Citizens of the World: A Stoic Podcast for Curious Travelers - Find Your Focus

Episode Date: June 13, 2020

Most of us still can't travel right now thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. So this should be the perfect time to plan for future travel and adventures abroad. For some, this means creating an online business that allows them to work from anywhere. But...a lot of us are having a hard time focussing. There's a lot happening in the world right now. Plus, many of us are natural dreamers and/or are a little too research obsessed (rather than action-oriented).The goal of today's episode is to help you find your focus so you can do work now and spend more time enjoying your life later.I’m speaking with my friend Emily Prokop, podcast editor, host of the Story Behind, and co-host of the Hate to Weight podcast. Emily and I have a lot in common, including being recovering research-obsessed perfectionists. That doesn’t mean we’re natural planners. We definitely fall in the daydreamer category. But we have big goals we want to accomplish, and we want to help you achieve yours, too. Today, Emily and I are sharing our favorite routines and resources to make you a more productive podcaster. We recorded this a few months ago, but the tools and tips we share are timeless. Enjoy.Show notesDo you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Everything is a practice. There's no final dress performance of your perfect day. Welcome to the Postcard Academy, a show about travel, living abroad, and location independence for people seeking a more meaningful freedom-fueled life. I'm your host, Sarah Micahettell, an American who first moved abroad on our own at age 18 and who has been permanently enjoying life in Europe since 2010. I am so glad you're here. My guests and I will share with you how we made our travel, living abroad, and location independent dreams come true and how you can too, because you will never have this day again. Make it matter. Hello, I hope you have been having a beautiful week wherever you are here in Fogston.

It is sunny. I spent all morning walking to the nearby town Sandgate, got a nice coffee. Hardly anything is open still, but there's a few cafes where you can get a coffee or a sandwich to go. So I did that, got my ice coffee to go, sat in a park and did some reading, did some facetiming with my mom. It was a very lovely start to the day. Then I walked back to Fokston and stopped at my friend's street food stand, a tiny little restaurant on the hill of the high street. And so she serves loaded fries, but also a new Hungarian edition, this fried bread called

longos that has this sort of like garlicky sour cream topping and like some cheese. Oh my gosh, it's so good. If you grew up in New England, we had something called doughboys, which was just fried dough and usually it was powdered sugar. But longos, it's a more savory treat. Oh my gosh, it was so good. It's a good thing. She's only open a few days a week right now. But anyway, a lot of the world is still closed, but we can find the simple pleasures wherever we can. And we can also prepare for when the world fully opens back up. If you're a listener of this podcast, if you've been a long time listener that you know that something that I am very interested in is learning ways where we can be more productive, but also in a peaceful way, not productive in

like the hustle and grind mindset. But how can we achieve what we want to achieve, especially when it comes to living the kind of life that we want to live. Traveling more, living abroad, it's much more fun when you are free to actually enjoy these experiences and not always having work on the mind. So today I am sharing a conversation with my friend Emily Procop. She is a podcast editor and host of the podcast The Story Behind, where it's just short episodes of the history behind certain products and, you know, songs, all sorts of interesting things where at one point you might have been like, hmm, what's a story behind that? And so that's where that came from.

And she is co-host of the podcast, Hate to Wait. Emily and I have a lot in common, including being recovering research-obsessed perfectionists. And that doesn't mean that we're natural planners, as you know, we definitely fall into the daydreamer category of people. But of course, that doesn't mean that we don't have big goals that we want to accomplish. And I specifically wanted to talk to Emily because she has ADHD, but has managed to figure out ways to organize herself and plan that works for her. So today, Emily and I are sharing our favorite routines and resources to make you more productive so that when the world does open up again, you can set yourself up for success.

right now is the perfect time to start working on that business or that side hustle to help you create or add more freedom into your life. But there's a lot going on in the world. And if you're having a hard time focusing right now, that's totally natural. It doesn't mean that you are lazy or don't have ambitions. It just means that your attention is being pulled in different directions. And so the goal for this episode is really to help you focus on doing, setting yourself up for the future that you really want. So I hope you enjoy the show. Welcome, Emily. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks, Sarah. Thanks for having me. I've gotten to get to know you better this year, which I'm so happy about. We actually shared a hotel or an apartment at Podfest in Florida. And I discovered

we have the same personality type exactly. We do. We do. We do. We do. And so both from Connecticut. So so many similarities. And I think similar struggles as well often, especially when it comes to productivity.

