How to Reignite Focus in Your Remote Team

If your team is remote, hybrid, or working somewhere between the laundry room and the dog park, there's a good chance that their attention is elsewhere. Distraction isn't just annoying. It is draining your budget, killing innovation, and turning your culture into a chaotic Slack thread. And that's what we're talking about today. On Marc Haine Live. Welcome to this episode. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs develop new skills to help them create the jaw-dropping, show-stopping experience that their customers and their employees deserve. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. And today, we're going to be diving headfirst into the chaos of remote work to uncover how you can stop chasing your team's attention and start inspiring their very best no matter where the heck they're plugging in from. I do have one simple request though. If there's somebody in your circle who could benefit from the insights that we're sharing today, do them a favor. Pass along a link to this episode. That way, they get to take advantage of the knowledge you've just picked up too as well. Do it! And it's free. I know perfectly well that leading a remote team these days feels a little bit like herding cats with a feather duster while blindfolded on a unicycle. Between the back-to-back Zoom calls, endless notifications, and the constant battle for attention, most teams are barely hanging on. Let alone thriving. And here's the thing. This is not a remote work problem. It is a focus problem. And if we don't fix it, we're gonna end up losing our people. We're going to lose our competitive advantage. And we're going to lose our sanity. So that brings us to our Question of the Day. So, is your team working remotely or just remotely working? I'd love to get your ideas, your thoughts. Why don't you go ahead, share a link to this episode on your favorite social media platform, hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership. Put your comments Because I'd love for you to be part of this conversation. I'd love to hear from you. As I mentioned, today's guest has helped tell stories about Die Hard, Wolverine, Transformers, even Star Trek. Stephen Purry is a former Hollywood producer turned tech founder and the creator of The Suca Company, a platform designed to help remote teams focus better, feel better, and actually get stuff done. From raising millions in venture capital to producing Oscar-winning visual effects, Stephen's journey is as action-packed as the franchises he once led. And today, he's bringing Hollywood-level thinking to your home office. Stephen, welcome to the show! It's great to have you here.

Marc, to hear you give that bio, I'm like, oh, I want to meet him too.

Just look in the mirror. Awesome! Hey Stephen, so let's start off a little bit. Why don't we start off by talking a little bit about who your clients are and kind of how do you serve them?

I'll tell you, we have a membership. Let me explain what we do is I have a community that is based around a focus app. And we built this largely on the principles of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the book on flow, as well as Cal Newport, Nir Eyal, Clear. There are a bunch of very smart people who have written books in this area. And it was really around this. As for most of the world, there was this evolution because of the pandemic into, oh, we have to understand how remote work works if I'm an individual contributor or I'm a leader. And then it also became like, well, hybrid work. And now we have these different colors on our palette we can paint with. So what I noticed is that in film, where I had come from, there's already established ways of doing this very successfully, both as an IC as well as a leader. And that's really why I created this current company. A lot of the people in our membership are Writers, designers, engineers. They're people who do knowledge work. They're almost all college-educated or postgraduate, over 30, and they need to do 3 or 4 hours of really deep work a day. And that is what moves their team forward. That's what moves their career forward. And we're just set up to help them overcome the obstacles to really push things, supercharge their life.

I love that you said and actually defined that we expect them to do 3 to 4 really focused hours of work. A lot of entrepreneurs, business owners would say, but wait a minute. I'm paying people for 8 hours a day. What do you mean you only want 3 hours? Let's talk a little bit about that.

Marc, what you just said is a fantastic phrase because I think as we evolve in work, One of the things you start to understand is what you're paying for is results. If you want to pay by the hour, then you should own a Burger King.

But again, results count, right? It's still about results. It's still about deliverables.

Suppose you even own a Burger King and you said, I would love to pay a percentage of every burger, see how many you can sell. And you had some superstars who are selling 60 burgers a minute or something ridiculous. Or you said, Hey man, I'm giving you $15 an hour. Just like push the menu.

Right.

You know the results are going to be.

And it's interesting.

It's really about what you get done.

Yeah, so it's interesting because I think that was kind of the paradigm shift we saw during the pandemic. Because when all of a sudden people had to work remotely, like people ran out. Owners, operators, managers ran out to buy software to be able to put onto laptops so we could surveil how many hours you're putting in. And we were hitting people up on Slack channels. panels with, hey Donna, I don't know why you're only working 6 hours this week or today.

Right?

And it's like, hmm, that's a little bit of a change in philosophy when you turn around and say, well, let's start looking at results rather than hours.

Yes, let me give you an example.

Sure.

So, as I said, my career in film, whereas as an Executive Vice President at DreamWorks at Kurtzman-Orsy, as a Vice President at 20th Century Fox, A lot of those lessons, when I moved into tech, mapped really well onto the current set of challenges, both as someone who was working on something as well as someone who was leading a team of people working. I'll give you an example. Writing, the core of any creative project, except— well, actually, not any creative. The core of film and television, maybe not sculpting or painting, but the core of those is the script. Fundamentally, you have to have a good foundation, so you need a quality script. Writers Guild regulates how that's done. You have X number of weeks in this contract to deliver a first draft. You get a set of notes in this many weeks. You have this much time to execute the revisions based upon those notes from the studio or the producer, right? So it's a very regulated thing saying, here are the time boxes in which you work. Now, it is interesting because you are not paying that writer. You're not paying David Ayer $1.5 million or Kurtz Morrissey $2 million. Because they spent 60 hours on it. What you're paying for is you got Avengers: Infinity War and it's ready to shoot, or you got the F1 movie at such a quality level Brad Pitt wants to be in this, right? So you don't care. What you want is something great.

Yes.

And if you are hiring talented people, that's great. Now, something you brought up before when you were joking was, you know, hey Donna, are you working? Like, I haven't seen you online, this sort of thing. There is no solution to bad hiring.

Right.

Bad hiring leads to you need to fire and learn how to hire better. If someone is not aligned with what your company does, like, I can't solve that. You can't solve that. No one can solve that. Just learn how to screen people better. So really, I think what we're going to talk about is when you have people that are open to be inspired, open to contribute and do great things, how can you help them feel great about that and feel healthy, as well as have your business grow because of it?

