[Music intro] Skipper: Hi, my name is Skipper Warson. I'm a design director in San Francisco and welcome to the show, How This Works. This is where I invite people on to talk about a topic they know incredibly well. Today, I'm fortunate to have Jake Kahana with me. Thanks for being here, Jake. Jake: Yeah, thanks Skipper. Thanks for having me. Skipper: Let's start off with you introducing yourself. Would you tell us in two to three sentences who you are, where you come from, all the important details? Jake: Two to three sentences is tough these days. But sure, so I'm Jake Kahana. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and after a decade in L.A., I'm now living in New York -- in and around New York -- as a designer, an educator, and an entrepreneur. Skipper: I don't know that I realized that you lived in L.A. Jake: Yeah, I went to school there, I went to film school, and wanted to work in animation. I was gonna go work at Pixar and my first semester, I took an animation course and I said, 'Oh shit, this is not for me. I need to figure out what I want to do.' Skipper laughs. Jake: And it was actually a blessing in disguise, it kicked off my four years (of school) being like exploration. I took music classes and acting classes. I joined an improv troupe and took different kinds of art classes. And different internships and I made my way into advertising. And I was an art director at a couple of big agencies in L.A. and, as most people do in the industry, I sort of burned out and took a year off and traveled. And through that process met my partner, moved to New York, and worked here a bit. I've been freelancing and started Caveday, which I'm sure we'll talk about, and some other things after that. Skipper: Yeah, let's not get too ahead of ourselves. But for as many times as we've met and we've chatted, I don't know that I knew you wanted to be an animator. Jake: Yeah, that was my original goal. I think if you were my therapist, we would dive deep into wanting to make art. You know, I've always made art, I've drawn, and I’ve painted my whole life. But there was there was something in like middle school or high school where I was out to prove that I could be an artist and still make money -- while being creative and not feel like I was a starving artist. And so I think that drove me to film and entertainment. But that changed again pretty quickly when I got to school and I minored in animation. I still love the process of working with animators, I just don't want to do it myself. Skipper: Yeah, to actually do it. Yep. Jake: And my daughter is awake. Skipper: I hear her. You called it. You said she would wake up while we were recording. Jake: I have my notes here. Say hi. Skipper: Hi... Remind me how old your daughter is again. Jake: She'll be two next month. Skipper: Wow. So many changing things. Jake: I know. Right, I'm fully ready to go. Keep it going. Skipper: Okay, keep it going. So Jake, what is the thing that we're going to talk about today? What is the topic that you know incredibly well? Jake: Yeah, sure. It's hard to answer that and include the question in the answer because a lot of us don't love bragging. Skipper: Right. Jake: So it's hard for me to say, you know, what I know incredibly well but what I know incredibly well is how people focus -- and how we get distracted so easily. At work, not at work, working from home, whatever we're at now. I spend a lot of time thinking about focus and distractions. Skipper: Thanks for taking that question with such grace, Jake. So would you tell me how the journey into focus work and distraction started for you? Jake: I think that the early nugget of where this stems from was in 2013 or so I was at an ad agency. I was working with a partner. In ad agencies you're partnered up, I was an art director working with a writer, and our task was to write a bunch of scripts and come up with an ad campaign. And day after day after day, we would be in the office until 9 or 10 at night. And that was normal. It was the culture of the agency. And one week, our boss was on vacation and so we decided, 'Hey, you know what, we're going to work remotely.' We're just going to work at the coffee shop near our house. We live near each other and every day for that week, we were done by two or three in the afternoon. We'd show up at 9, 9:30 AM, whatever, and we would just finish our work early because we were not distracted by other people and because we weren't sort of expecting that the day was going to take long and that early idea that work fills the time that you give it -- which is called Parkinson's Law. And that's the culture of advertising in general, but specifically the agency we were at was about being social, hanging out, and stretching the work. You knew you were gonna stay late so you might as well you know, have a long lunch or socialize a little bit. But when we were able to focus and remove some of those distractions, I have a whole different relationship to work, I have a whole different experience of work. And so Caveday didn't start until three or four years later but I