If you’re feeling brave—or just tired of lying to yourself—I dare you to face an inconvenient little truth right now. Pick up your phone. Yes, that glowing oracle you keep in your pocket like a digital rosary. Open the Screen Time app and look at your weekly average. Let the number hit you in the chest before you start rationalizing it.
Then do a real gut check. Not the polite kind. The kind where you actually tell the truth:
How much of that time was you deliberately using this device with a purpose… and how much was you slipping into a trance, waking up 43 reels later, wondering how you got dragged into the metaverse equivalent of a back alley?
Be honest. Your soul already knows the answer.
Yesterday, Matthew and I ran a two-hour workshop on the only two skills that matter if you actually want to be awake for your own life. Not “optimize your potential” awake—alive awake. The kind where you can feel the ground under your feet and remember what you said ten minutes ago because your brain isn’t dissolving in TikTok acid.
These two skills are the whole game. The real competitive advantage—not just in business, but in love, friendship, craft, prayer, everything. They decide whether you’re steering the damn ship… or sleepwalking through your own story while your dreams get quietly euthanized by doomscrolling, disappearing thoughts, and another Uber Eats delivery you swear you didn’t order.
The culprits?
Time management.
And undistracted concentration.
Two ancient, boring-sounding disciplines that will either hand you your life back—or guarantee you never really had one.
When I’ve run this screentime dare before, the numbers people confess hover somewhere between 3 and 12 hours a day. Let that sink in: 1,095 to 4,380 hours a year. That’s more than half of your waking life spent finger-tapping your way through a digital funhouse—jumping from one app to another like a dopamine-starved rabbit chasing the next red notification hit. Picture a heroin addict, but with (slightly) better posture and a impulse Temu purchases instead of mainlining straight into your veins.
This is not an accident.
The attention economy is a machine with an appetite, and your mind is the buffet. One of Facebook’s early architects flat-out admitted that the hackers who built the platform intentionally wired it to exploit the soft underbelly of human psychology—our hunger for connection, validation, belonging.
We’re not the customers. We’re the livestock. The longer we graze, the fatter their ad revenue becomes.
And here’s the twisted part: for creators and entrepreneurs, this beast cuts both ways. The same algorithms that can turn your mind to mush—scrolling through thirst traps, brainrot memes, and digital fast-food entertainment—can also catapult your art, your mission, your business into the bloodstream of culture.
While everyone else is hypnotized, feeding the hungry Moloch of social media with their hours and attention, you can slip a message into the trance. Billions of eyes, one tap away.
Play your cards right, and you might even do something subversive:
Wake people up.
Crack the spell.
Help them reclaim their hours, their imagination, their agency from the sprawling Satanic Entertainment System we’ve all been baptized into without consent.
That’s the hidden gamble.
Same tool.
Two futures.
Pick your master.
If you want to stand up and take a swing at this digital dragon, you can’t show up empty-handed. You need a weapon of your own—a forged-in-fire system that cuts through chaos instead of adding to it. A sword for the beast.
What follows is the machinery we’ve built: the ecosystem of games, disciplines, strategies, and “second-brain” architecture that liberates your mind from the algorithm’s grip. This is how you defrag a fractured attention span, reclaim your hours, and wield your time like a sorcerer who actually read the grimoire.
It’s the exact breakdown of what we taught in the workshop—and the same framework our highest-paying clients use to hit those eerie, flow-state levels of output that leave bystanders staring like they’ve just witnessed witchcraft.
Dharma Sprints
I've written about Dharma Sprints many times before. I'll write about them many, many more times.
One of the biggest tectonic shifts in my life happened when I picked up Cal Newport’s Deep Work. The book is essentially one long plea to stop behaving like a goldfish with WiFi. Newport laid out the cost of task-switching with surgical clarity: if you can’t stay with a single task long enough to sink into the deeper layers of your own mind, you never access your real genius. Concentration is the doorway; distraction is the locked gate.
In a world engineered to scatter your mind, the ability to truly be there—in your work, your relationships, your body, your joy—is the ultimate competitive edge. Deep concentration is the soil everything meaningful grows from. And it only blooms when you stop bouncing between tasks like a caffeinated pigeon.
