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If your firm feels one good decision away from a breakthrough, then this is for you. We're hosting our first mastermind of 2026 in Phoenix on February 26th and 27th, and it's two days designed to actually move your firm forward and grow who you are as a leader. Day one is a full day of hot seats where you break into groups and work through the real problems in your business. Day two is our wellness workshop, featuring sessions that help you boost your energy, lower stress, and think more clearly. We have Jocelyn and Erin Freeman, host of a top 10 marriage podcast and masters in psychology, teaching relationship skills that you'll use at work and at home. A lunch and learn on habit formation with Tyson and more. View the full event details and grab your seat@maxwell events.com.

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This is Maximum Lawyer with your host, Tyson Mutrix.

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Good morning and welcome back to Maximum Lawyer Live. I'm Tyson Mutrix and I have a really, I think a really important episode today. Today we're going to be talking about tuning down the noise. I don't think you're able to tune out the noise completely, but tune down the noise so that you can actually execute on what needs to get done on a daily basis. Because the reality is, I mean, politics is everywhere. There are distractions everywhere. Not just, not just politics, but everything. There's feeds screaming for attention. It's one of the major reasons why we moved used to be called the Guild, the association off of Facebook, out of the Facebook group into a separate thing by itself in circle. A lot of it has to do with just distraction. I can just tell you from, from my perspective, I hated going on to Facebook to get into the Guild because inevitably I would get on there and I would see something else and I would get distracted. That's why I even found something to help block my feed on my desktop. That's how, that's how bad it was. But my goal for today is that maybe I can give you some practical tips to help tune down the noise a little bit and, and remain focused because, and I talk about compounding a little bit. I wouldn't say quite a bit, but a little bit whenever it comes to your actions. And the more you can stay focused, the more those things will compound. And you know, ultimately, as, as the years go by, you will have gotten much, much more accomplished. So that's my goal for you because focus. I think a lot of people, you know, people talk about ADHD and a lot of people claim to have ADHD and you know, they, it's undiagnosed who cares about all that, that crap. Focus is not a personality trait. It really comes down to whether you have a system. That's really what it comes down to. So, and I'm not discounting anyone that does have adh, adhd. I'm not. That's not what I'm saying. Whether you have it or not, if you have a system, that's what will help help you fix it. Okay. That's my point. And a lot of this comes down to. And I, I've always been really interested with the whole idea of task changing and whenever we redesign the new task system and everything for, for Zoho, a big part of it was based on a world without email. And what's really kind of interesting is, is like because you want to have everything inside of, of that task when you're doing it. But when you change change from task to task, it takes about 23 minutes and 15 seconds. That's, that's how long it takes to change to another task and regain deep focus. I mean that is. How crazy is that? 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back into deep focus. That's why like I don't, I, I have all these things turned off on my phone. I like. So I guess this is maybe one of the, the first practical tips is that if you don't have focus turned on on your phone, I highly encourage it. And you can change the different settings. Some calls can get through, some don't. But if you, and this is really for Apple users, but I'm going to assume that anyone that else any other smartphone has a similar function where if you just go on your phone and I'm doing it right now. There's a, there's actually a, a section called Focus if I remember correctly. Yeah, it's called Focus. And then you go through and you can kind of see mine here I'm, I've got do not disturb. That's where like nothing gets through. Okay. Rarely do I have it on that because I want to be notified of some if there's some sort of an emergency. I also have a driving focus. I have a family time focus. I have focus. Focus. I, I think that may be the built in one. I don't remember creating that one. I have a mindfulness one that's whenever it's for like if I'm doing like meditation or something. I have a personal one that's where if I'm at home it's, it defaults to that. I have one for reading. I have one for reduce interruptions I think that was a built in one. I don't remember doing that one. I went for sleep. It's an important one. I have one for work, the one for personal and the one for work. And then the driving, those are automatically activated based on where I am or what I'm doing. So when I get to the office, it's, it's geo, that one's GEO targeted. When I get home, that's GEO targeted. Actually, I take that back. Work is time based, so work is time based. The personal one is geolocated. Driving is based on my movement. So it automatically, automatically picks it up and it tunes out a lot of distractions for me. I do