Focused - 166: The Social Dilemma

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

David & Mike walk through their planning processes and make their best case for leaving social media altogether.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hello, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great. How about you, David? Always good. Always good. I look forward to recording this show. I've always got a lot on my mind about this stuff, and this is the place I get to exercise those demons, so here we are. This episode, we've got kind of a smorgasbord.

Is that the right word of things we're going to talk about today? We've got calendar and planning. The calendars are still on sale for the focused 2023 planning wall calendar, which is I'm hearing from people that are getting them and liking them. I really love mine. And it's just a great calendar. I feel like, um, this is a tool that we can all use. We'll talk about it more as we talk about how we use ours and just how we do calendars in general. That's something we're going to talk about today, but also social media is on our mind. Um, the, uh, you know,

there's a bunch of news going on with social media. So we got thinking about how do we address social media and focus and, uh, you know, where some good advice there. And then finally, um, the email that Elon Musk wrote about making his employees go hardcore quit that triggered me and I have thoughts. So we got a lot to cover today. Uh, I guess we should just get started. All right. I'm looking forward to David's rant. Uh, probably not too much of a rant, but just some wisdom from somebody with a little gray hair on emails like that. Fair enough.

Yeah, but Randy wrote us and he was saying, hey, is there an episode of Focus that deals with annual planning and the Focus calendar and maybe the planning pad? Could you tell me more how you guys are using these?

And we are conscious of the fact that sounds like a commercial because we're selling these calendars and we're going to try not to do that. But we are selling them and we do use them. And the reason we started selling this product, what was it, four years ago now? Is because you already had one and I wanted one.

So we were like, well, let's make one with our podcast on it. And I love that it says underneath, you know, life is more than cranking widgets. I think that is a great bit of advice to look at every day. But just to go over it a little bit, it's about roughly two by three foot calendar. Both Mike and I mount ours on foam core and hang them on the wall. But you've got this massive calendar on the wall next to your desk that shows you the whole year at any one time. And given that we're both nerds

and we both use digital calendars to, um, to answer Randy's question, what do we do with these things? You want to go first? Sure. And, uh, just to back up a second, you mentioned that we do sell these. This is really the only thing that we sell. I guess the other thing you could say we sell is the, the deep focus version of the podcast for the members, which by the way, there's a special relay promotion for that as well. Put a link in the show notes for that if you want to support Focused or one of your other favorite relay shows. There's a little bit of a discount for that right now.

But that's kind of intentional that this is essentially the one thing that we sell under the Focus brand because, like you said, I've been using this thing for a really long time. And I kind of reached out to Jesse at New Year with a hope and a dream of maybe he'll agree to do a custom one for us. And I think it's gone better than any of us could have predicted. But it's a product that I really believe in. And you don't have to use the focused one specifically. If you want to get one of the other New Year calendars, that's fine. And there are other versions of the entire year at a glance calendar.

But the New Year one is the best one, in my opinion. The design is great. And I really like the way that it's built for the different quarters. So I guess that's the thing you have to understand going into what is this New Year calendar. It's essentially the entire year at a glance. And I believe all the New Year calendars kind of have each quarter shaded so you can easily see there are four different quarters in your year. And then from there, you can have different calendars have different features like Sunday or Monday start. Some of them have like put your theme for the month up above or things

like that. We've kind of specifically built in a couple of features which are essential to how I use mine. There is these small dots in the bottom corner of every single day on the focus New Year calendar, which essentially is like a habit tracker. And what this allows you to do is color in the dots on the days that you do a habit. And you can figure out for yourself what those are. I kind of recommend more substantial stuff. So like the habits that I use are specifically fasting and running. Those are the two things I want to track on my New Year calendar. And those colors that I use for that habit tracker are also the colors that I use for putting in all of the important events that end up on that calendar.

And this is where you can kind of go crazy with this because I find it helpful to use different colors for the different areas of responsibility for my life. So I've got a red one, which denotes all the big, important work events. So for example, I've got some leadership meetings at the day job that are coming up all day, Monday and Tuesday, as we record this, and that's on my calendar in red. And then I've got my personal events. These are things that we're doing as a family or things that I want to do personally. So I do a handful of races every year. So those are in there and those are all green. Then I've got the content schedule. I have different podcasts that I'm responsible for publishing, Focus being one of them. Then I've got the content schedule. I have different podcasts that I'm responsible for publishing, Focus being one of them. So I put every single Focus published date on my calendar

to make sure that I don't miss it, because this is something that I usually glance on the first thing when I go into my office. So all that stuff is on there. And then I've got Orange, which is all of the church events. And this isn't like every single service that we go to, but occasionally we'll have like a monthly men's ministry meeting or special speaker come in. Those are the stuff that ends up under the church category. Yeah, I mean, mine, I guess you can use these any way you want, but the first thing I would say is the focused one in particular is very opinionated from the opinions of Mike and me. For instance, it starts on a Monday. I think calendars that

split the weekend are just silly. I don't understand why that's a thing. So it starts on Monday. The months run together. So for instance, just looking right now at the 2022 calendar, June 30th is a Tuesday or Thursday, and then July 1st is a Friday. It's not two separate lines. You know, the 30th leads right to the 1st, and they've got clever design work to break that up for you by month. I find it really useful

to have a nice big calendar like this. I have been playing with the habit system. You don't have to make that just for habit, but there's these dots, and you've got the ability to add data below. Um, I've really, really been working on my intentionality muscle lately, and I'm using that for the dot, you know, and, but it's kind of like an overall rating of the day. Did I, you know, plan the day that I time tracked the things that helped me be more intentional. You just know at the end of the day, if you were intentional or

not, and I'll put a dot in the days I do it. So that's something kind of fun I've been trying. But I just find the big use for this thing really is having a calendar on the wall in the studio that I can look at at any time. And this is particularly useful for me when I'm most vulnerable. When someone calls me or I get an email and they ask me to do something right. And I get that I have a digital calendar with this data on it, but there's something about just looking at the wall and saying, wow, there is a lot of stuff in August. I should really not agree to go away for three days and do the speaking gig, you know? And that's to me, the biggest benefit of it is the wall calendar for me is a tool towards getting to know, to say no to things.

