293. Spring Clean Your Life (for Your Sanity)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Joel: Now, technically speaking, the first day of spring isn’t until March 21st. You know, the Equinox and all that stuff. Solstice. I think it’s the Equinox.

[00:00:11] Marissa: Equinox,

[00:00:11] Joel: that’s, that’s not until March 21st, but there’s no use waiting. It’s time to start thinking about spring cleaning. I don’t want you to stop at spring cleaning the junk drawer.

[00:00:24] I actually wanna start talking about spring cleaning. Your life, the whole thing. And that’s what we’re gonna get into today.

[00:00:39] Welcome to Focus on This, the most productive podcast on the internet. I’m Joel Miller.

[00:00:45] Marissa: And I’m Marissa Hyatt.

[00:00:47] Joel: This is where we remind you of something that you already know. It’s not about getting more things done, it’s about getting the right things done,

[00:00:56] Marissa: both at work and in life. And today we’re talking about spring cleaning your life, which

[00:01:03] Joel: the whole thing, everything

[00:01:05] Marissa: sounds both exciting and a little bit intimidating.

[00:01:08] However, don’t you love that feeling when you really like in depth, clean a space. You’re cleaning the baseboards, you know, you’re really mopping the floors and wiping down all the surfaces and decluttering and all those things, and just being in that space feels so good. It’s like when people get ready to sell their house and they do this big purge and they do this deep clean, and then it’s like, wait, we actually love this house.

[00:01:34] Why we don’t wanna move? And a lot of this is because we’re not doing. These rituals of spring cleaning, and it’s the perfect time to kind of turn the page on winter and really create a space that is optimized for things to grow, which really is the whole intention of spring, right? Uh, this is why we do spring cleaning.

[00:01:59] It’s because we know summer’s coming and the rest of the year, and so we wanna be able to make space for things to grow. This is one of my favorite things to do. I tend to try to take a weekend, or even take a Friday or or a Monday off so I can really have a little bit more space to do all of this, go through all the drawers and, and really clean out each of these areas.

[00:02:19] But what we’re talking about today is really creating space for you to grow. So space in your rhythms. Space in your mind and space in your space.

[00:02:32] Joel: You know, last week we talked about the squeaky wheels and sprain Cleaning is a great time. It’s a great framework for just thinking about knocking out a bunch of squeaky wheels,

[00:02:45] Marissa: which we actually will touch on later on in the episode.

[00:02:48] Joel: Also, I do have to just pause long enough for an episode callback from however long ago. When the whole premise for the show Love it, or listed early HGTV folks Yes. Was brought up and you just stated the whole premise for the show again a minute ago. It’s like when you step in and clean a space. You then start loving it again and you’re like, why didn’t I do this before?

[00:03:10] I wanna stay now.

[00:03:12] Marissa: Well, if you think about clutter or dust or dirt and grime and all of those things, they don’t evoke inspiration.

[00:03:21] Joel: Quite the opposite.

[00:03:23] Marissa: We actually wanna do this spring cleaning to clear away all of that, to give ourselves the space to grow, to imagine, to dream again, to envision something better.

[00:03:34] And that’s. Both our environments and ourselves. This is really something that reminds us that one of the best ways to optimize is actually through subtraction.

[00:03:45] Joel: Yes. One of my very favorite books is Lottie K’s book, subtract.

[00:03:51] Marissa: It’s a good principle.

[00:03:52] Joel: It’s like when we think about optimizing our life, the way we think about it normally is to add.

[00:03:59] We’re always adding, and there’s tons of research on this, there’s reasons for this that are like buried deep inside the worms of your brain that like constantly want to add things, that wanna pull new things in, that want to continue to accumulate not only ideas and frameworks and stuff and all of that, but just constantly we’re busy adding and we think that that’s the way out and the reality is.

[00:04:24] Cutting stuff out is almost always the most effective way to get to a quicker solution.

