Focused - 117: Roles & Goals

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

Goals are great, but they aren't enough. In this episode, David & Mike talk about how roles & goals work together and how the hats that you decide to wear are the real foundation of a solid personal productivity system.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my pal and yours, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great. I'm ready to jump in and talk about roles and goals. But before we do that, we've got a couple things we should announce here. The first is that we have a really cool Deep Focus segment. Well, I think it's cool anyways for today. For people who are supporting

the show directly, we have a special feed called Deep Focus with an extra segment at the end where we get into some of the nerdy stuff. And we are definitely going to nerd out today because you have been looking at keyboards yes yeah we're going to talk mechanical keyboards today and and as with pins i feel like mike is ahead of me on the curve but we both have much to say so that's going to be fun and and i'd recommend checking out deep focus um we're really making an effort with this new year to bring some fun content to deep focus so So if you're a supporter, we really appreciate it.

If you're interested in becoming a supporter, we're going to be working on bringing you excellent deep focus with every episode. One of the things I like is when we have the guests and we're able to go down a separate rabbit hole with the guests in the deep focus section, but keyboards are fun too. Yes, absolutely.

So if you want to subscribe directly to focus, support the show directly, you can do that. There'll be a link in the show notes. And also you can go to relay.fm slash focused and subscribe. And then once you log in, you'll get the special feed. You drop that into your podcast player and you'll be able to get the Deep focus episodes. So those are a lot of fun. And it has very cool artwork. I'll just say that. It does. It does very cool artwork. The other thing that we should mention is that our friend Mike Vardy is putting together a digital productivity conference called The Big Ready. And you and I are going to participate. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun, a lot of really smart people, and you and I are going to be talking about retreats. Yes.

So it's going to be a lot to cover, but we'll put a link in the show notes to it if you're interested. Mike Vardy is a really smart guy, and he's done the Avengers Assemble for productivity nerds with this event, and you don't want to miss it. Yeah, I was looking at the list of speakers, and there's a lot of people on there that I have looked up to for a very long time. I'm pretty excited to be able to participate in this. We're going to be participating in a panel, like you said. There are also some keynote speakers, and the link that we'll put in the show notes will get you all of the information that you need for the entire thing. It's a one-day

conference and it's going to be on February 2nd. So that's a Tuesday and you can follow the link to get all the details. That's Groundhog Day, right? February 2nd? I hadn't made that connection, but I think you're right. Yeah. All right. Well, instead of looking at your shadow, look at your productivity. Yep. Yep. All right. Goals, Mike. Goals. Let's get into today's topic. Roles and goals, like you said, and this is going to kind of be the foundation for a lot of the things that we do. This is kind of inspired by some follow-up to a challenge that we had had, and we're going to get to that eventually. But as we were talking through this and putting the notes together, really, it just kind of

became obvious that roles and goals is kind of the place to start. You agree? Yeah. I mean, I kind of went on a journey with that because for so long, so many of the books I read and people I talked to, you know, said, well, when you're creating your productivity system, you've got to start with goals. You know, that's the foundation of whatever you're going to build upon. You know, what are your goals? And then you work from there. And I never found that answer adequate for me. I mean, there's a lot of reasons,

you know, goals, once you achieve them, Mike talked about that, you know, once you run your marathon, then what, right? But they just always felt too much like vapor to me to be a foundation. And it was very difficult for me to kind of build upon it because i could never kind of like sort that out does that does that make sense yeah i i agree with that um i actually as we record this just presented a webinar last week on systems and roles and goals were definitely a part of what what i presented as the productivity hierarchy, which is actually an idea that I picked up from Sean Blanc working with the Blanc Media team. It's a different way of saying it, but essentially the goals that you have, I've come around

on the term goals a little bit. I agree with you that just a goal is not going to be enough for a lot of reasons that we've already talked about on this podcast, But they do have their place. They do help you kind of go in the right direction. But essentially, it has to be built on top of something. So in the productivity hierarchy from the systems webinar I did, we labeled it vision and values. But essentially, your vision and your values are encapsulated by your roles as you define them because the things that you are going to show up and do, show up and be really with your roles, those have to be imprinted on your bones.

They have to be a part of your DNA. Otherwise, you're going to get frustrated and you won't feel like you're being authentic to your true self. You'll feel like you're living somebody else's life. You can phrase it a lot of different ways, but it's got to resonate with you in order to direct any sort of action. Yeah. I want to put a pin in that vision and values roles distinction to the extent there is one and come back to that later today. But, but for me, I'll tell you the kind of the hallelujah moment was figuring out, well, what is below the goals? You know, what is the foundation of the hallelujah moment was figuring out, well, what is below

the goals? You know, what is the foundation of whatever I'm trying to do here? And the more I thought about it, the more I settled on the idea that my roles are my foundation, you know, what are the iterations of Sparky? You know, what do I do? And, and, and I even have kind of a further discussion we'll get to about the idealized version of me but but the beginning point is there are certain roles i feel in my life and that is the foundation that's the stuff that while the individual roles may change that there's always the roles and anything i build has to work down to one of those roles. And that made a huge difference for me once I kind of adopted that framework. Yeah, makes a lot of sense.

The roles, really what they do is they provide the why behind the goals, in my opinion. A goal in and of itself is just an outcome that you want to achieve. And without something deeper, it's kind of an arbitrary reason. This is kind of coming from a lot of research I've been doing around habits and tasks, which is maybe a whole separate episode.

But I realize there's a distinction between your task list, which is an ever-growing list of things that you say you need to do, but you never are going to complete it. And your habits, which in my opinion are kind of on a different level because they are non-negotiable. They're like who you are, getting back to the roles piece. And so the roles, I mean, you can connect those however you want. That's just the one that kind of makes sense in my head. But there has to be a connection between the roles that you're volunteering to fulfill and the things that you are going to try and do.

If you don't, then, like I said, at least my experience, there's this disconnect and you start to resent some of the things that you're doing. And it's because there's always other things that you want to be doing. So I feel like especially now there is a premium on making sure that you are not trying to do everything, but just doing the right things. We talked about the big reset recently and how we've got this opportunity to clarify what are the big rocks that we're going to put back in our jar, the things that we really want to be committed to. And the things that we had always assumed were important, I'm finding they're not necessarily are. And the rules of engagement are being changed a little bit. So for me, for example, one of the things that I realized as I

was reflecting on this year is that we have eaten almost every meal together as a family. That did not happen prior to all this craziness that was in 2020. But I recognize that that is something that is really important to me and I want to be able to prioritize that. So tying that back to a role, my role as a husband and a father, I'm going to make sure that there is a way to sustain that. And it's not just going to be some pie in the sky like it was before. Oh, it would be nice if we could do this sort of thing. The roles that I'm recognizing, these are the ones that are important. I'm figuring out a way to have those drive my daily actions. Yeah, I mean, exactly. Once you have a foundation, then you can always drive

towards those. What are the roles that I have? And now when I'm choosing a goal or a project or what am I going to do after I brush my teeth today? I can have that foundation say, OK, what is that? What is that helping? You know, if I'm going to take time to do this one thing, what role is that feeding? And if it's not feeding a role, why am I doing it? And that's been very helpful for me. And the interesting thing is when you think about roles, it's easy to think about them in simple forms,

like I'm a podcaster or I'm a Mac Sparky or I'm a lawyer. But there's a lot of other categories of roles, I believe. Don't just think about the roles you have that put money in your pocket or food on your table, but I think there is a whole category of relationship-based roles, husband, father, friend, uncle, brother, whatever. And more subtle than that, I think, are the inward facing roles. You know, I am a student. I am a spiritual person. I am a person that is healthy. You know, I am a person that, you know, you just kind of break it down to those areas. I'm altruistic. That was one of the new roles I added to my life, as we talked about in the last episode on this. So that's a new role for me. I'm an altruistic human. Well, what does that mean?

