Focused - 118: Tasks and Habits

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

Tasks are great but sometimes the wrong tool. Mike and David make the case that habits are underrated and can help you where projects can not.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by Mike Schmitz. Hey, Mike. Hey, David. How are you? Good. We had a lot of real positive feedback from the last episode we did about roles and goals, but there is like a second half of that conversation, which kind of gets into tasks or projects and habits. So we decided that we would just bump that one in order to the next show because there were just so many questions,

it makes more sense just to do a show about it. So today we're going to be talking about projects, tasks, and habits. And I think you have a couple thoughts on that subject, right? I do. I do. I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I think there's a distinction to be made between tasks and habits. And I also feel that the foundation for this, like we talked about in the last episode, is those roles and goals that you identify as these are the areas that are important to me. That's going to direct both your tasks and your habits, but those are going to be expressed a little bit differently. And I think for me anyways, have a little bit different level of importance. I feel like this is last week or last episode was the how or the why in this,

this episode is almost the how it's the tactical piece of it in my mind. Before we get there, we did have a couple of shiny new objects and I thought it'd be fun to just put those at the top of the show this time because we've got a lot once we get rolling. What's shiny and new in your life, Mike? Well, I have new keycaps on my fancy keyboard. I ordered a set of SA granite keycaps. The link will be in the show notes, but unfortunately I think they are all sold out as of this as of as of recording right now. They do re-release these in different profiles from time to time. But I think this is a pretty clean looking keycap set, which is a little bit higher than the ones I was using. So they feel quite different. But I think I like these a little bit better. And the other thing I was able to get with these is the set of Apple modifiers.

So I no longer have the Alt and Windows keys on my keyboard. I have Command and Option like a good Mac user should. Excellent. I have a set of alternate keycaps I got off like Amazon. They're not fancy. They're not double shot, but they have the Apple key printed backwards. Like the bite is out of the wrong side. And I'm sure it's like a trademark thing, but it is driving me crazy.

That is the worst. That would drive me crazy too. The other thing I like about these is that instead of the words for all the alternate keys, like the page up, page down, there's symbols. So it takes a little bit of getting used to because I don't use those keys all that often. But I do like the look of the keyboard with the symbols over the words. Yeah, we went in deep on Deep Focus last episode about mechanical keyboards. So I feel like that kind of inspired both of us. I bought a new set of switches that have arrived, but I have not used them yet. So I'm ready to make some changes on mine as well.

All right. Well, we don't have to revisit the keyboard discussion, but I do have to know what switches you ended up getting. So I bought Holy Panda switches, which some people told me are overpriced, but everybody agreed they're pretty good. So they're awesome. Is that what you have? That is what I have. Yeah.

Okay. All right. Well, there we go. I guess I should have checked in with you. It's a premium tactile switch, so it's not super clicky, but you still feel the bump and it makes a huge difference with the key cron i have a box of them i have an open downstairs and at some point when i want to have a break i'm going to switch out my switches awesome shiny new on my side of the fence is just

my continuing love affair with obsidian it is such a great app um and for people interested in focus um i'm using it to run my pkm system i've also been playing a lot with craft and i'm always keeping my eye in and roam and there's other ones out there but obsidian continues to be the app that that really just does such a good job for me because all your files are marked down and by shiny and new i mean it seems like twice a week we get a major update to the application with new features now they have end-to-end encryption into the app so if you're worried about privacy with the end-to-end encryption which which you pay for i think it's like four dollars a month but i set my own password all of my data is securely stored on their servers and syncs flawlessly between Macs and nobody can read the data except me because it's end-to-end encrypted

really nice update for for Obsidian I think that I've been watching Obsidian from a distance and I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion I think that's where I'm going to be in the future. There's still some stuff that I like better about Rome, but the stuff that gets added to Obsidian, you're right. The development cycle is crazy fast. It uses true markdown, unlike Rome, where you have to use double underscores in order to italicize something, which drives me absolutely crazy and basically makes it useless for any sort of writing that I do. And I just signed up for a course called Linking Your Thinking, and the preferred tool there is Obsidian. So I'm going into that course, kind of resigned to the fact that I'm going to learn more about it and probably come to the realization that that's the app I should be using.

I think you're going to like Obsidian because they have now inline queries, which was a big thing in Rome for a long time. They've got that now in Obsidian. And they have a public chart showing the upcoming features. And the next big feature, which they are now actively working on, is a mobile app. And the next big feature, which they are now actively working on, is a mobile app. And as I understand it, talking to the developer, I have this end-to-end encrypted vault. My mobile app that I get from them will be able to access that data. So I'll have a mobile solution as well.

And it just seems like not only are they doing a lot of updates, the updates they're doing are the stuff that we really need to make the app better. So it seems like they're just right on target. So I've been using it a while, and it is new and shiny. I know a lot of listeners like Craft, which is a new player in the field, and I really like them, too. I've been in touch with their developer as well, and I think that's a great app. It's a native app as opposed to something else. And there's a lot to like about that, too. as opposed to something else. And there's a lot to like about that too,

but Obsidian continues to impress me with this very aggressive release schedule of solid features. And then the third-party plugins too, that's the other thing. You know, Mike, you and I are going to have to get on the computer for an hour one day, and I'm just going to show you around Obsidian. Oh, I was installing third-party plugins this morning actually okay i'm pretty impressed with some of the stuff that's that's out there it's been a while since i looked it's come a long way i still think however whether you pick obsidian craft room or whatever pkm software is not the end-all be-all i i just don't

i know you do tasks in one so so, you know, that's cool. But for me, I feel like, you know, when you pick up on these apps, don't, don't necessarily, you know, go down that road of trying to make it the app that you do everything in, because a lot of times as good as they are, they're bad at some things that you try to force into them. So, you know, go into it with some degree of skepticism about what you're going to do with it. But they're amazing apps, and this is just a real fun time to be a nerd. I will echo that recommendation. And what made Roam really work for me was the fact that I had a specific problem that I was trying to solve that no other app could solve,

which was kind of like a cross-reference library of all my sermon notes. And then once I had that in place, I found it was easy to layer stuff on top of it. And that's kind of what led me to do a bunch of other things with it. Had I gone into it thinking this is going to be my replacement for my journal, my task manager, my archive, there's no way it would have worked for me. I would have given up a long time ago. Yeah. But the new and shiny part for me that is worth note is the installation of Indian encryption, because I find that very liberating. I can write pretty much anything I want in there and know it's encrypted. And that is a big, you know, it's a game changer for me. You know, like, yeah yeah that's a pretty big deal

i mean i want to track work i perform on legal services and there's nothing privileged that i write in there but still just the fact that i worked on this project on this day um is something i want to keep confidential and i can do that now which i never could do with with room and even craft i mean the developers of craft i talked to and they don't have end-to-end really on their roadmap right now they've got so much so many other things they're working on and hopefully they'll get there someday but the fact is obsidian gives that to me right now yeah it's an impressive app for sure this episode of focused is brought to you by timing the app that tracks your time automatically instead of manually.

Now let's talk about why you should be tracking your time. For anyone who bills their hours like a freelancer, then this might seem a little obvious. But even if you are employed or billing per project or simply want to keep track of how much time you spend on a side project, project or simply want to keep track of how much time you spend on a side project, it's helpful to estimate how long a specific task is going to take. Time tracking can help you stay on track with those estimates to make sure that you don't end up in the red with your projects, making sure you stick close to what your estimates are instead of going way over, which can help you make more accurate estimates in the future. This is where timing can really help. Instead of making you start and stop timers, timing automatically tracks how much

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I, like a lot of people, got excited about time tracking, tried some manual services, forgot to turn off my timers, and ended up with a bunch of useless data. It never really clicked for me until I installed timing on my Mac. And once I set up a couple of rules, then it was just tracking all of my time automatically. It gives me information that I can look back and review. I can see details. I can see reports on specific projects. I can see, for example, that last week I spent 10 hours inside of Brave, and I can even break that down by website like Notion or Basecamp if I wanted to.

