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Most productivity advice tells you to work harder, manage your time better, or develop more discipline. But what if the real problem isn’t your work ethic—it’s your energy? Former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante reveals a counterintuitive approach to productivity that changed how intelligence operatives accomplish extraordinary missions in compressed timeframes.
In a conversation on the Everyday Spy channel, Bustamante explained that the CIA doesn’t teach hyperefficiency. Instead, they teach something far more powerful: the balance between hyperfocus and hyperawareness. This isn’t about doing more—it’s about understanding the architecture of your energy and using it strategically.
Watch the full conversation with Andrew Bustamante on Everyday Spy
The Two States That Control Your Energy According To Andrew Bustamante
Bustamante describes two extremes on a spectrum. On one end, you have hyperawareness—a state where you’re intensely cognizant of everything happening around you. On the other end sits hyperfocus—where you’re so absorbed in what you’re doing that the outside world essentially disappears.
These aren’t just productivity concepts. They’re fundamentally different modes of human consciousness, and each affects your energy in opposite ways.
Think about the last time you got lost in a book you loved, spent hours on a project that fascinated you, or had an uninterrupted conversation with someone who captivates you. When you finished, you probably felt energized rather than drained. That’s hyperfocus at work.
Now think about sitting in a meeting where you’re pretending to pay attention, hoping nobody notices you’re mentally checked out. Or working at a job where you’re constantly aware of how others perceive you, watching the clock, wondering when you can leave. That’s hyperawareness draining your reserves.
How Hyperfocus Builds Energy
Bustamante explains that activities requiring hyperfocus actually build up your energy reserves. When people engage in activities they love—reading for hours, playing music, cooking—they’re hyperfocused, and when they’re done, they have energy to last days.
This explains why you can binge-watch four hours of your favorite show and then feel restless, wanting to go out or tackle a project. The hyperfocus refilled your tank. The problem isn’t that you watched TV—the problem is what you do with that recharged energy afterward.
Most people waste their replenished energy on survival mode rather than building something meaningful. They use the energy they saved from Netflix to merely endure another miserable workday. As Bustamante puts it directly: there’s no future for the person who does that.
Why Hyperawareness Drains You
Hyperawareness is the state of constant vigilance about your surroundings, what others think, how you’re being perceived. In intelligence work, this state is necessary when operating in hostile territory. But it’s exhausting by design.
That worry about what’s happening around you all the time—what’s that person doing, is the camera catching me, what time is it—becomes an incredibly exhausting experience.
Yet this is exactly how millions of people spend their workdays. They’re hyperaware because they’re self-conscious at work, worried about perception, counting down the hours. This isn’t productive hyperawareness—it’s energy hemorrhaging.
The CIA uses hyperawareness strategically during missions. They balance it with periods of hyperfocus during preparation. By bouncing between these states intentionally, operatives maximize their energy reserves and focus, ensuring they have full capacity when it matters most.
The Fatal Mistake Most People Make
Here’s where most people go wrong: they experience hyperfocus naturally when relaxing but never direct the resulting energy toward hyperawareness activities that serve them.
Bustamante offers a simple example. After work, you come home, lock the door, pour a drink, and watch several hours of television. Your brain enters hyperfocus. You’re building energy. You finish watching and feel surprisingly energized—maybe you even get up, pace around, wonder if anyone wants to do something.
That’s your signal. You just refueled. But instead of directing that energy toward something challenging and worthwhile—starting the business you’ve talked about, writing that book, learning a skill, building a meaningful project—you either waste it or use it just to survive the next day at a job you hate.
The hyperawareness of going to the gym when you don’t like it, of applying for new jobs, of building something difficult—these activities drain energy precisely because they require intense awareness and discomfort. But that’s the point. You’re supposed to spend the energy you built during hyperfocus on hyperawareness activities that move your life forward.
How to Apply This System
Start by recognizing that both states are necessary. The goal isn’t to be in hyperfocus all the time or hyperaware constantly. It’s to oscillate between them with intention.
When you engage in hyperfocused activities—watching movies, reading, spending time with people you love, pursuing hobbies—you’re not being lazy. You’re refueling. The question is: what are you refueling for?
