186. The Most Overlooked Question You Can Ask

Courtney, Blake, as you think about just your productivity, the things that you want to get done, could be a goal, could be a project that you’re in the middle of, what is one thing that you need to stop doing in order to get those accomplished?

It’s a great question, and it’s counterintuitive to how I think I naturally approach reaching a goal. My brain wants to go, what do I have to do in order to get X results? But what you’re asking is, what do I need to stop doing, something I’m already doing, that is keeping me from getting that result. Almost like, I would naturally progress towards this goal if it weren’t for these activities. What could I take out? I love this question. I love this topic today. I had to think hard about it, and I think something that comes to my mind is I do work, genuine work, dialoguing with prospects, clients, or a little bit of marketing through social media, and naturally I’ve got social media on my phone and I notice that I will execute work from my phone a decent amount.

But I’m actually not so sure that, that’s an effective way to do it, because what ends up happening is things tend to take longer because there’s a lot more distractions and temptations to scroll or see things. That’s what those apps are designed to do, is to capture your attention and to keep it. I’m realizing, I think I need to take out working from my phone. I can use my phone still to create perhaps, and of course, to relax or socialize or check to see if Kevin Durant got hurt again or not. Sorry, Verbs, but working from my phone. I think if I stopped working from my phone, I would probably be way more effective.

Well, thank you for those powerful insights on what to look at when we try to challenge ourself to see what we can stop doing and still be productive. Today, we’re going to look at three categories in which we should ask that question. What should I stop doing? Welcome to another episode of Focus On This. This is the most productive podcast on the internet, so you can banish distractions, get the right stuff done, and finally start loving Mondays. I’m Verbs, here with Courtney Baker and Blake Stratton. Once again, Happy Monday to you both.

Happy Monday.

Happy Monday unto you.

Now, I just want to say the day we’re recording this, it’s a little behind the scenes. We record these ahead of time. Spoiler. Today is Michael Caine’s 90th birthday and I felt like-

He is 90?

Yeah, I felt like it might be-

Oh, time is real.

… an opportunity to revisit one of our favorite characters here on the podcast, which is Blake’s-

Oh my God.

Michael Kane impersonation.

I totally forgot that that ever was a thing.

Okay, but what episode is that, Nick?

Oh, I don’t know, but we don’t need to know because he’s going to do it right now.

Great.

Oh no. Wait, she was only four years old and he went down the stairs. Master Wayne.

Great, thank you. That’s it. That’s all I needed.

That was worth a try.

Didn’t even make, it was just ramblings. Oh, man. Michael Caine is 90.

We have three categories that we’re going to look at today each an area where we could stop doing something. Category one is work. What should you stop doing at work? What is it that you’re doing currently right now that’s really starting to undermine or maybe has been undermining your productivity? That could be phone, that could be email writing. Courtney, I know we’ve talked about this before, is the whole categorization of folders that tends to steal your time away. I noticed actually, the other day, I was working on a budget project that I was starting to get overwhelmed by and I just kind of checked out and said, I need to take a walk.

And I started doing something totally unrelated, but I realized every time I get to that moment in my work that I check out and I go do that thing. There’s these little things that we really need to ask ourselves those questions. What am I doing that… Maybe we couch it as taking a break or getting a breather, to walk away for a moment, but it’s actually activity. It’s truly hindering what we want to do in our productivity. What does it look like? And admitting that thing is there to yourself and creating some sort of self-accountability is going to be very important for this in this step.

Do y’all want to know one thing I tried last week that was very effective for me? And it’s actually backwards from what we teach, but in doing it backwards, it actually helped me realize something I needed to stop doing. Are you so curious how I built this up just so much? Your just with anticipation.

What up.

This is anti-teaching. You’re doing anti-teaching right now.

