SEASON 2 - EPISODE 165 - SEPTEMBER 17, 2025

Finding focus

Curious how Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson keep their attention where it counts? In this episode of The REWORK Podcast, the 37signals co-founders join host Kimberly Rhodes to talk about the different ways they approach focus. From procrastination that sometimes pays off to meditation and visualization, Jason and David share their tips for finding and maintaining focus.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:00 - Episode Highlights
01:12 - What procrastination really tells you
06:38 - Traditional and alternative meditation practices
14:58 - Breaking through creative block
18:19 - Building a work schedule that makes focus easier

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m Kimberly Rhodes, joined as always by the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. This week we’re talking a little bit about finding focus. In fact, we got an email in from a listener, Richard, so we’re going to dive into some of his questions. He said he discovered the podcast a few weeks ago. There’s so many interesting gems. Thank you so much. It became clear to me that Jason and David value focus time each day. No interruptions, just deeply engaged into the task at hand. I have a multi-fold question about this. I’m trying to self-improve on focus and clear thinking, and I think Jason’s and David’s answers would help a lot. So here we go guys, no pressure. The first one is how do you battle procrastination? That’s kind of a big general question, but are you procrastinators? I kind of feel like you’re not.

Jason (00:52): Well, here’s what I would say about procrastination. I think it’s a tool and it helps you figure out what you really want to do and what you really don’t want to do.

(01:00): That’s kind of all it is. If you really want to do something, you tend to just do it. If you don’t want to do it, you put it off. In my opinion, it’s not a good or bad thing. It just brings clarity to the table and goes, this is really what you care about and what you don’t. I will procrastinate on paperwork. I hate paperwork. I’m not going to procrastinate on stuff I’m really interested in doing, but it’s also when I find myself procrastinating on something, it just reminds me that maybe I don’t actually want to do this and why don’t I actually want to do this and is there’s something I can change about it that would make me want to do it. That’s how I think about it. I don’t think it’s good or bad necessarily. I do think it can be useful at times. I think sometimes when you have less time to do something, at the end of the day you end up just kind of focusing on the stuff that matters and not all the other stuff you could do. But fundamentally, I really just believe it separates the what do you want to do from what do you not want to do?

Kimberly (01:44): Yeah, that’s a good point. David, do you feel the same way?

David (01:47): I find that procrastination is actually a bit of a superpower. It is how I get my inboxes cleaned up. It is how I just tick off all the to-dos that feel easy to manage and get off the list when there’s something I don’t want to do, and I agree with Jason. It is very often I don’t want to do it, but I just did this case with the Rails World keynote that I have to present every year and I have to put together an hour’s worth of material and I basically procrastinated Omarchy into existence on the back of that. Like I didn’t really want to get started on. I knew I had to, but then I just said, well, what if I put in the presentation that I’m going to give a demo of this Omarchy thing and Omarchy’s not ready. Well, I’m sort of working on my presentation by putting all my hours into Omarchy and that could be quite effectful.

(02:39): Now, I do think it’s also true that sometimes you don’t want to do something but you know have to. It’s not an optional thing. I will have to be on stage at this conference at this time and if I’m not prepared, I’m going to have a bad time, right? So I don’t want to do it, but I have to do it and it just kind of squeezes down. In this case, I thought, do you know what if I leave myself, I dunno, a month, do it, just noodle on it. It’ll be great. I left myself basically a week to compress it because I’d spend all the time on it, but in the end, that was great. I look back upon that and I go, I like the work that came out of the procrastination. I actually also find that procrastination is sometimes where I’ll do my best sort of spelunking.

(03:25): I’ll start pulling on some thread. This is what happened with our cloud exit in part. I actually forget what I was procrastinating on, but I was procrastinating by learning Docker. That’s often what happens with procrastination is, at least for me, I spent the time that I’m procrastinating on something actually useful because that’s the only way the procrastination feels like it’s legit. If I’m procrastinating just scrolling on Twitter, I can’t do that for very long. I’ll start getting a bad conscious about the things I really should do, but if I’m procrastinating with something that feels valuable, I’m either learning something, I’m building something, then I can make the procrastination last longer and I sometimes end up with a whole body of new knowledge. So that’s what happened with the cloud exit. I learned all this stuff about Docker because for a couple of weeks I had some tasks I didn’t want to complete and I thought like, ah, do you know what? Learning more about Docker is really important for my role as a CTO at this company, so I should do that. And it feels okay. You can get some really nice stuff out of procrastination.

