Focused - 173: Life Has Lifed You, with Mark Metzger

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Business lawyer Mark Metzger joins David to talk about false urgency, the power of having a coach, and getting back on the wagon when life happens.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks. Mike Schmitz couldn't be here this week, but I am joined with my friend Mark Metzger. Welcome to Focus, Mark. Thanks, David. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. somebody who's out there in the weeds trying to stay focused and get work done. And you were on the top of my list for this. Mark and I have been friends over a decade now, I would think. It might even be two. Yeah. Mark is a business lawyer in Chicago who's very connected to the ideas of productivity and focus. In addition to running a successful practice, he also is a coach. He helps other lawyers work through these problems. And we're going to be talking about that today. But if you're not a lawyer, don't turn the dial. The stuff Mark has to talk about really applies to

anybody. And I'm just really looking forward to sitting down with you and kind of working through some of this, Mark. Well, I'm really excited to talk about this too. And resonating in my head is literally this morning, I finished listening to you and Mike's most recent episode talking about journaling. And I think that fits beautifully into a lot of this stuff. And there's so much to explore. I'm excited for the discussion. I guess let's just pick up from last week. Do you journal? You know, I do on and off. I'm the ultimate fits and starts guy on that. And I so desperately want to have a regular journaling habit. And I live the journey that you and Mike described. I did the fancy pen and paper

route because I thought that would be the ticket. And I thought day one would be the ticket. And it just seems like no matter what tool I choose or what approach I choose, eventually life life's me. And before I know it, I look up and it's been three months since I did a journal entry. Yeah. It is really easy to fall off that wagon. I am just, it's funny cause we were recording this at 8 AM and I got up today at six and I had plenty of time to journal between then and now. But, you know, life happened, and I didn't. And I was just thinking as I got on the call today,

I was like, ah, I didn't journal yet. And, like, if I don't do it immediately after we get done recording today, like if we get to noon, I'm in serious trouble in terms of the journal habit for today. Well, let me ask you a question on behalf of all your listeners, Dave, because we know that you are a big fan of meditation, as am I. And you, I suspect, know, as I and other meditators have discovered, on days that for whatever reason life has lifed you and it's getting away from you and you postpone the sit, you notice that later in the

day that you haven't done it. The fact that you haven't recharged that battery becomes noticeable. Yeah, totally. Do you notice that with your journaling? If you haven't journaled, do you feel the pull that there's something unfinished and unsatisfied that I need to get back to? No. No, I don't. I find the meditation takes precedence. But if I don't journal, I feel like I miss out on some insight that could be helpful for me. But the meditation, it is like that.

Did you ever see that show Lost? You remember that show Lost? And they had the computer where the guy had to go and type in like six numbers every eight hours when the world ended. Yep. That's kind of like me in the meditation practice. I got a bunch like six numbers every eight hours with the world ended yep that's kind of like me in the meditation practice i got a bunch in the numbers man every day but but you know and it is funny and this is kind of as we did our prep call i think this is going

to be a theme today it's it's the times when you need it the most when you find excuses not to do it um i i remember distinctly a few years ago we one of my close relatives got really sick and was in intensive care. And I stopped meditating because I spent all my time driving to the hospital sitting by her side. And then after like four or five days, I was frazzled. And I'm like, oh, you know what it is? And so I literally sat in the hospital and meditated for like an hour next to her. And I think they thought I was praying or something. I don't know what happened.

But they left me alone. And it really helped center me. Whereas journaling doesn't have that much of a negative effect on me. But when I do it, I get a positive effect from it. Well, there is that. But I'm thinking back to that Russell Simmons quote that makes me laugh, Thinking back to that Russell Simmons quote that makes me laugh, where apparently some young rapper was discussing meditation with Russell Simmons. And he says, man, I don't have time to sit still for 20 minutes.

And Russell's response was, if you don't have 20 minutes, then you need like two hours. Yeah, yeah. And it really is a, you know, Chris Bailey, who was on the show a month or two ago, talks about it in terms of a productivity hack. Like it actually is a net gain. You know, doing meditation for 20 minutes means that the next six hours are going to be more productive. You're actually getting time. You're not only getting the 20 minutes back, you're probably getting more overall. Oh, I completely agree. And that's definitely my experience. Now, some people will be listening to this saying,

oh, you crazy hippies. But Mark is in Chicago, home of sausage and steak and deep-dish pizza. That's right. I'm a doughy Midwesterner for crying out loud. Yeah. But I really do think it works. But the trouble is it doesn't work the first day. And I think that gets people. Well, this isn't even on the outline, Mark, but when did you start meditating? I didn't know you were a meditator. Um, you know, I'm not sure I could pin down the exact day. I can tell you how I got there, which was, I, um, read Dan Harris's book, 10% happier. Yeah. And I was actually hooked on the book from the first line of the introduction, which, um, your editor may need to bleep this,

but this is the actual line from the introduction that Dan Harris wrote. It says, I wanted to call this book, The Voice in My Head is an A**hole, but the publisher wouldn't let me. So the degree of irreverence that he showed in that kind of was attractive to me from the get-go. But the book, if you're not familiar with it, tells the story of Dan Harris, the ABC journalist, who famously had a panic attack on air during Good Morning America. And he quickly, because his air supply was getting choked off, the anxiety had gotten to that level. And he, inside of two minutes, threw it back to Charlie Gibson, who recognized it was a problem, went to commercial, and then they all descended on the news desk to try to help Dan and get him back into a calm state. But the book tells the story of

how he came to meditation as a solution to a combination of anxiety and PTSD that he was suffering from, that he had self-medicated for a number of years with illegal substances. And that, of course, amplified all the problems and how he eventually came to meditation. But he got through the same way you just talked about it with me and for the listeners, which is to ridicule a little bit this idea of, oh, come on. I mean, how could that possibly help? That's a bunch of hippie woo-woo nonsense. And as I read the book, it just resonated for me because every time he would have an objection, the same objection was already in my head and then he would overcome the objection. So I got to the end of the book and I thought I should try this.

And it worked like every step of the way. So did you get a coach or did you just sit down? How did you get started? I started with the Headspace app and, uh, little Andy Pudicombe, the, uh, um, British accented monk doing guided meditations. And when Dan's company finally put out their own applicant app, uh, on the, on the iPhone, um, 10% Happier app. I've been using that one ever since. And it's just made a remarkable difference for me. Now, do you sit on the ground? Do you sit on a chair? I mean, what's your meditation position? Yes. I will do it any place, any time, in any condition, in any position. For me, it's about the practice, not about the procedure.

