There it is. All right, everyone. Welcome to the show. We're about a minute late, but hey, we're mostly on
time with the way we roll this show and we're going to have a really great show for you today. But before we get started
here, let's uh play off the stuff that we go. It is time.
It's interview 71 and we are achieving flow in WordPress with Steven Pury.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for WordPress plugins A to Zed, not Z.
Welcome to another episode of WP Plugins A to Zed interview show. This episode
features Steven Puri, founder and CEO of the Suka Company, who brings a wealth of
experience from media technology, film production to share productivity strategies tailored for the WordPress
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management systems, powering the web with over 80,000 plugins to choose from.
How do you sort the junk from the gems? Welcome to our WP plugin set where we've
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rolling. Well, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you happen to be
hiding out there on the Globe today. Coming to you direct from the Brewery Overlook in beautiful southern Vancouver
Island. I'm John Overall and in today's episode 71 of WP Plugins, we are
unlocking the secrets to peak productivity with Steven Puri, founder and CEO of Duka Company with a career
that includes broadcasting, software engineering, and producing visual effects for blockbuster films. Steven
now focuses on enhancing productivity for remote workers through his innovative innovative app, the Suka. In
this episode, Steven shares tips and tricks for WordPress developers and designers to achieve flow states, boost
productivity, and block distractions. We'll explore how the Suka app can transform your workflow with features
like AI coaches and focus music. Whether you're a season pro or just starting out, this episode is packed with a
productivity wisdom you won't want to miss. Let's get started. Welcome to the show, Stephen.
Ah, John, thank you. And I hope we have some fun, actionable advice in this episode.
Well, that's what we're shooting for. And uh as we talked about a little briefly beforehand, this one's a little
different than the shows that we normally do for WP Pro A to Zed. A little atypical.
Yeah, a little bit, you know, but that's what we're shooting for and we're going to be talking a little bit about it. Let's start out with you. Tell us a
little bit about yourself. I know I had a nice great intro for you, but can you share your journey from working in film
production? You're the founding of the Suka company and what inspired you to create a productivity app for remote
workers? Uh, I would be happy to tell you that. I'll tell you the story probably begins with my parents were both engineers. Mom
was a software engineer, dad was a hardware engineer. So, I was a code monkey when I was little and that's how
I fell into film because film went digital and I knew how engineering
worked. So, I got into film producing digital effects. Um, as you mentioned, I did a bunch of movies in the 90s. Uh,
worked on True Lies with Cameron, uh, Braveheart with Mel Gibson, worked with
Woody Allen, Jim Jarmish, David Fincher on Seven, and produced the digital
effects for Independence Day for which we won the Academy Award. Nice. That was really fun. Set up a company with the director and producer Roland D
of the movie because we got along really well and ended up selling that company. And then after that, I was like, what do
I want to do next? And I was like, well, you know, I actually make films, the whole film. So, I got into that for a
few years, as you know, was a vice president at Fox, so I ran the Die Hard and the Wolverine franchises and a bunch
of stuff like that. and then had a moment where I'm like, is this really changing the world in any meaningful way? And I I went back to doing a
startup. And one of the things I noticed, and this is the most direct answer to your question, John, which is
there were a lot of techniques I'd seen high performers apply in both the film
and the tech worlds that allowed like remote work to be more productive, allowed people to find their flow
states. And I thought, how do I take all of that and put it behind one button and also, you know, share these lessons for
free? Go on podcasts and talk about, you know, how some of these things work because not a lot of people have had
that experience being a senior executive at a couple motion picture studios seeing film and then also, you know,
I've started a few tech companies and, you know, run those. So that's kind of how I got here.
That's very cool. Well, with your background in software engineering, what specific techniques can WordPress
developers use to enter flow states when coding plugin, etc., you know,
especially when dealing with repetitive tasks like debugging or optimizing code for performance?
Yes, an excellent question. Okay, so let me just set the table for 30 seconds, which is I know some people are out
there at home or in the car nodding. They know what a flow state is. to make sure we're all on even footing. Flow
state is a phenomena that was named by this Hungarian American psychologist
Mihi Chined Mahai who wrote a book called flow after he researched high performers and his thesis was they have
a way of getting into this concentrated state where they do great work the work that moves their career or the world
forward. How do they do it? What are the conditions precedent when they get into this per highly performant state? And
his book was called flow because he loved the metaphor of yes you
can paddle and move yourself forward but if you're aligned with the river the river magnifies your efforts it carries
you forward right so this concept of flow states people have heard in many ways people talk about being in the zone
a lot of developers I work with talk yeah when I'm in the zone when I'm sort of like you know doing my thing I get to
that high output state and it's where you lose track of time You're not staring at the clock.
