How to stay focused at work with Phil Nayna, Life & Performance Coach & Founder of Absolute Mind + Body

Amid a proliferation of workplace tech platforms, Unily reports 77% of UK employees consider notifications from digital tools distracting. Despite being valuable in many areas, clearly workplace tech is hindering focus & productivity. 

So, I wanted to hear from an expert on how to stay focused at work. Phil Nayna is the Founder of Absolute Mind + Body: a coaching consultancy supporting businesses to build high-performing teams, resilient teams. Having trained in performance psychology, neuroscience, and a range of mindfulness techniques, Phil works with leaders & their teams to unlock untapped performance potential. 

Keep listening to hear Phil’s advice on how to build sustainable focus, make the transition from busy to effective, and what to do to manage your energy, so you can stay focused for longer.

Phil’s advice:

• To be focussed, you can’t be busy
• Avoid distractions; all your energy and attention need to be directed to one thing
• It takes energy to suppress all the small details and distractions
• If there are things you tend to do every day, automate them so you don’t have to keep making small decisions
• Practise quick 2-3 minute meditations to clear your mind before each important activity
• If your mind is quieter, decisions will be clearer
• Maintain your conviction about the core belief/mission of your business while you are undertaking minor activities - this belief will help you focus on them
• Doing something you care about releases dopamine which brings more motivation and focus
• It’s important that you take care of yourself physically 
• Hours of sleep before midnight are more valuable than those after
• Accept that you won’t be 100% focussed all day every day; a good aim would be 2 x 2-hour sessions a day of really focussed deep work; the more trivial tasks can fill in the rest of the day
• Be disciplined about avoiding distractions during those 2-hour sessions
• Imagine that you only have 3 hours a day to do what matters - this will show you what’s important and what isn’t
• Concentrate only on the revenue-creating tasks
• To avoid procrastination, you must 
  • Believe in what you’re doing 
  • Address the fear which is preventing you doing the task 
  • Be clear in your head about why it needs doing and how to do it

FF&M enables you to own your own PR & produces podcasts. 
Recorded, edited & published by Juliet Fallowfield, 2023 MD & Founder of PR & Communications consultancy for startups Fallow, Field & Mason.  Email us at hello@fallowfieldmason.com or DM us on instagram @fallowfieldmason. 

FF&M recommends: 

• LastPass the password-keeping site that syncs between devices.
• Google Workspace is brilliant for small businesses
• Buzzsprout podcast 'how to' & hosting directory
• Canva has proved invaluable for creating all the social media assets and audio bites.

MUSIC CREDIT Funk Game Loop by Kevin MacLeod.  Link &  Licence

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to season 11 of How To Start Up, the podcast helping you start and scale your business with advice from entrepreneurs on what to do now, next, or never. This season, we'll be hearing about all things productivity from amazing entrepreneurs sharing how they've hacked theirs. Hosted by me, Juliet Fallowfield, founder of the B Corp certified PR communications and podcasting consultancy, Fallow, Field & Mason. Our mission is to enable you to master your own storytelling, whether that be via PR or podcasting, all with a long term view.

 Amid a proliferation of workplace tech platforms, Unily reports 70 percent of UK employers consider notifications from digital tools distracting. Despite being valuable in many areas, clearly workplace tech is hindering focus and productivity at times. With this in mind, I wanted to hear from an expert on how to stay focused at work.

Phil Nayna is a founder of Absolute Mind and Body,a coaching consultancy supporting businesses to build high performing and resilient teams. [00:01:00] Having trained in performance psychology, neuroscience, and a range of mindfulness techniques, Phil works with leaders and their teams to unlock untapped performance potential.

Keep listening to hear Phil's advice on how to build sustainable focus. Make the transition from busy to effective. And what to do to manage your energy so you can stay focused for longer.

 Hi Phil, thank you so much for joining How to Start Up today.

It's great to have you on the show. Before we get into the detail on all things focus, it'd be wonderful if you could introduce a bit about yourself and the business that you started.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me first of all, and nice to meet you properly today. My name is Phil, I'm a performance coach and the founder of a company called Absolute Mind + Body. I started the business about seven years ago ex corporate person myself.

So I did 12 years sales leadership before I set up the business. I guess the initial idea was a corporate wellness company. So we would take wellness services into corporates. So we did that for about two and a half years. And then when COVID hit, we [00:02:00] had a real shift. And at that point I retrained and I trained as a leadership coach and transformation coach. And the business today has evolved as I've evolved. So primarily what I do now is I go into my old world, I coach sales leaders one on one and I coach their teams in groups but I don't teach them sales, I teach them the psychology of performance, so I help them understand what's happening in their mind. And how their own psychology is impacting how they perform. 

