Focused - 145: Focus & Your Environment

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

David & Mike consider how the environment affects our ability to focus and share the very different ways they set up their workspaces.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great. I'm excited to talk about Focus and our environment. Yeah, this came to me when I was reading The Extended Mind, which was probably one of my favorite books of last year. reading The Extended Mind, which was probably one of my favorite books of last year. There's a whole section in there about being focused and or, you know, how your environment affects your ability

to focus. And I thought it was something we should probably cover on the show. So today we've got our outline together. We've got a lot to talk about. Yes, we do. You had in putting together this outline, ask the question, how does your environment affect your ability to focus? And I like the answer that you gave here. Yeah, a lot. book where where annie refers to human brains as magpies you know magpies build their nests out of whatever materials are available to them and so you know the environment determines what the nest looks like and that's the way the brain works too it's you know it works with the materials you feed to it and the contrary story to that and one that I'm frankly guilty of using myself, is equating the brain to a computer.

In fact, I have my personal productivity system. I call it Sparky OS. I mean, how much more computery could you get? But there are differences. And one of the things she points out through the book is a computer largely works the same way no matter where it is. Like if you take a computer and you put it on the beach in Tahiti or on your lap on your kitchen table or, you know, at your work, it's going to process at the same speed. It's going to do the same calculations.

It's not really going to change. However, our brains are not the same. You know, you put our brains into the Tahiti versus your kitchen table, it's going to operate differently. And that is something that I think really extends to our environments and how we determine a focused environment. Yeah, I like that whole analogy of the brain as a computer, like most people do. it's convenient, right? But there's definitely places that it falls down, like you mentioned.

At the beginning of that book, I like how she kind of starts by saying our brain is like a computer in some ways, but it's also like a muscle, and it's also like the magpie, which I had no idea what that actually was until I read the book. It's a type of bird. Yeah. Yeah. And that story about the magpies really resonated with me. I could totally see how my brain does that exact thing. It just picks out

these little pieces and hard codes them. You know, I can't remember things that I have to do, them, you know, I can't remember things that I have to do, but I remember silly sports statistics from 20 years ago because that's what my brain chose to hardwire into the nest. Yeah. And frankly, that has a lot of consequences. I mean, I think it affects what information you pour into your brain, like where do you watch your news and what books do you read? It also, I think, has an impact on the people you surround yourself with, you know. But for today's discussion, I think the focus is what is the environment we build around ourselves as we try to do our work or live our lives and how does that affect our ability to focus? So the thing I'd like you to buy into going into this

show is that it does affect your focus a lot. If you think that you are going to have the same thoughts, whether you're on the beach in Tahiti or at your kitchen table, or whether you're in a crowded airport or in a Zen monastery, I think you're going to be mistaken. I think the environment does affect you. And if you accept that, then we can start programming against it. See, there I go again with computer terms. If you accept that, you can start building tricks around that. Sure. As we get into this, we're going to talk about some of the different environments that

we can grab from. There's obviously the physical ones. There's also digital workspaces and things like that. But I think it's also important to call it here at the beginning that you maybe don't have complete control over all of these different environments that you find yourself in. And so don't get discouraged as we share a whole bunch of options, things that you might be able to do, levers you might be able to pull. Just control what you can control. And even if you make one of those environments just a little bit better, it's going to pay off as you go forward. Yeah. I mean, both Mike and I are lucky enough to be self-employed right now. So we actually have more control than we have historically. But I worked for other people for a long time. And I remember going to the office every day and limits as to what you

could and couldn't do. I had this one boss one time who was super into the way he wanted the offices to look. And they had these big glass panes next to each door. So you could always walk around and look in. And had a picture an ansel adams picture hanging in my office that would always go just a little crooked and he would come in the office and straighten it like he just like walking my office straight and it became a game where then i would like intentionally make it crooked just to see how long it would take. That's funny. So there was control in that instance as to how crooked the pictures were on my wall. But we built that into the outline.

We're going to talk about that. So if you're listening and say, I'm in a cube and I don't have any control, this isn't worth my time. No, it is. In fact, you need the show more than anybody else because you've got to start to work on those environmental dials

even even if you have very little control over them as much as you can because this stuff really matters right have you ever realized that i mean have you ever noticed it in yourself the change of environment and or like made a change in your environment and notice a change the way you worked well i've noticed that when I change my environment, it does wonders for my ability to think about things. So a couple specific things that I do just day to day, I find myself at a point where I can't figure out what to do about a particular problem or I hit a wall writing something. That's usually the time when I'll go for a run and getting out into a different environment kind of shakes things up and allows things to flow again.

It's usually when I'm out for a run that I'll get the idea or the solution. the idea or the solution. And I've got drafts on my Apple Watch that I've started capturing those things because more than once, I'm like, I'll remember that when I get back and I don't. And that's where all the good stuff comes from is when I'm in a different environment. And then likewise, with the personal retreat stuff, I go away to a different location. And the whole purpose there is that I'm going to think about things differently when I'm not around my normal surroundings. Yeah, I think the blunt instrument of environmental impact on focus is when you're stuck. That's the obvious one. And I think almost everybody has experienced that where you're stuck on something

and you take the dog for a walk or you go get coffee or you do something and you get yourself unstuck without even really trying. It feels like whereas when you stay in your current environment, there's like no way out. And I think a lot of people experience that. a lot more subtle than that where I have found that over time I have certain environments that particularly lend themselves to certain kinds of work or or focus modes and by just kind of embracing that I it's like a shortcut in my brain to get focused so like all of a sudden environment is at you know we're talking about environment here really as a way to stay focused. Like how do you engineer your environment so you don't lose focus, but you can actually turn environment into a tool to turn on focus, which I think is like the second level of

this stuff. And we're going to get into all that in the show, but I was just curious going in, if you've noticed it and I definitely have. And I think if you're listening to the show, I'd like you to just take a minute and think about sometime you were stuck and how you got unstuck and if it didn't involve a change of environment, because so often it does. Environment is, this is no mystery that people use environment to affect focus. The example that Annie Murphy Paul used in her book was this Jonas Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. I've actually been there. It's really cool. And it was built in the 60s. And he wanted to create an environment that would encourage, you know, Nobel Prize winning

scientists to further science. And it's right on the ocean. The architecture really does kind of look like something out of an older age because it was the 60s and the construction techniques and things. But for the time, it's got a lot of glass, and you've got a lot of views of the ocean. I found a virtual tour of the Salk Institute online. I'm going to put it in the show notes. You should check it out just if you're curious. But that is a building that was engineered to encourage focus. And that's a thing that you can do. But that's one of the first examples I'm aware of that did it.