Most people don’t realize how brutal the stats are. It takes the average human 15–20 minutes to drop into the kind of focused state where real work becomes possible. But researchers at UC Irvine found that office workers change tasks every three minutes—with notifications doing most of the damage. And once someone switches? It takes them, on average, 23 minutes just to stumble back to where they left off.
Once I started meditating and could actually observe the inside of my own skull, these numbers stopped being “concerning research” and started becoming a mirror. I saw how often I bailed on what I was doing. How fragmented I felt. How a day could evaporate in front of me like rain on asphalt. And I knew—if I didn’t get control of this, my life was going to blur into one long, grey smear of half-finished tasks and “how is it 10pm already?”
So I built a practice I called Monotasking. No fancy apps, no ritualistic nonsense. I’d pick the one thing I needed to do, set a timer, and give myself exactly two options for the duration of that block:
Do the task. Or do nothing.
The first attempts were humbling. Twenty minutes felt like trying to hold my breath underwater. My attention was flabby, weak, atrophied. But gradually—like a muscle responding to tension—I could stretch the blocks to 30 minutes. Then 45. Then an hour. Eventually, I hit three-hour stretches every morning, uninterrupted, unharmed, unscattered.
This single discipline became the engine of almost everything remarkable I’ve made:
- my best writing,
- my most profitable businesses,
- the fitness and health habits that actually stuck,
- even the reading pace that had me moving through close to a hundred books a year.
And if you’ve been following this article closely, then you’re practicing a form of Monotasking without even realizing it. For many people, this might be the longest they’ve held a single focus in years. (And no—sitting in a dark theater passively gaping at a Marvel movie does not count.)
Every time I fall out of this practice, my life unravels with frightening speed. My mind gets sloppy. My consciousness feels like it’s fraying at the edges, hungry for cheap dopamine scraps. Monotasking is the bedrock. The operating system. The foundation everything else stands on.
Enter: Dharma Sprints.
Over the last year, I’ve been devouring the work of Erick Godsey—a writer, myth-maker, and creative wizard who leads the Mentally Fit program and the Dharma Artist Collective on Skool. Calling him “a modern philosopher” feels too sterile; the man’s a mythopoetic storm with a WiFi connection.
It turns out Erick and I grew up on the same diet of behavioral psychology, habit design, and identity-based change. But he brought something I hadn’t yet integrated: myth. Meaning. Dharma.
The orientation of discipline toward the soul’s calling rather than mere productivity.
His version of Monotasking?
Dharma Sprints.
It’s almost the same skeleton I’ve always used—just infused with mythic purpose and two core upgrades:
- Decide on the next “right action.”
- Choose the duration of the sprint.
- Define the constraints.
- When the timer runs, you either do the task or you meditate.
- When you finish, you write an honest review of how it went.
Same discipline, upgraded soul. You can check out his OG podcast on sprints HERE.
Dharma Sprints are the building blocks of the whole damn game. They’re how we program life itself — not in the corporate-productivity sense, but in the “I’m actually awake and steering the ship” sense. Yes, they’re phenomenal for deep work. Yes, they slot perfectly into a calendar like precision-cut Tetris pieces. But at their core, Dharma Sprints aren’t about work at all.
They’re about deliberate presence.
A Sprint is simply you choosing to be fully here with whatever you’re doing — whether that’s writing your magnum opus, cleaning the bathroom, lifting iron, or sitting on the floor playing LEGO with a kid who needs your attention more than your notifications do.
Everything in this course is designed to be practiced through Sprints. They’re the scaffolding, the structure, the ritualized time containers that turn intention into life. And they can be anything.
Here are some of mine:
Training Sprint
Duration: 60 minutes of resistance training, with 30-minute commutes on either side.
Constraints:
- Phone only for Spotify.
- Track workouts manually in a notebook.
- Conversations allowed between exercises, not between sets — and max 5 minutes.
- Audiobook during the commute only.
Building an Online Course Sprint
Duration: Two 90-minute blocks of writing/filming, with 30-minute movement-and-hydration breaks between.
Constraints:
- Only tabs open are for direct research related to the content.
- Phone off, in another room.
Reading Sprint
Duration: 70 minutes reading, followed by 20 minutes of written or video reflection posted somewhere online.
Constraints:
- Only the book and notebook in the room.
- Background music without lyrics allowed.
