Finding focus

0:00Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37 Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes, joined as always by the co-founders of 37 Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. This week, we're talking a little bit about finding focus. In fact, we got an email in from a listener, Richard, so we're going to dive into some of his questions. He said he discovered the podcast a few weeks ago. There's so many interesting gems. Thank you so much. It became clear to me that Jason and David value focused time each day. No interruptions, just deeply engaged into the task at hand.

0:33I have a multifold question about this. I'm trying to self-improve on focus and clear thinking, and I think Jason's and David's answers would help a lot. So here we go, guys. No pressure. The first one is, how do you battle procrastination? That's kind of a big general question, but do you guys, are you procrastinators? I kind of feel like you're not.

0:53Kimberly Rhodes:Well, here's what I would say about procrastination. I think it's a tool and it helps you figure out what you really want to do and what you really don't want to do. That's kind of all it is. If you really want to do something, you tend to just do it. If you don't want to do it, you put it off. In my opinion, it's not a good or bad thing. It just brings clarity to the table and goes, this is really what you care about and what you don't. Like I will procrastinate on paperwork because I hate paperwork. I'm not going to procrastinate on like stuff I'm really interested in doing. But it's also when I find myself procrastinating on something, it just reminds me that maybe maybe I don't actually want to do this.

1:23Kimberly Rhodes:And why don't I actually want to do this? And is there something I can change about it that would make me want to do it? That's how I think about it. I don't think it's good or bad necessarily. I do think it can be useful at times. I think sometimes when you have less time to do something at the end of the day, you end up just kind of focusing on the stuff that matters and not all the other stuff you could do. But fundamentally, I really just believe it separates the what do you want to do from what do you don't want to do? Yeah, that's a good point. David, do you feel the same way? I find that procrastination is actually a bit of a superpower.

1:50It is how I get my inboxes cleaned up. It is how I just tick off all the to do's that feel easy to manage and get off the list when there's something I don't want to do. And I agree with Jason. It is very often I don't want to do it. But I just did this case with the Rails World keynote that I have to present every year and I have to put together an hour's worth of material. And I basically procrastinated Omachi into existence on the back of that. I didn't really want to get started on. I knew I had to. But then I just said, well, what if I put in the presentation that I'm going to give a demo of this Omachi thing and Omachi's not ready?

2:30Well, I'm sort of kind of working on my presentation by putting all my hours into Omachi. And that could be quite effectful. Now, I do think it's also true that sometimes you don't want to do something, but you know you have to. It's not an optional thing. Like, I will have to be on stage at this conference at this time. And if I'm not prepared, I'm going to have a bad time. Right. So I don't want to do it, but I have to do it. And it just kind of squeezes down In this case, I thought, you know what? If I leave myself, I don't know, a month Do it, just noodle on it, it'll be great I left myself basically like a week To compress it because I'd spend all the time on it But in the end, that was great I look back upon that and I go I like the work that came out of the procrastination I actually also find that procrastination Is sometimes where I'll do my best sort of spelunking Like I'll start pulling on some thread This is what happened with our cloud exit in part.

3:29I actually forget what I was procrastinating on, but I was procrastinating by learning Docker. That's often what happens with procrastination is, at least for me, I spend the time that I'm procrastinating on something actually useful. Right. Because that's the only way the procrastination feels like it's legit. If I'm procrastinating, just scrolling on Twitter, I can't do that for very long. I'll start getting a bad conscience about the things I really should do. But if I'm procrastinating with something that feels valuable, I'm either learning something, I'm building something, then I can make the procrastination last longer.

4:06And I sometimes end up with a whole body of new knowledge. So that's what happened with the cloud exit. I learned all this stuff about Docker because for a couple of weeks, I had some tasks I didn't want to complete. And I thought like, ah, do you know what? Learning more about Docker is really important for my role as a CTO at this company. So I should do that. And it feels okay. hey, you get some really nice stuff out of procrastination. Yeah, I always tell myself, because I tend to procrastinate, that I do my best work under pressure, which is probably not always great. But to your point about writing your speech, I also had to do a presentation recently.