[00:04:29] Marissa: Well, a great way to think about this is by comparing a bike with training wheels, which have been added to stabilize the bike, to help the child learn how to ride a bike. Versus a balance bike. Right. Which your son, Jonah, I can remember clear as day when he was, I don’t know, three years old, riding that balance bike like crazy, and he eventually transferred over into a regular bike with peddle.

[00:04:59] He was

[00:05:00] Joel: still three when he did

[00:05:01] Marissa: and he was three years old. Our nephew Nico, who is also three years old, he’s. He’ll be for this next month. He also just had this experience where he had been using a balanced bike for about the last year, riding that thing all over the place, and for Christmas, he just got his first official.

[00:05:20] Pedal bike and has been riding it like a champ, and turns out subtracting those training wheels, subtracting the pedals actually allows the child to feel and to learn what balance is in their body so that by the time that they get on the bike with the pedals, they’ve already established that muscle. So it’s through subtraction.

[00:05:41] It’s not through the addition of the training wheels. That actually helps. It’s through subtracting not only those training wheels, but also the pedals as it turns out.

[00:05:48] Joel: Yeah. Okay. So that’s a great example because that’s an engineering problem, right? Somebody had to look at it and say, we don’t need the training wheels, but that still doesn’t accomplish the problem, which is training the child to balance.

[00:06:00] We need to get rid of something else. In that case, the pedals. That means that there is some intelligence we have to apply to choosing what stays and what goes. And my question for you, Marissa, if you are ready for, is. Where do we begin?

[00:06:18] Marissa: Well, I think the first thing we need to consider and to look at when we’re thinking about spring cleaning our lives is to cut some goals and projects.

[00:06:28] This is something that I think is really important. You know, we talk a lot here on the show inside of Double Win Coaching, basically everywhere that we’re talking to our people. We talk a lot about focusing on very few things at once, and in fact, our system talks about only focusing on no more than three goals at any given time.

[00:06:52] This is really hard, especially as people come into our, our community, they start using our system for the first time and they’re like, what do you mean I can only choose three?

[00:07:01] Joel: You’re gonna limit me.

[00:07:02] Marissa: Yeah. That goes for our task list. That goes for our weekly priorities. That goes for our goals. And this is really difficult advice to a adhere to

[00:07:13] Joel: and And people don’t adhere

[00:07:15] Marissa: to it.

[00:07:15] Yeah, they don’t because they try to roll in. This is something I see people try to like find a loophole and they try to roll in multiple goals into one.

[00:07:25] Joel: Yeah.

[00:07:26] Marissa: It sounds something like this. I’m going to improve my health by eating better, exercising and sleeping eight hours. I actually met with Alex, who is your, and Megan and my parents’ personal trainer yesterday.

[00:07:39] He and I are gonna be working together in a coaching capacity. He’s gonna be coaching me on my health and getting to my health goals. And it was funny because. This was kind of our initial discovery call and learning, and I went in with, okay, here’s, I wanna do four workouts a week. I wanna be walking every week.

[00:07:59] I wanna be eating healthy and. What I found out through that conversation was based on the other factors related to my stress level nervous system, so on and so forth, that I actually need to be doing less for a period of time rather than trying to go. Fall in and do all these things, and what I’m ultimately optimizing for is consistency.

[00:08:25] That’s really what I want in my health habits, and I’ve struggled especially within the last year to maintain those consistently.

[00:08:33] Joel: Let me just say for the listeners that don’t know Marissa as well as I know her, this is a woman who can go real hard. I mean, like you’ve done 70 hard how many times?

[00:08:43] Marissa: Yeah. Uh, twice.

[00:08:44] 75 hard. Yeah,

[00:08:45] Joel: 75 hard. Go ahead and just describe the intensity of that. Describe what’s required of somebody to do.

[00:08:51] Marissa: Yeah. Well, first of all, no grace is given in this. So if you fail at any of the tasks that you have to do every day, you have to start over from day one. So you don’t just like say, whoops, I, I missed today.

