The What If Experience Michelle Berkey: Entrepreneur, Artist, Life/Small Business Coach, Personal Growth Junkie

I might have used that question before, now that I think about it. Oh well, this, my friends, is an update episode, and it’s coming at you a little sooner than I’d originally planned. I’m really not due for an update until July, which means I should have a whole ‘nother month to get my eating back under control before I have to tell you I did great for six weeks, then fell hard off the wagon. But, I’ve had some big shifts going on and I wanted to talk about those with you this week.
A few months ago when I did the first quarterly update of the year, I mentioned that I hadn’t planned on doing any serious changes in my work, career, or business bucket, but that some opportunities had come up that changed my mind and shifted my focus. Therefore, I’m working on a new business launch, I think I mentioned that in last week’s episode. I mentioned I was going to have a crazy-intense Teddy-Roosevelt-style planning weekend.
Which I did! I’m on the other side of that experience now and I thought I’d let you know three things: what I learned and a decision that came from it.
Three Things I Learned In My Deep Work Weekend First, I learned that three days of non-stop deep work is mentally exhausting! By Monday evening, I was pretty much DONE. And not ready for normal life to start again on Tuesday. At that point, on Monday evening, I was regretting the intensity of the weekend and mourning the loss of a holiday. I was tired and drained. But, now that I’m a few days past the experience, I’m glad I did it that way. I got through everything I needed to…basically every action step in a six-week course completed over 2-1/2 days. Plus, I have a detailed, actionable plan for the next nine months.
I learned it helps to have your space and your tasks well organized. We can spend a lot of time messing around getting to the work…instead of doing the work if we have to figure out what to do next, what we need, where we’re headed or where we left off. Creating a plan helps significantly because you have a path mapped out. But, so does keeping track of what you’ve accomplished. When you’re stopping work for a break, or even choosing to follow a distraction or be interrupted in a normal work environment, writing down two things when you break, will help a lot. Make a note of where you are and what exactly you need to do next. When you come back to it, you’ll be able to step back into the work far more easily.
I learned that mind-absorbing breaks really help restore focus. We talked about this last month, that rest really isn’t doing nothing. And, this is one of those instances where head knowledge has now been replaced by heart knowledge. Saturday after a full day of deep work, we took the evening completely off. What my habit has been in the past is that even during downtime, I’m still thinking about my work. Even if I’m not focusing on it, my mind is still going at it sideways. So, instead of chilling at home surrounded by the work, we switched environments and went to a movie, something that would fully capture my attention and give my mind a break. And it totally worked, I was refreshed and ready to return to it the next day.
But What Else? That's three tips from my deep work weekend, but we need to talk about something else, too. One of the decisions I had to make in the planning process was about this podcast. This is, unfortunately, going to be the last episode of this show. It has been tremendously fun to do for the past almost two years, but it’s time for me to make some changes in my schedule to make room for other things. Are you familiar with the Jim Collins quote, “Good is the enemy of great”? That’s where I am with this show right now. It’s good - I love doing it, I know it helps people (because y’all tell me it does). But, it has some limitations and I need to set it aside. I’ve been knowing this decision was probably going to shake out this way for about three months and I’

“A commitment to deep work…is a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done. Deep work is important in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion dollar industry in less than a semester” ~ Cal Newport.
I’ve been tossing statistics at my son this month about multitasking, distraction, and focus. He, I think, feels like they’re hand grenades. He’s taking them personally as if I’m insulting the things he loves. He loves video games. He loves random videos of ducks quacking to Prince’s "Purple Rain." Not that that exists. In my mind, it would actually be sacrilegious. I’m sure he’d think it was hysterical. I’m not objecting to the things he loves. He has a pretty sophisticated sense of humor and other than when the preteen boy hormones kick in, the things he shows me are really funny. It’s just that I’m taking a hard look at how our habits are affecting our lives. Especially our mental habits. And the more I read, the more concerned I am that we’re changing our minds in ways that aren’t healthy.
Basically, the results of my research say this: We live in a culture that is full of distractions which we both invite and have come to crave. We think we can do more by multitasking and we can’t. We’re losing the ability to concentrate and focus for more than a few minutes at a time. This is causing mostly negative changes to our work, our health, the way our brains function, how we experience emotion, and how we act within relationships.
Even in the midst of writing this episode, I just caught myself somehow watching a video of people being scared by excessively large fake spiders. What? A lost few minutes of life I’ll never regain. Even though I’m hyper-aware of it this month, I’m still struggling with distraction. I am improving though. I thought to wrap up this month, I’d share some of the things that have worked for me as I’ve been putting into practice ideas that I’ve come across. These might be a bit random, but they were either new ideas to me, or I found them surprisingly helpful after trying them.
