Time Wasters Stealing Your Focus

Most stalled days aren’t about willpower—they’re about constant context-switching. In this episode, Marissa Hyatt and Joel Miller break down the science of interruptions, how internal distractions amplify them, and practical ways to protect your best hours. Expect notification triage, deep-work tactics, and a saner way to take breaks that actually refuel you.

Key Takeaways

• Name the Real Culprit. It’s not laziness—it’s interruptions. Expect hits that derail you every 3–11 minutes, costing 20–30 minutes to fully refocus. How will you plan accordingly?
• The Difference Matters. Interruptions are external; distractions are internal. You can’t stop every ping, but you can stop taking the bait.
• Cut Notifications Ruthlessly. Turn off non-essential alerts across phone and laptop. Use Focus/Do Not Disturb so only true emergencies break through.
• Signal Deep Work Windows. Tell people when you’re dark and when you’re back: set Slack/Teams status (e.g., “Deep Work — back at 1:00 pm”) and stick to it.
• Remove Temptation. Delete or block high-hook apps/sites during work blocks (tools like Freedom help). Make distraction harder than staying on task.
• Sprint, Then Breathe. Work in focused sprints and replace “digital smoke breaks” with 3–5 minutes outside to reset your brain without derailing momentum.
• Protect Uphill Work. Tackle your Big 3 (creative/strategic) when you’re freshest; save downhill tasks like email/Slack for lower-energy windows.

Watch on YouTube at:  https://youtu.be/TIPbksG9_wI


This episode was produced by Sarah Vorhees Wendel of VW Sound

Creators and Guests

Host

Joel Miller

Originally from Sacramento, Joel is the Chief Content Officer at Full Focus. He is committed to helping people cut through distractions, focus on what matters most, and live fully present. When he's not savoring moments with his wife, Megan, and their five kids, he's probably reading or writing. He enjoys reviewing novels, listening to jazz, and musing about economics—and his latest book, The Idea Machine, is available for order now.

Host

Marissa Hyatt

Born and raised south of Nashville, Marissa is the Chief Marketing Officer at Full Focus. She is super passionate about helping people get outside their comfort zones, find their own power, and achieve their dreams. In her free time, she enjoys cooking for friends, baking sourdough bread, and hiking. She geeks out on natural wellness, skincare, personal growth, gardening, and traveling.

What is Focus on This?

Start loving Mondays! Join Marissa & Joel each week for practical strategies, weekly rhythms, and honest insights to help you slow down, show up, and live intentionally. Based on the proven Full Focus methods used in the Full Focus Planner™, each episode offers habits, mindset shifts, and real support so you can quiet the noise, follow through, and build a life that feels good to live. Ready to focus on what really matters?