What am I going to do to drive towards that goal? But stopping to think about the roles you serve, really, I do believe can give you a foundation into making decisions based on that in your day to day, you know, under fire. Yeah, I think there's a distinction to be made here, by the way, with the roles that you are currently signed up for. Maybe we'll call those evidence-based roles because that is an approach you can take as you're figuring out your roles as you can just look at, well, where am I spending my time? What are the things that I'm doing? I guess I've, whether it was intentional or by default, signed up for these specific roles. But there's also aspirational roles, I think. And that kind of gets into James Clear and the whole concept of habits, where you got

to believe that you're a writer before you'll show up every day and write, just as a random example. But I think that there's a lot of different ways that you could define these. And you have to connect, not just, okay, I want to be this specific thing as a role, but then you have to, and this is where the goals piece comes in, I think, figure out a way to move towards living that out. And if you have some aspirational roles, for example, but you aren't doing anything to support those roles, you're kind of sabotaging yourself, I think, because you're hearing yourself say, well, I am this thing, but then your actions don't follow, don't back that up. And so I think it's okay to let some roles go if it's kind of like a someday maybe sort of a thing. Well, I'd like to be a writer

at some point, but it's just not going to happen for me right now with all the other roles that I'm currently committed to. I think figuring out which roles are evidence-based and which ones are aspirational can kind of help you set yourself up for success as you're figuring these out because the list of roles can grow very quickly. Yeah, and I think giving yourself this roles audit is an opportunity to put the microscope on roles, the evidence-based roles that you already have. I mean, are you really an advertising executive? Are you, you know, whatever, is that something you need to rethink? We were just talking recently to a friend who is a

litigation attorney and, and litigation attorneys. That's what I did for 20 years. It's very aggressive and it's a lot of fighting. And he was telling me how his favorite part is the part where they negotiate settlements and the parts where, you know, literally the non litigation points, everything that about litigation was the part of the job he liked lease. And I said, well, maybe you're not a litigation attorney. You know, I challenged his role. There are lots of kinds of lawyers. The stuff that brings you joy and the stuff that is in your wheelhouse isn't necessarily matching the role that you have. Maybe it's time to rethink that role. And only by a very deliberate thought can you pull yourself through that miserable process?

Right, right. Yeah. Do you think maybe we should talk about some of our roles, give people some examples? Yeah, sure. You know, like I said, to me, I've got these categories, you know, the categories are kind of like the relationship-based roles. So just to go through those, the ones that are primary to me is number one is a husband. Number two is a father. Number three is kind of my family relationships, which I call brother-uncle because my parents are gone and I'm a brother and an uncle to a lot of people. And then my friendships. a lot of people and the um and then my friendships and those are the big four relationship based roles that i kind of identified for myself those are good uh do you have anything specific with like how you live these out i'm moving back to like moving the needle for example yeah um or my version of this i guess is kind of like the daily questions are you measuring how you are doing in terms of being a friend daily with this

sort of sort of thing or is this just kind of something you review when you do your your quarterly retreat sort of a thing or how does that work? Do you have any idea what sort of rabbit hole you just sent me down? Kind of, I hesitate to go there, but I think it's important. Okay. So I think that just identifying roles isn't enough to create the foundation. Just identifying roles isn't enough to create the foundation. And this is why it took me so long to get there. But it's not just identifying the role, but identifying the perfect version of you in those roles. And I get that none of us are perfect and we probably will never get there.

But sitting down with each role, and this is part of my quarterly retreat, is going through and auditing those. What is the perfect version of David the husband? What does he do to be an ideal husband to his wife? And there is a whole bunch of stuff. I have like four paragraphs written on what I think the ideal husband is. And it changes over time. I have like four paragraphs written on what I think the ideal husband is and that, you know, it changes over time, but coming up with that perfect version is kind of gives you the target to aim at. And it gives you the context when you pick up a new project or goal, what is this helping in the husband role? What part of that perfect husband am I aiming for by doing this or creating this habit? And, um, and I, the, the, the bit I've

added to it in the last year is a bit of like nerdiness. Um, there's this, there's a Greek term arete, you know, and it's kind of like the perfect version, the idealized version. Um, the Stoics use it, but a bunch of other people use it too. It's not just a Stoicism thing. And the Stoics use it, but a bunch of other people use it too. It's not just a Stoicism thing. But when I was in college, I studied political philosophy. So that was kind of, it allowed me to read Aristotle and Socrates and a lot of interesting people. And I played with philosophy a lot in kind of political systems, but it exposed me to

a lot of classic philosophy. And I picked up the term like in the eighties when I was going through school and I would use it as like a weapon. I weaponized arete for lack of a better term. And it would be the, the mindset I would adopt when I was taking, tackling a particular problem, like, you know, what is the perfect workflow for writing this paper? You know, and I would say, what is the RTA of this? And I would try to do the idealized version of getting the research right and reading the right books and putting together the right, you know, paper. And, and I use that throughout college and law school. And really the way I did it with

the bar exam too, like when you, when you graduate law school, you get like two months to study for the biggest test of your life. You know, it's a three day test and, you know, and if you pass it, you become a lawyer. And if you don't, you don't become a lawyer despite all the work you've done. pass it, you become a lawyer. And if you don't, you don't become a lawyer despite all the work you've done. And in my case, I had added a degree of pressure because my wife and I had got engaged and we were getting married in December and the bar results came out in late November. And you take the exam in, I think it was August or July. So you graduate like May, June, you got two months until you take the test. And then you wait like four months, you get the results. And then I'm going to be at my wedding, like three weeks later. So who wants to go to their wedding and say, Hey, Dave, I heard you,

you failed the bar. So I brought out Arete, you know, and that was in my head. I wrote it on a piece of paper and stuck it on my mirror. And every day I would think, what am I going to do today? Well, what are the perfect things I need to do to pass the bar exam? And I, you know, I took like 10,000, I'm not exaggerating, like 10,000 multiple choice practice. Because I basically did all of the multiple choice that were published that had ever been done before. I wrote hundreds of essays and, you know, did a lot of work. And that was RTA for me, you know, it got me there and I passed the bar. So that was great. But then I abandoned it. I don't have any idea why Mike, but I never really thought about the concept again until I started writing up these perfect versions of myself for roles about a year ago and then i realized oh this is arete you know i'm finding the perfect version as husband brother whatever and um so that's kind of like

the landscape i hang all this on now is like, what is that perfect version? Spoken like a true nerd, right? So I have a question about that. A point of clarification that I'm hoping you can help me out with here. It sounds like Arte is a version of goals for your roles. Is that wrong? No, no, it's not. It's a, it's a,

it's a description of what the perfect iteration of me in that role is, you know, like, like with my children, one of the, one of the descriptions is that they learned from me by my actions, not my words. I don't lecture them, but they see me acting in a way that they should want to emulate. That's not really a goal.

To me, that is an element of the perfect version of me as a father. Gotcha. Okay. So it is sort of tied then to a vision and a values sort of a thing. Maybe, you know, you don't want to go there quite yet. That's fine. But that's what you're using to define the arete, right? I mean, this is a personalized, this is what a perfect David as a father looks like, correct? Yes, yes, exactly. And the trick is to take time and think about it. What is the perfect version of you as a father or whatever your roles are? And consider them and then reconsider them on a regular basis. Sure, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I've got another question for you then,

because I've got my roles here, which I can walk through real quickly. But I think maybe I have a different way that I have historically connected these things. And I want to me is husband and father. Family is not just what I profess to be the most important thing. I try to live that out. And then I've got a whole bunch of ones that are kind of work-related. And I say work because I realized that there is a couple of distinctions around that term that I need to clarify. So I'm a podcaster, that's a role, and I've got a couple different podcasts that I do. And the ones that I do just as like the definition of a passion project, for example, that would be like the intentional family that I do with my wife. That's different than the work one that I define here for something like focused, where this is part of the relay network.

