Minette Riordan: Have you ever said to yourself, “I don’t have enough time?”

Brad Dobson: I am so overwhelmed.

Minette Riordan: I need more clarity.

Brad Dobson: I don’t know how to do this.

Minette Riordan: My to do list is miles long.

Brad Dobson: I’m exhausted.

Minette Riordan: There’s got to be a better way.

Brad Dobson: Hi there, I’m Brad.

Minette Riordan: And I’m Minette. Not only have we said all these things ourselves, but we’re heard our community of creative entrepreneurs say them, over and over again.

Brad Dobson: That’s why we created the Structure and Flow Podcast. I’m Structure.

Minette Riordan: And I’m Flow, and this is the Productivity Podcast for Creative Entrepreneurs.

Brad Dobson: We believe that doing more and working harder are not the solution to your productivity challenges.

Minette Riordan: We believe in more play, more fun, and more profit. Join us as we explore the interplay between structure and flow, so that we can bring more grace and ease to your creative business.

Brad’s cursing.

Brad Dobson: I didn’t curse.

Minette Riordan: You did curse.

Brad Dobson: We need a tip jar like in Luke Cage.

Minette Riordan: Yes, where you have to give a dollar every time you say a bad word.

Brad Dobson: That’s right.

Minette Riordan: That would be pretty funny.

Brad Dobson: I just binge watched all of Luke Cage. I like that show. It was really good.

Minette Riordan: It’s kind of violent and kind of good, like it’s hard and man, Alfre Woodard in that.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, she … lots of good acting and good music.

Minette Riordan: So this is an episode about focus and we’re talking about our distractions.

Brad Dobson: That’s right.

Minette Riordan: Not about focus. So welcome to Structure and Flow.

Brad Dobson: Episode 110.

Minette Riordan: Episode 110. Seven Ways to Improve Focus at Work, or when you work from home, is it different than when you work in an office. We can talk about that as well since we both work from home.

Brad Dobson: Cool, this is part nine of our Nine Pillars of Productivity. We did it!

Minette Riordan: We did it! Woo-hoo.

Brad Dobson: It was a nine part series, I think this is our longest series ever in the podcast.

Minette Riordan: Is it our only series? No, we had some other series, right?

Brad Dobson: Oh yeah, definitely.

Minette Riordan: Oh yeah, because we did the Unique Productivity Styles, we did those years before about that.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, but it’s cool stuff, and I think these have been really effective, and they’ve kind of really set the tone for where we’re going with Structure and Flow, which is the name of our podcast which we forgot to say at the beginning.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, I did. I said welcome to Structure and Flow.

Brad Dobson: Oh good, okay.

Minette Riordan: And if I didn’t, I’ll say it again. Welcome to Structure and Flow, the Productivity Podcast for Creative Entrepreneurs.

Brad Dobson: And if you’re listening to this July 24th, our enrollment opened for the Creative Business Accelerator today, which we’re really excited about.

Minette Riordan: Yesterday. It opened yesterday.

Brad Dobson: Was it yesterday?

Minette Riordan: Yes.

Brad Dobson: Okay, cool stuff.

Minette Riordan: It’s been open for a day.

Brad Dobson: Cool stuff.

Minette Riordan: It’s very exciting.

Brad Dobson: Head on over to pathtoprofitacademy.com/joincba. Learn all sorts of cool stuff, and our three video series is still up. You can take a look at that. We’ll have the notes … the links to that in the show notes.

Minette Riordan: The link to that in the show notes.

Brad Dobson: Just a lot of good resources, it’s a three video mini class, totally free. You can learn a ton of stuff and learn about the business accelerator, and how to really take your business, your creative business, into the next steps.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, it’s where we actually help you implement everything we talk about in the Structure and Flow podcast, starting with your creative business canvas, all the way down to, “I don’t know what the F to do to grow my business today.” Can we curse on our own podcast?

Brad Dobson: No, I don’t wanna do that.

Minette Riordan: You don’t wanna do that? So, yeah there’s that tip jar idea, again.

Brad Dobson: So back to focus, my alarm just went off.

