How can you be more confident in your everyday life?

Find me on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@josephbrewster1

Find me on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@josephbrewster1

Find me on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@josephbrewster1

Find me on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@josephbrewster1

Find me on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@josephbrewster1

Find me on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@josephbrewster1

Find me on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@josephbrewster1

But in a very controversial and now legendary move, Joseph Stalin in what was then the Soviet Union, decided that Sunday was a wasted day. He was scheming ways to supercharge the productivity of his population and to eliminate what he considered to be like the pointless recreational time that Sunday brought about. Machines were sitting idle on Sundays and people were working.

People were going to church. They were worshiping, which was something that he saw no value in. And so in 1929, Joseph Stalin canceled Sundays. For real? You should look this up. It's a very interesting story that I won't have time to go into today. But Joseph Stalin effectively got rid of weekends. And for 11 years, the Soviet Union wrestled with a schedule that forced people into a sort of always on workweek, dividing up time off so that a lot of times husbands and wives didn't get the same days off and families didn't get to hang out together when they did have time off.

And the impact of the changes as a result of Stalin's new laws is now legendary. We need time off. And if we didn't know it before, we certainly realized it. After their experiment, people started feeling unmotivated. Machines started breaking down because they were always going 24 seven. People were discouraged that they didn't have time off. That coincided with their friends and with their families, so they didn't really get quality social time on the days when they were off.

And overall, things just didn't go well. They ended up changing up the system multiple times over the course of those 11 years and then eventually completely abolished the system that Joseph Stalin set up. We need time off. It's just a fact. And in America, we are nothing like Communist Soviet Union, right? I mean, we get time off. Everybody who works for somebody probably has a certain amount of days off or vacation days a year.

And when Americans were polled, that was actually one of the things that they cared most about when they were looking for a new job. They wanted to know what were the paid time off options. Were they going to be able to go on vacation? Were they going to get regular days away from the office? We say we care about these things and yet pulls from the last couple of years show that we don't do so well at actually following through on those.

In fact, in 2019, there was a poll done that showed that 768 million days of paid time off in America went unused. That means there were 768 million opportunities for someone to take a day off and they just didn't do it. In fact, polls show that Americans really struggle with unplugging when they take time off so that sometimes when they take time off, they're actually sneaking work in while they're on vacation.

There's even a trend that's been going around that's been documented on social media and in research that shows that it's not uncommon for people to actually lie when they take time off about where they're going or what they're doing. This is really interesting. People have a tendency to lie and say they're going somewhere where their connection isn't great or their phone isn't working because they're concerned and that when they take time off, they're going to get pulled back into work on accident, or maybe that they won't even have the willpower to stay away from their device.

And when we look at what Stalin did in the Soviet Union and think how awful that is, do we realize that even though the government imposed it on those people, we in our culture are sometimes self inducing a crazy level of always on torture because we don't know how to rest. So I'm asking myself, why is that? Now there is a lot of good research done on this and there are a lot of potential answers.

And I'm about to give you what I think are some of the most interesting, but definitely not the only reasons that we have these issues in America. But I see these as definite problems, so hear me out. I think we have been duped by the hustle culture. We have been duped into this way of thinking that says it's super cool to be always on your grind.

24 seven Nothing but the money. And that's what we care about. In fact, that's driven home to us in media, both in music and in movies that we have this respect for people who just never stop and never quit. And we think to ourselves that in order for us to achieve our dreams and to, you know, make the money that we want to make or be able to get the education we want, we just can't stop.

We've got to go 24 seven. And the truth is, we can't always be on the grind. The truth is, the research just shows that our bodies don't function like that. And if the Soviet Union weren't a good enough reason, we see it in our own culture that the more we stress, the more we work and refuse to take time off, the worse we actually do it our jobs.

The truth is that time off allows our time on to be more focused and to be more productive. So if you really do want your hustle to be top of its game, you're going to have to let your rest and your relaxation also be on the top of its game. Here's something else I notice about our culture. We see non-work time as wasted time.

In fact, we term it. Things like free time and I think free insinuates that there's not a high value on the time, but actually there is. And the truth is that playing that exploration, that those faith traditions and those casual social interactions really have huge health benefits that are part of a fulfilling life. Not to mention, they help you be a better worker, employee, leader, manager, whatever it is that you do when you're in your vocational status.

But, you know, it's not just about being good at work. It's just about being a good human being. And that's not wasted time. That's vital. You need that time. So don't see your time off as wasted time. And maybe it depends on how you're using it. So make sure that you are looking at that time as valuable and giving some intentionality to those days off.

Here's another thing that I think hurts our willingness to take rest, and that is that we don't want to go home. I mean, sometimes let's be honest. Home is where more problems are. Problems that no boss and no team is helping us fix. So it's easier to stay at work to avoid our personal stress, to avoid people, to avoid our mental health problems.

And the truth is that we often categorize our family, our friends, our personal life, our health as top priority over work. That's just across the boards. When people take surveys, that's what they say. All these things come first and then work. But if that's true, our passionate investment should start there, and then it's going to spill over into our workday.

We've got to start at home. And if you're working a lot because working is easier than fixing what's going on at home, I'm telling you that it's going to come back and bite you. You need to spend some quality time in your off days making sure that the life you're creating for yourself is amazing and that if that job changes or goes away entirely, your only reason for living didn't just vanish.

Here's another thing we struggle with. We are afraid of being expendable. So we think that if we don't show up, maybe things will go well in our absence, and then they'll realize they don't really need us there and we'll get fired. But, you know, that's a really selfish way of looking at the work that we do. The truth is, a good leader.

They can leave. They can go on vacation. If everything falls apart when you're gone, then you're not doing something right at your job. You nee...

