← Mondays with Matt
Mondays with Matt
#13: From Distracted to Focused: Deep Work Strategies for Business Success
00:57:10
Conquer distractions, unlock focus, and discover the transformative power of deep work for business owners and entrepreneurs. Learn practical strategies to cultivate focus, eliminate distractions, and build effective routines for maximizing productivity and achieving sustainable success. This is a must-listen for anyone drowning in urgency, struggling to complete their to do lists and achieve their goals, and looking to unlock their full potential.
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- [00:02]
A
You're listening to the Build you'd Business podcast, powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear. I'm Matt Reynolds and I'm his brother, Chris Reynolds.
- [00:12]
B
Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom. You're listening to the Build you'd business podcast where we help move you from fear to freedom and business ownership, whether that is somebody who's just starting a business or is looking forward to starting a business or if you're even several years down the road. I am your co host Matt Reynolds, here with my brother Chris Reynolds. Welcome to the show, sir.
- [00:45]
A
Hello.
- [00:46]
B
We have about 40 years of business ownership between the two of us, a couple decades apiece. And we're walking you through really the roadmap of what we wish we had two decades ago to help take away a lot of that anxiety and move to freedom. So again, would always love. I don't say this on every podcast, but certainly happy to answer any questions. If you have questions about here's the thing that I'm dealing with in business, I'm nervous about it. I'm scared about it. If it requires a relatively short answer and you email it to me and Chris is probably the same, I will respond back personally to that. If it requires a longer answer and it's solid, we'll just do an episode about the thing.
- [01:21]
A
That's right. Absolutely.
- [01:23]
B
You know, the response may be like, hey, that's a great question. But I think the length of the answer would be enough that we could make up a 30, 40 minute show. So we're going to dive in today on one of our favorite topics, which is deep work. Last week. If you didn't listen to last week's episode, I think it'd be a great one to even just stop right now, go back and listen to last week's episode, which is about time as our most valuable resource. And the great bridge between last week's episode and this week's episode is that if time is our most valuable resource, if we consider the resources of time, energy and money, we all have 24 hours in a day. We have a finite amount of days to live, and we don't know what that is. Time is our most valuable resource. The best and most effective use of our time is spending as much of that time doing deep, quality work. And this is something that you and I, we absolutely have been students of this game for many years, even before we're going to talk some about. You know, Cal Newport wrote a book called Deep Work I don't know, probably 10 years ago now. Yeah, it's an excellent book. There are a lot of books about this and we've read most of them, but I think we discovered a lot of these things. One of the things I like about those books, there are times I read books and it's all new information and it's like you have to read it slow and you stop and you take notes. But for a lot of these deep work type books, it helps confirm what I've already found in my own life and understanding how to get into a deep focus mode. And so we've mentioned this before, one of our favorite quotes, a combination interview with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. And the question was, what is the singular most important factor in being successful in business? And of course, people define success differently, but both of them answered the ability to focus and get a tremendous amount of work done. And I think that is the thing, the exception that makes unsuccessful entrepreneurs into successful entrepreneurs. And honestly, maybe not even an entrepreneur, somebody who's just able to accomplish a lot in life, maybe you're never gonna be a business owner, maybe you work for somebody else. But the ability to get deep work done. We've homeschooled our kids through most of their life. My younger, her entire schooling was through homeschooling. And we used very difficult curriculum, classical based education, kind of Thomas Jefferson based stuff. And so it's hard. It was hard stuff. We weren't an unschooling type, like we were going to hammer the classics hard. My kids know Latin, all that sort of stuff. And when I taught my daughters how to really do deep work via pomodoros and things like that, like undistracted, deep how to get into that mode, they could not believe the amount of work they could accomplish just in schoolwork, even as third graders or fifth graders or whatever it was all the way through high school for them. So this works not just in business ownership, but really in anything. It's being able to leverage your time as wisely as possible is by leveraging deep work.
- [04:28]
A
Well, yeah, no, this is absolutely the case. And it is probably the most important first skill to acquire for all founders, because life is going to throw a ton of distractions at you and everyone is going to want a piece of your time. And there's just no way to make that happen and still get the critical things done that need to get done within the business. And so you have to learn how to, how to go into this deep work mode and get things done where you can Essentially block out everything else. A big portion of Deep Work is about how well you ignore distractions.
- [05:16]
B
That's right.
- [05:17]
A
And so we'll kind of get into the details of this. One of the things that I think is really important, everybody has devices of some kind on them at all points in time. It remains to be seen as to whether you know what the long term effect of any of this is, but I assume it's probably fine. I've been around people who have not learned that they need to keep their phone on basically do not disturb mode all the time. So maybe a very early step here is figure out what things are pulling your distraction away or pulling your attention away from whatever it is that you should be focused on and immediately silence all of those. That's the first place that we get with Deep Work, and there are a lot of them. But I think the first place that you want to focus is your phone. Your phone is going to be the thing that's dinging and it's buzzing and it's doing all those things.
- [06:06]
B
Sure.
- [06:06]
A
If you're the kind of person who has a phone in your pocket, in your purse, in your breast pocket or whatever, like wherever you keep it, and it is constantly buzzing, it is constantly dinging, it is constantly doing things, you are getting basically nothing done in your day. I know you think you are, yeah, sure. But you're not. And this is just a reality of all humans. But if we're going to try to tackle this problem, it sort of starts in this place. One of the things that you have to understand before you go into too much depth around Deep Work. And there's been a lot written about this, a lot that we're going to talk about today is going to be basically around three books. And I'll give you the titles of the three books when we get to the end of the podcast. But a lot of this is about understanding the way our brains work. This part is not all that complicated. If you happen to be in the computer world, it might apply, it might make a little more sense because computers actually behave the same way. And what this is, is you quite literally can only do one thing at a time. Now, I know that there are people listening to this that disagree with that. They'll go, no, no, no, I'm a multitasker. I'm the best multitasker. And what I would say is, not only are you not a multitasker, you have deceived yourself for probably a great many years about what you think you can do. Multitasking is Just distracted work. It is less good than not distracted work.
