Staying Focused in a Noisy World: Lessons from Mister Productivity (Part 1)

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season on Building Better Foundations. We are Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast. I am Rob Brodhead, one of the founders of Developer Noir, also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you leverage technology, build a roadmap for a better future. Good things, bad things. Good thing is that modern technology allows us to go wherever the heck we want to go. I can actually be working just about anywhere. I've talked about some of my toys in the past that have like, I can have multiple screens, I can have all that good stuff. The bad thing is that there is still a level of like degradation. If you really have a good office and you got really good tools, then sometimes it's difficult to take them along. But I'm still working on those. I'm not working on replacing my co-hosts. So Michael, go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Melosh. I'm one of the founders of Developer Noir. I'm also the founder of Envision QA, where we help businesses build reliable custom software by combining smart development with thorough testing so you can grow with confidence. Good thing, bad things. A good thing, it's recording on a Friday. The weather may be a little bit cloudy in that, but it's actually feeling like a nice fall day and I'm looking forward to getting out with the dogs this afternoon and running around and enjoying the weather. Bad thing, wife is out of town, so I have basically animal duty for the next week and a half, which is eating into my time tremendously. Yeah. Yes, I have a grand dog basically that one of my children took from other children that didn't raise him properly and I'm having a real fun time trying to work with that. Luckily, my wife is like a dog whisperer type level expert, so she can like, she's figuring it out and it's a smart dog, so we'll see. He's also a jerk, so we'll see how this works out. I am really looking forward to this conversation. We were back to an interview episode and I'm going to dive right into the introduction side of it. I'm going to just start with your name, your first name, because I'm sure I will butcher the last name. Go ahead and introduce yourself, Mark. Well, my name is Mark Stucheski, but because nobody is going to understand it's true what, I'm go by Mr. Productivity on the interwebs. It's Mr. All spelled out, M-I-S-T-E-R. My passion in life, my dream, my goal, what drives me every morning when I wake up is to help people get unstuck, whether that's with time management, goal setting, clarity, prioritization, whatever. So many people are stuck these days and I love helping people get unstuck. Well, we have the right audience for that. We talk about this a lot because developers do this. We end up, I think a lot of times we end up overwhelming ourselves. We put too much on our plate. We promise too much. We underestimate what it's going to take and honestly, development world is full of just gotchas where you think something's going to take you five seconds and it takes you five hours chasing that thing down. So somebody with a title of Mr. Productivity is exactly what we all need. And I think I want to dive right into one of the things that you mentioned is that you've got a practical tool called Distraction Detox Framework. Distractions are the bane of our existence. And I would really like to just, I think that's going to be right away like a very high return on investment there. So let's talk a little bit about that. Well, the Distraction Detox starts with a very painful and horrifying exercise. I encourage people to carry a little notebook with them or you can use an app on your phone. Don't go looking for a special notebook or a special app. Just whatever you have lying around around your phone. And every time you are distracted, every time you are distracted, write it down. Could be the FedEx driver showing up at your house. It could be a helicopter flying overhead. It could be the neighbor's dog barking. All I want you to do is write all these down. Most people, as a matter of fact, I don't think anyone's ever made it an hour because after like 10, 15 minutes, you look at everything that is on your list and you're like, Holy macaroni, I am really distracted. And here's the thing about distractions. Some distractions you're like, oh, that's distraction. But sometimes you may not be paying attention to it, but your subconscious mind is. And so you think you're fully focused on the task at hand, but your subconscious mind is going, what's that? Oh, the FedEx driver is at the neighbor's house. Wonder what they're getting at. How could they afford that? And so you start distracting yourself. So distractions breed other distractions. So the first step is to identify your distractions. I'm not saying you're going to be able to solve all these, but it's to bring awareness that you are this distracted. Now, once you get past that horrifying stage, that horror flick stage, then you're going to sit there and ask yourself, how can I begin to mitigate some of these distractions? Now, there's two types of distractions. There are distractions that are not within your control. You really can't go to your neighbor and say, hey, can you bring the dog in the house? I mean, we're recording this right now. Next door, we have a neighbor who has a couple of dogs. When they bring their kids home, sometimes they let the dog out for a few minutes, sometimes a little bit. I cannot tell them I'm going to record a podcast episode, keep your dog in the house. So that is a distraction that's out of my control. I certainly can't