Focused - 123: A Focus on Time

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

David & Mike talk about the different ways they track their time, what tools they use, and share the focus & productivity benefits they glean from the process.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz. I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you? I'm doing great. I just, as we record this, published a huge app pick for the suite setup on the best time tracking app. So we're going to talk about time tracking today. What's new in your world? You know, just I'm feeling good. You know, things seem to be

turning around a little bit and I just love recording focused. And these episodes where it's just the two of us kind of going into topics are some of my favorite. I mean, we've had some great guests recently, but I've been looking forward the last few days to sitting down with you and talking about staying focused. Yes, we did have some great guests recently. Some of my favorite guests. I mean, I love all my guests, all my podcasts the same, but some I love more. I was really excited to have Jeff Sheldon on.

That was episode 121, I believe, where we talked about Analog. I've been a big fan of his stuff for a long time, was thrilled to get him on. And then Nick Milo with the Linking Your Thinking. In fact, we had some great feedback on that particular episode. Someone had reached out and said that that episode is finally what made MOCs or Maps of Content click for me, which I was really excited to hear because I went through that linking your thinking course myself. I paid for it. It wasn't, you know, he gave it to me and we had him on the show sort of a thing. I'm just a really big fan of Nick Milo. And that was a big

thing for me. And I've been telling everybody I can about no maps of content. This is the thing that makes it work. And I've had a lot of people who are like, I don't think so, man, I don't really get it. That particular piece of feedback, I was very happy to get because Nick did a great job explaining it. No, he really is thinking about this stuff a lot clearly. And, and just it's a whole new technology, this personal knowledge management and LinkedIn, no technology that has shown up in the last year or two. And it's fun to be at the front of this and talking to these people who have thought about it so much. He was an excellent guest. We just did an episode.

We recorded as we record this. It hasn't been released yet, but it will be out just a few days before this episode drops. But Stephen Hackett started sending me screenshots of Obsidian on his computer. All right. So I couldn't help myself. We,

we did a full episode of Mac power users on workflows and a deep dive into obsidian. Stephen's relatively new to it. I've been using it since October. That's how I looked at my notes. October is when I fully embraced obsidian. So it's been a little while now. And,

um, we went deep on it. So that's an episode. I actually name dropped Nick Milo on that episode too, because I just think the guy is so smart. Awesome. Well, we're going to talk a little bit in the deep focus section for this about something that I recently figured out in Obsidian regarding journaling and my daily questions. So I am all in with this app as well. I'm a more recent convert than you, but I have seen the light and Obsidian is great. Their iOS app continues to amaze me what you can do with it. That's been really cool. I've got access to the beta and I know you do too. And we've mentioned publicly before that we're kind of amazed at how stable it is.

And the development cycle behind the Obsidian in general is just freakishly fast. It's like the Jimmy Johns of quality applications. I agree. And for you paid subscribers, the extra content today is not just about obsidian so don't don't turn it off if you're not obsidian it's the idea is we're going to talk about how we do daily pages and obsidian plays into it for us but i think really you could use what we're going to talk about the do a paper or something fancy like obsidian doesn't matter true but the real reason we're here today though is to talk about um time you know and you just did this excellent article about time tracking i know

having talked to you over the last couple months you have been going deep on time tracking and looking at all the apps and you did a great article over at suite setup and you have something else to share here about time tracking in a minute and the related subject of time tracking in my mind is time blocking and we've talked about hyper scheduling and time blocking before but uh we're also going to talk today a bit about where we are on time blocking and time tracking because it's it's definitely been an evolution for me with both of those related concepts. And I've got a little bit of a journey to share and hopefully it'll help you figure out where you stand with things like time tracking and time blocking. Yeah, well, time tracking and time blocking, in my opinion, go together like peanut butter and jelly. They're like bookends. If you're going to do one, you may as well do the other.

