Focused - 211: The Focus MOB

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

Welcome to Focus, the 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. Hi, Mike. How are you today? Pretty good. How about yourself?

I had some bad news this morning. I was reading yesterday and I was squinting and holding the paper far away and I'm wearing my cheater glasses. And I said, what if I just ordered a little stronger? And I got them and I put them on this morning and everything looks good again. And I was once again reminded, momento mori. But I can read again, so that's good.

Yep, good news, bad news there. There you go, whatever, right? Just keep them coming. There's more improvements to this prescription after this one. But today we've got a fun show planned, right? We do. Yeah. So I floated this idea by you after I had guest hosted one of Sean Blanc's Focus Like a Boss workshops, which is essentially the focus course for business owners. Yeah. So Sean's been on the show a couple times before.

He's a friend of both of ours. Before I knew Sean, he told me at one point that when he first released the focus course, I was the first person to actually pay money for it. And I've been a longtime fan of Sean Sean's for since the beginning and I've just been a fan of everything that he does. But it hit me as I was going through this Focus Like a Boss session, he has this concept which is a fairly minor point in what was a full day, two day workshop where he was talking about the Focused Mob. And the focused MOB stands for margin, ownership, and boundaries.

And in the course, or the workshop, we were talking about it in terms of, as a business owner, how do you apply these things so that as a business owner, you can focus on the work that you wanna do instead of being distracted by all the minutiae of the day-to-day. There's a term, you know, working in your business instead of on your business.

That's kind of how focus manifests in that particular setting. But the instant that I started presenting this session, there was something going off in the back of my mind that said, this would be awesome to talk about on the focus podcast from a personal perspective, because I feel like a lot of the same challenges you face on a personal level and are very much in line with a lot of the things

that we talk about on this show. So I thought maybe we could just break this apart piece by piece and talk about how we're fighting for margin, ownership, and boundaries in order to help us live a focused life. Sound good? Yeah. And this is definitely a play along episode because Mike and I are going to be talking about our search for the mob and we want you to do the same as you listen, maybe

even write down a few notes so long as you're not driving down the road. Yeah, exactly. And the context of the mob as it was framed in the workshop is this is kind of like a mob. It's an army that can work for you. So in terms of fighting for focus, I think focus is kind of the end result. It's the thing that either we're able to say, yeah, I was focused or no, I wasn't, but we don't really think about sometimes the contributing factors there. And sometimes it's just we got some bad news and it threw us off and we had a bad day and we're gonna try and do better tomorrow. But the willpower approach to focus,

I feel like is a bad one. It's much better if you can design systems and your environment in a way that it helps facilitate that focus and product. So I think that the goal today is to talk about these things in terms of what are the systems that we can use in the areas of margin, ownership, and boundaries that can help us get the focus payoff that we're after. It's remarkable how much of this boils down to systems or habits.

This has been true forever and we still need to learn the lesson. Yeah, it's a lesson that I feel like you kind of continually learn. And then as soon as you think that you've got it figured out, you can't just set it and forget it because tomorrow something's going to change and you got to evolve with your surroundings. But I think the way to do this is probably to tackle it piece by piece.

So if there's anything else you want to say about systems, you could do that now. Otherwise you want to jump into the first one here. Yeah, this is just our old friend, Aristotle. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit. So, you know, 3000 years ago we had figured it out, but it's tough. Yep. Everything is a remix. You said it maybe. And he probably stole that from, you know, Socrates. So there you go. All right. So the first area here is margin. And I'm kind of curious. So I just went through this workshop.

I was working full time with the Blanc Media team when we were developing a margin course. But I'm kind of curious right at the beginning here, when you think of margin, David, what does that mean to you? Margin is something that I just didn't have for so long. I mean, just to give you, you know, people listening, most people know my story, but you know,

I was a trial lawyer for over, you know, about 15 years. And that job just inherently doesn't have margin because there's always something you should be doing. I tried to like back it down a little bit and do less, but then I picked up the Max Sparky empire. So I had two careers plus kids and margin was a thing I'd heard of but never really understood.

And I think part of the problem for me was that in my mind, margin meant like dead time. Like margin means you sit on the couch and watch TV. I didn't really understand what margin was, to be honest with you. And I feel like I've come to a much better understanding of it. We still have a tenuous relationship with each other,

but margin is definitely something that I appreciate and seek to do more of. And it's not what I thought it was. That was kind of a rambling answer, wasn't it? No, that's good. I think it's never what you think it is. That's sort of the point. And when you first come to margin,

I think it's easy to think, well, that's a luxury. I don't really need that. That's kind of the whole point of the emphasis in Sean's workshop, especially with business owners. It's really hard to tell them you can't do everything because they've made a living and a successful business a lot of times by trying to do everything. Yeah. So by saying you'll actually be able to do better work when you do less feels very counterintuitive. Yeah. But it's just the, it's not just business. It's the, the culture I think is, well, we don't want to miss out on anything so there's this underlying FOMO.

And when you have that, as soon as you have space, then you have this tendency to try and fill it. And the definition of margin, which actually there's a good book on this by Dr. Richard Swenson called margin, and he defines margin as the difference between your limit and your load. So if you have a load being, these are all the things that I'm committed to doing, all the things that are on my schedule, all the things that I've said yes to, right? And then that just slowly creeps up and then eventually you get to the point where you are at your limit, then the minute that anything goes sideways, it all comes crashing down.

So one of the things that I think about all the time, whenever I hear the word margin now, is the story that you shared a while back about feeling like you're running down a hill as a kid and you're just on the verge of falling on your face. And there's this very precarious balance that you're trying to maintain at a great speed as you're running down this hill. That's what a lot of us do with our obligations

and our commitments for a lot of different reasons. Maybe we're in a job where that is the culture. Like I said, this is kind of the norm. So it's, whenever there's space, we tend to fill it. And the thing that the book is trying to teach and Sean's trying to teach is that we need to protect that margin. We don't want to just fill it up to maximum capacity because inevitably things will go wrong. And we're much better off protecting a little bit of margin so that we can roll with the punches,

then we are just trying to maximize every single moment of every single day. And there's lots of different areas of your life that margin could manifest. I mean, the one we're kinda talking about right now, I think, is probably in our time. But if you've got margin in your finances, then that means that you're not living paycheck to paycheck. If you have margin in your emotions, it means that you're not thrown off when you get

some bad news. I think that this is a valuable concept that we should be looking for in all areas of our life. And it'll ebb and flow. In some seasons, you'll have more breathing room or margin in one particular area, and you won't have as much margin in another area. But that's kind of the point. We have to identify what trade-offs we're going to make because as hard as it is for us to hear sometimes, the truth is that we can't do everything. And ultimately when we say yes to something, what we are doing is we are saying no to something else. By trying to cram everything in, we just lose the ability to choose what that thing is

that we're saying no to. We just keep going, keep going, keep going until we crash and burn. Yeah, well going back to the running downhill analogy, I felt that for years. I worked for a law firm and ran Max Barkey, and then I quit the law firm, opened my own practice, which was theoretically smaller. But when you run your own business,

there's a whole lot of other stuff you're doing. And so I was running downhill for about 15 years. And I used to talk about it with you constantly because, in fact, if you go back to the archives of the show, it was something that came up often because that's the way I felt and it was constant. Now I have thrown my law career overboard, you know, and I guess that's a way that I, I fought for margin as I gave up a career and I don't talk about

running down Helenmore cause I don't feel like I'm doing it. I do have occasional periods where I am busy, and for one reason or another things happen, and I'm busier than normal, and I don't have as much margin as I want, but it cycles. Usually that's only for a short period of time. I know it when I see it, I deal with it,

and I work myself back to it. Like I have barometers of margin. Like for me, the wood shop is a barometer of margin. If I spend a decent amount of time in the shop, I know that I've got margin. And I haven't been in the shop for two months, but we've had a ton of travel and some stuff going on in the family and the usual push of, you know, three podcasts and a blog and field guides in the lab.