Reduce Multitasking.
As much as possible, I’m doing one thing at a time. When I’m not, I’m choosing to multitask intentionally, knowing I’m taking a productivity hit. This means in the car, cooking dinner, working, talking to friends…all the situations I might have previously been multitasking, I’m not doing so anymore. Are there things not getting done because of it? No, not that I’m aware of, except I may be missing out on some videos. Not spider vs. crying child videos, but marketing videos or educational videos. So far, I’m not feeling the loss. And the work that I am doing is better. This is an easy change to make and just requires noticing when you’re multitasking and choosing one thing at a time. This is one of those things that you really should try instead of just hearing me talk about it. Choose a day. Go through it doing one thing at a time. See how hard it is, how it affects your mind, your productivity, and your work.
Schedule shenanigans.
We have the ability to concentrate intensely for no more than 5-6 hours a day altogether. So, schedule that time when you’re at your best and limit busy work to the best of your ability. Restrict those shallow things more than you think you can and schedule it when you normally feel the least productive. For me that’s between 2 and 4 pm.
Be Hard to Reach.
Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t have to be available all hours of the day. I don’t have to be available to clients, friends, facebook acquaintances and random app notifications 24/7/365. I can limit the ways I’m reached and I can limit the times I’m available to all those people. You are in charge of the use of your time, not random strangers, not your phone, not even your friends.
Productive Meditation.
This has been a game changer fo

I started a writing project ten months ago. When I started having to produce an article every day, I realized I was having trouble focusing. We tend to believe that focus is like a light switch, we just turn it either on or off when the necessity or the mood strikes us. But the truth is that research is finding that’s not what happens. When we develop brain patterns that impede our ability to focus, when we don't train that ability, when we want to flip that switch on, nothing happens. We live in a world that attacks our ability to focus at every turn. Cal Newport’s book Deep Work says this, “there’s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow, is not a choice that can easily be reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to do deep work.”
The work that pays my bills right now is by nature full of distraction and driven by interruptions. It completely fits Newport’s definition of shallow work. I need to be highly accurate in a distracted environment, so in that respect, focus is important for me, but it doesn’t require sustaining that attention for more than a few minutes nor does it require any type of deep thought. So, I’ve found that I’m out of practice at thinking. How can that be? We think all the time, right? Our minds run and run and run. We react, we plan, we socialize, we talk, but how much of that is really thinking?
“Consumerism” has several (and often contradictory) definitions. One of those explanations is the selfish and frivolous collecting of products, or in other words, economic materialism. Generally, in our culture, we engage in consumerism without much thought. We’re culturally biased to consume and consume. Most of us, even those critical of economic materialism, readily engage in the psychological and mental equivalent. We allow a constant barrage of input into our minds. We consume and consume. We lunge after any new tidbit of information without thinking about it. We actually go further than just allowing it, we invite, encourage and enable it.
One study from the University of California-San Diego indicates that people are inundated with the equivalent of 34 Gb (gigabytes) of information every day, which if you were a laptop, would overload you within a week. Good thing we’re not laptops, right?
According to Tech 21 Century, the main effect of information overload is that the human attention to focus is continually hampered and interrupted. We talked about that last week. American psychiatrist Edward Hallowell says we’re so busy processing the mostly superficial information we’re receiving from all directions that we lose the ability to think and feel. If you think that’s an exaggeration, studies that indicate that the way we are currently training our brains to think, the constantly disrupted mental state we’ve come to accept as normal, is hampering our ability to feel empathy for others in addition to other deeply felt emotions. Brain plasticity doesn’t only result in positive changes. It results in negative ones as well.
A constant barrage of stimuli has become the norm. While we might intellectually understand and agree that it has a downside when we see a news headline, read a blog post, or listen to a podcast like this one, we’re remarkably apathetic in applying that information.
I learned some things about myself when I started my writing project last summer. I mentioned that I learned that I’m out of practice at thinking. That’s true. I also learned I’m good and bad at different types of thinking. As much as I loved my college freshman small group philosophy course, I’m no philosopher. I’m not good at teasing out the ramifications of complicated problems. And, I’m not the research scientist that can spend twenty years digging deep into a very specific question. But, what I am good at is taking information that’s out there and applying it in practical ways. That’s

Let’s jump right in with statistics today. Inc. Magazine says that we’re spending an average of just 1 minute and 15 seconds on a task before being interrupted. Other statistics say that it takes 23-25 minutes to get back on track after an interruption. To put it another way, Dr. Gloria Mark, from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, found that average information workers are interrupted every three minutes. If you do some super-high-level complicated math with me, that comes out to about 20 times every hour.