I've not seen the virtual tour that you mentioned, but looking at some of the pictures online, this looks like a very interesting place. Yeah. And one of the things she talked about in the book that also kind of rung with me was like monasteries of the Middle Ages and how they were engineered around focus and the way, you know, the living quarters were set up and, you know, giving people enough exposure to each other, but also giving them a space to work and be solo. In a lot of ways, I think that actually affected Dr. Salk's thinking for the Salk Institute. And that was really fascinating.

So, I mean, I've recommended this book so many times now. If you're not going to read it, don't read it, but it's a good book. And another one that stood out to me when I was reading this was the pixar building up in i think it's in berkeley it's not in berkeley but it's near berkeley and um that's the building steve jobs had a huge say over and it was you know pixar grew up kind of explosively at the beginning and famously when they made a toy story to the company kind of imploded like there was all these stories i think it was the ed catmull book he was talking about how somebody left their baby in the car and it was okay but it was very dangerous and and they had people working in different buildings all over the city and it was was like a huge mess. And Jobs is like, okay, guys,

we have enough money. We need to make a building to encourage creativity. And that's a form of focus. He wanted a building for creativity. And what he wanted was delightful interactions, I think is, and this is coming from the Steve Jobs book, I think. I've read so many things about Steve Jobs. I'm not sure where they all come from at this point. But he wanted people to bump into each other, but he also wanted them to have space to work. And one of the things he had wanted when they were planning it was he wanted a single bathroom for the whole building. Well, a single men's room and women's room. And the architect in the city planning commission was like,

no, you can't do that. You know, you have to. But his idea was, if you only have one bathroom, everybody has to go to the bathroom. You're going to bump into people. And let's just force them to do that. And it was very intentional. And if you look at the architecture of the building, it's the same thing. They have this big, like, barn center where everybody is forced to walk through on their way to their individual

workspaces and the whole idea is to encourage you know individual interaction but allow for focus and so we've got you know a version from the 1960s we've got a version from i think it was the ought tens that i don't know when that was built but it wasn't you know i think it was in the last 10 years maybe a little bit longer i first see it's been gone a while now. Yeah. I don't remember when it was built, but I do remember reading Creativity Inc. And there's some cool examples of just how the environment changes the way people work. We're talking about it specifically from the ability to focus. But one of the stories that stands out to me still from that book is they were having these meetings and they had this big, long table. And the people who were quote unquote important sat at the middle and everybody else kind of moved towards the ends in order of rank.

And some people didn't get to sit at all. And so the people way on the ends didn't get to sit at all. And so the people way on the ends didn't get to contribute to the meetings. And so they got rid of that table and built a big square one. So nobody had an advantage over anybody else when they sat down to have a meeting. And that is kind of brilliant when you think about it. And it's not something you maybe would think about. You'd probably just go to that sort of meeting, sit down at the end and walk out of it and feel like, well, that was a waste of time. And that's simply because of the environment that you happen to be in when that meeting took place. So the long and the short of it is that we're monkeys,

we're not computers, and monkeys' environment matters. And this this shows about staying focused and productive but I think this is something that everybody should be intentional about in designing your workspace and there's all there's all sorts of implications for this I want to kind of talk through this in a minute but I also want to thank Mike and just put this in the back of your brain because I didn't put this in the outline. What if you had an unlimited budget to build a workspace for yourself? You know, I think that would be kind of a fun thought experiment. Let's get to that in just a minute. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Indeed. If you're ready to take your business to the next level, you'll need the right team to make it happen. Indeed makes it easy to hire and build a team with the right skills to make those thoughts you've had about growing your business a reality. If you're hiring, you need Indeed because Indeed

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I mean, of the last 50 years or so, right? That's kind of what we've evolved to. Yeah. And that's exactly what I thought of when you mentioned the Salk Institute and the model of the monastery. Maybe it's just my own upbringing, but that's the picture that I got. It's like, you have this room, you have your bed, you have a chair, you have an old wooden desk, and that's it. That's not appealing to me. But that's not the point that you were making. These physical workspaces, though, and I love that question that you asked about the unlimited budget. I think that this is really cool,

like the different sorts of levers that you can pull here with things that maybe cost a lot of money but don't necessarily have to in terms of changing your physical workspace. Yeah. Well, I don't want to answer that question yet. I want to kind of go through the mechanics first. But if you look, you know, the idea, and really, let's say the last, instead of 50 years, the last 25 to 30 years, it's really evolved as the emergence of the personal computer arrived. And, you know, and that was dictated by the constraints of computer technology. You needed a desk that could hold a big CRT monitor for a very long time.

And you needed a place that you could stick a big box underneath and have a keyboard on. And the workplace kind of adapted to the idea that you do your thinking while seated at a computer with a cathode ray in front of you. And that was a fairly short period of time. I mean, the CRT monitors are already gone, so they're a lot lighter now. Laptops are much more popular than desktop computers. And now a lot of people think about a workspace as like these rooms with a lot of empty desks where you can take your laptop and sit it but that it seems to me like the technology has been driving the idea of what is the space where you do your thinking and i think that's a mistake

you know i think we've really kind of let ourselves be led around by technology on this where we should be thinking about the monkey's brain instead of the technology more in terms of you know determining workspace where we can stay focused i agree with you i also remember growing up having a big roll top desk that my dad had bought which had a cutout space for that CRT monitor. And it had a built-in surge protector style thing with the six different switches in the front. And on the left was a big pull-out drawer, which had two shelves, one for the computer and one for the printer. And I remember when we got it thinking, oh, that is so cool that it's custom designed for this technology now i go to their house and i see it like that seems so long ago you know it's fire

what are you going to do with this stuff now yeah exactly yeah i i do think that is something and and just the idea that you need to be seated and you know relatively stationary to do your thinking i don't think that really uh jives with our species and you know getting back this whole subject was inspired by this book so i'm going to keep going back to it but you know for generations on generations, humans did their thinking while wandering the plains. You know, I mean, we were not a stationary species until very recently. And there's something to that, right? I mean, the technology evolved so quickly, but the brain doesn't. And, you know, that's why all of a sudden there's all this interest in desks that can switch between standing and sitting modes and people getting on treadmills or just taking walks and and people are like

