Focused - 128: Communication

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Mike and David tackle one of the most difficult subjects of focus, Communication.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. How you doing, Mike? I'm doing great. How about you, David? I'm really happy. It's WWDC week as we record this. We're recording a little early. Mike's got a couple things going on. And I really made an effort this week to stay focused on just a couple things going on and uh i really made an effort this week to stay focused on just a couple things and throw some things overboard and it's paying off so practicing those focus muscles baby

awesome way to go yeah i think that is actually a thing for focus is you know looking ahead and knowing the times that you're going to be under a lot of time crunches on unusual things and deciding ahead of time that other things are just not going to get done that week like usually i put in a couple hours a day on field guides and this week i'm just taking the week off and um i'm getting eight hours of sleep and not going crazy because of that. Sure. Yeah. Agreed.

We're going to talk today a lot about, well, focus, obviously, but I think we've gotten some feedback recently. And I want to kind of talk about some of the things that you can and can't do when you maybe see these things coming, but there's nothing you can do about it. If you work in an office environment, that's maybe a little bit different when you maybe see these things coming, but there's nothing you can do about it. You know, if you work in an office environment, that's maybe a little bit different when you feel a stressful time coming than if you are a freelancer. But I do think there's some commonalities and there are certain things, certain levers you can pull no matter what your situation is.

A lot of those have to do with communication. Yeah, and that's going to be the focus of today's show. We've got a lot to say about it. I think that it's kind of criminal that we really haven't devoted a show to communication yet when that is such an important thing for people that want to stay focused and on target. And it's something where it's really easy not to focus on communications to your own peril. So we've got a lot to talk about on that. But I thought before we get to the main topic today, I just want to take a minute to acknowledge that the folks at Apple have recognized the brilliance and insight of the Focus podcast. And they love it so much that they've added a feature, starting with iOS 15 and Mac Monterey that's coming out in September.

They've added a focus feature, Mike. I know. They didn't even call me. They didn't even call me about that. It looks pretty cool. I can't wait to test this out, although I am not going to install the betas right away. Famous last words. But as much as I want to try out this focus feature

i want my stuff not to break even more uh so at this point it's on my iphone my ipad and one of my macs of course there you go there you go but that's also kind of with mac power users and some of the other stuff i do it's kind of comes with the territory. Well, you are our boots on the ground. Yeah. And I don't mind, especially like right now I'm not, I'm barely leaving the house. So if my phone doesn't get received calls or whatever, that's okay. In fact, that might help with my focus. If my phone stops, it's not a bug. It's a feature. Yes. But I do want to talk about this, this feature and we're going to, I think we're going to do a show on focus and technology once this ships. Because this is really powerful. So the way it works, it's called Focus.

And they allow you to create separate focus modes on your Apple devices. And I know that some of the other platforms are playing with this too. So if you're not an Apple user, just bear along and maybe you can find a way to apply this with your other technology. But the idea is you decide you want to do some type of work and then you have very customizable controls over what interruptions you can get while you're doing that work. I wrote a post on it at Max Barkey. We'll put it in the show notes. And the way I look at this feature is they did it exactly right.

When you turn on focus by default, it builds a big wall around you to keep out all notifications, people and interruptions. And then it gives you a set of dials and switches where you can decide who or what gets to come through that wall. Like you can make a really tiny little door that little things can fit through, or you can make a bigger door that let more through. But it's entirely with your control, and it's customizable by which context you're working in. As an example, when I podcast, I really don't want interruptions, you know, because it's really hard to podcast. And I sit here, at least my brain is stretched to its limit as I sit here and record, believe it or not. So I don't want a bunch of notifications coming in. I don't want to get a message from a random person with a question. And so when I have a podcast, I just click the button on my iPhone for podcasts. And then suddenly the only people in the world that can message me are, are Mike, Stephen, Rosemary, which are the three people I podcast with and my wife and nobody else in the world

is going to get through to me on a message. And I can also say, well, only certain apps can send me messages. And like in this case, it might be something like Zoom, you know, or some, you know, apps that I need to get messaged on. They're related to the task at hand, but the rest of the world and the rest of the apps can't get through. And you can even say, well, what if I get an emergency? What if, you know, Lyft shows up at the front door to take me somewhere? Well, they can get through, but I turn that off too when I'm podcasting. So the door for getting to me while I'm sitting here on microphone is very small. And then when I've done podcasting, I turn that focus off and then all those, that wall comes down. And it's really powerful because think of all the areas of your life where you want to have different limitations.

You know, like maybe when you're at work, you let certain work people through. But when you're at home, you don't let them through. And all of that is easy to set up. And it takes an hour or two probably to get it all sorted out when this ships in September. But if you're interested in focus, this is a power tool. It sounds pretty cool i like from your description it sounds like that it is opt in instead of opt out for the notifications which has always been my biggest issue with notifications most of the time when people complain about or they they first realize how much

attention is going to notifications the first thing they do is they go into their settings and they go into notifications and they look at every single app that they've ever installed that they have by default allowed notifications for. There's hundreds of them in there sometimes and you got to start turning them off individually and in inadvertently almost always you're going to miss one and then something has the opportunity that to interrupt your focus when it shouldn't and after it does you feel kind of bad about that or you the other side of that but what the trap i fall into is like oh well i haven't seen that one in a while i don't really need to go and turn that one off it's's fine. And then a couple of weeks later, you get the same sort of thing.

And at that moment, it seems like too much friction to go in and turn it off. So unless you have a built-in review where you're going and you're toggling all these things off and only letting through the really critical stuff, then it's easy for stuff to slip through the cracks. But if what I'm hearing is correct, you know, when you toggle a focus, then everything is off and then you get to choose which things you are going to allow in, which in my opinion is a much better approach. Yeah. You're whitelisting individual people in apps. You're not blacklisting out of the whole pool. And I think by and large, that's the way something like this should be run. And then it does even more because you can have it trigger a particular home screen on your device. Like an example is for me, I have, and we're going to talk about communications today,

but one of the tips I'm going to share later is I feel like for me, the best way to communicate with focus is to dedicate time to communications. I do much better at tracking communications if I batch it and do it all together. Whereas if I let people get through the wall and communicate with me while I'm in the middle of working on a project, I'm going to do a much worse job of communicating. So I have a communications context. And I can set up a home screen on my phone that has the mail app and the messages app and all that stuff. And I, and I hide it.