Minette Riordan: We are so not focused.

Brad Dobson: My phone alarm just went off that it’s time to meditate, so clearly I’m not gonna do that.

Minette Riordan: Right now.

Brad Dobson: And Minette’s got a quote here from Bruce Lee. So we’ve got a whole Eastern influence going on here. Let’s see if we can bring that to our-

Minette Riordan: Zen focus.

Brad Dobson: Let’s see if we can bring that to our focus episode.

Minette Riordan: You can read it.

Brad Dobson: Okay.

Minette Riordan: You like Bruce Lee.

Brad Dobson: “The successful warrior is the average man with laser like focus.” And we could say man or a woman there, I guess.

Minette Riordan: Yes we could, but it is Bruce Lee and he said the average man, so.

Brad Dobson: Laser like focus.

Minette Riordan: How about the average human?

Brad Dobson: And that means practice, right?

Minette Riordan: Yep.

Brad Dobson: Focus and practice, that’s how you get there.

Minette Riordan: It does, and so we wanna share with you our Seven Favorite Ways to Improve Focus at Work. You might have some other ways that you improve your focus at work. If you do, I’d love for you to go share them in the iTunes comments. Leave us a review and let us know what is your best practice for improving focus at work. Because we’re just two people, trying to muck it out, figure it out, you know. Post your own.

Brad Dobson: And if you say cats, you’re lying and we won’t believe you. Cats do not help focus.

Minette Riordan: Oh my gosh, so our cat, and we have a family of mockingbirds that nest in our yard every year, and there’s this ongoing saga of Phoebe and the mockingbird. You can follow me on Instagram at Dr. Minette Riordan and see the videos. It’s pretty hilarious, and unfortunately, Brad, his window faces where Phoebe and mockingbird are spending their time.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, I might as well have the gardener with the leaf blower out there, it’s so noisy.

Minette Riordan: Yes, but anyway, we’re super distracted. We can’t even talk about it.

Brad Dobson: So focus, number one. Pay attention to your work environment. Clear the clutter. Clear the clutter, Minette.

Minette Riordan: We’re working on it.

Brad Dobson: Have a great table or chair combo, bring in the water and the snacks, everything you need to make a great environment. Take away the clutter around you, the visual clutter, the audio clutter. Get things that support you, literally, like a chair and a table, and spiritually, and emotionally, all of those things that support you, so you have a better chance to focus.

Minette Riordan: You know it’s interesting when we talk about pay attention to your work environment. A lot of us that work from home, we live in small spaces and lofts, or we have families, and we don’t always have the luxury of dedicated offices, and so how do you carve out that space when you work from home? I highly recommend that you carve out a corner in your home somewhere, and just stake claim that this is your office space, and that the only thing that goes in that space, is stuff related to work. Like don’t put your home bills there, so have a place that you can create that whole sense of, “I’m going to work today,” when you walk into that space. I know that sometimes I have that sense of, “I need to leave my workspace and not come back for a little while,” because it’s also my craft room, and my art studio. I spend a lot of time in there, seven days a week, and there are sometimes when I just have that feeling, that I cannot sit in this chair anymore.

But there’s also that feeling of when I walk into that space, I’m there to get to work. Whether that’s creative work, whether that’s content creation, or teaching, or coaching, or whatever it is, that is dedicated space, and it has that same feeling of getting in a car or on your bike, or on a bus and traveling to work. Even though the distance is 50 steps. It’s actually 10 steps from the kitchen and my coffee maker, but really paying attention to, how can you create dedicated space, and are you comfortable in this space? I’ve struggled a lot with this, trying to find a chair/table combo. We seem to have a plethora of inherited old tables that I have been using as desks, and they’re weird heights, and so trying to find the right chair so that I’m not killing myself and spending all my money that I’m making at the chiropractor. So, that work chair/table space is really important.
But also, when you go to this space, it’s pretty easy to distract yourself with trips to the fridge and the coffee maker, the fresh glass of water, so bring snacks with you. Prepare snacks ahead of time. Have your lunch made in the fridge, as if you were going to work for the day. There’s some great things you can do, so that you’re not distracting yourself with thoughts of, “I wonder what there is to make for lunch today?”

