Focused - 41: A Walk on the Beach

Episode Date: February 21, 2018

David has a big birthday and joins Jason in discovering the value of embracing a lull; David's wife gets a new job, leading to changes in working at home; and Team Sparky expands as David gets some help with his business.

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. Hi, David.

We're back for more of our feelings being shared. It's one of those episodes, isn't it? I think they're all kind of. I think we had a theme here. Yeah. The interview, and then we share our feelings, and then there's an interview, and then we share our feelings. Yeah, the interview, and then we share our feelings, and then there's an interview, and then we share our feelings. People have been very nice about our kind of format change, and I'm glad about it because I'm happy with it, too.

I think this is a good way to move forward and just sort of check in now that we're just kind of on this course. So, it's going to be one of those. It is kind of turning into my free agent therapy, you know? Uh-huh. Share my thoughts, get some ideas from some listeners. So, it's working out for me. Pete I've been joking about it for years, but, you know, as podcasting is therapy, but there is something to that. The idea of just sort of like talking through your feelings about whatever subject it is. I think there's something to that.

And hopefully listening to people talk about their feelings is also a therapy of a sort. I don't know. Listeners can make that decision themselves. Pete David Sparks, without a single unpublished thought. Yeah, I have those moments. Do you have those moments where you're like, oh, hey, a friend is coming over and we're going to talk about something? That's a podcast. I should record that. No, no. People talk to each other and it's not a podcast sometimes. Well, it's strange for me is I meet a lot of listeners and they know a lot about me because I can't stop talking. So there you go. I guess to start with, we have a big hubbub at

the Sparks house right now. My wife, Daisy, got a job. Wow. Well, congratulations to her. What's the story behind that? Yeah. You know, it's related to the free agency kind of thing. I mean, she, uh, when I was working for, you know, the firm got my air quotes up right now, the, um, uh, we made the decision years ago when our second child was born that she would stay home. You know, we, we figured it out, you know, we actually did the investment. We figured out how much money she made and if she stayed home for 10 or 15 years, how much it would cost us. And it was the best investment we ever made because the kids, you know, grew up how much it would cost us. And it was the best investment we ever made because the kids, you know, grew up great and they're great kids. And, uh, but at the same

time, we're kind of changing seasons again. And we've got one in college and we've got another one, uh, you know, heading into out of her sophomore year and into her junior year pretty soon here in high school. And, and, uh, Daisy decided, decided you know she might want to go back and get in the game a little bit she was a a manager at disneyland for years and years and she left and she's gone back to disney now she's uh taking a part-time gig there in their events team you know like when apple puts on new events and they share the new iphone or whatever she's on the team that does that for disneyland so oh cool um it's parttime, but right now it feels more like full-time as she's getting kind of ramped up, but, uh, never would have happened if I hadn't come home because

you still need somebody home. Right. That's interesting. That's interesting. Is the, is the goal, you know, what you said part-time, was she thinking about full-time? Does she like it part-time? Is there, is there an end here, or is it just sort of like go back and put her toe back in? Well, I think that's the first step, is to put your toe back in and see how you feel about it and how it's working out for you. But honestly, as the second one goes off to college, if it turns into a full-time gig, that would help because college is expensive. And the other thing that's expensive is health insurance. Our health insurance has now gone up to $2,000 a month. I have to make $24,000 a year just to have health insurance for my family.

So if she were to go full-time with Disney, we would get benefits, which would be really nice. So that's kind of down the road. But right now, I don't want to put a lot of pressure on her about that stuff. You know, for now, it's just like, okay, you got a gig, let's just try it out and see how it goes. And it's interesting for me, because suddenly, I'm Mr. Mom again. And the first day she went into work, one of my daughters got sick. I mean, you know, really stomach flu sick. And I had to help with lunch and I had to drive. So the very first day I got the Mr. Mom treatment.