So I was recently reading an article about astronauts in space, and I found this fact really intriguing. So living and working in space is really mentally strenuous for an astronaut, as you can imagine, all kinds of things that are very unlike living on the Earth.
But the absence of gravity actually makes working in a spacecraft very physically undemanding. So even though you're thinking hard, you've got this high stress job, you really don't have to use your body that much because you're not dealing with gravity. So gravity isn't pushing against your muscles. And they were saying that based on studies they've done with astronauts, if they don't regularly exercise in space, they lose muscle mass at a very high rate.
So the studies were showing that astronauts were experiencing up to 20% loss of muscle just over the course of like a five to ten day space flight. So around a week and they were losing 20% of muscle mass in their bodies because they just weren't experiencing that pressure of gravity and they weren't working out. So if you're listening to this, it's likely that you have a mentally demanding role.
You know, maybe there are areas of your life that you would consider really important to you. You want to be able to use them later like an astronaut would want to be able to return to Earth and be able to walk around without falling over and having, you know, proper muscle mass when they get back. But if you're going to do that, you're going to have to maintain it.
And I was thinking as I was reading this, what is an area of my life that is atrophying that I'm allowing to decrease in mass or in strength because I'm not using it or working it out. And, you know, sometimes we build a skill and then we find seasons in our life where we're not using it and we still identify with that skill.
We consider it vital to our self, our person, but we really don't invest any time into it. So my question to you is, what is something you feel is atrophying in your life? How can you institute small and consistent exercises for skills you want to retain? So here's a good example for me. I grew up drawing. I love art.
I never wanted to be a professional artist as a kid because I didn't think artists made money. And I honestly didn't want anyone to tell me what to draw But as I got older, I was involved in leading organizations. I worked in nonprofits for ten years. They didn't need me to draw anything. Art was not at all a part of my regular work schedule.
But at the same time, it was really important to me. It was vital to who I felt like I identified as. And so I made an effort over those years to find ways to continue to keep those muscles, if you will, moving in myself. That art I continued to produce So I would spend a little bit of time at night or during my breaks during the day, drawing, sketching, writing, engaging in that creative side of me so that I could keep those muscles limber.
I didn't know if I would ever use them, but I knew I didn't want to lose them. And, you know, what ended up happening is after I finished that decade, in nonprofits, I ended up being a designer and I ended up using those skills all the time. And the only reason I could do that is because over the period of time, I was not needing them, I continued to exercise and to practice them.
So what if you dedicated 15 minutes a day to improving and retaining one's skill, which is really important to you? Just 15 minutes a day. I mean, I think you could probably do it with even less. But I would challenge you for 15 because I feel like 15 is good, a good number. But you could probably do 5 minutes a day and it's still better than nothing.
But what is something that you could invest 15 minutes a day in to improve and retain so that you don't lose that? Because you're going to want it in the future. You've probably heard the saying the grass is always greener on the other side. And in a very young age, I remember hearing push back on that and somebody saying, Well, the grass is always greener where you water it.
And I love that. I don't know who coined that comeback, but I feel like that's a classic comeback. Yeah, the grass is greener where you water it. So you're on your side feeling like, Well, I'm not good at this or I'm not good at that, but look at that person over there and how great they're doing. And I think, well, yeah, but that person's watering their grass.
That person's exercising their muscles. Of course, they have bigger muscles than you. You don't work out. Or of course they have greener grass than you. What is your muscle? Where is your line that you should be watering? Make sure you're taking care of that. Don't allow important things to atrophy just because you might be in a season in your life right now.
That doesn't necessarily require them. Just because no one's asking you to do it doesn't mean it's not something you really should do. 15 minutes a day what could you do with 15 minutes a day? I'd love to hear your comments, your criticisms, your feedback. I'd love to hear what it is in your life right now that you feel like maybe atrophying because you haven't needed it, maybe for the job that you're doing or the phase of life that you're in.
But it's something you really care about and you love. How are you going to maintain that? How are you going to encourage that skill within yourself? What's your plan? Send me your comments, criticisms, critiques. I'd love to hear anything you have to say. You can get a hold of me at theuppercaselife@gmail.com, and I'll see you next.

I'm going to give you two words, and I want you to think of what comes to your mind when you hear them. The first word is engaged, and the second word is autopilot. If these two words were in a fight to the death in a duel, which one of them would you see as the villain and which one would be the hero?
I mean, if you're thinking of these two states of being, which one seems intuitively the better option to you? And full disclosure, that was a trick question. But I bet if one seemed more like the hero in your mind, it was probably the word engaged, because we think of being engaged as being on an active and connected and alive.
And we think of autopilot as being repetitive, mundane, probably boring and mechanical. And surely a really meaningful life is an engaged life that's better and more desirable than being on autopilot. Right. But it's wait, Engagement, it is vital to a productive and fulfilling life. I mean, nobody wants to be the lifeless automation trudging to work every day and performing the same mindless tasks and just coming home to some bland way of life.
However, when we talk about living life full throttle, always on, totally engaged, sharp focus. Is that really what you want? I mean, actually, for me, no, I it exhausts me just to say that. And I think, well, that's OK sometimes, but I can't live like that. 24, seven. That's just not healthy. And it would probably drive my family crazy.
So a demanding life and a productive habit every day is going to require you to automate some things. I mean, seriously. Automation will save your time, save your energy. And if you don't have some automated behaviors that make sure things go well, even when you're really not able to fully engage, then you're going to be in for this rollercoaster ride of existence.
And it's not not in a fun way. What's going to happen is that you're going to engage, you're going to burn out, you're going to crash. And when you do, nothing will get done because you have to be all on all the time in order to do anything. So how can we differentiate between when we should be engaged and when we should be on autopilot?
Well, there's probably a lot of good answers for this, but I want to give you three scenarios in which I want to encourage you to think of being engaged in autopilot in different ways. So I want you to think about engaging experiences and automating your maintenance, because the world is full of incredible and really novel things. You're going to pass them every day and maybe you're missing them because your brain is so distracted by maintenance mode.
And I would define maintenance as being these tasks that are they are crucial, but they are also repetitive. And you can put systems in place to accomplish these tasks without giving them your full attention. They're going to happen over and over again, usually in a timely manner. So take the time to set up less hassle ways of doing repetitive type tasks so that later you can spend less time overseeing them.
Anything from haircuts, all changes to weekly lunch schedules. I mean, all of these things are recurring and set. So why not automate them? You know, here's one great example. It always humors me when it's coming holiday time in America and we're nearing Christmas and suddenly you have all these adults acting like, who would have thought it's Christmas already, you know, as if Christmas doesn't come every stinkin year.
But these people are so, you know, engaged in other things that they haven't even thought about Christmas. And then they feel, you know, behind on that task when you could you could really mostly plan for Christmas, like six months out. Come on, you know, it's coming. Just get it done. And then when the time comes, you'll be mostly prepared.
So engaging experience is automating maintenance tasks so you can have really novel and cool experiences on a daily basis. If you're perceptive and being present for them. So make sure that you're delegating, you're automating these things that you don't need to put a ton of attention into, but they still need to get done. So you can't not do them, but then participate.
Look around you today. What do you see? Be open to new experiences, sights and smells. I mean, these are vital to our creative thinking and our overall interest in just staying alive, which I'm sure you can relate to. That idea is that sometimes our life feels so stressful and overwhelming, trying to be engaged all the time that, you know, we just want to check out and stay in bed all day.
So the second thing is engage with people and automate the things. So look at it as the value, the really high value things that you're going to participate in life relate to people in some way. And there's going to be a person on the other side of it, even if that person is not standing in front of you and staring you in the face, but make sure that you are engaging with the humans in your life, the people that you say you love, and you're automating the things, the tasks.
Sometimes people even though we would say, you know, somebody ask us which are greater, we'd be like, well, people, of course people are. But sometimes we let the things crowd in on the people and then we find that we're spending our high value mental energy on tough thing tasks. And then we have to suffer through social times, like we end up with people with family.
Family gets the worst of it, right? Because you come home to them whether you want to or not every night and you're tired and you spend all your mental energy on maybe on a computer or on a spreadsheet and then you got these beautiful humans there and you don't have anything to give them. So engage with the people, automate the things, look into people's eyes.
Check in with them, make sure you're using the right tools in your daily work and life flow to automate things. There's usually an app for that. Can you get an app that will take some of that time away from what you spend on the thing and allow you to have a little more time with the people? And then here's the last.
I engage with dreams. And automate drudgery is we all have stuff we don't want to do. And that could range anywhere from, you know, doing your taxes, taking out the trash to paying off your student loans or whatever it is in your life, which is something you can't simply stop doing. But their drudgery is we have them. We got to do them.
But let's engage with the things that we're dreaming of we feel called to do. We have a vision for doing and make sure we automate those drudgery. Because let's face it, usually when a thing is a drudgery, usually there is someone else out there that is better at that task than we are anyways. Somewhere in the world, there's probably somebody that that really sparks them to do that thing.
They love it. And here you are trying to do it and you hate it, and it's taking you so long when you could just engage someone else to do it. And you might say, Yeah, but you know, I've got to spend money. I don't feel like I should, or I'm going to tell you, you know, wait, look at this stuff.
You spend money on every day. Wouldn't it be worth it to take some of these drudgery off your plate and engage in dreams? Your boss is not going to put that on your desk. Your clients are not going to call you and ask you to do your dreams. You got to do them yourself. What are the things that you're worst at you absolutely hate?
How can you offload those things and think of yourself as a steward of that task who needs to see to it that the task is done, but you don't have to be the one that directly does it. Can you steward those tasks while still stepping away from them? And then what would it take to pour some quality time into a vision project?
For yourself, something that is closely alig...

