Focused - 179: Ideal Weeks

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

David & Mike discuss the process of planning (and attempting to live out) their ideal weeks.

Welcome to Focused, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz. I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mr. Schmitz. How are you today? I'm doing pretty good. How about yourself? It's an ideal day, Mike. It's ideal. I see what you did there. I like it. Before we get into the ideal day and the ideal week,

I would like to, just for a moment, talk about a new thing that I'm doing, if you're cool with that. Yeah. Yeah. So I mentioned in the previous episode something that I have since kind of fleshed out a little bit more details on, and that is the Obsidian University, which is an Obsidian cohort. I've done Obsidian trainings in the past, live workshops, I've done courses on Obsidian, but I've kind of always wanted to go deep with people and nerd out about my favorite app of all

time. And now that I am an independent creator, I have the time to do that sort of thing. So I put something together and all the details can be found at obsidianuniversity.com. But essentially, it's a eight session, four week cohort that is going to kick off June 12th. And we're going to dive through everything Obsidian related from like essential settings that you should configure to task management, digital journaling, all that kind of stuff. But again, you can see all of the details on the website. It's $249 and that gets you access to the live calls, some open office hour type calls, and a private circle community, which is where all of this stuff eventually is going to

live. This is going to kind of slowly be built out over time. So you'll get to see it all kind of take shape in addition to going through it all live with me. But if you are interested in upping your obsidian game and would like to join, I'd love to have you. Excellent. I'm very happy for the world with Mike's independence. We're going to get more cool stuff from you. And this is the first of many, I hope. I hope so too. I'm really excited about this one. Did one previous cohort for this, the life theme cohort for the faith-based productivity community. And I was a little nervous about that one because I had been a part of cohorts before, but never actually led one myself. That one was amazing. That has wrapped up now as we record this,

but was really, really happy with the way that one turned out. And kind of my big takeaway from that was I really, really enjoy these live group settings. And so trying to apply that format to one of my favorite topics and apps, And I'm really looking forward to it. Excellent. Well, today we are here to talk about Ideal Weeks. And this goes back to episode 176, when we had some action items for each other. And one of them was coming up with our Ideal Week. And what does that mean? It's been a couple months since we did that. We talked about it, but I have been working on my ideal week for years now. And I know you've been working on it as well. I thought it would be fun

to share that with the audience and kind of talk through the process and why ideal weeks can be so powerful. Yeah, I don't think I really knew what this exercise would kickstart in my life when I said I would do this back in episode 176. Yeah, you've changed a bit since then. I have, I have. Yeah, that was before I had made the decision to leave the day job. And I think I was already kind of considering that as a possibility. But when I sat down to think about my ideal week at the end of episode 176, it looked a lot different than it does now here in episode 179. So even in just a

couple of months, it's amazing to me how much can change. But I am thankful for these types of action items that spur this sort of change. So thanks for the homework. No worries. And I hope that people listening are encouraged as well to try to put together their ideal weeks. This is a practice I sort of stumbled on out of necessity. Back when I was first an independent lawyer, after I'd left the firm and I had a little more control over my schedule, I started designing ideal weeks because I had to balance my time between Max Barkey and being a lawyer. And I thought that would get much easier when I became just Max Barkey and no longer a lawyer. And actually, I found it took several iterations to get this right. I feel like I've got a good one now, but who knows where I'll be in six months.

One of the things I do with ideal weeks is I actually quarterly go and audit it and look at it and say, does this still work for me? And, uh, but I'm getting ahead of myself, Mike, let's talk about, you know, why we have ideal weeks before we get into the mechanics of it. Weeks go by very fast. So it's really easy to get lost in the thick of it and not bring intentionality. And for me, a week is one of the building blocks of a system where you can make good stuff. I think it's probably the most important one. So why not bring some intentionality to how you plan it out? Well, intentionality is the thing with this. It's easy to live your life by default. And as much as possible,

I don't want to do that. I want to dictate the terms. I guess I'm a little bit of a rebel that way. But I would encourage everyone to take that mindset of controlling which you can control, even if you don't have complete control over all of your hours.

But ultimately, the time is the context within which everything that we want to do has to happen. So this whole practice of identifying at least what your ideal week looks like significantly increases not just the percentage that you'll be able to execute the perfect week, because this is not a binary pass-fail sort of a thing. If you set an ideal week, I think even if you could get 80% of it or 50% of it or even 20% of it, I mean, that's a lot better than just stumbling through it and hoping that the stars align and you end up making the progress that you want to make. It sounds ridiculous to describe it that way, but I'm kind of ashamed that I've lived my life that way for a long time. I don't want to do that anymore,

which is why I started doing this perfect week exercise. And like you, I also review it every couple of months just to make sure that this is still what I want to do. And you gave me great advice one time about whenever you are going through a significant life change, which I happen to be going through, that is the perfect time to audit these types of things and look at all the systems and reinvent yourself. So I think this is perfect timing for me to consider what does my ideal week look like. But I would also argue that any time is a good time to look at this. I remember kind of the thought process for me was frustration with how fast the weeks were going. I'd get to Friday and say, wow, I had a couple things I wanted to do this week and I haven't done them yet.

