Focused - 39: Quality Time with a Sledgehammer

Episode Date: January 23, 2018

David tries to not work too hard on his European vacation, while Jason tries to do the same in his own house; David's experiments with hyper-scheduling and the Twelve Week Year; Jason performs some drastic office remodeling.

David Sparks and Jason Snell spent their careers working for the establishment. Then one day, they'd had enough. Now, they are independent workers learning what it takes to succeed in the 21st century. They are free agents. Welcome back to Free Agents, a podcast about being an independent worker in a digital age. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my fellow host, Mr. Jason Snell. Hello, Jason. Hello, David. How are you? Happy New Year.

Happy New Year to you, too. And also, welcome back from your big trip. Yeah, European vacation. It was so fun. I was getting messages from you at all hours, all sorts of surprising times. I hope I wasn't screwing you up too much. No, I was more concerned that you were staying up too late. That was... Yeah. Well, I actually have some discussion on that because the European vacation, I guess I should just talk about how that went. You want to just dive in? I went to Europe a long time ago in the 80s, as I keep reminding my kids, last century. And going back this time, I had jet lag for the first time. Last time I went, I had no jet lag.

For some reason, I would wake up every day at 4 a.m., which wasn't even a reasonable time in California. It was like somewhere in the middle, I guess. But I would just wake up ready to go at 4. So I decided to roll with it. And I would get up at four, we were in a hotel, not an Airbnb this time. And so I'd go down to the lobby, take my computer, and I could make calls to the West Coast, deal with a few client things, you know, get some work done, I'd get two or three hours of work in. And then when the family would get rolling, then we could all go have a good time together. So it kind of worked out for me, except for the fact that I fell apart about 9 PM every day. Right. Right. You got to go

to bed because you know, you're going to be up at four. Yeah. And, uh, so, but I think it was, uh, in hindsight, it was good. You know, it worked out and there were a couple of times we had night plans. And in those days couple times we had night plans. And in those days, I would go back to the room and take a nap in the afternoon so I could make it. And that worked fine. In terms of the overall plan, I talked about it last month. I went with the idea that I wasn't going to do any normal projects. You know, I wasn't going to plan to do anything that was, you know, like, you know, write a special contract for a client or

anything, but I was going to be available for whatever emergencies occurred. And it worked out for me, you know, with those couple hours in the morning, I could deal with the emergencies. And I really, for the first time, maybe ever felt very relaxed about being on vacation and still having business going on. Wow, that's really good. Like more than when you were with the firm? Yeah, you know, when I was at the firm, I really never had a lot of support. So I still needed to take care of my own clients when I went on the road. So I've been doing that part of this for a long time. But I think the difference this time is I went with more realistic expectations, probably because of the show. You know, we talked about, you know, when you go on a vacation,

you know, don't be optimistic and say, you're going to do a bunch of extra work. You're not going to write chapters for your book. You're not going to, you know, do whatever your normal business is. But if you can just go with the idea that I'll just keep, you know, things going where they need a little love and care while I'm gone, that's a much more realistic approach to it. And this is the first time I really not only talk the talk, but walk the walk. That's great. That's quite a thing to end up there, I think. Yeah, the downside is I'm digging out now.

I am definitely behind coming back. Yeah. Yeah, I hear you. I mean, honestly, I didn't go anywhere. I stayed in my house for most of this trip, but I had that same feeling of not only all the work that led up to the moment where the holidays sort of happened, but that you do get that, the letdown on the other side where I felt like, first off, I had a, uh, four day week, New Year's week was tough, um, for, uh, lots of reasons that I want to get into later.

Um, but you know, you get the four day week, so you're already starting on a Tuesday in my case. And, um, and, and there's that week and then the next week comes and, you know, it's, it's things have piled up because that, that, that week was a slow week. And then the next week comes and, you know, it's, it's, things have piled up because that, that, that week was a slow week. And so then you end up with that, uh, that next week being, uh, tough. And then we had another four day week this week. Um, so it just keeps on, uh, it just keeps on going where, um, I feel I, I, like you, I feel behind.

Yeah. I feel behind, but not super behind. And that's one of the things I'm going to try and carry into 2018 is not let that stress me out as much as it used to. I'm just going to do my best with this stuff, which isn't probably that healthy in some ways, but I'm trying to be less freaked out about it. Yeah, that's good.

That's good. So do you use that New Year's week at all for reflection and thoughts about how you want to change things in the year going forward? Is that a thing you do? That is not a thing I do, honestly. um but i did this in fact i just had this conversation for a different relay podcast about uh with with mike hurley about uh um like do i have like do i do the year thing of like what are my plans and my dreams and all that for the new year and i'm terrible at that because i don't i i try to do a little bit of reflection or at least i try to start to think about it but i am not really big into the you know let's let's, let's, you know, I don't know, mark off some time and have this be my,

my time to consider. In this case, the dead week, which I might as well talk about now, was also hard because, so Lauren had to work, but the kids were out of school. So it was not a week that was a normal week that I could behave like a normal worker, nor was it one where I could sort of sit in the living room with a mug of tea and scratch my chin and ponder the year gone by and the year to come because, um, my, my daughter was on a trip with a friend, but my son was there and so he's playing video games and I was trying to like give him activities. Um, and, and so for me, that, that, that week, that dead week became, um, more like trying to strike a balance between, um, going back to work and, uh, taking a little bit more downtime because I felt like I wanted to take more downtime than the week of Christmas to new years. I wanted a little bit more, uh,

a little bit more lighter load work, especially since, um, the, I was going to have my son for that whole week and the dot, my daughter would be back sort of like midweek and even though my wife was working the you know it was like spring break it's a it's a thing where um it's hard because there are people in the house and they're doing whatever they want to do and you're trying to work so um i and i gotta say i'm kind of happy with how that turned out because i really did have that i am my own boss and i'm giving myself permission kind of feeling. So like I took my son to a, there's like a video game museum in the Bay Area that you can go to and you pay $20 or something and you just, and it's got old video games lining the walls and you can play, you know, no coins or tokens or anything, Just play ultimate, you know, unlimited video games

