Focus Bear App: Reclaim Your Productivity And Eliminate Distractions with Jeremy Nagel

Welcome back to Autistic Techie.

Today I have the honor and pleasure of being joined by Jeremy Nagle.

He is a neurospicy Software Developer turned startup founder who is slightly obsessed with his habits.

He likes to start each day with a two hour morning routine and sometimes surprises his colleagues by riding his elliptical trainer during meetings to keep his energy high.

When he's not working on startups, he enjoys cross-country skiing, trail running, and cycling with his wife.

Jeremy, welcome to Autistic Techie.

Thanks, Shea, Good to be here.

I've been on your podcast before on the Focus Bear podcast.

Can you tell us a little bit more about Focus Bear and how that came to be?

Yeah sure, Focus Bear is an app to help autistic and ADHD people with building routines, with staying focused at work and avoiding burnout.

It's an app on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android that helps to block distractions and lets you plan a morning routine and a schedule for the day.

Where did the idea for this come from?

Did it come from your own personal experiences, from those other people?

What started it all?

combination of the two.

It started with my own personal experience of dealing with autistic burnout and ADHD burnout from taking on too much and not having proper coping mechanisms in place because

for me I find that I really need to leverage emotional coping strategies like meditation and journaling and also going for a run that really helps me to set up for my day.

But I was going through a period in late 2021 where I wasn't doing any of those things.

It was really intense with my work because I was basically doing three jobs at that point.

I had two businesses and a part-time job and the businesses were involving me waking up at 5am in order to look after people in the US, customers in the US.

And then I'd work for my part-time job during the day in Australian business hours.

and that I'd have European customers coming online in the evening.

And I would never stop working and I had no time to look after myself.

I wasn't sleeping well, wasn't spending time with my wife.

And the other thing was I was working a lot but I wasn't being that efficient.

was, because I was tired and because I wasn't actually properly setting myself up to be productive, at least three hours during the day was just me reading the news or doing

non-important tasks.

And I realised that there was an opportunity here for me to work less and be less stressed if I could be more focused during the day and if I could set myself up well at the start

of the day.

And I tried all the typical strategies that they didn't really work for me.

I thought I'd try making a solution that basically fights fire with fire.

That if my computer and my phone were the problem, I could turn them into my ally instead by making them...

forced me to do my meditation before I could check my emails, for example.

That was the original idea.

say that you make them your en- not your enemies, but like made them kind of push back against you.

Yeah, kind of in a way, but in a gentle way where I like the idea of dual systems theory, which has been popularized as thinking fast and thinking slow, that there's the impulsive

part of me that is probably the ADHD part of me, where I don't really think through the consequences and I just think, this would be really fun to do right now.

And then there's the deliberative part of me, the

planning mind, which is probably more aligned with my autism, which likes to create structure and plan things out.

And I basically still want to have the creativity associated with my ADHD, but I don't want to have the impulsiveness.

And so the idea is that my, my planning brain set up, sets up the schedule and designs the type of habits that I want to do in the morning.

And then when I wake up and my ADHD brain wants to just go,

Scrolling on news websites or go through the LinkedIn feed, it gets nudged back into the direction instead of doing meditation and going for a run instead.

And over time, I'm just used to that now and I don't think about going down the other pathway because I've now been having this lifestyle for a couple of years now.

you find that you're working smart and not just working hard.

Because it sounded like in the beginning, you were working very hard, but in a way that was inefficient.

And now it seems like you found a way not just for you, but with FocusBear to work smartly and efficiently to apply the right effort where it actually matters, somewhere it actually

gets stuff done.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Something that you also said to me about like emotional regulation, like I am also a runner and a cyclist and people say like, what do do when you're stressed?

I say, I go for a run and listen to my angry music.

It really varies on some heavier rock and crazy soundtrack.

There's a couple of Broadway tunes in there for sure calling it angry music.

How did you stumble upon your own self-regulation strategies?

How did you experiment and find what worked?

I've known what they are for a long time since high school.

think running was probably the thing that became apparent to me when I was 16, 17, going through the final years of high school in Australia, which was very stressful.

And I found that my mum would say, can you try and relax?

And I didn't know how to relax.

I found that I can't calm down, but I can calm up.

So the idea there is, like you said, going and doing something quite active.

