Less Chaos, More Impact: A People-First Perspective on Innovation and Productivity

In a world where constant notifications, multitasking, and digital overload are the norm, reclaiming focus and productivity has become a strategic advantage. At Innovation Summit 2025, HIKE2’s Adam Franklin and Patrick Caruso shared a fresh, people-first perspective on how respecting our cognitive limits—and designing our work around them—can lead to happier, more impactful teams. Their session cut through the noise with real strategies for reducing chaos, improving innovation, and finding a healthier relationship with the technology that surrounds us. Watch the full session below and start with these human-centered takeaways:

Key Takeaways:

1. Human Brains Have Built-In Limits That Technology Often Overwhelms
   Our ability to form goals outpaces our ability to enact them. Frequent task switching, constant notifications, and scattered focus deeply strain our selective attention, working memory, and goal management systems—reducing productivity and increasing stress.
   
2. Task Switching Costs More Than You Think
   Research shows it can take up to 23 minutes to fully refocus after switching tasks. Frequent multitasking doesn’t just slow us down—it increases errors by up to 50%, raises stress levels, and fragments our working memory.
   
3. Clear Goals and Thoughtful Tool Use Help Fight Digital Overload
   Instead of reflexively responding to every Slack ping or email, workers can protect their cognitive resources by setting clear goals, choosing the right communication tools for the task, and batching shallow work to preserve deep work windows.
   
4. Intentional Rituals Create Space for Focus and Creativity
   Structuring focused work sessions, using end-of-day shutdown rituals, and alternating periods of intense concentration with downtime for diffuse thinking are essential for maintaining both productivity and creative problem solving in a hyperconnected world.

So we kind of already introduced yourself so let kick us off we’re going to be talking all right can you both hear me excellent so the session today what we’re going to be talking about is how as human beings we all have some very real limitations with our human brains and uh how you know maybe if we paid attention to those gave them a little more respect and adjusted the way we work accommodate those we might be a little happier a little more effective and a little less stressed out so I I think the obvious question is who the heck are we to be up here talking about this um we had a real neuroscientist uh earlier today and then I got two consultants well less charitable view would be well as consultants we’re pretty good at talking about things we don’t know a lot about um which totally fair uh on the other hand though um this is really great news for y’all because we’re not going to use a lot of jargon we’re going to try to stay in our lane uh and really we’re just here and excited to talk about something we both feel strongly about so what does the next give you a preview of something here uh what does it look like the next half hour or so we’re going to talk about being a human being having a brain we’re going to establish some terms and some of the common limitations that we all share uh then we’re going to talk about what it looks like when we get online and what it looks like when we start to stress those limitations and then lastly we’re going to explore some of the ways that we can try doing things differently uh possible ways to really look at those limitations and with respect find ways to be more effective uh with you know that in mind so just before we begin uh I’m just going to hand it off to Patrick who has a few fun exciting notes to share 

So since it’s just after lunch uh you might be feeling sluggish we thought we’d keep it interesting so we have some prizes available for good engaging questions or conversations so be thinking about that and kind of on a related note um I actually think this might be easy just kind of scanning the room but if you’re willing to participate and just as a preface obviously any work or personal matters don’t worry about it but if you’re willing to participate I think it’ll actually help kind of engage in the content to minimally put away your phone and if possible also put away your laptop um and try to notice during the course of the talk how often you feel the pull to check either device um and then we’ll kind of circle back at the end and talk about it all right thank you so good news there’s only one slide for the first five minutes so we’re going to talk a little about being human in our brains um it may surprise you all that the brains we have today are the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution um and when we started off we didn’t really have uh these incredible sophisticated brains we basically had reflex mechanisms we were responding to external stimuli in our environment uh with zero processing over time that changed we started to develop the ability to represent our environment internally inside of our brains and we were still responding to those representations we weren’t really giving it much thought we couldn’t do that yet and we can categorize both of these is what we could think of as bottom up regulations now over many many millions of years we developed this ability to pause so if you were looking at a slide right now you can see this wonderful graphic we stole from someone smarter than us about this cycle perception and action and this ability to pause between perception and action is really where we developed the ability to even form goals to evaluate and make decisions about what actions we were willing to take now this is this is actually incredible right think about the ability to define our goals and think about the way that this has evolved over time we’ve developed this ability to form these complex timebased sophisticated often conflicting goals and to somehow achieve these incredible feats as a result so if you think about great feats of engineering works of art symphonies medical advances none of this is possible without the ability to actually form and enact so great we’ve all developed this capacity for goal formation what good is that though if we can’t actually enact those goals and so it turns out what we’ve learned uh is that this is a whole different system in our in our brain that achieves this for us uh we can broadly categorize these as cognitive controls so cognitive controls uh we can have three categories for our conversation today because like we said we’re not going to go that deep um we have selective attention we have working memory and we have goal management.