as long as you want. And that was the thing that I did with my son that that was an afternoon. And he was out of school. I wanted to get him out of the house and I gave myself permission to do that. So, I did like fulfill the commitments that I was required to. That week, I also had pre-taped a lot of podcasts because other people were traveling. And so I had a lighter load that way too. Um, but what I tried to do is make it like, I'm going to do what I need to do, what I'm committed to doing, but nothing else. I'm not going to, I'm not going to push it. I'm not going to go beyond it. So that's what I ended up getting out of that week more than, um, more than considering like my, gone by and the year to come, which, yeah, I have, which I haven't done. And that risk here and never getting a chance to do that, but I don't think I need to have it be right on the new year. And because of the holidays, there is that feeling

that you mentioned earlier, which is, I feel like I'm digging out now of the load from the holidays. And it's only, um, as we record this, I meant we gave this away earlier when I said that it was a short week this week, recorded this the week before we're posting it. But I'm only now getting, feeling like I'm starting to dig out of all the things that are behind. And I'm not done yet. I've got more to do. But it's going to be another week or two before I feel like, okay, now I'm, you know, now I'm back to normal and I'm ready to roll. And so, you know, maybe that's the point when I do a little consideration. It's funny. I was thinking about on my walk this morning, and I thought that by now I'd be all caught up. I've been back a week today and I realized,

you know, it's going to be another week. It's just going to be another week. And that's, I'll just have to deal with that. Yeah. And, and with, with, uh, with the Martin Luther King three-day weekend, we went on a family trip to Southern California. And so that was another, like, that was a real, real three-day weekend where we flew out on a Friday night and flew back on a Monday night. And I didn't, I guess I wrote like a post for Six Colors at one point in there and I edited a podcast, but basically by my standards, I did nothing, which was great. But at the same time, it's another four-day week where now you're pushing kind of other commitments into other days and everything gets packed back up. So, I feel like this is just, you know, this is just the rhythm of this time of year is you get holiday time and you try to dig out and you're going to have another three-day weekend in there. And then you just kind of like, I think, I guess,

if I, anything to walk away from this, it would be give yourself, forgive yourself, give yourself permission to accept that you're going to be digging out for a little while and that's okay. That's right. Because I basically had the same experience on my trip. I decided I wasn't going to try and keep up with the usual course of business. I would just deal with the emergencies and then try to be present with my kids in Europe. I mean, how many times are we going to be in Europe together? And I wanted to be in the museums with them. I didn't want to be the guy back at the hotel. So it all works out. I mean, but we're digging out now. On that reflection point, I do think that that can be healthy. I do it on my birthday, though. My birthday is in February.

So it's always kind of nice. And like the morning of my birthday, I usually just drive off down here. I go to Laguna Beach or some nice place and just sit down. And I look at what I wrote down last year and I laugh at myself about how I didn't get most of it done. And then try and be more realistic about the next year. But I find that's a good time to do it because the new year, like you said, the kids are out of school and family are visiting and things are going on. It's really not the ideal time to try and sit down and figure

that stuff out. In fact, since you mentioned that, I'm going to pull out a letter that we were going to save to the end from listener listener uh listener john uh who you who is a he's actually a writer by trade he's a he's a novelist um and he sent you a tweet that said i'm spending today planning my year ahead first step look at the plan i prepared this time last year and rolling on the floor laughing loudly uh puts it all in perspective right like setting realistic goals and realizing that if you have lofty expectations that are unmakeable, that I think that, yeah, being realistic is important and realizing what you thought your goals were for last year and what you accomplished. I mean,

it can be sobering, but I think in a lot, in most cases, I would say it's more like, that was not realistic of me. You want to aim high, I guess, but also if you aim too high and have unrealistic expectations that you're trying to meet all year, you're going to feel bad about yourself and define things as a failure that may not be a failure just because you set unreachable goals for yourself. Yeah, and they don't stick. The real problem with that is if you bite off too much, you just abandon your goals. Yeah, you don't even believe in yourself that you're going to do any of it. whereas if you

chose a little aimed a little lower you would probably be more likely to stick to it and actually do more that way yeah it's it's it's harmful i think i mean i love i love people saying look i want to set i want to set these amazing goals for myself but um i saw in the workplace that if you set unrealistic goals for people, it is bad because they will fail and they will either feel bad about themselves or they'll blame you for setting unrealistic goals. Well, when you're the person setting goals for yourself, both of those things still apply. It's your mistake if you set unrealistic goals and you're going to make yourself feel bad and feel like you're a failure because you failed to meet these goals that you were never going to meet.

So, you know, I'm not saying set the bar low. I'm saying try to be realistic. And when you look at last year's goals, if you are like John or like you, David, laughing and laughing about last year's goals, that's worth considering when you're setting this year's goals. Like, why did i not do that and it's like well that was not going to happen that's not realistic and also tagging goals i would say tagging goals is something to shoot for it's like a wish list item like that would be a nice to have but it's not a must have that's not a bad way to do it sometimes i find like i've got some things that are floating in the ether and it's like that might happen it might not

happen if it doesn't happen i'm not going to beat myself up over it but i want to kind of keep it out there in case a moment comes where i want to kind of pluck it out of the ether and say yes let's do this now but i'm not going to blame myself if i if i don't do that this year all right before we move on there's a very important question i have for you yes does the video game museum have donkey kong it the original so the um the proprietors of the video game museum uh which is called oh god what's it called it's in it's in alameda california so if you're in the bay area you can look high scores arcade is the name of it and uh you pay an admission fee and then you can play as many games as you like they have a private collection of classic video games that they rotate

