Transcription
Good morning! Let's see who is up on a Saturday morning. Yeah, I love the shirt, by the way. You’ve got to show the shirt, Landon! Like, that is the ultimate Christmas shirt. Oh, here, should I make this more exciting? I love it! I mean, with that shirt, come on! I mean, try to keep it as professional as possible, you know? I love it! That's more professional than an office ugly sweater.
Um, okay, so I'll tell everyone how this live came about. You and I were sending audio messages, or you sent me an audio message, and you were telling me about what you're going through when it comes to focus. Let's call it focus for now. But you were also sort of asking a little bit about how I am productive and how you can overcome your productivity issues. Then you mentioned briefly that, hey, I think I have ADHD. I'm kind of in the process. And then you proposed, "Let's go live and talk about it because others might benefit from hearing this." Did I miss something?
No, and it's something that happens to me a lot where I'll sit down and I'm like, "Okay, it's time to get stuff done." I think it's a combination of anxiety and ADHD. I'm going through the diagnosis process, by the way, which is the proper way of doing this—not diagnosing yourself. I have to say that as a doctor. So I'm going through a formal process. But yeah, I just get overwhelmed. It's like anxiety and too many things to choose from. You know, I'll go listen to a Gary Vee post or video, and he'll be like, "Post 20 times on 20 different platforms," and I'm like overwhelmed with choices. Sometimes I just get stuck and don't get anything done.
So I'll tell you, when you said, "Let's go live and talk about this," I love talking about this topic. So I'm just going to tell you my story, and then you're going to laugh. When I grew up—I'm born in '80—but when I grew up, it was only the most severe ADHD people that ended up getting diagnosed and getting help and so on. Mine isn't that severe, but what ended up happening was, as a kid and a young adult, I was never diagnosed. But here are the signs: my mother made very sure I didn't eat too many carbs for breakfast. She made sure that every single morning she took me up, and we went running for at least 40 minutes. During breaks, she was like, "You got to get out and run around." I had such a hard time sitting down and concentrating. Anyway, I failed high school because I couldn't focus. I couldn't pay attention; it was just not interesting. I actually redid high school and all my bachelor's and master's afterwards when I finally realized how I could control my brain.
As an adult, when we had an autistic son, I went my entire life more or less without just finding coping mechanisms and how to focus. I can give you a long list that works for me. There is no—now I know I have ADHD, my oldest son has it, and I have an autistic son. So what ended up happening was, as we were diagnosing my middle son for autism, my wife went, "You do realize that you hit all like 90% of these as well, right?" And I was like, "Yeah, I kind of know, but it's okay."
So I talk to—I have a leadership psychologist that I've had for 12, 14 years—14 years. I said to him, "I think I have ADHD," and he just looks at me and says, "Yeah." I'm like, "Okay." He's like, "Let's formally do it if you want to." We filled out some paperwork, and he looked them over and said, "Yeah, and what's the difference? What's new?" What ended up happening is basically he said, "It doesn't matter; you're an adult. You already figured out all the ways how to get productive, how to focus. I mean, what do you want?" Then we talked about medication, and I'm like, "I don't want medication because I know when I—" So what I did when I was young, I used other things to sort of medicate my brain to keep calm. But I realized that if I want to focus on family, I don't want the medication because they make you a little bit numb in the head, or for me, it makes me very mellow.
Today, I have, you know, heart problems, so if I take medications, it's not going to go very well for me. Makes sense? So I don't have a choice. But that's my journey. What I realized, Landon, is that there are so many people who never get diagnosed. They never get curious about what they should be doing in order for them to control their brain, and everyone is different. What I've noticed is that you got to start exploring and trying different things.
So I wanted to partly jump on the call. Also, I want to hear your reflection on the story, but I want to tell you all the things I have experimented with and all the things that work for me. What's your thoughts on my story?
Well, I think that, you know, some people will listen to that and be like, "You know, ADHD is not real. ADHD only exists because of the world that we live in." But I personally have treated ADHD in my clinic. I remember I had this one kid; he was like 7 years old, doing really bad in school, having behavior problems. Then I put him on some medication, and he snapped into doing really well—almost instantly. So I think it's an actual medical thing. Even though we're not hunting buffalo on our horses, maybe our world is a little bit too boring for our brains right now, and we've just not adapted yet. But I believe in psychiatry and mental health, and I also believe in medications.