We’re going to do a 50,000 foot view of each of those selective attention i want to make sure I get this right it’s one of these attention in general right it’s a word that gets tossed around all the time we all know it uh it’s fundamental to our human experience and so it feels intuitive for our conversation today what we’re really talking about is this selective attention which is this ability to spotlight a certain thing and when we do that right whether it’s smell sensations perception point in time uh what we’re doing is we’re really amplifying those signals so whatever it is uh that’s in our brain is being boosted and at the same time there’s a function of suppression happening as well where things that are not relevant to our goal in that moment we’re actually dialing down and this is all happening automatically and it’s part of our selective attention we’ll call it a capability so I mentioned before this ability to um kind of pause and to process something before you do something well when we pause between our perception and action something has to sustain that perception in our mind it’s gone right it’s not out there in the world anymore but we need to be able to process it and that something is working memory so working memory is what gives us the ability to persist a perception of an experience after it’s passed uh and that’s where our mind processes it so without that we wouldn’t be able to actually represent those things we pause them and so we can think of working memory kind of like the bridge between our perception and our action this is the thing that actually allows us to choose goals and to take action on them so then goal management um I mentioned before we all have lots of different goals at any given moment uh we always have we always will and uh goal management is really this thing that deals with the fact that all of those goals are competing for the same very limited set of cognitive resources so you can think of goal management uh and the ability to manage these goals like a traffic controller um it’s basically the thing making making sure we stay on one and not go to the other if you imagine if you had no control over this you would never get anything done so that’s goal formation that’s goal enactment there’s one more thing I want to talk about before I hand it over to Patrick and that’s goal interference so goal interference is all the noise that gets in the way of our pursuit of goals um we can think of this like a radio or any other very sensitive instrument there’s a a degree of sensitivity to any kind of interference um and this takes on two forms there’s distractions meaning things that are really happening without any uh impetus from you but they’re out there or in here uh and interruptions which is when we actually engage with one of those distractions in a conscious way we we switch in some fashion and each of those can happen both internally and externally so internally I’m sure we’re all familiar with thoughts that just go through our head at any given moment throughout the day when we’re really focused on something else uh externally maybe it’s your phone ringing uh maybe it’s you’re at a restaurant and you hear your name in the background uh those would be two good examples of distraction an interruption might be if you were to follow that thought or if you were to tune out the conversation with your dining partner and start trying to listen in on the thing where you thought someone said your name so why am I mentioning this because our cognitive control systems are extremely sensitive to interference uh this has been true for millions of years so it’s not getting any better in any of our lifetimes uh developmentally speaking we’re really not that far away from our you know closest ancestors in terms of primates so you let’s lower our expectations there what this ultimately means and what Patrick’s going to talk about is that we have a significant delta between our ability to come up with and form goals and our ability to actually enact those goals so if you remember one thing from this part of I hope it’s this um fundamentally we all have champagne taste and beer budgets when it comes to our cognitive resources so with that I’m going to hand it over to Patrick who’s going to tell you how bad it really is so you know the first limit we’re going to talk about is one thing at a time and it’s interesting research actually shows that people think they can multitask but in reality we can only actually do one thing with 100% of our attention at a time what we’re doing if we’re doing anything else is we’re actually switching rapidly between those things so we’re going to do a little exercise kind of as an example.

