Focused - 53: The Value of Your Time

Episode Date: August 7, 2018

David and Mike talk about protecting your most valuable resource and how to figure out what you shouldn’t be doing anymore. Mike gets inspired during his personal retreat and learns how to say “no.” David learns the hard way from his recent travels but has a plan for what to do differently next time.

David Sparks and Mike Schmitz spent their careers working for the establishment. Now they've had enough. They've rebelled against the status quo and are now seeking success on their terms. They are free agents. Welcome back to Free Agents. I'm David Sparks and I'm joined by my pal Mike Schmitz. How you doing, Mike? Doing great. How are you, David? Excellent. I'm glad that we've got another content show. So much to cover today. We both have some interesting notes to talk about. In your case, a personal success and in my case, a personal failure, which may be a theme on our show going forward, Mike.

which may be a theme on our show going forward, Mike. I'm not going to have a success every time, but this is an interesting experience that I just went through, and I thought it was appropriate for our audience, so I'm excited to dive into it. All right. Before we get there, we do have a survivor skill to talk about and just a few points of introduction. First is, as I said last time, we have now officially moved the free agents discussion forum off of Facebook. We now occupy a little alley on the side of the Mac power users discourse forum. So go to talk.macpowerusers.com, sign up for an account there. There's already a discussion ongoing. Please join in. We've got to show all those Mac power users that free agents know how to use a discourse forum too. So get in there and talk. And it's giving me and Mike some great

resources for the shows you'll hear later. And we're going to be doing something kind of special where we're going to be talking to some of our listeners. We want to hear your free agent story, and that's the place to put it. So talk.macpowerusers.com. And don't go to Facebook anymore. There's nothing there. And thanks again, everybody, for subscribing to The Automators. I know it's different from free agents, but a little cross-promotion.

I'm really proud of that new podcast and real happy to have a bunch of free agents, listeners going. If you haven't checked it out yet, go to relay.fm slash automators. Now that I've done all my self-promotion, Mike, you got anything you want to share with everybody? Well, I think the automators is a really interesting podcast, which is right up the alley for a lot of free agents because a lot of free agents have kind of

embraced this systems thinking mindset and they're figuring out how to tweak the systems in their life to create the results that they want. And so automators, obviously, you're applying that specifically to technology. But I think a lot of free agents like that mindset, they've already got. So if you I'm really impressed with that podcast that you've done a little I mentioned in the Slack team, I don't think I can keep up if you keep releasing all these screencasts. the Slack team, I don't think I can keep up if you keep releasing all these screencasts. That's the plan. That's the plan. But anyway, we want to talk about, you know, is that with the new format with these content shows, we always want to start the show with what we call a free agent survival skill. And at the end of the show we did four weeks ago, we started stumbling into the value of your time. And I thought that would be something worthy of continuing on. So we're going to talk today a little bit about that. I think this is an important skill you need to have as a free agent, almost a survival skill, because when you

work for somebody else, somebody else is usually deciding what the priorities of your time are. But when you're on your own, it's all up to you. And if you don't have good data when you make those decisions, the goal is here to stay a free agent. And you may not be able to stay one if you can't figure that out. Yeah, I think this is absolutely a survival skill. And it's really interesting because a lot of people will view productivity in terms of how many widgets can I crank out, but there's really two pieces to it. There's both being efficient, which is doing things the right way, but also being effective, doing the right things.

And I think when it comes to the value of your time, you've got to balance both of those as you figure out what is your time actually worth. I know with Asian Efficiency, we walk people through this and we help them figure out how much is your time actually worth. And their eyes are always opened at this point when they figure out what their quote unquote hourly rate is. And with free agents specifically, I mean, there's always more work that you can do. And a lot of times you feel the incentive to do that work because that's the thing that's going to get you paid. So it's even more important for you to take a step back and consider these things that are going to pay the

bills. Those are great. But what about all the other things that are competing for your time, which maybe don't fit under the work example? So I'll just share one from my own personal experience. I absolutely despise yard work. We've got almost a half acre in the Midwest. And I used to spend an hour and a half every Saturday mowing the lawn. And I thought about that. I'm like, you know, for how much I make per hour, all these other projects that I've got going on, pretty much any of them, if I were to do

an extra hour and a half in any of those projects, I would make more than it would cost me to hire somebody to mow the lawn and to do this thing that I absolutely hate. And that's kind of like a first world problem sort of example, because I don't know, I mean, but fill in the blank with the thing that you don't want to do, or you don't think you should do. I mean, it can kind of appear as a luxury, but really what you're trading when you are a free agent is you are trading your time for money. And so if you can use money to buy back some additional time, whatever area that applies to, that's a worthwhile investment yeah i mean the trick is the math like if you if you decide that you make a hundred dollars an hour for the work you do when

you sit and work on things and you can pay a neighborhood kid ten dollars an hour twenty dollars an hour to do your yard work for you um the math works out and you can actually make money, you know, hiring somebody in effect to do that. I think one of the challenges for that is self-identification with a task. Like if you've always done your own yard work, it's easy to have a hangup about that. Like,

Oh, I don't need to hire somebody. I can cut my own lawn. I'm not so fancy. Right. And I think that's something you need to get over i i've been dealing with that as we've been doing some this build out from my home office i've painted walls i have done i've run electrical i've done a whole bunch of stuff myself over the years

my dad was in construction i feel like i'm pretty handy with this stuff but i had to come to the idea of like do i want to spend four days doing all this stuff when I'm already backed up on work? And if I look at the math, how much would it cost me to hire someone to do a bunch of this stuff and allow me to get caught up or get my regular work done? And that's the challenge you're up against. Exactly. And if you like doing those things, absolutely keep doing those things.

Just recognize that you're maybe not the best at those things or you're not as good as somebody else who can do those things more efficiently than you. So the cost for doing it yourself is going to be higher than the cost for if you gave it to somebody else to do. And I think that a lot of the tasks that you don't like to do, this is the prime place to look for these sorts of things. Because we have this, speaking generally, but we have this belief that I don't like to do this task, so there must be nobody that really enjoys doing this task. But that's not the case. I mean,

even in my case, with mowing the lawn, we found a retired guy who goes down to Florida for the winter. He comes up here during the summer. He's looking for something to do. He likes talking to people. I mean, he loves doing this. And so I am happy to pay him so that he can do this for me. He's happy to do it for me. It's a win-win. And when you're looking at the things that you don't like to do and you're thinking about how can I figure out a way to not do this thing anymore? How can I find somebody else who can do this for me? There's that belief, I think, a lot of times that because I don't like it, somebody else isn't going to like it either.

And when I ask them to do this, it's kind of an imposition. But that's not really the case. Yeah, and for what I was talking about, it's not that I necessarily even enjoy getting up in the attic and running electrical. It's just that I identify as someone who does that himself. Do you know what I mean? It's like, I don't know.

