Focused - 47: Personal Floating Holiday

Episode Date: May 15, 2018

David needs to deal with some clients who aren't paying him. Jason thinks about "taking a personal day" and how that's different from going on vacation or taking a few hours off. David ponders creating a mission statement for himself. And Jason questions whether he's unable to give himself credit for doing certain kinds of work.

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. Good to hear your voice again. Yeah, I know we say this every month, but I always look forward to Free Agent Day.

It's fun for me. Yeah, it's nice to chat about what we're up to. And now we chat and share it with people. Yes, yes yes we do uh i'll tell you first up for me on this episode is dealing with old accounts uh so i've been doing this this racket now for about three years being out on my own and i noticed recently that i have got some people that haven't paid me yeah that's no fun no fun. That was a good Homer Simpson sound there. No!

But no, it kind of slipped, you know, most of my clients are very good about paying, so I never really paid that close of attention to it. Recently, I noticed that, hey, there's a lot of money owed to me from people that haven't paid. So I decided I was going to do something about it. So the first thing I did was I wrote emails to the people that hadn't paid and said, hey, you need to pay me. And most of them did. And in most of the cases, I think this can happen where clients just get busy and things slide by. But a couple didn't, and I have now got rid of them. I said, look, it's a one warning rule. I'm busy enough. I don't need to do work for people for free. So I've become a little more

aggressive about dealing with the non-payers. And the other thing that came out of this for me is I now have a regularly scheduled appointment for myself around the 15th of each month. I think it's like the third Wednesday of each month. I do it after lunch, but I have an appointment from 1 to 2 p.m. just called Receivables. And I'm just going to schedule an hour every month for me. I'm going to do it after lunch so I'm not on an empty stomach and grouchy, but just going to take a look at anybody that hasn't paid. Cause you know, the invoices for me go out the end of the month. So by two weeks later, folks who haven't paid, I can just kind of take a look at where things are. And I want to make that a regular thing because one of the problems I had was like,

I had a really good client who always pays their bill. And I had an invoice from them that was like 10 months old that hadn't been paid. And it wasn't a lot of money, but then I got thinking, well, did I screw that up? Did the money come in and somehow did I not credit it? And I spent some time like, you know, sniffing through the bank account, trying to figure it out. And I never could. And that one, I just wrote it off because I didn't want to be a dummy and tell them 10 months later, hey, I just noticed you never paid your bill 10 months ago. Yeah, I think you doing a monthly check-in is wise, right?

Because it's so easy to let that stuff get away. It's not part, we talked about this again and again, it's not part of why you go out on your own. It's not part of your core business, but it is your business. Like, literally, you got to get paid. So, having a, and you are not looking forward to that right so having it be on your calendar and just say like this is the you don't like it but this is the time we're going to do it once a month right now i think that's smart i i don't i've been fortunate i i dread

this because i do worry about every so often that I'm going to get some client that doesn't pay me on time. And generally they do. Some of them are slow, but they all pay. And some of them are faster than others. But I do have that thought about like, well, I'm going to put a lot of work into this. They better not go out of business before they pay me. And it just hasn't happened yet. But I don't have a variety of clients like you do. I have a small number of things and they're generally like media companies where they're going to pay me because they're either going to pay me or I'll know because they will have shut down and I won't have any place to write anymore.

Yeah. It is in the practice of law that it is a lot of people have receivables and a lot of people are writing off bills. But the way my practice is structured, I really don't want to do that very much. It's not really meant to be that way. And kind of coming out of this, it was kind of reassuring to me, just like you were talking about last month, how you felt comfortable saying, I could go to a ball game. It's okay. I can get rid of a client. It's okay. I'm not so panicked now that I'm going to lose my house if I don't take every bit of work that comes in, where it's a lot easier now to say, oh, you have trouble paying. I don't want to make a regular routine of having to pester you about the bill. Maybe this isn't the right relationship. And that felt real good. Another thing that kind

of went through my brain as I was dealing with this is, is this something I can offload to another person? Like I have an online billing system. We talk about it all the time here on the show. I could have it automatically send reminder emails, or I could have an assistant take care of following up on this stuff for me rather than me have to do it for an hour every month should I have an assistant. Ultimately, I decided I don't have enough of these overdue accounts to turn it over to somebody. I don't mind doing it myself. And honestly, I kind of want to have a hand in this because I want to be aware and I want to be the one sending the email

to someone saying, hey, the bill's unpaid, you know, so they know it's coming directly from me. It's just not a, you know, I'm not like a big company where I need a receivable department. It's small enough I can do it myself. And, you know, I'm always trying to think of stuff I can give to other people, because I think that's a real help for me is to be able to offload stuff. But this is one that I felt ultimately I need to do myself. It's a tough one. I was thinking about when I was doing some advertising directly, I had some of this too.