But we've kind of sorted it out now. And with a little planning, it'll be better. But, you know, when somebody gets sick, everything always gets turned upside down. It does. It happens. It happens. Well, that's a big step. That is, I mean, I talked on this show about how, I think at least to a certain extent certain extent that Lauren was part time at the library and she went full time. And the difference there was benefits, which is awesome,

but also, um, she's got a very different set of, uh, of hours now. I mean, she was already working a lot for a part-time person. Um, but just going over to full-time you know she's out of the house a lot more than she was before and that changes all of our kind of like calibrations of like when the shopping gets done and stuff like that because now you know there are different free times when both or one of us are around and so i know it's a i know it can be a big life change in in ways that you don't even notice until the change happens. And then you realized, oh, I never thought about how I counted on this thing that no longer happens. Yeah, we're still sorting it out. It's early days for us. But

I've heard from a lot of listeners in the Facebook group, too. You see a lot of people that say the only reason they couldn't go try the free agency thing is because they had a spouse that had benefits or a reliable gig yeah there's a lot a lot to be said for that that added flexibility i guess i'm in that category yeah yeah well and and for me it's i would still be able to do this um but the the calculation of the cost of doing business would be dramatically different was dramatically different before Lauren got the full-time job. I mean, I would still, if she wasn't working full-time and didn't have benefits, we would still be doing what we're doing. But the calculations I make about like,

you know, like I said, the cost of doing business, the cost of paying for things like health insurance would be very different. Yeah. I'm going through that right now. I don't know why, because last year it went up $400 this year on me. And for some reason, it just feels like a lot. It just, once you get over that, you know, that number, it's, you think about it often. You know, and that's something all of us struggle with. Yep, for sure. At least in the United States.

Okay, what about you, Jason? What are you up to uh there's a weird topic that i wanted to mention i don't know i i didn't have a lot going into this episode actually usually since we've been doing these i have these moments where i'm walking around or i'm i'm doing something i think oh this is a free agents topic i should just write this down right now that didn't really happen to me in the last month but this is something that did come up that I wanted to mention, which is this feeling of the metaphor that I used in our little planning document is it's like breaking out of the clouds into clear air. If you're on an airplane, it's that idea, or even if you're like driving in fog in a car, and then all of a sudden the fog breaks open and you can see into the distance and you can

see clearly. It's this sudden state change kind of unexpected state change that happens and i use that metaphor because i want to talk about um get going through a period of heavy work and coming out the other side and how a uh how you react to that because i was very busy throughout um through the fall honestly um writing about Apple and talking about Apple like the Apple product launches and stuff there's a lot of work to be done Apple's product launches extended into November this year um then there's the holidays and although I didn't go anywhere I have a whole bunch of stuff I had to get I had to do early because of people being gone for the holidays and and the iMac Pro came out at the end

of the year. So, all of a sudden, I was doing more work there. In January, you know, I ended up spending a lot of time kind of playing catch up on stuff. Just a lot. We had a brief weekend travel in January, a three-day weekend thing, and yet that caused a lot of catch-up what i'm saying is i felt like i was running at full speed more or less since the fall and i came to a moment a couple weeks ago maybe where it was like a tuesday at two in the afternoon and i thought there is nothing left that I have to do today. And it seemed so wrong and so weird. Like, how can it be that there isn't something that's so high priority that at two in the afternoon, I know I need to immediately pick it up and work on it so that I can move it forward.

No long-term projects in the hopper. I'd already done the sort of like the writing tasks that I needed to do. I'd done the podcasting tasks I needed to do. And I had that moment where I thought, okay, now I'm in the clear air. Now I am like, there's been the state change. It's like, what do I do now? And I think one of the great challenges for any independent worker is how whenever you've got a moment where you could do anything, even if you've got lots of things to do, this is true, by the way, what do you choose to do? And that can be very hard to pick out. Like, if you don't have anything pressing, how do you sequence what you work on? And that's

very hard to do. It's also hard, though, and I think it's important to talk about, to have that moment where you could make work for yourself. You could do an extra thing that maybe doesn't need to be done, but you could do it. And you could continue to, dare I say, sit at your desk until it's time to go home from the old days when we were working at regular jobs, like the idea that you have a lull and it's two in the afternoon and you can't go home. So you sit at your desk and kind of like do some busy work. That would happen to me occasionally back in my old job where I'm like, whoa, what do I do now? Like, I have nothing until tomorrow. I'm not going to knock off early, so I'm just going to sit here

and try to figure something out and grind my gears a little bit just because it's work time. And so, for me, I had this moment and I thought, this is important. I work some evenings and weekends a lot. And now it's two in the afternoon on a Tuesday. I need to give myself permission to take it easy. Like to say, you know what? You don't have anything to do right now. Your business is going okay. Take a break. Like you didn't get one of these. You didn't have anything to do right now. Your business is going okay. Take a break. Like, you didn't get one of these. You didn't get a day like this for months, but now you've got one. Take advantage of it. And, you know, I try to do some of that, but when I take the dog out for a walk or something like that, or go for a run or go for a bike ride to exercise, I don't think of it

as like, oh, well, I've got nothing else to do. I guess I'll knock off early and go exercise. It's more like I'm going to pause between activities and do an hour of exercise time and then come back and resume work. And this was not like that. This was, I'm going to not worry about work right now. And that was, it's just, it's funny to have that, to have that moment. But I feel like it's a natural tendency of certainly of me. And I think maybe of other people that you get really used to revving the engine into the red to use a completely different metaphor, but don't give yourself permission to ever let it idle. And I think that's unhealthy.