[00:00:00] Marissa: So what if your biggest productivity killer isn't laziness? But interruptions, stealing your brain's best hours. I don't know about you, but that feels good to hear, to just know. It may not be that I'm just lazy, but there might be something else at play here.
[00:00:23] Welcome to Focus on This, the most productive podcast on the internet. I'm Marissa Hyatt.
[00:00:28] Joel: And I'm Joel Miller.
[00:00:29] Marissa: This is where we remind you of something you already know. It's not about getting more things done, it's about getting the right things done,
[00:00:38] Joel: both at work and in life. And today we're exposing the distractions, costing you the most time
[00:00:45] Marissa: and
[00:00:45] Joel: what to do instead.
[00:00:46] Marissa: This feels like a big sigh of relief that we are going to reveal these and talk about them and how to handle them because. I don't like to find out that other things are stealing my time and attention. Uh, that doesn't feel good to me. Yeah, it feels like somebody kind of has come in and hijacked my plan and I like that we can actually have some agency and some control here that you may not even be aware of, which is encouraging.
[00:01:15] Joel: It's not laziness. Most likely for most people it's there, but there is a personal issue that will come into this that we still need to talk about. Oh, so it turns out it's always about us in some way or another.
[00:01:27] Marissa: Well, yeah. That is the first lesson of life. Yeah, usually comes back to us, but I'm at least encouraged that we don't have to say that we're lazy.
[00:01:36] And what I know all of you who are listening, you're not lazy. No. You wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you were lazy. It's actually probably, if anything, you're trying to do too much.
[00:01:47] Joel: Guaranteed.
[00:01:48] Marissa: Guaranteed. Actually, we've talked about that a lot on this show and how to combat that, but today is a little different.
[00:01:55] Because we're not just talking about having too many things to do, which we've talked about, you know, at length on this show, but we're talking about a lot of other things that maybe kind of creeping in to sabotage your success or your work that you're trying to accomplish in any given day related to most areas of your life.
[00:02:14] In fact, what we're talking about is distraction, it's interruptions, it's things that are costing you your time.
[00:02:23] Joel: Absolutely. And. There's more of 'em than you might think.
[00:02:27] Marissa: Yeah. It
[00:02:27] Joel: turns out that the average office worker gets interrupted every three to 11 minutes, which
[00:02:35] Marissa: whoa
[00:02:35] Joel: is a lot.
[00:02:36] Marissa: That's actually really sad,
[00:02:39] Joel: although you're laughing, which only shows you how, also how comical it is.
[00:02:43] Marissa: Oh, it's completely true.
[00:02:45] Joel: Yeah.
[00:02:45] Marissa: And it feels like it's every five seconds, half of the time.
[00:02:49] Joel: Totally.
[00:02:50] Marissa: And so every three to 11 minutes.
[00:02:54] Joel: A couple of studies that go into establishing those numbers. It's different in different fields. You know, you might go as long as 12 minutes before you get distracted in other fields.
[00:03:03] You know?
[00:03:04] Marissa: Really, that's a, that's a a long time. Yeah. In our book, and I know that one of the issues with this is it often takes us quite a bit of time to come back to the thing and kind of bring our focus back into play. Isn't that right?
[00:03:17] Joel: Yeah. It's like 20 to 30 minutes. So a lot of this research goes back to Gloria, mark, and.
[00:03:23] There's a whole way of thinking about this. That's pretty useful to, to get into. But not all interruptions are the same. You know, like if you get a notification or a ping on your phone, sometimes that can be highly interrupting. You know, like if you pay attention to it, you go look at it, right? You read it, you know, you.
[00:03:41] Follow the rabbit trail down, whatever it's suggesting you do and deal with it and then come back versus just ignoring it. But the reason for that is something that Mark talks about in her research, which is that when we are working on something, we create like a mental frame in which we're operating.
[00:04:01] And so all of the different. Little components of the job, whatever it happens to be, the things we need to be thinking about are in that frame. And when an interruption comes in, it's like, you can imagine that frame is like a window in front of you. It's like that interruption comes in, bumps that window out of place.
[00:04:22] Marissa: Wow.
[00:04:23] Joel: But it doesn't just bump it outta place, like you can just go grab it and slide it back in exactly the same as before. It's like all the pieces that went into making the frame get blown apart and you have to reassemble the frame. That's why it takes like 20 to 30 minutes to come back to it because it's like, gosh, you just have other things that, that now you have to deal with.
[00:04:41] All of a sudden things that you had pushed away, now they're competing for your attention again. And so to get refocused means to like reassemble that cognitive frame. And then get back to work. And sometimes, you know, that can be relatively quick, but it could take as long as 20 to 30 minutes.