But again, it was pretty similar where it was just like, also, I'm fortunate because as I've said before, my wife is the one who's doing the invoicing. So she has to deal with this. And that's a great luxury on my part that she spends a couple of days a month looking over all the invoices and kind of added together and the books and making sure that it all pensless outright. All right. What's on your mind? Yeah, this is something that came up a little bit last time, or I guess two episodes ago when I was

talking about going to the baseball game and all that. But I wanted to talk about the bigger idea of giving yourself permission to take a day off and how we deal with that and whether there are tricks about that. And I say this because it's very easy for me to work all morning and then in the afternoon be like, I'm going to walk the dog. I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, read a book. I'm going to, I'm going to not work all afternoon today because I've been working hard and over the weekend and all sorts of things like that. Um, so that's fine. And I can plan vacations, right? Like I I've got, I've got that down where I can say, all right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, um, go on a trip this summer and it's a week and I'm going to block it off and here are two weeks and here's where it's going to be. That's

not a problem. I can do that. But first off, what about when you're feeling like you're a little bit crispy, that you've been working really hard and you've been working through weekends and you've been pulling late nights? And what about recognizing they're like, you know what? I've been burning the candle at both ends. I'm going to find a day and I'm going to take it off. And you talked about like going to the beach or something like that. Like, I think there's that aspect of it. And then the other thought I had is preventative personal time, which is don't get to that point. Like, I get that there are big projects and, you know, if something is,

you're in crunch time for a couple of weeks, so be it. But what about like pacing yourself a little bit? And that was another thought that I had. These are things that I don't do. This is what I'm saying is I'm not saying I've got this solved. These are things that I don't do. And I'm trying to look within myself and say, how do I strategize? How do I better recognize when I've got tough parts of my schedule and light parts of my schedule? So and plan a little bit better, because that's one of the challenges, too, is I've got tough parts of my schedule and light parts of my schedule.

So, and plan a little bit better because that's one of the challenges too, is you've got a light day, but you agreed to do something at 11 a.m. on that day. And it's like, well, I can't go anywhere and I can't do anything because I've got one thing on my calendar. And so, could I plan that better? Could I move that thing? So some of it is about recognizing that and planning it. So I don't know. I do often work on weekends with various things, and that is fine on one level, but on another level, beyond that, you know, if my family is home on the weekend and I'm working all the time, then that's really annoying to them. And I got to look at that too. But sometimes the pace, that's sort of how it works. But I'll tell you, when I work on the weekend,

what happens is Monday morning comes around and I feel like, how is the week starting? I didn't get a break because I literally, I didn't get a break. What do you think? What do you do in terms of finding like, just finding downtime here and there, or maybe like plotting to have a break, a short break, not a planned vacation or something like that, or just a stolen hour or two. I think you're onto something here. So just to kind of back up a little bit, when I was in the firm, I frequently had to work on weekends, because that's just what you do. And I always resented it. You know, I resented, uh, being, getting in the car. I think that was the worst part about it on a Saturday or a Sunday,

getting in the car and driving a half hour to the office and being in the office while I knew my family was home. I, I don't know. It just drove me nuts and, and no hard feelings with the people that wanted me to do that. That's just kind of the way it went a lot of times. Since going out on my own, I work routinely on the weekends. You know, I, like one of my rituals is on Saturday mornings, I get up early, do my, you know, exercise and all that. And I usually get on my fancy electric bike and go down to Starbucks. And I'm down there writing for the blog for the week. I write a lot of my blog posts and then I don't get home till like 11. And that's about the time people in my family really start rolling. I mean,

they get up earlier than that, but you know, there's the breakfast and the whatever. So I don't miss much time with them, but I, I don't resent it at all. I was just thinking about that recently. I,

it doesn't bother me that I work on the weekends and I do often take little time out during the week if one of my kids has something interesting going on or even they just got a problem, I'll take time off to deal with them and help them out. But I don't schedule like free days. I just don't do that. I did it on my birthday and that wasn't even really a free day it was like an introspection planning day for me you know it was like a retreat it wasn't just a i'm taking a day to be brain dead and i think i think you're onto something i i don't know how i do it we had sean blanc on and he does those sprints with his company where they work like i think it's six or eight weeks and then they take