I, I grew up very blue collar. So it's like, Oh, are you really now the guy who hires a contractor just to put a can light in your house or to paint a wall? I mean, are you that fancy now? And I think it's just kind of the stuff I carry from my childhood up, you know, thinking that, you know, you're never that fancy sparky. Don't do that. You always have to do that yourself. But it was a little bit of a challenge for me to overcome. But in the end, I've hired a guy and I think it was the right move. Yeah. And that's a good distinction. I guess I know that you do some woodworking and stuff on the side too. So that's definitely not something that I enjoy doing. I don't like working on my house in any way, shape or form. I'm much more comfortable in front of a keyboard. And I guess everybody's

got their preferences in terms of things they like versus they don't like. So thanks for clarifying that. Whatever your preferences are, whether they've been ingrained in you because of the way that you grew up, or maybe it's just something that you enjoy doing. I know a lot of entrepreneurs, free agents, they reach that point where there's this thing that they enjoy doing, but it's not the thing that's the most valuable use of their time. And they all kind of have this revelation point where it's like, I just can't do this anymore. And so when you force yourself to look a little bit, you know, Sam Carpenter and work, the system would call it, get outside and slightly above your situation, you change your perspective a little bit. It's a lot easier to see the things that really aren't the thing for you anymore. of unique ability. And I've gone through the book and the workbook and it's really good. It's kind of identifying what is the thing that you're really good at, your unique ability, and then

you find other people who have unique abilities that are complementary to yours and then you work together to do something awesome. But you don't work in your unique ability for a little while and then go do all of the other stuff that you quote unquote have to do. When people make that switch, and he works with a lot of really, really successful entrepreneurs. So this is him saying, it's not me. But like when you make that switch into doing the thing that you can really pour everything that you have into, that comes through in terms of quality, excellence, and that's going to be more valuable in a lot of times to the marketplace. But you have to get yourself out of the day to day-day and just, well, this is what we do. You have to look at it a little bit

differently before you even recognize those opportunities are there. Yeah, I think really getting to the nut of this, the survival skill is finding those things that you shouldn't be doing anymore. I mean, the underlying premise of the show for me was when I first wanted to become a free agent, I spent a lot of time thinking about how do I escape? And we cover that a lot on this show. There's a lot of people listening to the show that are thinking about getting out and going on their own, becoming an independent worker, joining the gig economy. And then the thing that I didn't realize at the time that I was thinking about my escape was what would be my fundamental concern once I got out? And for me, it was I immediately realized that I loved being an independent worker.

I just I can't imagine going back. So now the immediate stress goes from how do I escape from how do I stay in this room? You know, and that's that's I guess why we get to these ideas of survival skills. and that's that's i guess why we get to these ideas of survival skills but i can't go and run my own electrical and paint extra rooms when i've got a bunch of legal clients and a bunch of max products in the pipeline you know and i love those things more than i love the idea of running my own electrical and you've got something in your life that's the same way. It's probably not construction related. It's probably something like managing your billing or, you know, dealing with administrative nonsense. But there are things in your life you have to identify and get off your plate now if you want to keep doing this. Yeah, effective delegation. And the thing that limits a lot of people when

it comes to offloading those things that they're out. The thing that keeps them doing these things over and over and over again is this belief that, well, no one can do it the way that I can do it. And that may be true initially. You may have to put forth additional effort at the beginning to delegate something to somebody else so that they can do it at an acceptable level. But if it's not the thing that's hitting the mark for you, it's going to be worth it. There's another angle to this entirely, which is this whole idea of doing the right things at the right time. So the right thing at the wrong time maybe is the wrong thing for you to be doing. And that gets into this idea like not all hours are created equal.

Chris Bailey talks about your biological prime time in the productivity project. It's kind of like the time and it's going to be different for everybody. We talked about eating your frogs a couple of episodes ago. And I do believe a lot in that concept of doing the hardest thing at the beginning of your day. But what if the beginning of your day isn't the best time for you to be writing? Your creative juices aren't flowing yet. Identifying your biological prime time and being able to say, okay, I'm really creative and I can really enter into a state of flow when I sit down to write between 10 and noon and maybe four and five in the afternoon, that's really valuable too. So you have to line up the times that you work best in the different

modes. So maybe you do have some admin stuff that you need to do, or you do have some physical projects that you have to work on. But if they're not as important as the quote-unquote creative work that's going to pay the bills, and I'm just speaking from my own personal situation, maybe you schedule those times during non-biological prime times when you're not in the zone. Because if you don't do that, you're really hindering the amount of output that you're able to create and the amount of value that you're able to put into the marketplace. You're hurting yourself. Yeah, I agree.

But I want to kind of put a pin in that because the survival skill we're really focusing today is the value of your time. The survival skill we're really focusing today is the value of your time. And there's some tools I want to cover before we move on about how do you get started in this process. And for me, it was saying, okay, well, the first thing I need to figure out is where I'm spending my time. If I need to figure out the value of my time, I need to figure out how I'm spending my time. And there's a couple apps that we use for that. I use, there's an app for the Mac called Timing. They are sometimes a sponsor of Mac Power Users. I don't, you know, they have been a sponsor of this show as well. So, you know, take that for what you will. But I was using the

app long before they sponsored the show, and they just came out with a nice update that allows you to use multiple Macss and it tracks time across both devices. But the idea behind this app is it just looks at what you're doing in the background. There's two types of timers. There's the kind where you physically throw a switch and the kind where it just runs in the background. And I find the one in the background is by far more accurate for me because it's really hard to remember every time you switch gears to go in and change a timer. That was the thing that kept me from tracking my time for the longest time. I use timing also, and I love it because you don't ever have to think about it. It'll even tell you

based on what websites you've gone to, how productive you were. But having to manually start and stop timers just did not work for me. I would find I'd start a travel timer, you know, and 16 hours later, I recognize that I forgot to turn it off. Yeah, I also have a toggle account. And I believe there's even a way to combine toggle data with timing. And I just haven't taken the time to dig in on that yet. But I have the exact problem. Anytime I try to use toggle, because when I'm not on the Mac, you know, how do I keep track of time? Um, so I, I've been trying that and I've got a bunch of,

of scripts created for Siri shortcuts or workload, depending on when you're listening to the show and it can automatically trigger those timers and to a degree automated, but nothing like the way timing just works in the background, but either way, no matter how you go about it, or another thing you could do, I mean, just to keep it simple, is you could just look at your calendar and just write down the blocks of time. I don't think this stuff has to be to the minute to be super helpful. Obviously, with more granularity, you get more details. But even just roughly saying at the end of the day,

okay, I spent an hour in email and two hours on the phone with clients and three hours writing proposals. Even just getting that degree of data is a good start. So you could do this with a pencil and a paper to start with. But having something like timing running in the background, the thing that you find is you get data that surprises you. You think you know how much time you're spending, and if you track time, you find out you're probably wrong. I'm interested to hear your perspective on what you've gleaned from this, because my approach to this is a little bit different. Like I mentioned, I've never been able to make one of those manual