 The psychology of why they say they want something, but are unable to execute on it, why they say they don't want these behaviors anymore, but they still end up executing on those old behaviors. Most people selling to those teams are sales trainers and saying, okay, let me teach you how to sell. I'm kind of stepping out a little bit and saying, actually, if we really want to drive performance, what we need to look at is the psychology a high performance, 80 percent psychology, and maybe 20 percent skill, particularly if you're working with skilled workers. I guess it's kind of been born through my own [00:03:00] desire to understand my own psychology. So a lot of the research I've done, a lot of the courses I've done, a lot of the books I've read have really been around, like, what are the things that I need to understand that I need to learn about how my mind works so that I can focus more, so I can feel more motivated, so I can manage emotions better. And then I've just kind of packaged those things up into courses, which I now take to the corporates and deliver on site.

It's amazing because what you're saying is what every founder needs and you say leader, everyone says when you start a business, whether you like it or not, 95 percent of your job is sales. You could be a jewellery maker, but you still have to sell a product to have a business to stay alive. 

You're juggling so many different balls at any different point. And for me, efficiency, process, productivity, I, I've got OCD. I love a spreadsheet. I kind of caught myself a year ago going, hang on, we are really efficient and we are very process driven. And if we're still feeling a bit panicked, how busy we are, it's not right.

And I don't want to live like this. And this is not [00:04:00] what life should be like and something has to change. this year,

We've actually been able to take a breath and like actual physical breath, and this is where this season's been so interesting for me because it's all about productivity, but everyone I've spoken to is like, mm mm. That's a bad word. Don't push productivity on people because it pushes you to do more.

And actually that is a lot of pressure and something we want to avoid. So when I was looking at our questions it was like, focus, this could be really helpful. Please can you teach us everything that you know in half an hour?

Probably not. But could define what focus means to you?

 I would say focus is, the ability to have all of your attention and energy on one thing. So in the workshop that I do around focus, I deliver it as a definition, but I also deliver itas a equation. And I say, focus is essentially attention minus distraction. So it's just to really kind of make it simple. It's just having all your attention on one thing. And I think particularly for founders, [00:05:00] I think we're trying to do so many different things all at once. And what happens is we end up being busy. And overwhelmed, but we're not focused. 

 I don't think you can be busy and focused

at the same time because focus is doing one thing. 

 People might be wondering, well, why, if I can multitask, why shouldn't I, I can get loads of things done at once and I really recently learned that multitasking is bad. And actually, if you do one thing and do it really well, you'll do it better. You'll enjoy it more. You'll get in the flow state.

You almost get into that zone of like, like. You are laser focused on something. And I've even seen it in my team who two of them have never worked for anybody else. They came straight out of uni into the business and working hybrid, remote, you know, things that they've taken, not for granted, but even they crave that laser focus on something

time on stuff and we tried time blocking. We tried like having the zoom in the background. So we're all in a remote office together and it keeps us a bit more accountable, but I love that feeling when you come out of something and you've thought about nothing else other [00:06:00] than fixing that one problem or doing that one thing, which feels like such a luxury when you're running a company, but is that correct?

Should we strive to do one thing at a time?

Yeah. So I mean, for a couple of reasons like firstly, if we're trying to do many things at one time, you're going to make really small progress on all of them. If you think about, have you, in fact, have you read the book essentialism, Greg McCurran,

Yes.

You probably remember on the front cover, he's got that picture and he's kind of got like busy on the left and it's a small circle with lots of little bits of energy coming out of this circle and then on the right, it's focused and it's the same circle, but with one straight line. And that's the difference really. Like you can choose to be busy and multitask. And make really small progress on everything, or you can choose one thing and you can make real progress on one thing. There's science behind this as well. 

So in fact, I'll start from the beginning. When you focus on something, your brain has to suppress other brain regions to allow you to focus on that thing. You have to suppress the parts of your brain that [00:07:00] are designed to kind of like pick up on. So that you can make sense of stuff, you have to suppress that to focus on something and that's a real high energy activity and every time you switch tasks, you'll have to do that whole process again. So every time you go from one thing to the next, to the next, the next, you're doing that whole process again. So you're, you're using so much energy.

So you're 

Every time, 

Redownloading the files every time you 

every time you've got to keep, you've got to keep doing it. I shared this in the workshop that I do around focus. I'll do this by question.

 How much do you think the brain weighs as a percentage of total body weight?

Oh, I think the fact you're asking the question, it means it's quite a lot.Two percent.

Oh, Okay.

So two percent of our, total body weight. There's a part of the brain that is called the executive function. And that's the part of the brain that does the thinking that does the focusing that does the decision making that part of the brain is 4 percent of our total brain. So 4% total brain is, is the active part of the [00:08:00] brain. The rest of it is subconscious. The whole brain is 2 percent of our total body consumption. Okay, so, so we're using a very small part of the brain, it weighs such a very small amount of our total body weight. Yet, our brain is responsible for 20 percent of our total body energy consumption.

Ah.

So the implication of that is thinking, focusing, decision making that that's a high energy activity, switching tasks, high energy activity.

