Erik Fisher Shares Practical Advice To Better Focus and Get More Done

Hey, it's Mark Podolski at the Land Geek with niche real estate website the landgeek.com and on this week's podcast, we're going to be talking all about something I love to talk about, which is productivity. But before we talk to our guest, I just want to remind the listeners that today's podcast is sponsored by flight School. Learn how the next 16 weeks and transform your life. Go up that mountain of land, investing quickly, safely and efficiently with Scott Todd as your Sherpa who's done it thousands of times. Start making that passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations, roads. Oh, yeah, and that flight school tuition ain't gonna cost you nothing. Guaranteed you're gonna make it back 180 days or less. Just show us your work. Learn more. Go to landgeek.com forward slash training thelangic.com forward slash training Today's guest is Eric Fisher. If you're not familiar with Eric Fisher, he's the producer and host of the long running beyond the To Do List podcast. For over 10 years, Eric has talked with productivity experts. One of my favorite, Greg McCune, as they share how they implement productivity strategies in their personal and professional lives. His mission is to explore all aspects of productivity as a means towards a true end goal, living a meaningful life. Eric Fisher, welcome.

Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

I gotta be honest, I'm a little intimidated talking. Don't be a fellow podcaster, especially one with a way better mic.

Well, thank you. You sound good, though.

Well, thank you. Thank you. So, Eric, let's just rewind the tape. And how did you become interested in productivity?

See, I think I've always been interested in productivity. I discovered that I was into it. So somewhere in the Cubicle farm days in 2005, ish. I was spending a lot of time sitting there doing data entry at my day job and listening to music and was figuring out, okay, well, I'm sitting here typing and I'm getting stuff done faster than anyone else. So I've got all this free time on my hands in my cubicle. And I was careful not to let on that I was getting stuff done faster and all that, but I thought, well, I got to make sure that I get other things done here. So. And as I moved into different positions, I realized there's so much time. And that's funny, because never since then have I ever said I have so much time on my hands. It's always, always retroactively back then. But I was the guy who was carrying around, like, the Flip open notebook and a clicky pen to be able to capture ideas in high school or was drawing, you know, and part of this productivity stuff was due to. And my interest in it was due to my adhd. And I hadn't been diagnosed yet. I was diagnosed as an adult, but I was creating and grasping at straws and mechanisms to basically make life work and not let things slip through the cracks. And so that led me to gradually discover David Allen and getting things done, and other people like Merlin Mann, who was a student of David Allen and so on, and just started to soak things up. And I said, oh, I think that this is something that I'm very interested in. Not as just a way for me to help myself and get better, but as a structure, as a way to move forward. And so with the adhd, I was. Once I was diagnosed as an adult, I started to take some prescriptions to figure out how to cope with that better. I always found the side effects weren't really the. The pro was. It helped. The con was the side effects almost made it worse or made me feel worse overall. Less sleep, less everything, you know, and so I decided to go off, back off the meds and switch back to systems and practices and habits and productivity.

I love it. I love it. So when you think about productivity, because it's a big, big word, how do you think about it?

Well, I think I. So that word is one that I'm constantly pivoting around and looking at it from all angles. And I try to say my definition really isn't as important as other people's definitions. But there's been varying degrees of definitions. As I've done this show for 10 years now, it's like, what's the word productivity mean to me this year? Well, I will say that produce is right there in the root of the word. And so it's about producing things, about doing things, getting things done, as the book title goes. But I think that we can call things productive. You know, when we. When we throw that phrase out, when we. When we say, oh, why don't you, you know, you tell your son, get off the video games, go do something productive. What we really mean is something worthwhile. Right? We aren't saying that it's necessary. Like, he could go and read a book and we'd still call that productive. We'd call that worthwhile, though. He's producing nothing. Although I would say maybe he is producing things. He's having ideas, he's consuming and having ideas in his head. But that's Again, that's just one sliver of what the word productivity can mean to other people. It means to be more productive. It means to you're more efficient, you're doing the thing that you're already doing, or you're doing new things or more things, but you're doing them faster, you're doing them better, you're optimizing. So there's a lot of different angles and I don't know, honestly, just baggage that that word can carry with it. And I like to. And it's good news for me. It means I get to address all those different avenues on my show.

Absolutely. And going back to adhd, I would make the argument we all have ADHD or ADD now in the digital age.