[00:09:02] Let me pick back up tomorrow. It’s like you have to start the 75 day period all over. If you miss one of these things. So it’s pretty intense. It’s a 75 day program, if you will, that you go through where you do 2 45 minute workouts a day, one of which has to be outside no matter the weather. And that can look like something as simple as a walk.

[00:09:25] It doesn’t have to be like you’re lifting weights twice a week, uh, or twice a day, excuse me. But one has to be outside rain or shine, or snow or sleet or anything in between. You have to drink a gallon of water a day,

[00:09:38] Joel: a gallon,

[00:09:38] Marissa: you have to adhere to some type of eating or nutrition plan. Mm-hmm. You get to pick whichever kind you want to do, but you have to adhere for that with zero cheats.

[00:09:51] You also cannot have any alcohol during this period, and you have to take a progress picture every single day. And that was the one that was the most challenging, interestingly enough for me to follow through with. It was the simplest task and was the easiest to forget, which was fascinating. And then you have to read 10 pages in a personal development book.

[00:10:12] Every day, and it has to be the physical book. You can’t just do audio because that’s easy to get sidetracked by or whatever. He, the guy who created this once you fully engaged. So those are the things that you have to do every single day without fail for 75 days. And I did do that hard. So to your point, yes, I can go hard, I can go all in and be super intense, but the problem is maintaining that.

[00:10:38] Is impossible.

[00:10:41] Joel: Our listeners can selectively go really hard on their goals and projects, you know, for seasons,

[00:10:47] Marissa: right?

[00:10:47] Joel: For periods, but. If it gets in the way of consistency that creates its own problem that we kind of discount on the back end ’cause we just did this great thing, but then we’re not being consistent and then we don’t get the benefit long term from it.

[00:11:02] Marissa: Absolutely. And I think our health goals specifically are the most prone to this. This is where I see this with our clients, that they try to roll in multiple goals into one and they think, oh yeah, well it’s only one goal. But it’s actually three separate goals or four separate goals wrapped into one.

[00:11:19] And, and the likelihood of success in that scenario is really, really low because it’s too many things for you to focus on and too many things to prioritize.

[00:11:29] Joel: You just can’t go that hard Consistently. You’re gonna, something’s gonna drop.

[00:11:33] Marissa: No. The other thing I see that happens a lot is that people think, oh, I can set three goals.

[00:11:40] Great. Well, that means three goals at work and three goals for the rest of my life. You know, for all of my personal life, my relationships, my health, my finances, my hobbies, so on and so forth. And the truth is. This doesn’t work either, because again, right, we’re not two separate people. We’re not one person at work and one person in the rest of our lives.

[00:11:58] We only have so much time, so much energy, so much focus. And so when we try to do six things in this case, you know, in any given quarter of our lives, it’s too many things for us to focus on. And so we’ve got to get three total, not three separate for your personal life and three separate for your work life.

[00:12:18] Joel: I think that. What’s going on here is this attempt to get maximum results at maximum speed. Like we’re gonna microwave our personal growth, we’re gonna microwave our productivity, and it just doesn’t work.

[00:12:34] Marissa: Yeah.

[00:12:34] Joel: Your capacity is less than you think, and it may not be less than you think if you are going all out, but you cannot go all out all the time.

[00:12:43] Yeah. And that means that you’re not gonna actually get done the full six. Mm-hmm. You’re gonna end up. Maybe coming back to some of them later, but if you just paired down the list to begin with to something manageable, you would make greater progress over time than if you go like. Hard Sprint and then Slack, and then hard sprint, and then slack.

[00:13:05] Marissa: Well, and a lot of us, at the beginning of the year, January 1st, we get excited. You know, it’s like, oh my gosh, what can I do this year? And we have all these goals, and then here we are in March and we realize, oh my gosh, I barely made progress on any of these because I had six things I was trying to do, and I frankly forgot what they are.