Yeah, I love that. And again, I think we have changed. We have to change from this idea. I worked in municipal government for a short time. And it was interesting when I walked in at like 9:45 after having a breakfast meeting with a stakeholder at 7:00 a.m. And as I'm walking past the front desk, somebody's like, well, isn't that nice? We have to be here by 8:30.

Right.

And it's like, oh well, I've been working since— why is it That the perception is if you're not at your desk, you're not working. And then, of course, you have all those, the solitaire games from ages ago of people sitting at their desk supposedly working, playing solitaire. They're checking in.

It's warm bodies, right? Well, the funny thing is to go back to the film thing is film for 100 years has operated with remote, hybrid, in-person, but it's never called it that. These terms really became popular, as you said, with Zoom and the pandemic and how do we make this work, right?

Yeah.

Because if you think about every film starts remote, it is writers writing alone in coffee shops, writing in their homes, their writing partners' living rooms or thing, right? At some point, your script is done and you start to have a couple coffees with producers or studio executives trying to get them interested. Maybe one of them gets some traction. So you move from remote into hybrid. You get a little money, you set up a production office. 1 or 2 days a week, you go in to meet with the location scout. Hey, Marc, I read your script. Tell me more about the castle you want to have, because I know some places in Eastern Europe. So you start to do 1 or 2 days a week, and then you go off 3 days a week and you do script revisions because, you know, Chris Hemsworth really wants to do this thing, but it has to be like different, right? Then there's a day where it's $125,000 a day. You are on set with a lot of people. It is RTO. It is, you know, in-office, in-person, whatever you're going to call it, but you do that for months and it is intense. And then you go back to hybrid. As you know about sound, it's sound editors and picture editors and Foley artists working, you know, you drift in and out. And you go back to remote. And that whole lifespan of a project has been natural in film for 100 years. There are established ways as a leader that you lead through each era, and there are established ways you contribute if you're an IC. So, that was really what I thought was interesting. That's why I created the platform I created just to say, hey, here are some like obvious lessons that map into this world because it's not really that new. It's just in some industries, it's new. Yeah.

And so, it was interesting because as I was going through and preparing for the show, I thought about this whole idea of remote work and how people blame remote work for not getting certain things done. And then, this whole statement that this is not about remote working. This is about creating cultures of trust. It's creating cultures where people have time to focus in their zone of genius. I mean, we've talked about disengagement on this show, including all the different fads around disengagement. Quiet quitting, bare minimum Mondays, coffee badges.

Burnout.

But we've never really talked about this idea of being distracted at work. And whether that's in person or remote, we all have our different things. Like, I've been working in the office and I'm heads down just grinding it out. And somebody comes up and goes, hey Marc, do you have a couple minutes?

What do you say?

Right? And so, no different than the remote worker who all of a sudden has to let their dog out or their kids are home for lunch, right? So, why is it that we have so many leaders misdiagnosing engagement problems as performance problems?

Let me respond to that in a slightly different way, which is when you talk about engagement and performance, I think I agree with you that when someone is engaged in what the company or the team does, if I fundamentally believe that we are making great running shoes and that is a good thing for the world, I may spend extra time designing the logo on the running shoe or designing the squishiness of the sole or whatever that thing may be, right? Because I'm engaged in what the company does.

Right.

And the performance hopefully is engagement times my skillset, right? Because if I suck, I can be engaged and I'm not really moving the shoe forward, right? So Hopefully, you have that match there where the engagement is the fundamental energy that drives the car forward, but the engine of the car is what you're hiring. You're hiring someone to say, yes, I love running shoes. I believe in this. I want to make the next generation of this social app, of this running shoe, of this restaurant concept, or whatever that thing is.

Mm-hmm.

So, and here's— to add on to that a little bit, here's something that I have found, and this is not original, but I have It's been demonstrated to me so clearly is that when you have someone with a particular passion, there's a reason for why they want to do this. It is about you as a leader learning how to channel that, right?

Right.

And when you have someone who doesn't have that passion, it's for you as a leader to determine, is it that I'm not inspiring? Is it not inspiring? Do I need to find a way to ignite that passion? Or should they work in another division? Or should they work somewhere else? Let me help them get to that place because we do have something great to do. And it's making sure you have the people who need to do this, the thing great that you need done great.

Yeah, there's so much to what you just said, Steven, because part of it is to what you said before about hiring right. So, hiring the people with the capacity and the competency to be able to do the work that they want to do. But then, there's this other side of that coin where it's like, are we hiring people to really shine within their superpower?

Yeah.

Right? Because we hire somebody like I was meeting with somebody with an organization. We were talking about how when people come into their business, usually the first step is they're in reception. But then, after a while, they're saying, well, and then they want to do other things. And we hired them as a receptionist. But now they want— but they come in and they want to do other things in the organization. And if we don't give it to them, then they leave. And it's like, but here's the thing. You hired people within a job description. What you want to do is constrain them by that job description. You don't want them to step into their superpower. And of course, they're not going to stick around.

Yeah.

So, I mean, when we're talking about whether it's in-person, hybrid, or remote work, this is all the same concepts.

Yes. And the thing I think we keep going back to is that sense of like, how are you a great leader? How do you say, oh, you know what? I understand these things because we have more options now than we did. Like my father and mother both went to IBM for a certain number of hours each day, every weekday. And my mom was a systems programmer. My dad was a chip designer, a logic chip designer, like CPUs. And it was a very traditional sort of relationship, right?

Mm-hmm.

I have raised $21 million of venture across 3 companies. I've had 2 failures and 1 successful exit. And I'll tell you the lessons in both those, in the failures and the exit very much around, hey, how am I growing as a leader with this? Oh, we're remote, we're hybrid, we're in person. And learning to say, like, for example, in film, because I did more film than television, I have never actually had a Zoom call or any sort of video conference call that has led to the collaborative ideas that I've had in person. There's something about a certain kind of collaboration that when you're in the room, it's just— I don't know if it's the smell or the vibe or the energy where it's just different. You can be on a Zoom call and have the exact same thing going, you know, I feel like in the third act, the hero, well, he's got the sword, but he needs to do something more unique with it. You know what I mean? That sort of thing, right?