With my heart, it's the same reason why I can't drink caffeine. When I was younger, the way I medicated myself was I drank 14, 15 espressos a day because coffee has a calming effect for me. It actually slows my brain down, and the noise around me—it's hard for me to explain this, but all the distraction noises just disappear for me. I get calm in my body, which I can't explain. Normally, I can't sit still; I fidget all the time. That's why I always hide my hands under the screen when I'm on camera because I fidget with things. I fidget with this; I fidget with a coin; I fidget with whatever doesn't make a sound. But coffee makes my body just calm down; my shoulders come down, everything.
But then when I got heart problems, which is probably from drinking a lot of coffee and genetic things, I can't. All the medication for ADHD that I have found has an impact on heart rhythm, and the worst thing that can happen for me is irregular heartbeats.
Oh, okay, so you're in this situation where you have the diagnosis, but you can't really use all the medication.
No, but I believe in them. For example, we give medication to my autistic son, and when we do, he gets so much calmer. Basically, amphetamine in smaller doses is what you give, but his focus becomes so much better. He even asks for it, and he's 10. In the beginning, we gave it to him, and we were like, "Are we doing the right thing?" Now he even asks, "Can I have it?" It's not addiction because the half-life is like microdosing of everything. But now he's like, "We asked him what it does without telling him," and he's like, "It calms my brain."
So he's aware, at 10 years old with autism, of what it does for him, and that's a good thing for somebody that has racing thoughts just spinning around and around. That happens to me where I'll just sit down, and I'll just be like, "You know, I know."
I'll give you a couple of ideas. So here, Ashley asked, "I love ADHD. I wouldn't be any other way. Do you think it's more of a label and a mindset of making decisions, not realizing it's a superpower that not everyone has?"
I think it might be a superpower, a super good thing. I personally, like, you know my career, but I tell people listening, I went from failing high school to working in a factory to realizing how I control my brain and how I went from getting a bachelor's to a master's to a second master's and had a career from entry-level to CEO. I was one of the younger CEOs in probably the Canon company. If it wasn't for my hyperfocus and my extreme dedication and focus when everyone else freaks out, or in a startup environment, there's a lot of chaos. My brain becomes so calm; my thoughts are so clear in chaos. If it wasn't for ADHD, I would never have figured this out. I would have given up a long time ago. So for me, it's a superpower.
I love that, Ashley. Then, I can't pronounce the title, Casa Cabin, I think that's correct. "I've just been diagnosed with ADHD now being in my late 30s. What are some good coping mechanisms to use for anxiety and focus? I did not do well with medication; I felt like I needed to be unmedicated."
I can start giving some of my advice. For me, there are many things I do to help with focus. There are three things I would say have the absolute biggest impact for me. Number one, I have to exercise to calm my brain. There is no— for Casa Cabin, there is no way if I skip exercising. I don't have to exercise every day, but every other day, if I have a big meeting or I have to deliver something for work, I have to work out. For me, historically, it's been cardio—just 20 minutes on an exercise bike or going to the gym lifting weights. But cardio for me has been better, or going for a walk for at least 40 minutes. I have to be enough where my heart is pumping; otherwise, I don't calm down. I think it's a way to probably release dopamine in your system. If I really work out and my body is tired, then that makes a huge impact for me.
The second—if I skip it, Landon, if I skip it, I know my wife will tell me. She's probably listening right now, but if I skip it for too long, she will nudge me like, "I'm getting irritated now."
Yeah, you need to go exercise.
I need my—yeah, and my wife just wrote, "100% superpower." But it's so important to have people around you who accept and understand the way your brain operates. True. That's why I tell people, and I mean, it's pretty obvious I can sit still, and when I sit still, I'm just very tired.
So let me just ask you a question. I've been reading the book "Rocket Fuel."
Yes!
And it talks about how—have you read that book?
Oh yeah, I love "Rocket Fuel."
Okay, so in there, he talks about how visionaries have the vision, and they can see into the future kind of and create ideas, which I think I'm 100% a visionary. But then he says some people label that as ADHD. So you, coming from the background of being in the CEO world, and you understand that idea of a visionary—how do you interpret being a visionary versus ADHD? Are they the same, or are they different?
They're not the same for me. I have met people without ADHD who are still visionaries and creatives. But I have to also say that I have met many visionaries that have ADHD. I have also met a lot of integrators or COOs that have ADHD. I don't think it's one is correlated with the other. I don't know statistically how they're correlated. I just think that entrepreneurs in general have more ADHD people than corporate people because it requires brains that operate very well in chaos, and entrepreneurship is chaos. Doing multiple things at the same time is chaos, where we become calm, where others become stressed. That makes them better fit in a corporate world where there's a clear perimeter of how they have to operate.
