Taylor Jacobson, Focusmate: Overcoming procrastination and improving productivity through virtual co-working structures

we are live guys Taylor Jacobson is with us he's founder and CEO at focusmate a company that I signed up for I think I saw you on producton Taylor and really loved the product because it's so simple and like I told you pre-called the best ideas are my favorite ideas at least they're super simple products easy to Launch they fix a clear problem and definitely we are

having that problem especially uh post pandemic hi Taylor um please introduce yourself please tell us about Focus mate you started that in 2016. tell us about the why behind it and a bit more about yourself yeah what's up everyone and thanks for having me Charles um well I'm going to start with the why um I started working remotely over 10 years ago I actually begged my boss at the time to let me work remotely because our office was really far away and um long story short I lost my job

because I just could not get it together working from home alone and um and yeah I went into a depression and shame spiral really I mean I'd never got fired from a job um I guess the Silver Lining was that that did start my entrepreneurial Journey but um but I spent really years and years trying to figure out how to not procrastinate and you know I always

been somebody that I knew I had a lot of potential I had great ideas I was really sharp and just following through was super hard and like the first business I tried on my own I just felt like I it was like watching paint dry except I was the paint I guess and um I just was moving at this glacial Pace you know and and I couldn't really figure it out um and it felt like I just was watching my life and my potential just slip away um and yeah and then I I actually found my way into coaching and workshops and just basically personal development because I was trying to figure out really how to do self-improvement and um I was working with a client who really high performer was procrastinating on an investor

presentation and you know part of my learning has been that actually a ton of really smart really high performers procrastinate have ADHD um and I had this fantasy basically that I'd never told anybody um but there was this guy in need so I pitched him on this idea that I thought could help him but I thought it could help me too and this is basically what's turned

into Focus made so what I pitched to him was let's get on a video call and let's tell each other what we're going to do what work we're going to accomplish on this video call we're not going to talk about it this is not a brainstorming call we're literally gonna sit there with each other kind of like babysitting one another while we do work so um you

know fast forward Focus mate is a platform it's a it's basically a social network where you can easily schedule a video call with another member and the structure is join the call you meet your partner for about a minute or less you're sharing what you're planning to do with the time and your partner sharing what they're planning to do at the time as well and then you

get to work and it could be 30 minutes 60 minutes or an hour and a half and at the end there's a bell reminds you to come back and you share how it went did you do what you said you wanted to do how far did you know how much progress did you make and I mean I guess the key point in all this is It's just absurdly effective to help us get work done it's it gets you you know gets your butt in the seat because you have an appointment now um it forces you to be intentional about what you're going to work on because you have to actually share it with another person you can't just kind of slide unintentionally into whatever kind of seems most has the most gravity for you at

that point you actually need to think about what you're going to do so you'd make much better choices about what you're going to do with your time and then the immediacy of knowing that in 30 minutes or in 60 minutes you're gonna tell that person if you did what you said you're going to do is really effective at just helping you stay on task um there's no

there's no like penalty we can't punish people for you know it's this is not like a drill sergeant type of situation but just human nature human psychology where social animals we're tribal animals we want to be good tribe members you know that's how our brains work and so it's insane how strong the effect is of telling somebody what you're going to do and then knowing you're going

to have to tell them if you did it and that's kind of it uh you know we have a few other features in terms of you can tell us preferences for who you want to work with you can save your favorite partners and kind of build your own tribe within the platform of favorite co-workers um but yeah long story short it's just a way to um it's a super supercharge your productivity love it dude um background I have used that method to inside my company we used to call them workshops for writing cold Outreach copy some people decided not to show up because it was daily so I think the frequency has to do something with it and just bad habits you know today I don't want and then the next day oh I don't