Yeah.

Or, God, we're positioned against this other product that's killing us, and there's something in the marketing that we should bring out and pull forward that would really differentiate us, right? And you're doing it on a Zoom call. And I would There are many theories why, but I'm going to tell you flat out, I've never seen that level of creativity as when you're in the room. For example, I do yoga. I have a daily yoga practice. I met my wife in yoga. For 10 years, we've been doing yoga together every day, right? When not traveling or sick. It is true. I could do yoga in my living room with an iPad alone, but I drive to yoga class every day because there's something about being in that room with a group of people who are all trying to push themselves and do something great. That lifts me up. You know, it's like you can buy a pair of Nikes. They'll sell you a left and right shoe. Go run. But 100 million people belong to the Nike Run Club, and there's something about that as a group. You know, as a community, we go farther. We go faster. We're accountable. We hold each other up. And when you as a leader start to understand, oh, here are the group dynamics. This work, go home. Spend two days. I'm not going to call you. Come back with this, right? I don't care if you do it in 1 hour or 70 hours in 2 days. That's a joke. But come back with greatness as opposed to, hey, you know, on Friday, let's all hang out together and really come up with that creativity that comes from being in the room. So, I think that's one of the really great things now about being a leader is you have that whole spectrum of what tool is appropriate and how do I lead into that tool.

I think that's really, really interesting because this is the first time I think I've had a conversation with somebody who said, let's look at remote and in-person and hybrid with more strategy.

Right.

Because right now, we have businesses that says, nope, we're tired of people working from home. We want everybody in the office. And then, when you ask why, why? Well, because that it's just better. And it's like, but why?

Yes, right. And it's not a binary thing. It's something to be celebrated going like, there is absolutely a reason to do in-person work.

Yeah.

And there's absolutely a reason to do— your joke earlier about You know, you're 15 minutes into something and someone comes by. Knock knock knock. Hey Mark, can I ask you a question? Yeah, what do you got? What do you got? You know, and like Cal Newport has a fantastic blog post about this where he talks about you know the 22 minutes it takes you to get back toward essentially a flow state. And you know, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book on flow, absolutely fantastic. What is that weird state you get into where you look up and you're like, "Wow, I'm done." I I didn't. Check my email.

I didn't— Or, wow, did I just miss lunch?

Yeah, exactly. I missed lunch. And you understand, like that great Michael Jordan quote about, when I'm in the zone, it's just me and the ball.

Yeah.

He's like, there are no defenders. There's no scoreboard. There's no stands. It's just, I get to that place where it's just me and the ball. It's that. It's that Picasso thing about, I know I stayed up all night. I forgot to pee. I didn't eat. But, you know, here's Guernica. What do you think? Nice, huh? You know, it's that weird thing of like when you get in that state, And he did such a beautiful job researching and explaining it that you realize, oh, there is absolutely an argument to be made for deep work. So it's not the knock, knock, knock. Hey, Marc, can I have a minute? Yeah, let me put this down. Okay, what do you need? And you context switch. And there's all that research around, do we multitask?

No, we don't.

No.

We monotask. And when you monotask and you stick in the middle of it context switching, so it's like, let me put aside the brain I was using on this bit of code or this copy I was writing or this design I was doing and then switch into that other thing that you need me to do now and come back. You get less done because you burn brain energy just context switching. It's just like a computer saying, let me store all that away. Let me load in the new parameters for this thing, execute that for a while. And then, we're going to store that to RAM and pull it. It's like that sort of thing.

And anybody who grew up with a computer that was a 386 way back when, when you had to go, oh, I got to switch programs? Hold on a second. Take this disc out. Put this disc in. Wait for it to load.

Wow! That was a strong move, my friend.

So, would it be fair to say then that we were treating remote work as if people were supposed to be working in person? But really, there's different philosophies. So, where do you think remote work culture has really gone off the rails now?

I think that there are definitely— everyone has a great example of like, oh, so-and-so hired Gino at their company and this person had 3 jobs. And they were sort of like all spoofing that. Yes, there are bad actors in any system.

Sure.

You can use any example to sort of justify almost any point because there's always either an outlier or a middle-of-the-road example. So with the remote work thing, I would say this. If you are looking to succeed, if you're looking to get the most out of yourself, execute on your dharma, do something great, do the thing you're capable of, right? Or you're looking to inspire someone. I have this guy on my team, Marc, When I let him go for a day or two, he comes back with the next 3 months of copy. He's like, this is the direction our company, we should be marketing ourselves. I stick him in this cubicle with that annoying girl across the office that asks him questions all day long. It's been 2 weeks. He's got nothing.

Right.

So there are other mental hacks that I found to be very interesting. And again, you can study this. There is also in which your brain is trained to execute certain kinds of things well in certain spaces. And this again is something that I saw several times in film where I was like, oh, there's a pattern here. For example, the director and producer Roland Emmerich, with whom I did Independence Day, Godzilla, and stuff like that, right? So they had a creative space that was this villa in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, right? It is their place where they just talked about, oh, the way the light comes in in the morning, the pool is inspiring. This is where we write. This is where they'd written their great scripts, right? Their scripts that grown their career. So when they had to go write Independence Day, of course Roland turns to his assistant, hey, rent the house next week. We'll probably need to be down there for 3 or 4 weeks, Bob.

All right.

She comes back. She's like, it's already rented. It was like an Airbnb or something. The hue and cry around the office of like, oh my God, our process is— Roland called John Diemer, his attorney. It was like, buy the house. He bought the house that weekend. I don't know what happened to the people that are renting it. I'm sure they were paid off. And Monday and They were down there writing, right? But it was that thing of like, we have so trained ourselves to be in this beautiful location with this space and this. And the other end of the spectrum is like Alex and Bob. Bob, who sadly just passed away a couple weeks ago, they, you know, had written Mission: Impossible III and Transformers and Zorro movie, and they'd been on Alias and all this stuff, right? They came up very much just like scrappy guys, like, you know, the dorm room, we're writing our next great thing. Their writing process, when they came down to, we have to go deliver this thing, is their assistant would go rent a room— I'm not making this up— at the Universal Hilton. Not a luxury hotel, I'm just going to say. But for them, it evoked that feeling of like, we're those scrappy young guys writing from our dorm room sort of thing. And that was their magic, where once they entered that, they just cranked out stuff that you and I have— $3, $4 billion worth of box office from being in that mentality. So I think that sort of thing is understanding someone going like, Marc, this feels like the kind of thing you need to go like home and sit in your office and like go do that. I'll see you on Wednesday. You know, let's see what you come up with. As opposed to, we should all go to the conference room and brainstorm on this. Very different. And as a leader, you start to learn which works for which.

