Focused - 137: Managing Busy

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

Mike and David return to the insidious problem of "busy". Mike and David are not beyond getting caught in this trap and share some ideas about how to avoid it.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great. How about you? I'm ready to talk about getting focused, which is increasingly a problem in my life. So today we're going to be venting our spleens a bit on the show about the challenges of focus. Yeah, I've had some self-made, busy problems to overcome, which is going to kind of be the theme here today.

But before we do that, big thank you to everybody who bought the focus calendar. I have not received mine yet, but I know you have. So what do you think? I love it. I love it. I love it. I feel like, you know, this has been an iteration of us building this focus calendar. And this new one is like, it's like the one. Like we've got, it's got the coating on it so you can use dry erase on it.

It's got two sides this year. So you can have it in portrait or landscape mode. It's like if you've got a wall above a cabinet or something, you want to put it in landscape, just flip it over, and it's right there for you. I'm really impressed with all the little additions that you and Jesse worked on with the habit tracking and stuff on it. I'm just so pleased with the way this calendar has evolved. I'm really happy with how it turned out too. Just a little behind the scenes, I guess, for this. Jesse was saying it's about that time. We're going to do a calendar again this year. Absolutely.

I've used a New Year calendar long before we started making a focused version of it. I just love that calendar, being able to see everything at once. And I just asked him, like, do you have any ideas for things that we could add to it? And he came back with a big long list. And some of them immediately, I was like, yes, that sounds great. And had a quick thought about how to implement it, made some suggestions. And then basically, first iteration, I'm like, yep, that's great. Let's do that. Yeah. I mean, I like it so much that I'm pulling down Star Wars art this year because I want it in a more prevalent place, which that's a big sacrifice, honestly. That is. That's impressive.

Yeah. But I dig it. There is something to be said. And I love calendar apps, and I put them on my big screen Mac, too. But there's just something to be said for at any moment looking over to that 12 month calendar. And when someone says, Hey, do you want to speak in June? And you look at June and you see that you've already blocked out a bunch of time in June. You say, Nope, I can't do that. And, uh, that's the power of having a wall calendar. Yeah, absolutely. And it's dry erase. So if you make a mistake, you can redo it.

And you mentioned this a little bit earlier, but one of the big things that's different this year, someone had asked us if we could do a landscape version. And at first I thought, well, I'm not sure we're going to have to commit to printing a whole bunch more calendars and selling that many in addition to the normal portrait ones. I don't think we're able to make that sort of investment. Talk to Jesse and he said, yeah, we can do it on the other side. It's not that much more work. So now when you get it, you get both versions and a link will be in the show notes.

If you want to pick one up, I think they're $28, which is consistent with the rest of the dry erase calendars on the new year site. And yeah, it's a great focus tool for sure. Yeah. Go check it out, gang. We've got a lot of listeners that have had them in years past, and I think it's a great way to start 2022 is to have a nice big focused wall calendar. Agreed.

All right. You and I have been talking offline about some challenges we've been facing and we realize that um we're probably not the only ones in the world that are dealing with a couple of these things so um i wanted to talk today about the you know the enemy of focus is busy and both of us are are facing challenges with now. What's going on, Mike? Yeah, well, part of this was my own doing. When COVID hit and everything kind of got reset, we even did an episode about the big reset. I kind of viewed it as an opportunity to rethink how we engaged with things. And so what that meant is that I had a lot more margin in our calendar.

And so what that meant is that I had a lot more margin in our calendar. But as things have kind of gotten back to normal, doing middle school sports and school and all that kind of stuff, there have been opportunities for the calendar to get full again. And I have been pretty good up until this fall of maintaining that margin. However, this fall, I had the opportunity to coach my two oldest are in sixth and eighth grade. So they were on the same middle school soccer team. Now I played soccer in high school. I loved it. My team was actually really good. We were state champs my junior year. So it's kind of my sport. And I had missed the opportunity to do that kind of stuff with my kids. When it was presented to me, I said, I'm interested, but basically these are the terms. I can't do Fridays. I can't do Thursdays. But if you're okay having a part-time participant, then I'll help out. And to my surprise, they're like,

oh yeah, sure, that'd be great. So what ended up happening was I got involved with coaching, realized that this is very rewarding for me. I absolutely love how coachable the kids are, how willing they are to try new things at that particular age, and then seeing them try something, doing something they didn't think they could do, and then all of a sudden the light goes on, that was way more rewarding than I thought it was going to be. The head coach ended up getting COVID for a couple of weeks, so he wasn't available. I ended up running the thing for a little while. It was way more work than I had anticipated, but I really, really enjoyed it. And so when the opportunity came as we're transitioning seasons now, I'm going to be coaching basketball as well.

So a lot of extra time, but it's something that I don't think I will have an opportunity to do for a very long time in the future. It's kind of, this is the right season. And having that margin allows me to, in this season, when I decide this is something that is really important, say yes. But when you combine that with all of the regular things that I do for work and family, the fact that I have recently started up my newsletter again, and now I'm writing consistently for that, that takes additional time because I don't want to just throw something haphazard out the door. I really want that to be a worthwhile investment if people are going to open that in their email inbox. That means that I have been

quote-unquote busy lately. I mean, when COVID started, when we did that that shown the big reset one of the the things that you had said or kind of implied was that you liked the rediscovery of white space you know um covid was terrible i mean there's lots of people who lost their lives their jobs their their health over this terrible disease but there were some you know there were some upsides for folks and for you i think it was it gave you an opportunity to stand back and look at your life before and i remember you explaining that you know you had the piano lessons and you had you know five kids you're just running constantly to different things

and you discovered in covid that you could actually spend time together and that wasn't so bad either. Correct. Yeah. Playing board games every night, all that kind of stuff. It's been a net positive for us. Yeah. But this idea of taking on coaching is a big obligation, but I don't get the impression you regret taking it on. It sounds like you like it. I do. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing basketball. Yeah, sure. So it was surprisingly rewarding. Where does the busy crisis hit there? I mean, how does that, how does that connect? You're doing two things you really love. Yeah. Well, the busy crisis, I guess, is not a crisis in the moment where it's hitting the fan and I need to pump the brakes on a bunch of

things. But in the back of my mind, I feel like I have a lot of moving pieces now and it's more precarious than it was a couple of months ago. I am not in a position where I can absorb a giant shock to my day-to-day life at the moment. It's kind of like when you have more margin, you're more prepared to deal with whatever life throws at you. And there's just less wiggle room for me right now. And I think in the back of my mind, because I've seen the results of that in the long term before, because I've let myself slip into that.

