Focused - 208: Moving the Needle Revisited

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by Mike Schmitz. Hello, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? I am couldn't be happier, man. It's a nice day. Summer's here.

Lots going on. And today we're going to talk about one of my favorite productivity topics, moving the needle. This is one of your favorite productivity topics, moving the needle. This is one of your favorite productivity topics. I was going back through the archives when you proposed this as a topic. I was like, didn't we just cover that? But no, it was actually episode 74 back in 2019.

So. Yeah, it's been a few years. A little water under the bridge since then. Yeah. But you know, sometimes the best things are the things that stick around and moving the needle is still something I find really useful. And I wanted to talk about it again.

We hear about it once while from folks, I've kind of evolved my thinking a bit on it. But I think it's time to discuss moving the needle again. Let's do it. Let's start with a statement of the problem. The problem is we have a lot to do, but not all of it is of equal importance. It's just easy to spend the whole day working without doing the important stuff.

Have you ever had a day where you feel like you've worked all day and you got to the end and you feel like you did nothing? Yes, yes I have. Yeah, a few times, all right. Well, that's a moving the needle problem. That is a day where you let the unimportant stuff take over. A couple ways this happens is what I call the email trap.

You go into email and you spend five hours in email and you can spend five hours in email. I can for sure if I let myself. Another way you do it is lots of meetings. And I know that with COVID, I mean we did this in 2019, but since then the Zoom meeting has made meetings almost worse of a problem because there's so little friction to setting meetings now.

100%. Yeah, another one is getting lost in the minutia. I feel like a lot of times mentally we just don't want to do the hard stuff. So we choose to spend an hour organizing the gas bills alphabetically, chronologically, you know, whatever, by color. You've heard the term organizing the deck chairs on the Titanic. I think in productivity we do that all the time.

And that is why you get to the end of the day and you find that you didn't really get any of the important work done. You gotta bring some discipline to the game and moving the needle is a technique to do that. Although I would say another one that you can forget or can use as a way to avoid moving the needle is a technique to do that. Oh, you know, I would say another one that you can forget or can use as a way to avoid moving the needle is getting caught up in other people's projects.

Yep, definitely. That one's a little more political and you gotta kind of figure it out. But if all you do is other people's projects, then what happens to your projects? Yeah, you brought up discipline. And that is interesting because I just finished, we were gonna talk about this

in the what we're reading later section, but Right Thing Right Now by Ryan Holiday. Good book. And I didn't make this connection till what you were talking about right now, but that whole book is based on the third stoic virtue of justice, which is doing the right thing. But I was kind of struck when I was reading

through that book and in part one where he's talking about the me or personal, there's the last chapter in the book and that section is actually the title of the book, Right Thing Right Now. And he says that the right thing, right time for the right thing is always right now. And then he says discipline is often a battle against procrastination. And immediately when he talked about that, I thought of obviously the, the productivity angle of this. We don't think about me getting distracted by email or being pulled into a pointless meeting as a matter of injustice, but maybe we should. I always sound so morbid on the show, Mike, but none of us are getting out of this alive.

And if you wanna make your dent, you gotta do the hard stuff. And you can spend all your time pushing pixels around in an email application, or you can make something great. And the only way you're gonna do it is to get some discipline and do it. And I think moving the needle, it's just a technique

that can help, you know, push you. I use it on myself all the time. So this, I'm just as bad at this stuff as everybody else. But, you know, I think, you know, before we get to the discipline, it's like, I'd like to kind of shrink this a little bit and just think about how do you get in the situation where you're repeatedly working all day

but not moving the needle, not making a difference on the things that matter? And I think primarily it's a you problem, or a me problem, I guess I should say, right? I think that, I mentioned that working on other people's projects can be a cause, but I think that the primary cause is myself. I was thinking about it like junk food.

Busy work is like eating junk food. It's empty calories. But it's easy. I even remember this back when I was a lawyer, how I would have a big motion to write and I would find myself going to email and saying, well, let me see what's in the email. And I can write back another lawyer,

I can set a meeting, I can do all this busy work in the email rather than do the hard work of research, thinking, writing, the stuff that really puts my brain to the test, but it's the stuff that I actually get paid for. And I remember catching myself doing that. It's just an escape mechanism to avoid doing hard work. And I think we all do it.

You don't need to be ashamed. I mean, I think all of us do it, but the trick is we gotta trick our monkey brains to rise above that. Yeah, a couple things I wanna kinda double click on there. You're kinda talking about the discipline and the problem starts with me, and that's not a very popular message maybe.

It feels uncomfortable to be talking about that. But that really is the root of the issue. And for a long time, I've been fascinated with the concept of self-determination going back to when I was working with the family business. My dad, who has a background in assessments, created several emotional intelligence assessment and skill building systems. And one of them was on the topic of self-determination and personal responsibility. And that was always my favorite one because essentially the message of that product was when you accept responsibility for the things that are going wrong in your life, you now

have the power to change them. And we sold that to big school districts primarily, and at-risk populations, which were kids who were in a bad situation through no fault of their own, but their lives completely changed when they said, I'm not going to let it stay this way. And that's ultimately the switch that has to be flipped is, okay, so there's something that's not right here. And rather than try to blame the external circumstances, which probably contributed at least in some small part to it,

but waiting for that stuff to change, you're gonna be waiting for a while. So by saying, you know, I'm not gonna wait for the situation to change, I'm gonna do something about it, that's really what the whole show is about. Although I think if we would have named it Disciplined instead of Focus, we'd probably have a few less listeners.

