Kwik Brain Episode 18: Fast Focus & Productivity with Julia Roy

Welcome to Kwik Brain, bite-sized brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more. I'm your coach, Jim Kwik. Free your mind. Let's imagine if we could access 100% of our brain's capacity.

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I knew what I needed to do and how to do it. I know kung fu. Show me. Welcome back, Kwik Brain. So how do you get focused In a world full of distraction, this is a question we get every single week in our private podcast Facebook group. I mean, think about it. Digital distractions are increasingly finding their ways onto our desks and into our pockets. They're competing for attention every single day. Phone calls, calendar reminders, chat apps, instant messenger, text messages, emails, app notifications, social media alerts. The list goes on and on and on. So if you feel like you're losing ground because of your monkey mind or entrepreneurial ADD, you're probably asking yourself, how do I keep my mind from becoming easily distracted? So here's the good news. There is hope and there is help. I want to introduce you to a dear friend, Julia Roy. She is my go-to personal trainer for productivity. And what I love about this superhero is she takes a neurological brain-based approach to transforming the way we work, the way we focus, and the way we perform. Now, this session is taken from a live talk she did at one of our recent Brain Conferences to a group of high achievers. I want you to pay attention and listen to these powerful work hacks so you can enjoy the gift of a focused, quick brain. Now, here's Julia Roy.

Hi, thank you. I want to talk to you and tell you a little story, something about Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway, he never ate at his desk. He also never talked on the phone or read the newspaper or opened up his mail when he was at his desk. When he was at his desk, He wrote, and that's it. In Mason Curry's book, Daily Rituals, he gives us a peek inside Hemingway's process. And he says, Hemingway wrote standing up. He actually was the inventor of the standing desk, apparently. Facing a chest-high bookshelf with a typewriter on it. And on top of that, a wooden writing board. First drafts were composed in pencil on onion skin typewriter paper laid slantwise across the board. When the work was going well, Hemingway would remove the board and shift to the typewriter. Hemingway created this very specific place where he did one thing, where he wrote. And when it was time to write, he stood in the same place, used the same tools, the same exact way, every single day. Now, if we fast-forward to today, in a world of work that's mostly digital, the only thing that we need is the internet to do our work, right? And this is great, we can do work anywhere, anyplace, anytime, but there's a cost because we don't really notice our physical environment anymore. We're so heads down into our computer. But this is a huge mistake. Our unconscious habitual mind is constantly aware of our surroundings, whether we're aware of it or not, all of the time. It's using cues and triggers like sound and senses and location in order to automate habitual thoughts and behaviors and workflows. And so I wanna talk to you about 3 ways that you can use your physical environment to boost your productivity, get you more focused and in the zone so that you can use the time that you spend working more effectively. Okay, number 1, designate work-only zones. Hemingway, when he was at that standing desk, he didn't wonder, oh, should I do this, should I do that? He knew exactly what he was there to do. He was there to write. He did nothing else there. So you wanna designate places, different places for different types of work. Because when you're there, it's a lot easier to get into what you are doing. So we have laptops and mobile phones, and they let us work anywhere. But when we try to do more than one thing in a single place, it becomes harder to do that task. So when you are at your desk and you are sometimes brainstorming, sometimes checking email, sometimes managing projects, You're constantly distracted, wondering what you should do, because you use that place, you anchor that place in all kinds of different types of work. And so let's use an example. Your bed. This is a really good one. When you get in your bed and watch TV, when you get in your bed and— she's smiling at me, yeah, bed. When you get in your bed and you watch TV, sometimes you read a book and you're checking your phone You're checking Facebook, you're checking your email. And then we wonder why it's hard to fall asleep at night, why our brain won't turn off. Because we're using our bed for all kinds of things, for work and for play. And then we're frustrated when we can't fall asleep because now the bed is actually not a great place to do what it's meant to do, which is to sleep and dream. Because you're confusing it by doing different kinds of things in that place. Another good example and just way to use this in your work life is let's say you need to brainstorm new ideas for a project, to just think outside of the box, you know, come up with something new. Don't do it at the place where you check email and manage projects and answer the phone. Pick up your computer, or even better, a pen and paper, and go outside. Sit on a park bench. Pick an empty office that has a view. Do it somewhere else. Try different places around your home and office and see what works. And when you find a place where brainstorming comes easily and naturally, do that there every single time and don't do anything else in that place. If you want to improve your focus and your attention on a specific thing that you want to do, let's say it might be writing, or you wanna get proposals out quicker and faster and more efficiently, just be intentional about where you do it. And don't do anything else in that place. Number 2, set the right soundtrack. Sound is so much a part of our physical environment, even if we're not aware of it. The good news is, is that audio cues is one of the easiest things to insert into your workflow because of music. For example, if you're trying to get through your inbox or check your emails, find a specific playlist or a specific song and set it on repeat. Now, I do this, I check my, when I'm trying to get to that elusive inbox zero, I play the same playlist. It's called Intense Studying. It's on Spotify. And what I really like about it is, is that it's fast and it's upbeat and it pulls me along, but it's instrumental, so there are no words. So I can read and write and compose really well-articulated emails because I'm not distracted by the lyrics, which is a thing for me for sure. When I'm trying to be more creative and think of, you know, I'm brainstorming or I'm mind mapping, there's a playlist on Spotify called Creativity Boost. And it's really artsy and innovative, has funky sounds, and it just gets me in that zone. And what's so interesting is that when you start to do this, as soon as that first song plays, there's a lot less resistance to whatever it is that you're doing. If you don't feel like getting through your emails or if you're just so overwhelmed by the The brainstorming session or the ideas that you have to come up with. And so when you're struggling to get something done, get the right soundtrack and let that pull you along. There are thousands of really great work-friendly playlists on Spotify and Pandora. Check it out and start to use sound and the right beats and melodies to get you in the right zone. state of mind. I don't know, is anyone familiar with Ryan Holiday?