Oh, yeah. Know that one. You Yeah. You know, you you're not distracted. You are doing something
where when you look up, you may have forgotten to do those little fidgety things like go to the bathroom, get some water, things like that. But something
important is accomplished. And what Mihi sent Mahai and it's a fantastic book, but he said there's some conditions
precedent. Like you have to work on something you think is meaningful. So when you were joking about debugging code, yeah, if you think this is
meaningful, like, oh my god, this is going to be a great release tomorrow if I get this done, you may very well get into a flow state fixing bugs. If you're
fixing bugs from your annoying pair programmer who's an idiot, you may not get into a flow state because you're
annoyed through the entire thing thinking, couldn't I partner with someone better? Right. Right. U
the things about flow states, you also need a bit of time to get into them. So let's talk now the table is set. That's
what a flow state is. people talk about in many disciplines, athletes, artists, developers,
designers, you know, right? So, actionable things to think about. Number one,
you need to set aside a block of time. Most research shows it takes 15 to 23
minutes to get into a flow state. To get to that point where the world falls away, you are just cranking on what you
need to do and you're not even distracted. Right? Now, if you're in a flow state and you get distracted, it
takes you the same amount of time to get back there. So, the number one thing to do is you need to set yourself a box and
say within this box, this is sacred. Now, I'll tell you in my company, we have 9 to 11 every morning central time
where we don't set meetings with each other. We don't slack each other. You know, that's a time where you can go deep and
hopefully at the end of that go, I actually did something meaningful. Let me share that. Right. Right. It's very different than the hey
man yeah I emptied my inbox I'm at inbox zero I got backed all my slacks I did whatever like yeah there's shallow work
as Cal Newport would call it but there's that deep work so that's something to to keep in mind is you have to respect that
block of time and keep it sacred right it may change every day now second thing to keep in mind is what
is your chronoype and this is the second term I'm going to throw out there which is
this is something new what is a chronoype Yeah. Well, I'm glad I could share something new, John.
So, prototype means you as you become more sensitive to how you work
may and hopefully will recognize what kinds of things you do best at certain times of day. I'll give you an
example from the world of film. It's a famous screenwriter, Ron Bass. He has written scripts that have gotten
Julia Roberts, Tom Cruz, Dustin Hoffman to play his roles. Right. Right. writes amazing characters. He was an attorney
who decided to become a screenwriter and he realized his chronotype was such that in the morning he told his family, "I
can't talk to you. I'm not the dad who's going to be like, hey, who wants flapjacks for breakfast and who did
their homework?" He's like, "Don't talk to me. I won't talk to you." because he said for me to write this
dialogue I can't hear my characters in my head if I'm talking to you as soon as
I've started engaging with his wife to just say good morning he's like I can't hear those and he was obviously so good
at writing dialogue that these huge A-list actors would be like I want to say those words on screen you know I'll
take that movie in the spring so that notion of that and I'll tell you in SF
where I was working for a while more than anywhere else. And I was never a banker in New York. There's also a
culture around that, but there was a hustle culture sort of mentality of, oh
my god, if you're not coding at 3:00 a.m. and micro doing source or LSD or something, like are you really a
developer, you know, are you really a software engineer sort of thing, right? Seen that part seen that part of the industry once.
Yeah, I think I think we both have. And for some that is a badge of honor. There
are some people who want to tell their boss Elon Musk, I'm sleeping under my desk. I'm taking photos and posting them
to Twitter of me sleeping under the desk and this out dedicate. Okay, whatever. Right. Right. Good for you. I would like to believe
that we're moving into a world where work is measured by the effect of what
you do, not when you do it or where you do it, right? And when you lock on to that, you say,
"Okay, you know what? Maybe my golden time for coding
is this period of time whereas in this other period of time I may be more distracted. So maybe that's when I should, you know, update linear or jura
or do you know lightweight stuff, return emails, write up some specs, but that time when I go deep, maybe it may be 10
o'clock at night. That may be true for you, but don't assume that just because the culture around you tells you, right,
this is how hustle culture works, right? Um I realized for me it is early in the
morning. And I'm I've never thought of myself as a morning person. You and I have talked about caffeine and coffee and stuff like
that, right? I never thought about that until I realized the clarity of my thought between about 6:00 a.m. and 910 a.m.
is measurably different than the rest of the day. Yeah. So that's why you and I were talking in
the afternoon. I would never book this in the morning. Yeah. Well, my my my mornings part part of the reason why my show doesn't start
till this late is my mornings are when I do the vast majority of all my work. The rest of the day I do all the
miscellaneous thing like work on inbox empty. Yeah. shallow work, the stuff that doesn't require
Well, it took me a long time to learn that because I was never a morning person. I used to previous to kids.
My work working working hours was 1:00 a.m. till 6:00 a.m. See, that was when I worked absolute
best. And then when I had kids, I had to change my life around and it took a few years to readjust.
Yes. But yeah. So, let me ask you a question real quickly. Uh as far as chronoype
goes, how does someone work to discover that? Or they just work pay attention to their
schedule or what do they do? The the truism is true which is when you
measure something you can then optimize it. Yeah. Absolutely.
If you use any sort of task management or timer like obviously in the platform I built we give you that ability to say
time box yourself go you know what this ticket should take me 75 minutes or 90 minutes
you can see your progress on screen you can also look historically and be like how well am I estimating the time it
takes me to things do things you can use it on paper like this this is not something you even need an app for but
if you do this for a week or two and see your patterns of like wow in the mornings
I seem to be very good when I'm doing this like what you just said. So, so what they could do is use the
Suka app to figure out their pattern over this course of several weeks to a couple of months depending on
but I don't want to just shill my app like I made one of which I'm very proud but I'm telling you you could do this with a piece of paper and a pencil.
True. And just for a week or two log what you do write down how long you think you're going to
take. I think this should doing this ticket or inbox zero or whatever it is. Designing this thing in Figma should
take me 45 minutes, right? Write down at the end how long it took you. See the patterns, learn.
Okay. Well, let's talk a little bit more about the uh Suka app here in that one.
