Focused - 55: The Math Works

Episode Date: September 4, 2018

Mike and David cover a variety of Free Agent topics including getting enough sleep, staying motivated, and David makes a big decision about his transportation.

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, a podcast about being an independent worker in a digital age. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Good. We've got a lot to cover today.

It's one of the episodes where it's just the two of us talking through our issues and a few tips. So I guess we should just get started with it. And this month we thought we'd talk about sleep. Right. I do want to point out, though, that it is cool now since we recorded the last content show, I've gotten to meet you at Maxstock, which makes these recordings a little bit different, at least in my head. I don't know why but it was weird because um uh this is the first time i ever co-hosted a show with someone that i hadn't met in person first but i just felt like you and i we had talked a lot on the phone and we had this kind of good connection but uh having met you and

your beautiful wife and uh hung out and i think we ate pancakes together one day that was fun you know had a good time fancy coffee yeah yeah and it was really nice because there were a bunch of free agents fans at MaxDocs. We got to meet a bunch of listeners and we got to do that more often. You know, hopefully in the future, maybe we can do something together, a live show or get a bunch of free agents together. It would be a lot of fun to get a group of us together somewhere. That would be a lot of fun. Yeah. And I think that that's an interesting idea that would have a lot of benefit because one of the things that people get, I know out of listening to this show is just the encouragement from other

people who are at their own spot on, on their free agent journey. You know, you, you get people, you get people in the same place and swapping stories. It, it encourages you that,

yeah, this is possible and yeah, I can do this. And sometimes that's all it takes for you to step out there and make something happen is someone to believe in you. So if we can do that digitally, you know, through your AirPods or whatever, then glad we can help. Yeah. And you can find other free agents over at talk.macpowerusers.com in the free agents room. There's a bunch of people there. But yeah, I do like the idea. Maybe someday we'll have to do something together. Maybe, I don't know, maybe we can do it based out of MaxDoc.

Sometimes we both go to Illinois, we can get a bunch of free agents there. I don't know, that's food for thought. But today we thought it would be fun to talk about something we've never really talked about before, but is very important if you're going to make this free agent thing work over time, is you have to get enough sleep. Yeah, this is something that worked its way into my presentation at MaxTalk even because I use technology and apps and things like that

to track both the amount of sleep that I'm getting and also the quality of my sleep. And I shared at MaxTalk, didn't go too much into it, but I've got a personal reason for this. When I was 18, I was diagnosed with epilepsy. I actually had a seizure standing in line at a McDonald's. And one of the things that can trigger an epileptic seizure is not getting enough sleep or not getting enough good sleep. The problem with epilepsy, you know, all the tests that they did, they hook you up to the

EEG monitors and basically they monitor your brain activity and they can tell you if you're having a seizure right now so there really is like no in my case uh leading indicators for this there's no warning signs it just is going to happen yeah and i don't want it to affect the quality of my life and as long as i take certain precautions then i can make sure that it doesn't um so sleep is one of those things that i keep a careful eye on i've done a a bunch of research on this topic. And that's kind of the thing in the productivity space anyways, right now, it's kind of a hot topic is this whole idea of sleep, because for a while, there has been, I don't know of another way to say this other than kind of like this, this macho attitude where I don't need this, I don't need that much sleep, I can get by on four hours,

you know, always hustling, hashtag hustle. hustle. And I think that that's really dangerous. And a lot of research has been done, which shows that you're just kind of fooling yourself. And it's going to come to a point where your body just physically can't keep up. In fact, I read a book one time by Arianna Huffington, where she went through that exact thing. She was not sleeping enough. And then all of a sudden she blacked out at her desk one time. And that was her wake up calls. Like I got to really pay attention to this stuff. Yeah. And you know, the thing is, I think it's obvious when you're getting like two or three hours of sleep that you're non-functional during the day. But I think the part that people have to be aware of, and there is research on this, is when you're

getting, instead of two or three this, is when you're getting, instead of two or three hours of sleep, you're getting five or six hours of sleep. And you think that you're doing okay with that. I guess maybe there's a few oddballs out there that can actually pull it off. And that's the problem, right? There's one out of 100 that can do that. But you think that you're doing okay on limited sleep and you're not. And it shows in your work product whether you see it or not. Yeah, everybody looks at like the Gary Vaynerchuks and they're like, oh, I can do that. That guy's never sleeping, but he seems to be okay. And the studies show it's like one or 2% of the people can actually do that. But like 85% of people think that they can do that. So there's a big discrepancy there and you really need to know your own body.

And that's kind of what being diagnosed with epilepsy did for me is it forced me to pay attention to my own body and keep a real careful eye on this sort of stuff. The average person needs five sleep cycles. And a sleep cycle is when you just fall asleep, you're kind of in a light state of sleep. There's several different stages as you get down into the deep sleep, which is the rapid eye movement sleep. That's where all the restorative stuff happens. If you never get to the REM sleep, then it really doesn't do a whole lot for you. And you need to get all the way down to the REM sleep and then all the way back up into the light sleep. That's a whole sleep cycle. The average person needs five of those. It typically takes about an hour and a half to get

through one of those sleep cycles. The app that I use is actually called Sleep Cycle, and it tracks that based off of either the microphone on your iPhone. I believe it's an Android app as well. So you can put it on your nightstand next to your bed and your breathing patterns will change. It will pick that up and it will determine what stage of sleep you're in. Or you can stick it like right on right under right by your pillow and then your movements because when you're in that rapid eye movement, sleep, your body is kind of, for lack of a better term, convulsing, I guess like it's it's doing a lot and it measures those things. And that's how it can tell what stage of sleep you're in.

I don't put it right next to my head because I'm afraid I'm going to knock it on the floor doing that. But what this app gives me is just a real quick screenshot of like a visual graph of how I slept during the night, how many sleep cycles I actually got, and then a total time that I've slept. So it's not something that I put a whole lot of stock in. In my opinion, it's not really the medical data that I'm going to live or die by,

but it's going to give me a snapshot. It's going to give me enough information to make an educated decision about whether I am getting enough sleep and whether I'm getting good sleep. And that's kind of the way that I do this. But there's other apps and tools you can use too. And I think they did an update recently where it also can look at data from the Apple Watch.

If you've got a recent Apple Watch, you can absolutely sleep with it on. I do it all the time and track sleep that way. And then you just drop it in a charger while you're taking a shower once or twice during the day and you'll keep it topped off. But I do think this is important. I know in my own experience that I see, I can see in myself, and maybe as I've got older, it's even more apparent to me where I get low energy and it's always related to sleep. You know, it just always is. And I've got a pretty regular routine about when I go to bed and when I wake up.

But whenever I throw off a little bit, it does affect me. And the quality of work goes down. I do this weird thing where I time block a lot of my bigger projects because that's one way that I make sure I get them done. And as I'm doing my planning for the week ahead of me, I was just doing this yesterday, I'll just take all the time blocks and I'll open up, um, I'll open up fantastic Cal on my iMac in the two week view on a full 27 inch screen. It's like crazy, right? This like two weeks stretched across, you know, this massive screen. But then when I put all those blocks, you know, for the Smith contract and the free agents preparation and just all the stuff that I

absolutely must get done or have really committed to. And then I started assigning those blocks out for the week. But when I'm collecting them, what I do is I put them usually like on Sunday at 1am. And so I've just got, you know, a Sunday from 1am to like 8am. These blocks that I want to assign to the weekend on busy weeks, maybe it's Sunday and Monday, you know, I've just got that, like in this holding place. And sometimes I look at it like, man, wouldn't it be great if I could just get up at 1am and just knock all this stuff out, you know, and have a normal day, right? And but you know, the problem is sleep,

and you got to account for it. Yeah. And a lot of people take that attitude to their, their work, especially I think, when you're trying to become a free agent. Last episode, we talked to Casey Liss, and he shared how he has trouble saying no to things. And a lot of that is this belief that I've got to make this work. And that compulsion can cause you to keep working all the time. But the problem is that if you never disconnect and you don't prioritize sleep first, what you're really doing is you're robbing from future you. If you have too much work or even if it's just a imaginary compulsion and no one's really got a deadline forcing you to do these things, but your mind is always going there. Like I've always got more to do. There's always going to be more work for you to do. But if you always try to squeeze in one more thing and you keep pushing it and you