a week off and do nothing and i i don't know how how this does but you've planted a seed for me i'd like to try and figure out a way maybe it's one day a month or i don't know but just just a day where i don't work on any legal or max sparky stuff and just have a day to myself that would be kind of nice i think you make a good point too that there's there's two different things we're talking about here. And one is what I always used to call when I was at IDG, the walk in the woods, which is sometimes as a part of your job, it's good to get out of your head, to get out of your office. This goes for people who are still working in offices. tell you, I'm going to take off my hat of somebody who's been out for three and a half, four years on my own and put on my, I worked at a big company for 20 years hat and ended up having, you know, being in charge of a group with 60 plus people in it and tell you that there is something to be said for you or you and a small group of people that you trust to go away somewhere,

whether it's down the street or to a baseball game, or whether it is to somebody's house, or whether it's literally you just going off on your own, staying at home, taking a long walk, going down to the beach and thinking about big picture work stuff, not what do I need to do today, but like big picture stuff. I am a real believer in that, that you need to take time away from the details in order to see the forest for the trees. That's one kind of thing, but that's not time off. I, with this, I'm talking about what you said, like, I'm not going to think about it. I'm going to watch a movie. I'm going to go in the middle of the day to a movie. I'm going to go to the beach and spend the day at the beach. I'm going to take a long hike. I'm going to

take a long hike. You might be able to think about work. I'm going to watch a baseball game. I'm going to take a long hike. You might be able to think about work. I'm going to watch a baseball game. Things that are like, you're just goofing off now, right? Like you are not working. And I think it's really important, especially since it's so easy to start thinking about work. And that is work at that point. That trying to carve out time that is truly not work. That is not, oh, well, this is productive because I got to think about the big picture.

Like, that's different. And it's good, but it's not what I'm talking about. I'm reminded of the fact, speaking of the corporate world, that when I was at IDG, we had PFLs or PFHs, personal floating holidays. And they were meant to be, I think there was some legal reason it was like a day of personal significance to you or something like that but the idea was this was not vacation time and it was vacation time in some ways but the floaters were not they did not come from a place of extending your vacation the floaters were personal days i I'm taking a personal day. I, for whatever reason, am not a sick day. I just am not going to work this day because I'm going to do something else or because I'm not going to do anything else. if giving yourself personal days is a strategy that might work literally once a month or once every three months, or I'll give myself three in a year and you've got them on a post-it note or something. And you literally are like, you know what? Next Tuesday, I'm taking a personal day.

And yeah, if you're the kind of person who wants to take every day as a personal day, that's going to be a problem, but give yourself a number, give yourself six or three or one a month and say, what day is going to be the personal day? What's a day that you're not going to work and that you know you're not going to work? I think maybe for some of us who are schedulers and planners, that that might be, so we'll gamify it a little bit, right? Like be your own HR department, give yourself a floater per month or per quarter and see what you do with it and make yourself take it as the HR director. Make sure that you take that day because it goes away if you don't take it. So you better take it. It's meant to be just kind of in passing rather than I'm going to hoard all of these and then spend them on a vacation.

It's not vacation time. It's a floater. Anyway, I've thought about that. I'm not sure I'm not doing that either. But it's a it's an idea, as we've been talking that I that I had is is maybe that would be something that will get me to actually like put my foot down and say not going to work on this day. Yeah, you inspired me. So as you're talking, I open up my calendar, I'm going to put one on right? There's no way I can do it in the next month and a half. I'm going up to WWDC in June, and I've got a bunch of deadlines on client stuff, but I'm going to figure it out. If you're listening and you do this as a free agent, write us and let us know. I'm curious how that's working, or tweet us or whatever. But I do think there's something to this. And honestly, I'd

never even given it any thought because my old firm, there was no personal floating holidays. I mean, that was not a thing people did, but you know what, why shouldn't I do that? And, um, I, it's like an example for me is this, my sister just texted me last night. My, it was my mom's 89th birthday, but she's passed. And we decided, you know what, on Friday morning, we're going to get up and go to the cemetery. It's kind of far from where we live, but we're going to go put flowers and wish mom a happy birthday and probably have breakfast. But that could be a day for me that could be a floater. I mean, if I could manage it where I could say, why don't we just spend the whole day together, you know,

as my adult sister and I have some adventure, you know, that would be something I could do if I planned it out. Pete Yeah, I think so. And my last thing on this is, what a little planning goes a long way. And I say that because there's nothing worse for me than a day that ends with me realizing it was a nice warm day, like a warm summer day. Yeah. I was inside all the time working. And when I thought about what I did that day, there was literally nothing that I had to do that day. Not saying I didn't work. I did work,

but I didn't work on anything that had to be done that day. It could have been done the day before, it could have been done the day after or spread out over many days. Those are the days that I kick myself. Those are the days that I think, you know what? I work at home. One of the benefits of being on my own is that if it's a nice warm day on a Tuesday and I don't have anything else going on, I could just go to the beach or whatever, or take a hike. And those are the ones that I really regret because I feel like I have failed to take advantage of my, one of the key fringe benefits of my job, which is being able to set my own schedule and take a day off when I want to. Again, yes, I feel irresponsible if I do it a lot, but never doing it is a mistake, right?