It's super easy to set up and use. You just install timing, you set up the helper, and then it runs automatically. The first time you open an application, it may ask you if you want to allow timing to access that application. When you click yes, then that data starts getting tracked inside of timing. And you can even track things like the sheets that you work on inside of Ulysses. You can see how much time you spent writing a specific article, for example. It's really, really useful. It's really, really easy. And the data you can't argue with. If you think that you spent 20 minutes on Twitter, but timing says that you spent two hours. Well, you spent two hours and you need to make some adjustments, maybe put up some intentional constraints there so you can stay focused on what you really want to be doing. Now, timing is so confident that you will love their

fuss-free approach that they offer a totally free trial. You can download the free 14-day trial today by going to timingapp.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, and you will save 10% when you decide to purchase. Once again, that is timingapp.com slash focused to save 10% when you purchase. So stop guessing how you spend your time and instead focus on doing what you're good at. We thank Timing for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. at. We thank Timing for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. Okay, tasks, habits, roles, goals. Mike, how does all of this stuff fit together? That is the million-dollar question, and I think the true answer is that it will be a little bit different for everybody. But I did have some insight into this for myself anyways that I wanted to share. We had some feedback a while back via Twitter asking if either of us

had looked into the PARA system, which is originated by Tiago Forte. It's P-A-R-A, stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. I have never really gotten this to click for me. However, as I was thinking about tasks and habits and roles and goals and how all this stuff connects, I realized that there is a piece of this that I do use, and that is this distinction between tasks and projects and habits and routines. So the PARA framework, P is projects. That's the projects and tasks, obviously. So your projects basically are a group of tasks that you have to complete in a specific order or not a specific order. I mean, they could be parallel tasks, they could be sequential tasks,

but you do all the tasks and then you get a specific outcome which is achieved by usually a specific deadline or time frame. But areas are a little bit different and these are supported by your habits and routines. And these are kind of like a standard that you want to maintain in a specific order. As we were talking about roles and goals, this is where I saw a lot of overlap with the roles and the RTA that you had talked about, the gold standard of what you want those to look like. And I think for me, probably like a minimum viable standard, like I don't want to let it drop below a certain point. You know, that's the specific or the standard to be maintained there. But the other thing with these areas is that there isn't an end date. You don't stop being a spouse.

You don't stop being a father. You don't stop being a friend. And so you can't just, in my mind anyways, I always had trouble with just checking off the tasks and completing the projects, like reach out to a friend and make a phone call. I was doing that at the beginning of all the quarantine stuff when it started in March of last year. And I kind of lost steam because I would get done and be like, there, that felt really good. And then it was kind of like, well, now we're back to the beginning again. And I needed to make a switch in my head of that's not a task to be completed. That's not

a project that will be finished even when things go back to normal. That's an area that needs... And there's a standard there. I want to be a good friend, so I have to be... I want to have good friends, so I need to be a good friend. And that's a standard that I have to maintain. When I try to check it off as a task and a list, it's frustrating. But when I recognize that this is an area of my life that's important to me and I start to build habits and routines that will support that, then it's a lot easier, and it makes me a lot less angry, if that makes any sense. I'm thinking of a quote from The Happiness Advantage by Sean Acor, and he talked about how if your happiness is tied to your goals, you're never going to be happy because you get to that

outcome, and then you're like, well, what do I do next? Yeah. I mean, and it's like, there is no arrival for a lot of these things. I feel like, like, you're never going to be like, okay, I called my friend. Now I'm a good friend. And that's done. You know, it's exactly you never get there. It's an ongoing thing. I really have come to the conclusion over the last year that habits are one of the most undervalued tools in your productivity toolbox um that that you know just inherently people don't use i feel like the idea of habits somehow got tied to brushing and flossing your teeth a long time ago and that did a massive disservice to the concept of habits because they are so much more powerful than dental hygiene. Yes.

The hallelujah moment for me with habits came when I really kind of got to the bottom of my idea of roles as the ultimate, you know, baseline of my system. You know, as we talked in the last episode, you can go back and listen to it if you haven't. You know, as we talked in the last episode, you can go back and listen to it if you haven't. To me, the foundation of my life is my roles. You know, looking at, you know, how do I get to the ideal version of myself in each role? And the realization that a lot of these roles do not lend themselves to projects. You know, Max Barkey lends itself to a project. I want to make a field guide. I set up a project to make a field guide.

Let's say you want to be a writer. Go write a book. Make a project for that. But there are a bunch of roles as a spiritual human or a father or whatever that doesn't necessarily lend itself to an ongoing series of projects to get you where you want to be. And habits are the solution. You know, building habits in those roles are the way you become the idealized version of yourself

in those. At least that was the insight I took away from that process. I think you're spot on. I'm glad you called out the toothbrushing example because that always drives me nuts. out the toothbrushing example because that always drives me nuts. That's such a basic level habit, and maybe it's not for some people. But you open up a habit tracker and you see the types of habits that they encourage you to build, and that's one of the ones that shows up right away. And that's not the stuff that's in my habit tracker. We're going to talk a little bit later about how we track habits and distinguish between the habits that we want to complete every day or on a regular basis and the tasks and projects that we're trying to get done. But for me, it's always been stuff that is way more important than that. So it's things that are tied to, you mentioned being a spiritual human, you know, so

like reading my Bible and prayer, those are habits that I track. The shutdown routine, stuff like that, that I know if I can create a habit or routine out of this, it's going to significantly impact the quality of my life because it's going to allow me to be in alignment with the role that I identified for myself in a particular area. I like to think of myself as an organized person. A shutdown routine kind of enforces that identity as an organized person. And I think that's one of the mistakes that you can make if you're starting to get into building habits is tracking all the tiny little things where you've got those down already. I mean, in my opinion, when you're looking at the areas and you're trying to identify

the habits that you want to build, these have to be significant to provide some motivation. So for me, I kind of think of tasks and projects. Those are a bunch of items on a to-do list that the majority of them on any given day, you are going to choose not to do. Now, that may be by default because you've got a powerful computer that can kind of blows my mind when you think about software like OmniFocus and how it searches thousands of tests and shows you the five that are important for you to think about right now. Like that's a pretty big advantage in selecting the right things. But the truth is that the majority of the stuff that's in there, you're going to say no to. But with habits, it's different. At least for me, these are things that I want to do all the time to reinforce an

identity, either that I have established that I want to remain true to or things that I want to do all the time to reinforce an identity, either that I have established that I want to remain true to or something that I'm trying to become. And every time I follow through and do something in that particular area, it's like casting the vote for the type of person that I want to be. So the habits are non-negotiable, in my opinion. Tasks are kind of like what I do when I choose to do them, but habits are really who I am. Yeah, and the interesting thing, you know, the neuroplasticity of us all is that you can change who you are. One of the most effective ways is through habits because, you know, you wake up every day and you say, well, I have this habit that I'm going to meditate.

Well, I've never really meditated consistently, so I'm going to start this habit. And then you wake up every day and you do it. And in a remarkably short amount of time, you wake up and don't think, I'm a person that's doing a habit of meditating. You wake up and think, I am a meditator. And it's that easy. You just have to stick with it. And the way to change the way you think about yourself is to change your actions. And these are the tools that get you there. And it's just, like I said earlier, it's amazing to me, myself included, how much I undervalued this whole idea until I really started thinking long and hard about my roles. And the ones that I was making progress on were the ones that had projects attached to them.

And I realized, well, how come I'm not making progress on the others? Well, there's no projects for them. Exactly. And so it's easy to prioritize projects. You want to write that book, you're going to wake up, you're going to do the writing, the outlining, the editing, whatever that day. But all those other things that are equally important to you that you don't have something to answer for, that's where habits run into the gap and help you out. And the truth is that it's a lot easier to view something like

writing a book as a project because as long as you talk about it, you've got the feeling that I could actually do that someday. But when you look at it through the lens of an identity, am I a writer or am I not a writer? Because that's what's required in order for me to write a book. You can look at your track record so far and say, well, I haven't been writing, so I guess I am not a writer. haven't been writing, so I guess I am not a writer. But in order to produce the outcome, that is the most effective way to get there is to change that identity and develop that habit of showing up and writing every day. You mentioned the focusing on a single area, setting a project in a particular area. I feel like that's the default way to deal with pain. And that's how a lot of us, myself included sometimes, choose to live is David Allen would call it emergency scan

modality. You find the fire, the thing that is causing you the most pain right now, and then you're motivated to create a project to deal with that fire. And we do have limited focus. You cannot focus on every single area at the same time, but that's why habits are so great because habits kind of let you automate your progress in those different areas. You can look at all those different roles and combine habits that are going to support those roles into a morning and evening routine. And now in an hour in the morning and a half hour in the evening, you're staying true to your identity and you've got the rest of your time to focus on a particular project somewhere which is really going to move the needle in a specific area. but you don't have to neglect everything else in order to do it. Yeah. And it's interesting to me that, and I haven't really stated this, but

