Start With A Win - How to Become More Productive by Becoming More Focused

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. And coming to you from Denver, Colorado, home of Remax World Headquarters, it's Adam Conto, CEO of Remax with Start With A Win. And I see Producer Mark. How are you doing, buddy? I am here. I'm doing great. Fantastic.

Starting point is 00:00:43 So good, as I like to say. I love it. I love it. Hey, are you focused right now, man? I am hyper-focused. You know, when you got to push all these button, make sure things are recording and being captured and you got to be on your ball, you know? You're like a fly in the airplane right now. We don't want any mistakes in the cockpit. Okay. That's right. Yeah. There's no autopilot for me to take a nap. Yeah. So what do you think about that word focus? I think it's something that a lot of people lack. And I think that here in 2022, that it's easy to lose focus with so much distraction that's going on between social media and Netflix and HBO Max and just all the different news outlets. Everything coming at us is trying to steal our focus. So I have an idea. What do you say we do a podcast about how to stay focused?

Starting point is 00:01:47 I think that would be very beneficial. And anyone who's listening right now is probably focusing in on what we're about to say next. Yeah. Okay. Everybody listen up here. We're going to talk about how to focus. So ready to get into this, Mark? Let's do it.

Starting point is 00:02:03 All right. So in the past, we've talked about focus before. I mean, I've used the acronym follow one course until success. There's a whole bunch of other ones you can throw in there. But ultimately, what it comes down to is, and I want to kind of peel the onion here, if you will, because focus has several layers to it. And I want to talk about how to become more productive by becoming more focused, if you will, because focus has several layers to it. And I want to talk about how to become more productive by becoming more focused, if you will. So let's dig into this. I want to start with just by saying, and I want to talk about both parts of this, focus consists of essentially two

Starting point is 00:02:38 things, two things here. And we're going to talk about both of these things during this show. And those two things are willpower, willpower. And the second one is attention, attention. So if you think about these two things, Mark, you've got willpower, which is our internal energy. Okay. And we can have people steal our willpower from us. They can take it through criticism. You know, we can have people steal our willpower from us. They can take it through criticism. We can have some sort of a physical burden put on us. We can be distracted like crazy, things like that. All of these different things, how do we wake up? Do we have a smile or a frown?

Starting point is 00:03:17 How's our relationships? Are we nourished? Have we hydrated? Have we slept? Things like that. So you've got these determinant factors of the energy internally in willpower. I've never thought about that. But as you're saying it, it's starting to make sense to me.

Starting point is 00:03:38 And it's almost like, are we able to make a list of all the things that contribute to our willpower? Yeah, you are, as a matter of fact. It's like, all right, did I sleep really well last night? Am I getting exercise? Am I staying hydrated? Am I eating right? Am I connecting with the people that I love and care about in my life? And those things equal more willpower.

Starting point is 00:04:01 If the listeners sit down and actually figure out, okay, what do I look like when it comes to that? When you wake up in the morning, I mean, the first question is, do you feel rested? That determines a lot of that energy. And we have circadian rhythms in how we sleep and how we're awake. And by the way, you're supposed to sleep when it's dark and you're supposed to be awake when it's light. Newsflash. Tell me I'm crazy on that one, but when it's dark, you're not supposed to be pumping blue light and different types of unnatural light in your eyes because your eyeballs have to burn all that off and remove the strange information that your brain is formulating as a result. So, you know, like the whole,

Starting point is 00:04:44 hey, I just leave the TV on until I fall asleep, Or I have an iPad in my bed and I watch Yellowstone until the light, you know, until I fall asleep, whatever it might be. And, um, that's, I mean, first of all, that's unhealthy. It, it screws with your circadian rhythms, which are when you should sleep and when you should wake. Now, we also have ultradian rhythms, which is the cycles of energy throughout your day. So what we're talking about here is a combination of both of those things. One, did you get enough rest? Did you sleep?