tell Amazon, the FedEx driver, the UPS driver, don't come down my street because I'm going to be on Rob and Michael's podcast. What about in my house? My dogs? What can I do? I can make sure they've already gone outside. I can make sure the blinds are shut so that they don't see squirrels or other dogs outside. So what can you control? Do your best to mitigate those distractions and everything else. Well, if your city is going to jackhammer your street today, or this week, or next week, probably not a good time to do podcast interviews because you can't control that. But what you can do, you can mitigate it by moving it to another time. So that's what the detox is all about. It's controlling what you can, mitigating what you can. That really speaks to me because I was sitting there the other day, and one of the things I do is often to go into, I have a Pomodoro technique where I'll go in and I'll have a focus period of 25 or sometimes 45 minutes, 60 minutes, something like that. Where I'm like, all right, and I'll have the background music on to just focus, focus, focus. Literally, I guess yesterday or the day before, I was sitting there and I was working on this problem. The next thing I know, I was sitting there looking at an email and I was like, what the heck am I doing? How did I even get over to... Email was not up. How did I get myself over here to looking at this email right now? And it's exactly what you said, it's that distraction of... And this is where I think it like, like I said, this is where developers, I think part is because we're in our heads so much when we're working, it's easy to have something in your head. You have this thought and you're like, oh, I gotta go look at that. And the next thing you know, you're distracted and you move on. And maybe it's partially just more me with like a ADHD kind of a nature that I have. I got a perfect solution for you though, Rob. It's what you do. I don't have a prop. I apologize not having a prop. You keep a little notepad next to you. When that thought pops in your head, no matter what it is, it could be, oh, I wonder why the sky is blue. Well, don't go to your favorite AI, write it down. And then later on, when you're out of focus mode, then you go look it up. What people do, they're working and all of a sudden, Denzel Washington pops in their head. Well, let me see what this latest movie is. No, write down Denzel Washington movie question mark on your notepad. That way, when you're done with your focus time, you can pick it up and go, why did they write Denzel Washington movie on here? Because it wasn't that important. Yeah, that's to me, that's probably the scariest thing about distractions is that you find out too often. It's like that was totally unnecessary. Yeah, I did it. Phones are the biggest distraction. And I want to talk about those here in a second. That was one of the things is that I did several things on my phone to just to turn it on, to get it out of my way, to get away from it, to shut off all the notifications, change it to black and white, do whatever I can to just make it like a dumb brick that I don't need. Deal with that often as much as I can outside of my work. Now with that, so I love the simplicity of just not even a special pretty notebook and just get something and keep it simple like that. So how do you like, I guess then it's the next step. So now I know I've got these distractions. My favorite would be like, you've got to watch, you've got a phone or something like that is what is that next step? Do you feel like it? And do you see it more of the approach of like a holistic approach or trying to or more like try to, you know, precision like, well, why don't you get rid of this distraction or that distraction? I think that there is something to be said about resting. And let me explain that you have done the right thing and you've written down 17 things that popped in your head while you're working on this focus mode. But don't get done with the focus mode and pick up the notebook. Go for a walk, go outside, go read a book, go watch some YouTube or TikTok or Instagram. Give yourself a buffer because you want to separate as much as you can in terms of time. How long since you create the list? And when you look at it, because now you're going to look at it totally different. You've gone out, got a drink of water, taking a walk around the block. And then you look at that list and like, oh, scratch that one off, scratch that one off, scratch that one off. What people actually do is the worst thing you can do is, okay, I write down the thing on my notebook, then they're getting back to focus and they keep looking at that list. They keep, well, well, no, maybe you have to turn the list upside down or whatever. You need to have the list there. But when you're in focus mode, you capture the thoughts that are on your head, but you're not supposed to go look at that list and everything you've written on it until focus mode is over and you've taken a break. Now, the break could be five minutes. It could be 15 minutes. I don't talk about absolute numbers. Then look at that list. And even more so, I encourage you look at that list someplace different, not where you made the list. Maybe go out in your front porch, get a cup of coffee, your favorite beverage, then look at the list. And if you're still not sure, maybe you go to your significant other and say, I wrote these things down. Do any of these things jump off the page to you? And they may give you some voices of reason and go, why did you write these things down? A lot of people just jump in like they're jumping in a pool in the summer vacation when maybe they should go, is there any