timers work for me. I've tried toggle, I've tried harvest, I've tried all of them. Timing was finally the thing that gave me a little bit of data because I could just have it running in the background. I never had to worry about it. I could just go look at it when I wanted to. But I tend to budget my time and plan my day ahead of time, not down to the minute, like you said, but I've got this sheet that I created. And on the left- side, I've got from 7am till 9pm hour blocks Cal Newport style where I will budget every hour of my day. And I've got important meetings on here. I've got a list of my important tasks on the right side of that sheet. And on the left side, I basically put the modes that I'm going to be in or the

physical locations that I will be in. And I plan my day that way. And I've found that doing this, providing a little bit of intentionality at the beginning of my day, provides the traction that I need to take action on the things that are important to me. So I'm thinking that I probably arrived at some of the same conclusions, but I went about it a different way. Yeah, the big inspiration for me, I did read the Cal Newport book, Deep Work, I believe it's called. I don't read as many of these books as Mike does, but that's one that everyone kept talking about. So I read it and it did inspire me to some degree. But the big question in my mind was, I've always got this underlying tension in me that I need to be doing legal work because that's how I paid the bills for so long. But I also can make money off the stuff I do for Max Barkey, and I really enjoy that.

So I needed to see data to see, well, how much time do I spend between these two enterprises and, you know, where do I earn money? And, and finding out that, you know, I actually get a pretty good bang for my buck for the time I put in Max Barkie makes it easier for me to let go of some of the more troublesome legal clients and, you know, start to maybe balance those things better. And I needed the data to figure that out. So that's the first reason I did that. And the second thing I needed was I was actively looking for targets of things I could assign to other people. And, um, and you know, I know objectively that I spend so much time on customer support or I'm sorry, I know subjectively that I spend time on customer support, but I didn't know objectively exactly how much time that was. And once I started tracking time, I saw, oh, wait a second, I'm spending two hours a week on this thing that I

could easily hand off to somebody else with a little training, they could handle it for me. And that gets me two hours back, which is golden. Yeah, that's a there's a really key principle, I think here where you use some numbers. Okay, so two hours, and let's say that's, you know, a week, a month, whatever. Once you assign a number to something, it's a lot easier to make the investment. Let's just say it's two hours a week. Okay, so maybe it takes you four hours to create those training materials that first week, but you know it's going to get you two hours a week after that. It's a lot easier to see, you know, in only a couple of weeks, this is going to pay for itself in terms of the time that I would invest in this

thing. Yeah. And the way I do it, if you're interested is, you know, I obviously I know how to screencast. This does Mike. So I have ScreenFlow installed on my Mac. So whenever there's something I've decided, okay, this is something that's going to get handed off. my Mac. So whenever there's something I've decided, okay, this is something that's going to get handed off. I still do the, the act for a while, but I just run video every time I do it. And I narrate the video. Okay. Here I am responding to this email and here I'm going to this database to get the code. And you know, I, I make videos about how I deal with it. And then I sit down with the person that I'm signing it off to and talk them through it. But I also give them those videos. And that way they can always go back and watch the videos over and over again to refresh themselves. And it's been very successful

being done that way. Yeah, I had trouble first couple times that I did that because I've done so many, quote unquote, professional screencasts that when you just sit down to do something, you notice like every time you stutter, or a mistake that you made. But if you just let it roll and like you said, do the activity after you do it a couple of times, it gets easier. And it's an invaluable resource to go back to. Like you said, Don does this too with Screencast Online. Just today, I was uploading an article and there a a new format that he had put forth and he created a video on how to do it and i went back and scrubbed the video found the the spot that showed the the change you know and and that eliminated in this particular case back and

forth between me and don or jf or whoever else on the team like hey so how was i supposed to do this again you know so even after you create the resource and you you train the first time like there are going to be things that come up and you're going to have to have those reminders. But having a resource that you can point back to, that's going to save a lot of time over and over and over again. Yeah. And just like Mike said, these are not the typical produced screencasts that I release and sell or distribute for software companies. These are really rough, but they work. They work, they save you time and they help you pay the bills. Exactly.

So time tracking, I think it's something to consider. You could do it just within your work hours. That's probably a good way to get started. I actually run the time tracking stuff all day. And because I'm a weirdo that has two careers, I really need that data between has two careers, I really need that data between the two careers to see where things are going. While with things like toggle and timing, you can get very detailed and in the weeds. And occasionally I pay attention to that

stuff. But for me, it's the big picture stuff that matters the most. I don't get hung up on the minutes, but I do like to know, well, what kind of work did I do for Max Barkey today? What kind of work did I do for the legal practice? And I'm just always got my radar up to say, oh, wait, this is something that I didn't have to do myself. And if I can find that stuff and offload it, great. But otherwise, it just gives me good data to figure out how I'm spending my time. And I have in my head this idea that I want to get more balance between the two. Things generally lean legal because it's hard to say no when people drop stuff on you. But the more I see those numbers, the more inclined I am to start maybe shrugging off a little bit of it. Maybe I'm going to start dropping a few of the slow play clients or some other stuff

so I can get the numbers in balance. But it all comes down to getting that data. And I think to get back to the top of this conversation, if you're a free agent and you don't have an idea how you're spending your time, you're taking your future into your hands.

And it's very easy to go down the wrong path and suddenly find yourself having to dust off your resume because it's not working for you anymore. So please find a way to do that. Yeah, that's a really important point. And the data will tell you that. If you are tracking these numbers, you can look at it. You don't have to be a rocket scientist in order to figure this stuff out. You can see that I spent 80 hours on this thing last month and it only produced this much income. It's time to shift my strategy, but you have to be able to see those things. All right. So today we covered

for your survival skill, figuring out how you're spending your time and where things are. Maybe on the next episode or in a future episode, I think the next step to this is, all right, how do you figure out what the value of your time is? We haven't even gone there, but I think that's another discussion. So we're going to come back to that one. But between now and next month, maybe spend some time, try out timing, get a pad of paper, try out toggle, one of these services, and see if you can't do a better job of figuring out where your time is going. And I guess one last point I'd add to this is one of the big pieces of feedback I got from this is I spend a lot of time with my family and reading books and in the garden and doing things that aren't related to my business. I, for some reason, when I started that

whole experiment, I was thinking I was spending all of my time working and I realized that that's just not true. And that was another important bit of feedback for me. Yeah. And that realized that that's just not true. And that was another important bit of feedback for me. Yeah. And that's good because that's the goal, right? That's everybody's dream. I want more time to spend with my family. I want more time to spend on the things that are important to me. I don't want to have to be working all the time. And having some numbers to support how you're actually spending your time, that can help you overcome that mental stronghold, I guess, would be the best term where you feel like whenever you're not working on your business, you should be. Whenever you're not working on your side hustle, your side project,

