在这个充满着令人分心事物的世界，我们能够培养的最稀有、最重要的技能，就是专注的能力。长时间专注于一件事而不被干扰分心的能力，不仅是数字时代成功的答案，还是一个万能解。如果我们能够以绝对专注的状态，投入到待办清单上，在最重要的事情上投入一小时，生活就会有实质性变化。
Despite all the self-improvement content that exists on YouTube or online in general, most people already know exactly what they need to do to improve their lives. Pretty much every day we have at least one thing that we know we need to do, and if we were somehow able to just sit down and do that thing from start to finish, our life would be better because of it. If you're a student, maybe that's sitting down to write a couple of hundred words of that giant essay that you need to write. Or maybe if you're just a regular guy and you drive a 2005 Honda Civic that's making weird noises, you really should bring it into the shop, but for some reason, you're not because it's working now. So you assume it's gonna keep on working, but you really should get it checked out.
尽管网上有很多关于自我提升的内容，而且大多数人其实都很清楚该做什么来改善他们的生活。几乎每天我们都至少有一件我们知道自己需要做的事情，如果我们能够坐下来从头到尾完成那件事，我们的生活就能够因此变得更好。如果你是一个学生，也许那件事就是坐下来把你那篇需要完成的长篇论文写上几百字；或者，如果你只是一个普通人，开一辆2005款的本田思域，它会发出奇怪的声音，你很清楚应该把它开去修理厂，但出于某些原因你没有，因为它现在还能开。于是你就觉得它能一直工作下去，但其实你真的该去检修一下了。
It's not that people don't know what to do; that's not the problem. The problem is that people just don't do those things. They put it off, they distract themselves, and they do pretty much anything under the Sun, even stuff that is sort of vaguely important in some way, but it's not really important to you. You might use that as a justification like, "Oh, I'm sweeping the floor and that's productive," and you use that as an excuse to not write the essay, even though the essay is the most important thing that you should be doing. And I don't wanna sound like a boomer or anything like that, but I actually think this is becoming a bigger problem that more and more people are facing as time goes on, and that's because distracting ourselves is easier than it ever has been. Every year, companies spend billions upon billions of dollars to shove ads or products into your face with online marketing that nobody wanted or asked for. You're just bombarded and assaulted with all these little pop-ups scattering your attention and distracting you from whatever you were planning on doing when you sat on the computer or opened your phone or whatever.
所以其实并不是人们不知道该做什么，问题并不出在这里。问题在于人们不去做他们该做的事，他们拖延，分心去做别的事情，他们愿意去做一切事，甚至是一些通常不怎么重要，但对你来说尤其不重要的事情。你可能会把这作为理由，比如我在扫地呢，不算闲着，你以此为借口不写论文，即使论文是你当前应该做的最重要的事情。我不想让自己听起来像是在说教，但我的确认为随着时间的推移，这正成为越来越多的人面临的一个重大问题，这是因为我们的生活中出现了越来越多会令我们分心的东西。每年，各种公司会花费数十亿美元通过网络营销将广告或产品推到你的面前，而这些都是没有人想要看到的。这些弹出窗口不断对你进行轰炸，分散你的注意力，在你坐在电脑前或拿起手机准备做计划的事情时使你分心。
Anyways, I'll spare you all this woke talk and just cut to the chase. A world of distraction simultaneously creates a huge demand for people who can resist its draw. In other words, the rarest and most important skill you can cultivate in today's information age is the ability to concentrate. The ability to actively concentrate on one thing for long periods of time without getting distracted isn't just one solution for succeeding in the digital age; it's the solution.But maybe I'm not saying anything new. You probably already know this. It's not like some crazy original idea that I've had. If you can just focus on doing important things, then you're gonna get better at life. But like I said before, not knowing what we need to do isn't the problem; it's the fact that we just don't do it.