And it's not that we're not hard workers. But I think that our minds work in a different way, especially for our personality type. We're sort of like the high thinking dreamers. We think very big picture. And when it comes to actually getting. details done, that can be a little bit more of a struggle. And I think a lot of it's to do with we're very research oriented and then fall down different rabbit holes. But you have figured out some certain tactics over the years to help work through this that I thought could be super

helpful for other people. And you also told me that you had ADHD, which I think a lot of people are still confused about what that even is. So could you just explain what ADHD is? Yeah, ADHD is sort of the umbrella term for both ADHD and ADD, and that's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or attention deficit disorder taking away that hyperactivity. And most people know that age very, very well, thinking back to elementary school and thinking about the kid who would sit in the back of the class because he couldn't sit still, he couldn't sit in his seat. He would be up and running around and shaking his foot all the time. and not being able to sit down. And most people, when you say ADHD, that's the first thing that pops into their heads. But for a lot of people, and especially women, as I came to found out when I was diagnosed with ADHD

in my late 20s, women and girls, especially in elementary school, they internalize it. And for most of us, the hyperactivity, I wasn't the one shaking my leg all the time or fidgeting and stuff like that. I was the one doodling or looking out the window, but at the same time listening to everything the teacher was saying, and understanding the concepts, but when it came down to doing the work, I couldn't get myself

to focus and actually do it. And it wasn't something that was diagnosed early for me. It was just like, I got the, she has so much potential, but she doesn't do the work. That's what I always got. And it was just a matter of learning how to do the work. So once I was diagnosed with ADHD, it kind of opened up something for me to research. I didn't know to research that before. I didn't know to look into tactics and strategies for coping with ADHD or ADD. And once I was able to do that, as you talked about, were very research heavy. I fell into that rabbit hole.

And I was looking up productivity tips and tips for people with ADHD and how to keep your focus. and I was lucky enough to work with Laura McClellan doing show notes for the productive woman podcast. And it was for me to be able to learn while writing show notes for that particular podcast. It was, I look back now and I didn't realize what a gift it was until now when I'm still every single day using the tactics that I learned from writing the show notes for that podcast. Oh my God, fate. That's amazing. I have gotten very interested in productivity this year. and so have been like seeking out people to interview about this.

And I recently interviewed a woman named Laura Vanderkim, who is a time management expert. She gave one of my favorite TED talks. And one of the things that she said was, well, she, in her one of her books, she referenced like somebody else who came up with the terms maximizer and satiscer. Have you heard of this? No, I love this. So I think we're probably both maximizers by nature. But I'm like weaning myself off of this. So maximizers are the type of people who want the best of everything, meaning they're afraid

of making the wrong choice. So we'll keep researching, like, an example that I gave was, like, it took me forever to decide, should I use Squarespace or should I use WordPress? I must have spent, like, weeks reading different blog posts about this. And then you get analysis paralysis where you just don't act on any of them. Yeah. And then, but when I'm reading this book, And then I was like, oh, there's these other group of people called Satisfisers.

And they're like, good enough people. They're like, does this, we'll have a set of criteria? Does this website host like match it? Done. Moving on. And I was like, whoa, that's the way to be. And in her book, Sherro exists? Yeah.

And in her book, she says, like, those people end up being the more happy people because it met, like, they're happy because it met their needs and they moved on where the maximizers. spend so much time investing, like time and money to find like the perfect like resource. And there is no perfect solution. And then they have are more likely to have buyers remorse. And so I just thought it was, but just having that knowledge, I was like, oh, I do think this way. But I don't want to think that way anymore. And so I can catch myself if I fall my, if I find myself like falling into this loop, I'll be like, nope, I want to be a satisfacer making a decision.