We made a brief mention in the intro where we talked about it provides music
and other things to help you. How how does this we you mentioned the flow state. How does the app help someone to
get into their flow state? What sort of things does it do to them for them? I'll give you a very concrete example.
And you know, necessity is the mother of invention, right? For me, it was pain is
the mother invention. And for me that pain was the six o'clock where I tell
myself, "Oh god, I didn't get through stuff today. God, I suck. How does this
happen again? I'll get up early tomorrow and then before I start tomorrow's work, I'll finish today's work. And you tell
yourself that lie and then it's just dominoes. You know, Tuesday night you don't finish, then Wednesday's morning. You know what I mean? Have you ever done
that? Oh, yeah. I I still do that occasionally out of foolishness, right? So, you get to a point and I know that
I'm going to have a child this fall. You're way ahead of me. You know how the rhythm is going to work, but I have been
very conscious of, okay, you know what? If I want to have afternoons where I'm like, I'm crushing this,
it starts in the morning. And what I realized was this, and this is that thing, you know, the six W's, the
peeling back the onion, I realized that I would tell myself, okay, you know, John, tomorrow morning
at 9, I got to dive in. I got to fix this bug in the in the website, whatever, blah blah. Right. And at 9:15, tomorrow morning, I would
be returning low priority emails my inbox or be scrolling quickly the news
just to make sure I'm up on anything going on. Right. Yeah. And I said to myself, why am I doing this? You know, but because I'm
procrastinating. Okay. Why are you procrastinating? Because I'm overwhelmed. Why are you
overwhelmed? And it came down to one of two things for me. It was the size of my task list where I would look at it. It
was so daunting. It was almost paralyzing. Like there are 17 things. I'm not going to get them all done before my podcast with John at lunch.
Right. Right. Or there was something on there that was so overwhelming because it was so large.
I'm not going to rewrite the marketing site right now before my lunch, right?
And it almost felt like how could I even make a dent in this? Why start? So, what I did in this specific way was
work with Tony, you know, a friend of mine. We're doing this together and said, "Okay, you know what? What if we
had a smart assistant like an LLM, you know, in a nice rapper inside the app that every morning would look at what I
had to do, identify the three priorities with me, and then as soon as I hit play,
in order to start the music and put my computer in DND and all that, it would hide the other 14. And it
helped my ADD brain to not want to multitask and jump around and not be
daunted by the size of my list. I would see three things and I'd be like, "Oh, I can get those three done in two hours."
Done. Yeah. And it helped tremendously. And I noticed in our app again measure things. Yeah.
When we did that, 77% of our members complete three tasks as as opposed to
before when they could see their whole list, they would complete less than three. So I think that's been a really
helpful thing for people in the community. It sounds really simple, right? But sometimes these little tricks you do
with your brain where your brain just goes, "Oh, okay. This feels good. Okay. Yeah, you got me." Yeah. So, so one of the things that the
Suka app can do is people can create their big 17 long task list, set their
time, like my focus time is 9:00 a.m. start and they soon as they hit that 9:00 a.m. that 17 drops to three.
It's almost like they've it's almost like they've completed 14 items suddenly.
Yes, that's exactly right. And then they can look at those and say, "This is what I'm going to focus on
now." Okay. Yes. We have a little little card. The whole uh when you open the website, you'll see some cards. There's like a
group chat card. There's your smart assistant card. There's a music card. You can choose flow music like you said,
and there is a task card which shows you three things. You can finish those three,
right? You can also set it that when you finish those three, it will automatically pull
for you the top task from the rest of your list. If you're like, I'm going to get through more than three today, but I
only want to see three at a time. So it does that just to help you know ease the stress in your brain. So the um the
thing that I personally find very interesting is as we were building this there are a
number of times when you know you were weighing do I build this next feature? Am I right? Am I wrong? And we happen to
have a really warm friendly community. Um the biggest
cohorts of members we have are developers, right? Designers and writers. Why? Because all
of them work from home. They're knowledge workers and they have hours of work to do. Yeah. Well, that was one of the things I
wanted to you'll talk about. It's like how does how does the app help people with developers and others that are you
know in particular WordPress the vast majority of WordPress workers are remote workers or solopreneurs or you know they
might work for an agency but the agency might be located in New York and they might work from South America
for example. Absolutely right. And are there a lot of distractions that when you work at home? Oh god. Yeah. I've got four monitors
here in front of me right now, you know, plus a laptop, plus another computer and a dog who wanders in from time to time
to say, "Hey, you got to get up from the computer and take me for a walk." So, it's like, yeah, the distractions are everywhere.
Let's not for There's always the fridge, which is calling like, "Oh, come get a little stack." And there's like, "Oh, you can put the laundry in and get the
laundry done while you're working." And million things, right? Million things you can do. Yeah. This is something that I learned. Here's
the thing that people don't get because not a lot of people have done film and tech. Mh. in film
for a hundred years they have already figured out how to do
remote and hybrid as well as like RTO or in office in person synchronous whatever you want to call it right because every
film starts out remote it's writers writing in their homes writing in their writing
partners' living room going to coffee shops and working remotely at some point God willing you get some traction on one
of your projects you get a little money you set up a production office, right? Two days a week you're in the production
office meeting with, you know, location scouts, costumeumers, production designers.
Let us hope that moves forward. Suddenly you're in production and it is RTO. It's all day, all night, four to six months.