There's ads, stuff like that. I've also got a role as a writer, which can be broken down into the stuff that I do for the suite setup. And then also the things that I do through, I'm just calling it faith-based productivity. There's a lot of things that go with that. Not just the site where I want to start blogging more regularly, but the book that I had written, stuff like that. Lots of different things fall into that bucket, I feel. Then there is, I recognize an aspirational one, one that I originally left off this list that I should pay more attention to, which is friend.

that I should pay more attention to, which is friend. I don't think I'm a very good friend a lot of times because I'm not cognizant a lot of times of reaching out to people proactively. I've tried to get better at that, especially with all the quarantine stuff. But that one just hasn't really stuck in terms of the things that I'm doing every single day. When you talk about Arate, I know what that looks like for me for this. It's where I'm calling somebody different every single day and I'm making a connection and I'm building those relationships. But when push comes to shove, that's the one that kind of doesn't happen. Okay, so let me interrupt there for a second. Yeah, go ahead. But just let me interrupt on that because that's it. This is why it works for me. Like,

friends is another one for me that's difficult. I mean, I have friends like you that I work with, and I am in contact with regularly. But I also have this whole flock of friends from high school and childhood and just over the course of my life that I've collected, that once you're out of my life, you know, I'm not working with you or seeing you regularly. I tend to drift away and, you know, like my kids, it's different because they're all very social media connected where, um, even though they've been out of high school a while, they, they, and their high school friends still have regular contact where me, when we, once we left high school, we all went off to college and we, a lot of us never saw each other again. You know, that was just kind of the way it was

back in my day. So, um, being aware of friend as being one of my core roles, um, by identifying it, by defining my RTA around being a friend, suddenly there's action on that. You know, like I have a habit that I track every week. Did I set up a call with a friend, suddenly there's action on that. You know, like I have a habit that I track every week. Did I set up a call with a friend? It's not every day. I don't have time to do it every day, but once a week I tried to click off that box in the habit list of setting a call with an old friend. And so that's 52 calls a year, which is 52 more than I was doing last year, you know, and, um, right. The, um, it's doesn't happen every week. Sometimes I'm really busy and I take the week off, but, but by having identified it, setting up the role, I've got something I'm pointing at. And now I

actually, I actually have to think about it once a week, even if I don't do it every week. So that's kind of how this all pays off. Sure. Okay. I guess I don't think about them every week. I tend to think about them more quarterly. And that's where my question comes in. I'd like to get your feedback on this. I've got my wheel of life as part of the personal retreat process that I do where I rate the eight different areas, which for me are spiritual, career and work, love and relationships, health and fitness, personal growth,

fun and recreation, social, which I guess friends would fit into that category, and then finances. Do you think that I have been, that's another version of the roles or is this something different entirely? I think it's probably another flavor of that i mean okay i just think no matter what you're doing you just have to have a big why you know why am i doing all this what what am i what is this feeding toward and the way it connected for me was foundational roles you know idealized versions of foundational roles are the reason I get out of bed and try and move the needle every day.

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Squarespace. I used it for a couple of projects. The most recent one is the podcast that I mentioned that I started with my wife, The Intentional Family. Now, I have connected all the pipes using other platforms before, specifically for podcasts. I know how all that stuff works. I can do it, but it is a hassle, and Squarespace just makes it so easy. And if you were to go look at the website for The Intentional Family, then you wouldn't even know that it's a Squarespace site. They connect it to Apple Podcasts. So all we have to do is upload the files, hit publish, they take care of everything else. They've got analytics so you can see who's downloading it, how many people have visited, all that sort of stuff. And I don't have to worry about maintaining

web servers or writing any code. It's super simple. And that's really what I wanted, because even though I know how to do all that technical stuff, that's not where my attention should be. I want to be focused on the stuff that I create. And Squarespace gives me the vehicle that I need to just get it out into the world so that people can see it. I highly recommend it for any personal project or even business projects that you might have. Check out Squarespace first, see how far you can get. And you might be amazed if you spent just a couple of hours trying to set something up, how far you can get with Squarespace. Their plans start at just $12 a month, but you can start a trial with no credit card required if you go to squarespace.com

slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D. And when you decide to sign up, use the offer code focus to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain, and you'll show your support for the Focus podcast. So once again, that is squarespace.com slash focused and the code focus to get 10% off your first purchase. We thank Squarespace for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. So my roles aren't just all relationship-based, though. I also have kind of different categories of roles. The work-based ones are, I call them Max Barkey and attorney, you know, because those are kind of the two things I do that are work-based.

I don't break down Max Barkey into podcaster, writer, blogger, etc. Those are just things I do under that, but the role is Max Barkey kind of in my head. And I guess that's really up to your own personal preference, but the description of the perfect Max Barkey includes discussion of all those things that he does, right? I should stop referring to myself in the third person. That is really annoying. But anyway, so that's the second kind of categories, the work-related roles. And then the final are the inward-facing ones, which were something I hadn't really thought about until I went through this practice.

But there's a whole bunch of inward-facing roles that I have. out until I went through this practice, but there's a whole bunch of inward facing roles that I have. You know, I talked about a few of them earlier, altruistic human, reliable human, you know, kind of that kind of all the, all this stuff by getting my teeth, well, actually my getting my teeth clean would go to the healthy human, but like, you know, paying the bills and paying the taxes and all that, that's a reliable human, the person who, you know, there's a lot of stuff I do in my life that is just being reliable, spiritual, creative. I call student a Padawan learner because I'm a nerd, but, you know, you want to be a student your whole life, right?

So I have these different roles I've defined there as well. And the payoff for this for me really is I take the review of the, because the roles are the foundation, they show up everywhere. And I've just incorporated them into so many different areas of my life. weekly, monthly, and quarterly review. When you look at my review template, whether it's week, month, or quarter, there's a section that has each one of those roles, kind of with the implied question, how am I doing? How can I get better? And I may not hit altruistic human every week, but I'm going to look at the word every week. And then I'm going to ask myself, what can I do next week to be more altruistic? And that fits with each role. So nothing really ever is far from the surface for me with respect to these roles. And then my habits and tasks are built towards the roles. if you look at my OmniFocus library, there is a top level folder called

husband. You know, there's one called father. There's one called reliable human. There's one called Padawan learner. There's one called Max Barkey. And so every project I create an OmniFocus fits in a role. If you look at my habit system, and we're going to talk about probably another day, but every habit is identified to a specific role. If it's not, then why am I making this a habit? So it's just like all present for me, these idea of these roles. And it really does give me kind of a foundation to work off of. That makes a lot of sense. I guess I have a little bit of an inverse application of this with the Wheel of Life because that's essentially showing me which areas I've neglected.