through storage and through their two locations in the bay area so it changes but when we were there yes indeed there was a donkey kong game there there was also a joust and a frogger joust my best video game by the way i love that game that game. It's super weird. My son, while we were playing it, pointed out a weird thing about Joust that in decades of playing it, I had never noticed. So that made me laugh too. That was a great moment where he's questioning premises of the game that I had never considered. That was pretty awesome. And then they also have some like faux consoles that are emulators that are built into either old console boxes that have been reclaimed and turned into an emulator where there's a PC in the background that can play like a hundred different classic video games, but it's still got all the controllers and stuff. Or like fake ones, like they had a Zelda one and a Wreck-It Ralph one that are actually just emulators, but somebody built an

homage to classic arcade boxes. So, it's pretty awesome. Check it out if you like old video games. And it was full of kids. Like, after, I guess some people in that town, in Alameda, were getting, were in school that week, even though Julian wasn't. And they, at like three o'clock, there were like teenagers just like flooding the arcade. And I thought, they, at like three o'clock, there were like teenagers just like flooding the arcade. And I thought, this is so great. These are modern teenagers playing old video games. And, uh, it was pretty awesome. So yeah, it's, uh, it was a good time. I used to be able to get like 45 minutes out of a quarter on the, um, on the Donkey Kong that, that one in the original star wars with

the vector graphics boy i was that was i was a monster on that game oh wow star wars um yeah well joust joust is mine that's the one i can do but uh they get you once you have to work up to being able to use a quarter that long and that's they still you put a lot of quarters they got a lot of quarters in the process yeah you put you put in your money. Well, let's take our first break, and then we'll come back and talk about more stuff that we're doing. This episode of Free Agents was brought to you in part by Squarespace. Enter offer code FREEAGENTS at checkout, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase.

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Go to squarespace.com. Thank you, Squarespace, for your support of this show and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. So, Jason, on the plane back, the 11-hour flight back, I finished that Cal Newport deep workbook. I think I mentioned I was reading it on the show a month or two ago, and I finally got to the end. And I'm not usually a productivity book guy. I don't know. I just feel like those things a lot of times are, I don't know. I just feel like those things a lot of times are,

I don't know. I have these friends that read them. I don't know that they get anything out of them and then they immediately go on to the next one. Imagine how much time they would save if they stopped reading productivity books. Exactly. But I've had this almost visceral reaction to them for so long. I decided this year I'm going to read a few. And I talked to a couple of friends that are really into it, and I have three or four titles, and that's all I'm going to read this year. And I want to read those books and see if I can't get something out of them and really take time implementing a few things I learn out of each one and see if it helps me get things a little better. So anyway, with that in

mind, I thought the deep work book was really good. And the idea of it is, you know, where are you spending your time? Are you spending your time in shallow work or deep work? And that's the book kind of summarized in a sentence. And I did that big experiment towards the end of last year with timing and running lots of timers to see where I could find work I could hand off to people, which in essence is shallow work. And I wanted to kind of do continue to keep track of where I was spending my time. But I don't want to run a million timers, I just don't need that accurate of information. I just want the general ballpark. And that got me thinking, well, why don't I get a little more structured with my schedule? So as I was flying back, that was my big idea. I'm going to kind of be hyper scheduling myself.

I've only been doing it a week now, but you know, usually the evening before when I'm closing out my prior day, I'll look at the next day and say, okay, I'm going to spend this much time dealing with email. I'm going to spend this much time dealing with, you know, writing, you know, legal work, this much time working on my next book, this much time podcasting or prep, I mean, just a few categories of things. But if you look at my schedule for the last week, I've got all this time blocked. And so I'm calling it hyper scheduling. I don't know if that's a fancy term somebody else has come up with, but that's what I'm using. So it's been kind of fun doing that for a week and just seeing how it works. And, uh, I just thought I'd kind of report in on it a little bit. That's really interesting. It's, it, it reminds me a little bit, I don't know, I I'm going to be, somebody's going to be angry

because somebody out there who listens to this is going to do this and it's not going to be the same at all. But, um, knowing a couple of people who do bullet journaling yeah um where it is creating just in the sense i don't know a lot about bullet journaling but in the sense of creating some structure uh around what you do like and it could be anything no it's exactly i mean bullet journaling i think it has influenced me with with this structure and a lot of people do it on paper. You know, and I like paper, too. And they have special books you can buy or they get graph paper and they make it out every day. And then they have the day as planned and then the day as performed, you know, and that always changes, especially when you deal with client stuff. But I'm not doing that.

I'm just doing it on my digital calendar, which makes it really easy in almost no time. There's an app on the Mac and iOS called Fantastical where you can create calendar entries really fast. And then you can duplicate calendar entries really fast. So once I had things going on, like one of the things that's come out of this is I've decided I'm not going to spend over a half hour a day on email for Mac Sparky. Because I get a lot of email. I could hour a day on email for Max Barkey because I get a lot of email. I could spend all day on email if I really wanted to. And I've just set this time limit. 30 minutes a day goes into that email. And now I duplicate it. I kind of spread out where I put it in the day, but I've scheduled 30 minutes for it and that's as much as I'm going to spend

on it. And stuff like that. It's been an interesting experiment for me. I think I can do it because I'm a free agent. I have complete control over my calendar. Like even before we started recording day, you and I were talking about how we're experimenting with where we put our exercise in a day. And that's something that kind of fits into this for me. And looking at it graphically on the screen helps me kind of see how things are going to go.