rediscovering ways to unlock focus and concentration which goes against the grain of what historically was considered for our generation serious work i think that though, there's a little bit of a wrong motivation for a lot of that stuff. At least speaking from my own experience, I know I fell into that trap. It's like, oh, I can get a standing desk because then I can be more focused. And there is something about focusing when you're standing up, but you're not careful, all that leads to is greater efficiency, which is fine to a certain point, but the reward for getting done with your work faster is always going to be more work for you to do. So there are limits with this and the treadmill desks and all that kind of stuff, that's great for helping you focus on the task at hand. But when you think about focus and

intentionality, I think there's a parallel here with thinking time, which requires you not just to be moving, but requires you to be in a different place. That's the whole idea of context switching. And you have to get out of your current location into someplace different for that context switch to really happen you don't have to go you know a certain number of miles or anything like that my home office we're going to talk about that later i think is kind of set up with like different areas for for different things but you have to go to a different place in order to think a different way yeah i'd I'd like to start though, even more fundamental of the idea of stationary versus motion. Because like one of the other people

I worked with at the firm was really like into the idea that you did your work seated at your desk because that's what he grew up doing. And that's what the generation before him did. But this is all relatively new. And I did a lot of my work in the firm pacing around my desk. I had a whiteboard on the wall and a pen. I'd literally walk in circles around my desk. I don't know, maybe miles a day. I mean, to the extent that the carpet was worn. And every time I was on the phone call, I had a headset and I'd walk around the desk. I just could not sit and work. It's just never been something that works particularly well for me. So I've always wanted some degree of motion in it. And I really do think that helps me with focus. And, you know, this is a spectrum and all of us are different, but I think as a species,

motion does help us. And I've never really bought into the idea of a treadmill desk, but I've never taken one seriously either. So if you're using one, that's great. They cite a study in the book about radiologists who were doing their radiology reviews sitting at a desk versus ones doing at a treadmill desk. And the treadmill desks, ones caught more mistakes, they caught more problems um so i don't know you know take it with a grain of salt some of these studies are hard to you know hard to believe but the uh but i do think like just the idea of introducing motion to your workspace can help i agree with that i i just think you got to be careful with how you

apply that. And again, that's just based on my own personal experience, I guess, and the traps that I've fallen into. But yeah, I agree. I mean, I've got a standing desk here because I find it, I'm more energized when I'm standing than when I am sitting at a desk. So there's definitely some truth to that kind of stuff. But also recognizing what is the type of work that really moves the needle for you? What's

the stuff that really matters? And going forward in the digital economy, I kind of feel it's the stuff that is solving problems. It's not the rote, you know, I'm going to do this thing as quickly as possible. Even cranking out words to a certain extent for me is a lot of the writing and stuff that I do. That's all fine and good but there's a a point where the human brain really just can do certain things that can't be automated or done by machines yeah and that's the kind of stuff where i think movement can help a little bit but it's not going to get you all the way there yeah agreed and and but and i think a standing desk is great i think a sit-stand desk is better because it allows you to introduce change. And change in environment, even going from sitting to standing, can sometimes give you that little bit of extra chemicals that you need.

But it's not just that. I mean, I have a comfy chair in my studio, and I love to sit in it and do certain things. And this kind of gets back to context engineering, where I'm trying to do certain things in certain places. So when I just sit there, my brain suddenly triggers a focus mode, which is like the second level stuff I want to get into later. you need to take in consideration when you're thinking about focus. A couple of categories that came to me. The first one is just, you know, kind of how much ownership do you have of the space? Like,

and like, if you work for someone where they're like, Hey, this little five by five cubicle is yours, but you're not allowed to put up any pictures from home and we want to keep everything very sterile. I think that can really constrain focus because you it's hard to feel safe in a space that isn't really yours and um there's studies behind this

as well i think um i think was it was it this book that i read about the study where they talked about where they they made everything sterile and then they let people like personalize and they were became suddenly more productive i've read too many books the um um and i think that's cool but and we're going to talk about our spaces but in a minute but i really have kind of like tried to think about that and put stuff in my space that makes me happy and also motivates me and but at the same time, I like things pretty clean, you know, it's like so much so that sometimes I'll take out something that's actually productive just because I don't like the clutter of it, you know, but I think we all kind of figure out our own balance there.

Yeah. And I also think that something to pay attention to, um, you're right that more personalized spaces are going to provide for lack of a better term, a productivity or focus boost used tactically. Context switching can also, though, and I'm thinking about like if you are working at home, you don't have a home office that you can decorate the way that you want to. office that you can decorate the way that you want to. Even just going to a coffee shop or a co-working space, something that maybe you can't really personalize that space. And it is sterile. In some instances, I actually kind of find that preferable. I don't know if it's just because our house is lived in and there's piles of stuff occasionally and go in in different ways and provide maybe some some different results yeah and i think that's another environmental trigger is cleanliness you know and some people can work amidst chaos and and there's you know everybody's on the spectrum

of this like my wife is she likes to keep a lot of stuff. So it like ends up like in piles around the house. And that's, that's not, I don't like that, you know, but you know, I mean, we have all the problems you could have with your marriage. That's not a very big one. You know, we work around it and she likes, she knows that about me. So the spaces that are mine get left alone. But yeah, I think there is something to that and to me it's it's not healthy sometimes how much i want things like clean and neat when i'm working

too much so that it's like is that an attempt for me to forestall actually doing the work like if i sit down to do important work and there's a lot of stuff on my desk i will have to address that before i can start the work and And we're going to look at our pictures later, but your space is more cluttered than mine. And it bugs me looking at it. But I think that says more about me than you. Well, I think there's an element of truth to that. I think regardless of what you prefer, there is some benefit to be had from things being orderly. But that being said, yeah, there's a bunch of stuff on my desk that I enjoy seeing.

So I don't feel the pressure like I got to clean this up. I'm going to put in the show notes here a Twitter thread that I stumbled across. This must have been a couple of years ago by Drew Kaufman of artists' desks that were covered with, in his words, an insane amount of stuff. Starting with Steve Jobs and then Oliver Sacks, and there's a whole bunch more Walt Disney. And some of these, even for me with my clutter desk, I look at these and I have a visceral negative reaction to looking at these. But it also seems like some of the most brilliant, creative people, maybe they do kind of thrive in this environment. So maybe there's something else that turns on the spigot of creativity for them.

on the spigot of creativity for them. Yeah. I mean, when I had my office in the firm and other lawyers would come sit with me, they'd look around my office and it would be, it would be, it would unhinge them because there was never like stacks of documents on the floor. Like all lawyers offices have stacks of files everywhere. And very early in my career, I just decided to digitize everything. So I just didn't have the stacks. Everything was very ship shape, you know? And so they either thought I was just a weirdo or I didn't have any business. Like I didn't have any clients because of my office. But yeah, so that's, that's the thing. And you got to be, I think you have to accept that about yourself as you're planning to create environments, to be focused. Another element in addition to ownership and cleanliness is noise and other people. Can you work good in a room full of background noise?