Yeah. We talked about it in the Max Varkey Labs and one of the listeners or members was saying, well, what about when I get stressed out in an airport? I'm like, you could do it in an airport. Just sit in your chair and just go to your happy place. You don't have to be wearing crimson robes and kneeling on a, you know, special Zafu pillow. You know, you can do it anywhere. In fact, I also like to do what the Buddhists call walking meditation, you know. And I do it with my dog walks sometimes, and the dog doesn't like me to meditate. She would rather I throw the ball.

But it just, you know, just. But it just depends on where I'm at and what I need. But I find it's a very easy way to recharge. In fact, I often think, because I've never been someone that got hung up on these digital distractions. I don't spend hours on Instagram or Facebook or whatever. And my meditation practice started in 92. And I feel like way before me. Yeah. But I feel like that, that life of meditation gave me armor against the age of digital distraction. I think that that's one of the key. I didn't realize it at the beginning, but as we've been doing the show and I've been

talking to people, the more I think about it, the more I think, you know, maybe I talk about it in a way, say, look, this stuff just doesn't bother me. Like when people tell me they have to delete apps from their phones and stuff, that's never been a problem. I just don't look at the app if I don't need it. But I think the meditation probably played a role in that. I don't know how nerdy you want to get on meditation, but there's two major flavors of it. There's insight meditation and there's meta.

And one of the things I've learned from the 10% Happier app is, and these are my words, not any actually learned person's description. The way it lands for me is when you do the meta meditation, for me, it feels like I'm enlarging the battery, or I guess maybe the better electronic term is capacitor. I'm enlarging the capacitor that allows me to absorb the irritations of daily life. And the more I do that, the more aggravation I can endure in a day without it really bothering me. And at some point, I exceed my capacity. And like any other person, I get irritated and annoyed and maybe even lash out. But the combination of doing insight meditation and periodically mixing in some meta meditation

seems to be providing, and there's papers I read on this that seem to imply that this is correct, seem to enlarge my capacity for handling the nonsense that life presents. Yeah. It doesn't make us perfect. It just makes us a little better. Do you do always narrated meditation or do you do meditation sessions with silence? I've done both. And which one I choose sometimes is a function of, in the 10% Happier app, what they often have are courses that I find to be really interesting. What some people would call a Dharma talk at the beginning to help you understand or think about some issue, challenge, or problem. And then there'll be a guided meditation to help reinforce that lesson. So I always, when I'm in one of those courses, I'll always do the guided meditations to go with it because it helps learn the technique

or the skill that's being taught. In some cases, the monkey brain is just all over the place. And for me, the guided meditation is that thing that brings me back because I just so rapidly get distracted by the train of distraction that shows up that I find myself often never, never land before I know it. And the just periodic break in the silence where somebody says,

and if your mind has wandered, bring it back to your breath and begin again. So when I know that I'm distractible, I'll do the guided meditation for sure. And when I feel like I'm in a pretty good place, I just do the quiet ones. And all it is, is one of them is a periodic gong. I think it's every two or three minutes. And the other one is whatever time you set it for just lets you know when you're done and that's it. Yeah. I would recommend for folks like you who got in through an app, which are almost always narrated, you know, guided, which is I think an excellent way to start though, though eventually do the silent meditations, even when you don't feel like you have it in you to do a silent one.

Um, like I think you, the term you use is often never, never land. When that happens and you're not, you know, you're not like, you're not having a good day and you're like, well, sometimes if you keep going to never, never land, addressing that, it builds a muscle that you wouldn't otherwise build. And I think it also gives you some insight sometimes. So I think guided meditations are great. I think you should continue to do them. But I would encourage you to not even, like, sometimes do a silent one, even when you don't feel like you're up to doing a silent one and see what

happens. Yeah. I'll try that. But that's not where you start. If anybody is listening and want to start, do the guided ones for like a month or two months until you're really comfortable with the process. You don't need to do it.

I mean, the way I learned there were no apps when I learned we got some training and then we went immediately into silent meditation. And the first, I remember my first 10 minuteminute silent meditation session, and it was horrible. It lasted an hour, right? It lasted 10 hours. I don't know. It was so hard.

But back then, that's just the way you did it. And then I did all-day retreats. So I got much better at it over time, and it got easier. But the only way you get better at it over time and it got easier, but the only way you get better at it is to do it. And if you get that crutch of always having someone guide you, I don't think you're, it's like, um, you're not getting to the, to the fourth gear of meditation. If you don't build that muscle, I'll, I'll accept that challenge. All right. Well, that wasn't in the outline, but is uh it is i think part of

the idea of focus i mean the i feel like the reason this show exists is because there's lots of good productivity advice we give it out on this show too but i think the underlying problem of this age is focus it's not productivity in fact in a lot of ways productivity is focus. It's not productivity. In fact, in a lot of ways, productivity is a way to avoid focus because it becomes its own little magic cookie, little escape. But in the world today, everybody is trying to steal your focus. The whole idea of Silicon Valley at this point is to sell your focus. They make a lot of money on it. They want you to watch their stuff and stay in their app. And everywhere you go, someone is trying to get you to pay attention to what's important to them and not what's important to you. So with that in mind, we are on this journey together to beat that. And I want to talk to you, Mark. What does focus mean to you? You know, for me, focus

is about where you're deliberately applying your attention. And the interesting thing is, I think you led into this beautifully. There are all kinds of opportunities at all moments of every day for other people who are clamoring for your attention and what they're really asking for is for your focus. So I think the concept, while focus itself is easily definable in terms of directing or maintaining your focus, that's where the challenge for me lies because there are so many invitations to give that focus to somebody else. And when I find that a day is not one that felt great to me, where I felt like I played whack-a-mole all day, or to use the language that we've just been using now, in days where I gave my focus to other people instead of applying it where I wanted it to go to make a difference on some things that were important to me, those are really irritating, uninspiring days. I mean, you really just feel like the day was left lacking and that you accomplished less than you were capable of and certainly less than you wanted to accomplish. And so I think for me, focus is a category devoted to how and when and how often I got to use my time and attention in a deliberate way instead of handing it over to others. Am I going to help make Mark Zuckerberg richer today,

or am I going to move the ball on something important to me? Sure. And another thing about focus is it's a finite resource. We don't have an unlimited amount of it in a day or in a lifetime. At some point, we are going to be put in a wooden box. And at that point, there's no focus left. So what do you want to accomplish while you're here? And the mechanism for that is the ability to stay focused and work on what's important to you. Totally agree. How do you hold on to your focus? I mean, you are a guy, I know from our friendship,

that you've got a bunch of people that work for you that have demands. You've got a bunch of clients. And I did that for 30 years. I get it. Clients are always pulling focus. And then you've got your coaching people that you work with. I mean, how do you hold on to your own focus? you're coaching people that you work with? I mean, how do you hold onto your own focus? Well, I think that for me, the answer is when it's working well, what tends to happen is I have decided in advance. And by in advance, I mean the evening before as part of a daily shutdown ritual. On a perfect day, I will identify what are the three most important things for me to finish or accomplish tomorrow. In a less than perfect day, but still pretty good day, I will make those decisions first thing in the morning as the day begins. But you may notice from the absence of it being mentioned,