So, so I just have not really had it for a while, but even just this morning, I was thinking, cause I'm making my last trip of the year today. When I get back, I'm going to find time to get out into the shop. And that means I will have margin again. Yeah. And it's a constant struggle. There's a constant ebb and flow here. The reason that we get to that place of overload a lot of times is because we just try to maintain the thing that we do in the short term. So you're doing all this travel, but you're recognizing that I don't really want to do all this travel all the time. In an alternate scenario, you could be like, travel's great.

I'm just going to keep squeezing more travel into my schedule. be like, travel's great. I'm just going to keep squeezing more travel into my schedule. And at the same time, I'm going to not decrease any of the work that I do for the Max Sparky labs. And I'm still going to honor all of my personal commitments and nothing is going to change at home. And like just talking through that, it feels stressful. It's like, who wants to come home to that? But that's essentially what we do with our work specifically because we've got a set number of hours that we're working a lot of times and then we start to get better at it.

We start to do it at a higher quality and that work starts to become compressed and then we've got a little bit of margin and then that gets filled with new work and then that gets compressed, but work. And then that gets compressed, but that now has become the new normal and then the cycle keeps repeating until it just squeezes every square inch of margin

out of the tank. So it's okay to hustle for a period, but you can't maintain that indefinitely. Yeah, and I guess the point I'm making is, it's okay to once in a while be a little underwater, so long as it isn't the normal state of affairs. And that's what it was for me for a very long time. And it is a feeling, anybody listening that's going through

knows what it feels like. It's like, man, if I just make one mistake, this is gonna be bad, you know? And so make one mistake, this is going to be, this is going to be bad, you know? And, uh, and so that's rough, you know? But so I'm, I'm past that now and I can tell you, if you're running downhill constantly right now, you need to find a way out of it. But, but even like in my, my current state of life where I don't have two careers at once, uh, occasionally hit hit points where I'm out of margin.

And I think one of the real beneficial tools for that is the review. Like I do quarterly, monthly, weekly reviews and I'm aware of the loss of margin because of what's going on, because of all the travel. And I think a lot of us actually aren't aware of it because we get so lost in it. But when you're aware of it, you can act on it. Like I have a field of us actually aren't aware of it because we get so lost in it. But when you're aware of it, you can act on it.

Like I have a field guide I'm working on that I intended to release in September. And you know, when I did the early August monthly review, I'm like, oh, this thing is not coming along. And I have two more trips and some other stuff going on. Okay, we're pushing the release date of that to October and that's not even like guaranteed, but for now I'm going to say October. So I gave myself margin by taking a commitment off the table. And honestly, if you're running downhill all the time, you're not going to get, you know, the solution to this is not to increase your capacity. The

solution is to decrease your load and you're going to have to figure out what you can throw overboard. You're hitting on a really important point because there are two levers that you can pull here. You can, to a certain point, increase your capacity, increase your limit. And that's what I feel a lot of the productivity advice has been for a long time. It's focused on the efficiency and squeezing in just a little bit more, but that has limits. And I think also you can go too far the other way where you're just decreasing your load to the point of you're not fulfilling your full potential.

I mean, there is a scenario where you are getting paid for the work that you do and you really enjoy the work that you do, but you're so worried about protecting the margin that you don't do very much of it. That seems like a really far, really long ways off for me at the moment to tell you the truth. But I think you can just focus on like, I got to cut, I got to cut, I got to cut. And the most effective way to do this is actually to combine them. So do the things that are going to improve your systems and are going to make you maybe a little bit more efficient, but don't rely on, well, that's the only thing I have to do now because as mentioned, that's gonna create some space which will,

if you don't have the ability to say no to things, be filled by people who want you to do things, especially as a recovering people pleaser. I mean, when someone asks me to do something at work specifically, I kind of don't want to be the person who lets anybody down. I want to be the team player. So the minute that I can breathe a little bit, the tendency is to, yeah, I can help you out with that.

But that kind of gets into the things that you should be doing and you shouldn't be doing in the next section. We'll talk about ownership. But essentially what you want to be able to do is to increase your limit by automating, delegating, eliminating, keeping boundaries, focusing, things like that. But then you also want to decrease the things. Actually, I guess that's where focus would appear in the elimination of the things that really aren't though the ones that move the needle for you particularly. So I think you should take a multifaceted approach to this and one of the ways that I try to implement that is through my personal retreat process.

I've got these three questions that I spend two hours at least thinking about every single time that I do a personal retreat. What should I start doing? What should I stop doing? What should I keep doing? And it's easy to come up with the things that I should start doing. I tend to see opportunities everywhere and have a bunch of good ideas that I want to take action on. But if I just keep trying to do new things, then I'm going to get overloaded. So I actually build into that quarterly review process. When I go through and I make those lists, I'm just brainstorming. I'm jotting down everything that comes to mind for those three areas. But then I force myself every

single time to pick something to stop doing. And what that does is it systemically decreases my load every 90 days. There's one thing I at least I'm going to stop doing. And the trick there, you know, I never want to, at first glance, stop doing the things that show up there. But the thing that gets me to the point where I'm okay letting go of some of those things is by recognizing that this thing that I committed to years ago, it hit the mark for Mike back then. But the question essentially is, does this still hit the mark today? If I were presented with this opportunity today, would I say yes to this thing? And recognizing that, there's a lot of things that there's inertia and momentum built.

So I just continued to do them until I asked that question. Then I realized, you know what, I don't really want to be doing this anymore. And is it going to be a little bit of a difficult conversation to tell the person who's counting on me for this thing that I just don't want to do it anymore? Yeah. But ultimately it's going to create the margin and space that I need to feel good about the obligations that I currently have. And it's going to allow me to show up in a better way for those other things. So ultimately,

it's worth the inconvenience and the little bit of the hard conversation. Yeah, agreed with all that. But I'd like to wind back a little bit about the two ways to increase margin, increase your capacity or decrease your load, and just talk about what comes with that. Because I feel like increase your capacity for a lot of people listening to this, when you hear that, or when you affect it, when you find a way to increase the capacity. You hire somebody, you create an automation,

you find something to allow you to get things done faster and more efficiently. I think for a lot of listeners, myself included, the immediate reaction is like, great, now I can do more. And you need to etch into your retina faster does not equal more. In fact, faster could equal margin if you give it. But I think for a lot of us, that first piece of the equation that you increase your capacity immediately makes us think that you can take on more because now you've got more capacity.