Yeah, absolutely. But no, I think there's truth to that. I mean, it's something though that we do struggle with. Yeah, and then the other thing I think is kind of where moving the needle comes in is how do you measure your effectiveness with this? Let's say you do want to change your situation. You bought into the idea of focus and discipline and gosh darn it, I'm going to figure this stuff out and I'm going to

assert my will over my day and do the very best that I can to bring every drop of life out of every moment that I've been given. It's kind of the whole idea behind memento mori, which we've talked about and I know we're both big fans of that idea. So that, that desire, I think is a good thing. The problem is when you look at the data and you see like, Oh, I meant to do this, but actually I got distracted for this long and my hit rate is an abysmal, you know, 15% on my intentions, but that's, that's okay. Like you have to have some sort of accurate measure. Facing those numbers is uncomfortable,

which is why I think a lot of people will substitute motion for effectiveness, but busyness is not a proxy for productivity. And so moving the needle is essentially an external accountability system. And I say system, but it's an external accountability mechanism, maybe. It's not a whole, you know, follow all these steps and do all these things, but it's an external accountability mechanism, maybe. It's not a whole follow all these steps

and do all these things, but it's something that you started using, and I think I have incorporated it in my own way into my productivity and creativity workflows. So we can look back and see how we did, because when we take that time to reflect, get outside the busyness of the day to day and ask yourself what really happened yesterday or last week or last quarter,

then we can figure out, you know, what are the things that contributed to me not being able to follow through on those intentions? Because I think at the heart of productivity and creativity and just kind of the way that we live our lives. A lot of people are writing about habits and routines and things like that. And James Clear Atomic Habits, you know, bestselling book for four years in a row or something like that.

It's crazy. No other nonfiction book has been that successful for that long, as long as people can remember. But the reason that it's so popular is because people are recognizing, I think think that everything that we do is all part of these independent but interdependent systems. So if we can figure out, you know, what are the inputs, what are the processes, what are the outputs? Okay. When you reflect, you start at the output.

I'm not happy with the output. Well, what can I change? I can change my input or I can change the processes. And that's where, you know, you tweak that stuff. And that's really what I, my opinion, the value of something like moving the needle is it allows you to see where things maybe are broken. And maybe you can make those small adjustments and those will compound to some better results over time. to some better results over time. Yeah, and it's simple. And I think that's important too. When you're talking about blame, it reminded me, I went into my Obsidian SparkyOS database,

you know, my encapsulation of my rules, my personal rules. I actually have a note about blame. It says there's two options for blame. Number one, blame yourself. Number two, blame nobody. And so I wrote that down, I don't know, four or five years ago, and that works for me. Like the fact that I wrote it down,

whenever I get tempted to blame somebody, I just move on. In fact, we just had an incident before the show started today. My recording device failed me. And I remembered the rules, like, all right, it's an inanimate object that didn't work. I'm not, so be it, move on. You know?

I'm not gonna sit here and cry about that not working. I'm just gonna move on. But people, things, whatever, just blame yourself or blame nobody. It's a pretty good rule for your life, I think, if you want to adopt that into your own personal operating system, go nuts. I do think also another kind of in the

it's all about me topic is the lack of priorities. I think that a big helper in this battle to make a full day actually equal a full day is to figure out what's important. When I did the productivity field guide and we did that webinar series, it was so instructive to me because a lot of people hadn't really done

the foundational work of figuring out what's important to them. And until you do that, it's really hard to move the needle because you don't know what the needle is pointing at. And I think that is another key piece of this. Yeah. And the interesting thing about this for me is the personal application of it. And I guess just because it's personal, we feel like we don't need this sometimes. it and I guess just because it's personal we feel like we don't need this sometimes.

I was just listening to a podcast episode by Barrett Brooks. He was someone that I met at Craft and Commerce and he was the number two at ConvertKit for a while when they grew from three million a year to 30 million a year and good friends with Nathan Berry and they actually recorded a podcast episode that they released in two places on Nathan's show and on Barrett's show. Barrett's show is called Good Work and it's one of my new favorite podcasts. It's really about business operations. But anyways, they were talking about principle, the things that they'd learned, you know, growing convert kit the way that they did, the mistakes that they made, things like that. And one of the things that they talked about was that clear as kind. And Barrett was basically a COO.

So his whole angle is, you know, how do I create effective teams? How do I empower the managers? How do we allow our employees to have a good quality of life and do awesome, awesome work? And so they talked about that, that clear as kind idea. And that was something that I've heard and I was a second in command at a digital marketing agency for a while. So that was definitely something that I understood the importance of it in terms of a team context. But then it's interesting because you take out all of the other people

that are dependent on that clarity. And even with just yourself remaining, you can still struggle from the same problem where if you're not clear, you have no idea what you're doing. The problem is that because you don't have a boss who's holding you accountable to the lack of progress a lot of times that you just continue to float. You're tossed back and forth by the whims and the waves. And I think that's what moving the needle helps with is it's not like a taskmaster saying you must crank X number of widgets today or you are a failure. I mean, I think you could take these concepts too far in that direction. I'm probably guilty of that in the past, but it's really just a gentle

reminder. Someone whispering in your ear is like, Hey, remember that this thing is actually the most important. And then you don't feel like you need to just scroll the endless feeds because you need a break, even though that doesn't really rejuvenate your brain the way that you think it will when you engage with that stuff. Yeah, agreed. And then in terms of the source of this stuff, there is someone else component of this if you are finding yourself like in a job where you're only working on other people's projects. And then I think it's just a question of looking into like, am I too much of a people pleaser?