So I don't know. You're just having that. Yeah. So I would love to hear more about, so you said you learned a lot from that woman doing her productivity show notes. Is there anything in particular that has been really helpful to you? I loved her different perspectives. So she read different books and she would read different productivity. Like she did the research for me that I couldn't have the focus or I didn't have the capacity to really look into, okay, I know I need to get productive. I don't even know where to start to research this. So find. somebody who was already a curator of this sort of stuff, and she was able to give broad concepts on her podcast, which is why I've learned so much more from podcasts than I ever remember learning in school is because you can give me a broad concept. And as I'm listening, if I want to learn more, good. I know exactly where to start. I know what I can put into my Google search bar. So she would talk about books like getting things done and Michael Hyatt and Mike Varty. And I was a

able to, okay, I like how this is structured. I like that concept she brought up. Now I know what to research specifically so that I can get the help I need. When you find yourself in a situation where you're thinking, okay, I need to fix this. Not many people know that the next step is thinking, okay, what do I need to learn? And when you finally get that next step of what do I need to learn and you start asking yourself the question, then it's like you can focus and like I said, put into Google exactly what you want to research. And so that, like, that was a huge step for me is just knowing that stuff like that is out there and that there are so many different methods. There isn't just going to be one. I don't need to search for the perfect ADHD solution because it

might not help me. And the other thing about Laura Show was she would always go back to the best productivity method is the one that you're going to use. Don't go to this productivity method because everyone says it's the best, go to the productivity method that you're going to use. And it made me try out different things, and I realized I'm a writer. I'm a hand, manual, tactile. I need to write with a pen and piece of paper

to first of all process a lot of my thoughts. And that's one thing with ADHD is you might learn a broad concept, but it might take you a few days to kind of work through it and kind of play with it with your mind. And for me, writing stuff out, making lists,

even just brain dumps. And what I do most mornings, which are morning pages, I just write three pages of whatever's in my brain just to get it out. And it's kind of like purging. And then all of a sudden, your mind is clear. And you're like, okay, well, that was useful. That was useful. That was useful. All the rest of this is just thoughts that just came in. And so things like that, finding out exactly what works for me, what I can do daily on a mostly daily basis, something like morning notes or morning pages. And then every single day, I have a checklist that it even has very basic things on it. It has brush teeth, floss, which by the way, I was not a flosser until I started putting it on the list. So, whoa, let me pause for a second. I know. So first I want to say,

I think what you just said was great, and it sounds so simple, but you said one of the things that you learned was you have to ask yourself, what do I need to learn? And I think that a lot of people just assume that their failures or they're bad at something because they've never done it before. One of the books that changed my life was mindset by Carol Dweck. Have you read that one? No. It's all about growth mindset. But in it, they talk about how most of us, have a closed mindset where I might say, I'm horrible at salsa dancing, but maybe I've never gone salsa dancing in my life. I assume that I'm really bad at it, but I've never tried it. So of course I'm not going to be as good as somebody who has been

salsa dancing for like 10 years. And so her like key word is yet. So I'm not a great salsa dancer yet, but I can get there. But you have to have the mindset. that like to be open to learning and it's totally fine if you're not good at it yet because you're a beginner. So I like the idea of being open to learning and trying to do new things. Yeah. That was one of the things when I started doing yoga on a daily basis too.

The fact that it's called a practice, I would think about it and I'm like, you know, everything is a practice. There's no final dress performance of your perfect day. You're not gearing up for that. All right, finally, I have brushed my teeth every single day. I can finally do it perfectly. Now let me go on stage for everybody and brush my teeth wonderfully. But when you think about things, even as simple as brushing your teeth, or even as complicated as a giant project, and you're just thinking of it in your head is, this is practice, this is practice. I just have to do my best. It goes back to what was not being a maximizer. And even something that I say sometimes, I'm a recovering perfectionist because I have those perfectionist tendencies so hardcore.

And even that, I can bring it back to ADHD and say, it's because I had all that potential, but I never did the work. So it's like, I know the flaws and I can't always fix them. But what I can control, I will control. Piano piano, as I say in Italian, slowly, slowly, slowly we'll get there. So I would love for you to walk me through your day. So you mentioned the morning notes. You said brain dump, but I feel already paralyzed by this. So are you writing dreams, goals for the day?

What is it? So with morning pages, this comes from Julie Cameron's book, The Artist's Way. And it's really a way to just get that creative juice flowing for me. Because I don't know about you, but I wake up. And that's my most proactive time of the day. That was one thing with ADHD is figuring out what times of the day I'm actually proactive versus times of the day when please don't ask me to plan something. And in the mornings, super proactive.