I don't make those decisions after I have looked at email to see what other people would like me to do for the day. I make those decisions based on what's on my list of things to do or my intended priorities. And on a given day, I'll get well more than three things done. I think most of us probably do. But I know that if I get those three things done, I get to call the day a win at that point because I got done the things that I decided were most important to me to get done. And only when I have finished those, again, on a good day, only on a good day, I will have finished those things before I give into the temptation to go look at email, to check to see what phone call message slips have accumulated or whatever else

has come to me, whether it's FedEx or US Mail or whatever, which really is just other people asking for my attention and saying, do this one next, do this one next. And I constantly tell my coaching clients that they've got to turn off the email. I mean, I think email has somehow and weirdly become a thing unto itself. I mean, there's just people that think that doing email is an important task for the day, and I'm not one of those people. To me, email is simply a different method of delivering things that other people wish

for you to use your time and attention on. In the beginning of your and my legal careers, most things would arrive in the U.S. mail. And then what most of us were taught by more senior attorneys that were training us was you let that thing sit for a day or so after you think you know what you want to say, or if you've already dictated a response, you let the response sit there for a day and make sure that emotions and other things did not get the better of you. And then you send it out. And two or three days later, they get it back in the mail.

And they do the same. And that set the pace of communication. And then faxes came along. And lawyers were addicted to faxes. They'd write these letters. And instead of mailing them and getting three days, you'd get it as a really crummy, fuzzy representation of the letter that would come three days before the original would come in the mail because for some reason, we always had to do that too. And it would get there a lot more quickly because it would come

in less than three days. And so that started to speed up the pace of communication. And then some of us got addicted to FedEx because it absolutely positively did need to be there overnight. And so it was, and it went. And that compressed the time period. And I think what happened is somewhere along the line, most people gave into the idea that because it was easy and fast to send an email, the response should come just as fast. And I think that's what set most of us up to start failing. Yeah. I've told this story on the show, but I remember I had this one abusive attorney. I was opposing counsel on a case I was working on who would send me multiple emails a day and it was just getting ridiculous. And at one point he sent me one on a Sunday night at 10 PM and I rerouted the email to

my secretary. So anything that came from him went to her. My instruction to her was, collect it for three days. Don't show it to me for three days. I will dictate a letter back to him, and then we'll send it with a stamp. And it worked. It worked. When I started doing that, eventually it stopped because he realized that when he did that to me, he did not get the cookie of me immediately responding.

And after a while, he just stopped doing that because I kind of trained him. But yeah, as lawyers, I think that's the really thing. And then it went from FedEx to email. Then the email, at the end of my practice, I had a bunch of clients and people saying, well, just give me your phone number and I'll text you. I'm like, no, you're not going to do that. I'm not going to be texting you about this case. So just forget about that. But I do think in the law, it's very tempting to get pulled into a false urgency. Boy, you said a lot right there. False urgency is everything.

into a false urgency. Boy, you said a lot right there. False urgency is everything. This episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com slash focus and make your next move and enter offer code focused at checkout to get 10% off of your first purchase. It seems like every six months or so, we learned that putting our stuff on somebody else's platform is a bad idea. You really should own your presence on the internet, and the best way to do that is with Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. With Squarespace, you can build a beautiful website and engage your audience and sell pretty much anything, products, services, and even content you create. So much of what I've done on the internet started with Squarespace. With Squarespace, you can use insights to grow your business. If you've ever wondered where your site visits and sales are coming from and which channels are most effective,

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and start them on a journey to become loyal customers? Just start with an email template and customize it by applying your brand ingredients like site colors and logo plus built-in analytics measure the impact of every send between myself and my family. I can think of six different Squarespace websites that we've directly used. We've also recommended it to a bunch of friends and it's such an easy recommend because when you set somebody up on Squarespace, you're empowering them to run their own beautiful website. You don't have to make them dependent on a developer. I think anybody

getting started should use Squarespace, but it can really grow with you and your business. So head to squarespace.com slash focused for a free trial with no credit card required. And when you're ready to launch, use that offer code focused F O C U S E D to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Once again, that is squarespace.com slash focused. And when you decide to sign up, use that offer code focus to get that 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for the podcast and our thanks to Squarespace for their support of the focused podcast and all of RelayFM. All right, Mark, before the break, I threw a piece of red meat to your feet called false urgency. Boy, and I jumped right at it too. Yeah. I know this is a thing you deal with a lot,

not only in your own practice, but your coaching and your clients. How do you want to start this? I feel like the Eisenhower matrix is a good place to kind of frame this, but where do you want to go with this? I think that's a tremendous place to start because it gives us the vocabulary to have the rest of the discussion. All right. So for people who are not familiar with this, and the Eisenhower matrix, I believe Dwight Eisenhower came up with it, or maybe we just call it that. I don't know the actual history behind it, but imagine a grid of four items, two by two. And if you already know this, feel free top is a importance column. And next to that is an urgency column, I guess you would say. So you can have things that are important, but urgent. Or you can have things, and that would be like A1. Then A2, the next one over to the right, would be important but not urgent.