In fact, I think that they can kind of be encapsulated in the concept of time budgeting, where time blocking is the plan and time tracking is how well you stuck to it, which you really need because you can just keep making plans. But if you don't learn anything from how it went, you know, you could be making some really crazy plans that you never follow through on. And then if you can't follow through on your plans, really, you're just kind of cementing in your mind that you're the type of person who can't follow through on their commitments. And that's not a good thing. Yeah, there's a real slippery slope with time blocking where it can become a practice that you don't follow, if you know what I mean. It's like there's blocks in your calendar,

and they have no relationship to reality, and I have thoughts on that. But I think let's start with time tracking, because that's something we've danced around on the show, but we've never kind of gone in with any depth. Yeah. You know, the idea of time tracking is just what it sounds like. You have a way to record where you spend your time, and then you can get reports later. We were talking to our mutual friend, Ernie Svensson,

about this, and he has no interest in it. And I think one of the reasons is because he's a lawyer. And when you're a lawyer, from your very first days as a baby lawyer, they, uh, they pull you aside and tell you how important it is to track all your time for your client work, you know, because, um, you know, as Abraham Lincoln said, a lawyer's time is his stock in trade. You know, that's, that's how you make your money. And, um, and when I first started practicing, they did, and I kind of hated it, but, And, um, and when I first started practicing, they did, and I kind of hated it, but, but I kind of evolved the way I practice. I do some stuff by time. I do a lot of my stuff for my clients just on a transaction, you know, like, okay, you want me to make this contract? It's going to cost this much money. And then I don't track time. I just tell, you know, they know upfront what's going to cost. And the reason I did that was because I would talk to clients on the phone and they would be rushing to get me off the phone, you know, because they, they, in their head, they were running how much money the phone call costs. And then they wouldn't give me what I needed to do the best work for them. So, so I've tried to over the years kind of evolve out of time, but you know, you almost, you still have to do it, you know, for some projects. But so as lawyers, a lot of people who do this or have any job where you're required by your boss to tell

exactly how much time you spend on each project, you become resistant to the idea. And it feels like, like, you know, misery to you. But this time tracking we're talking about is a different time tracking, right? I mean, this is something you're doing for yourself to give yourself data to help you become more efficient and have a better understanding of where you're spending your time. Yeah. So even deeper than time tracking, there's this concept, which maybe will turn some people off, but will probably excite others of the quantified self, which is simply being able to have numbers and data that shows kind of who you really are,

how you're in time tracking is like how you're spending your time. But Obsidian, we were talking a little bit about the beginning. this is kind of this in terms of your ideas and your thoughts, the whole second brain sort of idea But I think that they can provide some insights for what's actually going on in your life, in your brain, in your body. I mean, if you step on a scale and you weigh yourself every day, that's another form of like quantified self is you're taking these measurements so you can measure your progress over time. And the thing that I am realizing the more that we do this show is like you have said over and over and over again, David, that focus is a superpower. That's becoming more and more true with all the information that comes at us. And the measure of focus really is,

did you follow through on your intention for how you wanted to spend your time? And this kind of, as I dig into this, I realize that a lot of times I'll speak for myself that the lack of time is not my issue, historically speaking. It's the lack of intention. I've got the time to do the things, but when I have the time to do it, I'm not feeling it. I don't have the energy. I don't have the clarity. I don't have the motivation to follow through with it. And so there are things that I can do, systems I can set up to make things more clear and break it down into simple steps and say, I'm going to do this thing right now. And then if I'm able to follow through with that, then I have the time to do all the things that I want to do, the things that typically are like important but not urgent, right? Spending time with the family, making sure that I get out for a run or a bike ride every day, you know, using time blocking and time tracking, I'm able to set aside the hours to do those things that are important to me without letting any of the other stuff drop.

But when you just react to things as they come in, that's when you never seem to have enough time in the day. And you're just constantly going from feeling stressed out and anxious about the work that you've got to get done to checking your email to avoid the work that you have to get done. And then you fall further behind. You know, it's a vicious negative cycle. And for me, you know, my journey with time blocking first and now time tracking, I feel has kind of shown the way out of that. Yeah, you know, just to kind of follow up on the point you made about quantification, I think that I know in my own personal experience that quantification of anything is the way to remain focused on it. You know, it's the way for me to keep myself honest. I've been struggling with weight lately.

I got a little heavy and I don't like that. So I was trying some diets out. And what I ultimately found was that the easiest way for me to lose weight is to write down everything I eat. And that's not a diet. It's not a special thing you you go to but if i require myself to record every seized candy i eat you know i'm not going to eat as much seized candy because i'm going to become aware of how much of that i'm eating make sense absolutely yeah so i mean i do think quantification and we're going to talk today about quantification of time, and it gives you so much good data to use. And maybe this is kind of a related but not exactly the same thing. Like, one of the things people assume about me is that I spend too much time on project and task management.