So that's when I want to get all that creative juice out of my system. Then I write my to-do list for the day. And then for the rest of the day, I can kind of slowly move into reactive mode where I'm just following that list. And by the end of the day when my toddler and my kids and my husband, husband have all driven me nuts and I'm just barely stringing sentences together. I can just look at the list and go, okay, I have to do the dishes. I can do that. That's a pretty reactive thing. But going back to morning pages specifically, so from Julie Cameron's book, it's really a brain dump. And there aren't

many rules. It's just three pages of a notebook. I have a smaller notebook. It's not a giant eight by 11. It's a smaller notebook that I use. And I started off actually with some affirmations. I am a big believer in the fact that what you tell yourself, what you listen to, the words that you are constantly telling yourself, your brain believes and really can't distinguish between somebody saying, I'm a terrible salsa dancer, something like that, and your brain also being able to think at the same time, but I've never salsa danced before. So I really love starting it off with today is going to be the greatest day ever. The universe is friendly to me and I am grateful. I always try to get some gratitude in there. And then this is going to get a little woo. Every new moon,

I pick a new affirmation to go with for that whole moon cycle until the next new moon. So I have about 28, 29 days of just picking one sort of affirmation to focus on for that month. And then after that, I've already gotten my hand used to writing. It's been writing the same thing every day. And I try to really get mindful and really think it, not just writing, oh, it's a page. I have to write my name on the top of it. You don't really think about it anymore. But I try to be very mindful when I'm writing. And then I just let it flow. And one of the first rules that Julie says in her book is you don't write about your dreams, actually, which is bizarre because I used to keep a dream journal. And I always thought it was really fun. But she's like, no, you actually just want to put out your

tangible thoughts that you're thinking, especially things that I've been sort of noodling in my head for a while. I'll just write it out. And on the last page of those three pages, I usually plan out my day. And I don't get so specific where it's at 801, I will brush my teeth. At 802, I will floss. At 803, I will throw away the flosser. I don't get that much, but I do a very general, this is how my day is going to go. And it helps me visualize it too, so that I'm not just looking at a list and being like, well, that's a whole lot of stuff to do. I've already kind of gone through and pictured myself doing the things. And it gets me in the right frame of mind to then sort of transition into reactive mode. And a lot of the work I do, you and I are both podcast editors, a lot of podcast editing is reactive. You don't really have to plan for it. You're just kind of

waiting for the next um or something that you have to fix. I'm the same exact way. No surprise. Yeah, I do my best creative work in the morning. So I try to reserve the morning for exercise and then doing like the creative deep work and then yeah editing is reactive and so that you can do that I do that in the afternoon as well but you don't need to apologize for being whoa I just wanted to say that I love that you start with the affirmations and I think that's actually an easier way to get like the mind like the juices flowing by knowing that you're going to do some like gratitude and affirmations and I also don't think anyone needs to apologize for being woo. Like I always hear people like apologize and we'll say, I know this is woo, but I was

like, and that's people just apologizing for being emotional or spiritual. And I don't think anyone should ever have to apologize for being emotional and spiritual. I think that's a really important part of, you know, being a human being. You know, it's funny. We're so trained that it's not professional to talk about spirituality or something. Like if you're talking professionally and nobody really pictures themselves in a board meeting, in a suit, and all of a sudden saying to somebody, yes, and quarter two, on the day of the new moon, when the new moon is in tourists, make sure we do it that day because it's the best day to, you know, I want them to because I love it, but. Yeah, yeah. Maybe there will be a global shift, like a mindset shift. I, like, that's

my great hope for, like, right now we're recording this during coronavirus time. And, um, And I'm hearing a lot of people reflecting on how things seem to be coming more meaningful. We're having more meaningful conversations that we've been sort of just forgetting about for a long time. We get so caught up in the day-to-day grind. I heard Andrew Cuomo talking about that the other day. He was like, I realized that my daughter is like, we've just been having these superficial conversations. Like, hello, how are you? How can I help you?