sharks or piranhas in this pool? No, we just jump in there. And then what happens? We go down this road and then an hour, two hours, three hours later, we're like, wait a minute, what am I doing? Like the Denzel Washington example. Now you're watching, now you're looking at all the movies he's done and you're like, oh, wow, you know what? We have Netflix and he has movies on Netflix. And you're so far away from your focus mode. Does that make sense? That totally makes sense. It sounds very much like that thing. We'll coin it right here because nobody's ever said this before. But the idea of doom scrolling where you just like, that's what those are. My first introduction to that kind of deal was actually Pinterest back when it first started. I was like, why are these people talking about this Pinterest thing? And then people will spend hours on it. I was like, that doesn't make any sense to me. And then I sat down and exactly that. It's just rabbit hole after rabbit hole after rabbit hole. And the next thing you know, you burned up an hour. And what you said really speaks to me is the idea of, I was thinking of like when you were a kid and you're taking tests in school and it's like pencils down, like, okay, I took my note pencils down. I was thinking right as you were saying, I was like, I'm going to have to flip that thing over and do something. Because if it's there, then it's like, if it's in my sight, I may come back to it. But I really liked the idea. And I think it's it feels like it's more of a habit than like, you're going to have to work on it kind of thing of put it down and not jump out and just keep that one of those things that you're not going to touch right now, that you're going to come back. And gosh, giving it a rest beforehand, I know for myself that will stop me from a lot of things because I'll just be like, okay, this is no longer an issue. And it's the reverse of where we're going because we always have like a phone, you've got searches, you've got AI. So you can, like you said, you can ask AI right away. What was that last movie Denzel Washington was in? And then you're sitting there 20 minutes later and go, why am I doing this? It really didn't matter that much. Our whole life is trivia. It's basically what we've come down to. So how did you get into it? How did you get because you obviously have a passion for productivity and for, you know, getting rid of distractions and being able to, to me, I'm going to coin this. Maybe this is what she is, but sort of be the best you can be. How did you stumble into this or how did you get into this? I love this question. By the way, this is a video podcast as well, right? Okay. So I just want people to know if you see me wiping the sweat off the floor, my head, I'm in Houston, Texas. It's hot. I do have my AC and the fan going. So I just want to, I'm not sick. It's just say it's hot in here. I probably shouldn't have put such a thick shirt on. But anyway, back to your question. I used to tell this, there's two versions of the story version. Number one, I was fired my job in 2005 and I decided I wasn't going back to the corporate world. Done. And I'm like, okay, now what I said, what is that word? Entra entrepreneur. What is that? So I said, I want to be an entrepreneur. Didn't know what it was. Just sounded cool. And my first dive into the entrepreneurial pool was something called wedding and portrait photography, which bombed. I mean, blew up the joint. I had two clients and I'm surprised they paid me. But one thing came out of that was my love for speaking and teaching. And coaching. Well, you have to understand that all through high school and all through college, I would never give any kind of oral oral report unless there was nobody in the room. Now I'm a podcaster. I'm a professional speaker. I'm a coach. So what happened was I went to one of our friends in our Bible study class, who was a professional speaker. And I don't know what in the world possessed me to go ask this lady, hey, you're a professional speaker. How can I and an introvert who hates speaking in front of anybody be a professional speaker? She gave me some guidelines. I fell in love with it. But then I had a problem. I didn't want to speak about photography. So I didn't know what to do. So I went out and hired my first coach. Up until this point, I thought coaches were football coaches and hockey coaches and basketball coaches. I had no idea a coach for me, but they saw something in me. And we were on one call. I identify as Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. I was born in 1965. So I grew up in Winnie the Pooh. And I was having on one call an Eeyore moment. I'm normally Tigger. And he said, what's going on? I said, well, I really love speaking because I was going out and speaking to groups and telling them how to take better pictures. If they're realtors, how to take better pictures of property and stuff like that. But I don't want to speak about photography, but I don't know what I should speak on. He goes, well, why don't you speak on productivity? I'm like, that's weird. Where did that come from? I had no idea. We're like, why'd you say that? And he goes, I know a lot of people and you are one of the most naturally productive people I know. And you should share that gift for the world. I'm like, the first thing I said is, isn't everybody this productive? And after he stopped laughing for 10 minutes, he goes, no, you need to share that gift for the world. So that's how I actually went into the productivity business, hung my shingle out in 2011. But the more people asked me about it, I started thinking. I was raised in the late 60s and early 70s by parents who were