Kimberly (04:26): Yeah, I always tell myself ‘cause I tend to procrastinate that I do my best work under pressure, which is probably not always great, but to your point about writing your speech, I also had to do a presentation recently and it’s like, I do best when I’m forced into a deadline versus having more time than is available to me to do it. I need a deadline.

Jason (04:47): It prevents you from overdoing it too.

Kimberly (04:50): Yeah.

David (04:50): That’s exactly what I had with this presentation too. I don’t want to spend actually three weeks on it. I mean, I have other things to do and I also find that if I save the prep work, especially for presentations, this is where I usually find the procrastination. It’ll be a better presentation because it’ll be more topical. It’ll be things I thought about literally that last week before I had to give the talk and I usually deliver much better presentations and keynotes when I’m super fired up about it because it’s something about now. If I actually prepare my slides like a month in advance, to me, it’s just going to feel stale.

Kimberly (05:27): Okay, good point. So the second part of Richard’s question is do you meditate each day to improve cognitive functions? Are you guys meditators?

Jason (05:37): I have been meditating for a while, but not to improve cognitive functions. I just do it because I think it’s interesting to watch your own thoughts and just to kind of be still for a while and just relax actually, frankly. So I don’t like doing things for other reasons beyond the thing itself. I just find that it gets muddy. We talked about this in a podcast, I’m going to go fishing and I’ll take those lessons and bring it back to whatever, just go fishing. So for me, I meditate just to meditate. It’s not for anything else and whatever benefits come from it, if they are or there aren’t, I don’t care. It’s not about the other, it’s not about the second order effects, it’s about the thing itself. So I’ve been doing this for a number of years on and off. I’ve been more into it lately, but I try to do 25 minutes a day.

Kimberly (06:18): Oh, that’s a lot.

Jason (06:21): That’s what I’ve been trying to do. I’ve been kind of keeping up with it for the most part.

Kimberly (06:24): That’s impressive.

Jason (06:25): Yeah, well, I dunno if it’s impressive or not, but it’s not easy. I can tell you that it’s hard for me to sit still for 25 minutes, but it’s important that I try to do that every day.

Kimberly (06:35): Wow. David, what about you?

David (06:36): I have tried a number of times and actually I do like it. I think it is a really interesting challenge. As Jason says, it’s way, way harder than it sounds. I mean, 25 minutes to me sounds impossibly long. I usually try like, oh, can I do it for two minutes? That seems like a big enough challenge, but it’s not something you do regularly. What I do do in its plays though is some of the other techniques you can use to bring stillness or perspective to things. The Stoic techniques for me are really effectful. Negative visualization is something I practice certainly on a weekly basis, just imagining all sorts of ways things could go wrong. Not to give myself anxiety, but to prepare myself for the night, for the fact that it won’t always be sunny, for the fact that people won’t always like what we do and we’ll launch something that it’s not a success or I’ll give a speech and people think meh, or all the other small and sometimes large challenges you can have in life.

(07:36): I find negative visualization to be an incredibly powerful technique to just prepare yourself for all the things that go wrong, and sometimes you prepare yourself well in advance because things just happen to be flowing quite nicely. I think right now I’m in a wonderful groove working on a bunch of things that I really am passionate about and people seem to enjoy it, but I also remember not quite five minutes ago, but not much longer than that, where no one really liked the things that I were working on. I may not even have liked the things that we’re working on. I remember, I think it was last summer, I had don’t know five weeks where I was just kind of wandering in a state of mild discontent of not having a project that really sucked me in. So when things are going well, I always go, do you know what things are going well, we should think about the fact that they won’t continue to go that well all of the time.

Kimberly (08:29): Okay. Tell me a little bit more about this negative visualization. So you’re thinking about all the worst case scenarios and then are you thinking through how that’s not so bad or are you thinking through solutions? Tell me the second part of that.

David (08:41): A big part of it is just thinking about it. I think is almost like exposure therapy. When you think about a project you’re working on, for example, and it’s just being a huge failure and I think, okay, so what would happen with that? In fact, Jason and I just played this game together yesterday when we were deciding on a new direction for something we’re working on and we went through, so what’s the worst that can happen? What if we take this gamble and it’s a bit of a gamble. In fact, it’s quite a big gamble or at least so it seemed in the moment when you’re proposing something kind of out there and then we walk through so, okay, so what if this didn’t work at all? Well, this could happen. That could happen. And normally when you start enumerating the specific things that can happen from something that doesn’t go your way, you realize that actually doesn’t sound that bad.