But it's also useful for me to just kind of see what's up and what's coming up. My wife never looks at my digital calendars, but she looks at this calendar. So she knows good times to maybe make know, you know, maybe make an appointment, um, to do things with friends. Like she, she knows when I've got a lot of stuff in a particular month that I'm not going to want to go out that I'm going to be wanting to get caught up in my free time. And so she, uh, she does a good job of, you know, checking that out. And, um, there's just something about putting it on the wall, Mike. I can't really explain it. Yeah, I think I wanted to mention the previous episode we did on mind mapping. We talked a bit about the analog versus

the digital tools, and I feel like the discussion there is appropriate for this as well. Yeah, you can do all of this stuff digitally. There's something different about writing on the calendar, just like writing on the whiteboard instead of doing it inside of an app. And I agree that this is not going to be my one calendaring solution. This is not where I want to manage my day-to-day calendar, but it's an essential supplement to digital calendaring for me. And you mentioned that we both have ours mounted on foam core, but we actually had someone reach out via Twitter and ask, how do you hang this thing on the wall? And I was kind of caught by surprise when I saw that because I thought it was obvious, but it makes total sense that this isn't necessarily obvious for people who've never

gotten one of these before. But command strips work great as well. Those are those little sticky tabs that you peel off one side, put it on the calendar, then you peel off the other side and you stick it to the wall. And they're a couple bucks off of Amazon, but those are a great way to get it on the wall. I do like the foam core. It is substantially thicker

and I feel it's more comfortable to write on when I put it on my wall because my wall is kind of like that skip trolling sort of texture. So it's thin enough that if I don't have that foam core behind it, I can feel some of that texture behind it. Sometimes I don't really like that foam core takes that away, but foam core is also pretty expensive. I mean, the calendars are 30 bucks to begin with. And then foam core, i think was like 50 at the local kinkos i intend to do foam core again this year because i like it so much it's just a an investment in a

tool that is really important to me but if you want a more economical way to hang it on the wall the command strips are a great option yeah the other thing i've done in the past is uh the first couple times i did this i just went to target and bought a piece of foam core and then i used spray adhesive and just it adhesed it down myself which was fine um last year i got fancy and i went to the local with the fedex kinkos whatever they've got a like an office supply store near here it was not 50 dollars so it was like 15 or so it was it was not that expensive for me to get it done maybe they didn't do it as fancy in california as they do in wisconsin i don't know but i don't know but it looks fine and i was happy with that so i'm gonna get it done again but it doesn't cost that much if you want to do it

yourself and like mike i put it on the command strips and i put one on each top corner and one in the center bottom and i can uh as long as you let those command strips set, here's some home advice from Sparky, put the, uh, the, the, the mating piece on the wall and leave it for 24 hours. It actually makes a difference. And then I find it that I can rip it off those command strips. You know, they're, they're two Velcro strips that connect together and you can like pull the Velcro off so you can take it off the wall whenever you want and then just stick it back up. And that's, that's worked fine for me. But I really find it useful. Some things I've discovered having used them for a few years now

is I don't find production schedules good on these things. I tried again just last month. And like when I'm working on a field guide, I, like I put a big box around November cause I'm working on the, uh, the, um, um, obsidian field guide right now. And I thought, well, that'll really inspire me to get it all the work done in November. And I, what I found is that this is, this is hard work and it's not going to get done in November. You know, uh, you know, there's some holidays and making a field guide is not something you draw an arbitrary box on a calendar and just make it happen in that time. And, you know, they're done when they're done for me. And all that was doing was giving me guilt every time I looked at it.

So I went ahead and removed that. So I don't find production schedules work for it, but I find it really good for commitments and times and just really kind of holding things together. And like I said earlier, most importantly, a tool for no, you know, and, and you laugh at that, but I think if you can dodge a few commitments and keep your life more sane and do quality work on the stuff you keep you know, getting something like this is worth the investment. So, but that's how i use them

is uh is that way and the interesting thing is both mike and i use them kind of differently but uh i think this is something everybody can kind of put put to work agreed you know i want to talk about the the content stuff specifically for uh for a second It makes total sense that you ship them when they're done. Historically, I have been making things for other people, so I haven't had that luxury. I need the reminder like, hey, you said you were going to deliver all these screencast videos on this date. So that's been really helpful for me. But also that kind of leads into another tip that I wanted to share with these calendars. They're dry erase, right? But I actually use fine tip wet erase markers because then when I put something on there,

it's not going to get smudged if I were to bump it with my hand later. I can still erase it if I want to. I can get Kleenex wet or a rag and I can wipe those things off and I can change what's on there. But essentially with the wet erase, it's a little bit more permanent for me. And I find that helpful in putting my commitments on there and saying, no, this really needs to get done by this time. Yeah. Actually, you've never told me that. And when I saw that in the notes, I'm like, okay, I'm going to start that in 2023 definitely it makes it makes more sense and you're right wet erase is not that much more difficult to get off and i do smear them when i go to edit something so a lot of times a month

gets so ugly that i'll just like erase the whole thing and redo it and if i had wet erase that would not be a problem. The other part of this question from Randy deals with the focus planning pad, which is a digital goodie that we included with the focus calendar, new year calendar this year. And this is something I collaborated with Jesse on and put together like a PDF version of this, which I've been using with the remarkable and I actually like it a lot. But essentially, it's just the components of time blocking that you and I have used for a long time. So if you want to walk through of how the action pad actually works, there's a video I created on

the sales page for for the New Year calendar. And we've talked about this before. But since it was specifically asked for, I thought maybe we could real briefly talk about how we plan our days as well. Yeah. I want to talk about that. I also, before we move on topics, I want to talk to you about the move from the analog to the digital version of this, but let's, let's save that part for later. Okay. The idea of daily planning, I mean, the calendar's on a wall kind of for big block planning, but we're also giving you a daily planner this year. And that works not only on the Remarkable, but also the iPad, if you're interested. You can even use it on your Mac and just put a cursor in there and type on top of it.

But the idea is you get this PDF and then you just make copies of it for each day. And it's got all the components that Mike and I use for, for daily planning. Time blocking, I think is a big one for both of us. A limited number of tasks. And then like some stuff like gratitude and, and other little bits that you may want to take care of as you get through

the day. It's really nice design. And I had nothing to do with it. It's all on Mike and Jesse, but I am benefiting from it already. So I think it's really nice that and i i had nothing to do with it it's all on mike and jesse but uh i am benefiting from it already so i i think it's really nice that you guys did that oh thank you let's talk about the pieces though you know time blocking we've done a show on hyper focus that's come up on the show uh multiple times and the idea of blocking your time to get work done, it continues to be, I think, the most bang for your buck productivity tip you could ever take.