So you're never getting off the running downhill because all you're doing is just adding more load on your back because you're getting better running downhill. That's not going to work. So think about that. And then decrease your load is the one that nobody wants to do because nobody wants to say no. And I think that kind of comes down to what I believe is like the fundamental of, of productivity and focus is you got to pick what's important and that's got to become the focus. Maybe, maybe what you have to accept is that you're not going to do everything. Right. We just finished the Olympics.

I watched the, um, the fencers. I used to be a fencer in school, right. It's part of me like, wow, maybe I could have been an Olympic fencer if I had kept up with it. Right. No, I'm not going to be an Olympic fencer. I'm not, but I've chosen some things that are important to me and I should focus on those things.

You know, so accept that you're not going to do it all. Choose the important stuff and then the no's get easier. Yeah, be okay not doing everything. And then the thing that I think helps with the first part of what you said where the minute that we decrease the load, we try to fill it with something else, it's okay to fill it with something else with an asterisk. I would say just not right away. You maybe don't realize how good having a little bit of margin would actually feel because you've just gotten used to living without it. So the minute that you create some margin, give it some time.

And then after you've had some time, go ahead and if you really want to do something and fill that, then go ahead and do it. But the thing to resist is there's some space. I must find something to do with this. If it really is something that hits the mark and moves the needle, then go ahead and do that. But by creating some time between the decision to decrease the load and the following decision

to increase the limit, I feel like you can see things a little bit more clearly and you can make better decisions about the things that you would commit to. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Indeed. We're driven by the search for better, but when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search, match instead with Indeed.

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Need to hire? You need Indeed. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of Relay. All right, Mike, tell us about ownership, for their support of the Focus podcast and all of Relay. All right, Mike, tell us about ownership, the second part of the mob. Yeah, ownership is an interesting topic because this is basically understanding what it is that you control. And as it pertains to the focus like a boss session

with business owners, the tendency is to feel like you own everything. I think there's alternate scenarios where if you are stuck in a job where it's hard to focus, you may feel like you own nothing. And I think the truth is actually somewhere in between. So a big piece of ownership is essentially self-determination, which is a fascinating concept to me growing up with the family business.

My dad has a master's in assessment and he creates software assessment skill building tools. The area that always fascinated me the most was the area of social emotional learning. And a lot of times the schools that were buying our products were special education or at risk programs where at risk is specifically inner cities, kids coming from single parent homes,

and they were just kind of, they would go into these programs believing that they were the victims of their environment, which if you look at the facts, that could very well be true, but nothing changes until they decide that I'm going to change my situation. That's what ownership really is, is to me, is recognizing that, you know, I am where I am

because of the decisions that I made yesterday. Maybe they turned out the way I thought they would, maybe they didn't. Maybe I had bad information, maybe something bad happened. An outcome, I made a good decision, but the outcome didn't turn out the way that I wanted it to. Doesn't really matter.

What am I gonna do from this point forward? And if you're going to take ownership of your situation then and make decisions that are going to ultimately lead you towards the type of life that you want to live and this ideal future that you are working towards, the thing that is going to help you move in that direction ultimately is clarity on your vision and your values. Who do I want to become? What are the things that are most important to me? It's kind of the basis for all of the life theme stuff that Rachel and I do, but you

don't have to go all the way down that rabbit hole to recognize that you're the captain of your own ship. And sometimes it takes a while to steer a large vessel like that. So you may make a decision and you may not see a noticeable change tomorrow, but the sum total of those decisions that you make day in and day out can lead you to a different place. And how do you decide, you know, what are the things that I'm going to care about? What are the things that I'm going to pay attention to? What are the decisions that actually matter? You have to have some sort of filter

in order to decide this is a thing that I want to own and this is a thing I'm okay letting go. Sure, just claim ownership, Mike, right? Isn't that easy? Well, it's, it's not, I don't think as difficult or as complicated, I should say, as maybe we make it out to be, but that doesn't mean that it's easy either.

Yeah, I think it's hard. I think it's really hard because claiming ownership of something means letting go of other things. And again, we're at that, that tipping point. That's true. Yep. Yeah. So as it pertains to how you would use this to live a focused life, I think there's a couple things. I mean, you can take ownership in a lot of different areas of your life, but there's two that kind of stand out to me. One would be time ownership and one is task ownership. So time ownership, essentially assuming that you are in control of how you spend your time. Again, maybe you have a boss or you're in a work situation where you have a whole bunch

of structured meetings and you can't show up tomorrow and be like, I'm not doing any of this because I decided I'm taking ownership over my life. That's not exactly what it looks like. But if you are in that position, you could recognize that I don't have to work here. I could find a different job if I really wanted to. I've decided that this is worth it to me to have this job.

And maybe it's not perfect, but it's good enough, and I'm content at this particular job. You don't always have to be fighting for more. But recognizing that ultimately you could make different decisions and you could have a different mix of things. So with time ownership is how you spend your time, how you intend to spend your time. And maybe you have a bunch of meetings with your job and you, like me, absolutely hate meetings and would prefer that all of those disappear. Maybe they're not even run very well and you think they're a complete waste of time. It doesn't matter. You're still showing up for these four hours of meetings every single day. Well, what are you doing with the

other four hours? Or maybe it's six and two or seven and one or whatever, we've got some amount of time that is at our discretion and we can choose how we're going to spend it. Going back to the last episode on the media strategies, that's essentially how we're choosing to spend our discretionary time. So when I'm reading all the non-fiction books and David's reading all the fiction books, is that how we intend to spend our time? I'd say yes. And then there's also the task ownership. So are the things that you're doing,

not just the things that you're working on, but all of the things that you decide to do. Are those things that you intend to be spending your time doing? And there's filters that you can use to make those decisions. One of the questions I like is what are the things that only I can do?

As it pertains to the focus like a boss stuff, that was a real important question because a lot of these people started their business and they did everything in their business at one point, but because they got used to doing something, doesn't mean that they should continue to be doing it. And I've seen this when I was with the agency as well, where, um,

if you've got people in leadership positions who like to do certain things, sometimes they can just jump in and do those things because they're the boss and no one's going to question them. So you in that position have to be the one that says, you know what, this isn't actually the best use of my time. That's the key question. And you can apply this at a personal level too, is, is this the best use of my time? Is this the best use of my energy? Is this the best use of my mental resources? And there are a whole bunch of assessments out there that you can use to figure

out what are my strengths, what are my weaknesses. From a business perspective, that kind of stuff fascinates me. I mentioned one of my favorite new podcasts is Good Work by Barrett Brooks, the former second in command at Converkit. And he's a business ops guy. And he talks about business systems. And that kind of stuff just really is

fascinating to me because when you've got a business or an organization that you're trying to make something, you really have to have the right people in the right places doing the right things. As an operations guy, the integrator at the digital marketing agency, that was really my job to make sure people were in the right places, doing the right things, so that the company could be more successful. And again, that doesn't just mean eke out every bit of productivity that you can from every single employee.

