Focused - 214: Solving Gnarly Problems, with Clarke Ching

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hey, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Good. We've got a guest today. Welcome to the show, Clark Ching.

Hello there. It's lovely to be here. Yeah. Clark, we're going to have a lot to talk about Clark. He's the bottleneck guy, got some great advice, got some good stuff to share. Before we do, however, let's check in. Mike, how are things going with LiveHQ? Yeah, well, as this is released, it's about a week after it's been available. We're recording this early, so I still have butterflies. I'm still nervous about it. I'm getting close to launch. It's basically ready to go at this point.

It's about a week before it actually gets released and just putting up, putting that in the eyes and crossing the T's. I'm really proud of how it's all come together. The feedback I've gotten from the beta process has been incredible. Starting to try to collect some testimonials from folks who have put it through the paces.

And basically everybody who has looked at it has had some sort of reaction of like, Whoa. And we, we talked about this at length last episode, but Mike's created a thing. It's a, it's a obsidian vault, but it's, it is a life HQ. It allows you to kind of run a whole bunch of different parts of your life through Obsidian. Mike's done all the work and you can check it out. Mike, where should people go to check that out?

Yeah, it's practicalpkm.com slash Life HQ. All right. So I have a story to tell you. On your advice, Mike, I read the Simple Marketing for Smart People by Billy Broas. I took it with me when I went to Scotland to see my daughter in the play she wrote. And when I was there, I got an email from a nice listener, this guy named Clark Ching,

and he was giving me all sorts of advice about Scotland and the Fringe Fest, and I enjoyed our short email exchange. And then I got on the plane to come home and finish my book, and Billy Broas, the author, started writing about this guy that he works with that helps people fix their companies named Clark Ching. I'm like, no way, there can only be one Clark Ching.

So sure enough, on the plane, I wrote an email to Clark that got sent off once I got back in Wi-Fi. That is the same guy. I just found it kind of funny that Clark and I were writing each other at the same time I'm reading about him in this book. That struck up a little bit of a friendship. As I got to know more about what Clark did, I realized that this would be a great guest for the Focus podcast. So welcome to the show, Clark. Hello, yes, small world, isn't it? Yeah, it is, right?

I mean, it's just because, I mean, the way you spell your name and everything, I felt like this had to be you, and it was. But tell us a little bit about what it is that you do, Clark, for the folks who haven't been reading about you in the Billy Burroughs book? Okay. So I'm 55 now. A long time ago, I was a computer scientist. And then I got bored with that, I guess I became a project manager. I ended up going and getting an MBA, doing all of that kind of good stuff. But in my mid-20s, I read a book called The Goal. It's by a guy called Ellie Goldratt. And it's about, it's actually, it sold millions

of copies. It's a business novel. And it tells the story of a character whose factory in 1970s or 1980s, middle America is about to be closed down. And he manages to save the factory by finding the bottleneck, which is the slowest point inside the factory, and speeding it up. And I read this and it was just a fascinating, absolutely gripping book. Although if you ask my wife, she thinks it's dreadful because I made her read it. And it basically just grabbed me and it grabbed a lot of people around the world. Ellie's work went on to be known as the theory of constraints, which is probably the worst name

you could give anything because theory of and constraints, the three words individually, just make me want to fall asleep. It's like, oh. So over the years, I got more and more into this. And I went really, really deep as people like us are inclined to do. And I became an expert in all of it. But in that time, I never once actually worked in a factory in this whole world that was described in this book and in the theory of constraints of certain factories. But I worked in software development and on big projects. And I have over probably more than 25 years taken the stuff I learned from that and combined it with the stuff I've learned from Lean, the quality movement, and the agile movement, and really adapted the theory of constraints stuff, the bottleneck stuff in particular, to software development.

And 20 years ago, actually, I finished my MBA and I did my dissertation on that topic. And then I spent 10 very long but highly pleasurable years writing my first book, which is also a business novel. It's called Rolling Rocks Downhill. And it's a strange thing for a business novel that people actually enjoy reading it. I managed to write a novel that I'm proud of that actually has a textbook hidden inside it. And more recently, I guess in between then and now, I moved through the agile software development world and Rolling Rocks Downhill was teaching people how to think about agile from a management point of view, although it never actually mentioned the agile in it at all. It's kind of taken from first principles. Nowadays,

as agile has become really widespread and so many places are doing it, I've gotten older, I've gotten wiser, I've gotten better at dealing with people. And nowadays I help the leaders of tech teams, partly to help them do the bottleneck stuff to speed up their teams. But largely, and this is the stuff that I work with on Billy on figuring out how to talk about it, I help really crazy busy leaders debottleneck themselves. So what that means if people don't understand

the idea of bottlenecks, just think of just you've got a leader and they're just so crazy busy. They're busy sacrificing their weekends and their evenings and a lot of their job, and they're just struggling to keep up. And so they might have 10 people, they might have a hundred, they might have 5,000 people working for them. And effectively, the whole organization is running at the speed of the leader. And I help them on a personal level get their lives back so that they can work normal hours. But I also get them so that they have a lot more time for thinking and solving large problems and effectively leading. And they're no longer bottlenecking their team. So like as a business,

it's most organizations sort of tend to think that if everyone's busy, that's really, really, really, really good. But actually it's really not. It just means that they're busy. It doesn't mean they're productive. So that's my long story. Well, I mean, I think it's an important lesson and something we talk about here, just not in relation to companies and which is with relation to individuals. But I think it's the same problem, right? Do you think it's cultural,

the way people like to be proud of like how busy they are? Like when you work with a CEO who's like, yeah, I work every weekend and I'm here on the holidays and I give a hundred percent to you. Is there like a false pride there or what's the psychology that you see? Totally. It's a, simply put, it's a misunderstanding. People think that if they're busy, they're productive. But we all know that. We've gone through a lot of thinking and a lot of learning

to realize that, hang on, actually, if we're busy, that means everyone's waiting for us. We're really chronically busy. And say we're the leader of a team of 100 people, and our email inbox is full and full of full of full of stuff. That means that everyone's waiting on us. And it means that just things is we're basically living in gridlock, but there's this mistaken belief that because everyone's busy,

that means that fully utilize and it means, wow, that must be productive. But actually when you look a little deeper and you think about it, it means that they actually have gridlock. And if you ever try to drive through gridlock traffic, it's not good at all. I think it's actually worse than cultural. I think it's actually built into us as a biological imperative, I guess you could say, that we need to be busy.. Some people have this more than others, but if I can give you a sort of sideways example, my wife is an old age psychiatrist. So she deals