Brad Dobson: Right. So moving on, we talked about paying attention to the work environment, setting up a dedicated work and creative space. Block time in your calendar for focus blocks, which we talked about quite a bit before. Or however you want to block off time. Whether it’s, “I blocked off all of today. I blocked off all of this morning.” Whatever it is. “I’m not taking calls during this time. This is my writing time, this is my art time, this is my doing the books time.” Whatever it is. Block those things off in your calendar, and your calendar could be your Google calendar, it could be your physical planner calendar, whatever you want. But block that time off.

Minette Riordan: I think, I can’t remember if it was episode 104 or 105, where we talked to Allen Brown about theming your days, is another way of improving your focus. Is by having those particular days be themed towards certain projects. For example, one that popped into my mind that he uses is, he has one day a week where he focuses on getting speaking events. That’s not what he does all day long, but that’s his most important task for that day, is spending some part of that day focused on getting booked to speak.

Brad Dobson: Right, and that flows directly into the next one, number four, which is, know what you’re going to focus on ahead of time. So, that’s listing out your big six like we’ve talked about a number of times. Whether it’s having a project that’s outlying, whether it’s you having taken the time to look at how long a task is gonna take, or what priority it’s gonna be. Know what you’re gonna focus on ahead of time.

Minette Riordan: And this flows also nicely from the last episode, episode 109, where we talked about task management and what are the systems and processes we personally use, to manage the tasks and all of the mini projects we have going on at the same time. But I wanted to give you some really specific examples of types of procreative projects, so that you understand what we’re talking about. So during these time blocks, or days, or whatever the amount of time is that you’re blocking out to do really focused creative work, or as one of our favorite authors Cal Newport says, “Deep work.”

So, work on a logo design would be an example of where you need distraction free time to be in creative mode. Practice drawing faces in another. Maybe you’re an artist or a caricaturist, or cartoonist, and drawing caricatures is your business. It takes a lot of practice and you probably have dedicated time for practice, just like our kids with their music, or if you’re a pianist, a drummer, a saxophonist. In order to get better at your craft, you need dedicated practice time. That’s an example. Writing 10,000 words a day is another example. This tends to be a fairly common goal for many professional writers, is they write every single day, and they have a word count, knowing that out of that 10,000 words, they’re lucky if 2,000 of them are keepable, and the rest get tossed, but they’re committed to the number of words every day.
So the thing about knowing your projects ahead of time, is that this is the magic between structure and flow. And it allows your mind to start working on the project before you sit down in your space to do the work. So, just be prepared, know what projects you’re working on. Set up the dedicated time, and then commit. And the commitment time is the hard part.

Brad Dobson: Sure. Next one, we have eliminating all distractions. Turn off your phones. Turn off the notifications on your phones. Close your browser tabs. Close your browsers. Go to the bathroom. You know get done with making tea and all of those things. Put the cat out. Turn the home phone off. There’s just a million distractions, and there’s more every day in the world we live in, and we need to learn to turn off the notifications on your computer and your phone. There’s some pretty simple ways to do that. You can Google it for windows, for Macintosh’s, for IOS, for Android.

Minette Riordan: What do you Google, like how to turn off notifications?

Brad Dobson: Yeah, or do not disturb mode is a typically a … computers and phones have a do not disturb mode that you can mess with. Give it that, unless you have fingers that don’t work on your phone, which we had a client that couldn’t make that happen.

Minette Riordan: It’s hard to get it to scroll up to put that do not disturb on.

Brad Dobson: But those things will eat your shorts, if you’re not, if you don’t turn them off.

Minette Riordan: And one of the things you do, and I saw this in a couple of articles that I was reading is about picking the right music to work to as well, can help you get into a better space of focus, whether you work at home or in an office. Simply putting headphones on, and I find sometimes I just put my headphones on and there’s no music playing, no noise, but it just sort of minimizes the distraction and the noise around me and the people coming and going. So what can you do to minimize noise or maximize the environment that we talked about before? Using music would be another way, and I think it was in the powerful engagement that they talked about Hemingway. It’s where we heard this quote, and he said to make himself write everyday he had two choices. He could do nothing or he could write.