What happened? And if you look back and you have any journaling practice or if you just have any you know a knowledge you look back and you say oh i got diverted here and there and this thing happened but what really happened is you never you never carved out time and you never kind of looked forward beyond a few thoughts as to what's going to be a good week for you and the question is what is going you know if is week for you. And the question is, what is going, you know, if, is this a perfect week as a question, but really the answer is what is a perfect week? And what if rather than think about how you missed on Friday, what if you thought

about how you're going to do it on Monday and even better, what if you had a system in place where you didn't have to think it on Monday because it's already designed for you. And that's what kind of led down the path. Like I said, for me, it has iterated a lot over the years. But there are certain considerations you need to take into place when you're putting an ideal week together. I think one of the first things you could consider is what we've called on the show productive prime time. I don't remember who said that first. Was that you, Mike, or was that a product productive prime time i don't remember who said

that first was that you mike or was that a book we read i don't remember i'm sure it was a book that we read the earliest mention of this that i can recall is the concept of the biological prime time from chris bailey back in the productivity project and the whole idea there is just the way that you're wired, when is the best time for you to do certain things. And I think at that point, kind of the whole idea was the deep work. And that's kind of the bent of this show, obviously, is the ability to focus. Well, there are certain times of your day, and it's gonna be different for everybody, where it's easier to do that. So don't try to do deep focused work at the end of a really long day. You're going to be exhausted. You're not going to be able to hold your attention on the thing that you want. right? And what's your awareness of that? Are you a person who does great work from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m.? Or are you a person like our friend Mike Vardy, who does his best work between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m.? And there's no judgment there. It's just you do when it's best for you, but you need to be aware

of that. And that's what I mean by productive prime time is at what point are you able to really deliver the goods? Because when you're planning out your perfect week, you need to take that into account. Like if you're a night owl, like Mike Vardy, maybe you need to plan your week in a way that you are doing the hard stuff during that night owl session, you know, and you just need to be aware of that. And I think that's one of the first things you want to consider as you head into the process. And that really is the jumping off point for everything else. Because I think the entry level to this sort of thing, if someone is trying to do something on the side, let's say,

like you've got a creative project that you want to do in addition to your day job. It's kind of how I stumbled into this. I think that's how you stumbled into this. What's the natural approach? It's to look at your calendar and to see when do I have time available. But if you look at that from the perspective of whatever is left over can go to this thing that is important, what happens? You find these pockets of time when you're basically useless, right? So maybe it's at the end of a really long day, or if you're a night owl and you think, I'm going to get up early because I've heard enough people talk about that. I'm going to try

it out. Well, that may be the time that is just completely worthless for you in terms of doing the deep focused work. So you have to figure out, first of all, wipe the decks clean. Where is the ideal spot for this type of work? And then you can kind of configure your environment to support that. Because if you just go into it, another environmental thing that doesn't line up with the calendar, for example, for me, was having a family at home. I may feel like sitting down and writing after I get done at the day job. I'm speaking from experience here. But my kids want to play with me at that point, and I want to be a dad at that point. So I may have the desire to sit down and do it, but the environment isn't going to be a dad at that point. So I may have the desire to sit down and do it, but the environment isn't going to be conducive to that. So figuring out how all this stuff aligns,

but really you've got to figure out, you got to start with yourself first, because if you have everything else nailed, but you just don't have it in you, then you're still not going to get it done. And the reason why this is so important is because the end goal here, the deliverable you're going to have when you finish this process is you're going to have a template that you can lay across future weeks. And you need to account for when you can do your best work so you can do your best work. I think another element of it, in addition to knowing your prime time, is what is your mix between maker and manager? And this is kind of the greatest hits of focus. We've talked about this stuff before. We've done entire shows on it. But I really like the idea of thinking about time

as a maker and a manager. And of course, it's very easy for me to say that as a precious content creator. And I'm holding up air quotes as I say that. But back when I was a lawyer, I thought of it the same way. I was a lawyer who made contracts or who made deals or whatever. But there's times when you're making the thing, and there's times when you're managing the thing. And you have to figure that out. And for some careers, you spend a lot of time as a manager. And for other careers, you spend a lot of time as a manager. And for other careers, you spend a lot of time as a maker. For most careers, you spend a little time in both. But you need to understand that mix for you because once you start putting together your ideal week,

if you're somebody who spends 80% of their time managing, you need to make sure you account for that in this template you're about to put together. This was the beginning of the end for me because I realized as I was thinking about this that I really do not like manager time. And I found myself doing a lot of managing in the day job. And when I started thinking about what would it look like if I had more maker time, I got really excited. Yeah, I think that's true for a lot of people, but there are people who love manager time. It's really an imperfect comparison, but it's like somebody who has a job

that spends a lot of time writing documents versus somebody who spends all day in email because their job is all about managing email. Those are very different demands on your time, and that time is spent very differently depending on what you're doing. And I think that relates. You know, you want to kind of audit how you work in building your perfect week so you can account for what you need. I always think of maker and manager. I have a third element to that, consumer, time you spend consuming. And really, the goal here is not to make an ideal week just for your work time. It's to make an ideal week that covers everything. And that's a part of it too. But I think the two big concerns really are maker and manager. And another part of it, I guess a third key component of it is what are your standing

work and personal commitments? Like if you volunteer at the shelter every weekend, if you have a standing meeting every Tuesday at 2 p.m, whatever it is that you've got going on in your life. And those commitments aren't going to change just because you've decided to make an ideal week. You need to, you know, throw those into the blender too, as you start to come up with this. So make sure you collect all that and, and you don't build a system that doesn't take an account, the stuff that you have already committed to do.

I agree with that. And I'll add to that, that don't be ashamed, I guess, is the only word that I could come up with of the things that don't fit cleanly into the buckets that everybody else has. as like one of the things on my ideal week which we'll get to in a little bit is a lot of time spent at church because my wife and I are elders there we're in charge of the the ministry the outreach team I play on the worship team like that's a lot of time that goes into that and if you look at the schedule from a scarcity mindset, you can look at it as, well, that's a lot of time that I could be doing other things. But then I kind of have to check myself. When I created this schedule, I put everything under the microscope and asked myself, what do I want to be here? And what I realized is that's actually what I want to be doing. So that's great. If that is looking at my schedule about 20 hours a week, if that's what I want to be doing, that's great. That's not an obligation anymore that's stealing from me and robbing me of having more in the tank for other things. It's completely okay that that is a priority for me. That is not necessarily, you have to ask yourself this question, I guess,

do I have to do this or do i get to do this what i realized is that's something that i i get to and uh as i'm creating my ideal week that was kind of the the recurring theme was uh going from the template which are just kind of all the obligations that we we make to ourselves and it's easy to get stuck in in something that you've agreed to previously. It's kind of why with my personal retreat, I make myself pick something to stop doing every time just to force myself to get in the habit of not continuing to do something that I said I was going to do months or even years ago just because I said I was going to do it. That's my personality. I just want to continue to show up and make people happy and do the thing that I said I would do. But

I constantly have to be asking, is this right for me now? And as you're going through your ideal week, you can hear us talk about maker. You can hear us talk about manager and be like, oh, well, those are the important ones. But there are going to be other things that are important to you. And that's the whole purpose of the ideal week. The whole takeaway from this entire exercise is to figure out what are the things that you want there. And don't be sorry about those. Yeah.