I think it's unhealthy to say, like, if there's a natural kind of up and down progression that you deal with the up, which is overwork. But when you get back to level and it starts to dip into taking a break, you're like, nope, I can't do that. I can't let that natural progression kind of go down. Yeah, I would even argue that if you're that type of person that wants to fill that space at 2 o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, that from a productivity standpoint, you're hurting yourself. I think it's those down times when you come up with some of your best ideas. I agree. I mean, I just had my birthday this week. So I decided, yeah, thank you. And so I decided,

it was a big one. So I decided, you know, I'm going to do something weird. I just got up, I went down to the beach because I live in California and took like a four mile walk along the beach, put my feet in the water and just decided today I'm not going to do anything productive. I'm not going to make any podcasts. I'm not going to write on any books. I'm not going to do any legal stuff and turn my phone off and just took a day to take a walk on the beach. And I had no other intention than to do that. And I spent most of the day down there. And at the end of the day, I had some really good ideas for things I want to do that I didn't even go there to, you know,

I mean, it's not like it was a plan, you know, but it was just remarkable to me that once I just kind of let myself go for a day and just kind of change my scenery and walk around, I actually came up with some really good ideas for things I want to change about, you know, the different things I'm doing. So, I don't know. I've read about that. I've never experienced it before this week. And now I want to plan time to do nothing. Yeah. I always call that the proverbial walk in the woods. You know, it's whether it's, whether it's take a walk on the beach or take a walk in the woods or something, it's like getting out of your headspace, getting out of, sorry to be, use hippie language here, but to get out of your usual break out of that pattern and go someplace where

you're not going to get distracted with all of the vagaries of your everyday working life, which means it can't be on the couch. I mean, on the couch watching TV can be relaxing, but, and I think that if that's a thing you want to do, that's fine. But I do separately, there is value in just getting completely out in a place where you don't usually go and all of the context clues you've got about your life and your work are behind you and you just let your brain kind of uh you're you're you're unshackling it you're giving it free roaming to do and maybe not all the ideas are good but you're going to get things out of your brain that you would not get otherwise because it is in in existing contexts that you've built the remarkable thing for me is

i did not start i did not take that day off to come up with some new ideas i took the day off to take the day off right because it was your birthday and you wanted to put your feet in the ocean and do some thinking and feel the sand between your toes which i i think is another thing as a uh we talk about keeping our own calendars here i not so much we've had a run of really warm weather in California because it's winter and yet it's been it's been not like winter. But I don't get winter anymore. No, but I may be that may be true. But in the summer, I will tell you, I absolutely look at this when I'm noticing the weather forecast. And I'm also noticing days where I don't have anything on my calendar or I have something in the morning and then nothing.

I should probably do this now since the weather is so good. But I absolutely do that where I start to eye certain days and say, you know, this might be a day that I leave the house and go do something else because I don't need to be here. And it's good to identify those. I mean, you can't do that all the time. I mean, I suppose you can if your business is going really well and you can just decide that one day a week you're not going to work. Bless you. Great. That's amazing.

But from time to time, noticing what your work schedule is and what, you know, what days are busy and what days are not and noticing holes in your calendar, noticing a free afternoon or, you know, a free late morning to late afternoon or something like that and doing something with it can be can be great i can i also can get to beaches from where i live although they're not as warm as yours and um and the same thing applies especially in the summer where i will think oh well i've got this thing and from 9 to 10 30 and it's supposed to be a really warm summer day maybe i will just leave and i do that like twice a year but it's great when i when i find the the right day to do that yeah well i'm gonna do it more i'm gonna figure out how i'm not