4:37And it's like, I do best when I'm like forced into a deadline versus having more time than is available to me to do it. Like, I need a deadline.

4:46Kimberly Rhodes:It prevents you from overdoing it too. Yeah. That's exactly what I had with this presentation too. I don't want to spend actually three weeks on it. I mean, I have other things to do. And I also find that if I save the prep work, especially for presentations, this is where I usually find the procrastination. It'll be a better presentation because it'll be more topical. It'll be the things I thought about literally that last week before I had to give the talk. And I usually deliver much better presentations and keynotes when I'm super fired up about it because it's something about now. wow, if I actually prepare my slides like a month in advance, to me, it's just going to feel stale.

5:27Okay, good point. So the second part of Richard's question is, do you meditate each day to improve cognitive functions? Are you guys meditators?

5:37Kimberly Rhodes:I've been meditating for a while, but not to improve cognitive functions. I just do it because I think it's interesting to watch your own thoughts and just to kind of be still for a while and just relax, actually, frankly. so I don't like doing things for other reasons beyond the thing itself I just find that that it gets muddy we talked about this in a podcast actually like I'm gonna go fishing and I'll take those lessons and bring it back to whatever just like go fishing so for me like I meditate just to meditate it's not for anything else and whatever benefits come from it if they are or there aren't I don't care it's not about the other it's not about the second order effects it's about the thing itself so I've been doing this for a number of years on and off I've been more into it lately but I try to do 25 minutes a day.

6:18Oh, that's a lot.

6:20Kimberly Rhodes:That's what I've been trying to do. I've been kind of keeping up with it for the most part. That's impressive. Yeah, well, I don't know if it's impressive or not, but it's not easy. I can tell you that. It's hard for me to sit still for 25 minutes, but it's important that I try to do that every day. Wow. David, what about you? I have tried a number of times and I actually, I do like it. I think it is a really interesting challenge. As Jason says, it's way, way harder than it sounds. I mean, 25 minutes to me sounds impossibly long. I usually try like, oh, can I do it for two minutes? That seems like a big enough challenge.

6:53But it's not something you do regularly. What I do do in its place, though, is some of the other techniques you can use to bring stillness or perspective to things. The stoic techniques for me are really effectful. Negative visualization is something I practice certainly on a weekly basis. just imagining all sorts of ways things could go wrong, not to give myself anxiety, but to prepare myself for the night, for the fact that it won't always be sunny, for the fact that people won't always like what we do and we'll launch something that's not a success or I'll give a speech and people think, meh, or all the other small and sometimes large challenges you can have in life.

7:36I find negative visualization to be an incredibly powerful technique to just prepare yourself for all the things that go wrong. And sometimes you prepare yourself well in advance because things just happen to be flowing quite nicely. I think right now I'm in a wonderful groove working on a bunch of things that I really am passionate about and people seem to enjoy it. But I also remember not quite five minutes ago, but not much longer than that, where no one really liked the things that I was working on. And I may not even have liked the things that we're working on. I remember, I think it was last summer, I had like, I don't know, five weeks where I was just kind of wandering in the state of mild discontent of not having a project that really sucked me in.

8:18So when things are going well, I always go like, you know what? Things are going well. We should think about the fact that they won't continue to go that well all of the time. Okay, tell me a little bit more about this negative visualization. So you're thinking about all the worst case scenarios. And then are you thinking through how that's not so bad? Are you thinking through solutions? Like, tell me the second part of that. A big part of it, just thinking about it, I think is almost like exposure therapy. When you think about a project you're working on, for example, and it's just being a huge failure.