If you read my blog, you know that I do a bunch of weird things to manage all my projects and tasks. And if you've seen my OmniFocus field guide, you're like, oh, this guy must spend like three hours a day in this. And I believed the hype. I felt like, man, I probably am spending too much time in this stuff. But when I started time tracking and I saw how little time I was actually spending in those tools versus the benefits I was getting from them. It, it made me kind of double down on the fact that, no, this I'm doing the right thing, you know? And so it just, you know, it's this quantification that lets you, that gives you the ability to focus in on something. I mean, going back a few months ago, we did an episode

on habits and habit trackers. And I can tell you, I've been running streaks pretty regularly since we did that. And it definitely makes a difference in my ability to maintain habits, having a way to keep myself honest. And, you know, time tracking is just one more flavor of that issue. Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out because there are lots of things that you're probably doing in some way to quantify yourself already. But time tracking is the one I feel that most people have a visceral negative reaction to. Like, I don't want to have to log every hour that I spend.

That's just one more thing I've got to do. And it's easy to dismiss it. So getting back to the main point that you had mentioned, why do you want to track your time? Well, most people who get started with time tracking, I think probably do start off as a, you mentioned the lawyers have to track their time. And I had honestly never even thought about the negative taste that would leave in somebody's mouth until we were talking to her about it. But freelancers are another one where like, if you don't track your time, then you're just not gonna get paid. And so maybe there's people come to the concept from that perspective. In fact, when I was doing the research for the best time tracking app pick that we picked at the suite setup, a lot of the apps that I stumbled on were built that way, specifically

so that you could track time that you spent for a client or project so you could send an invoice. But I think the real value for this for a lot of people, especially right now, is the mindfulness aspect of it. And mindfulness, I mean, that's another very broad category. You mentioned being more mindful about eating. Meditation is a form of mindfulness. Journaling is a form of mindfulness. Really just paying attention to what you are doing and making sure that the things that you are doing are the things that you actually want to be doing. We had Chris Bailey on the show. One of the first episodes, I think, after I joined was when he mentioned the thing about Netflix, which I thought was

absolutely brilliant. And he said that if you intend to binge watch Netflix for eight hours in the day, and you follow through and you do that, then that is one of the most productive things you can do. Where we get into trouble is when that's not our intention. Our intention is to watch just one episode for 30 minutes, and then we get sucked in and we watch the entire season. That's what we want to avoid. And so bringing it back to time tracking, you know, you can look at the data and it shows you exactly what happened, which is another big insight I got when I started tracking my time is how I thought I was tracking my time or how I was spending my time was not actually how I was spending my time.

And this is, I know I'm not alone in this insight. You know, I've seen a lot of people who like pull out their iPhones and they go to screen time after I asked them, how much time do you think you spend in social media? And they look at the numbers like, what? No, something must be broken. It says twice as much, you know, that's not, that's not uncommon. We're really, really bad at remembering, you know, how we, how we follow through on, on the intentions that we set. But when you've got the numbers to look at, you know, you can't, you can't get around that. You don't stay there and you feel bad about like, oh, well, I spent 10 hours on Twitter this week. I only meant to spend three. I guess, you know, there's just something wrong with me. No, that approach to that is you look at that information and then you figure out some systems that will kind of nudge you onto the right path. And the

right path can be any path that you determine. If you meant to spend 10 hours on Twitter, that's totally fine. I don't want to spend 10 hours on Twitter. So I'm going to set up things that are going to nudge me away from Twitter. I'm not going to install it on my phone, those sorts of things. Email specifically, that's a big one for me. If I have it on my phone, I tend to get sucked into it. So I just don't even put it there. Yeah, I do think that like, if you are resistant to time tracking, because you had a job where you're required to time track, I would say we're talking about today something entirely different. We're talking about selfish time tracking. You know, this is data just for your own benefit, for you to get better at figuring out what you can, you know, hand off to somebody else, or maybe you can automate

it, or maybe it's something you need to throw overboard. But you don't know what those things are until you get quantifiable data about how you're spending your time exactly another complaint about time tracking is um that you know why are we elevating time to become so important you know why shouldn't you be thinking instead about the quality of your production or why you know there are other metrics of how well you're doing and the fact that you spend three hours on a thing isn't necessarily the most important metric. So why are you wasting your time with this? blocking, which we'll talk about putting constraints around the time that you spend on things that actually produces better results, in my opinion. Now, I tend to be a perfectionist. And so without time tracking and time blocking, the workflow usually goes something like I get an idea and I start working on it and I don't ever finish it because I feel like it can get