I mean, I am lucky enough that my job is a big part of what gives me fulfillment. I am lucky enough that my job is a big part of what gives me fulfillment. So making time for doing the good parts of my job was a big, was a big motivator for me and putting together the ideal week. But also I have other artistic endeavors. I'm really getting into this woodworking thing again. And when you see my schedule, most evenings are wide open and I've got, I've done that for a reason. And also,

hopefully, recovering some Saturdays and Sundays, too, in the process. But this is an opportunity for you to really take a look at all of those commitments and catalog and inventory them. Some of them you may find are the reason you're doing it, and you definitely want to protect them or even expand them. But some of them you'll look at and say you know what maybe this doesn't need to be an outstanding obligation anymore but we're going to get into ours later and i think that'll kind of demonstrate itself a little more i think another thing that you should look at when you're kind of outlining the idea of an ideal week is how much time are you willing to spend on non-production work? And I'm speaking in terms of production because that's the way I think about it.

But no matter what you do, production can be a different thing. If you're an insurance adjuster, production is managing insurance claims. If you're a guy who makes stuff for the internet, then it could be making videos or whatever. But how much time are you willing to spend not doing that, but related to your work? And this is a little bit kind of continuation of the management maker discussion, but I like to think explicitly, how much time am I willing to spend on things like email meetings and other bits that are necessary to a degree, but also can really get in the way of making the thing that are necessary to a degree,

but also can really get in the way of making the thing that you want to make. Yeah, I don't necessarily think it needs to be making. Maybe it does, but hearing you describe that reminds me of the quote by Walt Disney, we don't make movies to make more money. We make money so we can make more movies. And there's really the thing that you want to do, making the movies, and then the thing that you have to do, making the money. And I think there's a ratio there of the parts of your work that really are fulfilling. I'll say spark joy, but that's

kind of a loaded term because work isn't always going to be fun. There's going to be unglamorous parts of it, so maybe that's a wrong description. But you can tell when something is really hitting the mark, and then it's something that is a drudgery and you absolutely just don't want to do this. And I think there's probably a threshold there for people. I know there was for myself when I was considering this and I was looking at how much time I was spending in meetings every week. That really just kind of irked me when I saw it. And I didn't really have that many meetings

compared to some of the other managers that I knew and other people in the agency world. But even looking at it and seeing, well, I had 13 hours of meetings last week. That was 13 hours I wasn't able to make stuff. And so I recognize that number's got to go down. And I think everyone needs to figure out how they can turn the dial there. But then also, the genesis of all of this for me, and I think this is somewhat related, is the whole idea of not just your week, but what does your ideal day look like? Because that's really the thing that got me going with this was thinking about what's it look like for my ideal day? And just filling in all of the details. I actually talked a little bit about this in the Life Theme cohort when we

went through it. Because we talk about what is the impact that you want to have, the legacy that you want to leave, and then identifying the values that you're going to live by, which are going to help you achieve that vision by living it out day to day and act as a filtering mechanism for what are the things that really hit the mark and what are the things that don't. And as I started to fill in the details of where am I, what time do I get up, and who's there there with me and what am I doing throughout the day, I started to be able to see it in my mind and I started to get really, really excited about it. the extension of that is kind of my approach to this whole ideal week exercise was, okay, so I have this ideal day, but that's not going to be everything that I want to do consistently isn't going to fit in those 24 hours. So that's when we start to see where are the other themes that show up. I'm not going to podcast every day, but a podcasting block is going to appear on my ideal week. All of the creative

stuff has to have a place. All of the things that I want to do with my family, the fun stuff, not the things that I have to do for work and compartmentalize those things and boundaries around them. I know that's one approach. You could time box the amount of time you spend on email and communication, right? I'm going to confine that to an hour every day. Well, that's great. That's one approach. But also, I just want to have the space for being able to take my kids to the coffee shop

for the one-on-ones that we do. I want to have a consistent date night with my wife, those sorts of things. And as you put that stuff on your calendar and you start to look forward to the stuff that's on there, it draws you. It's exciting. You look forward to getting up in the morning because you get to live out those things. Yeah, I do think that that's an important element of this. It's not just, you know, what are the sources of burden that I must carry? This is also, what are the sources of joy that I can build in? And an ideal week should have a lot of joy in it, right? Yeah, because that's otherwise, what's the point?

As I mentioned, the Walt Disney quote, I don't want to just make money to sustain an existence. The whole approach I took to this was based off of this life and air term that I came across. And it's a play on millionaire. So a millionaire has a lot of money. Well, what does it look like if you have a lot of life? And what does it look like if you start to live your rich life now? It doesn't have to be something that's off in the future. In fact, that's kind of the wrong approach, I feel, because if you have this goal of someday I'm going to be able to do this thing, then you fall into the gap and you lose

the gain, you lose the momentum because you never feel like you're making progress fast enough. But when you realize this is what my ideal day looks like. And hey, I can live out different parts of this on a regular basis. Maybe I can't do it quite the way that I want to be able to do it at some point. But I can do parts of it now. And that's pretty cool. It helps you feel like you're making progress and gaining traction as you move this way. Yeah, I think the whole idea of future payoff is a difficult one.

