NerdBrand Podcast
The NerdBrand Podcast is at the intersection of nerd culture, branding, and advertising. Nerd culture is no longer an isolated subculture; it’s THE culture of the day and makes its way into our daily lives through the entertainment we seek and the technology we rely upon. Listen as we discuss our views on visual design, branding, and advertising for movies, comics and novels, video games, technology, and other nerdy passions.
NerdBrand Podcast
Distractions: The Silent Revenue Killers
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Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the NerdBrand Podcast. We're going to be talking about distractions, distractions, because you know we all have that going on right now. Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the Nerd Brand Podcast. We're talking about distractions, the stock market things. I've never seen such a panic cycle of one news thing after another. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. Today we're going to be talking about distractions in business, and it can come from anywhere, because distractions in business are actually really really bad, especially if you're like running a business, if you're doing the sales and operations and accounting and things like that. Like running a business, if you're doing the sales and operations and accounting and things like that. You know, even though you have employees, like you know me, you end up still can be distracted by just some bad things that you know seem like they're good but they're not.
Speaker 1:I always try to take an approach to things where I try not to be mean about it when the distraction comes along. Sometimes I'm talking about people, but at the end of the day, you do have to be mean about it when the distraction comes along. Sometimes I'm talking about people, but at the end of the day. You do have to be pretty guarded with what you're doing and I do my best to be polite. But I'm a hard person to get along with, I think, because I am very literal. I'm very much a thinking like three, six, seven steps ahead, because I sort of like to have options. I like to have options for my clients and myself and I think that it's good for that, because I'm a strategist and the tactics to me are irrelevant until we determine the direction, and sometimes some moments are. You can go in multiple directions and so if I got a bunch of distractions coming at me, I can't think along those lines and I'm actually not doing a service to my clients, because many of them want me to do strategy and branding for them. But you know, if I'm distracted, boy, it's just not going to be good.
Speaker 1:Now, distractions can happen, sometimes just at nobody's fault. One thing can happen is fatigue and illness. I mean you get tired or unwell. It's hard to concentrate, flat out. That is a distraction in your business.
Speaker 1:So your personal health has to be taken care of. You need to look after it. You need to make sure you're staying on top of it. One of the things about personal health lately, especially during flu season, is, you know, not getting the flu. So you start seeing a lot of people getting the flu and you decide to all become like internal again and doing Zooms and things like that. And if people aren't happy with you, then you know, just tell them like, hey, you know, look, I'm sorry, but you guys are coughing up lungs and stuff and I don't want to join the cough party. I don't want that. You know, I kind of like waking up in the morning and not having a headache from jump. So personal worries, which can also lead to headaches, can be another distraction.
Speaker 1:So, thinking about your personal problems, it can get you focused off work. So many people actually do a lot of work to get away from their personal problems and that's not too bad. But you got to have that work-life balance thing going. So be careful with that because, whether you notice it or not, other people do where personal things can affect work and some people that have been doing this for a while, we are able to just switch that on and off. I mean, I went through a lot of things last year. 2025 has been rough as well, but not compared to last year when I lost a parent. So you have a lot of things that can be on your plate, from family to children, to other, just other personal stuff, and it's all valid, it's all bad, it sucks, shouldn't happen, but it does. But how you respond to it is really what matters. And so, to quote Rocky, it's not about how hard you get hit, it's about how hard you get hit and can get back up and keep moving forward. And that's not my Rocky impression. For those of you that are judging that, and that's okay, I understand it sucks, it's not Rocky at all. So, moving on Daydreaming, don't do that.
Speaker 1:That's for children. That's a quote from a movie that I can't remember what. But don't, don't, don't daydream, just just don't Procrastination. Don't daydream, just don't Procrastination. Here's the thing about that one People who procrastinate obviously we put off tasks creates a sense of overwhelming anxiety.
Speaker 1:Therefore, you have a hard time to focus. But there's some of you out there that I know that listen to this podcast and you like that. You live for that, so you will procrastinate. Here's the thing Careful, because you're maybe causing anxiety to or on other people. Maybe they're waiting on you for stuff and your procrastination is causing them to become delayed and therefore they're freaking the heck out and that can be a problem. So, just, you know, if you're procrastinating on something you got to do, like cutting the grass or whatever you know, hey, that's, that's on, that's on you. You know, get your jollies off on that, but do don't do it to where it affects others. That's not good and that can affect the business, especially if you have employees, because now you got everybody mad at you and everybody's just sitting in a hate circle, and that's just not good.