habits and projects are not mutually exclusive. Like if you have a role that lends itself to projects, habits can still be very helpful. I mean, one of my habits is six days a week, I do something for a field guide, you know, and this kind of grew out of the fact that I would go through sometimes weeks at a time without making progress. So I'm not saying that I'm going to work an hour, but I'm going to do something Monday through Saturday on a field guide. And it's just a little checkbox, but every day I'm reminded of it. And that's a habit on a project-sensitive role. Yes, absolutely. You can definitely do that and apply it to a work context. I don't like the distinction of work-life balance. I don't really think there's different halves to your life. It's not

like a coin with two sides. You just have your life and it's up to you to balance it, especially now when probably all of your life stuff happens in the same space where you're at home. It's a lot lot harder to draw boundaries around different areas. But that being said, habits allow you to take care of a lot of different things with a small amount of effort. I really believe the Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule. This applies to personal productivity as well as the traditional, the way it was invented, I guess, is where they recognized that 80% of the production came from 20% of the population. This applies on a smaller level too, where a lot of your effort comes from a small number of actions. And so for habits, the way to start with this is to identify what is the thing that provides the biggest return for me. Build those things into a morning and evening routine. And at that point, you have a small amount of your

actions producing a large amount of benefit for you. But once you have that, absolutely look to extend this into other areas as well. And this is where it kind of crosses into the work domain for a lot of people, I think. Morning routine and evening routine, you kind of think of like, first thing you do when you get up, last thing you do before you go to bed. And in between, you're going to work, you're spending time with your family, you kind of think of like first thing you do when you get up, last thing you do before you go to bed. And in between, you're going to work, you're spending time with your family, you're wearing all of the other hats, fulfilling all of the other roles. But if you can apply this stuff to those areas as well, you can achieve some pretty impressive results. Because the real key to getting anywhere in a specific area is not trying to write 2,500 words per day. The way to get your book written is to write every day. And when you're establishing those habits, almost smaller is better. You want

to reduce the amount of friction that it takes to get that thing started, especially at the beginning when you're trying to build some momentum. Showing up every day and writing for five minutes is more important than showing up one day and cranking out thousands of words because at that point, you're going to feel depleted and tomorrow you're not going to necessarily feel it and you'll probably not show up. But if you're only writing for five minutes, I will just write for five minutes. Then you show up and you show up and you show up again. And the truth is that once you get there and you sit down at the keyboard and you start writing,

you never just write for five minutes. It's the same thing with going to the gym and getting on the treadmill. You're not just going to run for five minutes. You just tell yourself that in order to get you into that space. And then once you're there, it's easy to keep going. Yeah, I mean, that's the same reason I have the do something on field guide habit. It's not time constrained, but once I start working on it, I inevitably spend some time on it. You know, it's not a short thing. I think one thing to look at with all of this, if, if you're thinking about building

habits and whether or not you buy into my whole roles kind of foundation, but what are the parts of your life that could, you could get better at, you know, even, you know, forget about roles from it, but just whatever, if there's something in your life you want to get better at quite often, it's something that has very few projects and could stand to have a few habits added to it. And I think that's kind of a good starting point of trying to figure those out and go beyond brushing your teeth with this. Yes, absolutely. Get beyond brushing your teeth.

The other thing I'll add here for people who don't have complete control of their schedules, because that's always a point of contention. And I recognize that if you're working in a corporate environment, for example, you're working from home, you're actually busier than you were when you were at the office, because now everything is a Zoom meeting, and they're happening all the time, and you have even less time to do the things that are really important for your work or your life. And in that case, habits are even more important. Gustav Flaubert has this quote that I really like. He says, be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.

And I think that's kind of what habits free you up to do. By building a foundation of habit and routine, you can basically be regular and orderly in certain areas of your life. And then with whatever time you have left, you can be violent and original in your work. For some people, that's going to be from eight to five because they are in complete control of your schedule. For some people, that may be 30 minutes before lunch. But the point is that don't get frustrated because you don't have as much time as you wish you would. Just start where you are with what you have and start to build habits in those areas. I routinely get emails from listeners and readers that talk about hyper-scheduling and OmniFocus. And they're like, I don't understand how you can be creative. You spend everything

that you do is so regimented. And my reply is, I don't know how I could be creative if I didn't do this stuff. I mean, it really is. I mean, by blocking time to do this stuff, it allows me to do this stuff. And I know that's like a fundamental philosophical difference, but I truly believe that by building habits and thinking through this stuff, it frees you to do your best work. And you will never convince me otherwise. I have a webinar that I am working on regarding habits. And one of my favorite slides is this picture of a crane hoisting up a steel beam. And the bottom of the slide says, tomorrow is being constructed by the habits of today. And that's really it in a nutshell for me is we've all got routines. Some of them are

intentional. Some of them are not. Pay attention to how you are spending your time. And if you don't like where some of it is going and the results that are being produced by the systems in your life, then make some changes. But the choices that you make today aren't going to produce a result today. They are going to provide the foundation or the framework that you need for the success to happen tomorrow. It doesn't matter if it's writing. It doesn't matter if it's physical exercise. I mean, that's one of the things that kind of got me going about this whole idea of tasks and projects is I, several years ago, decided I was going to become a runner. I have always hated running. I've always been pretty athletic. I played sports in high school and college, but hated running, especially in Wisconsin where

it's currently zero degrees Fahrenheit and you don't really want to go outside. But I signed up for a half marathon. And I'm like, if I can teach myself to love running, then that's kind of like the ultimate test of mind over matter for me. And I viewed it as a project. I had a deadline. In fact, you think about smart goals, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time sensitive, like that's what that was. I had a specific date it was going to happen. I had a target time. I had a training plan. And I remember running that first half marathon. I ran it faster than I had hoped to, but I over-trained the week before and my patella tendon had fallen off the side of my leg. I hurt myself and I could barely finish. I remember crossing the finish line, getting the metal

and then thinking, now what? Because I had been so focused on this outcome and I achieved my outcome. But at that point, what do you do next? Because it was a project, the next project would have been sign up for another race. But I couldn't because I was hurt and I had several weeks of physical therapy in front of me. So I had to basically go back to the drawing board and redo everything when it came to running. And the second time that I did it, I identified as a runner and just learned to enjoy the process. And I still run the races, but I no longer have the pressure of my training runs. I got to go this far or I got to hit this time. It's much more enjoyable.

And it's also much, it's going to be much more sustainable, I believe. Yeah, I think that, you know, that's an experience we all share. You know, because I always seem to think about things in terms of SparkyOS, you know, I grew up with computers. so I like to equate my productivity spare request to building my own operating system. And if you're old enough to remember computers, they used to have what they called dip switches. Are you familiar with this concept, Mike? Yeah, I had one on the back of my keyboard, actually. Okay. So dip switches is like these defaults, and you throw a switch and it changes the way everything works.

And like one of the thoughts that occurred to me as I was going through this habit journey is really dip switches are like habits are like dip switches in the Sparky OS. You know, if I can stick with a habit long enough to make it work, then the switch gets thrown. work, then the switch gets thrown. And then the default system is to wake up and start tracking my food or to wake up and do something on the field guide or whatever the habit is that I'm working on. And then the beauty of it is that it almost costs nothing to keep it going. Yes, 100% agree. And it also gives you a safety net when things don't go according to plan because now you've changed the default. So when things go wrong, you have that to fall back on. And that was a big revelation for me last March with all the COVID stuff. I recognized that a lot of my systems and a lot of my habits weren't as strong as I thought they

were. Some of them were. Some of them, I didn't miss a beat. Others completely fell off the rails and I had to ask myself why. And that's kind of what led to me figuring out different ways to do journaling, different ways to do task management. An important point of distinction here, by the way, kind of a side note, but if your systems break, recognize that that's just an outcome related to an input or a process that you have the ability to change. It is not a judgment on your character. It does not mean you are a failure as a person because the system broke. It just means that something needs to be fixed. And that's actually very empowering. When you think of yourself as the problem in all of the systems, that also means that you are the solution and you have the power and the ability to change without waiting for somebody or something else to happen, for the stars to

align and things to finally break your way. And so I just want to encourage everybody, you don't need someone else's permission in order to start tinkering with those inputs and those processes and making improvements to your systems. It feels like everything about productivity has already been written by someone. And you're more well read on this than i am mike has anybody ever set up a a rule that um when dealing with yourself on this you need to be more patient than you normally are i mean i just feel like almost no

matter what topic we bring up on this show there's a dark side to it where if you say oh terrible me i didn't get up and do my field guide habit today. I'm a horrible person. And then you just draw yourself down into this, you know, rabbit hole of darkness. I mean, how,

I mean, I think that's just true with everything we talk about. You can't go there. It's okay. Yeah. You know? Yep, exactly.