I understand why it can be motivating, but it can also be like drinking seawater. It's just it doesn't fulfill you and it gets in the way. I've told the story in the past about how I worked for two and a half weeks for a big law firm. And it didn't work out just for a variety of reasons. But I was making really good money. And I decided I wasn't going to stay with it and go back to a little firm where I made a lot less money. But at one point, I had this conversation in my head. Well, if I do this for like 10 or 15 years,

I could probably save enough and retire early. And then like the little voice in my head said, if you do this for 15 years, you're going to be dead. This is going to kill you. And, and I believed it. So I quit.

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slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D. This offer is only good for a limited time, so claim your $75 credit now at indeed.com slash focused. That's I-N-D-E-E-D.com slash focused to support the show by saying that you heard about it here on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. All right, so let's talk about, now that we've given some considerations of building the ideal week, let's just talk about the actual process of building the week. Like I said, I've been doing this for years now and I really, really liked the practice. That's why I'm happy to share it with you and hopefully inspire you to give it a try. There's been a couple of different ways. I

do write down a bunch of notes based on the considerations that we talked about in the last segment. But at some point, you need to do it. And the idea for me is to build it out as a grid. You could do it, I do it in a seven-day block. So it's Monday through Sunday. If you want to be really strict about not working on weekends, you could make it a five-day block and just try and make it fit there. But because I also put some of the fun stuff in, actually, I want it to be the perfect ideal week. I need all seven days there. Indeed, there have been times where my ideal week has not been seven days, but 14 days, because just the flow of my work was in such a way that it didn't make sense to try and do it over a seven-day week. There were some things that really only needed to be done every two weeks,

and I wanted to account for that. And so I had a 14-day ideal week. In fact, the last iteration of my ideal week was two weeks. And then about a month ago, I changed it back to a seven-day week because I made some changes and I'll share with you later. But have an open mind about it. Maybe it's an ideal month for you, although I think that's getting pretty abstract when you go out that far.

But get down with a piece of graph paper or get an application. For years, I did them in OmniGraffle, which is just a tool I know how to use well. And what I would do is go into the calendar application on my computer, and I could have it do a view where it didn't show any events. And I'd put it in the weak view, and I'd just take a screenshot of that and drop in OmniGraffle. And then I would put little blocks in and draw on top of it. But then I realized that's kind of fiddly.

And a couple of years ago, I started using just a piece of graph paper or a dot grid, and I just draw it out with a pencil. Pencil's important here. And then I would just lay it out, and then I would just start kind of fiddling with it with a piece of paper. I think almost getting away from the computer helps a little bit.

So my current method is to get a piece of graph paper and lay it out. I think there's some truth to what you just said, although I have not actually ever done this analog, even though I've done a lot of stuff analog, I have always used digital tools for this. I do think the big thing you need is just the seven days. And I would push people to have blocks for every hour, every waking hour of those seven days. those seven days because when you look at it that way, you realize how many of those blocks you really have to work with. I used to do this exercise every once in a while where I would take

the, I think it's 156 hours in a week, right? And then just start whittling away at those. Well, I got to sleep eight hours a night times seven. So that's 56 hours. And then fill in the blanks with the rest of the stuff. And I probably messed up the number for the total hours in the week. But the takeaway is that as you set aside, I need this many hours for this thing and this many hours for that thing, which you end up with is you realize

you actually have a lot more hours to work with than it feels like. And when you have a block on your calendar for each one of those hours that is available to you and you have an opportunity to put something fun there, then you're not just going from thing you dread to thing you dread and then pausing whenever you've got a break to try to catch your breath. You find yourself looking forward to the fun things that you have put on there. And I take the same approach with

that that I do with time blocking my day. I give every hour a job. And you start with the big ones. You put the big rocks in first. So the time that you're going to spend working, especially if you do have a day job, that's probably non-negotiable, right? So that is going to go on there first. But then as you put those things on there, you start to see all of the opportunities that you have to do something important that's not urgent. The things that typically fall off the side that end up slipping through the cracks. And when you are able to start putting some of those things on the calendar, it gets really exciting. Yeah. I have been kind of on a journey with that granularity. Like I started

making it just kind of nebulous blocks. I at one point was doing the hour by hour blocking that, that Mike's talking about. And now I have the privilege of not needing that. Um, not being a lawyer makes it easier for me. And when've been teasing you about this, dear listener, but my system has gotten a lot simpler with this last iteration. So I don't need to. It's almost like I've got to the point where some things are assigned by day instead of hour, and it's just this is a day for that thing. Now, that being said, doesn't mean um you know eight to ten hours just doing the

single thing like like the wood shop if i want to go out and cut a set of dev tales and enjoy lunch i will but in terms of setting the ideal week it actually helps me to be really clear in my head that this is the day to do that thing and that's really the only thing that I must do. I'll talk about that later, but I'm really kind of looking kind of what I guess what Cal Newport would call monk mode. I'm putting monk mode into days now, and that has really helped me. So, you know, to each his own, but I think probably the smarter way to do it is Mike is doing it is hour by hour, but I'm not doing it that way anymore. I don't always do the smart thing, Mike. I don't know. Well, I don't think it's necessarily the smart way, but I think it's the easier way to get started. Oh, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Because then you're working with what you have

to work with and it's not a problem that the day job is taking 40, 45, however many hours it takes. It just is what it is. And then you manage whatever is left. And it doesn't matter if you don't have as much of that time to work with as you would like. Start where you are with what you have. Even if it's only a couple of hours a week, it's a couple of hours a week. And really the goal here is the intentionality. We've all heard the studies about the average American watching 30 hours of TV a week and all that kind of stuff. And really the reason that we slip into that stuff and the social media and the endless feeds is because it's convenient and it's always there. But when we do that, we give away the time, the precious time that we have to do some of these other things, and we don't even realize it. And that's really what I want people to take away

from this whole episode, is if I want to watch Netflix, if I want to scroll through social media, fine. That's great. That is a productive use of my time. But if I don't intend to do those things, I don't want to let that stuff steal from me anymore because that's what it's doing. It is literally stealing a portion of my life that I can never get back. And when I have the opportunity to just map it all out, I have the ability to set the intentions. And just by setting the intentions, it significantly increases the likelihood that I'm going to follow through and do that. If I'm just going from one thing to the next and I am reacting to how I feel and what's in front of my eyeballs, I'm not going to be able to be intentional. My brain is just

going to keep jumping from dopamine hit to dopamine hit. But if I can, before I enter into the fray, declare this is my attack plan, this is the map, the route, the course I want to take, map, the route, the course I want to take. Now it feels like that stuff doesn't hit as hard. Instead of just feeling like I am involuntarily reacting, I'm able to respond appropriately. And that sounds like maybe it's not that big a difference, but it really is. It's the difference between feeling like there's absolutely nothing that I can do about this to feeling in control, even if it's not exactly the way that you would want it to be. Which leads us back to Mike's favorite quote from Dwight Eisenhower. Exactly. I wasn't going to go there, but I will. Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