I'm a little bit worried that I'm skating too close to the line there. Yeah. So I'm going to talk about my busy crisis for a minute too. Then we can talk about what we're doing about it. It's the same thing. Mine is the same that I've always had, that I'm doing two things. I'm running a law practice and running a publishing business and they, uh, they just constantly conflict. You know, I get, I have a week, this is as we, um, as we record this, it's the week of an Apple event. Plus I had four podcasts to record. Plus there's a lot of extra publishing related to the Apple event. And I had a couple of client problems that showed up. So I've been waking

up at like four in the morning and doing all kinds of weird stuff to try and like balance it all. And it's the same old story of the little sparky running downhill. You know, it's like, okay, this is a week I could easily stumble because I got things coming at me from everywhere and I'm going really fast. And that is, um, that is a warning sign. You know, whenever I feel that I have to step back and think about it. Um, and it's, uh, I feel like a kind of a bit of a fraud actually making a show called focused when it's hard for me to keep my focus because, because I do run into the struggles that everybody else does frequently. And sometimes I, I don't, I'm not up to the task, but, but I, I, I'm feeling it too. And, you know, I keep doing things to make it easier. You know, I cut things out of my life. I've hired people to

help me, but, uh, that doesn't change the fact that I'm still running downhill a lot. And, um, so I think both of us are feeling this right now, but in both of our cases, we're busy because we're doing things we want to be doing. It's not busy for the sake of busy or, or letting too many yeses. Well, maybe it is too many yeses, but letting too many things creep into our lives. So both of us have kind of willingly embraced these things. Yes. And the yeses that I have made recently are not long-term yeses. I think that's one of the traps that I've fallen into in the past is I say yes to something

and basically that means I'm doing it forever now in perpetuity. And that is a mistake. I've found myself, I've just continued to do things because I said yes several years ago without asking, is this the right thing to be doing right now? But with both the basketball and the soccer coaching, I recognize that I have a small window of time here for coaching my sons. And yes, I have more sons coming up behind them who may or may not be interested in playing sports. Basketball specifically, just my oldest is interested in sports. And I have no interest

in coaching at the high school level. I feel like from middle school to high school, that's a big step up in terms of you really got to show up all the time and it's going to be serious. I feel like this is the perfect blend of competitiveness and fun for me. So if I don't do it now, by next year he's in high school, I will have missed that opportunity. So I feel very fortunate to be able to say yes to that. When you were talking about the analogy of running downhill, that's immediately what I thought of when I started saying yes to these things is I am running faster. And just like a parent who is watching their kid run down the hill, especially with little kids, they can't really control themselves. They just let their momentum take them. And then pretty soon they're just like crashing down the hill, like the characters in The Princess Bride, you know, when Prince Humpernicke is chasing him and they

jump down the hill. And that's kind of the picture I get. And I can see it happening before like my four-year-old just started running down this hill. And I almost want to like run out and grab her because I know she's going to get to the point where she's moving too fast and she's going to fall on her face. In the back of my mind, I'm thinking, it's grandpa Sparky's watching me. Trying to keep me, would he counsel me, you know, not to, not to keep going so fast. And I think probably, but also I think there's a lot of give and take with this kind of stuff. The reason that we have the margin is so we can say yes to the things that are important. We say yes to the things that are important. We get a little bit more over onto the side of busy maybe, and we know we can't stay there forever, but it's okay

for a little while because this is what's really important to us. And we're willing to give our time, energy, and attention to this. We just can't do that forever without recognizing that there are impacts to our long-term health for doing that sort of thing. All right. so what are we doing about it and i'll say one thing i'm not doing about it right now is bragging about it um i don't look at being busy as a badge of honor but a bit of a failure like how did i let this happen to where i'm giving up margin you know you're only here for a limited amount of time. I was thinking the other day, if I, if I'm on my dad's calendar, um, I only got nine years left and like, why would I want to spend all that time going crazy? And, um, so don't look at being busy as a margin, as a,

as a six, you know, like a badge of honor or like, Oh, look at me. I'm so busy. I can brag to my friends how busy I am. I think that's the first step is to not look at it with pride, but look at it as a problem to be addressed. I completely agree with that. And like I said, I think there are justifiable reasons for being busy, but that's the first place my mind goes when I recognize that I am so busy is not, oh, everybody look at me, look at all the things that I'm doing. But I should be careful right now because we're getting into the danger zone here and potentially the whole system is going to shut down. I have been in that place before. It's kind of a recurring theme for me that I work really hard on things to the point

where my body just kind of shuts down and I get sick and it completely takes me out for like a week or two. And both my wife and my parents recognize this and they usually can see it and they say, hey, you got to slow down. You're getting too close. And I don't ever want them to feel like they have to tell me that again. I feel like I have failed if I let myself get to that point, but it's so insidious. It's just one little thing here, one little thing there, and it all adds up, but you don't see the cumulative cost of it. Yeah. I mean, and something for me is that, you know, we had Sean McCabe on to talk about burnout because I think that's something people

need to be concerned about. But I've been doing this double life now. I've been a lawyer almost 30 years. I've been Max Barkey 15 years. So I've been doing this a long time. And I've never experienced the burnout that Sean described, but I'm just always at this margin. You know, I'm never back. It seems like I'm never backing off of it. And it's like, I am, you know, I'm just asking for trouble. Because you're right, you do make mistakes when you're running, you know. When a motor runs on red line all the time, it breaks, you know. Or it shuts down or something happens. And I do feel like that is a concern of mine.

And this idea of busy is not something I'm proud of. It's a problem I'm trying to address. Some of the ways I'm trying to address it is just this whole idea of hyper-scheduling and block scheduling is to me, the great reality pill for people that are too busy. Because task managers are great. I love my task manager because it keeps track of things that I wouldn't otherwise keep track of. And I don't want to carry that in my brain, you know, the whole David Allen thing, but it's not good in the sense of gauging work to be done. And time blocking is, I mean, if you're good at time blocking, you know, if you bring the discipline to it to say, yes, that thing, that client project's going to take three hours, blocking, you know, if you bring the discipline to it to say, yes, that thing, that client project is going to take three hours that, you know,

newsletter is going to take an hour and a half. If you're good at that and you put them on the schedule, um, you have a, um, there is a hard limit for you. You know, as I say, you know, task lists are infinite, but calendars are finite. And that is a great way to combat busy. Yes, absolutely. I've also found that with time blocking, and that's primarily the way that I'm combating this as well, time blocking, and then also time tracking. But with time blocking specifically, when it comes to was today a success, I feel like it's easy to feel busy lot and not feel busy. And I think one of the things that helps me with that is time blocking and putting parameters and boundaries around the hours that I'm going to be spending on something. If I put a time blocked plan together and I say I've got two hours to write this article,

then I will spend two hours writing the article. This literally happened today. I've had my iPad mini for about a month, so I wanted to write the different ways that I've been using it for the suite setup. And in my mind, I'm thinking this is going to be a huge article. I've got to take some photos with the fancy camera. It's going to be a couple thousand words. This is like a multi-day project. And it could be if I let it, but you know what? I time blocked it to two hours and I got about 95% of it done. I always forget the productivity terms. It's not the Pareto principle. What is the thing where the work will take as much time as you give it? principle, what is the thing where the work will take as much time as you give it? What's that?