Yeah.

He talks extensively about how he does this, and what I love is he talks about how he actually picks music that he doesn't particularly like. And that's so fascinating to me. I don't think that we need to pick music that we don't like, but the point there is that it doesn't really— the music is less important than it is that it just sets that tone and allows you to pull forward. All right, number 3. Give your devices specific tasks. Okay, so you might not think of your devices as your physical environment, as a part of the space that you live in, but if you think about it, what I love— I read this study that talked about how when we look into our computers, our brain doesn't know the difference between the real world and the digital world. So that's why when you read an email that's super nice or an email that's you know, that's not so nice, that you feel the same way as if that person was standing right there telling you that to your face. And so when it's looking into the computer, it's seeing the same thing as it would be if it was in the physical real world. So we should use our devices in order to support different modes of work. So for example, you know, I have my personal phone, my work phone. I have my work computer, my personal computer. I have my old iPad, my new iPad. I have my Kindle. I have all of these devices that I use to get my work done. And most recently, I've tried to really focus on my writing. So I took an old computer, got every single app off of it except for one writing app, disconnected the Wi-Fi, and that's the device that I use to write. And it's been a month now, and now whenever I even just see the background image on that computer and I open it up and there's only one app in the little, you know, bar at the bottom in the little dock, it's so much easier to just stay focused on writing, because I am here until my writing is done. There's nothing else I can do there. A good example too is also your iPad. Use your iPad for entertainment purposes only. Don't watch videos on your work computer. Don't open Hulu or Netflix or any of that. Because then when you're working on something that's particularly hard and you're just struggling with it and you feel that resistance, your mind's gonna try to find other things and places for it to do. Check your email or maybe watch, oh, I think there's a new episode of my favorite show on. You designate your iPad and when you know when you're on your iPad that you are, you know, you're watching videos, you're reading your backlog of Kindle books, you're actually finally watching the videos for a training course that you bought a year ago. What's fascinating here again is that soon when you have your iPad, you automatically relax. You're not confused. You're not adding to-dos or anything like that. The iPad becomes a place where you can truly Release and relax. When we designate different devices for different types of work, it just makes it easier to stay focused. So you want to designate specific places for specific kinds of work that require different kinds of thinking. Use music to help push you along, and the same music, the same first song, to get you going, to get you started, and to keep pushing you along. Pushing you through that task. And then also, use your devices. I'm sure if we all pull out all of the computers and phones and Kindles and iPads that we have, we can probably designate one device for each thing that we do in our work. And start to use your environment better as a way to create the place where specific kind of work happens. Work like Hemingway. Thank you.

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