I don't know of, and nothing comes to mind off the top of my head of like, this is a quote or a saying, but I think a lot of the older productivity authors like the Stephen Coveys and the Dale Carnegie's, those books, Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and Dale Carnegie, I'm thinking of How to Win Friends and Influence People. Those are almost like clickbaity titles from a long, long time ago. Before clickbait was a thing, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I think there's a lot of negative reaction to those types of books. Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. You read those titles now and you can have a negative reaction to them. I know I did too when I saw them.

But as I read those books, I realized that really a lot of those authors are saying what you just said, which is that you are the problem and also the solution. And don't give yourself a hard time. Because what that does is it forces you to stop moving. And when you stop moving, that's when you stop making progress. You cannot steer a parked car. And so that's really the big secret for a lot of this stuff is just never give up. Don't quit just because something didn't go the way that you wanted it to. One of the best bits of advice in James Clear's Atomic Habits book that stood out to me was the idea of two days in a row.

He's like, it's okay. Occasionally, you will fall off the wagon. I'm paraphrasing, but what you don't want to do is fall off the wagon two days in a row. So if you're trying to start running and for whatever reason, one day you don't run, that's okay. But that second day, if you don't run that second day, that's the one that'll get you. Yeah. And that's a lot easier to do when you have an identity as a runner, because at that point, you just got to go for a run. When you're training for a half marathon, got to go for a run. When you're training for a half marathon, oh, this is my speed day. I got to crank it out at a seven minute pace or this is my endurance day. So I got to run 12 miles.

No, just put on your shoes and enjoy the process. And if you're not feeling it after a mile and a half, give yourself permission to turn around and go home and still feel good that you were authentic to you. You were true to your identity as a runner because you ran. And that's really the only requirement. As a father, I failed so many times, you know, with my kids, you always try to do your best, but you don't always. And, but one of my successes I would credit myself with is when my youngest said she wanted to be a playwright. And my immediate response was, then you should go write some place,

you know, and she did, you know, and I feel like that is what helped her succeed on that was not the idea of how do we get started, but how do you identify if you want to be a playwright, you need to identify as a playwright. And how do you do that?

You write a playwright, you need to identify as a playwright. And how do you do that? You write a play. Exactly. That was what got me going when I started writing for my first book, which I'm almost ashamed to go back and read it now because I've developed a whole lot more skill and developed the ideas a whole lot more since I originally wrote them down. But that was exactly my thought process. It's like, well, I've got this idea to write a book. I don't know how to write a book, but I guess I better start writing. So I just started getting up early and writing for the only time I could find was the hour before I went into the office working for the family business with several kids at home. I think I had three at that point. That was the only quiet time I could find. And you could say, well, only an hour a day.

You're not going to make a ton of progress there. But because it was only an hour a day, it was easy for me to do. I was able to show up every day. And eight months later, easy for me to do. I was able to show up every day and eight months later, I had self-published that book. And that's the process for everybody. We are terrible at estimating how long something's going to take. In the short run, we overestimate what we can get done. In the long run, though, we severely underestimate what we are capable of, we don't realize the results that can come from even a half hour a day devoted to something, that's there in that system that makes it easy to show up every day and check the box and say, there, now I have been true to my identity as a writer or whatever it is that you want to create a habit for. I think it helps to do the math. If you're going to say, I'm going to spend an hour a day on this five days a week, over the course of two months, you will have spent an entire week working on that project. Yeah. And, um, that doesn't take long, you know, it's like, Oh, that's like the same thing as

taking a whole week off work and doing nothing but this, but all it takes is an hour a day. Yep. You can find the time. Um, I want to talk about the mechanics more of throwing the dip switches and maybe even throwing two or three at once. Let's do that right after this. This episode of the Focused podcast is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Go to expressvpn.com slash focused to get high speed, secure and anonymous VPN services with an extra three months for free. We all know how a VPN protects your privacy and security online. But did you know it can take your TV watching to the next level

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want. There are hundreds of VPNs out there, but ExpressVPN is ridiculously fast, which you want when you're watching shows. There's no buffering, no lag, and you can stream in HD. ExpressVPN is ridiculously fast, which you want when you're watching shows. There's no buffering, no lag, and you can stream in HD. ExpressVPN is also compatible with all your devices, phones, media consoles, smart TVs, and more. So you can watch what you want, wherever you want. If you go to this link right now, expressvpn.com slash focused, you can get three extra months of ExpressVPN for free. Support this show and watch what you want and protect yourself at ExpressVPN.com slash focused. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Well, as I mentioned in the last segment, I think the are currently doing is what has gotten you the

results that you have right now. It has gotten you to where you are today. And if you're not happy with that, then you just switch some of the things that you're doing. You flip some of those dip switches, as you were talking about, and you start to form some new habits. But you don't just chuck everything and then try to do 12 new habits at once. That's not going to work. However, with these routines, you can kind of use these as, I view them as like habit clusters. So if you have a morning routine already, it's a lot easier to build things into that morning routine. And you might be surprised how many habits you can fit into that routine as opposed to breaking all those habits apart and trying to do each of them individually throughout the day.

Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, just like kind of chaining them together. sense? Yeah. I mean, just like kind of chaining them together. Um, like if you've ever gone swimming in the ocean, the thing you need to learn when you swim in the ocean is to read the, read the current. You need to know which way the current or the ocean is moving. If you swim with the current, it's a lot easier to get a lot farther. And I feel like habits work the same way. Um, if you've got a habit every morning of waking up and journaling and you want to start meditating, that would be a great time to just clip on to that existing habit. Yeah, the books like James Clear's Atomic Habits or Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habits, they would probably call this habit stacking, where you've got one habit that is pretty solid already. That one is kind of on autopilot. And so

you put another habit on top of it. And when you understand the mechanics of how habits work, then you recognize why this is so powerful, because there's a cue or a trigger, different words to describe it, but basically something that prompts you that it is now time to do this habit. And so when you have a habit cycle that is already solid, you can use the end of that habit cycle as the launch pad for the next one when you stack it on top of it, which has a bunch of benefits. It makes it easier to get started. It gives you a repeatable structure. It reduces distraction and it helps you to stay intentional and be more focused on what you really want to be doing. Yeah. Do you use that technique?

I do, but I am pretty happy with my current morning and evening routine. So I use that when I'm making modifications, typically. Once in a while, I will create a habit that is not attached to something. Most of the time, those fails. The one that has stuck for me has been a habit of practicing Spanish. I use Duolingo for that. And I just enjoy that and get the notifications, hey, your streak's in danger, whatever. But I don't build it into a morning or an evening routine. I typically complete that throughout the course of my day. That being said, there are times when it doesn't happen. And so I get to my evening routine

and I'm trying to squeeze that in so I don't lose my streak. So there's definitely an advantage of having these things built into routines. Yeah, it is crazy as humans how susceptible we are to routines, both good and bad. And one of the nice things about being intentional about habits is not only does it allow you to develop new habits, it also allows you to identify bad habits that you want to remove from your life. Back when I used to drive to work every day, I would always get hungry. And if I worked too late and I would end up getting like French fries or something going home. And there was a definite like routine between leaving work, being tired and me eating garbage food. And that was something that I had to like work on. And, but, but being aware of this, the programming, you can actually, you know, interfere with it and, and add good things and take away bad things.