Yeah, that's Parkinson's law. Work will expand to fill the time that you allot to it. And that's totally the case, especially with writing. Writing for me feels like one of those things that it feels very mentally burdensome. And in my mind, it's going to be this great big thing. But then when I force myself to sit down and actually do it, it's never as bad as I think it is. And then time tracking, that helps me to realize that I've spent so many hours on different things. One of the things I've gleaned from that is I actually have a timer set for thinking time now. And I'm trying to bump up the amount of time that I spend thinking. For me, that's kind of like priming the pump. If I just think about things before I sit down to do the actual work, it's a force multiplier in terms of how effective I am and how quickly I can get the thing done at a quality level that I'm satisfied with because I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist. If I sit

down and just open-ended, continue to pick at something, I'll always find little things to refine and refine. But when I think about it ahead of time, and then I sit down for that two-hour writing block, and I just crank out the words, by the end, I'm like, wow, that was actually pretty effective. Something I would recommend you try on that is to block thinking time for all pending projects. This is a trick I've used for a long time. And so I have thinking time in the schedule. And the way it works for me is MindNote. In MindNote, I've got at any one time

between three and 10 projects that I'm working on. And for me, they always start as a MindNote and as a mind map in my node. And all I do is just open it up and look at it for five minutes. And it's like magic, you know, because the subconscious mind has been cranking on this problem for me. And I'm able to add a few nodes to it and move things around and make it better. And then I go to the next one. And the whole process takes maybe 30 minutes to look at all of my projects, you know, once every day or two. And, and the other trick to this is you have to start early. Like, I guess if you wanted to get

that post on the Mac, on the iPad mini out tomorrow, you wouldn't have time, but if you have time for projects to go hit it, and then the, the actual thinking about it happens over time. And I really believe when you add days in between sessions, that that is a much easier process. I completely agree. I've also found that not just for thinking about next steps for projects. But even as part of the creative process, I'll block out thinking time when it's time to sit down and create scripts for a course, for example. But I'll only do that after I have mind mapped the outline of the course and I've identified the individual videos and I've gone through that process that you've talked about where you take a break, you step away from it for a day or even a couple of days, you come back to it. And I'll do that several times because every time I do it, the first couple

of times anyways, there's always additional pieces that my brain instantly shows me the minute that I open up that mind node file. But then once I am solid on it, like, yeah, this is what this course is supposed to be, then I will usually, if the weather is nice here in Wisconsin, there's this beautiful trail right by the co-working space that I work from sometimes downtown. And I will just go walk that trail. It's through the woods. It's by the river. It's beautiful. And I realized that walking that trail and dictating the scripts, my brain has been thinking about these things for so long that things just flow. And I'm always shocked at the results that I get from it. Last time I did it for the PKM course that we released at the Suite Setup. There were 10 different PKM videos, I think, and I scripted all of them in about four hours of walking one week while I was

walking those trails. It always amazes me how good my brain is at that stuff when I give it the conditions that it needs to function properly. Yeah. I know that that's been a subject on your mind and mine as well, as we've both been reading some books on this subject and the idea of giving yourself space. There's a lot to that, but we're kind of getting off the trail of busy here. But I think that one thing you do when you feel yourself too busy is start time blocking and time tracking to see, you know, where the rubber hits the road, because you just got to be careful. This, this is a good example. I talked earlier about how busy I am this week with all the Max Barkey things. I like to have a habit of working on a field guide every day. You know, I want to record something. I want

to work on something. And when I did my week planning on Sunday and I saw what I was up against, I just said, okay, well, you know, I'm not going to get much done on that this week. I'm not going to do any recording until Friday. And that's just the way it's going to be. And that was like one way of managing busy was choosing to say no to some things that I usually would say yes to. And I think it is that time blocking process that really forced me to accept that in my brain. And I think that's a good way to handle busy. You know, you don't have to just chuck things overboard, like say, I'm not going to, I'm going to quit this job or, you know, I'm going to stop being a coach for my kid's team.

But when the coaching has a particularly intense week, like when the head coach is out because he's sick, then you need to be realistic about slowing down on other things so you're not running downhill. Yes. And the thing that causes me to run faster than even my schedule is telling me I need to is the minute that I start to feel busy, that's also the same time that I am particularly prone to distractions. little thing can cause me to waste two hours chasing some stupid rabbit trail that is going to go nowhere. And if I think about it, even for a moment, I know that this is going to end up nowhere. There is no value in continuing to chase this thing, but it's that dopamine hit that my brain is just craving at that particular moment. And it's really hard to resist, which is why I feel the case that we're really making here in terms of managing busy for

anybody, regardless of how busy you are, is to fight for that white space, to fight for that margin, because you need it before you realize that you need it. Yeah. And the other thing I would observe from what you just described, which we all experience, I mean, the other day I went down a rabbit hole of looking at the new Xbox. I have the old one. I don't need a new one. Somebody like a post and there was a tweet or something. I was like, well, what is it about? I spent like an hour doing it. And what happens is I don't even intend to buy one. I was just reading about it. And I think that if you don't give yourself white space, your brain will find ways to make it. And that won't necessarily be the best way you could have spent it. Like what if I had taken the dog for a walk

at the park instead of reading about a gaming console that I don't intend to buy. Maybe that would have been a better use. That would have been the intentional use, but because I didn't set myself up, my brain went ahead and made it anyway. Yep. Well, anyway,

busy is a thing we're all struggling with. We've, we had a whole show on it before, but both of us are feeling it now. We thought it'd be useful to check in on it. But both of us are feeling it now. We thought it'd be useful to check in on it. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Privacy.com.

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I have two, you have one, I'll go first. All right. I have two. You have one. I'll go first. The first one stems back to what you were saying before, which I call normal-ish challenges. Things are getting more normal for us, and I know that's not true everywhere in the world. There's a lot of countries where they don't have vaccines yet. where they don't have vaccines yet. But fortunately, in my little corner of the universe, people are getting vaccinated. Things are getting more normal, but not entirely. But we all went through this thing with COVID where we were all stuck home together in my house, and that caused me to give up my studio and change a bunch of my workflows, but things are freeing up now. One of my children is now off living at college. The other one is in grad school and out of the house many days. And my wife still is, you know, she's trying to get back to work, but, you know, things are slow. But, you know, everything is kind of getting more normal. And suddenly, I have more freedom in my schedule.