But I have to— that's a great comment, though. I would say when I've met visionaries in the corporate world, they are not ADHD people. No, they're a little calmer; they can— they're more patient. Here's the biggest thing, and you might be doing this, Landon. I meet a lot of people who have diagnosed or undiagnosed ADHD, and if they're in the entrepreneurial world, they tend to self-sabotage. The reason why they tend to self-sabotage is that when they have the chaos, they feel better. They feel valuable because they can structure chaos. I meet a lot of people that when they're sort of saying, "Now I have everything lined up. I know exactly what I need to do. Now I just have to sit down and do it," they don't feel valuable. They don't like to do it that way.
So then what ends up happening is they self-sabotage, or they're like, "No, now I got to go back to prioritizing what's important," or "Maybe if I did this instead." It's their brain sort of saying to them, "No, let's get back to chaos. Dopamine! We need dopamine!" I'm a firm believer that people tend to—how do I say? There are different types of entrepreneurs, but there are definitely those who build up something and manage to go through crazy times for most people, where they create, they get through the chaos, and then all of a sudden, they're in a good spot, and they start self-sabotaging just because they want the chaos again.
That's where I come in and help a lot of people as well because what I realized is exactly like "Rocket Fuel." You need the visionary, and you need the operations-focused person. The thing is that the visionary has to give over the power to the operations-focused person sooner or later; otherwise, they're going to redo chaos again, and that will be destroying the company, basically.
I have to go back to answer there. There are several more questions, and for everyone who joins in now, I'm going to just write, "We are talking about ADHD." I wanted to answer—I said three things I do. One is physically exhaust my body. Historically, if I drank a lot of caffeine, but I can't do that right now because my heart is messed up. What I can do, however, is I eat magnesium in high doses—magnesium taurate—that has a calming effect on my brain. Combined with—I take another supplement so I can drink one cup of one espresso a day or half a cup of coffee a day, and I do that in the morning. I take that with—it's called—here, I have to check what it's called, but that's working for me.
So a lot of magnesium I eat in the morning. It messes up your stomach a little bit, but other than that, it works great. Let's see here. I do eat—Elan, it's a supplement that I drink. I take twice the amount. So if an espresso is about 40 milligrams of caffeine, I take about 100 milligrams of L-theanine, and that was someone who recommended that to me, and that has a calming effect.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That combined with a little coffee makes my brain a little bit extra focused. And then what I do—which is the biggest one for me—but the biggest problem as well—the way I dope my brain today is by eating high—like I love cookies, sugar, carbs. People like—we can go out and have a big steak at a restaurant, and I'm the person who orders the massive chocolate cake afterward and just basically inhales it myself. The reason is that calms my brain, or sorry, that gives me that rush, and I feel very aware for 30 minutes, and then it gets way worse.
So what I have learned to do is the opposite. The more keto or high protein, low carb I eat—even though I am feeling frustrations from eating that—it calms my brain tremendously. So if I cut—because I don't get this, and then I'm not like in my sugar levels, but I keep it more flat. When I keep it more flat, I can focus on things for much longer time frames and remain very productive.
Okay, so you're really affected by food, it sounds like.
Yeah, exactly. I'm not like that, though, and I don't think food seems to affect it as much. I think exercise is what it is for you. I think it's just being disorganized with my business plan in general.
Yeah. Are you writing things down, or are you letting it stay in your head?
Um, so this last week, I sat down. I think I have a lot of anxiety with it too, and I've been working on—there's somebody I listen to that I like, and I've been working on going through a stepwise process of processing my anxiety. I get really—my throat will get really tight, and I'll start feeling like chest tightness and palpitations, and it's just from like I'm so excited to work and so excited to get stuff done. But then I have so many thoughts just running through my head that—
Do you ever use a timer?
Yeah, yeah, I've done that. I do that as well. I have one here on my desk. I use it for everything. So I'm going to spend 10 minutes on this task, and then I don't allow myself to stand up or do anything until the timer goes off.