sure how i'm gonna do it yet but i'm gonna figure it out and the other the other thing i want to mention about this is that i i don't consider myself i mean there's this so all right i'm gonna back up workaholic is a term, like people who just can't do anything but work. And is it real? It's a stupid name, but let's just take it for what it was. When I have a moment, like that moment I had at two in the afternoon, or I had a string with podcasting, I do a lot of podcasting in evenings, and I had a whole string of busy evenings between podcasting and school and going to stuff like we have theater tickets and we have all these things going on in the evenings. And my kids with their

school, they've both got homework and they've got activities. My daughter's got a lot of outside activities, very busy evenings. And then we had an evening where nothing had to happen and I felt super uncomfortable. Like, what do we do? Because it was unscheduled, unplanned, and not mandatory. And in both of those instances, I had that thought, which is, this is dangerous. at these points uh i just it can become i think incredibly corrosive and that you need to be aware of it and you and we all need to fight against it like um another example was that my wife had a day off from work because she is a uh she's full time but she is at the library she's like uh time she's got a certain number of hours. She's a timed employee. She's not an unrestricted employee. She's a timed employee.

And so she works library programs sometimes in the evenings and on the weekends and all of that. And she has an hourly cap during a pay period. So she had a day off on a weekday. Unusual, but it happens. And it was one of those things where she, it was a Monday and I did my podcast in the morning that I always do. And then, and she was like, you know, you want to go for, go for a hike, go for a walk. And I, and I thought to myself, yes, I do. Like I have the ability to do this. Let's do it. And it's funny that I had to almost fight myself to get out the door and it just it's it's just a reminder to me that it's

so easy to fall into the trap of if i always if i'm always working in the evening and the weekends because of the peak of work and it's necessary it's so easy to make that your usual and it's important to not it's not the norm that's right make it the norm you can't keep that you can't keep that going but it's so easy to just go with the inertia of it yeah i i agree and i think about you because i listen to your incomparable podcast where you guys talk about the books you read and the tech and the tv shows you watch and i love it because it gives me something to do when i do have that downtime. But then I think for you, it's almost like work watching TV because you've got to be taking notes for a podcast. I don't know when you get downtime, really, when you think about it.

Yeah, it comes. I mean, it is weird that some of my viewing and reading for entertainment is actually homework for a podcast, but it usually doesn't feel that way. Sometimes it's like, I need to watch this movie tonight because I have a podcast about it tomorrow. But a lot of times, like I'm reading a novel right now that will become a podcast episode at some point. But I don't, I mean, it's only vaguely homework in the sense that I know I need to finish it in the next week. But that's it. It's not that bad. But it can be like, that's part of my own regulation. And it comes back to what we were saying earlier about like, not every conversation is a podcast. Not every movie you watch is homework for a podcast. It is something I have to remind myself of from time to time.

Well, we've got more to talk about. But before that, we've got to keep the lights on. And we'd like to thank our first sponsor today, Squarespace. This episode of Free Agents is brought to you by Squarespace. Enter offer code FREEAGENTS, and that's just one word. Squeeze it all together at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase. So make your next move with Squarespace. Squarespace lets you easily create a website for your next idea

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David, how's the hyper-scheduling experiment coming? Good. It's going good. Some of this stuff is all related. You were talking about fighting yourself, well, not really, but finding yourself with free time. And I think the biggest problem I've had with my whole free agent experiment over the last few years is that issue of working too hard and working a good long day and getting at the end of it and feeling like a failure, you know, because I look at how much stuff it is that I need to do. And I've been really trying to force myself to become more realistic in my planning and my day planning about what I will and will not get done. It's really a conglomeration of a lot of things. I felt like I was making promises that I wasn't keeping to people when they would ask me to do something because in my mind, I was feeling like I could do so much in a day that I would make promises I couldn't keep. And in that in combination with that feeling at the end of the day that I wasn't done, and that's why I started this hyper scheduling thing.

When we spoke last month, I was doing it in a way where I would set blocks of time for like legal work versus blocks of time versus book writing. I'm still doing that, but I've got a little more nuanced with it. It's kind of evolved over the last month. Now I've got this new kind of thing I do in the evenings where I take a look at, I've got this great app OmniFocus. It's just got a ton of information in there of all the things I could do. There's enough work in that application for me to work for years, you know, without stopping. And I think that's what the problem was. I would look at how much was left at the end of the day and just feel kind of defeated. So I'm pulling out of my task management application a list of things for the next day, and I um, a block of time for them,

you know, realistic block of time, how long it will take to do this or that. And then I kind of just kind of plan the next day based on those timings. And what I find, especially as I started this experiment is I would always pull out more blocks than I had time in the day. You know, I, uh, a Merlin man once told me a story. He did a talk once where he was talking about how much you can do in a day. And he had like a pitcher on the table. But then he had like five gallons of water underneath the table. And then he just took it out and started pouring it in the pitcher.