[00:04:58] Marissa: So we're not really just talking about three to 11 minutes of interruptions.
[00:05:02] No, we're talking about like 23 to 41 minutes. Somewhere within that range of the actual interruption and then trying to get back to the thing that you were doing before the interruption happened.
[00:05:15] Joel: Well, what it really means is if you think about the way that those two sets of numbers work is that you're getting interrupted while you're being interrupted.
[00:05:23] Marissa: Didn't even think about that.
[00:05:24] Joel: You haven't even gotten back to the other thing before you got interrupted again.
[00:05:28] Marissa: Which, I mean, how many of you are listening right now and you've already gotten interrupted listening? Totally. Maybe it was your directions. If you're driving, you're commuting to work and we're talking, and then all of a sudden your directions tell you to turn left.
[00:05:41] Right. You know, at the next stop sign or something. And then it takes you a minute to realize, oh yeah. What were they still talking about?
[00:05:47] Joel: Right. You know, then it's back 10 seconds on the app, you know? Yeah. To figure out what happened
[00:05:51] Marissa: Exactly. Or you're trying to write an email and. Somebody comes into your office and says, I need to talk to you.
[00:05:58] And then you have to stop and go, you know, once they've left, you have to go back to the email that you're responding to reread it because you forgot what you're talking about. And then you have to pick up your thought process and figure out how to word what you're trying to say and all the things. And gosh, this is like so true.
[00:06:14] Joel: You know? It's like you show up to work, you open your laptop, whatever it is, and you get started and then all of a sudden it's like the end of the day and you literally have no idea what you did.
[00:06:23] Marissa: I don't know how. Everybody in the workforce some years ago would work in offices all the time,
[00:06:32] Joel: right?
[00:06:33] Marissa: And I don't know how people got anything done because I love our team.
[00:06:39] I love going into the office. We go into the office as a team every single Monday. It's so fun to be with everybody, but if I'm really honest, my productivity goes way down on Mondays.
[00:06:50] Joel: Too many conversations.
[00:06:51] Marissa: There's so many conversations and that's important. Yeah. And it's helpful and it's, it serves a different purpose, but in terms of specifically like you're trying to get the things done that you need to get done.
[00:07:01] Sometimes it's not that helpful. And you know, I do think our productivity, and there's probably lots of research on this, has gone up since remote work has happened for this mere fact of, we're getting less interruptions in terms of actual people coming in and knocking on our door and saying something, however.
[00:07:19] We're not immune. There's still a lot of interruptions. So many
[00:07:22] Joel: things. Email notifications. Yeah, message alerts. All kinds of contextual work problems too. Like changing tasks, right? That all by itself, you know, like if you think about Gloria Marx frame that your busy, your cognitive frame or your mental frame that you're busy working in.
[00:07:40] Every time you task switch, you're blowing apart that frame on your own.
[00:07:44] Marissa: Yeah. It's like self-inflicted at that point. Yeah. To some degree or another. And this is all day long.
[00:07:50] Joel: Yeah.
[00:07:51] Marissa: This is just like on a continuous loop. This is gonna happen. You're gonna continue to get interrupted over and over again.
[00:07:57] However, there's a point that I want to talk about Joel, which is there's a difference between interruptions and distractions.
[00:08:04] Joel: Yeah. This is the part where it starts to get personal again.
[00:08:07] Marissa: Yeah, this is like, okay, we're all gonna have to take a deep breath and look in the mirror a little bit, uh, which is not always fun.
[00:08:14] But I think this is helpful and I want you to talk through what is the difference between those, because it's not the same thing to be interrupted versus distracted, and they can kind of feel and look the same, although they're really different.
[00:08:27] Joel: Yeah, absolutely. So an interruption. Is an external disruption to your work or your frame of thought, your train of thought, whatever a distraction is an internal disruption to your train of thought.
[00:08:39] Yeah, and those can go together. Like if you get the email notification from outside. Like that can be an interruption. It's likely not that serious of an interruption unless you're also distracted by it, which is to say, right, you read it rather than look at the work that you're doing as meaningful enough or more meaningful than that.
[00:09:00] You bounce to that and then you, you have just now been distracted by that interruption and, and that's a problem
[00:09:07] Marissa: We've created like a habit loop with this, where for me, often checking my phone is a big distraction. And it's almost habitual. I don't actually wanna look at the iPhone stat on my phone that says how many times a day I pick up my phone because I would probably be, do reveal ed review, do revealing.