And then below that, we'd have B1, which is urgent but not important. And then B2 would be not important, not urgent. That's actually quite hard to do, to describe verbally. I realized halfway through that conversation. But so you've got a matrix where you can take any task and say, is this important? Is this urgent? And then you can locate it on that matrix and then kind of decide what you're going to do with it. Yeah. I, you know, I think the most important thing that everybody should to take away from that is that last block, the lower right block, anything that is neither important nor urgent, I think we should all immediately agree, are things you should not be devoting your time and attention to

unless everything else in your life that is either urgent or important has already been addressed. And for most of you, my guess is you'll never get there. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes that is stuff that is not important or urgent, but it still needs to get done. And that's great stuff to look at in delegation, automation, or just getting it to where it's not your problem. But I do think the problem that I feel like the modern world has created with respect to the Eisenhower matrix, and I talked about this. I did a session in Sean Blanc's focus course about this. But I feel like the matrix has been turned into a line where people now equate urgency with importance. And I think it's partly because of what we talked about in the last segment

about how communications is so fast and everything moves so fast now that when something becomes urgent, you just assume that it's important. And it's very easy to fall into that trap to turn a four box grid into a line where on one side you have urgent equals important. And on the other side, you have not urgent equals not important. And both of those are a lie. I think that's a really nice metaphor. The idea that, that, that grid really gets turned into a line instead of a matrix. You know, the other way that I think that's a really nice metaphor, the idea that that grid really gets turned into a line instead of a matrix. The other way that I think that helps some people think about this is to say that somewhere along the line, we have decided that urgency outranks importance. Yeah.

ostensibly President Eisenhower, who promote this thought process of asking yourself, is this urgent or important, yes or no on each of those? And so you end up with things that are both urgent and important, or just important but not urgent, or just urgent but not important. I think what those people would say is that there's a reason that we identify both urgency and importance in this matrix. And one of the critical reasons that we have to pay attention to the difference is things which are important are things that have long range benefits, or in some cases, consequence avoidance, because we did the small tasks along the way that were important to do, even though they were not urgent. And most of the people that have written about this, including Covey, have pointed out that the most difficult challenge, if you look at this as a matrix, is to make sure that you are doing the things that are important but not urgent before you do the things that are urgent but not important. And there's all kinds of reasons that we gravitate toward doing the things that are urgent. Just the other day, you mentioned our prep call. I told you I read an article that morning that there's some new psychological research that's out that implies that one of the reasons that we elevate urgency over importance is we get a dopamine hit from resolving

something that felt urgent. We feel satisfied and, well, as I said, you get the dopamine hit. There's nothing better in life than a good dopamine hit, especially if you want to reinforce behavior. And so our brain is, in some cases, tricking us into pursuing things that are urgent, mostly because we haven't taught our brain that we're entitled to a dopamine hit when we do something important because there's a long-term consequence. It's the short-term win versus the long-term win phenomenon where a lot of long-term wins either never get realized or never get pursued simply because there wasn't an immediate reward. And the delayed gratification causes us to underscore the value of things that are important but not urgent. And it's possible,

apparently, to retrain yourself to recognize that when you've done something important that that's worthy of celebration and reinforces the idea that you're entitled to a dopamine hit then. Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons why the idea of a shutdown or a planning where you say, I have three big things I'm going to do tomorrow. That is so important because it does help you kind of celebrate the important and not the urgent right and if you can build that muscle you uh you are you're bucks ahead and i really think that it's a difficult muscle to build because genetically uh we are these ancient brains that were on the you know out on the veldt and worried about getting eaten by lions. And, you know, the urgent was important when you're out there trying to stay alive, right? But, you know, the short time

is all that really mattered to somebody who's wandering with a group of nomads and trying to not get eaten by lions. So it's really deeply embedded in us, but it is completely the wrong priority or the wrong instinct for the modern world. one that I'm sure you would appreciate, which was, I said, you know, you have to back up your computer. It's irresponsible not to do that, but you're not going to get a dopamine hit from doing that. There's, you know, nobody's going to pat you on the back saying, good job, you backed up your computer. But if you did it and you've lost a file or a hard drive or had a crash, you're going to get to recover in minutes instead of days or weeks, if ever. And the fact that you did the important task, even though it wasn't urgent, will have its payoff at that moment in time. And he paused in the middle of that description. He

said, I can see that. And he said, now for the first time, I understand what you're saying about making sure you're doing the important things before you give in to mere urgency. And, and, you know, I think that there's another part of, you know, I like to use the phrase urgency addiction because it, to me, it gets back to that whole idea of the dopamine hits and, and explains why we have this preference. But I, I think that, that there's this, I guess the phrase I want to use is, there's a way that I think we can motivate ourselves to try to elevate importance over urgency. And the way I like to do that is to say, for me, the biggest temptation here is always email, right? Yeah. Because there's always somebody who's emailing you.

Because there's always somebody who's emailing you. And email really just boils down to, I'm the most recent person to try to capture your attention. And my preference is that you do the thing I would like you to do before you do any of the other things in your life that you wish to do. It's a request for time and attention. And it's just a delivery vehicle. It's no different than a FedEx envelope or a fax. It's a delivery vehicle. It's no different than a FedEx envelope or a fax. It's a delivery vehicle for a request. I remember once I was on vacation and I had told my clients, I'm going on vacation. If there's something urgent, let me know.

But otherwise, I'll deal with when I get back. And I'm sitting there on the beach in Hawaii and some client calls me. And he's like, well, you know, hey, I know you're on vacation. But my wife and I were talking and we're thinking about maybe doing some succession planning and we're wondering if you could sit down and talk to us about it. And I'm like, okay, well, I'll be back in two weeks. He's like, well, how about tomorrow? I know you're on vacation, but how about tomorrow? And the world is constantly doing that to us.

And I think the only way to respond to it is to push back. Like in that case, I told the client, I said, well, I'm on vacation, so I'm not going to do it tomorrow, but I'll do it with you in two weeks. And if I got back from vacation and he went and found another lawyer, you know, God bless him. You know, that's fine with me. And, but I'm just not going to let people do that to us. And the problem is so often it's not another person doing it. It's actually our own selves doing it to ourselves. Exactly right. Because you've given the permission.

Yeah. And you know what I often say, particularly to litigator-type lawyers, is if you give into the notion that you have to have your email open at all times and that you need to respond instantly to whatever has been most recently emailed to you, what you're really doing is deliberately making yourself the puppet of whoever emailed you most recently. And that phrasing usually gets under the skin of those kinds of people in a way that allows me to get their attention. Because the last thing they want to be is accused of deliberately becoming someone else's puppet by choice. Yeah. Well, opposing counsel can manipulate you. Going back

to my earlier story, if I had dropped everything every time that Bozo sent me an email, I would not be moving the ball forward on my client's case. I would be in reaction mode to him 100% of the time. Well, that's just the thing. And even if it's not the bozo lawyer, even if it's just the client who's saying, hey, I'd like you to respond to me immediately on this new thing I just thought of, I'm sure they would like you to respond to them as quickly as possible.