- Log a 5-minute review in your Notion habit tracker.
Connecting-with-People-I-Love Sprint
Duration: Four hours of being unmistakably, unmistakably present with the humans in front of you.
Constraints:
- Phone on Do Not Disturb.
- Only used to take photos or look up something necessary for the conversation.
Instagram Sprint
Duration: 60 minutes of creator-mode social media stewardship.
Constraints: Follow this exact sequence —
- 15 min: Post content or stories
- 10 min: Reply to comments
- 10 min: Engage with relevant followers’ content
- 25 min: Answer DM’s/book calls
(If unfinished, run an extra 20-minute Sprint later)
Absolutely no: Reels. Discover Page. For You Page. Dopamine roulette of any kind.
Write a review after the Sprint and track who needs follow-up.
House Cleaning Sprint
Duration: 2 hours focusing on specific zones (kitchen, bathrooms, bedroom).
Constraints:
- Spotify, Audible, or pre-selected YouTube only.
- Choose what you're listening to before starting or between completed rooms.
- Phone notifications off so the thing doesn’t buzz you out of your body.
Laundry can be bundled in.
Anything can be a Sprint. The first stage of this practice is simply reforging your capacity for sustained attention — rebuilding the muscle that our digital environment has quietly eaten alive.
But something else happens as your focus strengthens.
A new kind of sensitivity emerges.
You start to notice the faint sense of what you ought to be doing during a Sprint.
The truth becomes louder. Harder to ignore. Like a compass that finally stops spinning.
And when your attention gets strong enough, that little nudge — that inner pull toward what is actually yours to do — starts pointing toward places that will make you uncomfortable in all the right ways.
Because now… you can no longer pretend you didn’t hear it.
Data + Iteration
One of the real aims here—the thing beneath all the tactics and timers—is to flood your life with presence. To live deliberately. To actually participate in your own damn experience instead of getting yanked around by impulses, triggers, and the psychic static of modern life.
This isn’t about going through the motions more efficiently. It’s about tasting your days. Checking the ripeness of your efforts. Iterating like your life is an evolving craft rather than a blurry sequence of reactions.
That’s why the final step of every Dharma Sprint is the review.
Don’t skip it. Seriously. It’s the hinge the whole practice swings on.
The review turns your Sprint into a feedback loop. It’s how you build a “practice within the practice.” Maybe you broke your flow because you got thirsty and wandered off for water. Great—next time you start with a full glass beside you. Maybe your phone burned a hole in your pocket until you cracked and checked it. Fine—next time you exile the thing to another room, powered down, buried in a drawer. (I’ve locked my phone in a timed safe more than once. Zero shame.)
The point is simple:
Find your weak spots.
Turn them into experiments.
Use the next Sprint to test your hypothesis.
Over time, you start building your own little operating system—your rituals, your environment, your triggers, the things that make your brain slip into deep work like it’s second nature. Maybe you finish a task early and then mill around like a confused Victorian ghost for twenty minutes. Perfect—next time you have a secondary task ready, or you end the Sprint early, reflect, and queue up the next one with calm precision.
Sprint by Sprint, you discover your Achilles’ heels.
And, more importantly, you discover yourself.
That 5–10 minute reflection—“Did I actually do the thing?”—becomes a quiet ritual of truth-telling. A microdose of accountability. Slow, steady training in that rare muscle: the willingness to see what’s actually happening, not what you wish were happening.
That’s where the real growth hides.
In the honest review.
In the capacity for truth.
The core philosophy behind how we teach clients to build their coaching business is the same philosophy Matthew and I use to do Dharma Sprints, and to run our entire lives:
Take Action.
Take Data.
Make Iterations.
Run the next experiment.
Repeat until God calls you home.
It’s simple, but only if you’re willing to stop lying to yourself.
Your capacity for truth is what determines whether the data you collect is even real. And just like attention, truth-telling is a trainable muscle. You can condition it. Strengthen it. Build a nervous system that doesn’t flinch when reality walks in the door without knocking.
One of the most powerful ways we train this is through a journaling process we built together.
Matthew created a beautifully simple framework that maps the five pillars of human potential:
Physical, Mental, Emotional/Relational, Spiritual, and Financial.