(09:30): Ok so we waste some time, maybe we waste some money, but then we learn some things and we have fun. That actually kind of evens out. I can afford to lose some time and lose some money if I learn some things and I have some fun. So that’s sort of the lower level of it, but I also try the harder levels. What if more catastrophic things happen either to me personally, what if I crash a race car and it doesn’t just hurt, but it’s worse than that? What are you going to do then? What if something happens to your family? What if something, god forbid, happens to your kids? I do actually try to go through these things as uncomfortable as they are and just stay in it for a moment. Not dwell on it needlessly, not use it to provoke anxiety, but just to have that reaction of like, oh, this is something that’s going to happen at some point. I don’t know, I got what, 40 years left on the planet. They’re not all going to go silky smooth. At some point things are going to just start failing. Jason and I are, well, I’m almost 50 now. Jason, are you 50 already?

Jason (10:40): I’m 51. 51.

David (10:40): So do you know what? Things just start breaking at some point.

Jason (10:43): When you get up off the seat, you start to make a noise, you’re like, ooh.

David (10:46): Like for example, my eyesight isn’t as good as it was. I, for many years, I loved shooting photography with Leica cameras and they have this range finder function where instead of auto focus where there’s a little engine inside the lens, you have to do it yourself, but it requires really good eyesight. I can’t do that anymore. And we’re like, oh, wow, that could be really tragic. Or it could be a new adventure where I discover new cameras that I also like. So just try to prepare myself for these kind of things and dive into ‘em, stay in the uncomfortable zone for just a second and then hop back out and then tomorrow maybe try again and cold exposure therapy or something else like that. If you’ve done it a few times, you’re not at least going to be shocked in the same way when it actually occurs.

Jason (11:35): Another thing, I do this as well, my framing for typically is like nothing is ever as good or as bad as it appears to be.

(11:44): And so when you’re flying high, it’s like, yeah, probably not as good as I think it is for other reasons. And when things are down, you’re like, it could be worse. It’s just a nice way to sort of cap the range, I think, and it’s good to live within that. And then, yeah, for negative visualization, we do this at work. It’s also, it’s a bit of a luxury when you’ve been around for 26 years, if everything went to shit, we’d be okay. I mean, I wouldn’t want everything to go to shit, but it could go to shit. We could make some decisions and it go to shit, the market could change, all the things could happen, and you still want to come away from that going well, we would’ve had a really, really good run had that happened. Now that’s just one particular scenario, but I do think that’s a pretty good scenario in most cases.

(12:23): Death, injury, difficult things are of course like a bad diagnosis, there’s some things that can be quite bad, obviously truly, truly bad, and I think you want to be ready for those things because those will befall us all, but there’s a lot of things that we treat as that bad that aren’t anywhere near that bad, and it’s just good to, is it really that bad right now that I’m have a creative block? Or have writer’s block or don’t like this thing? It’s not really that bad, so don’t catastrophize things. That’s another really fundamental Stoic principles, don’t catastrophize things. That is a mental exercise that we put on ourselves that we don’t have to do. And so that kind of stuff I think is very, very helpful, especially in this world that we’re in where everything seems like a catastrophe all the time, if you’re paying attention to the things that engage people most of the time, which is typically negative stories and whatnot. It can seem like everything is falling apart constantly. That’s just maybe some things are, maybe some things aren’t, I don’t know, but certainly not everything is, certainly not the way it’s being presented, so I think it’s just healthy to reflect on that from time to time.

Kimberly (13:23): Okay, perfect. Well, Jason, you mentioned writer’s block. Richard’s next question is similar. Did you ever have issues with brain fog and if so, how did you solve it?