[00:13:23] Joel: I think Greg Mccuen’s essentialism is just like a really useful mental framework here. Like he draws this illustration of a circle with. Arrows of energy coming out of it. And if you took those arrows of energy and the length of those arrows, in other words, this is like the expended effort in multiple directions, if you took the expendable effort and limited the number of directions, you would clearly make more progress because you would be adding that length of effort to one thing or two things, or three things, as opposed to like.

[00:13:56] Six or 12 or whatever people Yeah. Regionally end up deciding to do. And the end result is you see more progress in a shorter amount of time. Whereas if you do, you know, like if you try to do too much at once, you end up not making progress on hardly any of that to any substantial degree.

[00:14:11] Marissa: Yeah. And I think it’s important to remember too, that if you choose to, you know, look through the goals that you’ve set and you say, okay, I’m gonna whittle this down to three, you’re not necessarily saying to the other goals that you’re passing on.

[00:14:24] That you’re never gonna do those things

[00:14:26] Joel: right.

[00:14:26] Marissa: It’s just that you’re intentionally procrastinating or moving them into the future to accomplish more, to have more focused energy now, and make better progress now so that you can get to those other goals. So it’s not that you’re just saying, I’m never gonna do these, you’re just saying not.

[00:14:43] I’m not gonna focus on these right now, which I think is helpful, gives you a little bit of freedom in this decision that you can kind of take the pressure off. It doesn’t mean that you’re only deciding to accomplish these goals forever and always and nothing else. It’s just you’re prioritizing what feels most important right now, which leads us to how do we prioritize, right?

[00:15:06] Right. What are, what are the ways in which, yeah, like what are the ways in which we can filter. Through our goals,

[00:15:13] Joel: well, one of them is to pick a domino goal. If you think about a set of dominoes, you know, they’re arranged in a row and you knock down the first one and the other other ones fall. You wanna look for the kind of goals that have the biggest impact on the total sum of your life that you can think of.

[00:15:32] So for instance, if it is that health goal. Then pick one thing that you’re gonna do that would make the most difference. If you’re thinking about like your finances, getting out of debt may be the first goal. The domino goal. Getting enough sleep might be that, you know, like you wanna pick a goal that will have an outsized impact on your flourishing.

[00:15:52] Marissa: Shalene Johnson calls this your push goal,

[00:15:57] Joel: right?

[00:15:57] Marissa: Yeah. And I love that concept of like when you. Accomplishes goals, it pushes everything else. You know that, that domino visual of everything else. Becomes easier. It’s the first thing that makes everything else easier. There’s also that book, you’re gonna have to remind me on the author.

[00:16:14] The one thing, yeah. The author talks about what is the one thing, it’s, you know, I’m not gonna get it Perfect. That by doing it makes everything else easier. Or unnecessary.

[00:16:26] Joel: Yeah.

[00:16:26] Marissa: And that’s such an interesting and effective way to filter your goals or your projects. Like what could you do now that if you accomplish that goal right now, would make the rest of those goals or the rest of those projects that you wanna accomplish easier or frankly unnecessary?

[00:16:44] I mean, that’s exciting to think about that you could do one thing rather than three things, and if you prioritize it well, like those other things. Just become unnecessary. It’s pretty amazing.

[00:16:53] Joel: That, again, goes back to the power of subtraction. If you can do something that will eliminate the need to do something else, that like should rank pretty high on your list because the less you have to do.

[00:17:06] The more time you have for the other things that are meaningful in your life,

[00:17:09] Marissa: which is pretty amazing. I mean, if you think about this within a financial context, you may have a goal to get a certain amount of new clients or increase your income by a certain percentage or something like that. You may also have getting out of debt or other type of financial goals, and it may be that you wanna prioritize one of those because it makes everything easier.

[00:17:29] For instance, if you increase your income, and that’s the first kind of domino goal that you choose. It makes getting out of debt really easy because all of a sudden you have a lot more income to give to that debt and, and pay it off quicker, versus if you try to pay that, which could be slow and painful first.