sleep less, that's going to make the next time you sit down to do your work, you're going to be more ineffective. There's a principle from Stephen Covey, sharpening the saw. And I think Abraham Lincoln said it this way, like if I have eight hours to chop down a tree, I'm going to spend the first six sharpening the axe. You know, if you prioritize sleep, really what you're doing is you're sharpening your axe so that when you do sit down to do a lot of like the deep work or the creative work that is what a lot of free agents do, that especially, like that's going to benefit from being well rested, well prepared, having all of your mental energy, willpower, your faculties to direct towards this thing. Having the time to do

the task is kind of entry level, in my opinion. You can create the time to do something. Maybe it's going to take you, quote unquote, three hours to do this project. But if you sit down to work on this project for three hours, you've got the three hours carved out on your calendar, but you have no energy, you're still not going to follow through and do it. You're going to find yourself watching Netflix or YouTube or something like that. Yeah. And the sleep stuff really impacts that. So that's the part where I think a lot of people are fooling themselves. They think they can get away with five hours of sleep at night. And what you don't realize is that thing that you just did that took you two hours,

if you had had eight hours of sleep, it would have taken you one hour. And so you actually get a net gain by sleeping, getting enough sleep. You know, if you get whatever, you know, and there's apps and books and things you can read, but you know, for most people it's seven or eight hours in that, in that ballpark. And if you get enough, the work that used to take you three hours may get done in one hour and it works, you know, it sounds crazy. It's kind of the same thing as multitasking where everybody's like, oh, that works. I can do two things at once. But then when you look at the studies on it, it's never true. Yeah, exactly. Once you face the actual numbers, you see how ineffective it really is. And even like you said, maybe you're not sleeping

two to three hours a night. Maybe you're just five or six hours. So you're cutting it a little bit short every night. That actually adds up. That's a concept known as sleep debt. And if you accumulate enough sleep debt, it's the same thing as just not sleeping an entire day. Like that stuff adds up and you can't just catch up on the weekends. You know, you have to prioritize this if you really want to move the needle and get to that state where you are in the best place to do the valuable work that you need to do as a free agent. Yeah. And the thing about that part for me, and to me, I guess that that's my one message in this segment is that is so insidious because you don't notice it. You know, when you have that sleep debt accumulating, you don't see it in yourself. If you only got two hours of sleep,

you know, if you have a baby and we're up all night, you know it from the, from the moment you start the day, you're just a wreck the whole day. But when you are under a lesser amount of sleep debt, it affects you and you don't know it. And that's when I think you get into trouble. Yeah. And if you've got a newborn, I mean, sometimes there's nothing you can do about that. I mean, you have to get up and you have to take care of it. But sometimes you're your own worst enemy. One of the things that there has been back and forth on the internet about the effectiveness of this, but I wholeheartedly believe that there is an impact from the blue light that you get from viewing your screens. So if you have a,

and Apple's taken steps actually to fix this with, is it Night Shift, I believe, on iOS and macOS, which is a step in the right direction, but it's still not nearly as effective, in my opinion, as Flux, which is a free Mac app, where it changes the whole tint of your screen instead of the blue light, which tells your body, hey, it's still daylight. You don't need to be producing the melatonin, which is going to help you fall asleep when you actually get into bed. It changes it from a blue light to an orangish tint. It's kind of like a candle light sort of a thing, which at first, if you see it, you're like, oh my gosh, I can't work on my devices when they look like that. But it's not that bad. You get used to it. And in my opinion,

it really does help you make the switch when you are done working at night that you can actually go to bed. So really what it's doing is it's kind of telling your body that the sun actually has gone down if you're using your computer after dark or your devices after dark. And then it makes the transition into falling asleep a lot easier. And if you've not done this, you know, you've probably been in that place where you're sitting watching TV at night or you're looking at your phone. All of a sudden it's 1030 and you're going to go to bed, but you have trouble falling asleep. It's because that blue light, like your body doesn't think it's as late as it really is. Yeah. Let's talk about that a little bit so we can help our free agents stay free agents.

What are some good tips to kind of deal with this sleep issue? I think the first one is when you're scheduling yourself, be realistic. You know, like when I'm doing that assignment of those blocks, I should not be giving myself tasks that start at 4 a.m. because I know that I'm not going to go to bed early enough to allow me to wake up at 4 a.m. and be productive. You know, so be realistic about the way you schedule your time would be one tip I would give you in terms of getting enough sleep. Yep, I definitely agree with that one.

I also think that scheduling and thinking ahead how you're going to spend your time is really valuable. So you talked about how you've got your two-week calendar. Even if you just started planning the next day, the night before, that would really help. And then putting into that schedule a shutdown routine or a hard stop time where this is where I'm going to stop working. That's easy when you've got a job because you're watching a clock, you're punching out at 5 p.m. or whatever. I should say it's easier. I mean, sometimes you are going to get pulled in and you're going to stay late and work overtime or whatever. But when you're a free agent, there's nobody telling you, hey, you should be working.

There's just a constant voice in the back of your head, which is always telling you, hey, you should be working. There's just a constant voice in the back of your head, which is always telling you, hey, you should be working. Don't screw this up. You need to work to make sure that you can continue to do this. And that is counterproductive. This is something that I struggle with. Having that shutdown routine where at the end of the day, I'm going to close my computer at 5 p.m., whatever.

I'm not going to open it again. I'm not going to look at email. I'm not going to do anything work related. I think that's a big thing. And then the next step of that would be an evening routine. So just like you're going to disconnect from your workday as you shut down your devices, disconnect from the day itself and have an evening routine which helps you transition into a state of sleep. So you're not just doing the things that are going to keep you awake. And then at 1030, okay, instantly now I'm going to go to bed and expect to fall asleep right away. If you build in a routine, maybe you, you read,

or maybe you listen to some soft music at 9pm. Maybe you've got fancy hue lights that change color when it's time for you to go to bed. Those are all things that you can do to kind of facilitate an evening routine and get your body ready. Katie on the Mac Power Users was talking recently how she has a home automation that turns on a fan that she likes to keep the room cool, but it's also white noise generation for her every night at 10 o'clock. And if she's somewhere else in the house and she hears the fan go on, it's like her brain says, okay, go to bed, time to go to bed. And, um, you know, it can be as hacky as that, but I do think some kind of routine helps. Another thing that, uh, you could do to help yourself get enough sleep because you're a free agent. Um, this isn't true for everybody, but if you're working from home or

if you have control, uh, take a nap. I, uh, I, you know, I was, was, when I was a kid growing up, I was obsessed with Winston Churchill, you know? And so when I went over to London a while back, I was able to go into his bunker, you know, they have the bunker where he was when the bombings were going on. And in his office, he had a cot and they were talking about how if he had a big decision, he would dismiss everybody and go take a nap and then come back and give him his decision. And I think naps are great. I've been doing them for a long time. Even when I was working at the jobby job, I would disappear for a half hour because I rarely take like a full lunch. I eat light lunches and often at my desk, but I would just disappear and go into the parking garage and just put the seat back in my car and

take a nap. And for me, the trick is 35 minutes. I can't take a long nap or, you know, if I go to the full REM cycle, it messes me up. But if I sit down at one o'clock, close my eyes for 35 minutes, because it takes me about five minutes to fall asleep. And I figure about a 30 minute nap out of that. I, uh, it really helps me through the afternoon. Yeah, absolutely. I've never been a big napper. The thing for me is I have trouble falling asleep quickly in the middle of the day. But from some of the stuff that I've been researching on the topic, it's really not, like you said, you're not getting a whole REM cycle or sleep cycle in when you take those short power naps anyways. And so even just the laying down and letting your body dial back a little bit, there's a lot of restorative stuff that happens

from that. And it's not replacing a whole night's sleep or something. If you only did get a couple of hours of sleep the night before, a 20-minute nap is not going to help you make up for that. couple of hours of sleep the night before a 20 minute nap is not going to help you make up for that. Yeah, but it does. It does help. And another thing that I saw recently that helps, which I know we've talked about this, I'm not sure if we talked about it on this show, but we both have a meditation ritual. Meditation actually helps you overcome insomnia. So that helps you fall asleep faster. But it also if you didn't get enough sleep, there's research that shows that it can actually make up for some of that stuff if you just spend 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation. Yeah, and I feel like both the meditation and the nap thing, it's easy to stress yourself out about

that stuff. You know, like, like, I know people like you say, well, I won't take a nap because I can't actually fall asleep. And occasionally that happens to me. I'll lay down and take a nap and my head is racing. And then I just tell myself, I say, you know what? It's okay not to fall asleep today. I think that taking 30 minutes to lay and relax is still going to be good for you. And so I just kind of take the stress off myself. I give myself permission to not fall asleep, if that makes sense.

