Break the Twitch Articles

While Amy and I have been working at home together for a few years now, we found we needed to adjust our practices when the pandemic started. Pre-pandemic, working at home with your partner already came with its challenges. In a pandemic situation, all bets were off.

For much of the world, the pandemic quickly uprooted major facets of day-to-day life. There will be lasting shifts in our cultural landscape from what’s happened in the past year. Many companies are likely to continue going fully remote. More meetings will be done virtually than face-to-face compared to before. There’s a greater need for the home to be multi-faceted in its functionality and use.

Over the years, we’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t when you’re working at home with your partner. It really has been an evolution of sorts. We started out sitting side by side in a small “office” bedroom in our old Minneapolis home, to having separate work areas in the house now in Phoenix.

We decided to talk through our experience working from home together—what we’ve learned, and what we’d recommend to others in a similar situation. If you’re still adjusting to making work-from-home work-for-you, read on (or check out the video below).

Tips For Working From Home With Your Partner

1 / Intentionally create some separation

Especially if working from home is a relatively new arrangement, you’re likely not used to spending all day, every weekday, with your partner. It can be easy to fall into the habit of not giving each other enough space—especially when it used to be there by default.

Back in 2018 when we began working from home together, it seemed like a good idea to have all the equipment and desks in the same place. However, it didn’t work out so well in other areas as we’ll discuss more below. We have separate working spaces now, which has made it easier to focus and to do our best work.

As annoying as commutes can be, driving or biking to work and back each day is actually built-in decompression time. This transition time tends to go away completely when working from home. You can find other ways to transition from “work” to “home” mode so there’s more of a separation.

2 / Allow focus blocks throughout the day

As we all know here at Break the Twitch, uninterrupted focus is worth its weight in gold. It’s nearly impossible to focus effectively if you’re asking each other questions or sharing things every few minutes.

While it’s tempting to share with your partner the second you think of something, it’s better to establish boundaries and guidelines for focus blocks during the day.

60 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted work time—similar to the 90-minute focus blocks we do over in Attention Collective—is my recommendation. It usually takes around 15 minutes to even get into this type of focused flow, so do your best to not interrupt when your partner is in the zone.

It can help to create some simple, visible guidelines that make it easier for your partner to see that you’re doing focused work. Indicators like “having headphones on” or having a small colored light you can turn on when you’re focusing can help. Having a Time Timer can be a wonderful visual indicator with the benefit of showing when you’re expecting to be done.

Test and establish the rules that work best so you each can do your best work. While we can’t control everything, even the smallest distractions can pull us out from a deeply focused state. So work together to create specific guidelines that work well for each of you.

3 / Same team!

There will be times when things are more frustrating, and communication wires get crossed. It’s bound to happen. When exchanges become more casual and interspersed, communication tends to be less clear and concise.

During these situations, Amy and I like to use the callout, “Same team!” It’s a lighthearted, humorous reminder when we have temporarily forgotten that we’re both working towards the same thing.

Imagine two soccer players on the same team, running after the ball and elbowing each other—each preventing the other one from getting the ball. Then imagine a coach screaming, “SAME TEAM!!” from the sidelines at the top of her lungs.

During these times, it’s good to remember you’re both working toward the same goals (hopefully—at least, that’s the assumption here). Take time to step back and make sure you’re communicating fully and effectively. Misunderstandings about issues you’re actually aligned on are a huge waste of energy better used for almost anything else.

4 / Schedule meetings like you would in an office

Schedule specific times to sit down and discuss priorities, household tasks, or whatever else needs to be done. Try to keep the meetings as light as possible and slow the pace down. It helps a lot when you do what you can to make the meetings more fun and positive.

It feels overly formal, yes—but that’s actually the point. Especially if you’re working on the same projects or business together, work-life balance becomes a thing of the past. At times, we’ll inadvertently discuss deadlines while washing the dishes, or make decisions while eating dinner. It’s almost too easy for everything to all mesh together. The stress from never being fully “off” of work can build up over time and lead to burnout or exhaustion.

