Focused - 143: Thinking Annually

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

David and Mike share some thoughts about what they’re up to in the new year and the personal changes they’re making to their routines.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, David Sparks, former Esquire. How's it going, David? Hey, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great. How about you? Good. You know, that former Esquire thing is weird because I do occasionally catch myself thinking, oh, yeah, I used to be a lawyer, you know? Man. Feels a little bit like a dream still? myself thinking, oh yeah, I used to be a lawyer, you know, uh, man.

Feels a little bit like a dream still. Yeah, it does. And in fact, a lot of people, I, first of all, thank you everyone who's been writing me nice notes and a bunch of you joined the Mac Sparky at labs, which is really helping me and the family out and, um, and giving me all this inspiration to make even more labs content, by the way. But the, uh, uh but i i did hear from several people who've gone through this before and they did a lot of them talked about how um the uh that you feel a period of mourning when you have like a career that you leave behind

and a lot of them talked about it in the terms of retirement like you're a lawyer your whole your whole life, and then you retire, and then you have this, like, mourning period. You're like, well, I'm not a lawyer. I guess you naturally get a little sad about it. Or even just, I think, a career change. But honestly, I don't think I'm going to experience that. But we'll see. So far, I'm doing good. Awesome.

I could definitely understand that. It's a pretty significant identity change as you go from one season to the next in one sense you're kind of just doing the same thing you were doing just more of it so yeah but uh it's been cool to see the in the forum there's a ton of positive feedback people who are inspired by you making the leap and And like you said, some people who have done the same thing. There's one person who pointed out that I should have in the last episode pressed you a little bit more as we were talking about all this newfound freedom you were going to have. And I floated the idea of the sabbaticals and they said that you got to quit being so wishy-washy and commit

to one already. Yeah, Chris, he always holds me honest. That's right. I was kind of wishy-washy. In fact, when I said it in the show, I'm like, oh man, Mike's going to take me down on that one. But I am going to do sabbaticals, but I will say that to Chris and everybody out there. But I'm in this transition right now and I'm just kind of figuring everything out. And when you say something on a podcast, people hold you to it. So I'm not going to commit yet, but I am going to do them and going to do proper sabbaticals. I even, the other thing that's happening is I have a couple of vacations this year. My wife and I years ago bought the Disney Vacation Club because that's how we roll.

Right. And it's a timeshare for Disney, if you've never heard of it. And we've really liked it and enjoyed it, but the problem is with COVID, you have to use the points or you lose them. And we've got a bunch of points that we're going to expire. So we're going to Disney World at the end of January for a week during this crazy outbreak. So we'll see how that goes. And then we're going to Hawaii at the Disney property in the summer and like, okay, so I'm going to go on vacation with no client obligations, you know, and what's that going to be like, you know, it's going to be, I don't know, man, I, I, I don't even know what

to think about it. Like, I mean, like I said, I'm still in that weird period where I'm like, oh, I used to be a lawyer. And I am still hearing just a little tiny bit from clients, old clients now, saying, hey, that referral you gave me, I'd like to get a different one. Or there's something you had that I never got from you, like a file or something. And that is very low back burner stuff. And I'm handling it. So I still have a little bit of contact with that old world just because the nature of what I was shutting down. And that's okay with me. But it is a strange time. One of the smartest things I did, I think, as part of the transition was I submitted paperwork to the state bar saying that I'm taking my license inactive. It doesn't mean that I'm, I'm surrendering my license, but I'm inactive and I'd have to reactivate in order to be legally allowed to give legal advice. And I think that is like the smartest thing I did.

Cause now when people ask, Hey, can you just help me out with this one thing? I'm like, Oh, I'm really sorry. It's not legal for me to tell it. You know, I'm not even, I'm inactive. I can't give you advice, you know, and that is really smart. It's not legal for me to tell, you know, I'm not even, I'm inactive. I can't give you advice, you know, and that is really smart. Like the get out of jail free card of all this. But yeah, I am just so,

so blessed and so happy with the change. And I'm just so, I didn't know what the community was going to say. You know, when I announced all this, it might've been like a big to say, you know, when I announced all this, it might've been like a big meh, you know, but it wasn't, people have been really supportive and people all over the world. I mean, you know how good it feels to make a risky choice and then have a bunch of people all over the world, write you and say, Hey, I got your back. I mean,

you know, how lucky am I to have that? You know, I can't even like, you know, my, uh, my gratitude journal has been full the last few days. Awesome. On the topic of the sabbatical real quick, uh, I had the thought to push you a little bit more on that, but a little bit behind the scenes that episode, I basically told you, I'm going to have a bunch of retrospective questions for you. I'm not going to share what they are ahead of time. So I felt like that would have been kind of jerkish for me to push you on the sabbaticals when you were already

just responding honestly to a bunch of stuff you hadn't seen before. I was definitely in the hot seat that day. You were. But the other thing I heard from a lot of people is they've gone through a transition like that, or they're thinking about it. And I know COVID has made a lot of people question a lot of things. And for whatever reason, I heard from so many people that are like thinking about their next move. And a few things that stood out to me was some of them were in jobs where you would think, oh, that person made it. They got there, you know, they're at the top of

their profession. And I don't want to like share details from personal emails, but, you know, we did a show the other day about, or a few months ago about you never make it. Well, that's true, you know. And there are people just getting started in their career or people very advanced in their career that are trying to think about what they're going to do next. And I'm not alone. And that really gave me food for thought. I think I'm going to do a video or something at some point on kind of how more details on how I did the process and what you should be thinking about. But one thing I would recommend is if you're having those thoughts is to sit down with a pen and paper and just start writing the thoughts out. I think that really helps. Yeah, absolutely. And I

think we probably both did some form of that as we get into the topic for today, which is kind of rethinking the year with the last episode at the beginning of the year and the transition that you were making. This one kind of got bumped a little bit, but I think that's actually a good thing because there's a lot of stuff that comes out kind of right before the end of the year. Hey, you should start thinking about your themes or your goals or resolutions. We'll get into why maybe that's not such a great idea, the resolution specifically. But then the year starts and then it doesn't go the way that you planned it maybe. And you just kind of discard all that stuff. At least that's what I've done

in the past. So I think actually a couple of weeks after the beginning of the year, this is a great time to kind of look at the plans that you had made and see, you know, was this on track or did I completely miss it and I need to pivot and make an adjustment? Because really you don't have a specific point in the calendar year where you can make these changes. January 1st just happens to be the convenient one as we go from one year to the next, but you could really make these sorts of things, these sorts of changes at any point in the year. Yeah. I mean, that's the reason we called this episode thinking annually, because I think that tying it to January one is really putting a lot of burden on yourself. A lot of times you're spending that week with family and you don't, you know,

that's what you should be doing that week. Not like tearing apart your, you know, your thoughts about your next year. And so I really am a fan of the idea of thinking about the stuff we're going to talk about today and going through that process, but not necessarily on January 1st. Personally, I do this every year on my birthday, which happens to be in the early February. So that is like half the day on my birthday spent alone thinking about a lot of stuff we're going to talk about today. And like, I know our friend, Mike Vardy,

I forget, I think he does it based on his kids school calendar. I don't remember, but he, he figures it out based on then, because that's basically January one for him. Okay. Kids are going to be in school for the next X months.

And then, you know, that it's kind of like the same thing as looking at a calendar starting on Monday instead of Sunday. Right. Yep. So I think there's a lot of ways to, to choose when you start this, but should have a plan. And I think that, you know, we've got some ideas today we're going to try and help you out with. Yeah. The, the plan specifically, one of my favorite quotes, I think it's Dwight Eisenhower, says that plans are worthless, but planning is everything. Yeah, I think that's going to become the drinking quote for our show. structure necessarily because when it changes, you need to be fluid and you need to be able to go with those changes. And that's something that personally I've kind of struggled with in the past.