think that nugget -- we all work in a sort of messed up way and we don't really know how to work, we're just sort of making it up as we go, and that's leading to some pretty bad habits and behavior. Skipper: Yeah. So you mentioned a couple of things there that I'd love to dive into. Tell me a little bit more about Parkinson's Law. Jake: In short, it says that work fills the time that you give it. Do you remember being in college and you're given an essay to write, and you have two months to write it, and somehow, you're still staying up all night the night before finishing it. And if you had two weeks to write it, you'd still stay up the last night writing it. And so similarly, when we're given an assignment, we tend to fill the time that we're given. And it works with things like meetings, you know, we have a 60 minute meeting and suddenly, there's two minutes left before we're ready to wrap up and we finish. But if the same meeting was a 30 minute meeting or a 15 minute meeting, you can cut through some of the B.S., and you fill the time with what you have. Skipper: Yeah. Is that something that you started digging deeper into for your own work before -- and this is before Caveday -- this is before you formalized it as part of a practice and working with other people to help them to focus? Jake: Correct. This was just anecdotal evidence. Back in 2013, I was on a very different path. I was on this path of running an agency in 10 years and, you know, being the lead creative person somewhere. And a lot has changed -- which maybe is time for another... is a another conversation for another podcast. Skipper: Sure. Jake: At the time, this was a strange observation and a strange insight. And until I started doing a lot of research with Caveday and putting together our blog posts – I design and develop our curriculum for workshops – that really wasn't formalized until several years later. Skipper: So between uncovering the relationship between work and focus, and when you started Caveday, how were you continuing to explore these notions? Jake: I think it's actually really interesting because probably for most of my adult life, let's say from the middle of college -- let's call it age 19 or 22 to 28 or 30, like a whole decade, I prided myself on what what my mom calls work ethic. Which I don't think is work ethic as much as I interpreted work ethic in that context of, I work all the time. I was working on the weekends in college, I surrounded myself with people that would party in the evenings, but Saturday was about shooting films and going to writing meetups and doing things around L.A. It wasn't about day drinking all weekend, every weekend. So from college through my early 20s into my late 20s, it was like I would work all the time. And I think that that were insights and feelings of, 'This is not great anymore.' I met my partner, I started having desires and goals outside of just work. Skipper: Okay. Jake: I'm starting to look up to different kinds of bloggers and authors. And so I was reading people like Paul Jarvis, Seth Godin, Derek Sivers, and Tristan Harris. I was looking at designers and creators like Tina Roth Eisenberg and Jocelyn K. Glei and all of those people influenced how I started thinking about my own work and process. And I'm also very conscious of that list and knowing that it's mostly white men and there's not a whole lot I can do about that -- that's what I was reading at the time. Skipper: Of course. Jake: But this idea of spending time with family, being with friends, and part of what's happening is that smartphones and cell phones were becoming more and more capable of distracting us in new ways. Instagram was becoming a thing in 2013 and so I'm just aware of... I feel like I'm working all the time and I'm not getting much further. Skipper: Sure. Jake: So I think there was this conflicting feeling of, 'Hey, for the last 10 years, I've prided myself on working all the time.' Because that's what the people around me were doing. That was what felt right to me. That's what got me the success that I had. And then starting to realize that one, I had different values and goals and two, that the world was changing and that my priorities were changing. It wasn't that I wanted to do less, I don't need to be working all weekend, I don't need to be up until midnight, or 1 AM on my computer sort of working, just in front of my computer when, you know, now I have a girlfriend, a fiance, and a wife now. And all of that stuff was starting to change in my life where I sort of realized that there has to be a new way of thinking about work. Skipper: Okay, all right. So all of these things are brewing, you're learning a lot more, you're sitting in this tension of not sure whether or not this is a lifestyle that contains a fair amount of work grind is the right way to approach the way in which you work. So 2013, when did Caveday start? And how did it start? Jake: When I first moved to New York, it was the end of 2014. And I started meeting people because I'm in a new city and I needed a new job. And I reconnected with a lot of