So you don't see it normally when I look at my phone, I don't even see the mail stuff, but if I trigger a communications focus, I can have my phone then bring that home screen out of hiding and make it the primary home screen so i go into communications mode i got my communications app once i turn communications off it all that stuff goes away and this is why the post i wrote is about um i see this as a huge like angle into contextual computing so um and this is something i talk about a lot of mac power users not so much here but i'm really a believer in the idea of your computer should arrange itself to the task at hand and that's one of the best ways you can set yourself up for success with focus

and this is this is that i don't know if apple intended that, but this is a huge tool for contextual computing. It's appealing to me too, because I tend to use my devices for specific things. And on my iPad is a great big sticker that says create every day. That is a creation device for me. It is not a consumption device. So theoretically, when I get this, I could set up a create focus.

Hopefully, I can trigger that automatically whenever I open my iPad using something like shortcuts. And then I only get the because these do sync between devices, I believe I saw, right? Yeah. So then, you know, when I'm whenever I am using my iPad, I am in creative mode. Whenever I am on my Mac, I'm in admin mode. Or whenever I'm on my phone, I'm in communication mode. That's the exciting part to me.

I have no idea what it'll actually look like when I set all this stuff up, but my brain is already creating these different scenarios. I already have like 10 of them and i'm only like two days into it but and by the time this ships it'll be more refined and it'll probably be under 20 but i'm gonna have a lot of them like i was thinking i could even make one per podcast like there's no reason while i'm making focus that steven should be able to to message me and get through but while i'm'm making MPU, there's no reason Mike should be able to message me and get through.

And these are free, so you can make as many as you want. There's a couple things. Like, we just went, you know, Disney's open now, and that's something that is a big deal to my family. So we had planned a trip together for, like, two months. And we all went together last weekend. And I had, um, a client get through to me while early in the day with a problem that just sent me on a tailspin. You know, I, I was a focused failure gang, you know,

he called a couple of times, started sending text messages. Eventually I returned the call and he sent me down this road in the back of my head. He started, he kicked off a subroutine that made it really hard for me to be at Disney after spending all this money to be there and just enjoy the day with my kids, you know? And like, um, and I got myself turned around, but it took a couple hours and i really you know i felt like a failure for that and like one of the things i'm i'm gonna do with this new focus was i'm gonna create a you know disneyland focus and trust me in the future if someone tries to reach me and they're not my family and i'm there with my family they are not getting through those walls you know and um and also i can add it to a specific home screen. So like, I can like,

battery level is always an issue when you're at a theme park. So I can like kind of give myself the information I need and, you know, kind of make my, turn my iPhone into a fun Disney device for a day and not a work device. And this is like, so I guess the point is this can be the, this technology can be applied to leisure as well as it can to work. Yeah, I love that Disneyland focus example. That's a great one.

The other thing I'll add with this feature is just from a big picture perspective, I love that big tech companies are taking mindfulness with technology use seriously. I know when stuff started coming out even a couple of years ago with the Breathe app, and Google's got a version of this too. It's like digital well-being or something like that. It kind of felt like we got these things and then they didn't change a ton. And people were starting to question, was this a sincere effort to promote digital well-being and effective use of technology and combat the addiction that sometimes happens because people just can't control themselves? Or is it just kind of like a token effort to say there, we did something. And I feel like with this, this feature, Apple

is saying, no, we're serious about this sort of stuff. Yeah. And I hope other companies follow that approach. And maybe they don't have their exact same focus mode feature, but they have something similar. And I feel like that's just going to have nothing but benefit for people who use these devices all day, every day. Yeah. And the point you made earlier, just to kind of step back to is this applies to all your Apple devices. Like when I put my device into podcast mode before we started recording today, all of my devices went into it. And that's always an issue because before you would try and like limit notifications on one device but the other device would start going off and now that is kind of a solved problem and

i know that there's going to be a lot of people that are going to like roll their eyes at this stuff and um and probably not give it an effort but i think that the listeners of this show are like you know people that get it. And we're still in beta. Like I said, I want to come back and talk about this when you listener can be looking at it on your phone. And by then I'll have spent more time with it and have better advice about how to use it. But I think that this is something to look forward to. And the point I just keep coming back to is this is not just a notification limitation system.

This is a contextual computing system for your Apple devices. And if you think about it in those terms, like what are the things that you do that you want to block schedule and be focused on? Well, each one of those should have its own focus on your Apple devices. And then you set yourself up for success. And this is a really good thing.

Also, you can automate it. So like you could trigger an automation that would turn it on. I mean, I'm rambling. I get it. But the, but I'm very excited about this. Me too. This episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by TextExpander from Smile. Communicate smarter with TextExpander and get 20% off at textexpander.com slash podcast.

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in any platform, any app, anywhere you type. Take your time back and increase your productivity with TextExpander. It's literally one of the first applications I install on any new Mac, iPhone, or iPad because I've got so many great snippets I've developed over the years, doing everything from customer support for field guides to responding to questions from legal clients to making new filings to the California Secretary of State when I'm doing my legal practice. All the stuff that is tedious is automated via TextExpander, allowing me to focus. I love TextExpander because it works on all my platforms, it syncs my snippets automatically,

and it's got the power to go to that next level when I need it to. One of my favorite uses for the automation in TextExpander is automatically putting the date and subject lines of emails. I can do that with TextExpander without having to type it myself. And as a listener of Focus, you can get 20% off your first year. To do that, visit textexpander.com slash podcast to learn more about TextExpander. Once again, that's textexpander.com slash podcast. Our thanks to TextExpander from Smile for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. So the theme for this episode is communication. And this was inspired originally by both of us reading the Cal Newport book, A World Without Email, which got us thinking

about the ways that we communicate. And maybe we'll get to that. But as we started talking about that, we realized that there's a whole lot more here to talk about as it pertains to communication that we really haven't directly addressed. Yeah. I mean, communication between humans is very difficult. Even when we do speak the same language, a lot of times we're not speaking the same language. Right, yeah. Which I had sent you prior to us recording this episode, a podcast that I had listened to a while back