Buckle up, because today we're going to talk about something big, something I think is potentially life changing if you can grasp it and practice it. In the 2015 Journal of Experimental Psychology, there was a paper published called Knowledge Doesn't Protect Against Illusory Truth, and they use this term illusory truth throughout the paper.
And in the summary, they say this In daily life, we encounter false claims in the form of consumer advertisements political propaganda and rumors. Repetition may be one way that insidious misconceptions enter our knowledge base. The research on this illusory truth effect demonstrates that repeated statements are easier to process and subsequently are perceived to be more truthful than new statements.
The prevailing assumption in the literature had been that knowledge would constrain this effect, but what they found in their research was that contrary to prior suppositions, this occurred even when participants knew better. So in other words, if you hear it often enough, you start to believe it, even if you know better even if you have already encountered the correct information, the frequency at which you hear a thing will indoctrinate you and this is something we've known for a very long time.
In fact, this is a technique that's been used in brainwashing, indoctrination, and torture during times of war. We know that if something is repeated over and over again to you, eventually it will start to feel like truth. I don't want to talk about political agendas. I don't want to talk about consumerism. I want to talk about your language.
I want to talk about the words that come out of your mouth every day. I believe that your words really matter. I believe that the frequency of your statements matter. And I believe that we often employ a language of helplessness when we speak about our life and our experiences. I want you to think of the following statements and ask yourself, what do they all have in common?
I don't have enough time for that. I can't afford to buy that. I couldn't run as fast as that guy does. I can't hang out with my friends tonight. I have to work. I'll never make my boss happy. This this is the language of helplessness. What do you see in common in those statements? In common in those statements is this idea of what you are not able to do, your incapability, your helplessness.
It's the language of someone who would prefer things possibly to be otherwise. But does it have the power to change them? And when we use this language day after day, we are brainwashing ourselves and we're brain washing those around us to believe that there is no choice, that there are no options. And this is just how things are going to be.
This language of helplessness is, I think, probably the most prominent thing I hear when I talk to people about their struggles in life, whether they're talking about trying to start a business or chase a dream, build a healthy relationship, raise a child. I hear this kind of language all the time. I hear more often than not the statement.
I don't have the time when people are talking about their schedules, when they're talking about what they would like to do with their life. And this language of helplessness is almost always, almost without exception, a lie, an exaggeration. And not only that is a transfer all of responsibility off of ourselves. And it's an acceptance of slavery within our own mind.
Here is where I'm at. I cannot change it. I cannot escape it. So what can we do about this? What can we do about indoctrinating our self with this illusory truth, with this repetition in this propaganda that we are actually telling ourselves? I think this is one of the biggest things that you can do just in general in your mindset, is to change your language and adopt a language of agency.
Adopt a language of agency, because the truth is we cannot control everything, but we do have a lot of agency and agency, as Merriam-Webster defines it, is the capacity condition or the state of acting or of exerting power. You see, we are making choices on a daily basis. We are using our agency every single day, but taking responsibility for those choices, especially when things just don't feel like they're going the way that we prefer.
That's really challenging and honestly, it's a bit humbling. It is much easier to use a language of helplessness. So when we use a language of helplessness, I'm the prisoner, I am the victim. You should feel sorry for me, but when I use the language of agency, I am a potential source of change. I am a participant and I have power.
So let's look at those statements I made earlier and let's say them again in a language of agency. I don't have enough time for that. I would say I'm choosing to do something else with that. Time, because honestly, you can do a lot of things with your time. You have the same amount of time as anyone on the planet.
What are you doing with it? So saying I don't have enough time for that is just telling yourself you're helpless. So I am choosing to do something else with that time. I do have the time to do that. I'm just not going to or I can't afford to buy that. You know what I think I'm not interested in going into debt for that thing.
It's just not that important to me. I'm going to use my money in other ways. Maybe you're looking at someone else's skill and you're saying, I couldn't do that. I couldn't run as fast as that person does. You know what the truth is? You haven't trained hard enough to run that fast. That's what the truth is. As someone who grew up as an artist, I can't tell you the amount of times somebody has said to me, I could never do that when I was drawing or painting or something to that effect.
And not only is that not true, it's really insulting to the other people who are doing the thing. It's almost as if implying it wasn't your effort that allowed you to do this. You were just somehow magically born with a skill to do something I will never have the ability to do. And I've always thought, Sure, you could everybody could.
All you got to do is what I did. So please don't diminish the effort other people have put into things by saying I could never do that. Yes, you could. You are not dedicating yourself to do that, and it's OK to acknowledge that. And it's also important for you to note that there is potential for you to improve that skill and do what they're doing.
Acknowledge that it's not like you are inferior to everyone else. Now, here's where I want to pause and I do want to acknowledge the fact that we do have limitations, right? Having a language of agency isn't about fooling ourselves. Maybe you are a quadriplegic listening to this. Maybe you are somebody with health conditions that legitimately prevent you from doing a thing and you say to yourself, I should not be doing that.
Thing. Given my circumstances, I completely understand that there are going to be times where saying that is not something I can physically do. Is going to be a true statement. Those situations will be rare for most people, but if you have those limitations, understand them don't focus on them, focus on the things you have the agency in and the choices you can make.
Here's one I can't hang out with friends tonight. I have to work. Here's where we get mixed up. You think, Well, I have a job, I have a boss, I have a responsibility. This is true. But you can quit any time when you tell yourself, I can't quit because I've got to pay the bills. That is a lie.
You're choosing not to quit because you really want to pay the bills, but at any time you can absolutely walk away from everything. And I'm not saying that you should. I'm not saying that it is the right move to make. What I'm saying is that it is freeing in your mind to acknowl...