- [07:29]
B
The only caveat I'll give to this, because I'm sure some people are thinking this is. And we talked about this some on the podcast last week, if there is a job that you're doing that is totally mindless, if you're mowing the lawn, which you should pay somebody to do, you're doing housework, you're cooking a meal that you've cooked a million times before, and you can do it in your sleep, you can absolutely listen to a podcast or an audiobook or something like that. But really what you're doing is listening to an audiobook or podcast. You certainly can drive. And like, you can again. And it's because now I had these rules when I was 16. I remember mom and Dad, they wouldn't let me for my first six months of having my driver's license, they wouldn't let me listen to the radio, which is dating me, because nobody listens to radio anymore. But they said they didn't want me listening to the radio because they didn't want me fiddling around with the. The dials on the radio while I was driving, because driving was the focus. Once you've driven for 20, 25, 30 years, then you really. Driving is relatively mindless. It's not totally mindless, but it's pretty mindless. And so you could absolutely listen to audiobooks, podcast, things like that, because the other task is mindless. But if you think you can do two tasks that require any sort of brain work whatsoever, any sort of focus, you can't.
- [08:43]
A
You cannot.
- [08:44]
B
You cannot do it.
- [08:45]
A
Yeah. So what, what you really, what are you doing? I mean, what you're doing here, Bouncing.
- [08:48]
B
Back and forth, bouncing back and forth.
- [08:49]
A
And that and what that actually means, you know, again, to use the computer example, you are going to load a bunch of context into your brain, into active memory, and you are going to be thinking about that and sort of solving problems. And maybe you're writing, or maybe you're writing code, or maybe you are, you know, recording a podcast or, or whatever. In any of those circumstances, when you switch to another one, you have to unload all of that from memory, and you have to load the new context into mem. And I can prove it very easily. In the middle of this podcast, if my kid walks through the door and asks me a question or starts screaming or something, I cannot continue the podcast and also have a conversation with my kid. That's not gonna happen because I have to sort of unload this and then Wait, what did you say? Like, I was. I wasn't actually. Right. So I'm like, switching gears and figuring out, loading it up and figuring out what's going on.
- [09:37]
B
And not only that, like, so what we would probably do in that scenario is we would pause, right? Because we got a producer, he could go back and we could try to pick up where we left off. But because there is now a context switch, it's actually very difficult to go from thinking about a specific thing, changing your attention to another thing, and then coming back to the thing that you had that takes.
- [09:58]
A
That's right.
- [09:59]
B
Really a pretty significant amount of time. Now, I think there's a skill that can be worked on so that you can context switch quicker and quicker. But one of the things that I've had to talk to my family about numerous times, and they're much, much better at it since I've work from home now for 10 years plus, is that when I'm working and I'm in deep focus mode, I'm in doing Pomodoros or whatever, the thing is, I cannot be distracted. I say, look, if you decide it's time to make lunch or whatever, you know what I like, just make some lunch. You don't have to ask me what I want for lunch, because I know you think it's not a very big deal. But if I'm deep, deep in work, and you come in and you say, hey, we're thinking about making this or this. Which one would you rather have? I have to completely stop thinking about the thing I was working deeply on and now think, do I want a sandwich or do I, you know, like, what is the thing I want? And then it's actually very difficult to get back to at least the same level of focus that I had before I became distracted from the thing.
- [10:55]
A
That's right. That's exactly what it is. In fact, the harder the work, the larger the context that you need to have in your head, the longer it takes to get back to that mode. And there are pretty good examples of this. There have been fairly decent studies that think, you know, it's between 15 and 30 minutes. In some cases, it can be that long because you have to get back on the train of thought that you were in at the point in time that you were distracted. So there's the unloading of what's. Whatever's in your memory, and then the reloading of whatever's in your memory. And then I got to still find what. Now, what was my train of thought? Oh, yeah, I was thinking about this, I was thinking about you're rereading what you were writing or, you know, whatever it is that you're doing. And so the first bit of this is just sort of an understanding that there is no distraction too small to ignore. You need to ignore it all. You need to learn how to ignore stuff. And there are a million tricks to figure out how this is done. But it starts with an understanding that you cannot multitask. You need to come to the conclusion on your own. You need to believe this in your guts, that the way that you accomplish big things, big things in any domain, but certainly in business, when you're trying to move the ball forward on some big sort of complex thing, you have got to have deep, concentrated time to get into the flow of work and get those kind of things done.
- [12:19]
B
Yeah, absolutely. You and I know we've talked about this a million times before we even started doing the podcast, so we think very similar in this way. And so the phone, like you said, is the very first thing that I make sure is always on. My phone is on do not disturb 100% of the time. And again, there are ways to. If I want something to come through for my wife, I can make her an important contact. And then she knows not to. I'll usually text her ahead of time. Hey, I'm going into a pomodoro mode or deep work mode. She knows to only text if it's an emergency, and that's the only thing that's going to come through. And part of this, I think, comes from some level of anxiety as a founder, that if I'm not constantly watching everything that's going on on, you know, basecamp, project notifications and slack notifications and emails, and then, then maybe the whole world will blow up in my business. And the reality is that just never happens the one time that there is an emergency every 10 years, the amount of work that you'll save yourself by not being constantly distracted by those things when the sky really isn't falling, which again, is 99.99 plus percent of the time, is far more worth it than getting distracted all the time. And then that one time in 10 years, you actually are able to respond to something quickly. The reality is, and we use all these techniques all the time, we take relatively frequent breaks. If I'm in deep work, this is the one thing about a true hardcore Pomodoro. 25 minutes of work. If I'm in really deep work and I'm at 26 minutes, 30 minutes, I just keep going until I can feel my brain start to slow down. And so especially if it's deep context, it's high level order of thinking, I completely have those notifications turned off now because most of us now in today's day and age as entrepreneurs and founders and owners, we have to work on our computer. Then you also have to be extremely mindful and intentional about turning off the notifications on your computer as well.
- [14:17]
A
And what screens are up.