that's eventually going to become your main business, you kind of feel guilty. But you shouldn't. I mean, the whole idea behind being a free agent is that you want to take control of your situation and design the life that you want. And data can help you get that, help you identify where the small adjustments need to be made. Yeah. And that was one of the things that just shocked me though, because in my head, I wasn't spending any time doing that stuff. I wasn't spending nearly enough. And I realized, wait a second, I'm actually doing pretty good on this. And that's good to know. So like I said, we'll come back to figuring out how do you put a dollar value on that maybe next month. But for now, figure out how to track your time. Let

us know. This is a great thing to discuss in the talk.macpowerusers.com free agents forum. Share your thoughts and ideas with other free agents. Let's get a dialogue going on that. And we'll come back to this next month. Sounds good. All right, before we get into the challenges, we need to pay the bills. So I want to tell you that this episode of free agents is brought to you in part by our friends over at Hover. Building your online identity has never been more important. I know, David, you encouraged me to update my website, which had been a little bit neglected, and showcase all the stuff that I was doing. And the domain that I use to do that is

hosted by Hover. With Hover, you can find a domain that shows the world who you are and what you're passionate about. I logged into my Hover account before we recorded this episode, and I was kind of shocked at how many domains I had in there. Several I had forgotten about. I've got my personal one, MikeSchmitz.me. I've got ones for other projects which are in the works. I've even got one for an outreach that we coordinated at my church because it's just so easy to get a domain with Hover. And what I love about Hover is that you control the domain and you don't have to play that game with the registrars. Like a lot of these domain hosting

services, they'll throw in the domain for free when you sign up for the hosting account. But then you got to jump through a bunch of hoops whenever you want to move that. And with Hover, it's just so easy. Do you use Hover for any of your projects, David? Oh, yeah, a ton. In fact, one of the things I'd recommend doing is I bought my kids' names at domains when they were born, practically. And so the one now is 21 years old. I have her name.com and, um, and I'm going to hand that off to her pretty soon, you know, cause you know,

Hey, you want to do something with this? But I think it's cool to have that. I feel like going, you know, as the world evolves and they grow up, they're good. They may want to have their domain. So I've got that. I've got ones for little things I did and I've got ones for big things that I did. One time Katie called me Max Barky, M-A-X-B-A-R-K-Y. Actually, it was Siri was calling me Max Barky and then I just bought the domain

and pointed it at Max Barky. At some point, you just got to deal with it. Yeah, I love that idea of buying the.com for your kids. I wish someone had bought the.com for me. I've got to settle for the.me. But having your domain is a great tool when you're looking for work. You can use it as a website

showing off all your best work and experience. You can show that hiring managers to show that you're serious about finding a job and that you're competent. You can do what you say you can do. You can also with Hover get a personalized email address, which is a nice professional touch when you're emailing back and forth. You can even set it up so you can send and receive emails straight through your Gmail inbox. So it integrates with Google Apps. Head over to Hover now to grab your domain, even if you're not quite ready yet. I can't tell you how many times

I've had an idea and I just went to Hover to buy the domain before I did anything else. When your website is ready, Hover's Connect feature lets you easily attach your domain. Head over to hover.com slash freeagents now and you'll get it. And you get 10% off of your first purchase. So that's hover.com slash freeagents, all one word, for 10% off. Thank you to Hover for their support of Free Agents and RelayFM. So challenges faced this month. Mike, I understand you went on a spirit quest. I did. I do this every three months, so I'm not sure how much of a spirit quest it really is,

but I call it my personal retreat. And it's been really interesting. I've done it now three quarters in a row. I hesitated to talk about it for a little while because I thought maybe I just got lucky one of these times, but it's happened consistently now. Every time I go, I just give myself an entire day to think about all of the things that I am committed to, my roles and responsibilities. I know Jason had talked about his personal floating holiday several episodes back. Jason had talked about his personal floating holiday several episodes back. And I thought this was an interesting follow-up because, like I said, I've been doing this fairly consistently. And every time I do it, I am just amazed at how much clarity I gain through this. And it's not difficult. It's not like I have a big plan that I follow.

It's pretty simple. I just do a couple of different things. I ask myself three questions and I rethink my roles and responsibilities, everything that I'm committed to. These three questions, I think, are the key. And you have to give yourself enough time to really think about these questions. You can't just answer them real quickly and move on. You have to give yourself some space because you'll find a whole bunch of things that'll come in after the initial brain dump. You know, you get a whole bunch of things right at the beginning and then you're like, oh, I guess that's it. Give yourself another hour and you'll get twice as many. But the three

questions are simply, what should I start doing? What should I stop doing? And what should I keep doing? Now, you can apply those a lot of different ways, and I happen to follow the 12-week year framework. But before we get into that and how it shapes my goals, I think that anybody, if you were to just ask these questions, you would get a lot of clarity about the things that are hitting the mark and the things that maybe aren't hitting the mark. So this is a great exercise if you want to identify some things that you should stop doing or you should delegate to somebody else. Maybe even the things that you shouldn't necessarily stop doing, but you shouldn't be the person to do them anymore, going back to our previous conversations. I got some questions before we get into this thing any deeper. First of all, you go somewhere else, right? Yep. My parents have a place up in Door County, which is about two hours away. It's kind of the touristy place in Wisconsin on the Thumb. So you're surrounded by water pretty much. But their place is up the hill from all the tourists. So whenever I go up there, it kind of feels like there's nobody else around. Especially in the winter when there literally is nobody else around. There's just one or two restaurants that are open and a gas station. Probably freezing cold too. Yep, yep.

We're in the middle of the polar vortex. So it gets really cold in December, January. But... All right. And the second question is, you talked about your three questions. The first is, you know, what should I start doing? What should I stop doing? Now, are you working from like a brain dump master list?

Are you just working out of what, what's internal to your brain at the point that you're asking these questions? Well, this is the beauty of these questions. I don't really have a master list. Like I said, I do write down my roles and responsibilities. That's on a separate list. Okay, but I don't necessarily need those even to answer these questions.

The beauty of these questions is that you can apply them in just about any situation, and the nature of the question brings the focus in the right place, and the answers kind of happen automatically, which sounds maybe too good to be true, but if you give it a shot, you'll see what I mean. And it's just obtaining a little bit of distance where your brain can untangle these things because it's not so caught up in what do I got to do next or what do I got to do an hour from now? What's the next meeting I've got on my calendar? If you go up there with no, in my case, I go up there with no agenda. I'm going to dedicate this whole day just to thinking about these things.