Jason (13:33): Yeah, I’ve had those moments. It kind of reminds me again of the procrastination question to some degree, which is I think in some ways maybe brain fog is a real thing. I don’t really know, right? Who knows. But I do think in some ways we sort of create these conditions for ourselves where we don’t want to do something, we can’t figure out why we can’t do something and we sort of create a reason why we can’t. I don’t know, maybe there’s a medical thing that someone’s going through, different story, but I do think we sometimes put ourselves in these positions to sort of have to have something to blame, and I just think you’re probably not foggy about something you really are excited about, you really want to do right now you’re really into, maybe you’re not quite at optimal levels for whatever reason, but this is just for me since the question’s being posed and I’m just going to give it my answer, I found whenever I’m in that sort of mode or mood because I kind of don’t want to do something or I’m just not up for it and I just get foggy about it or just lose interest in it and that manifests in different ways, that’s my take.

Kimberly (14:32): Yeah, that’s good enough.

David (14:33): What I find interesting is I used to track more metrics about my sort of mental capacity, if you want to say it like that. I used to use the Aura ring. I would track my nightly sleep, and I did that for many, many years. I think almost 10 years I wore that damn ring, and it’s got this veneer of paying attention to your state that there’s something to. I’m a huge fan of getting enough sleep, but I also found myself getting a little tired with that, excuse the pun, getting a little tired with the idea that everything sort of has to be tracked in that way. I use step counters for a while too, and I just realized, you know what? Sometimes it’s okay to be a little tired. Sometimes it’s okay to be a little lazy, and as long as that’s not a permanent condition that you’re in for months on end or years on end, it’s going to be fine.

(15:29): And I also find that occasionally I’ll get a bad night’s of sleep, and if that’s just off, if I’m working on something I really care about, I don’t give a shit. I’m still going to do the work. I’m still going to put my all into it and maybe at a slightly decreased capacity, but exactly as Jason says, when I’m in the mode that I sort of don’t want to do something, it becomes a crutch real easy. Oh I didn’t get the perfect sleep or I didn’t get all my steps in or I skipped working out this week. That’s why I can’t do anything at all. Bullshit. That is an excuse. You’re looking for an excuse to explain why you aren’t achieving things you want to achieve or doing the things you want to do, and you got to dig a little deeper there. It’s probably not just that you only got six hours and 52 minutes instead of a solid seven forty-five last night. There might be something deeper underneath and uncovering that for a second and not letting yourself off the hook by everything not being optimal all the time is I think a really good exercise.

Kimberly (16:34): Okay. Now this isn’t Richard’s question, but I know we talk about this a lot, you guys being able to do, and not just you, the entire company being able to do focused work because we don’t have a lot of meetings. I’m curious if you guys have your schedule set up in such a way that your interruptions are all on one day or is it like this week I’m going to do nothing but focus? Kind of talk me through meetings versus no meetings and how you guys work on a day-to-day basis?

Jason (17:00): My calendar is generally open every day. I mean, I’ve got this podcast for example, which we do from 10 to 11 Pacific on Tuesdays. I’ve got a team call at 7:30 in the morning on Tuesday mornings, which we just did this morning. We have some people in Europe, so we’ve got to find the right time zone. There’s a few things, a few dotted random things, but for the most part, I have uninterrupted stretches of time and that’s what everyone should have and does have here. We don’t put things on each other’s calendars. We can’t even see each other’s calendars. We don’t have days packed full of meetings. I mean, sometimes there’s work that we’re doing. I don’t consider that a meeting. When you’re actually talking to somebody and having a conversation or working through something that’s not a meeting, that’s working. So there’s times where I’ll be on a call with someone or whatever and I’ll be discussing something.

(17:43): I don’t look at that as a slot on my calendar because it isn’t actually, I’m just like, hey, are you free for 15 minutes? I want to show something. No, I’m not . How about in a couple hours? Sure, hit me up then and you have a conversation. That’s how that works. That’s my day. That’s what I think most people’s days are here. The organization itself does not create time blocks for people and suck their time away, so that’s something that’s very important to us. I will say that the other thing I’ve really tried to do is I try not to schedule anything at all on Mondays or Fridays at all, at all, and then the other thing is I’ve really gotten better at not accepting things in the future. Even things like podcasts, I typically will say, I know this is probably tough for your schedule, but hit me up a week ahead of time and I’ll do it.

(18:26): If I’m not signing up for something 14 weeks from now. Sometimes there’s going to be an exception If something is really, really important for whatever reason, for the most part I just say, let me know as we get sooner and closer to the thing, and if that doesn’t work for you, I totally get it. Because I just find that the further out something is the more of an obligation it feels like, and oftentimes the less enthusiastic I am about the thing then, and so I’d just rather get it on the schedule now or not.