Have I communicated my priorities to my co-workers so they understand that my work is important too? That's something that you, that's a battle you can win. I have won it personally in the past, but it's not something you win overnight, but you need to first identify that that is an issue for you. Yeah, you need the clarity before you can move forward and it's worth fighting for. This episode of Focused is brought to you by our friends at Vitaly. Vitaly is bringing in a new era for customer service productivity with their all-in-one

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when you schedule a qualified meeting. That's vitaly.io slash focused. Our thanks to Vitally for their support of the Focus podcast and all of Relay FM. So we've been talking around this whole day of moving the needle, but I haven't explained it. That was kind of intentional. I want to talk about the problem first.

But moving the needle is a technique I use to make sure that I work on the important stuff. And all it is, is it's the world's simplest time tracking. At the end of the day, I look at where I spent my time, what blocks did I work on. When I'm doing substantive work, the kind of stuff that matters to me is important, usually results in me earning money or moving forward on an important goal of mine. I call that moving the needle.

So, moving the needle for me is making this podcast. It's not dealing with sponsor emails or answering email in general. Moving the needle for me is making a Max Barkey field guide. It's not, you know, sitting here at the end of the day and, uh, planning my tasks for the next day. You know, it's admin type stuff to me is not moving the needle production work is. Um, and so I, at the end of the day, do an accounting and I just

write down a number, It's not hard. I don't really do it with a high degree of accuracy. Like yesterday, I did not spend, like I know I spent five hours moving the needle yesterday, but I don't know if it was five hours and 16 minutes or five hours and 40 minutes. I just make a rough approximation looking at the time I spent.

If you want to be fancy with a timing app or a proper timer, you can do it that way and get it down to the minute. But to me, it's just hours are good enough. And when you start the practice of tracking, moving the needle, it becomes a background process in your brain. So not only do you add up the hours at the end of the day, you also plan the next, when I plan the next day the night before, but if you even do it in the morning,

you've got that in your mind that at some point you're gonna be accountable to yourself for moving the needle. And when you plan your day, you actually plan to do the important priority work more because you want that number to be higher at the end of the day. It's just a little hack of the human brain, but it actually works.

I like the distinction you made that admin work is not moving the needle, but production work is. I'm wondering if you see any value in making that any more granular though. I mean, you do a lot of different things. So is all production work equal when it comes to moving the needle? Primarily. Like if I'm, I, the way I look at it, like I have different channels as Max Barkie, you know, the labs and the stuff I make for the labs,

the webinars we do in the labs, all stuff I make for the labs, the webinars we do in the labs, all of that is moving the needle, writing blog posts, preparing for and recording podcasts, making, researching and developing and recording field guides. All that stuff to me, I have a lot, I guess I'm lucky in that my life has kind of coalesced around a lot of what I call moving the needle work.

And I think it's partly a result of the fact I've been doing this for so long, that I find ways to get rid of non-moving the needle work. I mean, I have, JF helps me. I hesitate to call him an assistant. He's really kind of a partner in crime with a lot of stuff. But whenever I find stuff that doesn't move the needle,

my first question is, is there a way I can give this to J.F.? Or is there a way I can turn this over to automation so I don't do it anymore? But part of the game of my life is doing as little non-moving the needle work as possible when I'm working. Sure, yeah, that makes sense. And you mentioned you've been doing this for a while, which I think is important because it occurs to me that you listed a whole bunch of things there. And if you're not careful,

you could get pulled into a research rabbit hole and neglect some of the other things that you have to do, which are still classified under needle moving production work. I think the thing that you've built into your rhythm because you've been doing it for a while, you kind of know this is what I'm capable of in whatever timeframe daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. So you kind of have accurate estimates to begin with with probably as a result of a lot of trial and error, but I'll let you speak to that. And then the other thing is you have some external accountability mechanisms that are built in with the regular webinars and the

labs content. People are expecting things from you. So you don't need to necessarily build in a system of checks and balances to make sure that you record the video for the labs this week is my guess. You just know that that's part of the rhythm. Yeah. So you've, you've designed your moving the needle system to be as, uh, as simple as it can be. And the trick there is not to make it too simple. You want to reduce as much complexity as you can so that you, you eliminate the friction that's associated with doing the work, but you also,

some of that friction intentionally added can be beneficial if it helps you keep your intentions on the right track. Exactly, and it works hand in hand with time blocking. So part of moving the needle is giving an appropriate amount of time to the various production tasks. Like you're right, I cannot spend the whole day in research mode because I need to ship.

I want my gravestone to say that. Here lies David Sparks, he's shipped. So to do that, you've got to actually produce. But that's part of the time blocking system. But I do feel like the research is fundamental to making good stuff. So I do the research and I do the work. And that to me is moving the needle.

I've thought about it over the years. Do I expand moving the needle to other things? Like when I'm doing creative pursuits outside of quote unquote work. And I don't do that. I just feel like kind of moving the needle is something really applied mainly to the Max Barkey role. I don't need to take this into my woodworking

or my parenting. It just starts to get weird. But I've experimented, but it just doesn't really work. But this is a very good technique to keep yourself aware and keep yourself focused on doing the stuff that matters. And like I said, writing down the number at the end of the day is great. And it's fun at the end of the month to look at the number

and like, oh yeah, I got a lot of work done this month. And you can see overall trends. I mean, to me, this scratches like 75 or maybe 80% of the time tracking it. Because the metric I wanna see is from month to month, am I moving the needle and how much? How is that trending? Like I had some personal stuff that got really busy

and then for a couple months my moving the needle number went down, but I knew why. If it goes down and I don't know why, that's something I'm worried about. So it gives me a lot of kind of feedback loop, but to me the real payoff is in the planning. When I plan the day, in the back of my mind, I want to juice that number.