people that I knew. And at the time, I thought, I want to hang out with my friends. But I realized that everyone wanted to just go get brunch and that people that I knew were not my friends. They were just people that I went to college with or people that I used to work with. And so I decided to sort of turn this into a project and I created a little club, a little design project for me, that I called You're Better Than Brunch. Skipper: Okay. Nice. Jake: I want to see these, I want to see these people, I want to meet amazing people who value the same things that I do. And so You're Better Than Brunch was this monthly adventure club. You'd sign up. I would design and mail you in the mail  a postcard would be your invitation to an event that month. Skipper: Ooh, nice. Jake: We would do the Russian and Turkish baths in the East Village. We did a hot sauce festival. We did a tour of the Chelsea Galleries. And my whole thing was like, we live in New York City, let's get our coffee and bagel to go, and let's explore. So I did that for about two and a half years. And I loved it. It was a lot of work, you know, designing, researching, and then mailing. But I met some amazing people, these are like my friends now. Not just like my old coworkers and the people I know in New York. And I was getting married and I felt like, 'Hey, that project has sort of run its course. I don't need to make new friends and go on adventures. I have an adventure partner. I have my friends. I've sort of done it.’ To sum this project up, to sum up You're Better Than Brunch, I ran a retreat. I won a small grant that was helpful in putting together this retreat. And I had 14 people upstate to explore what You're Better Than Brunch means in the larger context of the world. Brunch became this metaphor of the social script, the thing that you're supposed to do because everyone does it. Skipper: Ah, the expectation. Jake: Exactly. Like everyone does brunch so you have to do brunch. And that's what we do on the weekends. And that's what we talk about on Monday. And You're Better Than Brunch became representative that can choose our own social scripts, I can choose to subscribe to what's normal for me, what my definition of success is, what I want to be and have in the world. Skipper: Sure. Jake: And so we spent this weekend exploring that. We did it cell phone free and looking at what is a meaningful experience in our world. It was an amazing experience and I really got to know my two co-founders from Caveday who I had met tangentially -- I met one through a You're Better Than Brunch event, I met Molly through a You're Better Than Brunch event and she introduced me to Jeremy at another one. And, I knew them but I didn't really know them. And we really bonded that weekend. And this retreat was in October of 2016. Skipper: Okay. Jake: And in November, we all got together for coffee, drinks, or something. And Jeremy came to us and says, 'I had an amazing weekend. I just spent it in the cave. I went upstate to my parents house. I shut off the Wi-Fi and I wrote a whole screenplay in a weekend. And it usually takes me six months but I feel really drained. I feel like we should do something with that idea.' And Molly, who's an event producer was like, 'Oh. We could put together an event.' And my background was in branding. And I'd said, 'We should turn this into a brand and turn this into a thing and not just a one-off event or whatever, a little project. It took us about two or three months of research and promoting, but we planned one event. We had a coworking space donate their space for a full Sunday. Skipper: Okay. Jake: We were able to get some free coffee, lunches donated, and some snacks. And basically, we researched putting together a methodology for how to work together -- work alongside one another -- in a way that feels energizing and socially connected so it's not just sitting at the library for eight hours. And we put this Caveday together in January 2017, we run our first event, it's an eight hour day. It's exhausting but everyone is like, 'That was amazing!' You know, we're gathering people that already work on the weekends. And it's not rare that you work on your side project, you update your website, you re-write your screenplay. These were people who had side projects who were working on them. Skipper: Sure. Jake: And every single person was like, 'That was amazing. I would do that again. I want to do that again. When's your next one?' We didn't have that, this was a thing we wanted to do for our friends. It's January, beginning of the year. And so we turned to each other and said, 'We just made $200 each. That was pretty cool. Do you want to do one again?' And we ran one in March, a month and a half later. And we sold out again, 50 people came. And we happened to have a journalist who is there participating. And he ended up writing about us in Fast Company a couple weeks later when it went live. And that's that's the history. We then had people asking about bringing us into their company. And maybe the way that I tell that seems like we were success