Let's think like in an example, when you've got a big decision to make, or when you do manage to get into those deep focus work blocks and you have, maybe you've got, you do two or three in a day, it's quite exhausting, right? You're, you're tired, you're tired after.

I heard this thing about decision fatigue, and this is why successful entrepreneurs lay out the clothes the night before, because they just can't have another decision the next day. If they can save themselves a decision. And I actually caught myself, I love an analogy, and as you've mentioned before, I'm moving house tomorrow.

And I got Thursday, Friday, I was so in the zone and I was packing per [00:09:00] room, per box, labeling, inventory, everything. And I got so knackered by Sunday that I was literally walking from room to room, just, randomly putting random things in boxes and I said to Mum, apologies in advance, you're going to find some bleach next to some sports kit, next to something like all system got broken and it was because I was tired and I wasn't able to focus and I wasn't doing it properly and it wasn't as enjoyable.

it's that really having to concentrate and put the energy towards the concentration in advance, I suppose of going, right, this is going to need some brainpower. I guess that's why they call it brain power. It takes up a lot of energy.

What, what you, what the bit you said about the, like a lot of successful people, they'll plan what they're going to wear the night before. And they do that with lots of decisions, it won't be just what they wear it'll be what they eat. It will be their schedule. The schedule will be the same every day. It's just kind of taking out the extra energy required to make those decisions. 

anything that you do on repeat, just automate it. If it's something that you do every day, [00:10:00] automate it. So there's no decision. 

It could be technology or it could, it could be as simple as what time you go to the gym, you know,

if you're, if you're like, spend the whole day thinking, Oh, am I going to go at lunchtime or am I going to go at 4 PM that's just energy that you could be using for something else.

Um, Waste time on worry. And it's like, don't waste time on moving things around, or as you said, I got to a point where I felt like I was beholden to clients and the journalists that I was going to see. So I spent the week running around London. I was like, no, no, I'm going to go back to my Shangri La self.

That was no meeting Mondays, work from home Wednesdays, free for all Fridays. I can't remember the other two for the Thursdays and the Tuesdays, but it meant It was a blanket rule. I knew I could look forward to Monday because I had no meetings. I could just get things done. Work from home Wednesday meant podcast recordings and I'd batched them.

So I find batch workings really helped me with focus and then I get to enjoy it more and I know already what is happening tomorrow because it's the same thing every week, so that's really helpful. I was going to say, are there any other specific techniques that you use to stay focused [00:11:00] during your working day?

 I have practices and rituals that I start the day with which would look like reviewing my goals is probably the biggest one. I think the reason why most people lose focus or struggle to stay in focus blocks is they forget why they're doing it.

Yeah, so it's opening Instagram, looking for something once you're in it, you see the notification, you get distracted and you forgot what you went into Instagram to look for. 

Exactly. Yes, it's exactly that it's the same thing you sit down to your desk You often people open their laptop without thinking about what they're about to do. So they just get drawn into everything that's incoming, like all the emails are incoming. And essentially my view is if you start your day,  answering email, you're essentially just ticking off other people's to do lists.

You're being reactive, not proactive. 

 That's That's other people saying, Hey, can you do this? Hey, can you do that? And you're not actually moving any closer towards your goals. So for me, a big part is just reminding yourself at the beginning of the day, what is [00:12:00] the big goal you're chasing? What are the things you need to get done this week? What are the things you need to get done this month and just making sure you're just really, you're intentional.

So one of the things I'm doing now is before I open my laptop, I'll just open my notebook first and revisit my intentions for the day before I look at the, before I open the laptop. 

Well, I was going to say your inbox is like an ant's nest and people who have in notifications on their email, like you're torturing yourself. Like we all know there's going to be another email. We don't need a ding to tell us there'll be an email. And I mean, there's something that I've managed to find on Apple that I've set a couple of key clients as VIP.

So I only get a notification if they email and it's very rare that they do.

And I don't have. Any other notifications and actually sitting next to a friend that has WhatsApp notifications on it gives me anxiety. I'm just like, I can't do it. It's just not, not for me.

It's so rare as well. My experience is is so rare that any email can't wait an hour.

If it's urgent, they'll phone you.

They'll call you. Yeah. But other other things that I use I have a [00:13:00] practice that I call clearing the space which is actually one of the first tools that I learned when I retrained as a coach and it's a mindfulness exercise and it's like a transition meditation. So I use it in between tasks, in between meetings, and essentially it's just a two to three minute meditation. You close your eyes, you quieten the mind and you essentially, as you quieten the mind, there's a visualisation that I do, where you see your thoughts as clouds. And on your outbreath, you let the cloud disappear and you do that a few rounds as thoughts come up, you watch it, you observe it, you let it disappear on the outbreath, do that a few times until your mind's a bit quieter. And when your mind's a bit quieter, you then, what's my intention for the next 60 minutes? What do I need to do? Who am I speaking to now? What do they need? And you just kind of really set an intention in your mind before you go into the next activity. And it just avoids that wasteful kind of like first 10 minutes when you open the laptop. 