from old school. You do chores, you do them correctly. You do them on time. You don't go out and play and then do your chores. You do your chores and then you go outside and play. And I think my mom and dad, who has since passed away, didn't know it. I was eventually going to be something called Mr. Productivity many years later. And so my parents, thankfully, laid that foundation for me. So it really sounds like it's kind of funny. Some of the things you mentioned there, you know, about teaching and that, because when I was going through college and that, I was like done with school, like all those public speakings and things like that, I hated it. And of course, six months after college, I became an instructor teaching Java. So it was like one of those where I'm never going back to school and I end up teaching. It's interesting how you kind of got into this because I think so many entrepreneurs kind of go through similar things. They leave corporate or they leave their jobs and they want to start something else. But one of the biggest problems they have is either the lack of focus or the lack of motivation or just maybe it's not the right topic through your experience, which how you became Mr. Productivity. What are some of the things that you could recommend for, you know, young entrepreneurs or just people getting into their own business to use productivity to help drive them, help their businesses thrive? Rule number one, make sure you're following somebody who is doing what you want to do. So if you want to be productive, go search for the productive productivity people on the interwebs. I would highly recommend you start with Mr. Productivity, but there's a lot of them out there. Go listen to their podcasts like the Mr. Productivity podcast and everybody else's go get their books. I don't have a book, but go follow them in social media. Because if you want to go from A to B, well, don't you want to follow and learn from someone who's already at B, which is really important because what happens when people come to me as clients, they're like, wow, I never knew this. I'm like, that's why you invested in me because I do know this and I can give you shortcuts. All coaches and books and podcasts are shortcuts. But here's the thing. You just it's not magic hiring a coach. It's not magic reading a book. It's not magic listening to a podcast. You have to listen and then go implement. So that's number one. You need to follow people who are where you want to go. Number two, I'm a huge fan of simplicity. Okay. Complexity is the gateway to procrastination. So we seem to live in a world where people like making things complex and I like making things simple because the more complex something is, the more the less likely you are to do it. So I always tell people here's a crazy idea. Let's break this down. So it's really, really simple because if I told your listeners, hey, here are 37 things that if you do all these things, you're going to be the most productive version of yourself ever. They're going to go, I'm out. But if I tell them and we'll probably get to this later, I mean, we already give them a solid, several solid tips. You pick one that resonates with you. So listener, if I've already said something that resonates with you, I encourage you to write that down and maybe go do it. Don't try to do three, four, five, six, seven, ten things because then you're like, okay, did I do one? I'm going to do four. What's next? Then you get confused. Then you get overwhelmed. And then you go to TikTok or Instagram and YouTube and endlessly scroll. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because it reminds me of some marketing material I've read recently. I can't remember which book it was in, but it was kind of the concept of focus and for sales. It's like if you want to sell, if you're a watch seller, a lot of the like watch brands want to promote all their watches. But really, if you give them one or two watches in an ad, they're going to be able to pick one or the other. But if you give them six or seven, it's too busy. It's too many. They'll just move on to the next advertisement or just miss your ad completely. I love the idea of simplicity. Kind of going back to your idea of writing down your distractions on, you know, in a notebook. I love the idea of analog. Too many times I find digital gets bloated. It makes it complex. It gets over complicated. You go down that rabbit hole. It's like, oh, it's here. You end up focusing on that versus what you're working on. Interestingly enough, especially in the new with like the chat bots and all these wonderful like Trello's and things like that where you can put them in. What I guess the trick here is how do you always know that you're distracted? Some of the times it's obvious and you can write it down. But some of the things you said like, you know, FedEx, you know, yeah, okay, I can see that. But sometimes there's those little nuances you get where you don't realize you're distracted or you're going down that rabbit hole. It could be like you're looking at the problem for some software you're working on, but you end up going down a rabbit hole trying to solve that problem. But you end up, you know, going way off topic. What are some tips to kind of catch yourself before you go down those paths or at least catch yourself that, hey, you are distracted when you really don't think you are? That's a great question. And what I encourage people to do is every once in a while, and again, I'm not going to give you an absolute number. Every once in a while, just stop, literally stop what you're doing and just ask yourself. Could be out loud or in your head. Is this what I'm