- Good morning, good life, welcome back to Amy TV
where we come together to help you go after
the life that you want.
Are there people around you who are stopping you
from getting your best work done?
I have a few ideas.
(upbeat music)
One of the biggest responses I hear when I talk about
using your time to its greatest potential
is about the people who are around us and just can't help
but be distracting.
Whether it's your kid who has a whole lot to say
when you are working at your home computer
or the coworker who's all to excited to continue talking
to you at the coffeepot because they don't
actually want to go to their desk to start their day,
or it could be somebody who doesn't realize
that you have a set amount of time for this phone call
and you don't really have all day.
We often find ourselves in situations
where we're trying to be productive and get things done
and the people around us kinda don't get it.
So what are you gonna do about it?
How do you politely let these people know
that they need to move on so that you can focus
on what you're doing?
That's what I wanna talk about today.
This episode of Amy TV is also brought to you
by Four Sigmatic, because it's not just about
helping the people around you get focused,
it's about the elixirs in your life as well.
Stay tuned for the end of the video
for more on this and how you can take advantage
of an exclusive discount just for Amy TV viewers.
All right, so how are we gonna get focused
when it comes to the people in our lives?
The people who are around us all the time?
My first tip is to build subtle signs around you.
Maybe you have an office and you can shut the door,
maybe you can have like a little door hanger too
that says I'm working, exclamation point.
The other thing you can do which is totally obvious
and a great tip for the airplane as well
is just to throw some huge headphones on.
A lot of people will just leave you alone
'cause there's such a barrier to entry.
But maybe you don't even wanna go subtle.
Lemme give you probably the best example
I ever saw of this.
I did a tour of an agency office once, and it was
an open floor plan and I saw a girl sitting in a chair
and she was facing her desk, she was on her computer
and she had a sign on the back of the chair.
Again, she's at a long desk, lots of people
sitting next to her, open floor plan.
The sign on the back of her chair said
"I am not here."
And I was like, but she is there, oh!
I am not here sign, plus headphones,
plus not looking away from task means take a hint, buddy.
I wanted to introduce myself to that girl so bad,
but I was respectful of her time.
These are small things that we can do
and they're going to be helpful if you do some of this
other stuff as well, because you can't just drop hints
all the time, sometimes you have to be obvious
in other ways, and that leads me to my next tip:
communication, specifically with the people
that you run into the most often, the people
that trip you up the most, you just need to have
a conversation with them.
Trust me when I say, do not disturb isn't enough.
I use do not, my, do not disturb is literally on
on my phone all the time.
It doesn't matter, people will get through.
So the subtle hints aren't enough,
you need to have a conversation with people and say hey,
when this is happening, I really, really need
some alone time, I need focus time.
If my door is shut, that's a big indication like,
do not even bother.
This isn't gonna work one everyone, and when I say everyone,
I'm just talking about adults, okay?
Some people just don't take the hint
even though they're hearing what you're saying.
But at least if you talk about it enough,
if you really try to see their side of it
and you let them know consistently, hey, again,
this is my time and I really need it,
you can refer back to that and they can't act
like this came out of nowhere.
It's going to be hard to have that conversation,
but the reality is, you've gotta have it
because most people don't have utter focus
in what they do, it's very hard for them
because we have so many distractions in this world.
And it doesn't mean you don't wanna talk to them either
but there's a time and a place for everything.
I wanna throw a tip in here that's a little bit risky
and that is to the moms of the world,
specifically the stay-at-home moms.
Here's my tip: try something.
I got nothing else.
I'm not gonna sit here and pretend like I have
all the mom hacks.
I don't.
But the keyword here is to try.
I feel that that the biggest issue in this particular arena
is that parent guilt gets the best of you a lot.
That guilt's gonna follow you around no matter what
you decide to do with your time, because there's always
somebody else who could use more of you.
That's what they think, but if what you're doing
is actually improving the quality of life for both of you
specifically for them in the long-term,
then you've gotta be able to make
some executive decisions here,
that's why you're the mom.
A lot of people that I talk to don't even entertain
the idea of calling a sitter for a couple of hours
just for deep focus.
It sounds silly, right?
Like I'll just do it when the kids take a nap or whatever,
and things always happen, and we never get into
a better groove, but if you just got it into your mind
that when you hire a sitter during the day, let's say
if you're a work at home mom, and you need
one to two hours alone, every time you have a sitter
you have to be dedicating that block of time
to something specific that needs to be done
by the end of it.
If you treat it like a habit stacking situation,
then maybe it'll actually work, but if you never
give yourself the chance to figure it out,
if you never give yourself the chance to find out
will I actually make the most of the time
if I hired a sitter, that's money spent,
how do I reap the benefits of that,
you can guilt yourself until the end of time,
regardless you're just hurting your mental state
and you're not getting more done.
So we can't tell the kids to go away, right?
You can't tell the kids, "guys, leave the office,"
although I would argue, I bet there are quite a few
kids out there that listen better than adults
when you say "when mommy's door is shut,
"you can't come in."
But it's still gonna be very hard to do that.
You are still to be a responsible adult
and take care of your children,
no neglect around here, okay?
No task is worth that.
But my challenge is for you to just try something
and at the risk of you wanting to punch
this non-mom in the face, I'm just saying
it's very easy to say that I'm responsible
for my kids so I can't do this kind of thing
if you've never actually tried more than once
to see what could be possible,
that could be customized to your life.