Kimberly (18:53): Where you see it on your calendar and you’re like, why did I agree to do that?

Jason (18:55): Yeah, and it’s not even a personal thing with the conference, but whatever. It could be great, but I have other things going on now that I didn’t know I was going to have, and I really don’t want to step away from those things right now. I didn’t know at the time that I would have those things. I’d rather just not have to have that sneak up on me, and so I just try to do less of that future planning as much as I can.

David (19:15): I need to take some notes here because I totally let that shit sneak up on me and I just did it and I cursed myself oh, so badly. I had a section over the summer where I didn’t accept anything, but I kept getting requests in to do podcasts or to do some conference or to meet for some conversation, and I just said, do you know what? That sounds like an August me kind of thing. That’s months from now, and I ended up with the damn two weeks before Rails World where I already had a very full plate with Omarchy and needing to do the keynote preparation and the week before was just packed and I was like, what kind of idiot would line up all this stuff right before this is supposed to happen? Oh, that kind of idiot, me, three months ago, that kind of idiot.

(20:09): I then did learn my lesson in that moment and I had actually quite a lot of requests in my set aside and after going through that experience of like, I can’t do any of that, so I just wrote everyone back, all requests that I had sort of halfway thought maybe I could do it, maybe I could fit it in and just say I’m not doing anything else, booking anything new in 2025, hit me up in January. Just clear the decks. Totally, and perhaps that should just be the permanent state of affairs. I will say I find it so much easier to say, yeah, do you know what? That sounds kind of interesting. Three months in advance and then the week before absolutely cursing myself for signing up for these things, and it’s not just that the thing is there. I mean, it’s not like I don’t like talking to people some of the time and it’s not like I don’t like appearances and getting a chance to talk about some of the topics that we’re excited about, but I don’t know if I like it enough, and very often the trade off is this week if I have two, three things, that week is off.

(21:14): I am not going to make big breakthroughs. I’m not going to dive into big technical things because Jason, actually, you had a wonderful post I think a couple of years ago. The problem’s, not the time. I keep getting sucked into this delusion, oh, it’s just one hour here. It’s just a half an hour here. It’s just a quick conference. That’s not what it is. It’s the attention. The attention just gets drained out of the week when you have a handful of little dots on that calendar. That’s when procrastination really kicks in. When I start the day and I think, you know what? I have something at one, what kind of problems do I want to start with today? Let’s just take some of the easy ones. Let’s not dive into the stuff I’m actually really excited about moving forward because I don’t want to get into it and then suddenly when I’m in the groove, when I’m in the zone, I got to leave the zone and I got to go to some stupid meeting or have a chat or a podcast, which it often is. Not ours, of course, that’s exempt, but all these other obligations. And this is a choice.

(22:15): That’s what I always remind myself. It feels like, do you know what? This is the nice thing to do. Someone reaches out to you and maybe you’re even interested in the topic and you’re interested in the person. It feels like the right thing to do to say yes, but you got to think about the bigger picture. Why do you work? Why do you even care about any of this stuff? What is it that gives you the energy? What kind of problems do you want to move forward and are those objectives compatible with filling your week with all this other nonsense? Well, it’s not nonsense, but all this other stuff. Very often it’s just not. This is why I believe that a lot of people do actually end up in a situation where it looks fine, work looks fine, but they’re not super happy. I am by far and away the most happy when I finally have a problem I can just dive into with both claws and just hang on, let’s go.

(23:09): Let’s see where this thing goes. I mean, I’ve been on this trip with Omarchy for a couple months now. I know that’s not going to last. I’m not going to be this obsessed about it for a year, but until it throws me off, I should probably just hold on, not get all the other stuff in the way. There will be a time, there’ll be a night when that project is over winding down and suddenly I feel like I don’t know what the next thing is yet. Then you can fill up your day. So that’s where Jason’s technique really fits in, I think, is when you’re in that mode and you’re just saying, hit me up next week. If you’re ready for that, it’s fine to do it. Don’t interrupt me in the middle of the flow and I’m speaking to myself here. Don’t do it.

Kimberly (23:47): Okay, well reminder to yourself then David. This has been an episode of Rework. Rework is a production 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube and if you have a question for Jason or David, like Richard did, send us a video request, you can do that at 37signals.com/podcastquestion and I’ll send you some REWORK merch.