I don't have to record at a certain hour to thread the needle of four people living in one house. And I have more freedom. And I've noticed that I've been squandering it. I haven't been intentional about the circumstances changing around me. Does that make sense? It does. And I love that analogy that you just mentioned of threading the needle. I get this picture of a thread going through the eye of a needle is hard enough under normal circumstances. But when you are busy, like we were talking about in the previous segment, and you're balancing a bunch of different schedules, a bunch of different people doing a whole bunch of different things at once, it's almost like you're trying to throw

that thread through the needle from a distance in the middle of a storm. And once you do that a couple of times, you kind of feel like you're a superhero and now you can do anything. So you've got all of this. It just feels like when things go back towards a normal, non-crazy scenario, you feel like, oh, well, now things are just going to be so much easier. I can afford to let my foot off of the focus gas a little bit and be less intentional. It's like, well, I could do it then. So certainly I can do it now. And then I start looking at my progress and I'm like, I was actually more successful when I had to thread the needle. What's going on here, Sparky? And it is exactly what you said. I have not been intentional enough about changing circumstances.

I mean, I think one of the best things you should always be doing is watching your habits and kind of your operating system system how are you managing and interacting with the world and um the the thing is the world is always changing around you and like once i got kind of a system to deal with the covid lifestyle you know four people two of them grown children my wife and a dog living in a 1500 square foot house. I had it like a system, but now the world has changed it up on me and there aren't as many people here. And, you know, I can actually go out if I want once in a while and things like that. And I haven't, like my system has not caught up with reality and I've just become aware of it over the last,

you know, few weeks that I've been doing this. And now I've just become aware of it over the last few weeks that I've been doing this. And now I'm trying to kind of like screw down on this point and get better at it. So that's a challenge I'm facing right now is like, okay, go back to square one, look at some assumptions, look at how you're blocking your day and start like making a system that works with this new reality. Yeah, I think that's a challenge for everybody. Everyone's been in that situation, I feel, at least once in their lives, where you feel that enormous amount of pressure, but you're able to perform anyways.

And some people I've even heard say things like, well, I just need the pressure of a looming deadline in order to motivate me to do something, which sounds to me every time someone describes it to me like an absolutely miserable way to live. I understand that when the time is precious and you got to get something out the door, that, yeah, that can cause you to be more effective. But I think the trick is trying to be effective without all of that stress. And that's where the system really comes in. Yeah, and I honestly believe that's a delusion.

I feel like the people who say that that if they were able to get a more deliberate, mindful work practice, they would do better. I mean, it kind of reminds me of my, one of my jazz heroes is Charlie Parker, who was a revolutionary musician, but he also had a crippling heroin addiction and it, it ruined his life. I mean, I think when he died, when I get this wrong, I think he died in his forties and the coroner estimated him in his sixties. I mean, he just, he just ruined his body. And, and a lot of people were like, well, he's so good because of the heroin, you know?

And then of course, if you actually go back and listen to the recordings he made in the few years that he was straight, they're the best recordings he ever made, you know? And these people with this addiction, uh, obviously I'm not trying to compare busy with heroin, but if this addiction to busy or this addiction to deadlines, uh, you do get the work done. That's true. Like if you say I'm best under deadlines, which means I get the work done when I have a deadline, I still think you would be better if you didn't work that way. I think if you came up with a system that allowed you to be more deliberate, you would still hit your deadlines

and your work would be even better. But yeah, that's my challenge to you if you're thinking that. Part of this, I think, comes down to the whole idea of goals versus habits. And are you going to focus on the outcome or are you going to focus on the process? And I think both you and I tend to lean more towards the process. If we have a good process and solid habits, then in some ways the score will take care of itself. But if you're focused on the outcome, the goal, for lack of a better term, a deadline really isn't a goal, I would argue. There's positive applications of goals, but waiting until the night before when an article or a paper is due and then staying up all night in order to get it done, yeah, you can do that, but it's not going to be beneficial for you. And one of the things that I still struggle with when it comes to this is that I want to know all the details. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the

Colby assessment. It's like a working styles assessment. It talks about there's four different models. There's FactFinder, there's QuickStart, there's FollowThru, and then Implementer. And none of them really mean exactly what they, they sound like. But basically fact finder is the person who wants to know everything about everything before they sit down to do the work. Well, it should come as no surprise to you that I am a high fact finder. Yeah.

I mean, I asked you once offline, I said, when you play the game of risk, do you assemble all your armies before you invade you know what i mean there's different ways to play that game and um and one of them is to say i'm not going to do anything until i have overwhelming force and that that can work but that can also not work because there is a such thing as a first mover advantage and um and um

i do think that's something to think about with all of ourselves, you know, how, how do we manage that? But, but getting back to this opportunity of normal-ish, I really look at it as a process question in my life. I don't feel like this is a really a problem for me, but it is an opportunity to say, okay, things have changed. So how can I take advantage of that? You know, how can I now apply this new normal and use my skills as somebody who likes to think about this stuff and come up with processes that lead to good results? How can I take better advantage of that?

And I wasn't, you know what I mean? I was just kind of like drifting into the new normal. And I caught that, you know, just from observing my work product and how my days were going, partly because I meditate, partly because I do a diary. But I caught it early enough that I'm actually, that's something I'm working on now. I don't really have all the answers about what I'm going to change, but at least it's now on the plate. but at least it's now on the plate. You got to first be aware of the problem before you would make any sort of process improvement. I use improvement loosely. Maybe the improvement is you just don't do quite as much if you're in that busy place that we talked about

in the first segment. But you got to recognize what is the undesirable scenario and then what are the contributing factors that are leading you to that before you can make any sort of systems-based adjustments to produce a different result, which kind of leads into my challenge here because I don't know what my end result is actually going to look like. I'm in the middle of some fairly tricky transitions right now, and they involve a lot of other people, a lot of relationships that are close to me. And kind of the scenario I'm faced with is having to make some adjustments which are in the long-term best interest of myself and my immediate family

without hurting any of the other people that are involved. So that means that I need to have lots of conversations in order to protect these relationships. And I don't want to get into too many specifics here, but I just want to be really careful. I want to make sure that I'm not being a selfish jerk, but also I'm standing up for what I feel is best for me and my family. And every single one of those conversations is necessary, but I never know how they're going to end. And so I just know I need to continue to have these conversations,

but I almost don't even know what the objective of the second one is until the first one is finished. And that is just absolutely terrifying to me as a high fact finder. Well, one of the things I would imagine is a challenge for you is that you are a very process oriented person. And you're going to look at this as something where you press buttons A and B and then C pops out the end, and it doesn't work that way with humans. But just remember what our friend Chris Bailey said. Productivity, the reason for productivity is people, right? That's right.