people with people who maybe have Alzheimer's or dementia. There's a syndrome that isn't formally identified, but people refer to it as utilization syndrome, which is that some people as they get older and they get sicker and they lose their memory, some of them just have to keep busy. So my grandmother actually suffered from this in her last years, and she was in an old folks home and she had to be busy. And if she wasn't busy, she would find ways of keeping herself busy. So the staff used to give her cutlery and they just pop the cutlery down and they mess it up and she would just tidy the cutlery. And it's kind of sad, but it's just what it was. But that was a big part of her wiring that she actually had to be

busy. So they nickname it Utilization Syndrome. Sometimes my wife said that, say, people might actually, they might come in in the morning and find that a patient has studiously pulled their bed to pieces overnight just to keep themselves busy. Not everyone has it, but unsurprisingly often a lot of the people who end up being leaders and set the tone of the culture, a lot of them have got Utilization Syndrome. And they think that the people who aren't busy all the time are lazy. So I think maybe there's a mixture of culture and just some people have it as a hard wiring. They tend to be successful. Tim Cynova I think there's an angle here also where,

especially you mentioned with the teams where they tend to go at the speed of their leader. My previous role before being independent full-time creator was as a integrator at a small digital marketing agency. So my job was literally to help remove the bottlenecks. And one of the things that I saw was that the, um, the visionary, the, the CEO, the leader of the team, we had about 20 people had a hard time not being involved with things because it was sort of a badge of honor that he was giving his time to these people in these different teams and these different meetings,

not realizing that, uh, by being pulled so thin, he was actually slowing down the entire organization. And there were a lot of people who, while they thought it was great that he cared that much, really would have preferred that he just not be involved in the meetings so that they could move faster. Do you find that a lot with the teams that you work with? Yeah, actually you said the key word there, which is caring. A lot of these people, they really do care. They care intensely. In fact, I was talking to a client this morning through this. He's gone through a bit of a transition and he's moved from being in charge of a lot of things and a lot of people to now having just a smaller remit where he has to care about something that's much

smaller. And he said to me that the thing that surprised him most now that he looked back in six months to gone is how now he actually has opinions about things, but he's quite happy with other people to have their opinions and he doesn't share his own. And we talked it through and he's effectively decided to care less about a lot of things, but to care much more intently and intentionally about a small number of things. So it's not being careless. So he's not being careless. It's not that he's actually caring less. He's just actually focusing his caring so that he doesn't dilute it and try and care about a whole lot of things in a diluted fashion. Actually, the other angle that comes with this is almost invisible to us,

though it shouldn't be because every other animal suffers from it, or at least mammals do, it suffers from it, or at least mammals do, which is status. All of us are driven. It's really surprising when you look at the research on this. We are driven so much more by status than we think we are. We think intellectually, go, oh no, I'm not driven by status. I don't care about those things. But we are driven by status, and a lot of people can be motivated by status. And being busy is often a sign of status. It's kind of almost like the big gorilla rushing around and thumping their chest. There's so much psychology involved in busy quite, it's not like when you go and have a look at, um, say some machines in a factory, uh, or even if you want to go and look at your Mac and go, Oh, um, we've got all of these, uh, things going on inside it.

What's, what's slowing us down when you get people, there's just so many things going on that we can't see until we go looking for them like status. I mean, looking at myself, I've got three podcasts that have now recorded north of 1100 episodes. And in all three of those shows, I've never missed a single show. And it's just, I think that's like you want, it's like a thing. I, maybe it's like a, an ego thing, right? But I've done them

with kidney stones. I've done them with people around me dying. I've done them whatever, and I can't get off that, right? I just need to like not do one at some point, get over it, right? Davey How about we go home now? David Okay, now, what's too late? Davey We'll just dial up. Jared I will share publicly, since you brought it up, David, that if you ever need to take a week off, you have my permission, we'll make it work.

Yeah, it's just a weird thing, but it is, I think it's tribal. I think the reason people want to say how busy they are and work weekends and the people that Clark works with is like, they run the company. They wanna be able to look in the eye and say, nobody's putting more into this than I am. It is not every leader has it.

And it's not the best for the health of the company. But even in my little company with one and a half employees, I'm the bottleneck. I think this is a very common thing that Clark's, I feel like you're in a growth industry, Clark. It's a hard message to sell sometimes. Actually, can I just, I step in there and I'm gonna say that for you,

you being the bottleneck is actually a good thing. Cause I know you've got JF there, but you wanna run the business at the speed of you. And if you're the slowest step, that means that you want JF to have wiggle room to be able to respond to you quickly. So that's a good model. That's a model I have. My assistant, NJ, she's in the Philippines. She does several hours for me a week. I pay her full time and her job is to do the stuff that stops me doing other stuff. And I deliberately pace my one and a half person business at the speed of me.

And she has a lot of wiggle room. And I remember when I hired her, it was, I go, but how do I keep her busy? How do I keep her busy? What do I keep her busy? How do I keep her busy? What do I do? And then I go, oh no, I don't want to hire an assistant because I will get drawn in and I'll have to keep her busy all the time.

And then I spoke to my coach at the time and he looked at me and he said, you're the bottleneck guy, right? Surely you of all people would realize that you don't need to keep her busy. Her job is to keep you productive. And it's her job, you know, she's really good at doing graphics and things like that. If you want a graphic,

that just makes you miserable and you don't do it. So it's just the irony of, even though I'm supposed to be the expert in this, I fell for my own trap that I have to keep her busy. I love it. You're the bottleneck guy, right? You're the bottleneck guy, right? Isn't it funny? So the three of us are probably, there's so many people listening, I imagine, if we're in a smallish business or a small team, not even operating as a business, we need to figure out there's going to be one person or one resource, but usually a person who's going to be the slowest.

But don't think of them as the slowest. Think of them as the pace setter. And you really want that to be the, I call it the flagship resource. So if you think of like a fleet of ships going along, a Navy Armada, and one of them would have had a flagship in the middle of it. And these days I guess it would be an aircraft carrier. And they call it the flagship because it used to be where the Admiral was and that was where the flag was on the ship. You want that resource, whether it be you David or me or Mike, you want that to set the pace of the whole fleet, which means that all of the other resources, they need to be faster or have more flexibility.

And if you can imagine that the opposite of that, a little rowboat sort of moving between the ships and trying to keep up with a fleet of ships and slowing them all down to the speed of the rowboat would be ridiculous. You want all of the other, every non-flagship resource to be, to have extra capacity, extra time, extra speed in order to be able to serve the key resource. That language might be a bit clunky, but if you're in a small business like we are or on a small team, sometimes you have one person that kind of is maybe more significant. I'm not going to say important, more significant than the others.