It's a little bit of work. It's not a lot of work, but it's a little bit of work kind of managing that and putting all those things together. And when things change, you have to move things around a bit. So it takes a little bit of time. So that's the curious thing to see if I'll stay on the wagon with this or if it won't be worth it to me. But early days, I find that I'm liking it and I'm being more realistic about scheduling when I'm going to do projects and when I have time to deal with people. And, uh, and I have noticed that I've been, I guess it's just a continuation of the jet lag thing, but I'm, I'm waking up earlier and, um, and scheduling that earlier time, which is,

uh, kind of shifting my whole work schedule earlier in the morning. And I'm just really kind of curious. I'm early into this experiment. I'm only into it like a week, but it's kind of fun. And I'm curious to see how it all turns out for me. Yeah, that's good. I'm interested to see how that goes. I definitely do day planning. And this is the thing that, of course, Mike Hurley has always given me a hard time about because he's very to-do list focused and I have always been more calendar focused. I think owing to, and we've talked about it on this show too, owing to my history of being really scheduled when I was working for the man, I was a very scheduled person

and so I would block off time to do tasks. And I still do that. I still make an appointment with myself to do a particular task. Like I know what I'm doing when we're done with the show. I have a thing I need to do. And that's, yes, I do have a to-do list. And yes, it's on the to-do list, but I still blocked out time for it. And I do, I don't take time at the end of the day to plan the next day, but definitely sort of like throughout as things are coming up, I am opening up Fantastical and dropping on items and moving them around. And it can be things I'm writing or things I need to edit for a podcast, or it can even

be like, I have an item, I had an item yesterday that was to put the dinner, put the steaks in the sous vide pot at two so that we could have dinner at 5.30 because of, you know, where my daughter was going and where my wife was going and all these things, you know, people intersected at a certain set of hours where we need to have dinner and we had the steaks frozen and it was like, but I needed to remember it too. So I just, I made an event saying, do this at two. Right. And again, it just all goes on there. And, and, uh, it, it, I'm a real supporter of this idea. It's not for everybody, but the idea of kind of like planning out your time a little bit, um, whether it's-goosey or it's more focused. I think

there's something there. Yeah. And the idea of closing out your day and kind of blocking out the next day is something that I'm finding really helps. So, I don't know. I'll talk about this again at some point because, like I said, I'm early into it. But this works for me better than running timers. I know a lot of our friends are super into timers, and they run timers on everything. This is less time intensive, but I still get a pretty good idea. I can look at the end of the day and say, yeah, I spent four hours today working on heavy stuff, writing books and doing heavy legal work. And I spent three hours on not heavy stuff. And I like that kind of information,

but I don't need it granularly that you get with the detailed timers. Yeah. I think that's fair. You sent me a copy of your schedule here. Yeah. I just sent you a screenshot. I can't share it cause there's a couple of client names in there, but just to give you an idea of what I'm doing and, uh, it's not that hard to do this. Yeah, no, that's pretty good. That's, that's more, you'll see, I'm going to send you mine that it's a little, uh, it's a little more loosey-goosey but it's still like you know here's when the podcasts are happening and here's there's one example there of like i need to write this article and right after we're done with this and that's the the kind of stuff that's in there so

yeah that's good it's good um let's see what do i want to talk about now let's let's talk about uh since we're sharing our feelings um that's all we do on the show jason let's see what do i want to talk about now let's let's talk about uh since we're sharing our feelings um let's go i know right let's go back into the garage which i'm already in but it's something that i wanted to call notes from the garage because like i said earlier i didn't go anywhere over the holidays i stayed in my garage but i wanted to give an update and people who listen to me talk to mike hurley about stuff on upgrade. This is covered briefly in episode 170. You can go listen to that if you want a little bit more about this. But one of the things that I mentioned a couple shows ago here is how getting organized and also keeping my workspace clean is important to me in a way that I didn't really understand before in terms of sort of like

focusing me and making me feel more pleasant in my environment. And one of the things that I did in December was buy a bunch of Ikea furniture. I bought a couple of, um, I was describing them to Mike in episode one 70 upgrade. And he said, Oh, that's the Calax. I have those too. I'm like, all right. Okay. Everybody has these, but it's this piece of furniture. Um, it's basically two by what? has these but it's this piece of furniture um it's basically two by what two by four uh of of these cubes and you can put i actually have one upright and one down so i have one that's uh two rows of four across and another one that's four rows up two um so a tall one and a short one i'm looking at them now do you have do you have those two no but i'm looking oh you're looking you're looking at my line all right well yeah so uh i wanted more after um three years in this garage three and a half years in this garage office i realized that a lot of my assumptions about space were it's not

even wrong it's like i didn't even think about the stuff i would collect over time and where it was going to go and i ended up with a giant, um, giant tangle of, of like cables and old hard drives and old technology that built up things. I was getting as review units that the people didn't want back and I didn't use anymore. And they're just sitting like,

so I did this thing where I was like, I'm going to get, I realized I've got some space in my, in my office for furniture. That's better suited for what I'm doing. Like I had a couple old chef's carts and things, and they're the wrong thing for what I've got for my workspace. I was using them because we had them, but they were really bad. They were a bad fit. They were free because we already had them, but they were a bad fit. And for not a lot of money at Ikea,

I have some better organizing principles here and I've got a bunch of bins that go in those squares um so i'm putting that together and uh i think it's and i think it's good i think it's it's you talk about uh at the end of the year uh thinking about uh your you know what you did this year and what you want to accomplish in the new year this was sort of like my, like a workspace reset, which I wanted to, I wanted to think about the space that I have and how I could use it better. So, bought the furniture, and I think it's going pretty well. I've, you know, I donated a bunch of stuff, the technology recycling center that takes old tech and old cables and stuff and

they've got all of that stuff that's gone which is good um and i organized a bunch of stuff the stuff i wanted to keep and that's really good so that's all good um there is more to do and this is an observation i wanted to share because i think i think it happens to me and i think it happens to other people too which is that i kind of got caught in the middle where there's that initial rush of like, I put the furniture together. I'm going through the cables. We're taking things to the recycling center. It's great.