So, that is, the key there is being aware, right? Is being aware like, you know, today I don't need to do this. Today is one of those rare days, because I look at my calendar, David, and it's the same thing, right? I have some days in the next couple of weeks where I could probably do something like this, but then i enter a busier period but the problem is if i don't identify them ever then what's going to happen is i'm going to get to the end of them and realize that that was one of those days and that's the

that's what i need to uh pay attention to is a little triage of my week and my month and say here are some possible days that are like open for maybe I could block that off. And, you know, maybe I'll try to do that. Yeah, I won't say the cursed word, but I am very much into scheduling myself lately and incorporating the stuff into that, into the monthly review, the weekly review, and the planning is something that can really, I think, make a difference. So, we'll report back on this, but we'd love to hear what you're doing about it. Before we go on though, I want to talk about one of our sponsors. I'm really happy to have, this is a new sponsor to the free agents, Warby Parker. This episode of free agents is brought

to you by Warby Parker, quality eyewear at a fraction of the usual price. I was so happy to see them come in as a sponsor because I'm a huge Warby Parker customer. I just bought new glasses. You know, Jason, do you ever get the new prescription and then you get the new glasses and you can see leaves again? Isn't that exciting? That just happened and it was great. Oh, yeah.

So I got a pair of Warby Parker glasses and they were founded by four friends who believe that your glasses shouldn't cost more than your iPhone. They've cut out the middleman so they can sell directly to you in-store and online. And this means that Warby Parker are able to provide high-quality, good-looking prescription glasses at a much fairer price. And if you think you're buying glasses online might be difficult, that's not true. Warby Parker makes it so easy with their free in-home try-on program. So what you do is you go to the website, you pick out five pairs of glasses that you think might work, and they just

mail them to you. There's no obligation to buy. Put them on at your house, show them to your family, your friends, take pictures of yourselves in them. So you can figure out what you want. Shipping is free and it includes a prepaid return shipping label. So when you pick your favorite pair, they can even call your doctor if you're not sure what your prescription is. But you pick your favorite pair, you send them back. And starting at $95, you get prescription lenses in the frames of your choice. And that includes the anti-glare and anti-scratch coatings. It's not one of these things where they start like ticky-tacky adding a bunch of fees on.

And for every pair that you buy, a pair of glasses will be distributed to someone in need. So you're helping someone out, you're getting yourself a good pair of glasses. So I got these new glasses from Warby Parker. As a result of me getting older, you know, in my slow march towards death, I now need reading glasses as well. So I went with the progressive lenses from Warby Parker. They do that. These are the best. I've done this for a couple of years now, but I've never bought them from Warby Parker. These are the best progressives I've ever had. They're super sharp. I was just sitting last night on the couch looking at the iPad while watching TV with the family, as sometimes I do. And it was the first time in my life I could see the screen in focus and also the iPad.

It was amazing. So I loved it. Super easy to use. I like the glasses I bought. If you're curious, I ended up getting the Watts frames. I think they're cool. They're blue. I've never had blue glasses before, but I'm liking them. They're easy to order. Listeners of this show can head over to warbyparker.com slash free agents with no spaces and order a free home try-on kit today. And once you're done that, you can check out the Warby Parker app. They've got a great iPhone app. They've built an awesome home try-on companion, which lets you create a quick video of you wearing all the frames so your family and friends can help you choose. And if you have an iPhone 10,

you can use a brand new find your fit feature. It uses the iPhone 10's true depth camera to map and measure your key facial features. And then it'll recommend around 12 Warby Parker frames that are likely to best fit your face. And that's how I got the frames I just bought from them. Same thing. The process is seamless and takes only a few seconds. It was great. And it helps narrow down your choices, which I think is helpful. So it's time to upgrade your glass experience. Go to warbyparker.com slash free agents to order your free home try on today. Thank you so much for Warby Parker for their support of the show. So what are we talking about next? I have one. This is super weird for me. Okay, so when I was back at the firm, occasionally some manager would go to some retreat or read a book and get all hot and bothered about creating a mission statement for the company.

And I just rolled my eyes so hard every time I hear that. I just think it's the dumbest thing in the world. I just rolled my eyes so hard every time I hear that. I just think it's the dumbest thing in the world. But Jason, lately, I think something's happened to me because I'm reading too many books or something. But all of a sudden, I'm thinking, maybe I need a mission statement for my little tiny business. I'm coming out of a little, you know, I had a problem that I talked about on the show for a while where I felt like I was out of balance. When I first got started, it was really easy to pour all of my time into the law practice.