And you want to make sure that they are the most productive. So for instance, if it was in a surgery, you would probably want the surgeon to make sure that they have all of the other stuff that's around them to have plenty of them. You wouldn't want the surgeon waiting there going, oh, we're just waiting to see if we can borrow some of the scalpels from next door when they're finished. Or we don't have enough nurses to help. We don't have enough wheelchairs, beds. You want to sort of figure out what the most important the flagship resource is, and then pace, set up the other, the whole team, the whole system to run at the speed of that flagship resource. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is an all-in-one

website platform for entrepreneurs to help you stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or you're managing a growing brand, you can stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything, your products, your services, even the content that you create. Squarespace has everything that you need, all in one place and all in your terms. Make the most of Design Intelligence from Squarespace, which combines two decades of industry-leading design expertise with cutting-edge AI technology to unlock your strongest creative potential. Design Intelligence really is impressive. It empowers anyone to build a beautiful, more personalized website tailored to their unique needs

and craft a bespoke digital identity to use across one's entire online presence. And Squarespace Payments is the easiest way to manage your payments all in one place. Onboarding is fast and simple, and you can get started in just a few clicks and start receiving payments right away. Plus you can give your customers more ways to pay

by choosing from popular payment methods like Klarna, ACH Direct, Debit, Apple Pay, Afterpay, and Clearpay depending on where you're located. Squarespace even lets you collect payments easily with Squarespace invoicing, which means that you can spend more time focusing on growing your business. You can invoice clients and get paid for your services,

then turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts. Plus, simplify your workflow and manage your service business all on one platform. I've used Squarespace myself for many years. It currently powers the PracticalPKM website, home of my LifeHQ product, and the place where people can go to sign up for my newsletter. I use Squarespace myself because it makes it really easy to create a great looking website and you know that your pages are going to look good on any device, anywhere, anytime. I love the grid system for laying out the elements on your page, whether it be in the desktop view or in the smaller mobile view. Squarespace gives you all the tools

that you need to get your website looking just right, which means that even if you know how to code a website and connect all those technical pipes, you can focus on what you're making. And honestly, that's what I want to focus on. I don't want to have to dig through the code and figure out which plugins need to be updated or why something doesn't work. So if you or someone that you know needs a website, head over to Squarespace.com and sign up right now for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, you can go to Squarespace.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

That's squarespace.com slash focused when you decide to sign up to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for the Focus Podcast. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of the Focus Podcast and all of Relay. So Clark, you spend a lot of time consulting with companies, but how does this advice apply to the individual? There's a lot of people listening who are, you know, work for themselves or they're a small cog in a big company. Where can they take this, this knowledge and apply it in their lives?

Where can they take this knowledge and apply it in their lives? Okay, so when you move to think about individuals, all businesses are made up of individuals, whether they be small or big or ginormous. And so I think it's really important that when you start thinking about individual people, you start by figuring out what they actually want, what they want out of life. And now I know you often think about, you mentioned at one stage, David, that you ask people what productivity means to them. And it's kind of asking that, what does productivity mean to people? And so if you're thinking about an individual, whether they be a leader of thousands or tens or a solopreneur, I think there's at least four different questions that you want to ask and they all just tie into each other and they're

really quite straightforward and simple. The first one is you got to figure out what productivity means to you and it starts with what are you especially good at? Because I reckon productivity is as you say, repeatedly, it's not about just cranking widgets. It's about doing what you're good at and joyful. Eight hours of doing stuff you don't like is not nearly as productive to me as an hour and a half of doing stuff that you really, really like. You need to also figure out who you like to work with. So like I've had some clients, quite often when I work with people, I'll say, why don't we just start out? We'll book in stuff and we'll have two sessions and we'll have a bit of a chat.

And then if we're finding it's not working, we just won't set up anymore and I won't send you an invoice because I don't want to work with people who I'm not jelling with and they don't want to work with me either. So figuring out what you're good at, figuring out who you like to work with, and then figuring out the way that you actually help them. So like, for instance, Mike, you're doing YouTube stuff, which is really cool. David, you're putting together pre-recorded stuff

and selling your field guides. What I realized that I like doing, actually I got there by figuring out what I didn't like doing. I don't like traveling a lot. I do like having a lot of flexibility in my day. I do actually possess some really good internet connection even though we're down here in the depths

of the Pacific Ocean. And I like to go for bike rides during the day. So I've geared my life to figuring out that I help people over the internet, where we actually have really high quality conversations over screens, even though I've never met them. And that works really, really well for me. Other people might find that hideous. And then there's the last bit of it that these are all good, they're, wouldn't it be lovely you got a Venn diagram where you got the three of these and you go,

wow, I'm good at that. I like those people and I like the way that we wanna work together. You've also got to figure out a way that you can sell yourself so that you can actually, so that the people that you help give you money and you can actually earn good money and have a good life. So I think that's actually the starting point for any individual is actually just figuring out where there's been in this Venn diagram, where the

intersection of those four things is. Because if you don't, you might be really, really busy. You might technically earn a lot of money, but are you productive if you hate it? I don't think you are. So that's where I would start. And I think there's a few other things about that. There's one rule with individuals is that everyone's the same and everyone's different. But what I've found is that you don't want everyone to try and be the same as everyone else. You actually want to make the most of how they're different, what their quirks are and what they excel at. So if I can give you, there's a little analogy that I've started using recently about energy and how we all are productive or not.

If you think of, so this isn't the analogy, but it's a precursor analogy, which is you think of your iPhone, you charge it overnight, which is like our sleeping. You use it all day and at the end of the day, you plug it in and recharge it. And sometimes if you're using it a lot, you need to maybe top it up,

give it a recharge during the day. Humans, we're kind of like that. We sleep at night, which recharges us. We work during the day. And then occasionally, we might need to have a little nap or a rest during the day. I've come to realize through working with a lot of really clever, clever people, that our brains are actually more like my electric lawnmower. So we've just come out of winter here and we're coming into spring here in New Zealand and the grass just suddenly grows and grows and grows and grows

and grows. So when I grab my lawnmower out there sometimes to mow my lawns, I actually have to take two or three different shots at it because the grass is long, it's a little bit damp, it's quite lush, and there's quite a lot of it. And so the battery's only got enough oomph in it to do 20 minutes worth of lawn mowing. And then I have to take the battery away, charge it up, and then I might have to come back the next day and do the next bit, and then the next day and do the next bit. But then later in the year, when the grass isn't growing as much, I can mow the entire lawns in 20 minutes off one charge, and I could probably mow the neighbor's lawns before it actually ran out of battery as well.