[00:09:26] That's too much. I need like a licensed therapist in the room working with me in order to handle that. But it is probably very high because there's this habitual behavior. I mean, these social media apps and our, our phones in general are created to get us to do that more. Yep. And even when you're.
[00:09:43] Sitting in a room by yourself. So like the whole idea of, you know, working in an office where you have those distractions, like all of that is removed. It's just you sitting there, but that urge, that desire to pick up your phone. And even if there's no notification, like the notification maybe there, and maybe that's, you know, an interruption, but more often than not.
[00:10:05] It's not there and we're still picking up the phone and we're distracting ourselves. We're opening the Instagram app, or for you, gen Xers, Twitter, you know, we're opening whatever app it is that feels most like, we're gonna get that dopamine hit and distract ourselves even sometimes within a work context.
[00:10:24] Like I know that if I'm working on a difficult task mm-hmm. There are definitely times where I'm like. Lemme just go check Shopify sales really quick and just like see how things are going. I don't need to know that in that moment.
[00:10:39] Joel: Right.
[00:10:40] Marissa: I'm just totally distracting myself from the difficult tasks that I'm trying to accomplish.
[00:10:44] Joel: This is a totally normal thing and like we should be gentle with ourselves a little bit about it, but at the same time, this is where we're going wrong. When you feel anxious or frustrated, or things are difficult that you're being challenged by something, it is a very natural impulse to try to bounce outta that to go do something easier.
[00:11:04] Marissa: And
[00:11:04] Joel: there's a lot of research on this that shows like as people deal with difficult tasks, you know, like the easiest thing to do is to go bounce and check Twitter or whatever. Yeah. Not that we call it that anymore, but, and I know this personally, we all know that, right? As you're facing difficult work, the easiest thing to do is not do it.
[00:11:22] And so like we just go bounce and do something easier. And like you said, sometimes it can actually be deceptive in that. It's actually work that we're gonna go do. Yes. And so it feels like, well, this isn't a bad thing and it's not, it's just that it's not as productive as you would be if you stuck with the hard thing.
[00:11:39] Marissa: Totally. I definitely fall prey to this, so I have my Slack notifications off on my computer. Mm-hmm. So I'm not getting pinged, I'm not having that external interruption in my day, which is really important for me. However, I will open Slack all day long. Looking for distraction from the thing I'm supposed to be doing, because it's probably difficult and requires a significant amount of, you know, brainpower mental energy to get there.
[00:12:07] And it's like, no, I just need a quick little hit of something. Yeah. And so I go into Slack totally looking for one of my team members who's gonna ask me a question that I can respond to and get that hit and feel good about myself and feel like I've accomplished something when the reality is. I'm doing this to myself, and then it actually perpetuates the problem.
[00:12:27] It makes trying to accomplish the thing that I'm avoiding in the first place. Harder, right? And more challenging and taking longer than if I just didn't distract myself and was able to go stay true to the task at hand.
[00:12:39] Joel: Well, it's a little bit like a digital smoke break.
[00:12:42] Marissa: Oh, I like that. Yeah, that's really true.
[00:12:44] But the
[00:12:44] Joel: problem is. It's worse in that like a digital smoke break. You're like, I don't know what, five minutes, an hour or whatever, somebody steps out to go do whatever. Like a real, a real smoke break. Yeah. This what's happening like every few minutes.
[00:12:56] Marissa: Yes.
[00:12:57] Joel: And so it's like if somebody was just every few minutes standing up to go take a cigarette, that's not very helpful.
[00:13:02] Marissa: I don't know if I've ever talked about this on this show. I've talked about it elsewhere. I used to be a smoker. Okay. I quit in 2020. Um, it was. It's a story for another time. But back then when I was smoking, it was helpful for me because I had clear designated breaks. Mm-hmm. Whereas now that I don't do that, I feel like I can't, I don't somehow have the permission to get up and allow my brain a little bit of a break.
[00:13:30] Totally. And this is, um, kind of interesting, the concept of smoking, which is actually just breathing if you think about it. Yeah. There's a lot that goes into that that is actually helpful and beneficial for your brain and your mental energy and focus, not the least of which is you're usually stepping outside mm-hmm.
[00:13:52] To do that. So you're literally walking away from the thing that you're working on, going outside, getting sunlight, getting natural air, breathing, all that in hearing the birds or whatever it is that, um, is around you. There's a lot of benefit to that. Um. Not that I'm advocating that we need to be going to smoke cigarettes by any means, but if we could almost bring in natural break points like that, breathing breaks to just literally walk outside, decompress for five minutes.