- [14:18]
B
Right, of course. Exactly right. So I don't get notifications from Slack and I don't have Slack up on the screen now. Our primary source of communication in our business is not Slack and it is for you. And so I do have notifications typically turned on for Basecamp, which is where most of our project management occurs. But when I go into deep work mode, I turn basecamp notifications off. It takes 10 seconds to turn it off, maybe less. And I do the deep work. And then when it comes time to take the break, I actually don't even have to turn the notifications back on. If I'm going to go back into more deep work. I can just take that little break, go to the bathroom, you know, fill up the coffee, check the notifications on Basecamp. Is everything going fine? And it always is and much more quickly get back into that same context. But it still requires a context shift that takes some time. I use that to unload and reload.
- [15:09]
A
Yeah. So I feel like one of the things that is super helpful for people is to think about testing that anxiety because it is, it's sort of an anxiety driven thing. As a business owner, founder, you care so much about the business that you do not want to see it fail. And so the reason you're staring at Slack and email and Basecamp and all the various things is because you have this belief that if you don't stare at it that you won't catch the critical thing in the moment that it happens. Right. That's what it is. So all you have to do is test this. Not that hard to do. What you do is you go through. I think Pomodoros are a good example and we'll maybe we'll just talk about this for just a second. A pomodoro, for those of you who are not aware, haven't heard us talk about it before, is a period of time. It's usually 25 minutes or 30 minutes where you set a timer. It's the reason it's called a pomodoro. Pomodoro is an, is a tomato. And the old tomato timers that they would, that they would turn, you know.
- [16:07]
B
Timer like your grandma had. We all have those on our phones now. So we don't actually use a kitchen timer.
- [16:12]
A
So you set a timer and there are rules. The rule is essentially that if you do anything at all, if you allow yourself to be distracted in any way, check email, go look at Slack, get up and pee.
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B
Right.
- [16:23]
A
Get a coffee. Like all of those things are disqualifying events. Pomodoro is over and you get a zero for it. No, no credit. Right. You have to have all of that off and you have to do that amount of time, 25 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever, focused on whatever the one thing is that you said you were going to do. That's it, that's what you're single task. And so what you can do is you just test your anxiety. So do one and then take a five minute break when it's done and go check what blew up.
- [16:51]
B
Right.
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A
And what you're going to find over and over and over and over and over is that everything on the planet can wait 25 to 30 minutes.
- [16:59]
B
That's right, everything.
- [17:00]
A
There is basically nothing that breaks in a business cannot still be fixed inside of that time frame.
- [17:08]
B
That's right.
- [17:09]
A
This is like the first belief that you need to adopt in order to be able to actually do this. Well, you need to believe that it is okay that you are still checking more frequently than 99.999% of humanity when you check things every 25 to 30 minutes. And so this is how you buy yourself this super deep period of time. You start with a really small amount of it. It's been a really long time for me. I know it's been a long time for you Matt as well. But when you're brand new at this, that 25 minutes is actually going to be pretty hard.
- [17:40]
B
Yeah, it feels long. Yeah.
- [17:42]
A
And you'll feel this draw to like I'm going to go open my email. Oh, I need to go look at Slack or I need to, you know, open social media or whatever. This is the first step. The first step is give yourself these little bits of time to do deep focus. I would probably start with a target of one maybe in the morning and one in the afternoon and then slowly start growing. How much you can do this. However, as a business owner, as a founder, it is completely unrealistic that you will be able to get a day full of Pomodoros in. That does not happen. So Matt, you've got a good one here. I feel like you do this really well. How do you think about the deep work time versus time that you know is going to be distracted because you know it's, it's busy and people be pinging you and you need to respond.
- [18:31]
B
I break up my day and this comes into and probably again something we'll do a full podcast on is my daily routine. I just have a daily routine so that I wake up early in the morning, I'm still groggy like most people are. I make my coffee and usually pop up zinn in some nicotine and some caffeine in me and I sit at the same chair and I do the same things. And so even though I wake up really early in the morning, again four in the morning or, or whatever, and not everybody's going to be able to do that, I just naturally do that. That is naturally undistracted work time because really the rest of the world is still sleeping. And so what I do is I start with often things that are not as deep thinking work in the first 45 minutes or an hour that I'm awake. I'm doing things that are often urgent and important. So I am responding to that initial like the emails that came in overnight. And again, I've got staff all over the world and in different time zones and whatnot, but things that don't require a lot of thought process from me that I can knock out quickly that would be hanging over my head otherwise. So I'd knock out the emails. I knock out the basecamp notifications that need to be responded to or the slack notifications. I do my online coaching and again, I've coached tens and tens of thousands of times of workouts and whatnot. And then that wakes me up enough in that first 45 minutes to an hour to then go into my deep work mode. And so now it's 5am it's still very early, especially the staff that are on the west coast. Nothing's really blowing up on the phone, emails aren't going off yet like crazy, anything like that. And then I get into that deep work mode and I just go into pomodoro zone and I can usually do, you know, three or four pomodoros back to back to back. And when I say that I do that 25 or 30 minutes of work, I still take the five minute break. And when I take the five minute break, I go to the bathroom, I fill up my coffee, I do a quick check of the emails and the texts come in that need to be responded to things. But I do it really Quick. And I usually, unless it's an absolute emergency, I don't respond to it until later and then go right back into the pomodoro and have a pretty quick context switch back into where I was. Then I get to the point in time, it's like seven in the morning. So now I've done two hours worth of work. I train with my wife, I go out, usually do the sauna and the cold plunge, take a shower, get dressed, I change the location that I'm where I work. So I come up, I'm filming this today from the library. It's a closed off room, it's very private, there's not people walking in and out of the library. And I go into more CEO type and creative type work while knowing that I'm going to have to probably take longer breaks between the pomodoros, between the deep work because at that point everything is up and moving in the business. And so I experienced this this morning. We're recording on a Monday, we don't typically record on Mondays and you know, it's actually Martin Luther King Day and so, so there's less work going on in general. But I got in over my head a little bit this morning and and I ended up having to push back our recording time because thing I was like, whoa, this thing is going on that I didn't expect. And this thing's going on that I didn't expect. Well, I should have expected it because that's normal for a Monday morning. And Monday mornings for me, I actually love Monday mornings because it helps me set the tone for the week for my staff. I make sure that they know the direction that they're going. And so I use those times when other people are sleeping that are naturally non distracted work. I still turn the notifications off on my phone, I still turn the notifications off on my computer. I go through the things that don't require super high order level of thinking in the first half hour, 45 minutes, whatever, I transition into higher order level of thinking. Then I have a little break. And for me it's training, it's working out, get some blood flow, the endorphins, the dopamine, all that sort of stuff. And then I'm transitioning from kind of urgent important work for me to non urgent important work for me. The things that a CEO can only do, the work on the board report or the quarterly report or setting vision or strategy for the quarter or for the year or whatever that thing is. And so that's how I do it. And Then I just know that there's this time period between 10am in the morning, 9am, maybe 9am in the morning until about 3pm in the afternoon, that things are just sort of more hectic. And so I will often even tell my staff, if it's a relatively busy day, I'll actually post on basecamp and I'll say, hey, I'm about to dive in and do some pomodoros. Which means they know that they're not going to hear back from me for a half hour or so.