So I think that's a really nice way of thinking for knowledge workers, that the work we do, even though it's not physical, it's actually some of it can be incredibly draining. So what we need to do is make sure that maybe if we got 20 minutes of that really good work done first thing in the morning, maybe that would be fantastic. Maybe we can another 20 minutes done in the afternoon, but packing yourself so that when we actually do that really heavy, draining hard work, we do it when we've got charged batteries, we don't do it for too long because this diminishing returns very quickly. And then we go away and we do other stuff, like go for a bike ride if you can, or maybe go do some lighter work, and then you recharge and then you come back

once you've got a fully charged brain. I reckon that's hugely important for knowledge work people, because our brains are our special gift. So I need to follow up with that, because you're describing the different modes and the energy that's required and it reminds me a lot of an assessment that I first came across in the agency world where you're using these different working styles assessments to figure out how you're gonna work better with the people that you are part

of your teams every single day. Are you familiar with the Colby type A? From a long time ago, yes. Well, the reason I bring it up because this is a section on individual removing individual bottlenecks and the Colby type A, I really like assessments in general. I think that any one assessment is not the be all end all assessment, but they're basically clues to figure out how you're wired. And the Colby I like because it breaks it down into these four different modes, which you've got the fact finder, the follow through, the quick start and the implementer. And everyone has a different score in these four different

areas. I tend to be a high fact finder and I worked with a high quick start. So you can kind of see there hopefully that there's going to be some friction because I'm the one who wants to research things until we know all the details. And then the other person is the one who's like, ah, let's just make it, it'll be fine. What's interesting about the Colby though is that this goes beyond working in an organization, and they actually have a version of this assessment that is for relationships. So my wife and I took it. And it was really kind of eye-opening when you put in your scores and you match them up with your significant other scores and it points out like this is where the friction is going to be when you're planning a family vacation and things

like that. And the big takeaway is not you know you should be more one way or the other but it's to recognize there are times when you got to find the facts there are times when you have to just go with the flow and you have to be a quick start and recognizing your default modes those are the ones that you kind of naturally gravitate towards those are the ones that are easy for you but that doesn't mean that you aren't ever going to have to do those other things and one of the things in the report was kind of like this pyramid diagram and it's kind of like this is how you should try to carve up how you're spending your time use your natural mode for roughly this amount of time

and then go into these other modes for this other amount of time. And it kind of sounds to me like that's what you're describing with knowledge workers and figuring out when and how you're going to do these different things. Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah. Can I mention, I love the idea of that. Those assessments, all of them, some of them are repeatable and reliable, some of them are a bit more or a bit less so. But the beauty of them is that they get you looking at yourself. They almost put a mirror up to yourself and you often see things that you can't see yourself. And then when you get two people working together like a husband and wife and you look at them, you go, wow, hadn't realized that about myself. And I'll give you a little example for me that

was really just, it shocked me, but it genuinely changed my life enormously. I did the strengths finder test a while ago. If people haven't heard of it, it's very easy to buy the book on Amazon. And it comes with a little code, even if you get the Kindle version. And you go in and you run through this thing and it comes back and it tells you what your top five strengths are. And I got those. And I imagine we would be similar. I'm an ideas guy if I would sum mine up, which probably fits in with the fact finder kind of thing. And 15 or 20 years passed, and I went in and I realized that I could actually get the full 34 strengths that they come up with in order and by giving them, I'm not sure, $50, $60 extra. So at the time I actually had someone

who was doing a strengths finder coaching and she wanted to use me as a guinea pig to test it out. So I went and did that and I got this report back and I remember looking at it and I looked at my last one. You know these things, you look and you go, these are my top five, I know them. None of them are interesting. And I looked at the last one to see what my weakness was. And I was absolutely shocked. And then I won't tell you

what it is for just a moment because then later on the day, my wife comes home. She comes in and I say, look, I've done this thing and there's 34 strengths and you won't guess what my last one is. And she says, oh, discipline. And it was really annoying because she was absolutely right that I don't have discipline. I just do not have it. And yet the funny thing was I was using a lot of, trying to use a lot of productivity techniques and tools that required me to be disciplined.

And then I spoke to the lady that I was doing the coaching with and she said, ah, yeah, but you're quite successful.'" And I said, "'Well, I'd like to think so, quite successful.'" And she said, "'Yeah, but did you ever become successful by being disciplined?' And I go, "'No.'" She said, "'You wouldn't be able to. It's not one of your strengths. You would be fighting your very nature to do that. And she said, you got successful by being an ideas guy and being clever and by outwitting yourself so you didn't have to be disciplined. And that's why earlier I said that everyone's different and yet we're

kind of all the same. But if you can go through and do any of these things, and I love the strengths, wonder, I usually get most of my clients to do it because it's so eye opening because you just go, wow, I didn't realize about this about myself. But once you've got it, you can just suddenly go, wow, okay, I see what I'm good at. I see what I'm really not good at. I cannot change my nature. So I might as well. I think the expression is cut the coat with the cloth that I have. In other words, just make the most of what you are. And it's really, really, really, when you realize that, and when I work through with clients and take them through, say the strengths of anything, it can just suddenly, their whole life can pivot. Because like in my case, I stopped trying to be disciplined. And I use the stuff I was good at. That's the thing that a lot of people will try to

mitigate their weaknesses instead of just leaning into their strengths, which is why assessments like the strengths finder are cool. I took that too. And actually, I came across that kind of in conjunction with the Colby Type A when I was going through a book, which was really just like a workbook called Unique Ability. And there's some other stuff that goes into it. You email the people that are closest to you, and you ask a couple of questions essentially along the lines of what do you think I'm good at? Because you kind of have this picture of how you do things and what your strengths and weaknesses are, but it can be totally different than what other people see. So that's kind of like the 360 approach to the assessment. But yeah, the goal is not to just eliminate all the flaws. It's just to figure out how you work

best and do more of that. RL Yeah. And in a way that you and everyone else enjoys. Because if you try to find your nature, you won't. Can I give you a guide? I've got my own little assessment and I just popped in a little outline here. It's a very easy one. I've used it with a lot of people. I'll just share it with you, but it's based on a tweet that's a humorous tweet by a lady called Collie Tangerina. I don't know if that's her real name, but she wrote on Twitter some time ago, in every partnership, there is a person who stacks the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect and a person who stacks the dishwasher like a raccoon on meth. And I know what one I am and you can probably guess what it is, but it's surprising in relationships

how often the dishwasher thing comes up. So there's a Scandinavian architect and a Rekoon on meth. And what you can do is I've taken that and I've run it, I actually use it. But partly, if you're working with people and you tell them something like this, and they have a little laugh, it changes, whatever it does, it changes somehow the way your brain's working at the moment, and you become a little bit more creative. So I will tell them this and then we'll sit down and I'll get them to imagine a two by two. It's not a continuum where at one end you've got Swedish architect and at the other end you've got Raccoon or meth. But just imagine that as a two by two where you measured or guessed, estimated the amount of architect-ness you had