[00:14:22] This would be an interesting experiment to try. If you took people and had them do that, like every hour, walk outside for five minutes and just breathe. And see how that affected productivity. It'd be interesting.
[00:14:32] Joel: I bet you'd be able to maintain focus better on the backside of that break. For sure. I
[00:14:37] Marissa: would think so too.
[00:14:38] Yeah. Because you're clearheaded,
[00:14:40] Joel: right? And you've done the one thing that your body needs in all those micro moments, which is that you're like getting some relief. But this is an actual, you know, it's like more sustained and it's real.
[00:15:03] Marissa: So if we're not gonna go smoke, like why does this matter? Why is this important for us to be talking about interruptions, distractions, how to like move away from this to maintain focus. Why? Why is this Im important
[00:15:18] Joel: for us? Well, one of the reasons is one that you just already kind of alluded to, if you are.
[00:15:23] Stepping away for a digital smoke break every few minutes, you know, because you're facing hard work. You're not actually getting the hard work done. And we can kind of think about like, we can think about two kinds of work, uphill work and downhill work.
[00:15:37] Marissa: Oh, okay. Uphill
[00:15:39] Joel: work is like the challenging but rewarding work that at the end of the day, you know, like when you think about your big three, that's probably an uphill task.
[00:15:47] Marissa: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:47] Joel: Checking your email. That's a downhill task,
[00:15:51] Marissa: right?
[00:15:51] Joel: When you think about work that matters, that's gonna move the needle on a project that's gonna complete a project. It's not the low level stuff, the easy stuff. It's the hard stuff. It's the stuff that requires focus, that requires creativity, that requires new thinking.
[00:16:07] It's the kind of stuff that requires us to show up in new and interesting ways to develop new things. And that's not easy. And because it's not easy, it's also easy. To avoid. And so we have a loss of productivity that, so that's one key reason this matters. Another one is that interruptions are correlated with elevated stress.
[00:16:30] The more interrupted we get, the more fragmented we feel. The more, honestly, if it's, if a lot of it's coming from distraction, probably the crappier we feel, right? 'cause like then there's like some self recrimination, uh, happening about it 'cause we're doing it to ourselves. And then on top of that. In that state, as you can easily imagine, our work suffers, so mm-hmm.
[00:16:51] We're not as productive. We feel more stress and in the state of feeling more stress, we, our work gets worse. So yeah, like our accuracy goes down, we make more mistakes. We're just not getting as much done as we otherwise could. So it's like. Aside from that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? You know, like everything is bad in that situation.
[00:17:12] Marissa: Yeah, a hundred percent. And we're just fooling ourselves in the process. You know, seeking out these small little quick hits. Totally. 'cause our brains, our brains like to complete things. And so this makes sense that we would be flooding our brain with more stress hormones. By all of these interruptions and distractions, because that's not what our brain actually wants.
[00:17:36] It really wants to complete things and not have these open loops. And when we're continually inviting those things in, whether that's externally or internally, we're bringing that into the picture. It creates a lot of friction in the process.
[00:17:50] Joel: Yeah. I can tell you for a fact that. I feel this all the time right now.
[00:17:56] More than usual. I mean, I always feel this, but I've got a book coming out very soon. In fact, this episode airs on the 17th. Tomorrow is when this comes up. Woo. And that means tell us
[00:18:08] Marissa: where to go first.
[00:18:10] Joel: Oh, well, any place where you can buy books you want. You're looking for The Idea Machine. By Joel Miller.
[00:18:15] By
[00:18:15] Marissa: Joel. By Joel Miller.
[00:18:16] Joel: Yes. It is a history of books as a, as an information technology. So if you've ever wondered about why books matter. This book is the whole answer.
[00:18:26] Marissa: Amazing.
[00:18:26] Joel: But here's the big problem. I decided that I needed to be more active on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, in order to help promote the book and just to be be like public again.
[00:18:39] And so I downloaded the app on my phone
[00:18:42] Marissa: and I have the
[00:18:43] Joel: Substack app on my phone. And so now I have two social media apps on my phone, which are constantly. Pulling at me. And by the way, it's not their fault. It's totally my fault. I,
[00:18:54] Marissa: yeah, I
[00:18:54] Joel: feel that anxiety or that agitation around hard work and I bounce to go complain about politics or something on Twitter.
[00:19:02] Marissa: Right.
[00:19:03] Joel: The least useful activity a human can do, by the way.