Cycling works for me as well.

something that moves my body, that raises my heart rate.

And sometimes I listen to trance music or music that's gonna up the tempo a little bit.

And paradoxically, I find that that then results in me being calmer afterwards.

It takes me at least 20 minutes to get to that state.

But if I go and release some energy, I normally feel better afterwards.

And then also, gurgling.

You shake the jitters out.

Yeah, yeah.

And then also journaling has been very effective for me.

And I guess it's a combination of reading books about it and trying things out, seeing what works.

And things don't always work indefinitely.

I think some novelty is important.

Otherwise, my ADHD brain gets bored of doing the exact same thing each day.

those general parameters of

having some way to shake the brain out through exercise, which might be different kinds, and then having some way of introspecting the situation.

And I find journaling is the best way for me.

I've tried the standard meditation approach of just sitting there and counting my breaths and trying to not engage with my thoughts, and that doesn't tend to work well for me.

Do you find that you get tired of things or become exhausted of them, which prompts you to move to something else?

Or is it more that you just want to stay ahead of your brain before it gets too comfortable with something?

I do with some things, but I really like routine a lot of the time.

I know that people who are pure ADHD are a bit allergic to routines, but I think, there's a longing for routine, but also a longing for novelty.

And I create space in the routine where it's a bit different each day, that my journaling has a different prompt each day.

And...

I do things with my exercise to make it interesting for me.

I train with a group on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

I go running with at an athletics track and there's no way that I do that on my own, but doing it with a group where the workout is different each time, that gives me the right

mixture.

I've been to a bunch of running clubs myself and I find that it really helps me with the accountability but also the social aspect of it too.

I can exercise and I can meet people and I know that I'm doing it at a specific day of the week.

We do our run clubs on Mondays.

So I know Monday evenings I'm always out there at the run club.

Pretty much rain or shine.

Have you ever like stumbled into something that's worked for you by accident or unintentionally?

I can't think of any examples.

I think a lot of the techniques are not necessarily that untraditional.

There's a lot of research saying that exercise works, meditation works, journaling works.

think that the hard part is actually getting myself to do it consistently.

And the approach, I guess, maybe that I stumbled onto was Tiny Habits, which is a book by a researcher, BJ Fogg, where he's looked at

how do you actually form a routine?

And he argues that a lot of people have this idea that they'll do a new year's resolution approach to starting a new goal, that they'll go from doing nothing to then going and

doing a one hour run the next day.

And that's a recipe for failure because it's very hard to actually keep doing that consistently if you haven't done it before.

And he advocates for an approach where you build it up slowly.

And think that's very non-intuitive to me because I've had a background where I used to do ultra marathons and I'd cycle 200 miles in one day.

But at the point in 2021, I wasn't really doing that much exercise.

I was maybe exercising once per week and I really wanted to go back to doing it daily, but it didn't feel like I had enough time.

And the tiny habits approach was really good because I just did five minutes per day.

and it feels almost pointless because a five minute run has almost no fitness benefit and it takes me as much time afterwards to then have a shower but it was about building it up

gradually over time and then every week I added on one minute per day and got up to now consistently doing half an hour per day and it doesn't feel hard.

I've actually seen that a lot of ultra runners are autistic or neurodivergent.

They have this sheer sense of willpower and commitment.

people say, have to be crazy to do an ultra marathon.

And I am in awe of them.

And I'm also like, well, you know what?

That actually makes a little bit of sense.

What ultra marathons have you done in the past?

I haven't done any for a while, but in my early twenties I did two 50 kilometre runs and I did a six hour race.

And I agree with what you're saying that it takes a certain type of personality, a personality that can cope with pain.

And we know people with autism tend to have higher pain thresholds and someone who's happy being on their own for extended periods of time and dealing with the emotional self doubt

of

can I keep going.

I found that especially with the six hour race because that was around a 400 meter athletics track just running round and round for six hours straight.

one spot?

Yeah.

One, well, not running on the spot, but running around laps around the track.

Yeah.

And, and yeah, it's really hard, both physically and mentally of why am I even doing this?

What is the point of this?

The doing the, the trial runs was a lot easier because they were, I actually ran further in the trial run, but it felt way easier.

The trial run was 56 kilometres.

I felt really good doing that because I was in nature and it's an out and back course.