You're living there and then it goes back to hybrid and then it goes back to remote. In each of those eras,
individual contributors know how to contribute in that particular era, right? And leaders know how to lead. And
the funny thing is because it's been done so long,
it predates the words that we use. Like if you said to someone in film, "Oh, you're in the remote phase of your movie." They'd be like, "John, what what
are you talking about?" Yeah. Okay. Right. It' be like, "Oh, you're in development. Oh, you're in prep. Oh, you're in pre-production." You know,
exactly. Well, yeah. A whole different terminology for the same. It's a whole different terminology for the exact same thing. The exact same
thing. Right. And it's like, how do you do each of these things in a way that's healthy? Because I'll tell you the name of my
company is I mean you know because you you heard me speak before the suka the suka company it's I can't
remember the precise term of it but yeah go ahead but yeah but it's it's suka is a term I
heard a lot in yoga my wife has heard in yoga which is about like the self-fululfillment the happiness you
feel when you're in your lane doing the thing you're good at you can do it with ease it is an easeful sort of like command of
what you're doing right so that is ultimately ely what we want
to what Tony and I want to you know enable people to say you know what I'd really like to have 3M where I look up
and I'm playing with my kids as opposed to 6 p.m. I'm like, "God, I suck. I'll get up early tomorrow and try and finish
this." Well, yeah. That's uh what I've st what I've striven for in the last several years is to make sure I was there for my
young boys. I'm with you. So, as they've heading as they're heading into manhood now.
Yeah. You have teenagers. I'm about to have a baby. Yeah. Well, I have I have teenagers and a grown daughter. So, yeah.
Yeah. So, you know a lot about this. But in terms of distractions, I appreciate where you're coming from, which is hopefully people listening to this are
saying like, "Yes, I do want to find a way to be more in control of my life. I
do have technical work to do as well as creative work to do." And if I can get into a flow state, get
into the zone, and that allows me to be more in command, what a great outcome.
And that is really what I'm focused on. That's why I really appreciate you having me on. Oh, yeah. I appreciate having you. I
appreciate expanding out what uh WP plugins A to Z can do. Another question
here for you Stephen. Um AI as everyone knows in the last eight months has
absolutely exploded on everything. How is Suka handling AI and its massive
number of distractions that it's bringing to the uh to the party? Because it is it's got a lot of distractions.
Fortunately, I use it for for helping me code, but that's all I'm using it for. I
don't do tons of research and other things with it, but it helps me with all the other things I do, but I know a few
people that they're using AI in ways that I never even thought was possible.
I'm I'm with you. And I will tell you this because it is a question I get
frequently and the best answer I can give you is a an analogy.
Mhm. which is if we were to say to Usain Bolt, "Hey man, with AI we made this
robot. It runs faster than you. So why don't you sit here? We'll let it run. It's going to win." That would suck for
us. That would suck for the spectators. Right. Right. But if you went to him and said, "Hey, with AI, we actually looked at your bone
structure and your feet and we think this shoe fits you just like 5% better. You might shave half a second off your
time. Would that interest you?" That would be thrilling for him and thrilling for the spectators,
right? So that thing of, hey, with a longer lever, how much more could you lift? Could you lift the earth? Right?
That I think is a very interesting application of AI. I know that yes there are jobs that will be displaced by LLMs
in particular but what we offer when you ask me like how do we apply that in SUA
the smart assistant is an LLM is an LM that is tuned for very specific things
and we improve it like every day as you know these things they're evolving like after you and I
speak Tony and I will spend an hour or two working on how do we make this better because we want to offer things like this
your LLM your smart assistant doesn't just say, "Hey, John, I looked at your task list. I think these are the three
things you need to focus on. You agree? Let's give each half an hour and get going." Right? That's helpful. Time boxing and organizing.
That's helpful. Yeah. I want the smart assistant to say, "Hey, John, you know, I looked at your schedule tomorrow
and I see that you have a block of two hours here and that's usually a great
time when you're coding. Can I make a calendar event just block that out so no one books anything in there?" And by the
way, I also noticed that that daytime you work best to this playlist. So, how
about I throw on like Sonic Caffeine or ambient atmosphere or one of the playlist. I'll throw that on for you
tomorrow at two. Mh. And or you in your case in the morning, right? And let me create a beautiful experience
for you so that the only thing you have to focus on is how are you making that beautiful plugin? Not hooking up your
Spotify and not doing this and not blocking your calendar. I want that. Mh. That's where I want AI to go. I want AI
to say, "Hey, man. I just put your Slack in do not disturb." Y because I want to give you this time.
Okay. So, so the Suka app, um, let's work in
talk a little bit about it actual functionality because I haven't personally downloaded it yet. It is something I'm going to look into.
It's a website. No download. Oh, there's no download. It runs purely from the website. So, the website that you pulled up, sugo.co.
Yeah, you can claim your free trial, enter your email address, 7-day free trial, no
credit card, you can be using it in 10 seconds. Okay. And so what you just mentioned
like putting your um Slack for those that use Slack, I don't, but put it into
no disturb. How does it do that? You you connect up Slack to Yeah. to it. So you connect up the different
things. Another question I've got here. The music it chooses where does does it
have its own music sources or do you provide music sources for it? Yes. So I happen from my ye oldie film
days to have a lot of friends who are film composers. There's a bunch of research on flow
music on focus music. Okay. Generally, the research points to
60 to 90 beats per minute, right? Certain key signatures, nonvocal, ambient, rhythmic music,
right? Bunch of friends have time on their hands, have written me over a thousand hours of original music to those specs.