I'm getting better at it, I feel. But at the beginning here, I want to just call it a couple of things as you are planning for the next year, the next quarter, whether you're listening to this in January or June, I would encourage you to do away with the traditional New Year's resolutions. I read a statistic today, David, that said more than 90% of New Year's resolutions fail. So why would you even... I don't know. Just reading that statistic, it's like, why would I even waste my time with something like that? That is over 90% likely not to stick and produce the change that I want. Because that's really what we're after, right? Is behavior change. Behavior change,

which is going to produce an outcome, which hopefully is a better outcome as we judge our own lives. We want to take ownership and create our future. We don't want to just be haphazardly tossed back and forth by the waves. As much as we can, we want to take ownership of the process and influence it. And there is obviously a big element of luck involved with it. Things are going to happen to you and being able to roll with those and make the best of the situation. I still think there's value in doing that and not just resigning yourself to whatever happens, happens, and I'm just along for the ride. Imagine you're in Las Vegas, right?

And you're having a great time. They're filling you with drinks. Very nice lady sits down next to you and you have an amazing conversation and you decide, hey, you know what? Let's just go down the street and get married. And you go and get married. Now, what's the likelihood of that marriage working for you? I think it's about the same as a New Year's resolution working for you because you have the same degree of commitment and preparation for a New Year's resolution that you do with a Las Vegas wedding. You know, it's just like, it's like, oh yeah, you're sitting around some friends and they're like, Hey, this year I'm going to work out more. And you say, oh,

me too. I'm going to do resolution. I'm going to meditate more without any like thought about what that means or how you're going to do it. And that's just, you know, you put zero effort into it, you get zero out of it. So, um, and, and every person who talks about productivity raises this, we're not going to bang it over the head much more, but resolutions just don't have enough investments in them to work, I think. So, you know, that's okay. Don't. And honestly, that's one thing I like about doing this after January 1st is the only time anybody ever talks about resolutions is January 1st. You don't say like, hey, it's Easter, so I'm going to make a resolution for the next year. It doesn't work that way. So that's a good thing to look at for a second and throw it aside. And on the other end of the spectrum, I think, is goals are specifically smart goals.

Using your Las Vegas wedding analogy, this would be the one where you're doing all the research and you have everything planned out specifically and you are 100% sure this is going to unfold exactly this way and produce this specific outcome. And 50 years from now, you're going to be happily married, living at a specific location, house on the beach, whatever. You can see that in your mind. And that's not going to work either. As I think about goals, and I've kind of gone back and forth on this over the years lately, I've had somebody tell me, you need to be nicer to goals because I've said the goals are dumb. And that's just for myself personally. I know they won't work

because I'm a planner. And if I attach to that outcome and that plan, then I lose the flexibility. It's easy for me to just blindly go forward with the next thing in the plan. And so when you're talking about planning for the year, specifically with SMART goals, because I see a lot of people who are taking this approach too, and they have specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-based goals. But all of those goals, whether they are successful or not, is binary. You either pass or fail. And so I don't like these either because you could have a goal to lose 30 pounds this year. And if you lost 25, to lose 30 pounds this year. And if you lost 25, is that a failed goal? I would argue it's not, but it's the specifics of how you got to that point and the habits that you've created that have produced that weight loss. You're not crash dieting the month before in order to lose those

25 pounds, hopefully. You're trying to create a healthy routine and get to the gym regularly, go running, biking, whatever it is, so that you consistently lose the weight over time. And the benefit of creating that healthy habit that far outweighs any successful completion of a goal, in my opinion. Yeah. And this kind of overlaps this idea that you need to make the plan but not necessarily live to it. That kind of overlaps with the discussion we had a few months ago when we went back and looked at block scheduling again. And I said a lot of the same things in that episode, but just, you know, as a real life example. So I started my new life, you know, a non-Esquire life the first week of January. And if you looked at my plan for that week, I had about 15 hours allocated to field guide

recording. And I ended up spending like three because, you know, I didn't realize that I was going to be getting email from the whole world and getting all these congratulations. And I wanted to engage with that stuff. And so the plan got thrown out the window. That doesn't mean the time I spent making that plan was wasted. It actually kind of helped me stay focused and, you know, intentionally decide, okay, that's going to get put aside because this other thing is more pressing right now. And I think you

work the same way on the annual basis. You come up with these plans, but it doesn't mean you're going to necessarily get everything on them. And I think that kind of also overlaps with your thing with goals. And I can tell you personally, that has always been my experience. I mean, I've never started one of these annual planning sessions and then came out of it and have the next year follow it like a movie script, you know. But that being said, I still feel like I got tremendous value out of the process and having it. Exactly. Any single action that you would take is not going to be the thing that's going to complete successfully a goal. It's the consistency as you do things over time, which is why I've kind of alluded to

this topic of habits. We revisit this every once in a while because this is the way to make behavior change happen. We've talked a lot about Atomic Habits by James Clear, but I want to throw out one additional book, which maybe is a little bit less well-known, but I think might be better. And that is Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg. In fact, in Atomic Habits, at the beginning, James references B.J. Fogg's research. I think he's the professor of behavioral studies or something at Stanford. And Tiny Habits, he lays out the different mechanics that produce either the desired action or not. So it's got the standard graph view where you have on the y-axis the motivation,

and on the x-axis you've got the ability and the behavior that you want to create or if you're flipping this around you're trying to eliminate a bad habit it's the behavior you're trying to avoid what you're trying to do is you're trying to create a prompt which gets you on the appropriate side of that action line now if it lands this at this point where motivation and ability are high enough to take the action and the prompt encourages us to do so, then we follow through and we go for the run. We go to the gym. We get up early. We write in our journal, whatever it is.

But if the motivation or the ability aren't there, we end up on the other side of that line and we don't take the action. or the ability aren't there, we end up on the other side of that line and we don't take the action. And again, any one instance is not going to make or break you, but if you consistently miss taking the action, or likewise, if you consistently do follow through and take the action, the results are either going to be there in the long run or they're not. They compound. So this whole concept of habits, I think, is really is really really important and we don't realize i'll include myself in this how much of our day-to-day actions are driven by these habits we are creatures of habit a lot of the stuff that we do is just without even thinking it's it's

automatic we respond to the prompts in our environment which is why if you take some time to think about how you can create the motivation or create the environmental triggers, which will help you to take the action or avoid the action, whether you're trying to create a habit or knock one out, that can have a really big impact in your overall happiness. Yeah, I mean, habits are not optional. You have them. The question is, are you in control of them or are they in control of you? And often, you know, they're in control of them or are they in control of you and often you know they're in control of you i i want to um i want to talk about this bj fogg book so last year i stumbled into it i didn't because i started this with james clear and i didn't realize that bj fogg was the guy who did a lot of this research. And then somehow I stumbled into his TED Talk.

And I'm just not a guy who watches a lot of TED Talks, but somehow it landed on my radar. And from there, I went and read his book, Tiny Habits. And I agree with Mike. I think that if you're going to want to get into habits, I would recommend reading this book first. And if you don't want to read a book, watch the TED Talk. You're going to get enough out of it.