- [23:07]
A
Yeah, I've done the same thing.
- [23:09]
B
That's the routine that I use. And if I do that and do that well, and I don't always do it well, and sometimes there are still way more distractions and things that I actually have to deal with on a daily basis. It doesn't happen every single day. If I do it well, then by 3pm, 4pm in the afternoon, because I started at 4am, I've now done 12 hours worth of really good, dedicated, deep work. I can start to then shut it down, and I do the same thing. I change the location again, and then I move into husband and dad zone, and I start to focus on those things which are important to me but are not urgent, that family time and making dinner and all that sort of stuff. And so, yeah, that's my daily routine. Yours, I think, looks pretty similar.
- [23:53]
A
It is very similar. And I think there's a couple of things to call out here, because I think there are aspects of this that are just exactly what everyone needs to do. Right. One of those things is there's a ritual involved. Like, and. And it's nothing. It's not spooky. It's just like. It's what you do, right? You make your coffee, you pop in a Zen. I put on, you know, a nose, A nose strip. There's just like a sequence of things I do. I put my headphones on, I go through this sort of process.
- [24:19]
B
Sit in the same chair.
- [24:20]
A
Sit in the same chair.
- [24:21]
B
Okay. Yep.
- [24:22]
A
The ritual is more important than you think. But the reason that it is is because last week we talked about how critically important time is, that time is your most important asset. And if you get good at that ritual, you can do it anywhere, and you can do it with tiny amounts of time. There's a story that I tell my staff fairly regularly, and it's there. I have moments where I have 15 to 30 minutes before I need to get on an airplane. Like, that's. And that is a weird amount of time because it's like, man, that's just not, you know, so what are you going to do? Well, I have learned that in that tiny period of time, if I just go through the ritual, I can actually get a mini pomodoro. Right. It's not like 25 minutes, but I can get a deep amount of concentrated work done in that timeframe simply because my brain knows that when I do 1, 2, 3, 4, I do these steps right in a row, Bam. I'm in the mode.
- [25:18]
B
Right. And the only thing that changes then is the location you're doing it from. So the only thing that changes about the routine is the chair in the room. All the rest of the routine stays.
- [25:27]
A
The same and it's enough that your brain goes, oh, this is what we're doing now. Got it right.
- [25:31]
B
Yeah. And then you can pick. The only other thing I would say is that again, I've talked about riding in the car. If we're going somewhere, we've got a 30 minute drive. A lot of times I'll hotspot off my phone, my wife will drive because I'll knock out work there. I'm going to try to pick tasks that I can definitely complete in a single pomodoro or in a short, even a short pomodoro in that scenario. Whereas if I'm working on a big project that's going to take 4, 6, maybe even 10 Pomodoros over the course of several days, that's not the time. I'm not diving into, you know, board reports or quarterly reports for the company or deep dives on the finances when I only have 15 minutes. But what I can do is I can respond to the emails, I can do the online coaching, I can do whatever the thing is that I, by the time I get on the airplane or whatever the thing is, I'm like, oh, cool, I just got that done. And what will often happen is in those short ones, because you're doing smaller tasks, but that still require focus, you actually get to check a bunch of things off the box and you get this little win, you get this little dopamine hit because you're like, oh man, I actually knocked out seven things in a short period of time because those things were not major projects, they were just things that were sort of hanging over my head that I knew I needed to get done. And that was a perfect small window of opportunity to do it.
- [26:48]
A
Yeah, if, if you're in a situation where your list is beginning to crush you, it is a great opportunity for you to do those. Pick the small things, like, don't I. I've said this before, do not spend time organizing the list like that. You will. Just organizing the list itself is going to not do anything for you. So, like, maybe a little time, but like, I would not spend more than 10, 15 minutes on organizing the list because you can get into this mode of like, what is the most important or the second most important and doesn't matter. Like, they just, like they're roughly about as important and we need to get through them. But if you can just take the things that are the smallest and get those knocked off the list, you build momentum. And building momentum has a huge effect on being able to sort of clear out the things that need to get done. There's also this idea, and I think this is, this is really important. So, like, why, why does this matter at all, right? Like, why is it that we need to have, as business owners, founders, why do we need this deep work? And the answer to that question is anyone who has an outsized effect in their space, whatever that is, your business space, if you're a scientist and you're in the science world, that can be your space. But anybody who has an outsized effect has to spend an unreasonable amount of time on something, right? It is actually the amount of time. It is roughly the amount of time, maybe times five or ten that most people stop working on the thing, right? That's what it is. Like, you got to go further than everybody else in order to discover the things nobody else was able to discover. That's what it is. You stay in the zone longer than they do, you stay committed to the problem longer than they do. And what happens is you find things that they didn't find, right? And you know, you've got examples of this sort of all over the business world. Warren Buffett used to do this when he was reading over his 10Ks, which are, you know, the financial reports that publicly traded companies do. He just looked longer than everybody else and understood it deeper than everybody else. And, and that's what's going to happen in your, in your business as well. If you want to have a big effect, if you want to make a big difference, you have to stay in the zone for a lot longer. And so what you need to train yourself to be able to do is sort of two things when you're thinking about that deep work. One of them is make sure you understand this is fairly easy to do if you just let, if you just sit with it for a minute. What is the most important thing that moves the needle the most within the business. Like what is the one thing that if I got this one thing done, it would absolutely. It either makes a bunch of things irrelevant so I can like clear everything else off the list, or it is the one thing that puts me into the best possible position with the business. That is the thing that you want to spend those deep work hours where you need to have many of them in a row. So one example, Matt, you just said is, you know, if you got 15, 20 minutes at the airport, you're going to do the little things.
