017 How I Turn Off Work Brain

Okay, so you're sitting at dinner with your partner and they're telling you this story, talking to you about this thing. You're, you're giving them the old uh huh, uh huh. Yep. And then they stop talking and you realize, shoot, I haven't been listening to any of the things that they just said because you got work brain turned up to a hundred and everything else turned down to nothing. How do you turn off work brain? It's one of the hardest aspects of entrepreneurship. How do you ever, like, put boundaries around. Boundaries around tasks are one thing, but boundaries around headspace? Oh, that's a whole different type of challenge. We're gonna talk about it today. I'll share what I do. I'd love to hear what you do if you found some helpful ways to manage this. And we'll put those brains to work on the things we actually want them to work on. Right, let's talk about. Okay, Best, like, best single thing I have done for managing work brain biggest, like before and after improvement I've made. David Allen's getting things done GTD if you know, you know, core to that approach of productivity is having a capture system. A capture system is a place to park that thing when it comes to your noggin so that you can then release said thing from. From your noggin. Probably the most quoted thing from that book is your brain is for having ideas, not for storing them. And the more you're trying to juggle in your brain at any given time, in my experience, like, the more stressed I am and the less likely I am to actually think of helpful things because I've got this headspace consumed by all this stuff that I'm like, oh, shoot, I gotta remember that. Or it's stressing me out. And so my brain's not actually going in a direction I want it to go in. So for me, my capture system is largely notion. I've got a space in notion where I just drop that stuff. And that's like the first step. Just get it out of your head. And then I've got another process for making sure all those things go where they need to go down the line. But important for me actually became ensuring that I had a capture system for every context. So let's say I'm flopping around with a kid on the floor, I don't have my phone in my pocket. Flop for me. Like turning off work brain. Where that's the biggest thing for me is being present with my kids and my family. But what do I do when that thing Comes into my head. Not because I was thinking about work, but just this thing comes into my head. I'm like, holy smokes, I gotta hang onto this. If I don't have my phone with me, that probably means I'm using my watch to capture with, like, a voice note or something like that. Driving in the car, same thing. Listening to a podcast, it was helpful for me to think through what are all the different contexts in which I could have that thing that I need to jot down. I need a capture system for it. Laying in bed, that's maybe one of my biggest ones. You think of those things in bed, and for me, the act of writing them down somewhere, it, like, makes it easier for my brain to then release that thing so that brain can get back to doing whatever it is brain needs to do. Now, an interesting wrinkle to capture systems. I talked about this a bit yesterday. I think in the age of AI, context becomes king. The more helpful information you have to draw on, the more capable you'll become, because knowledge and all that, like, that's kind of becoming commoditized. But your specific knowledge and your contextual stuff, that's specific to you. In the age of AI, that becomes an asset, because now it's searchable, it's discoverable, and your capture system is like the first step on a path to being just a more documented, better documented human being. For goodness sakes. This is a daily show, and the most common thing people tell me is, what the heck is there to talk about every single day? Well, I can tell you it's not novel stuff that I'm thinking of. Usually it's like a combination of, like, here's how I think I feel about this thing. But I also read these other couple interesting things and just kind of, here's where I'm at. And this show is an example of documentation, obviously, because I have context coming away from all these shows. I have transcripts, I have show notes. I have all these things. So in the process of becoming more better documented human beings, because that becomes beneficial in the age of AI, a capture system ensures that all those little things the Noodle was working on that may be valuable, may not be valuable, they at least got parked somewhere. And that's step one for me, that releases my mind when I'm having a conversation with somebody or there's something else I would rather be doing. Now, another kind of angle on this, I started taking an improv class. My wife got me an improv class for Christmas because I love improv. Like, middle Ditch and Schwartz. Like, there's so many, like, improv things out there that I just think are amazing and really funny because they're not, like, super produced. It's just, like, stuff made up on the fly. Like, growing up, I loved Whose Line Is It Anyways? That sort of thing. So my wife gets me this Christmas gift to go do improv classes. And back when I did my MBA a while ago, there was a guy in there who was like an IT consultant. And he went through this improv course with his team, and he absolutely swore by it. He said it was, like, one of the most viable things he ever did. Way more valuable than, like, technical trainings and all of that. And I always kind of had, like, a hard time getting my head around that. Like, why would an improv class be viable for business, for work? I can understand. Like, maybe it helps you think on your feet a little better, that sort of thing. But I will tell you something that it is amazingly helpful for is improv, like, by definition, is ephemeral. You go through an improv scene, let's say you go through five improv scenes in a night. Those scenes, they start, they end, they're never coming back up again. But that doesn't stop you from thinking about them. And the way that improv plays out, like, it's all immediate. Like, you don't have time to think about it. You don't have time to try to be funny. You just have time to react and kind of say the first thing that comes to your mind. And then the funny comes from the absurdity of just wherever you end up. But we all do this. You get to the end of a work day and you, like, lay in