[00:19:06] Marissa: Well, I think that you talked about it a little bit, but this is really in a lot of ways within our control, it's not all up to. These companies or everybody else to stop interrupting us. We do have a lot of things that we can do to help protect our time and our energy and our focus, most importantly, our focus.
[00:19:30] So I wanna get to some of these solutions, uh, because I think that this is gonna be helpful for you guys as you think about this. First and foremost, I want to have everybody who is listening. Open up on their phone. Any single social media or communication platform outside of maybe your text messages.
[00:19:52] I'm doing this. And turn the notifications off. Yeah, toggle it from onto off. Usually if you're on an iPhone, you can go into your notifications and in your settings. Can I
[00:20:00] Joel: just tell you the sneakiest part about this though? Like how many things have notifications? Every freaking app. Every
[00:20:07] Marissa: single one.
[00:20:08] Every
[00:20:08] Joel: one. So
[00:20:09] Marissa: like I have a budgeting app. It's giving me notifications, my house alarm. Why do I need to know about my house alarm? Unless it's going off.
[00:20:18] Joel: The only notification you need from your house alarm is The alarm.
[00:20:21] Marissa: Is the alarm? Okay. Yeah. But it still has all these unnecessary notifications. So go into, if you're on an iPhone into settings, scroll down to where it says notifications, and literally keep scrolling and you'll see every app on your phone and go one by one and turn them off.
[00:20:38] This alone will give you an audible exhale of like, oh, okay, you just won't be pinged 24 7. I'm checking
[00:20:48] Joel: mine out right now. And here's the frustrating thing, like,
[00:20:51] Marissa: okay,
[00:20:51] Joel: I have done this before and yet I'm going in here now and I'm seeing a few things that. Are like somehow not back or they're, they're like notifications are back on.
[00:21:02] And then on top of that, every time you get a new app of any kind, it's like, you have to do this.
[00:21:07] Marissa: You have to do this. Yes. So if you,
[00:21:09] Joel: if you've fallen behind, you probably have 27 apps right now that are busy trying to notify you about something Yes. And probably are successfully notifying you about something.
[00:21:16] Marissa: It's ridiculous. I mean, we just, we don't need. These levels of notification, so turn them off. Anything and everything that can be turned off, that's not critical. In terms of like, you need to know when your alarm is going off. You need your text messages to know if somebody is not safe or something's happening and there's emergency.
[00:21:36] Those are things that you need to know about your Slack notifications, your calendar, your email. You don't need to get a notification every time somebody pings you
[00:21:45] Joel: and God help you if you do.
[00:21:47] Marissa: God help you if you do. Okay, so that's first and foremost, turn the notifications off. Secondly is use focus modes.
[00:21:56] So on your iPhone, and I'm sorry for you Android people, I really am deeply sorry for you because I don't know anything about an Android, and I am sorry to say that that. I dunno how to help you, but I'm sure that there's, I'll prove
[00:22:08] Joel: that every Android user I know feels fine that they don't have an apple.
[00:22:12] So they actually, they're busy feeling sorry for us. Right? They're
[00:22:14] Marissa: feeling sorry for us. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. We're both in it together. There's probably similar types of capabilities on your phone. I would suspect it may just be called something different. So similarly, if you go into your iPhone settings.
[00:22:28] Under notifications, if you down there says focus, and this is where you want to use this to your advantage. So there's several things. There's several options here. One of my favorite is the work setting. So I have this to where our employees, and actually not all of them, but certain team members can get through via text message to me during this time.
[00:22:52] Joel: Like, I'm blocked, for instance, I can, Joel is definitely
[00:22:54] Marissa: blocked. Yeah. No, actually you're, you're not at all. But there's certain people. That I know if they text me, I need to know what they have to say. Yeah, that's important for me. Now, my sisters, whom I adore and love, we have a text thread that is, seems to be going off 24 7 with all kinds of things.
[00:23:15] Kid updates, health updates, some product that they bought that they loved, a podcast they listen to, you name it. They're always talking about something and I love them, but I don't need to hear from them during my work hours. I can get to that either on my lunch break or at the end of the day. I can look back and see all the 57 notifications I've gotten in the time that I've been working.
[00:23:37] So I don't take any of, now Megan, who's our CEO, I do have her, but the rest of my sisters cannot get through to me during my work hours. That's by design. My girlfriends same kind of thing. I'm not getting texts from them about their bad date last night. I don't need to know about that while I'm in the middle of working on a big work project.