Great. Like dad conversations. And he's like, I actually. know what's happening in my daughter's life now and it's and it's nice it is i've been noticing that since more of everybody's work is online it's actually easier to shut it off when you're done with work and go do something like have a conversation with somebody or read a book for me it was like okay i'm done working time to go on social media some more and actually have fun on there and now i think we're constantly doing zoom meetings we're constantly staring at a screen

and a lot of people are doing it a lot more than they used to. And I think we're all kind of feeling just, I need a break. I need to get back to actually feeling a book in my hand or actually going outside and enjoying nature. Yes, I love it. And then just one more thing on the moon. People talk about hitting quarterly numbers

and different things like that. And even that, I think people are getting sick of, like even companies are getting sick of that. And I'm seeing a slight movement. I would love to see more of people like considering a happiness index rather than just like gross domestic product. And it was like, yeah, like we should be measuring how happy our citizens are rather just than how rich we can make companies. Yeah. Anyway, that was a fun tangent.

I can bring it back to podcasting too because one of the things that I started doing this year was talking to my clients and having one-on-ones with them at the end of the year. just to find out, how are you doing? How are you actually doing with your podcast? How are you feeling about it? What are you nervous about? And it's always funny because I've heard them every single week and they never talk to me. So they're so, they're very shy and hi, how are you? And I'm like, oh, I know you really well. Don't worry about it. Oh, that's so interesting. And for podcast listeners as well. Like, we're coming into their ears every week and they feel like they really know us. And so that's another reason why conferences can be fun when you can actually get to meet people who've been listening to you. It's wild. I love it. All right. Emily, so we talked about the morning

papers. They're morning pages. Okay. So morning pages and then you also write down notes of everything else that you want to do throughout the day? You can visualize yourself doing these. Could you tell me a little bit more about this visualization? Well, it's usually just when I'm writing because when I'm writing freehand, my mind is kind of going with whatever, not like, oh, and this is how this word is spelled. It's kind of so ingrained in me already that I'm thinking about it and I'm picturing it while I'm writing it down. And that might be another thing with our brains that we can do, especially with ADHD. We kind of need constant stimulation. So I can write down something and also visualize it at the same time. And so then I finally, on the next page, after those three pages, then I have one page that's

just the whole checklist for the day. And it's compartmentalized into three different sections. There's the self-care section, and that was what I was talking about, brush your teeth, get dressed, floss, yoga, make your bed. I love making my bed every day because that's one of those things that future me really gets happy that past me did. So at the end of the night, when I get into my bed and it's all made, I'm like, oh, thanks, thanks earlier, Emily. Thanks, proactive Emily, for making your bed. And it's just a really nice surprise. So I consider that the self-care area. And then after that, I write down all the stuff I have to do with work or on the computer. I've kind of taken anything I have to do on the computer and put it into my work category now.

It's not so much fun anymore to go on my computer as much as it used to be because it's like, okay, as soon as I open this laptop, my day starts. And then below that is the family stuff. So that's the breakfast, lunch, making sure that my kids go outside for the day, except if they don't go outside for a day, oh, they can't sleep, anything I have to clean. And so I have this written down calendar, but I also use Google Calendar. and I have a lot of my work stuff on there as well because this is a paper notebook and I have kids and they have ripped it, ripped stuff out and stuff.

So I make sure that anything that's really, really important is also on my Google calendar, which I can check on my phone. And it has things like reoccurring chores. So every two weeks, it has a thing that pops up a reminder that says clip the cat snails because I'm not one of those people who could just look around my house and see, huh, when was the last time I'm. mop again. I actually need that reminder in there. So I make sure that I don't have a lot of stuff just in my head constantly. I have it in a place where if something happens, at least my husband knows, okay, it's time to cut the cat's nail. Oh, no. So how do you plan your calendar then? Do you have like a weekly or a monthly sit down where you're mapping your workout and stuff like that? So with Google Calendar, I'm pretty good about coming up with these things as I need them. So with something like the cat's nails, they usually get to the point where they would be too long. And I'm like, oh, I need a better system. And then that's one. I'll start adding to it. But also Sunday nights, I really like to take that time and look at the week ahead. And speaking of another notebook, I also have this long post-it.