by our friend Sean McCabe. He had put out on his podcast, which I don't think is active anymore, but he had an episode on the communication episode is the name of the title. And I remembered listening to that a while back. And the big thing that stood out to me from that particular episode regarding this whole communication amongst humans is hard, is that there is a sender and a receiver whenever you communicate. But as the sender of information, you can't just assume that the recipient has received your message, even if they can state it back to you word for word. And that makes this kind of tricky. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, just to kind of look at the statement of the problem is that almost everything we do, whether it's work or you're talking to your spouse or dealing with your kids involves communication. And at a root level,

we assume that what we say to the other person, the message is received and understood. And as the receiver, we assume that we understand what they were intending. And I don't think enough scrutiny is put on those assumptions because very often that is not the case. And, and we go out into the world when we act on communications based on our understanding of them. And if that fundamental understanding is wrong, everything following that point is, is going to cause pain and suffering and waste your time. You know, it's just like getting it wrong at the beginning is, uh, the thing is doomed before you even start working on it. And it's like, if you were playing baseball and you thought that you had to run to third base every time you hit the bat, right. You know, you're just, it doesn't matter. It's all effort

wasted because you're going in the wrong direction. Yeah, that's a good analogy. I didn't think about this through the lens of alignment with the people that you are working with. And I say working with loosely because it could be co-workers and you're working on a project. It could also be a family. That's one of the most difficult things in my family. We've got five kids, my wife and I, and we're busy. So we need to make sure that we communicate effectively so we know who's got to be doing what, who's got to be where and when. All that kind of stuff needs to be balanced and it's impossible to do without effective communication. And I can't just send a text message saying, this is what needs to happen and assume that my wife got it and interpreted that message correctly. I need to, as I'm listening to that episode, the big revelation I got from it is

if I want to improve the communication wherever I am, then the thing to do is to take responsibility for it myself. I can take steps to make sure that when I send a message, it is received correctly. The big thing for me as I think about that is just to make sure that I am not communicating in the way that is most convenient for me. I think it's easy to do that. Just shoot off an email, shoot off a text message. Those two specifically, by the way, are interesting to me because you're just left with the actual text of the message. You don't get anything else. You don't see the person's facial expressions. There's no vocal inflections. It's literally just the message itself. And so it's really easy to misinterpret that stuff sometimes. I mean, I just can't state enough that this process is just fraught with peril. Like communicating with somebody, it requires an extreme amount of focus to do it properly. And I don't think, I know I don't, at least personally, I don't think we think about that often enough.

If you get it wrong, if you communicate and get it wrong, the two of you are going to leave that conversation and go off and do entirely different things because you don't even know what just happened, right? And so that's one problem. Another problem is the other person is going to feel undervalued because they know that you weren't paying attention or trying to do it right. I mean, there's just all these issues that arise from communication. I mean, there's just all these issues that arise from communication. And we sit here and make a podcast about focus, but I don't think we've talked enough about how important focus is to bring into your interpersonal communications. I was thinking about what are some real world examples? One of them is almost every sitcom that's ever been made, right? You know, I mean, you're too young to remember Three's Company, but that was a, that was a sitcom that was based every episode on a miscommunication.

Sure. And, and a lot of them are, I think it's less, it's a, it's a thing they use less often now that everybody has a cell phone, it's harder to get away with it. But, um, but just yesterday I had an example where I had a client, um, where I wrote some text for a client for a thing the client was working on. And we were using a shared GitHub. And the client's like, hey, where is that? I'm like, I put it in GitHub. And he's like, I don't see it.

And so we were talking. And the fundamental problem is I'm not good at GitHub. I don't use it enough. And I think I did something where he didn't see it. But we had texted each other, and I didn't take that away from the text. I didn't realize that he couldn't see it still. I thought that he could.

And then this morning he emails me and says, hey, I wrote something because I needed to get something done. And I'm like, damn, he didn't even realize. I didn't even realize that he didn't have what I had done. Sure. even realize, I didn't even realize that he didn't have what I had done, you know? Sure. And it was all because I didn't take the time to work that out in our short conversation about it.

I ran off and did something else. I didn't bring focus to the table and there was a miscommunication. And it's like, this is a daily thing, you know, I mean, for all of us really. But I mean, I know that, you know, I'll be the first to admit that I make a lot of mistakes with this stuff. And I think we all need to slow down a bit when it comes to communicating. That brings up an interesting point because a lot of the forms of communication that we have now, I feel like they are an attempt to make communication more efficient. Faster is not faster. Exactly. The slow path is the fast path because I can send an email and I can think like,

well, there, I cleared it off of my plate and I have communicated my message to the person. But if they have any questions and they email me back and then I answer that question and I email them back and we're playing email ping pong now and it can happen via text message too. In fact, it happened via text message to me just the other day. By the time you've gone back and forth a couple of times,

it would have been easier just to pick up the phone and to call the person. But even that is not a guarantee that everything is going to be communicated effectively. So we have a couple different problems here. We have a tendency to try and clear things quickly. And then we have a tendency to use alternate forms of communication to communicate those messages. So we're already trying to distill stuff down. And now we're using tools that aren't sending the entire signal. And it's just a recipe for disaster. At some point, you realize, like you said, that the fast way is not fast. When it comes to communication, it's actually more efficient to slow down, take time to go back and forth if you need to make sure that

you are on the same page and in alignment before you move forward. It's better to deal with those things in the short term than it is to just continue to run in opposite directions and realize down the road that, oh, I thought you meant this thing when you really meant the other thing. Yeah. And the whiteboard of your brain, goals of communication, number one should not be fast. Number one should be communication. I mean, the goal is that the thing I'm thinking gets across to the person that's listening to me or the thing they're thinking gets across to me. Because like I was saying earlier, if you're, if you don't get that right, you are running to third base and you are wasting everyone's time and possibly, you know, um, doing

real damage to something that needed to get done. So it is so important that we slow down with this stuff and get it right. Um, I was thinking about, about, you know, how do we get focused in communication? What are the barriers? And I thought it'd be worthwhile to spend a few minutes kind of like acknowledging why this is hard. And I just started writing down a list of ideas that come to me and reasons why it's hard for me to communicate. And, and so I've got a couple here and Mike, I'm sure you've got some too.