And so as a leader, when you have these different things, we've done shows where we've— we talked about night owls versus early risers. And how some people work really good in opposites. And expecting everybody to do the 9 to 5 may be unreasonable. So now, we're adding another dimension to that conversation because now you're saying maybe location matters.

And so, location matters. But I also want to hang a lantern on what you said. Chronotype is really important. When you start to understand that about someone who's working for you, you are really sophisticated to go, Marc sucks after lunch. But Jenny, home run after lunch. How do I play to that? What you said is so true.

And so, as leaders then, how do we uncover some of that? Because maybe you have team members where you haven't figured that out yet. So, how do you test? How do you set yourself up to try and fail and try and fail to the point where you can really find that when we put this group of people kind of in this environment, they really fly, but yet if we do it into the regular kind of, they just suck.

Yeah. Well, Marc, I mean, you're smart enough. You embedded the answer in the question.

Oh, did I?

Oops.

Yeah. Right.

Whoops.

Oh, did that happen? Yes. I'm not going to belabor the point where you said it's exactly right, which is when you become sensitive to these things, then you start to track them. And again, when you measure something, you can improve it. So when you start to go, wow, 3 times I've asked Marc to do this kind of thing in the office in the afternoon in a group setting and his ideas suck. Twice he's gone home and the day later given us like a revolutionary idea. Hmm, let me see. Data don't lie.

Yeah. Cause and effect, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. This is brilliant. Are there any early warning signs that a workplace culture is dysfunctional or headed towards this level of disengagement that we're talking about? Like, are there any things that you could pinpoint if somebody's tuning in going, I don't— I just expect people just to do their work and I don't know if they're disengaged?

Yeah, well, I mean, what you're touching upon there is something that I'm not an expert in. I have thoughts on it and I'll share that. Really, where I focus is around focus and healthy productivity and how to manage the remote, hybrid, in-office work. But what you're talking about is very true. As someone who has led teams, I have learned through mistakes that you need to have— you can't have so many direct reports and so many people beneath you that you're basically just reading emails from them, right? You have to have some sort of personal connection to have that judge of like, you know what? Jennifer feels like something's up because I've seen her 3 times this week. I've seen her 3 times a week for 16 weeks. And I've measured her work, yes, but I also have that Spidey sense. So I think—

Yeah.

That is a very true thing. But I can't speak to that with reliable metrics. That is more personal experience there. That's anecdotal.

And from what you've experienced in your own data, as it were. So, this idea, I know that there are boardrooms everywhere just debating this thing about hybrid versus remote versus in-person. I mean, I think the common term is like distributed or flexible teams.

What are—

Oh, there's so many words now.

Work anywhere.

I know, right?

Yeah.

So, so what are the most common problems that you're tripping across when it comes down to these conversations? Because a lot of it is going to be anecdotal conversations. It's like, no, I think people do better in the office.

Yes.

Okay.

Well, as we said, let us assume for the purposes of this answer that your hiring process is good. That you haven't hired people who don't want to do what you do, that don't care, that are Nothing will work.

Yeah.

Right. So let's assume we have people who have the potential to be inspired and move your company forward and you'll be a winner in your category. But the challenge is obviously inspiring them, delegating properly, and doing those managerial things. So I'll tell you one thing very specifically, and this has come up. We have thousands of people in our membership and I talk to as many as I can because I want to learn. I always approach it, I try to do that beginner's mind thing of like, Tell me what's hard. Why is it hard? How often— how do you try and solve that? One of the most common things that comes up, and this is from C-suite to, hey, I am the new worker bee here, right, is the cold start problem. This very often, and it's not popular for people to say this out loud unless you really dig down, is that thing of like, okay, first thing in the morning, I know I need to get going. I made myself a mental agreement. I'm going to start at 8:30, or I'm at work at 9:00. I need to do that thing. And there's always the, like in the remote situation, the, well, I could go throw in that load of laundry, or I didn't do the dishes last night. Let me just in 5 minutes do this. Or let me just return those emails really quickly and then I'll do the thing on my task list. Right? And if you're in the office, then it's the thing of like, I'll just run and get a cup of coffee. I bumped into Mark at the cooler, do the thing, come back, that sort of thing.

Right.