Some of you out there are thinking, well, I already take notes. And others are thinking, I hate taking notes. But what I can tell you for a fact is that all of you have a notes app already.
If you're listening to this, you have a notes app built in to whatever device it is that you use on a daily basis. Just about every computer phone tablet in the world all come preinstalled with the notes app. They assume you were going to need to take notes. But in what ways do you use your notes app? I want to challenge you with a couple of ways that I use mine, and I would love to hear your feedback on the ways that you employ a notes app to help you on a daily basis achieve your goals, your ambitions, and just be more productive in general.
So I personally am an iPhone user, but the principles I'm going to talk about in this, I have used in Evernote across multiple kinds of devices, including PCs. So it works in any notes app that I've ever used. I use notes in folder based segmentation, and so I will create folders for my notes and then have my notes under that folder.
And I'll tell you some of the folders that I currently have in my notes at the first folder and the one that I use the most often is called conversations. Inside of this folder is a note for every conversation, including phone call and sometimes in person, depending on the nature of the conversation that I'm having on a daily basis.
And this is a great record for me to go back and look at some of the important things that were said in conversations. Now I deal with client calls throughout the day and also with personal calls. And so it's important to me to not have to remember all of this stuff in my head. As soon as I'm given important information, I want to dump it somewhere so that I mitigate the risk of it just draining out of my phone ahead during the day.
So I want to dump it directly into my notes app and maybe from there it goes somewhere else, like into a project management tool. But first, it can go right into my notes app during the conversation, and I do this simply with a bullet list. I start a bullet list, and throughout the conversation I will mark out bulleted important things that I note.
And then if it's a client, I will take that note, copy and paste it into an email and just give them a summary of the conversation to clarify what it was that we discussed. Now, if it's a friend, they will not know. I'm taking this note, except they might know that I remember next time I see them, the information they gave me about the fact that their grandmother was sick or whatever.
Well, because I took the time to note it. I care about it. I want to be able to follow up on that. But I don't tell my friends and taking notes what we're talking on the phone. And I usually will not take notes if I'm somewhere in-person unless we're discussing a project because I do not want to have my phone out when I am face to face with a human being and having a conversation.
However, I may, when I leave that coffee meeting or whatever, pull out my notes app and take a minute before I drive away to note some of the things that they said so that I don't forget them. So, first of all, do I have conversations? And I use that when just about every single day. Another really useful folder I have is called Books.
Now I hope that you engage in reading books, whether it's through audio or just looking at or maybe you engage in reading articles, blog posts, something like that. In any case, if you're listening to this, there's a high chance that you are interested in bettering yourself. So you're probably looking at information about it. And the thing is, we get a lot of really good information coming into our head, through our eyes and our ears and whatnot.
But it's really hard to retain all of that. So if you have a note for each book that you read, you can mark down some of the high points, some of the things that struck you, whether it's notes to yourself about what you want to do based on what you read, or for me, a lot of times I just like to write down the really impactful things that I found in that book, things that really stuck out to me that I want to implement.
I'll put them into a bullet list in a note that has the title of that book and author, so that I can go back and find it at any time. And you can do this without even owning the book. You could just walk into a bookstore, sit down and with a notes app in a few minutes time, you can scan a book and really glean some important information.
You can take that note away with you and then you'll be able to reference where you found that. Who said that? Who was this quote from? And it's really nice to be able to do that. It also makes that reading process. It makes the retention of the information higher in your mind because you were writing it down. I personally have a poetry folder in my notes app I like to create and creating with words is important to me as an artist.
I create in many different ways, most of them visual, but sometimes I just want to write something interesting. Not boring, not commercial. I just want to sit down and write something that is creative. So I have a folder for myself to write poetry, to write stories, lyrics, anything that's coming to my mind that allows me to put my feelings and my experiences into a creative style note.
I have a folder in my notes app called Goals, and in this one I will create a note. Periodically. Sometimes I'll do this more than others depends on the phase I'm going through. In that moment, I will create a note that is simply the date of the time I'm making the note. So it just has the day, month, year of the note.
And then inside of that note I will put a very, very quick 5 to 10 bullet list of goals I have in that moment. And it's important to me not to think this through very hard. So what I do is just off the top of my head as quickly as possible. I put the five things that are the most important to me that day, and some of them may end up being long term, maybe that day I've been thinking about, you know, really in the long term, I want to, you know, write a book about this idea or maybe I'm thinking very short term, like I just really need to get this crack in the
windshield fixed for the car. I mean, anything from the very mundane to the big legacy building things, I will write them down just rapidly via bang, bang, bang in usually no more than five bullet lists. The thing that I find helpful about this is you can go back and you can track the things you're interested in and you know what you'll do over time.
If you start opening back up those goals notes and seeing what was it last year that was really important to me and that was consuming my thoughts in terms of goals. Did I forget all about that? Have I completely changed course? It gives yourself a self-assessment of sorts. And also, sometimes you can look back and just chuckle about it like, Oh yeah, that was apparently a really big deal to me there.
And it was I got it done. It wasn't that big of a deal, but that day just felt like it was the whole world. I think being able to see your goals over time, how they progressed, whether you've been pursuing them, is sometimes a good metric to help you evaluate your progress over time and the focus that you have on the things that really matter to you.
I also have a folder called People and in this folder I collect names of people. Names and helpful descriptions for me. So every day I'm meeting people, right? And you probably have this experience too. We get introduced to a lot of people and personally I am part of multiple organizations, either where I volunteer or maybe client organizations that I work with, or maybe just in the office space where I wo...