The first one for me is what I call not arriving at the conversation. And I have a very active subroutine in my brain, okay? So as I go through the day, like I have some hard problems I'm trying to solve for clients. I also do some thinking about Max Sparky and things I'm doing. And so at any one time, I've got things going on in my head that I'm trying to work my way through.

My, uh, I remember, I don't know if I've shared this story on a podcast before, but there's, there's kind of a, a, a story in my family about me as a little kid. a story in my family about me as a little kid. And my mom told us to me, like when I was little, um, my mom and, uh, one of her friends were sitting in the family room at our house and she was

doing laundry and I was reading a book and I walked through the room reading this book and I walked right through a pile of laundry, like, you know, folded towels. I just walked through it from one place to the next room. And my mom's friend says, hey, you know, what's going on? And my mom said something to the extent of like, I don't even think he knows he did it, you know? And my mom told me that defined my childhood, kind of like that was the kid I was, that I would get lost in

something and completely zone out of the world. And that's still true for me, sadly, you know? So that's a weakness for me, you know, inability to like engage with things if my brain is going somewhere else. And so with conversations, I have to be aware of that. When I arrive to talk to Mike about something, like Mike and I, we schedule calls for planning the show, but I have an alarm that goes off 15 minutes in advance so I can stop and like set down whatever is in motion in my brain and like start thinking about the focus podcast. I can't just like pick up the phone and call him or I'm not going to be at the conversation. Does that make sense? Yeah. You got to set up the context switch so you can transition effectively. Totally makes sense.

Yeah. Is that a problem you face? Is that something you're better at? It's definitely a problem that I face. I think also kind of the barriers to communication for me, these manifest differently in my different relationships. So just the not arriving at the conversation, to piggyback off of that, I would say that one of the struggles I face is not understanding what the expectations are from the communication that is going to happen. For a work meeting, is going to happen. For a work meeting, ideally, you've got an agenda and you have things that you're talking through and decisions that are going to be made, action items that are going to be applied from that meeting. I have a tendency to take that approach with my marriage as well. So I need to do a better job of understanding, you know, when my wife

needs to communicate something to me, is this her just needing to be heard? Or is this her telling me something so that I can present a solution? I automatically flip into solution mode and, well, here's the problem in the system. Let's see if we can fix this. And that's not always appreciated. Yeah. There was years ago, there was a book that was very popular called Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. And my wife and I read it together. And one of the points the author made, which I think is an oversimplification, but in generally, a lot of times women want to talk about an issue to talk about it and to get it out. And men generally go into fix mode. Like everything, you start telling me a problem and immediately my brain engages into how can I fix this?

Especially for my wife, because I want her life to be perfect and I want any problems she has to be solved. And she's not telling me something to get, you know, Mr. Fix it out. She's just telling me something so she can, so to tell me, you know, and I think there is, like I said, it's an oversimplification and you know, there are men and women on both sides of that spectrum and it's silly to categorize it by male and female but i do think that a lot of times when you communicate with people um the it's the reason they are telling you something is important and if you don't if you're not on the same page there again you can get distracted um and easily go into fix-it mode when they just want a listener. Yeah. Another problem, I think, is that whole concept of listening. This needs to be applied not just in that scenario, but I think this

is something that, a general statement, but probably true, everyone could improve their listening abilities. Because I do feel that a lot of communication that happens specifically in a work setting, at least historically for me, is not true communication where I say something or somebody says something to me and I am truly listening to understand what the person is saying. I'm just going to use it that way. So I make myself the bad guy. But the tendency is to listen in order to respond. And I'm curious, David, if you have struggled with this and if you think podcasting makes this worse. Well, podcasting adds an additional element because you don't want dead air, right? And so you're trying to keep things going. And it is hard because what you're saying is about to be recorded and published to thousands of people. So you and and trying to prepare your response while they're still talking yeah and that that's that's an issue i mean that comes in a few flavors really

i think one of them is you want to impress them and tell them how smart you are or another one is you think you know where they're going, but they haven't finished telling their story yet. But you've decided you know where they're going, so now you know what you're going to say in response. And so you're responding to what you think they're going to say, and who knows if they're actually going to say it, you know? And I think that is a very common mistake we make in communications with other people i'm guilty of that one all the time to be honest oh yeah but let's just step back a minute for the idea of listening like this show is about communication i feel like listening is an equal if not bigger

part of communication than than actual speaking yes i i agree I forget who said this, but somebody had a saying that I like says, you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. You're supposed to use them proportionally. Well, also just think about the people in your life. And we all have friends that when we talk to them, they're very quick-witted and they always have something to say back but we also have friends that when you talk to them they look at you and you know instinctively they're listening they want to completely understand where you're coming from and um those are the friends you value the most because that is a special and unique snowflake that we don't get enough of in our lives special and unique snowflake that we don't get enough of in our lives. Yes, 100%. How do you develop more of those types of relationships based off of communication? Maybe that's outside of context for a single podcast episode. But I do think that you can kind of

figure out what are the places that you have effective communication in your life, And they are probably tied to the better relationships that you have. Well, hopefully. Yeah, and then an interesting exercise from there, just the way my brain works, is like, well, how do I cultivate more of those? I think that a big part of this problem is focus and awareness, is bringing that to the table. this problem is focus and awareness is bringing that to the table. Like last week I had a planned call with a good friend and a, and a, and someone who does work with me on the field guides. And,

um, I had a bunch of calls from clients earlier in the day. And again, I came to the communication without arriving at the communication and I hung up feeling like I really let him down. You know, it's like, you know,

he had questions for me and some things he wanted to talk about and I was not feeling like I really let him down. You know, it's like, you know, he had questions for me and some things he wanted to talk about, and I was not there, you know. And I almost picked up the phone to call him back and apologize and say, let's start over, but I didn't. And in hindsight, that's exactly what I should have done. But I think bringing an awareness to the table is the battle. I mean, you know, when you plan for communications then you can be more communicative and you can you can bring all the tools we're talking about in today's

show to bear and and don't you want to be that person for your friend that yeah that is there and listens to them and and i think you need to judge yourself and when you have communications with people at the end maybe stop for a moment and say, you know, how did I do? And you know instinctively when you were there for them or when you were there to show how smart you are. Just to piggyback off of the idea that you shared at the beginning of that story where you felt bad and should you have picked up the phone and apologized for not engaging the right way. Back in high school, I liked my now wife, and I remember distinctly talking to her for the first time as a scared teenage boy and her immediately disconnecting from the conversation because her friend popped in and they went off and did their own thing. And at the time, I felt a little bit bad about it, but