5 / Learn each other’s working styles and adapt

Each one of us has a different working style and energy flow during the day. One of the fun parts about being in a relationship is that opposites tend to attract, which means that working styles may likely differ. If you’re working at home with your partner, any differences between the two of you will need to be accommodated.

Some people need more of a 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off, Pomodoro-type situation, while others work best in three-hour chunks. Psychologically, it may be difficult to work when you don’t see the other person working at the same time. Perhaps the other person is taking a mental break by playing a game or checking social media while you’re working. Do what you can to trust that the other person is doing what’s best for them.

Most importantly, understand that each person works differently, and trying to force your own working style upon someone else doesn’t really work. In the end, the other person works best if given the space to do so on his or her terms.

6 / Take it day by day.

There is a lot to consider and learn when adjusting to a new work-from-home situation, so remember to take it day by day. Do what you can to stay flexible and communicate in a kind and honest manner with the other person. It’s always best to approach any disagreements with curiosity, kindness, and creativity, rather than with annoyance or blame. No matter what happens, the situation will evolve over time, and you’ll adapt along with it!

If you know someone who could benefit from these tips on working at home with your partner, share this article!

On a crisp autumn day in the late ’80s, more than a hundred thousand people made their way towards the college football stadium about four blocks from my childhood home. Given that the town’s population practically doubled every home game, parking was a nightmare. Thousands of people always ended up walking past our house and apparently, I saw this as an opportunity.

I went out and collected fallen maple leaves from the front yard and tried to sell them to people walking by. It didn’t make a ton of sense, as there were thousands of them all over the ground—but that didn’t stop me. If I remember correctly, a very nice woman gave me five bucks for one. Which to this day is one of the reasons I always try to stop and buy something when kids are out selling lemonade or whatever. It’s never too early to encourage creative, opportunistic thinking.

Entrepreneurship really is for everyone—even if you never officially start a business or a company. It’s a great model for identifying problems and fostering optimism about creating solutions. And the value of entrepreneurship is so much greater than the pursuit of money.

Entrepreneurship… isn’t about money? Yeah, I said it.

At least for me, that has never been the most important part of it all. There’s so much joy and learning opportunity in taking a novel idea, trying to make it work, and seeing what the world had to say about it. I imagine I’ve fostered this mentality partly due to having ADHD and being a high sensitivity person. A lot of the things that were supposed to happen a certain way in school and my career didn’t really work for me, so I’ve had to find my own ways to bring it all together.

While hustling dried leaves to captive passers-by might have been my first venture, it certainly wasn’t my last. I’ve learned continuously from my entrepreneurial explorations since then, and have found a myriad of interesting ideas. One of those ideas, is an incredibly effective model in the startup world for developing new ideas that works flawlessly in developing new habits, too.

I’ve come to call it the Minimally Viable Action, a Break the Twitch concept adapted from something called Lean Startup methodology—the Minimally Viable Product.

The Minimally Viable Product, or MVP

Ideas are great, but they’re a dime a dozen; they don’t carry much value unless we do something with them. When an entrepreneur has an idea, she needs a way to see if that idea is actually viable—without immediately raising millions of dollars or investing years of life into building the idea when it, well… might not be that great.

An MVP is a simple and inexpensive version of the entrepreneur’s idea, created to test and get feedback that will be incorporated in the next prototype. The process is iterative and evolves with each version to make small improvements along the way. The team is able to change the idea more quickly, easily, and cost-effectively based on early audience feedback. It doesn’t make sense to spend months building a feature that no one ends up wanting, right? By the end of this process she, in theory, has something that works well, and that people actually want.

A few examples of this would be:
If you have a big idea for a new type of electric car, start by applying the idea to an electric skateboard. You’ll learn if your concept for propulsion is practical, and what challenges might arise at a larger scale.

Perhaps you want to start a business in the agricultural industry, creating a new hybrid fruit by combining an orange and an apple. Driven by the deep desire to finally put all the comparisons to rest, you start looking at farms to buy to create your vision. Instead, start with an inexpensive, fast-growing fruit like raspberries or strawberries in your backyard.

When you start any project like this, the biggest problem is not yet knowing what you don’t yet know. You can spend years theorizing about this, but it’s more effective to test the waters and learn by following the process.