want again and then the habit of not showing up is Forge um and through my mind went okay can I be with other CEOs doing that I think that would be the best for me um and I would kind of incorporate it in my Mastermind product you know like uh show up with a bunch of CEOs and and get you done and or potentially do workshops with them copywriting workshops whatever cool concept I I love the concept um yeah I'm sold and I'll give it another try um pretty soon Focus made the question I had for you is I heard you starting this call you mentioned um procrastination and ADHD I do consider myself a functional ADHD or and it's way more than functional it's like uh probably hyper productive ADHD person um or I

like to think myself that way at least um is ADHD and procrastination synonyms or do they go hand in hand most of the time that's a good question I would say no um is the simple answer ADHD the way that I understand it and think about ADHD is it's maybe a combination of somebody who is more sensitive than average and possibly had what I would categorically describe

as like childhood or developmental trauma that um manifests itself as again sort of categorically chronic nervous system dysregulation and we just live in a society that has normalized that experience and also in a society that is very overstimulating to the human organism and so when you put together that kind of combination what happens is you have somebody who's and there's so many ADHD symptoms right so all

of those different symptoms you could kind of you say are different different bodies expressing the same thing which is being sensitive having some degree of trauma which you could it's like lowercase T trauma like we all have some trauma expressing itself as distractibility and distractibility you know one way to think about it is like my environment is stimulating me in a way that is not supporting me

to do the thing that I want to be doing doesn't mean the body is responding incorrectly the body is actually responding as it was evolved to respond to a something that feels dangerous basically um so at a very high level I would say ADHD is a sensitive organism responding to an environment that's telling it it's maybe it's not super safe and so this is why I think

a lot of people with ADHD are also very intelligent it's it's the sensitivity that they are expressing a higher they're responding more or reacting more to an environment that somebody else might not react to as much it doesn't mean there's something wrong and to me it means also that somebody with ADHD just needs to be a lot more mindful of what their body needs um what resources

they need to ground their nervous system what structures they need to ensure that they are supported in order to actually Channel all that sensitivity into you know the gift that it can be it seems like you've been pretty successful at doing that I'd be interested to hear some of the things that you think have been like the 80 20s for you in in becoming super productive as

you said and procrastination I would say is just one of the symptoms um and like the key thing I think for people to understand is that the body the nervous system when it is in a state of sympathetic arousal which is more commonly known as fight or flight or freeze it's optimizing to run or to fight the blood flow is in the spinal column and the extremities

it's not in the brain and so you might be very active and that's an experience a lot of procrastinators have is they want to move unless you're in a freeze State then you might be you know in bed which is another common experience for procrastinators but it's basically you're very agitated you want to move you want to do stuff but there's no blood the blood's not in

your brain you know you're trying to fight or run so if we want to stop procrastinating we need to be in a state of and when we're in a state of safety the blood flow goes to the brain to the facial muscles to the throat we're now optimizing for communication and collaboration and creativity uh but you know as as I mentioned earlier the way Society is structured

a lot of us are chronically over stimulated which means we're chronically in a state of stress that we might not realize because we're so used to it but if we're in a chronic state of stress that's basically saying we're either trying to fight or trying to run we're not going to be able to focus and be creative and be intentional with our time my definition of ADHD

is my brain seeing your head as a pineapple you have to tell me more well look at your head oh yeah no I gotcha it's like you take something in your environment and it's like a a tangent right yeah uh you touched so many points um the superpower that I have um once you control adhes I can almost remember um not by thinking but uh I it's just in there everything that you said and I can like deconstruct probably 75 of what you just mentioned there so first we'll need a round two because there was so much in um but what let's start with one point before this this podcast and I think a a legally bad combination is ADHD with anxiety I don't have anxiety and I also um you know just like a

blacksmith I forged a sword with my uh ADHD one one tip that I would have for the audience is do very hard events that require your full concentration for quite a while Iron Man's for example just pummeling for 16 hours um 10 day vipassana Retreat for example and you can shape your brain in that way to take all that massive energy and focus into it I think