So just go with it, man. Just go with it. Yeah, so this has actually been really good for me because it forces me to stay in the moment. And kind of what I am learning is not to get ahead. And I feel like this has actually helped me in a lot of other areas because my tendency is to jump ahead and portray almost a worst-case scenario and then stress out about something which probably isn't going to happen. So by forcing myself not to get too far ahead, I eliminate a lot of that stress and anxiety. And so it's forcing me to engage with the people who are right in front of me. And I'm recognizing that even when the stakes aren't high in these crucial conversations that we're having, that is translating into my other interactions with even my wife and my kids. I'm able to be more

attentive, more mindful, more in the moment because I've been forced to do it in somewhere else. I'm a little bit surprised at how easily that has kind of translated between those different domains. But it's been one benefit of this unsure period that I'm going through. You mentioned about the idea of worst-case scenario. There's both a Buddhist and a Stoic tradition of actually meditating on worst-case scenario. Are you familiar with this?

Yes, the fear setting. Pre-meditatio malorum. You just go through and think about, well, what would happen if I did that? What would happen? And I do think that there's really something to that um uh and many times in my life i've been worried about something like nagging worry where you wake up worried about it or um it continues over a period of days and if you stop and just say okay so what are the results of that event and just think through it and then all of a sudden it's not an unknown to you and by removing the mystery from it you also kind of defang it yeah the uh the the process of naming it makes it a little bit less intimidating there's a really good video that i saw tim ferris gave a ted talk on this once

about fear setting and it's exactly what you talked about. He talks about the Stoic philosophy behind it. He's got a whole process that he walks through in that, but it's exactly what you're describing. So let's follow this thought to its logical conclusion, recognize, okay, this is the absolute worst thing that could happen. It's probably not going to be as bad as that, so what are you really scared Yeah. And I think the thing that makes this a little bit tricky for me is just the relationships. I mean, these are people that the worst case scenario is they end up hating me and I don't want that to happen. So what do I have to do to make sure that that doesn't happen?

And that's not going to happen, but that's where my brain goes. not going to happen, but that's where my brain goes. So I'm just trying to prioritize the relationships, trying to prioritize the other people, and also at the same time, stand up for myself, which is a little bit of a foreign idea for me. For a long time, I've been a people pleaser. Just to avoid the conflict, I'll just do this thing. I've been a people pleaser and just to avoid the conflict, you know, I'll just do this thing. And I want to say something though. And, um, I know, and we can cut this out if you want. Um, but the, I know more about your situation and I know that, um, there is no worst case scenario where these people end up hating you. And so what's your mistake there is you're actually doing the worst case scenario exercise and you're lying to yourself so you need to go back and do that again and be

more honest about what the worst case scenarios i think that will help but anyway that's good um the uh one more one that i'm dealing with is and this is a silly one, but I think everybody deals with this, is work play bleed over. I just noticed recently that I've been spending a lot of time working on the couch in front of the TV, which is just not the way to get work done. The dog really likes to lay on the couch at night, and it's starting to get cold. We're building a fire in the fireplace because it's cold in California. It's like 60 degrees right now. And, um, so we put a little fire in and she likes to lay there and I like to go sit with her, but inevitably somebody turned the TV on. And then I realized I was going to spend an hour, you know,

clearing out email or working on a draft of something. And I spent 10 minutes working on that and 15 minutes watching TV and I'm not drawing lines good between play and work and uh so i need to i need to do that if i want to sit in with the fire with the dog and somebody's going to watch tv i have started now i switch my position on the couch so i'm not the tv's behind me and i put um airpods on you know and and kind of drowned it out. So I can still be in the room, but actually working. But that was just a little tweak,

but it was a problem that I kind of stumbled into. Yeah, I like that. Changing your position on the couch is interesting to me because a couple of years ago, we actually redid our living room specifically because we did not want the TV to be the focal point because I recognized exactly what you were talking about. As soon as you sit down, whether the goal is to prep for a podcast episode on my iPad or to engage in a conversation with somebody else who is over for dinner,

if the TV, it doesn't even have to be on. Just the fact that everything is pointed towards the TV instantly means that everybody's attention goes to the TV and you feel like there should be something on. So you turn something on and then you're sucked into it. And I think that's a really practical tip that you just shared, because you don't need to rearrange your living room. You just have to stop looking at it, right? Yeah. I mean, the other option would be to go back to my studio and do the work there, but there is something to being next to the fire with your dog at your feet and around your family. And even though this is work time, they get it you know i mean sometimes you got to work but but me trying to say i'm going to do both is silly so um i caught that's just a dumb little thing i caught myself

doing this episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by Timing, the automatic time tracking app for Mac OS. Go to timingapp.com slash focus to save 10% on your purchase. So let's talk about why you should be tracking your time. For anyone billing their hours, this might seem a little obvious, but even if you are employed or billing per project, you need to estimate how long a specific task is going to take. I'm also a fan of time tracking because it helps you identify problems, as Mike and I have been talking about throughout today's episode. Time tracking helps you stay on track of your estimates and your projects to make sure you don't end up getting into the red with your projects and make sure you make more accurate estimates in the future. This is a help in the

endless fight against busy. In today's work environment, work changes so quickly that you can't start and stop a timer for everything. And the good news is your computer already knows what you do. So why not have it track time for you? And that's what timing automatically does. It tracks everything you do on your Mac without having to lift a finger. You can trust it to always give you the complete picture and you don't have to worry about starting or stopping timers. For example, I run timing on my Mac and I didn't start a timer when we started recording the podcast today, but I know timing is keeping track of what I'm doing right now at this minute. So I can go back later and categorize it to this podcast and I'll have accurate time estimates. It won't just be me guessing in the dark.