总之，一个充满着令人分心事物的世界非常需要能够抵御这类诱惑的人。换言之，在当今的信息时代，你能够培养的最稀有、最重要的技能就是专注的能力。能够长时间专注于一件事而不被干扰分心的能力不仅仅是数字时代成功的答案，还是一个万能解，不过这可能并不是什么新鲜的观点。如果你能专注于做重要的事情，那么你的生活就会变得更好，这一观点也并不是我的原创，但正如我之前说的，问题并不在于我们不知道需要做什么，而是我们不去做。
Maybe you've tried to concentrate for long periods of time, but you find it extremely, almost pessimistically difficult. But that's exactly why I'm making this video. I'm probably the most distractable person you've ever met. Naturally, I'm very scatterbrained. If a light turns on in the other room, I'm like a moth: "Oh, what's that? Let's go check it out." In fact, my mom will tell you I'm the worst procrastinator she's ever raised, but somehow even I have managed to find shortcuts and strategies and little hacks to convert myself into a relatively productive human being who can concentrate on boring things for long periods of time. This is a skill that anybody can learn, and one of the crazy things I've noticed is that you don't need to dive into like eight hours of deep work in order to make progress in your life. The bar is actually way lower than that. If you can dive in for one hour on the most important thing on your to-do list for the day with a ruthless active concentration, you will make substantial progress in your life. And as you get used to putting in that hour of focus, you can upgrade that to an hour and a half, to two hours, to three hours, and even then, that's so much intense focus that you will skyrocket past your goals and start living a life that you actually thought you'd be living at this point in your life. Let's be real.
也许你也有过尝试长时间集中注意力，但你发现这件事非常困难，几乎做不到，但这正是我制作这个视频的原因。我应该算是那种最容易分心的人了，我天生注意力就不太集中。如果另一个房间的灯亮了，我就会像一只飞蛾一样，那是什么？让我来看看。我的妈妈会说我是家里的孩子中最能拖延的一个，但就是我这样的一个人，居然也找到了捷径、策略和诀窍，能够使自己成为一个高效的人，能够长时间专注于做比较枯燥的事情。这一方法所有人都能学会，并且我注意到很棒的一点是你不需要一次投入工作8个小时也能够取得不错的进展，门槛其实远没有这么高。如果你能够以绝对专注的状态投入到你当天待办清单上最重要的事情上一个小时，你的生活就会有实质性的进展。当你习惯了一个小时的专注，你就可以把它升级到一个半小时、两个小时，三个小时甚至更多，这会是非常强大的专注能力，你能够很快实现你的目标，过上那种你认为自己应该拥有的生活。
I'm gonna break this video down into three categories. Step one is to properly craft your physical environment. You probably heard it a million times that if you have a messy room, then you're gonna have a messy mind, and if you just clean and organize your room, it's kind of like cleaning and organizing your mind. There's an amazing truth to this. Even if you just look at it from a practical perspective, each room should have a use, and each physical space where you dwell should reduce the friction that's in the way of doing the things that room was intended to help you do. For instance, in my own home office, I have a video editing PC. It's where I do all my creative stuff, and it's where I'm shooting this video, behind me, whoops, right there. If I want to help myself succeed and to concentrate and not get distracted, I should clean my desk to be as minimal as possible. The only things on there should help me accomplish my tasks that I've been setting out to do. This might sound like a total sidetrack rabbit hole, but I promise it'll make sense in a second.
我将把这个视频分成三部分。第一步是适当地打造你的物理环境。你可能已经听说过无数次，如果你的房间很乱，那么你的大脑也会很乱，如果你清洁并整理你的房间，也等于是在清洁和整理你的大脑。这是事实。即使你只是从实用的角度来看，每个房间也应该有不同的用途，你存在的每个物理空间都应该减少阻碍你做本该做的事情的阻力。例如，在我的家庭办公室里，有一台用于视频编辑的电脑，这是我进行所有创作工作的地方，也是我拍摄这个视频的地方。如果我想要成功，想要专注不分心，我就应该尽可能把我的桌子整理得简单，上面唯一应该留下的只有能够帮助我完成我设定的任务的东西。
I bought one of these awesome little wireless chargers for my phone. I bought it off Amazon; it was sleek, kind of fake wood. I figured, hey, this would be a great addition to my desk. I can put my phone on there, I can see when I'm getting notifications, and I'll never run out of juice on my phone throughout the day. But if you think about it, that's a really stupid idea. Why do I need to be notified when somebody is texting me or somebody comments on something on the Facebook page or something like that? I'm literally inviting more distraction into my life, and it's dumb. So how did I get around this? Well, there's a little shelf next to me, and I just put my wireless phone charger there, so that when I'm video editing into a flow state, it doesn't distract me. Little fixes like this seem really small, and you might think, "Oh, Joey, you're making like a 15-minute video about little dumb tricks like this?" Yes. Believe me, when it comes to your focus, it is everything, and this doesn't just apply to the workspace. There are other little ways that your environment dictates the amount of focus that you have.