- [29:50]
B
Right.
- [29:50]
A
You're not going to get into the really big like multi hour type of events.
- [29:53]
B
Sure.
- [29:54]
A
But our lives are also going to be full of those big multi hour things. And you have to figure out how you're going to get those in. And you also figure out how to figure out what are you going to do when you run out of time. Because you will frequently run out of time when you need to switch into that more chaotic, you know, regular day mode. What are you going to do to make sure that the next time you're going to pick that thing up and take off, how are you going to pick up where you left off?
- [30:22]
B
Right.
- [30:22]
A
And the answer to that is you have to do what I always call a brain dump. And the brain dump is wherever you keep your notes, whatever that is. And everybody has kind of a different system for this. When you get to the end of those of a series of Pomodoros and you don't have to do it at the end of every one, but you need to do it when it's time to make the transition. You really don't have time to complete this thing. You're learning as you go, as we all do. You may have four or five more hours, you may have 10 to 20 more hours to get this thing really, truly wrapped up. The way that you do that well is you dump everything that's in your brain onto a piece of paper.
- [30:59]
B
Sure.
- [30:59]
A
And you can do that with pen and paper or you can do that with, by typing on a keyboard, however you, you want to do it. But you need to do it in a way where the next time you're going to pick it up, you can go read your notes to yourself. I mean, you're the only audience there. You're going to go read the notes to yourself. Like, where did I leave off? Oh yeah, this is where I was. What questions did I have? Oh, I had these questions. You know, we were talking about how all that context is in your head at the Moment that, you know, someone comes in and asks you, what sandwich do you want for lunch? Right. And what you need to do is make sure that gets written to disk. The computer world, that is what a computer is doing. It's writing all that memory to disk so I can go get it later. Right. You need to be able to do the same thing with wherever it is that you keep your notes. And that's how you do these multiple super long arc things that are really, really, really important for. For most founders.
- [31:46]
B
Yep. For me, one of the things I actually will often do, and I do this a lot of times at night before I go to bed, but not while I'm laying in bed and trying to relax. But I will often make the list in the evening not of the where was I? Brain dump on the major project, but because I constantly have an ongoing list for me. And that ongoing list is sort of in order of urgent and important things. And then new stuff pops up every day. I will pretty quickly put it where I think it should generally go in the chronological order of the day. Right? Yep. And so I do that because. And so it doesn't take up a ton of time. But what it does is if I don't do that, then all of those extra tasks that haven't been written down yet become. They're holding bandwidth in my brain and they become a distraction. Right. And in the original Pomodoro, little mini book PDF that you can download online, they talk about, even if you're in the middle of Pomodoro, especially if you're somebody who has some ADD type issues, there's usually a scrap piece of paper there. Something pops into your head, which is a small distraction in order to keep it just a very tiny distraction and be able to go right back into what you were. When you think of like, oh, I need to take the trash out, or I need to thaw the meat or what, you just write trash on a piece of paper and you go right back to the thing. You don't stop and take the trash out.
- [33:10]
A
Nope.
- [33:10]
B
You don't, you know, whatever. You don't, you don't message to a family member that this needs to be done. Oh, hey, would you please take. You know, you don't send the text that can wait 25 minutes. But if you're trying to hold multiple things in your brain, that bandwidth that is space in your brain needed to focus on the deep work at hand.
- [33:30]
A
That's exactly right.
- [33:30]
B
So that's why you have to get it out. So for me, I will almost always have a running list at the end of the day. I've got that. I'll make sure I add whatever is going to have to be done tomorrow. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning again, because it doesn't require a ton of thought, is I look at. I open up that list. Okay, here's the list. It's in general chronological order. It takes me no longer than five or six minutes to maybe move a few things around, and I get right into work. And then I often am going to look at my calendar for the day, which I live off my calendar, as a lot of us do. And I'm going to think like I did this morning. Okay, from. You know, we're going to walk through the notes of the podcast that we're recording today from 7am to 8am and then I've got podcasts from 8am to 10am so that means I can't do the things I would normally do at that time. So we've broke routine a little bit since it's a holiday. Then for me, it allowed me then to put those things in order.
- [34:22]
A
Go.
- [34:22]
B
Okay, so I needed. This is what must be done before I do the podcast. This is what then needs to be done after I'm done recording the podcast. So I will keep that. But I'm not somebody who's constantly managing and organizing the notes. I think once you get a good system in place, you really are talking about five or six minutes a day. It's often for me, once I first pour that cup of coffee, once I first sit in the chair, before I dive in on everything, I just take a few minutes, I pull up the notepad. Okay, yes, that's right. This is what I'm working on today. Here are the other few things that I think will pop up today that I need to work on. And. And I'm off into the races.
- [34:58]
A
Yeah. The key is just to not get lost in it. Right. I do the same thing. I have a list that I basically, I have in rough order, I would say. Yeah, rough and roughly in order. And I have noticed that if I get a little obsessive about that list, I can get lost in it. Where I try to figure. I try to figure out the exact order or I try to go into too much detail. One of the biggest things to consider, you know, as you're sort of thinking about your list and you're thinking about, like, how do I, you know, how do I manage all of this, is to schedule time for the things that are not deep work as well.
- [35:32]
B
Sure.