Like if you want to get the best tip ever on being more productive, in my book, this is probably it. Just taking the time to time block. So often I've got emails from listeners and readers who say, you know, you've been banging the drum about this for years. I finally tried it and I can't believe how useful this is. You know, it is, you know, people are just shocked by it. And then sometimes I hear

from those people later and they're like, well, I fell off the wagon. Then I got back on and I learned the lesson again, how useful this is. And, um, you know, the whole idea of it is using your calendar as more than just dentist appointments, using it to actually engineer your day to do your most important work. And, um, it is, I'll give you a personal example of time blocking. So like I said earlier, I've been working on a new field guide and, uh, the production is going slower than I want because, you know, I'm doing a bunch of the production is going slower than I want because, you know, I'm doing a bunch of research while I'm recording and it's just, you know, Obsidian is not a simple

piece of software, but I want to make it simple through the course and figuring out the best way to communicate that isn't always easy, but also it's November. And like we, you know, my daughter did a big project at school that involved me. The other daughter is starting a new career. My wife has jobs. And there's family stuff lately that has been more often interfering. And I make three podcasts. I've got a lot going on.

So I also felt like I wasn't getting enough time in on it. And so I have a solution for this. Anytime I feel like there's a project that I'm going to bed wishing I had worked on more, the answer is always time blocking. And so what I did a few weeks ago is said, okay, enough is enough. I'm going to block at least two hours every morning that I'm working on this project. And rather than, you know, monkey around with it, like I said, an eight to 10 a.m. block every day. So nothing else. I don't schedule podcasts. I don't schedule calls. I'm, you know, I'm eating the frog and doing two hours on this thing every morning. And sometimes that two hours will turn into six hours, but sometimes it's just two hours. And all that is because I've blocked out time on the calendar, not for a

dentist, but for me working on work, that's important to me. And suddenly, you know, everything is working now. It like, it's like the gears shifted and I'm making progress on this thing. That's important to me. And that's to me, the primary benefit of a block scheduling is finding that thing that you feel like you're not spending enough time on and literally carving time out of it for your day. And that might mean you don't answer as much email or, you know,

go to as many meetings or whatever. But at the end of the day, the stuff that matters is getting done. I agree. The other part of the time blocking that you didn't really get into is, but if there's something that you want to confine to a set period of time, time blocking is great for that as well. Yeah.

Parkinson's law, I think it is, says that work expands to fill the time that you allow to it. Well, if you don't time block the time that you allow to it. Well, if you don't time block your day and you have a company slack or something like that, you will probably find yourself dealing with a whole bunch of minor urgent things that really aren't all that important. You get to the end of your day and you're like, I only had three important things that I was going to do today and I didn't take action on any of them. That's happened to me lots of times. So time blocking essentially helps me compartmentalize things. I'm going to go check the communication channels during these times, and then I'm going to do the important stuff

during these other times. But the other thing that is important as it pertains to time blocking, I'm going through this book right now for Bookworm called Mind Management, Not Time Management by David Kadavy. And I think you can kind of tell what this book is all about. Time management is great, but there are limits with this. And this is probably a future topic for another Focus episode. But the number of tasks that you try to get done in a day is important with time blocking as well, because if you just try to schedule every minute of your day and squeeze as much as you can in there, you're setting yourself up for failure. And so when you're thinking about this, you have to be realistic. You have to know essentially where your limits are. And with the action pad, we tried to confine the amount of space available for the tasks

that you would try to list there. Myself personally, I limit myself to five tasks in a day. And some people are going to hear that and be like, only five tasks in a day? That's ridiculous. My task list is 30 items long. Yeah, maybe, you know, but then maybe you batch them together and you say, I'm going to do the customer service stuff during this time. And I'm going to knock out a whole bunch of tasks related to customer service

during that block and kind of group them together. I find it helpful not just to focus on all the individual things that you're going to be doing, but also the kind of mode that you're going to be in. So if you're going to be doing email or even like planning your week, those sorts of things, put those on your time block plan. And then also make sure you put the fun stuff on there too, because if all of it is work related from 6 10 p.m. because I personally time block every hour of my day, you find yourself not wanting to look at it because you're just, oh, there's another thing that I'm going to have to do and I don't feel like doing it.

But when there's some fun stuff on there, things you can look forward to, it changes your relationship and the way you interact with the plan. Yeah, I've got a little fir tree here that I'm going to sculpt for Christmas. It's going to be a little Christmas bonsai. I've got two hours tonight on my calendar for that.

So that is time blocking, but that's something I'm looking forward to and make sure that I'll have that downtime because it's in the calendar. A couple of pieces on this. Mike talked about boxing. I call it time boxing. It's like, you've got blocking for stuff that you really want to do that you're not doing and

boxing for stuff that you don't really want to do so much. And you're doing too much of like email is a great is, is like the, you know, the, the first version of this, like if you're spending too much in email, just say, okay, every day at four o'clock, I'm going to spend an hour in email, but the rest of the day, I'm not going to touch email and just see how you do. And you may not get through all of it, but in an hour, you'll get through as much as you can. And I'll actually find the, uh, the constraint of the hour to deal with it means that you move through it more deliberately and quickly, and you get through a lot more than you think you will. So it's, it's, it's really helpful for stuff like that. And, you know, I call it hyper-scheduling. I it's, it's, that's poor branding. Cause it's

not like I'm not scheduling my bathroom breaks, right? It is the big, it is the big things. And so I may have, you know, two hour block to work on a field guide. I may also have a block of an hour for what I call personal business, which equates to work on a field guide. I may also have a block of an hour for what I call personal business, which equates to 10 or 15 tasks in OmniFocus. But, you know, I just set aside an hour to get as many of those done as I can. And you just work from the most time urgent or most important one down to the least. And then you see how many you have left. And maybe you say, well, in three days, I need to do that again to get caught up with this stuff. I think a lot of people get in trouble when they start doing this because they stress out on it.

Like a common complaint is, well, what if my day changes? Well, then it changes and you move stuff around. You know, it's okay. You are not carving these in granite. You are just putting them on the calendar saying this is important. In fact, sometimes you get to the end of the day and you're like, oh, I had three big things I blocked time for. I only got one of them done. The day got away from me. You say, okay, well, that was today.

And then what you do on your calendar, there's this thing called the mouse. You just take the block that you really wanted to do that you didn't get done. You drag it to tomorrow or Thursday or next Saturday or whatever. And you get this overwhelming sense of calm because you know that there's this thing you need to do and you have put it on the calendar and you have blocked time for it. And it's like, you don't stress about it anymore because you know there's time for it. Now you can't do that daily, right? You can't always miss your blocks, but when you do, you can move them. And it does give me a sense of relief. But when you do, you can move them.