And timing's intelligent tracking doesn't stop there. It detects when you are in a video call and lets you record what the meeting was about afterwards. And there's even more magic like this in timing to make recording your time as easy as possible. And if you're collaborating with a colleague, timing's Teams feature lets you share projects with them and record everyone's time in a central location, which lets managers get a quick overview of where their team members spend their time while also preserving their privacy. They did it in a way that's not creepy because which apps, documents, and websites each team member stays private and is not visible to the managers. I'm a big fan of timing. I use it every day. I love the way it does the reports, and I like the way it allows me to

catch up with time tracking without requiring me to think, well, when exactly did I do that? Because my Mac does know, and it gives me the information I need. Now, if you want to take control of how you spend your time and improve your productivity, download the free 14-day trial today by going to timingapp.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, and save 10% when you subscribe. That's timingapp.com slash focused to try timing for free and save 10% when you subscribe. Our thanks to Timing for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. You know, you've mentioned a couple times today

about the strategies for managing busy, being mindful, things like that. One of the things that helps with that a lot is journaling. And we've talked about journaling a lot, but we did have this great feedback about journaling that is appropriate for this episode, I think. So let me just share this and then we can jump into it. You guys have mentioned journaling on many occasions. I had used day one for a occasions. I had used day one for a while. I have all this data for about a year, but I don't know how I can use this data looking back at it for any particular use. How do past journals help in the future? Seems like I just

have a bunch of notes from the past. This is a great question and a great point. I feel like if you just sit down because somebody told you you need to journal, this is exactly where you're going to end up in a benefit from journaling. I think that the primary benefit for me of journaling is at the moment that I journal. It's a self-observation, and that's where I catch things about my life that aren't working and gives me an opportunity to get in and fix them. I mean, earlier I talked about the new options post-COVID in my household, and it really came from journaling and looking back at my day and saying, well, I'm not really taking advantage of the new reality. And the only reason that's on my radar is because I journal. So that would be my first point is you don't have to use them at all to

still get benefit from journaling. I completely agree with you. And I think that if all you did was write down your thoughts as you had them at the end of the day, that that would be good enough. Yeah, I actually have a couple of friends that journal and they make a point of shredding their journals in a month or two because they you know you don't want to get in a trap where you are mark twain writing for posterity you know this is not at least that's my opinion of a journal i don't write it for my children to read it one day and glean wisdom it's a tool that i use for myself um but that being said I think there's also a lot of benefit in going back and looking at them.

And like whenever you're making major life decisions, going back and looking at, you know, how, what's the trend line in your journals over the way you've thought about a subject over time? What did you think about it a year ago or five years ago? And I think that is really useful. or five years ago. And I think that is really useful. I also find it really useful just for kind of getting perspective on things. A little bit of personal stuff is a few years ago, one of my sisters had an accident that led to major surgery and her life was in jeopardy. And my journals at the time were kind of a mess because i was just so worried about her and she had to go back in uh for another surgery related to it but it was a minor surgery and she's fine and everything's good but i was starting to feel

myself get tense about it as i knew the date was coming for her to go back in and i went back and read my journal injuries from after her accident. And it gave me a lot of perspective about what she went through then versus now. And I realized it was a really big deal then. And now it's more of a, you know, this is more of a, just a normal operation. And those are, those are scary too, but they are not nearly as scary as what she went through the first time. And it gave me a little perspective about dealing with it. So I find it useful for that. And then of course,

both Mike and I are big fans of reviews and the quarterly review in particular, to me is the kind of the king of reviews. I think a yearly review is hard because it's too much time, but in a quarterly review, I can look over the last 90 days pretty quickly through my journal. And I see things when I look at them and review that I didn't see at the time I wrote them every time. That's kind of a brain dump, I know. But yeah, there's a lot there. So first of all, I think the question to ask is, why do I want to journal? And recognizing that there are different benefits from different types of journaling. If all you want to do is get some clarity around what you are thinking and feeling at the moment, that is perfectly valid. And all

you have to do is write it down and shred it like you were talking about. You don't need to keep it, go back and look at it later, whatever. However, you're right in that there is value, I think, in going back and looking at your journal entries periodically. And this is something that I do quarterly, just like you do. I have this whole process called a personal retreat. I've created a course to help people do it. And as part of that, I go back and I look at all of my journal entries from the last 90 days, which currently those all exist inside of Obsidian. I've actually got two articles, which I will link to for the suite setup, articles, which I will link to for the suite setup, which are key to kind of how I do this. One is using this QuickAdd plugin. And so that just allows me to type in something. It's kind of like TextExpander and sticks it in a specific section in my daily notes. So I've got sections for learning. So something that I learned today. Journal entries, so something significant that

happened will go in there. And then gratitude, something that I am grateful for. And the other part of this is to take my ratings for these different areas, which I've tried to do this kind of thing in the past and it's never worked, because it's always been attached to the output, which we talked about earlier. So I've adapted this method of daily questions from Marshall Goldsmith in Triggers, where he, instead of measuring what he did in a particular area, he's measuring his effort. So the key here is you ask yourself, did I do my best to insert whatever you want in the blank there and then give yourself a rating? He was doing it in Excel spreadsheet.

I do it inside of Obsidian and rate myself in categories like grow spiritually, love my wife, love my kids, be a good friend, learn something, create something or exercise. And again, there's a video in the post which shows how I do this. But basically, I assign a value to each one of those tags. Because it's based off of my intention instead of the outcome, this is way easier for me to do than any of the other prompts that I've tried to use in the past. And then I do some magic with a plugin called Tracker where I pull all those values and I plot them over the last 90 days. So as part of my personal retreat process, I'll look at those as well and I'll see the trends and I'll see, on this day, this score was abnormally low. So what happened there? Or overall, this particular area has been

kind of neglected. So maybe I should try to do something in the next 90 days to sort of correct for that, which is, I think, an important point here with all of the self-improvement stuff is you're constantly just switching your focus from one area to the next. It's kind of the idea of the intentional imbalance. It's not like you master a particular area, then you move on to the next area and you master that. The Benjamin Franklin approach to mastering the 12 virtues or whatever it was. You go and you pay attention to one and you get it better. And then you go to another area that's low and you make that better.

And then the minute that you walk away from something, it starts to go downhill. But that's okay. You're just trying to maintain a certain standard in these different areas with your daily habits. And I think journaling is one of the best ways to identify what's really going on in the areas that are important to you. Yeah, you know, I've never done therapy. I've never had a therapist. But I do feel like the process of journaling is kind of self-therapy, where if you're just honest about it when you write in your journal and meditation does the same thing. But I find both actually work really well together.

But the process of being honest with yourself about what's going on and what you're thinking gives you the space to kind of figure out where you need to improve or where you're concerned or where you need to make changes. And doing that over time is very valuable. And like I said, just, you know, the big question was, well, what do you do with them? I'd say, go back and read them and see what you've learned about yourself. And, you know, the person you are today is not the person you were last week or last month or last year when you wrote that and how have you changed and are you changing in the direction you want to be changing and it just gives you a um a little bit of like a a plot on the graph i guess uh to see how your life is going i i find it a very valuable process that's why it keeps coming up on the show and uh i hope that helps and since we've talked about journaling uh my

journaling workflow has changed i thought it'd be fun to do a quick check-in on that what what are you doing these days mike i'm still using obsidian and uh i'm using the daily notes feature to capture all of my journal entries that's literally the only thing i'm using daily notes for inside of obsidian and then i mentioned uh two videos which will explain this much better than i can via audio i'm using the tracker plugin so i can rate the areas for my daily questions and then just capture the other stuff wherever using quick ad what that gives me is when i do my personal retreats every 90 days i've got not only the charts of the trends, but also the

individual entries. And I don't have an entry for a journal entry or a gratitude entry or a learning every single day. But the fact that QuickEd allows me to just plop those in quickly, no matter where I am in Obsidian, means I catch more of those than I miss, which is the important thing. I want to eliminate as much friction as I can with adding these things. And Obsidian, for me, is the perfect tool for this. The iOS version continues to get better. I absolutely love using Obsidian on my new iPad mini. It's perfect.