And it was simple. There really wasn’t a choice because he would get bored, and so he would write. And remember that, when it comes to creativity, boredom is not your enemy. It’s actually your friend. Solitude is your creative friend, and it’s so easy to wanna constantly be checking our phone, and constantly be checking our email, and let yourself get bored sometimes. Those moments of rest and creativity can often inspire your greatest thoughts.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, I think people struggle with the fact that it’s like that apocryphal study where given the choice, people would rather hit themselves with an electric charge than be alone with their thoughts.

Minette Riordan: Oh yeah, that was bizarre. That was in the same book.

Brad Dobson: So, you know it’s clear that we’re not good at being alone with our thoughts. We’re not good at being bored. Because it means that we’re alone with our thoughts and somehow that’s a scary thing, but yeah you need to get used to it.

Minette Riordan: Are you already thinking about how you have to go meditate right after this and you’re all distracted?

Brad Dobson: Mediating doesn’t bother me.

Minette Riordan: So the thing about this practice, so getting your work environment aligned, having dedicated work space, blocking time, knowing what you’re going to focus on, eliminating distractions. All of these are just habits, and guess what habits require?

Brad Dobson: Practice. Gotta practice.

Minette Riordan: You have to practice.

Brad Dobson: You gotta keep coming back to it. Gotta keep coming back to it. All of them.

Minette Riordan: And then the final thing that I think is so important, and I don’t know if we’ve actually done a dedicated show about this one, but we probably should, because I think one of the biggest secrets, and one of the biggest inhibitors of productivity is actually rest. That rest and renewal improve productivity, and we talk so much about what happens when we do or don’t get a good night’s sleep. Changes everything.

Brad Dobson: Oh yeah, yeah. You know ask yourself, I know me personally I know what the answer is. But ask yourself, what type of person you are when you get a terrible night’s sleep-

Minette Riordan: Grumpy.

Brad Dobson: … and what type of person you are after you’ve had the best sleep you’ve ever had. And if you’re honest with yourself, I think you’d see that there’s a pretty wide gap, and for us to be our best selves, we need sleep and we need good sleep. And we need rest and renewal and all the things that it takes to keep your energy levels high.

Minette Riordan: And this is not a health and wellness show, but we so often use things like Netflix, Amazon Video, caffeine, sugar, alcohol, other stimulants, to help us stay awake and keep going long past when our body is already done. And I often talk about sales from the perspective of service, well let’s talk about productivity from that perspective as well. When you’re tired, are you really giving your clients the best of you? Are they getting your most productive and most creative? Or, if you work for someone else, are you giving your employer the best of you, if you’re over tired and over worked? There’s been so many studies in the medical industry about doctors, in the airline industry about pilots, like people are really finally cluing in, we need rest and renewal, and we need more than just a few hours, more than just a day off here and there. That we need dedicated space and time to really improve both productivity and creativity.

Brad Dobson: Good stuff. That was seven. Seven way, we did it. Seven ways to improve focus at work. We’re at home.

Minette Riordan: We totally did, so let’s do our quick summary of our four productivity styles.

Brad Dobson: Oh cool.

Minette Riordan: How the commander, contemplator, conductor, and creator approach focus very differently from each other. We shared our model, but you might be a completely different productivity style.

Brad Dobson: Our commanders tend to focus on intense fast action, and getting results without pausing to breathe or take a break.

Minette Riordan: Guilty as charged. I can go, go, go, go like the Energizer bunny and I don’t even notice that I’m stressed out or not pausing until Brad says, “Minette, time to stop working,” or my body goes, “Oh,” I grown and moan every time I stand up from my chair. So for commanders, what we recommend in terms of focus is, using a timer on your phone so that your 90 minute focus blocks don’t turn into three days. So make sure that you’re using the tools. This is a great way to use technology to actually improve focus, by creating some rest breaks.