But just the idea, I think one of the suggestions he made was and and if you don't want to read a book watch the ted talk you're going to get enough out of it but like just the idea like i think one of the suggestions he made was he wanted to get more physical fit so every time he goes to the bathroom he does five push-ups you know like an easy trigger and easy action and before you know it's just a built-in habit and i thought, this guy gets it. And we can kind of program ourselves with this type of habit and this type of knowledge. So why not take control of that process? Because we're doing the same thing. Like, you know, how many people go to get gas and then go into the gas station and get a candy bar? It's like you're programming yourself that every time I get gas, I take on another 400 calories. You could flip that, right? You could flip that and it doesn't have to be as

difficult as you think it is. I mean, you mentioned the push-up habit that he was talking about and you could even break it down even further than that because one of those axes, remember, is ability. So if you just want to start creating movement in the right direction, don't say five push-ups, do a single push-up, which I think is where he started in the example in the book. And then once you master that and that becomes easy, then you can do two push-ups and three and four and five and et cetera. It has this snowball effect, but once you start to see some of the gains, then the motivation is there and it encourages you to keep going. Yeah. Although there are some bathrooms that I have gone to that I would not do a pushup in. I just want to say that. That's fair. I agree, man. And this is part of this annual thing. I mean, when you talk about

things you want to change about yourself, taking control of your habits is a great place to start. to change about yourself, taking control of your habits is a great place to start. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Indeed. 2022 is the year for you to make the leap and turn your passion into profit, but you need the right team to make it happen. Indeed makes it easy to hire and build a team with the right skills to make your dream a reality. If you're hiring, you need Indeed because Indeed is the hiring partner where you can attract, interview, and even hire all in one place. And Indeed is the only job site where you're guaranteed to find quality applications that meet your must-have requirements or you don't have to pay. Instead

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All right, Mike, let's get personal. How do you go through that process? How do you figure it out when you sit down to think annually? Yeah, well, I have a personal retreat process that I do not just at the beginning of the year, but every couple of months. So I kind of shorten the timescale here.

The inspiration for this originally came from the 12-week year, which is one of those hashtag productivity books that people may not necessarily engage with. But I think there's an idea there which is powerful in that if you approach the entire year as I want to do something in this time frame, the natural human tendency is not to even think about it until the deadline is approaching. And then you scramble to make stuff happen. So shorten that time frame and you can get more traction. Well, in my case, it's even worse. more traction. Well, in my case, it's even worse. If I make it on a year basis, I say, well, I'll do it in October. And then by October, I've completely forgot that I'd ever thought about it. It's just, you know, it's just too long for me. Yeah, it is. It is too long,

definitely. So that's kind of the framework that I use. But before I get into the specifics of this, I just want to explain real quickly that this is the thing that helps me identify kind of my theme or my words for the year. And then that's the thing that inspires the habits that I create to produce the change in the areas that I want to move the needle. So it's kind of approaching this from a different direction than just, this is a problem that I see and I want to create this habit per the New Year's resolutions. I want to drop the weight or whatever. It's deeper than that. At least the ones that really stick for me, there has to be more motivation than just, you know, this is a surface level problem that I want to address. So

that's kind of the inspiration for the process is figuring out what those themes or words are and then from there figuring out the habits. Yeah, for me, the start process is always reflecting on the past. It's interesting for me because a lot of people have week review and then they have week planning or month review, month planning, year review, year planning.

To me, they're one and the same. Everything I do planning in includes a review process of the last segment of time. and I find that that is the way for me to actually make progress, is to think about, well, you know, how did I do as a Max Barkey the last quarter, and then going into the next quarter, what do I want to change? And I have to connect them. So with this annual thing, it starts the same way, and I actually did a post at Max Barkey at the end of last year about kind of reflective questions. And I have a bunch

of them. Mike is a recipient of this. I keep Obsidian Note with prompt questions. It just keeps growing. And I also have a set of annual ones and I put them in the blog post. But I think a really good way to start the process is reflection with the idea that you're going to act on it with the plan. Agreed. In fact, the process of asking the questions, that's where the real power is. I think I have some specific questions that I answer too, but if I have learned anything from the last year, it is, we were talking about this earlier this week, the power of these mental models and learning to ask the right questions. Because when you ask the right questions, you could be totally confused about what's the right action to take. But as soon as you ask the right clarifying

question, then the solution becomes obvious. Just as an example, as one of the mental models from The Great Mental Models, Volume 1, which is a book that I read earlier in 2021. There's the concept of Occam's razor, which I'm sure people are familiar with. The simplest solution is the best solution. Okay, well, that is just a note which sits in a collection somewhere gathering dust in the virtual filing cabinet until you start applying it. And the way to apply it is when you are faced with a situation and you're trying to decide which is the right course of action to take, you can use a question like that. Which is the right decision given that the best solution is the simplest solution? Well, this one's way more

complex than this other one. Everything else looks the same, so I'll take the easy solution is the simplest solution. Well, this one's way more complex than this other one. Everything else looks the same, so I'll take the easy solution. And the whole process of trying to figure out and pros, cons, all that kind of stuff, it's much less of a mental burden in order to make that decision just because you've asked the proper question. Now, the danger here is that

you have to know when to use these questions. You can't always take the simplest solution, right? So Occam's razor is one lens that you can look at your problem or the situation through, and you got to know when to use that lens. But you are probably, if you're interested in this whole concept of mental models and these clarifying questions, you're collecting a whole bunch of these, just like the prompts that you were talking about. And so you're asking different ones in different situations, and you kind of learn trial and error, which ones are the right ones to apply when. But collecting them is the thing that I think is invaluable. Yeah, I think of it kind of like as mental triangulation. You know, you've got to come at it from different directions. The only way to do that is to use, I guess you say, different lenses or different questions, different mental models, you know, come at a problem from more than one direction. And it gets a lot easier to get a clear answer.

easier to get a clear answer. And by the way, Mike, you didn't just read the Mental Models book in 2021. You picked it as the best book you read in the year, right? That's what you said in your newsletter. Yeah. Which put it at the top of my list. I own the book. That's kind of embarrassing. I own it. I haven't just haven't got around to reading it yet. But when I saw that in your newsletter, I thought, well, I got to read that one next now. Well, I sent out that newsletter at the end of last year and I thought that was a cool topic. The best book that I have read this year and I was reflecting on all the books that I have read and which ones really impacted me. And I couldn't believe that I had read that one in February of 2021. It felt like five years prior to that because I had recommended it so many times to so many people. That one really just did have a giant impact in the way that I

think about the world. What book did you gift the most in 2021? Give away to people. Do you do that? I don't know if that's a thing you do or not. It is. It is. So there were a couple of them. I think probably the one I gifted the most was the Personal Socrates book, which is produced by the Baron Fig people. It's by Mark Champagne, I believe. And it's got a whole bunch of different character sketches, a couple pages on a famous person and a clarifying question they use you know a little story from a specific point in their their life and then exercises that go along with it which i think is kind of cool the other one which we've talked about before is the power of positive thinking i really did like that one by

norman vincent peel yeah well i still have issues with that, but we'll, we'll get there. The reason I asked is just recently I was looking through Amazon and it told me that I had bought the obstacles that way six times. And, you know, cause I sent it, I had several friends going through a hard time in the last year for different reasons, you know, medical job, whatever. And I always feel like that's my go-to purchase for somebody that's having a hard time. And I realized that I should probably be on Ryan Holiday's Christmas card list

because I have sent way too much money his way. That's a good one too, for sure. All right. So we got a little bit on a tangent there. Yep. Back to the process. The process. Yeah. I mean, I do think coming up with a way of going through this, and I think a good starting point is looking at the past and then somehow turning that into future ideas and actions and habits. And I do this all on a role based criteria. So I just go through each

role in my life. And if you've been listening to the show, you've heard me talk about this before, but like it starts with husband, you know, how did I do in the last year? Um, how am I going to do going forward? If you want, I can yammer on about RTA, but this is probably not the show to do that in. in but but that whole role-based audit to me is the foundation of all of these reviews sure how about yourself i think that's a great way to to go about it by the way and but i guess as a point of clarification i don't think there's a wrong way to approach this either uh just ask some questions if they don't work you can find better ones that really resonate with you. But start somewhere. And roles is a great place to start. I do something similar with the roles