I got into my office, my home office, and I had already set my daily big three and it was one of those, sometimes your daily big three, you’re like, not only have I already established this is important, but I got to knock this out. You know how sometimes you have, not only have you set it aside as your daily big three, but just the environment, you really got to get this done. I started out, I did not even do my workday startup yet. I just went straight in for this item and knocked it out. It took actually, way less time than I had anticipated, and it made me realize that I had been letting my workday startup, we changed some systems recently, and it’s taking me a little longer to get through some of those items.

But when I didn’t have a meeting right up against my workday startup, I realized that it was kind of bleeding much longer than I would like it to be contained into. It was an interesting experiment that it gave me, I really need to stop allowing that. I’ve got to have a hard stop on that workday startup, which is really to get that low leverage work out of the way, so I can do that high leverage work, but I just thought I would share that because I think it’s something that’s easy to fall into of, you want to get it out of the way, but you don’t want to get sucked in and stay there, so that was a real key one for me recently.

I think there’s obvious things, distractions that are non-work related. Oh, I shouldn’t be going on social media while I’m trying to work, for instance, but the sneakiest ones that really hold us back are the stuff that has been helpful to us in the past, like Courtney was saying. What came up for me was, when I started coaching and working with clients on my own, I just had my whole calendar open because I wanted to provide flexibility and support for as many clients as I could have. At a certain point, I realized I’m always struggling to create the meaningful material that’s going to help my clients long term and help my business long term.

As an experiment, I decided, hey, this week I’m going to block off Mondays and not allow any clients to schedule a call with me on Mondays, or on this Monday, and it went so well. I actually was ahead of my creative work that I just made it a policy. I don’t do client calls on Mondays. By removing that, all of a sudden naturally, it opened up opportunity for me to do what was more important towards reaching my longer term goals, so this is a huge one. What do you need to stop doing at work?

Category number two is relationships. I already shared an example of this for me. What do I need to stop doing in relationships? With my daughter being so enthused about the goals, her pursuits, that it takes over my schedule, that I think this is a really good question that sometimes we don’t take the time to really examine. Are there things that you need to subtract to stop doing in a relationship? What are you doing or saying that is hurting your relationships with those closest to you? What are different decisions that you can make instead of those?

With this one, I would say, I’m curious how you two would approach this. Where my head goes is, I would start with the relationships that are most important to me and looking at what are my goals for those relationships, or how’s my connection with my spouse, my partner? How’s my connection with my kids or my close friends or my work colleagues, the people that I’m spending the most time with and I’m most invested in? Is there any friction or a sense of, boy, it’s been hard to do X, Y, and Z thing. And then, rather than thinking what do I need to add to fix it, seeing what those roadblocks are, or would you go the opposite and go, what are relationships that are not so significant to me that perhaps I’m overcommitted to in some way? Do either of you have an opinion on that?

Yeah, that’s actually a good prompt with how you set it up just now, because immediately, I started thinking about in those moments where I don’t do the weekly preview and there’s information that I have in my head that I dropped down into the document, but if I don’t do that and I miss it, then there’s information in there that I should be communicating with my wife, and then I’ll remember it the day before, so I need to stop waiting until the last minute to communicate certain events or details of the week or the weekend to my wife because it’s just not beneficial to me, nor her nor the household. So

I think you can look at your relationships and examine the areas that you have friction. I can think of one example for me recently. My husband and I just rolled out a new kind of system for how we were going to get things that we needed to get done in our house, basically our home operation. Before we did this, I’d kind of done some work on it and thinking about it, but I kept delaying talking to him about it. I think I was a little nervous how he would respond, and I knew that… It’s not fun to sit through and think about all the things that need to get done. I don’t know about y’all, but not usually the thing I want to do at the end of the day or on my weekend. It kind of feels like just a real … on your time that feels a little leisurely.