So you should definitely plan your perfect week. Have you ever heard the saying, nobody regrets not working harder on their deathbed? Yes. I take a little bit of issue with that. If the thing you work on is your passion. I read a quote by Isaac Asimov who once said if his doctor told him he was dying,

he wouldn't lament. He would just type faster. He wants to get those books out while he still has time. I think that's part of this whole thing for me. I mean, that's the reason the show exists is we all have that contribution we want to make. And it is an ideal week that helps you get there. So I want to start. Why don't I just go through mine? And let's just start doing it. I think we that helps you get there. So, so I want to start, uh, why don't I just go through mine and let's just, let's start doing, I think we've been teasing people enough.

Let's talk through our ideal weeks. Sure. So I've explained that for me, it's been very much an evolution back when I was a lawyer, I tried to split time where I'd spend either the morning as a lawyer or a max Sparky in the afternoon in the opposite realm. either the morning as a lawyer or a Max Barkey in the afternoon in the opposite realm. And that was a big change for me because when I was at the law firm, it was real clear. You went to work, you're a lawyer, you came home, you're a Max Barkey. But then when I became a solo lawyer and I worked from home, I was jumping back multiple times a day. And that was having a

real cost in terms of focus and productivity because it's really hard to switch gears between two entirely separate careers every hour and or sometimes even more than that. So when I decided to make an ideal week and I had the revelation, okay, I'm going to devote one half of the day to one thing and one half of the day to the other, that made a big leap in my ability to focus in and get work done. I never was in the position where I could make a leap where I'd say spend Monday as a lawyer and Tuesday as a max parking because when you're a lawyer, you just never know when a client's going to meet you. So you have to allot time for that career every day. But then I stopped being a lawyer and I had kind of a year of chaos in terms of getting the lab set up and doing a construction project.

And I never really had the focus time to kind of sit and figure out what the ideal week was. I was kind of winging it and I definitely paid a price for that. So I kind of got back to that last year and I had these various iterations. Like because some of the podcasts I produce only publish every two weeks, I was getting to a point where, and I still am in this position where we record a show for the two-week podcast about two weeks before the show publishes. And that way, if there's a problem with a sponsor or if a host, you know, Mike gets sick or I get sick, we still have several days that we can reschedule and have time to get it edited timely and get it out. So that's good. But that led to me this idea of a 14 day ideal

week. And I use that for a while, but I realized I was still jumping around too much. And that, that realization came from the practice of putting together an ideal week. I mean, I do, I don't know about you, Mike, but I find this practice of quarterly going through and recreating it from scratch to be something that really forces me to question things that I don't normally question. Yes, absolutely. It's a forcing function for sure, which is the whole reason to do it. So I spent, granted, I had a lot going on during this transition as I was setting up the labs and

doing all this other stuff. But I was unhappy with the amount of time I was getting in on field guides. And field guides are something I really, that's my Isaac Asimov novel. I want those in the world. If I drop dead, I want to get as many of that as I can. I want people to be able to look at these and get better at this stuff. So that's the art I'm creating. I know that's a very big stretch of the word art, but that to me is my art. And so why is it that I can't get enough of them done? Well, I was trying to block them in in the ideal week in two-hour blocks every afternoon. If you recall back at the beginning of the year, I talked about how I was trying to block them in in the ideal week in two-hour blocks every afternoon.

If you recall back at the beginning of the year, I talked about how I was going to use my focus calendar to say do something on a field guide every day. And what I realized is that is not the right measure for that kind of work because it takes a tremendous amount of focus to really do it right. And going in for an hour a day is not the same as going in for five hours. And so with this last kind of audit of the weekly schedule, I decided, okay, I need to really go more into, I think it was Cal Newport who first could use the term monk mode. And I don't even remember the context of it. It was part of his deep work book. And I think he means it like you go away for weeks, but I'm just talking about a day at a time. He may have had a different term for that, but in my mind, it's a monk mode, but I'm like, okay,

what if I just took this thing that it's bugging me and just gave it a day? You know, the field guides gets a full day. And, and the thing I had to compare it with was the labs work, because I make a lot of content for the Max Barkey Labs. And I did the same thing leading up to the last quarterly review is I started compressing all of the work I do for the labs numbers into Thursdays. So I make a bunch of videos. I write newsletters. I do a bunch of stuff for the labs every Thursday. And that was working. So I'm like, OK, I can do this. But then I got thinking as I did it, okay, I could do that on Wednesday. But what if I did it on Friday too? What if I gave two full days to field guide work and one full day to labs work? So Wednesday is field guides, Thursday is labs and Friday is field

guides. And really that is my ideal week to have a full day of production for three days of the seven. All right. So then we go back. Well, what, what about the podcast? Well,

then I'm getting the podcast. They've all, and Mike knows this. I've been on the back and rescheduling our regular recording time. So podcasts are done on Monday and Tuesday. And it's the same time that I do sometimes guest spots. It's the same time that I do meetings and talk to other people. But what I found is now I don't have as much time to do those things

because I'm only doing those on Monday and Tuesday. Now, what I could do is say, okay, well, I'll go Wednesday too. So I can do that stuff. But I'm not happy because I feel like I'm not working on my important art enough. So what if I treat Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday as sacred and just say, nope, sorry, if it doesn't fit Monday or Tuesday, we can look at next Monday or Tuesday, or we can look at six weeks from now on Monday or Tuesday, but Wednesday through Friday is not available. And I started this, I don't know, about a month ago.