 Or the first five minutes of a meeting,[00:14:00] obviously there's times where small talk's appropriate, but sometimes like it can be 15 minutes before you get to, okay, what are we here to talk about? Giving yourself a few minutes before it just means that you're just a bit more dialed in

and that you're, you're intentional with that next interaction.

 the thing is, there's always going to be more things you can do and if people, when they start business in any job, you can always do more. And for me in communications and podcasting, it's, with OCD, it's not a happy marriage in the sense that you can always pitch another angle, find another journalist to talk to.

You have to know when off is, and when you've done enough, and I think that's where you can get distracted because you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed that you've got all these other things to do. You can spend your time going around and around in circles. So given you want to be more focused, and I think focus would lead to output and better energy.

And I've been told not to use the word productivity a number of times now, but you will enjoy the work more. You'll get distracted less. The result will be better. And then you free up more time if you need more [00:15:00] time. And that's why I think every founder is after is how to magic another eight hours into the day.

But going into that, okay, I'm going to spend my time, but I'm going to spend it wisely. What is my priority here? And what you said about quietening the mind, is meditation a big part of your practice?

Huge part of my practice. I'd say it's probably the thing that has impacted me more than anything else

How come? 

As you develop a mindfulness practice, I think that your mind is quieter which means that your decision making is clearer it makes you much more aware of how the 

thoughts that you're

thinking or paying attention to are impacting your mood, your motivation and your energy. I do mindfulness meditation, which is just observing the mind.

 The more skilled you get at that, the more you understand where your psychology is

impacting you. So you can notice the patterns as they're arising and put an end to the pattern and [00:16:00] pay attention to a different thought, which is going to be more useful for you.

But I think without practice, that is really difficult to do. 

 is it almost like upgrading your operating system of your laptop, refreshing it with a cleaner, smoother, well oiled machine, where it's, it's tapping into the right things rather than the wrong things. So I feel like when I meditate, it kind of cleans out my brain.

It gets rid of all the peripheral things. I did it regularly for six months, morning and afternoon for 20 minutes. And it was a mantra in my head and I'd come out of it being like, well, that's not a problem anymore. I've got the solution for this.

That's now solved. And it made me so efficient. And even my mum clocked it. She's like, I can see a difference in you. But why would I then deprive myself of doing that knowing I know it was a really useful tool? Cause I know you work with people on how to kind of,

Yeah.

Their self saboteur, how could you manage that as a founder?

So I'll give you my experience, 

 so for example, the clearing the space meditation, the short meditation.

When I learned that, I did that [00:17:00] five to eight times a day for about 18 months. And it's just a short meditation, because when I got taught it, it was taught to us as, do this before every session.

For every session, get present. The biggest gift you can give to your client is your presence. And so it was so important for me to make sure that when I did that, it, it cleared my mind of all of my own chaos, my own stuff, so that I could be really present for the person that I'm with. The reason why I'm telling this, telling the story is because, because

I did it so frequently, I just doing it five to eight times a day for like 18 months, and I saw the impact of it immediately, every time I went into a session, I was like, oh, wow.

I would never have been able to deal with that situation if I hadn't have done that meditation beforehand. It's like I got the ROI. immediately. It's just this, this kind of constant reinforcement. My invitation to anybody who's looking to build a meditation practice or mindfulness practice is just to do short meditations really regularly.

So you can see [00:18:00] the impact of it really quickly. In the sense that

in two ways one like anything cadence or repetition is the thing that's going to get you results quickest so kind of doing smaller smaller sessions multiple times a day is going to get you quicker results but also if you do it before an important task before an important meeting you will see the results of it in real time and you'll be like, okay, I'm doing that before the next meeting.

So it just gives you that constant reinforcement. So that's, that would be my advice to anyone who's looking to build a practice. 

We've got a finite amount of energy to use. We've got to be clever about how we use it. So I think when you have something that so clearly given you an ROI, I think for me, that's the motivation for me to keep carrying on. When I introduced that to clients, which I do for nearly everybody, I think it's appropriate for nearly everybody, because I think we all would like to be more intentional with our time.

We'd all

like to show up to our interactions better. We'd all like to be less distracted when we're in a meeting, when we're working on something. So I give that practice to nearly everybody.[00:19:00] 

And it's one of those things that it's like drinking water. It's so beneficial and it's free. It's, you know, I often do it on a tube and it just expedites the journey. I'm like, Oh, I'm at Paddington. That was quick. And it gets rid of that time that I don't really want to be under ground. And it surprises me because I know it works.

I know how efficient my brain is when I do it regularly, how I don't do it regularly. And it's something in this season has really come up. Everyone has really talked about meditation as being something that's massively helped them in their work day, which I think maybe 5, 10 years ago, people wouldn't be as open about.