ADHD is energy it's more mental capacity I think that ADHD and or age uh ADHD folks will perform better than normal people because there's all that similar that is if they can take it off and focus it into um one funnel that is and right now for example I have a dog barking that someone distracting me but then I can move in and uh Focus myself on one thing I think it's it's practice practice also like um for example on my ends lately um I've been having various work periods right so I told you about my 10 to 15 podcast today but I also have the after supper period in which I have zero meaning and then I look at my checklist and I start crunching the work solo by myself um but so many

topics there um maybe let's let's just end up with that because we'll we'll do a a round two um focus mate is quite interesting um I'm gonna reuse it uh but there's a potential chance that I'm not successful with it there's a potential chance that I actually turn or you know just give up the habit for the very fact that I am ADHD you know I'm like uh oh this is just not generating enough serotonin in my brain and I'll just move on to my normal stuff how do you actually fix that in your product so many things there um I I will just go back to something that you hit on around like how you hacked your ADHD which I would describe as like you found structures that that the structure itself helps you

focus right so like an Iron Man is like you're so singularly focused on one thing and it requires so much energy and in a way it's like creating the optimal environment so that all of your all of your capacity goes into one thing and um absolutely I would say you know to the extent of that environment creates safety also if it doesn't create safety you know you're

still not going to be able to focus but an Iron Man for example or um I forget some of the other examples you gave but um yeah yeah and the blood flow thing you mentioned was like so interesting right because the other day I was interviewed by uh I was actually interviewing Andrew Warner and he started like dissing my business at minute 15 and the whole blood

flow to my brain cut off you know I exactly got into fight or flight and that never happens to me um anyway I'm just like going for another tangent here but yeah go back to the The Retreat it's a great example because you think okay a podcast is a structure for Focus like there's a person right in front of me and there's pressure and there's there's all

these things that are positive unless you introduce danger right and then your body is like [ __ ] this right so um the passion is another great example and I would say Focus mate and we don't need to get into a lot of the science of it but it's it's a structure that allows you to focus and it is also it's another safe environment so it'd be cool to hear what your experience is and kind of how it lines up against those other ones um but yeah really cool kind of insight that you that you shared there and then yeah you know the serotonin and dopamine thing um those are it's like those are byproducts of when we create environments that do allow us to to focus right we're going to get more serotonin we're

going to get more dopamine and actually in some cases we're going to get more oxytocin as well because we're with another person we're experiencing a positive connection um you know a lot of people will say because of focus made I am actually smiling and laughing a lot more because every time I start a new session I see a new person there's this spark of connection it might

surprise you but um a lot of people come into these experience you know into a focus made session like I'm gonna be friendly to this person I'm beating a new person or a meeting a familiar partner um and so the kind of uh the you know biochemical cocktail is pretty powerful too and as far as you know as far as your last question about people churning um

yeah of course procrastinators and all human beings uh have a you know some kind of bar of habit formation I would say you know what works in our advantage is people get on Focus mate and almost universally they're you know it's kind of a jaw-dropping experience of like holy [ __ ] that was a game changer so that's basically the answer to your question is the product

works really [ __ ] well um but yeah you know we can't uh we currently don't have the capacity to go knock on people's doors and say Hey you know you forgot about this thing that was really helping you so you know one day yeah I love the product dude really bullish on it and I want to do a round two to talk about that and a couple of other topics that you mentioned I want to talk about the serotonin chain which I uh blogged about yesterday which is basically Zuckerberg crunching 18-hour days in the early days and clutching to Do's you know and being jumping from serotonin to serotonin serotonin I think the greatest Achievers in our uh in our current modern times they've mastered the serotonin chain uh hits I call it that

way they could be a better term for um Taylor where can people find out more about you and focus mate until then yep um so if you want to join Focus mate we have a free plan um and we're at focusmate.com and yeah if you want to connect with me on social LinkedIn and Instagram are the best best place to do that LinkedIn Taylor Jacobson and