Becca Froh - Productivity Hacks & Finding Flow
In this game-changing episode, we're introduced to productivity coach Becca Froh. Becca delves into tips for improving focus, discussing techniques like gamifying tasks with dice and embracing the Pomodoro method, as well as the significance of achieving flow state through meditation and binaural beats.
Discover more at Becca's website GetProductive.org
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Transcript
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Becca Froh Podcast recording.m4a
Transcript
::Hello and thanks for joining us today for You World Order Podcast showcase. Today, I'm very excited to introduce Becca Froh. She's a productivity coach. I'm so excited to get this conversation started and Becca, welcome.
::Thank you so much. I am so happy to be here and it's just great to talk with you.
::I'm so excited. So basically, you know what the floor is yours. Why don't you tell us about yourself? Share your story of you know, where you came from and where you are now and what you're doing.
::Absolutely. Thank you so much. So my name is Becca Froh. I'm from Des Moines, Iowa. And like you said, I am a productivity coach. So how did I get to be a productivity coach? Definitely it started. My aunt was a portrait artist. We lived in this very small farm community growing up and.
::There is a family in town who couldn't read.
::I was 10 or 11 years old and she said, you know what? Can you help me and help this family to read?
::I said sure.
::Yeah, absolutely. That sounds fun, you know? And so there's a mom, a dad and three kids. And we worked with them every single day after the dad got off work.
::And then one day, he was able to read the newspaper.
::And I cried, she cried. I think everybody cried because finally, this, you know, this man, this head of the household could read a newspaper which, back in the early 90s was a big deal, I.
::Know we don't do.
::Newspapers anymore. But.
::That that was life changing. And for me, and I knew that I wanted to help people.
::It had been his dream to learn how to read and you know he was going to be able to get off some social programs then because he could read his own mail and pay his own bills. And so just to have that independence and also to show his kids that it's OK to.
::I read and I I'm an avid, avid, avid reader, so that it it's hard for me to even say like people think that reading isn't important. But a lot of people think that reading is important. So
::It was his dream and I knew that I wanted to help people. And I thought, well, do I want to help people learn to read? And I thought, no, that's not exactly.
::It that's.
::Not what feels right in the soul.
::And I do that sometimes, but.
::What? What helps? What fills my soul, what my life's purpose is, is helping people to live the life that they have imagined, helping people to reach their dreams, whether it's reading or whether it's retiring. Whether it's getting that promotion or losing 80 pounds, my job is to help you.
::To get there.
::So that is, that's what I do and I start a lot of times with, especially when I.
::Work with moms.
::I have a book called. Are you OK? Because that's the question that we should be asking moms.
::Are you OK? Yes.
::I can attest to that.
::And I mean, truly, it's a love letter to women to let them know that you're doing a lot better than you think.
::What you're doing that you are not a failure, you are not wrecking your child.
::You know, normal is just a setting.
::On the dryer.
::That's I have a big graphic in there that says normal is just a setting on the dryer and it's really just to say, you know, you're doing alright and.
::If you feel.
::Like judging another mom, then instead ask them.
::Have you eaten?
::Can I support you in some
::way or, you know my favorite one? It's funny. My best friend and I live about 30 minutes apart, so we don't do it very often, but she does it with her neighbor all the time.
::She'll say. You know what I love to cook. You love to clean. We hate the opposite thing. Let's get together. I'll clean your house and my house while you cook my meals and your meals. Prep them for the week. How about let's just do that?
::And instead of judging somebody for having a trashed house, why don't you just say, hey, you want to cook for me?
::And I'll clean your house.
::Because doesn't that feel better? Because I think, you know, we're all doing the very best that we can at any given time. Now some days that looks like laying in bed, curled up in a ball and some days that looks like being superwoman.
::We're all trying our best, so let's not judge each other. Let's not be harsh with one another. Let's instead seek how we can be a help and a blessing to one another because I'm.
::I mean.
::A lot of us don't have, you know, the support of family, so my family, you know, my closest family lives a 16 hour drive away. They can't babysit my 4 year old.
::They can't pick up my daughter from swim practice. You know they can't give that kind of help and support. So you have to build your own community and.
::Yeah, I mean I have done that and I don't know what I would do, you know, without my little support and community and it's, it just feels better to help instead of instead of to judge. So that's the first thing that we always.
::Talk about.
::I love that I absolutely love that being a mom myself, and it's very, very easy to shame yourself and feel alone, especially if you don't have that support system. And I and yeah, you don't know, maybe.