There may be something I've advised here
that's not gonna work for you, but a percentage of it could
and that could get you closer.
So put in the work to find what that looks like for you,
if you care about it enough, and I know
you're gonna care about your kids more no matter what,
but do we need to consider a few more areas
of our life to be elevated to importance?
My next tip is to set reminders and make sure
they go off out loud, like very loud.
One thing I like to do when I know there's potential
for a phone call to go long or if it's coming
to the end and it doesn't seem like it's ending
is I will set a timer to go off, very loud in the background
so that the person on the other end of the line can hear it.
I actually for this, because if I'm on my phone
I can't use my phone as a timer,
I use my time cubes for this.
So let's say I'm like oh, I'm giving these guys
five more minutes.
When this thing goes off, it's a little loud
and I make sure that the phone's like right,
"oh, that's my time."
So that's really useful but you can always set an alarm
on your phone if you're doing something
away from a phone call.
Let's say you're walking to go get water
from the water cooler and you know somebody's
gonna be like all like oh, thank goodness,
somebody's here, I wanted to procrastinate.
Maybe you should set a timer on your phone,
say, you need to be back in your desk in five minutes
so that not only that thing is challenging you,
it's challenging somebody else to shut it down
when you're like oh shoot, gotta go.
Timers work wonders.
It's actually, probably gotta be, there's gotta be
some science to that when a timer goes off
or when an alarm goes off, all these things
that we're just like programmed to like conform.
What is that?
Next I want you to learn the phrase "hard stop"
and then I want you to learn to follow through on that.
I enter a lot of scenarios where I say
"so happy to be here, let's get focused,
"let's spend time together and really not be distracted,
"but I have a hard stop at X time."
When you say those words, you shouldn't use them
maybe too much because you don't wanna overuse it
where everybody's like okay, Amy's always got a hard stop,
you know, that's not always true,
but when you say it, you've gotta follow through on it
so it actually means something.
At the end of the day, it's that small communication
you did to be able to say, "I have a hard stop,
"reminder, hard stop's in 15 minutes."
So that when that time comes, if somebody's just still
going and going and not being respectful of time,
not because they're terrible people but just because
they're not thinking about it, it's not their priority,
it's not the way that they tick, and that's fine,
literal tick, oh my gosh, that was terrible.
You get to just say "look, this is my hard stop,
"see you later, bye guys, let's recap this on an email
"or something else, let me know."
You've got to move on.
Otherwise people don't learn to get more efficient
in a set period of time.
And my last tip is not my favorite tip
but I think it does work for a lot of people
and that is to leverage auto-responders.
I'm definitely gonna be doing this during the summer
because I'm gonna be away from my email so significantly,
but emails are very easily distractions.
People don't have to stand next to you
to make you decide to deviate from what you're doing.
You need to let people know that you're not just
on call when an email comes in, and so I see a lot
of people do this where they have an email
that goes out all day long, except for the hours
that they do check email which I think
is a little aggressive.
Like just because I sent you an email
doesn't mean I need a response right now
so I definitely don't need your auto-responder
cluttering my space, and saying I only check email
at 5:00 p.m., thank you so much for sending this to me.
No, I don't need that, I don't need that.
If you're out of the office on vacation, sure, makes sense.
If you're out of the office on any other occasion
that you need me to have the contact information
of somebody else so that we can officially
get something done, awesome, but I do think
that that strategy works for people so I wanted
to put it out there.
My preference is that I'm still gonna email people back
but in the signature of my emails, every single email,
it says you know, footnote, just so you know,
I only check email once or twice a day,
I can't tell you when that will be, but if this
is more urgent than a couple of days,
you should probably hit up Meg, and I will put
Meg's email address at the bottom.
That way it's a personal email from me
but it still has the disclosure in it
in case anyone's like furiously looking
for my phone number or more information,
there's information there that says
here's how you get ahold of me faster,
it's probably through somebody else.
But these technologies are very useful
if you can use them to set boundaries, it's great,
especially if you're not good at setting those boundaries
in person, start setting them digitally
and see what you're capable of there,
and you might just find that those policies
that live on the internet can be moved into real life.
That was a good tip, girl.
Didn't even write that one down.
All right, let's share what we learned today in a Tweetable.
"Don't compromise yourself, you are all you've got,"
Janis Joplin.
Now I wanna hear from you, what's your way of politely
telling somebody to buzz off?
I wanna know your tip.
It has to go in the comments below 'cause we gotta add this
to the archive of things that we can all do
when we are in a weird situation where we're just
trying to get something done.
This video's all about focus and it's not just
about getting people to let you work but also
having the tools and the elixirs that help us
to focus at our greatest ability.
And that's why I'm so excited to shout out
Four Sigmatic for sponsoring this episode of Amy TV.
Let me tell you my favorite, I've completely stepped up
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I'm also a really big fan of the mushroom coffee
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Go to their website and try to get a feel for
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I cannot wait for you to try this mushroom life
to focus and get stuff done.
I will list the products that I talked about
in the description below and if you wanna get 15% off
your first order, the link is down there as well.
Thank you so much to Four Sigmatic for sponsoring
this episode of Amy TV.
That's all for today, thank you so much for tuning in,
I appreciate it.
As always, make sure you subscribe for good vibes,
kiss the ones you love,
and go after the life you want, cheers.
(calm electronic music)
I'm really distracted by the fact that I have
a ponytail today.
Other than wanting to punch me in my mom-nom,
damn, I almost nailed that.
(laughs)