[00:23:59] So I hold that until later. Again, like those still get through. They just don't come through as a notification, which is helpful. So focus mode is your friend. There's all kinds of other opportunities in here. You can set reduce, uh, interruptions and so that'll reduce the amount of interruptions that you're getting.
[00:24:15] So use these settings to your advantage. And I would say also similarly on your laptop, do the same thing most. Of Apple's products, this will hold over. So if you create these settings on your phone, they'll work on your laptop, put your laptop in a do not disturb or work mode while you're working, so you're not getting pinged from those, uh, notifications.
[00:24:38] You can also turn off, like I said, slack notifications. You don't need to get those. You can go into Slack every so often when you need to, but you don't have to be getting those live updates constantly throughout the day. I can't even imagine. I turned those off probably five years ago at least, and I can't imagine if I turned 'em back on, I'd probably end up in the fetal position.
[00:25:00] Joel: So one of the things I find helpful is if I know that I've got, like I've gotta go down a dark hole in order to work on something, I sometimes think of it like, I'm gonna go into the back cave and I'm gonna work on something.
[00:25:11] Marissa: Yes,
[00:25:12] Joel: I'm essentially gonna go dark. I just communicate that to the team and let them know like, Hey, I'm gonna be unavailable.
[00:25:20] What do you think about. Like sort of self-protective strategies like that.
[00:25:24] Marissa: I think this is brilliant and such an underused strategy. Again, we often feel like we have to be super responsive, especially within a work context, that we're not allowed to tell people, Hey, I'm gonna be unavailable to go work.
[00:25:36] We feel like that's somehow not okay. And this is your permission slip right here. You heard it here first, that you can do this and not only do this, but you should be doing this frequently. So I would encourage you guys, whether you use Slack or Teams or any other type of app similar to that, where you're communicating with your colleagues, uh, that you change your status to either deep work mode.
[00:26:00] Batman mode, you know, whatever floats your boat in this case, and let them know that you're going to be offline for a certain amount of time and, and make sure that that's explicit. So usually what this looks like is like, Hey, I'm going into dark mode for the next four hours or three hours. I'll check in at this time.
[00:26:19] So that way if somebody's trying to message you in the platform, they know, Hey, Joel is gonna be offline until one o'clock this afternoon, but at one he'll be back on. I know. I'm gonna get my question answered at that point, which is super helpful. It's a courtesy to everyone else you work with, and it's a courtesy to yourself because you're protecting that time.
[00:26:38] Yeah, and usually, I mean, it's rare that people will interrupt you. During that, unless it's a literal, a
[00:26:45] Joel: real emergency. Emergency. Yeah.
[00:26:46] Marissa: Yeah. Usually people are pretty respectful of this. It's like if we all worked in offices, it's like putting the do not disturb on the door, you know? It's the same kind of thing.
[00:26:55] Or out to lunch, be back at this time. It's the same idea that you're telling people how long you're gonna be gone, when they can expect you back. And I know like when my team members put that on their Slack status. I'm not gonna be reaching out to them because I know they're doing some really good, important work and I wanna support them in that.
[00:27:14] I want them to get that thing done or make significant progress on it.
[00:27:18] Joel: I think that's a, a really important point to underscore if, if you know how important that time is for yourself, imagine how important that time is for others and you'll wanna protect it for others too.
[00:27:28] Marissa: Right.
[00:27:28] Joel: Yeah,
[00:27:28] Marissa: yeah, totally. I think the last tip that I would say is if you know that there's apps, whether on your phone or your computer that are stealing your focus and tend to be these distraction traps.
[00:27:45] Remove the obstacle. Literally get rid. Get rid that
[00:27:48] Joel: back off my phone. Yeah. That's what I'm doing. Get rid of
[00:27:50] Marissa: the thing that is causing you the problem. Yeah. It's like, you know, doctor, it hurts every time I do this. Well stop doing it. Mm-hmm. It's really that simple. So for me, this is looked at different times, like taking social media apps literally off.
[00:28:04] Of my phone so that the only way I could access that if I really wanted to would be through the browser. Yeah. Which most of these are not optimized for browser. They kind of, that's not as enjoyable of an experience, and so I'm less likely to go do that thing. You can totally do that. There's also apps for your computer where you can utilize these apps that will help block certain sites or certain apps during certain hours so that you're able to really focus on just the task at hand.