[00:17:48] And then move to income. That’s not necessarily gonna make it easier for you or unnecessary for you necessarily to make more on the income side. So that’s a helpful way to think about things within the, the idea or the concept of this first domino goal. I love that.

[00:18:03] Joel: Another thing you can do is stop trying to hyper optimize everything in your life.

[00:18:10] You know, like we all have. 50 wearables and apps and everything that we’re using to track everything in our lives. We have our morning rituals dialed in, and we’re thinking because the stats on clicks would tell us that we’re all thinking some version of this, that if I just get the ideal version of my morning ritual figured out that everything else will be perfect.

[00:18:36] And so we’re always trying to hack our rituals. We’re trying to hack ourselves and. That is not actually the key to bliss. In fact, it becomes like almost cartoonish, like the level of effort we put into optimizing these tiny parts of our life thinking that it will somehow unlock. The next phase of like wonder in our, in our lives, it just won’t happen.

[00:18:59] Marissa: I am definitely guilty of this for sure, especially like on the morning routine. You know, just open any frankly social media platform and you’ll see. You know, my day in my life, right? You know, or what I eat in a day, or my five to nine before my nine to five or whatever. All these different viral posts that are about people optimizing every single area of that ritual.

[00:19:28] Of their days, and it’s exhausting. And again, you’re trying to accomplish so much that the ability to actually follow through with those things long term is gonna be low because you’re not planning for life to happen. You know, you, you’re like, okay, every morning I’m gonna do an hour long workout. I’m gonna go sit in the sauna for.

[00:19:45] 30 minutes and I’m gonna do my red light for 20 minutes and I’m gonna meditate for 30 and go on a walk around the block and you know, eat a perfectly balanced superfood smoothie, and so on and so forth. And it’s like what happens on the day that you get a call, first thing in the morning that something happened at work or your kid gets sick and all of a sudden.

[00:20:08] What happens? All of that goes out the window.

[00:20:10] Joel: Right. And if it goes out the window more than a day, which it will, because we all encounter these interruptions. The momentum that we have falls away.

[00:20:19] Yeah.

[00:20:19] Joel: The ability to follow through falls away. We feel kind of crummy about the fact that we’re not doing it, and then suddenly the whole thing falls apart and it’s like we’re trying to.

[00:20:30] Arrive at an ideal state that is not robust enough to handle real life, and then because we have not settled for something actually manageable, we do less than we actually could if it were manageable and we don’t get the benefit at all.

[00:20:59] Marissa: If in order for you to follow through with your ritual, your day, your life has to happen just right then, it’s not likely going to happen, and, and the likelihood of consistency in those rituals is gonna be really low. So we wanna first start with the constraints. Take an honest look in the mirror and ask yourself, how much time do you reliably, keyword, reliably have to complete your ritual?

[00:21:28] And I’m not talking about in your perfect scenario if all the stars align and everything’s perfect, but like genuinely speaking, every single day, look at your average. How much time do you have? And then you wanna ask, what could you subtract? So it’s so simple. You could do it every day,

[00:21:45] Joel: right?

[00:21:47] Marissa: One of my favorite things that I first actually heard from chat GPT and actually was referenced on my call yesterday with Alex, this health coach, personal trainer, is a concept called a ceiling and a floor.

[00:22:02] And you may have heard this, but I love this so much. So rather than feeling like, okay, I have to go do that hour long workout every single day in order to make progress on this goal, you can say, okay, well that’s my ceiling. That’s like if everything goes well, if the stars are aligned and I have margin and I have energy and all those things, that’s the ceiling.

[00:22:23] What’s the floor? What happens when I wake up and I feel sick?

[00:22:26] Joel: Right?

[00:22:26] Marissa: Or what happens when my kid gets sick? Or when I have meetings that go too long and I’m planning that workout in the afternoon and now it’s five o’clock or six o’clock, and I still haven’t gotten the workout in? What is the floor? What is the bare minimum, the non-negotiable that even on those days, I can follow through with?

