Focused - 132: Willpower and Your Environment

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

Is willpower enough to plow through? In this episode, Mike and David look into that question.

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. Hey, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Good. Good. We've got a lot stacked up for today. This is another show with just Mike and I. We kind of have a little trilogy in the mix here. And today we're finishing up the discussion of the last two episodes heading into willpower. Yeah, it's kind of funny. I never really thought about it in terms of a trilogy, but I think this kind of fits. We talked about toxic productivity. We talked about liminal thinking. And I think this whole conversation of willpower, this is one of those productivity trends that I've noticed over the last several years. So maybe this has some overlap with toxic productivity as well. Yeah, I think so. It's funny how these things kind of merge. And then today

on Deep Focus, we're going to go deep in on the new focus features in the Apple betas. I've been using them now for over a month and going to check in with Mike too and kind of talk about where that is. I think these are some things coming down the pike that a lot of focused listeners are going to really enjoy. Excellent. Looking forward to it. All right. Well, this discussion really got started because Mike had read a book that he turned me on to called Willpower Doesn't Work. he turned me on to called Willpower Doesn't Work. Tell us how you got into this book, Mike. Well, as most of the books that I read, it was for the Bookworm podcast that I do with Joe Buleg. This one was my choice, however, and I kind of picked it specifically because it's a little bit of a clickbaity title. If you can apply clickbait to a physical book title, that's totally what this

is in the productivity space. Because if you go do a Google search for productivity, somewhere near the top, you will find something along the lines of the morning routines of super successful people like Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, and it's all designed around they wear the same things every day and they focus on the decisions that really matter. They automate everything that they can so that they have willpower for the things that are important to them. And this kind of just abruptly confronts that and says, no, that's wrong. And so I kind of went into it thinking that I might disagree with a lot of the stuff that's in here. Maybe this was just a title that was selected so that he could sell a bunch of copies of the book. But I feel like there's some good stuff in here.

I don't think it's quite as simple as willpower is the be-all end-all or willpower is completely worthless. I feel it's somewhere in the middle. And so I feel there's a pretty great focused discussion in here. Yeah, I feel like every time I go down that rabbit hole of routines, there's like a bunch of like, greatest hits, you know, for Haraku Murakami is one that always comes up. He's a Japanese author that wakes up at 4am everym. every day and he writes. He doesn't do anything but just wake up and start writing. And then by like noon, he's done.

And there's just like a bunch of these people that are like kind of legendary for this stuff. And I agree. It is kind of, I would almost argue that that becomes clickbaity. I agree. It is kind of, I would almost argue that that becomes clickbaity, the whole idea that if you just copy what Steve Jobs did, then you're going to be as successful as Steve Jobs. I think that's silly. That's the toxic productivity part of this, right? Because you see somebody who is successful and you're like, well, if I just do what they did, I'll get the same results, right? Wrong. You're not the same person. You have to figure out how this fits into your own situation. But that larger topic of those morning routines, for

example, I believe in the value of routines. I like focusing on habits instead of goals. We've done episodes on that topic specifically. But when it comes to the routines and the habits, I feel there's an aspect of truth in this Willpower Doesn't Work book, which Benjamin Hardy kind of hits on. And that is that this isn't just you are a terrible person if you don't have the willpower to do the things that you know you're supposed to do. But likewise, he makes the argument that you're not just a byproduct of your environment, you do have some say in what you do. So that middle ground, I feel, is kind of this whole topic of environmental design. And I do think, by the way,

disclaimer right here, that there are some people maybe that take this a little bit too far, but that's what I wanted to unpack here today is what are the things that you can do to influence your environment so that your environment then in turn in the future influences you and helps you make what you consider to be and define for yourself to be the right default choices. Yes. And even like getting back to the idea of the morning routines, the reason we read those, the reason you and I talk about stuff like that is not for someone to copy it, but for someone to be inspired by it, to figure out what works for them. Yep. You got to make it your own. But either way, so, and let's just jump back a little bit more. The idea of this being a clickbaity title, Mike, aren't all of these productivity books kind of clickbaity titles? I mean, I kind of take a little issue with picking one out because I feel like that's kind of the racket.

Like if you want to sell books, you've got to make a title that someone in an airport is going to be willing to drop 20 bucks on before they jump on a flight, right? is going to be willing to drop 20 bucks on before they jump on a flight, right? Yeah, well, there's a couple different categories for these, I feel. There are the ones that make an outrageous promise that they're going to change your life with three simple life hacks and save you an hour a day every day for the rest of your life. And that go-to toxic productivity episode, you know? Yeah, exactly. And that go-to toxic productivity episode, you know? Yeah, exactly. But then there's this other area which I have started to explore more, which is just like these general thinking concepts, and you got to figure out how to derive any value from these whatsoever. I think one example of this, liminal thinking kind of is in this category, but the better example of this, in my opinion, is The Great Mental Models, Volume

1, which is written by Shane Parrish and Rhianna Baubin, I believe. And that is just, here are some mental models, and you have to choose which lens you want to look through at whatever time. But the value is in collecting all of these mental models and it forces you to make them your own. I feel like most people want a little bit of help, which is why maybe they gravitate towards the other systems type books where just follow the system and it'll be easy. But it's not. And the truth is somewhere in between. be easy. But it's not. And the truth is somewhere in between. Great Mental Models is an excellent book. I read it in pieces. I haven't read it cover to cover, but I just go and read it occasionally because literally everything in there,

you've got to stop and think about afterwards if it makes any sense for you. Yeah, exactly. You got to synthesize it and decide for yourself, what does this mean for me? Because it's forcing you not to just collect a bunch of facts. I would add another category of these productivity books that's fairly recent, and it's the ones that use curse words in the title. And they're trying to be edgy. And I think those books sell really well and i just want to say that i don't like that honestly i just don't feel like that's a um this is serious business honestly and i just don't like that they they use a gimmick like that i mean to begin with i think curse words are usually a sign that you're not working hard enough you know you can find a word

that works that's not you know on the on the list and judge me all you want. But I just don't like a lot of cursing. And I don't think it should be in a book title either. The content here is going to be fairly similar. A lot of the productivity books have spoken recently. And not just books, but articles and things like that. spoken recently, and not just books, but articles and things like that. I feel like there's been a little bit of a boon lately with this whole topic of willpower. And it can kind of be traced back to this Ray Baumeister study. This is kind of how I became acclimated with the topic.