And it does give me a sense of relief. They're like, oh, this is on the calendar. I know that'll get done. It's okay. I can not think about that now and focus on what's in front of me. It's just a, it's an amazing trick. We, we, like I said, go back and listen to the hyper-focused or the hyper-scheduling episode. The hyper-focus is also a very good book by our friend, Chris Bailey.

But the hyper-scheduling is the episode where we really kind of went deep on this. But it's super useful. And getting back to the daily planner, both Mike and I do it on a daily. Now, Mike, when do you block that time? Do you do it? I mean, when do you find time to decide what the blocks are? I try to do it at the end of my workday as part of a shutdown routine, but I need to get better at honoring that shutdown routine. So if I don't have time to do that, there's still immense value in planning it the morning of. Yeah. But you pay a price when you wait till the next morning. I do, at least I feel like,

because the morning time for me is golden. That's like when I wanted to really make sure I was putting more time into the obsidian field guide that I made it those first hours of the morning. Like I, at this point I get up, I do my business. I take care of the dog, do a couple little things around the house and do a quick meditation. So by eight o'clock, I am sitting in front of my desk doing it. I try to like do nothing but that in those first couple hours. And if I have to plan the day, then it's a loss for me. So anybody that's doing this, I would really encourage you to try to do it the night before. I also find I sleep better when I do it the night before because I feel comfortable. Like I have a plan for tomorrow. That's good, right? And it doesn't take long. If you start

doing this, you'll realize it takes a trivial amount of time kind of once you get everything set. And I do it the night before really helps. I also do a Sunday afternoon initial block for the week. And I just go into my calendar app of choice. Fantastic. How they've got a great feature where you can copy blocks of events. So a lot of times I use last week's events as building blocks. Like in the morning I have like, I call morning routine, you know, where I'm doing the, you know, more stuff I do in the morning and I put that block across the week. And then every afternoon I do have a time I call comms where I deal with social media, you know, like the Max Market Labs, Discord, the email, I check my text messages and Slack and all that stuff I do for an hour.

And that's four o'clock every day. And then at five o'clock I do shutdown. And so that block goes in on Sunday. So, and then like I have podcasts scheduled, I'll put in the blocks for like the prep time for the shows. And like, so a lot of my week gets filled up on that Sunday evening, but there's gaps in there. And that's the time that I can kind of bring in those intentional blocks to things that are really important to me. So I do like a rough week on Sundays. And then during the week, I feel very free to move stuff around, stuff that can be moved. And in the evening when I go, that's why it probably takes me so little time in the

evening. I've already got kind of a rough plan for tomorrow. But let's say I had planned on, you know, writing a big newsletter tomorrow, but I didn't finish something that was important today. I may, you know, move that newsletter block into the future and then move today's thing to tomorrow. And it just gives me a way to kind of balance things. It's very useful. I said it already once in this episode, but man, this stuff, if you've never tried it, it is empowering. The trick for me, I think, is just not entering into

my workday without this time block plan. So even, I agree, the best case scenario is that I plan this the day before, but sometimes that doesn't happen. So at the very least, I don't think it's a wash when the morning of I realize I don't have this and I spend those five to 10 minutes thinking through what my day is actually going to look like. And with a day job and people who are going to be sending me things in the morning, which are going to determine my priorities anyways, sometimes it works out better that I wait till the next day because I don't respond to all the comms in the morning, but I at least look to see if there's anything that really needs my attention today. Frequently, there is, especially with the leadership team, where it really needs your

feedback on this particular thing. And I'll make sure that I time block that. Again, I would be better off, the ideal version of this is doing it the day before, but just don't go into your day without a plan is the advice that I would give people. And then the other thing is recognizing that time management is great, but you can't just optimize all your time. There is a point of diminishing returns and even a point of negative returns where if you try to just block work into your day, you're not going to get it done. So when you don't get that block done and you have to bring it over to the next day, I would encourage people to ask, why did that happen? Was it because something came up that was more important and I needed to bump this till tomorrow? That's no problem. But if it's, I was unrealistic and I bit off more than I could chew,

I have to recognize that maybe I'm coming up against my limits. And those limits are lower than you think they are. For creative work, it's usually like four to five hours a day, I think is what the research says, instead of the full eight. Now, it doesn't mean you can't fill that time with other things. But if you're thinking you're just going to be writing for eight hours a day, you are sadly mistaken. Your brain is going to tap out at a certain point. And you got to recognize that when you're making your plans. Yeah. But that's an advantage of this really is you get to intentionally observe that and say, well, I planned on writing my novel for eight hours and I only made it through four. Well, that's not necessarily a failure. That may be all you're really capable of doing in a day.

And it's a muscle. Say, well, tomorrow, why don't I try for four and a half, not eight, you know, and just see where that works. Or you decide, say, well, tomorrow, why don't I try for four and a half, not eight, you know, and just see where that works. Or you decide, you know what, four hours is really all I'm good for in a day with this type of work. And then what is the other busy work that gets in the way? Maybe I can do that with the second half of the day. And it's just this feedback loop that is actually extremely positive if you're observant

of it. The other piece of it I would add is that sometimes things just go a little bit sideways on you. We're recording this the week of Thanksgiving. Both of my kids are going to be home this week. I'm very much looking forward to that. But one of my kids has a problem that is going to need my help. And it's easily going to take four hours. Now, I didn't know about that last night when I made my plans for today, but now I do. And I moved one meeting so I could get that done after we finished the show today. And the rest of the day has got her name

on it. And several of my blocks got moved and that's just life, you know, and I don't feel bad about it. You know, you don't get hung up on it. It allows me to kind of separate from it and do my job as being a dad for half a day and, and do my job of paying the bills and making max parking content for the other half. And I'm okay with that. So I just feel like this stuff liberates you and gives you a lot of options. And, um, but, but the P the mistakes people make this is they over, they underestimate how long it's going to take to do things. They overschedule the day and they take it too serious.