miss, sometimes I miss an important call. By important call, what I mean by that is, is that it wasn't an emergency. Wasn't something that, you know, would have been, you know, devastating if I didn't answer. It's more like, you know, I might have wanted to answer the call. That's. But you can you fine tune it over time? Okay, so, and if also if you know an important call is coming through, you just turn off the focus and that's the simple turn. That's the simple solution to that. So that, that's one of the ones that I, I really, that's, that's, that's gonna solve a lot of your problems right there all by itself. I guess another thing didn't point out is, is that distraction is something that is engineered. Okay? It's not an accident. We are the engineers of it. Like, we're the ones that have created this environment that we exist in that, that have, that create all these distractions. Like if you just think about the average person, they check their phones 140 times a day. I mean, 140 times a day. So you're, you factor in the 140 times a day. And then you also think about having an interruption where it takes about 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get into deep focus again. As a law firm owner, I mean, you should be really trying to spend as much of your time in defocus as possible. Really should, because you, you were the strategy person. You're the person that's really trying to figure out, all right, how are we going to configure these trains, right? You have other people to make sure the trains are on time. You, you're configuring the trains, you're setting up the tracks. That's what you're doing. You're the engineer. But sometimes what we do is we, we set up our Lives in a way where it is distracting. Your, your workplace, your work setup needs to be set up in a way where you're not always distracted. I'll give you an example. I have, I have three screens up right now. I always have three screens up on. Well, at this desk. I'm actually at my regular work desk. There was an issue with the mic this morning. On the other, my other workstation, which is over there for. That's my, usually my podcast recording setup. And that one has two screens, but this one has three screens. And so if you're working on any particular task, screens need be set up for that task. That's, that's just the reality of it. They need. There should not be some, like three different things going on at one time because that's, that's really going to, it's going to distract you. So you have your calendar on one screen and you know you're doing one thing or maybe of your chat, that's another one. I would, I would highly, highly recommend that if you, if you don't have office hours, integrating office hours, but more importantly, don't have your chat up all the time. Most firms at this point have, you know, Slack or something similar. We use Zoho Click. Having that chat up all the time is going to distract you all the time. Even with. We have office hours. Okay. But we still have things that come through in the qlik as like, reports where, like, if a lead comes through, it automatically comes through. So I could, if I have it up, I can see it. So it's, it's one of those things where if I didn't do that, I would be engineering, remember? If. So if you're doing this, you're engineering your own distractions. That's what you're doing. You're creating them yourself. That there's no one to blame. It's not the person that's sending the message that's to blame for that. You're the one to blame for it because you have it up and you're the one checking it. And if you're getting alerts on your phone from it, that's also your fault too. You should turn those alerts off. That's another tip. Turn those alerts off. Do not get alerts on your phone for emails. Do not get alerts on your phone for chats. Do not get alerts on your phone for text messages. My text messages, I do get them for some things, but it's based on my focus. So if I'm at work, I don't get notifications. Unless it's for Mamie or my parents. I've got it set for my parents too. I think there's maybe a couple other people that I've got it set up for, but for the most part, I don't get text messages. I recommend that you turn those off. One of the things that you can do, so that's what's kind of cool is you can, you can adjust these different settings and different, different softwares and different apps. Like on X, you can mute keywords. On Facebook, you can mute certain people. So maybe you don't want to unfriend them, but you're sick of seeing all the, all the posts that they're, they're putting out. Like I jokingly. So we're, we're hiring a marketing person. Maximum lawyer. We're hiring like a full time marketing person. So we're doing all of our marketing in house and we're really wanting to, to level up things. And I really kind of suckered people a little bit. I put up a Facebook post and it was about, you know, no one cares. Everyone thought it was about politics, you know, and I. It was kind of the setup. And then once you clicked read more, it was about the job. It was actually about the job posting. But it was kind of funny because it was, there was a line in there but like, I don't care about your politics. You shouldn't care about mine either. And that's kind of the reality. I don't care about your politics. So if you put a bunch of political stuff on Facebook, I'm just gonna unfollow you because I don't care. I don't care. I don't want to hear about. You're not gonna change my mind. I'm sorry. You're