Starting point is 00:05:17 You can actually measure that, by the way. With like an Apple Watch? An Apple Watch? I use this fun little Whoop band that I have in my wrist band, the whoop. There it is. It looks like an ankle bracelet. Like I'm out on parole. Um, but, uh, yeah, it essentially, it tells me how much, you know, how much recovery I got. And strangely, it takes like a couple of weeks to 30 days or whatever to calibrate it. But I worked a bed and it tells me how many disturbances I had, what my oxygen or my

Starting point is 00:05:52 breathing level, my heart rate, all this other fancy, fancy stuff is. And all that matters. It all truly matters because that determines how much rest you actually get. Do you have deep sleep and REM sleep or are you just laying in bed and your brain's going a million miles an hour because you're having nightmares and you're thinking about the open loop things that you just watched on Netflix? Or are you worried about the job you just did or the job you're going to do at work or the day before? Or did you eat late? It asks you all these questions.

Starting point is 00:06:30 Did you hydrate effectively during the day? Did you have a dog sleep in the room? Are you in the same bed as normal? The altitude you sleep at? I mean, it's just a million different questions that it asks you. Not a million, but a handful of them. 500,000. 500,000 questions. It seems like it when you're filling out the questionnaire at the beginning, but it's really crazy accurate.

Starting point is 00:06:53 So what I like to do is I focus on that and I am able to balance those things and say, okay, I know I need to stay away from eating processed sugar before I go to bed. Or when's the last time during the day I can have a cup of coffee? It asks me those questions because I set it up to do that. And then I can look at my results because what you can measure, you can manage. And now I'm measuring the things that impact my sleep. So traveling on an airplane changes that versus sleeping in your own bed, things of that nature. So you want to get a good night's sleep and a good night's sleep leads to a good morning energy level. So I wake up at four 30 in the morning. My top focus levels are

Starting point is 00:07:41 between four 30 and nine 30 AM four 30m., 4.30 and 9.30. And that's where you feel like you can focus hardcore and get the most done in that window. Yeah, I want to get most of the heavy lifting out of the way between those times. And it's funny because people set meetings for a lot of those in the corporate world. It's like meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting from eight to five. And you may, might be on zoom that whole time. Well, you know, what's happening on zoom is you're absorbing all that garbage light that's going into your eyes from your computers, poor audio and video quality. Oh, it's horrible. It's horrible. I mean, it's, and there's flickering that happens that you can't see, and that's just wearing out your eyes and your brain.

Starting point is 00:08:26 So you have to find a happy place. You have to maximize your energy. I get up first thing in the morning. I take my vitamins, a lot of omegas and multivitamin and stuff like that. But I also have a bunch of MCT oil, which is a fat. And that goes into my brain and it's food for your brain. And it helps me focus. So I get into, all right, wake up, drink a big glass of water, have this MCT oil, cup of coffee, things like that. I work for an hour and then I go to the gym. That hour before I go to

Starting point is 00:08:58 the gym, I get a lot done because there's nothing on my brain yet. There's nothing confusing it because your brain is like a clean glass of water in the morning. And as soon as you start adding things to it, it muddies it up and makes it dirty, dirty, dirty. You need to have a reset time where you rinse it out and put clean water in it again. That's my gym time. And then I come home and I work for several more hours and I get work done before I go to the gym. I go to the gym and I learn things because I'll put on a podcast. And then I come home for a few hours and I'm creating. That's when I create the most because that podcast stimulated my brain, the MCT oil, the fats and

Starting point is 00:09:38 the things that I fed my brain give me all that willpower in the morning. I'm like, bam, I'm getting like five or six hours worth of work done in two or three. It's almost like Brian Tracy's eat that frog, right? Now, this is different in the sense of obviously you're trying to find that window. Cause I'm assuming this window would be different for different people, right? It may not be four 30 to nine 30 for everybody, but that idea of like, when is that best time or tackling those things that need that focus and that might be more difficult or taxing on your brain, get those things done in that special window. So here's a good tip to figure out when that special window is. If you feel like you're burdened running around all day long and you're not getting anything done, you're not finding that window. You have to look for those

Starting point is 00:10:29 times when you're going, where's my pad of paper? I need to write that idea down because it's going to go away. When those ideas are generating in your brain, your brain is like, let's go to work. So you think about that. I mean, you've been a musician, songwriter. You do a lot of branding and marketing and things like that. There's a time in your day where you're like, oh my gosh, I have to write that down. When is that time? Yeah, it's interesting. For me, especially when I was younger and as a songwriter, it would be really late at night for some reason, maybe it was the hallucinogenic lack of sleep takes place. And then a great lyric or song comes into my head and it's like, oh, I got to get my guitar and, you know, hammer this out and try to like create something. But then, yeah, it's funny. I feel like in the shower is when a lot of ideas come because I'm bombarded