::Where to get that support system? Because you're afraid to ask for help, or you know, or to admit that I can't keep a tidy house. But I'm a darn good cook, you know? And I never really thought that's actually pretty genius. I never really thought of that of, you know, kind of teaming up with somebody with your strengths and your weaknesses. And that takes the pressure off of both. You Beautiful.
::I love that.
::Thank you. Thank you.
::Well, another thing I always encourage people to do is have a lot.
::Of fun.
::So everybody probably has dice around their house. These are 10 sided crystal dice just because I'm a big fan of crystals, not because I'm a big.
::Fan of the candy?
::But So what I will do?
::This is a 10 sided.
::And so I'll take my To Do List and you would put it in a circle in a brainstorming method instead. So in the middle write ‘to do’
::And then you put spokes out and you would say, wash the dishes, pay the bills, clean out my e-mail list and.
::You can just say, oh, number one, I'm doing #1 on my.
::List or you can spin if you have.
::My 4 year old.
::Stole my spinner toy out of his.
::Apples game box, but I usually use a spinner toy and just say ohh. I guess I'm washing the dishes right now because the dial said or oh the dice said I'm doing #2 and #2 is pay the bills.
::So when you.
::Love that.
::Thank you. Because when you gamify your To Do List, then for one thing it's not so boring. But also it takes that decision freeze away. Do you ever have so many things to do that you just get frozen and do?
::Nothing, absolutely. Yeah.
::Well, glad it's not just me, but you know gamifying, it takes that away. It's like a Magic 8 ball, right? So you.
::Say ohh do I do this.
::Not recommended, right? So you're giving the decision away to the game, so you're having fun and you're taking away that opportunity to freeze. You can't freeze because you just roll.
::The dice and say.
::Whatever it is. Oh, I have to go rake the yard. That sucks. But I got number.
::Four. Yeah, I love that because we tend to just avoid it and we and that list.
::Then sometimes grows and it becomes overwhelming and the then you don't want to tackle it even more after that. So it snowballs after that. So yeah, I love that gamified. That's really cool.
::OK.
::Yeah. Yeah, good, good, good.
::Well, my last big thing that I always like to talk about is the Pomodoro method. And have you heard of the Pomodoro method? Never
::OK, so this method was brought about in the 1980s by a college professor who was trying to focus more, and he just he couldn't focus. And so he got one of those.
::Previous kitchen timers. Do you remember the apple shaped kitchen timers that everybody had?
::And he set that sucker for 25 minutes, did absolutely nothing but focus on his task at hand for 25 minutes and found like a 60% increase in productivity as a result.
::So the method is that you focus intensely on absolutely nothing but one task at hand, and you have a goal. So I want to write a half a page I want to finish paying all my utilities, whatever the case may be.
::And so 25 minutes. And then at 5
::Minutes. You take a break.
::And you do that three times and then after the 4th 25 minute segment you take 1/2 hour break, so you're spending.
::Two hours.
::And you can accomplish a full day's work in two hours.
::By doing 25 minute segments, no.
::Phone no bathroom breaks. You have your snack and you have your drink and you just go. And I had a guy I am working with who is studying for the LSAT. He increased his LSAT scores by 50% the first time he tried the method.
::He goes. I might get into Harvard.
::This is insane. Wow
::I hope we get into Harvard.
::That's an, that's an incredible improvement and that goes to show you, yeah, that goes to show you how important focus is when it obviously when it relates to productivity, do you find that that's.
::Yeah, yeah, I was shocked. I was shocked.
::One of.
::A leading cause of people not being productive in whatever kind of task, whether it's work, school, home, you know, whatever.
::Yeah, absolutely. They can't focus and some of that is neurodivergence. Now, I would argue that we're all on a spectrum of neurodivergence and none of us are perfectly normal.
::I Don't think.
::But that's just my personal insights and part of it is we have all the distractions with our phones. We have all the distractions with our families, but part of it is just purely brain training.
::So one way you can train your brain is through learning to achieve flow state.
::And I actually have a course on flow state. So when we talk about contact information. I'll talk about how to get in touch with me to find out more about the course.
::But getting into flow state is so incredibly important because one it can make the mundane interesting because when you're in that.
::You're in the flow, you're in the zone. Hours pass by. You don't hear airplanes and all of a sudden your synapses and your brain are just crackling like crazy, and you have insights that you wouldn't have had. Your brain is working at a speed that wouldn't normally be working at. And then when you rest.