Yeah, I would say that at this point. I mean, at the time it was. I think it was summer of 2005, when that diagnosis. I said, you know what I suspect, and I'm going to go to the doctor. And I. And I got. Went through the system and tested and everything. But that was on the cusp of almost social media. Like, we were already surfing the web a lot. Right. We were already flipping channels. We were already avoiding any kind of downtime whatsoever. Fill every moment with something. And then came along the smartphone, then came along social media, all designed and all the algorithms that came with them designed to hold our attention for longer and longer and jump from thing to thing to thing. So, yeah, I would say even if we don't physically, chemically have something like that going on, we've all gotten to the point where we've trained ourselves habitually to act like we do.

Absolutely. So walk me through what you would consider for yourself a productive day and how you would structure that.

Yeah, yeah. Well, so I would say definitely having enough breaks in between each thing. And ideally that I would have it mapped out to where, for example, I am fully present with you as I'm recording this. There's nothing else that's on my mind. There's no bells and whistles. There's no, you know, on my computer, on my phone, which is not even on my desk right now. I have put up barriers and guardrails for distraction so that when I'm in this mode of having a conversation with you or when I'm recording my own podcast, I am fully present. I am doing that thing until that time is done. And then I move on to another thing and ideally, again, like I said, have those margin moments in between each thing that I've selected that I'm doing. That said, I like to Decide to whittle it down. There's various degrees of, you know, opinion on this, whether it's okay, pick your big three things you're going to do today. I honestly, I think even if you can pick one important thing per day and you fully complete that, whether that means that's part of a project and you've designated this is the start and completion point for that piece of the project, whatever you need to do, I would. You know, for me personally, I love having one thing and checking it off and feeling like if I do nothing else the rest of the day, which I know that's high and lofty goals and not necessarily realistic. But think about the opposite of that. Think about most days, when you finish the day or the next day, you're looking back on the previous day and you're wondering, what did I get done? Because we're living in this digital world. So it really comes down to can you pick one thing, or can you pick one thing in the morning and one thing in the afternoon? Or can you pick three things total, one for the morning, one for the afternoon, and one that you may be, you know, again, varying degrees. This all comes into play when you estimate what. When you start to get better, I should say at estimating how much time certain things take you to do, then you can more properly place them in calendar blocks and block them out and keep people from taking that time from you. So I know that's a little bit of a vague answer, but I mean, again, depending upon the day, like, for example, I'll give you a Friday. I only work till noon in the afternoon. I'm technically not working, though. I do stuff, but it's not with other people. It's all me. It's closing my day down. It's closing the week down. Depending upon if it's the end of the month, I'm closing the months down. I'm kind of closing loops so I can leave work at the desk and then try as much as possible to have margin in my head, clear my mental RAM for the weekend.

I am a big proponent of everything you said. Although while you're talking, I was checking email and Twitter and lost my complete train of thought. I'm joking, but. But today you do see that, where our attention is being drawn out and it is one of those superpowers to be able to do what Cal Newport would describe as deep work, where. And we've actually seen this in the science, we're not able to multitask. It might feel like you're getting things Done, but you're doing things in a very mediocre way, so. Or not. You know, a worthwhile type of activity. For example, if while you're talking, I was actually checking Twitter and my email, well, it doesn't really get anything done. It might make me feel like I'm doing something productive, but essentially nothing really is being produced in an effective way. So what would you say are some of your favorite tools to help people become more productive, more focused, more clear on the essential, most important, worthwhile tasks and things that they do want to get done? Maybe it's one a day, two or three a day. Usually not more than three.