just not. I think most people think that way. And the way the kind of, the way I view social media, it's like germs. Like if you think about, if you're spreading happy stuff, you're gonna be spreading happy germs. If you're spread, spreading negative stuff, you're gonna be spreading negative germs. That's just kind of how I view social media in general. And I, for a while I thought it was just maybe my algorithm. I was like, man, what am I, what am I, you know, looking at that's making me get all this political junk? And I don't, I just don't think that's what it is. I think just everyone is posting about political stuff and I just, I just, I'm sick of it. I'm so tired of it. I was watching Tim Ferriss is on the Sean Ryan show this week. It's amazing episode. I highly recommend that you, that you listen to it. And he was just, I can tell he's just done with people. He's just completely like, you know, people will be people. And that is just kind of how. Kind of how I feel lately about politics. I just feel that way. Like, gosh, I just don't care. So anyways, when it comes back to, like, muting, you can mute keywords, you can mute different people. I highly recommend that you do that. And you can also just unfollow accounts. That's another thing too. Like another way, a way of looking at it is unfollow accounts that feel important but that never really change your behavior. All right? So it's like, oh, it's there, but you don't follow any of the advice. Okay, you don't take any of that advice. Do you really need that in your life? Garbage in, garbage out. That's another way of looking at it. So if it's garbage, right, You. So if you're taking in garbage, you're usually putting out garbage. So if, if you think that maybe it's just garbage, you need to unfollow that account, mute that account, tell whatever social media platform that you're on that, hey, don't want to get any more of this content. That's. That's important part of it, too. Another thing you could do is turn off all breaking news notifications. Turn off the news. That's. That's another one you can do where you got to remember much of what you see on the news, you cannot change. All right? There's nothing you can do about it. So the information that you're taking in is usually negative. The news is usually negative. Just reality of what it is, because that is what draws people in. It's just human nature. So you're generally taking in just negative information. And like you're, you, your body and your mind, you're taking all that in. Okay? Do you really need it? There's nothing you can do about it. That's another thing to think about too, is that's why I'm just so sick of the political stuff because there's nothing you can do about it unless you're going to go run for office or going to go campaign for someone or lobby for some cause. There's certain causes you can lobby for. There's. That's certain. Certainly something you could do. But I mean, posting about social media is not going to do it. You can go and go to your state capitol and you go lobby there. I believe in all that. I think that's important. I think political, political activism is important. I don't think it. On social media you're going to make any, you're going to change any minds. So the kind of the something that I think about, I try to have to try like remind myself and I wrote this quote down. It's the Marcus, Marcus Aurelius quote. The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts. Okay? The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts. So if all of your thoughts are negative, right? If all of your thoughts are about bad things, then think about what the quality of your life is going to be. It's something that Jason Selk talks about a lot in, in his books where, you know, what you focus on is what expands. And that's part of the reason why the algorithms really work too, is like if you focus on one topic, your algorithm will feed you more of that topic. So what. The more you focus on a thing, the more that thing expands. So if it's positive, it's going to. Positivity is going to expand, but if it's negative, that's also what's going to expand. So those bad inputs are going to guarantee bad outputs. So the more good you put in, the more good you spread, the more happy that you are more likely to be. There's no guarantee to it, but it's just the reality of what it is. So that's why I'm going to try to, I'm going to try to pass on more good and less bad or, yeah, far less bad. I don't, and I don't generally put on, put bad stuff on social media. I, I think I've put on native posts before, so I'm not, I'm not completely innocent of this, but I generally try to put things on there that are positive because I don't. I just know that I'm not going to change any minds. And I also know that, yeah, these posts are like germs, they do spread. So whether it's good or bad, another thing to think about is noise. It can feel like work and then it's weird because sometimes focus can feel like risk, almost like you're missing out on like, like. So if you're focusing on work only, you're missing out on what's going on in the world. It's kind of a weird thing. And so that's why we kind of stay glued to the noise a little bit. So I understand why people want to watch the news and why they want to get on social media and check out all the different things. And it gives you the illusion of control and participation. But what the key thing is is that it's, it doesn't require commitment from you generally. So you're just