And at some point, the water just started overflowing and going all over the table, all over the floor. I wish I was there to see it. But that was the problem, all over the floor. I wish I was there to see it. But that was the problem I was having, Jason. I was trying to put, as I said on Mac Power, just 10 gallons of water in a five-gallon bucket. It just wasn't fitting. So I'm really being deliberate now about saying I have five gallons,

so I'm not going to pick 10 gallons worth of work. And it's working for me because I do feel a lot better at the end of the day because I'm doing a pretty good job of finishing the things I assigned to myself. And, um, and in doing that, it also allows me the other thing I was disappointed with myself in the last couple of years is I get hung up on doing so much legal work that I don't do the Max Barkey stuff that I'm passionate about. So as I'm assigning these buckets, I can put a two hour bucket to do screencasting or to do writing for Max Barkey. And that is assigned to the, just like any other legitimate thing. And the experience I'm having with it is great because like people are sending me, like asking me to, you know, calling with something they want help with. And I can say, well, all right, I can help you with that, but that block is not going to get done today. I'm working a couple days in advance. I've got a pretty good idea of where things are going a couple days in advance, not much more than that, but it's just allowing me to be much more realistic about what I take on.

It's really kind of fundamentally a head game. It's not that the amount of work I'm doing has changed, but the way I'm planning it and my expectations and really my response to it has changed in a very positive way. So I'm really happy with this experiment. That's great. I struggle with this idea to a certain degree. And even though I do some of this, because I have a calendar with items on it that I call routine, but it's really just, it's kind of like my hyper-scheduling calendar, except less hyper. It's like a hypo-scheduling calendar. It is. Because I mean, we talked about tasks earlier in the show, and you do it exclusively really in your calendar. I'm using the calendar in addition to a system but i've got to i mean i've got to do is to now that

i'm using a little bit just for recurrings and i find that i i found that actually useful and i am still using it which is kind of amazing i'm using it lightly but i am using it um honestly one of the reasons i don't use to-do list items or to-do list apps a lot is that I found with to-do list that most of my items are recurring, which is why they were on a calendar, right? It's because they're recurring. They're just, it's very rare. Every now and then, every now and then I have something where somebody says, oh yeah, can you do this tomorrow? And I'm going like, oh, I can make a to-do for that. But it's so rare.

And I think if you get those all the time, then I see why you use these apps. But I don't. I very rarely get a, can you do this tomorrow? Can you do this right now? Can you do this later today? Oh, I better put that in my to-do list. It's just not the way my life is and not the way I work. My issue is, well, it's all very cyclical.

And that's nice. Like, it's all like, you know, I do these podcasts on these days and I post these podcasts on these days and I write these stories on these days and the, like, it's, it's very much, you know, it messes all of that stuff up. And the advantage of having that rhythm is also a disadvantage that when the rhythm breaks, it becomes quite, it gives me some anxiety and frustration and all sorts of other things. But my point here is just that, you know, the downside of setting a schedule like this is I have stuff that I can't guarantee. Like, I have my macro column that I write every week. And I have that set as a recurring item in my calendar for 2 o'clock in the afternoon on Tuesdays for two hours. And it's write that column. Okay, sounds great, right?

What that does do is make me look at my day and say I need to reserve that time in the the afternoon to write the column. So when I get there, I'm going to sit there and then I get an alert at, uh, at one 45 saying, you know, write the column. Great. The problem is that sometimes at two or one on Tuesday, I, I sit down or stand up or wherever I'm writing this column and it, and it comes out and it's done in 45 minutes. There are other times when I could stand there staring at my screen for the entire afternoon and just not get it out. And this is the problem is the truth of writing, at least for me, Truth of writing, at least for me, is, you know, I meet my deadlines, but there are times when it's hard and times when it's easy. And so, the problem with hyper-scheduling is that, like, that's a good example where I don't know whether I can do that column in two hours.