Like what I did for work was I just kept a jar of fruit in the work fridge and I would take it with me. And I would say, I don't know if I'll eat it or not, but I'm going to take it home. And of course I'd always eat it in the car, but I wouldn't get french fries. Yeah, that's a great example of living by design and not by default, I feel. My pastor has this saying, which I really like. He says, be a thermostat, not a thermometer. And for me, the difference between that is in what gets impacted. So a thermometer, that takes the temperature of the environment, whereas a thermostat controls the temperature of the

environment. And I feel like that's what you're doing when you're being intentional about building your habits and your routines. If you're a thermometer, if you're living like a thermometer, then you get to the end of the day, you feel exhausted, you feel like you just want a break, and so it's easy to get the french fries. But when you are living like a thermostat, you're thinking about that situation down the road, and you're controlling the environment so that you don't produce that negative behavior that you wanted to eliminate of getting the french fries. And you can apply this in any scenario, I believe. But the key to starting to think like this is recognizing what is really happening, recognizing where the systems are broken, and what's triggering you to produce the results that you don't like. Grabbing the french fries,

to produce the results that you don't like, grabbing the French fries, you know, binging on Netflix instead of working out or whatever it is. You know, there are these defaults that just happen when you're not paying attention to them. But the moment that you do start paying attention to them, you can start changing those and constructing positive habits to replace them. Yeah. And I think one thing that would be very useful is if you spent a little time looking and identifying your negative and positive habits you already have. And I don't know that I have any particular advice on that other than to be observant, maybe get a log

and write down any time you note that you've got a certain habit or trigger um you know a lot of mine involve junk food you know i'm working at home and like i'll finish i think whenever i finish something i like want to reward myself with a snack and that's that that's like a habit that i'm trying to work on but that that's an easy one but there are definitely more complicated ones where um for whatever maybe you hit something hard at work or something that um you have to give bad news to somebody about and rather than deal with that you will go play a video game or something you know you you will find these weird things in yourself and your own programming that you need to work on

and i think you really have to be intentional about rooting those out. There's a study at Duke University, which is the one that became popular because it was quoted by Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit. But that one said that our habits and our routines account for 40% of our daily actions. I've actually seen a lot of studies since that, and it's somewhere between 40% and 95%, depending on which one you align with. But the takeaway is that a surprising amount of the stuff that we do every single day is the result of a habit or routine. So don't view it as this is just what I do because it's a response to something in my environment. You have the ability to change this stuff. It's not always easy. I don't want to paint this picture like, oh, as soon as you start

paying attention to how you're spending your time, you're going to be able to fix it. I still find myself at the end of the day, even when I am not hungry, standing in the pantry, looking for something to snack on. That's a bad habit I got to break. But it's the starting point. And there's lots of places where you can leverage these routines and cause a chain reaction of positive habits to knock which we've mentioned. A shutdown routine at the end of the day, which we've talked a lot about on this podcast even. A start up routine as you get into your work. This was kind of a revelation I had regarding these routines is that I default to not, I have no problem putting my phone in the kitchen and avoiding email first thing when I get up. But when I sit down at my computer, because that's where I check my email,

there's still a temptation to open up Mailmate and look at mail first thing instead of doing some of my creative work, which is what I want to be doing at the beginning of my day. Weekends, workouts, writing, study, I mean, every single area of your life, you probably have a routine. And recognizing, first of all, that routine exists. And then secondly, what is associated with that routine, that's going to give you a lot of flexibility now. And it's going to give you a lot of flexibility now, and it's going to give you a lot of ability to start making some of those positive changes. Because now you don't have to change your entire morning routine. You just have to make one small change, get that to stick, and then do something else a little bit later.

Yeah, I mean, it really is. Having a morning and evening routine gives you a framework that you can hang new habits on, try them out. And it makes it very easy to fit them into something as opposed to randomly during the day, I'm going to do this thing. And I have found that to be very helpful for that process. Do you want to talk through some of our morning, evening routines? Sure. Sure. You want to, um, you want to go first? How about you go first in the morning? I'll go first on evening. Okay. So my morning routine, I have been tinkering with this lately, uh, shared how we got that USB charging dock and I removed my phone from the bedroom, which has helped a lot. But basically now what

happens is I get up and I have my bottle of water, which I have filled the night before, sitting on my nightstand. And I drink about 20 ounces of water to get me going. And then after I use the restroom, I will go read my Bible and I will pray. After that, I do a couple of stretches, which are assigned to me from when I was doing physical therapy, which really helped not just with the knee stuff that I was dealing with, but also some sciatica. So basically, as long as I do these stretches, I don't really have any issues. Once I am done with all of that, I brew some fancy coffee as kind of my reward. And then I'll grab that, go downstairs to my office, and that is where I will start work. That's where tasks and projects come in. And usually they are

defined by, with my work at The Suite Setup, for for example everything we do is in notion so i'll open up notion i'll see if anybody needs my help with something and if not then i have specific stuff that i'm working on like today i'm working on the webinar deck for this habits webinar and i've got a couple articles that i'm starting to mind map and write. So I've got those, those are all kept in, in Notion. And so I don't need to really worry about tracking those in a separate system. We'll get into tracking and managing in a little bit. But basically I make sure that the important stuff is dealt with before I sit down to work. Yeah. My, my morning routine varies with COVID, it has kind of changed as well. Historically, my morning routine was almost non-existent in that I would just get up and

work on my big project right away. Like I would work on field guides before I did anything else. But, you know, based on recommendations from people like Mike Schmitz, we got a puppy this year and me taking care of this dog has actually had an effect on how I kind of structure my day. Cause, uh, in the Sparks house, the girls wake up and do online courses. They don't really come downstairs. My wife works later in the night than I do. So often I'll go to bed before her and wake up before. So I'll get up in the morning and have the house relatively quiet, but the dog needs, you know, things. So I get up. One of the things

I make a point of doing, I know this is a little crass, but I do not take my phone in the toilet. You know, maybe you call that a habit, whatever. I just never use the phone in the bathroom. That is a positive roadblock that you are putting in front of a negative default habit. Yeah, I mean, it's funny because just the other day we had a very big rainstorm and my daughter in the middle of the night went down and got the dog out of the crate and took her to bed. And so when I got downstairs, the crate was open, the dog wasn't anywhere. And I'm like, okay, where's the dog? And then, then I finally went and got my phone and looked at my messages and she had messaged me at like 3am. But I wouldn't know because I don't check any of that stuff when I wake up in the morning. But anyway, that's just a habit that I have done that I'm happy to have done.

But anyway, so I get up, I take care of my basic morning routine necessities, and then I go down and I start the day out with a moment of joy. I mean, there's this little furry creature that is so happy to see me in the morning, right? She wants to jump on me and play with me and lick me. And I take care of her. We go in the backyard she does her business and we play a little ball or frisbee then i take her in and i

feed her and then she goes back to sleep because she's a sparks woman and she doesn't want to wake up so we have like about a half hour of just kind of fun play time and feeding for the dog and then she's ready to go back to sleep. So then I've kind of tacked on to that some morning routine stuff. I have medications I need to take and I keep those downstairs and I do that right after we feed the dog. And then I do a morning meditation session and I do a morning journaling session and then I start work. So usually about an hour after I wake up, the dog is back asleep at my feet. And I've got a laptop or I'm at my desk.

And I'm starting it on work. But even then, I don't check email. I don't go into OmniFocus. All that stuff was done the night before. And I just go straight into whatever my project it is. And usually it's working something on a field guide, but maybe if I have a client emergency, it's that, or maybe it will be like podcast planning. If, if you know, there's something important we're working on. So, um, but that is all chosen the night before

and the morning is kind of autopiloted through the, the idea of this morning routine for me is that I can put new things into it if I want. Like I've been experimenting lately because it's cold and it gets dark early with doing, I do like a two mile walk most days. And I usually do it at the end of the day. It's a nice way to kind of wind down. But when it's cold and the sun goes down so early, I've been experimenting with now doing that morning block of two or three hours on the big thing and then taking a walk at like 11 a.m. with the dog and doing the two-mile walk then, but that is very movable for me. That might be the habit until the clocks change and it gets a little warmer, but nothing is really kind of set in stone that way.

The other thing I do is all of this stuff is in blocks on my calendar. So when I do the nighttime routine before I actually set all those blocks out, so I can look at my watch at any time and it'll tell me what I'm supposed to be doing at that moment. That gets into a whole nother topic with time blocking, but I think it's a very important point to be made is that if you want this stuff to really stick, you do have to make the time for it to happen. And so time blocking is a great way to carve out the time for your morning routine. I do that on my paper time blocked plan every single day. I've got the morning routine and evening routine blocked off. And basically what that does is it secures that

space for stuff to happen. Now you can move those blocks around. That's kind of the point. This is sort of like scheduling Tetris, where you've got all these blocks and you want to stick them in in a specific order. And if something changes, you just rearrange the blocks. That's the flexibility that comes from having the structure like you talked about earlier. It's kind of like budgeting for your time. As the financial advice from people like Dave Ramsey, every dollar should have a job. Well, I firmly believe every hour should have a job. If you're going to be intentional about your habits and routines, it needs to be because if you don't have that, then you just default to whatever feels good in the moment, the path of least resistance.

Yeah. One of the funny things you'll hear about my routine is rarely do I shower first thing in the morning. I don't want to wake up my wife. And, you know, I go downstairs grungy. And then later when the wife and the kids start moving around and come downstairs and they want to, you know, be doing stuff downstairs, then I will go up and do kind of the shower and all that stuff. And the blocks that Mike were talking about, I really rarely move them around in the morning because that's set pretty strictly. But then after I have the morning routine, do the big thing first, go take a shower, then I open up email and messages and catch up with the world. And quite often that will cause a reshuffling of the deck for the afternoon. I also have a secret that I do not shower as part of my morning routine either.