Okay, if I—20 minutes is the number for me, and then I need my brain to do something else. But the mistake many people do with a timer is that when the timer comes up in 20 minutes, they need to set a new timer for five minutes to do something else for five minutes. When it beeps again, we go back to the other one for 20 minutes. So I have to—I sometimes write a post-it note literally next to the timer because I forget what I was working on, and I put the post-it next to it, and then I know when the timer goes off, it's back to this task.
Okay, I know it sounds weird, but it really works. And then I allow myself that for two hours, and then I need to go and move my body.
Yeah, yeah, I definitely—you know, I would—in an ideal world, I think to myself, like, if I could do this one task for 12 hours, I could send—I could talk to so many people and get so many DMs done. But then I sit down, and I can't do it for some reason.
Use Mel Robbins' 5-second rule.
No, so Mel Robbins has this—it was actually used for people with anxiety and depression to begin with. What it is is that if you count backwards from a number down five steps and you say it out loud, your emotional part—like the brain—all the signals that go through your emotional part of the brain, I forgot what it's called, basically you activate your frontal cortex, which is logical thinking, and your emotion fades. So it's like five, four, three, two, one. But then you have to physically stand up or go to another room or whatever you're doing. It's a rule where you interrupt your own pattern, and that stops a lot of people from getting stuck in the emotion. Like you said, your throat cramps up or you feel it.
Using that 5-second rule—maybe we can link to this later on—but that has really helped a lot of people that I know of that have anxiety. The other thing is—so I know people use the 5-second rule. I also know people that when you have to sit down and work and you are getting to that point—and this is going to sound weird—allow yourself a break. So take a 10-minute break.
Okay, I can't apparently do this.
Okay, let's take 10 minutes, and then you put a timer, and you literally go and do something else—whatever you like to do. Go get some snacks or go for a quick walk around the house or go say hi to your wife, give her a hug, or like your kids, or like whatever you're doing. But after that break, you go back to it. Sometimes what I do is, again, I use post-its. I write down the things I have. If you saw my desk, every time I have an idea, I have to write it down. I have two seconds to write it down, or I forget about it.
But what I do is I fill my desk with post-its, and then when I'm going to focus, I pick one post-it and I put it on the screen. I can have a lot of post-its on my desk, but on my screen, I put a post-it, and I have to work on that, and I set a timer for it.
Okay, I'm very—like I force my own brain because the emotions, the frustrations, like I get those as well. Sometimes I just want to scream because I really don't want to do something, especially if it's an administrative thing. I have the best wife in the world who actually likes to do administrative things and dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's. By the way, she's a visionary integrator; she's a hardcore integrator. I'm a hardcore visionary, but she helps me. Sometimes she has to tell me, "Andreas, just effing sit down. Just do it." She has to almost like, "You know how you will feel better afterwards?"
You know, when I start stressing and getting anxiety about something I should do, she's like, "Just do it now. 10 minutes, come on, let's go, boom, sit down." I needed you now, do it now, do it now. Then I sit down and just do it, and then afterwards, I'm like, "I got one thing done." Every time—this is ridiculous—I write everything down on post-its, and when I'm done, I do this and that feeling for me is amazing. I have a trash bin, and I take it and I throw it in there, and I'm like, "Out of mind, out of sight." I feel amazing.
These are small things, like "Call back Anna." That was one of my post-its from yesterday, but I was too tired yesterday, so after our call, that's the first post-it I will do. But my goal is to get rid of the post-its physically around me, and that has also helped me tremendously.
Okay, that's a good idea. I think I need—also, like you said, you have your wife that's like pushing you. I think I need somebody. Oh, I really hope it's just the—oh, now I heard my—
For the day, and then I think just psychologically, if I don't get stuff done, then I know there's that outside pressure, like your wife, to say—and that's how I motivated myself in the past.
How did I get through school? So now I can't hear you.
Okay, I think it's lagging. I was having internet issues before. Let me know when I'm back, Landon.
Oh no! Hey, Spencer, I'm on a live with Andreas. Let's see, maybe I can try—
Okay, I'll talk and let me know when you can hear me again.
I can hear you.
Okay, when I was younger, I had someone tell me, "You can't—there's no way you're smart enough to take a software engineering degree." And what I did, I was like, "No, I'm going to prove that person wrong." So whenever I was struggling or I got distracted with something, I reminded myself, "Hey, I'm going to prove—I can do it." It was the same with the MBA. Someone said, "Oh, you can't do an MBA while you're working full-time." I'm like, "The hell I can!" I wanted to prove them wrong.
