to fall asleep and will make your sleep less restful. Researchers have found that exposure to blue light causes you to produce less melatonin, a hormone that regulates your natural sleep cycle and helps you fall asleep at night.)

Conversely, dim lighting has been shown to foster greater creativity. Davis says that low light makes you feel hidden from others, and therefore provides a sense of creative freedom: It feels safe to ignore the usual constraints on how you think and behave.

If you can’t directly change your workspace’s lighting, you could try strategies such as using a desk lamp with a daylight bulb or adjusting your monitor’s brightness and color to better suit the type of work you’re doing.

(Shortform note: Multiple studies support Davis’s assertion that dim light leads to greater creativity when compared to standard and bright lighting. However, researchers found that this effect only applies when coming up with creative ideas, not when evaluating or implementing them. The researchers hypothesized that putting new ideas into practice was actually an analytical task, not a creative one. A follow-up experiment confirmed that bright light was more beneficial than dim light for implementing a new idea, which supports that hypothesis.)

Personalize and Organize

Finally, Davis recommends that you personalize your workspace with decorations that help you feel calm and rested, such as potted plants or pictures of natural scenes. However, he also warns against collecting so many items that your area starts to feel cluttered or cramped.

The distracting effects of clutter are even worse if the mess reminds you of undone tasks, such as having stacks of papers on your desk or dozens of tabs open on your computer. Therefore, try to maintain a clean and organized workspace, and keep unfinished work out of sight until you’re ready to tackle it.

(Shortform note: Davis stresses the idea that an uncluttered work environment is crucial for focus and productivity. However, studies on people’s working environments suggest that this may not be the case. In fact, psychologists found no significant difference in productivity between people working in organized environments and those working in cluttered ones. However, the researchers did note that people in cluttered environments produced more unique and interesting ideas—in other words, they were more creative.)

Strategy 4: Choose Your Next Task Carefully

Another strategy Davis presents involves understanding and leveraging the brief periods when you’ve completed one activity and must choose what to do next. These times are crucial because you’ll generally want to finish a task once you’ve started it—it’s difficult and frustrating to select a new task mid-activity, so making those choices when you’re already between tasks will feel much more natural.

However, Davis argues that most people hurry through these moments in their eagerness to feel productive again. As a result, they tend to choose whatever task is most urgent, most appealing, or most habitual, but never consider whether it’s really the best use of their time.

Davis offers three suggestions on how to make the most of the times between activities:

1. Take your time. Taking a few minutes to step back and consider your priorities creates psychological distance that enables better judgment. Any time you spend making your choice will pay for itself many times over in improved productivity.

2. Make a deliberate choice. Before you start any new task, ask yourself whether it’s truly the best use of your time, and make a conscious decision to tackle that task next.

(Shortform note: These first two suggestions closely resemble what Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance) calls the “essential pause.” Instead of immediately reacting to a situation (such as completing a task), Brach suggests taking a moment to consider what’s happening, how it’s impacting you in that moment, and what you should do about it. So, when you’ve finished a task and are considering what to do next, you can ask yourself what you feel driven to do at that moment, and why. Is the task you’re thinking about really the most important thing for you to do, or do you only have the urge to do it out of convenience or habit?)

3. Plan your responses to predictable interruptions in advance. Mid-task interruptions are sometimes unavoidable, and each interruption creates a new decision point: Do you allow yourself to get distracted by whoever or whatever interrupted you, or do you continue with your current activity?

To help yourself stay on task through these unplanned decision points, Davis recommends crafting if-then statements that predetermine how you’ll act in certain situations. For instance: “If a coworker tries to get my attention, then I will politely ask them to wait until I’m done with my current task.” These statements are commonly known as implementation intentions, and they greatly reduce the chance that you’ll react impulsively and make a poor decision.

(Shortform note: In Willpower Doesn’t Work, Hardy also recommends using implementation intentions as a way to minimize your need for willpower, which means this method also supports Strategy 2 (conserve your mental resources). Basically, since you’ve decided what to do ahead of time, you don’t need to spend willpower forcing yourself to make the right decision and stick to it. To make your “if-then” statements more effective, you can include a statement of the goal you’re supporting. Instead of simply thinking, “When X happens, I will do Y,” tell yourself, “When X happens, I will do Y in order to achieve Z.” When combined with a declaration of your goal, implementation intentions explicitly illustrate when and how you can work toward it.)

Strategy 5: Stop Fighting to Focus

The last of Davis’s strategies is to stop resisting your natural tendency to get distracted. He argues that people struggle with focus due to a mismatch between how our brains evolved and what modern society demands of us. Your attention mechanisms constantly scan the environment for novelty, change, and potential threats. Unfortunately, this works against the deep, sustained concentration that most present-day jobs require.

(Shortform note: The reason we haven’t continued evolving to better suit our modern world is that there’s little evolutionary pressure to do so. We can survive and reproduce with our current attention mechanisms, so we keep passing those traits on to future generations. This is one example of why biologists argue that the common framing of biology as “survival of the fittest” is a misunderstanding, and we should instead view it as survival of the adequate. In short, we’re already good enough to stay alive, so we reproduce to make more “good enough” people.)

With this in mind, Davis recommends a two-pronged approach to managing your attention. First, remove predictable distractors from your environment whenever possible. For instance, you could turn off your phone’s notification sounds or wear headphones to block out ambient noise.

(Shortform note: In addition to removing distractions, James Clear (Atomic Habits) provides another practical way to stay focused on what you want to achieve: Add visual reminders of what you intend to accomplish. Visual cues prompt action because they trick your brain into thinking it’s convenient to act on them. For example, email pop-ups trigger you to check your emails; without those pop-ups, opening your email requires a conscious decision. In a similar vein, you might set alarms to pop up on your phone or computer to remind you of important tasks.)

Davis’s second suggestion may seem counterintuitive: Allow your mind to wander rather than fighting to stay on task. When your attention naturally drifts, notice the wandering without judgment, let your thoughts run their course, then gently return to your original task. This method allows you to take a short mental break, then return to your work with minimal effort. Conversely, attempts to force yourself to concentrate usually backfire—trying not to think about something distracting practically ensures that you’ll keep thinking about it.

Furthermore, research suggests that mind wandering boosts important cognitive functions, including creative problem-solving and long-term planning. Studies show that people who engage in mildly demanding tasks between periods of focused work perform better on creative challenges than those who try to maintain constant focus.

Intentional vs. Unintentional Mind-Wandering

In Hyperfocus, Bailey differentiates between unintentional and intentional mind-wandering, or “scatterfocus.” Unintentional mind-wandering distracts you from your original intention. But in scatterfocus, you deliberately leave room in your working memory to allow your mind to wander. According to Bailey, when you mind-wander intentionally, you can maximize its short-term and long-term benefits because you remember your insights and connections; if your mind wanders unintentionally, you’re far less likely to remember anything useful.

Bailey suggests two ways to intentionally mind-wander. First, try a fun task that takes up little working memory, leaving the rest of your working memory free to let your mind wander. Regularly check in to see what you’re thinking about, and jot down any great ideas.

Second, schedule time to record your ideas. Bailey recommends scheduling weekly blocks with just your thoughts and a notepad. During this time, don’t think about anything in particular. Instead, write down whatever useful thoughts pop into your head.