But the thing is, they don't know what other commitments or obligations or things potentially of greater urgency or greater importance are lurking on your calendar or in your life. And so I think that at some level, it's also completely wrong to simply delegate to them the decision of what you will do next based solely on the idea that they were the most recent person to contact you.

Yeah. And I used to have a speech I would give clients related to that, particularly when I was litigating and in trial. And I would say, look, I'm in trial right now. And that means I'm giving 100% of myself to this one client and I can't help you right now. But what I will promise you is that one day when you're in trial and you need me, I will be there for you 100% and nobody else. So you're just going to be patient with me now, but one day it'll be your turn. And that actually really resonated well with clients. Yeah. I started my legal career in doing litigation and we used to say a similar thing to our clients as well. And it does work. They do understand. The issue in many cases really boils down to the simple notion that there's only one

legal case that any particular client is particularly concerned about, and that's theirs. And they often have no perception of the fact that others are in the same position and that your time needs to be divided and sorted. And they don't understand the relative obligations or commitments that exist there. In my experience, most clients, both in the law and outside the law, are willing to be told that I can't do this now, but I can get back to you day after tomorrow. For most people, that's just fine. On a rare occasion, you'll hear somebody say, it won't wait that long. It won't wait that long. So getting back to the Eisenhower matrix turned into the Eisenhower line, if somebody out there listening is thinking, you know what? I think I have turned it into a line. I am equating urgency with importance and non-urgency with non-importance, which is not true.

How do you tell them to get past that? What's your advice to somebody who's struggling with that right now? Well, I think that I would have them go through the list of things that, whether they're using a to-do list or they've got some tool that's tracking their tasks and commitments and so forth, and have them score everything that they've just recently done and everything that's yet to be done in the next short window of time in terms of both urgency and importance and have them look back at what they've done because there's a lesson in the decisions that they're making. So for example, if they discover, as I suspect will often be the case, that if they're in the

situation of your hypothetical, they're in a mode where on reflection, they're realizing they've been elevating urgency over importance. They're going to see that reflected in their decisions, which leads to a discussion about why are you doing that and why, if you acknowledge that these other things are in fact more important, why did you choose to do those first? And that it allows them to get in touch with the fact that they're addicted to urgency. And they did so only because it felt better to do the urgent thing first. So if you call, if you call that out, if you, if you name the thing you're trying to tame, it's a lot easier to gain control over it. So that's, I think strategy number one, reflect back

on what you did and what worked and what didn't and why. And there's a lesson waiting for you almost every time. Yeah. I mean, so often just documenting and looking at it after the fact can really help open your eyes. The other thing I would say is I think there are different kinds of urgency. And I would go to the next step and say, not only look at what's urgent,

but look at the source of urgency. Like some stuff is urgent because one of your customer calls you with an emergency that you had no idea was going to happen. Other stuff is urgent because it was earlier not urgent, but you just didn't do it. And that stuff in particular, if you have a

lot of stuff that's urgent because you didn't do it when it was not urgent, that feeds into what Mark calls the urgency addiction. And I think that, you know, like whenever somebody tells me, oh, just give me a deadline. I'm really good on a deadline. And I always think, oh, okay. So they're using, you know, the urgency cookie to get work done and they're just going to sit on it until the last minute. And I feel like that is a warning sign. No question. It means that they're giving up on all, all of what's important.

And eventually they're going to experience the professional work equivalent of an earthquake. the professional work equivalent of an earthquake. This episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by clean my Mac X, go to clean my Mac X slash focus to make your Mac as good as new and get 5% off, man. Do I love this app? Clean my Mac X is a constant companion for me on my Mac. It takes care of all the maintenance tasks. So I don't have to, the Mac is a crucial tool for your work and your focus and on my Mac. It takes care of all the maintenance tasks so I don't have to. The Mac is a crucial tool for your work and your focus, and CleanMyMac X, developed by MacPaw, pursues the mission to help your machines help you. CleanMyMac X is an ideal decluttering app

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I read this in one of the Ryan Holiday books. I don't remember which one at this point, but the day he got inaugurated as president, he went to the White House. The butler brought him a tray full of envelopes with his mail, his first delivery of mail as a president. And he said, wait, you need to understand that this will never happen

again. I never expect to receive mail in envelopes again. I expect someone to open the mail, go through the mail, bring me only that which needs my attention. And it was like an expectation setting. And when I heard that story, I was like, yes, I need to adopt that in my life. Anytime somebody brings me something, I need to think of, well, how could they have done better to help me? But a lot of people listening, myself included, have this gut feeling against getting help. Sometimes it's like, I don't want to spend the money. Sometimes it's, I don't want to train them.

Or sometimes it's like, only I can do this. And I know this is something that you work a lot with your clients or your coaching subjects on because lawyers are probably the worst at not getting help. If somebody is out there and needs help, Mark, what are you going to tell them? Well, I think there's a lot of different ways you could get into that discussion. But I think one of the things that's important for everybody to realize that hasn't owned up to the idea yet is if you were going to solve the problem of marshalling and taking control of your own attention, you would already have done it. So one of the most important reasons to ask for help or to go buy help or read books or try to figure out some way out of the mess that you put yourself in is – it's back to – Eisenhower quotes are great, by the way, and those stories are always fun.

I love the old Einstein quote that says, doing things the same way and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. If you were going to figure out how to get control of your time or your focus or your energy or your attention, you would already have done it. By definition, if you're in that boat, you need some other help, some other resource. Now, whether that's more knowledge so that you can learn to think in a different way and read a book to get there or listen to a podcast to help you get there or learn to meditate to help you get there or pursue a coaching relationship so that somebody can stand alongside you and point out what's working and what's not and help get you

back on track. Some outside input is clearly going to be necessary. Otherwise, you're going to keep doing what you've been doing, which means you'll keep getting what you get. Yeah, I like that quote too from Einstein. So let's break that down though. What are the reasons people give you that they can't get help? You know, I think that they're varied. So one type of answer to that is sadly unique to attorneys. And that is in most cases, lawyers are really fast conceptual learners. And one of the things

they taught us to do in law school was to learn to master forest and trees analyses very, very quickly so that we could understand the way systems or processes work or where a sequence of cause and effect things work. So you can quickly triage and diagnose either weaknesses to be exploited or weaknesses to eliminate in order to provide for better protection for your client. And one of the sicknesses that comes along with that, and that's my word, it's not really a term of art, is that it's pretty easy to persuade ourselves that if it was possible to solve this problem, I would have already done it because I'm the smartest person in the room.