8:51And I think, OK, so what would happen with that? In fact, Jason and I just played this game together yesterday when we were deciding on a new direction for something we're working on. And we went through, so what's the worst that can happen? What if we take this gamble? And it is a bit of a gamble. In fact, it's quite a big gamble. Or at least so it seemed in the moment when you're proposing something kind of out there. And then we walked through. So, okay, so what if this didn't work at all? Well, this could happen. That could happen. And like normally when you start enumerating the specific things that can happen from something that doesn't go your way, you realize that actually doesn't sound that bad.

9:29Okay, so we waste some time, maybe we waste some money, but then we learn some things and we have fun. That actually kind of evens out. Like, I can afford to lose some time and lose some money if I learn some things and I have some fun. So that's sort of the lower level of it, but I also try the harder levels. What if more catastrophic things happen? Either to me personally, what if I crash a race car and it doesn't just hurt, but it's worse than that? What are you going to do then? What if something happens to your family? What if something, God forbid, happens to your kids? I do actually try to go through these things as uncomfortable as they are and just stay in it for a moment.

10:12Not dwell on it needlessly, not use it to provoke anxiety, but just to have that reaction of like, oh, this is something that's going to happen at some point. I don't know I got what 40 years left on the planet they're not all gonna go silky smooth at some point things are gonna just start failing Jason and I are well I'm almost 50 now Jason are you 50 all right 51 51 so do you know what things just start breaking at some point when you get up off the seat you start to make a noise you're like oh like for example my eyesight isn't as good as it was. I, for many years, I loved shooting photography with Leica cameras.

10:54And they have this range finder function where instead of autofocus, where there's a little injured inside the lens, you have to do it yourself, but it requires really good eyesight. I can't do that anymore. And we're like, oh, wow, that could be really tragic. Or it could be a new adventure where I discover new cameras that I also like. So just try to prepare myself for these kind of things and dive into them. Stay in the uncomfortable zone for just a second and then hop back out. And then tomorrow, maybe try again and like cold exposure therapy or something else like that. If you've done it a few times, you're not at least going to be shocked in the same way when it actually occurs.

11:35Kimberly Rhodes:Another thing, I do this as well. My framing for it typically is like, nothing is ever as good or as bad as it appears to be. And so when you're flying high, it's like, yeah, probably not as good as I think it is you know for other reasons and when it's when things are down you're like it could be worse it's just a nice way to to sort of cap the range I think and it's good to sort of live within that and then yeah for negative visualization we do this at work it's also like it's a bit of a luxury when you've been around for 26 years you're like if everything went to shit we'd be okay I mean I wouldn't want everything to go to shit but it could go to shit we could make some decisions that make go to shit the market it could change competitor all the things could happen.

12:13Kimberly Rhodes:And you still want to come away from that going, well, we would have had a really, really good run had that happened. Now, that's just one particular scenario. But I do think that's a pretty good scenario in most cases. Death, injury, difficult things are, of course, you know, like a bad diagnosis. There's some things that can be quite bad, obviously, truly, truly bad. And I think you want to be ready for those things because those will befall us all. But there's a lot of things that we treat as that bad that aren't anywhere near that bad. and it's just good to, is it really that bad right now that I'm like, have a creative block or like have writer's block or like, don't like this thing.

12:48Kimberly Rhodes:Like, it's not really that bad. So don't catastrophize things. That's like another really fundamental stoic principles. Don't catastrophize things. That is a mental exercise that we put on ourselves that we don't have to do. And so that kind of stuff, I think is very, very helpful, especially in this world that we're in where everything seems like a catastrophe all the time. If you're paying attention to the things that engage people most of the time, which is typically negative stories and whatnot. It can seem like everything is falling apart constantly. That's just kind of, you know, maybe some things are, maybe some things aren't.