I let go of it very quickly. But later that afternoon, she called me and she apologized for that. And that was the moment where I was like, wow, I've never experienced anything like this before. And was one of the things that initially attracted me to my wife. It's like she actually cares about other people. She's different. And so I would say along this theme of taking responsibility for communications, don't be afraid to have to be, don't put this expectation on yourself to have to be perfect but if you do make a mistake own up to it and have that difficult conversation you know it's hard

to say you know i messed up i do this with my kids too by the way like i'll we have principles we've got values that we live by we We try to respect each other, treat each other fairly. But breaking news, I lose my temper sometimes. And every time that I do, I try to bring everybody together and say, hey, I should not have responded this way to this thing. I'm asking for your forgiveness. Even to my three-year-old daughter, I will say, I'm sorry, do you forgive me? three-year-old daughter, I will say, I'm sorry, do you forgive me? And the reconciliation that happens after that, it's hard to put a price tag on that sort of thing. And those are the sorts of things I think you can kind of gloss over to say, oh, it was no big deal. And years go by and you do that enough and you wonder why you don't have a connection to your teenage kids. I think communication is the basis of life. It's the basis of the life of your marriage, your relationship with your children,

the relationships at work, and whatever you can do to improve that, you should do, even if it is uncomfortable in the moment. Well, I agree. And I think you're also teaching your kids how adults should behave. True. That really helps. But, I mean, it's really an issue for me. And even like I was talking about earlier, how I need time to context shift before I talk, now that my studio is kind of located in the center of the house. It's really easy for family members to walk up to me and start talking. And I really have to be aware of that or

we'll have a conversation and I'll have no idea what just happened because my head is in the middle of whatever I was doing when they walked up to me. Sure. Yeah. That's a struggle. I've got an office in the basement with a door that closes and it still happens all the time. One of the things that I've learned with that is not to get upset when it happens. If I am in work mode and I have a bunch of things on my task list, that's easier said than done. than done. But it never makes reacting emotionally when those interruptions happen never does any good. It does not make it any easier to go back into what I was doing. And it doesn't really do anything but potentially damage the relationship I have with my kids. I've learned to just kind of flow with those interruptions.

And even if, you know, they're asking me to do something when I'm in work mode, I will just stop what I'm doing and go play foosball for a few minutes or play a game of horse in the backyard with my oldest. And that, you know, in the big scheme of things, it really doesn't matter. I think that's maybe another aspect to communication is recognizing that what's going on in the back and forth right now has limited value. In the moment, it seems very important. You want to make sure that you get your message communicated the right way, that it's received, that people follow through with your instructions or whatever. But taking a big picture approach to the communication and the relationship that's being built, I think has very positive ramifications. It kind of leads into maybe a topic for after the ad break here of the relational bank account. finding an edge and leveraging it. If you're hiring, that edge is Indeed. Indeed is the job

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Terms and conditions do apply. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. So Mike, before the break, you talked about the relationship bank account. Tell us about that. concept that I originally picked up from Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which side tangent here, I feel like that book gets some undeserved bad press. That and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, those are two of the best books that I've ever read. But I feel like the titles maybe don't do them justice. And people don't really understand the message of the book because they just look at the title and they project kind of the current clickbaity society that we live in to the rest of that particular book. But that's an idea from that book where every interaction that you have with somebody,

That's an idea from that book where every interaction that you have with somebody, you are either making a withdrawal or you are making a deposit. And I really like this idea. Someone reciprocates and actually listens to you and shows you and gives you the attention and the help. If you're applying this in a work context, you know, the tendency can kind of be like, well, I just got to make sure I get my stuff done. And so this maybe seems out of place at first, but you make deposits in the relationships you have with your coworkers. Eventually, like that gets paid back to you. It kind of starts a virtuous communication circle. Yeah, I agree. And the continuous deposits are so important. But this really does come back to communication as well. What about, you know, what can we do to get better at this? How can we bring focus into communications? Well, I think when you're talking about the relational bank account, you can be focused

on making deposits when you interact with people. Specifically for me, the important relationships in my life would be my wife and my kids. So I can make sure that every interaction that I have with them, I am trying to intentionally make a deposit and recognizing the moments where I have been making withdrawals. As we talked about earlier, when you make a withdrawal, it's not necessarily a destructive thing to the relationship, but recognizing it and trying not to do it too often is important. Otherwise, you will find yourself without those relationships when you really need them. So it's not easy to do, and I fail at it probably daily, but it's a mindset I try to have,

and I feel just being aware of it provides a lot of value. Yeah, I agree. And I do think that you need to think about this question both as communicator and as receiver. I mean, a lot of times the communication is primarily from one person to another. But I also think that a real good rule for me is trying to batch communications together. You know, like I have a time, a block of time in the late morning and in the early evening that I call comms, you know, AM comms and PM comms. And I really try to keep, you know, all the time for calls and significant email and things like that to those

batches. And there's something to be said for saying, okay, now I am Sparky the communicator. I'm not Sparky the contract writer or Sparky the podcaster. And if I can just keep myself in that zone in order to get through all the primary, you know, communications of the day, I can do it with a more intentional and focused manner. Yeah, I'm kind of curious. It's one thing to intentionally put on the communicator hat and say, this is what I'm going to be doing right now. But do you feel that it is ever appropriate to take that hat off? Oh, yeah.

I mean, when I'm not in communication mode, I try not to communicate. But if you got interrupted and now you are communicating whether you want to or not, do you just say, well, I'm not in communication mode? Or at that point, I feel like you kind of have to put it on and deal with it the right way, right? Yeah.

As soon as you accept the call, as soon as you engage with the text or the email, you should be bringing that skill to bear. I mean, you can't do it half-assed. But I think that I am resistant to engaging with that stuff when I'm in the middle of doing things. That's one of the reasons why I like this new focus feature with the Apple devices. You know, I think that will be really helpful. And I would really like to be able to keep those things segregated if I can.