I want to get a high moving the needle number. And so much so that I'm willing to work hard instead of answer email for five hours. Yeah. The, the thing I want to just call out here though, is that this is personal and you've figured out where to draw the lines for yourself. Yeah. But let's just say the Silicon Valley startup of Sparky Enterprises sells and they make a $40 million exit. And the new guy comes in, he's got your customer base,

he's got all the things that you've done. You've given him your moving the needle system. And in that documentation, it says, strive for five hours of moving the needle work per day. That's not enough for that person to do what you do. There's a whole bunch of things that are kind of clicking in your brain as to, okay, well now it's time to go do these, these other things. But that's kind of the point. Like you need to figure out your own system for protecting your focus and your intention. So I just want to call that out.

Like some people may be listening to this and be like, well, there's a hole there. Well, yeah, there's a hole there for the way that your brain works. And if you were to try to implement this yourself, you're going to need to figure out how to personalize this. And I think we're going to talk about maybe the specifics of our, our systems here in a little bit, but I just wanted to call that out before we get too far with this. Yeah. Agreed. Aristotle quote. We are what we repeatedly do.

Therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit. And that's the idea. You move the needle every day. So how do we do that? For me, it starts with the roles base priorities. Figuring out your roles and figuring out what you wanna do in those roles and pursuing that.

Like I said earlier, this is for me primarily in the Max Sparky role. The experimentation of trying this, like I said, like as a father, doesn't really compute for me. But for Max Sparky, it is very easy to get caught up in the little stuff and not do the big stuff. So, uh, I look at the beginning of each quarter and each month and each week at my, you know, my view of what I want to do in that role. And then I figure out how to make it happen.

Nice. So for me, I've got a, a multi-scale planning system that I think I've probably talked about previously. I for sure have talked about this with a YouTube video, so I will link to this. And I won't get too nerdy about the technical details as I do it all in obsidian. Yeah. But essentially though, the TLDR for this is that I look at the things that I want to do, my intentions that I set during the personal retreat planning process. And then when I do my next quarterly personal retreat, I look at what sort of progress was I able to make. And then I look at the systems. But then as I'm going

through and setting the plans, setting the intentions, I'm doing that at the systems, but then as I'm going through and setting the plans, setting the intentions, I'm doing that at the weekly level and then at the daily level. And with the weekly level, I've got the templates and everything set up. So I do that in Obsidian and I have all the tasks that I need to get done that week, all the podcasts that have to be recorded. I've actually got a section in my community where I started doing this and other people have been sharing their weekly intentions as well. So there's some public accountability. Like you said, you were gonna do these things

and they were important. So, okay, well, I said that publicly. Now I gotta follow through on it. But then I'll do that. And then when I make the time block plans, I'm really just trying to chip away at that weekly plan. I do that enough and the weekly plan takes care of itself. You look back at the weekly plans and the progress that you made on a quarterly level

and hopefully those add up and you've made a dent in some of the things that you intended to do for the last quarter. Which I've seen that myself, you know I've talked a little bit about it previously on the podcast, but my big intentions lately have been revolved, have been focused on the YouTube channel and the newsletter. Now there that goes with ebbs and flows like I'm in this season right now where actually I have a YouTube video that's ready to go but I haven't published one in about three to four weeks so I don't put the pressure on myself like I have to do this every single week just to crank something out.

You could make the argument that maybe I should but but that's not the way that it's played out for me. I'm just, I'm happy going back and forth between those. So I'm focusing on building the newsletter, making that better. How can I make this as good as it can be for the people who have decided to subscribe and want to actually read what I have to write every week? I feel I have a responsibility to make that as awesome as I can. And then the YouTube video videos, those are really things that are driving the signups for the newsletter list. So I want to make good quality stuff there. So people like what they see and they want more of it.

So they sign up for the newsletter. Those things are kind of on a different balances on the scale for me. So I'll put my thumb on one for a little bit and then I'll change it. I'll put my thumb on the other, but they're connected and they're both part of the quarterly intentions. So that's kind of how I do it. I don't focus so much, you know, did I do five hours of moving the needle work today? I just kind of look back at the end of the week and I say, was I able to follow through on my daily plans? Was I able to complete everything that was part of that weekly plan? I've defined, like, this is what success for the week looks like. Was I

able to achieve that? And if I wasn't, you know, it's just kind of a data point at that specific moment in time, because the real changes that I'm going to make to my systems, that happens during the personal retreats. I try not to get too into the weeds on the daily or weekly. I build in those, those quarterly opportunities to mess with the systems. Well, I do find that the, the recording, the number keeps it at the front of mind daily. And I think that is really useful being able to just always remember, oh yeah, there's a big thing I'm working on here.

In terms of technicalities, I've done this in so many different ways. I've done it in Obsidian, I've done it, I put it in reminders once, just a list of the quarterly goals. I did it, I made an Apple Note and used the widget to put it on this home screen, you know, or the desktop with an Apple widget.

You know what works best for me, and this is so low tech, it's just, I made a wallpaper and I just wrote down, you know, the goals for the next three months on it. And it's just on my screen anytime I look at my screen without an app, it shows me them. And I find that kind of motivational and it gives me a little kick in the pants. But all of this stuff really is, like I said,

rewiring the brain because there's so many instincts we have that are wrong in terms of getting the hard work done and you can go through a whole year of days where you don't work on the important stuff and then that was just one more year of your where you don't work on the important stuff. And then that was just one more year of your life that you didn't do the important stuff. So it does take, you know, little hacks like this sometimes, I think, to get yourself jump started. Yeah. So you were talking about the scores and that made something click in my brain. I guess I do actually have a daily score, which is sort of related to moving the needle.