Now, some people in the community have said, "Oh, I love Loi." Okay, so we created three channels, three playlists
that are exclusively lowfi. You know, one more little uptempo, one more little down temple. Okay, for that. Um, do you ever listen to
binaural beats? I notic you have nice cans on. Do do you listen to binaural? Um, I don't know the terms. I should
know it from my days in college where I took applied communications and learned radio, television, newspaper, and all of
that stuff at the time, but I don't remember all those specific. Let's talk about it. Okay, so and again for those playing at home, binaural is a
relatively new concept. become more popular, which is if you were to feed
slightly different feeds, channels into your left and right ear. Mhm.
Where it's offset by certain number of cycles per second, certain number of hertz. There are some early studies that show
that it stimulates the brain in an interesting way because the brain now has to reconcile sound that's maybe like
40 cycles or 36 42 cycles different than what it expects to be hearing. So some
people believe that there are different kinds of brain waves that are that are stimulated by listening binaural or
gamma delta depending on the hertz right I actually wrote a long blog post about this
so we had people in the community that were passionate about binaural they're like oh I love this but I wish you had
binaural so great did some research spoke to some composer friends said hey
would love for you to create some tracks where there's this slight offset and we launched those some people swear by I
personally have tried it and I believe it helps me, but I also don't know if it's the placebo effect of I believe I
should feel something. So, I can't tell you personally, but if binaural is is your jam and you're listening to this,
yes, we support binaural and we'll probably launch more playlists with it because it's been pretty popular. I'll
also mention this. We had a number of people say they missed coffee shops. The background ambient noise of them.
Yeah. The wall, what are you going to call it? The white noise. Yeah. of coffee shops. So, we found a
recording of a coffee shop in Vienna, Austria. It was like two hours long. Yeah. If you want to listen to a coffee shop,
you can literally just choose, you know, Cafe Vienna. Yeah. So, yeah. Some people do need
white noise versus music. It's like me, it varies. Depends on what I'm doing. Sometimes it's white noise, sometimes
it's music, sometimes it's absolute silence. We not only have white noise, we have pink noise and brown noise, which I
learned how those are subtly different. Pink noise and brown noise. Those are two terms I haven't heard either.
Here's the thing is, so in obviously the range of frequencies, our ears are more attuned to certain
frequencies than others, right? The way some people can start to lose the bass or lose the treble, sort of thing. So
pink noise and brown noise are where there's equalization applied to white noise to boost or attenuate certain
frequencies to sort of balance it differently. And it can sound I know this is going to sound weird, but it can sound warmer or
cooler depending on how you do that. Even though it is white noise that's just been equalized. So again, some
people love that. We have a great community. When they ask for something, I usually jump to it and be like, "Oh, sure. Let's see how we can figure that
out." So that's something that uh that we launched was like we call it pink dawn and brown earth.
Very cool. All right. Well, let's uh talk a little bit about we we've touched on it once or twice here, the ADHD
brains and the the bouncing which it turn it turns out there's a vast number of
programmers, developers, and whatnot that seem to have ADHD brain. It's almost like a prerequisite sometimes.
It's it's crazy, right? Yeah. And but your your your app, the SUA app, how
does it help provide friendly flow techniques so that those with those challenges can get moving forward? Well,
having been medically diagnosed with ADHD because one of the members of the Suka,
who's an ADHD coach, we become friends. And she turned to me two years ago and said, "I think you should go like have a
test done because I think you don't know it, but you are, and that's probably why you created a flow state app." Right.
She was right. I know the doctor did all the tests. He's like, "Yes, you have ADD." Not so much the hyperactive
presentation. Well, you lost the hyperactivity as you aged. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Probably right.
And so I say this because that led me to, you know, because you want to learn,
you want to say, "Okay, tell me more about me." And the idea that we can monotask
is true. Yeah. The idea we can multitask is not true. No. But we believe it.
I I learned that one a few years ago. I had that belief I could multitask and finally I went nope focus on one item at
a time and I get way more done. And for those listening, there's a really good uh Cal's written about it. Near Al's
written great blog post about this saying like it's really just monotasking where in between monotasking you burn
brain energy context switching saying okay I'm going to stop doing this. Let me store what I was thinking about this.
Let me load into local memory like what I'm about to do. Go work on that for and switch back and forth. So you know it's
almost like RAM swapping where you're like this is expensive to keep doing this. Right. Right. So that said, since we clearly both know
what that is, one of the things that Tony wanted to do with with uh Suka is say, "Hey, you know
what? Let's show you your active task." So when you begin, here's the thing you should be working on. There's a little
colored progress bar on it. If you finish that task before you touch
something else, you get more points. There's a there's a system where you can see am I getting better day over day,
week over week, you know, and you get points for not picking up your phone while you're working. Like you can lock your phone.
That was a big one for me is I when I hit something that's hard, my dopamine craving brain picks up my
phone. Even if I'm sitting here at my desk, it's like, well, I'll just scroll for a minute while I think on I don't
know how to fix this bug in, you know, our React app. So
that was something we thought, okay, so let's let's help you see how you're doing and score. And one of the things
we want to do is say not just we'll hide the rest of your task list so you're not, you know, so um tempted to try and
multitask, but even among the three things you can see, if you finish the first one, you'll be rewarded for that.