a little bit better. And then I pick it up the next day and I know that I want to make improvements, but I don't know where. So maybe I'll sit there for an hour and tweak one thing and then the next day I'll do the same and the next day I'll do the same. You know, at some point when you have a finish line, a set like deadline, essentially, you just ship it, you get it out there. When you have that in mind, it directs the work specifically. I guess I'm taking this creative approach for creative work where the constraints that I put around the things that I make actually make the end result better because they force me to think through the process and not walk into one of those work sessions open-ended, which is when I leave the door wide open for

interruptions and distractions. Yeah, I would answer the question in a similar fashion. What really kind of sunk in for me on this was that although the amount of time you spend on something isn't necessarily the most important metric, it's a very useful metric. Like a realization I had recently with time tracking is in my law practice, because in addition to tracking the time I spend on the practice, I also do track actually the time that I bill to clients, you know, what you would call the production work of being a lawyer. And recently, I noticed that increasingly, the time spent being a lawyer was two and sometimes three times the amount of time I actually spent billing for clients. And I realized that there were a bunch of inefficiencies developing and brewing in the law practice where I spent a lot of time that really didn't move the needle. And it was having that time tracking data on top of that billing data

that gave me the wake up call I needed to kind of make changes. So I think even though it may not be the most important metric, it's an extremely useful metric for diagnosing problems. extremely useful metric for diagnosing problems. Yes, yes, absolutely. And the problems that you solve, really, this is the interesting part for me because they're all highly personal. The types of insights that I get from my time tracking, probably very few people would want to get those types of insights. And it's kind of like you see what you are looking for. But without the information, you're just making a guess, you're stabbing in the dark. a communications agency. Got a brilliant idea that will change the world? Spokes knows that whether you are pitching investors or selling products or services, a compelling story is the difference between your business struggling or thriving. In a crowded market, the best story

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That's Spox.Agency.Focused21 and mention this show for a 25% discount. Our thanks to Spox Agency for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. Okay, I feel like we've been in the hippie land of time tracking. Let's get a little practical. How are you time tracking, Mike? Yeah, well, I am doing a couple of things with time tracking. And before we get to the specific details of how we're doing it, I think we should probably explain the different approaches that you can take. Because when most people think of time tracking, they probably think of starting and stopping manual timers, which was how I came to time tracking. And I kept messing those up. I would

get in the car to go to the co-working space, start a travel timer, and then not realize it was still running until the next morning. And at that point, my data is kind of useless. It says I've been in the car for 18 hours. That's not true. So went all the way to the other extreme with the automatic time tracking.

Real basic version of this is something like screen time, which will tell you how long you spend in different applications. But timing is the app you want to use for this sort of thing. And I've been using timing for several years because it runs in the background on my Mac, which happens to be where probably 95% of my work happens. So it's running in the background and I can create rules for when I'm in this application or even like visiting this particular website or working on this particular document. Like there's, you can even track time

against individual sheets and Ulysses, things like that. Assigning those two projects in timing and then that one, I kind of just set it and forget it. So that's my backup. But the last probably six months or so, I've been using Timery on my iPhone. And I absolutely love this app. I know I jumped into it at kind of the wrong time because with iOS 14, Timery actually lost some power with the new widget stuff. But for me, the real value running timer in the upper left. I've got the time that I'm tracking for the individual projects for the day in the upper right. And then I've got for the week, the different modes. That's all based by tags and then individual timers.

And that's the place that I go to start and stop my timers. And so I kind of have this hybrid approach where I combine these things and I use the data from Timery most of the time, but timing is there to help me fill in any holes. Or if I mess something up, you know, that's going to help me understand really what's happening to kind of see that the forest through the trees. I love that you kind of stumbled into the same thing I've been doing for a long time. So I feel like we got confirmation bias here. But let's talk a minute about timing. Let's talk about the automatic time tracking.

Timing is an occasional sponsor of this show. So full disclosure, I and I believe Mike both were customers of the timing app long before they sponsored the show. Yes. But it is, and I like it because, and this is not an advertisement. They don't even know that we're doing a show on this. I like it because it's on your Mac. So the data is private to you. It's not, you know, you, you're, you're safely getting very detailed, accurate data.