Totally agree. And I think there's value in taking that approach, controlling whatever you can control. But going back to something that we said kind of at the beginning of the episode, let's say you work in an office environment. You don't have control over the interruptions. What do you do when you get interrupted? I would argue that not probably in every scenario, but in most of them, most of the healthy organizations that I can picture, you may not like the fact that the interruption or distraction has happened. But at that point, the very best thing you can do is communicate effectively so that the person who's popped into your office doesn't do it again in 20 minutes. Let's get to the root of the issue, deal with it, move on.

One of the things I did as a young lawyer, because in law, it's like reading a book on how to hit a baseball but never swing in a bat kind of thing. And so once you start practicing, once you get out there, there's a million things you have to learn. And one of the things I would always try to do with the senior lawyers that I was learning from was I would just make a list of questions and issues that I was working on. And I would schedule a time with them. And they knew this was coming. I'd say, hey, I have a list of questions. When's the best time for me to sit down with you on it? And that way I could get them isolated

from whatever they were working on and focused on me. And then as I got older and there were younger lawyers coming to the office, I did the same thing. If I found that they kept coming to me with questions, I'd say, you know, here, write down a list of questions. You know, let's plan tomorrow afternoon to sit down for an hour and get through them all.

Yeah. And just kind of talking to people about that and setting space for it. Once again, you know, that's the thing I keep coming back to is just like put communications in a box to the extent you can, so you can really focus on it. Yes. When you're in the middle of something hard and someone asks you something, that's when that's where the dragons lie. Yeah. I like the idea of compartmentalizing, creating the space for the communication to happen. That's a great tip. Because even if you don't have complete control over your day at the office, there are probably teams that you work with where you can at least suggest, hey, how about we have this meeting once a week and everybody who has talking points, questions that need to be answered, let's put them on this document and then we'll meet for an hour and we'll crank through all of those and we'll get all the answers to people's questions, you know, as opposed to dealing with

the random stuff that comes in all the time via email or Slack or whatever form of instant communication messaging tool that you happen to be using, I feel you're right. Creating the expectation of this is the place where these questions can be answered, that is enough to curb a lot of the, well, I need an answer to this right away. Another interesting form of communication that I heard somebody talk about at a conference one time is that, you mentioned when you were a young lawyer and you were scheduling these meetings with people to ask them questions. That got me thinking about how valuable insight from people who have been through stuff and understand things can be. And I heard somebody say at a conference

one time that what they would do is they would reach out to all of these big business people that they looked up to. And they would send an email or reach out some way and say, I'm going to be in your area on these dates. Would you be available to meet for lunch? I'll buy on this day or this day. And then he would wait till he got a response, and then he would book a plane ticket and go meet them. So he wasn't just waiting for like, I'm going to be in town for a conference. Anyways, he was prioritizing the wisdom that these people had. And then he would set up the meetings with them whenever it was convenient for them.

And it was cool to see how willing they were to share their insights once they recognized that people were actually willing to listen. recognize that people were actually willing to listen. And so as an inexperienced, younger person, I try to take that approach and not just try to talk when I really should be listening because I don't know as much as I think I know. So I guess the TLDR from this is recognize when is the time to contribute and recognize when is the time to be quiet and just learn from the other people in the room. Yeah. Easier said than done, right? Some of the biggest lessons that I have learned in my life have come from scenarios like that, where I was willing to admit that I didn't have the answers and just look at some people that I admired and try to model my life after some of the things that they've done. And whenever they were willing to communicate, I was willing to just absorb whatever they were willing to share with me. One of the things that Sean talked about in his podcast is responsibilities and ways to think

about your communication as the person trying to get the point across. And, and one of the, the big points he made in his show that I think really stuck with me was that if you're going to communicate something to another person, you are responsible for them receiving the message. You know, somebody has to be responsible. So it's you. I want to take a minute to talk about that. You know, what are ways you can be more focused as a communicator and what are ways you can be more focused as a receiver? Yeah, that's a great question. That responsibility aspect, by the way, that was a big thing that stood out to me from that episode too.

So I think the number one way that I would apply that would be, let's say you have a difficult relationship, a person who you know is difficult to communicate with. And maybe it's a boss who should not be popping into your office and asking you a million questions via email all the time. But you can get upset about that. It doesn't really do any good. So taking responsibility, what that looks like in those scenarios is whenever they have the question, predicting the follow-up question. Trying to eliminate the frequency of the pop-ins or the urgent requests by thinking ahead. And yes, that requires more effort on your end. And no, you probably shouldn't have to do that. But it's only going to make

things better if you just get past your personal feelings and like, well, it's their responsibility. They're the boss. They're the ones who should be communicating effectively. Well, they're not going to. So you may as well do it. Otherwise, nothing's going to change. Yeah. So I guess it's hard. It is hard. But I do think taking the responsibility is going to look different in every single scenario. I'm thinking of one specifically here where I know when I make a request that there's a good chance I am going to have to follow up with this person because they are going to forget that I made this request and I needed an answer by a specific time. So I just go into it with that expectation. I don't get upset when it happens.

And I put a little reminder saying, hey, you got to ask this person about this thing again. You know, right before I know it's mission critical, I get this answer. I do think that, you know, there, there's something to that. And you know, we, we frequently get that, that email or that feedback that, Hey, you guys are nerdy people that work for yourselves. So all this stuff is easy for you. And I work for a crazy person and I don't have any control. And I think the, one of the things I would say is you have to take what control you can, you know?