and rich from the start. And I wanted to definitely be transparent as I continue to tell the story of Caveday. It's still not my full income, it's still a quarter to a third of my income even though it's more than half of my time. And we're doing better in COVID than we did pre COVID, which feels uncomfortable, but that's the reality and so obviously, maybe I skipped a step there. But we were running entirely remotely now and we run about 30 sessions a week of deep -- we can get back to that. Skipper: Yeah, let's come back to that. Can I ask you a clarifying question? Jake: Yeah. Skipper: Did you meet Molly and Jeremy as a result of You're Better Than Brunch? Were they friends or acquaintances before? Or were they folks that came to an event where they plus ones of someone else's? Jake: Yeah, that's exactly the way that it went down. Molly and I met at a dinner a couple weeks before and then I invited her to a You're Better Than Brunch event. You can say that we met at the dinner and we spent a lot more time at You're Better Than Brunch together. And then, she invited Jeremy to a rooftop concert. She had classical music on her rooftop and that was a You're Better Than Brunch type thing. And that's where I met Jeremy. Skipper: Okay. January 2017 is that when you all did your first event -- and it's in New York City? Jake: Yep, it was in SoHo. Skipper: The idea was that you were holding the Caveday events inside of coworking or other kinds of workspaces -- and I mean workspaces in comparison to residential spaces. Jake: Exactly. So we had a coworking space who donated their space. And we did that for about three or four events. And then we moved to Breather spaces. We had a relationship with Breather and we would be all over New York City in a different spot every day, basically, when we were running those events. Skipper: Got it. Jake, for those of you listening who don't know, what is Breather? Jake: Sorry, Breather is sort of like WeWork meets Airbnb. They rent out spaces in big office buildings. And they furnish it, it's like really nice tables and Wi-Fi. And some of the bigger ones have couches and refrigerators. And so we would take over some of the bigger spaces. We would run our events in those spaces. Skipper: So it's not just helping individuals to focus on work in these Caveday events, but you're also having businesses reach out to you during this time, right? Wanting to figure out how they can create environments for groups of people and employees to do better and more focused work? Jake: Yeah, like I said we ran this one event and then a second one. And after the Fast Company article came out, a lot of companies were reaching out to us saying, 'How do you work with us? How can we bring you?' We had no idea, we're not even a company. We weren't even a LLC, we were three friends who had done some research on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow" and how to take breaks when we work. Skipper: Yeah. Jake, what did you just say? Me-hi-chick-send-me-hi. What is that? I don't know what that is. Jake: Sorry. It's one man, his name is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, I'm not even going to spell his last name but his first name is M-I-H-A-L-Y. But he wrote a book called "Flow" and he wrote another book called "Creativity". Skipper: Oh, yeah. Jake: It's about sort of these optimal mental states. You know, flow is like when you fully immerse yourself in a thing. So we've likely experienced that when we're exercising, cooking, dancing, playing music, making art,  jigsaw puzzles, or playing chess, those kinds of things that are like fully immersive and require full attention. And he studied basically these mental states and what he learned is that the quality of your work goes up, you learn three times faster, and we generate new, novel, strange, and more interesting ideas. And the book, the subtitle of the book "Flow", I don't remember exactly what it is but it has a lot to do with happiness that people who are in this state are happier, that they report when you're fully engaged in something when you're losing track of time, you're happier. And so if we can find that in our work, and monotask and lose ourselves, lose track of time a little bit and immerse ourselves that people will generate better work, learn faster, and be happier. And all that stuff is important. Skipper: Yeah, better work, learn faster, be happier, all super important. And thanks for helping me with the phonetic pronunciation of his name. I don't think that I've ever heard it audibly before. Okay, so since Caveday started in 2016, you mentioned the notion of remote, working remote, about the in-person workshops in New York City. How does it work today? Jake: So right now, we're entirely remote. We've been running remote caves, we call our deep work sessions 'caves'. We've been running remote sessions for a little over a year now -- pre pandemic. We were doing a little bit in New York, a little bit in L.A., and a little bit remote. And since March 2020, we've gone entirely remote. We're running 30 sessions a week. Some