So you run 28 kilometres out and then 28 kilometres back.

And that felt really fun.

Running around the athletics track just felt gruelling.

It was something that I felt very satisfied about in the end.

I came third overall in the state ultra marathon championships.

There are only five people who actually completed it because it's not a very fun thing to do.

I think it might be more popular now than it was back then.

But there are events which are much longer than that.

Six hours is quite short for an ultra marathon.

Ultra is anything longer than 42 kilometres.

And there are people who do six day races.

I don't understand how you do that.

I think I'd be completely wrecked even after a day.

In the US has been a couple people who have tried to trail run the Appalachian Trail as fast as possible.

There was somebody who just attempted it recently.

They had to bail out because of an injury.

But there are people who will run not quite the length of the East Coast in United States, but like a little bit shorter than that.

Completely ridiculous.

And they're trail running like 20, 30 miles a day in some cases.

It's ridiculous and insane.

And I am in awe of people who can do that.

They have like the Barkley Marathons that are

also somewhere in the Appalachians in the US, those people are like completely crazy so in shape and I'm just fascinated by the concept of it.

What, what I come to now is that there's a sweet spot when it comes to exercise that you don't have to go into do ultra marathon.

So if we've scared you off by talking about that, it's not an inevitable step that you go from running say 5k and that you have to keep on increasing the distance.

I found that I get probably as much benefit from running at the moment, roughly 30, 40 kilometres per week.

as I did when I was running 100 miles per week at the peak of my fitness journey.

And I'm not running as fast as I did back then, but it's okay given my overall life commitments.

Because back then running was my only hobby and my only emotional coping strategy.

And now I've got other hobbies.

I've got a wife, I've got a social life.

It's a bit hard to fit in that amount of training if you have other things in your life.

found that too, I'd love to go do all these.

Appalachian Trail things, but it's hard to take life away for months at a time.

The people who do that sort of thing kind of put their life on hold while that happens.

I'm not suggesting that any of our listeners go hike the Appalachian Trail or go run an ultra marathon.

Like if you're interested in that, start small, go for a walk.

You can run for half a mile or a couple kilometers and run a 5K, run a 10K.

Keep it small first.

You do not have to overwhelm yourself with these things before you even know what's going on.

I wanna shift gears a little bit to talk about Focus Bear, because this is a, we talked about it before, kind of alluding to this brainchild of yours, something that came from a

place of need to help you reinforce your habits.

How has that grown from a personal project into something with much more of a business sense to an actual organization that people are using?

How did that growth come to be?

So I began building it in early 2022 and you asked me, was it just my inspiration or were there other people who expressed interest?

there's a process of earlier you asked me and there's a process called customer development, which is very non-intuitive for software developers.

Cause we think about if you're building an app, then the focus is building the app, writing the code.

making it work.

But there's an argument that actually it's much more important to figure out what do people need first and make sure that you're going to be building the right thing.

And that's a challenge that I face because I've, find it much more comfortable to go and just write code than to go and talk with people.

But this time around, I tried to do the customer development thing.

I spent a lot of time on Reddit, talking to people, finding out what their problems were.

And a message was that a lot of people were struggling with their phones and getting distracted while they were working, which is kind of not surprising and similar thing to

what I experienced.

But I kind of took that and I don't think I necessarily interrogated the data well enough because people were saying their phones were the problem.

Whereas for me, my laptop is the problem.

I didn't tend to use my phone that much.

and I gravitated towards building a Mac app because I'm a Mac guy.

So we spent a lot of time building a Mac app that worked quite well and put it out there.

We got a few people paying for it.

We got to maybe 200 regular users of the app, got some funding from a disability tech accelerator in Australia.

A startup accelerator is when

They accept an entrepreneur with an idea and they give you money sometimes and they give you mentoring to try and build the business faster than you would be able to on your own.

And that was really helpful.

But I got to a point after doing the accelerator where we were sort of plateauing that we weren't getting that many more people finding the app.

And I went back to looking at those notes and I realised I really didn't read it properly that

people were clearly telling me it was their phone that was the issue.

And I had started on a mobile app, but I hadn't really put that much effort into it.

And I'd hired the wrong person to do it.

It turned into spaghetti code essentially, and it became very hard to actually move forward on it.