And the automatic time tracking is the data is far superior to what you get with anything. Even like with, you know, as much as Mike likes timery, you're never going to get the same kind of data you get with anything, even like with, you know, as much as Mike likes Timery, you're never going to get the same kind of data you get with timing, you know, timing keeps track of where you spend your time. Exactly. And a good example for me is I, um, I went down a rabbit hole the other day. I wanted to get a new harness for the dog because my life is now all about the dog, you know? And I said, well, I'll take a little break and do that. And then I, I went, did some research, bought a new harness. And then I looked down at my time or data and it was still on the law task I was doing before I

decided to go off shopping. Right. And I said, well, I need to fix that. So in my head, I'm like, well, what'd I spend? How much time did I spend on it? Cause I didn't look at the clock. I'm guessing it's like 10 minutes. It wasn't that long. And then I said, well, I'll go check. And I opened up Timery and sure enough, I was on, you know, um, wire cutter and Amazon for an hour. And so you catch yourself, but as humans, we're very bad at looking back or looking forward and making these time estimates. And I guess that's kind of an underlying problem of why this stuff is useful is that as humans, we're terrible at it. And Timery just gives you that, you know, cold water in the face, honest data. You know, the flip side of that is I'll be working on a contract for

a client and think, well, that only took like an hour. And then I'll look and I spent three hours on it, you know, because Timery keeps track of exactly how much time I was in Microsoft Word writing that thing. So it just gives you very, very accurate data if you work on your Mac. And having that running in the background at all times, there's no cost to it. You know, it's collecting the data without you having to do anything. Yeah, exactly. Now, timing has been around for a while and the pricing model has changed over the years. I think it's a subscription right now and it is fairly expensive but it is also part of the set app subscription so i forget what the exact numbers are for the timing subscription versus the set

app subscription but if you're going to subscribe to an application you may want to check out set app first because you get access to a whole bunch of other awesome stuff like MyNode and Ulysses as part of the same subscription. Yeah, well, either way, I think it's worth paying for that data because, you know, if you're a little leery about time tracking, here's a way to do it without having to spend any of your own effort. It's just always happening. Now, this is particularly true if you work primarily on Mac. If you work primarily on your iPhone, it doesn't have that ability. Apple hasn't given it that yet. I mean, that's one of the things that kind of kills me is like Apple's willing to share your health data with third-party apps. So you can enable your meditation app to see your meditation data from the health app

i don't understand why it's not willing to share the the time tracking data that you know they they're clearly collecting because i would love to see the timing developer get access to that on mobile and see what you know he could do yeah there are people who try to figure out ways around this. Like one example, which is actually a decent option if you don't want to subscribe to something like timing. If you're just kind of dipping your toes in the water, timing is much, much better, but rescue time is free. And it does sort of the same thing. Again, timing does it way, way better. And it's worth every penny, in my opinion. But I understand people want maybe want to see what kind of stuff they can get from this before they they commit. RescueTime has an iOS app, which I absolutely cannot recommend. It actually uses your location data to try to fill in the holes, which I don't want rescue time watching all of my location data the entire time and trying to guess, you know, what I was doing when I was at this place. But that's kind of where people are left with the restrictions that you

were talking about. Yeah. And then as we move kind of now into the more intentional time tracking apps, and we're going to focus on Timery. But before we leave timing, I would mention that timing has a web like portal for the data and you can save that as an app on your home screen. If you do decide to invest in timing, you can also manually track your time. So if you're away from your mac it is pretty trivial to just save that website as an app on your phone and open it up and it does a great job you can start and stop timers just like you do with timery um it's not as integrated as timery is because timery is like a built app for this whereas the web portal for timing is a webpage, but it's still very good. And, you know, I did some experiments where I just ran all my time tracking through timing and it,

it was fine. So, um, if you want to keep it simpler than having two solutions, I think time timing combined with that, that web portal that they've got would probably do the job. combined with that web portal that they've got would probably do the job. Yeah, that is definitely a good option. And another thing that is probably a simple solution for people who are just kind of dipping their toes in the water before we get into the really geeky stuff with Timery would be Timular. I wrote a review of this for the suite setup. It's not something I'm personally going to use because it doesn't integrate with toggle nicely like Timery does. But if you just want an application to track time and you want something tangible to use to track your time,

Timeler is actually kind of cool. It's got this Bluetooth connected tracker, kind of looks like an eight sided die. And they've got stickers and you can use dry erase markers and, you know, color code each side. And then basically, you can assign each side as it's facing up to a specific timer. And so as you turn the tracker, you know, it starts and stops your your timers in the the app is probably an electron type app. You know, it's available on a lot of different platforms. It doesn't really feel like a native Mac app, but it's pretty nicely done. And it does give you the data that you would need, you know, if you're not going to really get into the weeds with this stuff. Yeah, and it's an interesting way to track time. So as Mike explained, it's an object.