Nice. And there are little things like that. And I know it's silly, but like for example, Dualingo is how my wife is
learning another language. and I watch her with it and my hat is kind of off to them. You can mock it all you want,
but man, she sticks with it and I'm like, great. So, it's gamification for good, which obviously
there are some very, very, very smart people working at the social media companies.
And I would say it's gamification for evil. No, you know, well, gamification works. That's why we
do it now. It works. It works all over the place for just about everything. Now, there is
something else you made mention of briefly. We didn't quite touch on enough. It's the time blocking
and the rewards for it. Can you kind of explain a little bit more about what that means?
Okay. So, let's start with the principle that you bring up and thank you for for teeing this up.
Mhm. This concept around time blocking. Some people embrace it and say, you know what, it's magical the way if I tell
myself I have 30 minutes to do something, I will get it done in 30 minutes. Other people are like, oh, I don't work that way. I, you know, but I
procrastinate in this. Let me point this out. If your point, your example of how
you don't time box is you procrastinate and like I would finish all of my term papers the night before I had to turn
them in in college, whatever it is, right? Let me simply reframe that for you,
which is yeah, you do time box. You just back the time box up against the
absolute deadline. So you time boxed yourself. I'll get it all done in the 24 hours before I have
to turn the paper in. Right? So when you actually think that way and you go, "Oh, so time boxing did work. I
did turn in my term papers, but I just did them in a way that was incredibly stressful, filled with Red Bull and, you
know, unhappiness and then crash. Yeah, exactly. What if I were to take that and say, "Oh, time boxing works. I
get it done." What if I were to time box that differently and say, "Why don't I get it done maybe a week earlier?" So,
you have the ability to maybe sleep or read it once over before you turn it in,
things like that. And the same thing applies here. It is a a clear it's an established principle that if you tell
yourself this is how long you have to do something you generally get it done that time. So the way in which we reinforce
that is when you're working your little task you have a little task cell like a lot of task apps right and by the way
you can integrate you know your linear your task you know your to-doist if you
want to pull tasks from some other task manager you can do it easily in our platform but as you work the background
of your little task cell is your progress bar and it's green until you
get to 100%. If you're 10% over, it's yellow just like a traffic light. And if you're more than 10% over, the
whole bar goes red. Like just like a traffic light to go, hey man, what's going wrong? Like did you pick up your phone? Are you playing
with your dog? What are you doing? So we we offer a lot of techniques like
that around time boxing to say, how can we reinforce with you? And of course, your smart assistant tells you stuff like you should be halfway done. You
have an hourlong task, you're 30 minutes in. Check in with yourself. You're halfway done. You have five minutes left. You
know, it's there to give you little cues like that. Okay. Well, we have a question here that's been proposed off of the chat one
for you. Cool. Do you do you have a function in your app where you can put your team in a
group and find where each member's non-focus times crossover so a member
can be scheduled and be scheduled that time works for most of them. Wow. That
I hope that made sense because that that it did make sense. It did make sense. That's actually a really interesting
thing that Tony have talked about. We are a twoerson little team building this
and that sort of sophisticated scheduling which is done very well by some other scheduling apps. We haven't
tackled that because my point of view is we should focus our energies right now on what we do better than everyone. And
what that is is get people into a flow state. And if there is a task manager that is fantastic, let's integrate with
them so people can pull their tasks in as opposed to try to ask out task manage
asauna, right? Which is or Jira, right, which are huge. So in this regard, no, we haven't built
that. I've thought about it. Yeah. And I encourage you to find the best
example of how to do that, of which there are many. I'm very proud of the fact that the people who sign up and pay
to be part of our community, we have a 96% month overmonth paid retention. Like the people who get into
a flow stay with us, they recognize this is a key part of them having 3 p.m. where they're like, I
feel great and not having a 6 p.m. where it's like, I suck. Yeah. I didn't get it done. Well, yeah. It's way better if you're
hitting that afternoon and you like feel like you've accomplished something versus you feel like you sat there
picking through your your inbox for hours. That's how I named my company. I don't know if you if you've heard that
anywhere I've spoken, but I named my company because I met Laura doing yoga for our honeymoon. We went to Bali to go
do yoga and hang out. Yeah. And I said to her, maybe on this trip I'll find a name for this thing that I'm working on because we had a working
title for it. So the first day I said, I want to talk to three of our members. I'll see if
anyone has 10 minutes to talk to me. I just want to begin by sort of getting some feedback from people outside my
head, right? So, I asked three uh people for 10 minutes and they were great, you know?
Hey, what's your favorite feature? I love the smart assistant. I love the task. I love the timers, the thing. The third guy, we were going to the wrap-up.
We were like, John, thank you so much for your time. It's eight minutes in. I'm going to let you go. Like, you know, have a great day. And he said, Stephen,
you asked the wrong questions. Yeah. He said, well, what was the right question? He said, "You should ask me
why I pay you." And I said, "It's 30 cents a day. I didn't think this is not like a Birkin bag, you know, every
month, you know, but okay, why do you pay me?" And he said, "I realize that I
have two kinds of days. I have 3:00 where I'm playing with my kids. They're two and four." Mhm. And I have six o'clocks where I'm
frustrated, where I haven't got my work done. And he said, 'The difference is, did I open your website and hit play in
the morning and I pay you because my kids are not going to be two and four forever?