So part of me also, Landon, even to this day, I know who my enemies are and who I'm slaying and who I'm proving to others I can do certain things. What has shifted over time—and that's really a little bit more fear-based motivation—but what has shifted for me over time is I have learned to move from fear-based or "I'm going to slay" because my cliff and strength competition is very high. But I've moved away from that, and I'm competing with myself these days.
I'm competing with, "I can do this better. I can do this faster." So now, even if I set a timer for 20 minutes, I raise myself to get it done in 15, or I have done this task before. I know it usually takes 30 minutes; I'm going to do it in 20 minutes this time. By doing that, my brain then releases the endorphins and dopamine that I need to like, "Let's go, let's go, let's go," and be excited about it. When I'm looking at the time, I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to beat my time on replying to this email," or "I'm going to beat my time building this course," or whatever I'm working on.
Yeah, so I'm competing with myself, and by doing that, I learn to operate quicker and stay more focused.
Nice!
So, okay, what about this, though? One of the problems I think I have also is just getting started—like sitting down. I know what I should do. I feel like what I should do is the night before, like plan my day out hour by hour so that when I sit down for this hour, I know what to do. But I think it's just getting started sometimes—like sitting down, and then there's too many tasks. So how do you get started to even know what to put on your sticky notes? What's your process for that?
I schedule myself in the calendar, and I fill up my calendar, and I play a "what if" game. Have you heard of catastrophe planning?
Oh no!
So what I do is I wake up in the morning, and I say to myself, "If I don't do these things today that I have to do—not my sh*t, but what I have to do—how will I feel tonight?" I go through the emotion of feeling stressed, anxiety, not happy with myself, and I do that in the morning. Then I go, "Okay, if that's the case, I don't want to feel that way." So I sort of imagine the worst case—how I will feel if I procrastinate the whole day.
What I then do is I get the feeling that I do not want, and then I tell myself I can control this. Then I just pick one thing on the list. If I can't pick, it's the first thing that is on my list. Next to my bed, I have pen and paper, and I write down—if I wake up and I'm stressed or I have something I'm thinking of, I write it down and go back to sleep. But then I just do what's top of the list, even if it's something stupid like, "Call my mother," or "Call a friend," or whatever it is.
But then I just do it, and then when I get the feeling like I've done one, so now I have the fear-based—I put in my head of how I will feel tonight. I have now made progress, so now I'm excited. I want to do another one. But it's called catastrophe planning, and I use the catastrophe in my head—like, how will I feel tonight if I don't do this? How will I feel about myself? How will someone else feel about me?
Okay, and when I put that emotion, I frontload the emotion that motivates me to just get started. Then another thing, if I'm too jittery in my body or I have too much spinning—let's say I look on my post-its and I have five calls I need to make—I get in the car, and I just drive around, and I make calls. Or I come up with, "Oh, I can actually go do an errand. I need to go drive 20 minutes away to pick something up in a store," and then I make the calls on the way there and on the way back.
I use, you know, Plae—it's an AI recorder that you have on the back of your phone, so it records the entire conversation. If I need to take notes, it gives you the transcript, and then I can use that transcript to just look at what were my to-dos from the calls if there was something specific. Or I bring pen and paper, post-its, in a paper. But sometimes I just have to drive; I have to go for a walk. When I do the calls, I have to—what my brain says is multitasking because then I'm more motivated to do them.
Okay, all right. Well, you've definitely given me like three or four bullets to work on.
You got to try these things! That's what I'm trying to say.
By the way, we had a couple of other questions. Someone asked if I could give advice on how to regulate my three-year-old daughter who is very hyperactive. Again, what my mom did—I'm not an expert at this, and the question is, is ADHD genetic? I don't know; I think it is. But I don't know; you have to Google that or ask GPT it. I would say from a doctor perspective, go see your pediatrician and talk to your pediatrician about that.
Yeah, probably. I would do—there are lots of resources for kids with ADHD.
Exactly, that's a good point. I'm just saying that for my two kids, if we go for a walk or we play first, physically exhausting my kids helps a lot.
Then Ashley said, "They diagnosed me with it, and the opas—like caffeine and meds make me go up." Okay, interesting. I really had to focus my brain in my 20s and force myself to focus. For example, cleaning the house, I would not allow myself to leave a room until I completed it.
Yeah, so she does something similar to what I do with timers and with post-it notes. I do not allow myself to leave my office until I have cleaned out all my musts or I know that I trashed x amount of post-its.
