I just underwent a 9+ hyperfocus session, during which I finished reading the last 125 pages of Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications. So, I wanted to share some patterns I noticed when going deep into an activity like coding or reading for longer hours and staying there.
I consider a hyperfocus session anything that lasts more than 1.5-2 hours. In this session, the focus is on one task, and time and space are forgotten. While 3-4 hour sessions occur frequently for me, a 9+ hour session is extremely rare, so I wanted to capture its details while it's still fresh to see whether this is purposefully reproducible in the future.
First of all, I was on a plane without Internet. This helps big time. As a standalone reason, it‘s not powerful enough, though. I definitely can distract and entertain myself for 9 hours on devices at a time without the Internet, not having learned or produced much. So, what was different this time?
Early Intent
I had already set a strong intent to finish the book. A few days before, I put the book into my backpack to finally finish it during my stay in the US. Thus, I was all set up for longer reading sessions.
Applying this to your day-to-day work, you can try setting your intent early to whatever task is on your plate, knowing that you will tackle and finish it soon.
Immediate intent
I started reading the book about 20 minutes before boarding, thus setting myself up before boarding. I knew that once I was on the plane, I could pick up where I left off and have a more extended reading session. I haven‘t planned for 9 more hours exactly, but I did play with the thought, „What if I finished this TODAY? Would that be even possible in terms of pages and available time?“So, I kept it open without forcing it.
Motivation
I started reading the 263-page book about half a year ago. It was sometime in late summer or autumn of 2024. Obviously, this dragged on for reading a book that's not War and Piece, and a small part of my motivation was „just finishing it“.
This brings us to some demotivating forces that can creep up before or during an enormous task:
- „No way you will get this activity done any time soon. “
- „This activity takes a lot of time that I probably could spend better otherwise.“
- „Those people who do or recommend this activity are out of their minds - there is obviously not as much return on investment on it.“
Once those forces are strong enough and the voice becomes louder, you will eventually give in and stop the activity. What kept me going through the 9+ hours were thoughts that dispelled doubts:
- „I‘m working with Rails daily, so learning from the condensed knowledge of one of the most prolific engineers in our niche is a blessing“ (authority motivation)
- „I learned about XYZ (e.g., that decorators are just open presenters and that a serializer like alba could be used as a presenter, replacing the need for an API serialization JBuilder view layer) - what else can I discover, experiment with, and apply in my real-life projects?“ (learning motivation)
- „Oh, I went through XYZ before (e.g., moving from a problematic partials mess to ViewComponents) - this confirms the approach we took“ (mapping of knowing concepts in the real world motivation)
- „Justin recently read from this and that passage and told me about it. Will be cool to discuss this with him again and talk about the rest of the book“. (doing it together motivation)
Funnily enough, because I started sharing more again on social media and my blog here, after several hours of focusing on the book, I felt like I could push through it for the rest of the flight and have a not too bad of a written up story to share with myself and others in the end, which also gave a motivational boost.
So, the takeaway is that one motivator might not be enough. Still, multiple motivators can be a strong enough bundled force to override your mini-me voice telling you to "do something else", "relax" or "finish it tomorrow."
On a side note, if you doubt that reading your current book is giving you the most benefit, you might be onto something. Ideally, reading a technical book should provide you with something you want to experiment with immediately and make the lights go on continuously (in my opinion, this is true for a technical book).
Internal conditions
If you go through a life drama, it‘s hard to go deep. If you have an acute health condition, you won’t go deep. If you have a chronic health condition, you might have adjusted enough to go deep, but probably not to your full potential.
You might not reach your full focus potential if you don‘t feed your brain the finest food. It‘s on you to experiment to understand what that food is. I won‘t give you any recommendations on this one because it takes your body and your awareness to figure this out. But if you want a personal example from my focus flight: If I ate the plane food right there at the 1-2 hour mark of the focus session, I definitely would have crashed after the „Chiming Chicken Crisp Rice Veggie Saté“ or „Truffle Cheese Tortellini“ for breakfast. I knew there was a high chance that the drive would be gone, so I opted out of heavy breakfasts and lunches.
A focus session can continue after breaks. While it‘s possible to work through a task for several hours, it‘s even better to take short breaks to take care of your physical needs, movement, healthy snacks, mind wandering, making notes, or whatever your brain is up to. You know that the session continues when the inner pain to continue the work is almost unnoticeably light or the drive to continue overrides it completely. You know that you need a quick break if you have physical sensations of any kind that distract you from the flow state. If you can‘t or don‘t want to focus on the task anymore at all, even after breaks, the session might be over for today, or you need a long break.
As an example for breaks: On this Barcelona -> New York flight, I stood up about 4-5 times and had a short stretch and walk (obviously, I only can sit on the isle; otherwise, I would drive my neighbors crazy). Apart from taking quick notes and sketches in the book during reading, I took some minutes after each chapter (3 or 4 times) to do some sketches and try to visualize and reflect on the information I just downloaded into my brain. I hadn't slept much before the flight, just 5-6 hours, which is low for my bar. So, I went into power nap mode twice. I'm unsure how long I was out of order, but I think it was 10-15 minutes. But what keeps it still a focus session is that the break is relatively short, and the focus is right back to it.
Depending on the task at hand and your existing conditions/addictions, you might want or need to use drugs/substances to go through longer sessions. However, ideally, and more sustainably in the long term, you can generate and sustain your energy through controlling your inner conversation, natural snacks, movement, breathing and mindfulness.
External conditions
If there are crying babies on your flight on your left and right, and you haven‘t protected yourself with well-isolating headphones that play the right brain music, you probably won‘t go deep. Alex Hormozi seems to start his day at 4 am in a dark room with no windows, his big headphones on and hacking away at his one thing for 6 hours (and then for another 6 hours after a 15-minute protein lunch 😅; reference; reference2). And I assume he doesn‘t have Slack running in a pinned side window. This is max protection against external environmental distraction factors. Unfortunately, he is a hyper-successful entrepreneur, so we‘ll never know his output as a software engineer. But he'd probably just ship amazing products as he does now.
Pre-training
All that said, you probably need some previous practice continuously focusing on one task for one, two, three, etc. hours at a time. Otherwise, you might not be prepared for really long focus sessions yet.
Some of my earlier memories of past 9+ hour hyperfocus sessions are:
- 10+ hours of live poker sessions (since 2006 - 2014).
- Code Sprint: Doing a side project in a day (e.g., on my datagoodie blog in 2018 4.5 hours + 7.5 hours).
- Getting a feature shipped by a tight deadline (sometimes since coding full-time since 2020 😬).
I think playing games as a kid and later poker semi-professionally for 8+ years (my life before software development) is where my focus training started. My mom also recently told me that I listened to her reading a lot when I was really small, so maybe that‘s where it began. Still, I don‘t think it‘s necessarily required that you follow a similar path. I bet there is something you can sustain your focus on for long periods. I hope it‘s coding and/or building because then you are well set up to get your focus optimized as described above. If not, it‘s never too late to start training now.
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Summing up everything, I think the mindset game is everything, and it‘s built up over days, months, and years through motivation and passion for what you do, intent building, and practicing discipline. Together with a good physical condition, it can make you a focus machine. If you can also put some prep into an environment beneficial to your focus, that would be even better.
I will dogfood myself with some of the advice here in the coming weeks and certainly on the flight back to see if I can replicate again and report to you so you can replicate even more. Until then, feel free to experiment with some of the examples above.