And by the time I come back, I know exactly what I need to do next. I know the things that I need to cut out to create the space for the next thing. That's a whole other topic, by the way, is just saying no to the things initially so you have the margin to say yes when other things pop up. Like this podcast, for example. I couldn't have done this if I hadn't said no to some things and had some additional time. it would have it would have killed me yeah it did kill jason the um all right so so do you are you bringing technology with you or are you just sitting up there navel gazing i i just kind of i want to get context i think i'm going to try this but i need to get more context well you, you could, you could do it completely analog. And maybe some people would argue that you should do it completely analog. I do bring my, my, uh,

my computer and my iPad, uh, and my phone are always in my backpack. I've always got them with me, but everything goes on. Do not disturb. Yeah. So I take a day off of everything i turn do not disturb on my wife knows that she cannot get in contact with me until you know it may be several hours when i come up for air you know that i see i've got some some text messages and i'll get back to her at that point but the assumption is that basically i am off the grid and i i use i bring it with just because i like to use my nodeode for mind mapping. And a lot of these lists that I create, I create them in drafts. But you don't have to use an app for these things.

The real value is just in letting your brain untangle things. Your brain's really good at figuring this stuff out if you let it work the way it's supposed to. And it's not always worried about distractions and notifications. the way it's supposed to. And it's not always worried about distractions and notifications. I was over the weekend, I was watching some old episodes of Jerry Seinfeld's comedians getting coffee in cars. It's on Netflix now. And he did one with President Obama. And Obama, this is back when he was in the White House, he was saying that when Teddy Roosevelt was president, he would go to like Yosemite or Yellowstone for a month and nobody knew where he was. He was the president of the United States,

but he just took a month off and went hiking to kind of clear his mind. And when they said that, they were both kind of like saying that how amazing that is. But I was thinking, how did we lose touch with that? Why is it that we can't just take a day off like this now? Yeah. And you don't have to take an entire day. That's the thing. Even if you were to take a half a day and give yourself a couple of hours, you would get 80% of the value from this exercise, I would think. But most people just never prioritize that space. And this was something that I had heard somebody talk about. And I was like, that's a really interesting idea. I'm going to give it a shot. And like I said,

the first couple of times I kind of had this revelation that this is really powerful, but I kind of thought maybe it was a fluke. But now that I've done it three times in a row, and every time I come back and I've just got so much clarity, and everybody then asks, like, well, what did you figure out? And I'm like, this is the plan for the next 12 weeks. And they're like, wow, that's amazing. I had that same response myself. You know, really what made me try this was the fact that I was doing this 12-week year method, and I sucked at it. I was not even coming close to hitting any of my 12 week year goals. I really believe in the format though, which is that a lot of people will wait 11 months to start working on their annual goals and you can shorten that time period to 12 weeks. And then

you've got a built in restart four times a year. Things didn't go exactly according to plan or if everything did, you've got some great results to show for it. So I was getting frustrated with not getting any results, but believing that this was possible. And then I went up there and I just started thinking through, what are the things that I want to get done this quarter? How is that actually going to happen? Well, I've got to let some things go. I've got to prioritize some other things. And those three questions gave me the framework that I needed to order those things and accomplish my goals. And I've hit all of my 12-week year goals now the last two quarters. I'm on pace to hit it for this quarter too. And if you're just looking at the results, I mean, I went from hitting none of my goals to hitting all of my goals just because

I spent this one day thinking through what should I really be doing if these goals that I've written down and I've said these are important, you know, how do I actually achieve those? And you do it over a weekend or do it on a weekday? Typically, it'll be a Friday. So I'll go up Thursday night, get up there late, you know, and then I'll have all day Friday. By Saturday morning, I'm starting to go crazy. I'll come home. by Saturday morning, I'm starting to go crazy. I'll come home. But I want to make sure that I give myself an entire day to think through these things. And your family's good. They give you the space to do it. I think that's an important piece of that. Yep. And I should also call out that my wife does this too, not once a quarter, but the very first time I went up, I mentioned that this was really powerful and I could tell she was kind of skeptical. The next, I think it

was two weeks after that, she had a ladies meeting at a church. I'm like, well, I'll take the boys, we'll go up there overnight and you can have mini version of this you know yeah and she she texted me before i even get up there and she's like oh my gosh i totally get it now good good so we try to we try to build in the the space for her to do it too and then do you make so you you make you kind of go through and you decide your 12-week plan then do you plan it out at that point or do you just kind of get yourself inspired to come back and start doing you know rolling up your sleeves you just kind of get yourself inspired to come back and start doing, you know, rolling up your sleeves. Well, that's, that's the interesting thing about the 12 week year format is I don't plan it all out as like, these are the milestones I have to hit in the first four weeks. I'm going

to be working on this the next four weeks. I'll be working on that part of it. I identify the goals and I write them down every day on that piece of paper that I mentioned that, that I created. So I've got my, my three goals for the quarter. And then the way that you achieve those goals according to the 12-week year is you establish the habits. So the things that you do every single day. For me, the value is simply in identifying these are the goals that are important to me and then making sure that I create the habits. So if I'm going to create content for something, I need to be writing consistently. So I'm going to make writing for that thing a consistent habit. Or one of my goals this time is the Mac stock presentation. So making sure that I've got consistent time to build out my slide decks, to work on my presentation, to practice it, to create the screencasts that I need to embed, those sorts of things. And I think that that's all I need. Now, I could totally see people who do need to

script everything out. But in my experience, Dwight Eisenhower once said, plans are worthless, but planning is everything. So if I were to map out everything 12-week year, it's all going to get thrown out the window by the time I get back. The real value comes in just identifying, okay, this is the thing I want to do. This is what I got to do every day or consistently anyways, in order to get there. Well, Mike, you know what? You've inspired me. I'm going to, we, I live in Southern California, which is great because we have the ocean and we have the mountains and I love going up to Arrowhead and the local mountains. I think I'm going to go get a cabin for a day or a weekend and try this.

I don't want to promise between now and our next content show, but in the next month or two, this is going to happen in my life. I'll be talking to you offline to get more tips. Sure. You've got mountains and oceans. I'm a little bit jealous.

I can be in the mountains in an hour. I can be in the mountains in an hour. You've got the ideal setup for this. Yeah, I can be in the mountains in an hour. I can be on a surfboard in 30 minutes. So, yeah. One other thing I want to call out here that I've done the last couple times, and at first I was like, well, maybe this isn't that important, but I've seen value in it every time, is I make myself say no to at least one thing.

is I make myself say no to at least one thing. And like I said, what that does is it makes the, it creates enough margin for other things that are more in line with what I want to do, where I want to end up. You know, if you're working backwards and you had a plan for where you want to be in five years, just a vision for like, this is my ideal future. The things that you're doing now

have gotten you where you are, but they're not going to get you to where you want to go necessarily. So the more that you're doing now have gotten you where you are, but they're not going to get you to where you want to go necessarily. So the more that you work on yourself and develop your skills, I've found anyways, that there are other better opportunities that will present themselves, but you have to create the margin in order to say yes to those things. You won't even recognize those things are there unless you create that space first. So I make myself say no to at least one commitment that I have on my calendar, role, responsibility, whatever, every single time I go up. Yeah, I know there's so many books about productivity. I'm working on a productivity project for Max Barkey. Everybody's got this stuff going on, but in my mind, so much

of this boils down to putting space on your calendar. I mean, everybody wants to be productive, but so much of it is about saying no and just making room to do the things you love. And if you can figure that out, the rest of it kind of comes together, in my opinion. Yep, yep, definitely. This episode of The Free Agents is also brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move with Squarespace. Squarespace lets you easily create a website for your next idea with a unique domain, award-winning templates, and more. a website for your business, Squarespace can do that for you. That was one of the exciting things for me, Mike, as I was setting up my law practice is going on Squarespace, creating the account and start developing the website. It was like my therapy, you know, getting it together.