And then I'm tired. We got other things to do and I've still got some stuff scattered around. And then for the next two or three weeks, you're in this interim state where it's like, it's not what it was, but it's also not done. It's in between. It's I'm, And some of that is, I'm still figuring it out. Where do I want to put everything? Did it work with the place that I put it? Does that actually work? Do I want to put it somewhere else? I don't want to finish this

off, right? Finish the project and realize, oh no, I've made some bad assumptions. I need to change it. I kind of want to live with it a little. At the same time, I also want it to be done, done and not in a transitional phase where there's still stuff on the ground that hasn't gotten filed and stuff that i don't know where i'm gonna put it i need to i need to kind of close out and i haven't done that yet so actually talking about on this show is part of my reminder that i really do need to uh clear a day to really properly finish the organizational system clean out the garage and get it back to what i would consider a uh a pleasant clean orderly state because as much as this is a better organized room than it used to be it's because it's not done it's also

kind of a mess so um so that's that's one of of those things where I don't want to get caught in the in-between states, so I need to make an appointment with myself, whether it's on a weekend or even just a light working day where I block off time, let's say, to do it. I need to do that because I really want to get back in a new kind of like default state, and I'm not there yet. Yeah, I always tell uh people by people i'm talking about my family so those people you know when we're doing that project i'm like let's just finish it even though we're not certain what's the best way to do this at

some point you just finish it yeah and just be willing to make changes again if you have to but it's i think it's really easy to get caught up because you don't know what the perfect way to organize this closet is or the perfect way to do whatever and at some point you gotta finish yeah yeah yeah yeah because it's it's just not a good that in between state is no good like i was happy with the in-between state for the first week or two because it's like i'm figuring it out now i feel like I have left that window. Like I am no longer figuring it out. I just have junk in places that they weren't before. And that's not organized. That's just moving junk around. So I need to finish. Like I need to commit to like, where's everything going to go? Get it cleared up. And, and since I've left that window, if I want to revisit it later,

or in fact, if I want to revisit it at that moment and say, I'm going to pull this thing out of here and move it over there and do this and do that, that's fine. But like, get it done. And that's where I am with it now is that it's, it's a little bit in a limbo state and I want to get it done. So I got to make a date with myself, maybe the, maybe this weekend, we'll see, but I'm definitely going to have to do that. Well, I fully expect to get my own office in August, and I think about it every day, but I'm not going to talk to the listeners about it today because we've got months, but at some point I will talk about it.

I have one other garage story that I wanted to share with you, and this is a, I don't even know, I was going to say this is almost more like a, you know, about dad jokes. This is almost like a dad story, see, this is almost more like a, like a, like a, you know, about dad jokes. This is almost like a dad story, but, um, it is also about having your own workspace and having control and ownership over your own workspace and trying to do what, um, what makes you happy and get rid of things that get in your way. And the story here is when we put in the door to my office in the garage,

because it used to be for those who do not know, I don't, I think I told this story, but I'm not sure. Um, the entry to my garage used to be outside. It used to be outside my front door. So to go to work, I would have to open the front door, go outside, lock the front door, go into the garage door and then work. And then if I wanted to go to the refrigerator or the bathroom or talk to somebody, I would once again have to exit the garage and go in the front door. It was bad. We hired a contractor and said, can you move that door and put it on the inside? And he said, and we're like, oh my God, this is going to be, can it even be done? And he's like, yeah, it's fine. And like a week later it was done. It was

great. But one of the things that he did, and because of the, like the building codes and things is it had to be a fire door which means it has to close itself that's fine and they put because it's an exterior door essentially because there's a garage door here and so if somebody got in the garage door they could get into the rest of the house they put a sort of standard exterior lock on it which means you can lock it from the inside well the problem is most of the time i want to lock it because i'm recording a podcast and i want to keep people from coming into my office not the other way around on the outside yeah so so i so they they did this and i didn't think about it and it's been like that for a while and that's been frustrating and also there's something wrong with the doorknob. Like it would get stuck and occasionally it would get stuck where it

wouldn't close. And then occasionally it would get stuck where it would lock closed and I would be locked out of the house accidentally. Like it would just literally somebody would leave and something would not turn all the way and I would be locked out. And I, you know, and then I knock,

knock, knock and somebody comes and gets me and I get out the WD 40 and I try to like grab both of the doorknobs and try to like move them to until they like kind of loosen up and i couldn't figure out how to do it and then and i i finally decided um this happened to me in december and i and i thought i gotta take this thing off i can take the doorknob off and maybe i can see what's wrong with it and i could also flip it around so that i could lock it so i start to take it off and i didn't install this one the contractor did and like i can't find it's not like any doorknob i've ever installed i can't find where all the parts come

off i can find some of them but others won't go and i can't find um like things that i can pop off or unscrew in order to like detach the whole thing it's just not anything like i've seen before and it's still jammed like it still obviously doesn't work right um so you know what i did i did one of the most satisfying things i have ever done as a as somebody who works at home and as a homeowner which is did it involve a sledgehammer uh no it was a regular hammer David just a regular hammer I took my I took a hammer and I smashed the crap out of that doorknob until it until it fell off and I could pull the other side out throw it away five minutes later I was at my local hardware store buying a new doorknob which i

installed the other way so i could lock it and literally like less than half an hour after this whole process started i had a completely functional doorknob that faces the opposite way and there's still a deadbolt so at night before i go to bed i deadbolt it so that if somebody breaks into the garage they can't get into the rest of the house. But when I'm podcasting, I pop a little button and people aren't going to accidentally open the door and disturb me while I'm working. So problem solved. And all it took was me getting angry enough to smash that thing into bits and replace it with another $ know 25 doorknob which was stupid because it made me very frustrated and angry and stressed out for months and all i really needed to do was take

ownership of it and say it's gonna go i think you should have streamed that i would have oh my god it was it was i cannot tell you how satisfying it was to destroy that thing because it was just causing me nothing but trouble and i couldn't and the frustration was i'd already tried it once where i'd started to take it apart and i couldn't figure out and so i just kind of put it back together and said i guess i'm just gonna live with it and this time i got to that point and i said to myself you know what i'm not gonna live with it i would rather this door just not have a doorknob on it which i did and i actually was like how am i gonna leave it way? And I realized I don't need to leave this way. They sell doorknobs at the hardware store and therefore, um, I could just go buy one, which I did. So anyway, what I'm saying is