Well, it's got like eight sides or 12 sides i don't how many sides does that have yeah it's got eight sides and it looks looks like a dungeons and dragons dice sort of a thing and it comes in a stand and so you take it out of the stand you put it on one side and the side facing up is associated with a timer and that one starts yeah so if you can get your time tracking down to eight categories and you want an object, that's a very deliberate practice. The downside is if you're somewhere and the dice isn't with you, it's not as easy. Yep, right, absolutely. But yeah, that's an option.

So let's talk about Timery and Toggle, because that's a two-piece solution for time tracking. The underlying engine is Toggle, which is a web service that the free tier is good enough for just about anybody that wants to use it if you're not billing clients. And a lot of folks use it, but also a lot of folks find that their applications, both for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, are not super. That is putting it nicely, yes. So the Toggle Track, that application boggles my mind because it's the official Toggle app, but just the design choices that they've made don't make any sense for a mobile app. I mean, you're assuming, I assume anyways, when you want to start and stop timers

from a mobile app, you want to make that as easy as possible. But with the Toggle Track app, it's actually way more complicated. They've got a couple suggestions up at the top. But if you don't use one of those, then you have to manually add your project, you have to manually add the description, manually add your tags, it's it's kind of ridiculous. But Timery makes it really, really simple. And then it also gives you phenomenal support for shortcuts, which I personally don't use, but I totally get the appeal of automating your time tracking when you open an app or when you close an app. Rose has done some really crazy stuff with this with like the lists. I don't know if you've done

that too, David, where you open an application, you can choose which timer you want to start, that sort of thing. But for me, I just want to have the timers and i really like tapping one it opens the app it starts that timer automatically and that sort of is part of a ritual as i go between my different modes throughout my day yeah i mean timer e puts the face on toggle that toggle should have put on it and it's it's an amazing little app that that just does the one thing well it's got a a timeline view where it shows all the timers that you've entered that day and if you long press on one it'll start that as the current timer so like if you spent time in the morning working on your work project and then you took a lunch break, you could go back and just long press on the work project and then resume. It also has the ability to have saved timers. So

what I've done is I've created a set of about, I don't know, 25 saved timers. So I've got one for focused podcasts, you know, and anytime I work on the focus podcast, I tap that timer. But because it's a saved timer, I always use the exact same syntax when I create it. And then when I go to get reports, I can see exactly how much time I spent on the focus podcast. And I've got that for all the areas of my life, you know, for the law practice, I've got four different timers related to the being being a lawyer. And so I can just go in any time and tap on one of those save timers. And it makes the process very easy. And I think that's one of the keys if you're going to do this manual time tracking,

is you want to remove the barrier to entry as much as possible. And I can talk about automation separately if you want, but even without using any automation, Timery does lower that barrier quite a bit. Yeah, that's the thing. When I was doing manual time tracking back in the day and it never stuck for me, it was because I wasn't using Timery. Timery completely obliterated the obstacles that were in my way to manual time tracking, to be honest. It's that great. And it's not the thing that really makes it click for me is the widgets. So I have actually on my time tracking dashboard. So I have on my iPhone specifically, I've got my home screen, which has a couple of WidgetSmith

widgets for like the calendar and then the forecast. And then my core apps, which are all intentional apps. I've got the ones that are associated with my morning routine, the communication apps that I will use to communicate with other people. And then my doc, you know, my node where I take notes on the books that I read. I get to that quickly. Drafts, streaks, overcasts, because I listen to a lot of podcasts. That is the one screen that actually has apps on it. If you swipe from that screen and go to the right, you will see my time tracking dashboard, which is all Timery widgets. And that's the only other screen I have. Everything else is in the app library or the other widgets exist in the today view if you go to the left of the home screen. So it's prime real estate