There's 

more science to prove it now, isn't there? I

think that's the thing. I think a lot of these kind of ancient practices. They're not just for yogis anymore. They are being proved by the likes of Andrew Huberman or Stephen Kotler and all of these kind of neuroscientists that are saying, okay, this is how peak performance works. And then,

and they're showing us how mindfulness helps, how you were speaking earlier to some of your team that you would be doing some stuff around resetting the goals [00:20:00] and being really clear around what the core business is. And that is a focus

activity because when you are really clear on what your big purpose is, what your mission for your business is, that actually releases dopamine that releases neurochemicals in the brain that allow you

to be more focused. So often the reason why people are not focused is because they haven't connected their work to something bigger, to something outside of the actual activity that they're doing in that very

moment.

 When you strip that back, like one of the first exercises I'll do with a client is we go through this exercise where we go through their core values, where we go through their core beliefs and really strip down to what is it that they really care about? What do they value more than anything else in the world?

What do they stand by and what do they want to create? Because without that, you'll always be distracted.

You'll always be distracted by the next thing.

When you're tired and you've worked really hard and you're stressed about something, and you [00:21:00] question what you're doing it for, you know the answer. You hit that kind of, someone called it the trampoline effect, where you hit rock bottom and you get really laser focused on what really matters, because you've got the clarity of like, it, but it's actually, for me, we do goal setting with the team and they were questioning why we do it.

And I was like, well, for the business and for you and for your progression and just for a system, for us to know what we're working towards, if we're working this goddamn hard, we need to know why. 

you know, it's not about the money when you start a business, that's a means to an end, but it's, it's how can you enjoy work more? And if we can tap that focus element, we'll all feel more reward, who doesn't want that?

I feel like it's actually tapping into the neurobiology of the brain. So like when you are working on something that you really care about, you're releasing chemicals such as dopamine, such as norepinephrine, you

know, you're releasing these chemicals that actually allow you to focus more.

 When dopamine is in the body, you have more motivation your cognitive load is reduced so you can

focus more and [00:22:00] you generally feel more inspired. You want to take the action and the same with norepinephrine when you have that chemical in your system, it's like, if you think of it as adrenaline for the brain, like when you're, really obsessive about something, when you're like, right, I just, I just cannot get this thing off my mind.

That's norepinephrine in your system. If you haven't connected your work to something bigger, 

to something that you really care about, you're not going to create those biological advantages in your system, which is why it's so important to do the value work first. Whether that's with your team for yourself, for your own business, we all need to do it. We all need to understand what we're doing, why we're doing it and what this kind of bigger purpose is. Because that is what will allow us to like grit it out in those hard times when it's tough, when it's difficult. 

 Often when people come to me and ask me about focus, they want to know about what the tactics, for me, it's the tactics of the last bit that for me, it's kind of, it's like three layered, it's like the physical,

the mental and the tactical.[00:23:00] 

So the physical is, are you sleeping enough? Like you get enough sleep so that you could actually get into a place where you can focus for long periods of time. Are you eating well? You eating clean, unprocessed foods. You get enough daylight, you get enough, enough sunlight. Are you, healthy?

You know, that's the physical, that the mental is the stuff that we're talking about, that the distractions, are you kind of removing distractions from your environment? Are you working on something that you're inspired by? Are you doing something that you care about? And then the tactical is the systems and the things that you kind of put on top, but without the physical and the mental in place, they're just tactics that you might ask your team to do this today or tomorrow, and they might go off and do it because you've asked them to do it today or tomorrow, but without kind of looking at their own physical and mental stuff, they will return to the old way of doing stuff eventually. 

So you kind of have to fix the biggest stuff, if you want the long-term success.

 someone said, you've got to be okay with the weight of responsibility when you start a business. And for me, it's the responsibility that my [00:24:00] team are happy, healthy and growing in terms of their progression. And I'm fortunate that I had 20 years of experience with other companies to bring into my own business.

Then they were like, Oh, do we really have to do goals? I was like, yes, this is why. And they were like, and it's bonus incentivized as well. And I was like, if you're not driven by money, be driven by job satisfaction. But it's the responsibility that they're looked after and I'm doing right by them, but I'm a hypocrite because then I'm not looking after myself as well as I'm looking after them.

When you said about sleep and I, yep. Okay. But it gets into this vicious circle of not sleeping, waking up, being inefficient, being tired, too tired to go to the gym, then eating badly. You have to like break that as soon as possible. But your physical health, and in fact, our health and wellness season we did last year, the nutritionist, the sleep expert, the mobility expert, the breathwork expert, everyone said, yes, breathwork is important, but sleep is number one, sleep is always number one.

 I interviewed Russell [00:25:00] Foster from Oxford University about it. And he said, oh, you're running a red light on your business if you don't look after your sleep. And I was like, Oh God. Okay, fine. It was, it was a shock. And he said, I think it was every hour before midnight is worth two hours after.

So you go to bed earlier.