So it's not a constant focus on the arete or the ideal version of it, but it's taking stock of where things are at currently and then figuring out what's the area that needs my attention right now, going along the whole idea of the intentional imbalance and focusing on one thing, getting that to a level that's acceptable, and then going to another. But I do that on a quarterly basis, kind of framed off of the 12-week year. And the idea there is that you do that frequently every couple of months as opposed to every year. And then you've got a way to address all these different areas without it feeling overwhelming. That's my concern, I think,

with the number of roles and looking at them all the time. But I do also have certain areas of my life, which even if they are going really well, I want to make sure that I'm paying attention to those. And so my version of this, I think, is the daily questions. We don't need to spend a whole lot of time here because we talked about that when we talked about journaling, but this is something I picked up from Marshall Goldsmith, the author of Triggers, and it's not outcome-based. It's simply, did I make an effort to, and then you fill in the blanks. So for me, did I do my best to grow spiritually, love my wife, love my kids? Did I do my best to be a good friend? Did I do my best to learn something new, do my best to create something, and do my best to be a good friend? Did I do my best to learn something new, do my best to create

something, and do my best to exercise? Those are kind of the areas that I hit on. But there is one other thing I want to unpack here around the work-based roles, because as I was thinking through this, I think I stumbled on something that made this click a little bit for me, I stumbled on something that made this click a little bit for me because I've got a lot of different things that I'm doing for work. And one of the things, the roles that I have identified as work, and I'll explain this in just a second, is church because I am an elder at my local church. And so that's not really work. I'm not getting paid for that, which I think is how most people would define work. But the roles that I have identified as work, what I mean by that is I am going to, in my day-to-day, prioritize inputs that affect these areas, mainly because there are other people who rely on me working

with them in these other areas. I can't just go underground and do my own thing for the suite setup and show up four days later, here's an article that we're going to publish. I have to be talking to the team and making sure that we're all moving in the same direction, stuff like that. to the team and making sure that we're all moving in the same direction, stuff like that. So I recognize that when it comes to work stuff, I prioritize the inputs from there, but I also put boundaries around those areas. And when I say work, primarily for like the, let's just use TSS as an example, then I'm going to be available during regular work hours, but after that, I am not going to be available. And I'm not going to put those limitations on my husband-father role. My family can interrupt me anytime that they want. But I'm also not going to be looking for

interruptions from those sources as opposed to some of the work-related roles. Does that make sense or am I crazy? No, I think it makes a lot of sense. That's why one of the reasons why I'm against the gut impulse a lot of people have to say, well, my role is I am an account executive or my role is I am a graphic artist. Well, that's one of your roles. But there's a whole bunch, if you think about it, there's a whole bunch of other things you are. Maybe you're a daughter, maybe you're a whatever. And each one of those, I think is equally important. I think that's one of the reasons why I don't have like separate roles for podcaster, writer, et cetera. I, Max Sparky is a role, but I don't want it to bloat

into being like half of my roles are related to being Max Barkey. Sure. Yeah. But I, you know, and all of this, I don't think Mike and I are telling you, you got to do it one way, but I think talking through how we do it really can help you come up with your own structure for this. And I can tell you that for me, this whole thing with the roles really clicked for me about the end of 2019. As I was kind of thinking about this a lot, kind of as we were transitioning this show into focused, and it's been a huge help for me because it just find these roles, find themselves, find themselves everywhere. They propagated throughout my system. I've got document

folders based on roles. I've got day one journals based on roles. And this constant reminder to me that I am all of these things really helps me kind of keep perspective about what I am and not get lost in just one, if that makes sense. It does. For me, it's a little bit trickier, I think, because I've designated these things as work, for example. Those are the things I recognize I tend to create tasks and projects around. And the things that I don't designate as work, in some ways those are more important, in some ways those are less important. You could make the argument day to day that they're less important because I've prioritized the inputs from the other areas. But ultimately, I would argue that long term, those things are more important to me. So if I'm not going to create tasks and projects around those because I have

responsibilities in these different areas and I can't control all the inputs that would happen in those other areas. How do I not neglect these? And kind of the thing that I've landed on is habits. And again, that's a whole nother episode. But I think the big takeaway is however you're going to do this, whether you are creating habits around some areas and tasks and projects around others like me, or you are just using the same roles everywhere, so they are constantly top of mind and filtering all the things that you do through those roles, like David, that there has to be some sort of connection between who you say you are and what you actually do.

Yeah, and for me, that's the beauty of it. By facing up to these every week, And that's the, for me, that's the beauty of it. By facing up to these every week, I had the same kind of revelation you did about habits. Like the father role is a good example. There are projects as a father. Like one of my things is I don't want my daughters to grow up and need smelly boys to do simple things around the house. So like they needed a new doorknob on their bathroom. So I have a project by the doorknob, teach them

how to install a doorknob. You know, I'm not just going to go do it for them. And that's a project. But overall, the number of projects I have as Max Barkey are many more than I do as a dad. And when by, you know, by going through this process weekly, monthly, quarterly and seeing, By going through this process weekly, monthly, quarterly, and seeing, wow, I don't really have many projects aiming at the father arete. So suddenly I developed this whole set of habits built around being the perfect dad and aiming towards it at least. Once again, I understand I'll never get there. I'm not trying to tell you to be perfect, but you've got to aim for something. So I have many, many habits that I'm working on as a dad. And when we do that habit show, you're going to hear how unhealthy my habits are,

how many I have, but the, but, but I have very few projects and they're just roles that naturally are more habit heavy. And, and one of the things that I will say when we get to that shows, I think habits are just as important as projects because in some roles there, that's all you have. Sure. So how does the goals fit into your, your roles? Maybe this is a good spot to explain how these tie together. Yeah. So goals still are great. You know, goals are, you know, shipping a big project or something like that. They, they just are not the foundation. They feed into a role, you know. Getting the paperless field guide out was a goal, and it took me, you know, a good part of a year to get that product put together and shipped it. But when I finished it,

it just meant that I was feeding the arete of Max Parkey, and there's more ROT to be fed. That's that, that will never be done. But that goal was finished. And, you know, I checked off the box, closed the OmniFocus project, moved on to the next one. And that, so goals to me are in service goals and major projects. They are in service of these roles and you pick them up and you do them but you know as you're working on them that i am working on the rta of a specific role by doing this i am not doing this

for just the sake of doing this do you think there's a tendency to over commit when you take this approach because i think it would be easy to see how this thing fits my rta in this area and this thing fits my rta in another area and i have to pick one no i'm gonna do both no yeah i mean i think that's the the the underlying premise of this show is that we have 24 hours in a day and we always have to make hard decisions and yeah it's when you are unable to make those hard decisions that you land yourself in trouble and i am on the hairy edge of that way more than i would like to admit but but but the uh what i will say is that you know i feel I feel like before I kind of figured out this Rolls Foundation for me, I wasn't sure how to decide between things. And now this gives me a framework.

It's like, OK, I'm doing pretty good as Max Barkey. But I think I could do a lot better as a father during a pandemic when my kids are going through something that is pretty hard for them. So I need to put my thumb on the scale for that one for a little while. I mean, it's very similar, I guess, in hindsight to your wheel concept, but it's just the mechanism that works for me. Yeah. And I think that's really what I'm getting at is these are different approaches maybe, but the result is the same. You're going to pick one thing that is most important right now and everything else you're going to forget about for a little while. And for me, that kind of conflicts with how I naturally think about goals.

kind of conflicts with how I naturally think about goals. And so when I do my quarterly planning process, I'm trying to just have one or usually two at the most of traditional goals, things that I want to accomplish in the next couple months. But I know that just having those goals and even knowing my roles isn't enough for me to actually take action on them. I got to break it down and I got to figure out how to make those habits. And then the other thing with those habits is that you can know what you need to do every day in order to get the outcome. It doesn't mean it's going to stick. And I've kind of given up judging myself for stuff that doesn't stick. I just say, oh, well, I tried it.