kind of consuming all this garbage without you having some sort of a commitment. Okay. And if you think about it from that standpoint, is it really worth doing then? So what I would encourage you to do is instead of you just kind of mindlessly scrolling or mindlessly getting on social media just because, you know, if you, if you feel the urge to just open your phone, get on social media, just check things, I would, I would encourage you to not do that. One of the things that you can do is schedule focus first. So schedule your focus first, not last. So have things on your calendar to do. Make sure, like, if you look at my calendar, justice does an amazing job of making sure that I've got things to do. All right, so they are on my count. I can look at it now and just, it'll. I, I know exactly what's on there. And, and if I've got gaps, I also have my backup list, my attack list. That, and that was something that I developed. Jason and I kind of put together was like, okay, when you have a couple extra minutes, what do you do? Like the most elite executives in the world, they don't waste a minute. So they have it down to a minute. So if you have like a minute of time, okay, these are my one minute tasks. If I've got five minutes, here's my five minute task. You know, if I've got an hour, here's my hour tasks. Really, really helpful. So if you can divide up your tasks by that, that's really, really. So it's kind of like you have it ready. So, oh, some time freezes up. Boom. Go to this. Boom. I can go to my, my tasks really quick. These are my five minute tasks. Let me knock out one of these five minute tasks. Boom. Get it done. Okay. Not to say you don't need rest. Sometimes, sometimes you do need rest. That's important too. Another interesting thing that came out of that Sean Ryan show episode with Tim Ferriss was, and I really like this, and I don't know why I've never thought about this, but. And he says he wants to start focusing more on relationships. So to just book all of that well and in advance. So you know, and spend the money on it. So make it hard for you to cancel it. So you, you know, you've already booked that time well in advance. You're going to do it. So buy those tickets now for whatever it is. And it. Tickets is more of a, of a metaphor than anything else, but put an investment in whatever that thing is and set aside the time for it. So book it on, put it on your calendar, obviously, and then put some sort of down payment on it. Put some commitment into it so you can't back out of it. All right. I, I love that whole idea. I think it's a great idea where you're, you find out who the, who are the most important people you want to spend more time with, book time with those people, make it almost impossible to back out of, and you're going to be way more likely to do it, and then you're going to be doing those things as opposed to mindlessly scrolling on your couch on a weekend. All right, That's. I think that's really, really important. Another part of this too is, and this is a, I think this is more of a basic thing for people that listen to Maximilian, that the same thing applies to big projects and work and time blocking, all that. So time blocking ultimately is really, really important. I'm not going to get into type blocking because I've talked about time blocking so much, but that's another, that's. This is a way of time blocking, but it's more for your personal life and people you want to spend more time with or, you know, professionally. Let's say you want to spend more time with certain professionals because you want to get better in a certain area. Make that investment. Do the same thing. Pay that person to spend time with them. Say, hey, I want to come out and spend a week with you and I want to pay you to do it. Let me, let me send you a check. That's another way of doing that. Okay. I guess one more thing with time blocking, if you're, if you're doing something important and you don't want the distractions, put your phone in another room. That's. I think that's a, that's an important part of this too. Or, or close down everything on your screen where you're just focusing on that one thing. And if you do have three screens, like, just put something on these other screens that are blank. That way you're not distracted. Okay. Yeah. Keep the main thing. The main thing. I don't remember who, quote who said that, but keep the main thing the main thing is what you want. I don't know if that's a. An athlete or who that was from, but. All right. We talked a little bit, and I've got my own kind of basic outline that I was going to go with you with this episode. That's why I'm just gonna want to make sure I hit everything. We already talked a little bit. Sometimes, I don't know if you know this, but sometimes I get off on these little tangents and I start to talk about other things that are outside my outline. So I kind of skip ahead a little bit. And we talked a little bit about stop feeding what you can't affect. So that's. I think that's a really important concept where most mental exhaustion comes from obsessing over things we can't act on. Right. Like, just think about. Think of how much effort and time and. Maybe this doesn't apply to you. Maybe it does, though. But sometimes I do obsess over things that I can't control, and so I had to, like, really force myself, like, hey, you, that's not something you can control. I'm sure some of you are the same way. And it's so exhausting. It can really wear you out. I mean, let's say