[00:28:32] Okay, so one of the apps or tools that we've recommended in the past is called Freedom, and this helps block specific websites or apps so that you don't have the temptation, you're just literally removing the temptation during certain hours or at certain times you can go to freedom.to in order to look at that.
[00:28:52] Uh, this is not sponsored, but this is something that we've used in the past that has been a helpful tool. Maybe for you too.
[00:28:58] Joel: Let's talk about the big tip for the week. We've just talked about some of the things that you can do operationally, like in terms of the way that you actually are working. What would you recommend?
[00:29:10] Marissa: I think one of the things we kind of barely grazed at this, but is work in sprints. Mm-hmm. If you know that you need to accomplish a certain thing on a certain day, go ahead and give all of your attention and focus to that thing and complete it. Go all in. Go all out and use a sprint to your advantage.
[00:29:30] Rather than having that just stretch over a ton of time and feel like you're never making progress on it, or you're not able to tie that open loop in your brain. So working in sprints can be a really helpful strategy to make sure that you stay focused. I would say similar to that, taking breaks I think is important.
[00:29:51] Our brain does need breaks, and often it's looking for that. That's kind of the healthy version, but the unhealthy or the junk food that we fill it with are these interruptions and these distractions. So if you need to bake in kind of these digital smoke breaks for yourself, by all means do that. And you can literally walk outside for five minutes, sit on your porch, sit on the patio, just walk outside on the sidewalk and stand out there for five minutes.
[00:30:20] Feel the sun on your face. Take some deep breaths as if you were, you know, having a smoke break. Clear your mind for a minute and then walk back in. And I think your focus will be much more enhanced at that point. And if you just try to power it out indefinitely, that's not necessarily the answer. You do need breaks.
[00:30:38] It's just being strategic about what those breaks are and how you're actually using them
[00:30:43] Joel: and what we know for sure is. If you are kind of going to those downhill tasks, the easy work, that's because you're tired and one of the best things to do to like recuperate is to simply like step away from work for a few minutes and just kind of recharge.
[00:30:59] Yes. Which will enable you to get back to the uphill stuff that you really need to be working on.
[00:31:02] Marissa: Yeah. Knowing your limits is helpful too. If you're feeling a lot of friction in what you're trying to accomplish, that may be an indication that you need to step away for a minute. Yeah, and usually when we do that, you take a walk around the block, you step outside for a second, uh, you grab a glass of water, whatever is needed.
[00:31:18] Usually that helps hit the reset button for us so that we can sit back down, get clear, get focused, and back to work.
[00:31:25] Joel: Yeah. Love that.
[00:31:28] Marissa: What are your final thoughts?
[00:31:30] Joel: Well, if we remember that there's a difference between an interruption and and a distraction, it's worth knowing that you can't really stop all the interruptions, but you can interfere with the distractions.
[00:31:44] You can be proactive in keeping yourself from falling into the trap, from taking the bait, and that means fundamentally you can outsmart the interruptions. So like if you know what your secret weaknesses are, if you know what your kryptonite is as far as distractions go, you can separate yourself from it.
[00:32:03] You can remove the temptations. You can also be better. I think about just recognizing. The things that are impinging on your time and then figuring out how to like, be strategic in responding to it. You know, like, right, we're not victims. We, we can actually do stuff about this.
[00:32:23] Marissa: You have control actually.
[00:32:24] Yeah. And it often can feel like a runaway train and like there's no stopping this. And the truth is you can, and you can actually take just a couple minutes. Right after you listen to this episode and, and put in some protective measures to be able to do that, manage your notifications, you know, change your slack status so that the team knows what you're doing, when you're gonna be available, and really guard against those distractions as best as possible.
[00:32:51] Yeah. And those interruptions as you're able to communicate, communicate, communicate. That is so incredibly helpful.
[00:33:03] Joel: Thanks for joining us for Focus On This.
[00:33:06] Marissa: This is the most productive podcast on the internet, so please take a quick second, share this episode with your friends, with your colleagues, if you found it helpful and useful, and make sure that you're subscribing wherever you listen to podcast. Especially now that we have Joel Miller as our co-host.
[00:33:23] I wanna make sure that you guys are getting notifications, the right kind every time we've got a new episode. So make sure to subscribe. Whatever platform that is,
[00:33:33] Joel: we'll be back here next week where we're going to talk about gratitude. Until then,
[00:33:40] Marissa: stay focused.