Speaker 1:Anyhow, external distractions, lots of emails from lots of places, lots of people. We're in the age of AI. Use it, it's okay. But here's the thing Don't ask it to do the work for you. I've talked about this in a previous episode with regards to marketing and your content. It's okay to draft an email and have AI clean it up and act as your personal assistant, you know, because it can find some of the spelling errors. But I will say from personal experience, if I get one more email that says I hope you find this message well, or it finds you well, or look, your message shouldn't find me, that's creepy, so stop it. You know, I can tell it's a robot and so can many other people.
Speaker 1:Now, a lot of times I use messages and use our use AI in emails because it allows me to take ginormous amounts of information, typically not in any sort of logical order, and it puts it in the logical order for me. And the prompt I use for that? It's pretty straightforward Just clean it up. And the prompt I use for that? It's pretty straightforward, just clean it up. So again, you find your way on this. It's not a magic secret, it's email. Um, it's been around since 1994. So formatting hasn't changed since then, really. But at the end of the day, what you're saying is important and so, um, yeah, kind of kind of you know, keep those to a minimum and, uh, you know you can use AI to help you. And if you need self-regulation on that, then hire a personal assistant or a project manager and they will tell you stop, quit.
Speaker 1:So constant interruptions. I think working in an office would be very bad for the nerds. At NerdBrand. I could see Michaela and I goofing off, making Mitch mad. Caitlin would want quiet and seal her door shut and then we would probably have a problem, as Reba She'd want quiet and she'd go with Mitch and it would just create these silos. So it's a good thing that we're separate, because I think it allows us to. We all know what we need to do and when we need to do it, so we don't get those interruptions.
Speaker 1:And so you know, everybody's got to kind of deal with their own um thing in their own personal house, uh, for that, so, um, but you know it, it it can cause problems staying focused on things and so, um, you know we got a campaign we got to do, we got to get this campaign out, or campaigns out for this month, and that's what we're going to focus on for the client. And I understand the client may say, hey, I got this other stuff and you know, and it's like, well, it wasn't really planned. So either we put this in the back or we move this to the front. Something's going to give. We can't do both and you know those are, because what you're doing is you're creating a distraction and it could harm you and we're just merely trying to set a standard. So you understand that that's not our goal and we're happy to help and do the thing. Of course, however, the priority is this, and we can't really have priorities as priorities, because that's illogical and non sorry. We're just not Jesus. We can't pull that kind of stuff off.
Speaker 1:The other big distraction I know everybody knows about is social media and personal phone usage. It can take away from work-related tasks. Social media is just a giant hole that all people disappear into. You go onto Facebook and you think I'm just going to see how people are doing. The next thing you know you can end up doom scrolling and you have no idea what's going on, and so be careful with social media. Also, if you're running a business and social media is your only channel that you're running for marketing, stop please. You know you need some other ones, so it just it could be in a simple conversation to talk about that, to be able to fix that, because, honestly, social media is sort of becoming more social now. It's really weird the transition it's made from this I don't know annoying thing to becoming more about the people, which is weird because it's social. Get it. So businesses are not people, and so, yeah, you know it might have to get a little creative in 2025 on social media in ways that you know require maybe a little bit more commitment, but at the end of the day, it's worth it.
Speaker 1:People like to talk to people, not inanimate objects, unless you're me. And when you stump your toe on the bed at night trying to go pee and then you can yell at an inanimate object, I think that's fine, though if you live with people, you might wake them up and they yell at you. But anyways, moving on Ambient noise, did you know background noise from other people or equipment can make it difficult to concentrate. It's weird. We all have these little things about us where we don't realize that, hey, you eat really loud. I'm sure many people who are married right now could be laughing. I hope you are, because, yeah, you know your spouse just won't stop breathing and, um, you sitting like not far away, and all you hear is and it's yeah that. That that could be definitely distracting for sure. So finding a quiet place, um, is definitely worth it.