It didn't work. I'll try something else. You know, I'll create a system and maybe it'll work. Maybe it won't. If it doesn't, then I'm going to tweak some of the inputs or I'll tweak some of the processes. And eventually I'm going to find the thing that makes the light bulb go on. Yeah. I mean, the only thing I'd take a little issue there, and I think you were just semantics here, but at no point do I ever turn them all the other ones off. You know, it's, I am constantly a podcaster, constantly a dad, and I don't see a situation where I can just like work on one at a time, but there are, there's a different weight waiting system in place all the time. And sometimes I lean into one over another. And that's been to me been the benefit of constantly pushing these things in

my face. Cause it's very easy to sit down, like, look, let's, I mean, you and I are both doing this stuff frequently. And I think the, the problem here is the annual idea of this saying, I'm going to sit down once a year and think about my roles and that is not nearly enough you know correct for me the quarterly review is where i actually go through and look at the rta definitions and think have they changed i also look at each role and say is this still a role that i fill you And maybe I'll find one that gets thrown overboard. I need to adopt a new role. So quarterly, I go through in depth. But for me, the weekly and the monthly review, I want to throw those words in front of my face. And maybe some weeks, like I said,

I'll look at one and say, I didn't do anything on that this week, but I was really busy and that's okay. But if I say that two or three weeks in a row, then I'm aware that I'm not doing that role as I should. And I need to add some tasks to OmniFocus or maybe create some new habits or I need to address that problem because I've chosen this as a role. So I need to make progress on it. Yeah. And I'm glad that you called that out because the podcast and things, as I was thinking through goals and where I set goals, it tends to be the personal stuff, the things or at least the things that only I am involved with. definition work again loosely as like, I'm going to prioritize inputs from these areas because there are other people that rely on me to get things done and move things forward. Those things are dictated a lot by a publishing schedule and like the content calendar at the suite setup, the podcasts get published every couple of weeks. Those things don't move. And so I guess the way

I've made peace with that in my own mind is that I guess technically you could define those podcast episodes or those articles that are going out on a certain day as goals, but I don't think of them that way. It's just I'm living according to the calendar, which maybe is because I've time blocked for so long now. I don't know another way to do that. Yeah. Well, I don't think if you're listening and you're saying, well, goals are my foundation, that's fine. And I'm not trying to tell you to change your system, but for me, the goals were not heavy enough. You know, I needed something more foundational than that. And now identifying goals and major projects along the lines of, well, what am I really driving at with this project?

It just gives me so much more context. It allows me to choose priorities between one and another. It allows me to choose priorities between one and another. And at the end of the day, it really allows me to track, you know, how am I doing on these various things? And by throwing it back to myself with the weekly, monthly, and quarterly review, I'm constantly looking at those. And without judgment, not trying to be hard on myself, I think that's a mistake too. not trying to be hard on myself. I think that's a mistake too, but, but say, well, if this was important enough for me to write an RIT statement for, then why have I gone a month without making any progress on this? Like one of them for me was, is creative, creative human. You know, I want to be, I want to use my creative muscles. I mean, that's one of the joys of being a human that we

are a unique species that has creativity. And when I was getting to the end of months and I wasn't playing much music because we had a pandemic and every time I want to play my saxophone, one of my kids is in a virtual college class or somebody's taking a nap or it just suddenly I was in the spot. I kept finding myself not being able to do it. And so I took steps to find a way to practice without making noise, you know, just like stuff like that. But it was only in seeing that and noticing the problem that I was able to take steps. Yeah. And that's the big thing I think that people do have to do. And I know you mentioned, you know, we're not trying to judge you if you are using goals

and that's directing your actions. Like that's fine if that's working for you. But if it's not working for you, I think I would say that there needs to be a connection made there to a deeper why. And maybe it's a narate. Maybe it's a vision of what you want your life to look like five years from now. You know, I've gone through that exercise. It's pretty cool when you start to think about what does your life look like five years from now? You know, I've gone through that exercise. It's pretty cool when you start to think about what does your life look like five years from now? You know, where do you live? What do you do? What sort of car do you drive? I mean, whatever is important to you, you know, fill in all the details. The more vivid the picture, the more specific it is, the more easily it is to attach to that. But that again is like vision and values. So that's a vision maybe,

but I've also seen and made the mistake before where, okay, you've got your vision, but it doesn't connect to your values. It doesn't connect to the roles that you've identified. If you can't see those roles being exemplified in your vision, then it's not going to be sustainable. going to be sustainable. You've got to have a why. I'm thinking of, I think it was Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs and the whole idea of passion. And he made a comment one time, said, don't follow your passion, but always bring it with you. I feel like that's kind of what we're trying to describe here with these roles is we're creating the motivation to do the things that we need to do because there's a reason to do them. We see how doing these is going to help us lead our best life authentically with integrity and character and fulfill all the promises that we've made to

ourselves about who we are and what we're about. Yeah. And a lot of this is semantics. You could say that my arete is a goal. I mean, if you want to start arguing with me, but in my head, goals are more transitory and a role is something that I can work upon. And me personally, I am not good at long-term planning. Like it's not concrete enough for me to keep me motivated. Like the idea I'm going to be somewhere in five years to me, I don't know where I'm going to be in five years. But I know what I think I want to be today and I'm going to take steps today to get there. And that, that's what works for me. But I know people, like you said, who do the five year, 10 year, 20 year lookout, and then they aim at that. And that, that's what works for me. But I know people, like you said, who do the five-year,

10-year, 20-year lookout, and then they aim at that and that really helps them. So, um, you know, as we keep saying on this show, everybody's got to kind of find their own path with this stuff, but, um, looking at roles as a foundation of a system, uh, for me has been a huge game changer and I just wanted to share it. Awesome. This episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by text expander from smile. Head over to text expander.com slash podcast and recall your best words instantly, repeatedly, and get 20% off your first year. Get ahead of your productivity for the new year with the power of TextExpander. TextExpander removes the repetition out of work,

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by getting rid of the repetitive things you type while still customizing and personalizing your messages. We were talking about roles today in the show, and I track roles in my personal knowledge manager. Now, I'm not sure what that is right now, because I'm looking at two or three at the same time, and we talked about on the show, but I've created a text expander snippet that I just type R-R-O-L-E-S, so it's roles with an extra R at the beginning, and it automatically generates an H1 list of all my roles. And even under Max

Barkey, it has subheadings for podcasting and field guides and blogging. So I can go in and write about how I'm doing on each one of my roles, no matter which personal knowledge management app I'm using that day. And that's one of the things I love about TextExpander. It just comes with me, no matter what app I'm in. So I'm using TextExpander for role tracking. So just think about it. You can use it for so many different things.

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and all of RelayFM. So where this stuff really, the rubber hits the road though, is with this follow-up that we had to a previous episode. we both had a challenge i challenged you you challenged me the exact same thing to map out our input workflows and as we did this i've got an image which i can share in the the show notes that i doodled inside of good notes but as i was doing this we realized that there's a couple areas that

are specific input sources that we both have to deal with. And so we thought maybe this would be better to break this down by each of those input sources and explain how we deal with that rather than me walk through my entire diagram and then you talk through yours. Yeah, your diagram is beautiful, by the way. I might have one done by the time the show publishes, but I am thoroughly intimidated by your diagram. Let me just say that. But it's cool because you thought through all this. And to me, I was thinking through inputs on a per input basis, but you have like the universal input system, which I have to admire, I have to admit. But let's start with some of the most common inputs and how we track them. Email is obviously

a big one for a lot of us. I guess more for me than for you, though. Yeah. So just real briefly referring to the diagram, what I recognized is that there are, I have six different areas of input. One of those is email. But then the things that I get from these that I want to hang on to tend to be in one of three different categories, ideas, information, or tasks. And not everything that I get via input is something that I want to hang on to. And that is going to be a common theme as we go through some of these different inputs. I mean, my email input workflow here is pretty simple. You want me to go through mine first?

Yeah, go ahead. Okay. So you had put all the different things that you do for email. And kind of my big one is that I am intentionally bad at email. And I say bad at email because I choose not to prioritize email. And I know that are important to me. Email is almost never a source of things that are in alignment with those vision and those values. Occasionally they are from the roles, but even with the work stuff, we've got different systems in place for that sort of thing, which we'll talk about a little bit. But as I thought about this, I recognized that there are a couple of things that will find their way into my email inbox. I'm not going to go

through like the schedule and things. We did that in a previous episode. But the inputs that come in, most of them are going to get deleted or archived. But there are going to be a couple other distinctions that I do want to call out here. If it's something that I need to reply to, and I don't want to do it right now, then I will send that to my task management system, which ultimately for me is going to be Roam Research. And there's a couple of things that I'm doing with Roam Research. I'm using Roam 42 to surface all the tasks that I need for a specific day. There's some really cool stuff you can do with that, by the way, with block references. stuff you can do with that, by the way, with block references. But essentially, I've got a keyboard maestro macro that I use with Mailmate that gets me that URL, just like you would,

you know, sending an email to OmniFocus, for example, and you got the link to the message in the notes. I basically create that same thing with the subject for the email. And when you click on it, it opens up a link in Mailmate to that specific message so I can reply to it later for stuff that I want to think through my response to. And then the other things that I want to reply to, but I recognize I don't necessarily need to, those are things that I will just flag and I'll work off of that flagged folder inside of Mailmate. That's the only one that I've got a counter on.