that you. Let's say something comes up in the news, some big event, and we're spending all morning focusing on it. By the afternoon, you're probably exhausted. You probably don't realize it. You probably not checked in with yourself to realize it. But most likely, if you just kind of step back for a second and check out your day, the reason why you are exhausted at the end of the day is probably because of all that junk you consumed in the morning. Right? It's not. It wasn't eating the donuts. Maybe you ate healthy. It was eating those mental donuts. Although I love donuts, don't tell anybody, but I. That's, like, my biggest advice is donuts. I think donuts are amazing, but I try to limit that and take as much as I can. So one of the things you can do is create, like, when it comes to, like, things like this, create a concerns list. And so write down all the things that you're concerned, if you're concerned about. And if it's not something that you can act on in, say, 30 days, leave it there on the page. Okay? It just dies there on the page. You don't need to worry about it anymore. It's on the page. You wrote it down. If it's something you can act on, it needs to go to a different list, and you can. You need to go act on it. It needs to go into your action items list, but you can't act on it the next 30 days, it goes and dies there. And if. If it's something that. That you can do in six months, okay, well, it'll resurface in six months, but maybe regularly sit down and create that concerns list and just let it die there. I think that. I think it's a good way of dealing with it. The reality is, like, usually, and this is usually the case, if news doesn't change today's priorities, it doesn't deserve today's attention. All right? So if news doesn't change today's priorities, it doesn't deserve today's attention, and it really shouldn't. You just gotta keep moving on. Just keep moving on. So. All right, just a few minutes left. So I'm gonna start to wrap things up, but I do want to get a few more things in. Replace that mindless scrolling with intentional clicks, meaning build more of an information diet. So if you feel like you have to sort of consume something, which is fine. It's just. Nothing wrong with that. I think. I think getting better. Replace that with maybe a book either. You know, it could be a paper book, it could like a hard copy. It could be audiobook. Okay. Listen to a. More of an educational podcast. Something like. Like Maximum Lawyer or something that is more like Hormozy, something like that, where you are. You're learning something. You know, you're not just taking in garbage. You're actually learning something. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. As long as you're gonna go, then listen to that thing or watch that thing or read that thing and then go take action on it. I did an episode months ago about stop reading more books. And the whole idea of that was, it's not that you shouldn't read books. It's that most people read a book and they don't do anything with it. The knowledge that they gain from it is not used at all. So consume these things with intent. With the intent of, I'm gonna go out and take action on it. I think that's an important part of it too. So no news before work. Get the work stuff in first, the work content first. Your best thinking should not be downstream from that stuff. Okay. Your best thinking needs to be downstream from the good inputs. Very good. That's a very good rule. All right. I don't really have a time. A lot of time. For this part. But the email, make sure you're having you have a set of email rules and then use those email rules aggressively. Get out of your email completely if you can. If someone else can do it, let them do it and then you get out of it completely. That way you can focus on other things. Replace that noise with direction. Okay, so by you removing all this other noise, all these distractions, that's going to allow you to really focus on the more important stuff. It's more practical advice. The one goal for the week and then five for each day. Or that. That's one of those. Mine's more one in three. Now it used to be one in five, but your big goal for the week and then, you know, up to three tasks for the day. That's really, really effective for me. Have your process goals. So the things you need to be doing on a daily or weekly basis to help move the ball forward, those are really, really important. The one weekly action, that's really important in my opinion. If you can get this. This is hard. Okay? 90 minutes of uninterrupted deep work per day. Every study shows it consistently outperforms scattered eight hour, eight to ten hour work days. So, and let me put that another way. Many studies show that if you just worked 90 days under 90 minutes a day, uninterrupted, just nine minutes, you outperform a scattered eight to 10 hour day. That's insane. Okay, so think about that. So you really, that focus time is really, really important. Okay, I think I've given enough. The whole idea is to really do, do more of an attention audit with this episode where you kind of step back. Okay, where am I being dist? What are some things I can do to better it? I try to put as many practical tips into this as possible because I want you to have some good takeaways from it. So create some sort of system for your day, some sort of process for your day. Filter out the junk and I think you'll be better off from it. But have a great week, everybody. We will be seeing you. See you.