Beer Mode and Coffee Mode - David Perell

In beer mode, you find inspiration. And in coffee mode, you harvest that inspiration. If you only spend time in coffee mode, you’ll shut yourself off to transformative ideas because the fruits of genius are sown with the seeds of beer mode wanderings.

Meanwhile, beer mode is filled with surprises that are impossible to predict. On most days, you feel like you wasted time because you don’t make a breakthrough discovery. But once in a while, beer mode leads to an intellectual breakthrough that you would’ve never discovered in coffee mode. In turn, they improve how you allocate your coffee mode tim... See more

The problem with traditional productivity advice is that it doesn’t take beer mode seriously. Standard tropes like turn off the Internet, tune out distractions, and turn towards your goals are all examples of coffee mode thinking. The productivity world is oriented around coffee mode because it’s easy to define, easy to measure, and therefore, easi... See more