Good morning and welcome to the 5 a.m. Miracle, episode number 613, the nine best books on focus, blocking distractions, and achieving deep work.

I am Jeff Sanders, and you have reached the podcast that is dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast. I am a keynote speaker

and corporate trainer, and to learn more about that, head over to jeffsanders.com slash speaking.

Now, the episode this week, I'll share my nine favorite books to help you focus like never before.

Let's dig right in.

Music focus like never before. Let's dig right in. So I was on a couple of long flights a few weeks ago while heading to Vancouver, Canada,

for a speaking gig slash vacation with my wife Tessa.

The fun part for this trip was that Tessa and I spoke together for the first time on stage

internationally, and it was a lot of fun with that one, and then we tagged along a nice little

vacation in the mountains just north of Vancouver. Now, the fun part here was that

I had planned my long-haul flights for very specific reasons. I wanted to read and sleep. But instead,

I watched movies, I ate snacks, and I just stared the clock until we landed. In other words, I had planned to focus, but instead I found myself just sucked into distractions

and I guess boredom, I just didn't want to do anything.

I wasn't motivated to do the work I'd planned to do even if that work was just to sleep.

What I realized was that focus itself requires very special

circumstances, just the right environments and a willingness to engage in the work at hand, whatever

that work happens to be. And not every scenario is equally capable of producing deep work or the right kind of focus.

And it's up to us to craft a very customized experience to enable more deep focus than what we are initially offered at first glance.

And so my intention of the episode this week is to share, yes, some amazing books on

focus and some of my favorite books overall on productivity. But more importantly, to really

ask and answer the question, what does it mean for you to do your best work? If focus is

required, if deep work is your goal, what does it take to truly achieve

...