Every day, we take five honest minutes to assess exactly where we stand in each pillar—no dramatizing, no self-flagellation, no spiritual bypassing. Just truth. Then we write an emergent iteration—one small, testable action to run as the next experiment.
This reflective loop turns your life into a living laboratory.
Constant growth becomes inevitable if you’re willing to be honest and actually keep your word to yourself.
Alongside the journal, we use a habit tracker where we track the highest-leverage habits across the pillars, including:
- Pillar Journaling (the anchor)
- Daily Dharma Sprint
- Physical training/movement
- Meditation
It’s not complicated. It’s not mystical.
It’s discipline braided with truth.
Attention braided with action.
And over time, this practice stops feeling like “self-improvement” and starts feeling like something deeper—like remembering who you promised to become.
I created a duplicatable template of the Pillar Journal/Tracker for Sunday Service readers which you can find HERE.
(There's a "Loop Dump" tool that I'll teach you how to use later in the newsletter)
Commit to it for 40 days, then email me and let me know how much your life changed.
Your 168 Hours
The next piece of the puzzle is the 168-Hour Audit, and it hits people like a cold wave to the face. Everyone on this planet gets the same weekly allotment—168 hours, no more, no less.
And despite what your inner martyr whispers at midnight, you don’t unlock secret bonus hours by grinding harder or shaving sleep down to monk-level deprivation. You should be sleeping 7–9 hours a night unless your goal is to live like a frenetic cortisol zombie.
During the workshop, Matthew asked the room how many people considered themselves “busy,” and every hand shot up in perfect, self-important unison. Then he asked who believed they were busier than Elon Musk or Alex Hormozi. Every hand evaporated. That’s the point: people aren’t short on time—they’re hemorrhaging it.
When you break down your week, you start with the foundations:
- Sleep — the nightly restoration your nervous system cannot negotiate with.
- Work — the hours you sell, the responsibilities you shoulder.
- Commute — car, bus, or train rides,
- Health — training, movement, cooking, recovery, and caring for the thing carrying your soul.
- Chores — the domestic maintenance that keeps entropy from eating your life.
- Relationships — partners, friends, family, the humans who tether you to love.
- Recreation — the joy and play that remind you you’re not just a machine.
- “Fuck Around Time” — the unconscious drift: scrolling, numbing, digital quicksand.
Once you actually map your week with ruthless honesty, you realize you’re not a time-poor tragic hero. You’re just unconscious. You have far more free hours than your inner martyr would like you to believe—and far more opportunity to build something meaningful if you stop lying about how “busy” you are.
If you really want to go above and beyond, and wake up to exactly where your time is going… then you take on the 1% audit.
Set a timer every single hour for seven straight days, and write down precisely what you did during each hour. No rounding. No “I think I was doing…” No aesthetic journaling. Just raw, unfiltered truth.
It’s brutal. It’s confrontational. Less than 1% of people will ever do it.
But those who do go through a kind of mild ego-death—because once you see where your hours bleed out, once you confront the micro-decisions that are stealing your life, you can’t go back to sleep.
You finally understand, without excuses, that you have more than enough time to build a business, deepen your relationships, and create the life you want—if you’re willing to stop pretending and start paying attention.
Bricks
Your calendar isn’t a scheduling tool. It’s a drafting table for your future self. Every block you place is a brushstroke on the canvas of the life you’re building. When you time-block, you’re not just saying when you’ll do something—you’re designing the conditions under which your next reality will be born.
Without a calendar, most people drift through their days asking, “What should I do now?” That question is slow poison. Decision fatigue. Cognitive drag. The soft tyranny of always choosing and never committing. A calendar removes that burden. You wake up already knowing. You’ve made the decision in advance. All that’s left is execution.
But there are two brutal, universal laws you must bow to when designing your time:
- Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time you give it. Give yourself four hours to write a paragraph and you’ll find a way to suffer through all four. Give yourself 40 minutes, and suddenly you’re a sniper—clean, precise, done.
- The Planning Fallacy: Humans chronically underestimate how long things actually take. Not because we’re foolish, but because we’re optimistic and slightly delusional. Your calendar has to compensate for this—like a seasoned climber spotting the overzealous rookie.
This is why the weekly iteration—planned vs. actual—is the real magic. You compare the fantasy you scheduled with the life you lived. No shame, no dramatics, just data. Then you tune. Adjust. Add buffers. Remove fluff. Strengthen the structure. Week by week, your calendar becomes less of a guessing game and more of an engineered system.