Yeah, no, I feel that my sleep is relatively good. It could be better sometimes. ButI really noticed that over Christmas, flew back from India on the 24th to be with my family for Christmas.

And I was so tired on Christmas Eve, I went to bed about 7:30 in the evening and I woke up on Christmas day about 5 AM and I felt amazing. I felt like the best I'd felt in, so long, in months. And it's true. I think those, those hours before midnight, if you're eight hours from like nine till five is so much better

than to 8, it's a complete contrast.

Hmm. 100%. 

so much information sharing out that we can all learn from each other and do the work. And I think if people are, our [00:26:00] podcast, we know our listeners are either starting a business, scaling a business or thinking about starting a business and for people to go, yeah, it is really hard work and you're never going to work as hard as you are for yourself, but

it's worth it in so many extraordinary ways that you have to look after the basics. If, if you're not okay, there's no business up basically. Are there things that people should do in terms of setting themselves up for success in the day? You already know my opinions on notifications, but there's some friends of mine that just have them and like they live with them and I just want to take them off their phone.

Are they as bad as I think they are?

My view is if you're doing focus work, if it's on a laptop, you should have one tab and one tab only your phone should be in a different room. My preference is to do my kind of like creative or my thinking work on pen and paper, I'd rather do it on that with no digital whatsoever, and then just input it into a document once I've done the thinking on paper but I just, I think just zero distractions, you know, just an environment where there is [00:27:00] nothing that can pull you away from a task. If you've got your phone in the same room as you even looking at it, 

 going into the science behind it, the energy required for me to look at the phone and not pick it up is energy that could be used on the thing that I'm supposed to be focused on. So you just want anything that's a distraction, you just want it out of sight. 

 You don't want it anywhere near your focus area where you're working.

And so environment design, really.

And I think there's distractions in two ways that things will just call on you, but there's things that you'll get distracted by like if I work from home, I could do a load of laundry or cook a meal, or if I'm in the office, I'm just doing work. So there's, easy outs if I'm at home, cause I can say, oh, well I need to do that.

And it's like, I'm being distracted. I'm pulling myself away, but there's other things that can pull you away. And I think getting rid of both of those is ideal. Just lock me in a podcast studio and I'll be happy. Cause then that's very safe environment. 

One thing I would add though, is like, I think there's a lot of pressure on founders, [00:28:00] I think to feel like they have to be like 100% focused all day every single day and if they're not then they're failing as a founder and I think that from personal experience, but also from the people I've coach.

I've just I just don't think that's true I think I think it's impossible to be 100 percent every single day and no one's doing that, regardless of what the gurus are saying, no one is actually 100 percent every single day. And I think that we just I personally think most businesses can be run on two, two hour deep work blocks a day

working on your most important tasks, only your most important tasks in those two blocks. And then all of your kind of admin, all of your kind of answering emails, all of the things that are low impact, low leverage, but need to be done, they either get done in those admin blocks or you delegate them, you get someone else to do them.

But if you, if you're doing two really focus, two hour blocks of big, high leverage [00:29:00] work, I think that most businesses can run from that.

And the challenge for most of us is that we might set up these blocks and, but then we get pulled in and out of them

by low impact, low leverage tasks that somebody else could do, or they could wait till later. They could wait till tomorrow. They could wait till this afternoon.

They don't need to happen in the moment when you're trying to do something that is high leverage.

 I've definitely clocked myself at work that I quite like month end and doing the accounts because again, you can only do that one thing whilst you're doing it. You can't be distracted. And I go into a two hour time block once a month and I just. Do it all and it's deeply satisfying.

I think probably cause I don't work with numbers that much in my day job, but then. Answering emails, 

That's the last thing I enjoy.

I'll do, I'll happily do anyone else's as well, but this is it. It's knowing how you work at work and what you, you like. And everyone says, eat the frog. And do the rock work before you do the pebbles in the sand, because you, in a day you've got a jar and you've put the [00:30:00] rock in first, and then the pebbles, and then the sand, it all fills up.

You can answer an email on the way to a bus stop, you can do the peripheral stuff. You don't need, as we were just saying at the beginning of the episode, the intensity or the load your brain is taking, the energy it's consuming answering a WhatsApp or an email doesn't need the same intensity. 

 A really good example to kind of bring this to life is like, you know, when you're trying to arrange a meeting with somebody and you've got a bit back and forth arranging meetings and you're looking at your schedule and you're trying to answer and you might have two or three conversations like that going on. Obviously you've got things like Calendly where you can kind of book that in, but.

God send, Yeah,

Yeah, but like I'd say like when you're like when you're kind of for the sake of this example when you're trying to organise something like that. How exhausting is that when you're just going back and forth and it's like it might take five minutes might take 10 minutes but so frustrating it's so exhausting.

And it's again it's just sapping energy away for something so low value, so just

Doesn't need your time or energy, and you could be using that for something [00:31:00] else.