And it's been working really well. So that's the latest iteration of my ideal week is Monday and Tuesday. I've got a variety of things scheduled between recording podcasts, research, and some other stuff I work on. And then Wednesday is field guides, Thursday is labs, and Friday is field guides. Now, I feel like I'm very privileged to have a schedule like this. Back when I was a lawyer, there's no way I could have had three days of just doing lawyer work without talking to clients.

But I think it's at least something to aim for. And I can tell you that for me, this is the best version of my ideal week I've had in all the years I've been doing it. the best version of my ideal week I've had in all the years I've been doing it. When I look at your ideal week, the thing that stands out to me, going back to what you talked about with the prime time, is the larger idea there, and that is rhythms. And I look at your schedule, and I feel like you have really landed on the rhythm that works for you as a creator. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Labs are on Thursday for a reason.

Because I put a podcast out to all the lab members every Friday morning that's kind of a news show. I try to get it under 15 minutes, all the Apple news in 15 minutes or less. And I need to record that on Thursday because it goes out first thing Friday morning and the news needs to be fresh, right? So that kind of drove Thursdays. But then all of a sudden I'm like, well, then why don't I do everything else on Thursday too? And working on field guides is fun, but it's intense. And I get a day break between working on field guides is fun, but it's intense. And I get a day break between working on field guides. So Wednesday, field guide.

Thursdays, labs. And Fridays, back to field guide. I like it. And the artificial limitation I'm putting on myself is really keeping those days where they're just non-negotiable. And then everything else has to fit into Monday, Tuesday. And so what I used to always be willing to do was sacrifice time for field guides, which is my art. I'm going to keep saying that.

Just don't annoy people. But I was sacrificing that always was the first thing to go. And now it's not with the way this ideal week is built. Now it's going to be like, if you don't fit into the few blocks I have available on Monday and Tuesday, then we're going to have to look into future weeks or we just don't do it. And that's been working out really good. because I feel like a lot of people discredit their art because it's not what they think art is. And I think it's easy to compare and look at something somebody else makes and be impressed by the level of skill that they were able to put into something and feel like you don't measure up because what you do is just what you do. And maybe it's something that comes really easy to you. So you discredit it and you think it's always really not

that big a deal. But everyone has their version of their art, I would argue. It doesn't matter if you're an accountant, an engineer, there is still an art to what you do. And the more that you can make your art, the happier, I believe, you are going to be. And I just want to call that out before we go on. I know it's not really the point of this episode, but don't discredit what you do and refuse to call it art.

I think everyone has something inside them that is a form of art that the world needs. And you should be looking for more ways to activate that. Yeah, I agree. It's easier to say that to other people than to yourself, though. Yeah, I agree. I agree. It's easier to say that to other people than to yourself, though. Yeah. But yeah, so that's my ideal week now. And this is not the reality of every week.

I mean, we just, before we recorded today, we had a technical problem. We were going to have to reschedule till Wednesday, which is my field guide day, right? But I was willing to make that sacrifice for the show. But if it was like somebody who wanted me to guest on their show, and there was a technical problem, I would say, well, we'll have to pick a Monday or Tuesday in the future. Right. But some weeks there are things that happen or, you know, something with the kids

or Daisy, my wife needs something. There are times when I will make exceptions for this stuff. It's not carved in stone. But an ideal week for me is one where I get three full days of production. And I try to build it into the ideal week. And that way, all the decisions are kind of driven by keeping that ideal going. And I just put it in my binder. So it's right there. I mean, I look at it every time I open it up. And every time I have a quarterly audit, I redraw it. And sometimes things move around. But boy, I'm really happy with this one. I hope that next quarter,

I don't change much. The ideal boundaries, as you were describing them, are permeable like that. They're not hard and rigid, because if you had hard, rigid boundaries, then the good stuff wouldn't be able to get in either. But the purpose of them is to, when you're not choosing to open the gate, that they are going to protect the time on Wednesday through Friday so that you can do the field guides and the lab content. on Wednesday through Friday so that you can do the field guides and the lab content. But I think that's the best version of that is you feel free to make an override decision anytime you want, but other people can't just impose their will on your calendar necessarily because you've established those boundaries and you've put some protection in place. Yeah. The other thing I've done here, which may be a mistake, but I have not structured in the other art time, music and woodworking. I will admit that, like I said earlier in the show, sometimes in between,

any time Monday through Friday when I've got a little downtime or just need a break, I will go out to the shop. Like we delayed today's show. We almost, like I said, reset the recording. I was outside in the shop cutting wood and Mike called back and said, Hey, I got it working. You want to come back and record? So, so I will fill that stuff in occasionally as I need just a break just to do something with my hands or if I want to make some music. But I have not structured it in. I don't have it written into evenings and weekends. And honestly, that's partly because my family is in a position of transition.

I've got one kid coming back and Daisy starting a new job. And I don't really have a rhythm to my off time yet. And maybe I will in the future. But right now, it's pretty loose. It changes depending on what's going on with the family and what people need from me. But that's okay. This is an evolution. This episode of the Focused Podcast is brought to you by ZocDoc. Find the right doctor right now with ZocDoc. Sign up for free at ZocDoc.com slash focused. It sucks when you go to a doctor's

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You're going to find the right doctor on the right plan that can take good care of you with ZocDoc. And our thanks to ZocDoc for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. All right. So my ideal week is still very much a work in progress here. But I am inspired by some of the stuff I picked up from yours. Just to touch on something you shared right before the break

about not having the other art time in here, the wood shop and the music stuff. I try to practice my guitar, or lately it's been bass, every single day, but I don't have that on my calendar either. So I just share that at the beginning here to say that there are lots of things that will happen throughout the course of my week that this is kind of intentionally designed to build in some margin to accommodate. And I think that is

something everyone needs to kind of figure out for yourself, but is very important. You have to have enough margin in the, the plan for things to ebb and flow a little bit. And I, I have felt it when it's been too packed and it was just impossible to find those little pockets for those, those things, 15 minutes here, a half hour there for something like taking the guitar off.

