During the late 2000s, around when I started this blog, there was a trend among young male entrepreneurs called “Monk Mode.”

Everyone had a different idea of what that term meant, but generally it referred to taking a definite period of time – a week to three months or more – to focus with unusual intensity on certain important and fruitful pursuits, while abstaining from certain distracting or self-defeating activities.

Somewhat like a monk, you would voluntarily adopt a standard of heightened discipline, following a few non-negotiable rules, in order to bring certain important things to the fore of your life. A person might do this in order to launch a website, finish a manuscript, or return to the level of fitness they enjoyed in college.  

The last time I heard this phrase was around 2009, and at the time it seemed indistinguishable from “working hard until I finish this current project,” which is what I was always trying to do anyway.

The Ancient Art of Exponential Progress

Recently I heard the term Monk Mode again, and it had a ring to it that it didn’t before. In intervening years I’d been on five silent retreats, semi-monastic environments in which you sequester yourself from social and electronic diversions, and live by certain rules of conduct called precepts, in order to create the best possible conditions for advancing your meditation practice in a relatively short time.

It really works. In seven or ten days you can permanently level up your contemplative skills, perhaps as much as you would in several years of more casual daily practice, because of this short and intense emphasis on one thing.

This kind of regimen has to be short though. As potent as a silent retreat is, a week or more away from the world is hard to arrange, and keeping up that standard for months or years isn’t practical. Too many things have to be sacrificed for too long.

The principle behind the retreat format is very powerful though: double down on certain important activities, abstain from behaviors that undermine these efforts, and limit this intensified regimen to a short enough period that you can actually complete it, rather than quit in a huff or drift away from it gradually.  

Monk Mode, as I conceive of it, is a way of leveraging this principle to a less intense degree. You still focus on a certain kind of self-development work for a short period (perhaps writing, meditating, practicing piano, or lifting barbells), you still commit to a list of no-no’s during that time (perhaps no alcohol, no social media, or no sugar), but aside from that you live life normally.

Essentially you’re committing to a new lifestyle standard in certain respects, but for a short enough time that you can sustain the effort to the end.

You might enter Monk Mode for a number of reasons:

• To finish a particular project
• To get past a plateau, or out of a rut
• To go deeper into an activity than you have before
• To get back into something you’ve been neglecting
• To end a period of complacency

For example, say you want to get back to your pre-pandemic level of fitness. The conventional way to go about this is the resolution approach. You slam your fist on the table, perhaps literally, and declare, “Enough is enough! Starting today I’m going to work out again and stop eating crap!” Essentially, you’re making a lifelong commitment to live with greater discipline and sacrifice, with nothing behind it but the emotional surge you are feeling in this moment. You already know how this tends to go.

What if, instead, you could enter a 14-day Monk Mode, in which you visit the gym three times a week, abstain from foods with added sugar, and stretch dutifully every morning and evening. This commitment is finite and doable, and will undoubtedly put you on a much better trajectory by the end of it. Then you figure out a sensible next step, from the new and more confident place your stint in Monk Mode has brought you to.

If fourteen days is too much, make it seven. If abstaining from all added sugar is too much, just do it for the breakfast meal. Dial the standard and duration to settings you know you can complete.

Four Essential Ingredients

Theoretically, you can do anything with your Monk Mode period. Maybe you want to deep clean the house, complete an online cooking course you bought last year, or read a big chunk of Joan Didion’s work. Maybe you want to improve your bench press after a lengthy plateau, get away from TikTok and Reddit, or write a song for the first time in a decade.

(There are definitely parallels here to the Depth Year, if you’re familiar with the concept, only with a closer and more achievable horizon.)

Whatever the goal, I believe a good Monk Mode plan should always involve:

• A commitment to do certain amounts of certain kinds of work
• A commitment to abstain from certain distractions or vices
• Definite rules for both of these things
• A definite start and stop date

Whatever your particular commitments are, they should feel challenging but absolutely doable for the duration you’ve chosen. Ambitious but not audacious.

They also need to be precise. Not “Start working out again,” but rather, “Do the Stronglifts program three times a week for two weeks.”

That’s my way of thinking about it, anyway. If you read online accounts of Monk Mode, they’re all different. Many of them recommend long durations (one to three months) and involve isolating yourself socially somewhat, à la Thoreau. I can see how that might help you enter a nose-to-grindstone mentality, but it would also make this a lot less accessible for most people. (As I said, Monk Mode fans have historically been mostly young, entrepreneur-scene dudes.)

It does make sense to select solitary activities, however. Monk Mode is a commitment to facing your own hesitation and complacency, often in the form of taking up physical tools in a dedicated workspace – just you and the barbell, the canvas, or the works of George Orwell.

My 10-day Monk Mode Experiment

I’m going to do a short Monk Mode as my next Raptitude experiment.

My main goals are to reinvigorate my meditation practice as I prepare for a proper silent retreat in September, and to remind my body what it’s like to lift barbells and leave alcohol and refined carbs out of my diet.

As opposed to my usual health-focused campaigns, I’m not doing this with any sort of “from this day forward” type resolution, just a very doable 10-day stint of higher standards in these areas.

Each day, for the ten days, I’m going to:

• Meditate 50 minutes in the morning and have at least one other sitting of at least 10 minutes
• Avoid all grains, added sugar, cheese, and potatoes
• Abstain from alcohol and other substances

I’m also going to:

• Fast completely on two of the days
• Do strength training six of eight the non-fasting days and run on the other two

Those are the parameters of my Monk Mode this time. I expect this regimen to bring me, after ten days, to a place where I feel physically and mentally pretty good. It should also break the momentum of certain late summer laissez-faire consumption habits.

This experiment also happens to be a good opportunity to confront another long-held aversion, which is posting myself in video format. Instead of only doing the usual written updates on the experiment log, I’ll also post video updates on Raptitude’s new Instagram profile. You can follow me there if you want to track my progress or are otherwise curious.  

If you’d like to do your own Monk Mode project, feel free to share your plans in the comments here or on the experiment log page.

When you design your own regimen, just remember to make it modest and short enough that you know you’ll complete it. You can go for the gold next time – this time just make a finish line you can reach.

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Photos by Liz Sanchez-Vegas and Quinten de Graaf