Yeah, a lot of lawyers think that. So step one is often asking people to get in touch with the idea that maybe there's a solution out there that you didn't think of, and to help gently show them that. I think that works really, really well. I also think that explaining to people that you had a version of this problem before, you had a less severe version of it now than you used to have, helps humanize you to them so that they can recognize that this isn't a failing on their part, but rather it's a normal part of the process of mastering time and attention delivery. So I think some of it is about getting out of your own way. When I work with my own coach, I've often said over the years that I feel like at the end of a great coaching session, I feel like I'm a racehorse that has had some

blinders removed. And I suddenly realized there are things I'm capable of seeing on the periphery that I had no idea that were there because I had the blinders on. And for me, the comical reveal is there are always more blinders to remove. There are always things that you have tunnel vision on. And one of the great things about getting help from somebody else in whatever form, whether it's a book or a podcast or a lecture or a coaching relationship, is the best of those interactions will cause you to recognize yet another instance where you're trapped in a bit of tunnel vision and you're overlooking solutions and opportunities that exist simply because you don't see that they're there. Yeah, agreed. And it's so hard. It's

similar to the idea, the resistance to meditation, because you feel like it's a waste of time. Coaching relationships, peer relationships. I'm in a mastermind group of people who make stuff for the internet. And we have our week retreat coming up in a month. And there is a part of me, Mark, that hates the idea of doing this so much. I can't even explain the idea of not being producing for four days, but singing kumbaya with people who I know and love, and they're great people. And I had a moment like that last week. Like, oh, is there a way I could get out of this?

I would rather just work. And then I went and read my journal entries from last year after we did it. And I got so many blinders removed. I'm like, oh, this is crazy. This is so valuable to me. But I do think there's like a gut instinct part of us that doesn't want to do this stuff. Well, you'd probably resonate with our mutual friend, Victor Medina, loves to say that for him, a great coaching session feels like he leveled up.

And I think there's a whole lot of truth in that. to say that for him, a great coaching session feels like he leveled up. Sure. And I think there's a whole lot of truth in that. There's something to be said for other people can help you see things that you can't for yourselves. I mean, professional athletes have known this their entire career. I live in Chicago suburbs now. I grew up in Southern Illinois, but my whole professional life has been spent in the suburbs of Chicago. And time-wise, that included the time when people

named Jordan and Pippin and Rodman were playing basketball in Chicago. And that was a thing of absolute wonder to watch people that talented work together to accomplish what they did. It was a lot of fun to watch. But there came a day where I realized that as good as he was, Michael Jordan had multiple coaches to help him. He had a guy who did nothing but watch his free throw form and correct things. A guy that good had somebody coaching him. Progress in anything that involves changing what you're doing ultimately revolves around three steps. And this even includes research that's been done in improving business and professional practice performances, begins with a compelling reason. The reason the gyms are full of people on January 2 and empty by March 1 is because the people who thought it might be cool to feel a little better and look a little better didn't really have a compelling reason to be there.

And other things became more important over the course of the ensuing next 60 days. And the people who are still in the gym on March 2nd are the ones whose doctors told them, if you don't do this, you will die. And those people had a compelling reason and they're still there. So step one is you've got to get a compelling reason, which means that sometimes your motivation lies in making sure you understand why you're doing what you're doing or why you think you need to make a change or what improvement to your life or your output or whatever makes enduring change worthwhile.

The second step is to have a system of accountability, and that's where your mastermind group fits in. The second step is to have a system of accountability. And that's where your mastermind group fits in. One of the things that I suspect makes you folks successful is at the end of one of those meetings, you tell each other one or two or three of the things that you're going to work on before you get together again, right? Sure. Yeah.

Every week. And the last thing you want to do is go see those people next quarter and tell them, oh, I didn't do any of that stuff. Yeah. to do is go see those people next quarter and tell them, oh, I didn't do any of that stuff. The fact that you told them that this is what you're playing for has increased the odds that you will actually be motivated to do and complete that work as difficult as it may be and through as much change as you may otherwise resist, because it's part of your accountability. You told those other people you were going to do that and it propels you forward when you get stuck. That's why reading your journal broke you free.

I feel like for a lot of us, myself included, it is a lot easier to let myself down than somebody else. Oh, sure. So a hack for this is involve another person. And then the third step in making and perfecting change is coaching and direction, where somebody from the outside is able to constantly put you back on the track to where you're trying to go because they can see the places that you're off track that you can't. And it's like a virtuous circle. The coaching and direction helps you more fervently adhere to what you said you wanted to do. And the system of accountability helps give you there's that old saw that if an airplane leaves LAX and its direction is off by one-tenth of one degree, the plane will end up in North Carolina and not New York City. Yeah. So the coach's job is to constantly help you nudge the steering back to the correct direction because you're slowly going astray in a way that you don't even yet recognize. And the system of accountability is all about keeping you

moving. And those three things when they're present is how you can make sustainable, lasting change in anything you're trying to accomplish, whether it's a law practice or improving a business or improving a relationship or whatever. And I think there's a hidden piece under this too, which is that backwards reflection. You're getting that with your journaling. Some of the best improvement that I've ever seen in people comes from reflecting back on a daily or a weekly basis about what worked and why. The why is really important. And what didn't work and why. And it's through that reflection process, you get better at choosing weapons and strategies that have the outcomes and the effects that you're looking for. And over time, you just get better at it because you learn

to make better decisions. So what about the people out there listening who are like, you know what? Mark makes a good point. I should get a coach. How do they get started? Or what about the people who are like, I might want a coach, but I'm not sure. Well, I guess we've made that argument. But how do you get started in this stuff from the blind if you just don't even know where to start getting help? Well, you know, thankfully the internet's out there, right? And there are an awful lot of people out there and an awful lot of resources out there that are designed to have coaching of all sorts of different kinds and categories. I'm only half kidding when I say thankfully, the internet's out there because there's this pricing model that, for example, those meditation apps are all done

on a pricing model that I call the crack dealer model. The first week is free and then you pay after that. And there are a lot of coaching opportunities that are out there. Many, many coaches and programs that are available to help guide you and help you make progress will offer you a meeting or two at no charge or a meeting or two with money back guarantees so that you can try it out and make sure that you like these people and that you feel like this is going to work for you. So I guess my direct answer to your question here, David, is go find a couple and try them. Yeah. And I would add to that, be aware of snake oil, because I feel like there is a lot of snake oil on the internet too. And people selling themselves as coaches that just give you a bunch of platitudes. You want

somebody who really cares about you and coaches to your needs, to your course correction, not just a bunch of bullet points out of a book. Also, I would say, in addition to getting a coach, get a peer group. I mean, I resisted masterminds for years. Just the word mastermind gave me the willies. You know what I mean? What a terrible name. Like, we're all masterminds. Give me a break.