sort of pad, and it has all the days of the weeks mapped out. So not only do I have that in Google calendar, but just to make sure that I have another calendar that sort of everybody can see my week, my husband can see my week, my kids, if they really want, they can see my week. I have that calendar, and I write down the stuff like Emily is doing an interview at 11, do not come downstairs, stuff like that. So I write that out for them, and I do that Sunday nights because the post-it pad really starts on Monday, so it goes all the way through the weekend. And the other thing with writing things down for me is having that physical memory of writing something down means I don't need to constantly look at my notebook either. So once I write that list, a lot of the times I'll put

that daily list down and just do the things. And there are some days where I won't do the morning pages. If I don't have a lot to talk about or if I'm thinking, you know what, I just want this day to just hang out, not really get into creative mode. Because if I get myself in creative mode, then I'll start working and I want to actually take a day off. So there are some days where I don't do morning pages, but I still have that list just to make sure that certain things get done. So Sunday nights sound like they're your planning nights. Yeah, that's my planning night for the week. And then I think usually at the end of the year, too, I'll look at my calendar and just see, okay, is there anything that wasn't really working this year? And I'm constantly changing that

checklist also, that daily checklist because I'll put stuff on there that it's like, oh, let me start adding more self-care. So I'll put down a checklist of self-care. And then I'm realizing I'm like, all these things are self-care. I don't need to go overboard with the self-care just for another thing to check off. Okay. Why do you get so granular for things that, I mean, you wouldn't actually forget to brush your teeth, would you? At the end of the day, yeah, when I'm just not thinking, when I'm kind of reacting and it's easy enough to say to yourself, you know what, I did all I need to do. I did my client work. That's all anybody can expect from me. And it's really easy for me to let that sort of self-care stuff go. And that's usually when I do let that self-care stuff go, I don't normally need to be reminded of it. But when I do need to be reminded of it, it's kind of a flag in my head of, hey, what's going on? What's actually? distracting you. So it's nice to be able to have that checklist that I still, I have the habit at the end of the day I look at and I check stuff off. And if I'm noticing like, you know what,

I'm not really getting enough water, even though, you know, water is something that you should be drinking all the time, it's still like, I'm not going to feel good unless I have that water or I'm not taking care of myself. This is a slippery slope to maybe going into a little bit of depression or getting bogged down by anxiety and stuff. So even though it's granular and it, like, every time I write down brush teeth, I laugh at myself too, like, I have to write this down. But the other thing is doing those check marks and checking things off. Every time you do that, you're accomplishing a small goal. So another thing, and we talk about being Enigram 9, but I think I have like Enigram 5 a lot in me because I loved finding out that when you check things off, it releases

dopamine in your brain and dopamine is that happy hormone that keeps you motivated. So as even if I'm checking off, great, I brushed my teeth. I'm much more likely to be like, okay, well, that was fun checking it off. What else can I check off? And having those easy little things like making my bed, getting dressed and checking those off, it actually motivates me to do the bigger things. So I know there are so many different methods. A lot of people might say, eat the frog, do the hard thing first. No, I'm realizing more and more, I need to warm myself up. I need to give myself, like, easy check marks and then push me toward the frog. Yeah, that's very satisfying. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's just, I mean, gamification works in general. One of my, like, favorite, I like to listen to a lot of, like, change management. It's just different, you know, behavior, economics type thing. And one story that I hear, you know, quite a bit that stands out is if you go to, like, your favorite coffee place and they give you a card and they said you know here you can like once you have 10 coffees the next one's on us but then but if they gave you a card and you had to get like 12 coffees before handing it in but they like stamp two for you right there stamp stamp stamp well let yeah let me get you started on this card and then when you get 10 it's the same thing yeah like both cards Like you have to buy 10 coffees before you get the free one.

But when they give you the two stamps, you feel like you're a little bit ahead because they've done the tick mark thing. Yeah. Essentially. Yeah. I gamify a lot of stuff and gamifying things that helps me stay focused and other things like the Pomodoro technique for staying focused, setting a timer for 25 minutes and working on just one single thing for that 25 minutes. Knowing that, okay, if I accomplished this. I get a five-minute break. I love it.

I need those sort of tiny little rewards, those little hits of dopamine. And I honestly tell my husband sometimes when I'm walking in my to do list, I'm like, I'm chasing my dopamine. Yeah, Pomodoro has been game-changing for me. Not, I guess, because I felt like I needed that five-minute break energetically, but I guess I did because I realized that if I let myself work for too long,

I'll start just floating off into La La Land and not realize it unless I have like that timer. So just to reiterate, Pramador technique is you're like, focus deep work for 25 or so minutes, five minute break. You do that four times and then you can take a longer break. But yeah, so helpful. It really is.