And this is where Dharma Sprints come in.
Dharma Sprints are the bricks you use to build the cathedral of your future. Time-blocking is the blueprint; Sprints are the masonry. Each Sprint is a unit of presence, a block of intention, a piece of handcrafted time you set in place. Stack enough of them, consistently and deliberately, and you’re no longer “trying to be productive”—you’re constructing something sacred with your hours.
After a few months of this, something stunning happens: Your calendar becomes reliable. Your time becomes obedient. Your life becomes architectural.
The future stops being a vague aspiration and starts becoming an inevitability—because you didn’t just wish for it. You built it, brick by brick, Sprint by Sprint.
Here's a screenshot of my next Week:
To some, it might look like an overwhelming wall of Tetris bricks, but to my nervous system, it feels like freedom and flow.
Brain Waves
Your brain spends all day shifting through different electrical frequencies—brainwave states that shape your emotions, your attention, and the quality of your consciousness. Most people think they’re “just stressed” or “just distracted,” but what they’re actually experiencing is a shift in dominant brainwave mode. When you understand these states, the chaos of your day suddenly has a map.
High Beta is the survival frequency. It’s the red-alert state—anxiety, dysregulation, shallow breathing, the sympathetic nervous system revving like a cornered animal. This is what hits when you open your laptop to 47 notifications, sit in traffic already running late, or scroll through Instagram first thing in the morning and compare yourself to 20 people in under 90 seconds. In High Beta, the prefrontal cortex essentially goes offline; you can’t think, create, or plan. You can only react.
Then there’s Mid Beta, the classic to-do-list hamster wheel. You feel “busy,” but your attention is fractured into a dozen tiny pieces. This is the multitasking state—half-writing an email while half-checking your phone while half-remembering you’re supposed to buy groceries. You jump tasks constantly, but never sink into real work. It feels productive, but it’s actually mild cognitive fragmentation dressed in effort.
Below that is Low Beta, the zone of calm, grounded focus. This is where you’re fully present with one task, not stressed, not rushed—just anchored. You’re studying, writing, strategizing, or working with steady attention. This is the brainwave of learning, creative problem-solving, and honest thinking.
And then there’s Alpha—the holy grail of performance. Alpha is flow, presence, spatial awareness, creativity, and ease. It’s what you feel after meditation or breathwork, on a quiet walk without your phone, during a deep conversation, or in the warm glow of sustained creative focus. Athletes train for it. Monks cultivate it. Children live in it. High performers spend more time in Low Beta and Alpha not because they’re magically gifted but because their nervous systems are regulated enough to stay there.
This is where time-blocking and Dharma Sprints become neuroscience in action.
Time-blocking removes uncertainty, which the brain interprets as a threat. When you know exactly what you’re doing and when you’re doing it, your nervous system exhales.
Instead of hovering in anxious or scattered Beta states, you drop into sequential attention—and sequential attention is the on-ramp into Alpha.
Time-blocking also closes open loops, which massively reduces cortisol. Instead of constantly asking, “What do I do next?” you follow the plan you designed in a regulated state. Decision fatigue evaporates. Your prefrontal cortex comes online. Your brain finally has the conditions required for focus, creativity, and flow.
Dharma Sprints amplify this effect even further. A Sprint gives you a clear intention, a defined container, hard constraints, and a built-in ending. This structure signals safety to the nervous system.
There’s no multitasking, no uncertainty, no negotiation. It’s “I do this, here, now.”
Over time, this rhythmic patterning rewires your baseline: cortisol lowers, attention steadies, presence deepens, and Alpha becomes more accessible—not as a spiritual experience, but as a biological consequence of regulated behavior.
High performers don’t live in Alpha because they’re special.
They live there because they’ve designed their lives to keep them out of survival mode.
Time-blocking and Dharma Sprints aren’t productivity hacks—they’re nervous system frameworks.
The Hydra of Open Loops
Let's be real: The to-do list is never done.
One of the quiet killers of modern attention is what psychologists call open loops—the unfinished tasks, unresolved conversations, vague obligations, future worries, and mental Post-It notes that hover on the edge of your awareness like static.