in what I call a wheel of life from my personal retreat framework. And there's eight different areas of my life that I consider and I give myself a rating based on how I feel about that area of my life on a scale of one to 10. The key questions that I ask, I'll throw these out here. I've shared them before, but every time I share them, people always give me really positive feedback. So I want to make sure that people have heard these. And that is, what should I start doing? What should I stop doing? And what should I keep doing? And you don't just have to apply these to your reflection on the past year and what you're going to change going into the next year. I mean, my wife and I ask these when we

have our date nights. We do it when we do retrospective sort of a thing for like we lead the outreach ministry at our church. So when we think about the things that we've done in the last year and how we want to make changes, again, these think about the things that we've done in the last year and how we want to make changes, again, these are the same questions that we ask. These are really, really powerful and they're very general. They're not that specific, which I think is actually where a lot of the power and the beauty comes from in these questions is your brain can kind of take this in any direction that you want. What should I start doing is very vague. It could be, you know, I have this specific habit that I want to create, or a lot of times what it

is, is it's just, I want to, and it starts as a goal. You know, I want to spend more time with my family. And then I'll take that answer to that question and I'll break that down into, okay, so if I want to spend more time with my family, what are the things that I can do to get there? I got some specifics for this year, which we'll get to in a little bit, but since we're just talking about the process right now, I just want to throw those questions out there. And then after I consider those for a while, matching that up with those areas that I had rated in the Wheel of Life and figuring out, where do I want to, to borrow your term, move the needle? Where are the areas that I think need a little bit of attention right now? Because balance is kind of a myth. Work-life balance is

definitely a myth. It's just your life and you have to balance all the different areas of it, but it doesn't mean that you're paying attention to all of the different areas all of the time. If you were to apply this with roles, you're saying, I'm good enough in this role for now, so I'm going to go lean into this other one for a little while because I want to boost this one. And maybe that sounds a little bit frantic. It doesn't have to be, though. That's why I do this every couple of months because I'm constantly checking back in on it and nothing's going to completely break in a couple of months. I can make a decision on a direction and then I can check back in and realize that's long enough to see some sort of feedback. Was that the right decision or not?

And I can make adjustments if I need to. I'm not just going to pedal to the metal for the next 12 months in this specific direction and trust that by the end of it, I'm going to arrive where I want. I'm constantly looking up, looking around and asking myself, am I still on the right track? Yeah, agreed. I mean, I guess another point I would make on this is, in my experience, doing this once a year isn't enough. And it is kind of funny that culturally there is this idea of reflection and resolutions and thoughts of change happening around January 1st, but why aren't we thinking about this regularly? And the, the roles, the way I do it with the roles, it happens pretty much every week. Sometimes I'll miss a week if something's up and I just don't get around to it, but I have every week I do it on a weekly basis every month and every quarter. So I am looking at those roles constantly. And it's like, I've talked on the show about how

I have this idea of Sparky OS. Well, the first step of Sparky OS is what are my roles and how am I doing? What, you know, what is the RTA of them? And, and I like to be aware of that because it, then it affects the way I move through the day. You know, um, if you think weekly about being a good husband, you're going to be a better husband. If you think yearly about being a good husband, you're going to be a better husband. If you think yearly about being a good husband, maybe you'll be a better husband for a week or two, you know? Um, so I, I do, I'm, I guess I'm, even though the show's about annual stuff, I guess one of the points I would make is in my case, I need to do it more than annually. And I suspect I'm not alone. I agree. You gotta be checking in on these things frequently.

You don't have to spend a ton of time either to do this. It's really just looking at them frequently enough to notice if there's anything that needs further attention. It's not like you have to do a deep dive on each one of those roles every single week when you're reviewing them. Yeah. So do you have themes for the year? Like, do you have ideas? I do have ideas. So the whole, backing up just a step here, whole idea behind these themes

or these words for the year, again, is to provide a direction, but not to bring the condemnation associated with a pass fail grade that comes with the standard goal setting process where did you learn about because the first time i ever heard of this idea was from cortex mike and uh and gray came up with this on their podcast and i mean they have a theme journal they've got a lot of cool stuff but i mean have you ever heard of that before i'd never heard of the idea before them. The yearly theme. Yeah, I first heard about that from Cortex. I remember though,

several years ago, Mike Vardy and Mike Schechter in the Mike's on Mike's podcast going through their words for the year. And so that is something that I've been doing for a very long time. And I feel like those are very similar ideas. I think the theme for the year just boils it down to kind of a single word and is probably more approachable for most people. I have trouble landing on just a single word, although I think this year I might give it a shot. So my theme for the year, if it were to boil it down to a single word, is I'm calling it the year of recalibration. And the word calibrate I like because it basically means you're checking all of the accuracy.

You're checking the accuracy of your instruments. And if you're thinking about like a pilot in a cockpit, you've got all those different dials and gauges and things like that. And if one of those is broken or giving you bad information, you could end up crashing and burning. If your altitude isn't displaying correctly and you're flying blind, that can cause some major problems. And I have a bunch of things going on in my life personally, which I'm not ready to share all that publicly, but I feel like a lot of things are being recalibrated for me. Normal is kind of being redefined. And some of the other words that go along with this, I feel, are renew, reset, redefine, recenter, figuring things out in terms of the proper place for priority and proper perspective on things, not based on what I had decided before. Because what I had

figured out even last year, I feel like I need to question everything. I need to go back to the drawing board. We did an episode a while back about the big reset. I kind of feel like this year is the big reset for me in terms of how I look at a lot of the things that I am involved with. And there's a lot of things that have kind of contributed to this. I think a big one is I broke my hand six weeks ago and I was coaching my son's basketball team and broke my pinky finger while I was scrimmaging with them. And that caused a whole lot of upheaval in my daily routine. And a lot of things that I thought I absolutely have to do, I could no longer do. And a lot of the things that I was involved with, where I thought I am an essential cog in this machine, they're doing just fine without me.

you know they're doing just fine without me so uh i'm i'm reading i'm figuring out on the fly here i guess my own insignificance in a lot of areas and that's not as depressing as it sounds you know we talked a lot about four thousand weeks by oliver berkman and really the idea there is that your life is pretty short and you're not gonna you're not as important as you think you are and that's actually very freeing because it gives you the ability to say yes or no to things without feeling like the world is going to collapse the minute that you take your hand off of the controls. So that's kind of my theme for the year. And I want to go through this year and question everything and figure out, is this something I still want to be involved with? If yes, what are the terms of engagement for me with this? You know, what is the ideal version

of this look like for me? Is it more, is it less? And then kind of putting everything back together, seeing what, what it looks like. No, I mean, I think we're kind of both in very similar space now i was looking um i read years ago about um machiavelli you know that guy um he had this theory of like revolutionary generations and maybe i'm maybe it was some other old guy who came up with this idea and it wasn't machiavelli because i couldn't find a link to it liam today's show but the idea was you've got a revolutionary generation you know they turn the apple cart over and then you've got a generation that like codifies the revolution you know after that you've got the group that comes in and turns it into the gospel then after that you've got the generation that starts to change it and then you've got the group that comes in and turns it into the gospel. Then after that, you've got the generation that starts to change it.

And then you've got the generation that starts to become disillusioned with it. And then you've got another revolutionary generation. He had this theory of how these things work on a national level. And I think that could apply personally, too. Anytime you have upheaval or change, you need a minute to like figure out what that means. And I know you've got stuff you're you can't really share yet, but I know that you're making some changes and that would be the natural next step. And and for me, it is, too. Obviously, I just went through this big thing.