- [35:32]
A
Right. So you have to know that there's going to be a time in your day. And again, everybody's different for, for you and me, it's early in the morning. My. I do by the way, this morning it was 4am I set my alarm for 4am because I tend to do that on a Monday. My natural wake up time is 5. My eyes will pop open at 5. My eyes will not pop pop open usually at 4 in the morning. In fact last night it opened at 12:30 and I got up for an hour and that was unpleasant. But anyway. But I ended up getting up at 4 because I like to get a jump on my Monday. I just, I don't want Monday to catch me ever. Like I want to catch it. Right. And so I think that is a really important piece is figure out what your deep work time is. It will almost definitely be early in the morning or late at night. I've never really met anybody who was like, mine's at 3 in the afternoon. Like it's. Maybe you're that person. I don't know. But probably it is when other people are not working, when the distractions are low in your life and it's when your brain is at its natural peak. My natural peak. I wake up to my natural peak and it just falls off a cliff all day long. There are people who wake up groggy and they stay groggy and they slowly get clearer throughout the day.
- [36:46]
B
True.
- [36:46]
A
Don't be upset if you're either one of those. Doesn't make any difference.
- [36:49]
B
Just like, just use the one that use it.
- [36:51]
A
Right. Use it and then also recognize just like you, nine o'clock, my time, east coast time, my world starts getting kind of crazy. 9:30, starts getting real crazy. And it is complete and total chaos until about five. Right. And like, and it just is that, that is what it is. And I've accepted that during that time. I'm not going to get anything done of any deep work value.
- [37:18]
B
Major projects, things like that require deep, lots of deep work.
- [37:22]
A
I've learned over time that that time is also valuable. It's just a different kind of thing. Right. Like I'm interacting with people. I'm learning how things apply in, you know, and how my staff is responding to different events of the day. It's the input. The way that I think about it is it's the input to my deep work time.
- [37:45]
B
Yep.
- [37:46]
A
It's the thing I allow, I test, you know, am I working on the right thing based on how well and efficiently can I solve the problems that are emerging during the chaos time during the day. And that is really, really critical time, too. But you don't get to use those hours almost ever in a way that is deep work, because you're constantly going to get hounded or whatever is going on, especially as you schedul grows.
- [38:12]
B
Right. As you have more staff and more clients and whatnot. That is absolutely the case. I know you've got some notes in here also to talk about this, but I think this would be a good time also to. One of the things that's extremely important for me to do, and I think for you as well, is to schedule just thinking time. Right. Or I think, is it Cal that talks about scheduled boredom? Scheduled boredom. Because when there's no agenda, that's often the time that the best ideas come. And the reason I think this is so important is because if ultimately the goal is to work on the one thing that is going to move the needle the most, you have to know what that is.
- [38:56]
A
Yeah, that's right.
- [38:57]
B
It's during those times that it comes. And so my favorite time to do that is actually on the weekends. And so on the weekends, when I'm not doing the normal routine work that I would do, and we've both talked about this, we utilize. Early morning on the weekends is a great time for me to just sit and think. Vacations are another great time, especially after the first couple days after I've actually relaxed. Especially if I'm out on the beach and I'm just sitting on the beach and I'm just thinking about the business and I'm thinking about what are those things? Or what is that one thing that'll move the needle the most? And so now I know this is. As I go back into scheduled time for deep work, that's going to take multiple pomodoros and maybe even multiple weeks. It's going to take potentially a fair amount of resources, especially in time and energy or time and effort. It's important because I know what I'm going to work on, and without that, I don't. And so what you don't want to do is think you're working on the most important thing, even something that is somewhat important, that takes lots of deep work and lots of pomodoros. But it actually wasn't the most important thing. It might've been fifth or sixth down the list.
- [40:08]
A
Yeah, yeah. And actually, like, think about this. Like, I. I get to see people work in a lot of different environments because not just my staff, but I am very commonly in a position of being a. Either interim or. Or fractional CTO at many different organizations. So I could see people that are not even my staff and kind of how they. How they work on a regular basis. And one of the things that is the most obvious to me is how many people on this planet wake up in the morning and do whatever was given to them in that moment every single day.
- [40:46]
B
Right.
- [40:46]
A
So it's. I'm responding to a slack message that I just got, and that's the thing I'm doing now. And I got an email, so I guess I'll do that thing. Right. It is like everyone else is dictating their calendar to them, is dictating their task list to them, and it is a completely ineffective way to work. So be sure you're not that person. Right. And how do you be sure that you're not that person? For a lot of people, this is going to happen on. I mean, the two times that you mentioned are actually, like, really good. Right. So I think about it. Vacations are always huge for me. Weekends are great. On a walk, for some reason, my brain will explode with ideas and I have to get all those, you know, notes down. There are times on an airplane when there is nothing else going on that I keep a. Like a notebook and I just write and I. I literally will fill. I will fill the thing up by the time I get to the end. And it's just. It's incredible time. Like, I. Everything.
- [41:46]
B
Ideas.
- [41:46]
A
Yeah, everything comes into focus. I'm usually listening to a podcast, or it starts with a podcast, and then eventually the podcast kind of fades to the back, and I'm in the middle of just writing feverish notes about something, and I get to the end and I'm like, oh, wow, that was really good. Thinking time, whatever that is for you. I think it's really important. And there are a lot of different terms for it. You find it in all three of the books that we were going to mention here at the end of the podcast. But the concept is the same, which is it's thinking time. What you notice is that you're just being intentional, in fact, about all of the time. That's actually what. That's the goal. Right. So you want to be intentional about your deep work time, you want to be intentional about your thinking time, and you want to be intentional about your sort of chaos time or whatever you want.
- [42:32]
B
Shallow work time.
- [42:32]
A
Shallow work, whatever you want to call it.
- [42:34]
B
Urgent work.
- [42:35]
A
Yeah. There's a lot of interactive meetings if you're having meetings, you know, I have a ton of meetings in my days and a lot of those meetings are me learning about what's happening to everyone else in the business and how I can apply the things that I know and can learn to help alleviate pain or whatever it is that I'm doing.
- [42:54]
B
Sure.