Well, I think that, you know, as you're describing, you know, we, we definitely cannot multitask. We are constantly switching tasks. We are quick task switchers. We switch from thing to thing to thing, leaving a residue of our intel, not intel, well, a residue of our intelligence as well as our attention on the previous thing, as we keep switching from thing to thing to thing. And so one of the things for me that is most important when it comes to blocking that time out, having that deep work focus time again, I almost kind of tipped my hat to it earlier is I will enter into a mode where I am closing apps, I am making sure my phone is sitting on a stand, not at the desk. I am, I actually even go into do not disturb mode on my watch. All those different things. I think one of the biggest things, though, is once you've blocked that out and you've, you've decided, you know, you've done the homework, you've predetermined what it is I'm going to work on, you sit down in that time and you start to work on it, inevitably you're going to think of something that is not related to what your task at hand is. And that's where I mean, one, I mentioned earlier that the tools or the pad of paper, the little micro pad of paper you flip open like a reporter, I always have a mini legal pad sitting here at my desk and a pen so that what I can do is I leave it out of reach. But then if I have, you know, oh, you know what, I'm working on a project I'm trying to finish to completion. Hey, you know, that'd be a great idea for a blog. Or that'd be a really, you know what? I should have this person as a guest on my show. Well, that's great and all, but you almost treat it like meditation where you acknowledge the thought and then I pick up the pen, I Write it down. And then I push it away again and I acknowledge it. And then I let it go and just. You would. I heard this tip from somebody years ago and started incorporating it. And I mean, who can't afford a legal pad and a pen? You literally are capturing that thought. You're saying to your brain, I see you, I acknowledge you. And you don't judge whether that thought is good or bad. You just, you capture that idea and then you set it aside and then come back to work. And the more you do that, you train your brain that those internal distractions, those internal thoughts and processes that are honestly quite hard to get rid of unless you've really practiced it, that those are okay, but they're not what you're doing right now. That it's almost like a child coming up to you and saying. And you say, I'm not saying no, I'm just saying not now. I will check back with you when I'm done with this thing I am doing. And that's what you're doing as a mature adult to yourself, for yourself.

Yeah, I love that. I'm going to start incorporating that as well. I'm a big proponent of no distractions. My phone's always on. Do not disturb my watch. I'm really difficult to distract externally. That being said internally. And I'll give you an example. Let's say that I'm working on a cognitively difficult task. Maybe I'm. I'm writing a. A longer blog post, for example. The. I will feel the initial to do something easier, but also feels productive, such as check my email. Can I get that quick dopamine hit? So, yeah, I won't go on social media, which I know can take me down a rabbit hole, but, oh, what's the harm in just checking a couple emails? And for me, it's. It's very harmful to the point where I have actually outsourced my email. So I have virtual assistants@inboxdone.com literally check my email twice a day and I get a summary of the emails at the end of the day via a walkie talkie app called Voxer. And I can be so much more productive because I know I personally don't need a check email. It's being checked for me. It's being categorized. And when I have time, I'll go and take care of the. The urgent, which is it's almost never urgent. I have a to do or I'll follow up or read later. It's all organized for me and I just feel so Much more focused. So much more peace and calm with my workday, knowing that that's off my plate.

Yeah, I liken it to, I liken this, this flurry of busyness to basically junk food. We, you know, we will often grab. You know, we'll, we'll say, okay, I'll allow, I will allow these Doritos. There's nothing wrong with Doritos in the, in and of themselves, but you don't just eat those. Right.

Ranch Doritos are not okay, though.

Okay, well, we'll, we'll go with the original. We know I love. Well, I'm not going to say I love all Doritos. I love often most Doritos. That said, I don't know why I'm picking on Doritos. But anyway, point being, it's not. There is, there's a little bit of like, could you live on Doritos alone? No. But in a pinch, if you had to go a few, like if you were stuck and you had to go days on days, it would keep you alive enough, but barely. And this is how we treat our activity for our work lives and frankly our regular lives is this busyness, this flurry of activity. We jump from thing to thing to thing and it's like snacking off a buffet of just cheese and crackers and Doritos when we really need something more sustainable, something that's actually going to fuel us. In other words, give us what we need. And by doing that thing to thing to thing jumping, we, we are. One, we're training ourselves that it's okay to do that and it's not. And two, we make it that much harder that when we want to sit down and actually eat something healthy or do actual work, we find that we can't. We've. We've trained ourselves out of it. We've. We've unlearned what we should have. Some of us have never learned it to begin with. We unlearn it.

Yeah. I would love to get your take on one of my favorite productivity books of 2022, which in and of itself is most likely a philosophy book and not a productivity book, is Oliver Berkman's 4000 time management for Mortals. Have you talked to Oliver Berkman and have you read the book?

I haven't. I believe that it is in my Audible account as I think I grabbed it when finally heard of it. I was like, oh, this is interesting. It's definitely a unique approach. I think it's definitely one of those things where it's like, okay, the Productivity world, blah, blah, blah. Let's get down to what, like, what's really going to help me? Like, what's really beneficial in the world of productivity? And, you know, I try to not be wordy or heady and too theoretical. I want to, I want to be practical. Like, if we're going to talk about this stuff, make an impact on our lives with it, versus just talk about it.