And, and even if you can only control 10% of it, then take the 10% and then start finding ways to grow it to 20%. But you got to start somewhere. And I understand that sometimes you are in a situation where you can't just like set your blocks exactly as you want and, you know, ignore communications for hours at a time like I do, but find ways to take what little real estate you can and work and start from

there. Yeah. And also recognize what the interaction is going to look like. is going to look like. One of the things that I did after, I forget, maybe it was the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People when we covered that for Bookworm. I made a list of all of the people that I frequently interact with and I gave them all ratings, which sounds terrible, but it was just a simple plus or minus. And then the more pluses or the more minuses, the more I knew this was either going to be a deposit or a withdrawal. Basically, another way to say this is when I interact with this person, are they giving me life or are they

taking life from me? Are they giving me energy or is this going to be an energy suck? Michael Hyatt might describe it this way. I remember a blog post a while back of people who have their own batteries and people who don't. So are they going to take from me or are they going to give to me? And that helped a lot because I knew whenever I interacted with this person, they're probably going to need something from me. So I'm not going to just drop everything and respond to a text message from that type of person. Going back to your point about boxing in your communication, I'm going to wait till I'm in an appropriate place and I can respond not emotionally to this request. I'm going to limit the potential for me to communicate ineffectively and damage

this relationship because I go into it knowing that they're probably needing something from me. You know, it's funny because you've talked a couple times now about being emotional and responding for, you know, when people talk to you or communicate with you at the wrong time. That's not a problem for me. My problem is that when someone comes to me when I'm not ready or not in the space to do it, is I just fake it. I fake it probably pretty effectively, but at the end, I didn't get whatever they were trying to say to me. I don't get mad. I just sit there and fake it. And I guess I've perspective that skill over my life, and it's caused no end of trouble. or your inner reader with Literati Book Clubs, where you can read alongside the world's most

inspiring authors and leaders. You can join Malala, Stephen Curry, Richard Branson, and more on their next reading adventure. Literati delivers their monthly book picks straight to your door, so you can spend less time finding a good book and more time actually reading one. Whether you're enjoying Beach Reads with Ellen Hildebrand or exploring mythic realms with Joseph Campbell Scholars, you'll find their brilliant insights on the Literati app. They also host exclusive interviews with the authors themselves where you can ask your biggest questions and get the insider answers that you won't find in any other book club. And when you

subscribe to a Literati book club, you help support children's literacy efforts. Since 2019, Literati has donated over 250,000 books to underfunded schools, women's and children's care centers, and non-profits. I've received two different books from Literati, The Art of Pollination by Martin Flanagan as part of the Richard Branson Book Club, and then Clara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro as part of the Kelly McGonigal Book Club, and that's one of the cool things. You can switch between book clubs at any time. They're very different books, and they're very different from the type of books that I normally read, but they are both fascinating in their own right. The Art of Pollination is a very inspirational story about Jane Tusson's quest for social change, and Claire and the Sun is actually a fiction book, which I

wouldn't normally pick, but I am actually finding that one very interesting and entertaining. And the coolest part about the Literati experience, in my opinion, is the conversations that happen within the app. The conversations are broken up by sections, so there are no spoilers, but I love how the book club leaders themselves chime in with thought-provoking questions, and it's really cool to see what everyone else is getting from the book as you read it together. It's a really fun experience and the app is really well done. Reimagine what a book club can be and redeem your free trial at literati.com slash focus. That's L-I-T-E-R-A-T-I dot com slash focus. F-O-C-U-S-E-D. So head to literati.com slash focus to learn more, read more with Literati. That URL one more time, literati.com slash focused. Our thanks to Literati for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. One other aspect of communication that I feel like we need to address here is trust and confrontation. So trust is built through the relational bank account, making deposits. But I also think there are times when the tendency can be to

not say what you are really thinking or feeling because you don't want to rock the boat. And that could happen both in a work environment or at home. And I want to unpack this a little bit with you. How do you balance that between stating the truth of what you are feeling and what you are thinking and recognizing when there's going to have to be some necessary confrontation and when you decide this isn't the time or place for this? This is something that meditation and Buddhist training really helped me with, and that is to always be examining your motivations. And, and I guess, you know, that's just the, that's the context I learned it in. But whenever you want to say something, you know, one of the Buddhist precepts is right speech, you know, and right speech doesn't necessarily mean you only say nice things, but it's like, what is the source of the speech? I'm simplifying.

But I think when I need to have a difficult conversation for someone, I really, especially that difficult conversation, it kind of like puts up red flags in my head. I'm thinking, okay, what is the problem? And why do I need to say this? You know, what, what is my, am I doing this to, to prove to them how much smarter than them I am? Or am I doing this because there's a genuine need for a correction that they're not aware of, but, but finding that you are coming from the right place is, to me, the essential kind of

first step of this. Does that make sense? It does. And another aspect of communication, intrapersonal communication, I guess, communicating with yourself versus interpersonal communication, communicating with others, would be journaling. And so if you, someone really just grinds your gears, you don't need to go tell them that necessarily. Maybe the release you need is to say so in your private journal where no one's ever going to see it, but it's enough for you to release it emotionally. If you're going to say something negative to someone because you want to hurt them, that's not right speech and that's going to end up hurting you in the long run.

But when you work with somebody and there's something that they need to do differently, I try to deliver stuff like that as much as possible with a very soft delivery. And I try to be intentional about it. soft delivery you know and i try to be intentional about it um i always give them room uh when i correct somebody to say like one of the things i often say which isn't necessarily always true even it's like oh yeah i made the same mistake let me show this to you but i just want to i want to kind of defuse the situation as much as possible sure I have a little bit of a history with this, I guess, working with a family business. Because in a family business, you have both personal and work,

and you need to be able to communicate effectively about problems in the business so that you can fix them so that you have a business. But also, you don't want to damage the relationships because these are the people that you're going to be seeing at every single holiday get-together. And I've got a couple brothers specifically where I don't want to damage the relationship that I have with them outside of work. So I got to be really careful about what I would say to them while involved

with the business. And I've seen a lot of examples of the negative version of this, I feel. You can say all the right things and you can say, well, let's put our family relationship aside here and let's just talk about the business does not mean that people are not going to take stuff personally. I can tell you that from experience. This is hard. I think that's the hardest,

to include business and family in the same thing. As an attorney, I've seen many businesses fail not because the business was bad, but because son wanted to exercise more independence over father in the business. And it just led to things blowing up. And in fact, it's kind of funny. There's an attorney slash therapist I work. He's a licensed attorney, but he's also a licensed therapist. And his whole practice is dealing with family businesses.

And a lot of times I have clients come to me where they're having an issue because they're a family and they're a business. And I have a standard speech I give them. I'm like, you guys are going to run this business into the ground and you're not going to have it to pass on to your next generation. You can spend a lot of money on lawyers suing each other, or you should go see this business therapist. And he does very good work and often helps them sort things out. But yeah, it is hard. Yeah. Yeah. And there's no simple solution to this sort of thing. For a long time, I've just kind of avoided it because that's the easiest thing for me. And I'm recently reading Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. He's got a

concept in that book of this circle of safety. And I really don't know how you draw the lines here when you cross the streams, family and business. But essentially, the circle of safety, what you're trying to do inside of any organization, whether that be a family, a work organization, a volunteer organization, like a church, that's another interesting one because a lot of the people who are involved with ministries that I'm involved in, they're not getting paid. They're not going to be able... I can't fire anybody for not doing their job. So we just got to figure stuff out and do the best that we can. But this circle of safety, essentially what you're trying to do is you've got your group and people need to feel safe inside the group because

the whole purpose of the group is to protect each other from the dangers that are outside. And he traces it all the way back to the groups of the cavemen, you know, and you're fighting against the saber-toothed tigers, and how that has not really evolved for modern society and organizations. Lots of examples of bad leaders who have not built that circle of safety. But as I'm thinking about this in the context of family business is like the hardest scenario, but really any sort of group, at some point you do need to address things. So there has to be some confrontation sometimes. You can't be afraid of the confrontation, but you do need to make sure that you are fighting fair when you have that confrontation

because everyone needs to feel good about the outcome. And the big takeaway from this for me is that I need to confront things before they become a big deal. A small confrontation now, effectively communicating and getting a resolution is better than ignoring it for a long time and then something blows up down the road and does a lot of damage. Yeah, I mean, in answer to your earlier question, how do you handle difficult communications, one potential answer is not, don't have them. Yeah. Yeah. Although for a lot of people, that's the way they handle it. And then they end up becoming bitter and they feel like they're taken advantage of and small problems become big problems. I think you have to address them, but you have to find a way to do it. One of the common

refrains that Daisy and I have when we need to talk to the kids about something difficult is we always want to have difficult conversations from a place of love. You know, there's all sorts of silly examples, but like my daughter took the dog out and she was using my shoes and she wasn't putting them on. She was just stepping into them and it was smashing down the heel of my shoe. And it was getting me frustrated because I like my shoes the last year. So I was, I wasn't happy with her about that. And I was like, I'm not going to just like bring her on the carpet and say, Hey, don't ruin my shoes.

I just, you know, as silly as it sounds, I stopped and wanted to come from a place of love. Hey, I don't mind using my shoes. Just, you know, take the time to put them on properly. And that's a, that's a silly example, but it just happened within the last few days. So that's the one at the top of my mind. But I think you need to think about those conversations and remembering, getting back to Sean's point, that it's your job to communicate if you're the one who wants to get the point across. And you know it's a difficult conversation, then you have to bring even more focus and intentionality of like, how is this person going to receive a communication that involves a difficult topic?

You know, is this a person that like jumps to rage? Is this a person that wants to become defensive or is a person that is none of those things and just wants to get to the bottom of it? And what's the best way to solve this riddle or this puzzle with this person? And if you want to communicate, then that's what you need to do. I mean, you need to go to them. Yeah. And then going back to Sean's point, where if you send a message and you are also responsible for the receipt of that message, what happens when your daughter continues to wear your shoes and stomps down your heels, right? Do you get upset about it? Maybe it's just my family where I have to communicate over and over and over and

over and over and over and over again. But I kind of don't think so. And at that point, you've got two different options, one, which can make you upset. And this is where I tend to get off here is like, I can be upset. Well, I told you to do not to do this and you did it anyways. And we judge other people by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions, right? So, well, obviously my daughter doesn't care that she's ruining my shoes because she continues to do it that's not the case at all but that's the conclusion that we we jump to so if i'm taking responsibility for that how does that what does that look like it means that i am not getting angry like i've told you a thousand times not to wear my shoes when you when you take the dog out

you say i'm sorry i haven't communicated effectively enough. I really don't want you to wear my shoes. Please don't do this anymore. And you could say like, as long as she continues to wear my shoes, then it's my fault because I really haven't communicated this effectively. And that's the difficult part. That's the point where I think a lot of people That's the difficult part. That's the point where I think a lot of people won't invest the extra effort in order to really communicate that thing effectively. But it's so important. And it's not just with family members. I'm thinking about, we've talked before about virtual assistants. And the issues that I've always had with virtual assistants I'm recognizing are my own fault because I don't communicate effectively the tasks that I want help with. And then I get upset when they aren't done correctly. Right. And so my... When they're not mind readers, you mean? Yeah. And so my default is just that, well, this isn't working. I'm not going to continue to pay

this person. But if I'm going to take responsibility for it, I obviously haven't equipped them well enough to do the task the way that I wanted them to do it. Communication is hard. Yes. But it is important and it is the key to better relationships. So it's worth the effort. I mean, it's more than just the key to relationship. It is, I think, one of the easiest ways to waste an obscene amount of time is to cut corners on the initial communication. You know, that's when you run to third base instead of first base. And it's something that it's in your interest to figure out. I also think that a show about being focused has to talk about this and has to be mindful of it.

And actually just doing the research for this show and thinking about it has helped me try to bring that focus muscle more to bear on my communications. Yeah. My big takeaway from doing the research for this is I need to take more responsibility for communication. A lot of the different teams and organizations that I am involved with. And that means different things in each one of those scenarios. But ultimately, I need to not get upset with other people.

I need to figure out what I can do to make the communication better because when the communication gets better, then the work gets better. It gets easier and it's just more enjoyable. It's more fun. Yeah. Agreed. Well, we have a forum and if you want to talk about your challenges with communications, ways you find easier to stay focused with your communications, that would be a great place to do it. You can find that over at talk.macpowerusers.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening to the Focus podcast.

We can be found at relay.fm slash focused. And before we go, I want to tell you about another great show here at RelayFM, Material. go, I want to tell you about another great show here at RelayFM, Material. Hosts Andy Anotko and Florence Ayan are veteran technology journalists with plenty to say about what's going on at Google. It's a really entertaining podcast, and it helps me as an Apple user to find out how the other side lives. So follow Google's journey with them at relay.fm slash material or search for material wherever you get your podcasts. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find show notes for this episode at relay.fm slash focused slash 128. Thank you to our sponsors for this episode, which is Text

Expander from Smile, Indeed, and Literati. And we will talk to you in a couple of weeks.