I gave up a career that I had 35 years invested in. And what does that mean? And even as we record the show, I'm not entirely sure I know what that means, you know, because I'm in the midst of it. One thing I will say, though, even though this show is all about annual stuff, I have to make an admission. I am not a big fan of like doing anything on an annual basis. I really like the idea of reflections on an annual basis.

I do them both at the end of the year and at my birthday, kind of sit down. And I like to think generally about where things are headed over the next year, but I feel like it's so far off in the distance that getting any level of detail is just almost a waste of time. The focus for me on these things is quarters. To me, the 12-week year, treating each quarter as its own thing is way more valuable than coming up with a word for the year. I'd rather think of in the next quarter, what is the focus going to be? And I'm not sure what it is yet for me in quarter one, because I've been just through a revolution. You know, I think a lot of it has to do with keeping an open mind to new habits and looking to what's really going on. I'm doing with the

Max Barkey Lab saying I've decided to do these quarterly and weekly and monthly planning sessions publicly. I'm going to be doing them and weekly and monthly planning sessions publicly. I'm going to be doing them on a Zoom call with the Early Access subscribers. And I'm hoping they'll come and bring some of these too. But I think holding myself accountable will be kind of interesting. But for me, this next quarter is about locking down this change and figuring out what it means and what's the workflow. Not in terms of like, what apps do I use? But generally, how does my week work? And I'm just going to keep, I don't want to make any of that stuff in concrete yet. I want to just

kind of see how things evolve. Makes sense. I don't have a word for it though. I don't have a cute word, but that's the concept. And I'm going to think about it more as we're recording the show right before my quarterly planning session. So I feel like after I do that, I'll have a better idea of what it means. But that is the thing for me in the next 90 days. That's what I have to focus on. Sure. I'll echo what you said about the quarters. Again,

I agree that that's the primary place to focus. And then I think when it comes to planning, the further out you go in the future, you do have to hold things a lot more lightly. But I also don't think it's necessarily bad to look further down the road. Where do I want to be five years from now, 10 years from now, 25 years from now? So I think you could extend the quarter to the year and just keep going with that. But if you're brand new to the process, yeah, just think about what's right in front of you. I want to throw a couple resources by the way if people are thinking about doing this sort of process for themselves you mentioned the cortex

yearly themes and there is the the theme system journal which is a a great product if you're all in with the theme system that's the one to to use so put a link to that in the show notes and also selfishly we've got a calendar a new calendar, which breaks down the entire year into quarters. So you could definitely use that for this sort of process, too. And it is dry erase. So you could write your words for the quarter up at the top once you get them, David, and then next quarter erase them and pick something different. Yeah. Yeah, agreed.

But it is nice thinking out to some distance and like i'm not like completely adrift for the future like i have things that i would like to do in a year or two and i know what they are but i'm i'm not married to them you know you know it's just their their ideas that may develop into more once I get closer to the horizon to see if that makes sense. Sure. But man, focus on the, on the quarter. The couple of things I like about that, first of all, it is something where you'll see results in 90 days and you'll, you'll be able to judge how you're doing. Um, if you're successful, you start to build that muscle that says, Oh, I'm going to make a commitment to myself and I'm going to live up to it.

And you get the cookie every 90 days instead of every 365 days, which is great. The other thing is it creates a sense of urgency. It's like, okay, well, the next 90 days I've got to work on figuring out this new life. Well, then I need to work on figuring out this new life in the next 90 days. I can't wait until October to do that. And I like that sense of urgency that comes with it. And the fact is that you know you're going to have an evolution in 90 days. Maybe you'll decide you need to continue on the same path for another 90 days, or maybe it gives you the opportunity to go somewhere else. Yeah, the key to making the decisions is the feedback that you get. And

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F-O-C-U-S-E-D. And remember, that's all lowercase. So our thanks to Shopify for their support of the Focused podcast and all of RelayFM. Support of the Focus Podcast and all of RelayFM. So we talked about our themes or words and the whole process for figuring out the habits. We should probably talk about the habits. What changes are you going to make, David? The big one for me is I need to respect the manager more and I need to give him more time. I've written and talked before about the idea of maker-manager.

That's been, I think, kicking around productivity circles forever. But, you know, the idea that there's two pieces of you, really in my mind, there's three. There's the maker, the manager, and the consumer. But the maker-man manager balance is a thing like any of us that work, whether you work for a big multinational company or you work for yourself, there's a thing you make, you know, it could be spreadsheets, it could be art, it could be whatever. And, uh, but for all of us, that's, that is the moving the needle process in a lot of ways. That's the thing you do that gets you satisfaction. That's the thing you're good at.

But then there's another side of you that is the manager that's responsible for making sure the maker is pointed in the right direction and working on the right projects and working with the right clients and being aware of what the future horizon looks like in terms of, you know, are people still going to want those spreadsheets in a year? And I feel like I have neglected my manager way too much in this process. It was partly because I had two jobs and I was so busy trying to hit client deadlines, trying to hit Max Barkey deadlines, that I just, I had my head down

all the time. And the thing that really stands out for me on this was the decision to quit being a lawyer. It was a decision that I woke up one day thinking I would be practicing law until I died. law until I died. And then I spent really less than two hours really looking at whether I should be doing two things at once. And it was obvious that I should be doing one thing and not two things. All I had to do is give that manager two hours to solve. That part is shocking to me still, by the way, how quickly you arrived at that decision. Well, you were in on it because we were on the creator's guild meeting. And I think I texted you within two or three hours of that meeting that I'm going to quit. But then you could also say I spent 15 years getting to that decision. I guess it depends how you look at it. But completely honestly, Mike, I had no intention of ever stopping a lot

when we were on the call. And I wrote about this in the blog post, so sorry to drag you guys through this. But when we finished the call in my head, I was thinking, oh, I'm going to tell these guys, I'm going to give up 25% and they'll be happy with me and, you know, business as usual. And it was shocking to me that once I gave the manager just a little bit of time to focus on it, how quickly he was able to make good decisions on my behalf. And even though I have a regular review process, even though I journal, I don't think as a manager in terms of my work enough. So this is separate from, you know, how am I going to be a better husband? This isn't like, hey, you make a living

doing this Max Barkey stuff. You know, what are you, you know, how are you handling marketing? How are you handling all the little bits of it? And that's stuff that the manager needs to do and something I have just not done well over the years. So, um, a big theme for me, you know, heading into the future is figuring out how to give that person more time and listen to them and just, you know, be more careful. And that is a, so that is a habit. Is that a habit? I guess that's a process that I'm working on going forward. Well, it's, it could be a habit. I think that you could make the argument, you're right. It's a process. It's a process habit. Yeah. But it's also the kind of thing, which I think this is like the perfect example, where on one level, I'm shocked that you made that decision that quickly.

On the other hand, it makes perfect sense the minute that you let the manager into the conversation that he was able to make a compelling argument for the way things turned out. Yeah. And I think that's a lesson we can all take is just, you know, it kind of gets back to asking the right questions. If you never ask the questions, you never hear what the manager maybe has to say or the other side, the other perspective. And once you consider all the options, perspective and once you consider all the options then maybe the uh the path forward is a lot less complicated and convoluted than you originally thought it was yeah so the way i'm solving that is with structure i haven't got it all wired in yet but i'm going to be scheduling time in on a

monthly basis for manager sparky to be in charge of the ship, you know, and I don't know, maybe it's just a day. I was thinking one way to do it would be like a day trip. Like, um, I live in Southern California. One of my favorite places in the world was Laguna beach.

It's, you know, it's like 30 minutes from my house without traffic. And it's a beautiful ocean view. I can go there and get tea and sit on the beach. I think I need to put myself out of my house for a manager to really kick in, but I need to make that a monthly thing.

