Ep. 644: Foundations - Dealing With Distractions In The Deer Woods

we should probably do something about it. Have you ever heard of the term neurotypical. If you're young, I'm sure you probably have. If you're my age or older, maybe you haven't. It's meant to describe someone who doesn't suffer from a litany of mental health conditions. In that list of conditions that would make someone neurodiverse, I guess instead of neurotypical, you'll see ADHD at the top of the list.

ADHD is a topic that garners a lot of interesting opinions, mostly because it didn't exist as a common diagnosis until the nineties, even though it was around earlier, from like the nineteen sixties on. But it really didn't become mainstream for quite a while. It is now, and it's probably not getting any better with our widespread screen addictions and just the general content we consume. In fact, research shows that our attention spans are our shrinking at a pretty

steady rate. That's not good, and while it affects all of our lives in a litany ways, it's also affecting whether we fill our deer tags or not, which is what this episode is really all about. Back when I was an assistant editor at Peterson's Bow Hunting, I worked in the end Fisherman office, which is a sweet building that overlooks the crow Wing River in north central Minnesota.

It's surrounded by woods and water, and it didn't take me long to figure out that the smalley and muskie population within a hundred yards of my cubicle was way overlooked and well worth a little fishing effort. We also had a full archery range at the office, and since I worked as a bow Hunting editor, it was literally part of my job to step outside and shoot a couple of dozen arrows. I've had a few different office jobs in my life, but that one was the best.

It's also the only one I've ever been fired from, which stings a little, even though forty percent of us got our pink slips at the same time thanks to the subprime mortgage disaster wiping out the markets for a few years. Anyway, one of the coolest things about that office gig, besides the fact that my boss was rarely there, was that we could bring our dogs into work with us. I was living alone five days a week in a shitty little apartment, so having my Golden Retriever coming to

the office with me was pretty sweet. It was also amazingly distracting for just about everyone, and it wasn't just my dog that caused people to drop whatever they were doing and go love up a four legged office mate. Other folks brought their dogs in as well, so you never knew who you were going to get to pet on any given day. I was a nice perk until it became clear that the presence of dogs was just

a little too much for us to handle. It also didn't help that I lost track of Luxe one time and she interrupted a studio shoot for one of the TV shows there. The overall lesson was that sometimes, despite how adorable they might be, distractions aren't so great. We

give into them all the time. In fact, when I write these scripts, I have to shut my phone off because there's always something calling my attention, from the weather, to my cell cameras to my stupid curiosity to see just how many fly fishing selfies Mark has posted on Instagram before lunch on any given day. Distractions are real, They are everywhere, and they are robbing you of good deer hunting. If you don't believe that, think about the

things you've missed in the woods. I'll give you a few examples from my personal life to not only make you feel better but also just kind of frame this whole thing up. But first, let me say that when you think about distractions, we think about an object, or a device, or a golden retriever in your office. About anything can be a distraction if you're wired to engage

with whatever crosses your plane of attention. But the truth is being easily distracted might be part of our wiring, and it might be a part of how you are

allowing yourself to be wired. We think of it as the physical act of paying attention to random stuff, but it's mostly mental, just like so many things in life, like what I talk about all the time, working out, you know, running, swimming, lifting weights, they're all, no doubt, physical activities, but really it's the mental side that matters most. Almost everyone can do some type of physical activity, and if you don't believe that, go spend some time in

a gym. You'll see people of all ages, all weight classes, all abilities. The differentiator for almost everyone is not whether they are physically capable of doing something. It's often whether they are mentally disciplined enough to keep doing it. People who don't work out say things like I just can't find the motivation after a day or whatever, But the truth is the motivation isn't as important as the discipline. Or maybe diet is a better example, going full keto

or akins or you name. It's a pretty simple proposition in today's world, and any one of those, if you do it right, will provide you with all the necessary calories to not die. Hell. Some of those diets actually do make you feel better, but are also largely unsustainable for almost everyone because it takes an insane amount of discipline and sacrifice to stick to a diet and ignore

all of the delicious, sugary distractions. That are just about everywhere in deer hunting, those distractions are all over two. We know we should scout on foot, but it's easier to run some cameras. We know we should work on developing our skills for deciphering deer movement, but it's also easier to plant a little plot of clover and hope

that it does the work for us. It's easier to bitch about non residents ruining our hunting than it is to accept the advantages we have over someone who lives five hundred miles away and oh, I don't know, working a little harder to find decent hunting by simply scouting more than the competition. There's so many different things in our life where we give into these distractions in hunting, and it hurts us. And I've done all of these so I know it. I'm not shitting on anyone here.

