silence the dumb monkey in your head - part 2

It's getting better... I think

First things first, if you arrive here and you haven’t read part 1 (and you have an extra 5-10 minutes) I advise you to do so, you will get more context (and learn a few things).

Ok, I will assume you’ve done it so let’s resume where we left off.

• I had fixed my health/lifestyle routine

• I had to find a way to fix my work routine (overthinking too much)

• Set goals to focus on (apps, learning, sharing)

So what’s going on 1 week after? I will go in this same order starting with the health routine because it’s gonna be fast: Still committed, still doing it every day, my body is getting used to my weird sleep schedule, and everything is going well yay!

Let’s talk about the rest now.

Fixing overthinking

I found a way to beat my overthinking self, and I kind of slowly introduced it last week.

The solution is quite simple. The first part of it is meditation.

What I’m doing is practicing meditation for 10 minutes before starting to work.

Even when I’ve selected one thing to do, I usually think a lot about the most effective way to do it, and what should I do first, and I often end up being lost and just losing time.

With meditation, it helps me to focus and begin my work session with just one thing in mind: what I have to do.

The second part is the Pomodoro technique.

This one could sound very simple, and even for myself it did not work for years, why does it work now?

Intention: How to beat lvl 2 monkey

There’s a next-level monkey in our head that’s stronger than the first one that we saw last week.

yeah that’s him

Instead of giving us the obvious wrong path to follow, this one will be more unconscious and let you think you can do things that you clearly cannot.

Examples?

• Focus on a task with your phone next to you.

• Working in a noisy environment

• Be interrupted and go back to what you were doing without losing focus

• The list goes on…

Don’t know for you but for me, I thought I was a focus god. I could work anywhere anytime and be efficient. I could receive texts, listen to music, and talk with someone, I knew I could still be focused and performant. I would even not think about that, for me it was natural. So when I tried the Pomodoro technique it was just putting a timer on something that’s already working, it was useless.

Fun fact: No.

It was the level 2 monkey on my head talking.

You can be whoever you want, we kind of all have the same brain, and that brain, as good as it can be at processing a lot of information, focusing on 1 thing (only one) is something it’s not used to be.

For example, try to put your phone in another room, sit, and focus your vision on something, whatever you want, for 5 minutes.

You can blink but that’s it, just focusing on that thing, no talking, don’t look at something else.

You will see that you will get bored quite fast and that finally, 5 min could be long (try to do a plank for the same amount of time and it will feel even longer).

The point here is that you have to put the intention to focus, with all your brain. And to help, as we saw last week, you have to make your life easier.

I will take myself as an example (because that’s my newsletter so I talk about me).
Here’s the list of things that I do be sure to be focused on that I was not doing before :

• I put my phone on focus mode, out of view → No notifications or temptation to take it.

• I close all the tabs/windows that are not related to my one task. I was used to working with my inbox open, a new mail even insignificant could break your focus.

• No music anymore while focusing. A part of your brain will focus on the lyrics, even if you don’t know them/they’re not in your language. I usually use white noise because I don’t like complete silence, and it helps you focus. It’s annoying at the beginning (at least for me) but it really works.

• I put myself alone in my room/desk/calm environment (ok this one I have no choice but still, if it’s not the case for you, do it).

This could sound like small things, but they have a great impact. Next are the rules that will help you define your focus.

Set the rules of your own game

I decided to work with the default blocks of 25 minutes.

You can adapt it as you prefer, some do with 20, some with 45, that’s as you wish. 25 was the good spot for me as it’s not too long, but not too short either.

The goal will be to shorten your task as much as possible to fit it in a x-min block.

Of course, some tasks could not be that small, but the goal is just to start.
For example, writing this newsletter will not take 25 min, but I start with a block of 25 min to write at least the first part.

At the end of a block, you could either go for another one or take a 5-minute break (or bigger after multiple blocks).

One big thing is to avoid messing up your focus during your breaks is going on social media or doing a totally different task. This will create attention residue and when you go back to your initial task, you’ll not be able to focus at 100% (even if you think you do, lvl2 monkey got you on this).

The best thing to do during your breaks is to walk around, do some stretches, drink water, and look outside, but nothing that will require your attention.

With all of these, I managed to be focused and really make progress.

Overall, it’s better to work a total of 4 hours during the day, being totally focused than 10 hours with a fake focus where you’ll not achieve half of what you could have done in the 4-hours focused mode.

Me → 1
lvl 2 monkey → 0

Focus Goals aka lvl 3 monkey

Ok let’s talk about work now.

It’s been almost a full week now that I achieved focus/deep work every day, so did I progress on my goals set last week?

Yes and no.

Yes, because I worked a lot on Auro.

I fixed some bugs, pushed 4 new versions, and started a big refactoring of the code (needed to add the next features) of the app.

No, seriously that’s how my project was looking before and after, this is f sexy. I could make a whole post about why and how I’ve done this and why this is amazing. I might do it actually…

Dev God's lvl of work

Also, I started to learn UI/UX design and app marketing (ASO).
I allow myself at least 25 minutes (you know where this comes from) a day to spend on one of these. I could share more about this next time if you’re interested.

So what’s the problem?

Here’s a quick reminder of what I set as goals last week:

• Learn about ASO → Good I started this

• Work on my apps and share updates → I worked and I shared things…

• Share more on social media → 🙈

You get it, I missed a big part which is sharing with the world.

Without sharing, no feedback, no downloads, no money, nothing.

The reason now is to understand why I did not do it.

For the simple reason that I don’t want to. And I’m not even joking.

First I don’t get how people find time to be on social media, post, make videos, content all that stuff, and still work on their projects, I’m truly amazed by this.

So amazed that I think it’s inaccessible for me, I spent all my days working on my app and now that I’m productive, I feel less productive than when I was overthinking because I have a todo list as big as the Eiffel Tower and yes I’m progressing, but I’m just looking at what I’ll have to do the next day to make more progress.

All of this without thinking about sharing anything.

This is what I call the monkey lvl 3. The one that easily makes you focus only on what you like to do.

I could motivate myself to go bike 10km every morning straight out of bed, whatever the weather, and follow this with a workout, focusing hard to work on my app until 5 am…

But posting a tweet about what I’m doing? Naaah
Making a 1-min titktok video everyday? Nooo way.

That’s monkey lvl 3, and so far I don’t know how to beat him but I have a big advantage: I’m aware of this now.

What’s next?

Hopefully, I noticed this after a small week, and not after a few months, so I’ll be able to work on this and hopefully find a solution.

By the way, if you have a solution to this, let me know. Really.

So far I think I will just force myself to do it, but remember (yeah I talking to myself right now) you have to make things easy for you, not hard, so I will have to find something else.

Hope this could have been at least a little bit helpful for you and if not, at least entertaining.

See you next week!

PS: This took me 2 blocks to write this, 1 to proofread + add links & GIFs, making progress!