So I want you to say out loud with me the letters A through J pretty quickly all right ready go a B C D E F G H I J great now we’re going to say the numbers 1 through 10 same speed ready go 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 all right now we’re going to switch between the two a little bit faster ready go a 1 B 2 C 3 D 4 right it’s a simple task it seems simple and all of a sudden you realize like you either make a mistake or if you can keep going it takes a little bit longer the further you get along and that only amplifies as the task becomes more and more complex the uh second limit we’re going to talk about is 23 minutes so it might sound familiar that’s about how long a sitcom show is it’s also how long it takes for us to refocus our full attention after switching tasks uh and researchers sometimes call this attentional residue it’s kind of a helpful image to think about uh your attention is still kind of stuck on the thing you were attending to and it takes a lot of cognitive resources to switch to a new task and there’s different neural networks for different tasks so that time delay can be up to 23 minutes and then when you talk about switching rapidly between multiple things especially if they’re complex that only compounds itself the third thing we’re going to talk about is working memory which Adam mentioned bridges perception and action and you know the easiest example is someone is going to tell you their phone number and that’s an auditory stimuli it’s the perception and you can remember it uh maybe not you need to repeat it for just long enough to write it down or put it in your phone right uh the action so uh the interesting thing is we can only hold somewhere between 3 to seven things in our working memory and it’s actually attention that is the means by which information even is able to enter our working memory so if our attention is divided you can already see how it’s possible we might not even it might not make it into our working memory or if it does we’re switching to the next thing and we can only hold so much at a time so I think the classic example probably all experienced is you’re upstairs and you think “I need to go down to the basement to get this thing.” And you’re going down you get a text message you check it and then you run into a kid and you sit have a quick conversation and you get into the room and you open the door and you’re like “I have no idea why I came down here you just can’t remember.” You know that’s kind of a failure of working memory it’s kind of funny i’ve been joking with my wife like failure of working memory we keep making these little mistakes and it’s you know we’re just const constantly trying to multitask and it and it doesn’t work um the last limit is uh 90 minutes so there’s many different rhythms and cycles in the body circadian rhythm digestion right and this is an idea that uh researchers have found that 90 minutes is kind of the optimal amount of time that we can intensely focus on something after which point we start to fatigue so there’s kind of a benefit to structuring work in such a way that you maximize that 90minute period but followed by a period of rest um and that leads into one last thing we want to talk about in this first section which is focus versus diffuse attention

There’s many different parts of the human brain it’s extremely complex these are just very relevant I think to what we’re talking about here today um and at this conference so focused attention is what it sounds like when you are entirely focused on the task at hand uh the best image is like a spotlight so it’s pointed directly at something um and it it requires a a defined kind of pattern of thinking or series of steps and it’s kind of necessary to execute a task right diffuse attention is kind of the opposite it’s where you’re able to relax the mind and not focus on something and it’s actually where uh our more creative thinking happens where we’re solving problems more creatively we’re making connections between the things that we focus on and uh you know the times you might think of this is when you’re in the shower or walking in nature or you know maybe looking at a fire um and so again there’s this kind of rhythm that has to be incorporated into our lives where we have the ability to focus intensely but then also have time for more diffuse thinking right because if you’re only able to execute you’re not going to come up with creative ways to solve problems and if you’re very creative but can’t execute no one’s ever going to know you’re creative so with that we’re going to switch into section two we’re going to talk about now being human online all right thank you Patrick okay so we’re going to do a speedun through the last 10,000 years or so before we get online um so starting back about 8,000 years ago we all transitioned as you know culturally from a hunter gatherer society to more agrarian societies and this was a huge shift uh we started you know settling down in places and organizing our entire lives differently now 8,000 years go by and about 300 years ago we start to move from an agrarian society into a more industrial society another huge shift uh you know we started to really just change the way we we did everything and the way that we could even communicate across uh you know continents changed now let’s go another uh 250 years or so into the 1950s and we start to enter what could be called the information age the first transistor uh is invented um and then another 30 years go by and we have the first computers being used for personal use so throughout all this time obviously there’s a lot of technological change happening but you can start to see there’s a compression over time so then another 10 years go by and we’ve got people on the internet um anybody here have a dialogue connection at 1400 B when they’re younger you all know um and then more and more time goes by then you have emails suddenly we have way more communication coming in but the friction for communication just keeps going down less time goes by we have mobile devices now you don’t even have to be at your desk you can get that email from anywhere where there’s a connection great um more time goes by and we have social media so suddenly um you know we we’ve had these kind of inspace bulletin boards for a long time i remember doing this when I was in high school figuring these things they were very focused it’s more of a conversation between small group social media introduces this level of asymmetry that nobody has ever been subjected to before a few more years go by less and less we start to see mobile phones penetrating now today right a lot of us either have it in our hand or in our pocket these always connected devices and we are just being bombarded by more and more and more communication every year so catching up to myself here i’m going to hand it over to Patrick 