And that's tied to the whole concept of the daily questions that I do. Uh, the daily questions is really basing the intentions though. It's not necessarily the outcome. So I'm not focused. Uh, and when I answer, did I do my best to create something today?

That's the specific daily question that I think is tied to most of what I would call moving the needle work. I'm not giving myself an eight or a nine because I spent four or five hours doing it. I'm really giving myself an eight or a nine because I made a pretty significant effort to make something. And if I don't, then it'll be a lower score. If I just absolutely crush it, you know, I might give myself a 10, but those are kind of few and far between. So I don't know if that really counts because moving the needle is really looking at what actually happened. And this is not focused

on the outcome. The outcome stuff really happens during the personal retreat, like I said, but I do have a form of this, I guess, with the daily journaling that I do. And again, I've got a YouTube video for those daily questions that people wanna see how deep that rabbit hole goes, I'll save you the conversation here. Well, I think it's a useful technique because, like I said, it brings it to the top of your mind. You know, maybe you're listening, you don't need something like this, but if you do, the mechanics

of this are not difficult. I've already kind of explained them. I think the first piece of this is you plan for it, or maybe the first piece of it is stop and think about what is moving the needle for you? And like Mike said earlier, this is an individual question and each of us have to have our own answers for it. When I was a lawyer, moving the needle was, for instance,

doing actual research and writing and client work and writing contracts, things like that. All of the admin, the filing stuff, the email stuff, all that was not moving the needle for me. But if you're listening to this, you gotta make your own calls. I think I could make the argument But if you're listening to this, you gotta make your own calls. I think, I could make the argument that if you're in sales, email is moving the needle for you.

So you just gotta figure out what that means to you. I would recommend writing it down. It's not enough to carry the list around in your head. Write it down, give yourself a rule set about what moving the needle is. And then incorporate the planning like Mike was talking about and figure out, well, if I wanna move the needle,

what are the projects that I wanna move it on and how am I going to make that progress in the next quarter? Quarter's such a great unit. I think that's the best planning unit. And I do like monthly and weekly too, but Mike's right, I think quarterly is really where it's at. And then, you know, do the work.

You know, at some point, all these tricks have to fall away and you have to do the work. But that's the beauty of this system, is you do make yourself accountable at the end of the day. And you know, five hours for me, yesterday was a pretty good day, frankly. Because I have other stuff to do that doesn't really move the needle,

but still needs to get done, and I have a life. But a two hour day is one that I look at and raise my eyebrow and say, what happened there? How come I only spent two hours working on the important stuff? And then that opens up a feedback cycle. And I started doing this, I don't know how long I was doing it

when we talked about it in 2019. It had to be years at that point. And I have continued the habit because it works for me. This one didn't fall away. That's one of the reasons I wanna do the show. I mean, after all these years, I still do it. Yeah, one of the things I want to talk about with this, you mentioned you've been doing this for a while and I have been applying this in my own way for a while as well. But

I want to for a moment think about the person who's listening to this who is working a day job and they're thinking, well, that would be nice. I wish I had five hours to devote to the needle moving work, but I don't. What do you do in that situation? And I think you can still apply the principles here. Just maybe the data that you're gonna get in terms of the quantity is not gonna be a lot at the beginning.

Although I would say everything that Cal Newport talks about in deep work can help you get to the point where you are able to do more of that. But I was thinking about the 80-20 principle and I think that definitely applies here. So if you can't devote five hours to moving the needle every day, that's okay. Just start where you are with what you have. And if you were in the position that, that you're, that, uh, you're trying to do

what you're doing now, David, but you are in the situation where you were working full time at the law firm, I feel like you might get a little bit more pointed on the types of things that you're focusing on in terms of moving the needle work. Yeah. It's, it's great that, you know, I can do, I can lump research in here and I can lump writing in here, but if someone is trying to struggle with a limited amount of time and they want to apply some of this stuff, I think really you want to boil it down, getting back to like the one thing, right?

What is the one thing that if done makes everything else easier or unnecessary? So if you've got a whole bunch of projects that you'd like to take action on, a whole bunch of things that you want to do and you know that you don't have a whole lot of resources, whole lot of time to devote to this type of stuff, just pick one that is the most important and then take consistent action on that thing. Do what you can with that thing. I mean, that's kind of how I got into making stuff online in the first place is I had this idea to write a book and I wasn't a writer. So, well, I guess I better learn how to write.

And I started getting up a little bit earlier and writing for about an hour every day before I went into the office. And then eight months later, I had a book self-published and I got connected with other people and I started doing jobs on the internet, writing for people that led to webinars and podcasts and video courses. And you never really know where that stuff is gonna take you. But if you think about,

well, I wanna be able to do all these things, it's completely overwhelming. If you just focus on like, what can I do today? That's the whole intention of moving the needle, right? Can I move the needle today in some small way? And then you do that consistently and the score takes care of itself. Yeah. I mean, that's it. And like, if you work in an office, I did that for 28 years, you can track moving, let's say you're not getting the hours you want, I think that should be a source of concern. If you define your key product of work

as certain classifications where you're not getting enough time in it, I think that's an opening for discussion with your manager. To say, look, this is what I defined as the most important work I do, the production work, the stuff that really matters while I'm in a chair collecting a paycheck from you. And because of the systems we have,

I'm only allowed to spend two hours a day on that work. Let's talk about that. And I think a good manager is going to look at that and going to be concerned and want to help you figure out a way and hopefully get some work off your back so you can get that number up. But I think quantifying it to begin with is a much more effective way to communicate that message.