And if you'd set your intentions at the beginning of the day, you'd call yourself out being like, hang on, this isn't the best use of my time. It's not meeting my intention that can wait, or that's not as important as I thought it would, because we can be reactive. We are busy. We have email and lots of people use Slack and lots of different pieces of

tech to help them. Our company, we use email or we phone each other. We try not use WhatsApp. We try not DM on Instagram, just less is more 'cause I don't want people to just go round in circles being like Slack, Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, email and back again 'cause then you don't get anything done.

I have used Slack and I see how some companies love it, but I just think a lot of people can be working inverted commas because they're just messaging back and forth, back and forth and it's the sand work and they're not getting to the rock stuff. But in your view, 

 How could a founder sort of get into this quite quickly to cut out the wasted time? Like, do you have advice for someone who's starting their own business where previously they've had a boss who's told them what to do, now they're suddenly like rabbit in [00:32:00] headlights, what do I do first?

Are there some good rules to kit them out with to get going?

I've got a couple of kind of question straight frameworks that I often ask that kind of help people get to that themselves. I think it's different for everybody. So I wouldn't say, right, you do this, you do that.When we're trying to understand where to focus, we're trying to understand what are the high leverage tasks that actually move the needle in our business.

What are the things that if I didn't do, my business wouldn't move forward. And I use questions framed in a way that might look like if you only had three hours a day to work on your business. What would you do? What would be the one or two things that you would spend your time on? If you only had three hours a day to work on your business.

I'd use a framing like that. Because what that does, it forces people to cut out all the stuff that doesn't make any sense to do all the things that they are probably at the moment spending loads of time on,

but don't do anything to move their business in the direction they want their business to [00:33:00] go.

That is a much healthier approach to my recent experience of when you get COVID really badly and you have zero energy and you're like, I've got to just do the bare minimum and go back to bed. And it was a real eye opener of like, I've been wasting a lot of time and I thought I was quite efficient. So it's, it's that.

Yeah. What really matters.

So I had this experience in say last December, I spent the month in India.

Amazing. 

I had a work trip and then I was like, right, I'm gonna stay for the rest of the month and just enjoy India. I've not been to India before.

I'm just gonna have a great time. And obviously as a founder, as a small business owner, I was like, I still need to work a little bit. So I was like, right, okay, I'm just gonna work three hours a day. I'm gonna do two hours in the morning before breakfast, and then if I need to take any calls, I'll do one hour in the evening. I had the highest revenue month I've had in six and a half years of running my business in December last year. And the reason I had that was because I cut out all the shit. I wasn't doing all the things that didn't generate [00:34:00] revenue. So I was like, I'm only going to do revenue generating things. In these two hours in the morning and I'm only gonna take sales calls in the evening. That's it I'm not i'm not going to do anything else and I had my highest revenue probably by about £6000

in december last year.

 Yeah, again, the trampoline effect. You learn the hard way sometimes, but that sounds like learning the great way. You're in India, you've got three hours a day, happy days. But on that same theme, procrastination, how can you help people eliminate procrastination? 

It's either a belief issue, you don't believe in what you're doing enough, 

when we want something and we believe in it, we do it. 

Yeah. 

Like when an opportunity comes up that it's just not to be missed, whatever's happening, you stop doing it and you do the thing that's going to get you that opportunity. If we really believe in it, it happens.

Fear is the second one, you know, like we're, we're scared of something, we're scared of what people think, we're scared of how it's going to be perceived, we're scared of what we believe that [00:35:00] they're thinking about us. Address that and realise often the ludicrousy of our perception of what other people think is, is so often wrong. 

No one cares either. They've

got their own, they've got their own stuff. They don't, they don't care about, they're not worried about us.

You know, they've got their own things that they're, that they're worried about. And then clarity, like if, if you're not clear on what it is you need to do or how you need to do it, that's the other reason why people procrastinate.

 In my experience.

 I think it's just being honest and facing up to things and just being like, I'm avoiding that because of this. And then, okay, I now know that and I'm doing to avoid it. What we do is a question from the previous guest has a question for our next guest. So the question for you was, if you wanted to scratch an itch for a totally new business, what would it be?

And I love this because every single guest has a completely random question and it's so interesting to see what's going on in other people's 

minds. 

Yeah, I saw that. I saw that in your notes. And I was like, Hmm, what would it [00:36:00] be? Because I, cause I do feel like I'm running a business that I love

 and I've got some ideas around the evolution of the business.

Yeah, you're in the right job then.

I'm in the right job.

 It's not completely unrelated but I would like to have some kind of either tech or nootropic that would help people just be more focused, be more driven, be more zoned in.