And you know what happens immediately after that? You fall asleep. I fall asleep. Right. But I think that helps. But I do think, you know, well-rested is well-armed and figuring this stuff out. And the other thing is, as a free agent, you've got flexibility. You know, maybe you're not a morning person. You know, I know that that's the popular mythos is you go to bed at nine and you wake up at five 30 or something. And you're just, you know, the super productive person. But I know people like I have a friend

that works for Facebook and I think she goes to bed at like 2am and she doesn't go into work for, you know, till after lunch. And she's very successful and very productive. I mean, so everybody's different, you know, and if you're a free agent, that does give you some flexibility to play around with that. But I don't think for the vast, vast majority of us, let's just say all of us, so nobody tries to play cute with this. You need to get enough sleep to do your best work. you need to get enough sleep to do your best work yep absolutely the the basic principle here is understand your own body and then prioritize your personal health because if if you don't have your health it makes everything else that you have to do quote unquote a lot lot harder yeah and you and the math works if you get eight hours of sleep as opposed to six, you're going to get those two hours

back in productivity, I think, immediately. Yep, absolutely. And if you're listening to the show and you're a six-hour sleeper, just try it for a week. Just try it for a week. Give yourself eight hours of sleep. And at the end of the week, see if you don't feel like you're a little more productive every day. That's been my experience with just about everybody that I've convinced

that they need to sleep more is they think that the level that they're functioning at, that's 100%. And then they do start getting enough sleep and they're shocked at how much more productive they can be. Yeah. Yeah. Another thing you can do to sleep better is to have a nice mattress. And this episode of Free Agents is brought to you by our friends at Casper. I actually have a Casper. I love it. We sleep on it every night. And Casper is the company that is focused on sleep. They are dedicated to making you exceptionally comfortable one night at a time. You spend a third of your life, ideally, as we're talking about in this episode, getting enough sleep. Okay, if you spend a third of your life doing anything, you'd want to make sure it's the best that it can possibly be. And

that is why you need Casper. Casper mattresses are perfectly designed for humans with engineering to soothe and support your natural geometry. It's got all the right support in all the right places. One of the reviews that I saw when my wife and I were looking at a Casper mattress said something like, I sleep like I'm dead. And we laughed at it at the time. And then after we got our Casper mattress, we're like, oh yeah, that's actually really accurate because the quality of our sleep just improves so much. So what goes into making a Casper mattress so comfortable? Well, they combine multiple supportive memory foams for a quality mattress with just the right sink and just the right bounce. And this is another thing that my wife and I typically prefer different types of mattresses. I like to have it a lot more firm. She likes it a lot more soft, but the Casper is perfect for both of us. Casper mattresses are

designed and developed in the US and their breathable design helps you regulate your body temperature throughout the night. And with over 20,000 reviews and an average rating of 4.8 stars, Casper is very quickly becoming the internet's favorite mattress. You can be sure of your purchase with Casper's 100 night risk-free sleep on it trial. They deliver it directly to your door. And if for any reason you don't love it, they have a hassle-free return policy. This kind of blew my mind at first because when you get a Casper, it comes in this little box. It's an impossibly small box. You're like, there's no way there's a full mattress in there.

You open it up, you cut it open, and the mattress just kind of fills the room. And it's kind of a unique unboxing experience. And then you don't have to worry about getting rid of it because they have this hassle-free return policy. And always in the back of my mind was, what are they going to do when they come pick this up? Like if I bring a king-size mattress upstairs into an apartment with a narrow hallway, how are they going to get it out of there? But you don't have to worry about that. And as I mentioned, this has really helped improve my sleep experience. Sleep is really

important to me. I track the quality of my sleep. I was not tracking the quality of my sleep before we got our Casper mattress, before I really got serious about this stuff. But I absolutely love our Casper mattress and we can't imagine sleeping on anything else. In fact, if we go somewhere, we can't wait to get back to our Casper mattress because we know we're going to get a good night's sleep. You can get $50 towards select mattresses right now by visiting casper.com slash free agents and using the code free agents it's all one word free agents at checkout terms and conditions apply that's casper.com slash free agents and the offer code free agents all one word at checkout we thank casper for their support of free agents and all of relay fm you know we uh my daughter

moved out in july and we got her a new Casper mattress. And she didn't because the place is in L.A. and she was going back and forth all the time. So we just had it delivered to the house. And she put her mattress in the back of her Prius, you know, because, you know, it's a box. You know, you put the box in and she got, you know, she got to L.A. She unboxed it in her new apartment. But that's pretty cool. That's awesome. Well, speaking of

July, something on my mind I just wanted to share. We record these shows usually in the middle of the month. So last month, I talked in the middle of July about how I needed to get over that I'd taken a trip in July and I was way behind and it was just like madness coming back. And I'm sad to report that that trend continued throughout July for me. And July was the worst month ever since I'd gone solo in terms of billable hours done for clients and just in terms of general production. You know, the stuff I do is, you know, I write books, I make blog posts, I make podcasts, I do legal work. And so that that's the creative, I guess, production element of what I do is I create stuff. And July was a terrible month for that for me. I just like, we went on a trip, which was a great trip. We've been married 25 years. We're entitled to take a week off to go to London.

That's fine. I took a trip to Illinois for MaxDoc. And that took some time. But also, my daughter did move out of the house. She's transferring to a different school. So now she can't live home anymore. And then I had contractors in. And I kind of set up my home office, which is a lot of fun, but

I thought hiring contractors would allow me to just focus on my work and let the contractors do their stuff, but instead what happened was I was looking over their shoulder every other minute, you know, because I wanted this to be just right, because in theory, if I can make this independent worker thing work out, this will be my office for the rest of my life, so I want to make sure it's done right, and so anyway, at the end of July, I just looked back and said, it was just a train wreck for me in terms of, you know, earned income and not even just the income so much as I like to look at the end of the month and say, wow, look at all the stuff I created. And while I kept up with the podcast, that was about it. And I felt bad at myself for like a week. I was like,

I can't get over how terrible that was. And really reminding myself to get on my horse and start working hard again. But then after about a week, it occurred to me, you know what? That's just the way it is sometimes. You're going to have a month like that. And looking back, all of the distractions that I had were legitimate, and some of them helped me to work harder going into the future. But it was very hard for me to give myself a little space. So is there anything specific that you're doing to press the reset button for that, other than it's a new month and I'm going to try better?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's just, well, you know, because I've got all these systems in place. I block time. I have a fancy paper notebook I write in. And I have, you know, I have all these systems that I've developed over the years that help me kind of motivate myself and get myself on track. Like planning the day, the night before. You were talking about that earlier. I do that every day.

When I wake up, I don't have to plan anything. I know exactly what's going to get done that day because I've already decided it. And over the doing this for a long time, I've got pretty good at being realistic about that so I can make a plan I can live with. But with the construction and the travel, all that stuff just kind of fell apart. You know, all your systems can fall apart and you do fall off the wagon once in a while. And my answer to it is first to stop beating myself up over it because I was doing that so much that I wasn't moving on, if that makes sense. Right. Yeah. No, it totally makes sense. But then I stopped beating myself up on it and I climbed back on the horse. Like I said,

I'm doing my planning again and I'm making things happen. And at the end of the day, I'm producing things. So point of clarification, because I think there is an important difference here. So with the July production not being where you wanted it to be, was it the fact that you weren't doing the daily plans or was it the fact that you were still doing the daily plans, but the plans were completely not what you had envisioned? Well, I was doing the daily plans, but I wasn't living up to them like I usually do. And that's a negative feedback cycle. And the more the daily plan doesn't work, the less faith you have in it.

And then the worst job you do, making the next daily plan. It's like, why should I bother promising myself I'm going to write this contract tomorrow when I know there's going to be guys with hammers walking around my house and I'm not going to get that done, you know? And so then I start to lose faith in the system, if that makes sense, you know? But I mean, it's all for a good reason. I mean, I have a great home office now. I'm really happy with it. And I think I'm going to be able to create some great stuff in this space. But it was just a wreck for me. And, think I'm going to be able to create some great stuff in this space. But it was just a wreck for me. And the other thing is, I moved my daughter out of the house. So that's a mechanical thing. You go, you find an apartment, you make a lot of trips to Los Angeles.

And we got the minivan working in full time and all that stuff. But there's also an emotional component to that. I wasn't ready for my first kid to leave the house. She's ready, but I wasn't, you know, and that just, I think it got me, I don't want to say depressed, but it just, it really did affect me for a little while. I had to get over that too. You know, we sit at the dinner table. Now there's three people. There used to be four. What's up with that? Yeah, this, I don't know what just happened, but I know it was wrong. Yeah, exactly. Just a schmaltzy dad thing, I guess. But so anyway, July was a rough month. But the lesson I got out of it for myself is, you know, sometimes that is going to happen. Hopefully it doesn't happen too often,

or you're in big trouble. But hopefully once in a while it's going to happen. And you've got to turn the page. Yeah, I think the emotional impact, that's interesting because it's something that you probably underestimate the impact that something like that is going to have. Just like you would underestimate the impact that not getting enough sleep is going to have. It's one of those things where it's like, oh, I can work around that. I'm better than that. I'm better than that. But really, you're not. And so that can throw off your plan, even if your plan is great. I think another aspect of this, which is really interesting, is that your plan, even if you didn't have huge life-changing events that happen throughout a given month. It doesn't matter how much you can

control your environment and your day-to-day. If you can minimize outside impact with anybody else, your day is still going to get thrown off. And that was something that I had to learn was the ability to forgive myself when it didn't go exactly according to plan. If I didn't accomplish everything that I wanted to do, well, that's okay. I'll do better tomorrow. And reflection really helps with that, I think, because you can look at the end of the month. These are the things that happen and learn from those things. The next time, I'm going to estimate that this is going to have a bigger impact on me. I'm going to learn from what happened the last time. But you can do that on a daily, you know, just putting this out there

for other free agents. You know, you don't have to have a kid who leaves the house or do a bunch of travel. There's things that can happen during your day where if you reflect on, you know, what happened throughout my day, it's one of the reasons that I journal every night. You can recognize those patterns and recognizing those things allows you to work around them a lot better. Recognizing those things allows you to work around them a lot better. Yeah. I even try to predict that stuff. Like I am in my journal, in addition to reflecting on the day, I always reflect on the next day because at the end of the day, I do go through OmniFocus and make my plan for the next day.

I do look at my calendar and block some time and I have a whole routine I go through. And often I'll know, like just as an example, a couple of days ago for a variety of reasons, I knew I was going to be recording four podcasts on Wednesday of this week, which is a lot of podcasts for one day. And this podcasting thing is weird because it sounds like we're just sitting around shucking and jiving, but actually afterwards it is draining. It is draining making these things. And I love it. I don't want that to sound funny, but, but it does take a toll on you. So I knew going to the next day, okay, I'm doing four shows. Um, I need to be realistic about what's going to get done in

between those four shows. And I need to be really realistic about how spent I'm going to be at the end of the day and not plan anything that's going to be too intensive. And doing that really helps. And I think that's, you're right, what I fail to do is say, oh, we have construction going on, or oh, I'm going to be moving a kid. That's going to take a lot more time and energy than I expected it would. Yeah, I totally agree. It feels weird, you know, you get done recording a podcast and you're just completely exhausted. But I think that's probably my introverted nature contributes to that too. Maybe some people get energy from this sort of thing, but I totally get what you're talking about. Somewhat related to that, by the way, I found myself in the middle of this week with just

absolutely no motivation to do anything. I underestimated how much effort it was going to take out of me to be at MacStock. Even though I was prepared with my talks, I figured that, I don't know, I guess looking back now, I'm just sharing all the mistakes that I made in this last one. So I had my talks ready. I was ready to go. I presented on Saturday. So in my mind, I guess I was kind of rationalizing like, well, by Saturday ready. I was ready to go. I presented on Saturday. So in my mind, I guess I was kind of rationalizing like, well, by Saturday afternoon, I'm going to be done and then I can just relax. But I'm introverted. And Max Stock, even though it was a ton of fun, I got to meet you. I got to meet a bunch of other listeners and see a lot of people that I only see once a year

that I really enjoy spending some time with. It was draining and I didn't have a weekend. Not only that, I did a public presentation, which took a lot out of me. And I jumped right back into work the next week. And I could kind of tell by the end of that week that I had been pushing a little too hard. But at that point, it's like, well, I just got to push through till this point. If I can make it's like, well, I just got to push through till this point. If I can make it till this point, then I've got a couple days off. I can relax. I can recover. Problem is I never quite made it there. I found myself Tuesday or Wednesday, this week, just not being able to do anything. And what I did to overcome this is I went back to my why the reason why I do

things because I gave myself I gave myself leniency with like one afternoon because I'm pretty good about getting up in the morning doing my morning routine, cranking through my most important tasks. But by the the afternoon, really, on Tuesday, it was basically like I was done and I had no motivation to do anything. So I gave myself a little bit of leniency on Tuesday. Well, you weren't as productive as you wanted to be in the afternoon, but that's okay. You can hit the reset button again tomorrow. The problem was that the next day was just as bad. And so at that point, I'm like, okay, well, I can't just take a couple days off in the middle of the week. I've got deadlines that I've got to meet. And so what do I do at that point? I went back and looked at my why. And it sounds so simple,

but why am I doing the things that I am doing? Why do I want to complete this task that is on my list? And initially, you may look at something and ask why, and it's, well, because I want to complete this task that is on my list? And initially, you may look at something and ask why, and it's, well, because I have to meet a deadline. But there's an exercise called the five whys, where if you keep asking yourself why, eventually you get to the root cause or the root motivation for doing the thing. And I actually have mine written down on a piece of paper every day. I time block my hours hours and at the top of it, I have my life theme. So I review this statement every single day. It says, help people answer the question, why am I here? By inspiring, encouraging, and teaching them how

to discover their destiny, connect to their calling, and live the life they were created for. When I viewed the things I had to do through that lens, I was able to manufacture the motivation to get the things done. And I still need to, it's a And, you know, I still need to, it's a warning sign to me, you know, I still need to take some time off. I still need to have that rest and allow my body and my brain really to recover. But that helped me in the moment to push through those things. Yeah, I get it. I do think that sometimes, and I think it's great that you can self-motivate and you can go to that why question and get yourself going. But sometimes you also just need to listen to yourself and say, you know what, this just isn't happening. You know, to dwell on this, moving this kid out of the house.

So we had gone up to the final trip when she was officially moving there and you hug her goodbye for a variety of reasons. I was driving alone on the way home and I just turned into a puddle of goo in the car. I didn't even realize it was going to happen. And I got home and I had a bunch of blocks that I was going to do. And I realized, you know what, this is not going to happen today. And I just said, I just gave my, I just called an audible and just took the day off, you know, and, and once in a while that that's a good solution to can't do it every day. But part of the benefit of being a free agent is once in a while you can do that. Yeah. That's basically what I did on, on Tuesday. And then on Wednesday when it's like, okay, talking to myself, you need to break out of this funk.

Yeah. Because you do need to pay the bills. You do have responsibilities. You do have people who are relying on you to finish some things. And Wednesday in particular for Asian Efficiency is our meeting day. So all of our meetings are batched to that one single day, which makes that day kind of suck. But the other days, you know that your day isn't going to be interrupted with other stuff that you, other meetings that are going to be called. So it's a net win most

of the time, except when you're feeling sorry for yourself because you're tired. But really, the takeaway for me was exactly what you said. I know, I need to reflect on this, the fact that, you know, MaxDoc for me is not an energy investment. It is going to deplete my energy and it's going to do it significantly. So even though it's super fun and I'm definitely going to go next year, I am not going to view it as, oh, this is a vacation. This is going to be something that I'm willing to do. I want to do, but it is going to use a lot of

my mental, emotional, physical resources that I have available. And it is going to impact the stuff that's going to come after. So one of the things that we've already decided we're going to change and I say we, because my wife came with me last year and I think she's going to come again next year. We took a day before Mac stock. We went and hung out in Woodstock and she went to the spa. We, we hung out that for, uh, to celebrate our anniversary. First time we've been away, uh, without our, our baby daughter. So that was, that was kind of nice. But one of the things we want to do next year is instead of taking that time before Mac

stock, doing it after Mac stock. Yeah. Cause before you're still stressed out about your talk and all that stuff. Exactly. As prepared as I was, I'm still thinking about it and I'm not able to disconnect. I'm not able to recover. And I didn't realize that. But, you know, now we know and we can adjust accordingly. Another thought on this topic is what you do when you do deplete your batteries, which we all do on occasion. The problem is if you stumble into it, if you're not paying attention to yourself, and suddenly you realize, oh, I have no energy, I have, you know, I have overdrawn my bank account. What happens is you waste a day

watching YouTube or binging, you know, Netflix or reading a fiction book or something, you just spend the day on something that it wasn't very deliberate. Whereas if you were able to say, hey, you know what? I feel like I'm heading for a crash. I'm going to take Tuesday off and I'm going to go for a hike in the woods, or I'm going to take the kids and go to the beach. Or just you find some way to re-energize yourself that is, I don't want to say productive, but it's healthier for you. And I think being a little more self-aware allows you to manage those crashes in a better way and more efficiently. Yeah, I would use the word productive because I think that the most productive thing you can do is put yourself in a position where when you do actually sit down to do the work that you can do it as efficiently, as effectively, as quickly and as excellent as you possibly can, which is why we talked about sleep at the beginning.

But there's absolutely things that you can do throughout your day. but maybe a free agent survival skill at some point is the Pomodoro method where those breaks are built in because the breaks allow you to do better work the next time you come in and giving a structure like that. I mean, that's a pretty rigid system, but recognizing for yourself that I just need to go for a walk right now that that is productive in my opinion. Yeah. Well, it's a challenge. I think we all face it. So if you're out there and you're having these same thoughts, you're not alone. Welcome to the human race. It's all of us. Yeah. Let's take a minute to talk about our second sponsor today. That's our friends over at Squarespace. This episode of The Free Agents is 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 and award-winning templates and more. Maybe you want to create an online store. Maybe you're getting ready to start your own business as you become a free agent. Or maybe you want to make a portfolio of pictures of your kids or your wedding. Or you want to make the next great blog, Squarespace has got you covered with their all-in-one platform that lets you do just that. There's nothing to install, and there's no patches to worry about, and no upgrades needed. Before I went to Squarespace, personally, that's the thing that used to make me nuts, is every time I logged into my website, there was a plugin that was not working any longer,

or some problem that I had to deal with. And I didn't want to do that. I wanted to create content. I didn't want to manage a website. So that's what Squarespace does. It just solves it for you. You don't have to worry about any of that stuff. They've got it all covered. And they have award-winning 24-7 customer support if you need any help. They let you quickly and easily grab a unique domain name. And all of those award-winning templates are beautifully designed so you can show off your great ideas. And they're not only beautiful, they're customizable so you can do whatever you want with them. I moved Max Barkey to Squarespace years ago. I've never regretted it. And when I gave notice at my law firm that I was leaving, one of the very first

things I did was create a Squarespace account for my website, for my law practice. And it looks beautiful. And it was like one of my therapies as I was getting out of the practice and starting a new one was setting up my own website. It was great. And it's super easy. And I get tons of compliments on my website from people because it doesn't look like every other, you know, bozo law firm. And it was a lot of fun putting it together. And it just costs $12 a month. You can start a free trial with no credit card required by going to squarespace.com slash free agent says that's one word. Now when you decide to sign up, use the offer code free agents to get 10% off your first

purchase of a website domain and show your support for free agents and we would really appreciate that. Once again, that's squarespace.com slash free agents with the code free agents to get 10% off your first purchase. We thank Squarespace for all of their support. Make your next move, make your next website with Squarespace. So Mike, something interesting happened to me this month. In addition to one daughter leaving, the other daughter over the last couple months has got her license you know so she's driving so daughter number two is driving and with daughter number one leaving we now have two cars and three drivers in my house i think i know where this is going no i bet you don't because it surprised myself even you know so we and my daughter number two

uh she goes to school pretty far from our house. She goes to one of those art schools. So it's like a half hour away. And then she participates in a lot of theater stuff in other parts of Orange County. So we spend a lot of time driving her around over the years. And she's a good driver. And we trust her to make some of these drives ourselves. So we were talking, OK, we've got to get another car.

We're going to get a car for, for her so she can, you know, get around. And, and so far she'd been driving mom, Daisy's car, you know, so I guess I should explain what I have a sedan and Daisy has a minivan, you know, the typical suburban, right? So the good daughter, number two, the minivan drive around, but then there's always these days where I've got to go to client meetings and, and my wife is working now too. So suddenly there's, we've got to like do this juggling act where I'm going to be driving daughter number two to her various events. So I can also have the car to go to client meetings. And, you know, realistically we need a third car, you know, and so we even started looking at them. And, and then a couple things happened to me. The first was, when I was up in San Jose for WWDC, I went and met with a couple friends at Apple, in relation to some of the work I do with Apple. And

one of the things this guy did, as I was walking out of a meeting with him, because Apple is not just in infinite loop or the spaceship. They're all over Cupertino. I mean, the company is just everywhere in that city. So as we're walking out of the meeting together, he pulls his phone out and pushes a couple of buttons. I didn't see what he was doing.

But and then we get to the front of the building as we get to the front of the building and Uber pulls up for him and he just jumps in it. It was like the biggest baller move I've ever seen. You know, it's a guy just, you know, literally walks to the front door. Uber pulls up for him. And he just jumps in it. It was like the biggest baller move I've ever seen. You know, it's a guy just, you know, literally walks to the front door, Uber pulls up, he gets in, shakes my hand, and he's off to the next meeting. And I'm just standing there going, what just happened? And so it kind of planted a seed for me. And I because I'm a free agent, I don't drive to an office every day. I have an office that I can go to when I need to, but it's fairly rare. And like you and your Asian efficiency

meetings, Wednesday is usually my meeting day. And so I have a lot of clients spread out around Orange County. And so I usually try to schedule anything where I've got to put on a suit and tie and go meet people to Wednesday. And the goal is that if I can stay home the other four days, I can get a lot of legal work done and a lot of production work done for Max Barkey, make a lot of podcasts. So I started toying with the idea of what if we didn't get another car? And instead on Wednesday, I just called a Lyft or an Uber and spent the day having people drive me to my various meetings. I bet you didn't see that coming, right? No, no. Look at you. Aren't you fancy? Yeah, I know. That's the exact thought

that occurred to me. It's like, oh, you can't do that. I mean, I'm a middle class kid. My dad loaded lumber on a truck. I do not have a driver, you know, that's not me. And but then I also remembered, like people used to ask me, what would you do if you had like Steve Jobs money, you know, if you were super rich, and I don't know how much I would change. But one thing I would definitely do is I would never drive another car. I don't get a lot of joy out of driving. It's not my thing. You know, I'd love to take a nap or do some work in the back of a car rather than drive. And so, but then I started thinking, well, I only need this really one day a week and how much money would it cost? And then, so I ran an experiment for the last three weeks. Now my daughter's been taking the second car to school and all the things she

does. As I sit here right now and record the show, there are no cars in my driveway. And it's actually worked out really well. So what I do, I have these planned meetings on Wednesday. But even when there's been the occasional emergency I had last week on Thursday, I had a client call and say, we need you here right now. There's a big problem. I just called the Lyft and it got me there and had the meeting. And the meeting was about 20 minutes away. So I spent the 20 minutes driving there prepping for this emergency. They had sent me a bunch of stuff to review. So I did all the review in the car on the way there.

Got there, did the meeting, got my Lyft home, and then everything was fine. And I'm spending about $60 a week on ride services so far, you know, that's kind of where it's at, which adds up to $240 a month. A car payment would be more than that, you know, definitely. But as would insurance on a third car and tires and gas and all of that. But even separating that math from it, it's actually working really well for me because I can get work done in the car. It's a tax write-off. I mean, I'm using the transportation for work.

And I think it's going to work out for me. Nice. Yeah, I totally thought you were going to say you bought a car after watching Casey review one. No, but I totally get it. I mean, I'm a borderline millennial. And one of the things that millennials, the research has shown is like they don't care if they own a house and they don't care if they own a vehicle.

They're happy to rent and they're happy to pay for their transportation. a vehicle. They're happy to rent and they're happy to pay for their transportation. And I think that in certain cases, it's really smart to take that approach. Where I live, Uber is still not really prevalent. And I would be waiting a lot longer for a car if I wanted to use it to get from point A to point B. But I think that this is a really interesting example of kind of what we talked about a couple episodes ago with the value of your time because you've crunched some of these numbers. And not only do you know how much you would be spending on these rides throughout a given month and you're weighing that against the car payment and the insurance and the gas and things like that. But like you mentioned, you're able to do work in the car. So you're buying back some of your time by doing this.

Yeah, I mean, that's like the icing on the cake. And some of the work I do is hourly. Some of my legal work I charge by the hour where I'm billing time in the back of a car. It's funny because I went to a meeting a couple of weeks ago for one of my larger clients. It's a pretty big company. And we had a big meeting. And after the meeting, I left. I ordered my car. And it was like three minutes away. And so I was standing out in front of the building. And the CEO of the company, because he could see me in front of the building from his office, he came down. He's like, Dave, what are you doing out here? While he's standing on the curb in front of my building, I said, oh,

I'm waiting for my ride. And he said, what are you doing? here? You know, he said, why are you standing on the curb in front of my building? I said, oh, I went for my ride. And he did, he said, what are you doing? And I explained to him how I figured out the math and everything. And I was just watching him. And about halfway through the conversation, he says,

you know what? He says, I'm not driving to work tomorrow. And he, he, he does even more driving than I do, but you know, he's got a big fancy company.

He can afford it. And the, um, and he just emailed a big fancy company. He can afford it. And he just emailed me. He's like, it's changed his life. It's an interesting thing. I think one of the reasons I brought it up on this show is because it's possible because I'm a free agent. If I was going into an office every day, I think I would have a car. This doesn't solve all of my problems. Sometimes I have to go to meetings up in the

valley or up in Los Angeles where it's legitimately like a two-hour ride to get there. And I don't want to do that. But I was thinking, well, I could get a lift to the train station and take the train up and then I could work on the train. So I'm definitely looking seriously at trying to do as little driving as possible in relation to my day job. And I'm very happy with the idea of working in the backseat. Uber drivers seem to kind of get the idea. If you get in the backseat and you like open up your iPad and just start working, or if you put an AirPod in your ear, even if you don't have any music on, they don't get chatty with you. They let you get your work done. And it really is great showing up someplace, having worked, you know, prepped for on the way there and then just get out of the car and go in.

The other thing, a benefit I find is there's a lot of traffic in LA and because I'm not a big fan of driving in general, traffic wears me out. You know, I'll spend 45 minutes in traffic and I feel like I've just run a marathon. This isn't like that at all. I'll be in traffic, somebody else is dealing with it. I can even take a nap if I want. Yeah. And another aspect of this, I completely agree with everything that you just said, but even if you aren't looking to buy back some of your time so that you can work more, which I think a lot of free agents, that's kind of the value proposition here for a lot of them. Even if you just want to have a private driver, like that's your dream. Like you said, Steve Jobs money, what's the life that you would design?

Maybe some of the things that you want, they're not as expensive as you think they are. Yes. It's crazy. I mean, that's it. Because it's the one thing I always said I would want if I was rich would be not to have to drive myself. And it's like, I'm getting it. I'm definitely not rich, but I'm definitely getting that benefit now. It's great. Yeah, you've arrived, Dave. Yeah, I have.

You had mentioned it's not like running a marathon for you. My topic here, protecting the golden goose. I did run a half marathon back in May. It was the first one that I had done. And I over-trained. I hurt myself when I ran it and I couldn't run for about another six weeks. And I had to go to physical therapy and they gave me a bunch of stretches and exercises that I have to do pretty much every day for the rest of my life, which I'm okay with. The whole idea behind the physical therapy, at least the one that I went to, is that they take each patient individually, they figure out their body, and then they give them a custom plan to help them live the most healthy life that they can. So that's what I got.

But it is a different routine. It is something that I now have to prioritize and make sure that I do every single day. So it kind of made me rethink my morning routine and taking even a step back from that. It kind of gave me this perspective, which honestly was the incentive behind the topic here today regarding the free agent survival skill and getting enough sleep, I realized that some areas maybe I'm doing pretty good, but in other areas, I need to do a better job of protecting the goose. Going back to the story of the goose that lays the golden eggs, if you don't take care of the goose, eventually you stop getting the golden eggs. And it's made me kind of rethink things from a physical wellness perspective. You know, the Mac stock experience that we talked about, I recognize that, you know, I haven't been doing a great job with this. I actually have a calendar now on my calendar called Goose, which is bright green because I want to make sure that Asian Efficiencies First Core Value Glow Green become

the best version of yourself. You know, I want to make sure that I'm investing in myself and I'm trying to make sure that I am exercising or going to the gym, you know, spacing out, running and some other things that I never really considered before, like biking. I've gotten into biking, which is kind of crazy to me, you know, doing all these other exercises to work out the other muscles around my leg, which I never even really thought about, you know, to protect my knee and the ligaments that I injured when I was running. I'm just recognizing that I need to do a better job of taking care of the whole package, not just like this one goal that I get fixated on. I'm going to accomplish this no matter what. That in the recent past, you know, has had detrimental effects for me. So I'm trying to adjust that. Yeah, it's hard.

I mean, so I'm older than you. I'm like, I'm creeping into middle age and like I'm running test video because I'm getting ready to do a bunch of video. I'm like, and I'm like, that's kind of a fat guy there on that video. It's like, what happened? I'm not really, I still exercise, but I, you know, and I eat okay,

but I don't eat good enough. And I think your metabolism changes. And I realized, you know, I can drift into becoming an overweight middle-aged person, or I can fight back about this. And it's the same thing. And I think it's part of the, um, the whole process of, of taking care of yourself. If you want to, when you're a free agent, you don't have someone to cover for you. You know, if you stop, if you get sick, you don't make money. You know, I mean, I strongly recommend you get a disability policy. We've talked about that in past episodes, but, but even then, I mean, it's just a massive problem. So like you, I'm, I'm trying to do

more of that too. I think this is the health episode, but, but I, I walk like two miles every day on a, on a, basically a hill. So I get great heart rate and stuff like that. But now I've started going to the pool. We have a community pool and I'll stop in there and swim two or three times a week. And suddenly I'm tracking food again and doing things to try and take better care of myself. But that's a key part of this whole thing. If you want to stick at it. Yeah. And I guess I've always thought that I've prioritized my health. Uh, in the past, I have been going to the gym or running five days a week. And what I realized is that I had gotten in this rut with running specifically,

a lot of runners have the same injury that I did because you build up a certain set of muscles, but nothing else around it. And so my patella tendon essentially slipped off the top of my kneecap and went on the side of my leg. And that's what caused a bunch of other stuff to happen. I can actually, according to physical therapists, like I can develop the correct muscles and push it back where it's supposed to be. But I never even considered those sets of exercises before. I was the guy who always skipped leg day, you know, because it didn't matter. I was able to run. I was able to run fairly fast. I was able to run as far as I wanted to. And so I never even really considered what the ramifications were of that. But as you do get older and even just, I wouldn't even say older, but as you progress, like things don't stay the

same. And so you constantly have to be, that's the lesson for me, you know, re-evaluating the process. And what you did yesterday, which maybe was fine, doesn't mean that it's the right thing going forward. So figuring out what those adjustments are and figuring out what my body's telling me, because ultimately, you know, I do need to protect the goose, especially with like a lot of the work that I do. It's quote unquote creative work. So I'm writing, I'm creating videos, I'm podcasting. I mean, if I'm not in a good mental state, all of that stuff is now exponentially harder. I'm not just cranking out widgets, I guess maybe you could view that I'm cranking out words, but

it's not a rote task. And if I'm not in the peak state, when I sit down to write that has turned now from an hour job to a four hour job. So there's, there's definitely incentive to get this right. I do think though, you make a really good point that you have to pay attention to your, not only your mental state, but your body and, and don't have expectations about, well, I used to be able to do this, but now I can't. So I guess you just have to accept that. I mean, as I'm a little older than you, and I've got a little better at it, but still, sometimes I shock myself, you know, because I will try something that used to be no problem for me. And it's not quite as easy anymore. And not only that, it's like, do you want to risk,

you know, things? I don't know. It's, that's tough. Yeah. And also I think like choosing the things that, or what it comes down to is choosing the things that you want to, you want to do. So for me, I got so laser focused on, I am going to run this half marathon. I was never even a runner before this. Like I played sports in high school. I played tennis in college, but I've always been in pretty decent shape. But for me, I always hated running. I liked playing sports because there was at least a goal. You know, you're playing basketball, you're trying to get the ball in the hoop or whatever. But for running, for me, it just kind of seemed like you're doing the same thing over and over and over again and there's no end in sight. So I would get bored. And so that's the thing that kind of got me to do this was, you know, this is the ultimate test for me of mind over matter. this is the ultimate test for me of mind over matter. I am going to train for this marathon. And if I can do this, like that basically is going to prove to myself that I can do anything sort of a thing. But what I realized is that while there is some benefit to that, and I do think that that was a valuable lesson that I got from running the half marathon that you get so caught up in the

tunnel vision that you miss the stuff that's happening on the periphery. Like you're so focused on, I just got across that finish line on May 5th or whatever it was that I ran my half marathon, you know, that you don't recognize the things that are happening around you. And I want to become better at paying attention to some of those things. I feel like there were definitely warning signs there that I should have seen. I feel like there were definitely warning signs there that I should have seen. But because it was, you know, the week before the marathon, I'm going to go hard so that I can run it easy. You know, actually, what ended up happening was I over-trained and made it a lot harder when it was race day. Yeah, that happens. I mean, that happens not just with sports and running, but it happens with a lot of things in life.

Exactly. The ability to, and I guess I kind of come back to the whole idea of mindfulness, not necessarily connected to a meditation habit, but just being aware of things so that you can be intentional in the right way,

you know, paying attention so that you can apply intention to everything that you do. Like that's really the goal. That's why I quote unquote became a free agent. You know, I wanted to have more time to spend with my family.

But if you, once you become a free agent, You know, I wanted to have more time to spend with my family. But if you, once you become a free agent, as we talked about with Casey in the last episode, you, there's a lot of other noise and a lot of other things that are going to tell you, Hey, you should be doing this instead. It's the battle's not over just because you've got more flexibility or more control over your calendar. You still have to apply that intentionality if you really want to get what you want. Yeah. You know, something that's been on my mind as well is just pricing my work. And I don't want to really get into the details

of it, but there's certain kinds of work I did that I started when I first went out on my own. And I think in hindsight, I had done what I will call fear-based pricing. I was afraid I wouldn't have any work or wouldn't make any money. And I think I priced some things a little too low. And I've been doing these things for some time, and I noticed myself doing one of them kind of resenting it. Like, wow, this is a lot of work for not really that much money. And whose fault is that? Well, it's mine. Um, so do I want to stop doing this work and not necessarily, I like doing the work, but I, it needs to compensate me, you know, adequately. And so I started, I just sat down and looked at how it's pricing things. And I started raising prices on some of the things that I do on a flat fee. And, um, I've been implementing that over the last month and the result has been a little less work, but I'm going to earn the same amount of money, you know, and, and I'll be able to put more time into the ones that I do take. So there'll be

better. And just, you know, this whole thing, I think when you're on your own, you always have to be looking at your pricing and how you're valuing yourself. It's just a constant thing. I think we'll do a, we'll do a segment on this in a future show about how to figure out what your time is worth. But just in general, this is something that's been on my mind lately because I have been going and kind of auditing things a bit. Yeah, this is a really interesting topic. I mean, I've kind of battled through this myself when I did web development and I had clients because there are some really amazing companies like Squarespace, which is a sponsor of this episode, where you can build a quality website for not a lot of money. And there are people who would come to me and they would view what I was able to do

for them with web development through that lens. And for some projects, you know, that's fine. And in that case, you know, I should have just told them, you should go check out Squarespace, because they're going to let you do this affordably, and it's going to meet all your project requirements. I don't really want that particular project. But what really just drove me nuts was when people would come and they would want this really complex membership site sort of a thing. And they have all these technical specs that they want met. And in their eyes, it's a simple value your expertise or your work high enough to the point where you are okay with people saying no to you. But I think that that's really the acid test is if you're not getting people who are saying no to your prices, they're probably not high enough. Yeah. And, but I think the, for me, the, the mindfulness bit of this was noticing in myself, uh, like a lingering resentment or there was, I knew there was something wrong about that work. Um, and I wasn't sure what it was and I had to like dig in a little bit. I'm

like, is it that I didn't want to do the work? No, I, I didn't mind doing the work. I like that work. I want to keep doing that work. But what it came down to for me was like, oh, this work takes a lot of time and it's not really earning me that much. And there's other things I want to be doing if I'm not going to be earning that much money. Playing with my kids would be a good one. So then I just said, okay, I still want to do this work. It's not that I don't like it. It's just that I have put myself in a position where I'm doing it. I'm cheapening myself too much.

And then once I accept it, okay, I'm going to charge more and I'm going to be okay if people aren't willing to pay it. Yeah, there's so many benefits that come from that. Because the people who want a lot for not a lot are not people you want to work with anyways. The client that you do at half price versus the client that you do at full price, the client at half price, their expectations are not going to be any different, in my opinion. In fact, they're probably going to be more work regarding the quality of the end product than the client who signs on and knows exactly what they're going to get. Matching the expectations as it pertains to client work is

really important. And being willing to cut out a big group of potential clients is scary. But ultimately, it's important if you do want to do quality work and you don't want the fact that you have to do this work to be something that you resent, you have to figure out a way where this is a win-win for everybody. And you are going to alienate some people when you do that. When Chase and I talked about this a long time ago, I had made the observation that now I have got to the point where if I'm getting a new legal client and they don't like my rate and they want to negotiate the rate, I just tell them that I can't represent them. To me, I've learned over time that the people that want to negotiate the rate are always the ones that are the most difficult and unrealistic and often the ones that don't listen to you. Anyway, so it's just like I've been bit by that snake so many times now that I just look at it as a massive red alert when they start wanting to negotiate that. Then I just get out. I don't even start.

Yeah, I like that a lot. I feel like if I had known that back when I was doing the client development for the web development, I feel like it maybe would have been a better experience. Maybe I wouldn't have the same attitude towards client work that I do now. But my solution was eventually just to get out of it. Yeah, that makes sense too, if you can. Yeah. If you are going to work with clients, though, you know what you should use is you should use FreshBooks.

Oh, I like how you did that, man. You're getting good at this. Thanks. To all the freelancers out there you know how important it is to make smart decisions for your business our friends at fresh books can save you up to 192 hours with their cloud accounting software for freelancers that is ridiculously easy to use by simplifying tasks like invoicing tracking expenses and getting paid online fresh books has drastically reduced the time it

takes for over 10 million people to deal with their paperwork, myself included. I've used FreshBooks for years because FreshBooks automates late payment email reminders. So you don't have to follow up with people and tell them, hey, where's that bill that I sent you? You can spend less time chasing those payments and more time working your magic, doing the stuff that is going to get you paid. And when you email a client an invoice, FreshBooks will show you whether they've seen it. So there's no more guessing, did they get it? Did they see it? You know, they've seen it, you know what day they saw it. And you know, then when you follow up with them, whether when you can expect to get paid. So if you're listening to this, and you're not using FreshBooks yet, now is the time to try it.

FreshBooks is offering an unrestricted 30-day free trial for listeners of this show. There's no credit card required when you sign up. All you have to do is go to freshbooks.com slash freeagents. So freshbooks.com slash freeagents, one word, and enter freeagents, two words, in the how did you hear about us section. All right, so go to freshbooks.com slash free agents one word and enter free agents two words in the how did you hear about us section all right so go to fresh books.com slash free agents one word enter code free agents two words in the how did you hear about us section we thank fresh books for their support of free agents and relay fm so we had a lot of feedback this month both in email and also in the forum

over at talk.micpowerusers.com. Yes, we did. My favorite piece of feedback here comes from Podfeet, which is Allison Sheridan. She was also at MacStock. She listened to episode 53, posted on the forum and said, instead of asking yourself, what should I start doing and what should I stop doing? You could consider asking, what do I want to start doing? This subtle word changes how I think about what I'm doing. I've tried to eliminate the word should from my vocabulary when talking to myself or when speaking for others. No one wants to hear it said to them. Why should I say it to myself?

I really like this comment. I still will use the word should, and I replied to Allison, and I mentioned this because in my head, there are a lot of things that I want to do. But the fact that I want to do it doesn't mean that it is the appropriate use of the time that I have. So in my head, I find it more effective to say should, but I love what she's doing here, which is taking the principle and applying it for herself. I think this is so important with any piece of productivity advice that you get, just because it's worked for me, or it's worked for you, David, or it's worked for somebody else, doesn't mean it is going to work exactly the same way for you. Now, so what Allison did, and I love this, is she took the principle and she

modified it slightly so that it works for her. And I just wanted to put this in here to call that out, because this is something I think that everybody should take this approach to any advice that they hear or they see. I also like the idea that she's questioning semantics, you know, because it can sound pedantic, but it actually can really make a difference in the way you react to something, as she explained, you know. And so when you hear a bit of advice or if something doesn't quite jive with you, pick apart the semantics a little bit and see if you can find a way to make it work.

Yep, exactly, exactly. There's a lot of chatter in the group about business email hosting. A lot of people are looking at Fastmail is a popular one. G Suite's a popular one. I use Hover, by the way. I started using them with Max Barkey, and then I got one for Spark's Law as well. And they've been great for me. But that's where I've been. I've purchased my domain, so it just made sense to have everything in one place. What about you, Mike? Do you use, I know Hover integrates directly with the G Suite then, so you're using just the

Hover-branded email. You're not using G Suite through Hover integrates directly with the G Suite then, so you're using just the Hover-branded email. You're not using G Suite through Hover. No, I'm an IMAP guy. Because on the geek side of my life, when I'm talking about being a free agent, I do spend a lot of time being a nerd on my power users. And I'm always trying new email clients. And I've just never really bought into the Google system, which is good or bad, I guess, depends what you think. But having IMAP email allows me to jump between a lot of different apps and try different systems.

Yeah, well, I've got a couple of organizations that I'm a part of that use Google apps. So I have G Suite addresses for that. And then my personal address is just a free Google address. Although I have to confess publicly here that I'm probably in the world's eyes bad at email. I really don't care about email that much. And so if you were to email me, you're not going to get an immediate response. This is kind of low on the totem pole

for me in terms of ways that people can get a hold of me and interact with me. So I've kind of always used what has been good enough. I'm also very militant about the amount of time that I spend in email. So I've never really looked for other solutions. I know I've heard a lot of great things about Fastmail. And if I were to switch away from the G Suite, I've heard enough about Fast Mail. That's probably the place that I would look. Yeah, they're an occasional sponsor of Mac Power Users. And I think this show too is SaneBox that is just a golden service for me because it does a lot of the email management. And questioning semantics, Mike, when you say I'm not good at email, I guess the question is, what is good at email?

Is spending four hours a day in email make you good at email? I would probably argue it doesn't. So I'm not sure what the terms are there. Yeah, I'm ruthless with email. How about that? That's maybe the best thing you can do. I, as well, budget time to email. And as much as it gets done in that time is what

gets done. And I've got a really using SaneBox and some other tools. I'm pretty good at triaging. So I spend those 30 minutes on the stuff that's most important. But the fact is, I referenced in my email book, the quote from quote from EB White and just, just bear with me here for a second. So he'd be white. He wrote Strunk and White guy. He also wrote Charlotte's Web. He, um, he was, uh, an author, a very successful children's author when that was kind of a new thing. And at the time, a lot of school teachers and librarians would tell the children to write a letter to the author after they read Charlotte's Web. So he would get all this mail from kids all over the country, and he would write them back. So he would literally write back everybody that wrote him a

letter. And some little girl wrote him a letter and said, hey, when are you going to write another book? And he says, well, that depends. When are you going to stop writing me letters? He said it nicer, but that's basically what he said. And then, so that letter got back. And I think the librarian wrote him a mean letter saying, how could you talk like that to this kid writing you? And he wrote her back and says, I was being honest with her. And he concludes the letter by saying, the morning mail is my enemy. And I just love that line so much. It's so true. It's even more true now than it ever was. Email comes in and floods you every day.

And if you let the flood take you, you are never going to produce a single thing. Yeah, I like that a lot because now the morning mail comes whenever you open your email client. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I tend to open it at the beginning of the day and triage things. Yeah, exactly. and then once a week I'll go through, because I use SaneBox too, I'll go through SaneLater and comb through all those things. So when I say I'm bad at email, someone will send me something, it'll go to SaneLater,

I won't see it till later in the week. So if you write to me and expect an immediate response, that's probably not going to happen. But I also think that that's probably the healthiest approach to email that you can take, because if you view email as

people can send me things and I have to respond to them, this is now a to-do list that other people can write on. And they have no discretion on how you're trying to spend your time. So that's my approach. Another thing, by the way, I use Mailmate on my Mac for my email client. And one of the big reasons I use Mailmate is that it is a markdown email editor. It is all plain text.

of the big reasons I use Mailmate is that it is a markdown email editor. It is all plain text. So I find that it is easier to respond shortly to emails when you don't have any images on your screen. It's kind of an ugly email client, honestly, because all you see is the text. It doesn't look nearly as nice as something like AirMail or even AppleMail. I feel like all you Mailmate guys are like a cult. Honestly, I'm afraid to try it. Like I'll get sucked in, you know? Yeah. Well, you know, I, I like markdown. I use it whenever I'm writing. My favorite writing app is Ulysses, which is markdown based and taking that approach to email where all you have is the text and you're going to say what you're going to say in a couple of sentences that helps me get

through my mail a lot quicker. Whatever works, baby. There's a lot of talk in the forum about tracking projects and invoicing. There's a thread with a ton of information from listeners. I would just point you to that if you're interested in that topic. We won't summarize it all here. But I wanted to finish up. We got an email from a Canadian listener saying, when do you incorporate a

business? He's Canadian and getting started and wants to know whether he should start a business. And there was some advice coming in, like you should immediately form a company or you shouldn't. I can tell, first of all, I have no idea what the laws are in Canada. And I always, anytime this legal stuff comes up, I have to disclaim, look, I'm not your lawyer. Even though I'm a lawyer, I'm not your lawyer. And I don't know what your situation is. So please don't rely on this as legal advice. So that being said, what you should do if you're getting ready to start a business is talk to a lawyer and talk to an accountant. In the United States, we just had a massive change to the tax law.

And it was just a crazy, like, middle-of-the-night, Sharpies-on-paper kind of law that was written. So there's a lot of differences now as to whether you make an LLC or a corporation or whether you do that at all. So you need to go to some professionals and get some real advice. One thing I would say, and once again, this is not legal advice, but a lot of times lawyers and accountants will tell you to incorporate immediately. And sometimes I'm not sure that's the best advice because if you're just starting like a little side hustle thing that is not going to make any income, I mean, a lot of people will go all in with a legal entity when they don't even really have an idea developed. And I feel like you're spending a lot of money

and adding a lot of overhead to your obligations on an idea that you're not even sure you love yet. So make sure that it's something you're serious about before you start going down that road. But either way, if you want advice on this stuff, go and find a lawyer and an accountant and tell them exactly what you're planning and see what they say. Yeah, I think that's a really important point that you mentioned, because I've definitely seen people fall into that category where they are so enamored with the idea of starting the business that they're doing all of these things and they really haven't developed the idea or the service that they're going to provide. And you can definitely put the cart before the horse that way. The advice in the

thread from a couple of people was to establish an LLC. I will say that when I did this, it was a lot easier than I thought. I put it off for a long time because I thought it would be a lot more difficult. And at least where I am in the state of Wisconsin, it really wasn't that bad. I think it was like 75 bucks to get it set up. I'm not a lawyer, but my limited understanding of this stuff is that before you're going to go do a bunch of stuff, you probably want some sort of protection in place, which an LLC would give you a little bit. Again, you're better to speak to this than I am. We did a show on this, and my disclaimer on that show was like 10 minutes long, it seemed like. I think Jason fell asleep halfway through it.

But I know that the common advice for a long time has been just make an LLC. But the point I'm making is tax law just got rewritten. And sometimes an LLC may end up costing you a lot more money in taxes than if you had formed a corporation or is it an S corp or a C corp? I mean, these are dangerous waters. So don't just take advice from the internet or some bozo on a podcast. Go talk to a professional.

Tell them your whole story. It's not something that really you're qualified to do on your own you know, are reading all those laws and reading a tax code. I honestly, I no longer give clients advice on LLC versus corporation because there are so many different changes in the tax law that it's really more of a CPA question than the lawyer question at this point. I mean, you need the lawyer to form it and put it together properly. But, but in terms of what's going to do your taxes, you got to talk to a CPA question than a lawyer question at this point. I mean, you need the lawyer to form it and put it together properly. But in terms of what's going to do your taxes, you got to talk to a CPA. Yeah, so go talk to somebody who knows what you don't know. Yeah, exactly. It's super important because it's a lot more expensive to unwind that later or find out that you're paying twice as many taxes as you would have if you had done something else. Okay, so that was a serious note. Yep. But if you want to join in the discussion, the place to do that is talk.macpowerusers.com

and then go to the free agent section. Another thread that I'll call out in there is your free agent story. We still want to hear those. Yes. And when you post them there, it not only helps you when you verbalize your own journey, but it helps everybody else and encourages them that yes, this is, this is possible. There are other people doing this and, you know, we're, we're kind of all, all on this journey together. Amen, brother. So where can you find us? You can find this show on Twitter. I think it's at free agents, uh, and free agents at free agents FM. At Free Agents FM.

At Free Agents FM. The website is relay.fm slash freeagents. Thank you to our sponsors for this episode, Casper, Squarespace, and FreshBooks. And we will see all of you in a fortnight.