[00:22:44] So you’re not working for the ideal in this context. You’re actually planning for the non-ideal, right? Those more challenging days. So rather than just saying, I’m going to work out an hour every single day, you say, that’s great, and that’s my ceiling, but my floor is. A 20 minute walk or doing 10 pushups.

[00:23:05] 10 squats and you know, holding a plank for a minute or something to that degree that even on your worst days, you can still follow through with.

[00:23:14] Joel: What’s great about that is you don’t lose momentum. You’re still getting the benefit of like the practice and when life lifes. You know, you still have the benefit of something that you’re going to, that is giving you what you need that you can reliably do, and consistency beats intensity.

[00:23:34] Always.

[00:23:35] Marissa: Yeah, and this is really hard for us as people who are high functioning, high achievers, caring a lot. Consistency can often feel boring, and it can feel kind of mundane and stale, and it gets tired pretty quickly. And you know, it’s like we can totally go all in and I’m speaking for myself right now.

[00:23:59] I can totally go all in, do a 75 hard challenge and do all those, you know, six or whatever things that you’re supposed to do every single day perfectly. And I can say I’m all in on this for 75 days. But on the other side of that, the likelihood that I continue those, and I know this ’cause I’ve done it twice, those habits, long term really is low.

[00:24:20] I’m burnt out, I’m exhausted. And I would make better progress if I was slower and more consistent. I mean, this is really like the tortoise and the hare, that if you are slower and more consistent and have more sustainable progress over time, your success rate goes way up. The likelihood of you hitting these goals goes way, way up.

[00:24:42] Or these tasks, or whatever it may be, these rituals. All of it. The likelihood of success goes way up through the roof when you are more consistent and create a scenario for life.

[00:24:55] Joel: Well, and that’s the benefit of having the ceiling too, right? Because now if you wanna jazz it up, you know how you’re gonna do it, and it still fits within your life.

[00:25:03] Marissa: Megan, often you’re. Wife, our CEO, my sister, she often refers to these as your non-negotiables. What are the things that even on your worst day, you wanna remain committed to and make it so easy that you can actually follow through with this? Like I hear this with our coaching clients all the time that, gosh, I’m really struggling with following through with whatever it is, whether it’s a ritual or a habit, and I don’t know what to do to change this.

[00:25:29] And I always ask, are you clear on what your non-negotiables are? Because most people aren’t, they’re, they’re shooting for the ideal more times than not. And like you talked about, then the shame spiral comes in, right? And we feel crappy about ourselves. We feel like, gosh, you know, damages our own trust. We can’t follow through with anything.

[00:25:49] I’ve been dealing with this for months, or I’ve been feeling like total crap about the fact that I cannot follow through with any of my health goals. I’m like, what is wrong with me? I know this. I’ve done this before. But what used to work isn’t working. And so this is when I reached outside of myself, I hired a coach, Alex, and he actually told me, we’re gonna have to have you slow down before we can have you speed up.

[00:26:10] And I would’ve never known that had I not worked with a coach, gotten outside of my own head to say, what is going on here and why isn’t this working? And it’s because I’m shooting for the ideal 99% of the time, which means my failure rate is. 99% because the ideal doesn’t happen. It rarely happens.

[00:26:31] Joel: So as we’re thinking about spring cleaning, we want to get rid of the things that are not gonna create the highest impact that we cannot be consistent with.

[00:26:41] And if you have something that’s high impact and you can be consistent with it. That stays. But the other stuff that’s the training wheels and the, and the pedals that you don’t need, it’s just not gonna help you.

[00:26:53] Marissa: And it may be a good time for you, especially as you’re getting ready to set your full focus planner up for Q2.

[00:26:59] We’re kind of at that point where hopefully if you’re, you know, aligned with the calendar quarters that you’re getting ready, you’re starting to do these and this is a perfect time to refresh. Your ideal week. We did a whole episode on that last week. Your rituals, and really make sure that you’re factoring in life.

[00:27:18] Use that ceiling in that floor to your advantage, especially when it comes to your rituals.