I'm not telling everybody to smash everything that they don't like with a hammer. I am saying, um, it's worth reminding yourself that if you have control over your workspace, if you have control over your home, if you have control over me, even if you're a renter, if you have control over the furniture in your space or anything like that, and it makes you unhappy, um, you don't, you don't need to ask anybody else's permission unless you do, but like give yourself permission to make yourself happy. If you, if there's something that's really unless you do but like give yourself permission to make yourself happy if you if there's something that's really driving you crazy um give yourself permission to make yourself happy solve it don't kick it down the road don't be like me with a stupid doorknob

instead be like me with a hammer and just take it out and make yourself a better workspace that's what i'm saying i too have spent quality time with a sledgehammer and will agree it is very satisfying the only time and this is going to be legendary now in my in my family for all all eternity is that we had a uh we had a gingerbread house that we made for christmas and this is like five years ago so my kids were a lot younger than they are now and we were talking about um breaking off pieces of the candy and pieces of the gingerbread and eating them. And the challenge is that it was really, once you got past the low-hanging fruit of the gingerbread house, it was constructed well enough that it was kind of hard to get to the rest of it. And I went into the garage and brought back a hammer and I smashed the roof of the gingerbread house

because then we had a whole bunch of gingerbread to eat and the kids are like yeah daddy oh you destroyed the gingerbread which i thought would be really funny they will not let me forget that i smashed the gingerbread house with a hammer and in fact every now and then i have the hammer and they're like uh-oh what are you going to smash this time it's like look i don't smash things all the time it's very special circumstances where i smash things with a hammer, but this, this was a special circumstance. So I did it. My dad was in construction and, uh, he, we did a lot of changes to my house growing up and there are stories. I was there once when my dad went into the garage and took a sledgehammer and came in and started knocking a hole in the wall because he decided he needed a door. Yep.

It's, it's really fulfilling. That's what I'm saying. Hey, let's take a break and talk about our other sponsor today. And that's our friends over at FreshBooks. To all the freelancers out there, you know how important it is to make smart decisions for your business. Our friends at FreshBooks can save you up to 192 hours with the cloud accounting software for freelancers that's ridiculously easy to use. By simplifying tasks like invoicing, tracking expenses, and getting paid online, FreshBooks has drastically reduced the time it takes for over 10 million people

to deal with their paperwork. I think that's one of the big blockages for people who want to go free agents, is like, how do I manage billing? How do I get paid? It used to be a big pain in the neck. Years ago, you had to hire a team of people and you had to send all these letters out once a month. It was just a huge mess, but not with something like FreshBooks. The new notification center in FreshBooks is like your personal assistant. You always know what's changing in your business since you last logged in and what needs to be dealt with pronto. And the part I like is it allows you to send all your invoices out via email. The clients can open it right there. They can pay it. They don't have to

lick a stamp. And that means that they pay faster. When you email a client an invoice with FreshBooks, it can show you whether they've seen it. And that puts an end to the guessing games. You know, sometimes clients just don't get the email and you'll see that in FreshBooks. Other times they get it, they open it and they don't pay it. And that's a different kind of information you have as you're dealing with your clients and which ones you decide to keep. But anyway, if you're listening to this and not using FreshBooks yet, now is the time to try. FreshBooks is offering an unrestricted 30 day free trial for listeners of the show. There's no credit card required. All you have to do is go to fresh

books.com slash free agents and enter free agents in the, how did you hear about a section? They love our show because you know, the people listening to the show need fresh books. And if you're out there and you're having any trouble getting paid, Hey, you know what? This is the time to switch over to fresh books and just get that problem solved for you. So, thank you again, FreshBooks, for all your support of the free agents and helping us free agents out in getting paid. All right, David. So, a month ago, we talked about your intriguing 12-week year concept. How is that going? What are you doing on that front? Yeah, I'm such a nerd now. I realize there's two different books I've talked about on the show,

so I'm starting to sound like the guys that I hate. That's right. It's David's Book Club, Free Agents Book Club with David, because I'm not reading those books, but you can. It's fine. But those two were the two that I was told to read. So, I have started to implement it, and I'm not doing a 12. I mean, my life is weird. I've got two careers and, you know, everything doesn't lend itself to 12 week years. But I did think, you know, why not have a dedicated plan for some of the bigger projects that I want to get done?

I've got this next Mac Sparky field guide I've been working on off and on forever. I want to get the thing done. And that 12 week year idea really gave me, you know, kind of lit a fire for me to say, okay. And I decided to go ahead and use 12 weeks. I don't think there's anything magical about it, but looking at the amount of work I have left to do, I could realistically get it done in 12 weeks while keeping everything else going. So I have taken that on. I didn't start until I got back from the trip, and I took a week to kind of get things sorted out. And once I get caught up, I'm going to start this 12-week plan.

I've got an application called OmniPlan, but there's a bunch of them out there where you can do Gantt charts, where you can kind of set up contingencies and see graphically your work over time and the major tasks you have. And because I'm a nerd, I wouldn't set that up. And it kind of gives me something to look at. I've got it stuck on the wall here. If I ever get my own office, I'll have it an even bigger version that I can draw on. But it's just really nice having it there. And I'm really looking forward to kind of digging in on this idea of giving myself a deadline, which I've never really done with the stuff that I published through Max Barkey, but I'm, I'm treating myself as a client in essence. And, uh, I've got this 12 week, uh, plan to finish it and I'm, I'm getting

ready to launch that. So, uh, that book did have some effect on me and I've now turned it into a plan. We'll see. I guess in three months, hopefully, I'll be able to tell you that I finished it. I think a distinction that I need to make about long-term projects is being so deadline-oriented, is to give myself deadlines. And this is what you're doing, is you've got a 12-week plan, and you know when you need to execute on all those milestones. And so much of what I do is recurring now that I don't do it. And when I do a project like the, like the photos book update that I did, I'm working with other people and we set a goal and then I meet a

deadline. And this is, this is good to hear from you because that's the thing that I need to do. If I have some longer term projects is the same thing as I can't just say, yeah, yeah, I'm going to do a longer term project. Um, I need to, yeah, yeah, I'm going to do a longer-term project. I need to say, here's what I'm going to do, here's the scope, here's when all these things need to be delivered, and here's the end of the process. And that's the only way it'll ever get done. Yeah, and this wasn't something I read in the book, but something that kind of came out of reading the book to me, my takeaway was, I'm not treating myself the same way I treat clients and other collaborators. Like if I do a podcast with Jason, I'm going to meet deadlines for that podcast.