Research shows that we typically don’t return immediately to the task that was interrupted, either. We usually tackle two other tasks before returning to the original one. Most of those twenty-time-an-hour interruptions are very minor. About four of them every hour are more serious interruptions. If you’re paying attention to how all those numbers work together (and why would you, that’s why I’m here), the interruptions, the being sidetracked, the time to get back into what you were doing…you’d realize that there’s no way we’re completing our work.
And yet, things do get done. Studies looking at that question found that first, we do push many tasks off until later. And second, we do actually complete tasks, but they’re being done more quickly than they should be and with more mistakes.
Those are all work-related statistics. But, the same thing is happening to us at home, in our cars, and at the dinner table. I’m fairly certain no one will argue with me when I say that we live in a world full of distractions. With the advent of cell phones, we now have many of those distractions in our hand at all times. A study commissioned by Nokia showed that users check their smartphones an average of 150 times during a waking day of 16 hours. With more high-level math, I figure that’s every 6-1/2 minutes.
This is what we think of when we hear the word distraction, and these are a big deal. They affect our productivity in work and happiness in life.
But, they’re not the only kind of distraction we deal with.
External Distractions External distractions are typically what come to mind when someone says the word “distraction”. Co-workers stopping by your desk to talk about last nights devastating seventh-game loss in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Yeah, I don’t want to talk about that. Now you’re stuck reliving it with every acquaintance that sees you in the hallway.
The phone ringing.
A loud sound from the next room.
The dog sticking his cold nose against your leg.
The really awful music playing in the coffee shop where you're working.
Your boss calling you.
The constant notifications on your phone.
These are all external distractions.
What can you do about them? How can you control external distractions? To some degree, you can’t. But, you do have more control than you think. When you need an uninterrupted span of time, Unplug from browsers and phones. Turn off all the notifications on that phone. Lock your door. Stop checking email. Put your headphones on. Put a sign on your chair, your desk, or your door that says you’re busy, please do not disturb unless you’re on fire.
Remember, your technology is for your convenience. Your phone is available to you so that you have access to people and services when you want that access. It’s not there so that anyone can hijack your time and attention whenever they please.
Obviously, there are some situations which you can’t control, but more often than not, you can drastically reduce external distractions by setting and communicating boundaries.
Internal Distractions External distractions are only part of the puzzle, though. Surprisingly, studies find that external distractions don’t explain many of the distractions we experience. They’re actually coming from inside of us. An internal distraction might be a sudden urge to check the weather. Again. A need to make a non-critical

I’m hungry for productivity. I want ways to get more done in less time. We all do. Time is one of our most limited resources in the day and age. The are thousands of articles, books, systems, workshops and products geared toward making us more productive. One of the things we all do to get more done is multitask. Whether it’s geared toward increasing work output or just that we’re afraid we’ll miss something if we don’t, we tend to multitask our way through life.
We listen to podcasts or television while we cook. We scroll facebook while we watch Netflix. We talk or listen while we drive or walk. We listen to a webinar while we answer emails. We email while we’re in a meeting. My son watches or listens to YouTube while he plays games on his computer. And he’s not alone.
Dr. Clifford Nass, a psychology professor at Stanford University, says (and I’m quoting from an interview on NPR), “the top 25 percent of Stanford students are using four or more media at one time whenever they're using media. So when they're writing a paper, they're also Facebooking, listening to music, texting, Twittering, et cetera. And that's something that just couldn't happen in previous generations even if we wanted it to.”
Lest you think this is just a new media problem or a bash technology episode, it’s not. This quote, “To do two things at once is to do neither.” Wasn’t said by a 21st-century researcher. It’s attributed to Publilius Syrus, a Roman slave in the first century B.C. Obviously, this issue of multitasking has been around long before smartphones. I routinely walked around with an open book in front of my face reading when I was a kid. I know this has always been an issue for me. Let’s take the lid off though and see how effective it actually is.
First, I need to say that you can go ahead and consider yourself a fantastic multi-tasker. You absolutely are. Supremely talented even. Because you’re breathing, moving, walking, reaching, digesting your lunch, doing all sorts of things that are involuntary and second nature while you’re accomplishing tasks that take more thought.