13:16Kimberly Rhodes:I don't know, but certainly not everything is. Certainly not the way it's being presented. So I think it's just healthy to reflect on that from time to time. Okay, perfect. Well, Jason, you mentioned writer's block. Richard's next question is similar. Did you ever have issues with brain fog? And if so, how did you solve it? Yeah, I've had those moments. It kind of reminds me again of the procrastination question to some degree, which is I think in some ways, maybe brain fog is a real thing. I don't really know, right? Who knows? But I do think in some ways, we sort of create these conditions for ourselves where we don't want to do something.

13:50Kimberly Rhodes:We can't figure out why we can't do something. And we sort of create a reason why we can't. I don't know. Maybe there's a medical thing that someone's going through a different story, right? But I do think we sometimes put ourselves in these positions to sort of have to have something to blame. And I just think like you're probably not foggy about something you really are excited about. You really want to do right now. You're really into. Maybe you're not quite at optimal levels for whatever reason, you know. But like this is just for me since the question is being posed and I'm just going to give it my answer.

14:20Kimberly Rhodes:Like I found whenever I'm in that sort of mode or mood, it's because I kind of don't want to do something or I'm just not up for it. and I just kind of get foggy about it or just lose interest in it. And that manifests in different ways. That's my take. Yeah, it's good enough. What I find interesting is I used to track more metrics about my sort of mental capacity, if you want to say it like that. I used to use the aura ring. I would track my nightly sleep. And I did that for many, many years. I think almost 10 years I wore that damn ring. And it's got this veneer of paying attention to your state.

14:56that there's something to like i'm a huge fan of getting enough sleep but i also found myself getting a little tired with that excuse the pun getting a little tired with the idea that like everything sort of has to be tracked in that way i use step counters for a while too and i just realized you know what sometimes it's okay to be a little tired sometimes it's okay to be a little lazy. And as long as that's not a permanent condition that you're in for months on end or years on end, it's going to be fine. And I also find that occasionally I'll get a bad night's sleep. And if that's just a one-off, if I'm working on something I really care about, I don't give a shit.

15:37I'm still going to do the work. I'm still going to put my all into it and maybe at a slightly decreased capacity. But exactly as Jason says, when I'm in the mode that I sort of don't want to do something, it becomes a crutch real easy. Or I didn't get the perfect sleep, or I didn't get all my steps in, or I skipped working out this week. That's why I can't do anything at all. Bullshit. That is an excuse. You're looking for an excuse to explain why you aren't achieving things you want to achieve or doing the things you want to do. And you got to dig a little deeper there. It's probably not just that you only got six hours and 52 minutes instead of a solid at 7.45 last night.

16:20There might be something deeper underneath and uncovering that for a second and not letting yourself off the hook by everything not being optimal all the time is, I think, a really good exercise. Okay. Now this isn't Richard's question, but I know we talk about this a lot. You guys being able to do, and not just you, like the entire company, being able to do focus work because we don't have a lot of meetings. I'm curious if you guys have your schedule set up in such a way that your interruptions are all on one day? Or is it like this week I'm going to do nothing but focus? Kind of talk me through meetings versus no meetings and how you guys work on a day-to-day basis.

17:00Kimberly Rhodes:My calendar is generally open every day. I mean, I've got this podcast, for example, which we do from 10 to 11 Pacific on Tuesdays. I've got a team call at 7 during the morning on Tuesday mornings, which we just did this morning because we have had some people in Europe, so we've got to find the right time zone. There's a few things, like a few dotted random things. But for the most part, I have uninterrupted stretches of time, and that's what everyone should have and does have here. We don't put things on each other's calendars. We can't even see each other's calendars. We don't have days packed full of meetings.

17:30Kimberly Rhodes:I mean, sometimes there's work that we're doing. I don't consider that a meeting. When you're actually talking to somebody and having a conversation or working through something, that's not a meeting. That's just that's working. So there's times when I'll be on a call with someone or whatever, and I'll be discussing something. I don't look at that as like a slot on my calendar because it isn't actually. I'm just like, hey, are you free for 15 minutes? I wanna show you something. No, I'm not. About in a couple hours, sure, hit me up then. And you have a conversation. That's how that kind of works.