And then just come in and say, I spend all my day in meetings and email and I can't get work done. That's not good enough. You got to come in and say, I spend all my day in meetings and email and I can't get work done. That's not good enough. You gotta come in and say, no, look, in the last month, this is what I was able to do. Give them data and maybe you can help make some change happen.

Yeah, I think if you're trying to make organizational change, then data is important in terms of the quantity because you can say, I was hired to do this and look, I was hired to do this, and look, I only get to do this for two hours every week. Oh, well, that's a problem. We gotta remove you some from of these meetings then, and things like that.

But in terms of the individual application to moving the needle, I think it's actually the opposite. You're not so worried about the numbers, you're worried about the trends. Are you consistently able to eke out just a little bit more moving the needlework? Maybe last week you were only able to do 30 minutes of writing towards the book that you want to publish or something. That's okay. Next week, shoot for 35. And then if you can squeeze out 40 the next week

and 45 the next week, you start to build this momentum because the common theme that we talk about all the time on this show, the reason it exists is that focus is a muscle and you have to develop it and the culture isn't going to help you do that. So you have to figure out your own ways to, as you said, trick your brain. That's really what we want to do is we want to establish some boundaries that are going to let the good stuff in, keep the bad stuff out so that we can follow through on the intentions that we set and live life on our own terms, even if it's only for a short period. And then we go to work and we have to do the things that other people tell us to do. And we have to respond to the inquiries that come in. You mentioned sales. I mean, that's one of the

most reactive jobs in the world. I don't think that that means you can't be intentional with it, though. I know several salespeople, I did sales myself, the ones that are the best are the ones that are intentional. And that doesn't mean that you're not responding to an email the moment that it comes in. I mean, I've been there with the family business, we sold the schools, so their fiscal year is up. June 30th, we get the email. If you can get me a purchase order in 15 minutes, the order is yours. Sometimes you got to do that, but it doesn't always have to be that way. And you got to figure out, you know, where are the times when I do have to switch into that mode and where are the

times where I'm thinking more big picture and I'm able to be a little bit more intentional and work on the systems and do the things that maybe you don't see immediate payoff from, but over time they're gonna, gonna produce some significant results. Yeah, well moving the needle still works for me. I think we've explained it. Give it a try, let us know in the forums

if it's working or not working for you. But the trick like Mike said is keep it as simple as possible, but not so simple that it's not effective. But giving yourself a little measuring stick for actually doing important work can really help. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Indeed. Join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast. Go to indeed.com slash focused.

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Do you need to hire? You need Indeed. And our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus Podcast and all of Relay FM. Mike, what are you reading these days? Lots of things. So the aforementioned Right Thing Right Now by Ryan Holiday, which is an incredible book.

I know you mentioned when I brought it up that you liked it too. So maybe we can talk about this more. I like everything Ryan Holiday writes. I like everything about the holiday rites. Honestly, I like his writing style. Sure. And it's very inspirational. I actually read, this is a four part series

on the four stoic virtues. I'm not even sure you can call them the stoic virtues though because if you read antiquity, these virtues are across a lot of schools of thought. But okay, let's call them stoke virtues. I read Courage when I was making the decision to stop being a lawyer, and that book played a role, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, it's a really good book.

You know, I loved Courage is Calling. The second one was Discipline is Destiny. That one was okay. I didn't like it as much as Courage is Calling. And then this one, I think so far is my favorite of the four. I am looking forward to the last one which is on the topic of wisdom but this one is great. Just recorded a bookworm episode for this and I've got my mind map book notes so I'll make that available. People want to download that. I've got a landing page where you can sign up. I

also share these mind maps in my newsletter every week. So there'll be a link for that in the show notes. So that's kind of the one that I've been focused on, but I did read another book, which you and I need to talk about at some point, not for focus, but it's a marketing book. It's called Simple Marketing for Smart People and it's by Billy Boris and Tiago Forte. So Billy is Tiago's marketing guy. And this book is essentially his very simple system, which if I were to condense it down, it's don't overthink things. Remember who you're talking to,

treat them as intelligent humans, and just continue to talk about the thing that you're going to do in the problem that you're going to solve. the problem that you're going to solve. He's got some pretty cool explanations of how that stuff all ties together, like a concept ladder. And it's a really short book, but it's I think the best marketing book that I have read. It's kind of the anti Alex Hormozi stuff. mean, a hundred million dollar offers is pretty good too, but this is, I don't know, this is basically how to market for people like us without feeling sleazy.

You don't have to have any of the crazy, you know, you got to buy right now to get all the thousand dollars worth of bonuses sort of thing. It's just, you know, how you can talk about the thing that you do, create a sustainable business and attract people who are actually interested in what you've got to offer. So a really, really good book. I definitely recommend that one. I am adding it to my list

because I need to understand this better. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, I never heard of that book. I did the Ryan Holiday book as well. Still kind of pondering it, having finished it. I just recently got started on a Matthew Crawford kick. Matthew Crawford is a guy who wrote shop class as Soulcraft. He's an interesting guy.

He got a physics undergraduate degree and wasn't sure what to do with it. So then he got a philosophy PhD. And then he started a motorcycle shop. You know? And Shop Class as a Soulcraft is his most popular book. It's kind of his story about how he went on that journey. And it is an incredibly well-written book

I mean he has a PhD and it shows in his writing but he wrote a second book that I wasn't aware of until two weeks ago called the world beyond your head and the subtitle is on becoming an individual in an age of distraction and He makes a philosophical argument in here about distraction. This is not a self-help book, this is a philosophy book. And it's not one you can buzz through in an afternoon. But it's a really good book, and I'm really enjoying it.