supposed to be doing right now? If you would just take three seconds to ask yourself that question, you may go, oh, my gosh, no, why am I in my email? Why am I? This is a project for tomorrow. Why am I doing it now? But what happens is we go down the road, we turn left, we should have gone right, and we just keep going instead of going, wait, wait a minute. Wait, I'm not. This doesn't look familiar. So just ask yourself that question in three seconds. Just it is not going to stop you from what you're doing. It just allows your brain to catch up because sometimes either our brain is really far ahead or it's still behind trying to catch up. And if you stop for three seconds ago, is this what I'm supposed to be working on? And you're like, whoa, no. Then you can stop yourself before you go all the way down the road and realize you're 20 miles off course. So just ask yourself that question. And if the answer is yes, okay, keep on going. If it's no, then you can do what you have to do. So nice. Oh, go ahead, Rob. So with this, I'm thinking, you know, as I'm almost getting a little distracted with that, but the idea of so now you're trying to figure out your distractions. You're trying and doing this and somebody you alluded early to that there's some of these things are easier to do for people than others. I know you've worked with a bunch of people. So are there as opposed to necessarily even specific, are there sort of like, we'll call them like families or classes of changes that people can do that tend to be more accessible and the kinds of like sort of like, I guess, entry level versus like more advanced, you know, distraction removal techniques and things of that nature. There's certain things like if somebody sitting there like, gosh, I don't know if I can do this. Are there some that are easier than others? Did you say this works for most people or most people are going to be better suitable to pick this up? Well, I like to talk about something that's very controversial and it gets people on edge, but probably people listening to your show are adults and there's this thing called adulting. So I am not a fan of blaming social media apps or technology. Oh, it's because of Facebook. No, it's because you are not disciplined. So let me just put that out there. You need to practice adulting. Stop making excuses. Stop blaming other people. So that's number one. Number two, I think one of my most popular and most powerful productivity tips is just get up and walk around for a couple of minutes because again, you're working, your eyes are seeing stuff, your brain's processing and you keep doing 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 120 minutes, 180 minutes. You haven't gotten up. The blood's not flowing. This is stuff that everybody can do. I mean, you're probably not landing a plane in the war zone. So get up and give yourself a break. If you work from home, just walk to the kitchen. If you are in a corporate environment, walk to the break room. But this is so simple because what happens is people want all these, give me these five things I can do that is really simple, that's going to make me more productive. And I'm like, let's start with the easy stuff. When's the last time you got up and walked around for a couple of minutes? When's the last time you went outside and took some deep breaths of air? When's the last time you closed your eyes, go outside, put your bare feet on the ground, close your eyes and meditate for a minute. I mean, these are really simple things, but they're proven to improve your productivity. Everybody wants the hacks like how do I hack my phone so I'm not distracted by it? Or how do I do this? Let's start with, let's build a strong foundation. How do we become more productive? When you build a house, you have to build the foundation first. Probably the same thing with your developers. You got to build the foundation. You can't put on the finishing touches in the beginning. You got to start with the foundation. So I encourage people to go back to the basics. Every sports league in the world, it doesn't matter how great of a player you are. You go back to the basics. Tom Brady, when he played, what'd he do? He went to training camp and threw footballs. Why? Because that's what you do when training camp. And I think what happens when we go from year one to year two, year three, we're like, I don't have to go back to the beginning. The greats always go back to the basics. How's my foundation? Is everything working? What do I need to learn? Because guess what? I hate to be a spoiler for your listeners. Everybody has stuff to learn. Everybody. And that is where we're going to pause our conversation with Mark. The energy is going to keep on flowing. Trust me, this is one of those that we could have gone on and made this like, I don't know, a whole season of stuff. We could have definitely cranked out a couple of episodes. The energy brings obviously is great. The brilliant mind on these kinds of things and also some just really good, simple solutions. So keep your notebook handy. Don't get distracted and be ready for part two when we come back in the next episode. As always, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Check us out in all the different places you can check us out. Let us know any feedback that you have. Get out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. We'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback, so drop a note to info at developthe newer.com. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen. And remember, a little bit of effort every day adds up to a great success. Keep learning, keep growing, and we'll see you in the next episode.