And one of the reasons I left the law firm was so I would have time to do the Max Markey stuff too. And I've really been making an effort lately to fix that. And I think part of the problem I had was I just wasn't thinking about kind of core value stuff. And having, I think in the last six months, I've got my act together a lot better. By the way, I just released a book for the first time in a long time. Congratulations. Thank you. It's the iPhone Field Guide. So if you're interested, go to maxbarkey.com slash iPhone. It'll make you great at your iPhone. But anyway, that is a result of some of the stuff I've been doing. And to me, because I've got really two businesses I'm running simultaneously, I need to stop and think about, you know, what is it that is key to me as an attorney representing clients and what is key to me as this publisher guy?

guy. And I haven't done it yet, but I've been starting to kind of collect ideas and thoughts about putting together a mission statement for myself. And I don't even know if I'm going to call it a mission statement because I hate the term so much. But I do think I need to kind of figure out core values and where I want to spend my time. Because I didn't do that the first couple years. And I just kind of let myself blow in the wind and I wasn't happy. So this is something that's kind of on my mind right now. This kind of goes back to my walk in the woods, doesn't it? Yeah, I guess we're on that theme lately. Taking a step back, thinking about the big picture,

coming from a corporation, like I always hated mission statements. I get why people wanted to do mission statements because what you're trying to do is have a thing that everybody can point to when they're wondering should we do this they can point to the mission statement and say well what does this say about about our mission like we've agreed we've all agreed to row in this direction now somebody's asking you to do something where are we going to agreed to row in this direction. Now somebody is asking you to do something. Where are we going to need to row? That's not in the right direction, right? Like that's how it's supposed to work.

And in big organizations, mission statements are a mess. I've been in so many different conference rooms with people having debates over specific words of the mission statement and different people in different groups with different desires, trying to make the mission statement about their job and not about the mission of the organization at large, which makes it very complicated. I've been in editorial groups where the mission statement is all about reaching advertisers, and it's just like, nope, that's not our mission. You got to think of something different. So, there's lots of things that are kind of problematic about dealing with a mission statement, but

especially as an individual, trying to have that North star, trying to have that question you can ask yourself or that, that set of questions you can ask yourself and say, does this fit with what I want to do? And if it's outside that, like, I'll give you an example. This is not something that I've, I've talked to people, but I've never actually had to turn down the work, but like the idea of doing marketing material of Jason, you could write, manual, maybe you could, you know, we want, we need somebody to do a bunch of posts on our corporate blog about how great our products are. It's kind of outside of what I want to do. And in a situation where I was kind of pivoting my business to be more about marketing and PR, maybe I would say yes to that. But where my business is now, that is not an area

of interest for me. I don't want to get into that stuff. So that would be an easy way for me to be like, yeah, actually, once you get across to the marketing side, it doesn't really follow. I feel like if you have trouble saying no, putting something together, like a set of filters you can run a work through to say, is this really going down the road that I want to be going down? And I haven't actually done it yet, so I don't have enough feedback for anybody to give advice on it. But just the fact that this is on my mind is kind of shocking to me because I've never, like you, I've never really been a fan of these things. But I think when you bring it down to a very small company or even just a sole free agent, I think there's something to this, but I haven't figured it out yet. Let me take a break before I've got something to talk to you about, a little more big picture stuff

and how we get our minds in the right places to do our jobs. But before that, I should probably tell everybody about our other sponsor this time. It is FreshBooks. So, hey, there are a lot of freelancers listening to this show, and you all know how important it is to make smart decisions for your business. David talked about doing the books, about checking on bills, and people who haven't paid well. Our friends at FreshBooks can save you many, many, many, many, many, many, many hours with their cloud accounting software for freelancers.

It's incredibly easy to use. It can simplify tasks like invoicing, tracking expenses, and getting paid online. They make it dramatically easier for people to get paid and deal with paperwork. They've got more than 10 million people doing that right now. Now, FreshBooks automates the late payment email reminders. So if you use FreshBooks, you can spend less time chasing payments and worrying about those clients who are not paying you and more time doing the thing that you got into this business to do. And there are new notifications. It's sort of like an intelligent personal assistant. You go to the notification center and you'll always know what's changed in your business since the last time you logged in and what needs to be dealt with ASAP.