There's values that determine what is important to us as an organization, and I would argue for you as an individual, you're going to use to make these decisions. And I'm thankful that a lot of the companies that have been a part of their values or for not extreme productivity and extreme profit, but we want this to be a pleasant place to work. We want people to not feel stressed out when they come to come to work. But think about that from your own life as an example. What are the things that are important to you? Creativity is an important thing to me. So going back to the social media strategies

episode, that means that all of the things that I consume, they're going through a filter where is this useful and is this enjoyable? Is this a mental Lego brick that I can, they're going through a filter where is this useful and is this enjoyable? Is this a mental Lego brick that I can use to put together and create something else? I could just, just using the social media stuff as an example, not taking ownership would be, well, I got to be on all these different social media platforms because this is where people are and I got to know what's going on in all these different places. And the FOMO kicks in and you're scrolling through the feeds and you're reading all the the news and you're feeling bad you get done and you don't want to do anything.

Well recognizing that I could take a different approach to how I use these tools is a very simple way that you could take ownership. So how are you taking ownership Mike? ownership. So how are you taking ownership, Mike? Well, I think, um, the way that I take ownership is really measuring how well I'm able to follow through on my intentions. And we've talked a lot about time blocking, time tracking. Those are really the, the measures that I'll use. Not the numbers specifically, but when I create those daily plans, they're in service of a weekly plan.

And then ultimately, am I able to follow through on those things that I've decided to do for that weekly plan? Now the things that appear on that weekly plan, just backing up a little bit here, maybe you need to take a look at some of those things and decide are these really the right things that should appear there. Sean teaches this concept of the ownership matrix, which is one of those two by two grids, and breaks things into

these different categories. Things that you love and only you can do, things that you hate and only you can do, things that you love and anyone can do, things that you hate and anyone can do. The things that you hate and anyone can do, those are the things that you try to delegate or automate or eliminate. Why in the world are we doing this in the first place? The things that you love and anyone can do, these are the things that can end up being time wasters for us. So maybe you really enjoy doing something, but there's somebody who can do it better. Or you recognize, going back to the conversation about margin, when I decide to do this thing, it means that I can't do this other thing. So I could say, you know, things that I love to do and, and anyone can do. This is not the case, but let's just say I really enjoy mowing my lawn and it takes me an hour and a half on a Saturday.

Right. And, uh, that's like my meditation time and listen to a podcast while mowing the lawn. And, uh, that's just that's just kind of me time. And I really enjoy it. It's something that needs to be done. So I just continue to do it. But then I have trouble planning my week, or I really want to, like I have this habit of my kids

of doing a one-on-one every week where we go get coffee and we just play games. That takes about an hour, right? And I, oh man, I really wish I had time for those one-on-ones. Well, what's more important to me? Is it mowing the lawn? Because I could hire somebody to do that. I could pay. And this is a clumsy example because my kids actually mow the lawn now. But I think that this is maybe something that is low-hanging fruit for people who are listening. I can find a kid in the neighborhood

who I could pay 20 bucks to mow the lawn. Now I've bought back an hour and a half of my time and I can invest that time somewhere else. But when you just view it through the lens of these are all the things that have to be done and then there's these things that are important but not urgent like the one-on-one with my kids, well I can never really find time for that. So we just kind of got to flip that script because the one-on-one that's something that I love and that's only I can

do. So that is not an option to be outsourced. And then there are things that you hate and only you can do. And this doesn't have to be a work context. This could be something even like going to the gym, working out. No one can go to the gym for you. You can't delegate losing weight, eating healthy, those kinds of things. But if you recognize that this is something that I dislike doing, but it is important because it's going to contribute to an outcome that I really want to achieve, then you just continue to do that thing because you have intrinsic motivation to do it. And eventually your tastes can actually change. So the thing that

you used to hate to do, but only you can do, so you just resolve yourself to the fact that I really have to do this over time, you can actually learn to love those things. That's happened with me with running. I hated running when I started. When I started running, it was actually a mental challenge for me because I figured if I could teach myself to run to the point where I ran a half marathon, that would require a lot of training. That would be like the ultimate test of mind over matter for Mike Schmitz who grew up loving sports, played anything with a ball, but running just seemed pointless. So I did. And I've discovered through the process that it's actually a meditative process for me now. And I really enjoy it. I feel off actually when I don't get to go for a run. So that's a long winded answer there, but ultimately what it means to me is that I need

to look at how I intended to spend my time and then how I actually spent my time. And was I able to honor those commitments that I made, both to others and to myself? A lot of times it's easier to honor the commitments that we make to other people. We don't wanna be seen as the type of person who breaks their promises, but we have trouble honoring the commitments that we make to ourself.

And it's not an easy fix, but I've found over time that when I lay out my plan for the week, and these are the things that I really wanna do. I don't hit it 100% of the time. When I don't hit it, then I ask myself, why was that the case? I'll make small adjustments and tweaks to my systems. Maybe I won't try to do so much next time

because it's more important that I can follow through on those intentions and show myself that I'm the type of person who can honor those commitments that I make to myself. And then over time, you, you do that enough. You, you start to convince yourself that you are a trustworthy person and you can trust your yourself when you say that you are going to do something. Yeah. Ownership for me has kind of been an evolution because, uh,

I am a control freak. So for the longest time, I would think of ownership as the fact that I own everything. And it was true as a lawyer, it was true as a Max Barkey, where I want to control the whole widget. I'm not happy having someone else do anything for me because I want it done in a particular way. And I know that the way to get it done

in a particular way is to do it myself, right? But then I think there's like ninja level ownership when you start to think about the real important deliverable. Like for me, it's the products I make or the podcasts I record. It's like, yeah, but what I really want is the final product to be really good. And there are parts of this process that make it really good

and there are parts that don't affect that. And it was only when I kind of took that ninja level ownership of the most important pieces of the shipping product of making the content good that I realized, well, I don't have enough time to do it as good as I would like it and answer all the email and do the website maintenance. And you know what I mean?

So it was when I started to really take ownership of the pieces of it that were most important to me, then I started handing things off and finding other solutions. Whenever people have this conversation, they would say, and I discovered that the people I hired are better at the little stuff than I am. And that's true for me, but even if it's not true,

I still think it's worth it, right? Like even if the other stuff doesn't get done quite as well because you're not doing it, if you're focusing on the real important stuff, that's fine. When you look at people who do extraordinary things, nobody really cares how well they do email or whether or not they manage the plugins at their website. They just don't care.

It's because the big thing they're doing is so good and I think that's what you should focus on. Yeah. The question really is what are you optimizing for? And on a organizational level that you brought up the point that when you delegate something, sometimes the person you delegated it to does it better than you did. Sometimes they don't do it as well as you did, but it's not something that you have to do anymore. And if you're trying to lead an organization or a team, sometimes you have to delegate those things that you know you could do better but you have to give them to someone

else because you simply can't take ownership of every area. It requires more people. And by saying, you know, this is important to me, but I'm going to let you do it, they now can take ownership over that thing. And this is different than delegation by abdication where it's just, I don't wanna do this thing. You figure it out. Yeah.