I don't leave the house. So I use that as sort of a strategic break. Usually I'll start work about 7.30 and I prefer to get a solid deep focus writing session and we're all right for an hour and a half or so. And then I will take a break and go take a shower or occasionally I'll go for a run during that time. And then in which case, I'm just going to shower when I get back. That's an interesting thing. So first of all,

the Schmitz and Sparks homes are smelly in the morning, but it does relate to habits for me because, um, so, you know, usually for me, the whole thing starts around 6.00 AM and by, you know, 1130 ish, I have done a lot of work and then I'm kind of freed up as my wife takes over the downstairs and does her thing and takes care of the dog and keeps the kids going. And I can, I have time to myself where I can go take a shower, but I've been working on a habit of working out. You know, I do the walks, but I also want to work on muscles. I used to belong to a gym before all this started. So I've got some free weights and some things I'm doing, but that gave

me a structure to hang a habit on it. So now three times a week, I do, I have an app that I use that gives me workouts based on the equipment I have. And I'll put on a YouTube video that I've been wanting to watch, whatever it is, you know, maybe it's something about tech stuff or philosophy or whatever, and I'll just watch it and go through and do the workout. And then I'll take the shower. And then other days I won't because I don't do it every day. And it's funny to me how quickly that habit was able to like string together because I had a structure I could hang it off of. And that was the, you know, late morning shower. Yeah, exactly. That's the power of routines right there.

You want to talk about evening routines let's do it i know we've both mentioned things that we do the night before it sounds like the evening routine really this is the beginning of the next day in my opinion so the first thing in my evening routine if it has not already happened as part of a shutdown routine which that's the one i really got to get better at sticking to is planning tomorrow First thing in my evening routine, if it has not already happened as part of a shutdown routine, which that's the one I really got to get better at sticking to, is planning tomorrow. I never skip this. I do it every single day. But if I get to the evening and recognize that this has not happened, this is the first thing that I do is I plan tomorrow. It takes five, 10 minutes,

do is I plan tomorrow takes five, 10 minutes, time block my day, pick up to five things that I'm going to do that next day, including appointments and put that on my notebook page, leave that open on my desk. We have also for the majority of the time since quarantine, we have started playing board games in the evening. Lately, we have not done such a great job with this. For a while, this was happening every single night. The last week or two, kids have had school stuff that they've been working on, and it's just been a little bit nuts. And I recognize that I really miss this. So we're actually have already taken some some steps to to correct this. But we like to play like King of Tokyo is one of our favorites. Castles of Mad King Ludwig Sushi Go Party. We really enjoy spending family time together by playing a game. And then once kids are in bed, then I will read a book. I will set out my clothes for tomorrow. So

my clothes are actually in the bathroom by the shower. So I don't have to think about that the next day. And then the last thing that I do before I go to bed is I fill up my water bottle in the kitchen. I charge my phone and the charger so it does not come into the bedroom with me and then I go to bed. And also with all of this habit stuff, we haven't really talked a ton about setting up your environment. You can use that as a cue. Well, when I go to bed, it is definitely a cue that it is time for my body to go to sleep because we have blackout curtains, that it is time for my body to go to sleep because we have blackout curtains, we have white noise, we've got a weighted blanket. I mean, we've invested heavily into our bedroom specifically so that it makes it easy to go to sleep. And I feel like this is something that's

easily overlooked by people and a great spot to start if you're looking for ways to tweak your routines where they're going to provide a big boost to you throughout the day. If you can get better sleep, that makes everything else that you're going to do tomorrow easier. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you've got to figure it out, Mike. I really focus in the evening on the shutdown routine. Sometimes I wonder if that's the right word for it, but that's what I call it. And this is longer than the morning routine for me. It takes at least an hour. And as I ignore the world in the morning, I embrace the world in the afternoon. And the shutdown usually starts for me around 4.30. If I can. Sometimes it's a little later. One of the tricks I've learned

is that if I feel like I'm really busy and I have a lot of work to do, I still stop to do the shutdown. And then I just tell myself that if I still want to work after the shutdown, I can. But the reverse of that is to say, well, let me just finish this and I'll shut down. But shutting down for me takes energy and focus and I don't have it really past six or seven o'clock. Yep. Yeah. So, so if I, it's a, it's a false promise. If I say I'm going to do it later, I never do it later. So I've just come to learn, okay, well, I need to stop everything now and do this anyway. This is really important. So I do a brief email check in the morning or actually kind of the late morning.

And if there's anything in there that's a rush or priority, I'll take care of it. But if there's not, everything gets pushed to the afternoon. And the first part of my shutdown is to actually really deal with email. So customer questions and people asking me to speak or dealing with client issues or whatever largely gets dealt with at the end of the day. And, uh, that, and I have three, you know, areas of my life. I have my personal stuff, my max Barkley stuff and my legal stuff. So it takes time to get through all that. And, but I try to, by the end of the day, have dealt with all the email that is important. Um, and then the next thing I'll do is I'll take a look

at the task audit for the day. What did I finish? I have a perspective in OmniFocus that shows me what I actually did. And the way I manage tasks in OmniFocus, they're not date-based. I don't have one for today, one for tomorrow. I have the most important tasks for the week, which I kind of determine on the weekend are flagged. And so I don't really expect to get all of the ones on my flag list done on Monday, but I kind of work down that through the week. And sometimes I make little additions or deletions as I go along the way, but that makes the audit process much easier. But I do that. And I will have some that are time-based that really need to get done today and I'll make sure they get done. I also, while I'm in OmniFocus but I do that. And I will have some that are time-based that really need to get done today and I'll make sure they get done. I also, while I'm in OmniFocus, I do a review of OmniFocus

and OmniFocus has this feature that I wish more task managers use where you can set a review frequency on any project and then it'll show up, you know, whatever that frequency is, whether it's one week or six months, and you can just check in on the project. And I used to try and do those just once a week, you know, go through all the reviews, but I have so many projects. I have a lot of clients that, that I wouldn't do a mindful job of it. You know, after I do like seven or eight of them, I'm just done doing that. And so if I try to do them all at once, the first seven or eight would get good treatment. The rest of them wouldn't. So I do it daily now. That's part of the shutdowns.

And usually there's no more than three to five to review a day if I do it daily. So I do that. And then I kind of go through a communications audit at the end of the day. In addition to having gone through email, I check because I have Slack for the stuff I do for relay. And I've got some clients that are on messaging platforms. I have to check. And even my text messages for the day, I try to bring all that down to zero at the end of the day. I am not somebody who responds to text messages immediately, usually, but I always try to respond to them by the end of the day. And so I just kind of go through and hit all my communications. I also go through like drafts, which is the app that I capture quick bits of text in. And maybe that'll get turned into an OmniFocus task or whatever. I just try to bring

all of the madness that I set aside during the day. I have time committed to it at the end of the day. And then finally, I plan tomorrow. That's the last thing I do. And because of the way I use OmniFocus, it's not a massive project. I can look at, you know, what are the available tasks for tomorrow so I can have a good idea. Like if there's a special client contract I really need to work on, I will specifically block time for that, usually in the afternoon, but maybe that's the morning block. It just kind of depends. usually in the afternoon, but maybe that's the morning block. It just kind of depends. And so I set up my blocks for the next day. And that's really the last thing I do.