and the amount of raccoon-ness you have. So put it in a two by two. And so like I would be probably medium architect, high raccoon, and I could plot myself on this two by two. And you can do this with a team and it's very, very unscientific, but it's really interesting because you can have a chat and notice, ah, we've got some people here

who really sort of Swedish architect and they're really good at some tasks and you want them doing those things. Sometimes you want the raccoons there, but you don't want to put them in charge. You might want to put them in charge of creative things, but maybe you don't want to put them in charge of creative things, but maybe you don't want to put them in charge of either stacking your dishwashers or running a big project. It's just humorous,

but it just gets people looking and they suddenly see people just with fresh eyes. And they see the whole team with fresh eyes. It can be very handy if, you have used it with people when they're looking about maybe promoting people and they'll look and they'll go on this one we actually need an architect or this thing. Wow, we need to harness that that guy's racoonness. Put them in a place where they can't cause any damage, but we really, really value their raccoon creativity and quirkiness. CB. Yeah, I want to lean into that a little bit because I think I get what you're getting at with that two by two grid. And you didn't explicitly say this, but you mentioned the scenario where essentially you're sort of putting the raccoon in a place where they

won't mess things up. That's not exactly what you're saying though because there are scenarios where being the raccoon is actually a benefit over the Swedish architect. You just got to have the right people in the right places. Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I've got a lot of raccoon in me and a lot of the people I work with, actually, that's probably 50-50, but the architects find it really helpful to talk to someone who's got some weird ideas. The quirky, weird creative bit, which they just can't do. It's really, really useful because they can solve things because they get ideas and solutions

that come from elsewhere. Sometimes when I'm working with people who are more raccoon-like, I have to pretend to be more architect by nature, and then I need to help them figure out how to harness their own strengths and weaknesses. Yeah, the architect in Raccoon is so unscientific, but people kind of get it and they know where they are. And it's just a little harmless, but helpful kind of way of looking at the world. CB The thing I like about that is that when you're talking about organizations specifically and jobs to be done, the focus can be on the technical skills that are required for the job, but that's only one piece of the equation. You really have to have people who are approaching it with the right mindset. It's not necessarily emotional intelligence. Some of it is working styles, but there's a whole nother component

about how the work actually gets done that I feel like a lot of people overlook. Well, what I like about it is it's kind of disarming. Personally, I've had bad experiences with these tests and I've had them used on me, not so much in love. And so I feel like I've just got my shields up whenever these tests come up. But what you're talking about is something that

is very approachable, accessible, and doesn't feel like an attack. I have found so often that the secret to helping people actually improve is to sit down and just have a smiley conversation. And if you could speed up the smiling by having something that is disarming, just like that silly little tweet that makes people smile, their minds shift and they go to a different place. I have read about it, but it's something to do with alpha waves. They just get in a different place. They start to trust you more. They have a little giggle and then you have a conversation. And quite often people will

actually solve their own problems, but they just actually just need someone to actually sit down and just have a good friendly chat with. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Indeed. Go to indeed.com slash focused and join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast. We're all 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 with Indeed. If you need to hire, you need Indeed. Indeed is your matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors, according to Indeed data, and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. So ditch the busy work,

use Indeed for scheduling, screening, and messaging. So you can connect with candidates faster. And Indeed doesn't just help you hire faster. 93% of employers agree Indeed delivers the highest quality matches compared to other job sites, according to a recent Indeed survey. Getting the right person isn't easy. You need the right mix of the mindset

and the skills and the qualities, and it takes a lot of time. Back when I used to hire people, it always felt kind of like a crapshoot to me, and I wish I had Indeed. Indeed makes the hiring process better and faster. Leveraging over 140 million qualifications and preferences every day,

Indeed's matching engine is constantly learning from your preferences. So the more you use Indeed, the better it gets. Join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. And listeners of the Focus Podcast will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your job more visibility at indeed.com slash focused.

Just go to indeed.com slash focused right now and support the Focus Podcast by saying you heard about it here. That URL one last time, indeed.com slash focused. Terms and conditions apply. 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. So you mentioned the lawnmower earlier, Clark. Do you mind explaining a little bit more why clever people's brains are like your lawnmower? RL Okay. Well, it really is just about energy. And it's just making sure that if you're doing

heavy thinking, it uses up the energy in your brain. There's only so much that you can actually do at a time. And I don't think a lot of people realize that. It took me years and years and years to actually realize that thinking is actually really hard work. Now, I know David, you have a young, youngish dog. Our dog is about seven years old. And we were told by various vets and training people that if you want to exhaust the dog, don't take it for a run to do physical exercise, that will work. Sit down and do a little few brain games and the dog will go off and have a really nice long sleep afterwards. And I think, actually, I don't think, I know that us clever people are like that, but we don't recognize instinctively that thinking is actually really, really draining hard work. And we need to have a pause and a rest and recharge our batteries, just like we do when we use the lawnmower on heavy

grass. The battery runs out much more quickly, and then we're going to take the battery away, charge it up, and maybe come back to the next day. So like if I could give you an example of that for me, it's something I've done in the last few months. I've just put out an email course called the Bottleneck Detective Bootcamp. It's a free one. And I actually, I knew that that general outline of the thing, but I wrote it a few days ahead of it actually being released. So I'd write one email and then a second one. And then I would, then I announced it to people who would beta test it for me. And I was always two days ahead of them, at least. And I would write it that way. And what I discovered while I was doing this is that I effectively, to write a five or six

hundred word email using ChatGTP to help me get the messy first draft of it, though I've got to reassure anyone that's listening, all of the thoughts in it are mine. All of the words are in mine. I just use the ChatGTP to come up with something that I could then go back and edit and edit and edit until it felt right. I found that I could do that in about 90 minutes a day, but I couldn't do a second one because my brain ran out. So I would then have to do a second, but then the next day when I go to do it, my battery is charged up.

I've done the heavy thinking yesterday, the brain is fully good, lots of battery there. I'll sit down, I'll do another 90 minutes or so, and then my brain had just run out of juice, which is good because I'd finished the second lesson. And then the next day I would repeat it. So there's something about pacing ourselves by not trying to do this heavy, heavy lifting that we do every day, all day. Just grab one burst of it and be delighted that you've managed to produce something that is actually really, really, really hard work, even though it's only five or 600 words. That for me is a

revelation. And I often felt guilty in the past about not working a full eight hours doing brain ear stuff and feeling exhausted doing it. And then I realized as I worked with more and more people who were doing this clever thinking, this heavy lifting, that we were all the same. But no one had actually told us that what we did was actually hard work. Anyway, so that's the lawn mower. Yeah, I would say that I think that's because people are pushing like the old manufacturing model

on knowledge work, and it doesn't work. You know, it doesn't work. You're right, using your brain is hard work and it's not something where you can just attach another bumper and push the button and wait for the next car to come down the line. And when we demand that of ourselves, we are just setting ourselves up for frustration and we've all experienced it, but it's still hard to accept. RL It is. There's a kind of a corollary. I don't know how to say that word. We'll see. Corollary. CB Corollary. Corollary.