great and uh I apologize that we’re going to talk a little bit about what some of the research has shown i don’t have the sources were on the slide so uh we’ll we’ll get those to you afterwards but uh we thought it’d be important to ground what we’re saying and you know people smarter than us so the first uh piece of research that’s worth noting um it it comes out of UC Irvine and uh found that when it looked at knowledge workers and how uh frequently they would switch tasks and what it uh they broke work into two categories so tasks were kind of like short-term uh goals like writing an email and then working spheres were kind of groups of tasks oriented towards a common goal like uh managing a project or coordinating an event and what they found is that uh people switch tasks about every 3 minutes and working spheres about every 11 minutes which is incredible you know we and we might not reflect on this in our work but you know when you can step back and and hear those numbers it’s pretty eye opening how fragmented work can be um the next piece of research looked at the impact of task switching on productivity and found that there was up to a 40% negative impact caused by task switching so in this exercise they had young adults categorize geometric shapes or solve math problems and switching between the two kind of like you were doing before and just like you experienced uh it took longer as they switched and the more complex tasks took even longer and they were more likely to make mistakes um which is leads into kind of this a third research I looked at where they found that the likelihood in a frequent multitasking led to a likelihood of up to 50% increase in likelihood of errors uh which is amazing right so they had people try to work on concurrent tasks and then what happened was when they would make a mistake they they would they called it attention tunneling they would focus their attention on the error and then it actually made them more likely to make a subsequent error And so that likelihood shot up to 50% especially in more complex environments um and then the last piece of research looked at what happens in these environments where there’s frequent task switching people actually develop a mode of working where they are working faster they’re writing less and there’s an increase in stress um you know and there’s more time pressure so you can kind of see how these are all connected right the frequent task switching leads to a negative impact in productivity leads to uh you know the likelihood of errors shooting up and then the stress so then the question is what are we going to do about it so in section three we’re going to talk about some humanentric strategies for what to do awesome i don’t know how you have that all memorized that is sick i have a four-month old son and he’s a very captive audience he was both crying at me and falling asleep as I was practicing i often cry when we cleanse so yeah the first two sections lay out two main ideas right uh first as human beings despite how incredible our brains are we really do have some very concrete very common shared limitations um and this is especially true when it relates to our sensitivity to interference and then the second section over the past uh you know couple decades especially the rate of technological advancement has been progressing uh and this has led to a lot more potential sources of interference uh you know particularly now with these asymmetrically connected digital communication that we all use uh and yet our human limitations really are the same as they’ve been with doctors so this last section will be a little bit more optimistic because what we’re going to propose that we all do have some say in the matter right these are choices we make in how we engage with these things uh and we can make other choices about if we use these tools when we use them how we use them and what we use them for so speaking of limitations uh we’re trying to get this done as quickly as possible so you all can ask questions and get brains so I’m going to hand it over to Patrick