So a bit like, a bit like Adderall, but like in a, like without having to take a pill, and be on like medication like that, more like something that you could just, I don't know, drink in a tea. Or maybe like in a vape or something and it just kind of gives you like a small hit of focus which gets you zoned in for like an hour

and then you can just go and do your own thing 

 but it's not like it's not going to have any long lasting

side effects something like that and the other thing I have considered and I am still thinking about is like a small dose mushroom retreat so kind of using psychedelic mushrooms, [00:37:00] psilocybin to

help people with personal professional development. So, whereas at the moment, a lot of the retreats that you can go on and experience psilocybin, a lot of it's to deal with kind of trauma and to kind of deal with like much kind of bigger issues. There are in my experience that there's ways to use

mushrooms and psychedelics to really optimise the mind to give you a better understanding of the mind.

And I think small dose mushroom retreats or something along those lines would be really powerful. And I think I'd really enjoy doing something like that. 

Definitely. Well, it's definitely feed into the bigger picture that you're already doing, but a new avenue for you, it should be super exciting. And what would your question be for our next guest?

Yeah. I deliberated on this a little bit because I know how powerful this question has been for me. I guess it would be what advice would your 80 year old self give you today that would allow you to build the business of your dreams?

 [00:38:00] So what advice would your 80 year old self give you to help you build your business? Oh, goodness. Mm

the business that you are trying to build,

what advice would they give you today that would help you build that business? That's essentially what I'm saying.

Yeah, that's a really interesting one. Cause my favorite expression of all time is experience is what you get after you've needed it. It's like, oh, well now I've gone through all that awful trauma. I know how to deal with it, but I didn't know how to deal with it.

Where that question comes from. Cause I think, this is very me with my coaching hat on. It's a quote I love it's true wisdom is the ability to follow your own advice consistently. And there's so much truth in that because we always have the answer and the answer is always within us 

 and the reason why coaching works is because coaching gives you a way of looking at your challenges or the obstacles in your way or the things that you're [00:39:00] trying to achieve with a new lens.

But a coach doesn't tell you what to do. They just help ask questions that allow you to figure it out. You know, they frame things in a way that allow you to connect dots that you

might not have connected otherwise. And the point is, you've always got the answers, whoever it is, and

that's why it's so beautiful to be a coach.

Because if you ask the right questions and you're intentional enough and mindful enough of the questions that you ask, you just watch people just connect the dots. 

Thank you, Phil. Any last piece of advice you'd like to offer a new founder when starting a business?

 I probably would have benefited hearing that entrepreneurship is sales. And if you don't like sales, you probably shouldn't be an entrepreneur because there is no business without sales. 

People kind of, think it's a bit crass and it's like, no, you need revenue to have a business. 

 I'm an ex sales person, ex sales leader, you know?

But I think like I came from that world, butI assumed that I wouldn't have to do as much of that when I set up my own business. And the truth is the bulk of your [00:40:00] work as an entrepreneur is selling.

Like, and unless you, unless you're selling product or services, you don't, you don't have a business.

You just, you've got a 

job.

Yeah. 

That's really good advice, 

The other thing that has kind of come up for me recently was this kind of spectrum of freedom, security. If you want to be an entrepreneur, whatever you decide in life, freedom and security are two ends of the spectrum. And if you want freedom, you're not going to have security. If you want security, you're not going to have freedom. And it's kind of like, you got to figure out where you want to be on that spectrum. 

 If you want to be completely free to do whatever you want all the time. You're probably not going to have a very regular, secure income stream. If you want the kind of corporate job where you know exactly what you're getting paid every month, there's expectations that mean you're not going to have the freedom that sits over here. And you just got to decide. 

Every guest has said be okay with rollercoaster and I'm like, I'm not okay with it, but I accept it because I love the freedom. I can work wherever I want in the world. I did a sales call [00:41:00] from the Antarctic. I'm like, I am winning. This is life. Like, but I didn't win the client because I couldn't go and see them in person.

So there was a risk factor there, but the only.

They were just saying don't waste time and worry and accept it. It is fact. You're gonna feel the ups and downs, and you will appreciate the ups more because you've had the downs. But the downs are gonna happen whether you like 'em or not. And the best advice that I was given in season one was have six months of your team salary saved in the bank account at all times.

So you never worry about paying them.

That's great advice.

And that for me was everything because it just meant worst case scenario, or revenue dries up overnight, I can still pay them. And that is another efficiency thing of, I'm not going to have to worry about that and that's time spent not worrying and I can go on fixing it instead.

So that was a real, real help kind of how to sleep at night, [00:42:00] basically, cause you need sleep. Entrepreneurship is so glamorised today in press and social media. And I'm really trying in this podcast to be as frank and blunt, but without putting people off to be like, there are so many pros that outweigh the cons, but there are asterisks and caveats and to be aware and go in informed and go in knowing what to expect  and accept it's hard work.

And if it was really easy, everybody would do it. So, you know, but it's worth it.

Thank you, Phil. It's been lovely chatting to you about all things focus and thank you for your time. 

 I really hope you've enjoyed this conversation, you can find a recap of all the advice so kindly shared by guests in the show notes, along with our contact details, we'd love it.

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