And this study, I'll just paraphrase this real quickly because people have heard different versions of this, I'm sure. But they did this study about willpower and they had these people come into a room and they had a plate of radishes and they had a plate of cookies. And they told one group, you can go ahead and eat the cookies if you want.

And the other group, they told them, you can eat the radishes, but the cookies are off limits, so don't touch the cookies. All right, so they sit in this waiting room for a little bit, then they take them into another room where they give them an unsolvable puzzle, and they tracked how long it took them to completely give up. And the people who were told, you can go ahead and have a cookie, they lasted about twice as long. So that is the study that everybody cites as C, you really need to make sure that you are protecting your willpower. And I get it, you know, we have limited mental resources, you make thousands of decisions every day, that really does deplete that. Eventually,

you get tired from making all these decisions, that's this whole concept of decision fatigue, and then you don't do the important thing. But the big question I want to wrestle with here today is, what do you do with that? So you can look at your situation after the fact, and you can say, oh, I guess I ran out of willpower, and that's why I didn't go to the gym. But how does that really help you going forward? Yeah, I mean, I think decision fatigue is real and it's been proven countless times with studies. But the inverse of what you're asking, I think, is are you allowed to use that as an excuse or are you supposed to somehow power through it? That's another common thread of productivity these days is like, you've got to buck up

and you've got to just do it and get through. And you've got to understand that you have this willpower, decision fatigue, but you have to keep going anyway. And I think that's something, and I've only got about halfway through the book because you just told me about it yesterday. So I was up late last night. But I think one of the themes of this book that resonates with me is that it doesn't work that way. I mean, you got to be smarter than the gray matter between your ears. And just telling

somebody that, yeah, you can do it, you got to just work harder, is not necessarily a good solution. No one's going to like hearing that. But also, people aren't going to like hearing what Benjamin Hardy has to say in this book either, because right at the beginning, he kind of confronts you with the fact that if you don't like the results that you're getting, you are the one who is responsible for changing those results. And I think there's a balance there too, which we'll get into later on, maybe in this episode about what do you do when you can't completely control your environment. But the place I want to start here is let's consider the impact that our environment has on us. And instead of bemoaning the fact that our environment isn't perfect or isn't optimized,

let's think about what we can do to change it because that is going to actually be helpful. I can complain about how people that I work with, they don't do things a certain way. Or I could just figure out what I can do to make communication better, because ultimately that's going to make my life easier when I work with these people. One of the things we discussed is the idea of that phrase, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Yeah, that is something that is, again, you hear that a lot in the productivity space. And I think there's some truth to that, but it goes beyond just the people in your immediate environment. This is kind of getting into a little bit of a deeper topic on this whole

environmental design, because it's really the people that you're, the five people that you spend the most time with, the people that they spend the most time with. Because in the book, Benjamin Hardy talks about these negative secondary connections, he calls them. And so if you have a friend who you spend a lot of time with and they aren't putting on weight, but they're spending time with somebody who is putting on weight, Benjamin Hardy is on the research. You are more likely to put on weight. And that's from a dietary example of the thing that's important to you is I do not want to put on weight. But define for yourself what are the things that are important and then look at everything that you're allowing into your world and control what you can control.

You know, you can't necessarily control the people that you work with, but you can control the friends that you hang with outside of work and you can decide for yourself if they are having a positive impact on you, if they're causing you to have a negative attitude. having a positive impact on you, if they're causing you to have a negative attitude. I mean, I did this whole thing at one point where I took stock of the people in my life, and I actually rated them in a draft from minus minus to plus plus plus based on do I feel like this person is going to take something from me or are they going to give something to me whenever I have a standard interaction with them? And the people who are negative, negative, you know, I recognize that these people are basically leeches. And I

want to know that when I'm going into, I want to make sure I'm in the right mental space before I go and I have an interaction with those type of people. And when I do, I'm going to be kind of on my guard. Maybe that sounds a little bit bad because there's going to be people in that category who are people you go to church with and people that are in your family. And it just is what it is. And I think for your own mental well-being, in order to become the best version of yourself, you do need to recognize what impact all of these people, things, places that I am surrounding myself with, what are they doing to me?

Yeah, I'm a big fan of the phrase, you are the average of five people. But I have a slight variation. I say you're the average of your five best friends, because I feel like those are the people that have the most influence on you. And I've really drilled it into my children because I want them to be evaluating their friends for whether this is a person that uplifts you or brings you down. Um, but it's more nuanced than that. I think, um, there, there are people in my life, uh, who I talk to and every time I talk to them, uh, all they can talk about is what's wrong and how

the world is wrong with them and how, you know, Uncle Joe didn't do this. And you know what I'm talking about. You're listening. We've all got these people. And then you've got people every time you see them, all they talk about is kind of positive things. And, you know, they're just so uplifting that you walk away from them feeling lighter. And I'm not saying that, group is more unrealistic or whatever, but I do find that I naturally gravitate towards those positive people.