yeah so the first strategy we want to talk about is thinking at more of a meta level about our work uh you know I think we all fall into the trap of just jumping into work to get it done and often this can be counterproductive um you know I think it’s only when we can set clear goals that we can then see the interference and the distractions um and so you know it’s having that kind of introspection and ability to step back and and and think about our work at at this level I think really helps to form clear goals so that um as we’re working we can you know perceive those uh the interference and distraction and the second thing we want to talk about is re-evaluating tools in terms of whether or not they they serve our goals so I think a good example of this is let’s say you wanted to develop three friendships in your life to be kind of deeper relationships over the course of the next year and you know you you might have different methods to do that so you could have coffee or get dinner in person you know you might use a tool like an application like Facebook um there might be other means that you you use to keep in touch with these your friends and then you can step back and evaluate those different methods for accomplishing your goal of deeper friendships based on pretty objectively right like how much time do I spend in person maybe half an hour an hour a week maybe uh how much time do I spend on Facebook four hours a week more you know is that helping move the ball forward towards that goal what would happen if I reallocated you know just an hour a week uh to the in-person interaction and I think we can apply the same to tools we use for business so something you know especially tools that maybe we don’t think about like uh Slack or Teams something that we all have to probably use maybe both um and you know I I think it takes a real empathy and and people first kind of perspective to think before you slack and ask questions like is this really the right medium to be using for this communication like does this really need to be a nearreal time response from somebody or might it be better to put in a Jira ticket or send an email or or wait until I can have a one-on-one meeting with this person and talk through a list of things right because I I think it’s all too easy we just reflex and we use tools a lot of times without thinking about how they serve our goals but we can apply that same kind of strategy to tools that we use every day even things that uh seem like we have to use them right like like Slack or email so another way we can think about this is that we have the freedom to experiment with different ways of working um you know we can try to find ways to sort of keep our spotlight focused and at the same time minimize that interference from internal and external sources so that maybe we have a chance of achieving some of our goals a good example of this many of you may be familiar with would be something like the Pomodoro technique very simply it says set a timer for 25 minutes try to work stay focused and then uh you know when you’re done take a five minute break um you know before you actually get started of course you’re going to want to close those 50 tabs maybe hide your phone somewhere uh maybe make sure that you don’t have any outstanding things you’re supposed to be doing at that moment so why why might that be helpful uh if we think about it in this context of interference and cognitive control uh we’re first of all we’re clearly identifying goals to work towards so we’re we’re kind of setting up an explicit goal uh second we’re the time boxing helps to actually reduce the interference right when we know that we’re going to do something for a certain amount of time we’re less likely to be worried or thinking about I’m supposed to be working on something else right now or I have these 10 other things I need to do uh it may not surprise anyone that anxiety is like putting the pedal to the metal when it comes to interference uh and then the actual process of closing tabs hiding your phone thinking uh you know all these things we do they they function like a ritual right we are we are to some extent animals and we are easily conditioned as anybody who’s uh kind of heard their phone alert or their Slack alert and felt their heartbeat pick up a little bit or no um so these can all be signals for us and we’re going to go into this kind of focus mode and you know we’ll come back to that other stuff a little bit later another strategy it was great to hear Mark talk about Atlassian and some of their uh ways of approaching work you know I was really encouraged to hear they had this kind of uh asynchronous communication uh goals that I’d like to look up you know thinking about something like a work capture tool or or other tools as a way to in this context like again how can I maybe move the conversation into a different context where um you know so from a work like a Jira perspective right instead of an 80 thread uh a thread with 80 replies deep you know uh back and forth where you’re trying to work out requirements maybe that conversation can be in a jury ticket where you know the whole team can see it and it can get moved about the project or you’re all sick um right and it’s in the context of the work but also from this perspective right um email and uh you know Jira type systems have a benefit of being able to then batch some of that kind of response so rather than being available in near real time for any and all questions you can focus for an intense period on work on on meaningful deep work and then you can have a period where you address those kinds of things in more of a batched approach Um oh planning excellent planning right here uh so yeah planning it might feel like one of those things that is super obvious so why are we even going to talk about it as this shouldn’t we be doing something innovative with AI now um so I think it’s a useful tool though for reducing interference and setting setting ourselves up structurally to um you know go towards our goals so it’s useful first of all to ensure that you’re actually prioritizing what’s important um you know when you take the time to come up with a plan first you’re kind of compelled to first think about like what do I actually want to do what’s the most important thing for me right now um and that that helps right you think about okay what are my goals how am I going to make progress uh you know it also helps you pick which of those goals you’re going to make progress on i don’t know about any of you I usually have about 50 to 60 goals that I know about there’s probably another 25 I’m going to find out about on my next call uh so this is a helpful way to also deal with the fact that when I find out about those 25 other goals I can respond to that and contextualize that based on the priorities I’ve already established uh if I need to change things fine uh but I at least I’m doing that within the context of saying okay I know what my priorities are i know what my long-term goals are here i’m going to make choices to support those goals doing this kind of planning it it really does help to I think direct our attention in a meaningful way um now