Our ancestral nervous system was designed to carry somewhere between 7 and 12 loops at a time—enough for hunting, gathering, shelter, fire, family, and maybe the occasional tribal rivalry.
Modern life casually hands you 300 to 500.
Every bill you haven’t paid, every unread email, every message you “need to get back to,” every idea, every micro-worry, every half-finished project, every dentist appointment you haven’t booked, every nagging reminder that pops into your head while you’re trying to sleep—each one is a tiny drain on cognitive bandwidth.
You don’t consciously feel them all… but your nervous system does.
Open loops pull at the edges of your awareness like tiny gravity wells, constantly siphoning energy.
The brain only relaxes when a loop is dealt with in one of two ways:
(1) It’s stored in a trusted external system.
(2) It has a designated time when it will be handled.
This is the Zeigarnik Effect—our brains hold onto unfinished tasks with a vice grip until they either get resolved or get scheduled. The loop doesn’t close until the mind believes, “This will be taken care of at a specific time.”
Once the brain trusts that, the loop releases. Mental tension drops. Focus returns. Anxiety recedes.
This is why we use a centralized Loop Dump system: one place where every open loop gets captured, categorized, prioritized, and—most importantly—time-blocked. When you empty your mind onto the page, you’re not just organizing tasks; you’re freeing up massive amounts of psychic RAM.
In the Notion template included in this newsletter, there’s a dedicated section for this: a place to pour out every unfinished loop cluttering your internal bandwidth.
The practice is simple and transformative: once a week, run a Dharma Sprint specifically for dumping every open loop you can think of. Get them out of your head and into the system. Then, choose the most important ones and assign them time blocks in the coming week—each one turned into its own Sprint.
This single ritual unlocks clarity most people haven’t felt since childhood. You stop feeling haunted by the invisible weight of everything you haven’t done. You stop carrying your entire life in your head as you close all the open tabs slowing down the browser.
Your mind becomes light, clean, spacious—a consciousness finally free to think, create, feel, and act with deliberate presence.
Close your loops, and you reclaim a kind of mental sovereignty that modern life quietly erodes. It’s one of the highest-leverage practices you’ll ever build.
Your Invitation
This entire breakdown comes from the workshop Matthew and I taught on week two for our QX FREE Coaches Community—a three-week container where we’re teaching coaches how to build real businesses that generate $12–25k per month without frying their nervous systems or sacrificing their soul at the altar of hustle culture. And I’ll say this plainly: everything you just read is the master key.
The metaskill. The structure beneath every other tactic, strategy, or offer you’ll ever build.
Because without the ability to steward your attention, close your open loops, regulate your brainwaves, and design your time like a craftsman shaping his future, no plan survives contact with reality. But with these tools—Dharma Sprints, time-blocking, loop dumps, deep work capacity—you don’t just “stay consistent.”
You become the kind of person who actually does what they say they’re going to do. The kind who executes without burnout. The kind who builds a business, a body of work, and a life that compounds. This isn’t a productivity system; it’s the operating system that makes everything else possible.
And because we’re gluttons for generosity—and maybe a little unhinged—in classic QX fashion, we’re running one final week of this program for free. This is the victory lap, the final torchlight before we close the gates, and we’re inviting anyone who wants to run with us to jump into the WhatsApp group and come hang out with the crew:
👉 https://chat.whatsapp.com/Bihm46iJCBQ4eKiHqB2XAP
This last week, we’re pulling back the curtain on how coaches can scale to serious monthly recurring revenue using Skool communities—the same system that let us hit top 5% on the platform within our first four months.
We’re teaching the community-building strategy, the ad angles, the retention architecture, and the exact levers we pulled to make QX explode.
And because we don’t know how to do anything halfway, we’re also giving away $61,000 worth of prizes on the final live call. Retreat tickets. High-end content gear. Tools. Toys. Wild stuff. Because we’re extra like that—and because we actually want to see people win.
But there’s one rule:
You must be there live.
Saturday, November 29th, at 9 am PST.
This is the kind of call people will pretend they “meant to show up for” after they hear the stories.
If you want in, jump into the WhatsApp group or message us inside the QX Free Community here:
👉 https://www.skool.com/qx-coaching-free-9909
See you there. And start fucking Dharma Sprinting like your life depends on it... because it does.