I'm about a quarter of the way through it. But I've already decided this is gonna be a topic of a show. So we're gonna cover this at some point in the future. I need to finish reading it and I wanna kind of process it. But if you wanna be a full participant in that episode, I'd recommend checking that book out. But it is a very interesting argument. Just to tease you a bit, he says digital things aren't the cause of this, that this is a societal thing

that's been going on for hundreds of years. And computers are just taking advantage of that. You know, the phones and the TikTok and all that. But the actual problem with distraction is built into our system before the computer's invented. Nice. Yeah, this one looked interesting. I saw you share this.

And when I saw the cover and how excited you were about it, I was like, this is gonna become a focused episode at some point. Yeah, yeah. He's a very smart guy and his writing, like I said, is entertaining. He inserts little bits of humor into his writing, but in a smart way. And I'm enjoying it, but it's actually very deep too.

And this book I'm finding that I can only read for like 30 minute sessions, because I'm processing a lot as I read through it. So maybe, I wonder what that, what is that Mike, when you can only read a book for so long? Is it because it's distracting your brain into other thoughts? Is it because it's just hard work to understand?

It's not hard to understand the book, but I think he's opening new synapses as I read it. Yeah. I know what you're talking about and I don't have a term for it, but I've definitely experienced that myself. There are certain authors that just the way that they talk and the quality of the ideas that they are sharing and the amount of thinking they are making you do can make you uncomfortable. So just like focus is a muscle. I feel like the ability to read, I'll say the right way,

is a muscle and you can get better at it over time. You can build up your endurance and tackle those those deep topics. I feel like that's kind of my reading journey in a nutshell and why I prefer nonfiction at this point. I get why people like fiction. I trying to read it. It hasn't really stuck with me because I've been a little bit busy, but I do have a bunch of fiction books that I want to read at some point. Um, but because I've been so busy, that's kind of fallen off the wayside, but the nonfiction stuff, like to me, it's almost like going to the gym. And it's one of the reasons I rail against audio books as the primary way for consuming nonfiction books specifically, because with the audio, it just keeps moving. Like you could have this podcast on in the

background while you're mowing the lawn or doing the dishes whatever and you get distracted by something the audio keeps going 10 minutes goes by you have no idea what they just said so you don't have to sit and wrestle with it and when you are forced to do that then it is it is difficult at first but it's worth the struggle I've actually got a whole workshop that I presented on this, two and a half hours on reading. I'll put a link to that in the show notes that people are interested in. It's called the reading masterclass. But I think that you do develop the ability to wrestle with these ideas. And then the value of that comes when you're able to think critically about them and not just, this is what this author is saying,

but here's how it measures up against all the other stuff that I've read on, on this topic. That's really where the payoff is. And you decide for yourself what all this means for you. Yeah. And I find that like when you read a good nonfiction book, you do find yourself taking off ramps, you know, he'll make an argument. And then you start thinking about that in terms of some other belief you have. And when you do an audiobook, there's no time for the off ramp.

So yeah, I'm like you, I tried that at some point because that was making it so easy when you buy a book, they're like, oh, you can get the audio book for another $5, but it's just frustrating because I wanna take an off ramp and the book just keeps going. So I'm like you, I don't do audio books for, for nonfiction. The one exception to that, I think though,

is that if you were to read the I'll say physical or digital book, if you're, if your eyes are looking at the words and you are listening to the audio book at the same time, I'm not sure if you've ever tried this, but that, for whatever reason that unlocks a greater level of comprehension. So if you've got a book that maybe for a class you're taking or something, I really need to ring everything I can out of this particular book. I would recommend people give that that approach a shot.

The, uh, I've never done that. So maybe I'll try that someday. Um, I am reading a fiction book right now, though. I went back and started a couple weeks ago Fellowship of the Ring from Tolkien. I read it when I was like 10. And then I saw the movies when they came out years ago. Gray and Mike have been doing a thing on Cortex where they've been watching the movies

and it reminded me how much I enjoyed the books and it's fun reading it, because last time I read it was 43, 46 years ago. I had to stop and think about how old I am. So it was a long time. So it's interesting because I remember a lot of it, but I also forgot some of it. So it's kind of fun seeing the book.

I do think the book is excellent by the way. If you've never read that one, you should check it out. That's a good one. Yeah, you forget how much like Lord of the Rings really created the genre and everything after that is kind of a copy. I think there's one other book though that we both read. Yeah.

Right, did you read Co-Intelligence by Ethan Molyk? Yeah I did, I went on vacation and I read it on the plane. What'd you think? I loved it, it was good. I mean, I've been following him, I'm in his sub stack. So Ethan Molyk is I think one of the best kind of thought leaders, I hate that word, but is, I think, one of the best kind of thought leaders. I hate that word, but it applies to him

about artificial intelligence. He's not an AI programmer. He's a business professor at Wharton. But I think he's been really smart in the way he thinks about it and how we can use it, what its limitations are. And he explains things in a very common sense way. And, you know, good book.

A lot of it was also kind of from his sub stack, but at the same time, it's just kind of a nice encapsulation of everything. If you're at all curious about artificial intelligence, co-intelligence by Ethan Molyk is an easy recommendation. I agree. In fact, maybe we should cover that for Deep Focus today. Okay, yeah, happy to do that.

Sweet. Interestingly, I read, you had told me you were reading the Ethan Molyk book. I didn't buy it initially because I read his Substack, and I was thinking, well, what am I gonna learn new on that? But then I got on an airplane for five hours, and I thought, well, you know what, I'll go ahead and read it.