And then I consider myself off the clock around six o'clock. And then if I want to work some more, I will. If I want to watch a movie with the kids, if I want to try a video game or just read a book, whatever, I can kind of do what I want at that point. And on the best days, by six or seven o'clock, I'm my own man. That's the goal is to get to that point where you no longer have the obligations to yourself even. I think that's a place where I've struggled in the past and I'm a little bit hesitant. You mentioned being on the clock till six or seven basically, and at that point, you are your own man. That probably sounds fairly miserable to a lot of people to be under obligation until 7 p.m. I know like 7 p.m. for me at that point we're trying to wrangle kids for bedtime and after that I know I'm useless. So you don't have to have a set time that you're finished by. That's, again, one of the benefits of these habits and things

is if you are going to automate a bunch of the areas of your life that are important and then you're going to go hard on a specific area or two for work, then you might actually get more done with less time devoted to the tasks. Our friend Chris Bailey, who is going to be coming on the show soon, I remember in the Productivity Project, he did all these experiments on himself. He worked 20 hours a week. He worked 70 hours a week. And I'm not saying this for you specifically, David, but I think for other people who are hearing your example of

what's working for you, I would caution them, you know, you're probably running out of gas before 6 or 7 p.m. if you're just getting into doing this and you're looking for a model. Yeah, I should be clear, too. I am at the most expensive time of my life right now. You know, two in college, you know, Daisy, you know, pandemic, she lost her job. So now we're paying over $2,000 a month for insurance. So I'm really putting the gas down on both careers. I have as a lawyer and as Max Sparky right now, that will probably slow down at some point. But, you know, right now what my family needs more than anything is for me to help pay the bills, you know? And so I'm working harder than usual. Um, but even then the other thing is I don't really, I enjoy what I do so much. I mean,

I actually enjoy being a lawyer. I help my clients through problems. I enjoy making podcasts. So one of the reasons why I'm not out of gas by six or seven is because I really, I jump out of bed in the morning. I'm so lucky with the things I do to help make a living. It's not that hard. Yes. Yeah. I know where you're coming from. I just want to caution people who think, you know, I'm going to create this very elaborate evening routine after my work obligations because I do have work obligations for a company or something like that. You may find at the end of the day that you're just completely wiped out and you don't have that much left in the tank for building an evening routine. That's okay. Just recognize that this is what you've got to work with. And again, start small, stack these things on top of each other to make it easier.

And if you can't get eight different things in a workout in after work, don't beat yourself up about it. Just recognize that's what you've got to work with and start plugging some things in some other places if you can. Yeah. And the other thing i didn't say was quite often like like i said earlier i take an hour walk in the middle of the day that's not work you know that's me listening to a book on tape about star wars or something and i do the same thing in the afternoon during the summer so it's not that i'm going bell to bell on this stuff. Yep. All right. Well, either way, I think a morning and an afternoon routine are a great framework for you if you want to get better at habits.

And once you have them, it is very easy to hang new habits on them and try them out. This episode of the Focus podcast is brought to you by Indeed. Go to indeed.com slash focus to get a free $75 credit to upgrade your job post. Indeed is the number one job site in the world with more total visits than any other job site according to Comscore. And hiring is one of the things you do not want to mess up. You need to hire great people if you want to take your entire business to the next level. You need to hire great people if you want to take your entire business to the next level. And with the stakes this high, there's only one choice, Indeed.

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Right now, listeners of this show get a free $75 credit to upgrade their job post at indeed.com focused this is indeed's best offer available anywhere so get a free 75 credit to upgrade your job post at indeed.com focused one last time that's indeed.com focused the offer is valid through march 31 and terms and conditions apply our thanks to indeed for their support of the Focused Podcast and all of RelayFM. Another thing that can help when making changes to your habits and routines is to track them. And this is where I think, maybe for me anyways, we start to see some of the distinctions between the habits and the tasks. So as I mentioned, for me, the list of tasks, that's basically everything

that I could possibly work on, which is being dictated by a goal that is maybe mine, maybe not mine. Maybe it's a company goal, in which case I'm in alignment with it, but it's not something that is tied to my identity. So I feel less intrinsic motivation to follow through with those things. So we did the inputs show. I had the chart that I drew in the last episode. You can download that if you want to take a look at it.

But there's a lot of different places that tasks come from for me. A lot of them as they're related to TSS, those are going to stay inside of Notion. When there's stuff that is just for me, you know, we don't have a dedicated task management platform for doing things for Focused or for Bookworm. for doing things for Focused or for Bookworm. I will keep those tasks inside of Roam Research. And I like using them in Roam because the Daily Notes page pops up. There's all the tasks that are in there that are tagged with that specific day.

I don't track a ton of tasks and projects, so my list is never super long. And then I transfer those things to my notebook. That's what I work off. Rome is the brain, and then the notebook is the list. However, habits, I don't keep there because habits are non-negotiable for me. These are things that I want to do every single day, and I don't want to break the chain. So I have been tracking these. I've tried a lot of different things. I was using a lot of different habit tracking apps. Then I

was starting, I tried doing it in my notebook last year when I started doing the Bujo stuff. That didn't stick. I am back tracking my habits inside of Streaks, which is an absolutely phenomenal application, which we're probably going to nerd out about a little bit in the deep focus segment. But I like having these separate from my tasks. With Streaks specifically, you can use the widgets to kind of build like a dashboard. I like that sort of thing as a positive use of my technology. So I actually have that built on my phone. I don't want to see all of the tasks that I have to do, but I do want to see some visual indications and maybe some statistics

on the habits that I've chosen as important. Another thing with these habits, though, is that I sometimes forget to mark them off as completed once I start to gain some traction with them. So the other thing that I really like about Streaks is some of the automation that is possible with that. So for example, I mentioned my Bluetooth water bottle previously that I got because I wanted to drink more water. That water bottle syncs with the Apple Health app, which then syncs with Streaks and then shows me my progress for drinking eight glasses of water a day. And actually, it goes up on days that I run. That's important to me because I hate forgetting to mark something off after I've done it, and having that be the thing that breaks the chain for me. The real value of these habit

tracking apps is showing you those streaks that you've built. Some of mine are like 400 something days in a row. That's super motivating when you see that because it's like, oh, I can't let that one fall to the ground. Now, there's also a fine line there too, though, where once something is so ingrained, that's the point where I start to think about, do I need to be tracking this anymore? Or has this crossed the line into something like brush teeth type habit where I don't need to mark this off? It's just something that I automatically do. Yeah, the dip switch has been thrown. Do you still need to track it?

Exactly. And I think that eliminating ego from this process is a really healthy way to do it. I actually kind of have a problem with getting hung up on these streaks. You know, like I was really into that with my watch. I'm going to fill my rings every day. And I went like a year and a half. And then I got sick one day and I couldn't do it. And I got really hung up.

And I'm like, why am I beating myself up? I'm sick. I'm not going to go work out while I'm sick. And the, um, and I think that it becomes a negative thing if you get too hung up on that. So I would recommend, you know, streaks are great and keeping track of them, but just realize it's just a one or a zero on a computer. It's not, it's not you. Yeah. One of the things that helps with that, by the way, is what we talked about earlier, where if you don't have a specific outcome in mind, like I'm going to run a certain number of miles, but you could view that as I'm going to do something. Obviously,

it depends how you're going to set up your streaks with that sort of thing. But that would be the approach I would take, is not to say, well, I'm going to do the same thing I would do if I was healthy, because I'm not. I've got less to work with, but I am going to do something, even if it's just a form of mental exercise as opposed to physical. Yeah. So I had tried a bunch of different habit apps last year. For a while, I was using the app productive we're actually in deep focus today going to go through all the apps and talk about our thoughts but um for a long time for most of the last year i've been doing it just in omni focus where i have a custom perspective called habits and the thing i don't really get from that is historical data i

mean i could look at the ones I'd checked off, but basically I just form, make a project called health habit and make one of them say workout and then have it repeat every two days upon completion. So it shows up every two days. And that's kind of a habit tracker and I can set them for AM or PM. But with Mike's article and kind of rethinking a lot of this, I realized that I had gone too far in the other direction and I actually do want some streak data

and I want this more present. But one of the challenges I had to kind of think through is what is a habit versus what is a checklist? You know, as an example, every weekend I scan all of the paper mail. You know, that's, if you read my paperless field guide, you know, I'm into that. And I don't feel like I need to deal with that every day, but once a week I need to do with that. And so I had that listed under my responsible human role that once a week I always scan the mail, but that's not really a habit. That's a task. That's a checklist thing that I do once a week. So I've been really rethinking this a lot. And