I might be able to do it in one. I might end up having to, I might not be able to write it until Wednesday Wednesday morning because sometimes I just, it's just not, it doesn't happen. And I know that seems really, really kind of like roll your eyes at the, at the, at the writer kind of moment. But, you know, even for somebody who takes great pride in meeting my deadlines and being consistent and all those things, it is absolutely true that sometimes it just is not, is not there and it's just not happening. So that's my challenge. Yeah. And that absolutely true that sometimes it just is not, it is not there and it's just not happening. So that's my challenge. Yeah. And that's true for anybody. Like also like, even

if you've got that time blocked off in my life, it's very possible. I could have a client call and say, Hey, uh, you know, some federal government agency is knocking on my door, uh, corporate lawyer, will you please come and find out what the heck's happening to me? You know? Um, so there are times where I have to drop everything. And I read, I can't remember if it was a podcast or a book I read or somewhere I read years ago, this idea of a calendar being a soup and not a puzzle. And I love the idea of it. When you make a soup, it doesn't matter necessarily what order you put the ingredients in. It just matters that you get all the ingredients in to make the soup and kind of on a weekly basis, my calendar is a soup. So if I get there and I'm just not feeling that,

that block of writing right now, or if somebody calls me with something that truly is an emergency, um, I have no problem moving things around. I don't look at it as like this jigsaw puzzle where everything has to fit in the exact order. But by doing these blocks, I'm aware of how many ingredients I have for the soup this week. And there's only so many ingredients that are going to fit. So I can accommodate and move things to a certain degree. But I love that idea of a soup versus a puzzle, because that gives you the freedom to move things around without feeling like you're breaking the whole system. Yeah, I don't know. It's, it's, it's interesting to me. And I'm happy that you are trying it out

and that it seems to be working. I'm taking a much lighter touch on it, I think. Yeah. And I do think it partly depends on the type of work you do. I mean, like I don't have cyclical repeating work all the time. I have just this never ending bustle. Yeah. A never ending stream of different tasks that you have to perform. That's a very different kind of thing for me. Also, if I had a daily thing where I literally was doing the same thing every day in the same order, that would be something that would make sense, right? To get in that kind of a rhythm. But my rhythm is more weekly or every other weekly and little bits here and there that fit in. And then, yeah, so it's interesting. It's a challenge. The other thing I've done with this kind of idea of hyper-scheduling is I've now started scheduling.

Usually I'll go down and have dinner with the family, but as soon as dinner's over, Usually I'll go down and have dinner with the family, but as soon as dinner's over, I'll give myself one more hour, and I just call it the shutdown hour. And so for an hour after dinner, I will make one last pass through email. I will plan the next day. I will just kind of like bring the day to the end, if that makes sense. And then at like around 7 o'clock, I'd like to be done working for the day and go watch a TV program or just play a board game with the kids or whatever. And I'm not perfect at that, but I'm getting better at it with these type of disciplines. So it's an ongoing thing for me, but I feel like I've made a lot of progress in the last couple months on it great that's great um i want to talk to you a little bit about you

we're sort of following up about getting getting extra help for the stuff that we do you know when you go from being a free agent to having a building a little bit of a a team around you but before we do that i should stop and tell everybody about our other sponsor for this episode. This episode of Free Agents is also brought to you by FreshBooks. So everybody out there listening, if you're a freelancer, a free agent, you know how important it is to make smart decisions for your business. We talk about it all the time. Our friends at FreshBooks say that they can save you up to 192 hours. That's a lot of hours with their cloud accounting software for freelancers.

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It all is automated from within FreshBooks. And the new notification center in FreshBooks is like a personal assistant that you don't have to hire because it's just part of FreshBooks. You always know what's changed in your business since the last time you logged in. That's super important to add that context in there and it'll let you know what needs to be dealt with immediately. If you're listening to this podcast

and you aren't using FreshBooks yet, give it a try. There's an unrestricted 30-day free trial with no credit card required available for anybody who listens to this show. Just go to freshbooks.com slash freeagents and enter freeagents in the How Did You Hear About Us section. That's good for them. It's good for us. Thank you, FreshBooks, for supporting Free Agents, the podcast, and Free Agents Everywhere. So, David, is Team David, team Sparky? Is it expanding?