That cold start problem of getting going. There is a lot of writing, as you probably know, around 2 schools of thought. One is the eat the frog, which is, hey, man, start with the hardest thing on your list, your most important task. You'll feel so good when it's done, blah, blah, blah. And the other school of thought is build momentum, right? Knock 1 or 2 things off. You're like, oh my God, it's 10:00 AM and I've already done 2 things, and I was supposed to start with a 3-hour task, right? So here's what I found. It is not a one-size-fits-all solution. This again is a thing, even as a leader or a leader of yourself, that you start to acknowledge, how does that work? For example, I preached the most important task, the MIT thing, the eat the frog, for a while until I really experimented on myself. And I said, you know what? It does work for some people that I counsel. But for me, I am way better at saying, let me pick off 2 things. And when I get to that 3rd thing, I'm like, I got this. Like, I'm on a roll. Right? And it gets me through that. So Number one, it is about understanding where on that spectrum you or the person that you are leading, you know, falls. And another part of it is when you dig down into the procrastination, like, why, Mark? Why is it in the morning you have a hard time going? Why do you want to do the dishes or go to the coffee break room and grab that? Why is that? Well, okay. Well, why is that? Well, you dig down, and it's usually one of two things: it is overwhelm. Or it is, I don't know. So for example, sometimes let's pretend, you know, Marc in this case, we have a lot of guys named Marc in this call. Let's say Marc is a writer, right? And he has his first task, which is like, write my next book, right? You're not going to accomplish that today. That's overwhelming. You look at it, you go, oh my God, I need a cup of coffee. Let me go do something to procrastinate because it's It's overwhelming. You look at that. Matter of fact, in the platform that we built, we have a smart assistant that when it sees stuff like that, it counsels you before you begin. Like, hey, Marc, you know that write your next book thing? What if we were to make a task that's maybe 30 minutes long? Like, what about outline your first chapter? Could we do that in 30 minutes? You're just talking to your smart assistant. You're like, yeah, I think I could do it. When I was driving last night, I had an idea for the first chapter. Okay. Why don't we make that your task? Which suddenly allows you to ramp into the day better than this huge frog you have to eat. And the other one is you look at your task list and you go, oh, man, I have like 17 things to do, which we all do have 1,700 things to do, right? And sometimes the volume of that stops you. The same way, like, when you have too many choices, there's that paradox of choice. Like, when you have 2 things to choose among, between, you know. And when you have 5 things to choose among, you're like, I don't know, with the guacamole, too many ranch dressing. I don't know which one, right? So So that sense, and again, this is something built into the platform because there's great research. If you choose 3 things and you have them visible in your field of view, I'm going to use 3 things, there's a good chance you'll finish all 3. If you put 7 things in your field of view, there's a good chance you only complete 2 of the 3 things that you would've done the other way because there's that sense of like, ah, I'm not making any progress. This is too hard.

Yeah.

So those 2 things, The task is overwhelmingly large or the task list is innumerable, right?

Right.

And again, with both of those, like, this is a lot of the research I've done is why we built the platform is to have a smart assistant that says to you, hey, you know what? Let me help you break that down into smaller pieces. Or, hey, you know what? Let's choose the top 3. Let's hide the rest. Let's get these done and you go take a break, right? Simple things like that you start to learn and that's applicable remote, Giving people a tool to do that, as well as in the office where you're like, hey, this is what I do. If it helps you, I would love to share the lessons I have learned. And the people who are ready for it pick it up.

I love that. And so, what I'd like to do is I want to take a quick break. When we come back, I want to talk a little bit more about your platform and how it helps people and how this will help lead leaders into solutions when they're looking at Things like disengagement, detachment, and not being very focused. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back! I am here with expert speaker on remote and hybrid work, Stephen Puri. We're having a great conversation. I hope you're getting tons and tons of value from this. Stephen, let's delve into a little bit about this platform that you've Because I have a sneaking suspicion as we get into solution-based, a lot of it will be tied into what you've created. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yes.

I'll say this.

I have done, as you were joking when we spoke before, a lot of things. It's been fun producing visual effects for movies that all my friends saw. It's been fun producing or being the studio executive on films that a lot of people have seen. Super fun stuff, right? I will tell you, when I had the moment of, okay, I'm going to— we're pregnant. I'm going to have a child. What am I leaving behind? What is it that I am giving back? And this really struck with me a few years ago, which is the concept that there are things that I have learned that could be incorporated into a platform that was very accessible by a large number of people to allow them to do the thing that they're capable of. And this is why I do what I do. This is Why I love you know building a tech company in a community, and it really is about this problem. When you talk to a lot of people who are working remotely or hybrid and even in office, there are very similar problems they express to you. Like we talked about the cold start problem. Oh, I procrastinate in the morning. Da da. The afternoon slump. Oh man, at three o'clock I'm worthless. Da da da. The six o'clock. Oh, where'd the day go? Matter of fact, I will tell you this: I named my company the Happiness Company. Sukha is the Sanskrit word for happiness, for self-fulfilled happiness. I'm doing the thing that I'm great at and it feels really good. Why I named it that is when I was looking for a name, we had an early version of this platform and I was looking for some better name than Focus App 14 or Productivity Mate or some god-awful thing. And when I talked to my wife and I said, hey, I'm going to talk— we're going on our honeymoon. And I said, if you don't mind, the first day, I just want to talk to a couple of our power members and hear from them, like, why they like what we're doing. Because I think over the course of the honeymoon, maybe my unconscious mind will bubble something up that's good from that. So I spoke to a few of them the first day. Laura said, I'm going to the pool. You can talk to a couple people. So I spoke to a couple people. I said, listen, I just want 10 minutes of your day. And had a couple of those. The third one was a guy, and I'm going to tell you what he said stopped me in my tracks. I asked about eight minutes of dumb questions, right? Hey, what feature do you love? Do you love the focus music? Do you love the smart assistant helps you get stuff done? Do you love the task list? Da da da, right? You go to this, and then I'm wrapping up. It's like eight minutes in. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I'll be thinking about this. And he said to me, Stephen, you did not ask the right question. I was like, what's the right question? He said. You should ask me why I pay you.

Okay.

Probably a little more bold than I would be. But since you brought it up, why do you pay me? He said, I pay you because at 3 o'clock I can be playing with my kids, or at 6 o'clock I can say, where the hell did the day go? He said, the difference is, did I open the sukkah in the morning? Right? And we hadn't even named the platform at that point. So I was talking to Laura over dinner. I was like, oh my God, I spoke to this guy. He just like, he encapsulated what we do so much better than I ever have. Right? And she loved it. And then that night we're brushing our teeth, going to bed. And she said, you know, because we have a daily yoga practice, so you hear a lot of Sanskrit. She said, that thing that he said about, I feel like I'm doing the thing I'm meant to do. I'm really good at it. And it feels great. She said, that's sukha. That's a— there's a word for that that we hear all the time, like prana and dharma and karma. You know, she's like, That's a word. That's a thing. And she's like, why don't you name your company that? So I named it The Suka Company because I think the tools that we give people are really just the path. The goal of my company is to get people to that feeling of self-fulfilled happiness. And what does that result in? What grows from that? Team engagement. Like when someone feels proud in what they do, it changes their attitude in staff meetings. It changes what they're putting out on their LinkedIn about, hey, man, my company's doing this great thing. It expresses in a lot of ways when you give someone the opportunity to go, oh, this feels great. I was meant to do this. And if you can get there, if that is the platonic ideal of leadership is you hire well and you let people do the thing they're great at, I mean, you're going to crush the competition. There are very few people who are that good that can do that. And so that is really what we aspire to do. And what we built is a very simple website.