But I think, you know, if you're really trying to get a group of people moving in the same direction, you have to give them opportunities to take ownership over things. A leader really isn't a leader if they just try to take it all on themselves, which I mean, that ties back to parenting too. You can't just make all the decisions and do all the things for your kids because they're never going to learn those lessons. They're never going to figure those things out for themselves. So it's not that this thing isn't important. It's not that email isn't important, going back to your examples that you shared there.

But if you're gonna optimize for one thing, maybe it's not email, maybe it's something else. And you're gonna put something else at the top of the priority list, and you'll do your best, get as far as you can, but recognize that some of those things are just not going to make the cut because ownership does have to take into account the actual capacity that we have. It all goes back to the concept of margin, which you talked about in the previous section. You got to know what you've got to work with and then

you've got to control what you can control and then you have to let go of the rest. Yeah, I think the exercise here is to ask yourself that question, you know, what is the thing that you must own? Whatever your job is, your business is, or where you are at school, there are things that you must own that those are the ultimate kind of judgment of your success

in this venture and what's it going to cost you to truly own them. It's a tough question because it does require you to let go of things, but ultimately that's how you're going to succeed. Yeah. And it's not just school. It's not just work. Let me give you an out there application of this. Let's talk about ownership in terms of relationships, right?

So I can control what I can control. I can't control what the other person is going to do. And it's easy to fall into this trap, I think, with relationships specifically, whether it's a significant other relationship or just managing relationships at work or, you know, at church, whatever, recognizing that we tend to judge others by their actions, but ourselves by our intentions. So when I say something stupid and offend you, David, I'm thinking, well, David knows my heart and he knows that I wouldn't actually say that. I didn't mean it that way. Right? But the natural tendency as a human is to be like, well,

Mike said this and he knows that I hate this. So he's obviously a jerk and he did this on purpose. What are you going to do with that? Right. I think there are plenty of opportunities in a relationship with a significant other to be offended by something. And that just compounds and makes the problem worse. One of the things that has helped me the most is to, even when I don't think I have done something wrong, ask myself what I have done wrong. How have I contributed to this problem? Ultimately, what makes marriage work, in my opinion, is this desire to benefit the other person at the expense of self. If we're constantly looking at what can I get out of it, then in my opinion, that's really not taking ownership of it. But when I'm thinking about how can I contribute, that is ownership and it makes everything better. This episode of the Focus Podcast

is brought to you by ZocDoc. Go to ZocDoc.com slash Focus and find the right doctor right now. Sign up for free. There are some things in life that are okay to be totally terrible, like trying a new type of milk in your coffee, rolling the dice out on a new workout class, or mixing it up with a new takeout spot. But finding the right doctor shouldn't be risky. And with ZocDoc, it's not, because you've got more options than you know.

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The next time you or someone you love needs to see a doctor, you will not regret it. And our thanks to Zoc Doc for sponsoring the focus podcasts and all of relay FM. All right, Mike, we're to the end of the mob. Let's talk about boundaries. Boundaries. This is probably the one that people will dislike the most if I had to guess. Boundaries are essentially defining what is yours and what is not yours. Now when most people think of boundaries, they probably think of these permanent barriers

like a fence around your your property. And I don't think that's actually a good representation. That is a boundary, yes. But I think that boundaries don't have to be these rigid, permanent structures. They don't have to be walls. They don't have to be perfect. structures. They don't have to be walls, they don't have to be perfect. But what they should do is they should help us keep the good stuff in and the bad stuff out. There's a whole book on boundaries which I read a while back, Boundaries by Henry Cloud. In that book he mentions that boundaries are a defensive tool, not an offensive weapon. So as it pertains to the whole mob analogy, maybe this one doesn't quite fit there. Because this is really, if you implement this correctly, I would argue, something that almost people don't even notice.

notice. It's something that just acts as a filter so you don't get overwhelmed by all the information and all the decisions that you have to make. And occasionally people will bump into it and they'll recognize that, oh, I, Mike is already left for the day or he's not going to respond to me immediately on Slack because we've already had this discussion about communication expectations and I know that the boundary there is that he's going to get back to me in a couple of hours when he's done with his deep work session. And it can be difficult to establish these, especially if you are in a culture where they

typically haven't been defined. It can feel a little bit awkward to all of a sudden try to create some boundaries. But it really is important. On page 26 of that book, there's a quote that I like, says workers who continually take on duties that aren't theirs will eventually burn out. It takes wisdom to know what we should be doing and what we shouldn't. We can't do everything. So again, this is kind of all building on itself. You've got to recognize your limits, then you got to take ownership over the things that are really yours to be doing.

And then once you get clear on that, then boundaries are going to help protect the time, attention, and the energy that you have to do those things while not distracting you or overwhelming you with a whole bunch of things that you really shouldn't be paying attention to. And again, you can define for yourself what what you should be paying attention to, but if you don't create these boundaries, then you just have these floodgates that are constantly open and it's

impossible to focus in that environment, in that scenario, because you're stuck while this new request came in, this new piece of information came in. It might be important. I better drop everything that I'm doing and figure out what the heck this really is. You know, at that point, you're not able to let go of the things that you aren't doing and focus on the thing that you are doing. You're constantly scanning the environment, going back to like David Allen's emergency scan modality. You don't know where the fire is coming from, but you know it's coming somewhere. So you got to pay attention. Yeah, it's remarkable to me how these all kind of interrelate, right? Because boundaries are so

tied to ownership. I feel like the more you take a sense of ownership, the easier it is to establish boundaries. The easier it is to establish boundaries, the more margin you get, you know, to establish boundaries, the easier it is to establish boundaries, the more margin you get. These really are all interrelated, but boundaries to me are a byproduct of the priority of a focus. When you decide something is important, then it becomes a lot easier to set boundaries around it.

Yeah, well, it's kind of a chicken and an egg scenario here. There's a, there's a cycle. I think you do need the boundaries to protect the focus, but at some point, if you don't have any boundaries, you'll never be able to focus. So I'm not really sure that I have a specific recommendation of this is the place that you actually start. I guess going back to the beginning of the episode, it would recognize where you're at in terms of the margin, then figure out what are your things to actually own. And then once you're clear on that, you can create these

boundaries to protect the time to focus on those things. And you probably have been moving in that direction maybe a little bit already. So I don't think if you're going to try to apply these principles of margin ownership and boundaries that most people who are listening to this podcast anyways are starting from zero, which is going to make this easier. So maybe you've got some boundaries and you just need to tweak them a little bit, nudge them in the right direction. Some examples of boundaries. I mentioned the physical boundaries already, like a property boundary, a fence around your property, things like that. You can also have emotional boundaries, but the ones that pertain to focus, as most people think of it, I think, in terms of like a work context, time and distance are going to be important things for work boundaries. And there are lots of ways that you can apply this. I mentioned the Slack example earlier,