Yeah, I wouldn't say Obsidian is perfect on iPad, but it's perfect yeah i don't i wouldn't say sitting is perfect on ipad but it's usable um maybe that's a topic for another day or maybe you and i just need to talk about that maybe that's deep focus today let's do that um but the uh what i would say is that i am really uh kind of like centering on obsidian now too for about a year i really jumped back and forth between a written you know paper journal between day one and obsidian and because i'm in the obsidian throughout the day already they have end-to-end encryption now and i get more information if i do it digitally than if i do it with a pen and paper, because I write slow and I can sit down and just start dictating into obsidian kind of stream of consciousness and get some really deep

diary entries about what I'm thinking. And suddenly, you know, it's one of those things where you start talking and suddenly stuff starts coming out of you that you didn't even realize was there. So I'm a big fan of Siri voice detection for these entries. I sit down in the morning, I sit down in the evening, I dictate into Obsidian, and that's kind of where I do it now. A couple things, failed experiments I did. I tried, Daisy and I went to Disney World. I did a speaking gig there, and we were only there for a

couple of days, but I went into the Pandora area of the, um, of the animal kingdom where they've got like the, the avatar of land, I guess, you know, and it reminded me of the movie, which I hadn't seen in a long time. And in the movie, there's a series of journal entries done by the, the protagonist where he's looking at a camera and just talking to the camera. And I thought, well, why don't I do that? The iPhone is with me all the time. I can just point at my face and talk to it. But I have found that that doesn't really work for me.

I'm just a little self-conscious of looking at my face while I talk to it about the things that are near and dear to me. Whereas I feel like when I am, when I just dictate, it's more, I get more of myself out of it than if I look at the camera. So that's kind of a weird thing that I discovered about myself. I actually don't think that's that weird. I think I would have the same sort of reaction, but it's a great idea. If that's what clicks for you then absolutely i could see certain personalities where that just absolutely is the thing that makes journaling work that would be a really cool way to do it and then chris up church in the mac power users and focused forums that said he does both he does a digital and he writes in his journal every day and i i don't remember exactly what he said i don't have in front of me now, but, um, I thought about that and I just realized I would not maintain that,

you know? Um, but so what I've, you know, the, the, the paper journaling for me is a thing where I have a thorny problem and I just started writing and the, the intentionality and the slow process of writing that actually gives me more time to think it through. And I think that is very good. The process of writing with pen and paper is good for that. But the actual journaling for me has really just gone into Obsidian. And also, I'm a big fan of interstitial journaling, where I journal throughout the day. I just put a time entry and start writing things down. Sometimes it'll just be the name of a case I'm working on. Sometimes it'll be the name of a

podcast I'm working on. So it's a little bit of a, just kind of a diary of what happened. But then other times, big journal entries grow out of it. Like we, when we did the episode with Sean McCabe several, like last month, he opened my eyes to some things that I hadn't been thinking about and right in the middle of my daily journal I've got you know three or four paragraphs of thoughts for me about things that I should be doing and thinking about following that discussion and so you know it just kind of varies but it's all going in obsidian and I'm really trying to not get on the journal merry-go-round now I I'm like, okay, I've tried the other things. This is working.

Just like I used day one for a long time, I'm going to use this. And what I did with day one is I printed everything out of day one into PDF. And I've got that saved in a good place. And so even if I decide to let go of day one, I still have all those entries. They make export really easy. go of day one, I still have all those entries. They make export really easy. And I'm thinking about running a script because, you know, my daily journals, I do it in the daily note. And that's where I also say, you know, what my gratitude for the day is and daily meditation, all that stuff is in that one note. I'm thinking about running a script to print all that out to

PDF monthly and just print it out so I can just go through and leaf through it and read it without going digital. I think that might be useful. I'm going to try that for this month. And if it works, I'll go back and add a bunch of prior months. It's a cool idea. But that's a journaling check-in. You should try it if you haven't. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Setapp.

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where I do a ton of research and write about the very best apps in a particular category. And over the years, I've noticed that more and more of those app picks end up in the set app service. So now if you were to ask me, where's the very first place that I should go to get quality software after purchasing a new computer, I would send you to Setapp. It has several apps that I use every single day. Some of my personal favorites are Mindnode, which is a great mind mapping application that you can use on both your Mac and on iOS via Setapp. Bartender, which helps me keep my Mac menu bar clean. Better Touch Tool, which I use to remap my Caps Lock key

so it functions as a hyperkey. And Sip, which I use to create color schemes for making new graphics and things like that. There's a ton of other great apps in here, including some really popular apps like CleanMyMac X, which is a great way to keep your Mac running clean, iStat Menus, Trip Mode if you take your Mac and you tether it to a device that can make sure that you don't blow through all of your data, Default Folder X, To Do, Sheet

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Our thanks to Setapp for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. We got some feedback, Mike. Got some more feedback to discuss. We did the show on ADHD, and I was a little leery about it because, you know, this isn't a show about ADHD, and I didn't want to get it wrong. I don't know enough about it to talk about it, but we had a great guest and we got a lot of really good feedback from people where it was eye-opening for themselves or people in their life. And we'll hear you and we may have to do something like that again on

some of these other topics that we've been shying away from. Yeah, that was with Jesse J. Anderson. And I remember walking away from that interview just thinking that he had really bared his soul when it came to that episode. I thought he did a great job talking about some of his own struggles and the things that he's learned. And we tried to frame it in a way that it would be helpful to just about anybody, but I've gotten several people saying that was a very helpful episode. We got a great email from somebody saying it was eye-opening for some people in their life who recognized that they had ADHD for the first time. And I was so impressed with the feedback that we got from that, that it makes me want to tackle some of these more difficult topics.

But yeah, we got to have the right guest because like you said, I don't feel like I'm qualified to speak to this. Yeah, and we had one listener write in about using some of our tips to recover from the Apple event. to recover from the Apple event. Yeah, speaking of candid interviews, we had Taylor Jacobson on, the founder of Focusmate, and got some great feedback on that episode as well. But Kevin C. in the forum mentioned that one of his favorite uses of Focusmate was to book a session after the apple event so quote i stopped reading the endless commentary about it and get back to work which i thought was absolutely brilliant yeah i have not lived up to my promise to do a focus mate session yet but i will it's just been i wasn't gonna throw you under the bus yeah i totally as you said it i oh man, I didn't put that in OmniFocus, so it didn't happen.