Yeah.

It's super cheap. I do this because I think it's fun and it changes the world in a good way. My kids will be proud, which is you come to our site in the morning when you start work, hit play, it blocks your distractions. There's a smart assistant, like I said, helps you break down your work into chunks where you can get going and be effective, plays beautiful music, it manages your tasks, it measures stuff for you so you can say, oh, how am I doing? And am I getting better day over day, week over week? There's a leaderboard with other people. It's sort of the competition, the gamified thing. And it's almost like a Slack replacement that gives you a community of people who are all together, but here, they're here to do something productive. And they're sharing, here's what I did. And it celebrates that community the same way Strava celebrates running. So that's what I do. And I love it.

Yeah.

It's not a fight. And if there is anyone who wants to learn more about the kind of things I do, even if it's not tied to my platform, please, you can put my email address in the show notes. I'm happy. Even if someone's like, hey, that Cal Newport blog you mentioned, could you send me a link to that? I'm happy to do that.

Yeah. So can you just let people know what your contact info is? Absolutely.

Yes. So my name is Steven, S-T-E-V-E-N. So, it is steven@thesukha.co, The Sukha Company, thesukha.co.

Terrific! And of course, it is in the show notes so people can just click there. I just like you to say it because I know how passionate you are about it. So, Steven, from what I've read, you've distilled a set of actionable principles that will really help. And these are probably mirrored in your in your platform as well. Can you walk us through a few of these actionable principles to help get the people tuning in, get them in sync with what you're talking about?

So much so. And let me share this. There's that great Newton quote about, if I've seen further, it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants, right?

Yes.

So, what I'm going to share, this is not that I am smart. I'm not that smart. But I did read the books. And do the work, right? So when you read Mihaly's book and you read Cal's book, you read Clear, and, you know, go down the list, you find that in those probably top 12 books on focus and productivity, how to have great teams, how to participate in great teams, they boil down to the same set of concepts. And let's admit, they all have different lexicons. They need to sell you their books. They have their way of wording it, and they have their colorful examples based on this McKinsey study and this great company you've never heard of. They all have that. But it really comes down to a simple set of things. I'll give you another example, which is we talked earlier about multitasking, right? If we can encourage you to monotask, you are going to have more of those moments where you're like, wow, it's 11 and I'm like, God, I've done everything I would normally do before lunch. This is great. So monotasking, which of course in our platform, we encourage you to do that. When you start jumping around, your smart assistant chimes in and is like, hey, seem like you keep going between these 2 things. Why don't we just finish one and get them done? And in the gamification, you get more points by finishing the thing you started, right? Simple principle. Once you start to see day over day, week over week, those results and they compound, you get it. And it's really, it's a nice feeling again at 3 o'clock to whether you have a 2 and a 4-year-old like that guy did and you get to play with them, or you're working on your side hustle or whatever you need to do, but you've done a tremendous amount of quality work. We talked about workspaces. That's another really good one. And I'll tell you, here's a funny one that people sometimes don't realize they do, which is timeboxing, which sounds like, oh, it's really disciplinarian technique of thou shalt spend 42 minutes on this or you'll be punished.

Is that right?

But let me tell you this, as someone who's a procrastinator, which I am, Marc, I have to fight that every day, including now.

Eat.

Okay. Don't say it out loud, then they'll hear. So as someone who's a procrastinator, you can say, oh, I don't want to timebox, or I don't know, there's this. You're going to look at all the research that says, you know what? If you say, I'm going to do this in 30 minutes, magically you kind of do it in 30 minutes. And when you don't, it sprawls. But here's the thing is suppose you don't timebox. There are many writers I worked with. Yes, you have an 8 or 10-week writing period on this. And they find that they do all the work in the last like 5 days or something, right? The other 7 weeks were like, I was thinking about it.

It was a habit we learned in school. It is.

It is so much. But here's the thing is if you think about it, you are simply passively timeboxing yourself. You're saying, I've decided to timebox this into 5 days, right? Because the deadline is there and you decided to procrastinate until your timebox was so small. You were nervous you wouldn't deliver. What if you were to take that timebox and just do it earlier? You would do it with less anxiety. You have more opportunity to correct things. You would have more opportunity to actually solicit input like, hey, you know what? I'm almost done. Can I bounce this off you? As opposed to like, I was up all night. This is the best I could do. You know what I mean? So it's funny because some people, usually the ones who shy away from timeboxing, If you point out to them that procrastinating is forcing a time box, it suddenly leads to that, oh, I never realized I do that to myself. So just some principles that, you know, hopefully we can get to a place where the part of work where we sing our song is amazing and the part of work that's administrative or drudge work, whatever, we have a great way of getting through it. You know, it doesn't kill you. So that's why I'm here.

I love that. Of course, leaders have different people in their businesses, in their organizations. I have a philosophy that in today's day and age, we need to remove the manager's cap and put on a coaching cap where we have to become more coaches with our teams. When you think about leaders helping their teams refocus, how can they coach this? How can they They understand what each person needs and be able to help them refocus.