I want to talk about procrastination today, but I've been putting it off for weeks. No, I'm just kidding. You know, procrastination is usually a negative word. It gets a bad rap and quite honestly, for good reason. A lot of times we associate procrastination with being lazy or maybe being hesitant to do a thing and willing to jump in and commit.
But procrastination and the act of putting something off from its intended timing isn't always bad. And I want to talk about three cases in which I think it's okay and even good to purposefully procrastinate. So let's get started. The first thing is impact timing. Now, I call this impact timing because sometimes we are trying to accomplish something or we have an action planned and we get more information after we've planned it about how the timing of that action is going to affect the project or the desired outcome.
For example, let's say that you had a gift for somebody that you really cared about. You know, just thinking of you and wanting to get you something and you were going to give it to them at a particular time. But then you notice that they're preoccupied and busy and you think, you know, I'd rather give this to you and we have a minute and you can really enjoy it.
I think in a case where the impact will be greater at a different time, you want to be intuitive and time that impact to where it gets the desired results. So you may want to procrastinate the action of that thing until you can have the greatest impact, which is what I would call impact timing. So look for the timing of that impact and ask yourself, is now the best time?
And if not, maybe I can choose a better time later and I will get more for the effort. The second thing is what I'm going to call priority spotting. Now, this is really important, and if you're not familiar with the idea of priority, go back and listen to our episode on priority. I think it's really important for you to be aware of what your priority is in your day and your action.
And it doesn't matter if well, today you're working on a project that is very high priority. Or maybe you want to say today, you know, I'm with my family or and my family is high priority. You want to identify what is the priority in this scenario and say sometimes you can replace the current plan or the current action with something that's even higher priority.
Now, don't confuse this with something that feels more urgent. This is a really important distinction because sometimes we make our decisions based on that outside pressure to do a thing. That is not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is to look at what you have on your schedule and maybe you receive new information that indicates to you that there is a higher priority objective you could be putting your time into.
And these other things you had initially planned, they really could wait. Maybe they're not time sensitive and maybe they're not as important as the thing which has just come up in an easy example of that is, you know, if you were forced into a situation where there was an emergency, let's say you get a call and someone you really cared about had been in an accident, you might suddenly in your mind be able to re categorize your priorities in that moment and say, Well, I thought I had important work to do today, but I am not going to do that.
I'm going to go and be with this person. I care about. That is when our brain just kicks in for us and automatically reprioritize. But on a smaller and less urgent scale, I think there are ways you can be doing that on a daily basis to identify the really high value things, the things you care about, the things that impact your life the most, and sometimes procrastinate those lower value things that could be done any time they don't have to be right now.
And then the third thing is contemplating commitment. Now, I'm going to do something that might sound a little weird right off the bat. I'm going to tell you commitment. Maybe you should be a little hesitant on the commitment in some cases. So, for example, if you go shopping for a car, you know, historically, the classic idea of a car salesman is this person who is there on the lot to high pressure you into a purchase you're going to make today.
And maybe you've gone into this thinking, well, I really do need to make a purchase today. You know, I need to get this thing and maybe you're set to do it. But I would say contemplate your commitments if the thing you're about to do is going to engage you in some sort of a long term or high risk endeavor.
You may put that decision off for a little bit. And here is why. Just based on your mood, your activities, the information you have in that moment, maybe you don't have all the right data or maybe you're really not in a good headspace to be making this big life decision yet maybe somebody just proposed you or, you know, handed you a ring, or maybe you've been given a job offer.
And at first glance you think, absolutely, that's what I want to do. I would say maybe stop for a second, put that off for a minute. Let that commitment percolate in your mind. If that is something that you can do, maybe there's a deadline. But I would say for commitments, sometimes procrastinating, the decisions will help. Things bubbled to the surface that make better decision making.
So, for example, we might rethink how much money do I have in the bank? Maybe I don't need to make that purchase. How much do I really want to do this thing? Maybe that's not where I should be spending my time. Now, again, I want to caution you this can very easily be confused with overthinking, and that's not what I'm encouraging you to do.
I'm not encouraging you to sit around all day and not do things because you're thinking too hard about how important they might be in the long term. You want to be able to do things right. You want to be able to do things. We just don't want to jump in blind into big commitments. So when we are encouraged to do a thing, think about a salesman coming in, knocking on your door with a product.
You're probably not going to buy that right away. And that's a good thing because you don't know this person. You don't understand the product. When you have limited information and you're contemplating a big commitment, I think it's okay in most cases to procrastinate that decision and try to accumulate more information and maybe you can think of other really useful places you could procrastinate.

I would love to hear your comments on where do you think it's okay to procrastinate and win? On the other hand, do you think procrastination is really hurting your daily productivity or your your intentional time? I'd love to hear your feedback, your comments or criticisms. You can email me at theuppercaselife@gmail.com and I'll see you next time.