bed at night about like, oh, man, that one little thing I said to that one person, they might have heard the wrong way or say you actually did have something stressful come up, had that, you know, really hard conversation with a client or staff person or something like that. We all, like, then dwell on these things and super mega hyper over analyze them. And these little, like, moments can take up our headspace, whether they're significant moments or not. And oftentimes what ends up taking up the headspace is the wondering of whether it was a significant moment or not. That person said that one thing. Did they say because of that or because of that other thing? Or you finally met this person and you had this conversation with them and you were nervous and you're like, ah, what did they think of me? That sort of thing. But what I'm loving about improv is just the ephemeral nature of it. The fact that you could go through a scene and then 30 seconds later you're like, oh, I could have done this one thing, and it would have been hilarious. But that situation is never gonna come up again. You're never like, you're never going to be in those circumstances where that funny thing could even happen. So it's gone just like that. And we get, it's like, ideas and so many other things in our life where we're like. We cling to them when oftentimes the better things for our brain is just like, you gotta find a way to just let that stuff roll off of you. Which we talk a lot about, like, the ways that you can design your firm and your work life to best work for the way that you work and the things that you enjoy and the things that you don't enjoy. And you should absolutely do that. But there's another side of this that is like, psychological resilience. Like, how easy is it for me to let these things just roll off? And when people talk about that, oftentimes it's like, yeah, it's very stressful in the beginning, but over time it just gets better. But I don't think that's like, a complete answer. I do think that there are things that you can do and things that you can be more mindful of that will help you to, like, not dwell on those things that are going to be what causes the anxiety. Because oftentimes, you know, the most anxious aspects of what we do is not the anxiety I'm feeling while I'm doing the thing. It's actually the anxiety that, like, lives with me the rest of the day. And the next morning when I get up and I think about the thing, the anxiety is like, all the stuff happening around, happening around, the doing of the thing, the actual doing of the thing oftentimes feels the best because then at least it feels like you're making progress. But there's this element of, like, psychological resilience where we all are born with different amounts of it. And it all probably gets better and easier over time, the more experience you have. But it's also a thing that you can learn. And I'm like, super enjoying this aspect of improvisational stuff is it's. Everything is like, by definition, fleeting. And human relationships are not that they're sticky. Those things do matter a little more. But I would argue 90% of the time, they do not hold the amount of value that we assign to them either because we overanalyze after the fact, and we blow that thing out of proportion when maybe it was not a big deal to the other person. But also through the lens of the fact that you're supporting a hundred clients, and let's say this one client is irritated for a reason that might not even be significant. But we dwell a whole bunch on, like, that human interaction and the uncomfortableness of it when in the grand scheme of things, you've got a successful business, you've got a bunch of other clients. This conversation does not represent, like, an existential threat to you and what you do. But it's still really hard not to dwell on it. And before you know it, like, there goes your headspace. You just perpetually thinking about those stressful, sticky things happening and in your firm, and you go home at the end of the day, God forbid you wanna do something besides work, man. It's really hard to get out of that mindset. But when it comes to, like, investing in yourself and investing in, you know, higher leverage things, rather than just doing the work all the time, like, that kind of all starts with your headspace, with what you allow your brain to be consumed by. So, like, the analogy I always come back to is, like, if your brain's a computer and you could put that process, you know, twice, work on anything, is it working for you or is it working against you? Is it something that somebody else did to you where, like, they got in your head and they're now living there rent free? Or is it working on something that will move you forward, that you're proud of? So, like, if you take inventory of, like, what are the things you're dwelling at, dwelling on before you go to bed or when you first get up in the morning or while you're working, that sort of thing, Are those things that are fundamentally, like, moving you forward? Are there things that are dragging you backward? Are they people that maybe you shouldn't even be dealing with that are, like, dragging you down? I'd like to think when I'm at my best, that brain's chugging away on things that are going to be helpful for me. Ideation, problem solving the important problems. For me, coming up with exciting new stuff like that is the value of that brain not always being in work mode because it's got the idle capacity to be helpful, to dwell on the things that you want to dwell on, rather than it being consumed by the ugliness of entrepreneurship and the worst thing that happened in a given day. That's kind of my framework right now for getting out of out of work brain, being out of firm running life. Last year, obviously my day to day is different, but I felt like when I was at my best, I was letting that stuff roll off of me. When my home life was most stressful was when my work life was most stressful because like I wasn't there. I didn't have the ability to think about kids, birthday and like do all that mental processing that I needed to do while I wasn't working. Talked a bit about this yesterday. I've been journaling in the mornings. I love that. I think your brain has to have some sort of space with which to organize just the things that you're experiencing day to day. Whether that's recording a voice memo that nobody ever listens to, whether that's