And when I bump into the negative ones, I try to have that label in my head that this is just kind of the way this person operates and I can't get caught in that cycle with them. Right, right. If anything, I try to pull them out of it. Well, the people aspect of this, I feel, is easy to overlook. We had a conversation the other day with a couple of friends about environment, and I noticed that people tend to focus on the aspects of their workspace. And this is the location that I do this thing. And that's good. But I think the people that you choose to surround yourself with, that's a form of your

environment as well. In fact, we have a guest coming up here, hopefully, who has on the sales page for their product, willpower isn't enough. And then they've created this human-focused solution to help you follow through and do the things that you do. And in the Willpower Doesn't Work book, Benjamin Hardy kind of talks about masterminds and collaboration and stuff like that. So sometimes you can't change your physical location. You can't completely redo your home office, but just changing the people that you surround yourself with can have a significant impact in terms of you doing the things that are important to you. This episode of the Focus podcast is brought to you by Indeed. Go to indeed.com slash focus to get a free $75 credit to upgrade your job post. If you're trying to build a brilliant AI, you need a Turing test.

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focused. That URL one more time, Indeed dot com slash focused. This offer is valid through September 30. Terms and conditions apply. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. So on the other side of the willpower coin is this whole topic of motivation. And I feel like these two have to go together. It's not as simple as you just pick one. And I'm not going to go as far as Benjamin Hardy and say that willpower doesn't work. However, I do think we can identify situations where motivation does, in fact, trump willpower. Yeah.

I mean, as far as I'm only halfway through the book, but I don't even think Benjamin Hardy is saying willpower doesn't work if you read the book. Just in the title. But yeah, you're right. So talk about how motivation is the other side of willpower. Well, I remember reading a news story about this mother who came outside and her son was working on a truck and the truck had fallen off the lift and was on top of her son. And in that moment, she's freaking out and somehow she summons the strength to lift the truck off of her son who was pinned beneath it.

And that's not something that willpower will allow you to do. So at that point, you ask yourself, how was she able to do something like that? And I think it's an extreme version of this fight versus flight response that we find ourselves in a lot of times. I think this manifests a lot in office situations where you maybe don't think you have a whole lot of control over your environment. I know I've been in that situation. I've talked to lots of people who have felt this way too. Like when my boss just comes into my office and interrupts my day, that's when I feel this fight versus flight response start to kick in and I can feel my body tensing

up and I'm starting to get more anxious and things like that. That's kind of a negative example, but the biological reaction that's happening, and we've talked about this before on the podcast, but that's something that's been around for a very long time, hasn't really changed to keep up with the way that people work right now. But back in the day, that was a very effective and useful mechanism to help you not be eaten by the saber tooth. Yeah. I mean, Stephen Covey, you know, one of the, you know, founders of the productivity movement, modern, uh, seven habits of highly effective people, he had a story he told about if you had two tall buildings, you put an I-beam between them, and you said, hey, I need you to walk across that I-beam, you'd say, I'm crazy. You're crazy.

I'm not going to do that. But then if there was a baby out in the middle of that I-beam, you would jump on it to go save the baby. You wouldn't think about it. And it's the same principle. Motivation can take over very easily if you're properly motivated. Yeah. But no one wants to live in that state of constantly being in fight versus flight either. That just sounds... It's only rescuing babies every day. That's too hard.

At some point, you got to ask yourself, why does this baby need rescuing every day? Yeah. At some point, you got to ask yourself, why does this baby need rescuing every day? Right. Which is where the environment, environmental design piece comes in here. That's as I was thinking about this, that's kind of the challenge is how do you maintain that motivation without burning yourself out? And I think it's easy to say, well, this is just the way things are and I'll just continue to deal with things as they come up. That's one way that you could deal with stuff. It's not the way I would

like to deal with stuff. But also I recognize that my ideal scenario is I'm in complete control of everything in my environment and I can pull all of the levers. And even for myself, that's not exactly true either. So I think if this is a spectrum, most people are going to land somewhere in the middle. And the hard part is figuring out how to control what you can control and then deal with the rest of the junk. control what you can control and then deal with the rest of the junk. Yes. Okay. Environmental design. I love that phrase because I think it's something that has always resonated with me. Workspaces make a huge difference in my ability to get work done. And so this book kind of stumbles into that area, which is a trigger for me, something that I

love to talk about. So let's go there a little bit, you know, give us some examples of environmental design. Sure. Well, one example is the bedroom, which is designed for sleep. And for me specifically, for sleep. And for me specifically, there's a lot of things I have done to design my bedroom so that it is easier for me to sleep. I've shared on the podcast before. This is something I take seriously because of some medical stuff that I've had to deal with. So got the blackout curtains. You got to share the whole thing because every time you tell me it makes me smile. I mean, you've done all in on this. I have. I have. So we've got blackout curtains in our bedroom. We've got white noise going. We've got a weighted blanket. I mean, we got the whole nine yards. It is the darkest room you've ever been in. But that's by design. And it's little things that we've made adjustments over time. It wasn't always just like, okay, this is enough. We got to do this,

that, and the other thing. And we made a whole bunch of changes at once. We just kept asking ourselves, my wife and I, because we share the space, what can we do to facilitate the purpose of this space a little bit more? When you got five kids at home, sleep is precious. You want to make the most of every moment of sleep you can get, right? So we've done everything that we can in order to set up that space for that specific purpose. But it's not just the bedroom. I mean, another one is our living room. I remember reading The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker and talking about how every event that you have, whether it's just a couple of people or it's a big conference, if it's going to be successful, you got to start by thinking about what is the type of interaction that you want to facilitate.

Kind of start with a vision of what does this successfully look like? And then you work backwards and you think about what are the things that are going to contribute to that vision coming to life. And our living room, we redesigned it. We got new furniture for it after we read that book. And then also Indistractable by Nir Eyal, because he talked about this concept of a kibbutz, he called it, where they had a couple other couples and their families over once a month or something like that. And the adults would hang out upstairs,

and they would have an intentional conversation about a specific topic that they would share ahead of time. All the kids would go spend time together in the basement. And I was like, that's really cool. I want to be able to do that. But the way our living room was arranged, I knew that wasn't going to happen because we had some people sitting over here, some people sitting over there, and you really couldn't be sitting in the same space and have those conversations. So we designed our living room so we could facilitate that kind of gathering and designed it for connecting. Yeah, and this triggered for me this recent book I've been reading, and I read books lower than you, Mike, so I'm sorry, audience. I think I talked about this one on the last episode, but The Extended Mind is this excellent book that really kind of goes into where as humans, beyond our brains, we're motivated and how we're wired.