So it ended up taking us three years to release the iPhone app because we had to almost start from scratch again and reverse all of the bad technical decisions that were made at

the start.

That sucks.

But now that we've done that, it's growing a lot faster because people, most people clearly struggle more with their phones than on their laptops.

And the combination of having it work across all your devices is the vision that I always had.

And we're now mostly at that point.

When you think about listening to people, I encountered a similar thing.

I worked at a startup where my founders were convinced that we needed an app.

But I said, no, we actually have people telling us that we don't need an app, a phone app, we needed these other things on our website.

similar thing, listening to people is an important part of building these products to make sure that you're doing something that actually addresses what people are telling you

about.

Your customers are gonna be the best people to tell you what do they actually want.

What was the takeoff like once you actually got the phone out there into the world?

How did that change things as far as your users?

It was quite a large change.

So typically we were getting 20 signups per week from our Mac and Windows apps.

And when we released the Android and iOS apps, it increased by 500 % basically.

There were a lot more people who were finding us via the Google Play Store and the iPhone App Store.

And generally we got much better feedback as well.

I think the other thing as well was that the way that I built the apps, it was very geared around what I wanted.

I'm a power user when it comes to productivity apps and I wanted all of these really intricate features that most people weren't using.

And as a result, the desktop apps became very cluttered.

And that was also why the mobile app became spaghetti code like because we were just adding on all of these features and I didn't...

I was reviewing some of the code but not enough at the architectural level, so we were getting to the point where we had one God object file with more than 1500 lines of code

and it was non-understandable to anyone, even the person who wrote it originally.

there was a...

yeah.

Mistakes in terms of the design, that I didn't involve a UX designer until recently, and mistakes in terms of who I hired to build the mobile app.

but we're in a better position now where we've got a UX designer working on it and she's helping to hide some of the complexity so that it's not overwhelming for new users and

that's also leading to benefits too.

I'm glad you've been able to find a team that helps kind of take some of that mental burden off of you.

How have you thought about managing and leading, guiding these people based on your vision?

Because you're the vision guy.

You're the one with the idea and the plan.

And these team members are basically extensions of your will in executing your vision.

How have you had to level up to communicate with them and help them understand what you actually want?

Partly me getting more precise because I think I had the luxury of with certain people we almost have a mind-meld experience that I give them the vision at a high level and they

take it and they add to it and they execute it quite well.

And I found that with the Mac app that we basically built exactly what I wanted.

It wasn't what we needed ultimately, but it was exactly what I wanted.

I didn't have that experience with the mobile dev that I hired originally.

And I think part of that is about me getting better at communicating requirements.

But a big part of it is also about realizing that there are certain people that I can work more effectively with and finding ways to hire them correctly in the beginning.

So I've now got a clearer process around recruitment that I follow a paid trial approach where

If I'm assessing someone for a job, I'll get them to do a test project initially, we'll work together for 20 hours, and I have to feel like it was an amazing experience.

If I feel like it was not really that easy and I had to repeat myself a lot of times and they didn't really ask the right questions, then it's only going to get worse over time.

I'm only going to become more frustrated over time.

And after having gone through that experience, I've

I've worked with, I think over 70 developers in total on this project.

And I've now got five that I'm really happy with that we've been working together now for two years.

It has just taken that long for me to figure out how to hire people well.

And I don't understand why it has been that hard because this isn't the first time that I've built a team.

I've been working with developers for about 12 years.

hired probably more than 300 people on Upwork, spent more than a million dollars on Upwork in total, but it's still taken me this long to figure out the recipe for what I'm looking

for.

It's never an art nor science.

really depends on the team.

It depends what you're trying to do.

It really, it is as chaotic as you make it out to be.

And I've been through that as well, interviewing hundreds of people on our side for Mentra and having to go through lots of people who maybe were really talented and actually didn't

have what it took or having communication issues or just them not being able to fully understand what we were trying to do.

Do you find that on your team, are the folks

working for you bought into the mission, how much of the culture around neurodiversity matters when you're talking to people?

Do you care more about them doing a good job or do you care more about them caring about the mission or is it a mixture of the two for you?

It's definitely a mixture of the two.

One of my screening questions is do you have a connection to the neurodiversity community?

And most of the team members are either neurodivergent or they have a family member or close friend who is.