If you're listening to this show and haven't tried FreshBooks yet, what are you waiting for? Now is the time. FreshBooks will let you try it for 30 days for free because you listen to this show. You don't have to give them a credit card or make any promises. Try it out for 30 days free by going to freshbooks.com slash free agents and enter free agents in the how did you hear about us section. I guess you could say that they put the free in free agents, something like that. I'll workshop that. I'll workshop that slogan. Thank you, FreshBooks, for supporting free agents. Okay, I wanted to talk about keeping score. And again, forgive me, there are a lot of topics that keep coming back on the show. And this is something that just occurred to me. And I wanted to get it out again, because I just want to turn this over. And David, maybe you've got some thoughts about

this too. Something I learned at my job job back in the day was this idea of keeping score that certain tasks gave me points and certain tasks didn't. And it's not like I was actually thinking about this and like keeping an actual score. It was all happening in the background in my it was what do I define as I've done work? And this is, this is the thing. So, like when I, today, if I post a podcast, host a podcast, anything like that, yeah, I did work. I wrote an article and posted it. Yeah, I did work. So, there's two things going on here. One is there's stuff that's necessary that I don't think of as work, like doing research for something, but not actually getting the thing done. Like, you know, you got a project and you know this from your big book projects, you got a project where there's,

you know, I'll just say five hours of research and five hours of writing and production. And what I would say is the first five hours when I'm working on something like that, I feel like I'm not doing anything and that it's fruitless. Even though I know that I'm actually doing something and I need to do it in order for the second part, it feels like not work. It feels like not accomplishing anything. And the second part, when I make the thing based on the five hours or you know i'm just using those numbers yeah that part feels like i'm doing something and this is something i realized about myself it's something that i struggle with which is this idea of what giving

yourself credit for things that are actually work even though you aren't getting whatever it is in your internal measurement and trying to either recalibrate your internal measurement or remind yourself that even though your internal measurement says you didn't do anything today, when you look back at what you did today, you realize that all the things you did were important. And, you know, I continue to struggle with that. It's better now. The backstory is that my last job at IDG, that was a job that was entirely made up of things that I didn't consider work. And what it meant was, that's one of the reasons I was deeply unhappy with my job, is that other than when I would steal away

to be in an editorial meeting or write a story, other than those times, I felt like I just felt frustrated, like I wasn't getting anything done. I was doing lots of stuff that was important and necessary and was my job. But in terms of how I felt about myself and the work that I was doing, and things I could take pride in, which might be another way of saying keeping score, things you could take pride in, I wasn't feeling it. Do you keep score like this, David? you could take pride in. I wasn't feeling it. Do you keep score like this, David? Yeah, this is a challenge and it depends what you do. Like, you know, switching over to the law side of my life, I do a lot of small things for clients that I don't bill them for. It's just,

you know, it's because in a lot of big firms, they bill you for everything. And I always, I always kind of detest that. I had a client write me the other day and says, I need a prenuptial agreement. And I don't do that stuff, but I had to track down a reputable lawyer that could do it for her and get her the referral. And you spend time on stuff like that. Or with the corporate clients I work with, there's some corporate filings that take a few minutes to do properly, but I never charge them for it. And you get to the end of a day and you realize, oh my goodness, I spent like half the day doing stuff that I can't even charge for. And it drives me crazy when I think about it. Going now to the other side of my life,

the research that that iPhone field guy was a good example, tons of research time in it. And that is, you're right. I mean, when you're sitting there typing words or recording a screencast, you feel like you're doing work. When you're sitting there trying out a dozen apps and like nine of them, you don't even decide to write about because they're so terrible. You know, does that feel like you're working? And it's easy to not do that. So the way I get around that a little bit is I am a heavy time tracker. I have an account with Toggle, and I also use Timing, the app that sometimes sponsors on the show, full disclosure. time and I categorize it. So when I looked at the iPhone field guide at the end of the day, I had something like 200 hours in it from January to publication. And about 80 of those hours was research. And that was a lot of time. But I realized when I look at it categorized and

quantified like that, it makes sense to me. And it's easy for me to accept that, no, no, I had to do that. I couldn't just, you know, write all those words without having done the work. So, that helps me do that. But if you're feeling that way, I guess one thing I would always say is if you're feeling that like you're spinning your wheels and not actually getting work done, is this work that you need to do. And to me, that is a good kind of alarm bell to say, okay, wait a second, you know, can I offload this? That's a recurring theme in my life lately is I'm always on the lookout for something that I'm doing that I could pay someone else $15 an hour to do, you know. Well, if you can make it work, right, the ideal is that 100% of your time should be spent on things that only you can do.