New Habits Are Just Like Big Ideas

Habits tend to carry a lot of weight for people—they did for me at one point, too—but I’ve learned to put a lot less pressure on the word. To me, habits are just how we show up in our lives with regularity. They’re the little things we do consistently over long periods of time—and we’re doing them whether we intend to or not. As the years pass, they become the way we spend our lives.

If you do something for five minutes each day, you’ll look back on a lifetime of doing that thing; not any one day in particular, but a long streak of color in the blur of a life well-lived.

With life being how it is though, starting and maintaining any positive habit can feel like an incredible burden. There’s a lot of deep human psychology at work that causes this, and we all have different reasons. For me, a big part of the resistance I’ve felt is the perceived distance between where I am and where I want to be. If the initial resistance didn’t get me, the pressure I put on myself to consistently see improvement eventually would. To make it work, we need to think like an entrepreneur—both in the way we try and the way we fail. Here’s how to do that.

Introducing Minimally Viable Action, or MVA

While modern culture has conditioned us to expect quick results and overnight success, that would be like trying to design a car without any experience. There are so many variables at play, so we need to start smaller and figure out what challenges might arise.

A minimally viable action is the smallest and easiest-to-do action of the habit you are trying to form.

With a Minimally Viable Action, we have the ability to test out a new habit just like it’s a simple lifestyle experiment. This allows us to see what issues come up, make adjustments, and continue on.

You don’t want mile two of a marathon to be the place where you discover that your new running shoes are rubbing in all the wrong places. That sounds terrible, and I doubt anyone would be encouraged to do another one after that experience.

To effectively use the Minimally Viable Action, you really need to boil down the new habit to its essence. Make it so incredibly simple that it becomes the easiest possible thing to do while still doing the thing you set out to do. A skateboard isn’t a car, sure—but it is a four-wheeled electric propulsion system designed to transport a human from A-to-B. If I had to design a full electric car from scratch, I would probably never bother starting because the thought is entirely overwhelming. A skateboard on the other hand? Complicated, but seems manageable, right?

By creating a minimally viable action, you’re increasing your chances of actually doing it—even when unexpected things come up during the day. It’s creating a goal with such little resistance that it’s hard not to do.

How To Build Habits That Last

1 / Create A Minimally Viable Action 

The first step is to consider the new habit you want to build and break it down into a small, easy action. The most common mistake with habits is going too big, too fast and burning out or running into unforeseen problems. If the MVA you’re choosing feels silly, you’re on the right track.

For example, if your new habit is to exercise more, but you’ve been almost completely inactive lately, the MVA would be to put on your sneakers and take two steps outside. That’s it. Maybe take some breaths of fresh air while you’re out there.

If you want to eat more vegetables, the MVA would be to have a few pieces of broccoli with your lunch. The goal isn’t to do as much as you can today; it’s to have enough in the tank to still do the action tomorrow, the next day, and so on. If you stuff yourself full of veggies on day one, especially if you haven’t developed a taste for them, the last thing you’re going to want to eat the next day is vegetables.

We’re not going for results today—we’re going for paradigm shift.

2 / Test, Improve, Repeat 

After you create the minimally viable action, the next phase would be to test, improve, and repeat. Just like an entrepreneur would test an MVP, you’re going to test the MVA you’ve created.

A week or two into it, you may choose to increase (or reduce) the difficulty, change some aspect of your habit, or try something else entirely! Continue to skew on the side of keeping it simple, even if you’re scaling up. This phase is all about testing and improving the MVA as you go along, so you stay consistent with the habit.

3 / Pivot!

Let’s say it’s really not working out, and something has to change. Back in entrepreneurship land, when a minimally viable product is presented to an audience and receives poor feedback, or a better opportunity appears, the entrepreneur doesn’t give up. She can always pivot and create a different solution for the same problem or use the MVP to solve a different problem entirely.

Wrigley Gum is an incredible story of pivoting: Did you know Wrigley’s Gum started as a business selling soap?

William Wrigley Jr. offered premiums as an incentive to buy his soap, such as baking powder. Later in his career, he switched to the baking powder business, in which he began offering two packages of chewing gum for each purchase of a can of baking powder. The popular premium, chewing gum, began to seem more promising, prompting another switch in product focus.