I find that a room that is completely silent, I cannot work in. I need a degree of noise. I have tinnitus, so I just hear noise anyway. I need a degree of noise. I have tinnitus, so I just hear noise anyway. But I want use as background noise whenever I was studying. A lot of my roommates thought I was crazy, but I could not focus unless there was some background noise. I've since moved on from movies to generally, there's like these focus music tracks that don't have any words and and i think those do work better for me now but yeah i've been doing this for a long time and i didn't even realize it

was a thing it wasn't an intentional choice that i made i just realized that i always had a movie playing and i was frequently not watching it i was doing something else but had to be something in the background. Yeah. And then there's like on YouTube, there's entire channels. It'll be like the Hogwarts library or whatever. And it'll put some static or relatively static image on and play music or sound effects in the background. I find that very useful as well. But some people don't like that. They really want silence. And all of this is kind of a self-assessment thing. You've got to figure out what works for you. But I think you kind of got to go through the checklist to figure it out. The last piece of this is other people. Like, can you work around other people? And this is increasingly an issue

because a lot of workplaces now are building out workspaces, you know, kind of with the evolving nature of technology where it used to be they'd have a cubicle farm or a bunch of little offices. Now they've got a bunch of couches and bar stools and they expect you to just take your laptop and wander around and find places to sit and work. And by that nature, you're going to be working with other people in the room. Yeah, I kind of wonder, you mentioned Steve Jobs designing the Pixar building with a single, wanting to design it with a single bathroom so people bumped into each other. And there's this big trend towards open offices and a lot of negative thoughts towards that approach. And from a focus perspective, I totally get it. But I also think that they're not necessarily bad. It depends on the nature

of the work that you're doing. If you're doing more collaborative work, that might be the ideal environment for you. It's when you're forced to focus on something as a monotask and you have to do it in that environment that it gets really difficult. But I kind of wonder how Steve Jobs would feel about that sort of trend. Because I think there's a time and place for both of those. Yes, I think that's right. I mean, if you look at kind of the Cal Newport deep work definition, I think that would be hard in a room full of people.

Because other humans do things. And as humans, we're always interested in other humans. If I'm sitting here trying to do deep work and Mike Schmitz is sitting next to me, you know, beep bopping along to some song that I can't stand, it's going to affect my ability to focus. And if you look at Pixar,

the interesting thing is he really did design it for both. He was very interested in the common areas and the one big bathroom. But also, you know, the creatives have their own spaces. In fact, famously, if you go on YouTube and you look it up, they decorate them extensively, you know, and they create these little like theme parks and their little office spaces

where they can go and be alone in there and do creative work. So they accounted for both. Now, as I understand, the new apple campus doesn't really do that it's almost everything is common space and these are some very smart people that are required to now work in that environment and i'm very curious to see how that all plays out see that that's the the thing though is when you have those separate spaces that requires some self-management to know which mode which environment to put yourself in when yeah i feel like getting back to the monkey brain part we're really bad at that yeah we seek out the distraction a lot of times when what we

should be doing is going to the the isolated environment that my office, I call it the focus cave. We should be going into our focus cave to do something, but that's the exact moment that you want to find out what everybody else is doing. Yeah. It's a nice escape, right?

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that we got to pay attention to, though. So what else should we be looking out for? For me, it's digital workspaces. I mean, and that's what's going on on your screen. I think that is another area of clutter, disorganization, and potential distraction. And that's one of the reasons why I have a podcast called The Automators, honestly, So I really like to have my computer kind of set itself up for me when I want to do a certain kind of work. Like when I record a podcast, I can tell you right now I'm looking at my screen. The left side of the screen is a show outline.

The right side of the screen is all the recording tools so I can make sure everything's working. And that's kind of evolved over the years like for instance the uh the the outline is closer to the left side of the screen because that's where the microphone is and i want to have i i don't want to talk away from the microphone and like i've kind of built the whole system around getting the best possible recording and i don't like set those windows up anymore i just sit down and i press my podcast setup and everything happens. And bringing intentionality to digital setups, I think also helps with focus. I mean, and when I see the screen like this, my brain, the wires in my brain that connect to, okay,

now you're going to give up, make a podcast, get connected. It's not me manually plugging things. And it's honestly like my eyeball seeing this screen, and then I'm like, okay, time to make a podcast. Let's go. Yeah, I like the thought and the intention paid towards the digital workspaces. A lot of the things you're talking about, the automation, the window arrangements,

opening different apps, positioning them specifically to facilitate the task that you're working on. That's all well and good. I think where things get really interesting is with the devices that are typically kind of fall in the gray zone. For me, and it sounds like for you, the computer is the place where the work happens. But there's a whole other set of things to consider when you pick up your phone or your tablet. pick up your phone or your tablet. And that, again, these are all different contexts which can benefit greatly from some intentional constraints maybe that you would apply to them to force you down a, maybe not force, maybe that's a too strong a word, but lead you down a path of desired activity. And really, we're all just creatures of habit. So

if you're just going to sit down at a digital device without any thought to what you're going to do when you get there, that's when you find yourself scrolling through social media, constantly checking email, those types of things. At least that's my experience. So how do you deal with it? types of things at least that's my experience so how do you deal with it well for my phone specifically i have a widget for widget smith right on my home screen that says create not consume so when i open it up that's what i see and i've been very careful about selecting apps for the that front screen which are going to facilitate what I determined to be positive technology uses or net positive technology uses. So I've got things on there like Obsidian,

MindNode, where I'll take notes on the books that I read, Drafts, where I'll capture some notes, some different things that I use for communicating, but not anything social, not anything email, communicating, but not anything social, not anything email, things that support my morning and evening routines, a big widget that shows me how much water I've drank today, because that's a habit I want to reinforce. And basically just stacking that front screen with as many cues as possible, which would take me in a positive direction. Everything else is there. I can search for Twitterific if I want to, but it's not there looking at me when I open it up. And that is, for some people, maybe not going to be enough. For some people, that maybe seems like, why in the world would you do that? Do you really not have enough self-control that if you saw the Twitter app on your home screen, you're just going to go into it?