Before I hand it back over to Patrick I do want to mention that this planning can take place at many different levels but I think the two obvious ones for a lot of us are going to be both um you know meetings how how many people have joined a meeting with zero agenda in the last month and did you love it um you know the other one is obviously just planning out your day uh so taking the time to just think through your day ahead of time i know some of us have to be more reactive than others but uh when we take the time to plan out our day in alignment with our priorities it helps to kind of set that intention early on and we can come back to that when we start to get a little bit of drift one way or the other and this this helps to I think reduce that interference because we end up at a point where we have less ambiguous tasks that we’re working with uh you know and our timelines are directly linked to the things we’ve already decided are important that means less worrying about it if you’re supposed to be doing something else right now i’ll hand it off to Patrick yeah so one more strategy is employing rituals so uh rituals help send signals to the brain that you’re about to begin or end something i employ these all the time i have five kids so morning routine nighttime routine we all have rituals in our life that help drive you know certain actions right and so we can employ these in our work too um when beginning work like Adam was kind of mentioning you know things like putting your phone away closing unnecessary browser tabs especially if you’re going to begin a period of intense focus on a particular task I think are really helpful signals that you’re not going to give in to some other distraction or interference right um for those of you that use Slack I don’t know if you’ve experimented with the focus mode I love it it’s you can have VIPs so when my manager Chris messages me I can still find out about that if I need to uh but you know otherwise I can just focus for you know a defined period of time you set the amount of time um and and then after it’s done it goes back to kind of normal mode um ending your workday is another time where rituals can actually really benefit you i don’t know if anybody’s ever heard of something called the zygarnic effect but it’s basically this idea that we remember unfinished tasks more than we remember finished ones and so uh it’s the idea is to close out any loops that are open uh before you end your workday so uh this is Cal Newport is the one that I picked this up from and it’s kind of a shutdown process so you can basically check Slack check email check the calendar for the next day kind of get a sense for what’s coming up get anything that’s in your head that came up during the day out of your head into some list uh or into a work capture tool and you know whatever other things that are kind of a part of your workflow do them and then say out loud especially those of you that work from home because it’s less embarrassing shut down complete close your laptop and walk away uh you know it sounds silly but then later when you’re you know going about your evening and you think did I finish that you can just remind yourself like