If your answer is “to get through another day at a job I tolerate,” you’re using premium fuel for survival. If your answer is “to build something that matters to me,” you’re on the right path.
Choose hyperawareness activities that serve your long-term interests. Going to the gym when you hate it makes you hyperaware of your physical limitations—that’s draining. But it’s supposed to be. You’re investing energy, not wasting it. Starting a business, having difficult conversations, learning complex skills—these all require hyperawareness and will deplete you. Then you refocus, recharge, and repeat.
Bustamante credits this system for the remarkable productivity during his Shadow Cell operation, which accomplished an extraordinary amount of work in approximately two years. By bouncing between hyperawareness in hostile countries and hyperfocus during preparation, they maximized energy reserves, focus, and success so that when they entered the country to do hard work, they had the most results.
The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything
This framework eliminates guilt around rest and reframes what productivity actually means. You’re not lazy for spending Saturday afternoon absorbed in a hobby. You’re generating fuel. The question is whether you’re burning that fuel on survival or construction.
The type of person who succeeds isn’t smarter, more handsome, dedicated, or blessed. They’re not from money. The successful person is always trying to build something they care about—it may take ten years or ten weeks, but they’re always building. The person who’s never trying to build anything is destined to fail repeatedly.
This is the dividing line Bustamante observed throughout his CIA career, traveling the world and meeting people from every background. Success isn’t about intelligence, resources, or advantages. It’s about using energy to construct rather than merely exist.
Most people are focused on surviving, skating by, avoiding making waves. That’s not a path to anywhere meaningful. When you understand that hyperfocus replenishes you and hyperawareness depletes you, the solution becomes obvious: schedule both intentionally.
Practical Implementation
Watch Netflix—genuinely enjoy it, enter hyperfocus, and build your energy. Then spend that energy at the gym. Go back home, hyperfocus on cooking a meal you love, and rebuild your reserves. Then use that energy to write three pages of your book. Alternate. Refuel and spend. Build and rest.
The rhythm matters more than the ratio. Some days you’ll need more hyperfocus to recover. Other days you’ll have surplus energy for extended hyperawareness work. Pay attention to your capacity and adjust accordingly.
What you cannot do—what guarantees failure—is use the energy you build during rest merely to endure circumstances that don’t serve you. That’s the definition of going nowhere.
People spend decades this way. They relax enough to survive another week of work they tolerate, at a job that doesn’t challenge them, in a life they’re not building. The energy management is there—they’re naturally entering hyperfocus during downtime. They’re just not spending what they generate on anything that compounds.
The CIA’s Real Lesson
The CIA didn’t teach Bustamante to be hyperefficient because hyperefficiency focuses on process over outcome. Instead, they taught him to understand energy as a strategic resource with specific properties. Hyperfocus generates it. Hyperawareness consumes it. Success comes from consciously alternating between both states in service of what you’re building.
This isn’t about cramming more into your day or optimizing every hour. It’s about recognizing that your energy has architecture, and that architecture determines what’s possible in your life. Once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. The person scrolling on their phone for hours isn’t recharging—they’re in diffuse awareness, neither hyperfocused nor meaningfully hyperaware. They’re in neutral, generating nothing and spending nothing.
The person who loses themselves in a craft, emerges energized, then tackles something difficult and draining before returning to restoration—that’s the rhythm of people who accomplish things that seem impossible to everyone else.
Your Next Move
Pay attention this week to when you enter genuine hyperfocus. Notice what activities pull you in completely—where time disappears and you emerge feeling alive rather than depleted. Those are your recharge stations.
Then identify what you’ve been avoiding because it’s uncomfortable, draining, or makes you hyperaware of your limitations. That’s probably where you need to spend your energy. Not to survive. To build.
The CIA’s lesson isn’t about becoming superhuman. It’s about understanding the mechanics of your own energy system and using it like someone who knows what they’re doing instead of someone just hoping to make it through the week.
You already have the capacity. You already enter hyperfocus naturally. The only question is what you’re saving up for.