Yeah, yeah, I've been there. I've had that muscle memory, and it felt really weird for the weeks that I was trying to break that. So I guess I'm just that gullible that if it's in my face, I'm going to tap on it, and I needed to remove it. So when Apple first announced Focus Mode for the iPhone and iPad and Mac, we talked about it on the show, but now it's been out for a while. Are you using any of that stuff to help along this path? I am using it very, very lightly. I know you've kind of gone all in with these different focus modes. That might actually be a really cool topic at some point because I've had on my list for a while

to reconsider these focus modes and how I might use them. But I really don't use them a lot. I just use Do Not Disturb whenever I'm going to be doing something like recording a podcast, you know, so that I don't get the dings in the background from a text message or something.

Yeah, I use them extensively. And I've talked about a lot on the automators and Mac Power User, so we don't need to repeat it here. But the big picture is you can set focus modes. And one of the things you can do is you can change the home screen on your devices based on which focus mode you are in. And it's per device. If I want to sit and read, I can turn on the reading mode and the reading app show up on my iPad. And the notification, people that can get a hold of me, the list goes way down. Or if I'm going to, like right now, I'm in podcast mode. So there's some real power there with what they've done.

And if you're struggling to kind of wrangle your digital stuff, I would recommend spending some time looking into how to do it and try some serious experiments with it. Because once again, I mean, we want to get you to the next level with this. I mean, it's not enough just to say, how can I engineer my surroundings to help me be more focused? It's almost better if you get to that level of like, how can I engineer my surroundings to focus me you know it's not a question of holding on it's a question of turning on i like that a lot and uh if i had not already ruthlessly eliminated

as many potential distractions from my phone as I possibly could prior to the focus modes being released, I probably would be using them a lot more extensively. I don't really, I don't really need those on my computer though, because the computer is the place that I actually need to see some of those notifications. I don't like the way that they sync over across different devices. I'm sure there's a way I could make that work. But on my phone, I've changed everything. So it only refreshes when I tell it to refresh. I've turned off all notifications for just about everything. And it took some getting used to and made some people mad when they couldn't get a hold of me right away but uh i've i'm okay with that that's a trade i'm willing to make and people

have just learned like this is i guess one of the difficulties of of dealing with mike but uh it does now that those expectations are set you know it i i don't need to allow certain people in i'm fine just keeping out everybody for this short period of time. And you might have that argument, well, what if something terrible happened and your wife needed to get a hold of you? I'll get it when I'm done recording and it'll be fine. That's kind of my approach. Maybe that's wrong, but that's kind of where I've landed on it.

And that's not, there, there really isn't any wrong answers. I think the purpose of the show is to get people to think about it and run some experiments. But for me, like I like being able to get messages from the person I'm podcasting with. So I punch holes for that person. And, um, you know, it's making a podcast is great, but it's not brain surgery. If my daughter gets a flat tire or something and texts me while recording the show, I may interrupt the show to try and help her get through whatever she's dealing with. So it just depends, you know, and we all make our own choices with this stuff. But the point I'd like to make is that Apple has given you some tools if you're on the Apple platforms that make this a

lot easier than it's ever been. So that's really useful. But the actual stuff that I do for triggering focus modes, and it kind of gets to this idea that I've been talking about on my other shows of contextual computing, is setting context with what appears on the screen. And I think too often if you've got your mail application open, that's going to become the thing that you focus on instead of the word processing document or the art document or whatever it is that you're trying to create. And so I like to eliminate those types of distractions through automation and have my computer do things. I've got a mode where if I'm doing file transfer activities, the computer arranges itself for that.

If I'm making a podcast, if I'm making a screencast, if I'm managing calendars and email, I've got different modes. And if you use those and you build them over time, your brain will automatically trigger into that mode when it sees it. And that's really powerful. Like if I push a button on my computer and suddenly I'm, you know, putting a mindset to do my art, then I'm winning. You know, that helps. And that's all we can ask for.

Because computers these days are not engineered to help you work. They're engineered to buy it, to sell your attention to third parties. I mean, the whole underlying premise of technology has changed underneath our feet. And I think as people who use these things, we have to take, you know, rest control back and we have to do whatever it takes to help us keep the focus. I mean, the reason we make this show is because I think it's a big deal and I don't think enough people have got their eyes on the ball. So I want to ask you a question

based on some of the environmental concerns that you had raised in the previous section on physical workspaces. I feel like some of these can apply to your digital workspaces as well, like the sterile versus personalized. I get that. People are going to personalize their devices.

They have the pictures they want to see, things like that. I'm curious, though, what you think in terms of cleanliness and file management or lack thereof. Do you think that when it comes to your digital workspaces, you need to keep, and again, your personal experience, desktop clean, things organized in folders. Does that kind of stuff bother you? You know, if you've been listening to the show, you probably know the answer already. The stuff that's on my desktop is there for a very short period of time. And then it gets put wherever it belongs. I do have an action folder.

If you saw my Hazel Field Guide, you know, I have a place that I put things into where a bunch of automation rules are applied. And sometimes the automation doesn't capture everything. And usually that means once in a while I'll sit down and look at what didn't get automatically filed and then I'll figure out how to set it so it does in the future. Maybe I need to add some tags to them or whatever. But largely I like the system to maintain itself but i want everything clean so i have a confession to make then okay uh i discovered an app called desktop curtain which basically covers up everything on the desktop i'm familiar and the desktop has become my my action item folder yeah i get it it's okay but it's just not for me you know yeah that's fine

i mean the daisy's like that too she has so many icons on her desktop that they overlap like it's like they literally overlap each other and like sometimes it's hard to get to one because it's got another one right on top of it but you know to each his own but that's a thing for me and like i said i i'm not saying this that everybody should copy the way i do things i just want you to be aware of these things and think them through for yourself but um my fixation with keeping things neat and tidy combined with my my automation chops means it doesn't become a big deal for me to do that you know i've built the tools to do it for me. The robots

handle that stuff. But either way, you know, one thing we didn't haven't talked about yet, and this kind of gets back more to physical spaces, though, is like, what kind of advice do you give to someone who's listening to the show and says, yeah, I am in a cubicle and I have no control over what, you know, is done in my cubicle? That's a good point. I think the general advice, which maybe isn't going to appear to be super helpful, is to control what you can control. So if that's where you find yourself, don't get upset that that's where you find yourself. Speaking to past me, I would have resented the fact that, oh, listen to these guys talking about their home offices and all the stuff that they're able to control and get upset that I couldn't do the same sort of thing myself. your environment isn't real great for facilitating deep focused work or whatever it is that you need to do effectively well.