It is, Jason. You know, we've kind of danced around this on the show for a while, but I figured I'd come clean today about what I've been doing. So I want, I need help, you know, and this is all part of this thing, you know, how do I make those blocks important work and not busy work? And there's the thing that I have, you know, the ongoing struggle for me is I've got two different businesses, a publishing business and a legal business. And the people who can help me with one can't necessarily help me with the other. And it took me way too long to figure that out, you know, because for the longest time I was thinking, oh, I'll get one person, like a full-time person to be just there for me and really help with everything. And the more I thought about it, that just doesn't, that person doesn't exist. Um, so instead what I've been doing is we've talked about in the show in the past is I've been like keeping an eye on what

I do every day and looking for targets for things to get rid of. So like, for instance, one of them is all the stuff I write, like for publication, I need someone else to read it, you know, so I hired an editor, a person who reads over things and make sure I don't screw it up and look ridiculous. And I've got a system with her where things go to her. And that was an easy one. But like another one is I'm working on a book right now and it's an iBooks author and iBooks author makes a wonderful looking book, but the process of making the book is actually quite difficult and tedious. You know, it's just not a great app. It's not Apple's best work, you know? And, um, and, but I've done, I've written five or six books with it over the years

and I've gotten really good at it. But the more I think about it, that is not a skill that really requires me. Making the screencast for the book is something I have to do. Writing the words for the book. But getting the words into the book in a way where the app doesn't crash, and getting the links, and cropping the artwork and like all of that stuff is not something I have to do. So I came to the realization, I'm going to get somebody to do that. And I, I hired my daughter. So, you know, I'm looking around and, uh, she, she has some extra time on her hand. She's in college. She's really smart and good with computers. And, uh, she's doing a great job.

You know, it took a couple hours to sit down and train her on, on a bit of it. And then as she got that part done and I trained her on a little bit more. And now she's doing a lot of the work that I used to do and saving me hours and hours. You know, it's a lot cheaper to have her do it than to have me do it. That's awesome. Yeah, it is. It's great. And then now I took on – I'm a corporate lawyer, so I do a lot of corporate book preparation.

Well, I write all the documents for the book, but in terms of printing the documents, printing the stock certificates, getting them physically in the book, and that kind of stuff. Every time I do a new company, it takes me an hour to do all that stuff, and I realize that's a target. It's another one I'm doing from home, So I hired my daughter to do that one. And just recently, I was referred by one of my legal clients to an offshore virtual assistant team that they do good work. They're not overly expensive. And the best part is they work while we're asleep. So I'm starting to look at some of the stuff, some of the documents I prepare, or even like when a lawyer sends me a contract review and it's formatted just nuts. Sometimes these guys don't understand Microsoft Word and it's hard to work with. Well, I usually clean it up myself.

Well, that can take like an hour. I can't build a client for that. But I need to do that in order to do my job where I can send it to this offshore person. I can go to bed and when I wake up in the morning, they formatted it perfectly for me. So, um, uh, I'm, I'm realizing that the team I'm building is not one person, but it's a group of, of people. And, uh, as I do this, this one with the offshore is brand new. So I'll report back on that one. I don't know how well it's going to work, but I definitely have a list of two or three things. It's not a lot of things, but you know, if I can save myself an hour a day by, by doing these things, books is absolutely going to offset these costs. So, I'm definitely doing more of this now. And I'm kind of excited about it. I didn't really start this whole process with the idea that I'd have a team, but as it's coming together,

it makes a lot of sense for me. Yeah, it's really interesting. I have thought about this that, you know, because I'm using freelance editors for some of my podcasts. And that's something I've done. I brought in Dan Morin to write stuff on Six Colors and Stephen Hackett writes a piece for our newsletter now every month. And I've thought about other things like this. And I haven't really gone. It may be that I've just optimized. This is what I do. i've discovered is i've just optimized everything to the point where it's like i like it the way i like it and i'm not sure it would be any less time for somebody else to do it like uh could i build could i pay somebody to build my newsletter template every month for me and i just send them the the files and they do a copy edit and they

post it probably but i'm not sure that that would actually save me any time versus me just doing it so that's always my challenge with this but but i do i do think about it i have to admit that i i have the scars of my old job where i worked with a lot of people and i love those people but at the same time i think i wonder if part of the way I've constructed my business now is to have it be mostly on me. Because once you get into, you know, throwing work to various places and all of that, you do add some overhead, you add some complication. And it's nice to work with other people. But I also have this kind of concern of like, well, now I'm going to let that stuff go out of my hands. And I've done it in certain areas.