Wikipedia

Not only will you find the challenges by trying something out, but you’ll find the opportunities that come with it too!

If you realize that walks aren’t the right exercise for you because of a heel issue, perhaps riding a bike would be a better fit. If you find out that you hate steamed broccoli, try cooking it another way. Better yet, try literally any other vegetable—there are so many of them! It might just be a green protein smoothie in the morning that does the trick. Trying out different solutions will help you find something you enjoy, so the habit stays around for the long haul. When things get boring, switch it up and find something new that serves a similar purpose.

There’s really no need to be rigid in our approach to building habits that become the way we live.

When building a habit, remember everyone is different. What works for one person may not work for someone else. Remember there is always a way to stay curious and look for creative solutions along the way. Keep it up, and you’ll find what works for you, too. Even the best products and greatest ideas have a lifespan. When you get bored, get creative and find the next thing that helps you stay engaged.

I think we can all agree that 2020 was quite the year of change, discomfort, and reflection (to say the least). Reflecting back, one of the more important things I learned from the past year is how our emotions impact our attention.

In March when the pandemic hit, it was accompanied by a cast of uncertainty, confusion, and worry. In a matter of weeks, millions of people went from living their normal lives to being stuck at home. Many of us had to figure out how to work from home and many lost our jobs entirely. Gyms, restaurants, and local shops closed their doors, and life as we knew it became radically different.

We all deal with uncertainty differently; but let’s just say there were a lot of coping cookies, pizzas, and other baking projects going on for Amy and me in 2020.

How Our Emotions Impact Our Attention

While all the baking helped get us through it, things overall might not have been handled completely rationally; and that is often what happens during emotional dysregulation. It looks different for each person, although emotional dysregulation can result in being in a mild or greater state of panic or anxiety. It often results in not being grounded, and therefore, being more susceptible to distractions and more impulsive choices. Sometimes, it can be not knowing what to do to improve a situation but also trying a lot of different things at the same time.

Thinking back, I made connections on why daily things that came easily before became so difficult back in March 2020. Certain productive practices in my life suddenly went off the rails. My thoughts ping-ponged all over the place. I bounced from one thing to the next instead of slowing down and doing one thing at a time. I was, as I imagine many others were, all over the place. It’s only now that I’m able to look back and grasp a deeper understanding of what exactly was going on during those early months of the pandemic.

A key part of emotional dysregulation is not being aware of what you’re feeling and going into a coping mode that can manifest in many ways. This is how emotions can impact our attention and ability to focus—regardless of whether you’re aware of it or not.

The Twitch Can Often Look Like Coping

I’ve realized the ways in which we cope with difficulty can look a lot like the Twitch. More social media time to fight the feelings of isolation. More impulsive purchases. Lots of news scrolling in an attempt to address questions left unanswered.

Checking for new information (what we call the Newsfeed Twitch) was extremely prevalent for us in March and April of last year. One of the ways many of us try to cope is by constantly checking Twitter, Reddit, or the news in our efforts to try to control the uncertainty.

When getting out of hand, these behaviors tend to be rooted in anxiety, fear, and emotional dysregulation. There is a ton of overlap between what I call the Twitch and the coping behaviors we do during emotionally difficult situations. Looking at the overlap helped me understand that the buzzing, distractible, bouncy-ball brain that I’d get during certain times actually had a lot to do with anxiety and emotional dysregulation.

And it was this realization that led to the insight that when we are feeling distracted, when we keep looking at Instagram, or when it’s hard to focus, there’s likely something that we’re afraid of in some way. Perhaps it’s a task or a project that’s personally meaningful. Maybe it’s a task or deliverable that you’re dreading because someone important will be judging it. Or we want to start writing the book we’ve always wanted to write, but we can’t get started. We conveniently get distracted or something comes up that prevents us from working on the thing that’s important to us.

It’s important to remember that not all social media checking or purchases are necessarily coping or a Twitch in general—it’s perfectly fine to do these things! For me, this is about coming to a deeper understanding of what is happening when these particular things get out of hand. More importantly, it’s about how we can address the situation moving forward. There’s no shame in distractions; they can be helpful in getting through things that we might not be ready to deal with otherwise.