And, and now you've got an emotional mess that you've got to sort through, which is fighting against you doing the task well also. And I would say find and win some little battles. You know, what if you put an orchid next to your computer? Are they really going to fight you on that? A living thing, sharing your space with you can be nice.

Put some art on the walls that brings you joy and delight. Or pictures of your family or whatever. Just try and win some battles. And just figure out where those lines are drawn. Be the edge case in your office. the one who's always pushing the limit. I like that. And I also think that a lot of these companies, I mean, if they're smart, they want results. And if you're somebody who's producing good results, they aren't going to,

they're going to lose their mind over your weird practices. Like when I was in my office, a lot of the other older attorneys thought it was nuts. Because I built my own standing desk. And it was a standing desk. It was not a stand desk. And this was a long time ago. And I moved into my office with a big hunk of walnut and maple. And I was wearing out the carpet. I was the first one to get a cordless phone because I wanted to walk around and talk.

I put this big whiteboard on my wall, and they would come in and shake their head once in a while at all the stuff I was doing in there, but I got results, so they left me alone in general. Yeah. One other more general tip that I like, how you mentioned the automation keeping your digital workspace clean and doing the work for you.

And my next thought was, wouldn't it be great if you could do that in your physical environment as well? But I think there probably are little ways that you could do that. One thing that comes to mind is like a little robot vacuum. And I don't have any experience with these. about vacuum and I don't have any experience with these, but if that's something that really just drives you nuts having to do that, you could solve that problem of having to, to sweep your floor, vacuum your floor with, uh, with a robot. We talked on the show years ago about Misen plus, you know, the idea of the chef's idea that, you know, there's a place for the knives and all the tools you need when you're in the kitchen and if you have things in their places

it works better and i really kind of apply that to my workspace i've got that kaizen foam in my drawers so all of my tools go into a specific place and by tools i'm not talking about hammers i'm talking about the things i use to create digital content. And I find putting them away and keeping it clean is like a nice transition. Like when I sit down to screencast, I may get a bunch of cables out to record things and whatever I need to like make this happen. Maybe I'll set up multiple cameras or anything. And when I finished that block, before I start the next block, the process of maybe putting a podcast in my ear and just kind of tidying up the cables, putting things away and just kind of bringing the workspace back to zero and starting the next thing, that actually helps me transition. It's like pulling weeds or doing anything else, right? It's kind of brainless It's like pulling weeds or doing anything else, right? It's kind of brainless way to transition. So I kind of use it to my advantage.

But again, everybody listening to this doesn't need to be as anal retentive as I am about stuff like this. If you just keep stuff in your head, that's fine. But what I want you to do is be intentional about finding what conditions lead you to focus and what conditions lead you away from focus. And then make an effort to lean into it so you can use this stuff to get your work done and get home and have fun and not have to work all the time. And do good work that you're proud of. home and have fun and not have to work all the time and do good work that you're proud of. entrepreneurs the resources once reserved exclusively for big business. So upstarts, startups, and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in-person sales, and effortlessly stay informed. Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. And if you're looking to scale your business, you should check out Shopify because it makes it

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F-O-C-U-S-E-D. That URL one more time, shopify.com slash focused. Remember, that's all lowercase. Our thanks to Shopify for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. All right, Mike, you want to talk about what we've done in terms of engineering our workspaces? I mean, this book actually made me rethink a lot of things when I read it. Yeah. So my workspace, I realize as you were talking about previously, you mentioned what conditions lead to focus. And I recognize that for me, it is eliminating the friction with starting

the task, which is why when you look at my messy desk, everything on there is basically in a place where whatever task I need to do, I can get into that mode as quickly as possible. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like I was thinking about looking, because are you okay if we share a couple pictures of our workspaces in the show notes? Yes, absolutely.

So Mike has two different cameras on his desk, and he's got also studio lighting on his desk. And so you can go from the idea of like, hey, I'm going to make a video to recording the video in about 30 seconds. It's true. It's true. So when I was making some videos for the suite setup a couple of years ago, being forced to do it from home, I had all the lights, I had all the camera gear, and I would set everything up, I would test it, and I didn't know see something wrong. Ah, got to do it again. Problem was it took me a really long time to set all that stuff up. And every time I would set it up again, it wasn't consistent. And so what I ended up doing is I've got bolted onto my desk a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4K that is sitting inside of a teleprompter. So I can throw my iPad up there

and have words for scripts if I need them. I can also use that camera just as a webcam. I've got some Elgato Keylight Airs that are on my desk and I can turn those on with a Stream Deck button. And you're right, within 15 seconds, probably I can go from, Hey, I've got this idea to a video to actually recording it. And that makes it a lot easier for me to sit down and record videos because there was a lot of times when I would have an idea for something that I wanted to record, like, Oh, that's great. That's a cool idea. I don't want to set up all the lights. I don't want to set up all the cameras. Even if it's just like I need to double check that the focus is correct or the ISO with any of the camera settings weren't messed up. That was enough friction for me not to do them. And it means

that a lot of stuff just never got created because, oh, it's too much work. Even if it really wasn't a whole lot, this is literally just turn on the camera, turn on the lights and I'm ready to go. Yeah. And I've gone the opposite direction with that in my studio in terms of camera stuff is I plan for it. Like I do, I have planned video shoot days and I spend time kind of like playing, what am I going to say? And kind of laying it out. And then I set up that day and I spend time kind of like playing what am I going to say and kind of laying it out and then I set up that day and I've timed it it takes me about 10 minutes to get my lighting set up and my camera on a tripod it doesn't take long because I've kind of streamlined everything but that's 10 minutes and for a lot of people 10 minutes is way too long to bother doing it right

but if I've decided I'm going to shoot three or four that day, it's not that long to set it up. And to me, the clutter of having all that stuff on my desk all the time, not to mention like my, my preferred video angles, aren't the angles of shooting from the desk back to me in my chair. I have different angles I want. So I would literally, if I wanted to have it set up that way to have to have it on like a rolling tripod in the middle of my house. So it's just, you know, for me, I went the opposite direction with it. And I don't think either one is wrong. I think there's a lot of argument that yours is the better solution because it removes friction, but I've kind of got to the point where the, I find the process of setting things up for the video gives me a chance to like rehearse it. Like I actually, a lot of times we'll say the words gives me a chance to like rehearse it like i actually a

lot of times will say the words out loud while i'm connecting pipes and putting things together just to get used to getting the words over my lips so it's almost like a dress rehearsal while i'm setting things up it's just not that big of a deal to me to do that and uh but it took me a while to get there and like it's affected the equipment choices I've made and things like that because I don't want equipment that's super complicated to set up because then it will take more than 10 or 15 minutes. It'll take half hour to an hour and then I'm not going to do it. You and I are very different people, but I wish I was like you.