Nope, they're not. Yeah. And I was like, before you know it, they're 16 and 18.
Yeah, I know yours are. I know. But just that that sense from him of being that aware of like time is the no matter how wealthy you
become, time you cannot buy. You cannot get it back. You are granted
86,400 seconds in every single day. Hey, how are you going to use those?
Thank you, doctor. Overall, well, no, that's it's it's because you do a lot of things.
Computers only know seconds. They don't know minutes, hours. They only know seconds. Well, they they know milliseconds, but
as general, when you're plugging it in, it's all about seconds. But you got 86,400 seconds in a 24-hour day.
I love you for that. You use part you use part of those sleeping. We can't avoid that no matter
how hard we try. And then you use the other parts doing the other things you need, eating and doing other things. And
then you have that part where you got to get your work done to help provide for the other parts of your day.
There it is. So, so let us find those ways to Yeah. manage it and and find happiness.
Yeah. Well, thank you very much, Stephen. Um, this is a point where you get to tell everyone, this is for the downloads
because we're going to move to just a YouTube little bit for everyone, but you tell everyone here how they can
find you and how they can reach out to you or how they can go test out your site.
Okay. I will tell you two things. Everyone listening, I appreciate that you're here at this moment. If there's anything I've mentioned that you'd like
to know more about, if you're like, "Oh, who is this Cal Newport guy or what's that blog post by Near that you mentioned?" You are welcome to email me.
It doesn't have to be about anything that I'm working on if you're curious and I have some information. It's
wonderful to share. My email address is stephenthesuka tsu kha.co.
You will not get back a long email from me with you know the history of my life. But I will say oh here's a link to the
blog post or here's a link to Mihi's book. So you're welcome to do that. Anyone who is looking to experiment with
flow states please. There's a 7-day free trial. No credit card, no BS. Try it. You need to
approach it with something you need to do. Like if if you turn it on and turn off in 10 seconds, you will not understand your flow state. You need to
say, "Hey, you know what? I have a thing I want to build. I have an hour or two." Try it out and jump in the group chat
and say, "Hi. I'm in there every day. I'd be thrilled to talk to you and help however I can." Um Tony and I don't
collect paychecks. We do this for free because we just think it's a good service. It helps us and it helps
others. Excellent. All right. So, those of you listening in the downloads for the uh
podcast, um this is where we're going to cut off. We'll have more over on the YouTube channel. So, if you want more,
pop over to YouTube channel. Fast forward so you can catch the end of the show. Don't run away, Stephen. I'm going
to play the extro and we'll be right back after this. Okay. Now,
reminders for the show. All the show notes can be found at wpplugins toz.com.
And while you're there, subscribe to the newsletter for more useful information delivered directly to your inbox. WP
Plugins A to Z is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins created by you, the developers, because
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or email her directly amber@wpro.ca.
Thanks for joining us. Have a great day and we'll see you next week.
There we go. All right, we are back here for the YouTube fun.
That little laugh at the end is my 18-year-old boy preserved at three years old.
You still there? I am. Although, for some reason, my uh
the screen just went black. I can hear you, but I can't see. I don't know what's up with Teams. Uh that's a weird one. Hang on a sec.
Let me go pop into my I can hear you perfectly. I just don't know where you went. Um, where's my team's at? Hiding behind
all these windows here.
Oh, there you are. Did you just click something or did I click something? You're back. I opened up the Teams window.
Oh, you're back in color. Yeah, I was just I was just commenting that little laugh you hear at the end of
my show as my three as my 18-year-old son preserved at three. I love that. What was funny?
I think he does too. Well, what's funny is that was just before my first episode. I I just
decided on what my show was going to be. I was testing all my equipment and I set up my microphone. I'd hit record to
record my voice. He came toddling over, grabbed the microphone, and did that.
I love that you've been doing the show that long. And now he's he's like a young adult.
So, at any rate, we've gotten into all kinds of miscellaneous discussions here. We have no I have no direction here for
this. This just some added stuff I'm working on towards the end to try and pull people over to the YouTube channel
to chat and see what's happening um throughout uh and I can scroll back through the
comments that were made and see if there's any other questions or comments people made. And I think the best one
here came from influence WP. It's because I was showing uh on the screen the the the video from your your your
website. He was like, "I should be lying on the sofa with a candle burning for this one." Zen
because it is kind of it is kind of mesmerizing your your website with the the video of the wave crashing. All you
need now is music to play with in the background. You know what? I appreciate you seeing that. Definitely looking at every other
app that tries to help you focus where they pretty much the same white background with some cartoon characters
and telling you all their features. I was like, you know what? I think our audience is mature enough that we're not
going to talk down say like we have the best features, we have the best this. It's more you know what try it for free
you decide. Well the interesting thing is seven days if someone sat down and say okay well this next week I will use this for a
week and see within seven days they will be able to if they use it daily for seven days I feel you will be able to
figure out whether it's going to benefit you or not in that seven days. I completely agree. Yes. I think you'll
know in three actually. I just did seven to be generous. Well, we'll find out because uh probably next week I'll I'll
sit down and give this an actual test and then who knows, it may end up on the other show as uh as something I uh I
talk about. John, come when you drop in, say hi in the group chat. I'll be in there. It'd
be so nice to see a happy face. I will do that and uh give it a good shot. I might even push this towards my
marketing manager and see if I can get her to do some uh work there. So
that'd be amazing. So it looks quite good. It might even be useful for my daughter who's suffers
more ADHD than me. You know what? I have a lot of parent
friends who have said the same thing. Oh, and my my daughter is my daughter's the one who does all my design work and
other other stuff for the business now. And she's your co-host, right? Yeah, she's my co-host. She's the
co-host on the other show, the uh WP Plugins A to Zed show where we review plugins and talk about this talk about
this and that and news and all the other things that impact the WordPress community.