Speaker 1:I was at a place that actually had cube. It was a cube farm and it was an engineering firm, so it's just kind of expected to find one of those there. And this is all before. Covid and my creative director Mitch and I we were touring the facility and we were standing there talking to the marketing director and five feet away somebody was having a conversation with someone else and we couldn't hear them and we just noticed it and we were just like hey, man, how is it that we can't hear or overhear their conversation and we're whispering? Do we need to whisper? And he was like no, you don't. He said we piped in. We have obviously acoustics and tiles in the ceiling, on the walls, but we pipe in white noise at a certain frequency and it cancels out, um, conversations that are nearby, like that. So everybody can be in a work related environment in this cube farm so you don't hear what's happening in the next cubicle over.
Speaker 1:I found that fascinating after working in engineering for 14 years. My word, that could have been so useful. Uh, because we had some noisy and some nosy neighbors back in the day with that and uh, and I just think that was really neat that they invested in that. So, yeah, technology does exist. I will confess that it was a $1 billion a year company we were at, so if you're thinking about doing it, you might want to keep that in mind.
Speaker 1:Brings me to loud colleagues conversations, loud behaviors from coworkers is disruptive. So you know you don't want to be like, hey, y'all stop having fun. You know if you're an owner, but at the end of the day. Yeah, everybody's kind of have to remember that. Maybe a little bit of some housekeeping, maybe kind of revise the employee handbook to mention like, hey, be respectful, remember everybody's front door. Yeah, I don't know, you've got an HR person. I'm sure they can find a nice way to say it. I am not that guy to take the advice from, but you know, I I do like to hear, um, people in the company have fun. I like to hear humor, laughter, people enjoying their jobs. I don't know, just weird for me maybe, but um, it's nice to know that there's people out there that like what they do and I have them Noisy equipment.
Speaker 1:I remember always having to deal with carrying a printer running every 10 minutes. And when I was at this place with this cube farm, at this firm, we had this giant. It was a giant plotter, is what it was. And oh my God and by that I don't mean like it stood up and it printed out like a laser printer, I mean it had a pen, it was a pen plotter. So if you're older, like my age, you're going to know what I'm talking about. For those that are younger, it's literally on an arm, on a flat table, and on that arm that goes up and down on the Y axis, on the X axis, is literally a pen with ink in it and it just does that all day and it draws out an image and that's what we used and we plotted out, that's how we printed out, plotted out prints and this thing is on a hard table, okay. So this was just noisy and I never understood why we couldn't put it in another room, soundproof that room and run an x, just an extension cord. So just just some advice there. Um, and the early 2000s, that was weird.
Speaker 1:Disorganization, that's a distraction. Now I'm the king of disorganization, which is why I have Michaela who helps me get organized. It's just one of those things. And you know, michaela has rejoined our team after a hiatus and now she's back and so she's getting her hands around the new basically, except for me and Mitch, who are the OG nerds I mean, she's getting her hands around the new team and the new client lists and everything that's going on, and so she's, you know, that's the disorganization is like her biggest pet peeve. So if you're disorganized, watch out. You know, don't make me sick, michaela, on you.
Speaker 1:But anyways, a disorganized workspace it can lead to confusion and it's harder to find what you need and it's going to be harder to get the job done. And then, finally, multitasking. I know there's a lot of people that are really good at it, but if you try to do too many things at once, you can end up losing focus and you'll lose productivity. I mean, it sounds like you're going to get a lot of things done at once because you're multitasking, but at the end of the day, you're probably getting a lot of nothing done. Or you're maybe getting a little bit done here and there, but there's some things that are just completely dropping off the map. And so those are some things to think about.
Speaker 1:When talking about distractions in a business, these can be revenue killers. If you're still listening at this point, the advice to really emphasize why not to do these things and fall into this trap is because they're revenue killers and you will see the cash flow taper off down to the right, and you don't want that. You want to go up to the right. You don't want to go down to the right, you want to go up. So be careful with some of those distractions, and they're usually people, well-meaning people, people that you just wouldn't expect it from, but you know you do have to have some safe boundaries and there's a ton of books out there about this stuff. I don't really have any offhand to recommend, but if you'd like to know of any, you can find us on Facebook at Nerd Brand Agency, or you can listen to this podcast and just tune in next time at nerdbrandagencycom slash podcast for the next podcast and listen to see how you can keep your nerd brand strong.