Stuff like that where you know that there's some sort of reward at the end, even if it's as simple as a checkmark or a five minute break to actually do nothing instead of trying to work and then distracting yourself and finding yourself to. 25 minutes later, still on Facebook when whatever it was that you were processing has been done for about 20 of those minutes. They are true wizards over there at Facebook figuring out how to suck us in because I still get sucked in.

Like half an hour will go by and I'm like, what am I doing? What have I even looked at in these last 30 minutes? It's just been a blur. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I try to cut down on my social media and really only go on when I have something. thing to say. I've tried doing that. But sometimes there's just that muscle memory. I have to move the apps on my phone for social media all the time because my muscle memory will just automatically

open up my phone and go to Instagram. And I finally moved Instagram out of where it was and put the Kindle app there instead. So then my thumb would open up a book and I'd be like, oh, I don't want to read right now. Then I probably don't want to be on Instagram either. What am I putting off? Yeah, yeah. I've deleted a lot of apps from my phone and, like, have made a conscious effort to not look at email or social media first thing in the morning. And it has made my mind feel so much cleaner. Yeah. Like, I just felt like garbage when I used to wake up. And, hmm, what's on Facebook? Better check my email before even getting out of bed. I'm sure lots of people are still like that. But I feel like such a healthier person now that I have broken the habit. That was one rule with morning pages that I have on most days is I don't look at my phone before writing everything out because I'm still sort of groggy and waking up and figuring out what my day is going to be. The last thing I want is a notification on Facebook to come through that all of a sudden derails all my plans and not necessarily something like an emergency that I have to deal with, but maybe a notification on Facebook of, oh, hey, there's this live going on today and thinking, oh, well, that seems like a bigger priority than whatever else I have on my calendar that I haven't

looked at yet. So I always want to make sure to leave social media until after I've already planned out my day and then kind of see where it can fit in if I need to do anything with it. For sure. And I think we both have people pleasing tendencies. And so we can have our intentions for the day. But then if we like look at email too soon or something else and somebody asks us to do something, even if they don't need it right away. Yeah. You may feel like better get to the snow, even though it's not. Yeah. One of the greatest things I found for my email just for that is boomerang, the extension boomerang, so you can actually put it off, but consciously put it off to be like, I don't need to deal with this right now. I don't need to deal with this today.

Let me put it off to a day. Maybe I'll send it to myself on Thursdays or Fridays when my workload are a lot lighter and I have more time to actually focus on my email. And it also helps me get to inbox zero, which is another thing I try to get to as much as I can because, oh, how satisfying is that to to get to inbox zero? I've never experienced that. I don't think. Can you tell me a little bit more about boomering how you're using it? Because I know that you can use it to send people email in the future. Like if I'm writing something and I want to send it, but I don't want them to receive it for a few days, like maybe I'm interviewing them, and I want them to get the questions, like, on a certain day. What was the way that you were talking about using it? Yeah, so when you open up your

email and you have the boomerang extension in Gmail, there's a little button on top that will say boomerang this in two days, boomering this in whenever, and you can pick whatever date you want it to resend you that email. So it gets out of your inbox. It's not sitting there left unread, which sometimes I'll do with emails I know I need to deal with very soon. I'll just leave them unread because I know it they'll bother me. But if there's something like maybe a ticket to an event specifically that I don't need that ticket now, but I have that ticket, I'll actually boomerang it to send to me the day before that event is so that I have it fresh in my email. Oh, okay, good. I have this ticket here. I don't have to go searching through my email to find it.

And another thing I'll do is I'll put off things that maybe somebody will ask me something that's not necessarily small enough to do in five to ten minutes. It's maybe something I need a half hour or an hour to do. I'll actually boomerang it and have it send it to me on Thursdays or Fridays when I know I'll have that chunk of time that I can spend on it. And so it's not actually sitting there taunting me Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, because those little taunts, those notifications, anything that's trying to pull focus away from what I'm doing, I get so frustrated with. And I get almost resentful of how

dare somebody email me this. They don't need it for a week. Why are they emailing me now? That's a brilliant tactic. It's a much better idea than just trying to keep everything in the back of your mind. Well, that's a big thing with being productive

and knowing my own brain and knowing that I need a place to capture all these thoughts. Even the dumb ideas I have and that's like morning pages is just to know that, all right, I don't have to work on all these ideas, every single thing that's coming into my brain. What can I do with it? Do I put it on my calendar? Do I put it on my ongoing to do list? Do I put it on a post it and stick it on my computer because it's a five-minute thing that I have to do, but I don't want to do it right now? Being able to know and have a system to capture