Our Mac developer has a neurodivergent daughter.

Our lead mobile developer has a niece who's neurodivergent and our project manager is ADHD.

So it, it

it has been important for people to have a buy-in to that.

I had one backend developer who originally worked on the project who was quite fast and did a relatively good job, but it was clear that it was just about the money for him and

he wasn't really interested in the mission.

And I found that led to a lot of conflict where he didn't want to do things the way that was going to support users.

He just wanted to do it quickly.

Ultimately, I don't want to work with someone like that even if they can get the job done.

I want someone who is going to come up with ideas that make sense and who's bought into what we're doing overall.

That's a tough one.

It has to matter on some level.

And how has your management style changed or evolved as a function of the people that you're managing?

Because some of them are neurodivergent, sounds like some of them are neuro-typical.

How have you thought about your leadership and your coaching for the people that work under you?

What I've come to is that there are different levels of competency and I need to give different levels of coaching depending on it.

At the moment I'm working with a lot of interns.

We're part of multiple university programs where people as part of their degree will do a work integrated learning placement.

we had last semester we had 70 student interns working for Focus Bear and I've

At one time?

Wow.

And I found that to really stretch the way that I lead and manage because I'm used to working with people who are relatively senior and they're relatively self-managing.

And I prefer working with people like that in general.

But in this context, I'm recognising that there's a lot of advantages to working with students because not only are they helping build the app, but they actually also represent

the customer because most of focus bear users are university students who are neurodivergent and so getting their feedback has been really helpful.

And I've had to change the way that I've had to be able to be very patient and explain the process to them, but in a way that is scalable because I get impatient quite quickly if I

have to repeat myself multiple times.

And I've recognized that it's not possible.

It's not possible for me to go through with each person and guide them through teaching them React.js or teaching them how to do back-end development.

So the approach I've taken is I've made a very detailed onboarding course for new people where they go through roundabout 60 GitHub issues that teach them the fundamentals of

React.js if they're a front-end developer or Nest.js if they're a back-end developer.

And then by the time they finish that, I don't have to do as much coaching because they've, they've generally learned the fundamentals already.

And then it's a lot easier to work with them.

And that has proved very effective.

It's a lot more pleasant for me doing it that way.

And the, the interns have really liked that as well compared to what I did in the past, which was just to immediately throw people into the deep end and ask them to

to look at our massive code base and try and figure it out.

It worked with about 20 % of people, but 80 % of people just felt so overwhelmed with it that they got completely stuck.

Only the strong will survive, and the rest will perish.

Yeah, and I don't...

that is natural selection, but I don't really want it to be like that.

I want people to have a chance to prove themselves as well, but without it being onerous for me.

What is something that has really surprised you over this whole experience?

Something you've learned about yourself, about other people?

What's the most surprising thing that you've come across during all of this?

I the importance of UX, I actually thought I was quite good at design because my last startup, it got a lot of praise for having really nice UX.

But the difference was that was a business to business product.

It was an SMS app and I basically copied the design of a standard messaging app on your phone.

And that was game changing for people.

were like, wow, this is so amazing because the competition was so bad.

they didn't follow the existing patterns.

And I thought based on that past experience that I knew what I was doing, but I wasn't.

Some things that I've learned are that I tend to read very quickly.

I, for that reason, and I also like a lot of detail.

So within the app, I'd explain things with paragraphs of text.

And I thought people would like that, but they don't.

It's very overwhelming for most people.

Most people just want to skim.

I also don't really care that much about how things look in general.

I didn't care about it looking cute or attractive, but for a B2C product for an audience of young people, that has been really important.

So I've had to, I guess, let go of me thinking that I understand design at all and hand that over to a UX designer.

Sometimes it is best to give it to people who know what they're doing and just say, you're smarter than me.

Please go figure this out because you've better read this than I am.

Jeremy, this has been an incredible conversation and I'm so glad I got to learn more about Focus Bear and talk about it with you.

If people want to make Focus Bear a part of their lives, where can they find it and where can they find you?

The app is available on the Play Store and the App Store or for the desktop app you can go to focusbear.io

I will make sure that I put all of this in the show notes for the episode and on our website so people can find it wherever they are.

Jeremy, thanks so much for talking about Focus Bear and it was great to talk to you today.

Likewise.