RL Thank you. That will do. CB 30 years as a lawyer. RL I got it. RL Excellent. I don't even know if this is one of those. But if you take the idea of doing creative work, and if you think of bottlenecks as you're helping people to improve, what I found for years before I went out by myself and become self-employed, I would be a quiet coach that wandered around and help people. It was almost like a coach without portfolio. I didn't actually have specific areas to work on much this time. I'd just go and help people. And I would find that in the early days that I could overhelp them.

I could try and help them change and fix things at the speed of my brain being able to come up with good ideas rather than the speed of their brains, which had to absorb and adapt the ideas. So the bottleneck in that case, this is a good bottleneck, is the ability of other people, the rate at which people can absorb change. And you find this in societies, you find it in workplaces, you find it in homes. We all need time to absorb change. And what you've got to do if you're a helper is you've actually got to be really, really careful not to change people, try and change people too quickly, because they just cannot cope and they wear out. It's like that old saying about trying to drink from the fire hose. You just overwhelm them and you

actually have to slow down. So that created in my work a funny situation in that I was actually far more productive as a helper if I did far fewer hours. If I tried to help people 48 hours a week, they would just get sick of me and they just couldn't improve. So that's a really difficult change to take from when you're working in a place where everyone else is sitting at a desk working 40 hours a week and you're wandering around and quietly helping people say 10 to 20 hours a week. If you go faster, it's actually counterproductive

but it's also counterintuitive. Yeah, I feel like the same applies to parenting, especially as they get older. Do you think there is an individual application of that principle you were just talking about where you can't change people too quickly? Is it possible to try to change yourself too quickly? Oh, yes.

OK, yeah, actually, that's a really good question. What was the term you used before? An idea collector when you're talking about the... AC Yeah, I don't remember the term. Yeah, idea collector probably is accurate. I mean, that's definitely something I try to do with obsidian specifically. It's where I collect all my notes and ideas, and then I try to create something out of them. But I was really just more thinking about this from a personal growth perspective because I think that's something maybe if you're an individual knowledge worker slash entrepreneur, you kind of pride yourself in your ability to change and learn new things, but there's probably a bottleneck

there too. RL Yeah, there definitely is. If you're trying to change and improve, like people like us, we read books. And what I found for myself initially, and then when I started helping people, I just found this recurring theme is that the people who read books and collect ideas, often we do it because we're addicted to new ideas. It's actually really common. And the analogy I have for that is, I hope this translates around the world, but these little packets of chips or crisps, in the UK they were called Pringles. I think they're the same here. I'm not sure. Yeah, they're called Pringles here too. They're this, you got them? Okay. So, you know, they come in those things and they're a little

pack and you take one out and you pop it in your mouth and you go, oh, wow, that's unbelievably delicious or something a little bit like that. And then you get the next one and you go, oh, that's really nice. And I know they had the saying, I think that once you start, you can't stop or once you pop, you can't stop or something like that. And I think a lot of us are addicted to new ideas, new things that we could improve, new things that we could do differently, new books, new blogs, all of that kind of stuff. And we keep having more and more and more and more of them, even though after about the third chip, you get really diminishing returns. You almost stop tasting them, but you keep eating them because you're effectively addicted to them. And I found that there's a Pringles problem with so many of

us and that we're constantly looking for the new stuff, but it's actually just to give us that dopamine hit of having something new. There's actually not a lot of nutrition. And I realized that when I was very deep in the agile world, I kept reading blog after blog after blog, book after book after book after book. And then one day I thought, I'm not getting anything out of any of these things. There's nothing new, but I love reading them. And then I stopped, and I just stopped reading all the blogs. I stopped reading all the books. And then I suddenly, it was almost like give it another two or three months later, I realized that I actually knew more by taking in less because stuff had started to consolidate and I started to realize what was important, and I'd actually started to apply this stuff.

So I guess if you wanted to sum that up, it's very easy just to become addicted to getting new information and filling your head with stuff. And it can actually be, it's the intellectual equivalent of doom scrolling, and it's an addiction. Yeah, and I would also argue that you just need time to absorb an idea. Like if you, like if you read a book and it's got 10 good ideas in it, you just

need to try one for a month or two to see how it works. You can't do alternate once it doesn't work. Cause you don't, there's just too many variables, nothing you don't know what's working. I, that's, I guess personal experience, but I can't change very much very often. I have to take it. If I want it to stick into matter,

I just pick the best ideas and then try those. Can I put a little different angle on that? Sure. David, the way I've worked, and I figured it out this for myself, and it's probably because I'm a bit different in the way I've always been wired to a lot of the people. It's the raccoon kind of nature of me,

as opposed to the architect. I developed a way of working whereby I decided I would try and solve one problem at a time, not absorb one idea at a time, but try and solve one problem. And I remember the West Wing show, which I love and we've watched it several times all the way through my wife and I. But there's this bit where President Bartlett, once they've solved one problem, he would say, what's next? And it was actually, it was one of the recurring things that you would hear throughout the entire seven series of it. Every so often you go, right, what's next? And then in one of the episodes, he actually explained that what's next meant he'd finished with that the episodes, he actually explained that what's next

meant he'd finished with that problem and he wanted to move on to the next and he didn't want to go back to it. But I kind of, I've found that when I work with clever people, they don't actually have enough time to sit and solve problems. So, you know, they're so busy. So what we do is we sit and we get an hour, say,

and we sit there and we just figure out what's one problem, one gnarly problem, and then we just untangle it, and that becomes our what next. It's the thing that we just wanna work on, and just chip away in it. And often we don't have to eliminate the problem, sometimes we just have to reduce it, and it becomes, and it stops becoming

an important problem after a while. But that rhythm of just going, what's the one thing I really need to fix now is really helpful. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I've got a different version of that, I guess, that I have inadvertently applied, which is from the one thing and that is what one thing if done is going to make everything else easier or unnecessary. It's kind of a positive spin as opposed to solving a problem, but it's addressing the same issue. Yes, it's almost the same thing just with a different spin. Yeah, I love that. I've always

avoided reading that book. I think I to have to go and read it now. It's a good one. So speaking of books, what are you reading, David? I am doing homework for the focus podcast. Um, Jonathan Haidt has this very, very, very popular book because it gets, does it get three varies? I think so. Called the anxious generation. Um, Very popular book, does it get three various? I think so. Called The Anxious Generation. I'm about three quarters of the way through it. I should have it finished by the weekend. Very much enjoying it.