of concern of like, well, now I'm going to let that stuff go out of my hands. And I've done it in certain areas. But I think the larger point is that I may not be having, or I may not be interested in pursuing visions of ways of expanding my business that involve more investment, more people and bigger, like bigger goals. It may be that I, it's not that I don't see those from time to time. It's that I don't think at least right now that I want to do that because what's working right now is working well. And because I do kind of bear the scars of having, you know, having worked for a larger organization and being like, well, no, I kind of like not having to deal with the complexities of those issues because I can just do it on my own. Yeah, I definitely know that my own automation has been one of the reasons why I haven't gone down this road too far. Like filing documents as a lawyer, I get all these digital documents,

I have these digital files. And I could technically pay somebody to go through and move the files. But there's automation tools like Hazel, where I can literally do it as fast as I can say it. So it's just doesn't make sense to hire someone for that. Or even like customer support emails for people who buy my books using TextExpander. I've got that kind of nailed down, but at the same time, there's nothing faster than just forwarding it to an assistant and say, deal with this. And I've done that. I've experiment say, deal with this. And, and I've, I've done that. I've experimented with some of that.

So I think I'm more willing than you are probably because I don't have the scars you do, but the, but also I, I see that there's kind of a, an end point for me. I'm not looking to have like writers or other people, you know,

screencasting. I'm, I'm solely looking for people just to take the TDM jobs out of my life. And, and that's just kind of a decision I've made. It's the same thing on the legal side, I, I got offered a case that I could have made a lot of money on, but I would have had to hire another lawyer and, you know, go on do all these things. And it just that is not of interest to me. So there's a limit for me too, but, but looking at it within the universe of saying, how can I take the stuff that I either

just don't want to do or stuff that doesn't really need me involved, um, and get rid of that stuff. I'm making more progress on getting that stuff off my desk now. That's good. I think this is, I think one of the things we learned doing this show is that there is no, not only is there no one-size-fits-all answer for people, but even like kinds of work, it varies completely about how you approach it. Yeah, one of the things I'm struggling with,

because I'm just bringing on this offshore thing now, is like, I know some things I could send to them, but I'm really dreading the idea of training them and getting them to do it the way I want it. Cause like you, I want it done a very specific way. And what I think I'm going to do is I'm just going to screencast it. Like one of the things I do when I get a new legal client, I have to prepare a retainer agreement and, you know, it takes maybe 15 minutes, but if I could get that 15 minutes off my desk, that adds up, you know. So, but how do I get them to prepare it properly when they're on the other side of the world?

And I think what I'm going to do is just run a screencast and make one or two and show them and then send the video file to them and say, here it is. Watch the video and then try and do it on your own. And kind of view that as a test for them. And also, if I have to get a different person, I can reuse that video. I'm still just thinking through how am I going to make this work. But I don't want to turn it into a thing where I'm constantly training people. Yeah, that's the worst, right? I don't want to do that.

Optimizing your work i mean this is a whole other topic but i feel like one of the ways that you can be successful as a free agent is by being like super optimizing all of your work and and that's great the problem with it is once it's super optimized you kind of can't take take it and hand it off without tearing parts of it apart and i think that i think that ends up being um uh yeah it's is it good is it bad i think it's neither i think it's it's one of those things where it just um it makes it harder it's like armor um but which makes it harder to move but also protects you from being hurt by things i think it's a little like that.

It's a shield or armor. And so I have those moments where I'm like, I can do my job because I am super optimized at all of these things. And now if I need somebody to help me, they can't like literally they can't. And that's not great. Well, this year I'm going to try and get rid of a lot of the little things and,

and see how that goes. That's one of the things I thought about walking on the beach. That's good. Everybody should take a walk on the beach if a beach is nearby. Don't. If it's too far, then don't do that. Yeah, that's a long walk. All right.

In a fortnight, we're going to be back with actually some listener feedback and also a special guest because it'll be our interview episode. and also a special guest because it'll be our interview episode and we'll be talking to Sean Blanc, which is very exciting because he does a whole lot of really interesting stuff on the internet and he has been a free agent for a while and I think that's going to be a great conversation.

If you would like to be part of the conversation with us and have your comments potentially addressed in our next episode in a month, please send us an email. To do that, go to relay.fm slash freeagents and click on the contact link. You can tweet at us at freeagentsfm. Tweets are long now.

You could probably get a whole really great question in a tweet. And you can go to our Facebook group, facebook.com slash groups slash freeagentsgroup. And we will be back in a fortnight with much more. And in the intervening two weeks, I'm sure David will have a very detailed calendar of what he's doing. And I won't. Very detailed. See you soon. Bye, everybody.