Starting point is 00:11:26 by emails and recordings and video and all these other kinds of things. And when I'm in the shower, it's usually just quiet and I'm just washing my hair, shampooing, conditioning. And then it's like that idea comes because I've given myself that space. But I would say most stuff happens before lunch. That's where I'm most productive is before lunch because I feel like myself that space. But I would say most stuff happens before lunch. That's where I'm most productive is before lunch because I feel like after I eat, I start to get a little tired after that, and then it's other little things throughout my day

Starting point is 00:11:55 that start distracting me. All right, and there's a reason for that, Mark. There's absolutely a reason for that. When you nourish yourself, your body is really empty, and most people don't have a really super heavy breakfast to begin with. They have enough protein and a little bit of carbs and things like that to get them going. You have your first heavy meal at lunch typically. Well, I like to do 16-hour fast too.

Starting point is 00:12:20 So I'm usually trying to go 16 hours before I eat. So if I stop eating at five or six, then I'm not eating until 11 or 12 the next day. Okay. Well, as soon as you start eating, your body pushes that blood to your stomach and your intestines to digest that food. Right. So that's kind of when you're going, I feel slow. I have a full belly. It's slowing me down. But I mean, the reality, and you mentioned the shower, a lot of people have great ideas in the shower. I, I have to have, I've got my little iPad with, it has a pen in it where I can write ideas down and my, uh, my daily journal, which

Starting point is 00:12:59 is electronic, it's a PDF. So I can see it on all of my devices. But that's when I really have to write down those ideas. And half the time, I'm like, I shut off the shower, dry off my hands, and I'm like, ideas. It's common. I thought you were taking the iPad and the pen into the shower. No, no. I don't think it would last. Are the new iPads waterproof?

Starting point is 00:13:22 Water resistant. Let's not test it. I've read a lot of books and talked to a lot of people where they're like, yeah, it's when I'm in the, in the shower or it's when I'm in the bathroom, like gross, but okay, whatever. It'll help you out. So, but yeah, you, you have to take advantage of these times, but the first thing you have to do is you have to recognize when these times

Starting point is 00:13:43 are, and you might have a toddler that's come wandering in like, hey, I found the matches, you know, something like that. And you're like, oh, no, no. And you're distracted away. But look for when those ultradian rhythms are when you have that highest level of focus and you have that highest level of the willpower because you're like, your brain's going bam, bam, bam, and firing out those ideas. That's important. And when you can singularly sit down and work at your computer during those times, perfect. It's perfect. Don't spend the energy where you don't need to use it where you have it. So that's the first one is, you know, understand those ultradian rhythms, understand that willpower. Don't let anybody steal that willpower from you. Criticism,

Starting point is 00:14:31 reading social media, emotional overload, things like that steals your willpower. Willpower is energy internally, and you only have so much of it. And you'll notice later on in the day, that's when people have arguments. That's when people drink alcohol. That's when people, you know, walk into the pantry and start shoveling potato chips into their mouth, things like that. When you are out of willpower for the day, you have no energy to prevent you from being in these bad situations. That should sound familiar to a lot of people, particularly those that end up with a tub of ice cream on the couch in the evenings. Your willpower is gone. So what do you do when your willpower is gone? Remove the bad stuff from your area. Stay out of the pantry. Stay out of the freezer. Don't argue with somebody because it's just not good. So willpower is your energy. Let's talk about the second thing. The second thing is attention. Attention. This one we can control. Attention is also a learned

Starting point is 00:15:34 habit, a learned skill. And you might start and go, I can only pay attention for like eight seconds, like a goldfish. Okay, great. So we'll start with eight seconds. So take that energy and pay attention to doing something. How do you pay attention to doing something? Get rid of everything else. Stop trying to, you know, task switch, multitask, whatever you want to call it. The reality is figure out what you're going to work on and close all the rest of your browsers, your browser tabs, all the rest of the apps, get all the electronics out of the way and work on that one thing and put a timer to it. Take your phone. If you want to do something with your phone and put it on stopwatch and then flip it over so you can't see how long. And then when you lose