我给我的手机买了一个很棒的无线充电器，我在亚马逊上买的，造型美观，很别致，看起来像是木质的。我觉得这个东西很适合放在我的桌子上，我可以把手机放在上面，我可以看到何时收到通知，而且我的手机一整天都不会没电。但如果你仔细想想这其实很蠢，为什么当有人给我发短信或者在脸书页面上发布评论时我要看到通知？我简直是在给我的生活增加更多分心的东西，这很愚蠢。那么，我是如何解决这个问题的呢？是这样的，我旁边有一个小架子，我把无线充电器放在那里，这样在我专心剪辑视频时就不会干扰到我。像这样的调整似乎微不足道，你们可能会想，哦，乔伊，你一个15分钟的视频都要讲这些愚蠢的小技巧？是的，相信我，这些东西对你的专注来说至关重要，而且这不仅仅适用于工作空间，你所处的环境对你专注力的影响存在于方方面面。
For instance, if you usually keep your phone on your nightstand next to your bed, that's kind of dumb if your plan for that room is to go to sleep. I personally found that I was spending way too much time on my phone before I went to sleep, and it was becoming a real problem, affecting my sleep. I couldn't get into a deep sleep, so I woke up in the morning feeling really groggy all the time, every single day. So what I did is I bought a cheap little Google Nest Mini, and I leave my phone on a charging station outside of my bedroom, and it's great. Every night I say, "Okay Google, set an alarm for 8:00 AM." "Tomorrow at 8:00 AM, set." "Thank you, Google." "Goodnight." "Goodnight, Google." "All right, that's okay. You don't need to say it back." So your bedroom is for sleeping. Your office is for working. Your kitchen is for cooking, and your private bowling alley in your basement is for bowling.
例如，如果你经常把你的手机放在床边的柜子上，而如果那个房间的用途是睡觉，这种做法就很蠢。我发现我在睡觉前在手机上花费了太多时间，这逐渐成为了一个不容忽视的问题，影响着我的睡眠，我无法进入深度睡眠，于是我每天早上起床时都很不清醒。对此我的解决方法是买了一个便宜的Google Nest Mini，把我的手机放在卧室外面充电。每天晚上我会说，谷歌，设置一个早上8点的闹钟，明天上午8:00，设定，谢谢，谷歌，晚安，晚安，谷歌，好吧，没关系，你可以不回应我。你的卧室是用来睡觉的，你的办公室是用来工作的，你的厨房是用来做饭的，在地下室的私人保龄球场是用来打保龄球的。
Okay, moving on to section two, this is all about designing your digital environment. Just like your physical environment, it is integral that you design your digital environment to also promote focus. I'm not Thomas Frank, but I do have a couple of tricks up my sleeve that helped me focus on stuff. Here's a bunch of things that helped me focus online. A lot of these are Chrome extensions, and I think they're available for Firefox as well. Number one is to download NewsFeed Eradicator for Facebook. What this does is it replaces your Facebook home page with a motivational quote and gets rid of you scrolling everywhere. So if you actually do stumble on Facebook, especially when you're working, all there really is to do is see if you have any notifications or respond to messages. You won't get caught in the trap of just like absorbing all this meaningless hotel nightmares, kitchen nightmares. Is hotel nightmares one?