Instead, what I found in myself is I was getting frustrated about things because I wasn’t willing to stop and have a conversation. So really what I need to do is stop being afraid to have a conversation about how to improve something, and on the flip side, isn’t it interesting? Even with my example with work, sometimes we think the things are bigger than they actually are, but as soon as we stop doing them or do the thing, we realize, oh, I made that seem so much bigger when it was actually a really easy conversation. We got some things sorted out, laid out this new system, and it’s been fantastic, but sometimes it’s just the resistance early on just to make that first step is hard to overcome. Do you like that Blake? I just went a little deep.

You did. I had to get my was I had to throw out my snorkel. It wasn’t deep enough.

No.

Had to get the whole mask.

I feel like I might have a vulnerability hangover now.

The third category is money. What should you stop doing when it comes to money? Is there a habit, an expense, something that you are indulging in that is holding you back from your financial goals? I’m embarrassed to say, I could think of several things for me instantly with this category, but there’s a couple of things that came to my mind. One, you’ll appreciate those that didn’t bring their oxygen tanks to go scuba diving with me. It’s very simple. I should say, what should I stop doing? You know when you are buying something online and you can get a discount for this first purchase if you subscribe to their newsletter? There’s one store that you never ever want to unsubscribe from, and that’s fullfocus.co because that newsletter is fire and you don’t want to miss out on those deals, but what I’ve noticed with me is that I’ll have all these deals and these offers and I’m overloaded with offers.

And the more aware of offers that I am, the more that I want to spend on those or not miss out on those. At a certain point, I started to do this thing, I’m kind of a dork because I was like, hey, I’m going to have unsubscribe Fridays, where I just go back through my email and I just unsubscribe from stuff that’s no longer serving me. This may not seem financial, but for me it totally is, is to stop looking at emails or being subscribed to stores, online stores, that I don’t actually need. When I need a new pair of pants, guess what? I’m going to look around and find a pair of pants. I don’t need to be aware of 15 stores deals every weekend because listen, I’m a simple man. I don’t need to be buying a bunch of pants.

I think that’s an excellent idea of, I may borrow your unsubscribe Fridays because I think one of the things that gets me is when you are doing your free trials for things that you want to try out and you have to put your debit card or your credit card number in there to start the free trial, then you actually don’t use the trial, but not only that, it kicks you into a full subscription, and by that time, you’re like, well, I got to use it now, but you never actually go back and really use it, so I’m going to borrow that idea of unsubscribing any free trial that is now no longer a free trial, but it’s just trialing on my bank account at this point.

Yeah, it’s a free trample on your-

Free trample, there you go.

… bank account. Can I do a quick scuba habit with money that I need to stop doing? Is worrying. Worrying is actually a habit. It’s this automatic thought habit, and I’ve been realizing, especially this year, that it’s a financial management plan that I’ve been enacting, that I’m going to worry about my money and it’s this cycle that’s hard to break. I realized this year, as I’ve kind of done some scuba diving with my own self and my thoughts or feelings about money and beliefs and all that stuff is, it doesn’t have much utility. Worry masquerades like it’s got game and it’s really going to help you with your finances, but it has very little game. It is not very helpful at all. In fact, in the long term, at least for me, makes me more likely to make emotional poor decisions in the long term either with my time, my work, my relationships, or my actual money. That’s your little scuba dive for the day. For anyone else, if you’re wondering, hm, what habit, if you’re like me and you’ve been addicted to the habit of worrying about your money, maybe consider stopping them.

I encourage you to look at the lilies. They need their toil [inaudible 00:17:15]-

Consider them.

… yet.

Preach. No, I got the organ behind you. Let’s go.

I forgot the rest of verse. All I know is his eye is on the sparrow and he watches-

Look at the lilies. You get it. You get it.

All right. So today’s tip to level up your focus is to write down one practice, one practice that you want to stop doing to boost your productivity this week. Thanks for joining us on Focus On This.

This is the most productive podcast on the internet, so share it with your friends and take a minute and leave us a review. It’s really helpful for sharing the episode with more people. I don’t know how the algorithm works, but apparently when you leave reviews, more people see our show. We’ll be back next week with another great episode. Until then, stay focused.