And when you make any one of those three mistakes, you feel like this doesn't work. But once you get past that, it can actually be very beneficial. 100% agree. I would just encourage people to consider that even if you have the time to do something, you also have to have the energy. You have to be in the right headspace in order to do the thing. You could block out the time. It doesn't guarantee that the thing is going to get done. So recognize where your emotional, psychological, mental limits are, all of those things, physical limits, and use those as you're crafting your, your plans. And this takes practice. It's like, you know, being in the big leagues, you're not going to hit a fastball the first time you stand

up at the plate. Right. But, uh, just start doing it and give it a shot, but, you know, kind of getting back to the thread here, we're using these, uh, these digital tools or the little, you know, the daily sheet to do that. And doing it with a pen on an iPad or a Remarkable is a great way to do it. And it kind of is like a little bit of a little contract with yourself, you know, and I just got done telling you that, you know, you can move these around, but writing it down really does make it more likely that you'll do it. And that's why I think this is a great little addition this year. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move and enter offer code FOCUSED, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing

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It's just so good. And it's such an easy way to get started on the web. And one of the things I love about Squarespace is once you get the site set up, really anybody can do it. And you can have people, like if you've got a small business and you want people in your staff to be able to update the website, Squarespace gets you that. Or maybe you know somebody at church that wants to set up a website for a charity. You can set them up with that and they can run it. And you don't have to go manage it for them because it is just so easy to use. I love Squarespace. So anyway, head to squarespace.com slash focused F-O-C-U-S-E-D for a free trial with no credit card required. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code focus to save that 10% on your first purchase of a website or domain.

Once again, that's squarespace.com slash focus. And don't forget to use that offer code focus to get the 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the focus podcast. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of the focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. All right, so there's been a lot of drama regarding Twitter specifically, and we've had on our episode idea list here for a very long time to talk about the social dilemma. And I thought if there was ever a time to talk about this, it is right now. All right. Well, let's tell people what the social dilemma is first. Sure. So the social dilemma is a documentary, which is available on Netflix and it's done by

somebody named Tristan Harris. I forget the name of the organization that he founded, by somebody named Tristan Harris. I forget the name of the organization that he founded, but he was an employee at Google when Gmail was first being developed and wrote a whole presentation and shared it with the entire company on what are we doing with the attention that people are giving us as they use our app.

And the short version of the story is that the company said all the right things, even created a separate position for him where he would work directly with Eric Schmidt. And eventually he left because he was discouraged that it wasn't actually changing any of the development of the apps and the services themselves. Because your attention as you use these different services is money for the services that you're using. So that is the background. There's a lot of reasons why if you are getting frustrated with Twitter, I think maybe the right solution isn't to replace it with something else. But think about what is the impact that it's having on you? What is the intention when you go to use this tool?

And can you live without it? Yeah. So a lot of people are rage quitting Twitter right now. Right. And, uh, and it's funny for me because I have been on kind of, I've been starving myself of social media slowly over the last several years without ever having made a plan. You know what I mean? I've got a Twitter account, but I don't go into it very often. In fact, I have a funny story about this. When I was still a lawyer, I went to a meeting once with a bunch of people. It was supposed to be like a networking meeting. Lawyers are always looking for new clients and you get groups of lawyers together and they can all tell about what they do

and maybe send work to each other. And one of these guys at the beginning, they said, well, does anybody have any announcements? And this guy stands up very proudly. He's like, I now have 1,000 Twitter followers. And everybody clapped like he had just ran a marathon or something. And I was just thinking, why do these people care how many Twitter followers this guy has?

something and and i was just thinking why do these people care how many twitter followers this guy has and you know it was just you know it's like um a bunch of guys in suits who don't really understand how this stuff works thinking that the number of followers you have on twitter somehow makes you more powerful in your business so i looked the guy up and he is following 2 000 people and he has a thousand followers. I would guess that most of his followers are just robot or even like people, there are people who like say, Oh, that person's following me. So I should follow them back. You know? I can tell you on Twitter, I have,

I honestly don't know how many followers I have. I think it's around 20,000. I follow like a hundred, under a hundred people, you know, it's not, and that's not a hundred, under a hundred people, you know, it's not, and that's not a brag, but it's just the fact that this is not something, it doesn't work that way that by following people and having them follow you, suddenly you have more reach or more power, you know? So I've just kind of like slowly distanced myself from it. But I mean, what I do with Twitter is really, I pay attention to people that mentioned me.

So it's almost like a form of email. And some of my close friends that I follow. But even that's really reduced over the years because they don't really tweet that much anymore. And when all this started, it just got me thinking about my relationship with Twitter. And it's really not very... It's very random and rare. It's like I probably go in there two to three times a week and, and whether I actually get through all my mentions is a, is,

is a good question whether I'm going to actually make it through. But, but then last night we're recording this the week of, and there was a shakeup at the Disney company. The CEO, who I have not been a fan of, got fired, and they replaced him with the old guy that I liked. And we don't need to talk about all that, but for some reason, maybe it was just like the mob mentality, the, you know, the mob mentality, but I wanted to see what people were saying about it. Right. So I went into Twitter last night and for the first time in a long time, I just did a search on a name, you know, usually, like I said, I go to mentions or my, you know, my feed of people that I follow the hundred or so people I follow. But I, I went into the wild of Twitter, you know, which I hadn't done in a long time. And a couple of things struck me at first is an hour and a half went by in a blink. It was

shocking to me how, how much time I wasted going through these tweets and how much I felt like I just ate like five pounds of McDonald's French fries, you know, just complete junk food, a bunch of people writing opinions about something that I was interested in, but people who I have no knowledge of, and a lot of their opinions were dumb. And, you know, it's like, why did I put myself through that? I mean, we can all get caught in this, right? I did last night. And, um, uh, I think, I think you should rethink your relationship, not with Twitter, but with all these social media things that can do that to you, where you can take an hour and a half of your life. One day you're going to be laying on a deathbed, right? And think about all the things you could have told somebody important to you.

important to you. And in the back of your mind, you can say, remember that night you spent an hour and a half listening to reading dumb comments from people about the Disney CEO. You're never going to get that back. Exactly. And that really is at the heart of what I wanted to talk about here with this, because I think there's a very focused message here with not just Twitter, but all social media, all news sources. We've talked about this kind of stuff before, but it's really pertinent right now. And as it pertains to Twitter, I think the thing that really drives the way I interact with it is these three questions by Jim Rohn, which are, who am I allowing to speak into my life? to speak into my life, what effect is that having on me? And is this okay? Now, Twitter is the one social media platform that I am on. And it is specifically because I get to choose what I see there. I have a whole bunch of stuff muted. I have a whole bunch of people blocked. And so I know what I'm getting into when I engage with

Twitter. I'm not going to search the, and occasionally I fall into that too, where it's like, what's trending and I'll see what people are saying about stuff. But that never ends positively. No, it does not. And I got that lesson again yesterday. Yeah. You have to go into it, recognizing that as you say, David, there'll be dragons here, but that doesn't mean that it's all bad. However, I hear a lot of people talking about how I'm going to quit Twitter. I'm going to find something else. And I want essentially paraphrasing here. I want a small group of my friends and on a platform where we can hang out. Right.