I hang it on the wall right by my desk. I have no excuses. It's within arm's reach, right? And I see it. And when I've got 10 minutes, I can do a couple of scales and things like that. And I really just try to do that consistently every day. But what is on my ideal week is really the big blocks. I think when you find that you don't have enough time to take those little breaks to do something, change of pace and use the different chemicals in your brain that

going and making music or cutting dovetails gives you, then that's a warning sign. Exactly. So with my ideal week, I have kind of always done this digitally. I think the first version of this was inside of my calendar app. I just created a new calendar and then blocked out all the different events. I have a PDF template that I built as part of my personal retreat handbook. So now when I do my personal retreats, I will load up a blank version of that handbook, put it on my iPad in GoodNotes, and take that with me and fill this out. Or the more recent version of that has been to implement pieces of that inside of Obsidian.

But this piece, because it has a specific design to it, I haven't brought this over to Markdown formatting yet. And as we mentioned, this is really just a check every couple of months when I do my personal retreats. I'm getting set to do my first one since leaving the day job, so that'll be a little bit of a different experience. But it's really just to check and make sure that I'm still on the right path with this. I just have to say I'm shocked that you have not turned this into an obsidian markdown sheet and just a little disappointed. Well, I will accept that homework. I will figure it out before June 30th when I do my next one. But when I did this exercise, I went back to the template that I had created and did it in GoodNotes. And the reason I did it in GoodNotes, because everything on mine is kind of color-coded,

because that helps me see which modes I'm in for the different things that I want to see on here. The work stuff is all blue. I specifically put on this ideal week, by the way, a shutdown routine Monday through Friday in red, specifically because this is something I know is really important. I know I'm in the middle of a radical life change right now. So it's an opportunity to reestablish some habits and some routines. This is something I really want to establish. And I've had trouble getting this to stick in the past. So I made it obvious and I put it on my ideal week. In the future, maybe that's something that wouldn't necessarily be there.

I have one up for you there. They've added a shortcuts action now for Apple's shortcuts application where you can send programmable text to your HomePod. And so now every day at 4 p.m., my HomePod says, Hey, Sparky, stop everything and shut down. It literally yells at me every day at 4. Nice. We may have to share that shortcut with people if you're willing to do that.

Yeah, I'll put it in the show notes. Cool. So yeah, that's the only thing that's red. I have several blocks on here which are yellow, and those are the church-related blocks, not just the services and the practices and things like that, but basically everything that's related to church or ministry. and that's on my ideal week. Worship team practice is on here, all that kind of stuff. And then the rest of it is all green, and that is personal stuff. So this is a combination, and maybe I would break this out later as I evolve this, but this includes my morning and evening routines. This includes a break in the middle of the day every day and also includes date night, family time, things like that. Let me just talk about the work stuff first, I guess, before I get

into some of the other things here. As I was thinking through my ideal day, I recognized there were basically two buckets that my ideal work breaks into. One is the creative stuff. And the other one, we talked a little bit about this in the last episode, is this business consulting or fractional integrator type services for, I think, specifically creative entrepreneurs is kind of where I'm leaning. People who have small teams but don't really have any formal business training and don't have a scoreboard, don't have processes in place to create alignment, other teams, stuff like that. Those are the people that I really want to help.

And my ideal workday looks something like getting up, going through my morning routine, and then immediately going into creative mode where I recognize that the majority of what I create originally starts life as some sort of writing. It doesn't matter if it's creating an outline for a podcast or writing a newsletter, video script, whatever. So I would love to, for a couple of hours every single morning, just write and not have a set limit on this is how many words I want to write or have something that I'm shipping at the end of every block, but just having a whole big queue of writing projects and just flowing as long as the words are coming. And then from there, transitioning

into, I'm calling it creating, but there's got to be a better term for this. This is all of the other stuff that I would make. And primarily I'm thinking of video formats here. So this would be videos for video courses. This would be YouTube videos, things like that. This would be YouTube videos, things like that. And doing that for a couple of hours every day. All of that happens before an extended lunch break, which not only has time for me to sit and eat with my family because we homeschool our kids and everybody's here most of the time, but also has time for either getting to the gym or going for a run.

If it's a run day, I'll do it before lunch. If it's a gym day, it might happen after lunch. Once a week, I have this on here still just as once a week currently, I would go do what I call a one-on-one with my kids. And I've shared the details of that. But the short version is we go to a coffee shop. They get hot chocolate. I get coffee. We play games for an hour, just have fun together, talk about whatever they want to talk about. And then in the afternoon, that's when I would do the business stuff, the consulting stuff with a couple of exceptions there. You mentioned compartmentalizing all of the podcast stuff

into Monday, Tuesday. Well, for me, it would just be Tuesdays would be podcasting. I really am enjoying this cohort stuff. So in the ideal version of this, I think I've always got some sort of cohort running, and that happens probably on a Friday in the afternoon. And then the other days are the days that I'm having the occasional meeting with some of these business leaders that I help consult. That would be pretty great. And then all that happens until 5 p.m. when I go through the shutdown routine and transition into the evening schedule, which looks different every day. But there is a date night that happens every week on Tuesdays.

That one's kind of already established. That was a lot of work to create that one, but very happy that we've had that routine. And then Mondays are typically the days when we don't have anything else going on. Kids aren't in sports or whatever. That just seems to be the day that gets to be free for us. So that's when we would just hang out and probably play board games. And then the Friday thing in the afternoon, I have social in the evening. I'm not really a very social person. So this one really isn't necessarily for me. My wife is very extroverted

and I'm perfectly fine sitting and reading a book in the evening, but she really likes to hang out with people. So we want to start having people over more now that the weather's getting nice here in Wisconsin. For example, last weekend, we had a bunch of families over and we had a basketball night, right? So the high school guys and a couple of dads played basketball and kids are running around in the yard on the jungle gym. And it was just, everyone's hanging out, having fun, just very chill, relaxed. That's kind of the atmosphere that my wife wants to create in our home. She wants it to be a place, and I'm 100% supportive of this, a place where people can come and relax.