Another thing is—let's see if there's something else. For me, it's going for a walk. Oh, what was the AI recorder? It's called Plae, and it's something that goes on the back of your cell phone with a magnet. I don't have it on my phone right now, but it goes on the back here, and you push a button, and it records something. How I use it is if I am having—if I know my brain is distracted, but sometimes when I drive, I just have these 10 items I want to do, and I can't remember all of them. So what I do is I just start to record in on myself. It doesn't have to be for a phone call; it can be for anything.
I just go, "I need to do this. I need to do that. I need to do this. I need to do this. I need to do this." Then I remind—when I come home, before I leave my car, I literally synchronize the Plae with my cell phone to get the to-do list from it. Then I copy that into either—I write down post-its, or I'm notorious for tracking everything in reminders on my cell phone.
What you can also do—you can say—I don't want to say it now because then I have three devices that pick it up—but you can say, "Siri, remind me to..." So the trick, what I have noticed is in order to calm the brain as well, when my brain is like, "I can do this. I can do this. I should maybe do this. What if I do this? What if I do that?"—it's just getting it out. So I sometimes say, "Remind me to do this. Remind me to do this."
Thank you, Spencer. He said, "This is epic." But the point is, as soon as the thought comes to my head, I got to catch it. If I don't catch it, I become stressed about missing something. So I have just learned to surround myself with post-its. I mean, I'm not kidding. Look here, Landon.
Oh my gosh, that's a brilliant idea!
I have—and I have different colors for different things. So the color for coaching is this. If I have someone I need to do something with coaching, it's purple or red. If it's something with software, it's green. If it's something real estate-related, it's either orange or yellow. I have to do that because for some reason, my brain just gets—I can't. I need these systems. I know it sounds weird, but by doing it, it actually makes me so much more effective.
Okay, yeah, this is all really helpful. I think I have to—I'm like going through this process of retraining my brain because I think going through school, there's always been a structure. Like medical school, they know exactly how much a brain can handle, and they have these little benchmarks. You know, there's like a test every week or every—you know, two tests a week. So I always had these benchmarks in my brain, and even working in medicine, it's like we have patients scheduled for you every 20 minutes.
And so then I just like—I know exactly how much time I have with them, and it's just like doing this thing over and over, but somebody else has created the structure for me.
Yeah, but now that I'm doing this thing where it's like I want to make my own path instead of just being somebody that follows somebody else's path, when I go try to make my own path, because I'm so creative, it's just like an explosion.
Roll a dice!
What? Roll a dice?
It sounds like what you're saying. If I can try to create some systems like what you said, I think that just trying to get my brain to follow a path—even though I don't know exactly where the path is sometimes, I think that could help.
And that's what I do. If I have something brand new I have to do, I have a whiteboard here next to me. I set a timer for 20 minutes, and I just brainstorm the hell out of it. The trick is, in the end, I have to circle one thing I'm going to do directly after my own little brainstorm.
So then I spend 20 minutes just exploring something on ChatGPT or creating a to-do list, but I have to write it. For me, it's physical. I have to physically write something. Chewing gum helps me as well a lot because when I'm chewing gum, I can't do it on lives. Sometimes I forget myself, but I always chew gum. The reason is if I activate the muscle of chewing, it also makes me more focused.
But I don't know what works for others; I just know what works for me. And this is—I’m going to sound like a nut job here.
Okay.
So, I drink a lot of water just in general, but when I feel like, "Okay, I should—I could go to the bathroom now and go pee," I actually wait because that feeling of "I have to go, I have to go, I have to go," it actually also makes me more focused in a weird way.
So what I do is I tend to wait until the last second just because it distracts me enough I can get more things done.
That's funny!
Yeah, I think I remember like in track, I would try not to go to the bathroom because I felt like I would run faster, kind of thing.
But it works for me, and I know it sounds crazy, but that does sound crazy. I've never done it, but I think that sounds—I don't know if physically that's good, but that's what I do.
And then I'm trying to give as much advice as I possibly can here. For another thing for me is I listen—when I have to really focus, my wife wrote, "You're weird."
Yeah, when I have to focus, sometimes there are these—what are they called? They're called—on Spotify, you have ADHD playlists or something like that, where the music isn't predictable. They use different tones and different Hertz frequencies embedded into the music—not lyrics. Sometimes if I really have to focus on something, I can do that, or I can do like really hardcore '90s techno.