of the sessions are one hour, one sprints and some are three hour, three sprints -- we break it down into sprints with breaks in between. And it's all remote and we have no plans -- because it's hard to plan anything right now -- but we have no plans right now about whether or not we'll go back to in-person because our community has grown internationally and so to say, 'Hey, we're going back to New York’ means we're leaving out 500 people. Skipper: Yeah, that's a ton of people. That doesn't feel feel right, that doesn't feel very inclusive. So, what's a lesson or a few of the lessons that you've learned in the time that you've been doing Caveday? Jake: One of the big things that I'd love to talk about is our phones. Our phones are the biggest distractor that we all have right in front of us. And if we want to learn anything from this podcast, Caveday, or anything is how your phone can reduce your cognitive abilities. Skipper: Sure. Jake: The University of Chicago did a study in 2017 that said having your phone upside down, even on airplane mode, just temporarily, can make you dumber. It challenges our cognitive abilities. And so by putting your phone out of reach or out of sight, it can boost your cognitive abilities automatically. And part of what I like to explain is that we get so used to distracting ourselves, the average person unlocks their screen about 80 to 150 times a day. Skipper: Wow. Jake: Which is anywhere from 3-5 minutes everyday you're unlocking your phone, depending on how long you're awake and blah, blah, blah. So, the average person unlocks their phone 80 to 150 times a day. And this has a dramatic effect on our work if we're expected to be working eight hours a day or whatever or maybe more than that. Microsoft did a parallel study that showed that the average focus time at work is 40 seconds at a time. Skipper: Huh. Jake: And obviously, part of that is other people distracting us. It's emails popping up and Slack messages. Six months ago, it was people coming up to your desk and saying, 'How was your weekend? What are you doing?' Or all that stuff. I think a big part that we don't talk about is how we get in our own way. Because we're so used to unlocking our screens so much and looking for that hit of dopamine when we see a message come in, when we see new news, or when we refresh our feeds. And we all do that. If you have a phone, that's what you do. If you have a smartphone -- Skipper: Yeah. Jake: What ends up happening is you know, you start writing an email, as soon as it gets challenging, as soon as you're not getting a hit of dopamine, we're used to that. We're used to something that feels good. So we open up another tab and check that Google Doc and so now I start writing that and I make a comment. And you know what, I just remembered, 'Oh, shit, today's the fourth of the month. I have to check that my paycheck on the first cleared.' And so I go to my bank's website and that's loading slowly but I know that when that loads, and if everything's good, then I'm going to be able to buy that thing on Amazon. So now I'm opening up an Amazon tab and while I'm here, I might as well buy toilet paper and groceries and now I'm buying toilet paper when I was you know, just writing that email. Skipper laughs. Jake: It's because we're used to this every 40 seconds I need something new. And it's not that the world is spiraling down the toilet, it's that we can train ourselves to do better. By putting your phone out of reach and out of sight, by training yourself, or by being in the habit of -- we don't own this but we're gonna brand it and own it as Caveday -- which is the more we can monotask instead of multitask. And when those things come up -- and they will -- check your bank account, get groceries, call your mom, all those things, write a quick note. Skipper: Okay. Jake: I always keep a post-it note next to me. When I'm working, let me just write it down, I'm going to tell my brain, ‘Hey, you're supposed to be monotasking’ so get it down so you don't forget it and learn to stay on task. Skipper: Yeah. Jake: And we can extend that 40 seconds at a time to, as much as science shows us, up to about 52 minutes -- Skipper: Wow. Jake: Of concentrated focus work before I need a little break. And we can, you know, extend that focus for a little bit longer, a little bit longer. Skipper: Yeah. That's a tremendous increase. I wasn't expecting you to say 52 minutes, but I was expecting you to say something like, go from 40 seconds to five minutes. Jake: Look, that's like, step six, you know. Let's start with 40 seconds to a minute. Or to two minutes. And all of that is self discipline. And in a lot of ways that's being a manager or like the Fast Company article called us "productivity nannies". Because we would take away your phone and we're giving you the structure and the guidelines for how to work and so in some ways, it's about managing yourself and being your own productivity nanny -- Skipper: Sure. Jake: To say before I do my work, let me set things up. Let me put my phone away, let me close those tabs, let me