I don't know the details yet, but that's going to happen. But also the thing I'm going to do is in October of 2019, right before everything happened, I went and did a quarterly personal retreat off-site. I got a cabin up in the woods, and I was really inspired by it. I did the video about it on YouTube, and it was a really helpful thing. And I've heard from a bunch of people that saw the video that have done their own and really liked it. But guess what? In 2020, I didn't do it. I'm sorry. And wind that back. It was October, 2020 that I did it. It was during

the pandemic, but then in the entire year of 2021, I didn't do a single offsite, like multi-day personal retreat. So, um, I'm committing. You hear that, Chris? I'm committing here. So I'm committing. You hear that, Chris? I'm committing here. I'm going to do two of them in 2022. I would like to say I'm going to do four of them. I'm going to do one every quarter.

But if this is a public commitment, I'm going to say two. And so I am going to make more time for the manager because I think that is something that I have suffered because I have not taken the step of giving Manager Sparky enough spotlight. Awesome. Well, I am excited to see what clarity comes from these personal retreats. I remember you shared some pictures. Maybe we even did one of our calls from the cabin. I can't remember, but it looked like a nice place. our calls from the cabin. I can't remember, but it looked like a nice place. And, uh, I remember you talking about the, how refreshing it felt, but exhausting at the same time to just think about things for, uh, for an entire day. But I wholeheartedly believe in the value of this, this process. Yeah. You're going to be useless the day after that's, that's for sure. Yep.

Go spend it with your kids or something, but either way. Yeah. So that, that is a big thing I'm working on heading to the next year. And, uh, I haven't figured out the logistics yet, but I do have the general direction. The compass is pointed. I just got to figure out, you know, what sales I'm going to put up. Sure. How about you?

I'm going to put up. Sure. How about you? Well, I've got three things specifically listed here, which again, kind of came from the personal retreat framework that I followed. So number one is that my mornings are becoming more precious. My schedule is a little bit less predictable, more precious. My schedule is a little bit less predictable, making the hours that I can claim at the beginning of the day more valuable. And so I want to create the habit of a routine of getting up a little bit earlier and spending at least one additional hour writing or creating. And I have done this before. That's actually the beginning of my whole journey into all of the things that I'm doing right now was this idea I had to write a book. So I started getting up early and writing for an hour before I went into the office, the family business, and within eight months had self-published my book, which opened up

a lot of other opportunities. And I have let that slide over the years. So I want to turn back the clock literally with this and get up earlier to make sure that I have time to write. Yeah, every time this comes up, I feel like we have to throw up a big warning flag and say, so long as you're getting enough sleep. Oh, yes. I think whenever you hear that, like I think there's a really popular book. I don't remember the title. It's like some former Navy sale that gets up at like 4 a.m.

And everybody's saying, oh, this is a great idea. I'm going to do this. But if you combine that with going to bed at the time you normally go to bed, and that means you're getting like five hours of sleep, that's a terrible idea. So just make sure, you know, if you're going to turn the clock forward and I get it, like if you, let's say you spend the last two hours watching dumb things on TV. You know, not, you know, you're not spending it with your family. You're not reading a good book, but you're watching just garbage on TV. Trading that for two hours in the morning where you can create things, that is a great trait. But you've got to give up the dumb hours on TV so you can get there. And I know we've talked about sleep a lot on the show, but maybe because I'm a little older than you, but I feel like sleep is so important, man.

Just don't sacrifice that for some habit that's going to just leave you walking around like you're drunk all the time because you're not getting enough sleep. Well, you are preaching to the choir because I actually was diagnosed with epilepsy right before I went to college. And one of the things that can trigger a seizure is not getting enough sleep. So I am very protective of the quantity and the quality of my sleep. It's not even an option for me to get up earlier without going to bed earlier. Some people would be able to function, but I don't want to put myself in the position where I'm driving somewhere and I have a seizure. that's obviously a terrible situation. So that's, that's not, not even a possibility for me. You know, a little, uh, just to go down that tangent for a little bit for Christmas, I got a weighted blanket and, um, I really have been enjoying it.

I think it actually helps me sleep. And, uh, absolutely. Yeah. enjoying it i think it actually helps me sleep and absolutely yeah and the funny thing because i got one a few years ago daisy got me one somewhere was like on sale but it was very poorly made where all the weighted stuff in it was bunching up like in like one square foot of the blanket you know like so it wasn't really a weighted blanket so much as it was like a blanket with a bowling ball in it and and so i hated it and i never really thought it made sense and she asked me about i said just give it away or you know whatever i this thing doesn't work for me

i said you know you need one that is like i know they have them where they're like sewn in so the weighted stuff is like distributed evenly across the blanket and then i got one like that for christmas and man that is like a game changer i it's a complete opposite experience where i i just dislike the other one intensely this new one is great i love pulling it up over me and going to bed at night. I echo the recommendation of the weighted blanket. I have two of them. Okay. My wife and I have a queen size one on our bed because we love it so much. And then I have the original one that I got that is now the weighted napping blanket. There you go. There you go. Anyway, it's a little side there, but yeah, it's worth trying. The other changes that I want to make to my habits and routines I talked about broke my hand and that forced a lot of changes. One of the big ones for me was everything I was doing

workout wise, I could no longer do literally everything because of the timing. End of November in Wisconsin, snow and ice on the ground. I can't ride my bike outside. I can now no longer run because I have a busted hand. And if I land on it because I fell, I'm going to hurt myself even more. I can't lift more than a couple pounds, so I can't go to the gym. I had to rethink everything. And I'm still not at the point where I can go back and lift weights like I used to. I do have these crazy lobster gloves, which kind of split a mitten down the middle, you know, so two pockets for the big one where it holds all your fingers. And that's kind of what a lobster glove is. So I got some of those and it's healed enough now

where just keeping them together like that, that's good enough for me. So I can actually go out running, but since I can't do any sort of weight training, that's been something that's made me even feeling a little bit, a little bit off. I do have a rowing machine. I have a, a concept to model these. So it's a nice one and I haven't really ever used it because I prefer going to the gym. However, that's not an option. And rowing is actually a really good workout. So I want to actually combine this with the getting up earlier. And I am actually starting to do this already. This isn't just aspirational. Someday I'm going to get up earlier. I'm making these changes now.

isn't just aspirational. I'm someday I'm going to get up earlier. I'm making these changes now and I'm not trying to row for a half an hour, 45 minutes every day. I'm trying to row for like 10 minutes every day, but I'm building this into kind of my morning routine combining with getting up early and doing a short rowing workout before I shower and get ready for the day. And then I've got the margin where I can sit down and write. And the workout is kind of enough to get me moving and make sure that I'm awake enough that when I do sit down, I'm not in a big mental fog and it's actually worked really well. So I want to keep that going. And maybe eventually I will get back to the gym and resume my normal routine. Maybe not. Maybe this is good enough for me going forward. I've never been a huge

bodybuilder type guy anyways. So maybe this is enough for me to feel strong and healthy. The last one here, and I have a confession to make before this, that is that I have not used a task manager for about the last two years. We've talked about the fake bullet journal thing that I'm doing, which isn't really a bullet journal, just time blocking and writing out my tasks. The different teams that I'm a part of and the things that I have to end up doing, those end up on my radar via other applications like Notion or my calendar. So I know we're going to record a podcast and I see that when I plan my week. And you know what, when I've got some time throughout that week, then I'm thinking about the outline and I'm dumping stuff in the show notes. I don't need a task

telling me at this specific time, it is now time to think about the focus show that you're going to be recording later this week. But I also don't think that's entirely a good thing. It's kind of freeing not to constantly be having my agenda driven by the tasks that I would plug into a task management system. But I do think there's some structure and some organization that could benefit, especially some of my personal projects. So I've been using Obsidian for everything. And it's come a long way with task management. There's some really good task management plugins and i'm going to give those a shot i'm going to attempt to go all in with obsidian and manage my tasks along with the daily notes which i'm already

doing for journaling and i will report back i guess on which one i end up using and whether it sticks but i think this is going to hopefully land in the sweet spot for me where I can just dump in the things that make sense. I want to be reminded of this at a specific time. When it existed in a separate application like OmniFocus or Todoist has been the last one that I've been trying, it hasn't been causing me to go back to that application enough in order for it to really serve me any sort of benefit other than if I'm going to trigger the notifications, but I typically don't want those. So the thought here is that since I'm going to Obsidian all the time anyways, I'm looking at the daily notes already anyways, that can kind of serve as the framework for transferring the tasks into my paper notebook that I've got right here, which has my plan for the day.