And Twitter was never that for me. And I don't think anything else is going to be that in terms of an open social media type platform. But that doesn't mean that you can't find that. There are lots of tools out there. If you're looking for something like that, you mentioned Discord previously. Essentially, you've got a small gated Mac Sparky community, right? But that's not true social media because you're in charge of it.

And if someone's being a jerk, you can kick them out. Yeah. And I've done the same thing with my faith-based productivity community using Circle. I'm on a Slack for the pen addict. And there are rules there. If you break the rules, you get kicked off, but it's somebody who's in charge of that sort of thing. And so I would just advise people that if you really want a small group of friends around a particular topic, you can find that sort of stuff, but Twitter was never the place that should be in the first place. So as you're engaging with this platform,

the question is, what is my intention here? What do I want to use this as a tool for? And I hear a lot of people in my personal circles who justify their use of social media and tends to be Facebook specifically. It's like, oh, I have to be on there for my business. Do you really, we were talking before we hit record, uh, about the, uh, the impact that social media has had or not had on, on your business, right? You can be successful without

it. Just to be clear. Like I, I gave up on Facebook, I don't know, like six or seven years. I was never really a Facebook user, to be honest, but I completely dissociated myself from the platform many years ago. And I don't think it's, I don't think it's cost me anything. There's really no way to measure that, but my business has done fine without me spending time on Facebook. And Twitter is really the same way. I guess I, you could say I do a little bit of customer support on Facebook, but usually when somebody has a customer support problem, I'm like, send me an email, let me get you in the system so I can, you know, hand you off to somebody or just manage this in a way that's better than Twitter. So I really do very little business

on Twitter. And as I said, you really don't know, but I don't spend a lot of time on Twitter. I don't go on there and like do a lot of discussion about products and podcasts and things like that. So maybe there is a cost to that, that, you know, I have a number of followers and I haven't, you know, use the platform to my, it's maximum advantage, but I can guarantee you that if you look at the opposite side of that, if I had spent a bunch of time further developing Twitter, trying to get more followers or trying to spend more time talking about stuff I'm making, I would spend less time making stuff. And that is a certainty. And that's the balance I've always been most concerned about. When I finished the day, did I a as a producer or as a as a consumer you know and I

feel like that social media stuff feels very consumerish to me I agree I don't think it has to be though that's the the thing you can use I would say Twitter specifically but also LinkedIn probably at this point if you were looking to find a social platform for writing specifically, I think it's honestly a decent tool. But the danger is you open up an app which is designed to get you to consume. So there are ways that I have designed my interactions with Twitter where I can write and publish without having to go in and see what's going on. And I feel like if you want to use the platform to create, that's a very valid use of it. But again, there'd be dragons.

So think about maybe the systems that you're using and don't default to just dipping your toes into the waters, assuming that you're going to be able to just jump out whenever you want. There are things that you can do to just publish and not look at what everybody else is saying all the time. And I think that could be a very valid use of the platform. But again, be careful. Yeah. And then the other thing I would say is, if you're thinking about quitting Twitter, you're not happy with decisions they're making, try not to make it a drama event. I would suggest just don't use it. Step away from it for a while. See how you're doing. There's nothing more frustrating than like publicly declaring you're giving up on something and then going back. I mean,

I was very careful about Facebook when I, when I quit it because people were mad at me. We had the, the Mac power users forums was on Facebook, which is the only reason I had a relation with Facebook, frankly, but I got tired of them trying to monetize my listeners. And, and my listeners are writing me saying, I don't understand why Facebook is trying to sell me questionable content. You know, when I just want to listen to a show about nerdy Mac stuff. Right. And I realized that I didn't control that. And I wanted to get out of that situation. So set up my own and you know the the other piece

of this is like the thing i've noticed as i've really not been an active twitter user for a year or two now is that i did find other places you know the max sparky forums for the people who are in the labs are fun and safe the mpu forums where we keep our forum for the show, there people, there are good people and trying to be helpful. And we moderate it. And if somebody, uh, you know,

acts up, we drop the hammer on them. It's not really, there's not a very long line between doing something silly and getting kicked off. Same thing with the relay Slack and the relay, um, and the relay discord.

I mean, so i found little communities that are safe for me to go in that don't feel like eating three pounds of french fries when i leave them they make me feel better and um that's the kind of things maybe you should be looking for if you're frustrated with you know big social media stuff i just don't think you're missing much i I mean, that thing last night, I mean, I did, I totally didn't do that. I mean, I knew we were going to talk about this today on the show, but it's funny to me how I got caught up in that even aware, having worked on this outline, you know, uh, I still got caught up into it like 12 hours ago.

And it was very rare for me to do that. But this Disney CEO thing to me was like red meat. I couldn't help myself, but you know, it was so funny that so many of those tweets were just so stupid. And then some people try to make funny memes, which were, some of them were kind of funny, but really was it worth giving up an hour and a half of my life to see, you know, a funny picture of somebody. And even that like reveling and somebody getting fired, that's not healthy. That's not the way to live, you know? So, uh, uh, I just feel, you know, I kind of was ashamed afterwards. I almost didn't put in the outline today, but also, you know, we keep telling you guys we're bad at this stuff too. And obviously I was last night.

So I, you know, that i think it be intentional with your relationship with social media but you know also really question your motives for being there like if you think you need to be there for your business it's probably not true you know right if you want to be there be a place that you can share thoughts with your friends well how often do you actually do that on social media versus trolling other stuff or just following, you know, whatever's in the moment,

you know, you know, nobody really cares if you got Taylor Swift tickets, except a couple of friends, just open a text thread with them, you know? Yep. And recognize that the,

these platforms, the, the public ones are engineered to work against you. So you can't bring a knife to a gunfight here. You got to recognize what you're up against in terms of your attention. I highly recommend everybody go watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix. It's a couple years old at this point, but it's so good. And it talks about all these people who were involved in the creation of these social networks. The guy who invented the like button is part of the documentary.