You know? But in fact, the group I'm- I think we can blame Napoleon Hill for the label, right? Yeah. Well, our group doesn't call ourselves a mastermind group, but I always refer to it once so people understand. our group doesn't call ourselves a mastermind group, but I always refer to it once. So people understand,

but we never use that word because we realized that all of us are, are deeply flawed humans and we're trying to figure it out together, which I, I almost feel like it's like fellow travelers, find some fellow travelers that can help, help you keep yourself accountable. My group meets once a week and it is, there's six.

Wow. I thought you were in a quarterly group. Weekly is really powerful. No, we do it every week. And we like, we added one person last year. And when we, we approached him, we said, just to be really clear, you're going to give us an hour a week, 52 hours a year. And if you're not comfortable with that, we don't want you to join because, you know, it's a rare exception that somebody misses and we really, we do hold each other accountable, but having a peer group really helps. And I think that's another way, but a coach, a peer group, don't try and

go on this journey by yourself. Well, you know, you can, the most recent research I read in the case of professional service businesses is that less than 2% of the people that don't use both a coach and a system of accountability are going to succeed. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by NetSuite. Being a business owner or working closely with business owners means knowing your numbers. If your business earns millions or maybe tens of millions in revenue, stop what you're doing and take a listen. Because NetSuite by Oracle just rolled out the best offer.

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That's netsuite.com slash focus to get the visibility and control you need to weather any storm. N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E dot com slash focus. And our thanks to NetSuite for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. All right, Mark, we have been on the mountain here for an hour talking about how to stay focused. But let's be real for a minute. When does this get hard for you? Where do you hit your roadblocks and how do you get past them? Well, I don't know anybody who has any type of business of any sort, whether it's a professional

practice or not, that doesn't periodically experience a wave of too much in the way of work that needs to happen in too short a period of time or for whatever confluence of events. There's a whole bunch of demands for your time and attention that just all coalesce. And if your personality makeup is that you want to try to help people or please people, you will periodically find yourself behind the eight ball of there is more demand for your time than there is time available to meet those demands. your time than there is time available to meet those demands. And for me, where it gets hardest to stay true to the path is when you're in one of those waves of there are just too many demands for my time and attention right now. And it becomes really easy to stop doing the important

things and give into the urgency. And boy, do you just pay a price for that later. and give into the urgency, and boy, do you just pay a price for that later. I still haven't figured out how to avoid in times of just complete duress and stress, giving into the urgency, even though I know that there's going to be a consequence on the other side. I still haven't figured out the ultimate path out of that. To a certain extent, hiring and training people and building systems in your business will easily help with that. But what most of us will from time to time say as a logical objection to that is, well, I don't yet have enough work to do to keep somebody else busy.

So I just have to suck it up and suffer until I get so much work available that I can't possibly do it all. And only by hiring somebody to do that extra work, can I possibly justify continuing to help other people or agree to be hired or sell more widgets or whatever. There's two elements there. You're talking about that. So the first one is avoiding the urgency problem by getting ahead of it, looking at things that could become urgent and cutting them off by getting help. But then there's also the secondary urgency where even though you have all the help in the world,

sometimes the proverbial you-know-what hits the fan. Right. Life has lifed you. Yeah. I think that's an accurate observation. And by the way, the solution to the first part of what you've, that first category you teased out is I think to reflect back after you're out of the worst of it to say what was working and why and what wasn't working and why and work on what you can to improve your ability to deal with the next time you run into one of those circumstances.

There's lessons in all of that. I mean, at the risk of getting too deep in the weeds on this, I mean, one of the lessons that I teach to people I coach early in our relationship is the importance of not letting the piles on their desk and floor and chairs and credenza and hallway leading to the office and everywhere else in their life, to not let those things get out of control. Because first of all, that just sentences you to permanent urgency addiction. But more importantly, every one of those things, every one of those pieces of paper or folders or whatever is a hidden lesson in what is currently missing that will allow you to have better control over your focus and attention. Everything that's parked on your desk is there for a reason. And sometimes that reason is your desk is serving as a to-do list.

serving as a to-do list. And I think, David, you would agree as a guy that loves to-do list software, perhaps more than any other category of software out there, that there are better tools for that than piles of paper on your desk, right? Yeah. And in fact, I feel like that really over time became a leading indicator for me of professionals that know what they're doing versus ones that don't. And when I was young, I had a lot of litigation as a young, and I spent all this time with other lawyers. And that was back in the day, we'd actually go to their offices. And I saw a trend. When I'd go visit a lawyer and their office was clean, and they would sit across the desk and look you in the eye, when you got to trial with those guys, look out. And then if you went into a guy's office

and he had papers and stacks of stuff all over the place, and he was yelling out the door to his secretary in the middle of your conversation with him, those were the guys I could pants and trial. And, and it was, it was absolutely 100% consistent. And to the, to this day, like when I go to hire a doctor or something and we go to see them, if they can give me their full attention, I feel like, oh, this is somebody that I would like to work with. Anytime you see somebody that's frazzled, I feel like they don't have the focus that I want if I'm going to pay this person. 100%. But there's other reasons that stuff ends up in those piles on their desk too. Sometimes it's because you're the only person that knows how to complete that task. So you've sentenced yourself to some of those piles because you haven't bothered to teach other people how to handle that particular type of task. So sometimes there's proof there in the waiting for you to identify other things you

could be training your team members to do. And the great thing is once you've trained them to do it, not only do you not have to do it anymore, but then those items won't be on your desk any longer. There's a lot to be said about reflecting on what we've done that works and what we've done that didn't work and the whys that live behind each of those. Because each one of them is an opportunity to improve our effectiveness, where in this case, I think effectiveness revolves around, did I apply my focus, that is my time and my attention and my energy, in a way that at the end of the day causes me to feel satisfied with what I did for the day. So when's the last time you fell off the wagon, Mark? What happened? You mean what prompted the fall off the wagon? Sure. And how'd you get back on?

I think the last time I had a big fall off the wagon was the last time I had an extensive, it wasn't quite a trial, but it was a series of hearings in court over the course of several days. And the fact that I had to devote such a large block of time and attention to one matter meant that everything else was left sitting to the side. And I have a personality makeup that I have a little more people pleasing in me than is probably good for my own good. And so I was busy flogging myself every day when we got done with that series of hearings about, frankly, stories that were going on in my head that probably there wasn't even good evidence for, that I was letting all these people down and I was a miserable failure as a result of that.