Starting point is 00:16:14 attention, flip it over and look at it and go, Oh, I made it that long. I'll write it down. Your goal is to beat that next time because you can train your attention muscles. You can train those. Shoot for, I mean, there are different ideas like a, what is it? The Pomodoro effect and things like that, where you go for like 20, 25 minutes and you use like a little cooking timer that goes ding after you're winded up. It looks like a little tomato. There's some good apps for that too that you can install on your computer. And then you can kind of do custom Pomodoro's where you maybe work for 40 minutes and then take a 15 minute break and then work for 40 minutes. And you know, yeah. So, I mean, really what you're trying to do is you're trying to combine that,

Starting point is 00:16:59 that willpower, the energy with the attention. And the combination of those two things together is focus. That's how you build focus is by doing those two things. Ultimately, we try to destroy focus every day with ourselves by committing, over committing ourselves, by always checking social media, by having a TV or music running in the background, something like that. If you're going to have something going, Baroque music, classical Baroque music is actually considered to be really good. If you just go on your podcast or your phone and music or Spotify or whatever it is and type in focus music, typically it's Baroque. I'm a big fan of lo-fi hip hop. Oh, there you go. It's a rhythm. It's a rhythm and it's, there's no words usually,

Starting point is 00:17:47 you know, and it's just kind of like this, like lo-fi hip hop. It's, I really love it. I like Baroque music too, but the lo-fi hip hop that gets me in the zone. What you need is you need a beat pattern in your brain to keep things aligned. It's in fact, with people that have ADHD, they, they're instructed to listen to these different types of music at these different rhythms in order to line up their attention because it gets them to focus on things instead of being distracted because your brain starts hitting on that rhythm and you end up focusing on your task. But once you start mixing all sorts of other stuff in the middle of that, then you end up losing that focus. Right. So it's interesting. Everybody that listens to this today, this is

Starting point is 00:18:33 a interesting concept of breaking down willpower and attention. And look at it that way. If you can take and break down willpower and attention and understand those different concepts in your life, did you get enough sleep? Did you get enough water? Did you get enough food? Minimize those heavy carbs during lunch. You got to have carbs during the day. Your body has to have fats, proteins, carbs, and water. Okay? You need to have those things. You can't go without, i'm on a low carb diet guess what you're not going to have any energy you have to have an amount of everything typically the biggest thing that people neglect is protein your muscles have to have protein otherwise you are starving them

Starting point is 00:19:17 and your body's going to be struggling for it you know that you got to have fats because fats power your brain like i don't like fats. Well, it's the unhealthy fats like a donut and stuff like that. An avocado or extra virgin olive oil. Yeah, exactly. Those oils, those healthy oils, omegas, and also the, you know, MCT oil and things like that. I drink Bulletproof coffee because it has all those things.

Starting point is 00:19:41 Collagen powder, put collagen in your coffee. That's high in protein. So all of these things feed your ability to focus. Think about that next time you're wondering, why can't I focus anymore? It's super important, but ultimately it has to do with your distractions, your happiness, your energy, your willpower, and your attention. So think about those things and put them into play and be more focused. That's great. So if you could leave us with one takeaway of today's episode, what would be the first thing someone should focus on in order to improve their willpower and attention? One action. One action. I would say write down how you feel first thing of the day and why. How do you feel and why? Is it because you didn't get enough rest? Okay,

Starting point is 00:20:37 then get more rest. Is it because you didn't drink enough water? Then drink more water. You should drink a gallon of water a day. Is it because your nutrition is terrible? All right. Get rid of anything that's in a box or processed. If it didn't grow or walk, don't eat it. And think about what's around you and your environment. Your environment has so much to do. So write all those things down, take a look at them, do a self audit on it and ask yourself, when am I most attentive? When's my ultradian rhythm giving me the most focus and energy? Maximize that time, exercise it like a muscle and it will grow and be more focused. Fantastic. Hey guys, thanks so much for tuning in today. If you're ready to create personal and

Starting point is 00:21:21 business success, make sure to subscribe to this podcast and head over to wherever you get your books, where you like to order stuff, and get the Start With A Win podcast, the book. For more great content, you can go to startwithawin.com. And until next time, start with a win. Bye.

Start With A Win - How to Become More Productive by Becoming More Focused

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