I know a bunch of teachers and parents in my life I've already recommended the book to. It's not really a lot of news for me because I've been pretty, I've been watching this story pretty closely. And it's about Gen Z and you know, they grew up with social media, we didn't really put a lot of limits on it and didn't really know what we were exposing them to and the various problems and maladies they have as a result. It's tough, it's kind of heartbreaking, some of this book. And when you look at the statistics of young children hurting themselves and the psychological

damage from social media for people getting access to it too young, it's very sad. But he's got recommendations and ideas, and it seems like that is taking hold. We're already seeing laws pass. California just passed a new law. Florida has one. New York has one now. And people are waking up to the risks of social media with children. And if anybody out there wants to help out a child in their orbit or wants to do their

homework for a future episode of the Focus podcasts. I'd recommend the anxious generation. Yeah. The, uh, the, the laws that are being passed, that reminds me of, um, Toby, my oldest, when he was 13 or 14, he had the opportunity to go down to the state Capitol and his people in his class and present a bill basically before the representatives. And the bill that he proposed was outlawing social media for everyone under 18, which did not garner a whole lot of support, but I feel like he was just ahead of his time. No, he was. He was. It looks like they're settling on 16. And I guess we can wait for the episode to explain why they think that

that age is okay. But I'll tell you, if I had a kid that was 16, I would still put limits on them. And, um, and, uh, it's just, it's an interesting thing. My kids kind of escaped the problem because they're old enough that social media wasn't like the big problem with my kids was they played angry birds too much. Um, but you know, still, I mean, one of the problems of these phones is insomnia. So that's, you know, I, I could have done a better job as a parent.

Didn't realize at the time, uh, how risky it was, but the, um, but my kids are old enough that they kind of avoided it. And honestly, I've always been kind of, uh, up to speed on stuff like this. And I always suspected it. Another interesting thing in the book, and again, I don't wanna like spend, give away the whole episode, but he talks about the science that argues

that it's not social media. And the science isn't very good. It's not social media. But I mean, how can you think it's anything but social media? I mean, even the kids say, when you ask the kids, what's the problem? Oh, it's the social media.

They'll tell you. Or you go to these schools where they have banned phones already and the kids are happy about it. Because so long as everybody's banned, their lives are so much easier. It's just if you take it away from one kid, there's a problem for that kid. But if you take away from all the kids, there's a problem for that kid. But if you take away from all the kids,

it's a lot easier for everybody. And I'm also thinking about the stories and science in this book has applied to people over 16 and adults and what that means. So it's a very good book. It's selling like hotcakes, which I think is good because I hope that it can provoke some change.

Nice. What are you reading, Clark? I'm reading a book called Hyper Efficient by, I hope I can pronounce her name correctly, Meethu Sturroni. It just came out last week. It's got hardly any reviews on Amazon at the moment, but I've got this funny feeling it's going to be a huge book. I'm about halfway through it. I've been audio booking it at the same time as I'm reading it on my Kindle. And the title is a bit, I think it gives the wrong impression, hyper-efficient. This is actually about effectively about slowing down and working at the pace for knowledge workers

that we're meant to. It ties in so much with what I've been talking about. And I love that there's actually a book that's got collected the science behind it, written it up well. And if you basically took the first half of it, what it's saying is that knowledge workers, our USP is our ability to think in our brains. And if we do that continuously, eight hours a day, we don't do it very well. We just dilute ourselves. So we need to talk like I've talked about with the electric lawnmower. We need to pick our battles and recognize that knowledge work can be incredibly and recognize that knowledge work can be incredibly draining, and we need to be very happy that we maybe do a couple of bursts of it each day. She says that up to four hours a day is achievable. I think I'm probably get maybe 90 minutes to two and a half hours a day. But it's actually about being high profpre-efficient by managing your energy

and doing your thinking at the right time and not doing too much of it. So yeah, it's a really, really interesting book. AC Well, that is the third book you have now had me buy on this episode. Jeff Bezos owes me. Yeah, this looks interesting. I have probably a somewhat related book called Good Work by Paul Millard. Paul Millard came on my radar because I read The Pathless Path and really enjoyed that book. And it's basically about challenging. That book was about challenging the conventional norms about your vocation and your career. And Paul Miller is an interesting guy. He's kind of carved his own path and that was, that book was sharing his story and kind of encouraging people to, uh, to carve their own path in the world, which was what I needed to hear at the,

at the time. I'm still finishing story worthy by Matthew Dix, but this is the next one up and I am really looking forward to this one. Yeah, I'm looking at this one thinking, is this Kindle or is this paperback? See, I've got limited shelf space. Oh, it's always paperback, David. It's always paperback.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes, I will be buying books because of you guys too. So there we go. There we go. That's the way the world is supposed to work. Yeah. Good.

Good. Good. Uh, one of the other things we like to do, Clark on the show, just for giggles is kind of share, uh, shiny new objects and things we purchased. I'm not sure how this got into a show about productivity, but we keep doing it. So there we go. Maybe because buying stuff is sometimes a good way to avoid being productive. I know that's my pick this week. So, um, so Mike, you want to go first?

Sure. Well, I think the, the, the reason for this segment is, uh, kind of leading into the fact that we all struggle with this stuff. Yeah. So rather than trying to, trying to make shiny new objects be like, well, just completely remove them. Let's have some fun with them, basically. There you go. So my shiny new object is an app that has been around for a while. Have you ever played with the app Morgan? No. So it's sort of a calendaring app that has like scheduling links and things like that. But really the framing of it is it's not just a calendar.

It's basically a place for you to time block your day and schedule the tasks that you are actually going to get done, which I have done for a long time. Analog and recently what they added with Morgan is an integration with Obsidian. So they actually worked with the Obsidian tasks developer on this. So it's really well done. It will pull in your tasks from Obsidian. It will have all the tags. It will respect the do and start dates. And basically they show up in these little buckets on the left side of the interface. So it'll say these are due today,

these are due soon, whatever. And then by default, you drag those tasks into your calendar. And then when you drag it into the calendar, they disappear from the list. So basically you have a visual of, this one has been time blocked. And then you can even check off the tasks in Morgan and

they get marked off in obsidian. So this is kind of the perfect intermediary between the crazy task dashboard that I created. I'll put a link to that YouTube video if people are interested in that. But that was basically showing me all my essential lists and then the time block plan still happens analog and this was kind of the the missing piece that I didn't really realize. So last couple weeks because I've had access to the beta and it is out now for everybody. But I look at this as part of the shutdown routine and I look at what's coming up tomorrow and then I scheduled those tasks on the calendar by dragging them on to the Morgan calendar. It actually drags them and creates events on my planning calendar.