Right? Yeah, absolutely. He just makes the argument that as a finite human being, you're not going to get it all done. And it's, it's an illusion to think that you will. And our lives are like substitutes where we're going up that mountain with that and we think we're going to get up there and just comes crashing down. There will be another email, there will be another project. You'll. There will be another country to visit. You'll never do it all, you'll never see it all, you'll never experience it all. And so just relax and figure out what is the most meaningful parts of your life and do those.

Yeah, there's, there's definitely not enough time for everything. There's always the fallacy is that we will get air quotes caught up. It's never going to happen. I mean, again, whose standard is that? Is it yours? Is it your boss's? Is it, you know, what does caught up mean? And honestly, if you just switch your paradigm and say, well, actually, like, it happened to me recently, this past few months, there was somebody who brought up, I think it was Lauren Vanderkam, Laura Vanderkam on the. She said that three times a week is as consistent. You know, if you call it consistent, then it's consistent. It's like if you say you have to do something every single day and then you miss it and you fall off the wagon, what good was that? But if you say you're consistent three times, I'm going to do this one thing three times a week. And as long as I do that, I'm consistent. And it just kind of broke my brain. I mean, it shouldn't have, but it did. Where I guess it just, it reawakened me to the idea that, no, you know what it's about having like, what's that minimum viable dose, you know, like two aspirin, we're good. You take four, you're pushing it. You start taking more and it's actually into dangerous territory versus, you know, it's not doing any more for you. It's actually, then it starts actually go the opposite way. And so for me, it's what's that minimum viable dosage that makes an impact and yet it is consistent and it's a low effort lift to make sure it happens if you haven't already been doing it consistently.

It's such an interesting way to think about it, especially for people that are type A and they think, I've got to do this every day. And pick your productivity poison, whether it's meditation, working out in box zero, whatever it is. And it can make you crazy.

It does. I've let it make me crazy. I think the thing for me, and this kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, it's like whether you're picking one thing or you're picking three, or however you want to put it, it's really about knowing what it is that is most important and growing. Not just the skill set to do that pre work ahead of time, but then having the in the moment, not perseverance, but I guess maybe grit is the right word. Resilience is probably the best and most appropriate word, is to have that, you know, once you've done the homework, once you know what it is, you know, you've done the pre thinking, you've made your decisions and you're allowing for triage as you know, maybe there is an emergency thing, but most more often than not there isn't. It's of your own making. But once you've put all that aside and now you're in the moment and doing the work, it's that having that resilience to stay in that moment and complete that thing you've selected to do.

I love that. So I'm overwhelmed. I'm listening to beyond the to do list and you have a guest on that you disagree with for whatever reason. What is some of the worst advice you see or hear given? Productivity.

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Most of the time I think I agree with people or at least consider their viewpoint. There's. I don't think there's been an outright maybe retroactively I've disagreed after this, you know, wait, it's been a couple of years. And I remember they said this thing and like, so for example, there's one person, I still remember they said, and this was as I was just getting started with the show, so it's almost 10 years ago now. They would grab their phone first thing and they would triage and delete, you know, they would triage and delete emails so that they knew they could start the day without anything, you know, rushing at them. Man, do I disagree with That I think if you're entering into the day again, the worst thing you can possibly do is if you open that phone and you look at that email and there is actually something that's an emergency. Guess what? Your rest of the you're now running in emergency mode. The rest of the day, basically, most likely, I think give yourself half an hour to an hour. I think if it is a true emergency, you will probably be contacted outside of email. Right. You'll either get the phone call or you will get a text or somebody that you've got in place that is empowered to deal with that emergency will want your feedback or to loop you in, wait for that to happen. Don't jump into it first thing. Now that said, there are some people who first thing in the morning is their best time to get work done. I'm really nitpicking at the looking at everybody else's expectations for you for the day through your email and especially grabbing technology first thing. But there are times where I've gotten up incredibly early in the morning. No one's up. I get my laptop, I go to a designated place in the house because my office isn't going to work at that moment because of noise. And I will sit and focus and clear out the decks. But that's rare. That's very rare. It's only when I again, air quotes, want to get caught up or there's a lot of stuff that's piled up and I need to just clear the deck.

