Book SummaryTwo Awesome Hours, by Josh Davis

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Two Awesome Hours

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 (2015), Davis presents five simple, flexible strategies. By choosing the methods that work best for you and adapting them to your personal needs, you can create these two-hour windows of maximum productivity for yourself.

Davis is the founder and director of the Science-Based Leadership Institute, where he translates scientific research into actionable insights for clients ranging from business schools to multinational corporations such as Hasbro. He also coaches business executives on skills such as public speaking and productivity, which gives him direct exposure to the challenges professionals face. In addition, Davis has taught classes at New York University,...

Two Awesome Hours Summary Strategy 1: Energize Your Body to Energize Your Mind

Many people view productivity as a purely mental issue, since it comes from focus and willpower. However, Davis says that your mind and body are closely connected, and therefore your physical state strongly influences your mental abilities.

In this section we’ll discuss two of the simplest, yet most effective ways to boost your energy and focus: Adjust your exercise and eating habits.

Work Out When You Need a Boost

Davis says exercise is one of the most accessible and reliable ways to enhance your productivity. Perhaps most notably, moderate aerobic exercise—intense enough to raise your heart rate and make you sweat, but not so intense that you exhaust yourself—improves your cognitive functions in numerous ways.

Studies have shown that people experience enhanced self-control, sharper focus, reduced anxiety, elevated mood, and greater energy after exercising. These benefits appear relatively quickly, typically 20 to 40 minutes after finishing a workout, and they persist for several hours.

In addition to regular exercise as a long-term health practice, Davis suggests you use exercise strategically to prepare for demanding tasks. For instance, if you have an...

Two Awesome Hours Summary Strategy 2: Spend Your Mental Resources Wisely

Davis’s second strategy is to recognize that your mental energy is limited and use it strategically. He explains that every time you make a choice, resist an impulse, or ignore a distraction, you draw on that limited mental resource. This is why your decisions may get worse as the day goes on, or why you might give in to temptations in the evening after successfully resisting them all morning and afternoon.

(Shortform note: To compound the problem of limited mental resources, modern life practically guarantees that you’re always mentally exhausted. In Willpower Doesn’t Work, organizational psychologist Benjamin Hardy explains how you’re...

Two Awesome Hours Summary 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...

Two Awesome Hours Summary 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...

Two Awesome Hours Summary 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...

Shortform Exercise: Plan for Your Two Awesome Hours

Consider which of Davis’s five strategies will work for you, how you might implement them, and what you’ll do with your two hours of peak performance.

For example, if you work in an office and don’t have much control over your schedule, perhaps “create your optimal workspace” is the most practical strategy to start with.