And it's really eye-opening in terms of what is actually happening as you interact with these things. Again, not to say don't use it and they're pure evil. You can get some good from these things. I met a lot of my internet friends and heroes via Twitter. I think you and I probably interacted for the first time on Twitter. And I've had several opportunities that were open to me because of the use of Twitter, but it's always been intentional use. It hasn't just been randomly bumping into somebody. It's identifying, this is the type of people that I want to hang around with. And then really thinking about what can I do to contribute to the conversation? And even if you can't get there

initially, because your favorite creators specifically, I think that's where Twitter really has value still. People who are making things and want to be known for something. I follow a bunch of people who I like what they say. I know exactly what they're doing. They're talking about their PKMs and their second brains and all that kind of stuff. But I find it fascinating. And Twitter is a great place to aggregate all that stuff. but I find it fascinating. And Twitter is a great place to aggregate all that stuff. But also, that can be aspirational. Well, I want to contribute to that conversation. And Twitter is a great vehicle to do that. It doesn't matter if you've got 100 followers and somebody else has 10,000. If you write good stuff, if you make good stuff, you can get noticed on a platform like that. But just go into it with both eyes open and don't assume that you absolutely need it. I think you mentioned doing the test with Facebook. I would encourage people to do the same thing right now. If you're really thinking about leaving Twitter, don't replace it with something else. Just stop using it for 30 days. See how you

feel afterwards. See if you feel better. See if you feel worse. See if you really feel like you're, you're missing out. You probably have some of that FOMO at the beginning, but my guess is that after a period, you're, you're not going to miss it. Yeah. I've done that a lot of times in my life. Like I did that with sports. I really was spending too much time following sports and I just gave it up cold turkey and I found out I didn't miss it. You know, uh, I've done that with some video games with some video games. I think it's a good idea once in a while to think about something that you might want to just try throwing overboard for a while. But don't make a big deal about it. Just try it. Last piece of this I would say is if you do find a good use for any social media, Twitter included, go back to our last segment and try and time box it.

Try and say, okay, well, Twitter actually is useful for me and my business. I want to spend time there. Give it a half hour a day. Put some time on your calendar and just remind yourself that after that, then you're not doing it. Try it that way. And that might be the balance that works for you. So you get the advantage of it, whatever that is. And you also get to make things and you don't spend all your day in Twitter. Agreed. Now, the other bit of all of this thing with Twitter that I wanted to mention is this email that Elon sent to his employees. And the first thing he did, he came in, it was, he fired like half the workforce.

And if, uh, you know, the people who know about this stuff are to be believed twitter had too many employees that was one of the reasons they weren't making as much money and with companies that are based on information technology um the labor is the biggest expense so he immediately fired half and then he started like further culling the herd, I guess, for lack of a better term. And he sent this email to them. I'm not going to read the whole email. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. But basically said, you know, we're going to rebuild Twitter and it's going to be really hard and it's going to require you to work long hours.

And, you know, only the best. I can only accept the best. And you're going to be, I remember the term hardcore, it's going to be hardcore. And now I need you to commit at the bottom of the emails, a button. It's like the, it's like on the, um, the matrix, you know, where you take the pill, you know, but there's a button that says, take, push the button to commit to working long hours and hardcore, or don't push the button and you're fired and you get a severance. You know, which really triggered me. I read that.

I never really had much of an opinion of Elon Musk. I never really thought about him much, to be honest with you. I was thinking, what a jerk. I mean, who does that to your employees? You know, and now since reading it, I've kind of researched it further. And, you know, you've always got people that work for you that are true believers, but you've also got people, especially in the technology industry, that are on work visas, that if they don't keep the job, they get deported. You've got people who have a wife and kids or a husband and kids and a house and a mortgage and a car payment and really need

this job. And this email is more abusive than a confirmation for true believers. And I guess karma paid him back. As I understand the news, he lost something like 1200 employees with that email. And my guess would be the people who could afford to say no said no and often that's some of your best people right especially in silicon valley if you're really good at something and your boss tells you hey um i need you to give up on your kids and your spouse and your life and just be a slave to me and you know that you can go down the street and get a job at another company for the same or maybe even better money, where they don't expect you to give up your whole life,

I feel like the best people are probably going to hit the eject button there. It's the people who are stuck who have to stay. And I'm not sure you end up with the best people at the end of that. And the people that do stay, it just wreaks such a tremendous cost. And I wanted to spend a minute talking about on this show because we talk about focus and a lot of it is, a side piece of this is productivity. How are you more productive? Well, I believe it's by being focused and intentional with your time. But there's an alternate narrative here where you're more productive by spending all of your

time working. And we've talked around it, but we've never talked directly to it. Yeah. So you definitely can't, I would argue, if Elon's trying to get the most production out of his employees, and this is a terrible way to do it, I agree with you that this is not the right approach on a lot of different levels. Interesting to me, though, because I also just finished reading Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday. And this isn't exactly what you're talking about, but he mentions the hustle culture a little bit. And I think my mind is being turned a little bit here because we vilify that so much. I don't want to take us in a completely different direction here. So Ryan Holiday talks about how hustle is essential.

And it's not the Gary V style hustle, but you do want to put forth your best effort. You want to try your hardest and you can never tell when a little bit of hustle is going to make the difference. But he also is very clear that the very next chapter after that is slow down to go faster. Hustling isn't always about hurrying. It's about getting things done properly. And he mentions the term festina lente, make haste slowly, right? Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. So there's also that side of it. But I wanted to bring it up here because it's easy to focus on that term hardcore and I think instantly go to the whole idea of hustle culture. And I think there is a fine line here, which obviously this email is crossing. I'm not trying to justify this in any way, shape or form.