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We thank Squarespace for all their support of the show and also helping all those free agents out there get started with a beautiful website. So Mike, you had success with your personal journey. I'm a little jealous. I think I'm going to try and take you up and follow that on. I have looked straight in the face of failure the last couple of weeks, and I thought I should share the story. We talked on Free Agents a while back with Jason

about going on trips as a free agent and the challenges you face. I mean, quite often, you don't have a lot of people giving you support and the work keeps coming in while you're gone. And when Jason and I cover, we talked about some strategies about, you know, how do you do that? You know, in terms of putting a little time in every day to maintain things. So you come back and it's just not a dumpster fire of work as you return. But I had a unique experience the last couple of weeks.

I had a couple of things go wrong. And I guess wrong is the wrong word. I had a couple of things get kind of exciting on my business. And I launched the new podcast, the automators, which is, it's always a lot of work getting a new show launched. And I had a client get acquired, which is from the legal side, a lot of work. So I had this influx of work that I had to deal with over a couple of weeks. And as a result, my usual process was starting to fall behind, you know, because in addition to the influx of work, I still have the day-to-day stuff.

We still have free agents work to do. We still have day-to-day client work to do on the lawyer side. So all that stuff was happening. At the same time, I was over capacity because of a couple unique circumstances. And I saw on my calendar the whole time this trip was coming up. We went to a friend's wedding. If you're on Relay, we went to Mike's wedding. And then my wife and I, since we've been married 25 years, we were going all the way to London. We decided let's stay three or four days and be tourists for a couple of days. And I knew intellectually I was heading into a train wreck because I was already behind as we were leading up to the trip. And I don't know what went wrong, Mike. I, I thought that I would solve the problem on the trip. And I don't know what went wrong, Mike. I thought that I would solve

the problem on the trip. I got on the plane. I went through OmniFocus. I took some of the emergency or priority work and budgeted it into days. I did all the things I normally do when I take a work-related trip, like when I go up to San Jose or as we record this, I'm about to head out to Chicago for a few days. I'm very good at getting work done on work-related trips, but on this, which was entirely almost a leisure trip, I just fell apart. Yeah, that's an interesting challenge because you, like you said, the thing in the back of your head, you're always saying, like, I can squeeze out a few hours here or there to do these things. But my experience is the same, I think, as yours, that it's a totally different mindset, totally different mode. It's way harder to break away from, in my case, maybe

it's family time. You know, we're going to go up to the cabin for a week, break away from the family for a couple of hours in the morning, it feels exponentially harder to do that on a quote-unquote vacation or a personal trip than it does when you're working and you're just trying to get something done before you have client meetings or something. Yeah, I mean, the whole time I was thinking, so on the plane, I set myself tasks to do every day.

I'd given myself a couple hours of work and I fully intended to stay on top of email. But then once we got there, first you're dealing with the wedding, which was kind of over a weekend. So I felt like I could kind of let things go. But then we had three days of kind of visiting sites in England and underlying all of this is we've been married 25 years and we have no kids. We rarely go out on trips like, we've never done this alone, like a trip of this nature. And the point of being here is to be with each other and to spend time with each other. And honestly, Daisy is more important than just about all this stuff. So like, so it's not a big sacrifice to say, okay, for three or four

days now, we're going to, I'm going to just focus on her and not worry about this stuff. And I'll deal with it when I get back. And that's what I did. And I was very good at that part. You know, I didn't let it like drag me down while I was there, but I knew in the back of my head that I left with things already kind of wobbly and I was going to get back and it was going to be a big mess. And I'm not used to having that problem because I'm usually pretty good about being organized and saying no and allocating work. So things get done on time, you know, the trains keep running. And when I got back, boy, did I have a mess. That's interesting. I wonder, you know,

at the beginning of this conversation, we were talking about the things that you can do, things you can't do, things you shouldn't be doing. I wonder, and I don't think you probably have an answer to this right now, but if you were to think through the whole process, how much effort does it take for you to keep the trains running while you're gone? And then are there things that you can delegate to somebody else to keep the trains running? Because I've had the same experience you have where you know this stuff is going to pile up on the back end, but in the moment you almost think, oh, it's not that big a deal because you underestimate how bad it's going to be in the future for the present moment.

But I think that there's definitely some things you just can't get away from. But I also think that a lot of times we're our own worst enemies when it comes to this sort of thing. And maybe a little bit of thinking about the system that's in place and how we can tweak it, you know, maybe next time, not that you're going to have another 25 year anniversary, but you know, next time you're in that situation, maybe a little bit of thinking about how you can tweak the systems ahead of time, maybe provides a little bit of relief. Yeah, I'm finally digging out now. I'm, you know, I'm caught up with email, and I've got now the projects that need, you know, the emergency projects when I got done are done. But I just don't feel good about myself.

And I don't feel good about my ability to live up to commitments. You know, when I tell people I'm going to get something by a certain amount of time, it's very important to me that I usually match, you know, meet those commitments. And I'm getting there, but the takeaway for me is I actually sat down and wrote some notes to myself in day one last night about this whole process, about what went wrong. And what really went wrong was at the beginning, I put my head in the sand. I knew going into this, this was going to be a mess. And I also knew, or I should have known, that this is a trip about celebrating our marriage and celebrating other friends' marriage and that I should have not expected to get anything done. And,

and my big takeaway is I need to get better at working with some other people to manage some of this stuff for me when I'm not available. Yeah. I just, you know, I, it's been hard for me for the longest time to delegate stuff because like a lot of free agents, I have this weird, selfish, independent streak that is always my worst enemy. But I have to be better at handing this stuff off.