Well, that's not the point. I mean, we're all... I mean, honestly, I think that you've got... We're going to talk at some point about unlimited budget. If I had unlimited budget, I would have dedicated camera studio space. You know, Michael Hyatt has a setup, he told me, where he took a picture of his office super clean and then had it blown up like wall size. And then he drives that, and then he stands in front of a camera and then talks. And if you're watching the video, it looks like he's in his office because, you know,

cameras aren't that smart. And it's like, that's, if I had the space and the money, I would have a nice camera, maybe a couple of nice cameras, like locked in on tripods that don't move. And, you know, everything just set. Like I just watched a video recently of NKBHD's studio and he's got rooms there set up for shooting, you know, and that would be great. But I don't have that space. So I've got to, you know, I've got to set things up when I need to do that. Yeah, just the thought of setting stuff up, though, it makes my skin crawl. Okay, well, then you shouldn't do that. I feel like, yeah, I think that part of that is like, yeah, like you said, you got over it. I don't know why I cannot get over that.

I even have on my desk here, if you look at this picture closely, not only do I have two cameras, I have two microphones. Because for the Intentional Family podcast I do with my wife, I never want to have to touch her microphone. I don't want to have to set any levels. Those are both permanently wired to the MixPre3 sitting on my desk so that all we need to do is swing down the boom arm when it's time to record every other week. Even just setting that up for a couple of minutes, which that's not hard,

but I just never, ever want to touch that stuff. Yeah. Well, I mean, I get it. And to me to sit there and look at an unused microphone, except for one hour a week and have to look at it every day on my desk, it would drive me up a flipping wall, you know? Yep.

Yeah. Yeah, I get it. I get it. I've been struggling lately um i talked on the mac power users about me and this thing called the vestiboard which is like this piece of like it's a flip board that you stick on a wall it's connected to the internet and i've been lusting after one for literally years and i at one point like shortly before I decided to quit being a lawyer I did a big project and and got made some money and because these things are like three grand and I'm like

you know what I'm just going to take that three grand and I'm going to put it in an account I'm going to buy a flipboard so I ordered one and then like I'm thinking what am I going to do with this flipboard you know I love the sound of it and the idea of it but i feel like that's so much money right and when i talked on um deep focus a while ago how i'm rekindling my interest in woodworking and like they make a thing now called the hot dog saw you know it's well i call it the hot dog saw it's called a saw stop if it touches meat the blade slams into a piece of aluminum and drops down so you don't cut your finger off with it you know well hot dog saw is the same amount as a flipboard you know so i realized i would rather have my fingers than a flipboard so i canceled the flipboard that that's the big you know like okay

oh okay you know i can't i you know i just cut off half my income i can't just be crazy you know and yeah i think well i don't have a flipboard. I could put up a second screen. And the stuff I was going to use on the flipboard, I could put up on the second screen. So I have a 4K monitor because I used to have extra vertical screens. And I put it up. And Annie Murphy-Paul in this book talks about how much better it is

with computers to have more screen space so you don't have to switch between screens. And I've had it up for like five hours because I started it this morning before we recorded today. I can already tell this thing's going to go because I hate the sight of it on my desk. It has nothing to do with its utility. I just don't want it on my desk. So it's a sickness. One thing I do want to talk about with some of the pictures that I shared with my office here is I don't have a huge office, but I basically have three different zones in my office. So I have the desk, which is where all of the work happens. But then to the side of that, I have this giant beanbag chair with a beanbag ottoman that is kind of like my thinking chair. This was totally inspired by Sean McCabe. Yeah. And this also, I'll put a link to this in the show notes.

It's a brand called Corduroy's. We don't have a guest bedroom at our house and we don't have anybody who's come to stay with us in the last couple years anyways.

But I do think that it would be nice to have somewhere for someone to sleep if they needed to stay

at our house. And so this thing actually is a queen size mattress that when you take out the bag from the inside of the chair, it puffs up and it's comfier than any air mattress I've ever slept on. And so the thought is that if someone really needed a place to stay, then my office could potentially be like a guest bedroom. But like I said, that hasn't happened. It's just been the comfy thinking chair for me. And that's also the place that, you know, a while ago you were telling me that I should really try taking a nap every once in a while. Well, that's the napping spot now as well. And then the other spot that I have here is this office that we built is at the bottom of our basement stairs. And it just so happened that this little cutout in the side is the perfect size for this old leather couch that I didn't even really want. My parents just kind of dropped it off one day, but it fits perfectly in the office. And so

that is a place where I can go to just, it feels like I'm going somewhere else. It's literally three feet away from me as I'm recording this podcast right now on the other side of these monitors, but it's a couch and it's got footrests that pop out and there's a coffee table right there and so when I just need a different angle even for thinking about something while I'm working on something I'll just grab the the laptop that I've got now which is kind of my I'm living the David Sparks single computer lifestyle and uh go there open it up and it just feels like a different different environment even though it's literally in the exact same space yeah see now if i had your space i would get rid of the couch and turn that

into a video production space i'm considering that yeah the couch is a pain in the pain in the butt to get get out of here. Set it fire and just come back the next day. Sweep it up. Yeah, that's good, though. I mean, it's nice. I have a chair as well next to my desk. We call it in the family the co-pilot chair because my dog sleeps on it most of the day.

But I also sit in that chair, and's like where i sit with um my ipad and go through my task lists and like it's like you know i talked earlier about you know context with switching on location it can be as simple as a chair next to your desk and when i'm there i feel very motivated to do things like journal and manage tasks because that's all I really do in that chair. And it works. I've created mental triggers by sitting into a nice comfy leather chair next to my desk. And I do think that's something nice. And if you've got a small space at work and you can carve out a corner,

like when I was a lawyer, I didn't have a very big office, but that standing desk that I made and brought in was a lawyer, I didn't have a very big office, but that standing desk that I made and brought in was a place where I would practice like oral arguments and things like that. I would stand up there and I also would do all my proofreading there. I never proofread setting down my desk. I would print it out and bring it and stand up there and proofread it because I wrote it at my desk, putting myself in a different location to proofread. I felt like I did a better job proofreading. And so, you know, try and find ways to play these tricks with yourself to find different spaces.