get my water, get a notepad by my side, and a pen so that I'm ready to work. Skipper: Yeah. Jake: And creating an environment of focus. Instead of just saying, whenever I'm in front of my computer, I am working. And so at night, when I have to work, I just open up my computer and I'm sort of emailing and I'm sort of watching Netflix and I'm sort of, you know, listening to three things -- and that's not work. And that's not doing you any justice. Skipper: No. You're right, that's not work. And I don't think it's very helpful. Jake, I want to go back to something you were just saying around our phones -- in our work and our home space because I think we've been in meetings where someone's walked in, or a few people walked in, and they have their phones and they put them down on the table. Even if, like you said before, it's on airplane mode, or it's asleep or locked or whatever. I've seen this before in restaurants where people are having dinner together, they will put their phone down on the table next to them and it's turned over. But even in our homes, this creeps in -- this idea of phones at the dinner table. In my house, we have a no phones rule. And part of it is because -- Jake: Why? Skipper: Why no phones? Jake: I mean, I know. But let's just say it explicitly. Skipper: Okay. Why? So when you're sitting with your phone at the table, it feels as though you're not present. Jake: Totally. Skipper: And that doesn't feel right. True, someone might be waiting for a phone call but most of the time you're not. In this country, generally we don't have these long drawn out dinners. Our dinners are typically 30-45 minutes, maybe an hour long. And if someone calls us, there's voicemail on our phones, right, these are modern phones, it'll pick up the phone. If it's an emergency, they'll call back or try some other way. Jake: Yeah. Skipper: Like you, we have a young child in our family. And you can already see the impact of screens on her. Once -- and this was a couple years ago -- she asked me to come play with her. And I was doing something on my phone. I don't remember what it was, but I was doing something. And I said, 'Okay, hold on. Just a minute.' And she said, ‘Dada. Fine. You can bring your phone with you.' I thought, 'Wow, she just called me out.' The first iPhone came out in 2013 so this is still a fairly new paradigm, these smartphones and these objects of distraction. And I think it's up to us to model better behavior. How do we build better behavior? Jake: Is that rhetorical? Or that's the point? Skipper: No, I guess not rhetorical. But more, so yes and... How do we start? Jake: Yeah, I think it sort of goes back to that early work session that I had in 2013 which was around getting our work done more efficiently. If we can learn to, look I'm at work, get my stuff done. I don't necessarily need to work until 5 or 6 PM because the work day is inefficient. You get more out of meetings when we're fully present. We get more out of meals and time with people who are fully present. And when we're trying to multitask, they don't even call it multitasking anymore, that they call it continuous partial attention, which was coined by Linda Stone, who's an ex-Apple and Microsoft person who's now a tech journalist. But continuous partial attention is like I'm at the dinner table and you have part of my attention the whole time, sure, but my phone has part of my attention. And I'm also thinking about something else. When we can be more present and give full attention in meetings and to our breaks and distractions when we're giving those things that attention, we can do them more efficiently. Otherwise, our brain just gets tired and exhausted and we don't feel like accomplishing as much as we could. You know that feeling of where it's six o'clock, you've worked all day, but you didn't get any work done. And that feeling is because of shallow work and multitasking. And you think, 'I was doing things all day. I was busy.' But did you actually focus on a demanding task without distraction? Did you focus on any one thing? For more than 40 seconds and -- Skipper: Sure. So if we're so distracted because of modern technology and just life in general. How do we get better at working? Jake: You and your wife and your daughter have set up some rules for your dinner table. Likely explicitly, you didn't just sort of come to this conclusion without talking about it, that we don't bring the phones to the dinner table. Skipper: Sure. Jake: And what I think is missing a lot in the workplace and within teams and within corporate structures is that same explicit rule setting agreement making. And so we joke around at Caveday, we call it the first day of kindergarten meeting. You know, the first day of kindergarten you sit around in a circle and the teacher says, 'What are the rules of the playground?' Because this is the first time kids are now in a social space outside of their house and they need to get socialized. Skipper: Sure. Jake: And so they say, 'What are the rules of playground?' Well, we clean up after ourselves, we don't push, we ask