I am trying streaks out, which is Mike's recommendation. There's a lot to like about that app. But one of the nice things about the app is that it only allows you to track 12 things. And maybe that there's only 12 real habits you're working on, and other things are checklist items. And where do you put those? Well, historically, they've been an OmniFocus for me. I'm actually trying an experiment now where I'm going to fold those into my review process,

which are templates in day one. My weekly, monthly, quarterly review starts out as a day one template. And I'll take that text, and I can put it in Obsidian because it now has end-to-end encryption. But the, but I can put a checklist very easily in day one and just say, okay, at the end of the week, the week review process, did I scan the mail? You know, did I, you know, do the things that I do? Did I give the dog a bath? You know, whatever the things I do once a week, you know, do the things that I do? Did I give the dog a bath? You know, whatever the things I do once a week, you know, I can keep track of those without necessarily

making a habit tracker. They really aren't habits. And that's been a fun experiment for me the last week or two as we worked up to the show to kind of rethink what are habits and what are checklists for me. That's an important distinction. I feel like that kind of leads into that piece of feedback that we received via email. Brandon Pittman had mentioned that they were struggling with managing time and focus. They were hardened to OmniFocus, scaled back to Things, recently wanting to move back to TaskPaper or Augmunk's analog system. But the sticking point here is those repeating tasks that aren't big mammoth project sort of things. I feel like these are kind of the ideal candidates for something to be combined into a checklist. Do you agree? Yeah. I mean, and I think being able to draw those lines is the

trick, you know, figuring out like, I don't need to develop a habit to scan my mail once a week. I've done that every weekend now for 10 years, you know, it's not a habit, but it is something I want to make sure I do every week. And I don't want that to slip my mind. So it's a checklist item. Sure. Yeah. And with something like OmniFocus, you can create a bunch of subtasks. There's your checklist for the one thing that you need to do, but there's five different pieces to that one task. Yeah. And the way it works is you say weekend checklist, and under that you would have scan the mail and you know and you just go through that once a week yep but that's not habit tracking and being able to make that distinction i think is the

trick i agree yeah my answer to brandon would be sit down and think about what are the habits you want to work on versus what are your checklists and you know brandon's been through all the task managers so he's gonna there's gonna be one that works for him um and i i could do this easily enough in omni focus like i said earlier i may even try to do it as part of my day one template because that's a way of stacking the habit or stacking the checklist on top of the thing I already do every weekend, which is write up my weekly review. And so that'd be a place to put that. If I wanted to go back and look, you know, at the end of January, did I scan the mail on Sunday? Maybe, you know, I don't know. I don't know if it really matters to me, but having the checklist there might not be a bad idea. That review example that you shared, I feel this is pretty brilliant. I know one of the

struggles that people have when they're using task managers for the first time specifically, and they're trying to implement something like GTD, is the thing that causes it to break is not doing those reviews and not looking at all of the things that you have made an obligation or commitment to yourself that you're going to follow through and do. So if you were to build that in terms of managing your tasks and projects, that's going to give you a real solid foundation for managing that part of your life. And then when you incorporate into your review routine, then an overview of the, and looking at the different habits that you have in place and what changes you want to make there, that gives you a pretty strong structure for evaluating the systems in your life and giving you the opportunities to make

those, those small changes. I like that a lot. lot. I feel like for me personally, I write a bunch of checks in the morning by delaying things like communications, email, all that, and just focusing on the work. And I need to cash those checks in the afternoon. I cannot legitimately ignore the world for four hours a day to work without, you know, paying the price at the end of the day of checking in with the world. I mean, some people have jobs, like if you just wrote novels and you had no clients and no business partners, maybe you could get away with that. But I can't. So I really have to make time. The thing I didn't say earlier is by the afternoon, I'm kind of wiped out, but I have enough focus to deal with email, whereas I would never have enough focus to do serious work past 4 p.m. Sure.

That's kind of like your low energy task if you were to define them that way. But you don't need to because you just know this is something I can do, which I need to do at some point. And it's kind of a perfect match for this time when I know that historically I'm not really feeling it. And if I were to try to do something really creative, like writing or video producing, whatever, it's not going to produce the result that I want. Yeah. Yeah. So Mike, are you willing to share your current habits that you're working on? Yeah. The big one for me is the shutdown routine. And there's not a specific habit associated with this. It's kind of reconfiguring that whole shutdown routine. This is a recurring theme, by the way.

It just means that I haven't found the thing that really makes this stick yet. And there's a lot of things that could be impacting that. It could be the fact that I'm not time blocking it as consistently as I should be, or I've got to figure out a way to create an environment at the end of the day where this is something that I really want to do. But my basic goal for the shutdown routine is to do what you described, where you're emptying all of the inboxes and you've planned tomorrow. And at that point, you feel good about walking away from work for the day. I recognize that I have trouble with this, and because I don't empty all the inboxes every single day, there is still a little bit of attachment when I go upstairs at night,

and I want to fix that. Yeah. Since I'm trying out Streaks again, I've got a couple in here. They have one that's built in that's very clever about filling your activity rings, and it pulls the activity ring data from your phone and shows it live in the app. And even though I made fun of tracking activity rings and getting hung up on streaks with those,

I do like to see them, and I do actually want to fill them most days, so I'm trying to use that. most days. So I'm trying to use that. I've been meditating daily since 1990 or so. But for some reason, with a lot of things going on in my life, I found myself in January going through multiple days of not doing it. And then I started to like get weird and I realized I needed to get back on that. So I've actually initiated that as a habit again, but I'm thinking this probably won't need to be here a long time, but I'm using it again. Tracking food is something that I definitely, it's a habit that I failed to do many times. I have the app, I'll go a week of tracking food and then somehow just stop doing it and not even think about it for another month. So I'm actively working on that. That's a dip switch that still needs to be thrown in my life, as is the exercise one I talked about earlier. And then music is another one where I've got to

just make some music once a day, because playing an instrument is something you need to do daily, and that one I've just not been consistent at all on. So I'm working on that one right now. And also, one I'm currently working on is I admire Mike's ability to read so many books. I want to spend it more than the thing I do at the very end of the day. So I'm trying to build a habit of in the midday reading for 30 minutes. And I'm trying to hang it off the shower kind of morning, end of morning routine. The challenge I have is by then the legal practice needs a bunch of work be done on it and things so

I'm just trying to figure out what I'm going to do with that but I want to add 30 minutes of intentional reading to my day and I'm not sure where I'm going to put it yet but that's that's what I'm working on nice I've uh I can walk through some of the other habits I guess uh in that I have inside of streaks at the moment. The shutdown routine is the one that needs the most TLC. So if you were to give me a challenge for next time, that would be the one that I would focus on. It's hard. It is hard.

It is hard. That's the one that's easy for me to skip. Inside of Streaks, I have a habit which is linked to a shortcut for opening the application for the Bible app. And this is kind of because even though I read my Bible every day, there is a group reading plan that me and a couple of the guys from my church go through together. So you read the reading, and then at the last piece of the checklist for that inside of the app is what did you get out of today? And so it's kind of cool to share what you heard and going into it with that expectation kind of changes it as opposed to just going through the motions.

I've got the prayer habit, which again is tied to automatic completion by opening a specific app. We use the Echo prayer app for group prayer requests and things. I've got my stretching one just as a reminder that because this is easy for me to do as part of the morning routine. But every once in a while, I find myself heeding the siren song of you Gotta Get Started with Your Workday. And so this is the one thing that I might say, well, I can do that later. I'll stretch it before I go for a run or before I take a shower. So that one is in there.

Meditation, I have this set to, because I don't do this every single day, I have it set to at least three times per week. And doing that, I've been able to build a streak of 11 weeks in a row. But I do want to get that a little bit more consistent. I track the amount of water that I drink. Again, that's tied to the health app. And the newest one here for me is practicing my guitar. I mentioned that I'm taking virtual guitar lessons for the first time, and this is really stretching me. And this has been useful in creating that habit of practicing every single day. Now practice 82 days in a row. So streaks for the win. I really struggle sometimes between

when does habit tracking stop becoming a useful technique and a flex instead? You know, if you like the meditation one is a good example for me. I haven't really tracked meditation, but now I am again because I had a little problem, but I don't, I don't need to admit it. I don't need to make that something I track every day because I do it every day. And, and I don't know, maybe I'm being too, too precious about it, but I feel

like I would really like to use a tool like this to really just make it something I focus on things that really where the dip switches really need to be thrown still. And, um, and that's, that's the way I'm going to try and treat it. We'll see how it goes. That's the, the approach I would recommend for a lot of people. I do admit though, it is kind of nice every once in a while when you feel like you're really having trouble following through on the commitments that you've made. You open up your Streaks app and you say, well, you've shown up 480 something days in a row, so give yourself a break. something days in a row. So give yourself a break. It's kind of sad on one level that I'm that fickle that I need that motivation sometimes, but the truth is that I do. Yeah. It's just like the

idea of making a task that you've already done and then checking it off, you know? Well, either way, habits, I think, are a very useful, underappreciated tool. If you made it this far in the show, thank you. Maybe stop and take a look at what your habits are and make a plan to make them better. We are The Focus Podcast. You can find us over on relay.fm. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Timing, ExpressVPN, and Indeed. This week on Deep Focus, Mike and I are going to go down the nerd hole on habit trackers and talk about some of the benefits of some of the various applications and what our specific choices are for us right now.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in two weeks.