But noise-canceling headsets—I can't be in a room because it's enough to get noise in, and then the kids scream, and I get curious about what's going on. So I use the headset as well quite a lot.
What else do I do? I think I covered a lot of things I do. I'm trying to remember something else. Timer—you said post-it notes, timer.
Well, you really start out with your plan with—you do like a catastrophe plan.
Yeah, how will I feel in the evening?
You do your catastrophe plan; you talk about how you would feel in the evening if you don't get the task done. Then it sounds like you have some brainstorming boards for your tasks, and then you kind of translate that onto post-it notes and timers and focusing on those individual tasks at a time—like one at a time.
Yes, and basically, the way I think you should think about it—do you know what a Kanban board is?
A Kanban?
So in agile software development and in other places, it's like post-it notes. Think about it like idea, and then you have research, ongoing, and done. What I try to do—and there are free tools like Asana that you can set up in a Kanban board. So you can also—and that's what I do for some of my businesses. I move things from post-it to digital, or I put my reminders and I move them into Asana.
But that is the same feeling. So if I'm on the road and I don't have my system in front of me, then I use Asana for it instead, where I write down all the digital post-it notes, and I sort of move them to done. Just that feeling of clicking them off is very—I have associated that.
So I'm not kidding, like in the beginning, it's like, "Oh, take a piece of chocolate every single time you achieve," like Pavlov's dogs on my own. But I am now like every time I get something done, I reward myself.
Nice!
Okay, I think there needs to be like a list of all the resources that you do because this—I want to try like all of them.
This sounds—you have—and I have tried so many things, Landon. You have no clue how many things I've tried. Over the years, I realized that—and then sleep for me is extremely important. If I don't get enough sleep, I'm screwed. Some people with ADHD say the opposite: they say if I operate on less sleep, I'm so tired, it gets easier for me to do things. But I need my brain at like 100% efficiency, and it just doesn't work for me.
Drinking plenty of water is also another good one for me. If I drink plenty of water, it makes me more focused—not just because I need to go to the restroom, but it just makes—I can't explain why.
Keeping your sugar levels leveled—we talked about that. We talked about exercise. For me, another reward is we live in California, so I go out. We have sun almost every day, or 300 days a year. I go outside and I sit for 20 minutes and just listen to music and take in the sun. Often, I have a little spot I go sit in my garden. I often fidget with something when I do, but that usually calms my brain as well so I can focus afterwards.
What else? I think learning—I think the 5-second rule is something I used to use; now it's sort of ingrained in my head. Everyone should Google Mel Robbins' 5-second rule. She's amazing.
What else do I do? Me and my wife, we do something else. I'm just spitting out ideas here, and hopefully, maybe we can clip these later. But another thing I do is—yeah, Vesna wrote ocean. Thank you, honey. When I go to the ocean, that calms me a lot, and I think it's the sound of the waves, and it's not a pattern. So my brain—I always look for patterns in everything, but when you have this coming in, it's—I don't know how that sounded, but you get my point. The waving is random, and that calms me a lot.
So often, I say to Vesna, or I say, "Can't we go down to the ocean and just walk in the morning?" That's what I do with my kids.
What else? BNA, if you're listening, you can tell me what more I do. I told you most of these. But the point is forests and going hiking is another one where there is no noise. It's just so much pattern from nature that my brain becomes very calm with that as well.
I don't know else. I think—
I think you've given me a lot of tasks. I think I'm going to—
Your ideas! I actually have to get going, Andreas.
Yeah, actually, I realized I had a meeting at 8 a.m. But anyway, this became very random. Landon, did this help? Did it help you in any way?
Yeah, this did! I'm going to go back. It did! Yeah, I'm definitely going to listen to this again and come up with some ideas. I just need to figure out how to basically get organized, figure out what exactly I'm trying to get done, and then break them up into small tasks.
Yeah, like kind of what you're talking about and use some maybe more tactile things.
Yeah, my wife added two more that I do. Video games sometimes, and then strategy games—they make me also hyper-focused. But video games that are strategy games definitely make me hyper-focused, but I have to play them on very hard—like the hardest difficulty—because otherwise, it's too easy to spot the pattern.
Anyway, I gotta go.
Yeah, okay! Nice talking with you. I hope this helped someone.
It was an ADHD type of call because we went everywhere.
We did! We just bounced off of each other. I love it! Have an amazing time, Landon, and let's stay in touch.
Okay, thanks, Andreas. You too! Have a good one. Bye-bye!