[00:27:23] Joel: Love it.

[00:27:24] Marissa: All right, so lastly, we want you to consider just one space. That you want to clean, literally, physically clean, and we want you to choose this intentionally. So we talked about this last week, Joel, you mentioned this at the top of the episode.

[00:27:40] Elizabeth Stanley calls these squeaky wheels of your environment. So these are the things that are just kind of hanging out unfinished. Mm-hmm. That just subtly nag at us that hold quite a bit of mental space as it turns out. That we feel like we’re constantly walking by that broken thing or that cluttered chair or that basket of laundry that we haven’t folded or that loaded dishwasher that we need to unload that we’re just sick of looking at, right?

[00:28:11] It’s those things that really drag our self-confidence down. It drags our focus down, usually creates an unnecessary level of stress or anxiety because it’s just like unfinished business.

[00:28:25] Joel: It’s not just physical space, it’s digital space too, right? Yeah. If your desktop is cluttered with files, if your Apple Notes are like approaching 4,000, by the way, don’t ask me how I know this.

[00:28:36] If your Apple Notes are approaching 4,000 or so and you haven’t been through them in a while to decide what’s actually useful to keep and what’s not, you can work around that stuff. We do work around that stuff, but it, it complicates our lives in ways that we don’t need, and so. Things like files, things like emails, email

[00:28:54] Marissa: inbox,

[00:28:55] Joel: email inbox, please.

[00:28:57] I didn’t need an intervention on this particular episode, but maybe I did. Like there are these digital spaces that we don’t think about because like when we close the laptop, they’re invisible to us, but when we open the laptop. They’re there accusing us. They’re there complicating our lives, adding complexity, adding friction and frustration.

[00:29:18] And they’re squeaky wheels. Yeah. And they need to be attended to.

[00:29:22] Marissa: I just did this two nights ago. I was folding and putting away laundry and I have a small house that is a, an old house. And so as anybody who lives in an old house, knows storage is always limited and it’s very difficult. I’m one person, but my closet space is.

[00:29:40] Very small and very full, and I noticed this primarily I have like a built-in closet with three semi large drawers and one of them is where I put all my pajamas and I have actually like workout tops and things like that in there. And it was to the point where every time I needed to close it, I was like having to just shove it, you know, like shove all my energy into it and try to get it to close because it was just like exploding with.

[00:30:09] Shirts and pajamas and whatever else it was,

[00:30:12] Joel: you didn’t even need to work out. You just needed to close the drawer.

[00:30:15] Marissa: Literally. So the other night I was, I was done with it. I was so frustrated with this darn drawer that I was like, I have got to deal with this. So I took everything out. I put it all on my bed, and I ended up with about half of what was in there before because I realized all this stuff.

[00:30:30] I kind of had it in like stacked. It’s like a, a pretty deep drawer, like a, a tall drawer, so to speak. So I had almost like two layers of clothes and everything that was on the bottom I never even saw. So I never. Remembered that I had it and I was never wearing, so I basically got rid of all of that except for a couple things that either had sentimental value or that I really like that old t-shirt that I love wearing or whatever, you know, that kind of a thing that I forgot about.

[00:30:57] But for the most part, I got rid of half of the items in that drawer. I want to go in my closet right now and open that drawer just to look at it. To give myself the satisfaction of yes, like this is clean, and now when I fold laundry, I’m not gonna have to have that mental conversation of. I’ve got to deal with this drawer and then putting it off for longer so it closes a loop.

[00:31:22] And so now I can go breathe easy and go put those pajamas away or those workout shirts and not have to think about it, which is really amazing.

[00:31:31] Joel: You know, we started this episode talking about spring cleaning, freer sanity. I mean, that is what we’re talking about here. Like all these little things drive us crazy.

[00:31:39] Marissa: Yes.

[00:31:40] Joel: And if we just take care of ’em, eliminate them. Clean them up, get rid of them. Our lives get simpler. Our head space is cleaner. It’s easier to manage.