Or if I want to keep doing trips like that, I'm going to have to find a way to hand some of this stuff off. That's the hard part, though, right? Because this is your baby. So in your head, you're thinking, A, like we talked about earlier, no one can do it as well as I can. Or B, no one's going to care as much about doing this the right way as I do. And that's a mental hurdle that you can overcome. But in the moment, you're just like, oh, this is just the way things are. And so you settle for those things. Even when you come back from a situation and you think about things and maybe you're in that situation where you're digging through things and you're saying

to yourself, this is horrible. I'm going to make sure this never happens again. And then as soon as you get a little bit of relief, you forget about it and then it happens again. That's why I wrote notes to myself because I'm gonna make myself go back and read it you know as i'm in the middle of the abyss but but you're right i mean for a lot of the stuff i do when the stuff that gets published at max sparky can only be written by me and you know the the screencast i make can only be actually made by me that's the whole brand really and And then, um, the legal stuff is similar. A client wants me to review a contract. I'm the only person that can do that, but there are other pieces that could have been handled, you know, uh, some day-to-day

administrative email stuff. Some of the, you know, there are pieces that could have been handled that I just haven't handed off because I'm too, um, I'm too anal retentive too. And this trip was just a really good reminder to me that I need to take, take this more seriously and find a way to get some of those extra pieces off my plate. And then the next time I'm heading into a trip and I'm behind already, I think the other thing I could have done is been more honest with myself and everybody around me about what they could expect from me in the next week or two. Maybe I should have just owned it and said, look, next week I'm out. You know, it's just, you're just not going to, everything's going to have to wait. If it's a true dire emergency, I'll make time, but there's

very few of those that I have to deal with. Yeah, that's, that's hard. You know, it's, it's hard personally to establish those boundaries, but it's even harder when you have other people that have expectations surrounding certain things where in your case, right away at the beginning, you're talking about you're going there to celebrate a friend's wedding, you're celebrating a 25-year anniversary. So those are already two groups of people and your wife and everybody else that you're going to that wedding for who their agenda, you know, is going to be completely against any work that, that you're going to try and get done. But in your head, you're like, well, I can make this work. I can keep all these, these plates spinning. And it's hard to say, you know what, I got to pick one or

the other. There's no way I can do both. Yeah yeah and the other thing that was harder for me on this trip is uh the jet lag just kicked my butt worse than it ever has in my life so you know i was i was counting on myself being able to wake up at 5 a.m and work for a couple hours and it just was i i slept one day on this trip for 11 hours i have never slept for 11 hours in my entire life but i slept one day on this trip for 11 hours. I have never slept for 11 hours in my entire life, but I did one day in this trip. I'm a big fan of sleep, but even I've not slept 11 hours, I don't think. Yeah, I didn't even know it was possible for me to sleep that long, but I did. Go figure. But yeah, so this has been a problem for me.

I haven't really unwound it all. You're catching me kind of still in the middle of the storm. I'm nearly caught up. I'm definitely caught up with all the, you know, house on fire type emergencies, but I'm not back to my usual kind of status quo position where I've got, I feel like I'm in control of everything going on. Like just this morning, I had a couple of clients ask me to do a few things that are going to take longer than they normally would, because I'm still digging my way out of this thing a little bit. But the big takeaway for me is I thought I had travel and being a free agent figured out, and it turns out I didn't. And I think that's a real hard part about this job when you're out on your own, is that you don't have people back at the office to cover for you when you're gone. And that's not true for every free agent, but it's true for a lot of them. And you've got to take that problem really seriously because the other option of just not taking time off is not an option either. Right. Yeah. And I would also say if you find

yourself in a situation, you're beating yourself up because you overcommitted to something, don't take it easy on yourself. Like, it's not a huge deal that you made a mistake. You can work through it. Yeah, maybe it's going to suck for a little while. But the big thing is to figure out how you can avoid doing that again. It's when you do this over and over and over again that it really starts to take a toll. It's interesting for me because we record these

shows in blocks. So this show will be published two or three weeks after the event, but I got back from Europe and then I'm home for a week and digging out, but then I'm going to take a Friday to Monday trip to Chicago for the Mac stock where Mike and I are going to be hanging out together. And, um, so that you know i'm i'm still digging out but i'm i'm going on another trip anyway so it's like you don't learn your lesson but the but this will be different that one's kind of my fault i talked you into it i feel so i think it is your fault mike uh we can blame mike but the uh but i don't i don't have nearly as much um i'm not nearly as anxious about this trip as I was about the other one because, number one, I don't have things blowing up as I'm going out the door, which I did on the last trip.

And this is not a let's celebrate being married for 25 years trip. And Mike Schmitz and the gang at MaxDoc is going to be perfectly fine if I disappear for three or four hours a day to take care of stuff. But I'm still there for the rest of the day for them. It'll be fine. And I think I'll be able to get through this no problem. But this last trip for me, I think it was a combination of the problems leading up to it or I guess the opportunities and challenges leading up to it that took a lot more time than normal and the nature of the trip that combined to something I had not experienced before and it hasn't been it was a great time going but it's been a real challenge for me getting out of it well there is light at the end of the tunnel yes getting there and you know what else is is

tough is um uh just as the week that i return my daughter's moving out of the house which is the first this is the first one moving out of the house for me and uh you know i you know how some people are like i can't wait till my kid's 18 and they're out of here i've never been that person and you know she's actually older than 18. And I drove her up there. I was up at her apartment with her on Sunday or a few days ago. I was up there with her and I was driving home alone, just crying in the car like a complete bozo. But I couldn't help myself. So I think I've got stuff going on there, too.

So, you know, it is. Yeah, well, I've got five kids at home. My daughter, though, is nine months old. So, I'm a ways away from experiencing that specific situation. You think you are. You think you are. But you're not. Yeah.

My daughter was nine months old two days ago. And now she's not. Yeah. I know I'm going to be a wreck too. Yeah. So, next month, I'm going to be a wreck too. So, yeah. So, uh, so next month I,

I'm, I'm deep in, you know, so the downside is I'm losing her to her apartment, but the upside is I'm going to have my new Mac Sparky headquarters in place, hopefully next month. So, um,

there's a thread over in the discourse forums and, uh, talk. My power users.com. It's in the uncategorized category of the Mac Power Users thread. But I lay out, I put in my 3D plans for my office,

a whole bunch of stuff in there. Free agents, please weigh in. Let me know what you think because I'm about to spend money as I go forward with this. And next month, I'm going to be weighing in on the whole experience

as a free agent of setting up your own office and what I did on that. Yeah, I'm going to have to chime in on that because I recently went through that, finished off my office, which I'm sure we could do probably multiple shows on that topic alone. Yeah, I don't want to get too, you know, navel-gazy about that. But I definitely have, I think we can talk about it for an episode. And I'm really looking forward to it. I didn't realize how badly I need my own office until recently. Because I've been working out of a, we have a big master bedroom, and I've just carved out a corner of it. And it's been fine. But then I realized now, no, it's not fine.

I really need my own space and uh if if sam hadn't moved out i probably would have gone and rented space somewhere but um anyway well that'll be next month so we can look forward to that all right if you're a freelancer you also need a system for sending out invoices. And that leads into our next sponsor, which is FreshBooks. To all the freelancers out there, you know how important it is to make smart decisions for your business.