I will be shocked if this isn't a complete success for you. Because I spent significant time with the better Obsidian task management plugins late last year just to see what was going on. And they are very good. You can set defer dates, due dates. I mean, if you're willing to go all in with it you can um my impression was that you lose some things um for me it's the ubiquitous linking

of the omni focus stuff everywhere although you can do that with obsidian it's a little more tricky i don't want to get into all the details here, but you and I can talk offline or whatever someday. We can, if people really want, we can do a deep focus dive on it someday. But the other thing is I really, really love the OmniFocus review process, timed rep review. And you can kind of do that in Obsidian, but it's like you're creating a bunch of work for yourself. And I realize, you know, why create a bunch of work when there's an app that does it really well already. And then the other thing that I found that suffered

trying to use Obsidian for this is mobile. I mean, it's just so easy with any modern task manager to manage and capture on mobile. But with Obsidian, even though they have an iphone app it's not great you know and and um and like not only and i could write a shortcut that would save a task to a page in obsidian and append i mean there's ways to do it don't you don't write me and explain how to do it i understand but it's just not as easy as it is with a dedicated app so there's some trade-offs but if you've not been using a task manager for two years this is going to be way better than that and i do know that that

like obsidian is your kind of like central hub it is for me too i mean this episode i have an obsidian note on open on my desk right now. On this episode, it has record date, publish date. It's got the links to the Google Doc and the OmniFocus task list and all the stuff that I do related to this. And it's on my Kanban. Do you say Kanban or Kanban? I don't know, Mike.

I think I say Kanban, but now you have me questioning whether that's right. Any Japanese listeners, please let me know how I'm supposed to pronounce that word, please. But anyway, so I get it. I've got a lot of stuff in my city, but I still think it's worth having OmniFocus for me. But my life is changing. Maybe that'll change too. Who knows? But I just feel like you're going to take to this like a duck to water.

Like a week from now, you're going to oh yeah this is it it's not gonna take you long to figure it out well here's hoping i will report back all right uh which is a good way to get around to challenges um i uh i i don't have a new challenge i like to follow up on my challenge from the last episode, which is keeping an open mind with the habit and, you know, realizing that I'm going through a period of transition and being observant and not just like falling into new things. This kind of relates to my quarterly goal too. One of the things I've been working on with that is how do I measure it? Because, you know, I said I'm going to do that, but what does that really mean?

I'll tell you one thing I have realized is that, you know, the planning really helps because I'm making plans and they're changing. And the observation of what I thought was going to happen versus what happened is a great data point when you're trying to go through a period of transition. Nice. Yeah, this is the thing that inspired this whole episode, to be honest. You were going to think through all your habits and routines, and I came along for the ride. Yeah. But I mean, even as I start this new thing where I just have one thing, I'm blocking time to work on certain things. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. So what are the things that pop up?

And where do I address those? And if I make a mistake with something, well, how did that happen? How do I create with this new regime? How do I make sure that doesn't happen again? And like all of that, I'm still kind of in data collection on that. I'm not ready to sign off on that challenge. But I do love the idea that I am aware

that I'm going through this and I'm trying to keep an open mind about things and not just say, okay, this is the new way everything's going to work from now on. No, I'm just going to say, let's just see how things are going and adjust it. I'm sure you've heard, all productivity nerds have heard the story about some university where they needed to have sidewalks. And rather than poor sidewalks, they just put grass everywhere and then they waited to see where the students walked because you could see all the grass would die on the natural path of students have you heard this

story mike right oh yeah yep i don't remember where it was but it's a great story and then like a year later they came and say okay well this is where we're going to make the sidewalks where all the places people walk and i'm kind of doing that right now with my whole system. Like, okay, what am I actually doing? Now, how do I work around that to make the system you work aren't necessarily going to fit. I remember you telling me at one point that anytime you go through a major life change, that is the perfect time to go back to the drawing board with all of your habits and routines. So data collection is absolutely the place to start with this. You have a focus challenge.

What is it? I do. I'm not going quite as big as you are, but looking at the habits that I want to create and change this year, I think the obvious first step for me is simply to get up earlier. And so I'm going to commit to that on air right now, that I'm going to move my wake time up an hour. And like I said, that isn't as simple as just setting the alarm clock earlier. It requires shifting the entire schedule for me up an hour to make sure that I do get enough rest and don't trigger a seizure. But that's what I want to throw out there as kind of public accountability. I do the same thing on Bookworm with Joe Buehlig. And just the fact that I say publicly, I'm going to do this thing, that's a lot of times the kick in the pants I need to make the change. So tell me the mechanics of this. How do you get yourself to sleep an hour earlier?

Well, we have a bedtime routine with our kids. We have five kids, and so they kind of have a staggered bedtime, which Adelaide, the youngest, starts at about quarter to eight. And so usually we get through the whole bedtime process with everybody. And at that point, I have some time and it's tempting to go start a movie or do something. And I think I want to just eliminate that whole block of time that I just find something to fill it with. At the end of the day, I'm pretty exhausted, especially after bedtime. And that would be a perfect opportunity to just say, you know what, I'm going to bed too. And if I do that, I think it'll be easy to get up earlier. It's just going to be a little bit shifting my mindset.

And there are some things that I've thought about that I can help move myself in that direction. We've got some hue lights. And I remember Sean McCabe talking about automations that he had set up so that at a certain time, the lights in his house start to dim. And that's kind of like a visual cue like, hey, you should start thinking about going to bed now. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with that or what sort of support I need to make that change happen. But I do know that I do have the support of my wife. That's obviously a big variable here with if you want to change your sleep-wake times and you sleep with a partner, you're not the only person that that affects. So it's kind of a group change that we're going to try to make. But we're both motivated to do it, and I think this will be healthier for both of us.

Now, I made jokes earlier about watching dumb TV, but I think there is something to having downtime in your day and being able to watch something on, you know, YouTube or, or dumb TV and just kind of decompress a little bit. Are you worried that you're not going to get that anymore with this change? I don't think so. Uh, I, I think the word you use decompress is accurate. I have used that many times in explaining things with my wife. I'll come back from worship team practice or something, and it's 8.30 at night, and I'm like, I just need a few minutes to decompress. I don't think I need to let it take up as much time as

it's been taking, though. The big immediate change we could make is just don't turn I need to let it take up as much time as it's been taking, though. The big immediate change we could make is just don't turn on the TV at that point. And I don't think that, like you said, dumb TV is necessarily a bad thing. And I think it is dumb TV at that point that I end up watching movies that we've seen a million times or just stupid TV shows that is almost like background noise at that point. I'll usually read at that point also. And I think if I just read and didn't turn on the TV in the background, that takes 20 or 30 minutes instead of an hour and a half. And there's my hour, the shifting of the hour in my schedule. But I don't know. I mean, I guess we'll kind of see how it goes. But I'm not concerned about not being able to fall asleep at night because I

haven't had that time to decompress. I tend to just fill it and stay up later than I mean to. You know, one of the things I have, glaucoma, I've had it most of my life. So I've got all these eye drops I have to take. And at night I have to take four of them. And the doctor wants me to wait five minutes between each one and keep my eyes closed. And I have found that to be almost like a good thing just to lay in bed for 20 minutes with my eyes closed. And it's a good way to like slow yourself down at the end of the day. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Ahrefs. Do you want more Google traffic? Maybe you're struggling to rank and you're not sure what you can do about it. And the idea of hiring an SEO agency might be outside your budget. Your solution is the Ahrefs Webmaster Tools,