[00:31:51] Marissa: Yeah. So a couple of questions you can ask yourself is like, which area is bothering you the most? Like, what’s the thing that is driving you crazy in your home or in your environment?

[00:32:02] Whether that’s your car, uh, your office. Wherever you spend quite a bit of time, what is bothering you the most, or which area do you frequent the most? Uh, you can think about that as well. What could you restore order to, and therefore peace of mind. So my pajama door was the thing that was driving me crazy.

[00:32:25] It was bothering me the most because I have to look at it every single night when I go to open and pull out, uh, specific pajamas to wear and I’m digging in and then I’m trying to jam the thing shut and it’s so frustrating. So. Ask yourselves those questions to determine what you want to clean and just pick one.

[00:32:44] This kind of does start to pull on the domino metaphor a little more. This does start to have a ripple effect where we all of a sudden go, oh my gosh. I did that thing, you kind of get a, a hit of dopamine and then you wanna move on to another space or another area to declutter or to clean or to deal with.

[00:33:02] So I find that starting is the hardest part. And we talked about this in the last episode. You can use a trick of timing yourself, like setting a specific timer for. Specific amount of time saying, I’m only giving myself 15 minutes for this task, or depending on what it is, I’m only giving myself 30 or 45 minutes.

[00:33:21] And just see what you can knock out in that period of time and then go from there. If you need to add more time on, great. Usually that’s really gonna kick you into high gear and you’re gonna be able to accomplish more in that period of time than you think is possible.

[00:33:35] Joel: Okay, so we’ve kind of given you one assignment already.

[00:33:39] Here’s another one I want you to think about. One ritual in your life that you might simplify. This could be your morning ritual, it could be your evening ritual, it could be your Workday startup or your workday shutdown. Could be another ritual. What’s one set of actions that you habitually do that you could look at, pull some items out that are maybe not serving you as well as they used to, that are giving you some stress that you don’t need, and just take ’em out.

[00:34:09] Maybe replace ’em with something else that will serve you better. Whatever it is, simplify a ritual and then track your streak for one week. Just see how well you do and then. Ask yourself at the end of the week, was that easier to do? Was that more pleasurable to do? Did that help me more? And use that as an inspiration to go simplify other places in your life.

[00:34:34] Marissa: I love this so much. It’s gonna help build your confidence, your trust with yourself to be able to follow through with the things that you really don’t want to compromise on. And. When you set the bar lower, it’s counterintuitive. It feels like we’re doing less and therefore we’re not gonna be as effective.

[00:34:51] But the reality is, it’s the exact opposite. By doing less, you’re gonna be able to accomplish more, make better progress, faster progress than you would if you’re shooting for the moon every single time.

[00:35:04] Joel: You know? I think sometimes we forget that there is not actually like a scale or a measuring tape or something on what success looks like, and so.

[00:35:15] We tend to have this idea that we just need more, that we just need to accomplish more, do more whatever in order to be productive, to have. Achieved whatever, and we forget that we set the terms of the game. We are the ones who are defining those things for ourselves. The world doesn’t do it to the extent that it does.

[00:35:36] It gets us wrong. Therefore it gets the standards wrong, and we don’t need to do that. We can set up the game to win the way we wanna do it,

[00:35:45] Marissa: and we’ll be a lot happier. In that context than if we feel like we’re constantly failing. So yeah, create a game that you can win and specifically look in at those rituals.

[00:36:01] Thanks for joining us on Focus On This.

[00:36:04] Joel: This is the most productive podcast on the internet, so please share it with your friends and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen or focus on this podcast. Dot com

[00:36:15] Marissa: and we will be here next week where we’re gonna talk about why you should stop paying attention to your goals.

[00:36:24] Yeah.

[00:36:24] Joel: Wait, what?

[00:36:25] Marissa: Really? That’s what we’re gonna be talking about.

[00:36:27] Joel: All right. I guess I’ll have to wait to see Until then. Stay.

[00:36:31] Marissa: Stay focused.