permission, and we share. And those make the list, we put them on the front of the board. And we follow these rules. And these are agreements. And as a team, I think it's important, it feels like you have buy-in, it feels like you have some level of contribution to how your team is structured, which makes you more invested in the team, which makes you more engaged which makes you feel like you have more freedom, and there's more purpose in your work. When a manager can sit their team together and say, 'What are the rules of our team? How do we protect deep work time? How can we make sure that people aren't emailing at 10 or 11 at night and on weekends? How can we make sure that people don't have to check Slack every 30 seconds to make sure they didn't miss anything?' And we've got tips, and I don't think we have enough time for that, but I think just the intention of -- How do we communicate better? How do we run meetings better? And how do we protect deep work time so we can encourage focus and and monotasking so that people can get better work done? Skipper: Totally. Um, let's just jump into the last couple questions. Jake: Yeah Skipper: And maybe this is related to focus and work, but what's one of the most important lessons that you've learned so far in your life or in your work. Jake: So one thing I've learned is about removing distractions, not just at work, but other parts of my life. And it's a hard thing to do. It's sort of like meditating constantly and I don't consider myself a good meditator, I don't do it that often -- but you know, your brain tends to wander, that's the work of meditating. Skipper: Sure. Jake: And I find that to be the relationship that I have with distractions, and with my phone, and with technology. That our intention is to be fully present, whatever I'm doing and to have deep conversations when I can. There are days and weekends where I just want to watch TV and I just want to be on my phone. And I think that's okay, I'm learning to be more comfortable with the self compassion part of this process. And knowing that I'm better than I was a year ago, and way better than I was five years ago at managing distraction and trying to extend my attention span and being mindful of my own distractions and the things that get in the way, removing social media from my phones, and creating friction in that way. And so that's one of the big lessons that I'm starting to learn is that this is a process. This is a relationship with technology. And just like a relationship with a person, there's going to be some energizing and exciting moments and lessons learned, and there's going to be really challenging and draining and critical points. And that's normal, but it's an ongoing thing. The other thing that I'll say, and I asked you this on Slack, which was the best piece of advice you've gotten as a leader Skipper: Yeah. Jake: And an old mentor and teacher of mine used to say, 'There's two kinds of people. There are people who make excuses and there's people who get shit done.' And that's always stuck with me. I don't want to be the sort of person who makes excuses. I want to be the kind of person that gets shit done. Skipper: That's a pretty apropos mantra, given our topic of conversation. So Jake, where can people find out more about you? Are you online? Are you on social media? Jake: I'm not much on social media. But caveday.org is a great place, I do monthly newsletter and all of the content there. You can find me personally at jakekahana-dot-com. I write a monthly newsletter sort of related to You're Better Than Brunch about modern philosophy, making more meaning in our lives, finding interesting patterns, and things going on every day. And that's monthly as well. I call it The Email Refrigerator. Skipper: Great name. Jake: Thanks. Yeah, we don't have enough time to go to the backstory but it's essentially the refrigerator is where we get snacks and a little bit of light and we put our best  artwork of the month up there. So it's a temporary space for me to put things out there and be held accountable to that. Skipper: It's always so lovely to have it land in my inbox. So thank you for making it. Jake: Yeah, thanks for having me Skipper. And thanks for listening everyone. Hope to see you in the Cave soon. Skipper: And with that, thank you for listening to How This Works. Please subscribe in your favorite podcast app and leave us a review. We're just starting and so it would be ultra helpful if you could tell just one other person about the show and why they should listen to it. You can find us online at howthisworks-dot-show -- all one word, no dashes. Again, that's howthisworks-dot-show. And you can find us in the places where social media happens. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that you learned something from my talk with Jake today, there are things I want to do around focus work myself. And we’ll talk again soon. [Music outro] Jake: Yeah. Skipper: Is there a lot of background noise? Jake: I don't hear anything. Skipper: Okay, great. If you don't hear anything, awesome. Ergh... Eh... Er...