接下来第二部分，那就是设计你的数字环境。正如你的物理环境一样，设计你的数字环境对于提升专注来说也是不可或缺的。我不是托马斯·弗兰克，但我也有几个锦囊妙计帮助我做到专注。以下是一些帮助我在上网时集中注意力的东西，其中很多都是Chrome浏览器的扩展插件，它们应该也同样适用于火狐浏览器。第一步是下载适用于脸书的新闻推送去除插件，它的作用是将你的脸书主页替换为激励性的话语，让你不再四处闲看。这样当你无意打开了脸书，尤其是在你工作的时候，你真正需要做的是看看有没有通知或回复信息，你不会陷入不断浏览一些毫无意义的内容的陷阱。
Another awesome Chrome extension, and I think it's also for Firefox as well, is DF YouTube, which stands for distraction-free YouTube. Shout out to my friend Alex for showing me this one. If you're like me, YouTube is probably the biggest time suck of all, but what DF YouTube does is it eliminates the classic homepage so you're not bombarded with all these huge thumbnails of different recommended videos. It just wipes it clean. You still get the trending tab if you're into that kind of thing. I don't know who would be, probably just like Lele Pons and the Late Night Hosts. My favorite part about it is it also keeps the subscriptions tab so that the people you're actually subscribed to show up there.
另一个很棒的Chrome插件是DF YouTube，应该也同样适用于火狐，指的是无干扰的YouTube。感谢我的朋友亚历克斯把这个推荐给我。如果你像我一样，YouTube可能是最大的时间杀手，但DF YouTube所做的是它会消除经典的主页，这样你就不会被那些推荐视频的巨大缩略图所轰炸。它把这一切都消除干净，但如果你点开趋势这一栏，仍然能看到当下热门的视频。我最喜欢的部分是它还保留了订阅栏，这样你订阅的频道就会展示出来。它所做的另一件事是消除了推荐视频的侧边栏，这样，当你在看你真正想看的频道的视频时，你就不会被吸引去看另一个频道，从而避免你落入兔子洞，你只能有意识地去看你本来准备要看的内容。
Another thing that it does is that it actually eliminates the sidebar of all these recommended videos so that when you're watching the video of the channel that you actually meant to watch, you're not sucked into watching another channel and you know, you go down the rabbit hole. You're just intentionally watching what you set out to watch. Another thing I did, this is a little bit more extreme, but it worked really well for me, is that I deleted social media apps off my phone in general. When I want to use a particular app, I actually have to physically type it in on Safari or whatever. Okay, section number three is all about training your mind. Sorry, that's probably a bit much. The first two sections were all about eliminating little traps and attention sucking succubuses, but this whole section is all about developing a philosophy and a mindset of intentionality. This is one of the most important and powerful mindsets you can adopt to promote concentration. You need to train your mind to be more intentional with your time, and you might think I'm coming at this from a hustle culture perspective where every single ounce of your time needs to be dedicated to working on your craft or grinding or something like that, but that's actually, I don't believe that at all.
我做的另一件事，稍微有点极端，但对我来说真的很有效，那就是我把所有的社交软件都删掉了，当我想使用某个特定的软件时，我就必须在Safari或其他地方搜索它。接下来，第三部分是关于训练你的大脑。前两部分都是关于消除小的陷阱以及吸引注意力的诱惑，但这一部分是关于培养一种人生观和一种意向性的思维方式。对于提升注意力，这是你可以采用的最重要和最有效的思维方式。你要训练你的大脑使其对时间的利用更有意识，你可能会觉得我是从“奋斗文化”来看待这个问题的，提倡每一盎司的时间都需要用于磨砺你的技艺或者类似的事情，但实际上，我根本不相信这种观点。
You know, for instance, I am a big fan of video games. I think video games are a great way to take a breather and escape and engage with either a work of art or a multiplayer experience, but my point is, if you're gonna play video games, play the crap out of video games for like an hour or two after you've already put in the tremendous amount of focus on something else, you've been productive, you've put in your time, you were intentional with it, so that you can fully immerse yourself in a video game with no guilt. Being present and fully engaged with whatever you're doing, whether that's having fun, having a conversation with a friend, or working on something extremely creative and fulfilling, I feel like this is the key to a happy and fulfilling life. One of the best ways that you can develop more intentionality in your life in order to promote focus but also just to have a more fulfilling life in general is to create a schedule for your day, and a schedule shouldn't be seen as something like the super ruthless iron-fisted limiting concoction that you trap and imprison yourself into fulfilling. Your schedule is your own. You can design your day in a way that is fulfilling to you.