Brad Dobson: Right. Our contemplators tend to focus on quality first and trying to get it perfect, which often slows progress. Hello. Yeah, that would be me.

Minette Riordan: So how does this impact focus? Do you feel like you kind of go in this spinning mode, or it impacts not your focus as much as your productivity, because you’re so stuck on getting one thing perfect?

Brad Dobson: Yeah. I think more than likely I butt up against something that’s hard that I’m trying to do, trying to get perfect, and then give up on that and lose focus.

Minette Riordan: Yeah.

Brad Dobson: That’s probably the most likely thing. Probably the most likely thing.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, no it’s a great description. Remember our conductors are our people pleasers and people lovers. They tend to focus on connections with people over getting things done, which causes stress when nothing gets checked off the to do list. And I wanna share a quick case study about one of our clients who was a graphic designer. She’d been in business forever. She was totally the contemplator and what happened with her is, she was being so responsive to her clients, checking her email every five minutes, responding instantly to emails or quick changes in creative projects that she was doing, that she lost her ability to get those nice chunks of creative time that she needed, to do the beautiful design work that she was capable of. But she felt like her need to please people and take care of her clients was more important than her own need for creative time.

So, we made some quick changes in her schedule. She was only allowed to check her email three times a day, and when she checked her email, if there was a response that required her to do any editorial work or quick design work, it went on a task list, and scheduled into her creative time rather than interrupting her whole morning, by her doing it right then in the moment. And so just restructuring her time and restructuring her responsiveness to her clients, where she was still respectful in getting back to them quickly, but not catering to every moment. Because the truth was, they weren’t expecting the immediate response. She trained them that way, and so we had to do a little retraining of clients and everybody was happy in the end. She got her creative time, she was more productive, and ultimately she made more money, because she was managing her time more effectively.

Brad Dobson: Cool stuff. And that was conductor, right?

Minette Riordan: That was the conductor, yep.

Brad Dobson: And finally, our creators tend to focus on creative projects and forget about the rest of the world, or the task needed to run a business.

Minette Riordan: Yes, that’s me. It’s so easy to get focused on those creative tasks, and forget about paying the bills, doing the dishes, folding the laundry that’s been sitting in the laundry basket for three weeks. Well, actually by the end of three weeks, there’s no laundry in the laundry basket, because we’ve just been living out of it.

Brad Dobson: I don’t do that, she does that.

Minette Riordan: That’s not true.

Brad Dobson: I tend to put the unfolded laundry baskets where they’re gonna get tripped over, so somebody will finally take care of them.

Minette Riordan: He’s been doing all the washing, I’ve been doing all the folding. Sometimes I get annoyed and say, “Can’t you wash and fold?” You know, it becomes this whole thing. Right? But laundry is not the probably we’re trying to solve today, so for creators, for you, you need to make sure that in your focus box, you’re creating a couple of hours a week to work on the task of running your business like marketing and sales, and focusing on your numbers and paying bills, so that you have more freedom of mind to actually do your creative projects.

Brad Dobson: Good stuff. I think we did it.

Minette Riordan: I think we did it too, and remember we talked about, our cart is open for enrollment in our Creative Business Accelerator. We’re super jazzed. We launched this earlier in January, and we’ve completely redone the content to really be focused in on how can we help you be more productive, and make sure that you’re implementing the right projects and plans in your business, instead of wasting time trying to do everything.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, jump on over to pathtoprofitacademy.com/joincba. That link will be in the episode show notes. /joincba. And in next week’s episode, 111-

Minette Riordan: One, one, one.

Brad Dobson: … we’re gonna be discussing how crafting a three year vision is a powerful productivity hack for creative business owners.

Minette Riordan: Every time we do something in our own life or business, we do a show about it, so you’ll get a sneak peak at what it is that we’re working on personally.

Brad Dobson: Bye, guys.

Minette Riordan: All right, see you next week.

Speaker 3: Thanks for listening to Structure and Flow, the productivity podcast for creative entrepreneurs. To find out more about this episode and others, go to pathtoproductivity.com and click on the podcast link.