that is actually from my work at the digital marketing agency. One of the first things that I did when I got there is I recognized that people were living on Slack. You're looking for the green bubble and then when you saw someone who was available, you send them a message and the expectation was they're gonna get back to me right away because after all they're available. Well what actually was happening was that they left Slack

on in the background and they were working on some important client work the stuff that we actually get paid for and then they got distracted because their manager or their boss asked them for to help out with something that they were working on. It wasn't the right person doing the right thing, but because it was easy and available, they were getting pulled off task a lot of times. So what we did is we created a communications expectations document, and we defined all the scenarios for the ideal way to communicate about the work that was being done. And we had everybody sign off on it

when we did the town hall. So the things that we landed on were, if something is important, then go ahead and use Slack, but recognize that just because the green bubble is on doesn't mean that that person is available. And the expectation is that they're going to check Slack once in the morning and once in the afternoon. They're going to do a deep work session at the beginning of the

day when they have a logical place to stop, then they will check their messages and then they'll get back to you. What that did is it eliminated a lot of those requests because the person who's working on it is thinking, well, I got to do this right now and I don't really want to do this. Or I know someone who could do this a little bit better. they've got some information that could get me unstuck. So instead of asking through the formal channels and waiting till the appropriate place to get that information, I'll just ping them right now. And so you do that enough and it creates this always on expectation. But the minute that you start to shift, well, we're going to use Slack different. And actually we're only going to use that for the real important stuff.

If it's related to the work, that should be a comment inside of ClickUp or whatever tool they're using. And the expectation there is that I'm going to get back to you within one day. And then you kind of zoom out and you recognize that we have all these meetings, these weekly meetings, these weekly meetings, these bi-weekly meetings for these different teams and recognizing that this is the work that we're trying to do. So you zoom out long enough and you recognize that, oh, actually when we communicate this

way, we can get more quality work done. That kind of reinforces all this kind of stuff. But you have to have those conversations before you will ever have the establishment of those boundaries. Another one with the time boundaries, I think, going back to like Slow Productivity by Cal Newport, he talks about office hours. That's a great example of a time boundary.

And basically what that is, is I'm willing to drop everything and help you with whatever problem you're facing, but you've got to do it within these set hours throughout the week. So that means that if you really need something from me, there is space for you to get what you want. But it doesn't mean that you can just interrupt my workday whenever you want to do that. There is, you know, 2 p.m. on Thursday where you can come with your request and we'll get you unstuck. And the rest of the time, then you're working on the other things that you don't need me for.

And there'll be occasions where you're trying to, where you have to figure out what are the real roadblocks and what are the things that can wait. So there is some trial and error to this, but once you establish these, then it makes it so much easier to create momentum and progress towards the things that really matter. Yeah, when I was in the law firm, we had a rule with my secretary that she came in at the end of the day with a list. And it just took a little while.

Anytime, you know, we got new staff to explain, no, you don't talk to me during the day. You come in at the end of the day with a written list. And I did the same thing to my superiors, the older attorneys. I would meet them like once a week, we'd have it on calendar and I'd show up with a list and it spread throughout the office over time because it was just so effective. And people, when you show up with a list, they take you seriously. Like, you know, they understand that, you know, you're there for a specific reason,

you're respecting their time. And I think for boundaries, one of the most powerful tools you can use to affect boundaries is time blocking. Because time blocking cures all sins for boundaries. So often time blocking is sold as like, well, you're carving out time to do the most important work. You figure out what's super important to you, you make sure you get two hours in on it a day.

And that's true. Time blocking gives you that, but it also lets you, and people sometimes call it time boxing, I don't know, but it also allows you to put a box around things that shouldn't take all your time. I have a block at the end of the day of an hour, and I deal with all communications with other humans during that hour.

And at the end of the hour, I stop. And if I didn't get to all of it, so be it. I gave it an hour, that's as much as it gets every day. There's all kinds of things you can do in your life that are taking too much time or more than you want it to. Or there are, what do they call that, time sinks, or where you can just, it'll take as much time as you give it, but that's not what the deliverable is,

that's not what's important. So you put a box around it, you know? And so I feel like time blocking is like the super tool for dealing with boundaries. It's definitely a very powerful tool as it pertains to time. And I think the thing to keep in mind with all of this stuff that we're talking about here today

is that there is a balance between what I want to do and what the other people in my life need from me. So maybe I want to just go into my focus cave and do eight hours of focused work, and that is not possible because other people are relying on me for other things. That's okay. We just wanna make the most that we can

with what we have to work with. And time blocking or block scheduling is definitely a good way to protect that time. There are other boundaries that I've established in terms of protecting my focus when I'm in a specific mode. So if time blocking is creating the plan for how I'm going to spend my time, one of the things that can derail that

is if my attention gets pulled in another direction. And one of the quickest ways to get your attention pulled in another direction is to use a digital device and dip into what John Zyrotsky and Jake Knapp would call in make time an infinity pool. That term I love because there is no end to the algorithms. But an infinity pool can be more than just social media. I remember when we talked to Shahid a while back, he's the one who actually

told me about that book and he mentioned that Amazon can be an infinity pool because you're looking for something that you need and then, oh look, there's this thing, that would be cool. And you've gone down a rabbit hole and found a whole bunch of stuff that you quote unquote need that you didn't know you needed. Right? So when I am going to use one of my devices, I want to do it with intention. And I don't want to get pulled in a direction that I did not mean to go. So I kind of have these different contexts for my devices.

My Mac is basically the place that I get all of my work done. So email is actually only going to be done on my Mac. And I'm okay being bad at email. I guess that's another point here in terms of what boundaries mean to me. Going back to the trade-offs of ownership and recognizing my limits, I really don't care if I respond to every email. And that is just simply because the volume of email that I get, occasionally I'll get a quality message in there from someone that I would actually like to interact with, but the signal to noise ratio

is pretty low. Even though I've got SaneBox and I've marked all the things as spam when I don't want to get them anymore, just seems to, that ratio continues to move in the wrong direction for me. So I'll do it when I can, but I'm not not a completionist there. But then the device context that I have, the Mac is the place that I do all the work. The iPhone is the place that I capture things. So I have a way to do all my journaling at the end of the day in from my iPhone. I've got drafts set up where I'll

capture ideas. I've got a mind node where I'll capture book notes and things like that. That's kind of it. I listen to podcasts. That doesn't necessarily fit with the capture phase, I guess. But when I'm out for a run or whatever, I'll listen to podcasts, things like that, messages and the occasional phone calls, stuff like that, but really just limiting the ways that I am using this super powerful computer that's in my pocket by putting context around it where this is really for capturing things on the go. I got to do something with this right now. That significantly decreases the amount of times that I'm going to pick up my phone throughout the day.