Some of you out there are listening to this right now and are in a state of feeling overwhelmed. And I'm going to define overwhelmed by the feeling that you are in over your head and you don't have the ability to rescue yourself in this moment.
Overwhelmed comes from a nautical idea. If you can just make a mental picture of high waves and rough seas and being stranded out there in the water with no sight of land and feeling as though each new wave is just coming over your head. You can't stay above the water. You can't catch your breath, and there's just no way out of this.
That is the summary of where we came up with this word and this idea of being overwhelmed. The end result of being overwhelmed for too long is that you just drowned in a very realistic sense. And I think when we're in the middle of trying something difficult or in a task or an endeavor that we feel incapable of completing, it does feel in a way like we are drowning in our life.
So I want to talk about what do you do when you recognize that feeling of being overwhelmed? How do you identify it and what steps do you take once you've identified it? In research, we've determined that, you know, some of the prolonged states of being overwhelmed come with just high anxiety, with being agitated or angry for reasons you don't know why, we're feeling extremely lethargic, like you don't want to get out of your house or you don't want to wake up in the morning.
Maybe it just feels like everything is too much. These are some signs that maybe you're dealing with this sense of being overwhelmed. So what do you do? What can we do when we are overwhelmed by the situations we face in life? Well, first thing I want to encourage you to do is pause. Pause. Now, this might seem elementary, but look, when you identify that there is a problem, let's say that you were driving a vehicle and suddenly you heard a very disturbing sound coming from your car and you don't know what it is.
We don't want to continue working on it as if everything is fine. We want to acknowledge something is not right here and we need to stop for a second and we need to assess the situation. So when you realize I am feeling overwhelmed, take a short pause, because if you determine you are just going to plow through that moment, what you may do is inadvertently go further down the wrong path.
Maybe you were doing something which is causing damage to your situation, and this feeling of being overwhelmed is an indicator of that. So take a pause and don't stop everything you're doing in life necessarily. But you need to take at least a few minutes out and assess the situation. In addition to pausing, the first thing I would tell you is you need to check your perspective.
Now, if you look up advice on being overwhelmed, the first thing you're going to see is people telling you, Well, you're doing too much and you need to say no to more things. And I'm going to tell you, I disagree with that. I don't think that that is always the case. I think that sometimes we are not overwhelmed because actually the waves in life are too high for us.
Sometimes we are overwhelmed because of our perspective. So you've paused. Now I want you to check your perspective. I want you to see what is it that I'm feeling? What am I thinking of this situation right now? And is my perspective accurate? And in order to assess that realistically, you might need to bring someone else into the situation who does not share your perspective.
Someone who can look at it, listen to your explanation in the way that you're feeling about it, and who can give you feedback realistically. The reason this is important is because overwhelmed is a feeling. It may be an indication that you are doing too much. It may be, but it may not be because it is a feeling and not a fact.
And so we want to check that feeling against reality and see, is our perspective accurate in this scenario? So you've pause. You're looking at your perspective. The next thing I want you to do is look at your plan, and this might be a good time to ask. You do have a plan, right? Because the fastest way to feeling overwhelmed is to not have a plan, to not have any idea of what it takes to accomplish this.
How long it requires and how you're going to go about doing that. So make sure you do have a plan in place. You've got things that you're working towards and hopefully you understand what they are and how you're hoping to achieve them in your plan might need to change. If you're feeling overwhelmed, maybe after pausing and reflecting a little bit, you realize things are not going according to plan.
Something is flawed in the plan here, and maybe we need to rethink the plan. If I just plow on down this path of doing what I'm doing while feeling overwhelmed, maybe what I'm doing is ineffective and my plan requires some tweaking. So look at your plan. Are you following the plan? Is the plan a good plan? Is it still working?
Does it need some change? Your plan is going to be the number one thing that helps keep that anxiety away. Because, look, if you know the direction you're going, you might be further away than you want to be from the destination. But at least you have an idea of how to get there. If you were out in the middle of that ocean of whatever your task is and you don't know how to get out of it and you don't have a plan, you have to make one.
Otherwise, you could be going in circles out there and you could be spending a lot of energy and not getting a lot of return on that energy to make sure that your plan is good. And there again, you might want to bring someone else in to look at it and give you their opinion to make sure that that plan is going to be effective.
So we've paused. We've checked our perspective. We've checked the plan. Now I want to check our performance. And here's where I'm going to challenge you when you talk about being overwhelmed and you express the difficulties of life, a lot of times what's going to happen is people are going to relate to that. They're going to encourage you to get out of that.
They're going to encourage you to relax more. And maybe those are good suggestions. But let's just be honest. Sometimes we don't want to have to do the hard thing. Sometimes we get into something and we really want the end results of it, but we don't want the actual sweat and the difficulty involved with accomplishing it. And we got to be realistic.
If we're not performing well, then we're not going to be able to efficiently account the things in our plan, and we're going to start feeling behind. We're going to start feeling overwhelmed. And the truth is, we just need to perform at a higher level. Now, that doesn't mean that you just take things as they are and you try harder.
I wouldn't say that that's the best way to go about it. I would say that you want to check what is your body feeling? What is your brain feeling? Are you operating at peak performance levels? You're going to try to do something hard here. Are you functioning well? Are you drinking enough water? Are you eating at the proper times every day?
Are you getting proper nutrition into your body? Are you getting out? Are you getting sunshine? Fresh air? Are you moving? Are you exercising? All of these things. Even if your job is in front of a computer for 6 to 8 hours a day, all of these things are really vital to helping your body and your mind perform at peak levels.
If you're not doing these things, if you're eating a bunch of junk food, if you're sleep, schedule is way off. If you are not taking care of the resources inside of your body, your performance is going to drop. And then in a in a sort of weird cycle, you're going to be pushed into more of those bad habits.
You're going to feel like, well, I'm really busy now...