And there's a whole section in this book about a similar concept of environmental design, but she focuses on the principles of natural spaces versus built spaces. And I felt like it really fits in well with this topic because I know this really resonated for me. Like the, the store, one of the stories she tells in the book is Jackson Pollock who lived in downtown New York and was having a really hard time getting focused and making his art. And then he moves out to the Island just outside New York and man, people in New York can be so mad for me. I don't remember which one it was. But either way, he goes out and gets farmland. And suddenly, it's his most productive period in his career. And scientists look into this, and they understand that this

whole idea of working in nature is something that we as humans have millennia of experience doing. And that's kind of the way we're wired. The idea of sticking us in a cubicle is a pretty new concept. And it's not necessarily the best way for us to be creative or to get our work done. And there's a lot of potential explanations for that. One of them is the idea that, you know, we are most comfortable historically when we're out on the plane, the grassy plane. And then you look around and you can see there are no lions around you because, you know, you're not in the middle of a dense forest. And, you know, people are more comfortable outside. And it's suddenly you can let your guard down more and suddenly come up with better ideas. And one of the ideas of this book that really sticks with me is the idea of the mind not being a computer. You know how that's kind of the thing now everybody's talking about? How do you get your brain to do more clock cycles and stuff? I'm even guilty of talking in those terms on this show.

But, you know But our brains are not computers. If you take a laptop and stick it in a cubicle, it's going to process data one way. And if you take a laptop and you put it out in the middle of a beautiful park, it's going to process data the exact same way. But our brains don't work that way. Our brains come up with different calculations when we're out in a nice park versus when we're in a cubicle. And I think that's really something that kind of weighs in on this. Am I going down a rabbit hole here?

Well, maybe, but it also is interesting to me that we would probably say, oh no, I calculate it the same way no matter where I am because I'm objective and I can see past that superficial environment stuff. No, no, you can't. No, you can't. I mean, there's studies on it. They did a study where they had people in hospital rooms that face into a park and then hospital rooms that don't face into a park. And the people that faced into the park took less painkillers for the same problems, you know, or even you can run an experiment on yourself. The next time you need to proofread a document, we all do some proofreading

at some point, proofread it once immediately, then go take a walk and come back and proofread it and see what happens. Yeah, exactly. And this is interesting to me because we get to choose at a certain level where we are going to place ourselves in order to do the thing that we want to do, which I want to make a distinction right now. It's not always working. And that's the thing that we tend to gravitate towards is, well, I'm going to optimize my workspace so that I can get my work done. But reading this, I want to take this same approach with all of the different spaces in my life and kind of ask, what is the purpose of this space? What do I want to see happen when I am in this location or a mental space or whatever? What's the desired

outcome of this? And then what are the things that I can do to make that a little bit more likely to happen? I put a link in the show notes here. I'm not sure if you looked at this, this environmental design piece. There's a James Clear article about this. And the article talks about the differences in the opt-in versus opt-out rates of organ donors in all of these different countries. And some of them are really, really high. Some of them are really, really low. And the people who did the research that James is looking at are kind of like, well, why is this such a big jump? I mean, one of the top countries is right next to one of the lowest countries geographically, so they must have done something different. Well, it turns out they did. In the one that was very high, it's an opt-in. You can choose to opt out of being an organ donor, whereas in the low

one, it's opt-in. You aren't opted in by default. You have to explicitly choose that option. And that's a simple example, but the bigger question here is, what is the default behavior we want to see happen? The people who maybe are trying to get organs donated, they are looking at this and they're saying, oh, well, we should just make all of the forms opt out because if people don't really care, then they organs can benefit somebody who needs a new heart, a new kidney, whatever, if they happen to get into a vehicle accident or something like that. But there's all sorts of personal examples that we can think of ourselves when we see that big discrepancy in the data, and we look at the fact that we're having trouble getting a journaling habit to stick or something, well, what are the things that I can do to make following through and doing my journaling every single day that the default? And if I'm going to explicitly

choose not to do that, it's going to really take something kind of extreme in order for me to not follow through on that desired activity. Yeah. And when you're thinking in those terms, a lot of the tricks we talk about with respect to habits apply equally here. Linking the behaviors, creating the ideal environment to perform the behaviors, make it hard not to do the thing you want to encourage yourself to do. Or the inverse. Exactly. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Timing, the intelligent time tracking app that you can trust. Let's talk a little bit about why you might want to track your time. For anyone billing their hours, this seems a little obvious. But even if you're employed or you're billing per project,

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You can just set it and forget it, which makes it a great solution for anybody who has struggled with manual time tracking before. Now, if you want to take control of how you spend your time and improve your productivity, then download the free 14-day trial today by going to timingapp.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, and you'll save 10% when you subscribe. That's timingapp.com slash focused to try timing for free and save 10% when you subscribe. Our thanks to Timing for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. All right, I want to talk about this a little bit, both in terms of places of work or creativity and places of relaxation, because you really spark an interest with me with this idea of environmental design applied across your life.

But I guess let's start with work, you know? And this is something I feel kind of passionate about because I've been moving around the place that I do my work in. You know, for years I had an office with a bunch of other lawyers, which was nice enough, but there's a lot of reasons why it never felt like the ideal workspace for me. Number one was I got too many interruptions. You know, the office had a big glass pane next to the door and everybody would walk by and see me in there and say, hey, Sparky's there. Let me go in and talk to him about something. So I never had adequate privacy.