But as it pertains to people who are listening to the show and what do you do with this sort of thing? I think, yeah, you recognize that you can't just keep filling in the time blocks with additional jobs to do. You're going to burn yourself out that way. jobs to do, you're going to burn yourself out that way. But also, don't be scared to try some things and figure out where those limits are. I think there's danger in going too far the other way while I have to protect my energy, right? You want to do that, but you also want to be able to expend it. You want to see what you're actually capable of. That's the whole idea behind

flow is when you're stretched beyond your limits a little bit, that's when you find that you do some pretty amazing things. You just got to not go too far into the crazy. I read that book too, and I felt like the make haste slowly bit really landed with me. In fact, I was looking up that Latin term before you mentioned it because I had written it down. But this has been a common theme in my life. The people, the craftsmen I meet, the work I do, it really is a form of being in flow. When you are intentional but working swiftly that that's a total thing. But I want to get back to kind of this whole idea of this commitment to work in an unnatural way. And this idea that you can just give up the rest of your life and work hard. I think, you know, first of all, the narrative is,

well, this is a Silicon Valley thing. That's not true. There's a bunch of people listening to this show who have never been in California or dealing with the same thing. When I had my first child, I was in the hospital and my boss called me with, you know, my wife had just had a C-section. I knew I was going to be, you know, taking care of the baby for a couple of weeks while she recovered from a surgery. And boss called me like the next morning, you know, and I'm sitting there holding a baby and he's telling me, um, the stuff he needs me to do. And he, he says, well, I'm just going to FedEx you the work. This is before the internet really. Um, this is like 96. And while I was FedEx the work to you and I'm like, okay, okay. do that boss. You know, I was, I was one of those,

you know, button pushing idiots, you know, and because I did not want to lose my job, just had a new baby. Right. And they, they tell me they're going to FedEx me the work to do while I'm trying to take care of my baby and take care of my wife. Who's just had a surgery. I just going to find a way to do it, you know, and I look back at now, you know, some almost 30 years later, 26 years later, and I am embarrassed about it. And to think all of the times that I said okay to demands like that, and my family paid the price. you know, I just think I wanted to mention it on the show because this is another thing where I have failed and looking back I understand how you get caught in those types of cultures, but with a little bit of gray hair and wisdom, I would recommend that you run from a situation. Correct. I have my own version of, of that story. I wasn't a lawyer, obviously, but working with a family business. And so the expectations and probably my relationship with my boss, who happened to

be my dad at that point, is totally different than the one that you had. But I still felt the pressure to acquiesce to the request, essentially. My wife had a couple of births that were a little bit complicated. One of our kids was born with a hole in his heart, which has since filled in, and he's totally fine. Another one, she was dealing with back labor and just a really difficult pregnancy, wasn't sleeping at all the whole week before we had our child. So she was needing me to be home and help out with things. And I had planned to take, you know, well, at one point it was a week off, a separate instance, it was two weeks off, both times, got a call pretty much two days after, like basically the day we come back from the hospital,

hey, I need you to do this. And I feel the pressure that I've got to make it work. I feel like that whole interaction is a large reason why I don't work with the family business anymore. I just had trouble redefining the expectations there. And so I removed myself from the situation, but you could argue the healthier thing to do would have been just to talk it through, right? But it wasn't just my dad. It was the culture of the family business. And I get it. Sometimes you have a business where you do need things to be responded to right away.

But I eventually came to the point where I realized I don't want to be associated with that. I don't want my livelihood to depend on that because it's having an impact in the lives of the people who mean the most to me. And it's not good. So what can I do to change this? Yeah. I mean, it's shocking to me how fast years go. And older folk will tell you that you're never going to get those opportunities back. And if you,

and my advice would be, if you find yourself in a culture like that, don't like throw a hissy fit and, you know, tell the boss he's a jerk and quit publicly and all that said, just start looking for your options and find a way to get yourself into a better situation, you know, which I honestly, in hindsight is part of the things I did and it took me a long time, but I eventually figured it out and, um, just don't think that's okay. And, uh, I don't really have a whole lot more to say to that. I, I guess to go back to your point about, you know, are we too mean to the hustle? I honestly don't think we are. I think the hustle was glorified so much that we aren't done you

know tearing the hustle down yet because in honesty it doesn't really work um and there are times you may need to work harder than other times and that's okay but hustle culture which is really the thing we're fighting here is the idea that that's always the case. And all people are doing is wasting their lives in that, in that environment, you know, before you know it, you are going to be worm food. You know, none of us are getting out of this alive. And if you want to spend your precious years on this planet, trying to make somebody else rich, go for it. But if you're listening to this show, I think you're smarter than that. Yeah. Well, that's, that's the thing is it's always applied to work, right? Work is the thing that gets optimized for. So as it pertains to the hustle culture stuff, what if you hustled in,

in the arena of building an awesome family life? You know, there's ways to do that and you can flip the script there, but it's important that you identify what are your priorities and what are you optimizing for? I don't think it's, I think the big thing are a Twitter employee who is dealing with Elon Musk currently, you're someone like me who is working in a family business. The approach has to be the same. You got to stick up for yourself and you got to be willing to say no. And I think that's scary for a lot of people. But I also think once you do it, we build up this scenario in our head where once we do that, everything is going to fall apart. And that's not usually the case. I mean, even with the Elon stuff, he's fired people and then had to ask them to come back,

right? So you could just say no. And if you are a valuable contributor and you work at a decent organization for decent people, they'll recognize that, you know, and they'll work with you to figure out a win-win situation there. But that's never a comfortable conversation to start. But unless you do it, no one else is going to stand up for what is important to you. Yeah. And, you know, but the trick is, you know, to be an advocate for yourself and find your own escape hatches. Like I'm not sure writing Elon replying to the email

and saying, Hey, I've got a new baby and I'm going to give you 40 harder, hardcore hours a week. You know, I'm not sure you would, I'm pretty sure the way that email is written, you are going to be getting your severance package in response to that. But that's okay. Probably. That's okay because that's not the only company you have to work for. And it's okay. But if you take control, somebody is going to control your life if you don't.

So it might as well be you. And I just feel like this thing kind of triggered me. I think it reminded me of the whole thing with the baby. And I totally understand people receiving that email and feeling like they're trapped into it. I mean, think about the people on the visas are like, I, if I don't push this button, I'm getting shipped to a different country. I mean, this, I mean, come on, man. Yep.

But either way, I, uh, I think this is something that we should all be, what was it? Forewarned is forearmed. How's that? I like it.

Yeah. I think that's the thing is you want to control the options, right? You want other possibilities. And, uh, when it comes to work specifically, no one else is going to create those other options for you. Your boss is obviously not going to be doing that. So take control of whatever you can take control of. And look to set your own boundaries.

Determine for yourself where your limits are. Somebody said one time that if you allow others to define your world, they will always make it too small. And I think that is 100% true. Today on Deep Focus, Mike and I are going to talk about just that idea of focus and avoiding the hardcore during the holidays as we're heading into December here. How are we all going to be productive and get some work done with focus, but also bring some of that focus over to our family and our friends. And Mike and I have some thoughts on that.

So we'll talk about that in deep focus. We want to thank our sponsor Squarespace for all their support. You can find us at relay.fm slash focus, and you can find those forums at talkmacpowerusers.com. We've got our very own room there for the Focus podcast. We'll see you next time.