And it helps me create boundaries in terms of these are the notifications that I want to receive. These are the ones that really aren't important right now. And those can wait. So iPhone is capture. And then my iPad basically is defining it as play. I don't use it a whole lot. Uh, it's kind of my civilization six machine, and then I'll use, uh,

I'll use it for good notes. The one video game I play occasionally is civilization six and the iPad version, my opinion, the best version of civilization six. So, um, maybe spend a couple of hours doing that throughout the week. Um, and then I'll use good notes for, for sketch notes, just because the Apple pencil and good notes on my iPad mini is, is the perfect form factor for that. But that's, that's it. And you could look at any one of these and be like, well, you're not getting

the full value out of your iPad. It can do all this stuff. You could do actual work on an iPad. Yeah, I could, but I'm okay not doing it because when I pick up a device, I know this is what I intend to be doing with this stuff. You could do actual work on an iPad. Yeah, I could, but I'm okay not doing it because when I pick up a device, I know this is what I intend to be doing with this thing. And then I can focus on the thing that I'm doing instead of being pulled in a million different directions about all the things that I could be doing with this instead. Yeah, that makes sense. I am more of a generalist with my devices. I use what works on them, but I have been blessed with the,

I'm just not as distracted on digital devices as most people are. It just doesn't bother me and I can pick up an iPad and have focused work on that for two hours just as easily as I can on my Mac, so long as the tool is up to the job. And for me, it's more of just, what's

with me and what works now. What I won't do is try to use an iPad to do something that's really not suited for. Because that is that's I'm not sure if that's a boundary problem. But it's certainly a focus problem because it's, you know, it's like working against sandpaper. But I do have areas where I look at boundaries as well. Like I said earlier, time blocks to me are the most important and I'm always conscious of the time block, time increment versus what needs to be done.

Like for me, I have all these lists of things I wanna do in various areas of my life. And my usual operating procedure is, okay, I'm going to give this area of my life two hours today. And during that two hours, I'll dip into that list and do as much as I can. But I may realize that, wow, there's a lot of stuff in here that's not getting done.

Maybe that area of my life needs more time. And so there's this constant kind of balance as I'm setting those blocks. But that's in essence drawing the boundaries of what gets priority and what doesn't. The other thing is like you said, you're okay being bad at email. I've kind of come to the conclusion

that I'm okay being bad at social media. I don't think I've logged into my Twitter account in over a year and I have like the social media accounts for all the others now with Facebook has one what's it I don't remember what's called basically what's the name of the news you know Facebook's Twitter oh is it threads threat threads yeah I haven't I have one I've never been in there I just don't do that stuff very often because as I go through the day, I really kind of dig in on these blocks. And I've had people tell me that this is bad for my business

and I need to do more of it because I'm online as Max Barkey, but I've kind of made the decision that it's more important that I ship good things than I keep up with all that stuff. And that is a boundary I've set for myself. Maybe someday I'll revise it, but at least for now, I'm totally comfortable with that. The other thing is, boundaries are also just refusing

to get involved with things that aren't part of the big goal. I think one of the overall themes of today's show is that all of this stuff is easier if you've done the work of figuring out what's important. I talk about roles in Arate. Mike has his circle. We've all got kind of different ways to figure out what is it that I'm trying to do

with my ears on this planet before my vision gets worse and they put me in the ground? And if you figure those things out, setting boundaries, you know, gets easier. Taking ownership, finding margin, all that stuff just gets easier. I feel like that's the fundamental premise

underneath all of this stuff. And I can tell you that I have got so much better at boundaries as I've gotten more in touch with what I want to do. Yeah, and it does all build on itself too. So if you create the margin to actually follow through on the commitments that you've made, then that leads to increased ownership

over the things that you have decided, this is something I am going to care about. And then that clarity helps you create the boundaries, which ultimately lets the good things in and the things that aren't appropriate for you ideally keeps those out that then contributes to Maintaining more margin because you have less requests coming at you less decisions to make about is this something that I should be doing? and so it's a

good version of the The cycle at that point. It's a good flywheel good version of the cycle at that point. It's a good flywheel. It also can be a negative flywheel if you've never paid attention to it before, which is why we decided to talk about it here today. But I think as we wrap up the discussion about these three, my big takeaway for people would be to,

again, you're not probably starting from scratch with any of these areas. So take each one of these and think about is there something simple I can do that is going to move me in the direction of increasing my margin, taking ownership over the right things, letting go of the wrong things, or establishing boundaries to protect my attention and energy so I can direct it at the things that really matter. I don't think there's a simple, like just do this one thing. It's almost like I mentioned the three questions I asked during my personal retreat process.

You got to just kind of make a list of the possibilities. And then as you make that list, you'll find that some of them maybe are easier to implement than others. And so start small with the one that is gonna be the quickest win. Maybe it isn't gonna make the biggest impact, but just get a little bit of momentum

as you start moving towards this. And maybe like in the terms of boundaries or ownership, you know, you start saying no to some small things at work, or you put up some boundaries just to see if people are gonna bump into them and even notice. You know, sometimes it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. And that's not to say that you just disconnect

and be like, no, I'm not doing that anymore. But maybe just push back a little bit and see what happens. You may be able push back a little bit and see what happens. You may be able to get a little bit of breathing room and have a little bit more focus without anyone even noticing. Sometimes we're our own worst enemies when it comes to this stuff and we keep all these expectations on ourselves because we're worried about what other people are going to say and sometimes they just don't care. So we've been living a certain way and making things worse for ourselves unnecessarily.

But just pick something that you can do to establish a boundary, to take a little bit more ownership over the right things or create a little bit more margin and then build momentum with that. But I think going back to the beginning of the episode, this is not something that you, a project that gets done. There's no completion date on any of this. It's a constant work in progress. So do what you can with what you got and just continue to build momentum. Yeah, I would just add to that that in terms of other people, it's not that sometimes they don't care, it's most of the time they don't care. That's what you'll find out.

And the last point I would make is that if you're really hitting a wall with this stuff, if it's really hard, I think it means you need to go back to basics and figure out what's important. Because if you don't know what's important, these things don't really gel. You've got to figure out what's important.

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So if you're a customer success decision maker, you can schedule your call by visiting vitally.io slash focused. That's vitally.io slash focused for a free pair of AirPods Pro when you schedule a qualified meeting. Our thanks to Vitally for the support of the Focus podcast and all of Relay. I do have a shiny new object. I'm not using it yet because I didn't want to mess up the recording. But as I was talking to you about, I've had some issues with some of my audio gear. So I purchased a Rodecast, a Rode Procaster Duo. It's like little mini soundboard that you can record multiple microphone inputs, which

I do the Intentional Family podcast with my wife. So we need at least two microphone inputs. What's nice about this one is that it also has two headphone outputs. So it's meant to be used like in a studio where you've got a couple of people sitting at a table talking to each other and they both have their own microphone, their own headphones, and they can hear what's going on. The reason I got this one is because I really want something that can serve as both an audio interface and allow me to record to an SD card, which based on the

research anyways looks like this is something that that can do that. So I'm going to mess with this after we are done recording. It's got lots of buttons, looks pretty cool. I think you can do a whole bunch of extra stuff with it like live production stuff, sound effects, things like that. But Rode makes good stuff and I'm anxious to mess around with this, but also recognize that this is gonna be a significant learning curve. It's gonna be not the plug and play that some of the stuff I've used in the past.