Fear Is A Powerful Emotion

Those feelings of resistance and anxiety work together in this elevated state of uncertainty—and so much of it is rooted in fear. It’s not just the pandemic that causes these feelings, either.

Fear of judgment, fear of not knowing what to do, fear of failure, fear of uncertainty. Our automatic and often unconscious response to the fear keeps us distracted, looking for any type of “out” or relief. Often, we will look for anything and everything to do except for that important thing. Our brains are exceptionally clever when it comes to avoiding whatever is scary or unpleasant.

What We Can Do About It

Fortunately for us, when it comes to finding solutions to this, most of the work has already been done. Grounding techniques are a form of behavioral therapy—and we can look to these techniques to help us come back to earth when things are spinning a bit out of control.

These practices help bring us back to feeling more centered, or grounded, and get things back on track.

The purpose of grounding techniques is to disrupt the frenetic thought patterns that tend to cycle through our brains in more anxious moments. Grounding helps us to feel safer and to be more at peace, so we can better focus. This feeling of safety is often important even though there may not be any real physical danger at the moment.

While I’m not a therapist or counselor, I’d like to share some grounding techniques I’ve personally found to be helpful during moments of higher distractibility. These techniques have helped me reduce the noise in my brain over the past year. I hope you find these simple practices to be helpful in getting focused when you need it most.

What To Do When Our Emotions Impact Our Attention

1 / Cold Therapy 

Cold Therapy is an incredibly effective grounding technique that can stop a panic attack or a high anxiety state in the moment. Really, this one blew my mind.

During this practice, an intense cold sensation is used to startle the body and to bring an individual’s focus to the present moment. The coldness will immediately stop you from spiraling down further and bring everything in your mind to a still. This could look like jumping into a cold shower, squeezing a few ice cubes in your hand, or holding a super cold compress to your face.

From the perspective of someone who has experienced panic to the point of becoming physically sick, a cold shower results in immediate relief. For me, taking a cold shower is the most effective in instantly quelling a panic attack or washing off an anxious state.

2 / Meditation

Although meditation may be the last thing you want to do when you’re having trouble focusing, it’s incredibly helpful in calming the body and mind, so you can better direct your attention.

I’ve found meditation to be the second most effective technique for me. It can be hard to make the choice to meditate when you’re already anxious—unless you train yourself to do it. Starting out small and building out a pattern of knowing meditation can help with focus is the way to go. You need to be willing to sit through the initial discomfort and feel what you’re feeling so it can pass.

Sometimes, it’s best and necessary to do something more immediate, like cold therapy (mentioned above) first. However, with continued practice, meditation is a wonderful way to become more aware of your thoughts, emotions, feelings, and the Twitch. With the greater awareness, you’re then able to be more intentional with your attention, focus, and actions.

3 / Activating All Five Senses

The final grounding technique I’ve found to be helpful for me is activating all five of your senses to bring yourself into the present moment. Smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing.

You could find something that has a strong scent (ideally a pleasant one), like coffee or essential oils. Another option to activate multiple senses is cooking and then eating something you like. Finding an object to touch that is tactile or textured such as your pet, a beaded bracelet, or rock is another great option. Zoning into observing a colorful pattern or things that visually stand out is yet another way to ground yourself. I’ve found singing or humming to work particularly well; truly hearing and feeling the resonance of my own voice helps to quiet the mind.

There are ample resources available for more grounding techniques similar to the ones mentioned above. Experimenting and discovering what works for you is key.

Whenever you’re experiencing greater distraction, a lack of focus, or feeling more susceptible to the Twitch, remember to have self-compassion. Don’t beat yourself up! Becoming aware of how our emotions impact our attention will help you to learn how to “Break the Twitch” and begin living more intentionally. 

Try a few of these or other grounding techniques and after a while, it won’t feel like work. You’ll shift into maintenance without thinking too much about it. Eventually, you’ll get better and better at staying grounded during times of turbulence so you can get back to the things that truly matter to you.