- [42:55]
A
And so it's really, really valuable time, but you need to schedule it. You need to be intentional, don't be reactive about your time. Right. That's a really, really critical piece of the puzzle. Beyond that, I think it's important to recognize that you have to manage your energy throughout your day on a regular basis. So, like, there's a couple of ways that I think you do that. There's a couple ways that I do that I am a big believer in. It's funny. So I'll tell a little story. Last week, one of my customers had a critical event occur. This is pretty normal inside of our world, inside of tech. But unbeknownst to them, unbeknownst to us, some decisions were made several years earlier that put them in a situation that was going to be really, really bad if it didn't get dealt with incredibly quickly.
- [43:47]
B
Right.
- [43:47]
A
And so this issue as it arose, needed an enormous amount of deep work for an extended period of time. And I ended up doing, I do this usually a couple times a year. I ended up working from. I think I woke up that morning at like 4 in the morning, found out about it by about 6 or 7, and I worked for two days straight with no sleep whatsoever. None. Zero.
- [44:11]
B
I can't do that.
- [44:12]
A
I do that a couple times a year.
- [44:14]
B
Yeah.
- [44:15]
A
And I always hear the same thing from everybody, which is like, oh, this is really terrible. Like you're, you immediately are. You have, you must have Alzheimer's right now because you did that. Like, no, you don't. That's stupid.
- [44:25]
B
Right?
- [44:25]
A
Like, come on. I sleep fairly consistently. I eat really, really well. You know, I try to get good exercise when I can. The reality is you can do those kinds of sprints, but I am not a superhuman. And I need rest and energy too. And what I do is I take naps. So, like right in the middle of my day when it's like, it's normally when my energy dips right after lunch, I will go lay down and take a 30 minute nap.
- [44:52]
B
And only 30 minutes during this time period, did you take a few naps?
- [44:56]
A
No, not during this one.
- [44:59]
B
Usually I've never done that. That's insanity.
- [45:01]
A
Usually I would. But in this circumstance and this happens from time to again, I realize this, this is kind of a crazy version of the story, but every so often in tech especially, I don't know if this happens everywhere else, but you are so hot on the trail of this thing and the context is so good in your brain and it's so thoroughly loaded up that you just don't want to lose it. Right. And I was in that situation where I, I had discovered how to solve the problem and I was moving so fast, it didn't even feel like it wasn't hard for me to stay awake. I was just like so zoned in on this, on this problem. You know, again, it doesn't happen all the time, but you need to manage this stuff. Like, this is an example of a place where it is okay to do an unreasonable amount of work for a short period of time, but you have to recognize you are also going, you're human and you're gonna need to catch up on that.
- [45:55]
B
Yeah, it's unsustainable. I talk about this in the book that we do have several times that I've looked back or we as a team look back in the business. There are times when extreme urgency in a hyper important situation that could make or break the business will arise. And that level of urgency is not always bad. We actually look back on those things now with nostalgia and say, man, remember when we did, like, I don't know that we ever worked 48 hours straight, nonstop, like every single person. But what we often did is we used the different time zones of people. So we did work on the project 24 hours a day. We were constantly working on the thing and Everybody was working 18 hours a day, 20 hours a day, whatever the thing was. And when you do that and you've got a good team and everybody's on board, and this is part of your job as a leader, is to make sure you lead well and help people really understand the importance of the task at hand. Then you can accomplish a tremendous amount of things. When it's not just you doing that, but when there's 10 or 12 other people doing that altogether, then it's like, this is do or die. I remember one of the most important times ever in our business. I was actually in Mexico on vacation. This thing hit, hit the fan on a Friday afternoon, Friday evening, and I basically had to call on all hands. And I was like, we are working all weekend long and Monday morning when the office opens up for the other company that we were having the issue with, I was like, they are going to not understand how we were able to get this thing done. And by Monday morning it was done. And so now we look back on the thing and in the midst of it, it was scary and it was tons of work and it zaps your energy like crazy. But acutely, those times of high hyper levels of urgency and importance will often be a galvanizing force for your team, not something that tears everyone apart. Now, if they're completely not a believer, and maybe they were on the edge anyway, sometimes it drives them over and they leave. But that's a probably a good thing to know as well. And so what you want to be careful with, and one thing that we've really done much better at is that we had more of those in the early years. Like in the early years we didn't like there were more of those hyper urgent reactive modes for our business. And I can look back now and say I was the cause of some of those things. Some of the things that really weren't as urgent and important as I thought they were at the time I made urgent and important for the team. That's right. And so as you become more experienced as a founder, you start to realize, like you said, probably everything's going to be okay. Right. But then every once in a while a thing happens and it's going to be okay, but it's still going to require 18 hours worth of work by everybody for the next four days.
- [48:44]
A
Yeah.
- [48:44]
B
Or whatever the thing is.
- [48:45]
A
Yeah. Well, and I think there's also just this, you know, I, I say this a lot to both my staff and then even customers that we work with. Like, you can do super hard things in short sprints and they almost look superhuman, I think, in some circumstances. And people have got themselves so tied up in a knot about all the things that they're not allowed to do. Oh, you know, you've got absolutely got to get eight hours of sleep every single night. You got to wake up at such and such a time and go get sunlight in your eyeballs. And like there's all these. And you got to go take your cold plunge and do all the things like. No, you don't, you don't have to do any of that crap.
- [49:20]
B
Yeah.
- [49:20]
A
In fact, there are times when you need to get into hyper focus. Hyper focus, like maybe the next level beyond this deep focus thing. And you need to stay there for like a couple days to get everything knocked out that needs to get knocked out. And it's amazing what will actually happen. But again, those are limited. Those are not all the time they need to be very rare. And like you said, you learn a lot. You galvanize as a team during those time frames. And ultimately, you should look back on those kinds of times and go, how can we keep that from happening in the future? We always do this thing called a postmortem, where you go in and look at it. How do we keep that from happening? But all of this goes to the point of there is a skill of deep focus, deep work that you have to have as a founder. And you need to make sure that the work that you're doing is fully intentional, that you are not doing work in a reactive way. Every time someone hands you a job, you just do it because they handed it to you. You need to make sure that your time is precious, and you need to make sure that it is being done by the right person. First of all, frequently, that will not be you.