Yeah, absolutely. I've been experimenting recently with going to bed. Well, first of all, I put my phone away around six and really try not to have it on me as much as possible. So last night I went out to dinner and just leave the phone in the car. And sure enough the bill comes and they want me to scan the QR code now to make the payment. So oh, now I gotta go get the phone, scan the QR code and do that or just do it the old fashioned way and give them cash or credit card. But it's so funny how the phone has become such an integral part of and just a habit. And so for me to short circuit it, I go, I put it in airplane Mode now at 6pm so when I wake up there are no notifications. There are. There's nothing there. And I can just use my phone as the tool that I want it to be, which might be the waking up app and doing a meditation or a breathing exercise that I've downloaded and then enough time is gone and I can really be more clear Minded about, okay, what is the most important thing I want to get done this day? And that's my productivity hack. What do you think? Is there something I could be doing that's even more effective?

No, I think that's great. I mean, and for me, I, you know, I will do the same thing. I will, I will put my phone, I will say that this isn't always a consistent practice, but most of the time it is. I will put my phone up and if somebody, absolutely, I mean, I won't go into do not disturb mode on my, I will keep my watch, my Apple watch. So in the house I can, you know, if someone were to call me, I'd see that someone were to text me, I'd see. I mean, I don't want to miss out on a friend texting me, hey, you know, call it fomo, but I don't want to miss out. And they're like, hey, do you want to go grab a coffee or do you want to, you know, or hey, can I ask you a chat about something real quick? More often than not it's been beneficial to do that. Or for example, my wife is shopping in the evening and she wants my opinion on something that she sees and she sends me a picture. I don't want to, you know, those are timely things that are important. But I would say, well, and so for that very reason, I want to allow that channel to have access to me. Most, if not all other apps have no notifications on anyway. Or you can train to be in a certain do not disturb mode on Apple. And I'm sure Android has this too, where only certain things that you've decided to allow will come through. So I kind of fine tune it, make sure it works that way.

I love it. Well, Eric, your mentorship has been invaluable this podcast, but now we're at that point where I'm going to ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

Well, I'll give you the one that I use daily. I literally was using it right before we started talking. It's called Brain fm. And if you've not heard of it, what it is is essentially it's science based music designed to get your brain in the wavelength that you want to get it into quickly, to be able to focus, to study, to de stress, to sleep even. You can use it for all these different things. I love it. Been using it for Years now. And I just, I put my headphones in, I select a track or I shuffle it. And the science just. I mean, again, we were talking about focusing earlier on the thing at hand. This is one of those secret hacks for me personally that gets me there to the zone and keeps me there longer than just regular. You know, you don't want to go looking around on Spotify or Apple Music for playlists for productivity, because most likely those either one, they either have words in them that are going to yank. You know, you're going to get into the mood and have fun while you're working, and then you're going to get yanked out of the work. I'm not saying don't have fun while you work, but I will say this occupies that space in your brain and kind of puts the blinders up and says, no, I'm doing this thing. And you can even set it for intervals like pomodoro method, et cetera. But I have just found nothing else works quite like it for me.

I love it. I used to use Brain fm. I met a buddy who owns a company called Focus at Will, and I use. It's the exact same type of thing, both of them.

I am also a lifetime member of Focus at Will. I took advantage of that at some point in the past and I've used both of them and so I would say. So there you go. Double. Double tool.

There you go. Double tool. Well, fantastic. Well, my tip of the week is learn more about Eric and productivity. Go to beyond the to do list.com beyond the to do list.com he has interviewed so many productivity experts. One of my favorite being Greg McCune who is on this podcast, the author of Essentialism, among many others, he had on the famous Phil Rosenthal, who is the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond. I don't know how you got Phil Rosenthal on, but if you can make an introduction, I would be so, so grateful for that. I love that guy. So go to beyond the to do list.com learn more. Eric, are we good?

We're great. Thank you.

Awesome. I want to thank the listeners to remind you the only way, the only way I'm gonna get the quality of guests like an Eric Fisher from BeyondTheTodoist.com is if you do three favors. Follow Rate Review the podcast, Send us a screenshot of that review. Supporthelandgeek.com I'm going to send you for free a signed copy of Dirt Rich. So please do it. Okay. Let freedom ring. Thanks everybody.

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