So when I do have some time at the end of the day as part of my shutdown routine, I'll go in there and I'll crank through some flagged emails if I have some time. But again, these are things that I want to reply to. They're not things that I have to reply to because occasionally that'll build up and I'll declare flagged email bankruptcy. I'll just empty it all out because, well, I never got to it. I guess that wasn't important. And kind of the thing that I have reconciled in my own mind is that's okay. You know, I recognize I will probably let some people down that way, but the way that I can most authentically live out my vision and my values is not to prioritize email. Yeah. I mean, it is a monster. If you get going with email, it can

literally take entire days and then you don't move the needle on any of your, your roles. The, um, I, you know, I had kind of a, an epiphany as we were seeing, as you were sitting here talking about email. And I think I've looked at email all wrong in terms of input workflows, because email is too generic of a term because there's different things I get. Like I get legal related communications in email and that's like a whole, that's a whole workflow, you know, and that includes documenting the response and tracking the project. And like, there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes with that, that wouldn't go with an email from Mike asking, you think of Star Wars Rebels, right?

It's just a totally different thing. It's a completely hypothetical situation. Yeah, there we go. Max Barkey, same thing. I get customer support emails, people having trouble accessing a course or have a question about a course. So customer support is a completely different email than an email from someone sending me a link to their new app that they want me to check out. And I actually need to rethink all of my email inputs in context of what they are, because I think if I bring that intentionality to it, I can actually make email easier. Like

customer support, I should have a system where I can get a lot of that offloaded to my virtual assistant to deal with. And the legal stuff is going to be more complicated, but I don't need that entire workflow for the silly stuff. So I actually need to rethink it, but I'll tell you, there's a bag of tricks I have. SaneBox is great. And the SaneLater feature, where you can blind copy it to one week at SaneBox.com saves me a whole lot of time because it's an easy way to track email replies without having to create separate tasks. So that's one trick I use.

Um, OmniFocus is another huge trick that I use because, um, anything that gets delayed, OmniFocus makes it very easy to put links to those emails where you can come back to them. That's another trick I use. And then the other thing I look at email in my email kind of workflow is email as reference, which I do a lot of, probably more than most people. So I'll reference an email and a task. I'll also reference it in a reference document. Like if I'm working on a research document, I might have email links in there. I mean, just once you learn that ability to grab a URL, no matter what, you know, mail app you're using, we don't need to go down that rabbit hole now, but then be able to

jump right back to that email. You find all sorts of ways to use that to your advantage. Like in a research document, I also do it in my PKM tool of the day. And I don't need to go down that rabbit hole today, but whatever one I'm using, I create links. Like if I have a client project and I reply to an email about a contract negotiation,

I'll make a note of what I did that day and I'll also put a link to the actual email in the note so that I can just jump back to the email when I come back six months and can't remember what we talked about or what I wrote. So I've got all these systems built in, but they're not applied uniformly. I mean, if you look at the actual input tracking, a lot of email is

quick reply and forget about it, or some of it's archive and forget about with no reply. But then there are others that fall down these rabbit holes of actually significant work. Yeah, that's an important distinction. And really the key here, not just with email, but with any source of inputs, is that not every input that shows up is worth paying attention to. So how do you filter that stuff out? I've kind of taken that approach with messages, which is the next one on the list here. I also am not very good at text messages. very good at text messages. I, first of all, mute all of my group threads because I cannot stand it when someone's having a conversation and my phone is blowing up in my pocket when I'm trying to get some writing done. That's completely distracting and it will take me out of my flow. And that is

definitely not worth paying attention to at that point. And that's typically when that stuff shows up is when I'm trying to focus on something which I consider to be important. So I mute all that stuff. I actually have a shortcuts icon, which opens up the messages application specifically. Well, two reasons. One, I like the color scheme a little bit better with the custom icon that I've got. And then also it doesn't have any badges on it. So I'm not seeing anything that says, hey, you've got three messages on your home screen that you need to reply to. I've got everything on do not disturb except for my phone with messages specifically. And then when I do get a message and I see it, I will reply immediately or often not at all.

I'm not going to jot down a reminder to get back to somebody via text message. And I guess I can think of a lot of different scenarios where I would need to do that, but it's not something in my day-to-day that I do have to do. And so again, just like email, I'm kind of intentionally bad at text messages. If you're talking to me with text messages, I think something you need to understand is I believe text messages

as an asynchronous form of communication. I don't expect when I message somebody for them to message me right back. And I, you know, the opposite. If someone messaged me, I'm not necessarily going to write them back immediately. And so long as, you know, we work on that foundation, it's fine, you know, and I'll reply when I can. The trouble for messages for me, the input tracking is on the legal side. You know, I don't really want to do substantive legal work over text messages. You know, the method of text messages usually doesn't

have enough words in it. People try to keep things really short and I need more details before I'm going to give you an opinion on something. And it's harder to kind of keep track of. So if it's any sort of substantive communication from a client, I will actually just set it aside and write them an email rather than replying text. If it's a very short thing, I'll reply in text, but even then I may take a screenshot of it and save it.

But I, yeah, that it's a, it's a big problem as a lawyer, the text message stuff. And I just try to avoid it, honestly. I could see that. One other point of clarification, I guess. Typically, I am not sitting waiting for a text message and as soon as it comes in, I'm looking. When I notice something,

I will look at it. And that's the point when I decide if I'm going to either reply right away or it's going to get lost in the ether. I actually don't have my phone on me a lot of times when I am trying to focus as an attempt to limit those distractions. That's why I have Do Not Disturb on my other devices. have do not disturb on my other devices. But when I do see it, I make the decision right there whether it's going to be something I'm going to get back to. And I think your point about steering people to a different communication medium is a good one. That's something we could all probably do a little bit more. If someone insists on contacting us in a way that we don't think is ideal, we have the right to say, you know what, I'm happy to help you out with this, but please do this instead. Instead of trying to make it work with the medium that it came from. I'm guilty of that sometimes. an afternoon habit. Like I have a series of habits that show up for my shutdown routine at the end of the day. And one of the tasks on a daily basis is clear out text messages. And so a lot of times I'll just let them accumulate throughout the day, which makes my wife and family insane because they text me and they like, well, didn't you read it yet? I'm like, I really didn't. I was busy.

But by the end of the day, and this sadly doesn't happen every day because some days I get too busy and don't get to it. But usually by the end of the day, I try to go through any text messages. And that's one of the few apps that I allow badges and flags and whatnot. So I can go through and see what's new at the end of the day and kind of get through them then. Because that gets into the next one for me, which is Slack. And I know that a lot of people use these messaging tools like Slack. And when it first came out, it was sort of a breath of fresh air as you didn't have to communicate via email.