I went through the shutdown process i wouldn’t have done that unless I finished everything and what it does is right you need that time for diffused thinking it’s you can trust that your brain’s actually forming connections helping to solve problems the next day even more effectively than if you were kind of continually re-engaging with your work with that we’re going to wrap things up all right so quick time check we’re actually going to have time for questions what’s the big word here uh so part one champagne tastes beer budgets extremely sensitive to interference part two uh the amount of information coming out of all of us has skyrocketed over the past few decades uh a lot of instances that information is actually engineered to be as attention grabbing as possible which means it takes more of our cognitive resources to deal with it whether we’re going to attend to it or suppress it in part three uh we talk what might be seen as a controversial step which suggesting you don’t have to check Slack every time it goes off uh you don’t have to look at your phone every minute um and we could make different choices about how we’re engaging with technology uh we could try to reduce the amount of context switching the interference the general scatteredness that a lot of us feel in our day you know I think suggesting that we have a choice in the matter may be obvious it may also feel a little bit uh you know a classic at times um so I think you know the thing is when we think about these choices we need to keep those limitations in mind uh you know how we can use those limitations and how we can structure our work to either help or hinder ourselves knowing those things exist you know we think that really by doing this and by taking a a careful look at these types of choices we can end up with a more human- centric way of working for all of us so why why did we do this at all you know why do this event called the innovation summit um we have a lot of motivations most of which we won’t admit to in public but there is uh you know two that we want to speak to here first of all you know we think that recognizing the dynamics of this issue opens up some opportunities for innovation a lot of innovation comes from problem solving so if we look at this as a problem that we have and that we could solve then there’s all these possibilities out there to just let’s find new ways of working this could be a competitive edge you can be more effective you can set up your organizations to be more effective and reduce that interference no one’s immune from it uh and secondly you know Patrick’s mentioned a few times this idea of focus and diffuse thinking so when we think of innovation you know part of it is this ability to come up with creative new ways of thinking about things connecting perhaps two ideas that aren’t related but maybe they’re they’re getting close what Steven Johnson uh calls the adjacent possible uh and so when we we give ourselves the time and we give ourselves the opportunity to both focus as Patrick has mentioned and we also give ourselves that space to unfocus to let our minds wander to brush our teeth without having to think about work to take a shower to go for a walk in the woods um to light a building on fire as Patrick likes to do uh then this is also creating a fertile substrate for all of us to be more innovative in our everyday life with that I’m gonna hand it off to Patrick for a wrap up great so we want to check in and see how it went what was your experience like and I know it’s kind of vulnerable if you if anybody would be willing to share like we mentioned we have some uh prizes here so in terms of checking your phone or your laptop I don’t know if anybody felt cool during the talk or has anything you know has experienced you know that and and has wrestled with it so start there

[Music]

[Music] right

yeah and I think that’s I don’t know personally I always am wrestling with like what’s again the right tool i just recently got an analog watch and I have a Whoop strap i don’t know if you’re familiar but it doesn’t have a screen so I I like the combination of like being able to track metrics without having the screen um you know functionally does what I need has a date has a light and a you know time it’s not you know obviously there’s multiple ways to do it but I just find you know checking my phone I’m more likely to then oh I missed a text message you know jump into it so um yeah it’s a you know these kind of things are constant you know question of personal you know maybe you have more people some people you’re like I don’t need to I get like a thousand notifications I don’t look at any of them but I see that notification like I have to check it so you know yeah I have a whole bunch of