So, I do see this as something that the WordPress community and remote workers
can make a big benefit to, especially if they're suffering from the ability like happens from time to time with me. It's
like I need to get focused and I can't get my day focused. Whatever is happening, the days I
actually have things organized and I sit down and do the stuff I need to do are the ones that I accomplish so much in.
Yes. I I want to make that available to people. And uh I don't know you and I
have talked about this, but I thought a lot this past winter over the holiday
about I'm going to have a son this year. Yeah. And what will he look at that I've done that he says, "Oh, that's what my
dad did." And I'll be super blunt. Die Hard 5, The Wolverine, some of
these, even Star Trek 11, which was pretty good. Yeah. They don't really make the world a
better place. They hopefully distract you and they tell you a story about life and about people, you know.
And a lot of why I'm doing what I'm doing is
I thought, how could I make the world maybe 1% better that I'm going to hand off to him?
And this is what I thought. If if more people could get in their flow state, do the thing of which they're capable.
That would be good. I have a strong thesis that we all have something great inside us. And the question of life is
will you get it out or not? That is a big question whether you will get it out or not.
Yeah. And there there are enough really smart developers and designers and behavioral psychologists that are paid
by companies to steal your life. It's hard to fight. They do they do a very good job of that.
Unfortunately, they they they grab attention and they keep it over other things that need to
be accomplished. And people people are susceptible to that. Unfortunately, it is one of those things that just
happens along with along life. Yeah. So yeah, it's like what am I where
I was? I was going somewhere and then my brain went pop. Did you get distracted, John?
Not exactly got distracted. It's like I had a I had a line of thought and it's it didn't quite come together as a
cohesive sentence. I'll be here whenever. Just call me. Yeah. Well, is what I'm enjoying here
and what I've enjoyed is finding out a bit more about this um about this um app
for lack of a better term, this way to help gain focus for people.
Yes. And one of the things I worked on is like I have notepads. I do things like
some people use different things. I use I have I have separate notepads for everything I'm doing on my desk.
Oh wow. Okay. That's part of your organizational strategy. That's my organizational strategy. I have my week
schedule. I have a I have an overall schedule of major projects that are happening. I have a daily schedule. And
then I have little notes off to the side as like, oh, I had a thought. And I write that thought down somewhere and I
push it away so I can go back to work. Wow. Okay. So, it's like because my brain will jump
suddenly. I'll be doing something and I'll look at something all a sudden my brain will say, "Hey, think about this." I'll say, "Great idea. Write it down. Push it away." and that I can look at it
later when I'm when I'm focus especially when I'm coding or when I'm debugging
because what happens when I'm coding or debugging is I'll be figuring something out and my brain go hey that's a great
idea to use somewhere else because for some reason I'm always thinking what other great idea can you do
you know you um I have a question for you because I also find writing things helps me in a certain way when you write
something down when you actually muscle a pencil across paper.
Do you find you do it for certain kinds of things or you remember certain kinds of things differently if you write them?
I do. I do. I do remember things. Not necessarily certain kinds of things, but anything I take the effort to write
down, it sticks a little bit better than if I put it into the computer. It's like I I also have a notepad on my
computer. Windows 11 did something great with note with the note note app where you can have multiple tabs open and then
if it crashes they all still stay remembered even though you didn't save them. So I have several tabs for different
things I'm doing and it's like I get a note I'll put it there on the computer sometimes. But if I write it on paper I
remember it better than if I wrote it on the on the computer. Okay. So I'm going to tell you something revealing about me.
I had one successful exit when we sold Centropolis, which was great. And I've had two startup failures, both around $3
million raises that did not end up turning into billion-dollar companies and all that. Right. Right.
Both times the companies failed. I had the same process, which is there's a chair that I have that sits underneath
a window sort of in my living room. I sat there with a pad of paper, like a legal pad and a pencil deliberately to
write down what did I learn? What did I think I did wrong? And there was something about writing it
with pencil on paper that made it more real to me. Be like, remember these things, Stephen. You
probably have a predisposition to remake these mistakes as people do. Yeah, there was something about I didn't want
to dictate it into my phone. I didn't want to type it into my laptop. I wanted to write it and I have both those pieces
of paper and I refer back to them and there's something out that graphite moving across the paper that was like
remember this. Yeah, it becomes a little more permanent and it also
seems to be easier to pull that information up at a later point in time
than try to remember where you put it in a computer in the filing system in a computer.
So I that is true. I I've just I've done that for many years and that's the way it's
been working out. So, at any rate, at that being said, we're going to cut the YouTube stream, folks. Don't run away,
Stephen. Let me just turn terminate the YouTube and we will be thanks for everyone for showing up and
greatly appreciate it. Oh, hang on a sec. We have a last minute question. Oh, I hear that from there are studies
that show writing notes by hand works better than the brain. That is from one of our commenters.
Thank you, commenter. All right, let's uh terminate the YouTube stream.