And I just had to work through it. I will tell you though, that when it comes back to things that are kind of left for you to do because you haven't trained anybody else to do them. I had this great paralegal years ago who used to randomly show up at my door sometime late in the afternoon, not every day, but once or twice a week. And she would just lurk in the door until I noticed her. And then I'd say, what do you need? And she would say, what are you doing? And why am I not doing it? Which is like the greatest question in the world from one of your team members. And usually more often than

not, the answer was because I haven't shown you how yet. So then she would sit down with her pad of paper, follow along as I would describe what it was I was doing and why I was doing that instead of some other variant of the approach. And she would then go back and document that process and then bring it back to me pretty much fully formed after that so that we could then edit it down and then give it to other people so that other folks could do that task. And the more you do that kind of thing, the more you free yourself from some of the drudgery, some of that nonsense that really doesn't even need to be sucking away your time, your energy, and your attention, so that you can focus on the things that really make a

difference for you and the people you're trying to help. Yeah, that is so hard for people, lawyers in particular, but I think everybody are so resistant to getting help. That kind of gets to that thing I was mentioning earlier where you think, well, only I can do this, or only I can do this to the quality that it needs to be. Or there's that ugly first cousin of that notion, which is, it will take me longer to describe to you how to do this than to do it, so I'll just do it, which sentences you to permanently being the only one that ever does that. I think if there's any task you're ever going to do again, it's worth documenting so that somebody else can do it the next time.

And there's tools that you've used for years, like ScreenFlow, for example, or if you're a Windows person, there's Camtasia and a whole bunch of other ones that are out there. Make movies about what you're doing on your computer screen to accomplish these tasks. And other people can play the movie and follow along with you to do the task. Yeah, and I have lately started on my team using the Loom for that

because it just saves it to the web. I send them a link. Anything I do, I can say, well, this is how you do a refund or whatever. And then they have that link. They can go back and watch it every time they do it. Sure. And literally follow along step by step. You know, the joke when I teach lawyers how to do this, one of the things I say is, you know, you'll know you're winning this game when you walk through the office and you see people playing one of the movies that you made alongside

themselves following along. And you'll also notice if you pay close attention that they can play that video as many times as they want in the video will never get annoyed. Yeah, exactly. And, but you know, going back to screencast, that's a good example. I was in on the early beta of that app, I consider myself a power user of it and very competent at it. And I do good work in screen flow. So that would be the thing where I'd say, well, only I can do this. But guess what? I have an editor that does a lot of work for me. I actually have two people helping me. And they are both better at it than I am. Even though I think I'm an expert, they are super experts. And when I take the time to pay them, when I get them the video early enough so they have time to edit it, the final product is better.

And it's just that simple. And that's a thing that I have to think about. So the time I spend editing, I could be creating another video. It's not that hard. I mean, the math always favors you when you get help, but there's a part of me that's always resistant to it. And I think that's a lot of people have that. I think that the other, there's a secret to,

to if you're doing these kind of train your team member to do a task using a screen video of some sort. There's a couple of rules I've learned over the years that make a difference in making them more effective. Number one is it has to be short. If it's not five or six minutes, then you need to break the task up into a series of steps that are no more than five or six minutes each. Because if you have a 20 minute long video and somebody has forgotten the step in the middle, they will not watch a 20 minuteminute video to find the 15 seconds

of information they're looking for in the middle. They'll just come interrupt you. So if the goal of doing the video is to make sure that you've delegated the ability to complete this task to somebody else, you need to make it usable and attractive to them, and that means small chunks. So for me, rule one is they need to be short. Rule two is a video must only ever cover one topic at a time. So if I thought about this in advance, if I realized that we would have got into this subject, I would have had a better example for you than this. I'm going to use a lawyer example. So I need to explain to the non-lawyers in the world that there are any number of reasons

that a lawyer might need to obtain an EIN, which is basically a social security number for something in the world other than a person. Could be a trust, could be an estate, could be an LLC or a corporation, or there's any number of other reasons that someone else might need a tax ID number other than their own personal social security number. And there's a website you can go to to obtain those. And for the longest time, I was the only person at my office that would get those because I was the only one that knew how to use the website because it would inevitably go off

into a decision tree of if you answer this, well, now you have to answer these other questions. And I was permanently locked in this mode of, I'm the only one that knows all the answers, so I have to do that. I realized when I went to go make videos of this, that it wasn't going to be very successful for me to say, well, we're here to record a video on how to get a tax ID number for a new LLC. If when I started that video, I'd say, well, now we need to choose, you know, the LLC thing here. Now, if you choose the corporation, you need to be prepared to answer all of these questions. And if you're in a trust, you're going to need to be, once you start talking about all the things that don't apply, they will stop watching the video. So I figured out that they had to be successful, these task training videos, had to be one topic at a time.

So we now have a video on how to get one for an LLC and a separate one on how to get one for a trust and a separate one on how to get one for a corporation and so forth, because that gets them back into that three to six minute long range. It's focused on the one task that they want to complete that they can then follow along with. These are not, you should never think of these videos as something that's trying to train somebody about all the knowledge associated with this. It's not about content.

It's about how to complete a specific task. And once you get clear on what the task is, it's really easy to make the video short. So rule one, make them short. Rule two, one topic only. And when's the last time you pulled an EIN for a new entity? I can't even tell you. Well, I'll call that a win. Well, gang, I'm so happy that Mark came on today. I feel like we had a lot of interesting discussions today. If you'd like to learn more about what Mark's doing, Mark, where should people go? If you want to know about the coaching and the lawyer coaching stuff, I do that with a company called Atticus that's been doing

that work for 34 years, which in the scheme of things is a great name for a lawyer coaching company, right? Yeah. And they are at AtticusAdvantage.com. If you're in the Chicago metropolitan area and you need help getting an estate plan done or buying or selling a home, those are the things that we help people do. And we're at MarkMetzger.net. All right, we'll put that in the show notes so you can check it out.

I've also got a couple of links there to my article on false urgency and some of the other tools we talked about. We are the Focus Podcast. Mike couldn't be here today, but he'll be back next time. He's off having a little R&R, and I told him to take the week off

and enjoy it with his family. Focus on them this week. I want to thank our sponsors, Squarespace, CleanMyMac, and NetSuite. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm. You can find the forums over at talk.macpowerusers.com.

And we'll see you next time.