You know, for a lot of what we do in life, there are definite start and end moments. And you have a task list. You check things off the projects. Eventually close and you shut everything down. But then there are some really long term endeavors.
There are some big commitments that you make in life that may not have such a neat ending. Maybe they have no foreseeable ending, and they are just what appears to be indefinite. And when you hear that you may have a resistance in your mind and think, well, I don't want any indefinite obligations, I wouldn't take those on. That just sounds like a bad idea.
And I think well, for most things, that's true. And if you were just signing up for something with no intent of ever finishing it for a lot of things, that would be a bad situation. But there are other other things in your life that require that long term commitment and thinking of things like family, things like careers, things like roads to recovery.
If you're struggling with addiction and these things don't really have a foreseeable expiration date, you're just jumping into this and you're planning to do this for the foreseeable future. If you have ever stood at the altar and gotten married to a significant other, you probably made some sort of really long term commitment. And I bet you didn't put a time on it.
Right. And you probably didn't say for the next five years at least. And then after that, we'll see. No, we commit to these things long term, but then sometimes we get into them and we think, wow. Forever is a long is a long time. So how do you stay motivated? How do you stay everyday really invested in enjoying long term commitments?
Here are some ways. I think you can do that. These are attitudes you can take that will help you in these long term commitments to not lose joy over time and also help you to just continue to be invested and not be bored. We have a pretty short attention span these days and we like to be jumping on to the next thing as soon as possible, and it's only getting more and more that way.
The more that our media and the things that we intake are very fast and rapid paced, and yet there are still some long term commitments we're taking in. It's it feels harder now to do them. So here are a couple of thoughts for you. First of all, and this might sound weird, but wear it like a badge. And here's what I mean by that.
And I'm going to draw for this one off of the recovery community. So when you are a struggling addict and you're recovering, you might go to a group, you might be acknowledged in that group, and you might start on a journey of saying, I'm going to be sober from whatever. The thing was that you were struggling with addiction from.
And you're going to identify as an addict who is now going to be sober. Now, when does sobriety end? Well, hypothetically, never. Right. You're constantly on that journey for the rest of your life, which is a really long time. But you aren't encouraged to disguise that fact. In fact, part of being able to see the journey through is acknowledging it and saying, Yeah, that's me.
This is what I'm doing. I'm not ashamed of it. I'm not trying to hide it from the world. This is a part of my experience and this is a part of my identity where it's like a badge. And I think when you when you do that, say you stand up in front of an altar and you get married.
You put it on your finger. Most of the time, you literally wear it like a badge so that you can show people here, look, I've made a long term commitment to somebody. I'm no longer on the market. I'm not available anymore. I think wearing it like a badge is very important. It ties it in to our identity and it says to the world, I'm not ashamed of this, and maybe this isn't the choice that you guys have made, but I've made it, and I'm seeing this through and I'm actually quite happy about it.
I think that that self-talk and saying this is something I am proud of, I want people to see this about me is really important because it ties it into your identity and makes you feel a sense of pride for what you're trying to accomplish. And then the second thing, learn to level it up. I mean, nobody wants to play a game in which you never improve.
If you're playing a video game or if you're playing a board game, you constantly want something else, right? You want to get to the next level. You want to get more coins or something like that. So how can you level up in your long term endeavors? And I think this is where in particular when I think about marriage, this hits me.
I think a lot of times people are trying to level it up to find a partner and then they get married and they stop trying to level it up because they think, well, it's over, game's over. But I think what a sad way to look at your life, right? Like, game's not over now. You got to level it up from here.
So that doesn't mean sit on a couch and get fat because there's nothing left to do. It means, how can I take this endeavor to the next level? How can I make this even more awesome? Which for me, isn't that hard to do because I know more today than I did yesterday, so I should be able to improve it, right?
In what ways can you level up some of your long term endeavors, maybe in your career path? You're looking ahead and thinking this career is going to see me through the rest of my life. Perhaps. How can you learn a new skill? How can you take the skills you have to the next level? How can you use them creatively to enhance that vocational realm and just benefit everyone involved?
Level it up. All right. Number three. Recognize the mile markers? I've been on some really long road trips. We traveled a lot when I was a kid. And as a kid, you just think that the trip will never end. And, you know, there's that cliche of the kids always asking, how much longer are we there yet? And I think as a kid, I recall that we didn't have GPS, but my dad taught me how to read mile markers.
And so if I knew where we were on the highway, I could calculate how far we'd already gone by the mile markers, and then I could see where we were to the next place that we were going. Now, the journey never really ends, right? You're always driving somewhere new the next day, but in this way, watching the mile markers, there's this sense of motion, motion, motion, motion, motion and movement where I just sort of squish those two words together.
And it came out as motion. I'm going to use that. So you have motion and movement that you can sense by the mile markers, which is vital in a long term endeavor, because sometimes, man, you get on that highway and you're driving and you have 400 miles to go and it feels like hours have passed and all you see is the same highway.
But if you're watching those mile markers, you know, I'm a little further down this road. I am making progress and that's really vital. So how can you look for mile markers in your long term endeavors? And it might be different depending on what endeavor we're talking about, but make sure that you can find and identify ways to show how far you've gone.
Maybe they're natural. Maybe you just have reoccurring reminders of how far you've gone. I have been trying to learn a language and have been using the Duolingo app along with YouTube and everything else. But the app tracks how many days in a row I have been learning in, and so I can see that number of days and it makes me feel a sense of accomplishment and it reminds me how much effort and time I put into this.
I also use habit trackers so I can go in at the end of the day and track my habits for the day to just see how frequently I'm doing these things in. Man, when you go back and you look at a tracked series of habits over the course of two, three, four years, that is really revealing. And it'...

In fact, maybe you've thought of it a lot, but you haven't felt able to actually accomplish it yet. You've got the thing in your head. All right. Now think of the reasons why you feel like you can accomplish it. Maybe it's time, maybe it's money, maybe it's the environment that you're living in or your lack of access to resources of some sort.

Now, now that you've thought of all that, ask yourself, how does that feel to me right now? How do I feel when I think about this thing that I want to do? Am I feeling sad? Am I feeling frustrated, angry, disappointed, discouraged? Now I'm going to challenge you with something. I'm going to say this, and your immediate reaction is probably going to be, that's not true.

You can just imagine a line of cars going through a checkpoint, the car at the very front. That is the priority. He passes through the next car becomes the priority and so on and so forth. Now, I was actually in a situation the other day where I was in traffic and somebody came around me on this one lane line of cars and they went on the shoulder and cut in front of me in line.

And I remember feeling slighted and frustrated and like I was the priority. And then this person then cut in front of me and they took priority over me in this line of cars, because I can exist in this space or they can exist in this space, but we can't coexist in the same space. That's called a car wreck.

And the word priority up until the 1900s was always singular. In the 1900s, we started pluralizing the word. And today we start talking about having lists of priorities so that if I talk to most people, I will get them to list me off five, ten, sometimes 20 priorities. And that's what we think they are. We think it's a list of important things which in a sense a priority is definitely an important thing.

However, what we are missing here is if you have two of them that you were trying to put into the same spot, that's called a car wreck. You can have a list of ten. Equally important priorities. How are you going to know which one to work on? How are you going to know which one to give your mental energy in your effort to when you're scheduling your time, you have to have a priority, and that one's going to be the one at the front of the line.

How would it change your life? How would it change the way you work and the way that you structure your time with your family and the way that you pursue your ambitions? If you started using priority only in the singular, what if you had a list of things to do? Yeah, you can have 25 things on the list to do, but the one at the top is the only one we call a priority.