This stuff really works. I mean, I know I keep saying it over and over again. One other trick I want to share, because this was inspired partly by you, partly by Mike Vardy, but I have on my door to my office a sign that is designed to trigger a certain mode when I walk down the stairs and go into my office. And it's just a cheap sign that I found off of Etsy that says studio. And that sounds like a really stupid, small change, calling your office a studio. But because a lot of the work that I do is creative in nature, I find that that term is a lot more appealing to me. And it kind of puts me in that mindset that I'm coming in here to create, or I'm coming in here, like I called it my focus cave before, right? So I am coming in here to create. Or I'm coming in here, like I called it my focus cave before, right? So I am coming in here with a specific purpose. I'm not just dreading going down the stairs

because, oh, it's time to work. I'm getting myself mentally prepared to do something specific. And it sounds like it shouldn't make that big a difference, but it totally does yeah no i think it i mean i i've called my working space the studio for a long time for exactly the same reason the other thing i have is an antique desk that was uh was my mother's and it's a writing desk it's a fold-down writing desk and i use that for all my personal

business and all my hand journaling and all that stuff happens at that desk. So it's like I very carefully kind of decided what happens at certain desks or certain locations, even in the limited space I have. And just to be clear, my office or studio is not in a separate room. It's like central to our house. When you walk in the front door, you walk into my studio. And that's just because we live in a small house and my, you know, COVID came and I got kicked out of my old studio because my kids were moving back home. And, and I, um, so I don't have a lot of room, but I definitely have been very intentional about the way I set things up. Well, you may not have a lot of room, but you have a lot of lightsabers. I do.

That's interesting, too. If you look at my wall, I got those. People started giving them to me after they opened the Batuu thing at Disneyland. Every Christmas, I was getting them. And a couple times, I bought myself a set. And I realized I had a bunch of them. So why are they sitting in a drawer? I just got some little hooks and hung them on the wall

and they bring me joy. And that's kind of like getting back to making the space yours. I have a little Yoda statue there because I'm a big Star Wars nerd and actually Yoda and I have a little conversation once in a while while I'm sitting there. And it's just kind of nice space. I still have a lot of room to work, but I've got some kind of personal stuff there. One thing I've discovered over the last several years is I like having living things in my space.

And I have a bonsai tree there that is now, I think, almost three years old. And I've been able to keep it alive. And I take care of it. I trim it. I feed it. I do all the things you need to do to a bonsai tree and I've also got an orchid someone gave my daughter an orchid like a year ago and I managed to keep it alive but it's my orchid now because I I like fuss over it all the time and I like having some living things around me and that's that was something like for instance when i put this test up with this monitor i put it where the orchid usually is and i think i get

much more value out of having an orchid there than more pixels um so i mean that seriously it's not like uh me being silly but but the um so either way you know you got to kind of engineer it to your personality but i like to keep it pretty clean, too. And there are no right answers. But getting back to the premise of today's show is your environment affects your focus. And you need to really take that into account. Mike and I are so different. Mike, on his desk, I was teasing him before we started recording.

He's got all his ink collections for all his pens on his desk. I was looking at this picture i'm like yep what are all those bottles and it's like i don't know they're like 15 20 bottles of ink on your desk yeah somebody came over one time and they said what are those your potions yeah i'm like oh my gosh mike i don't know how you do it i couldn't i couldn't work that way it would drive me nuts i have i don't have as ink as you, but it's in a little plastic container in the garage. And when I need it, I go get one once a month. To have them on my desk all the time, I just couldn't do it.

But then Michael will look at my desk and say, how does he do anything? It looks like a surgical table or something. I don't know what you think. Or it's like a Star Wars cosplay or something. I don't know what you think, or it's like a Star Wars, um, a Star Wars cosplay or something. I don't know, but we're all different. I do like your little Yoda there. Uh, I, as I look at my space and it does, I'll admit it looks very cluttered, but it is optimized for function and you use the term joy. And I recognize that that is definitely something that I have done with my space. So on my desk, I've got this like plastic rhinoceros, which is got some intrinsic value to me. I just really like the rhinoceros. My discipleship group at church, we call ourselves

Rhino Squad because it's got symbolism. They've got real thick skin. You can knock them down, but you're not going to take them out sort of a thing. I've got little Lego guys. I've got the challenge coins for relaying the pen addict. I got the key switch tester and basically everything I've got art wise in my office has intrinsic value as well. Several of the pictures, including the three that are framed over the couch, those are photos that my wife took of my violin that my grandma gave me which is over 200 years old and then my acoustic guitar yeah there's a picture above the thinking chair that she painted of like the the headstock of a guitar and somebody playing a a song i've got fracture prints of the projects that i have active got my guitar hanging on the wall

because I think it looks cool. And every time I see it, I smile. You know, so everything in here has meaning to me. And I feel like that's the thing that makes it work. If it didn't have meaning, I probably would want stuff a lot cleaner. But even the ink bottles, I know what each one of those is for and what it

represents and it makes me happy yeah and i totally get like the rhino and stuff and this is just me like i'm again i'm not judging i'm just telling you for me like all the cords from all the cameras the ink i would rather just deal with the hassle of setting things up and that doesn't mean i'm right and you're wrong. It's just, we're very different about it. And I think that's really the point. Environment affects focus. I would have a hard time working at your desk. You would have a hard time working at my desk. And if you're listening to the show, you know, you've got to find your own balance with all this stuff, but you should be looking for it. If you're just kind of like using the space around you

without being intentional about it, I think you're going to regret it. Yeah, and not even going as nuts as we have in this last segment of describing our own workspaces and all the stuff that we've done. Again, going back to the beginning, control what you can control.

If you can make your environment just a little bit better, a little bit more fun, that's going to make the work that you have to do better and more enjoyable. Well, we have a forum. We'd love to hear from you guys about what you're doing with your spaces and how you're trying to use your environment to encourage you to focus or maybe even trigger it. You can find that over at talk.macpowerusers.com. Let us hear about it. You can find that over at talk.macpowerusers.com. Let us hear about it. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm. Thank you to our sponsors today,

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