You know, you bring your own magic to it. And that's the core of what you do. And that's the stuff that works the best for you. And that makes you presumably the stuff that only you can do is the stuff that you keep score on that you really love. When it gets out of balance, you end up in a situation like my job where i was in a position where it was my job to do that and i might have been the right person to do that from a capability standpoint i might not have been i mean ask the people i work with then but um but it was not a match for what i took pride in doing and so that that's that's uh some of the trick there is how do you,

if you can offload the things that you don't view as, you know they're necessary, but you never are going to take pride in them and score them that way. And it's not part of your secret sauce. It's not part of your magic. It's not the thing that you do great. If you can get somebody else to do that, so you have more time to do the other stuff that is the that is the dream i think yeah and i would add to that if you're somebody who really wants to get to that hundred percent that you're always doing the stuff that you're really good at and not dealing with the other stuff it may not make sense for you to be a free agent honestly because uh free agency is not the kind of gig where you're going to be able

to spend a lot of free time. Well, you're going to be able to control it that much. You're going to have a lot of stuff that you have to do that there's nobody else there to do for you. And I think that's something you have to accept, especially when you're getting started. Sure. Sure. Yeah. There are some, you know, if you become wildly successful, you can literally end up in a position where you outsource everything that is not the stuff that is the core of what you do. I know somebody, I know somebody like that at this point. He might not, he might dispute this, but I'll just, I'll just mention it that my impression of how CGP Grey does what he does is that he has built up a system where he is able to focus on the things that are important to him.

And he's got help for everything that is not important to him. And like, I think that's the dream. The dream is you're so successful out on your own doing your thing that you can put everything that is not that core thing off on someone else. And just do your thing and do that secret sauce, that magic thing that you do. But in reality, when you get started, that's not going to happen. I mean, we all start from a position where we have to wear a lot of different hats. And that's where it starts. But there is that as time goes on and you start progressing, having the ability to move that stuff out is important. But also having the ability to recognize that if you spend all morning doing billing, that

you need to not go to lunch hating yourself for not having done anything in the morning because all you did was billing. Because the reality is you worked all morning on vitally important things and you need to give yourself credit for that. But I don't, I often do not give myself credit for stuff like that. Yeah. And that's a good example for me, like billing. I talked earlier about how I take time every month

to follow up on overdue accounts. But the actual billing process, I offload. I have someone I trust. They've got the FreshBooks login. They go in. At the end of the, it's the last Sunday of the month. They go in, they prep all the bills for me. They check all the grammar in the entries

to make sure I didn't do something stupid. And the process is super easy to make invoices. These online services are like that. And so I can just go in on the afternoon of the last Sunday of the month, and it takes me about an hour just to check, read through to make sure she got it right and press the send button. And sometimes I add a personal note and that's it. And something that would take me a whole morning to do, I was able to pay somebody else to do for me and it's totally worth it. But that's the kind of stuff you just have to be looking at. And I do think checking, you know, checking your time, being honest with yourself about what work matters. Like the fact that I do this free work for clients isn't a waste of time because it's one of the reasons why they keep coming back to me because they don't feel like they're being abused. So all this stuff makes sense and you got to be honest with yourself. But I think when you're on your own, it's really easy to tear yourself apart about this stuff. Yeah. And time tracking you mentioned earlier, and that's something I wanted

to mention as well, that doing some time tracking, what it made me realize is I'm not just not keeping score when I do work like this. I forget that I did it. Because one of the things, and if you've heard me read ads for time tracking software in previous episodes, I will have mentioned this, that, you know, you think that you didn't do anything and you look and you say, like, what did I spend my morning on? You're oh yeah i worked this morning but what i learned from that is i don't even file that in my brain as having done work in fact i file i seem to file a lot of that stuff in the memory washer like just throw it away it's it's it's disposable stuff like what did i do this morning? And that's one of the

reasons why I fail to keep score. Because like, what did I do? I don't even remember what I did this morning. And then with a time tracking app, you can actually look and be like, oh, yeah, I did all this stuff that's important and that had to be done. But it told me something about myself that not only was I not feeling fulfilled by it, but like, I was just discarding it, just completely like it didn't even happen because so at the end of the day, you think, what did I do? And you look back and you think like, I did nothing. I, I, I remember nothing. And it was not, oh, well, you know, I'm in my late forties and my, and my memory is, is going bad. It really isn't that it, because this was also happening in my early forties when