And when that one has passed through the checkpoint or that one has been addressed, then we will talk about the next priority. But we cannot have a list of ten equally important things. Have you ever felt paralyzed by your goals? You looking at your goals like these are all really good things. I really want to accomplish all of them.

How am I going to do this? I think that paralyzing feeling comes from the fact that we're trying to make everything special, and if everything is special, then really nothing is special. We've got to give the top spot to something. And that's why I say you don't have priorities. You have a priority. Have you identified it today? What are you going to spend the next hour working on?

What are you going to spend the next day putting your energy into? That's your priority. Be careful about putting too many things on that list and then finding yourself in a situation where you can never feel like you've accomplished your goals because the priority list is too big. You just need to deal with the next thing in line.

Love to hear your feedback, your comments, your criticisms. Leave me a comment. Leave me a like. Tell me what you like to hear us talk about on here. And I'd be happy to answer any of your questions until then. I'll see you next time.

Have you ever felt like being focused in the fast paced world we live in is nearly impossible. Well, you're not alone. I've definitely felt that way. And I think all of us have at some point or another. But focus isn't impossible for you. It can be done. In fact, you have to cultivate focus if you're going to do the best things in life.

So let's talk about focus. I think intuitively we all feel like we know what focus means, but I want to define focus as where the attention has been devoted. And I really early on here want to dispel a myth that you are excluded from the category of people who can focus because of your personality type or maybe because of a disorder that you have.

That's just not true. Now, yes, there are things about you that will impact the way that you focus, but you can focus. Absolutely, you can focus. And I want you to think of focus as a muscle that needs to be worked out. And what happens is so often we wait until we need to use it and then we are discouraged that we're weak, but we're not really practicing it any other time.

And so we're not ready to focus when we really need to focus. So if you can think of it as a muscle, you're working out and think of the practice you're putting into it, just like going to the gym and improving something about yourself physically only this is in your mind. Then I would say the first thing you need to do is just start practicing.

And a key here is to be easy on yourself, right? Go into the practice understanding that it's not something you've mastered yet and being completely okay with that some of the time. The way that we approach focus is we wait until we desperately need it because we've got something really important to accomplish and then we can't focus very well.

We feel like we're failing internally were hard on ourselves and all of this creates a loop that really it makes it even harder to focus. So start by practicing focus on things that are not super high value. Maybe take some time on your lunch break or in the evening in practice. Focus in on a thought, on an activity, or on a conversation with another person.

And what I mean by this is just make that time intentional. So that you set aside time where you're going into this, knowing that you are going to put aside distractions and you're going to focus on this thing. It doesn't have to be for a very long period of time. Start small. Give yourself five minutes to focus on something just uninterrupted and zeroed in.

And if you practice this over a period of time, I guarantee you it's going to start getting easier. So exercise that ability to focus and be careful about multitasking. I think we all know by now that multitasking is, you know, risky in terms of you don't get much done when you're trying to multitask. Sometimes, though, our focus does need to be divided.

However, I think we really need to be intentional about when and where that is going to be the case. So for example, if you were in a social environment and you were in a crowd of people all talking and chatting, you are going to have a lot of external stimuli and probably focus in allowed area. Like that is going to be difficult, but you expect that because that's what the environment is for and you probably don't go there and try to set up and do important deep work while people are constantly talking to you and laughing and asking questions.

So just multitask intentionally so that when you need to do important work, you're ready to set aside the other tasks and focus as somebody who's a photographer and has worked in video. You know, when we talk about focus, I think of an image and I think of the fact that almost any time you run across an image, there's going to be an area that's in focus and there's going to be areas that are not.

You almost never find an image where everything is in focus all at one time. And the same is true with life. You may be focusing on a task, but there's still things happening in your peripheral, and you can't always help that. In fact, that's just life. So those things can be there. They just need to remain out of focus.

You have to be okay with letting there be things present that are not in focus. And that's really hard for some of us. In fact, I think that's one of my biggest struggles is because I feel like if it's present, I should be giving it attention. So be really careful about multitasking. Be willing to leave things in the environment that you do not give your focus to let them stay blurry.

It's totally okay. And then later you can readjust your focus to them. Here's something that's really helped me, and that is meditation. Now, I know some of you are probably rolling your eyes at that. Like I tried meditation and, you know, it was it was cool, but it was difficult. And I didn't I didn't really enjoy it. Meditation especially if you're not used to it, can be really frustrating, actually, because sitting down and being still isn't something we're taught to do very often.

But that's part of practicing focus. And if you can build that discipline of being motionless, of being quiet, and of just being present with your thoughts instead of acting on them, it may help train you to calm some of that anxiety of feeling that you always have to respond to those stimuli, whether they're in your head or outside of your head.

Because, I mean, everything is coming at us all day long, right? We're in a fast paced world with notifications and things happening, and sometimes it feels like we're required to give all of those things a response. And in meditation, what you're asked to, depending on the type of meditation in one similarity, is that usually you are being mindful, you are being still and quiet, you are not responding to the external stimuli or the internal thoughts in your head.

And you know what? When you do that, sometimes it feels like you have a tornado in your brain. And my suggestion to you is it's okay, let there be a tornado in your brain. You don't have to fix it. That's part of cultivating focus, is that you can't control everything, but you can choose where you're going to dedicate your attention.

And then the last thing for today I want to encourage you with it's your phone. You know, I was going to go here, right? So I was looking at research from like back at  and in , surveys found that % of people admitted that notifications were leading them to procrastination and decreased focus. % of people and that individuals wasted nearly  hours of work time a week just checking notifications on their devices.

That's crazy. Think of all the cool things you could learn  hours a week. You could learn an instrument. You could learn a new skill.  hours a week. Just checking notifications on your devices. That's crazy. And I would say there are two solutions here, right? One is that you can turn your phone off when you're doing something.

I know this might come as a surprise to you, but there actually is a power option on your phone and it powers off. Probably you haven't powered it off in a while. Most of us don't. But you can. You can totally do that. So power off your phone or turn off your notifications. How many of those really are necessary?

Do you need those notifications? There are very few apps that should have your attention. I don't leave my notifications on for my emails. I'm going to pull up my computer and check them when I need to. I don't want emails coming straight to me at any time of day, and neither should you. Don't allow the world full access to your life, to your brain, to your focus.

And don't be discouraged if you're not able to focus...