Well, you touched on this earlier. And I don't want to belabor the point because I want us to cover as much as we can. But a lot of it is being observant. It is as you learn a tool or a technique or something that's helpful. Like suppose you adopt having focus time. You say, you know what? I'm going to try this thing where the next 2 weeks, I'm going to block 9 to 11 and no one can schedule meetings with me. And you do this, and you have that weird thing. If you look up at eleven, you're like, "Wow! I didn't go to the bathroom." But most of my deep work is done for the day. Like I did two solid hours of amazing work, right? That sort of thing. And then you decide, "Well, let me share this with my team," right? I've come down from the mountain with fire. Let me give it to the humans, right? So, and don't worry, your liver is safe. Your liver is good. So you do that, and then you measure that. You say. Hey, I want to offer you guys a tool. Like I've read about this. Here's maybe something you can read. Here's a million great blog posts on this, right? Do you guys want to try this? And suppose you lead a team of copywriters or designers or engineers or something like that. And you know there's some buy-in. There's like, hey Mark, you know we love you. We trust you. We'll try this, right? Okay, great. So for the next week, nine to eleven, I'm not gonna slack you and schedule meetings over that tonight. And don't do it to each other. And let's just see how it goes. And you are absolutely going to get some people by Wednesday, Thursday, Friday that are like, oh, you know, I needed to do this meeting with the— some vendor came in and did it. Okay, failed with them. But you're going to get 3 or 4 of them to go, I think I probably did the best work I've done since I came here. And then you understand how you can lead each one, how you can coach, as you were saying, each one to say, okay, let me help develop that further with you. What else can I do to just throw more fuel onto that fire? And the people for whom it doesn't work, You need to evaluate and be observant saying, is that because you were resistant to it? You didn't try it? Or is that because you're a salesperson and honestly, you need to be on Zoom all day long? You're not going to do any flow work here.

And it's understanding what that job description looks like as well, right? Yeah, yeah. I love that. You can measure it.

You can improve it.

And I love that you talked about— you touched on the procrastination side of things because there's these philosophies as well. Do anything for 4 minutes. Right? Do something. Just give yourself 4 minutes to do something. Why does that work so well?

I think it's that thing we were talking about early on, which is you can say eat the frog or you can say build momentum. And things become less scary if you do 4 minutes of work on something. Suddenly, you're into it. And your idea about what it is, I think it's Epictetus that said, men are not afraid of— you know, men, people, right? But I think he wrote it as men in Greek. People are not afraid of things, but they're afraid of their ideas about things. And sometimes the idea, looking at your task list, is not really your task list. It's your idea about the task list. And like you said, the 4 minutes in, once you're 4 minutes in, you're like, I got this. This is doable.

So— And, you know, pair those 2 ideas now. What does it look like to separate and keep 4 minutes to say this. I'm going to tackle this just for 4 minutes. If I get nowhere, you know, when I wrote my book, I used to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning. Some mornings were super, super productive. I was down and I ended up skipping my workout. And before I knew it, it was 9:30 and I've been writing since I got up in the morning. Right, so you're in the flow state. But other times, it was like, oh, I need to research this. I need to dig a little bit deeper in this. And then, I go into— and then, I look at how many words I wrote. And I was like, I've only written 50 words in an hour and a half. It's like, oh my goodness, this wasn't a good day. But I would still celebrate it because I learned a bunch of stuff because I needed to uncover some research. There you go. Right? But and then, this idea about giving oneself grace.

Yes.

You mentioned because of the way that you named your app, this idea of happiness.

At some point, where does grace fall into this when we know I would love to throw a glass house for my stone, but I'm just gonna say there are absolutely, like you said, there are days where you're like, for whatever reason, like lightning did not strike today. I didn't come up with the great idea to move our company forward. I did not, you know, solve the weird accounting bug that's in our spreadsheet.

I did not even, you know, I did not do anything. It happens.

But hopefully, we're measured over the season, not on one particular minute of one game.

Yeah.

And you actually touched on something where you said, sometimes when you're writing a book, you said you do that in the morning, right?

Yes.

And it sounded like what you described as a flow state where you look up, you're like, wow, I banged out a whole chapter, right?

Yep.

Yeah. That's a beautiful experience, wasn't it?

It was. And it goes by like this and you wonder, why can't I replicate this every single day?

Yeah, it's hard to replicate every day, but I'll tell you a funny story, which is Ron Bass, who's a huge screenwriter, he would not talk to his family in the mornings when he had a screenplay to write or any sort of manuscript because he said to his family, listen, if I greet you in the morning like, hey, little Timmy, how you doing? Who's cereal? What do you want to do? He said, as soon as I've spoken to you or you've spoken to me, I can't hear my characters' voices anymore. And so his family understood that part of his understanding of his, like, chronotype, of his work ritual was he was an early morning, like 4 or 5 in the morning until like 8, 9, 10 in the morning. Dad was in his office. And then suddenly he was massively available because he's like, I've done— I've created, you know, the movie that everyone's— that Julia Roberts is going to star in, right?

Mm-hmm.

But if he didn't respect his chronotype, if he didn't respect how he worked, Would he have hooked so many stars to be— would he have written the characters that would have hooked these stars? I don't know.

I love that. When we come back, I'd like to talk about some cautionaries and pitfalls. Things we should be aware of as we try to implicate because I'm always fearful of band-aid managers. You know, the ones who come up with a new idea and they go to their teams and say, okay, for the next 30 days, I got a new policy. And so, I want to talk about cautionaries and pitfalls and we'll get to that. Right after this.

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Welcome back! We are having a great discussion. I hope you're getting tons of value from today's conversation. As evident from our discussion today, you can tell that Steven and I are deeply passionate about supporting business leaders like yours, like you are. And if you are in the midst of planning things like a leadership retreat or an industry conference and you're looking for amazing content, or you're just needing some expert guidance, We're just a message away. Feel free to reach out to us. Our contact information is in the show notes. We're here to serve you. So Stephen, we talked about SUKA. We talked about this tool to be able to help people with their flow state, getting more consistent flow state. You mentioned that it has a bunch of tools. Can you describe some of those tools?