I was doing this. It's, it's your brain, you know, prioritizes what you want to remember and what is pointless and that you can just go ahead and forget. And I was literally just categorizing a lot of my job as, eh, it's pointless. Don't even worry about it. No wonder I felt unfulfilled at the end of the day. No wonder I felt like I hadn't done anything. It's because I categorized huge swaths of my job as okay to delete because it's just dumb and not worth it even though that's not true it was important it was my job and we all have to just kind of work through those things or either either change how we keep score or recognize that we keep score that way and try to uh come up with some other way of recognizing that this other work that is not

giving you that direct hit is still important. Well, I think you need a new scorecard. That's when I'm here. Yes, sure. Great. You're only scoring yourself for home runs and triples. Great. But that's the challenge is how do you do that? How do you get around that? And certainly in my time at IDG, i i i really struggled to find a way to to do that and the answer is yes get a new scorecard if you can otherwise understand that you have this scoring system and find a way to mitigate that somehow yeah i never really thought about it but the whole time tracking thing really has helped me with that whole issue because like i just i was looking at my my ip iPhone field guide tracking and I had categories for research, writing, uh, iBooks author production. Cause

that's a whole thing, screencasting and marketing. I had like categories for each one. So I would, and then it would just give me a raw number. If I set the reports, right. Another thing I do is I have, you know, because I'm a little crazy, in addition to all my electronic stuff, I have a journal book that I keep on my desk that I plan days in and weeks. And on the weekly plan, I have a little entry for the major facets of my life, the law practice, Max Barkey, the field guides, the podcasting. And I just, at the end of each day, I have my time trackers give me a report, just the rawest number for each category. Like today, I spent four hours in law and two hours on podcasting.

And just in my weekly plan book, I just fill in, it's a grid dot paper, you know, so it's just dots. So I just fill in a box for each hour. And as the week goes by, I fill it in at the end of each day. It takes me all of about two minutes to do this. But just the process of putting it in there by my hand with a pencil, I see a running tally as the week is going, as where I'm spending my time. And it's a real simple process.

I cribbed that off the internet somewhere. I forget who did it, but I thought it was a good idea. And even though I can go on the computer and get very detailed reports, just having that little page for each week where I can see, oh, it looks like I'm pouring a lot of time into law this week and I'm not getting a lot done on the field guides or whatever. It allows me to see balance and it allows me to see progress. That's another thing. Maybe you should try that.

We're just about out of time. But before we go, I wanted to read at least one email. This is from paul yeah who wrote jason and david i just listened to episode 43 i'm a little behind it's fine podcasts are on demand that's that's how it works it's good your segment about the questions david received at the chicago conference has inspired me to send feedback i agree you are not infomercial type cheerleaders, but to me, you are cheerleaders of another sort. You have shown that it is possible to become a free agent and the steps to take to determine if it's right for me or any other listener to become one. To me, that is cheerleading, realistic cheerleading. I'm not sure realistic cheerleading is a thing, but thank you, Paul.

I love it. He says, yes, it's realistic. That's like, who's going to win? Maybe not us, right? Let's say that's interesting. He says, this is what we have gone through in our free agency style. I have found very helpful. I've listened to the podcast from episode one.

Here's what I've learned about myself. One, I'll probably never be a free agent. I'm 52 and have too many responsibilities to make this a possibility. Never say never. There are, you know, you know your own situation, but never say never, I would say. Two, you show me the details that I would need to figure out to become a free agent. Three, I can use some of your techniques to help me start a side hustle. Thanks for the podcast. I've enjoyed every episode. Thank you, Paul. Thank you. Yeah, I think a side hustle is a

great way to start this journey. yeah i i was uh i was last week uh out with some friends and i realized that most of them were independent workers and then there was the guy who has a regular job and i felt really bad for that guy because um it it hit all the same buttons that that i think you and I worry about pressing when we're talking about this stuff that like, we want to be realistic. This is not a podcast where we say, you should quit your job today. We guarantee that you'll have great success going out on your own. Like, I just, we, neither of us wants that responsibility. We want to let you know what it's like and what the issues are. And you know your situation better than we ever could. And I had that feeling when we were just the peer pressure in the room of like, oh, boy, like, don't make this guy quit his job just because we all quit our jobs because he has all his own issues and is his own person. And so, that was a kind of a funny moment. So, I like this realistic cheerleading idea. I'll take it. Again, I'm not quite sure. That's not my kind of a funny moment so i like this realistic cheerleading idea i'll take it again i'm not quite sure that's not my definition of a cheerleader anyway i think there's some unreality about cheerleading it's 100 positive and we're trying to bring that reality but i

appreciate the sentiment and i agree with it that this is about like giving people solid information about uh our experience and the good and the bad and the techniques and tricks that we try to use and then you got to make up your own mind and nobody knows your own situation better than yourself. Well, I think that about wraps it up. We've got a great guest lined up in two weeks. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you. If you want to give us feedback, we're on Twitter at Free Agents FM.

And there's a little box on the relay.fm slash freeagents website where you can send us a note if you've got a note for us. Thank you to our sponsors, Warby Parker and FreshBooks and we'll see you all in a fortnight. Bye everybody. Thank you.