And I do think that privacy is a very useful tool for creativity, you know, which is the exact opposite of these open workspaces that everybody's building now. But you don't really have the freedom to let your mind wander when you got to hear the guy next to you, you know, eating his potato chips, and you got to hear the people across the room talking about the latest, you know, episode of Loki. And all of a sudden, you know, how are you creative in that? Yeah, well, there's different types of creative here too, right? Because if you're going to be creative collaboratively, maybe that is the right space for that. But if you just need a quiet place to think about things, then that's absolutely not going to be the type of environment

that you want to create. And I think probably most people who listen to this podcast can think of ways to optimize their specific environments for the latter. Yeah. And I really think the answer is both. I mean, you know, that kind of bump into a person spontaneity that comes up with good ideas is a good idea, but you still need a workplace where people can go do their work. A good example of this is the Pixar building. And I'd recommend going and watching like a YouTube video on if you ever get a chance, it was one of Steve Jobs kind of better works of toward the end of his life because he wanted a collaborative space, but these animators still had to have a space where they could just

really dig in. So they all have their own little workspaces and they're encouraged to personalize and make it themselves. I mean, some of them have their little workspace turned into a farm or a dungeon or whatever, but then the central area of the building, everybody has to bump into each other there. In fact, when he was building it, when he was designing it, he wanted the architect to put only one set of bathrooms in the entire building with the idea that if everybody has to go to the same place to go to the bathroom, they're all going to inevitably bump into each other. And of course, the safety code and health code wouldn't allow him to do that. So he didn't get his way there, but he really thought of it, you know, in the sense of we want to have people have that

spontaneity of bumping into each other, but also have their privacy. Now for me, it's not that. One of the things, I was so happy when I went out on my own to be able to work from home. I mean, I have space that I rent with like a fancy conference room where I can do client meetings when I need to, but I rarely use it. And I love working from my own space. I do too. Although I have to admit that I've been lately to get out of my home for a little bit and go find someplace else to work just to mix things up, which there's probably a whole element of discussion there in terms of just changing your environment and kind of resetting every so often. I do want to go back real quickly,

though, because you mentioned the Pixar building. And I remember reading Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull. And there's a great example of environmental design right at the beginning of that book where they talk about these big meetings that they used to have. And they had this big, long table. And all the important people were right in the middle. And as you got more towards the end, it was the less important people and the real not important people were, they had to stand or, you know, up against the wall or something. And that's not how they would define it. You know, they would, if you asked them, I'm sure they would say, no, everybody in this meeting is important, but it was

kind of implicitly communicated. You're not as important. You don't have a seat at the table. Yeah, there's a hierarchy. Yeah, exactly. So they got these great big square tables. So no one had a higher position sitting at this table than anybody else. And that, I love that story. I think that's a really cool example

of how you don't even see the things that are happening from your environment because you just work with what you've got. And then the moment that you take a look at what's really going on here, you can kind of see some of the effects. And then you ask yourself, is this what we want to have happen? If it's not, then how do we change it? And in that case, it was as simple as just buying a square table and putting it in the room. Yeah. Well, environmental design for me has evolved because, as I said, I'm very interested in this topic, but I've really been bouncing around. So I had the office in the law firm.

And then when I left the law firm, I had been working out of a corner of our bedroom, which is not ideal because the bedroom, as you explained earlier, is designed for sleep. But for probably five or 10 years, I was doing all the Max Barkey podcasting and production out of this corner. So it came to feel like a workplace for me. And when I first left the office, I had, I guess what you would call post-traumatic stress. I did not want to wake up every day and put a suit on and go talk to a bunch of lawyers. So even though I had this space I could use, I rarely, you had to like force me to go to it. I wanted to work from home. I want to get up and put on jeans and a t-shirt and my slippers and write contracts. So, but at the time, both of my kids were home and we have a Southern California house, which they're nice, but they're expensive to get big ones. And we don't have a big one. Um, so, so I had a corner of the bedroom that I use in my office for a couple of years. And then when my daughter went to school, um, my first daughter moved out to go to

school, I turned, uh, the smallest bedroom, uh, into a studio. And that was my thing for a year and a half or so. And then this COVID came, right? And my daughter came back and I needed to give her a bedroom back. So we did. And but then I was really stuck because I did not want to go back to the bedroom. Environmental design means something to me. And ultimately, we decided to turn our formal living room into my studio, which was kind of crazy when you think about it. Yeah.

So how's that? How's that worked? Did you miss the formal dining room? Yeah. You know, we have a house that has like a, I call it the lounge. It's like the room that we actually spend our time in. It's got the couch, the TV, the dining table. You know, that's kind of where that's the focus of our family time. And then we had the room, it's a smaller room, but it,

it is got a high ceiling with big windows. And, you know, if you went to the model of our home, when we bought it, it had really nice couches in it. It's the conversation room, you know, it's the room where you couldibitz, as you were saying earlier. But we find when people come over to talk to us, they still go into the other room. The lounge room is the comfortable room of our house that everybody comes into eventually. And so we never really used it as that. For a while, my wife was trying to use it as a room to do some of her crafting and stuff in. And then when I needed this room, we cleared it out and I turned it into a studio. And it's a very interesting space for me

because it really helps me with a lot of the stuff I was talking about earlier. I've got this massive window behind my desk that opens up to my garden that I take care of. And I can look out and see my plants at any moment. And it's got big windows, high ceilings, and I do not feel cornered like I've felt in prior offices. And it really is a great space for creativity. I love going down there in the morning because there's plenty of sunlight, you know, and you feel like

you're almost outside when you're in that room. The downside is that it's in the center of the house. And when everybody's home, I do get interrupted and distracted with people walking around. Well, I do not have a giant window overlooking a garden. I have what I call a focus cave, which is a room built in the lower corner of our basement. We have a ranch house with a walkout basement. It's why we bought the house,

because the basement was very open and we knew that we would be able to finish that off over time. We've done that. So we've got my office in the corner and then we've got a bedroom for two of our boys, which has an egress window. But my office in the corner has advantages not having a window. I mean, there could be people mowing the lawn outside, you know, six feet away on the other side of this wall, and you're not going to hear it. But it means I come in here, and after a certain amount of time, I got to get out of here. I got to get outside. I got to see something besides my computer monitors and the art and stuff that I've hung on the wall. But I have done everything that I can to set up this space for my creating. Based off of your recommendation and a couple other people in our mastermind, I got this little

plaque put on the front of my office door, which says studio, because I like that term studio. I'm trying to reframe this in my head that the studio is the place that I go to create. It's not the place that I'm going to sit and think. I find that's better if I get outside. It's not the place that I necessarily want to sit and do admin and answer email and manage tasks, but everything is set up for the purpose of creating. I've got my DSLR camera set up so I can either record a screencast or a talking head video for like a course that we're developing for the suite setup or something like that. It is permanently fixed. All of my lighting is permanently fixed to the desk. All I have to do is hit a button on the stream deck, turn it all on, and it's ready to go. Because I don't want to think about anything except the thing that I'm going to create when I

come down here. All of my podcasting stuff is set up so I never have to change any cables. I just push a couple of buttons and then I'm able to start creating. But I can't stay in that creative mode all day every day either. I mean, this kind of gets into the topic of deep work and how much deep work can you really do in a day. The research says it's probably something like four hours. So I'm not going to sit in here from eight in the morning until 5 p.m., but I find it's the perfect spot to go in when I have a short burst where I'm going to crank out some videos. I'm going to record this podcast. I'm going to do some serious writing. And then once I hit a wall, which is usually after a couple of hours, then I can come up for air.

Yeah. up for air. Yeah. I like that idea of picking and choosing your environment that way to say, this is a limited purpose space and this is all I'm going to do here. I think that really helps also if you consistently do work there. Like you told me recently, you never answer email in that room. And I thought, wow, what a great idea. So your brain never engages in email mode as you're sitting in your studio. And that's a fantastic idea. For me, it's more multipurpose because I have a bunch of different jobs. You know, when I'm a lawyer, I'm working on contracts. And I want my big screen and my big desk to do that.

And then when I'm making a video, it takes me 10 minutes to switch the room from law mode to sparky mode. I've timed it because I've got the lighting and stuff. I can't just flip a switch. It does take me 10 minutes. But I just remind myself, 10 minutes, that's not that much time.

It's fine. Just being careful and not going crazy with the gear I use. But the, I do think that having those limited uses for spaces are really good. And I really think that's something that everybody should be intentional about. Another thing I would recommend is that once you pick an environment you're going to work in is to really make it yours. And there's also research on this. I'm not going to get into all of it, but the concept of ownership of the space actually really can impact your ability to focus in and

come up with good ideas. Because when you feel like the space is not yours, there's an insecurity, an underlying insecurity there that blocks, you know, certain neurons from clicking together. And there's been studies on this, you know, where the boss says you can't bring anything personal into work, what you're actually doing is you're squelching their individuality, and it makes it harder for them to actually be creative in the way they do their work. And I guess if you've got them doing a job where they're just mashing widgets together, that can work for you. But for, you know, people who are listening to the show, a lot of them are, you know, people who make money using their brain to come up with ideas. I think that's a bad idea.

You know, you should have the space be your own. I mean, that's why I've got a big Yoda sitting on my desk because he makes me smile. And it's like a little counselor looking down on me as I sit there mulling over what I'm going to do next. And we all have our different ways of going about it, but I think it really makes a difference. I completely agree. And I think what you're describing here in making it your own is you're putting things in your environment that make you happy. And happy people are productive people. Happy people are creative people. If you aren't happy, then all you're going to be thinking about is the fact that you

aren't happy. We're motivated by two things, the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure. But the big one is the avoidance of pain. I'll just speak for myself. If I recognize that something is bugging me, it is hard for me to think about anything else other than this universal wrong that needs to be righted. And at that point, I'm not going to be able to come up with anything new. I'm not going to be very effective as a creator. I need to focus on the things that put me in that space where I can release those things

and I can just let my brain do what it wants to do and think about the things that it wants to think about and connect the dots that are there, even though I'm not seeing them all of the time. I've got things in my environment which kind of are optimized for joy as well. I've got this little plastic rhino on my desk. The small group that I have at my church, the discipleship group we have, we call ourselves the Rhino Squad. So that's representative of those guys that I'm pretty close with. I've got a couple of Lego characters that my kids have given me over the years. I've got fracture prints of all of my successful projects. I've got the fancy pen case with all of the pens that I've bought, which a lot of them represent, not everyone, but most of them represent a successful project

because I have this thing where, you know, if I ship something, then I'll get a fancy fountain pen to celebrate. I shared with you the other day, the obsidian pen. Yeah. Right. So I look at that and subconsciously, I don't even think about it, but when I pick out the pen that I'm going to use as I time block my day in my fancy notebook, I'm kind of reminding myself of all of these wins that I've had. And it makes me happy. And it puts me in a space where

I'm excited to sit down and go to work. Now, it doesn't happen that way all the time, right? But I'm doing everything that I can to make that the default. Yeah. Another thing I do, and I know this sounds very academic and basic, but just bear with me, is when COVID first started, I bought a bonsai tree that I keep in my office. And I've been taking care of it for the last almost two years now. And I like to think I've taken pretty good care of it because I spend substantial effort making sure this little tree is going to do okay. But having nature in next to me, I think actually helps. And I know a lot of people are like, oh, great insight, Sparky. Buy a plant.

But it actually helps. And this is just the stuff I do. I mean, you've got to figure out what works for you. But I find it that my creative space now is the best it's ever been in my entire working life. So much so that my wife said, well, you know, the kids are going to start going back to college or one of them's probably going to go have a, her own career here pretty soon. You know, you're going to go back upstairs once, you know, we get the space back. And I said, no, I mean, now that I've got this room with all this sunlight and these big windows, I can't imagine going back into a small room again. So my wife's

going to have to get used to the fact that when you walk in our front door, you see my studio. Nice. You know, with the bonsai tree specifically, there's a whole bunch of things that probably contribute to this. One of the things I came across when I was doing some research for this episode of like things that you can do to change your environment if you wanted it to, if you wanted to set it up so you were more, more creative is that color makes a big difference. Blue and green specifically are good for creativity. And I know a lot of people who think better, they think more clearly, they are more creative whenever they get outside in the sunlight, but specifically when they are either in the woods or they are by the lake. And I think that probably has an impact on that. Sound also is a contributing factor to creativity. Happy music tends to lead

to more divergent thinking. So if you're thinking about sense-making and connecting dots, that's an essential piece of creativity for me. So happy music can help you do that. And there's lots of different things that you, lots of different levers that you can pull. I mean, maybe you can't paint the walls in your office to a different color, but you can get a pair of headphones and block out all the noise and choose what you listen to, right? So figuring out for yourself, what are the things that I can do in my current situation that are gonna help me achieve the outcomes that I'm looking for. This episode of the Focused podcast is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Go to expressvpn.com slash focused for high speed,

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That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash focused. And you can get an extra free month for free. Expressvpn.com slash focused. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of the focus podcast and all of relay fm so mike one of the pieces of environmental design for me that really i've suffered during covet is um i have all these external places away from my house that i have historically done work and i was telling you about this yesterday on a phone call, how there is a specific table in Batuu in Star Wars land of Disneyland where I do long-term planning.

And I know it's silly, but for about a year before we shut down, I was able to go there and sit there with my journal or an iPad and write out ideas for long-term planning. And it was so successful that recently I was in design walking past that table thinking, you know, I could sit down at that table right now and go straight into long-term planning again, you know. And right now, because the way the pass situation is, I really can't because you'd have to buy a ticket. But passes are starting on August 25th, and I'm pretty sure I'll be back there again doing long-term planning at that table. But it's not just Disneyland.

I've got other places I go that I have specific types or categories of work associated with. And I really missed that during COVID. I mean, the fact that we're starting to get to a point where I can get back to some of that to me is something I, uh, I'm very much looking forward to resuming. Batuu Rebel strikes again, huh? Yeah, he'll be back. But the, but really, I mean, it sounds silly, but, um, you were talking about sound earlier and, um, it's funny because when they first opened up Star Wars Galaxy's Edge, which is Batuu in Disneyland, it was kind of controversial. The guy who made it was really into being immersive. He wanted it to feel like you were in Star Wars.

And for me, the old nerd that was pushing all my buttons. But he didn't play John Williams music. You don't hear the Star Wars theme as you're just walking through there. And, um, conversely, they just opened up across the way, um, the Avengers campus and you go in there and they're playing Avengers music, you know, and, uh, we went and visited it. And after like 10 minutes, I was like, ah, this music, I mean i mean it's like you hear the same avengers theme over and over again and for someone who's into music like me it became a huge distraction whereas in batuu it's just the sound of a starport i mean occasionally you hear a sound of a ship flying over and they've got these massive woofers on the roofs of the building so you can actually

kind of track it with your ears across the buildings, like it just flew over. And, but that, that noise does not distract me the way the music does over on the other side. And I thought it was really kind of interesting. I, I think there's a lot of reasons why I can do planning there. And it's not just because I grew up, you know, in love with Star Wars. Sure. I think for you, it's Batuu, but for a lot of other people, maybe it's a coffee shop. Yeah, sure.

There are apps on the App Store that you can download that just play coffee shop sounds from your computer because being in that space and hearing those things, hearing the espresso machine fire up, that can be enough to help people focus. And I also, the other part of this which you mentioned is you walk past that space now and you see that's where I did the thing.

I definitely have experienced that myself as well. myself as well. I've been struggling a little bit with that because I don't want to tie a specific space to something that I previously did. I'm not sure that there's necessarily a negative outcome with doing that sort of thing. But I've been thinking about this. And what I want is I want to go into a space to be forward focused. And I know that when I get here, this is the way that it's going to impact me. And there has definitely been, with everything being shut down with COVID, you have less options. everything being shut down with COVID, you have less options. And I can totally empathize with you being able to go back to that space now and kind of having that, oh, I missed this sort of a feeling. One of the ways that I coped with that over the last year and a half is I

decided I was going to get outside every single day. And I did that. I went for a bike ride or a run every single day from March 14th of last year until I think it was October sometime. I put 1,200 miles on my bike last year at 600 running. And that was an intentional choice because the hypothesis was that getting outside every day was going to help me deal with whatever the timeline was going to be. I was going to be in a better mental space to deal with things. And I really do think that that helped me out. But now I'm finding, going back to what we were talking about at the beginning, I've been working in this office and I find myself itching to get out of here because I have those options again. And for me, it's not going to

Disneyland, although that does sound pretty awesome. It's simply going to the co-working space downtown, which is about 10 minutes away. And I've done that exactly once so far since COVID, but I'm looking forward to doing that more because just the whole energy of going into the downtown area, that does something in me and it makes it easier for me to, okay, I'm here for a specific purpose. I'm going to get something done while I'm here. And if I need to take a break down there, I'll just go walk around downtown. And I just enjoy being in downtown Appleton. I mean, it's not, we're not talking LA here but no i get it um like and to be less extreme like the weekly and the monthly reviews i do there's a chair in my backyard you

know that's under a tree and i go out there every weekend and i sit in that chair and do the reviews and and with these these hacks i'm doing this environmental design, whether it be Batuu or the chair in my backyard, is that it's like a mental shorthand. It's like it's very easy for me to get into the space and get the circuits going in my brain that deal with writing a review or doing long-term planning or whatever the thing is that I do in that space. And it's like a very easy on-ramp to sit there and do that. Whereas if I do the weekly review in my studio, I find it a little more difficult. Yeah, and that on-ramp, that is an important concept. I mean, the struggle that I go through frequently

when I think about going to the co-working space and doing my work from there is it's going to take me at least 15 minutes to get there. I'm going to have to find a place to park. I'm going to have to walk there. I have to figure out all of these things that I don't have to figure out when I'm at home. What am I going to do for food, etc. And sometimes that's enough to cause me not to go. But even with all of those extra things that I have to do, the additional time I have to spend to check all of the other boxes, I find that I'm more productive when I'm there. I can get my work done in less time than if I would have just stayed home. Because when I am home, it's not fair to say that there are all these distractions that

pull me off course. I think I'm just my own worst enemy a lot of times. And it's so easy. All the other things are so accessible that I don't fully transition into that mode for any length of time. I know that I can open the door. I can go do something else. I can go play video games. I can go outside and shoot hoops. All of those things are right there. And so my brain is always kind of entertaining those as options like, hey, wouldn't you rather be doing this other thing? And I feel like sometimes that reduces my ability to engage with the task for any length of time. Yeah, I can see that. But I mean, kind of getting back to the beginning, what we're really looking for here, environmental, you know, design is willpower engineering,

you know, and that's a good way to put it. And it really does work. I mean, if you're finding yourself with something in your life that you have a hard time doing, you know, maybe it's writing a monthly report for your work, or maybe it's engaging with your kids um you can environmentally design your way around it like i was thinking about mike uh telling us in deep focus how he had bought a new xbox a few months ago and i could see knowing mike he's probably engineered a whole room around that xbox where the kids can have drinks and they can sit around and talk to each other. And like I told you offline, I think that I have got my kids to talk to me so much while playing video games. I think it's because they're not looking you in the eye and the stakes are lower,

but they just talk more when you play video games. So I can see you having an environmental design around this family time and video games. And that makes perfect sense to me. And again, just lowering the on-ramp and getting into that space faster is an absolute, you know, God, I hate to say this, but it's a life hack. Yeah, there's that term that neither of us like.

I haven't done that with the video games yet, but I have done it with board games. That's another adjustment that we made with things being shut down from COVID is that we played board games almost every night. And we don't play them quite as frequently anymore, but there were a lot of great conversations that came about just because we were playing a game together. because we were playing a game together. Yeah.

Well, when my kids, my kids are five years apart, and when they got to 15 and 10 years old, I realized that the grass in my backyard, number one is keeping grass green in Southern California is dumb. We don't have enough water to begin with. And the slide and the swing set back there were no longer getting any use. So we went on this big mission to do it. And Daisy and I talked and we're like, you know what we want to do is we want to make our house the teenager bait. We want all the teenagers that know my kids to always want to come to our house.

And that way we get to know their friends. We can kind of keep an eye on things. And we can know that the kids are in a safe space. So we got rid of the slide set, got rid of the grass. I put rocks in, you know, kind of more drought friendly landscaping. And then we put a big like table with a fire pit in the middle of it. And we put, you know, we put things in the yard where they can come over and hang out with their friends in the backyard and talk about And we put, you know, we put things in the yard where they can come over and hang out with their friends in the backyard and talk about whatever they want to talk about,

but we know they're safe. And that has been like the best investment we ever made. We did it. I mean, I didn't thought about it in these terms, but we did environmental design to make it easier for our kids to enjoy themselves with their friends. And it was one of the best investments we ever made. I love that. I feel like my wife and I are doing a version of that too. And that's a great example of why I find this topic so fascinating is that we kind of accidentally do this in some areas of our life, but we don't think about it in any of the others. Yeah. And I think that's the same, my same attitude towards the idea of getting out in nature. I mean, inherently, most people listening know that if they get up and take a walk, they come back and have new ideas, but they don't engineer that into their life. Instead, they sit at their desk for 12 hours and they can't understand why they're not getting anything done. Yeah, yeah yeah exactly and if you just like build in i am you know one of the best things i

did was get a dog because the dog needs a walk but it turns out i need to walk too and i didn't know it you know and um yeah and that you know just finding ways to get yourself up and moving and out a little bit you know in the park or if you live in a place that's got big trees go walk among the trees, whatever. But, and then you'll come back and all the problems you had are going to be solved. How's that for simplification? Yeah.

A dog is a great way to optimize for joy. Anyway, I do think that all of this matters. And, um, that's the reason why we went at it so hard today. And I think, um,

one of the through lines of these last three episodes to me has been awareness and intentionality. You know, are you aware of toxic productivity and are you being intentional to get around it? You know, I feel like the same applies today. Are you aware that environmental design can help build your willpower and are you taking intentional steps around it? can help build your willpower? And are you taking intentional steps around it? And I'm not asking you to, you know, go build a house in the woods or anything, but I would say take a look at what you're doing and see where you can start making little tweaks. Agreed. And I would add to that, that the things in your life that are contributing to your situation are not neutral. You know, you are either at, you talked about building your willpower, right? So either things are making that easier or they are making it harder. It's not just something that's there that has no effect on you. Whether that be where you're choosing to do your work, the things that you are listening to, the people that you are surrounding yourself with, they are all having

an impact, either positive or negative. And if you just get a plant and a dog, everything will be fine. True. Before we go, let me tell you about another show here on RelayFM, Make Do. If you like this show, there's a good chance you'll like Make Do as well. You don't have to monetize your hobbies, but if you want to, Make Do is ready to be your cheerleader. MakeDo, or search for MakeDo wherever you get your podcasts. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find the show notes for this episode at relay.fm slash focused slash 132. You can join the discussion over at talk.macpowerusers.com. Thanks to our sponsors today, Indeed, Timing, and ExpressVPN, and we'll see you in a couple of weeks.