- [50:30]
B
Yep.
- [50:30]
A
And when it is you, and you're the one that needs to get this thing done, you need to make sure that you know how to get into the mode that will actually get that done in the most efficient way possible. Not distracted, not, you know, not doing two, three, four things at once. Just because people are asking for your time, just because people are asking for a meeting doesn't mean you need to actually have one. You've got to figure out how to use that time to your benefit. And the way that you get that done is with deep work. So little wrap up here, we'll just go through a couple of steps, make sure that you've done a good job identifying what that thing is. What is the one thing? What is the one domino you can knock over? Knocks over all the rest of them, Right. Keep that list. Do it at night if it makes you feel better. I think I do mine at night more frequently than not, too. I should probably formalize that because I think once you go to bed, if you don't do it once you go to bed, you'll be thinking about it. So it's kind of a close the close the loop kind of thing. That's what I'm doing.
- [51:22]
B
I'm getting it out of my brain so I can relax and go to sleep.
- [51:25]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Create that repeatable ritual and add into that repeatable ritual that gets you into deep work some stuff you like. So we've talked before. Coffee, Zen, whatever it is, nose strip music, headphones, whatever. Do the same thing over and over and over again so that you can put yourself in to deep work mode when you want to, simply by using Pavlov's Dogs. Right. Like, that's what we're doing.
- [51:48]
B
Yep.
- [51:48]
A
Carve out your best hours. Make sure that the hours that you're doing this work are when your unique brain is at its peak.
- [51:55]
B
Yep.
- [51:56]
A
For us, that's more morning. For you, that might be night. And it's totally fine. Just pick the hours that are really good for you and use them on a regular basis. Whatever happens, please, please, please do not waste those hours every single day. I know people that are great in the evening and they waste the time playing video games at night. Right. Don't do that. It's crazy. Plan for distraction. You're gonna have it every single day. Make sure that you know when those times are and just say, all right, these are gonna be my. My times when I'm having to deal with the chaos of the business on a regular basis. That's fine. Let your mind have thinking time. Right.
- [52:30]
B
Schedule.
- [52:31]
A
Have these times scheduled. Know when it's going to be good, like if it's on a plane or on vacation and plan for it. Like, you're going to have these great times where you're going to be able to have a notepad around and write lots of notes and do the things that you're going to do to help. You know, use that time and then take some time to review and adjust as you need to. A lot of the routines that I've had in life, I have changed after some period of time. So, like, sometimes they don't work forever. Sometimes they work for a season and that's fine. Make modifications. If you're the kind of person that likes change. I like change. Then every so often you should change it. How frequently? Like once a year, maybe, or less. But like not. Not every. Not every week.
- [53:13]
B
Sure.
- [53:14]
A
Yeah. And that's it. The three books that we based a lot of this information from, that was super useful, I know, to both of us as we've gone through our Our Business Journeys are Deep Work by Cal Newport is an excellent book. We've talked about it several times. Hyper Focus by Chris Bailey is a super good book as well. It's another one where there's a ton of detail in there about how to get yourself into a hyper focus mode. And then there's a book called the One Thing by Gary Keller was recently recommended to me by a friend of mine on LinkedIn and it was excellent. Excellent. Excellent. In some ways, that book talks a lot about the ways that you see Elon Musk sort of focused on one thing at a time. Like he's got one you know, he shifts gears, but he focuses on like this killer important one thing. That book is all about that topic. So if you want to learn more about it, read those books. Highly recommended.
- [54:02]
B
Yeah, that's great. I haven't read the one thing by Gary Keller, but I would love to read that because it sounds like it's the type of book that helps you identify what is the one thing that moves the needle the most. So that if you understand the principles I'm assuming in this book, when you have that scheduled thinking time, no agenda, but you just get to sit there and think, then you now know the direction that you, I assume the skills that need to be acquired in order to recognize and identify the one thing that really needs to be done.
- [54:30]
A
Yeah, that's exactly right. And it sort of lifts off that Peter Thiel thing as well, which is that at the end of the day, like, you really can only actually focus on one thing anyway.
- [54:38]
B
That's right.
- [54:38]
A
And your team should pretty much only be focused on one thing. Like you need to know what is the major thing we're trying to accomplish right now. And game plan stuff gets us there as well. So we'll talk about that. I know, in a future podcast.
- [54:48]
B
Absolutely. Awesome. There is another episode of the build your business podcast with Matt and Chris Reynolds. As I say every week, but I very much mean it. We would love a review, an honest review, so we love five star reviews obviously, but an honest review. Wherever you listen to your podcast, please reach out to us and let us know things you would like to learn about, things you're anxious about, things you're nervous about, things you just don't understand in business. And we may not have the answer, but one of the things that I'm sure that we'll do in the future, if we don't know, we'll bring a professional on who does and we'll have a three way conversation. And so that's where the podcast is going. So while the podcast doesn't absolutely follow chronological order, because I don't think that works very well with podcasts in general, we do have a pretty solid direction that we want to take the podcast, which you can think about it as in the beginning for people who are just starting out, and as we continue the podcast, it will get a little bit more complex, a little bit it'll be more about like if you've listened to this podcast for the last year or two years, depending on how long we continue to do the podcast, for the foreseeable future, we'll get into and this is what it looks like when you need to hire an executive team or become a C corp or you know like what or have a board of directors or all of those things because those are all scary things too. But we want to get these big things out of the way first. That deep work applies whether you are just starting a business on day one or whether you're somebody like you who are on your second business. You've already sold one, you've two mature businesses. My business is mature. This stuff still very much impacts my life on a daily basis but it also impacted my life on a daily basis in the first few weeks of business ownership as well. And so that's the goal of the podcast again, moving you from fear to freedom, taking that anxiety away way and just kind of walking through those steps as we've learned over the past 20 years. So thanks for listening. Thanks for giving us your Friday and we'll see you next week.