And slowly, in my opinion, all of the problems that existed in email now are showing up in Slack, except they are magnified because now you've got giant threads of text that you're trying to keep up with everything that's going on in instead of just a single message. So my foundation for Slack is recognizing that I'm going to do this according to a set of rules, which this is the connection to the roles part for me, is I only use Slack for the areas that I have designated as work, which is going to be Blanc Media, it's going to be the relay stuff, it's going to be my role as an elder at my church. And when I'm using Slack, I'm going to turn off all notifications except for mentions and DMs. And just doing that, I have now eliminated 99% of the stuff that would

have interrupted me that I had no reason to look at. And then from there, I block this and I check it periodically. Usually it's a couple times in the morning, couple times in the afternoon. And I don't have a specific time to do this. Basically, what I will do is I will time block my day based on the work that I need to do. And if I've got a writing block, for example, I'll set that for two hours. And after that two hours or when I feel like I'm losing steam, and before I go over to my next time block, I'll check in on Slack because these are the things that I am prioritizing. Remember, I'm working with other people and they may need

something from me. That's part of the agreement that I've made with these different organizations and that I'm a part of. So it's my responsibility not to let anything fall through the cracks there. And so I'll check in and see if there's anything, again, in mentions or DMs that I need to respond to because we've clarified the terms of engagement for Slack. And if there isn't anything, then I'm free to move on to the next thing. But if there is something that somebody needs help with, like if Isaac needs help with a video or something at the suite setup, and he has sent me a direct message during my writing block during that time, you know, I'll check in with them and be like, hey, how can I help get you unstuck before I go back and do what I need to do? Yeah, I think I'm mismanaging Slack

because I kind of treat it as text messages and don't really pay much of attention to it but at the end of the day i try to clear it out and um the primaries for me with slack is the relay slack where people i i make three podcasts on that network i i need to actually be more responsive in it that's when i could get better at so maybe maybe i need to check it at lunch as well as at the end of the day but but i really try to not have those kind of tap on the shoulder communications divert me from whatever I'm working on. Right, which is really the goal. I mean, that's what you want is you want to put the structures in place so that you can focus on the real important work and not the stuff that isn't. Yeah. Another input for me, probably less so for you, is phone calls.

And this is me wearing my lawyer hat, but I do get on the phone quite a bit with people and talk about things related to client issues and problems. And again, this is a different phone call than a phone call from my sister to talk about, you know, baseball or whatever. So those calls, I have a whole workflow for them. I actually usually make notes just to, you know, if it's of any substance at all. And it gets tracked on a per project basis.

So if I'm, you know, writing a contract with Acme for a client, I have an Acme client project in the PKM, and I'll put notes in with the date stamp as to what we talked about and what the plans were. So I have a whole kind of workflow for that stuff. I feel like my inputs are really like a tale of two careers. And for one, they're way more serious than the other. But even like you and I did a planning call just a few days ago about Focus,

and we were planning upcoming episodes within a couple months. I took notes on what it is we talked about. And then once you hung up, I made myself a bunch of tasks in OmniFocus to reach out to some potential guests and to work on some show outlines. So, I mean, I actually make actionable items out of a lot of phone calls, you know, that applies across the board. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. I did the same thing when we had our call, except the things that I jotted down were in the notebook. Or as we were on the call, we were both looking at the Google Sheet as we were thinking through what are the upcoming episodes that we want to plan for.

So some of that stuff happened live and we, in a sense, collaborated on it. But the stuff that was just me, I jotted down those notes in my hybrid bullet journal thingamabob. And then eventually that's going to end up in Rome. You can see all the details of all that stuff in the diagram, which I'll put in the show notes. But you're right, I don't do a whole lot with phone calls. And that has led to my approach to calls, where if I recognize the number, if I see that David Sparks is calling me, I'm going to answer the phone. But everything else is going to go to voicemail. And if I see things pop up more than once from numbers that I don't recognize and there is no voicemail, then I will block those numbers

and I will never hear from them again. I realize this is a very privileged position that I am in in order to be able to do that. But this has given me a lot of peace of mind. And I think this is really important for helping me to focus on the stuff that I create. Yeah, I think the only thing you have to do if you take that approach is you have to make a promise to check the voicemail. Because sometimes it is an important call coming through. Yep. You know, blocking time after important phone calls to process is important to me. And so that's part of that input process. That's how I take the notes and add the OmniFocus tasks. But just, I was just thinking overall, like, even though I have some

pretty detailed inputs, if you're listening to this, you're going David's off the office rocker, but I just, for certain things I do, I really do need to properly track what's happened and make notes and make sure I don't drop the ball going forward. And for me, at least, having these input processes in place has been a really great thing for me in a couple of ways. Number one is I don't drop the ball because of that. And number two, it's a barometer for me. If suddenly I find myself at the end of the day realizing I did three calls and I didn't write down anything for them that were related to the legal or I don't have tasks

written down for my OmniFocus or my focused planning call with Mike, suddenly I realize that I'm not following the system. That's a real good sign that I'm underwater, you know, that I'm suddenly cutting corners on these inputs. And all that's doing is just making future Dave's life hell. And it's a really good sign I need to slow down. So this episode of Focused is brought to you by Indeed. Hiring is one of those things that you do not want to mess up. You need to hire great people if you want to take your business to the next level. And with the stakes this high, there's only one choice. That is Indeed.

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combined. That's according to Talent Nest. So if you want your quality shortlist fast, you need Indeed, and right now, listeners of Focused can get a free $75 credit to upgrade their job post at Indeed.com slash Focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D. This is Indeed's best offer available anywhere. So get a free $75 credit to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com slash Focused. One more time, that's Indeed.com slash Focused. This offer is valid through March 31st, 2021. Terms and conditions apply. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. Now I've got one on my list here, which maybe you could talk me out of, maybe you could talk me out of, but I actually use Twitter as a source of inputs. And let me explain before you come at me with the torches and pitchforks. So I use Twitterific and I have

muffled pretty much everything related to politics. And I use it solely for stuff I want to see around tech and productivity. And what that allows me to do is see a much smaller list of things, but they are things that I want to see. And I get a lot of great ideas and become aware of a lot of really cool applications based on the people that I follow who are talking about those things on Twitter. So it takes some work to curate this, but by doing so, I've found that Twitter is actually a really cool source of ideas and information. And based on my diagram, again,

these sorts of things are eventually gonna end up in Rome, and that's where I connect these things. And a lot of the ideas I get for the articles that I write about, like I've got one that I wrote about recently for journaling inside of Rome research. That was spurred by some stuff, specifically Drew Kaufman's journaling video on YouTube. I came across that on Twitter. And so I collect those dots, put them inside of Roam, and then connect them. And then that inspires me creatively for a lot of the stuff that I'm

going to make. Am I off my rocker or does this make sense? You know, it's funny. I have a weird problem with Twitter. Usually the problem with Twitter is you get stuck in it and you can't get yourself out of it. I forget to go on Twitter and I just get busy with things. And I like Twitter and I like what I can get from it. But again, it's kind of like one of those end of the day things for me. And I'm not good at answering questions on Twitter because a lot of times I just don't see them all. You know, a lot of people ask me things on Twitter and I, I don't scroll through all of them necessarily every day. And then after a while they, they just get lost.

And, um, and I actually think I could use Twitter better in the ways that you're talking about, but I just, I don't really have a practice around it. You know, sometimes you'll see me in Twitter two or three times in one day and then sometimes two or three days will go by and I'm not in there at all. Sure. And, um, I, I've got to figure that out. I think that's an area that I need to work on. But I don't really see it as the infinity pool that some people see. For me, the infinity pool is always

and shall be the news. So that's the one I've got to treat like kryptonite. But Twitter's not a bad thing for me. I don't mind. Yeah, there's some cool stuff, but you got to curate it. You know, I was talking to you about a cool little habit tracker that I came across. That was a Twitter recommendation from somebody who follows me.