It’s the more complex tasks, the ones that take more thought that tend to trip us up, though. We think we can do several of those at the same time. But, we actually can’t. I mean it might look like I’m listening to a podcast and cooking a new recipe for dinner, but I’m actually not multi-tasking. I’m switch-tasking. My brain is doing only one of those things at the same time. It’s switching back and forth between the two tasks. It’s doing so pretty quickly, but it’s only actually processing information from one of those activities at a time. If I really think about that, I know it’s true.
If I’m doing something I don’t use a recipe for, something like a stir-fry, where I’m just chopping vegetables and not measuring, reading a recipe or following a real instructional list, it’s much easier to listen to something and cook. There’s a good chance I’m more distracted than I think I am though because I’ll routinely forget to include something I’d intended to.
If I’m following a recipe, though, it’s much tougher. I’ll re-read. I’ll lose track of where I am, I’ll realize that I’ve either done one or the other thing. I’ve either read and understood the recipe or I’ve listened to the audio. I’ll often miss audio while I’m paying attention to the recipe or have to re-read the recipe because I was paying attention to the audio.
Generally, a loss in productivity or forgetting to put the mushrooms in a stir-fry just means dinner takes a little longer to cook and I have mushrooms for an omelet in the morning. But, that loss of productivity is a bigger deal at work.
Conservative estimates are that we have a 40% loss in productivity when we multitask. We might think we’re being more efficient, but we’re not. A 40% loss. That’s a big deal.
Actually, the news is worse than that. Studie

I’m writing this after a tough month. I’m wiped out. Sort of. I am really tired. I just got home from a boy scout camping weekend. I came home early because I have a charity event tonight. And before I could start working on this episode, before I leave for the event, I laid my head down and took a 10-minute-power nap. I’m tired. But not as depleted as I expected to be after this month was over.
That in itself is a glimmer of improvement. I knew talking about rest all month was somewhat ironic as it was a really draining month. But, it underscored the importance of the topic in my life and it helped me along the way as I had a busy schedule and a lot of stressful events.
We talked about sleep early on and my sleep has improved. I’ve darkened my room and I’ve noticed a difference. I’ve made a point to go to sleep earlier and it’s made a difference. I’ve paid attention to how sleep affects my decisions, my patience and my ability to think. I’ve noticed, for example, I make terrible decisions about food when I’m tired. Things I normally would be able to resist, I eat when I’m tired. And by “things” I generally mean cookies and chocolate and anything with sugar. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Here are a few more things I’m working on to get more and better sleep. I’m setting myself a bedtime of 10:30. I’m terribly inconsistent right now and that will help a lot. I’m getting my bedroom in order and redoing some of it. I moved out a TV that wasn’t even hooked up and I never use in the bedroom. I realized it had been driving some decisions about furniture. I’ll be replacing my mattress and bed soon as well and turning that room into something that feels more like a personal spa.
That’s the easy part. The attitude that sleep is expendable is a harder mental habit to break, but I’m going to try. I’m starting the 10:30 bedtime tonight, and it’s 10:15 right now, and I really wanted to have worked out all the details for this episode to happen before I go to bed tonight, but that’s not going to happen if I head for bed. I’d also chosen to shut down anything with a screen at 10 pm. I’m going to have to start that tomorrow because I already blew that tonight.
Sleep is pretty simple to deal with, at least in the planning stage. Execution is harder. But, rest itself, that’s another story. Sleep is only one side of the equation. Last week we talked about what rest is and how it affects us. Here’s how I’m going to approach applying that knowledge. I plan to make some changes to create a rhythm of rest in my life. Here’s how that breaks down.
Yearly This might be where you assume I’m going to list a major vacation, but I’m not going to do that. I’m not considering vacations to be part of my rest plan. Partly because their effects don’t last that long and partly because, I’m going to try to rely on shorter, quarterly breaks instead for rest. I may take a longer trip (at least I hope so anyway), but I won’t rely on that time as the only way I’m recovering. I’ll use it as a treat and a memory-maker, but not the most important rest activity in my life.
Quarterly I’m going to plan a quarterly long weekend trip. I’ll be headed to Toronto in June and Philadelphia in July for conferences. I plan to add a few days to those trips for sightseeing and rest. I’ll be in Florida in November for an extended family vacation. And, I think I’ll add a few weekend camping trips on the calendar as well. Plus, I think I’ll let my son choose one long weekend getaway trip.
Monthly It's so easy for us to schedule so many activities that our lives become overfull. This is a discipline issue. There are a million good things out there to do. We’re not able to do them all. We have to live within our limits. Different seasons of life call for different levels of activity. So, what works for a newly married couple might not work after kids come along. It seems obvious but it