These are real, and acknowledging them just kind of frames this thing up and makes you say, Okay, I know I'm doing this to kind of take a shortcut, or I know when I should be doing this, I'm kind of looking at doing something else that I like a little better. All of those things add up to kind of a less than stellar deer hunting plan. We really sabotage our hunting in so many different ways. Part of it is that it's just damn hard to focus. Think about it this way. Most of us use on X

or some sort of mapping app for our hunting. They're amazing tools, but they're also ripe for distraction because you can sit down and look at hundreds of thousands of acres aground in a matter of minutes, and it takes literally seconds to drop a waypoint on some spot and

just move on. Pretty soon, you've scoured a chunk of ground via satellite imagery that covers seven sections of land, and you have thirty seven different waypoints on ponds and pinch points and other dear friendly looking features, and you slap your hands together, old guy style and you proclaim a job well done. But is it? Does that translate to a deer come fall? Maybe, but it's easy to get lost in second guessing and the paralysis by analysis when you have that much real ground to work with

and to scout, it's too much. Which probably need to do instead is pick one section or even half a section, dig into it on a granular level to focus on what that has to offer you. Because here's the secret about not focusing on this white tail game. You'll talk yourself into false realities that support your inability to focus. Now, not to go all Freud on you here, because I'm definitely not qualified for that, but look at it this Way's just an example of how to frame this thing up.

What kind of buck would make you happy this fall? If you have reasonable standards for your hunting situation, then you'll have bucks to work with that would make you happy on any given half section. Hell, in a lot of places, you'll have bucks to work with. It'll make you happy on any given forty acre parcels, even if the bucks you want to shoot don't live there full time. So is it better to focus on three thousand acres when three hundred is more than enough for you to

try to figure out? Probably? Not breaking down properties into manageable chunks does an awful lot for helping us focus on the real task at hand, which is what I talked about last week's figuring out where bucks live and like to walk. We are also always kind of looking for this magic bullet, but it really doesn't exist in white till hunting outside of putting up a ten foot

fence and maybe some automatic feeders. If you want to figure out while deer in their chosen environment, a micro look instead of a macro look is often the way to go. Another way to look at this is something I learned in my old tournament fishing days. No matter where you fish a bass tournament, there will always be

some locals in the mix. Now, if it's like a small derby on a Sunday, it might be all locals, but if it's a bigger tournament, it might only be a handful of locals out of a one hundred or more competitors. Everyone fears the locals. Well, scratch that, almost everyone fears the local advantage. But it's not uncommon for the locals to get totally smoked by fishermen who live

a thousand miles away or more. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the biggest is that you can have too many spots, too many options, too many memories of big fish that bid on the docks one day and others that were suspended under schools of shad and thirty feet of water the next. Too much information. If you're not great at processing, it is

a disaster. If you can ignore most of the distractions and make a nice plan based around relatively current information and up to the minute conditions, you can do pretty well in fishing and deer hunting. And now I know what you're thinking, so I'll say it. I know. I often preach about options as the best hedge against staled deer hunting. Having five stands up is better than two almost always. Having more than one spot to hunt is always better, unless you have one hell of a spot

to hunt, Even then it might go away. So options are good, but they need to be managed. They need to exist in a way where they promote the right kind of scouting and the right setups, all of which will work with your personal style. And this is maybe the most important part here, personal style, because if you cater to this, you're going to just naturally push away

some of those distractions and have better focus. Like I'm a mobile guy at heart, I do better just trusting my gut on any given day and setting up for the moment. Then I do setting stands and blinds up way earlier and then picking and choosing them based on my availability in the seasonal timing. This is because I have a long pedigree as a mobile hunter goes way back to my team years when I started bow hunting, and for whatever reason, I'm just kind of wired to

see new ground. I don't like sitting the same spots over and over, so I know to run a good strategy in any given state on any given year, I might set up some stands ahead of time if I can, you know, I usually do, and they'll be placed around some specific timing and conditions that I plan to encounter in the season. Maybe that's an opening night sit over a soybean field, or maybe it's a November first sit

in a staging area or on a funnel. Having some of those as backups or just built into my plan it helps me a lot, helps me focus, take some of the guesswork out when those conditions do show up. But the mobile option has to be there for me too, even on small properties. Yet I know, with my own inability to focus sometimes and my propensity for second guessing, I also need as much data about specific spots as