That's what we're trying to do. So we want to do something socially on a regular basis. And then Saturday is kind of my Sabbath, for lack of a better term, where it's just a rest day. And that doesn't mean that we're not doing anything as a family, but we have the time to go do whatever we want to do. Whether that's going and kicking a soccer ball around, playing pickleball at the park a couple miles away, whatever we want to do, but not having an agenda. That kind of reminds me of the Sabbath episode when we talked to Sean McCabe about how you can't have an agenda for a Sabbath. That was his approach.

He showed up on the podcast, but he couldn't make plans for that week or that year that he was off. that week or that year that he was off, I had to reach out to him within 24 hours. And if he had the space, he would be willing to do it. That's kind of what I want to do with our Saturdays. Just have that protected time to, if my body's telling me I need a break and I just want to lay on the couch all day, that's fine. That's when it will happen. And that's kind of what I'm trying to do with my weekends and evenings right now. It's just, let's play it by ear for now. And if I want to add more structure later, I can.

But I'm just not quite there yet. Like the one thing I always do on Sunday is I plan the next week. I like to hit the ground running on Monday morning. But that is not a huge commitment. Otherwise, I kind of like to have it free right now. And with the life stage we're all in, in my family, those days are usually taken anyway. But when they're not, maybe I'll feel like recording some more. Maybe I'll want to go out and fiddle in the shop.

Maybe I'll want to lay on the couch and play a video game. I don't know. But I'm just trying to give myself some space now to figure that out. And that's really my whole point about this episode is this ideal week is a framework. It's not a contract. And if you haven't tried it yet, I would really recommend you give it a shot because bringing that level of intentionality of saying, okay, I'm going to pick some days that I really try to buckle down and get hard work done and other days where I'm lighter or I'm more open to management versus

maker type work, that suddenly gives your brain a way to make decisions as commitments are thrown at you. And I find it just really helpful. And it does let you be more productive on the stuff that's most important to you because suddenly you're doing more than just thinking about it. It's the act of writing it down that brings that intentionality. And what I would say, if you're listening and say, well, I just thought of a way to do that in my head and I'm good. I don't need to write this down. No, you do need to write it down. Whether you do it with a piece of graph paper and a pencil or with a computer program or I don't know, whatever it is you want to use, you need to commit it somewhere in writing. I agree with that. The other thing that I'll mention, because you were talking about having

the flexibility to do other things on other days if you want to, for me and the approach that I took, I know myself and I will, as long as there are things to be done, I will want to do them. So the all green day of Saturday, that actually is kind of a forced boundary for me. I intentionally did that because I want to put up a barrier there where no work happens on Saturday. And I've only been without the day job a couple of weeks, so I'm still figuring this out. But prior to when I did have the day job, there were some side projects that did have to get done. I found they were kind of bleeding over into the weekend. And I want to protect that time. So everyone's got to figure this out for themselves, obviously, but that's the approach that I want to take with that day

and the intention behind that being all green. Well, I just figured with five kids, that being all green was self-explanatory. You're going to be busy. I can tell you that one of the things I've done is I share my ideal week with my spouse. So she knows that, you know, usually on Wednesday through Friday to not try and schedule stuff that I may need to be participating in. Although Friday night, I'm always eager to go do something. That's like one of our favorite nights to use our Disney passes and just head up there for a few hours. But, but, you know, she knows kind of the block days that I'm working. And often my family has plans for me on the weekend and I, I go with it. I don't try to be the grumpy guy. Oh, you didn't check with me. If they have something going on on the weekend,

usually I'm down for it. Um, you know, as as i watch them grow up i know they're going to be gone before i know it and i really want to to spend time with them when i can but i also need to to get my art out and and pay for it all right yep all right well listen if you're going to try and do an ideal week, we have a forum. You could go in and talk to some other people and us. Go to talk.macpowerusers.com. There's a room in there just for the Focus podcast. We'd love to hear your thoughts on it and how it's working for you.

Maybe you've got some techniques that we haven't heard of. Mike and I are trying to do more feedback now, so send us some feedback. There's a forum at the Relay website, relay.fm. You can send us a note from there. And we'd love to hear your experiences with this. Something we had in the outline we didn't get to, but I want to talk about real quick, is the idea of an ideal day or an ideal month and quarter. I don't really think about them that way. The ideal day is a thing, but that's why I do a shutdown every day and I plan out the next day. So I kind of do an ideal day every day, but I also am very flexible and understand that I can't always live up to the blocks I set for

myself for the next day. But when it comes to months and quarters, I don't really find they lend themselves to that. I guess if you had the kind of work where you truly could say, like, I'm going to spend, you know, the first two weeks of this month writing my novel and not deal with anybody else. So if you could like have the kind of work where you could literally take weeks at a time and shut the world out, then that would make sense. But that doesn't work for me. The smallest unit I can get, or I'm sorry,

the largest unit I can get to is a week. Because of the kind of stuff I do, there are weekly obligations. I really can't go any bigger than that. But I guess there are people that do this weekly and monthly and quarterly, even if you've got the kind of life where you can do that. But that's not me. But if that's you, again, I'd love to hear about that. That'd be really interesting. I agree. I'm not at that point either, but would love to see how other people are doing this. And I think I aspire to do something like this

once I start to figure out my own creative rhythms. This, I feel like, is kind of the basis of that seventh week sabbatical idea that Sean talked to us about. And I would love to incorporate something like that into my regular schedule. Yeah, me too. I keep talking about it and I don't do it. And I'm a little embarrassed by that, but maybe we'll get there this year. Yep. Either way, you can learn more about us at relay.fm.com. That's the website for the show. You can join the forums over at talk.macpowerusers.com.

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