::Afterwards, your brain continues to make those connections and you come up with insights that you wouldn't have come up with otherwise because you couldn't have taken in enough information to do so.
::It's so interesting.
::I'm like thinking about all of the. Yeah, I'm just thinking about all these things and how my day goes and, like, do I even get to focus? Like I'm sitting here wondering.
::If I do, I even get to the point where I'm focusing because I have so many things, because OK, I'm for instance, I might be in front of my computer and I might be in front of, I don't know, example, a spreadsheet that I'm working on, and I'm updating a spreadsheet with whatever data that I'm updating it with.
::And I'm thinking that I'm focusing on that.
::But I feel like in my brain I'm also thinking, OK, I have 15 more minutes before I know that I have to go and take my daughter.
::You know to soccer practice, but then I'm also thinking, OK, by the time I come back from getting my. But I'm doing this task, but these things, how do you, how can you possibly?
::How can you stop all?
::The craziness that goes on like.
::Can't even stop.
::OK.
::It does. It does stop. I promise it stops. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort. It takes truly meditation. I have guided meditations available on my YouTube channel and for anybody who says, Oh my gosh, I don't have time to meditate. None of them are longer than 10 minutes because I don't want to talk for 10 minutes.
::I don't want to listen to myself for 10 minutes, so if I don't want to listen to myself for 10 minutes, nobody else will either. Right in meditation, you just want it short and sweet because that's all we have time for. That's all the space we have is like 7.
::Minutes, so I just posted one yesterday on weight loss actually. And so it's a weight loss, guided meditation. It's like 7 1/2 minutes long. So to answer your question, how you do that is through training your brain. It's like stretching a rubber band when you first get a hair tie, it's so tight.
::It'll make a.
::Mark around your wrist.
::And then you slowly stretch it and stretch it and stretch it until it can't go back.
::Focus is the same.
::way
::You have to keep stretching it just like you stretch a hair tie and it takes. It's frustrating at first because you want to make progress, but know that every time you're taking that time to meditate, you're making progress because you're stretching just a little bit. And I mean, it's no different than giving birth.
::Really. Because you.
::You know, I mean, you know what happens there? You.
::Go stretch so.
::Yep, Yep.
::I absolutely just that that was off topic, but.
::So you have to stretch that focus muscle and then once you stretch it then you'll be able to focus for a lot longer periods of time. And then there are a lot of hacks and things that you can do. For example setting a timer on your phone. Because you can set the 25 minute Pomodoro timer.
::And in addition to that, say have a timer for 3:15 PM to go pick up your daughter from school.
::And then whatever you have to do when you get home. So I will set sometimes 20 timers in a day. I'll have a timer to start dinner. I'll have a timer to remind me to start the laundry, and then I'll set a timer to go get the laundry. Otherwise, I you know, I won't otherwise. So I set.
::Right, right.
::Timers for.
::My daughter was taking off and we had a podcast at noon, and she generally takes off at noon to go to work, and so I set a timer for 10 minutes before and I went and gave her.
::A hug and a kiss goodbye.
::Hey, can you just set those timers?
::OK.
::OK, now a question I did have also is when you do have that focus time and say you said this Pomodoro timer and OK 25 minutes and you're going to be immersed in this task, whatever it is and.
::You're in that focus mode. I don't know about you, but I know my life is completely chaotic where it's very hard for me to get away from. Like, to get away from the chaos. Right? So there's something always happening, whether it's a cat scratching at the door or a cat outside the door shaking his head and his jingling.
::Right now.
::Or, you know, my teenager's not bothering me, but you know.
::No, they don't know how to close doors without slamming them. So I'm, you know, I'm constantly hearing door slams from each and every door that they're going in. Is that part of it too? Like, you're training your mind to kind of tune those things out where when you are focused, you're not hearing, you know, the garbage men passing, you know, my office knows right here. I hear the garbage man.
::Or you know.
::The lawn mower for the neighbor, you know like.
::How do you do you have tactics and ways to, like, ignore the chaos while you're in that 25 minutes, say, well, if you're doing that practice.
::Absolutely. And a lot of that comes from the meditation, but my best solution for that is ear buds.
::I just have one ear bud in. Well, I have two ways to talk to you, but I have one earbud in at all times and I listen to so much. Just binaural beats that I forget that it's on. We are getting on today and I thought, Oh no, we have to turn up my binaural beats off, but there are.