possible to make those decisions about my mobile hunting. This is a tricky one because we often talk about in season scouting and setting up right on specific sign This works and it can work real well, but it's also often like an incomplete picture because you have to know how to find that sign or what spots to check for that sign before you go in. Now, you can just stumble across something during the season that is definitely worth hunting, but it usually isn't quite as accidental as

we make it sound. A little focus now on scouting to your strengths will lay the groundwork later for you to go properly mobile on October seventh when you stumble across four fresh scrapes and one small travel hub. So what is keeping you from doing this now? Is it taking the kids to twelve thousand activities a week, I get that, trust me. Or is it just there isn't a real pressing concern now since it's almost Turkey season

and the deer hunting is so far off. Are gobblers or maybe the spawning croppies distracting you while the deer are a distant memory. It's worth taking a look at things right now and focusing a little on the mission. That's what I'm doing. As our snow finally and I mean finally starts to melt away, the window for real scouting is here. It's going to be a short one, but that's the way it goes when you live a few hours from Canada. What I plan on doing is

walking several properties. I'll take the dogs out and try not to get too distracted by looking for sheds or whatever else. I want to focus on a few parcels of land, some public, some private, and I want to really understand a few areas on all of them. I'm not looking to master any one property because that's kind of a fool's errand, but there are spots I think the bucks will be and I want to learn them better.

I also want to see what's out there for other hunters signed too, But mostly I'm just going to try to get my bearings on a few pieces of ground, or more specifically, a few spots on a few pieces of ground. I need this because it's easy for me to get distracted. I know if you look at my way points on on X have them dropped all over the country, and they're in places that I'd love to

visit hunt but I just can't. I can instead pick some spots that will fit into my schedule and try to learn them really well, because that's going to eliminate some of the distractions all face later. Look at it this way. If you scout ten new areas this winner, but give each one a quick walkthrough, you're going to benefit from it. But there's six months or more until the season, and when the season opens, how much confidence will you have in those ten areas. Maybe two or

three struck you as good or even better. But that's a lot of surface level information to filter through into a good plan, and it gets real easy to second guess, and second guessing saves a lot of bucks. What if you scouted three spots instead and spent way more time in each one, Maybe that would be better because you know what they contain, how to approach them, what trees are best for a setup, and when you should actually

get in there to hunt. Maybe that approach means you can run a camera in each spot all summer long and further increase your knowledge. Then come season, the second guessing and the distractions will be nullified. You'll make better decisions. You have fewer places to think about. That will help you drown out the white noise and go man, there should be bucks betted by that spot because it's this time of the season and the wind is doing this

and it just feels right with the weather. It's kind of a quality over quantity thing, but it also plays on the reality that we know. We will see social media posts during the season about someone who killed a giant by rattling, and someone else who killed a giant by still hunting an island on some river, and on

and on. We will talk to our buddies who will tell us stuff about deer that don't really matter to our situation, and we will absorb a lot of not so relevant information that's distracting and it's dangerous, but it's also going to happen. How much that affects us is up to us. There's a wonderful tune by the band Bring Me the Horizon called Happy Song, where the lead singer sings in the chorus, I really wish that you could help, but my head is like a carousel and

I'm going round in circles, going round in circles. The general sentiment to that song, which you should not listen to if you have little kids around, is that he's accepted that things are all messed up and he'll never get better because of how he's wired. But maybe he'll feel a little better if he listens to a happy song, it's tongue in cheek because that's not actually going to fix his problems, which would take more work than just going to Apple Music and picking a happy, go lucky

tune to listen to. So, just like rattling on Halloween because somebody like Lee Lakowski or someone else killed a toad, doing that isn't going to help you fix your own deer hunting problems, problems some of which can actually be fixed by figuring out how to focus a little more on the task at hand at all points of the year, and by limiting some of the distractions that weasel their way into our minds when we should be thinking simply about where bucks live and how we can go there

to kill them. Avoiding this as much as possible is avoiding self sabotage, and that's such a good skill to learn for so many facets of life. Work on that in the whitetail woods right now, and listen in next week when I plan to talk about how you can actively become a better deer hunter when you're out in the spring woods looking to rearrange at Gobbler's face with a twelve gage. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which has brought

to you by First Light. As I always, thank you so much for listening, and if you need some more white tail content, head on over to them editor dot com slash wired and you'll see a ton of articles by myself, Mark, guys like Alex Gilstrom and Andy May and Dylan Tramp and a whole bunch of white tail killers. So much good information there. Please go check it out.