And I never would have come across that had I not been using Twitter the way that I am using it. So I guess whatever you're going to use for social media, they'll recognize that is a slippery slope and put some controls in your systems if you're going to try to get any sort of information from those. Yeah, but one thing Twitter does that makes this easy is it allows you to get a shareable URL. So if it's something you want to come back to, you can always save it and put it in your

task manager or PKkm of choice also one thing we haven't talked about are kind of like reference materials like books and articles and things like that um i have really settled on a kind of workflow flow for those inputs over the last year as i've embraced readwise and um uh i read all books and i know this is where Mike raises his eyebrows or maybe rolls his eyes at me, but I read all books on Kindle. The I remember being a young lad and carrying these bags full of books around with me. And I don't care to go back to that. I love that a little tiny, you know, Kindle measured in ounces has all of my books on

it and books I haven't read and books I have read. They're all there for me. All I have to do is throw it in my bag or I can even see it on my iPad and iPhone. And I also really like leveraging the highlight system and the digital highlights that you get by reading it in Kindle. And I combine that with a Readwise account where it feeds them back to me every day. And I'm really happy with, in general, kind of my workflow for that stuff. I get it. I mean, I understand the appeal of the Kindle. But for me, the thing that really caused my reading habit to stick was using physical books. And at the time, it was just carrying a physical book with me everywhere that I went. Don't go that many places anymore. If I was in that spot now, it probably wouldn't have worked. But yeah, there's something about the physical book. It just feels so much better.

And for me, that makes the difference between reading consistently and not. But you're right, there's a lot of advantages with having all that digital stuff. And every once in a while, when I hear people like you mention the ReadWise connection with something like Roam or other personal knowledge management systems, I get tempted. I'm not going to lie. Well, I mean, you finish reading a book and ReadWise will give you a markdown file of all your highlights from that book. So then you can go into your personal knowledge management system, paste those highlights, and then you can read them again.

And then you can highlight those highlights, you know, basically taking a second or third pass at it. And then you really get the stuff that's most important for you out of a book. And it's because it's on a digital system, it's in your pocket. You know, anytime you want to go back and see that it's, it's pretty, it's pretty attractive. That is tempting. You know, I get the appeal of that. I've got a different, that is the approach that you need to take really is like the different levels. So if you review things a couple of times, then you're really going to get some things that are going to just completely stick and some things that are not. And that's kind of the way my book reading workflow is built too. I actually use the physical book like I mentioned, but then I jot down the things that I want to remember inside of a mind map and I use MindNode for this. I did a presentation not too long ago for BiggerPlate where I explained how I did that and kind of the thought process behind the things that I capture.

And then what I do with that information afterwards, which is I export that mind map and I attach it to my personal knowledge management inside of Roam. And then I also copy all that text and paste it in. And as I do that, I'm going through and I'm kind of editing those things. I'm reviewing it and I'm highlighting the stuff that's really important and then making the connections. And I've got some work to do with that based on all of the mind map files that I've taken or made historically. I still have to get everything inside of Roam and get it all connected. But that's my version of doing that. And that is something that is worthwhile. I mean, don't just capture your notes once and dump them in somewhere and assume that, well, I can search for them now, so that's fine. Really, it's the retention of these things and resurfacing those

dots when you need them. That's the valuable part. And I do the same thing with web articles, is they all get sent to Instapaper. That's another thing I did in the last year. I just went ahead and paid for Instapaper and I send everything there that is on the web of interest to me. Rarely do I read an article on the website. I'll just send it to Instapaper and then at night in bed, quite often, I'll just kind of read through the articles that I've flagged over the last few days. And I do highlights and Instapaper, which also gets sent over to Readwise. And so everything kind of feeds into the same digital system. Cool. Yeah, that's a good workflow. I use Reader for the things that I want to read. And then if there is something that really is worth collecting, I will copy and paste that manually. There is some highlighter tools that you can use inside of Chrome, but I don't do that

very often. I view that kind of the way I view social media, where I'll get some ideas that way and I'll jot something down in my notebook or I'll jot something down in drafts. Maybe I'll capture a link, but very rarely because I just want the idea and I want that to tumble around in my head for a while and then figure out a way to connect it. Yeah, makes sense. So Mike, have you got any new shiny new objects lately? do uh this is probably another episode at some point on music and focus but i mentioned that i've been taking guitar lessons and this was probably inevitable but uh after several weeks of taking lessons i had a desire for uh a new guitar and so i got a 2003 fender eric clapton signature series stradicaster

everybody gets a strat at some point right exactly exactly as i was doing the lessons i've got a less paul and i recognize that like you know these humbuckers these really aren't these really aren't a great fit for my style and And maybe it was just this is the first time I've taken lessons. So it's the first time I've really noticed or my skill has been developed to the point where I recognize that this is actually a better fit for the way that I play as opposed to just, oh, I guess I'm not doing it quite right. But this thing is awesome. And I love it. It changes the sound and it makes it so that even just doing scales and things, it brings me joy to my ears and to my soul. It makes me want to keep practicing, not just because it's new and shiny, I believe, although

it is at the moment still new and shiny. But since I got this,'ve been practicing like two to three hours a day because i can't put it down i'm a little jealous as a horn player because our new saxophone is you know anywhere from like two to like you know fifty thousand dollars i guess you can spend a lot of money on saxophone but the uh so getting a new horn isn't something that we normally do most of us get one and we play it the rest of our lives but guitar players every guitar player i know has like you go in their house there's inevitably a wall with like somewhere between five and twenty guitars hanging

on it well i've just got two well two electrics and an acoustic i guess so i'm getting there but uh yeah i don't really have a collection. Your wall is coming, my friend. I'm sure. All right. You got something new and shiny too. Well, yeah, I've talked about before, but you know, just Apple switching to the Apple Silicon and me getting this new 13 inch MacBook. It's just something that I haven't used a laptop this small for a while. I can, I still cannot get over how fast this machine is. It just does so many things better than the old Intel system. And I've gone into it so hard that I've sold my iMac Pro

because I feel like I can do screencasts on this just as easily. And right now I have one Mac. So that's kind of a new experience for me because for the longest time I had a desktop and a laptop. just as easily. And right now I have one Mac. So that's kind of a new experience for me because for the longest time I had a desktop and a laptop. And now I just have this laptop that I move around and I plug into a screen on my desktop. And it's a fun experience for me. And it's a kind of a focus experiment, seeing the areas where it's easier. Like I don't have to fiddle with settings on two computers. You know, when you've got to make a change and

you've got to make the change ultimately on the other one too, now it's just one place. But also there's some downsides to it, like backup routines and, you know, making it successfully connect to the screen and the backup drives and not have everything go haywire if you just yank the cord out. So I'm kind of new at this experience, but this is kind of the new shiny thing that I'm giving clock cycles to right now is like, how do I use just one computer? It's not probably a permanent thing. I think once Apple gets some desktop solutions with the Apple Silicon, I'll probably get one. But I thought there's no better time than now to try and do this with just one machine. And I don't think the imac pro is going

to be worth a lot in a year sure so i kind of felt like now's the time but anyway it's uh it's kind of fun as a nerd i always like having little challenges like this and um that's my new and shiny right now awesome you've got one more new and shiny which we're going to talk about in deep focus but uh this is probably a good spot to wrap things up. trouble finding foundation, think about the journey Mike and I went on and find out, you know, what is your base level before you start building your productivity or your focus system? And I found by creating a new foundation, mine based on roles, it made everything else above that foundation a lot easier. Yeah, having the foundation provides structure and support to everything else. And that's really what people

see a lot of times when they think of productivity, they think of all the things that you check off of the list. But I think both of our experience is that you're never going to get to that point if you don't have something that you can fall back on and that holds you up underneath the surface. Yeah. Or even, I guess, another way to look at it is you need a destination. You need a point at something. Just checking off tasks isn't enough. Either way, we'll have a thread for this show

in the forums at talk.macpowerusers.com so you can go in and weigh in. We'll let us know how you're dealing with this stuff. I want to thank our sponsors today, Squarespace, TextExpander, and Indeed. We'll be back in a couple weeks. And today, with deep focus, Mike and I are going to get super nerdy about keyboards. See you next time.