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required. All you have to do is go to freshbooks.com slash free agents and enter free agents in the how did you hear about us section. So that's freshbooks.com slash free agents and enter free space agents in the how did you hear about us section. Thank you FreshBooks for supporting free agents everywhere. So Mike, we had some good listener feedback this month. Ben wrote in and he talked about eating your frog. Yeah, we got a lot of feedback. And I really liked the form how it breaks it all down by episode. So if you have specific feedback for a particular episode, you can do that now. But yeah, Ben had some feedback specifically about eating frogs, which I knew was going to be an interesting topic to get some feedback on.

Yeah, and Mike makes a good point there. Please go give this feedback in the forum because it makes it really easy for us to get you into the show that way. So Ben wrote, mostly I agree with the idea of doing difficult thing first to get it out of the way, but I think that it actually shows the value of having a framework to the day that is rigid but not very overly specific. For instance, 6.30 a.m. to 9.00 a.m. is education, learning time, 9.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. is at my desk working, and 5.00 p.m. to 9.00 p.m. is family time. No matter what you do, you can't get away from things like a server going down at 3.00 a.m. to 5 p.m. is at my desk working and 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. is family time. No matter what you do, you can't get away from things like a server going down at 3 a.m. and needing to be dealt with right now. But by having a high-level framework to the work types to time, it allows

for processing of the day. And is education the hardest part of his day? No. But it means that rather than getting to the end of the day and kicking himself for not slotting it in, he can be happy that he knows it was done. I completely agree with this. And he brings up a good point because he mentions education not being like the hardest thing, but maybe that's the most valuable thing. So when we talked about eating your frog, we talked about doing the hardest thing under the assumption really that that is going to be the most valuable thing a lot of times. But maybe the most valuable thing for you isn't going to be the hardest thing and that's okay. Really what the principle is you got to do the valuable things at the beginning of your day when you've got the most attention, energy, willpower, mental resources that you can devote to them because it's going to result in a better product,

a better result. And that's the beautiful thing about the framework is because it's going to result in a better product, a better result. And that's the beautiful thing about the framework is that it's flexible. You can slide in for yourself what your most valuable thing is. I know for myself and probably for a lot of people out there, the frog eating to me is not necessarily about what's hardest, but that thing that eats at your guts if at the end of the, you didn't do it. And I feel like that's very common, whether it is something on your side hustle, or maybe it's just a really hard thing you need to do in your day job. If you know, you're going to get to the end of the day and judge yourself for not having done that, maybe whether it's write a chapter of your novel or, I don't know,

finish the report for the boss. Whatever it is that you think is going to eat at your guts, that's the thing you should do. You can define for yourself what that is. There was also feedback from Chris regarding eating his frog. He mentioned that, listening to this episode, I realized I'm eating a frog every day. So he's already doing it. It's not really job or side hustle related, though. First thing I do every morning after I get up is to exercise. With the shape I used to be in before I started this habit, it probably has a bigger effect on my future than anything job related that I could do with that time. There's a lot in that statement, but that's another example of how you can define your own frog. I think for a lot of people,

exercise or physical fitness, taking care of yourself, protecting the golden goose, that is a very valid form of frog eating. Yeah. Because every day I do a hike and some body weight exercises and some meditation. And I was toying with the idea of just pushing that to the evening because the morning time is so golden. Usually I get up and work for a while, then I exercise after I've done a couple hours of work. I toyed with the idea and even tried for a few weeks to push that exercise and meditation to later in the day. And I found that I just never got it done if I pushed it later. And so to a certain extent for me, I eat the frog that way as well.

Because I've just accepted that there's a time that I have to do that if I expect it to get done. Absolutely. Chris also had a plus one for the Herman Miller Embody chair with some great advice. So I want to share this. He said, if folks are looking for one of these or a similar high-end chair, I'd recommend finding a local retailer. They often have loaners that you can try out. I was able to use the Embody and a Steelcase gesture for about a week each, and the trial definitely changed my buying decision. The other advantage is that, at least with Herman Miller, the local retailer has access to all sorts of discount programs that can substantially reduce the price, even lowering it below what you can get it for online. The most

applicable for free agents is probably a small business discount, but I was able to get a discount for engineering professionals. A bit of a stretch in my case, but hey, I'll take it. That's a great tip. Yeah, another one I would give is take a look at the, you know, the Craigslist or, you know, recycling side of your choice.

Like where I live in Orange County, there's a lot of startup companies that fail. And for some reason, startups, especially when they get any sort of decent funding, buy really fancy furniture. And a lot of times you can find them used with companies that didn't make it. Yeah, that's a great tip too. I don't have any companies that are going out of business near me. Yeah, same. I'm not sure where you are, if that happens as much. But keep your eyes open. You can get deals on those things, too. You don't have to buy it new. I think a Herman Miller chair that's a year old is not going to feel a lot

different than one that's brand new. Yep, definitely. One other piece of feedback here from Deacon Blues. I think it's how you say this. Yeah, I love the name. Yeah. Yeah. So I won't read the whole thing. It's fairly long. But basically, Deacon resonated with the discussion regarding the imposter syndrome. And there's one phrase at the end of this, which I think is great. We're all free agents to some extent. And this podcast can really speak to all of us for all of us. What's interesting is right after this, I saw somebody had posted a poll on whether you are a free agent, you want to be a free agent, or you're happy working for the man. There's a lot of people in the free agents community that are happy working for the man.

And I think that that's great. That's perfectly okay. Because free agency is really not about obtaining a certain job title or a certain occupation. It's really about designing and creating the life that you want to live, taking control for your future. And a lot of the principles we talk about this show, you can be, in essence, a free agent while you're working for the man in some ways. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. And we want to hear those stories. So that's the other piece of feedback I want to call out here is that we've got a thread in the free agents forum where you can submit your own free agent stories. And I posted when I created that thread that it does a couple of things. One, it helps you to talk through your own story. It encourages you because you can look at

how far you've come and the growth that's happened since maybe you first made that leap. But secondly, it really inspires a lot of other people who maybe are in the same situation and they're thinking about taking that leap, but they're too scared to do it. Having somebody else chime in and say, hey, I did it. No, that gives people the encouragement that they need to step over the line and not necessarily like quit their job. I know you've mentioned like, we don't want to tell people, hey, just quit your job, go do your passion. That's not what we're saying, but really just start moving in the direction of the thing that really is inside of you, like your yes. Agreed. And we are going to be picking from some of those stories with maybe some segments or even

small smegas segments on the show going forward. So share it. We want to read them and help inspire your fellow free agents. All that's over on the forum. I really encourage you to join the forum. I think that I want to make that a nice safe place for people to talk about this stuff, even more so than it ever was on Facebook. And once again, that's over at talk.macpowerusers.com. Awesome. And if you want to connect with the show, it is at freeagentsfm on Twitter, I believe. That's correct.

It's on the web at relay.fm slash freeagents. Anything I'm forgetting? No. Thanks to our sponsors for today. That's our friends over at Squarespace, Hover, and FreshBooks. And we'll see you all in two weeks. Thank you.