those ideas and those thoughts and all that stuff that comes into your brain, it's so freeing because then at the end of the day, you're not laying down and thinking, oh, what do I have to do tomorrow? Oh, I don't even know. I know it's on my calendar, but I don't know if it's reliable. I don't know if I'm going to check my calendar. And it took a long time to come up with the processes that, first of all, I would use and also getting into the habit of using it and checking my calendar every day. And I'm very lucky my phone is a Google Pixel. It's an Android. And one of the things that I can have it do, is actually display my calendar on the home screen. So even when I open it up and I want to go to Facebook, I still have to stare at my calendar to see, you know, you have this to do today. Right. So you open up to your calendar.

Yeah. Yeah. It opens up to my calendar and then my other apps, but you can see it's sort of a snippet of what you have to do for that day. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. But so Emily, do you have a wind down routine or what does the end of your day look like? Usually it's finishing up my list and kind of going through.

and making sure the stuff that gets put off until the last minute, it's usually the stuff that I'm trying to reward myself with. So a lot of the times it'll be yoga. I like doing yoga in the mornings, but if I don't have time, or sometimes I don't want my son climbing all over me while I do yoga, I'll wait until he goes to bed. So doing yoga at the end of the night, and it's never a long, drawn out 90-minute yoga routine because I wanted to do yoga every single day. I had this. day where I just decided to write down exactly what my ideal day would look like. And in that ideal day, I don't make a lot of decisions of like, I want a big house. I can't picture all of that stuff, but there are certain things that I was like, I want to be able to do yoga every day in a beautiful

sunroom. Now, I don't have the sunroom, but I realized I'm like, what little steps could I take today to be able to get there? Okay, I don't have the sunroom, but I'm also not doing yoga. And when I'm picturing myself doing yoga in the sunroom, I'm good at it. So I need to get myself good at it. I can take steps to do that. So I started a daily yoga practice. And I told myself, I want to make it daily, because I really need that daily movement. But if it's going to be too long, if it's going to be the thing that I put off until the end of the day and it's something like 90 minutes, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to tell myself, no, it's better to go to bed. So I made my yoga practice only 10 minutes. It's only a 10-minute routine.

I learned it off of Rodney Yee yoga DVD years ago. And since it's only 10 minutes, I can think to myself, all right, 10 minutes, 10 minutes is not going to put off anything too badly. No matter what I'm doing, 10 minutes is not going to be life or death. I mean, unless it's a real emergency. But for the most part, if I put off going to bed by 10 minutes, it's not going to make that big of a difference. I'm still going to be tired the next day.

So I'm able to do yoga every night. And anything that sort of winds me down and helps me forget about the day and just releasing, that's kind of when I do some spiritual work. And I'll even do some more journaling. But normally at night, if I'm journaling, it's really reactive journaling. So it's kind of just like maybe processing something that I don't want to deal with the next day in morning pages. It's something that if somebody makes me angry, I don't want to go to bed angry and then write about it the next day. I want to kind of get. I want to kind of get. some of it out knowing that it's going to take a while to process. So that's pretty much the end of my day. It's just making sure that there's nothing else in my brain that's going to keep me up all night, making sure stuff is on my calendar for the next day. Sometimes I'll write a post-it note of I have to make sure tomorrow to do these three things specifically. And then as long as it's put somewhere, as long as those ideas and those thoughts are captured somewhere, then I know that I can get to the next day. I can go to bed, not thinking about anything. It's wonderful. Well, Emily, thank you so much for talking to me today. Where can people find out more about you?

Absolutely. You can find out about me going to e-podcastproductions.com. If you want to listen to hate-to-wait, that's over at hate-to-wait.com. And the story behind is that the story behind podcast.com. Excellent. And it's hate-to-wait, W-E-I-G-H-T. Yeah, hate-to-wait. Yep. All right. Thank you, Emily. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. The links to you, Everything that Emily and I discussed will be in the show notes, including links to the podcast that she's on. If you want to find more productivity resources, you can go to postcardacademy.co. That's all for now. Thank you so much for listening.

And have a beautiful week wherever you are. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or or just talking with friends. Download it at sarahmicatel.com slash blank no more.