If I have a legal client that wants me to do something, I'm going to hit deadlines for that client. But for something that's important to me, I can't seem to get it done because I'm not putting myself under that same burden for something that is probably more important to me than the other stuff. It's one of the challenges of being your own boss is doing something like this and realizing you need to set those goals for yourself and internalize them and realize that, you know, you have to follow them. You can't just blow them off because nobody's going to call you on it. You have to have another part of your brain that calls you on it and says, I need to meet my deadlines and i need to have this structure and and uh have you know

somebody's counting on me it's me so i need to do this it's a challenge um i wanted to talk about one more thing before we go to a few listener letters which is uh just an experience that i've had uh this last month which is about handing off work. I know we've talked about saying no and divesting yourself of stuff that you don't want to do anymore in order to start doing new stuff that you do want to do. I've had this happen to me, and I wanted to report about it because basically that's what we do on this show, which is that I am finishing up my term on the nonprofit board that I sit on. I have been for the last more, almost two years, year and a half plus, the chair of the National Novel Writing Month board.

And I've been on the board for six years, I want to say six, seven years. And I'm finishing that all up. I have handed over the responsibilities of board chair to someone else. And although I thought that I might stay on for a year, I'm thinking now I'm not. I'm thinking now I'll stay on for a few months and then I will exit. And my reason for that is that not only did I feel late last year, like I was not, I mean, not to just be blunt about it, but I was kind of not feeling it anymore. Like I was not able to give it the attention I felt it deserved and I was not able to bring my focus to it like i would always prioritize something else over it it was just one of those things where it was very clear to me that

i was kind of done doing this job yeah and um so i we found a replacement for me and i was already we already amended we actually amended the terms of the organization to let have me last as chair longer than a year um which i was fine with and everybody on the board there was a lot of turnover so everybody on the board has only been there for a relatively short time for the most part and they're all like no no no stay longer i'm like all right i'll stay longer and then at the end of year two i'm like no no no i can't i i'm done i'm i'm that's maybe that's why they only have people be a chair for a year because it's a lot of work um and so uh what I'm saying is it is a huge relief to be uh to have that done and even

though it didn't take a massive amount of of time and of my brain space um yet, the act of handing all that over, like today, I sent my replacement all of the files that I got from the previous chair, like all of the archival minutes and things like that. I sent him a bunch of Dropbox links to a bunch of zip files that came out of my Google Drive that we had previously shared. And now it's all exported. And I just said, here, take it. And it's all exported. And I just said, here, take it. And it's, it's amazing. Like I got like a, I don't know what, like a little bit of a, a little bit of an endorphin hit from divesting myself of an existing commitment to the point where I think to myself, oh, I need to do that more. Now, you know, there are limits to it, oh, I need to do that more. Now, you know, there are limits to it, but it does make me think this is one of those things I need to do in the new year. Since we're in January,

we can phrase it that way. But regardless of what year, what time of year it was, I think I would have the same realization, which is it's time for me to do another one of those audits where I really look at everything I do or just week to week as I'm doing work, question every single bit of work I do and say, do I need to do this or could I get rid of this? Whether it is handed off to somebody or just kick it to the curb and say, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm done with that.

Um, even, even if there's somebody who, um, is saying, Oh no, I want you to do this and I'm paying you. And it's like,

yeah, I don't want to do that anymore. I'm not going to do that anymore. Like it is, I've talked about it before. It's an ongoing thing. But this moment gave me that realization that this is really good and I need to do this. It's also, I think, a sign that I feel like I have too much on my plate and that this is a, if this felt that good, I had too much on my plate and I need to clear, I need to clear more space. Yeah. I think it's something, it's a lesson that we all constantly learn. And, um, and I do think it's easy once you have got into something to not question it anymore. And that's like the, that whole thing with the running the

timers or me with this hyper-scheduling, it, puts at the front of my mind that I'm choosing to do all these things that I write down. And that gives me a vector to choose not to do them. And I'm working on the same thing. I think it's very hard, especially when there are things that make you money. But I do think that both of us are kind of in that space now where we are, you know, relooking at things and certain, you know,

in my case, I have a lot of clients. You don't have as many clients because the way your, your business is, it doesn't have so many people, but you know, one of the things I'm thinking about is, uh,

do I want all these people in my life still? Maybe some people haven't for one reason or another aren't, aren't the right fit for me anymore. And, uh, yeah, for me, it's a lot of project based things, which is, do I want to do this aspect of this project? Do I want to, you know, say, I mean, I did this last year with some stuff and, and, and that was good. And I got, I got a little bit of the same hit of like, oh, it's so great that they're, that I don't have to do that anymore. So do I do more of that? Do I push more of that out there? And I think the answer is yes, I do. I just need to figure out what it is.

And the other thing to be aware of is what makes sense for you to do today isn't necessarily makes sense for you a year from now or five years from now or whatever, or a week, who knows, you know. So, it is a question I think you have to constantly be asking yourself. Yep. Anyway, it felt good. We got a couple of listener letters that I would like to read. And if you've got comments about them, I would love to get them. The first one comes from Dustin, who wrote in to say, I was just listening to the latest episode with Tom Zoller, and it made me think about another scenario. It would be interesting to find someone that

struggled to make ends meet for a while and change their career route. Basically, I call it the Einstein method. Einstein took a job at the Swiss Patent Office to make ends meet. The job was much less cognitively demanding, and he was able to spend his personal time working on physics. So, if there's someone that took a part-time job at Starbucks that provides some income and benefits or fills the gaps with doing things like Uber, I think this is, I mean, whether we can find somebody who does that or not and talk to them, I don't know, maybe, but that is, I thought, I thought this was really interesting in the sense of it being another way you do this instead of sort of like you're doing it for your job and you build up your side business and then you quit. It's like, can you do sort of some other work on the side to help make ends meet while you're launching your main thing?