很多人都知道，我非常喜欢玩游戏，我认为电子游戏是一种很好的放松方式，逃离现实，沉浸体验一件艺术作品或参与多人对战，但我想说的是，如果你要玩游戏，就在你已经在其他事情上专注、高效地工作了一段时间之后玩一两个小时的游戏，你已经有意识地做了该做的事，这样你就可以完全沉浸于游戏之中而不需要有负罪感。无论做什么，都要全身心投入，无论你是玩、在和朋友交谈还是做一些极富创造性和成就感的工作，我觉得这一点是幸福和充实生活的关键。让你的生活更具意向性的一个有效方法是为你的一天建立一个时间表，并且不要把时间表当作是极端无情和铁腕限制的混合产物使你被忙碌的生活所束缚，你的时间表是你自己的，你可以以适合自己的方式来安排你的一天。
Before you design your schedule, you can really ask yourself, "What could I do day to day that I would truly feel happy and fulfilled with? How much time would I dedicate to working and be realistic with that? How much time should I dedicate to socializing and be realistic?" If gaming is important to you or something like that, or working out or whatever, you have the freedom to design your day in a way that's most fulfilling to you. But once you do that, be absolutely ruthless with being engaged and intentional with every single thing on your schedule. That way when you're working, you get way more work done because you're concentrated, and when you're playing, you have a lot more fun because you're right there, not guiltily playing because you didn't actually do work and you shouldn't actually be playing.
在你安排你的日程表之前，你可以问问自己我每天该做什么才会真正感到快乐和满足？我要分配多少时间用于工作并且要现实地对待这个问题？我应该拿出多少时间用于社交并且要现实？如果游戏或类似的东西对你很重要，或者锻炼身体或其他事情，你可以自由地以一种最令你感到满足的方式来安排你的一天。但是一旦你安排好了，就要严格执行，有意识地处理好你日程表上的每一件事。这样，当你工作的时候，你能够完成更多的工作，因为你很专注；当你在玩的时候，也能收获更多的乐趣，因为你能够很投入，而不是在没有完成工作、不该玩的时候带着负罪感去玩。
To develop focus specifically, start off by scheduling one hour of focus on a very specific thing that you really need to get done. Pretty much everyone can manage one hour once they enter a flow state. Try to break past that 20-minute mark so you can enter that flow state. After a couple of weeks of getting used to doing an hour of deep focus, ramp it up to an hour and a half, then to two hours, maybe two and a half hours, three, if you're really getting the hang of it. I find that three hours is sort of the point of time that I'm the most productive and after that, it's sort of diminishing returns. As you get better at developing the skill of concentration, you'll find that you get stuff done a lot quicker. You know, you only put three hours into work and you're really concentrated, and you can get more done in those three hours than you typically did in your entire week. If you have a high-intensity workout, you can usually spend that hour and a half, and you can reduce that time to like 45 minutes, so basically you free up all this time in your day for something else.
想要培养专注力，可以从安排一个小时的时间专注于一件你真正需要完成的事情开始，一旦进入状态后几乎每个人都能做到专注一个小时，尝试突破20分钟，使自己就能够进入状态。当你习惯于一个小时的专注，几周后可以把它提升到一个半小时，然后到两个小时，或者两个半小时，三个，如果你能够掌握其中的诀窍的话，我发现三个小时是我最高效的时间，在那之后效率就会稍稍递减。当你更擅长专注的时候，你就会发现你能够更快地完成任务，你只是花三个小时投入工作，但你非常专注，你这三个小时完成的事情可能比通常一周做的更多。如果你进行高强度的锻炼，可能你通常需要花费一个半小时，你会在健身房看手机，然后做四组10分钟的锻炼，那么你其实可以把健身时间缩短到45分钟，那么你空出来的时间就可以去做别的事情。