And then in the morning, I look at that, see if I want to make any changes and transfer that over to the, the analog, uh, time block plan, but I am loving this. It's so great. I, uh, I am interested, Mike. This is a really nice. The integration with obsidian is dangerous for me. It's like, I really don't wanna move my stuff again. We're always looking for a good integration

between a calendar and a task manager. I feel like if Apple really wanted to do something smart, I would just buy Fantastical and heavily integrate it with Reminder so you would get something like this natively. But this is in the ballpark because my shiny new object this month is something that was a fail. I've been getting, somehow I got on the email list for Motion, usemotion.com, which sells itself as an AI task manager. And so I bought a month of it and tried it,

and it really just doesn't. I think turning over, you know, the idea is you feed it all your tasks and then it's gonna tell you what to do. There's a lot of good things AI can do, but this is not something I'm interested in AI doing for me. I feel like I would need to make the decision about what I work on each day. And I kind of felt that going in,

but I was even more convinced of it after trying it for a while. And so that one didn't really stick for me, but this, what you're showing is much more along the lines of what I'm thinking of like, okay, I'm going to choose these blocks, these acts, and then you're going to do the digital part for me to make it easy. Yeah. And the cool thing about Morgan is not just that it integrates with Obsidian via the tasks plugin, but it also integrates with all of your online tools.

So there has always been this disconnect between, well, my team manages projects in Notion, or ClickUp, or Linear, and I have to go into Notion, and I have to grab a link to that task, and then create a new OmniFocus task, and have a link to it. Well, you can actually just pull those in, and those can show up in the list as well. And there's filters for like,

you can only show the ones that are relevant to you versus the ones for your entire team if you're responsible and you wanna keep tabs on everything that everybody's doing. But you can basically have all of it in one place and then you can schedule all that stuff, which I think is pretty cool. Do you, does it have integration with iCloud?

Good question, I think it does, but I am full on Google, so I don't know for sure. Yeah. That always holds me, holds me back. But I guess, you know, at some point that the service gets good enough, I should just switch calendars, you know? But anyway, uh, well that is going into the research bucket. Thank you, Mike.

Clark, what do you got? Right. That is going into the research bucket. Thank you, Mike. Clark, what do you got? Right, I'm going very old school and very new school at the same time. I've got two things here. Getting old, I realized after prompting from my children and wife who'd all started to mumble a lot that maybe I should get my ears tested, which I did. And now for the last three, four months, maybe six months, I've been wearing hearing

aids. And I must say, I wish I'd done it years ago. I think it was probably pride and denial that I didn't. My hearing loss isn't that I could quite happily survive without them, but I'm far, far happier wearing them. So it's really one of the best investments I've made. For ages, I can go out to and eat dinner in a restaurant and I can hear what other people are saying. And even better, I can turn off one hearing aid on one side so I can shut out some noisy tables if I want to. Really, really made a huge difference to my quality of life. And the second one, which is probably me being greedy, but if you can see here on my arm, I have a continuous glucose monitor, which is for type one diabetics to watch their glucose, their blood sugars. I've been type two for a long time and I

take insulin. So I've just started wearing one of these just so I can track how my blood sugar levels actually are. And it has been a real eye-opener. Can PSA taking two finger prick tests each day with having a continuous monitoring which is updated every minute, I've discovered so much stuff going on that I had no idea was happening. And it's actually it's kind of like when you wear an Apple watch or one of those Aura rings and you track your sleep and you can see what's going on. This has really, really opened up my eyes to some of the things that explain why sometimes I'm tired when my blood sugars are really high, um, where I wouldn't have thought they would have been. So it's been, it's been wonderful.

Totally recommend both of those. You know, Clark, I don't have any blood sugar problems, but I've had now. You're like the fifth friend that's told me about doing that, where you put the thing in your arm and it gives you real-time data, even if they like, most people I know do it for like a month or so, just to kind of find out

what their profile's like and what types of foods they digest better and don't, you know, it just, I don't really understand all the science behind it, but you are one of many people that have told me about this. I guess I have to look into it. Part of me is like, oh, I don't know if I want to stick something in my arm. Oh, it actually, it's 100% painless.

I promise you, you wouldn't even know that the way it applies to your arm, it's the tiniest little thing and it's stuck on with glue. That makes it sound a bit primitive, but it's stuck on really well. It's just so easy to apply, absolutely zero pain. I may do that after the new year, just to learn about my health a little more. What you might find is that some of the tiredness that you feel at certain times a day could be because you're eating different things.

So for instance, white bread shoots me, my blood sugar's really high. And because I don't process the sugar as well as non-diabetic people do, it makes me just really sluggish. And what I've found is that some of the stuff that says it's low carb and it is actually has a similar effect. So it's just figuring out what has that effect and what doesn't. And one of the things that was really amazed me is for the last few, well, my blood sugars have been high when I test them in the morning. And then when I put this on,

I discovered that they're actually really good all night. It's just that when I wake up before I have breakfast, my body pumps out a bit of sugar into my blood system, and it pushes my blood sugar up high. And when I do my one-off reading, I go, wow, my blood sugars are high, but they've actually been really good for the previous 10 hours.

I had no idea of that. So that's, even just in the point of view of removing anxiety, that's made me feel a lot happier. All right, well, I'll look into that one. So this has been an expensive episode for me. Clark, if people wanna learn more about the work you're doing, rolling rocks downhill, the, you know, some of the, the products you've got,

where should they go? Right. Um, there are two ways to find me easily. One is Clark Ching.com. Um, with an E, that's got an E in the middle of it. Yep. The other one is LinkedIn. There are two Clark chings on LinkedIn. I'm not the dentist. Okay. Right. And I was gonna say, if anyone would like a copy

of any of the books I've written, The Bottlenet Rolls, Rolling Rocks Downhill, which is the novel or Corks Resolutions, which is mysteriously titled, subtitled, How to Solve Impossible Problems. Track me down on LinkedIn or on clarkcheng.com, send me an email or a LinkedIn message. And I'm really happy to give anyone a PDF copy. It makes me so happy if people read that stuff. And there's another thing that I've just released recently. I mentioned it earlier was the the bottleneck detective bootcamp, which is a free email course. It's effectively like a really

small book and it's sent out over two or three weeks. And it teaches you how to find bottlenecks and see them in the real world, which I honestly reckon is like a 20 IQ boost just by reading that. You can find that at bottleneckdetective.com and it's totally free. Excellent. Thank you, Clark, so much for coming on. It's just kind of funny how we struck up a friendship because of something in a book and an email you wrote to me. But super happy to have you on the show today.

We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm slash focused. Thank you to our sponsors, Indeed and Squarespace. For those of you in deep focus, stick around. We've got more to talk about with Clark. We'll see you next time.