17:54Kimberly Rhodes:That's my day. That's what I think most people's days are here. The organization itself does not create time blocks for people and suck their time away. So that's something that's very important to us. I will say that the other thing I've really tried to do is I try not to schedule anything at all on Mondays or Fridays. at all at all. And then the other thing is I've really gotten better at not accepting things in the future. Even things like podcasts, I typically will say, I know this is probably tough for your schedule, but like hit me up a week ahead of time and I'll do it if I'm not signing up for something, you know, 14 weeks from now.

18:30Kimberly Rhodes:Sometimes there's going to be an exception if something is really, really important for whatever reason. For the most part, I just say like, let me know as we get sooner and closer to the thing. And if that doesn't work for you, I totally get it. because I just find that the further out something is, the more of an obligation it feels like. And sort of oftentimes the less enthusiastic I am about the thing then. And so I'd just rather like get it on the schedule now or not. Where you see it on your calendar and you're like, why did I agree to do that? Yeah, and it's like not even a personal thing with the conference or whatever.

18:59Kimberly Rhodes:It could be great, but I have other things going on now that I didn't know I was going to have. And I really don't want to step away from those things right now. I didn't know at the time that I would have those things. I'd rather just not have to have that sneak up on me. And so I just try to do less of that future planning as much as I can. I need to take some notes here because I totally let that shit sneak up on me. And I just did it and I cursed myself oh so badly. I had a section over the summer where I didn't accept anything, but I kept getting requests in to do podcasts or to do some conference or to meet for some conversation.

19:35And I just said like, you know what? That sounds like an August me kind of thing Like that's months from now And I ended up with the damn two weeks Before Rails World Where I already had a very full plate With Amachi And needing to do the keynote preparation And the week before was just packed And I was like, what kind of idiot Would line up all this stuff Right before this is supposed to happen Oh, that kind of me like three months ago, that kind of idiot. I then did learn my lesson in that moment. And I had actually quite a lot of requests in my set aside. And after going through that experience, I can't do any of that.

20:18So I just wrote everyone back, all requests that I had sort of halfway thought, maybe I could do it. Maybe I could fit it in and just say, I'm not doing anything else, booking anything new in 2025. Hit me up in January. I just clear the decks totally and perhaps that should just be the permanent state of affairs I will say I find it so much easier to say yeah do you know that sounds kind of interesting three months in advance and then the week before absolutely cursing myself for signing up for these things and it's not just that the thing is there I mean it's not like don't like talking to people some of the time and it's not like I don't like appearances and getting a chance to talk about some of the topics that we're excited about.

21:02But I don't know if I like it enough. And very often the trade-off is this week, if I have two, three things, that week is off. I'm not going to make big breakthroughs. I'm not going to dive into big technical things. Because Jason, actually, you had a wonderful post, I think a couple of years ago. The problem is not the time. I keep getting sucked into this delusion. Oh, it's just one hour here. It's just half an hour here. It's just a quick conference. That's not what it is. It's the attention. The attention just gets drained out of the week when you have a handful of little dots on that calendar.

21:39That's when procrastination really kicks in. When I start the day and I think, you know what, I have something at one. What kind of problems do I want to start with today? Let's just take some of the easy ones.

21:50Kimberly Rhodes:Let's not dive into the stuff. I'm actually really excited about moving forward because I don't want to get into it. And then suddenly when I'm in the groove, when I'm in the zone, I got to leave the zone and I got to go do some stupid meeting or have a chat or a podcast, which it often is. Not ours, of course, that's except. But all these other obligations. And this is a choice. That's what I always remind myself. It feels like, you know what? This is the nice thing to do. Someone reaches out to you and maybe you're even interested in the topic and you're interested in the person, it feels like the right thing to do to say yes.