I mean, that seems like another way to do it. Yeah, when I saw this email, it reminded me of a friend of mine that was getting her PhD and under a ton of money stress. And she was rushing to get the PhD done because she wanted to be able to go out and get a job. But then she realized, you know, even once she gets the PhD, that doesn't necessarily mean she's going to get this big university job right away. And the thing she did was exactly what Dustin mentioned. She got a job at Starbucks. And I don't know how many hours she was working. I didn't think it was full time, but this was like three or four years ago, she did it. But it was enough hours that she got benefits and decent pay and gave herself permission to take a little bit more time to get the PhD stuff done. And I remember talking to her about it and she said it changed her life. It made everything easier. And she took some of the pressure off and she had a little bit of money and she had benefits and it worked out for her great. she had a little bit of money and she had benefits and I, you know, it worked out for her. Great. So I guess you could switch that to the idea of, you know, I'm making, I'm writing my book or I'm starting my indie job that doesn't have a lot of money at the beginning. I think that makes a lot

of sense. Yeah. And, and we haven't really defined being an independent worker this way, but I think you could say that building your personal business by having this part that you're doing on your own and this slice that you're doing from an employer of some sort is part of what this is, right? It's slices of different revenue from different sources. And it's a little bit different if it's working 20 hours at Starbucks. But in some ways, it's all still like I'm doing a little bit over here and a little bit over there, and I'm putting it all together. Yeah. And I do like the point Dustin makes that it's less cognitively demanding. I think that's important because if you are trying to build your own thing, if you've got a job where you're using your brain all day,

it is really hard to get home and get energy to work on the next thing. But if you're pouring coffee all day, you probably have a lot more energy for that kind of stuff when you get home. One more letter. This one is from Sean, who says, When I went out on my own, I rented space from an architect friend. But when he sold the place, I went home for the summer to help schlep the kids around. That was four years ago, and I've never looked back.

A couple of years ago, I lost the business of two of my longtime clients, and something hit me then. I realized I was staring down a terrific opportunity. My wife has a good job with healthcare and she enjoys going to work. We have two kids, now ages 14 and 9. If I was in a job, I don't know how they would get home or how I would meet with teachers or whatever. Success to me was always about this dream that I had when I was 21 years old. It involved having this business, a cool office, employees, and money. I lived part of the dream and it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. I realized I needed to redefine what success means to me.

I tried to make the morning my billable hours. After lunch is for billing, learning, and non-revenue generating activities. I pick up my kids and then either finish up some work or get some exercise or anything else. I realized I had the opportunity to be there for my kids and have the career that I always wanted, which is to make things. So that's from Sean. And I thought this was a fantastic letter with a lot of different stuff in it. But at its core, it's about redefining what success means to me. using the initial conception of what you think success would be because he realized he had a great opportunity to redefine it and live the dream and have it be what it was cracked up to be instead of the initial dream, which turned out not to be all that. Yeah, that really resonated with me because, you know, as a lawyer, the way you make a big pile of money is you get in a law firm, and then there's a bunch of smaller, you know, associate lawyers working for you, you make a cut off what they earn. And, you know, it's like a whole, it's almost like a pyramid,

you know, you make, when you're at the top, you make a ton of money. And all my friends that are chasing that don't understand why I'm doing this, because I've, I've put a cap. I only make as much money for the clients that I work for and there's nobody else. And I'm so comfortable with that. You know, it just doesn't bother me. And it bothers them for me, if that makes any sense. But Sean's letter really did kind of resonate with me on that basis. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, do you feel that way as well? I mean, because you worked for the big company and now you're on your own. I mean, do you, does that, does that something you think about? Yeah. Yeah, of course. I think redefining what success meant to me, the way, the way that that happened for me is when I chose to leave,

right? Because I, that didn't happen to me out on my own. That happened to me when I was at the job. Like, that was that moment where I thought to myself, you know, I can keep taking these jobs that are better paying and with more, you know, power and authority. And all of a sudden, they're not more fulfilling, they're less fulfilling, and I hate them. And I need to do something else. And that was a big step for me to say, this this track that I was on being in, you know, management in the media is like, I don't want to do this, I need to change what I do. But it also finds resonance for me in something like the conversation we had a month or two ago about that that uh

company that big company that came by sort of asking if they could talk to me about a job opportunity they had where i had to take stock of what i was doing now and how my business was working and realize that it was unlikely that they were going to be able to make any offer that I would find acceptable just because I had defined my success a different way. And that I don't think there was any math that was going to have them be able to reach me at that point. So a little bit of both. But so much of this for me was that at the the act of leaving more than it was like within it's only been three plus years so who knows but right now i feel like the most resonance that i had was um was in uh in in the moments of leaving my old job

and not as a free agent but um but i can i can totally see it. As somebody who, my wife just got full-time work after working part-time and just got benefits, and that changed the equation for us. Similarly, I haven't really changed a lot about my business, but it certainly feels different knowing that we're no longer spending that money on healthcare that we were spending before. It's a big deal, but it also means that i do have to pick up some of the slack because she's out of the house more now because she's working full time instead of part time she was working close to full time across a few different jobs so the additional hours out of the house is not a lot for her she was already out a lot but now it's all for

one place and that's great um for a bunch of other reasons. Yeah. That benefits is great. Yeah. That's a good thing. All right. Well, if you would like to send us a comment or a letter for the show or just to

reach us, you can, there are lots of ways to do it. You can go to the Facebook group and join it. Facebook.com slash groups slash free agents group. You can tweet at us at freeagentsfm on Twitter, or you can send us an email by going to relay.fm slash free agents and clicking on the contact link on that page where you'll also find all of our episodes and our show notes.

But I think that's it for this fortnight, David. It's been a pleasure as always. We'll see you all in two weeks