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Our thanks to Ahrefs for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. So new and shiny, Mike, I want to talk about something new and shiny in my life. In addition to my weighted blanket is that, um, I have, uh, I've been a tea drinker. We've talked about on the show. I know you love your coffee. I'm just not, I don't like the way coffee tastes. And for whatever reason, I've just never gone down the coffee train, but I do like hot tea. And usually I do like light green teas or white teas. I'm not a big fan of like the British dark teas. They're a little too bitter for me, but I do like the green teas, but they don't give you much of a caffeine boost. And, you know, our friend Chris Bailey and a lot of people talk about the benefits of, you know, strategic deployment of caffeine. And I got thinking, well, do I need to drink coffee to get that? So I started researching

it and matcha tea has a lot more caffeine than standard tea. That's because it's ground up and there's a whole bunch of science behind it. But so I've been trying to drink matcha on days when I feel like I need a little bit of a jolt, but I never kind of could get around it. And one of the things I asked for for Christmas was some tools to make matcha tea because it's a process. And I found that getting those, it's just like a little bowl and a little wooden spoon. It's not like super expensive or fancy, but getting the right tools to make matcha tea has made matcha tea much more fun to me because the way I'm wired up, if you add a ritual to something, I'm going to do it.

I'm going to be all in. I can't help myself. This sounds very similar to the beginnings of my coffee journey with the pour overs. It was the ritual that hooked me. Just the act of making the fancy coffee was the thing that made it stick. And I think it's honestly pretty cool that you can apply that to a different caffeine source, for lack of a better term, than matcha. I think that's a really cool idea, to be honest, especially if you don't like the taste of coffee. Every time me drinking tea comes up on Mac Power Users, some cool geek listener sends me the link to the tea robot. It's like a fancy teapot that you push a button and it steeps it and then it pulls the steeping out.

It does everything automatically. And this is one thing where i i want to stay as analog as possible you know i i when i steep tea i just set a timer on my watch and then i pull it out honestly i steep tea for a very short period of time because it gets bitter like when you see people go into starbucks and get like a hot tea and they just leave the tea bag in there i don't understand how they do that. Honestly, how can you drink it after like two or three minutes? I mean, it must be so bitter. But anyway, so I'm very analog on this stuff, but my new and shiny for this episode is matcha stuff. If you're a tea drinker and you want a caffeine boost, I strongly recommend looking into matcha.

It tastes good and it's kind of fun to make it and it does give you a little bit of a jolt. I'm kind of curious, you mentioned that it's pretty simple and coffee gear for me at the beginning was also pretty simple. I wonder if there's a slippery slope here of fancy matcha gear. I don't think there is. I mean, I think for tea, for instance, like, I don't know, 10 years ago or something, my wife gave me a cast iron, like Japanese style teapot. Uh, and I still use it to this day and I love it. And like, I just don't think there's as much room for gear with tea as there is with coffee. Sure. Cause you know, you grind the beans and there's like a whole bunch of stuff to coffee

that doesn't happen with tea. Tea is essentially putting some leaves in some hot water. So there's not a whole lot of places you can go with that. I was looking back through my photos last night and came across one of our buddy JF when we were at a Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco for the Relay Show. And we were there buying siphon coffee. Are you familiar with this method?

No, not really. I know every time I go to Macworld or WWDC, all of my geek friends go crazy for Blue Bottle. But what is siphon coffee i don't this is blue bottle plus plus uh so there's normal blue bottle which is good and then uh certain blue bottles they have a siphon where basically they they ground the coffee and they put it in and they they heat it up so it goes up the tube up to the top and it percolates and they turn the heat off and it comes back down and and then you drink it. It's a ridiculous-looking contraption.

It looks like it belongs in a chemistry set. But it's kind of cool, everyone. So there's no way you would make that at home, but it's the kind of thing, like, when you're there, it's a cool thing to watch. Cool. Anything new? Yeah, I've got a new and shiny thing.

Speaking of coffee, this isn't purely mine, although I kind of wish it was. I bought my wife for Christmas an Ember coffee mug. Are you familiar with these? Yeah, I mean, I've not spent a lot of time with one, but it's an electronic mug, right? an electronic mug that you can control the temperature of the beverage inside via an iOS app. And the reason that I bought this for my wife, she is a stay-at-home mom, homeschools all of our kids. And so I make coffee in the morning and I'll ask her if she wants some. I'll pour it for her. She has every intention of sitting down to drink it but stuff happens and i come back upstairs two hours later and there's the coffee mug and the coffee is cold yeah and that's that's disappointing so uh the ember coffee mug keeps it warm it has this plate like a saucer sort of a thing that you uh into the wall and that's how you charge it.

But once you charge it, you can control that. It'll maintain the temperature of the liquid inside for like an hour and a half, I think it says, which has been kind of like the sweet spot for this where several times, even since I gave it to her for Christmas, kind of had that thought, oh no, I forgot to drink my coffee, and then realize, oh, it's in the ember. It's totally fine. And you could rest the mug itself inside of the charging base, the saucer, but even if you take it out of there, bring it somewhere else, it's going to keep your drink warm for quite a while. I was a little bit concerned that it would have like a giant battery in the bottom and that would affect the size of the mug

versus the amount of liquid that it could hold. You'd end up with this really heavy mug that actually didn't hold that much liquid. But the newer version of this is, which is the one that I got, actually, it has a maybe half an inch base where the battery is. And so it really doesn't take up that much space. It does feel a little bit heavy, feels kind of weighted, but it's actually not super heavy. It just feels solid, like you're not going to knock it over and spill it everywhere. And I've been very impressed with the mug itself. The app is fine. It's nothing to really write home about, but it does what it's supposed to do. It's got the thing on the bottom where you can swipe with your thumb to the right or to the left to

adjust the temperature, which is really the only control that you need. And then there's an LED on the front, which indicates that it is maintaining the temperature or it will turn red when it's time to put it back on the base and and charge it yeah i have my solution is analog i have a yeti rambler which is these yeti mugs but it's really like coffee mug size and i find it keeps tea warm a long time at least an hour and a half so i'm good um i don't know for when it comes to tea i just want to stay i don't want electronic gizmos involved i just want it simple and um but yeah okay so there's some new and shiny stuff i mean so mike uh i uh just kind of looking overall with the annual planning stuff, I feel like I kind of let you down, dear listener, because I don't have a bulletproof plan to plan for the year.

But I do think the idea of reflection and thinking about what you want to change going forward is the best thing you can do in the habits. And I would just say don't get too hung up on having a bullet list of things you must accomplish in the next 12 months maybe think more in terms of the next three I agree with that and I also think that maybe in an alternate universe where you had not just made the decision to not be a lawyer I you do think a little bit more long, but I think it's totally healthy to say, you know what? I just made a major change. I have no idea what the future is going to look like.

So I'm not even going to consider a year from now. I'm just going to focus on the next couple of months. So I would just add to that. If you're in the middle of a transition, then don't spend a whole lot of time making that plan because plans are worthless but planning is everything. We are the Focus Podcast

and you can find us over at relay.fm slash focus. I want to thank our sponsors for today's show. That's our friends at Indeed and Shopify. On Deep Focus today we're going into rediscovering hobbies. I've got something on my mind and I need some advice. So we'll be talking about that today and see you next time.