So I bought the book on my Kindle app in the airport and read it on the plane. So it gave me another chance to use Kindle. I've been going back and forth. I know you're 100% a physical book guy. I have historically been a Kindle guy, but I'm getting more on an analog book kick. But I read this been a Kindle guy, but I'm getting more on an analog book kick. But I read this one in Kindle,

because that's how I could get it immediately. And there are some advantages to Kindle. It's nice to be able to read it. I had to finish it up and Daisy was asleep, but I could read it without turning the light on. That's kind of nice. I do like the read-wise integration. But I also think that kind of my system

for reading analog books has progressed to a point that I think I actually get more information out of a physical book than I do a Kindle book at this point. Yes, victory. Yeah, well, I mean, just the, because like with a Kindle, you can highlight and you can leave notes, but it's all tedious

so you just don't do it much. Where if you read a physical book with a pencil, it's very easy. A couple things that I've kind of developed around it as I've kind of gone back to analog books is I use lines and tick marks on the margins. Like a line is something that I would highlight on a Kindle. A tick mark is something that's really good

that I want to come back and think about. Two tick marks is like, you know, oh yeah, this is it. And I try to only have a few instances of those in an entire book. And then I've been doing what I call an enhanced table of contents. Anytime they define a word or a concept that I want to come back to

or think I may want to look at later, I just go to the table of contents at the front of the book and I make a second table of contents for all of those terms. And then the other thing I've been doing is, whenever I read something in a nonfiction book that I want to act on later,

I write it down in the back of the book. Just like a list of action items. And that's been kind of cool. And then I'm toying with the idea of the book, just like a list of action items. And that's been kind of cool. And then I'm toying with the idea of idea mapping. You do that with MindNode. Maybe I'll do something like that too. But yeah, I do find that annotating a physical book is easier than a Kindle book.

Yeah, I think annotating a physical book is completely fine. I don't actually do any of that. I do it all inside of my node as I read the book itself. And because I've been doing that as long as I have been, that has as little friction for me as grabbing a pencil and underlining something for you. I don't think that that's gonna be the case for everybody.

No matter how long you read books and take mind map notes like I do, you may never get to the point where that friction is, is gone for you. So I don't actually just blanket recommend people do it my way, but you've got all the key components there. I think your workflow is, is really great. And I think that's a really important approach. Like when you just have a digital book, yeah, you can grab the highlights and you can send them somewhere. But that's like one small piece of actually working the book. Like you have to put in some extra processing effort. It's not just cranking through the words with your eyeballs.

That's going to provide the real benefit from it. And that doesn't mean that you have to go nuts either. I mean one of the traps I fell in when I started taking notes on books was trying to recapture everything that the author was saying. I kind of had to find the balance there between okay I understand what they're saying and this is the stuff that's important to me, but probably 500 books in at this point. I've found the sweet spot. So glad that you're finding it too with analog books, which is interesting. Honestly thought I'd never see the day where this really was the thing. You're like, okay, yeah, this is the way

I'm going to do it now. Because you're right. There's lots of benefits to reading the digital books every once in a while. I'm tempted to get a Kindle and read books that way. But yeah, the physical books, I just get so much more out of them when I read it that way that by the time I get done with a book, I'm like, I don't know what I was thinking. This is definitely home for me. Yeah. Well, I mean, like I said, I was getting on an airplane and I could buy it immediately. That's an advantage. Absolutely. I do think that there's nothing wrong with a Kindle book

in terms of focus. We have this focus podcast. I think reading a Kindle book is just as easy as reading a physical book in terms of maintaining focus. I didn't bring my Kindle on that trip. I actually read it on an iPad in the Kindle app. And same thing, I didn't feel distracted. But I'm very careful about the way my devices are set up

so they don't distract me. And that was fine. I'm able to focus on a book just as easily in digital form as I'm in analog form. But I do like the annotation element of it. I wreck my books, as you say, but it's part of the engagement with it. I still haven't entirely figured out

what my workflow should be when I get done with a book. Summarizing some of the key arguments, like going back and looking at the tick marks seems to help, but I'm still figuring it all out. But I think I'm generally in favor of analog, but I'm not a zealot about it. You know, if I, like if I already bought the book on Kindle years ago, you know, in the Creators Guild, you and I often talk about books,

and then we, I buy a book that I don't read for several years. If I already have it on Kindle, I'm not gonna go buy it on a physical, you know. But I'm generally leaning analog at this point, so success there. You have to understand also, I went to law school and I carried like 50 pounds of books

in college. In my day, there was no digital book version and it was hard to carry all those books. So I've got a little bit of a negative connotation to it from that. I get it. I get it. Which is why I never thought that you would actually fully embrace the animal hog lifestyle. Cause that's a, that is definitely a big benefit. If I could give you one suggestion for what to do when you finish a book. Uh, one of the things that I've been doing, which has been really helpful is creating these three sentence summaries.

So typically I do that not at the end of the book, but when I bring the notes over into, uh, into obsidian, I relook at all the notes and I try to condense what are three big ideas I want to be able to retain from this particular book and I write those as three bullets at the top of the note. Yeah. makes sense. I was thinking about doing something like in the cover of the book, like doing something similar, like mapping or summarizing just in the front of the book.

So I could go back and just look at it. Yeah. All right, we are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at read at relay.fm slash focused We'd we'd love to have you join the deep focus version of the show. That's the ad free version in the show extended version We're going to be talking about co intelligence and AI today Either way, we love having you along for the ride. Thank you to our sponsors today Indeed and vitally and we'll see you next time