like feel like I was able to focus

[Music] If I would pick up my phone next to see how it’s

Yeah so it sounds like what you’re saying is that explicit goal of not having that interruption there that source of distraction actually helped you to stay focused is that right and that that’s the case a lot of times right all the decisions we make and all these choices that we make about what we’re going to do how we’re going to set up our environment they really do play a huge role in how successful we’ll be when we actually try to do these other things i’m going to get back to the watch because I had and I don’t wear watch anymore because it actually made me feel guilty about what I was doing you know like did you get your steps in did you you know and these messages are coming through and it was just more it was more anxiety than than it was certainly worth and it’s sitting at home and it needs to be charged but I don’t know what charge it’s just not worth it yeah one of one of the things I was talking to my wife about recently is I think what like a good measure I think to me of like how much autonomy you have is like if you can have that kind of distance from a tool or a technology to evaluate whether or not it’s you know helping or hurting whatever goals you have and um I think I mean I think we’re all wrestling with that in different ways and especially you know it’s you know easy to adopt new technology and then it’s hard to be really introspective and ask those kind of hard questions but yeah especially whenever everyone else has it you know but you’re sitting in a meeting and everyone’s doing this yep yeah it’s like over here yeah i I was just thinking too like about this goal thing um one of the questions I kind of wanted to ask is how much people might think about the way we work influencing the way we live outside of work right so if you’re constantly checking email Slack working email working right when you walk away you’re going to be thinking in that same kind of pattern I need to check my phone you know where you know for me I go upstairs I got to be my goal has to be my relationship with my wife my relationship with my kids and it you know if I’m not practicing that in my work it’s hard to make that transition so yeah I think um ultimately a lot of us probably need to be more intentional about getting away from these technologies more clear with ourselves about how we want to operate in the world uh you know much like you I I have a Fitbit uh I think I stopped charging it in 2021 and my life got better i usually hide my phone when I’m working from home i’ll put it under like a cushion or something unless I need to like 2F at a somewhere i’m not looking at it my life got better um I think that there’s just this often urge and you know it can be a sense of like I’m going to miss out on something important generally speaking we’re not but it feels that and so often what happens is that we get drawn to those other things and as a result we’re not actually doing the things and making progress on the things we already actually decided we know are

I think the whole ending the day shut down it’s pretty cool because I find myself actually thinking about right around the time yeah I’m just thinking about what I want to model what I need to pay attention to what I’m doing about something that happened and even though I don’t practice [Music] that shut down you can stay

quietly my but yeah I think that’s a that’s a good take check out his stuff it’s he’s incredible author uh a lot of you know a lot of great content ideas like that so

just to follow I don’t say shut down complete i say I’ve done all I can do for the city today and and then I laptop yeah and I think that was a product of having like multiple clients and so like I would end one thing with a client and then focus on a different client so yeah someone like that so yeah it’s more missionoriented i like that batman he’s like “I’ve done all I can do for

this.” Just Yeah i think um you know what’s interesting about it is this this whole idea court got it from what’s called acceptance therapy which is this idea that people that have a lot of anxiety often what they need to do is get to a place where they fought through these things that are giving them a lot of grief and they can go back to this when they find these intrusive thoughts coming up well we all have a lot of anxiety that the fact of human existence um is probably higher than for a lot of us uh and so this is a mechanism that works right these thoughts are inherently intrusive uh because we’re trying to do something else and you know we’re being kept awake and we’re not having the pleasant toothbrushing experience you might want to have uh so it’s it’s fascinating but ultimately right whatever you say the main idea is you’re closing these loops in a conscious explicit explicit fashion uh so it’s just very

effective i think it’s a focusing on distraction i think it’s a it makes a big difference just being aware of how distractions affect you i know we’ve all seen a lot of people rail against smartphones and how how horrible they are they can be horrible in the wrong context i mean it’s I think 10 years ago if I if I was running a meeting and I asked people to put away their cell phones get a mixed reaction now if I say let’s put away our cell phones for this meeting I can actually see people scouting at me when I request that um it’s kind of a how dare you look but just on a personal level I understand this you know it’s it’s a promise I’m going through realizing just how my distraction distractions affect me recently I got to a point it was just hard to concentrate on anything just took a suggestion from my wife she said I think you need to go on immediate fast you know put away your your cell phone I did for a week no listening to it nothing except calls and it was amazing how my head started to clear Yeah um but it’s an ongoing problem yeah for sure we have about 60 seconds i saw one before yeah no I just think the 23 minutes I hadn’t heard that before and like I’m constantly shifting gears and it just really made me think about well I never really get out of one task and into the other before I switch again and so I think that just really resonated with me and going forward I think I’ll be much more thoughtful of how often I’m shifting gears it’s awesome okay well I think we’re just about out of time here and we do have QR code that it’s a GitHub repos has a bunch of links too yeah you can take out your phone yeah yeah so if you’re interested like Cal Newport some of the other authors and people have been influential with that online um there’s some links to their their content and uh yeah thank you all for attending and enjoy the rest of your day