::There are different levels of Hertz for concentration, for calming and, and so you can just play those
::binaural beats with the appropriate Hertz level behind it, and that's something that I work with my clients on as I'll say, OK, so these are your top four issues. So these when you are trying to focus on your work, you can listen to this for binaural beats and this is going to help you to focus.
::And then this one's going to help you to calm down. This one's going to help you to reach a deeper.
::Sleep. And so it's a Hertz level sound with binaural beats and you just play it in your ear.
::And everybody else, you can just tune out or you can listen to just your favorite upbeat music that you know.
::Like you know, you know it from heart. You can sing along to it without even thinking. It's so in your subconscious that it actually does about the same thing.
::All of it is just so interesting because I think we all, for the most part, have.
::Focus issues and then when you really, really get down to and you boil down to and you dig down.
::How much more productive?
::We could actually be how much more we could get done in a day.
::So much more.
::You know, if I'm more productive and I'm getting.
::The things I need to get done because I'm having more focus than I'm not going into the next day with five things that I had to do the day before. So that's along the lines of how I'm thinking this would work and I think that's.
::Well, and you're not yelling at your kids and you're not yelling at your husband because you're calmer and you're learning instead of flying off the handle, which I have been guilty of over the years. Then you just say, you know what not worth it
::Right.
::And you go and you put your music in.
::And you go do something else. And you don't you say not worth it because the long term damage
::Of yeah, it might.
::Feel good to.
::Just like, let the hormones fly and.
::For a minute.
::And I'm perimenopausal so I have plenty of hormones.
::To let fly but.
::Yeah, yeah.
::As good as it feels in.
::The moment the way.
::That their feelings
::Are hurt, it just isn't worth it. And so I've just learned.
::To say Nope.
::Not worth it.
::I just turn it on and I leave and I put myself.
::In time out music. Until I feel better.
::I love that and I think a.
::Lot of people.
::Can resonate with this and feeling these things even if they never want to admit it? Or maybe it's just a realization like, hey, yeah, I've been kind of feeling that way. And yeah, maybe this is the reason I absolutely love that. And I think that I can speak for, like, all of the listeners that are listening right now. You believe me?
::Right.
::You can relate to this and you can relate.
::To because
::You know, I know very little people.
::That can just magically focus on something and be able to be as productive. You know, maybe retired people, maybe like my parents, retired. And they're like looking for things to do. But, you know, I absolutely love it. But, you know, tell us, how can people get in touch with you? Where can they go and kind of look at some of the resources that you have and look at the different types of coaching that you offer. Tell us where we.
::Can get in touch with you.
::Absolutely. So if you go on Facebook, find me.
::At Becca Froh
::BECCAFROH and if you send me a DM ‘vision’, I'll send you a free vision workbook.
::You can find my book. Are you OK on Amazon? It's also on Kindle Unlimited.
::And you can go to my website get productive dot ORG and then you can get in touch with me for information about coaching or our flow state class. So yeah, get productive dot ORG
::And I love how it's all different types of resources. It's not just one thing, because obviously people struggle with different.
::Different aspects that you know is holding them back from focusing or being productive, and I love how I love how you have the different options and it seems like it would connect and resonate with a lot of different people once they realize and admit that.
::They, you know, probably need a little assistance.
::In that.
::So this was absolutely eye opening for me because I feel like and I.
::Feel like on every.
::Thank you.
::The podcast that I do it like opens my eyes and I'm like, Oh my gosh, I need that too with the amount of things that I need and the amount of coaching programs that like I've written down that I probably need I.
::Would probably never make an income.
::But, but that's the first part, right? Admitting that you need help and not having the shame in in in admitting that.
::but thank you so much for joining us today. It was wonderful. You know, everybody get in.
::Touch with Becca.
::Because, you know, increasing your focus and increasing your productivity, I think is.
::You know it just.
::Wrapped up in so much of our lives.
::And would improve.
::So many different parts of our life that I think is extremely beneficial.
::And I love what you're doing. So thank you so much for coming on today.
::And uh, get in touch with Becca. I'm telling you, I think this is, uh, you know, this could be a game changer for a lot of people. Thanks, Becca.
::I always say whether you're in your quarter life crisis, your midlife crisis or an existential crisis between.
::Yeah, 100. I love it. I love it. You're like only one. I love it. But thanks so much for joining us today.
::Thanks