journaling, whether that's counseling. There's like this indexing that has to happen and if you don't give the space to index that stuff that I think you'd never really like close the page on that stuff. I feel like I'm able to like tackle my days in a more organized way if I take the time to compartmentalize that, which in the past I would have said like, wow, that's a very, that's a very privileged thing for you to be able to just take the time and do whatever, philosophize. Right. But I think there's a lot of aspects of knowledge work that are like too tied to time and attention, you know, like I get squat done past like three in the afternoon, so I save that time for like the fun stuff that I want to do where I'm energized to work on it. Because the hour block from 3 to 4pm for me is like 10 minutes at 6 in the morning when my brain is just like raring to go. Okay, shower, shower, thought. Try this one on for size. No amount of workflow optimization turns a bad client into a good client. Think about that. I. So I was. This came up as I was thinking as I was sharing some info from last Sunday's video on the main channel around how I think we often talk about workflow because it's easier to talk about than client gatekeeping. Client gatekeeping is like very human, very squishy. You usually involves uncomfortable conversations. So when you have capacity issues, where we immediately go is workflow and automation and stuff like that. When the problem is you just didn't gatekeep, you didn't capacity plan, it's your fault at the end of the day because you just let too much stuff in the door. But it's really easy to pull that back to, oh, we're gonna use workflow and all that to solve a problem. But workflow doesn't change whether a client is a good client or a bad client. Right? And this came up in a discussion again today on Twitter talking about like, what are the biggest opportunities for your firm and what are you most excited about to change? And a lot of people said cutting the stinker clients. And you get like some of the expected responses of things like, why don't you, why don't you just increase their price until they are good clients? So I would actually probably extend that statement to say no amount of price increasing turns a bad client into a good client, or even no amount of staff hiring turns a bad client into a good client. I, in the past, I always just hired my way out of capacity holes. We didn't even really stop to consider, is this a client list that we actually want? And I, and I honestly think it came from a point of like, gratitude. Like, we feel so fortunate to be able to work and support all these people. Why would we ever not do it? And just the whole conversation around like selectivity and the client list, like, there's this inherent level of entitlement that is hard still, hard for me to get over. And I think that's where a lot of people still are, is like they just, especially if you start from nothing, like you have so much gratitude for the people who would bring you their business, that to ever get to that level of entitlement where you can fire these people and push back on them and make requirements of them rather than vice versa is a really hard thing to get your head around. And so when we were up against capacity issues, the answer was always higher. Like it was never a question of, well then what do we gotta chop to get it down to a level of capacity that we can manage. But these days, in many ways it's like shooting fish in the barrel. Find those clients. And so we're increasing prices a lot, most of us, and that filters out some, but not as much as we usually expect. But is that doing anything to get you closer to identifying what the, the good client is versus the bad client is a high paying client that's identical to a low paying client. Like, is the high paying one better? Yes, it is. But changing your firm to support a client list, you know, through workflow, through hiring, like, that's only one side of the equation. The other side of the equation is the client list itself. Like, you are the curator of a client list. That is the most important hat you will wear as a firm runner. It is your job to only make sure that really cool people make it on there. And all the stinkers can't, can't hang around so much of staff happiness and your own happiness and all that stems from just the people that you work with. Like, there's no amount of, there's no amount of building a rad firm that will make it fun to work with a holes. So, like, you're curating that client list. Can you hire more people to get the work done? Yes. Will automation help you get the work done faster? Probably. But that's only 50% of the equation. The other half is figuring out what should this client list actually be? Is there a way to make it even more specific? Is a smaller version of it more fun? Very possibly, but I've been thinking about that and it's easy to. It's easy to get yourself sucked down the shiny object rabbit hole that will maybe get that work done without taking the time to stop and consider. Is that even work that I should be doing in the first place? Easier said than done. I know and I, like, I did it wrong for years and I don't know that I ever truly got to a point where I was like, yep, a hundred percent. This is absolutely the work that we should be doing. But I would also say, like, niching down that sort of thing. Like, it's not a. That specificity is not a thing that ever stops. Like, you can always get more specific. You can always solve a more specific problem that I think people will love you even more for. It's not as if you get to a client list and you're gonna have that client list until the end of time because you're going to change, your team's going to change, what you're capable of is going to change. That's just part of the journey. And honestly was like, for me, probably the most fun part of the journey is what is, what is the next iteration of that client list and our firm's capabilities look like that enabled my personal growth and the growth of my team and, and working with, you know, a lot of really fun people on your client list along the way. What do you do to get out of like, work brain? What are your tricks? How do you make sure you're present with the family? How do you put time into hobbies and stuff like that? Feel free to drop a comment. I'd love to hear. Thanks for coming and hanging today and we'll see you tomorrow.