I would be happy to. The way we design this is really based upon flow states and the writings about what conditions precedent that help you get into a flow state as well as let you sustain it for a reasonable period of time. And one of the things I'll mention is the smart assistant that I talked to you about, it will interrupt you after 2 hours to say, hey, you know what? It's not actually healthy for you to just grind this out for 6 hours. Take a break. And it'll give you options to say, do you want to watch a video about stretching at your desk? Here's 3 minutes of stretching. Just do something. Stand up. You get points for getting a glass of water. You get points for saying, I'm going to go for a 5-minute walk. If you're working remotely, like I work in Austin remotely, I have a beautiful neighborhood. I know in 15 minutes I can circle the block that I'm on, and it's a beautiful little green wooded street, and it just refreshes me. So healthy breaks. is as important as the work tools that we give. So speaking of the work tools, I mentioned there's certain key signatures, there's certain beats like 60 to 90 beats per minute. There's a lot of research that says in this zone of non-vocal rhythmic music, most people are assisted by this in getting into their flow state. Now, we all have that friend who's like, I have to listen to death metal. It gets me there. Or gangster rap. We all have that friend, right? They're statistically not the middle of the road. And if you want to hook up your Spotify on our platform and listen to your gangster rap, you absolutely can, right? We offer over 1,000 hours of custom-focused music because luckily I know a lot of film composers. And right now, film composers are very available to create original beautiful music. So we do a lot of that and it just helps. And by the way, a funny thing is A sound engineer I know was in Kathmandu and he came back and we were chatting. He's like, you know, while I was there, I had my sound equipment with me and it rained. He's like, I recorded 2 hours of rain up in the Himalayas. So I was like, can we put that in the app? That'd be kind of cool if you want to just listen to rain while you work. So we did. It was a huge hit. So we did a stream in Japan. We did the surf in Cyprus.

Wow.

One of the engineers I work with is Just outside of Vancouver, and there's a lake, there's a beautiful emerald lake up there near Banff or something that you hear the birds chirping. So, there's a lot of soundscapes. If you're like, hey, I don't need music today, I just want to hear the rain or the wind or the birds, we got you. The smart assistant I mentioned is probably the core of it, which is in addition to running the Pomodoro timer, which— have you guys talked about Pomodoro timers? Should we talk about that for a moment?

No. Sure.

Okay. So this is a productivity technique. Italian guy came up with this named Pomodoro, tomato, because he based it on a kitchen timer that's shaped like a tomato. And it was the idea of work for 25 minutes on the timer, take a 5-minute break, work for 25 minutes, 5-minute break, do this. And then you take a longer break at the end of it. So we built that in. There's a timer. You'll set 25 and 5. You can customize it. Like, I personally do 55 and 5 because I find in 25 minutes, I'm not at a breakpoint. I'm usually in the middle of the thought. So you can customize it for yourself, but that's generally the idea of it. And there's also some research, and there's a great Huberman lab about blood glucose levels as you think, as you do deep thinking. And it seems that around 90 minutes in, you become somewhat depleted. Your ability to do deep thought kind of erodes after 90 minutes. And after about 2 hours, Sometimes you need some refresher, which is why we built a 2-hour break-in. Say, after 2 hours, we don't reward you for grinding it out. This is not the '90s. This is not a bunch of kids in a dorm room or in the garage in Silicon Valley. This is adults building huge businesses, right?

Yeah.

Who often have families. Shocking. So there's a Pomodoro timer. There's a smart assistant that helps you break down your tasks, helps you get stuff done. You're a political blogger, your smart assistant, you wake up and your smart assistant is like, hey, by the way, in the news last night, 3 things happened that seem like the kind of things you write about. Do you want me to suggest them to you? Sometimes that's super helpful, just the cold start thing of like, oh, actually that's a cool one. I could write that one. That, because ultimately what we want to do is we want you to have that experience of joy, of happiness, of like, this is great. What I get to do, not what I have to do, Is great. So there's a coffee shop where you can see other people. It's like a virtual coworking space. Uh, there's, you know, productivity graphs so you can see how you're doing. And, you know, you can see, oh, you know, my score went down. That's when I opened up YouTube and I watched that video, right? That's when I went back and checked my email because I was procrastinating. Things like that. You know, we let you see how you're doing and you can decide if you want to learn from it. So there's some other features, but that's kind of the core of it. It gives you what a lot of the smart people have talked about in one place very affordably.

Love it. Cautionaries, pitfalls. Somebody wants to try and—

Don't enter into a land war in Asia.

Yeah, right?

Right. But there's the cautionary tale.

Don't do that. I tell you, right? But as people want to try to start experimenting with some of these ideas in their teams, what are some things they should be on the lookout for?

I'd say the biggest thing that I hear is if you approach this with a beginner's mind of like, let me see what I can learn, you are generally going to be very pleasantly surprised. And you approach it from, well, today's the day I'm going to be Superman and I'm going to fly around and I'm going— you're going to be disappointed, right?

Right.

So it is going in there and just saying, let me see what I can learn today, as opposed to, let me see how I'm just going to crush it. You know, it's like, let me step on the court and I'm just going to play like Michael Jordan. No, you're probably not, right? But if you start watching Michael's, you know, tape on Michael and you start like practicing, you're going to get better.

Yeah. Stephen, this has been such a great conversation. I have a sneaking suspicion I could talk to you for hours. about this stuff because it seems like it's so needed. It's such an important conversation that we don't have long enough to be able to do that. But do you have any last thoughts about what we've been talking about today?

I just really appreciate the way you structured the amount of research you did on the tools that we have built, the principles. Like when you and I met first talking about this, it was so thoughtful and I want to acknowledge that. Because I speak a lot. I speak probably 60 to 100 times a year. And some of them are very much like, hey, you know what you know. Just come and share it with my audience. I'd love them to learn. And I hope your audience appreciates that about you.

Well, and I hope they appreciate everything you brought to the forefront today because again, this is— we've talked about remote working before but we've never talked about it in this context. And so, I thought it was very, very important. So, thank you very much for making time for us today. It's been absolutely brilliant. I've enjoyed every moment of it. And I can't believe a whole 60 minutes has gone by.

It's been ridiculous. I know it flew by.

We've been in the flow, Steven.

That's why.

Thanks for joining me today.

Okay, have a great day and thanks everyone for listening.

Why don't you let me know if this was of value to you? As always, my offer stands. If you would like 30 minutes of my time to brainstorm your business with you and your team, feel free to book yourself on my online calendar. The link is down below. And please make sure that you check out Stephen's free offer. He's giving you a free 30-day access to his platform to try out. So, make sure you give it a try. I know personally, it would be an honor for me to be of service to you. So, why don't you go ahead, reach out to me if you need anything. But in the meantime, why don't you go ahead and leave a review or comment about this episode? I'd love to get your feedback. Was this of value to you? And of course, please, if you haven't done so yet, please make sure you are subscribed to this podcast. And please make sure you share it if you know somebody who could use this information. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception.