Focused - 71: Hyper-Scheduling

Episode Date: April 16, 2019

This episode focuses on hyper-scheduling and how to turn your calendar into a productivity weapon. Mike and David also continue the conversation about digital minimalism and share a few of their favorite books.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hello, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Good. I'm really looking forward to this episode. The big topic today is going to be hyperscheduling, which is something I'm kind of excited about talking about that. I like using that tool.

It's something that helps me get through every day, and we have a lot to talk about it. But before we do, we've got a couple of follow-up items. I guess we should catch up with those. First, you made something. I did. I made what I'm calling the journaling boot camp because I get asked all the time about my journaling technique. And then it was kind of

spurred by a recent Bookworm episode too, where this was one of Joe's action items was to establish a journaling habit. I've kind of gone through my own spirit quest with this in the last several years because I've struggled with it, just like everybody else who hasn't really understood what's going on when you sit down to do a personal growth type journal. And so I created this eight video course, which walks you through not like a system on this is how you do it, but kind of the why behind it, and then gives you a bunch of prompts. The idea being that you've got a toolkit here, and you can just select the ones that you want and start to create this own habit so that you can focus on the growth that's happening rather than getting discouraged about, well, this is where I want to be and I'm not there yet. And it kind of came together really

quick. I'm super excited about this one because it's a topic that's kind of near and dear to my heart and it came together pretty quick. I just started working on this and the put the snowball in motion and just kept rolling down the hill. So this is now available. And, uh, I'm, I'm, I've gotten some pretty good feedback on people who have taken a look at it, but like I said, it's a little bit different because it's not a prescriptive system or like, this is what you have to do. It's more, here's the information and you can craft your own workflow from this. have to do. It's more, here's the information and you can craft your own workflow from this. No, I watched it. I think it's great. I do think that journaling is real important. It's funny because this week as we record, once in a while, all of my podcasts intersect, you know, and

a couple of months ago, Rose and I did an Automator's episode about automation and journaling. And then Stephen and I did a show. It's largely about day one that we'll have released by the time this show gets released, just a few days ago. And now here we are talking about it here. When we recorded with Stephen, I had this insight as we were starting it off. And Stephen didn't want me to get too hippie about journaling, and I always felt like focus is the place that I can be hippie. So I was okay with that. But I made the observation that I feel like journaling is a very good bookend to a meditation practice in the sense that meditation helps you kind of see what's going on in your own brain.

And I usually do that at the beginning of the day. And I journal at the end of the day. And it's just a way for me to kind of write out what's going on in my head, which is another medium. And they work really well together for me. So I made that observation. I was really proud of myself. And then a couple of days later, I'm driving down the road. I'm listening to you on Bookworm. And then a couple of days later, I'm driving down the road. I'm listening to you on Bookworm. And you made the exact same observation with Joe.

But I do think there's something to the journaling. I mean, if you haven't done it, you're like, I don't have time for it. And I definitely made that argument myself for years. But a couple of years ago, I decided I just was going to make time and to see what happened. And I got immediate payoffs. And I have a daily journaling practice. I explain it at some length in the last episode of Mac Power Users. So I'd recommend you go check that out.

But mine is both analog and digital. And it is something that I, at this point, it's almost a must do for me. A couple of weeks ago, I had a very labor intensive weekend. We were putting our room back together. We did some work in our room. So I was building, um, you know, closets and I was doing, you know, I was doing all the little construction tasks and for a couple of days and by I didn't journal. And I actually did start to feel a little itchy because I hadn't. Yeah.

It's really interesting for me, the big value, well, the immediate value, because there's, there's definite value from going back and reviewing your entries too, because that's where you can really see the growth that's happened over time instead of getting discouraged that you're not where you think you should be, is that when you journal at the end of the day, and if you do it the right way, and I kind of outlined this in the course, but the big thing for me is starting with gratitude because you kind of snap yourself out of any sort of negative mindset you may happen to be in. And then you can kind of process through what happened throughout your day. And then it kind of gives your brain permission to let all

that stuff go, which for me translates into a much more effective bedtime routine and much better sleep, which is a really big thing for me. I was diagnosed with epilepsy when I was 18. So one of the things that can trigger a seizure is not getting enough sleep. And I'm pretty militant about that. So I kind of stumbled on the journaling that way. But it's been a huge, it's been a huge tool that's helped me just process through things and make that release so that I can start with a blank page tomorrow instead of just sitting there stewing on all the things that maybe have happened or what I'm feeling because I never bothered to completely process that stuff. I'm not sure if that makes any sense to anybody else, but I can totally feel the difference when I sit down for

five minutes, even at the end of the day and just jot down a few things as opposed to not doing that and keeping that stuff inside. Yeah. It's definitely like a ritual for me in the evening, part of the shutdown ritual. And it's a great way to kind of say, OK, I'm done with that. Now I can go and relax. The thanks thing, I didn't mention it on Mac Power Users, but I do an a.m. thanks and a p.m. thanks. So when I wake up in the morning, I write down something I'm thankful for. And before I go to bed, I write something I'm thankful for. And I know it's, you know, it's hippy dippy stuff, but it actually really helps me, especially when I'm going to

sleep to end the day on a positive thought and just be thankful for something. And I'm sure Mike knows of two or three books that would tell me why that's good. I haven't read them. I just picked that up from, you know, around and it has been a really nice practice. That's just a part of the stuff I do with the journal. Anecdotal evidence. Yeah. What is the book? I think you told me once there's a book that talks about that. Well, the whole concept of gratitude really can, I don't think I've read a single book that's been completely devoted to that topic. Probably the closest thing would be the Happiness Advantage, I believe, by Sean Acor. But really, what it boils down to is that the happier you are, the more productive you are. And I don't mean productive in terms of doing some research on that earlier this week. And one of the definitions for productive, which I really liked, was basically making a significant impact in the direction you want to go. I'm like, yes, that's what focused is all about. It's not about hitting X number of units. It's about moving in the right direction. And as long as you do that,

then you are, in my opinion, being productive, whatever your end goal happens to be. And gratitude is a big piece of that. If you're negative, you tend to focus inward and look at all the things that are going wrong. When you flip the script and you express gratitude, whether there's another person there or not, I mean, my wife and I do this as part of our date night. It's a really interesting exercise because you can be completely mad at the other person for something they did or didn't do. And then the moment that you have to verbally express gratitude for something, all that stuff melts away. But even on a personal level, the gratitude kind of takes your focus off of all

the things that could potentially be going wrong in your own life. And you start recognizing things that are going well. And then your vision gets bigger and it's not all about you anymore that's the big benefit for me yeah i mean that and and we all fall prey to that i mean i know that like i will get maybe 30 or 40 positive emails for every negative one maybe more it's a lot the number is very high in terms of people that like the stuff I make on the Internet and write me to tell me thanks. And I love those emails. And then one person will send me something telling me what a scoundrel I am. And it's like that's the one that sticks.

And what's wrong with us? Why do we do that? And I do think trying to rewire yourself with gratitude and being thankful for things. All that stuff, it works. At least it works on my mushy, soft brain. Yep. It's what's crazy to me about the whole thing. And then we can move on to the other follow-up items if you want. Yeah.

But the crazy thing to me is that your situation doesn't have to change at all. Just your perspective about it does. And your perspective makes all the difference. You can be viewing things through a negative mindset and it can completely paralyze you and nothing has to change other than your perspective. And that can be enough to get you to start taking action and moving towards that ideal future. What you mentioned that before is kind of like the night in a negative sense because you can never seem to get there. And I talk about that in the course how a lot of people view like, well, if I just accomplish

this goal or do this thing, then everything's going to be fine. You know, you're never going to get to that point. But as long as you're moving in the right direction, and then the journaling practice, what that does is it grounds you and it shows you, hey, this is where you started. This is where you are now. And it gives you that motivation to keep going. Yeah, well, I would recommend Mike's course if you're thinking about trying to get into this stuff and, and I hope it helps you. But we, we do have some other feedback. Mike and I are both

going to be at Mac stock in July. That's going to be really fun. If you are going to attend in Woodstock, Illinois, I would recommend it. It's, you know, it reminds me a lot of Mac world, the old days of macro, but it's more intimate. Everybody gets to know each other better. Like one night we have game night. I'm looking forward to doing the board games. Hopefully I can get in on a good board game this year. But there's some great speakers. Mike is one of them.

We're going to do episode 500 of Mac Power Users. I'm going to be talking too. So there's just a lot of stuff going on. And it's a lot of fun. If you go and you use the the code focused, you're going to get a discount. So that's FOC USED. Go ahead and try that out. And Mike, I know you've been working on the masterminds that are arising out of the focus podcast. Yeah, that's been pretty cool. So we've got two, sounds like we're on the verge of needing a third mastermind group from the Focus listeners. And I've done a couple of calls with these groups just to help kind of answer the questions and

cast the vision and lay the framework for people to run with this themselves. Because as I mentioned to the call that you attended, David, if there's one group in the entire world where you could just say, this is how a mastermind works. Now go do it yourself. It would be the growth-minded people who listened to this podcast. And that's kind of been exactly what we've found. So the first group got up and rolling a couple of weeks ago. We had another call and I messed up some of the time zone stuff. So there were only a couple of people that came on that call. But then we had a follow up call to that. I believe as we record this, it was Tuesday and

had a fairly big group. So they're going to get up and rolling with a mastermind. We've got people who have agreed to facilitate it. And I kind of walk people through, these are the tools that you should use and the type of format that you need when you, you do meet together. These are the types of goals that you should, or problems that you should come to the mastermind meeting with. And I'm super excited to, to hear some of the growth that was going to happen from these groups. I know it's going to happen. I just can't wait to hear about it. Yeah, me too. I'm going to eventually bite on one of these, but I just need time right now. We have also, I just thought I'd announce it's somewhat related. My other podcast, The Automators that I do with Rose Orchard. Rose is coming out from Vienna to attend WWDC.

She's going to hang out with me down in Southern California for a couple of days beforehand. I'm going to take her to Disneyland because she needs to see the real Disneyland, right? But we're also going to do a meetup in Orange County, California, and we're going to do one up in San Jose. I'll put links in the show notes if you're interested. It's a free meetup. There's no show or anything going on. We're just going to meet somewhere and have burgers and fries, and it's going to be fun. So if you're interested,

please sign up and we'd love to see you there. All right. I guess this is kind of feedback, but I want to talk a little bit about a screenshot you texted to me the other day, Mike. Yeah, this is definitely feedback. This is inspired by episode 70 with Shahid, where we talked about digital decluttering. And I also recorded a bookworm episode on the book that Shahid and I had been talking about, which is Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. As I recorded that episode with Joe, though, I was the one who was saying, well, this digital declutter idea sounds kind of intriguing, but I don't think I'm ready for that. And Shahid gave some great perspective and a lot of great resources. I even went back to him afterwards and said, you know, you recommended this one book, Make Time, which

I'm in the middle of and absolutely loving. And I said, what other books would you recommend? Because you're one of the few people whose recommendations I would trust at this point. And he's just a really smart guy. I really loved his perspective. And he was talking about those infinity pools. That's really the thing that got me because I feel like I can do a pretty good job of going and doing only what I want to do on my phone. But I do find myself pulling my phone out of my pocket, unlocking it. And then at that point, it's kind of the wild, wild west. Maybe I'm going to do the thing that I wanted to do, or maybe I'm going to end up in one of those infinity pools scrolling through the endless feats. So I recognized that activity in myself. And I was going through that

book that Shahid had mentioned, Make Time. And they kind of presented this idea. And I thought that this was brilliant. Just take all the other stuff. You don't have to delete anything off of your phone. Just move it off of that first screen. So the first screen anyways, is only the things that you want to create a habit. So I've got on mine, for example, my Bible app, my prayer app. I've got day one for my journal, overcast for podcasts. And then my home row is my notes, series,, Drafts, and then the Productive Habit Tracker. So that's all stuff that is a net positive when I interact with my device. And all the other stuff that might potentially lead me down a rabbit hole of distraction is not there. So when I unlock my phone, I see only those essential apps. And it produces just

a little bit more friction for me to go find the ESPN app and check the basketball scores or something. And that has made a world of difference because in that fraction of a second that it would take for me to swipe to the next screen, I'm able to ask myself, what are you doing here? And that's all it's required for me to check myself and be like, no, i don't need to go do that thing and put my phone away and i believe that that's going to have long-term residual effects as well any way you can find to put a tiny bit of space between action and reaction uh is is your bucks ahead i mean i think as people who are trying to be focused we have to take control of

those reactions you know you can't just autopilot your way into Instagram or, you know, or into getting angry or to, you know, insert whatever here. So adding that swipe actually, I think could make a difference. I was trying it because I, you sent me the screen. So I went ahead and moved a bunch of mine. Then I realized none of them really need to be on my home screen. So I put them all on the second screen just for giggles. And the problem was then I've got this blank, because I usually have a black background, because on the OLED screen it looks so nice. But I'm like, well, if I'm just going to have something here,

I need a picture or something. And then when I swipe to the second screen, the picture is behind the icons, and it looks terrible. And my sensibilities are so offended that i i don't know what i'm going to do i'm either having to just have a black screen and still swipe to the second screen or just move them back and i don't know yet i'll have to figure it out but you have to train yourself to use spotlight to access stuff then you never have to leave your home screen oh that would be interesting you know what that's actually not

a bad idea because that that actually additional, some additional intentionality as well. Yep, exactly. I, I'll tell you, I, um, I continue to be that guy and maybe it's because of my age. I don't, I don't really know. I, I just feel like this has not been as big of a problem for me as it has for some. And I'm very able to ignore social media and most infinity pools. Although I must admit, as we were preparing for the show today, somebody sent me a link to the Star Wars trailer and completely screwed up my focus prep for the day. So I'm not perfect, but it is not as big of a deal for me as I think it is for others. And I'm, for whatever reason, I'm lucky that way. Yeah, to push back on that a little bit and to come back to the journaling discussion,

that's the type of thing where if you were to journal that observation that you just made, and then you have a record where you can go back and you can see how often did I get pulled off of a task. And I was supposed to do this thing. And I didn't do this thing, whether it was because you had a deadline coming up, or it was just something that you wanted to do. And that's one of the places I think where journaling can be really beneficial is showing you a real historical record of what you've actually done. The other thing that I've accidentally decluttered is just email,

because for years I've been going through this, you know, this journey on Mac Power Users to find the perfect iPhone email client, and they all are terrible. Yep. And I just realized like three or four months ago, you know what, I'm just not going to do email on the iPhone. That's my, that's my perfect app is just no app at this point. And that, that helps, you know what, I'm just not going to do email on the iPhone. That's my perfect app is just no app at this point. And that helps, you know. But anyway, I don't know. It's very interesting. And I do think this is a real thing. I've observed some people in my own life who I think definitely could take a lot of this advice, as myself too. I'm sure there are things I could do that I could get better at with this. And I do think that we have this new and unique problem that's created by these devices that no generation has ever faced before.

I also think that this is a big explanation of the lack of focus for a lot of people, which is the whole point of this show. of the show. And I think the people who can figure out how to focus in a world where not many people are focusing these days, that's a huge advantage. I mean, that's one of the reasons why we make this show. So I'm not trying to poo-poo this stuff at all. I think it's real. And I think everybody should take it seriously. Yeah, absolutely. That actually leads perfectly into today's episode, because that's one of the things that Cal Newport talked about in Deep Work, was the type of people who are going to be successful in the new economy. And he really traces it back to this ability to apply intentionality, and he calls it deep

work, but focus to what you're going to be doing. But before that, we should probably take an ad break. Yeah, let's pay the bills. We're so happy to welcome a new sponsor to the Focus podcast. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Moo. Moo is an online print and design company. It offers a variety of premium print products, including business cards, postcards, notebooks, and more.

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off your order right now when you go to Moo.com and use the promo code PRINT15 at checkout. Once again, that's Moo.com and promo code PRINT15. Our thanks to Moo for their support of Focus and all of RelayFM. Moo, let's get physical. All right, I feel like I need to put a disclaimer here because you've mentioned before you've been a little bit hesitant to cover the topic of hyperscheduling. So before we get into this, I need to tell everybody up front that I'm the one who advocated for this as the show topic today. But that being said, you want to talk to us about what hyperscheduling is? Well, when the focus of the show was going to be a free agent, I thought it was just getting to be too much. But I mean, our focus is now focus. And I think this is an excellent topic for that. And what I'm doing with this hyperscheduling isn't rocket science or isn't anything brand new that I thought of. In fact, almost everything we talk about on the show, somebody else has talked about or written about at some point along the way.

Everything's a remix. I first, I didn't really research it. This is just kind of stuff that I started doing and came up with. And when I first started writing about it at Max Barkey, I called it hyper-scheduling. And I think that was probably a dumb name. I think a lot of people who are familiar with this technique call it block scheduling. And hyper-scheduling can have some negative connotations. But what it really is, is I look at my calendar as more than a place that I calendar appointments with other people. Like if you looked at my calendar today and I was not a hyper scheduler, it would only have one appointment on it today to record with Mike. But as it is, this is my sixth appointment today. So what I do is I schedule time for things that are important to me. You know, my, the things that, that I are most important to me, I want to get done, get added to my calendar. That includes big projects.

You know, I guess what you would call appointments with yourself. I also schedule things that, you know, time I want to spend on specific items or time I want to limit to certain items. I even scheduled downtime. I have time scheduled after I get done recording today. I'm going to take my daughter to lunch and then I'm going to play the saxophone for 30 minutes. So that is on my calendar. And that's what hyper scheduling is for me. It's looking at my day and having made room for the big rocks. I like that. I think that the whole idea of hyper scheduling or block scheduling or whatever term you want to use there is the benefit of it is the intentionality that it provides to the time that you have. This is something that I've been brewing on a little bit because I'm not

super happy with any of the definitions that are out there currently, but I'm kind of kicking around in my head, like how does time, energy, focus, all that stuff work together? And I want to present kind of the early version of this because I think it pertains to the reason why you might want to hyper schedule. pertains to the reason why you might want to hyper schedule. So the time that's really the canvas. One of the books that I've on my bookshelf that I've read previously is your money or your life. The main idea being that you go to a job, you trade your time for money. And really what you're trading is a portion of your life that you can never get back. Not to get all negative about that, but like that's the one thing you can never get more of is your time. Okay, so that's your canvas. And then when it comes to productivity and that definition that I mentioned earlier about creating the results that you want,

the real key there is that you're moving in the right direction. So I kind of view like you're in the middle of this park, you've got a compass, you can go in any direction. The intentionality or your focus is going to be the thing that points you in the right direction. And then how fast you move in that direction is determined by your energy. And your energy can go up and down. The key is to keep it on the positive side of that and not switch over into the negative, the high negative energy in particular. That's kind of the place where that leads to burnout. So I've been thinking on this and kind of the thing that I've landed on is it doesn't matter how fast you're going in a specific direction. There's going to be times when you're sprinting and you're making a lot of making

up a lot of ground. But if you don't have the intentionality or the focus, you're not moving in the right direction. That doesn't really matter. So how does that apply to hyper scheduling? I've totally been there where I'm working on this project and I am just hammering it and I've got the energy and I've got the time and then I get done and I realized that this wasn't the right project or this didn't really matter. And then it's like, oh my gosh, I just wasted all of this, all of these resources to create something that didn't really matter. Whereas if you're going to write a book or any sort of those big projects that people tend to put off, I mean, I've been there where you just have to show up and do a little bit

every single day. And as long as you're moving in the right direction, eventually you get to that goal of a published book or whatever. So hyperscheduling for me is the thing that keeps you on the tracks as you move in the right direction. And it's kind of the inverse of the time tracking, which shows you how you actually spent your time. This is the thing that's going to point you in the right direction at the beginning of your day. And yeah, stuff's going to come up and you're going to have to deal with things. But just having that clear direction really helps me out a lot as it comes to

talking about journaling at the end of the day. What did I actually get done? When I take the time to plan my day and provide intentionality at the beginning, I get a lot more done. I have a much better day. It's such a worthwhile investment to plan your day. And this time blocking or hyper scheduling is, for me, a big piece of that. And part of the challenge I face is, and if you listen to older episodes of the show, for years, it was a real problem for me of balancing my two lives. I have a law practice and I have a publishing business where I do these videos and these podcasts. And they're both dear to me. I like doing them both. And most people would say you can't do two things. But I've changed the rules a little bit. I've said no to a lot of legal work and turned down a lot of legal income in order to carve time out to do this other thing that I also love.

And it's working out for me, but I have to be serious about blocking my time in order to keep these two bowling balls in the air. How's that for mixing my metaphors? No, I love it because that's one of the things, one of my action items from a Bookworm episode not too long ago. I forget which book it was, but my action item was consider how to bend the rules in my favor. If you just go off of this is like, how do people typically do this? You're not going to find those creative solutions. Yeah, but so blocking time. And I used the term big rocks earlier and I'm going to

assume most of the audience knows that, but there's probably a few people haven't heard that term before. I think it was David Allen who used that first, but just talked about saying at the beginning of your week, you've got this jar of water. I think it was the, he, or just this jar and you put in the tasks that you want to complete, and then when you're done, you fill in the sand. But if you don't put the big tasks you want, the big rocks in first, the sand will always fill up the jar. You know, whether you do your big tasks or not, there's an endless supply of sand. Merlin Mann once told me he did a talk about that with water, where he said, you know, he had like a jar and he had twice as much water that would fit in the vessel as, you know, would fit.

So he ended up pouring water all over the ground. The fact is you've got to carve out time for the things that are important. For me, that is client priority stuff. Like just as we talk here today, I've got a client that is got a contract issue that we need to get resolved today. And for me, the other piece of that is to keep moving the ball forward on the next field guide, next video field guide, which I'm working on. And if you looked at my calendar, you'll see that there's like four hours today blocked between those two projects that is on my calendar. And in my head, when it's on the

calendar, it's just as, you know, gospel as it would be as an appointment with another person. Like, just like I wouldn't skip out on Mike at the last minute to record the show, I'm not going to skip out on those blocks I've got to work on those two projects today and make sure they get done. And by doing that, and I do them the night before. Someday we'll talk about shutdowns and startups. That's a whole nother show, really. But I set the blocks the night before. And one of the things I do is I get up and I have my first big block is when I first wake up. I do it before I shower, before I go on a walk, and before I do anything, I just get up and knock one

of them out. And this stuff is a big deal for me because as I kind of perfected the way it works for me, I saw immediately the transformative powers. And suddenly I stopped being as worried about doing two things at once. I realized, oh, I can do this and still have a normal life if I'm intentional. Yeah. And just to piggyback on that for a second, you've got the things that you have to do and you've got the things that you want to do. And by putting the things that you want to do on your calendar, which that's the place where a lot of people miss this is they put the things on their calendar that they have to do, but then they've got a couple of hours and they're trying to rack their brain and think about what's that urgent thing

that I'm supposed to be doing. And they completely miss the opportunity to do the thing that they wanted to do, which contributes to you feeling busy, but exhausted. And you journal at the end of the day and you realize you didn't really make as big an impact as you wanted to, didn't move your big projects forward like you wanted to. And so hyperscheduling, in my mind, really is the thing that allows a lot of that fun stuff to happen. If you don't hyperschedule, that's the stuff where you don't even think about, oh, I should play my guitar, play my saxophone, whatever. I've got work to do. And then you just look for something that classifies as work to justify that attitude. And maybe it's email, maybe it's something that doesn't really matter. But the intentionality, what that does is it creates the opportunity for those big rocks, like you said. And then the other thing I want to mention here, I think it goes back to an old

Mike's on Mike's episode with Patrick Roan. He kind of introduced this idea to me, which I thought was completely novel at the time of everything that you have to do has to take place within the context of time. And I think if I'm remembering that episode correctly, he kind of advocates that you kind of use your calendar as your task manager. And I wouldn't go that far. But I do create the time blocks for the things that I have to do to happen. And I think that's a really important perspective to think that, well, it's not,

I have to get 12 things done today. It's, I have this many hours. How can I put these to the best possible use? Another thing you can do, not only can you use it to create time for the stuff that you really must do or want to do or passionate about, it also allows you to box in time for things that usually turn into time sucks for you. Email for me is one of those. I could spend a lot of time in email.

I get great email. I mean, you know, everybody always hates email. I love email in a large way because I largely hear from people that are like me, think like me, listen to my stuff, buy some of my products. And I could have these nice long conversations with them in email, which would be great except for the fact I'd never release another product if I just went down that hole and did that all the time. So that's the challenge for me with it. And I started hyper scheduling email where, you know, I give myself 30 minutes to get through all of the email that relates to the law practice. I give myself 45 minutes for all the email that relates to Mac Sparky. And that's as much time as I give to email every day. And it's on the schedule. So uh and there's the other thing i do with these these

block schedules is i use alarms incessantly my i love my apple watch for hyper scheduling because it taps me on the wrist and says oh time to go to the next thing now and i you know i follow those alarms i don't say no no no i'm just going to do this another 30 minutes you you have to kind of follow your own rules uh just like if I had an appointment with Mike, I would make sure I'd get to it on time. And so you can take things that normally would suck a lot of your time and put them in a box. Let's say you love Facebook and you were listening to us earlier and you're like, yeah, Facebook is too big of a thing for me. I should not be spending three hours a day in Facebook, but you're not willing to go cold turkey. Well,

what if you just gave yourself 30 minutes and said every day at 6 PM, I'm going to sit down for a half hour and play with Facebook. And you could do that. And you put it in as a block of time. It tells you when to start doing it and when to end doing it. And that for me has real power. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it was Parkinson's law, going back to what you said about email, where work will expand to fit the amount of time that you give it. When you combine that with what we talked about in the last episode with Shahid, with the notifications and all of the digital stuff that's on your phone that can interrupt what you want to be doing at any given moment, it's real easy to see how you go from, I'm going to spend 30 minutes a day without

these constraints of hyper-scheduling to, I'm doing this for hours at a time. So I really like that piece of advice that you gave there. The other thing that I wanted to call out with this is I think a lot of people, when they think about time blocking or hyper scheduling, they view it as extremely rigid. And maybe one of the things that you would push back on is I want to be spontaneous. So you've mentioned a couple times, I've got these alarms that'll go off saying I've got to record with Mike. But you don't have to follow the exact outline of your schedule. The fact that you made a schedule gives you the ability to break the schedule, if that makes sense. It's kind of like a budget for your money, where a lot of people say, I don't want to

budget because I want to have the spontaneity. But when you actually budget your money, you find that you have more money to be spontaneous with. It's the same concept with your time. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple like negatives attached to hyper scheduling. And I think the word hyper is part of the problem because you go online and there are people, somebody just recently sent me an article from, I think it was the wall street journal or some big newspaper of someone who does block scheduling. But this lady was like blocking in her bathroom breaks. And it was just like insane, you know, how detailed she was with those blocks.

For me, it's very rare for a block to be 30 minutes. Almost always they're at least an hour. And, you know, so I'm realistic with this stuff. I don't block potty breaks, all right? So, you know, that's the first problem. The second is, um, sometimes things don't work out. You'll put the schedule together the night before you wake up the next day and your daughter is sick and you need to take care of her. And so, you know what, all those blocks you figured out that stuff isn't going to work anymore. Maybe

you'll take a look at it. Maybe we'll keep a couple of them, but push the rest of the stuff off or delete it. That's okay. You know, I try not to have two bad days like that in a row if I can. You know, it's kind of, you know, that whole idea of keeping it rolling. And if you have a bad day, try and get back on the horse the next day, but that's okay. And the other thing is those blocks are not written in stone, like something I've been trying to do consciously, because this next field guide is near and dear to me. I really want to get it done and released. And so for the last few weeks, I've been spending, you know, three to four hours each morning working on it. Whereas a lot of times I do the legal stuff in the morning and I do the Max Sparky stuff in the afternoon, but I'm like, by lunchtime, I want to feel good about having worked on this big

project and put real quality time into it. So I've been doing that. But today, uh, because of a client emergency and a few other things, I got up at six o'clock. I am, you know, I'm, we were recording this at 11. I've already put four solid hours of work in before we got to this, before I found the Star Wars trailer, that is. And I got a bunch of legal stuff done, and I haven't touched the new project. And I'll make some time for it this afternoon, but that's okay. This stuff doesn't have to be in a certain order. That's the beauty of the block schedules, is you can move the blocks around. I heard somebody say once,

it might have been you, Mike. I wish I could remember where I heard this because I want to give the person credit. But somebody said that a calendar, when you do it like this, is more like a soup, you know, where when you're making tomato soup, you just got to put all the ingredients. It doesn't matter what order you put them in. And I really like that idea of this block scheduling. It's like, okay, so largely legal stuff in the afternoon, largely Max Barkey stuff in the morning. But you know what? Things can move around. If I don't have some information I need, if a client has a rush, you know, whatever the problem is, I'll move the blocks around. Yeah, no, that was not me. But I do like that. That's saying a lot. I don't. Everything else that happens after that, you just kind of roll with the punches and you adapt. You need to be able to erase things and move things around. But the intentionality that you apply at the beginning, the planning process, that's what provides you moving in the right direction instead of being pulled in every which way. I guess maybe another

way to say that would be like the tyranny of the urgent, going back to like the important versus the urgent. Without the intentionality, it's really, really easy to get sucked into that quadrant where everything is urgent. But if you really think about it, it's not that important. But again, you know, we want to say, oh, we got a lot of work done. We cranked a lot of widgets. And we want to say, oh, we got a lot of work done. We cranked a lot of widgets. So those are the things that make us feel good in the moment. But when we take the time to reflect, aren't really maybe moving us in the right direction as much as we think they are in the moment. This episode of Focused is brought to you in part by our friends over at Hover.

Buying a domain name is the first step to building your online identity. And with Hover, you can find the domain that shows the world who you are and what you're passionate about. I have, last time I logged in, it was something like 12 different Hover domains for my personal website, for my faith-based productivity project. I love Hover because it's so easy to get the domain name. And I go there first whenever I have an idea because I want to make sure that I'm able to secure that identity. And then from that point, once I have the domain in Hover, it's super easy to hook it up to whatever else I might need in terms of hosting. But that's kind of the first step now in my ideation whenever I've got an idea. I go there first, I create the domain, and I make sure that

I'm going to be able to have that brand, like Faith-Based Productivity, for example. I want to be able to email people as Mike at Faith-Based Productivity. And so if I can't get that domain, then that's not an option. There's a couple of things that are really, really nice about Hover. The first one is that they have free Whois privacy, so the bad guys don't get all of your information. I've bought domains in the past, I'm sad to say, from people who did not offer this, and it is crazy the amount of spam that I've gotten from those over the years. They've also got best-in- class customer support. So if you have any issues, they've got a team of really helpful people who will help you solve anything that

might come up. And I want to just plant the seed for people. We talked about creating your online identity. Think about what you might need a domain name for. It seems like everybody has a domain. And it's important if you're going to have one that yours stands out. And Hover can help you do that because they have over 400 domain name extensions to choose from which can help you brand yourself or your project online. So talking about your personal identity, a real cool option is the.me extension. I've got a.me from my personal site. It's a great extension to use to showcase something like a portfolio, and it shows everyone who you are and what you're good at. So if you have a great personal website that is ready for launch, go over to Hover and grab a.me extension. It's a popular domain for

personal portfolios, and it's a great way to stand out when sending your resume. The.me domains are on sale for this month only at Hover for $9.99, which is 33% off your first year. And if you're new to Hover, you can get an additional 10% off any domain extensions for your first year. Go to hover.com slash focused right now to sign up. That's hover.com slash F-O-C-U-S-E-D. It's time to get your portfolio website up and running. Thank you to Hover for their support of Focused and RelayFM. I thought it'd be fun, Mike, to talk a little bit about how we're implementing hyper-scheduling in our lives. Yeah, so I have a very specific process for this,

and it's actually outlined in my course. As we're recording this, I had just uploaded all of the fillable PDFs and explainer videos to Faith-Based Productivity. But there's basically five steps that I go through. It goes a little bit beyond just the hyper scheduling though. So do you want to talk about yours first or do you want to jump into this? Well, let's hear yours. Okay. So for hyper scheduling, really the goal for me, like I said, is intentionality. And that has to be traced back to my goals. So the first thing that I do every quarter is I complete what I call the wheel of life exercise, where I rate the different areas

in my life and identify the areas that I want to improve. And then from there, I'll set goals in those specific areas which are designed to produce the changes that I want. And then once I've got those goals, I've got a template which I call Master Your Month. And it's a monthly calendar at the top where I put the major deadlines. So podcast episode recordings, for example, or publishing dates would go on there. If I have a deadline for a video module or an article I'm writing, those would go on there. And then I've got basically the goals from there and then also a habit tracker. So there's little dots on the dates in the month where I can say, yes, I took action,

I did this habit, which is going to produce the results I'm looking for. So for example, one of my goals from last quarter was to grow my newsletter email list. And the habit that was going to be connected to that was a writing habit showing up in writing every day. So I've got the ability to track that on my month view and see at a glance, oh, I hit my writing goal 80% of the time. Once I've got that month laid out and my goals, then I really don't do a weekly plan. I do a daily plan. And I've got a specific format for that. And I believe I've got a link to download this. I know you've got links for your stuff too, David. But the way I do this is I've got on the left-hand side, all of my hours available starting at 7 a.m. And I time block from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.

in one-hour blocks. And then on the right side, I've got space to write my goals because I want to write them every day so they stay top of mind mind my most important tasks, which I limit to five. And then a separate space where I asked myself the question, what would make today awesome? It's kind of like my my stretch goal, if you want a definition for that, you know, if I'm able to do this, then I've really had a good day. So that's how I plan and I hyper schedule. But I also have one additional piece to this, which I call planning your perfect week. This really has nothing to do with serving as a plan for your week and really just walking through the exercise of allocating the time that you have available. I've done coaching with people and I've gone through this several times. And

every time I've done it, it's been really cool to see the lights go on. But you kind of work backwards from the 168 hours that you have available to you. And you say, okay, you're going to sleep eight hours a night. So that's 56 hours. You've got a full-time job. That's 40 hours. And you put those on the calendar. As you do that and you use up the hours you have available to you, you find out you have a lot more time than you think you do. So then what you can do is you can construct what the perfect week might look like for you. And I do this about once a quarter. And then I use that kind of as the frame when I'm going through and I'm going I'm planning out my my specific day,

I don't look at it every single day. But I do that to kind of have a picture of what my ideal week kind of looks like. And then I try to, when I plan my day using hyper scheduling or block scheduling, time blocking, get as close to that as I possibly can. So I do some of those steps, but for me, a big one is, and I don't want to get into all of the craziness I do, but in terms of hyper-scheduling, there's a couple key times for me, and one of them is Sunday night. And I get fantastic hell open. It's got this great 14-day view. You can put it on your iMac and see the whole week in front of you. And on Sunday night, what I'll see is just my appointments for the week, because I haven't hyper-scheduled that week yet. And I go through then and just block time in.

And there are some old favorites for me, like every day, I try to have a period of time that I do some exercise and some meditation. So I've got that one. And you can digitally you can either just create the event and then copy and paste it multiple times. And I usually try and do that sometime in the morning, but not always. And then every day I try to give myself a scheduled shutdown time to finish up the day, follow up with any email and plan the next day. And that, that goes on every day. And then I just kind of work from there. I like to block some time for email. I like to block some time for whatever big project I'm working on right now. It's the next field guide. And then hopefully I'll do, if there's outstanding legal work,

I will block the big ones in and hopefully there's some space in there because one of the problems I have is I don't always know what I'm going to be facing during the week. With my schedule, I may get a call from a client that suddenly requires a lot of time to deal with it, and I need to make space for that. But the nice thing about these blocks is a lot of them can be moved, too. Like, once in a while, I'll say, okay, this is not going to be a day that I get a lot of work done on the field guide. After all, I'm going to put all that time into catching up with these client issues. I'm going to put all that time into catching up with these client issues. Or maybe I have a day that's relatively slow on legal problems, and I can put more time into the Max Barkey stuff.

So it varies, and you have to be willing to be flexible with it. But on Sunday evening, once I'm done, I've got a pretty good idea about what I want to get done every day. And that's a really great feeling. So you do yours. It sounds like digitally in Fantastical then when you're doing your hyperscheduling. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I do. I used to do things that way. And I think the digital format, that's probably the easiest way to do that is a week at a time. Which is kind of interesting as I reflect on how my hyper scheduling has changed over time I don't have a weekly plan anymore I just take it a day at a time but I do that it started off paper pencil now it's a pdf inside of good notes but I still use the apple pencil and I'm physically writing out my time blocks every single day I do have a question though for the digital format do you use a single calendar then to block out the time and you say what you're going to be using it for?

Or do you have different calendars associated with the different areas of your life that you want to make sure that you have on there? For example, I used to have like a calendar for exercise and then I made sure I've got a green thing on there every single day. Yeah, I've got something like I've got more than 10 calendars. I was talking about them, but they like, you know, the legal stuff is one color. The max Sparky stuff is another color. The personal stuff is another color. And, and, but that's fine. Once you create the event and you duplicate it, it will, it'll take that characteristic over. I've even gone as far. And we talked about this on an, on an episode of the automators about calendar automation. Um. I've even gone as far as making Siri shortcuts that can do the standard block for a day. Like you press a button in Siri shortcuts

and it creates events for all the standard events. And I do have standard events, you know, like, like, you know, I have a shutdown period, I have an exercise period, I have an email period. There's some things that show up on every day, but not necessarily, even though I have ideally a time I'd like to do them, sometimes those things move around. Like we said earlier, it's a soup. Some of the lessons I've learned in doing this is, number one, block enough time. It's easy when you're doing the week to try and stick to an hour for something that takes two hours, and then you just create havoc for yourself because you've double booked yourself. You know, be realistic about your days, you know, how much you can get done. Yeah, I want to piggyback on that advice. I think that's great. That's a great

advice is to err on the side of caution when it comes to hyperscheduling. If you think something is on the fence between taking an hour or two hours, book a whole two hours for it. Because what that's going to do is if you finish it in an hour or even an hour and 15 minutes, you now have a 45-minute margin that you can use to either start working on the next thing or use to catch up on something that you didn't get finished. And I really like the idea between big blocks, like if I spend a couple hours working on a client thing, I really like the idea of getting it done in an hour 45 or less and having 15 minutes to maybe go outside and pull a weed or two or pick up my sacks and play some scales or just have kind of a mental downtime or alternate

time between that and jumping into the next big block. If I try and go block to block to block, I'll crash. Yeah, no, that's good advice. And that's something we didn't really spend a whole lot of time talking about. But in my mind, that's one of the big advantages of the hyper scheduling is if you do it the right way, you end up with a whole lot of margin that you wouldn't have had previously. And the fact that you got your two-hour thing done in an hour and 45 minutes gives you the release to play the scales on your instrument. I've got my guitar sitting right next to me, and I've started doing that too, where I've got a little bit of time and I'll open up my exercise scale book, you know, and I'll go through and

play some scales. And that has a lot of benefits. Number one, it helps me to play my guitar more. But two, the actual act of playing guitar when I'm focused on writing something, it's kind of a mode switch and it kind of resets me. And then when I'm done and I want to go into the next thing, I feel like I've got more energy. Yeah, it's a gear shift for your brain. Yeah, exactly. The other advantage of the way I do it this week is then when I get a call on Tuesday and someone says, Dave, I really need you for this. You know, when can you get it to me? Then I can look at, because I've already blocked the next several days. So I can look at it and say, okay, is this truly an emergency? Yeah. Okay. So what, which of these blocks can move and I can move them or maybe it's not truly an emergency and

I'll say, well, I'm blocked out for the next couple of days. I'll get it to you Friday morning. And I can actually live up to that commitment because I just created a block for Friday morning and I'm going to get that thing done on Friday. So when I make a promise, I live up to it, but I don't make promises I can't keep. You know, in a perfect world, I probably got a couple clients listening to this right now going, hey, wait a second. But you know, in a perfect world, I've probably got a couple of clients listening to this right now going, hey, wait a second. But you know, I'm not perfect,

but I really try to stick to those blocks and having that kind of done that forward planning, it gives me the ability to stick to it. That's another side benefit for it. Another thing I think people need to do when they do their own block timing is block fun in, you know. I mean, there's nothing wrong with saying, I'm going to finish at four o'clock on Thursday and I'm going to go to the movies with

my kid. Or if you're a weirdo jazz guy like me, say, you know what, at two o'clock today, I'm spending an hour playing my sax. And that goes in as a block of time. It's just as important of a commitment to me as that client contract or the next field guide. And I end the day feeling pretty good about myself. So, you know, look at it not as just a sense of work, but a sense of building your balance in. You may be somebody that's not very good at taking time off. And those blocks of giving yourself free time are perhaps more important than anything else you're going to do. Yeah, absolutely. I do have a question for you because I know you're into time tracking as well. Do you ever go back and compare this is how I scheduled my day and this is how my day actually turned out? It's a little odd the way I do it. I will sometimes move the blocks as I work through the day.

But what I really do, that's where I have the paper planner where I diary the day. I actually write down as I go through the day the stuff I actually accomplish. And on the right side of the page, I have like a column where I just log the time that I actually – what I actually did during the day. And I got that idea. what I actually did during the day. And I got that idea at Cal Newport when he wrote that book, Deep Work, which is a great book, had said he leaves room for what he had planned and what actually happened. I've got them in two different places, but it works. Yeah. I think that's an important piece for some people. I've kind of landed into a routine and I'm not dealing with client stuff all day, every day. So my scheduled day has a lot less volatility, I guess, to it than maybe yours does.

Yeah. And so when I write something on paper, it's probably not going to change. It might, but chances are it's going to go exactly as I planned it. But if you have a lot of fluidity in your schedule, I think that's where time tracking, which is a whole separate episode at some point. But that's where it can kind of be, it can locate you in terms of your personal integrity. Because you said earlier something that was really important, where you put something on the calendar for self-care or whatever. This is David time. This is me time.

And you treat that as a commitment that you can't break. And I know that's something that a lot of people struggle with is, well, I have no trouble honoring the commitments that I make to other people. If I say I'm going to be somewhere, I'm going to show up. But when it comes time to doing the thing that I want to do for myself, that's where I let work creep in or email or whatever. I feel like I've got to appease other people and their desires for my time. And so time tracking, I feel like the big value from that is not that you do it every single day, but that you go back to it occasionally and you look at, okay, so this is how I think I'm spending my time. This is how I'm actually spending my time. And as long as those two are close, then the time, the hyper

scheduling, the front end of that, the intentionality, that's where the value, the day-to-day value comes in my mind. But it is worthwhile every once in a while to go back and make sure that you are still on track and you're seeing how you're spending your time through the correct lens. No, I totally believe that time tracking is a useful exercise. But for me, this time blocking and the intentionality that it necessarily creates is like a productivity superpower, you know? And it's something that is,

it's transformational for me, which is the reason why I've written about it on a blog that largely focuses on tech. That's why I started writing about it on Mac Sparky, because it just really makes a big difference. Like I said, I cage in time where I find myself getting time sucks. I cage them in with small blocks when I'm upset with myself because I'm not getting enough done on things that are important to me. I build in time for those things. because I'm not getting enough done on things that are important to me.

I build in time for those things. And I also famously use OmniFocus to have a very complex task system. But to me, OmniFocus is the place I go to figure out what those blocks are going to be on Sunday. Right, yeah. And then the blocks are where I get the work done. Yep, I love that. That makes any sense. And then so big times for me are Sunday evening when I do the week, and then also every night. Like I do a shutdown, and there's a whole bunch of stuff to the shutdown.

We're already an hour, and I'm not going to go through it all. But one of the things I do is I audit kind of the blocks for the next day. I have much better intel the night before, because by then I've heard from the clients, and I know what's going on, and I can make adjustments. But I really like the idea of jumping out of bed and hitting a big block, you know, eating the frog, not boiling the frog, eating the frog in the morning before I do anything. It's just a weird quirk I have. It's a luxury when you work from home. But I love the idea of before I do anything, knocking out one of those big ones. And so that's the way I do it.

But so the big times for me are in the afternoon and Sunday. And then hopefully when things are working, it's just a question of execution. And my calendar is like my assistant just telling me, hey, Dave, you got to do this stuff. And I don't have to govern myself. The calendar does it for me. And that's since I use a bunch of technology. The Apple Watch is a huge benefit for this because it taps your wrist

every time you've got another appointment, assuming you've set alarms. You know, Fantastical is another huge benefit because it's got super easy entry of time, you know? So if I'm sitting here thinking, man, I really would like to, you know, play that song on my sax. I look at my calendar.

I type a couple buttons in Fantasical. I just block time out for it, and then I can go back to work. I use alarms on almost everything with this stuff. Nice. Anyway, that's how I do it. It's not as hyper-scheduled as some people think it is. It does change, I understand.

I mean, all the stuff I've kind of said already. But if you try this, it can really work for you. You have to do it with a little bit of forgiveness for yourself and understand that some days aren't going to work. But the days that do work, you will see a substantial gain in the amount of work you get done on the things that are important to you. I guess it's the part that really stands out for me is if you don't block the time, the time will get used. And maybe you'll be really productive and crank a lot of widgets, but who knows if they're widgets that actually matter. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I

think maybe the place to leave this discussion would be to challenge people who are listening to this to try it for themselves if they've never done it. A couple of weeks. Yeah. And like you said, give yourself some grace. If you mess it up, that's to be expected. But try blocking out the time for the things that are really important to you. Put those big rocks in your jar first and let the sand fall where it may. But I think that's a great, the great thing about this is that you can apply it how you want. I would recommend, I think, to start that everybody working at least one hour time blocks. Like you said, if you do less than

that, it can quickly get to the point where you're over scheduling. But that at least one hour, that gives you at least a little bit of margin as you go through your day. It doesn't mean that every block has to be an hour. A lot of my blocks might be an hour and a half, but they're at least an hour long. And that provides me the margin that I need to err on the side of caution and end up with a net win at the end of the day. And if you're starting this out as an experiment, I would say a minimum increase every time estimate by 50%. Probably. True.

Probably needs to be double what your estimate is. But at a minimum 50%. And if you have 50%, you're still missing, you know, the alarms are hitting and you're still not done with whatever you had planned on, then, you know, remember that when planning tomorrow. If you can give yourself big enough blocks. you know, remember that when planning tomorrow, if you can give yourself big enough blocks, because let's be honest, if it took that much time, you were never going to get the other thing done anyway. All you do is make yourself anxious. So, so give yourself enough time, get it done and, and see how it goes. Let us know in the forums. I'd love to hear if this helps you or what your stumbling blocks are. All right, let's take a minute to talk about our

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then you don't know exactly what kind of call you need to have with them. I use FreshBooks for Max Barkey. I do all my invoicing through FreshBooks. I've totally automated it because FreshBooks is a web service that's super amenable to automation. Like when I create a new invoice in FreshBooks, it creates an entry and error table. And it relates to Basecamp. And I've got all these things going on. I love it because it took all of this work out of the process for me. And it makes sure I get paid.

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We thank FreshBooks for all of their support of this show and RelayFM. Hey, Mike, you know, there's a bunch of questions in the forum about productivity books. And I know that I feel like I'm, you know, playing with, you know, a flamethrower here. You have a whole podcast called Bookworm

where you talk about productivity books. But I've had kind of changing attitudes towards this stuff. For the longest time, I felt like almost all productivity books were snake oil sales. And between listening to you guys over on Bookworm and picking up a few books myself, I actually am starting to appreciate a lot of people that are making these books. Like, you know, we had Chris Bailey on the show, a super sincere guy, just trying to help people get better at stuff. And it seems like there's actually

quite a few books written these days that are not snake oil salesmen, but people really trying to help others get better. And so I've been getting an increasingly positive feeling towards some of these books. I know you've always felt pretty good about them. I thought it'd be fun to talk a little bit about how we read these books and if there's two or three to recommend. Sure. Yeah. So the thread is Productivity Books Must Reads Greatest Impact? And I loved seeing this thread blow up.

It was introduced as we're recording this three days ago, and there's 26 messages in here. I got very excited when I saw the title. And just to back up a little bit and kind of explain my perspective on this, because you're right. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen. I guess you could use that term. There are a lot of people who think that. I guess you could use that term. There are a lot of people who think that they are pretty great stuff and that they've discovered

the secret of life. And they're going to tell you the three quick things you need to do to win back an hour a day. Yeah. Anytime there's a list, I get suspicious. Yeah. So you do have to kind of spit out the sticks when it comes to some of this stuff. But one of the things that has been

really transformative to me was reading a book specifically, Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. Because I think we talked about this probably when we talked about imposter syndrome, but I've struggled with this my entire life. And I've battled the limiting belief that I am just not creative. That book in particular gave me permission to be creative because it said that when you create something, you're not creating something from scratch. What you're doing is you're connecting the dots in ways that haven't been connected before. So in my mind, reading these books and listening to podcasts to a certain degree too, but I think with books specifically, you do have a lot of people

who understand this stuff really well. And so it is a great place to get more dots to connect. And maybe I take that too far because I know you've given me advice where like you need to just kind of own this stuff yourself. You don't need to give everybody credit for every single idea, which is something that I tend to do. But that has been the incentive behind for me reading all

of these books is I'm going to go into a book with the attitude that I don't care if I only get one thing out of this. That one thing might be the thing that changes my life, like the perspective I got when I read the Austin Kleon book. Yeah. I mean, and that's why I apologize like once an episode for focus is I don't want to come across as somebody who feels like he knows everything because I don't. And, um, and I've been kind of know it all today because I've been doing a lot of this hyper scheduling stuff, but, but, you know, we, we really believe we're fellow travelers with you on this and we're trying to figure it out ourselves. But the other thing I wanted to talk about is now that I'm starting to get into some of these books,

I realized that I don't want to just read them. I actually have kind of been developing a workflow around the books, which seriously reduces the number of books I can read over a given amount of time. But I thought I'd share that as well. For instance, I'm just starting going through that Make Time book that Shahid recommended last week. And in that one, I will read the book. I went ahead and bought the Audible as well. And so sometimes with Amazon, you go on on and if you buy the Kindle book for like $5, you can get the audio too. And that's a good investment for me because I spend a lot of time when I do like walks or when I'm doing housework, I'll listen to these books. So now

I realize that I've kind of developed this workflow where I get a book, I listen to the book on audible first, you know, I don't read the book and then I go back and I get the Kindle version out and I go through it with a, and I take notes as I go through it. You know, I mean, Kindle's got a great highlight feature.

I know that the true nerds would, would never do it on Kindle. They'd get the book and they'd get a number two pencil and do all that. I just go ahead on Kindle and go through the book and actually take notes on the book. And then the final step I do, which was inspired by Bookworm, is I give myself action items on the book. So by the time I get through it, I've been through the book a couple times and I've actually hopefully incorporated a couple of the good lessons and turned it into something. And it's only after I finish all of that that I go on to the next book. So it takes me like, you know, probably two to four weeks to get through one. And I don't read

it word for word on Kindle because I've already listened to it, but I do go through the major points. I usually skip all the stories. You know, a lot of these productivity authors want to tell you about Jane and Dubuque, you know? Yeah. You know, and I skip all that stuff when I go through it on Kindle because I've already heard it. But I've got this kind of weird workflow, but it's really kind of working out for me in the sense that I feel like I'm getting good content out of these books.

Yeah, I like that workflow. And I have evolved my note-taking workflow for the books that I read as well. Now I record everything in a mind map using MindNode and I flesh out the bones of the book itself, but I'm not trying to record everything that the authors say or every point that they make. I'm really just highlighting the stuff that stands out to me so that I have a useful reference if I wanted to go back and look at it again. That was largely shaped by a book that we did

for Bookworm called How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. And it was written in like 1940 or something. So you can kind of take your own spin on it in terms of the digital workflows. But that was really helpful. And it's been interesting to see as I gain more distance from those books that I've read, which ones really stick with me. You know, that one, when I went through it, didn't really like it all that much, but it totally changed the way that I take notes when I am reading a book. And that has helped me retain a lot more from some of the books that we've read. Yeah, it makes sense. Should we talk about some of the favorite ones? Go back to your original question. Yeah. Yeah, let's do that.

All right. So one that I have read recently, which I absolutely loved, was Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. It's a leadership book by a couple of ex-Navy SEALs. So if you don't really like the military culture, you probably won't like this book because they do tell a lot of stories about their deployment in Iraq. But the chapters are set up where they tell a story from their deployment, and then they talk about the principle. And then they also have a leadership company now where they work with businesses and organizations. So then they'll tell

the business version of the story as well. So you don't have to have military experience in order to benefit from some of the stuff that they're telling in there. But the thing that really is just smacking me in the face with this extreme ownership idea is taking responsibility for everything that comes into your sphere. So they tell a whole bunch of stories, like they have a command coming in from headquarters, and they're supposed to communicate it to their subordinates. They don't really understand that the subordinates are getting mad at what they're being asked to do.

So they would say, I, as a leader, have to take ownership of the vision communicated from my higher ups. And I need to put in forth the effort and really understand this and believe in it before I can be an effective leader and tell it to the people who are underneath me. believe in it before I can be an effective leader and tell it to the people who are underneath me. You know, stuff like that really challenges me to go higher, to do better, as I want to develop my own leadership skills. And so there was a lot in this for me. That's a good one. One that I have gone through this whole process with is Carol Dweck's Mindset book, which I think is a great book in terms of where your mind is at on stuff. And I found this book very useful as a parent as well,

the advice into it with my children, even my growing children, trying to kind of change the conversation around things that they're frustrated with has been really useful for me. And this is one my wife and I talk about, and my wife is even less inclined to get into this productivity stuff than I am. So, you know, it's really been a great book, and I would recommend that to anybody. I completely agree. That growth mindset idea that she outlines in that book, that's probably been the most influential revelation that I've gotten from reading a book in the last five, 10 years. That's kind of been the thing that's gotten me to where I am today has been that growth mindset. And when you read that, she explains it really well. She makes it very approachable, I guess. You

don't have to have a productivity background to understand that I want to have a growth mindset and I want to continue to look for ways to become better from the situations and the obstacles that are presented before me. Another one, just real quickly, we've talked about Atomic Habits by James Clear already, but that is the book on habits that I would recommend everybody read. Not The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, but Atomic Habits by James Clear. I've now bought four copies of that book because I've been giving them away. Yeah, I've given away a bunch of copies of that too. I've also given away a bunch of copies of Extreme Ownership. That's the other book that I've been giving away recently. Another book that I have to mention here, and this

isn't really a productivity type book, but this is a perspective book. And that's Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Are you familiar with Viktor Frankl? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So this is, for those who aren't, he was a concentration camp survivor, and he's really the power of attitude type guy. And he shares a lot of his personal stories from being in the concentration camp. So next time you think that you've got a rough read, man, search for me. It'll instantly locate you. Yeah, I mean, it is funny, though. It's a conversation I have with my children often when they feel like the world isn't.

And I talk to them about people in the world today and the problems they're facing compared to what we have. And you realize that, you know, living where we do, we kind of hit the lotto just by being born here. And it's crazy. A couple other, so I would second the Atomic Habits. That's one that I read when it first came out because I just wanted to get through it. It's on my list to go back and do kind of the full treatment. I haven't done that yet, but I want to. I have finished going through twice now, Essentialism by Greg McCown, which I really liked. Yeah. And I don't know, give us one more. Well, we can talk about these

later because there's so many books. I don't want to overwhelm people, but give us one more. Well, let me give you two. I'm going to say... You can't help yourself. I'm going to say The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. This was a really great book because it presents this idea of the clarifying question. There's a lot of stuff in here, and Gary Keller is a really good author. But if all you got was this one question, which is what is the one thing that by doing it will make everything else easier or unnecessary, that would still be a potentially life-changing revelation that I got from this book. And it's very much in line with the idea of focus. And I also want to call out Overlap by Sean McCabe, who we've had on the podcast,

because I think this is a great book specifically for the people who, the more I meet our listeners, they fall into this camp. I was never a free agent, but I've always kind of wanted to be a free agent. So Sean McCabe in this book, Overlap, this is a really great book. And it basically outlines the way to make your side thing, your main thing, regardless of the situation that you find yourself in right now. This is a limiting belief I think a lot of potential free agents have is the fact that, well, I want to do this thing, but I can't just quit my job, so I'm never going to do this thing. And Sean kind of shows you the way forward with that. And this is a book that you can read for free online. You can obviously buy the book if you

want also, but you can read the full text of the book online. And I also want to call out because I sent it to you earlier that I'm building out based on this thread, a page on my website, I call it the recommended reading list where it's got the books that I consider to be essential reads. There's only a few on there at the moment. I'm adding more every day, though. And so people want to see all my recommendations for books. You can go there. And Sean's overlap is also on Audible.

If you want to listen to it driving to work, that'd be kind of, you know, that'd be kind of ballsy, really, you know, listening to how to build your business while working a full time job while driving to your full time job. I kind of like that. Very meta. All right. Just for giggles, do you read fiction at all? I don't really. And somebody had asked about this on Bookworm at one point. I understand the value of reading fiction, but when people say, I want to read fiction for fun, honestly, the self-development type stuff, that is fun for me. There are occasionally books that I'll start reading and I just, I don't like this guy. I'm not going to do this. But for the most part, if I can make a connection with an author, and usually even the first couple chapters,

I can tell if I'm going to like them or not, then I just, I'm really interested in what they have to say. So that is fun for me, believe it or not. All right. I got one for you because I do like reading fiction. Quite often I listen to fiction. I don't read, you know what I mean? I don't read it as much as I listen to it because fiction is great for me. Once again, for just like when I'm taking a walk or doing the dishes. The Rook by Daniel O'Malley. Great book. Love it. Nice.

That's all I'm going to say. Go check it out. All right. Well, we went kind of long, but that was fun. Hopefully we created a few hyper schedulers today. Let us know what you think. We'd love to hear from you over in the show notes and at the forum over at talk.macpowerusers.com.

And let us know what's working for you for hyperscheduling, what's not working for you, and where you're having your trouble points. Because I do think this is something that could help everyone. We'll be back in a few weeks with another episode. In the meantime, thank you to our sponsors, FreshBooks, Hover, and our new sponsor, Moo. And everybody, have a great day and stick to your blocks.