So I'm kind of putting it off until I've got some extended time that I can just mess around with stuff. You mean some margin? Kinda, yeah. I think it's necessary before the next recording. I think my mix pre is on the fritz, unfortunately. A new mix pre is like a thousand dollars, so that's not an option. Yeah. I do have to make the time for this, but also balancing like there's certain things that need to get done in the next week.

Creative projects that I got delivered for other people. So I'm putting up the boundary, let's say. Well I have been doing a lot of writing lately. I, you know, I've always kind of go back and forth between analog and digital tools. One of the big spots for that is journaling, but even kind of on the bigger end is like the sparky operating system. I write these essays about my thoughts on different things and it sounds very silly, but I have one on honesty or just different concepts that I have these relationships with, and I, I like documenting them because then they become

more firm for me and I've talked about this and the obsidian field guide, it's kind of called the sparky OS, but, uh, the last few months I started writing them out long hand and it's not efficient, right? It's not searchable. You can't put tags on it, but I find the process of writing them is helping me kind of like internalize them more. So I've been writing more and I am, but I've been using for several years now the studio neat tote books, which are nice little notebooks, about 80 pages in one. But I have been missing my ring binder system for a long time.

I used the, uh, the Levenger ring binder system, but I never really liked the paper and the designs aren't totally up my alley. Like, I mean, it sounds silly, but like they're, they're doc grid. The dots are so, so, um, dark, you know, I just don't, you know, so there's just things about it. I don't like. And then, so somebody told me, Oh, you should check out plotter. And so just the last week I've been researching this plotter ring binder system and it's a Japanese company. The, the ring binders are small. The biggest one is A4 and the rings themselves are small. Like it's an 11 millimeter ring. So it only holds like 80 pages.

And it looks really nice. I mean, it's very well designed. And so I got some paper from them and I've been using it and their paper is really good. And I'm going to be going down the plotter rabbit hole here. I wanna be able to write write an entry for a commonplace or an entry for an operating system or an entry on a day in the same book and then move the pages where they belong later. And this gives me that. Yeah. Looking at this website, there is a whole system here with like a memo pad,

then a project manager, then a leather binder, then refill storage. I am curious how much of this you end up using. I can see where this is going. The pad is really nice because you can write on the pad. The book is, the pages are glued in. A lot of these ring systems, you buy paper and they give you a stack of paper,

but this is, it's in a little book that's glued together. So actually you can write in the book and then you can peel the pages out. They're lightly glued. And then you can put them into the ring system. So you don't even have to write in the ring system if you don't want. And yeah, I've looked, there's a lot of pieces to this,

but if I use it and continue to fill up paper, then I will get some of the storage boxes. And I do like the idea of being able to resort the pages or like if I wanna replace a page, I can. So yeah, I've always been a bit enamored with ring systems and this one looks like kind of like the fancy pants ring system. So I'm gonna be playing with that.

Nice. So I'm sorry, did you say what size you got? A4, I got the biggest A4. Okay. And A4 is not really that big, you know, so it's fine. Yeah, cause they have a bunch of different sizes and it looks like they've got different tools for all the different sizes.

Yeah. So a five, a narrow one, mini, mini five, I'm not sure exactly what that means, maybe five inches tall? No, it's a, it means it has five rings and that's the one you can stick in your pocket, like a wallet if you wanted, you know, like a pocket notebook. Yeah, because the tote books were that size, right?

They were the small ones you throw in your pocket? No, no, they were a little smaller than A4. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, that's one of the things I like about this system is it looks like you can implement this system in a bunch of different sizes, as opposed to this size is for this thing and this size is for this thing. So, and you know, on the flip side, the digital side, because the pages come out, it's very easy to scan them in if you want to, you know, add them to day

one or put them in some sort of digital lockup, you know, so it just, it seems to me like the right kind of analog for me, but it costs. I think if I get a book and everything, it's gonna be like 200 bucks. But I just started with a single pad of paper, which is only like $6, just to kind of see. And the paper is, Japanese make great paper. And a fountain pen you can write on it.

It doesn't bleed through at all. Um, and the ink pen does bleed through a little bit, but it's really thin paper. I can't get over, you know, how thin the paper is for how good it holds ink without bleeding through. Although I do most of my writing in pencil, which is another discussion. But the, um, but it's really nice paper and I'm sure these, these books are nice too. So I'm going to, uh, I'm going on a trip when I get back, I'm going to make some decisions. Yeah. This looks like an analog system built for Max Sparky.

Yeah, it does. Doesn't it? What are you reading these days? I am reading, this is a bookworm book, but it's called The Ritual Effect by Michael Norton. And Cory picked this one. To be honest, I wasn't super excited about it because it looked kind of like another habit book. But I've been pleasantly surprised with this one so far, about halfway done. We're recording the the Bookworm episode for this later later in the week. It's not just about habits, in fact he actually calls out in this book the difference between habits and rituals,

where habits are essentially the things that you do, which I guess you know traditionally I've been thinking of habits as I'm going to bundle things together into a morning or evening routine in order to get a bunch of things done that are important, but not urgent little things that are going to help me keep the trains on the tracks. And this book is really about rituals being the, the meaning that we ascribe to the things that we do. And, um, I didn't really expect that angle to it.

It kind of starts by talking about some examples of cultural rituals that have been around for a long time. Religious rituals are one example that people ascribe meaning to the things that they are doing. But then he talks about how you can incorporate pieces of that into building your own daily rituals, which I'm enjoying a lot. Yeah, I feel like to me a ritual is a bit more sacred. And I don't mean that necessarily in the religious sense of the word. And there are rituals I've developed that are clear in my mind are rituals and not habits. And I look forward to doing them. I look forward, I like the fact

that I have developed a ritual and I look forward to engaging in it. So like, I mean, I will, you know, the meditation practice is a ritual to me. And I don't know, there's just something, it's like kind of a next level to me. I'm gonna have to read this book. You recommend it?

Let me finish it first, but so far, yes. Okay, sounds good. Well, last time we did a show, which we actually recorded pretty recent, you recommended Simple Marketing for Smart People. Once we finish recording today, I'm headed to the airport and I'm gonna read this book. It's a, I got it.

It's a short book. It's like, it's completely doable on a flight. Yes, be forewarned though. You'll be able to get through it and then the wheels will be turning. You're actually not done with the book until you start implementing some of the questions that he's gonna enclose some of the open loops he's gonna, uh, and close some of the open loops he's going to open in your brain.

Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I'm not the kind of, I don't read a lot of like business development books to my chagrin and, and, uh, that's something I'm trying to do more of now that I have one thing and I have a little more margin. Uh, so, uh, on your recommendation, this is going to be one that I do. Awesome. Let me know how you like it. All right.

We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us over at relay.fm slash focused. If you are a member of Deep Focus, stick around. I'm going to be talking about my crazy idea of airport retreating. And I'm sure Mike will have thoughts. Thank you to our sponsors, our friends over at Zockdoc, Indeed and Vitaly. Once again, relay.fm slash focused, and we'll see you next time.