But I'm putting it in right now, and I will. Gang, my life has been kind of crazy the last few weeks. More to that story later. But either way, so yeah, I will book one, and I'll report back next episode. All right, sounds good. The one thing that I wanted to share, I know that this is not the bookworm podcast and you guys recently covered bookworm Ryan Holiday's latest book called Courage. And I'm a big fan of Ryan Holiday.

I know you are too. I think his books are great and they make excellent gifts. Like I've got a friend going through a real challenging time and I bought him the obstacle is the way and sent it to him. And he wrote me back and he was telling me how much that helped him get through what he's getting through. And so I feel like Ryan Holiday is a, is a great author and really talks to me with the, some of the stuff he, he researches and covers, but this new book,

he started in a new series on like kind of the four fundamental precepts of stoicism, one of which is courage. And he wrote a whole book on courage. And I feel like this is Ryan at his best. I mean, he the book is a bunch of short chapters, all of them kind of inspirational.

He's got little stories intermixed. I think you both gave it five stars on Bookworm, did you? We did. Yep, it's a great book. And the thing is, so I've been reading this book. I'm not done with it yet. I don't read them as fast as Mike does because I sit down and I scribble notes and start writing things right when I'm in the middle of writing the book because it inspires me.

But I feel like this book should come with a warning label because you're going to start reading it, and then you set it down and you decide you just want to run through a wall somewhere because it just empowers you so much. But if anybody has any interest in this stuff, I would put my two thumbs up behind the Courage book by Ryan Holiday. I would echo that. It's a phenomenal book. It's, like you said, the first part in a four-part series, but he does frame it as kind of the foundational virtue.

So I'm not confident that all of these four books are going to hit me the way that this one did, but this one absolutely did. One of the interesting things about this to me is that Ryan is a phenomenal storyteller. He obviously has done a ton of research and he knows a lot, but the way that he tells the stories about even things that are familiar from other books that I've read, he tends not to rehash all the details that everybody's heard a million times. He tends to pick specific things to support his points, which seems kind of obvious. But he does it in a way where it doesn't overwhelm you with detail. But there was one story in particular in this book, in the It's Good to Be Difficult chapter, where he mentioned this guy August Landmesser. And when he mentioned the name, it sounded familiar to me, but I immediately felt like I had to stop reading and go research this guy. go research this guy. And the short version is he's the guy in the famous picture where everyone at the shipyard is doing the Nazi salute in front of Adolf Hitler. And there's one guy in the back

with his arms crossed. That's August Landmesser. So dug into the story behind him. And it's a fascinating story. I wrote about it in my newsletter, which I'll put a link to in the show notes if people are interested in this. I'm starting to get back into this and send it every couple weeks. But that one little thing from this book, if that was all I got from it, that would have been enough for me. But there were probably a dozen points like that where I got something that he said and I was immediately, to borrow your words, want to run through a wall. It's very inspirational. I think that one of the things he does so well, because a lot of productivity books that may be

good, I can't stomach because of all the stories. I feel like so often productivity books are like 60 pages turned into 300. And there's a lot of just dumb stories that don't even make sense or I don't know, but it doesn't work for me. But his he doesn't even tell you the whole story. He just like grabs a snippet of something and says and he gives you enough to understand why he said it. But he doesn't give you chapter and verse in the whole story. And I actually really appreciate that because that makes it makes it a shorter book and you get what you need. And just like Mike, if you see something that you're more interested in, it triggers your imagination. You can go learn the whole story yourself.

And I don't know. I liked it, but I was just looking while you were talking to my read wise. I have a hundred. I'm not done with the book yet. I have 166 highlights in this book so that's a lot it's a good one it's a good one it is it is a good one and i will just say that the way to get the most out of a ryan holiday book is exactly that you're reading through it take the notes of the things that are really inspiring to you and then find out what other

context there is around that. Because Ryan does a phenomenal job of condensing down these thousands of books that he has read and all of this research that he has done into a singular point that is very well articulated. But if you want more context, there certainly is more to the story than what he is sharing in an effort just to make it not be completely burdensome he's a great author at giving you what you need in order to take the action but not overwhelming you with all of the the detail yeah i talked about readwise on mac power users the technology of it and it's a service

that when you highlight something on kindle or instapaper or other various web services that they've connected to that it collects that for you and then it's a spaced repetition system like you can they have an app or you can log into the website and every day it'll give you five random things that you have highlighted over the years. And so I'm going to set the technology part aside and just say, as a listener focused, this is an amazing tool for focus. I love it so much. I actually went into the defaults and change it from five highlights to 10. it from five highlights to 10 and every morning i mean before i read email or before i actually dig in on work i go in every morning and um and read my 10 highlights and you know i they they do a streak thing on it i really don't like that because you know some days something happens and

i don't do it and then you know the whole idea of streaks to me is a problem sometimes because it becomes anti, um, you know, antithetical to why you're doing it. But almost every day I go in and read these 10 highlights and it, I always find at least one in them that is very inspirational for me for the day. And then I can just meditate on it throughout the day. I'll even, I even write, if there's a good one, I'll write it down on my daily note in, in Obsidian. And I don't know, you know, I have a digital workflow because I use Kindle. Mike, I know you read the paper books, but no matter what medium you're using, having some sort of system where you can get these, these things that were important to you, throw them back at you later is a at you later is a really good way to stay focused. I find it one of the big improvements of my life in the last two years is finding

ReadWise and having this as a spaced repetition system in my daily life. Yeah, Encourages Calling by Ryan Holiday is a great one to have little bits and pieces thrown back in your face for sure. Just looking through my outline here from when I read it, there's a quote which is very applicable given what we have talked about today, page 224. He says, if you had more time, you'd overthink it. Yeah. No, that kind of gets back to your problem. I mean, sometimes you just got to move. Exactly, exactly. So I'll listen to you.

I'll listen to Ryan and let's take some action. All right. Okay, that's going to wrap it up for today. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us over at relay.fm. You can find the forum. We've got a room in the Mac Power Users forum. It's at talk.macpowerusers.com.

I want to thank our sponsors for today, and that's our friends over at Privacy, Timing, and Setup. Don't forget to go check out the Focused Wall Calendar that we've got a link in the show notes, and they're awesome. And before I go, I just wanted to mention another podcast on Relay Network called Material. It's hosted by Andy Anotko and Florence Ion. They're both veteran technology journalists with plenty to say about what's going on at Google. Follow Google's journey with them at relay.fm slash material or search for material wherever you get your podcasts. Again, we are the Focus Podcast and we'll see you next time.