on my phone. And the thing that really just makes this great is all of the options that you can use to configure this stuff just the way that you want it. With the timers, you can create the small, medium, or large size widgets, but there's this compact mode, which allows you to fit more timers into that widget size, which I really like because the big touch targets for like, if you do a medium size widget, typically you get four timers. Those always seem like wasted screen real estate to me. So you turn on compact mode and now you can get six timers instead of four. Yeah. And then you put, you create multiple medium size save timer widgets where you, because

you can choose exactly which timers you want to appear in each widget, put those all in a widget stack. And now I can quickly get to, I've got about the same amount of timers you want to appear in each widget, put those all in a widget stack, and now I can quickly get to, I've got about the same amount of timers, probably about 24 total timers. I don't have them all in these widget stacks, but it very easily lets me get to whatever timer I need. And then I tap that, you know, it opens the app because that's a limitation of iOS. It doesn't just start the timer. It does open the application, but it gives you this nice little haptic feedback as you do, which to me kind of cements like, okay, I'm switching from this previous mode to a new mode and the timer starts. It's great. Yeah. And I do think that if you're

going to do this, you need to find the right balance with the saved timers. I think that's a mistake that's easy to make. When I first started doing this, I had too many saved timers. Like for instance, I, for the longest time for each podcast, I have three podcasts. I would have three separate timers. Uh, I would have one for prep, one for, um, recording and one for post-production. And so I've been collecting data for years now about how much time I spend on prep of the Focus podcast and how much I spend on post-production versus how much I spend recording. I've never used that data. I've never found it useful. And I realized that I was collecting data just for the sake of data, not really for any use.

And so I turned nine timers into three just by having one timer for focus, one timer for Mac power users, one timer for automators. And that's enough data. I just want to know how much time I'm spending working on the podcast in any capacity. And I do think that when you set these up, you should give some thought. I said earlier, I have four for the law practice. I have one for email because I'm always want to be aware of how much time I spend in email. I have one for admin. I have one for client work. And I don't remember what the fourth one is. I'm looking at one for planning. That's another one I have. I have a planning timer for Max Barkey, the law practice and personal. And I just like to keep track of that.

That's the kind of stuff that lets me know how much time I'm spending in OmniFocus and my other planning tools. Nice. You mentioned the email thing specifically. That is a prime opportunity for people who do want to make this a little bit simpler, though,

to do something with the automations. Because with Timer, you can automatically start a specific timer so you could set it up that if you have email on your ios device for example then when you open up the mail app whatever app that happens to be it automatically starts your email timer and then you look at that at the end of the day and you you say oh i guess i spent a few more hours in email than I realized, but you would miss that maybe if you didn't intentionally go start the timer. Yeah. We we've covered, um, uh, timery and automation on the automators podcast. I'd recommend going to check that out if you're really interested, but,

um, suffice to say, I've gone deep down that rabbit hole, you know? So like one of the things I do with timery is you can have it set a time-based automation on the iPhone. And I have every morning because my, you know, I don't want to sound gross, but I mean, my morning timer is hygiene. I have a timer called hygiene. And that's time I spend brushing my teeth, taking a shower, doing all the stuff you do to take care of your body. And that one kicks off for me every day at 6 30 a.m because that's usually when i get up and uh the timer just starts so i don't have to think about it as i get out of bed another one that i do is i run a timer every day at 11 p.m

that stops whatever the running time or timer is because occasionally i'll have one running and forget to stop it before i go to bed and then it runs into the next day and that's silly so so I actually have some automation to start and stop timers in the morning and night and then app-based timers like if you want to switch into if I open OmniFocus to like I have a shortcut that will open OmniFocus to the Mac Sparky planning page. And when it does that, it starts the Mac Sparky planning timer. Yeah, that gets into another aspect here of like, what do you actually track? It sounds like you probably track more time than I do. I specifically track my work time. I guess, you know, I have a Bookworm prep timer, which I typically will start when I am reading a book for bookworm.

But other than that, every timer I have is really related to how I spend time on my workday. When I'm done working, I'm not really tracking my time. But that, again, kind of gets back to why do you want to track your time? And then once you identify why you want to track your time, that helps clarify what specifically you want to track. And the insights that you're trying to gain from these different things will determine the timers that you use. Like you mentioned, you don't actually have a prep or a post-production timer for the individual podcasts that you do. I actually do because there's one in particular, the Intentional Family Podcast that I do with my wife that, I mean, she creates the outlines. We record them

together, but I'm responsible for getting it out the door. I'm the one who knows how to do all that stuff. And kind of in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, you know, maybe I should delegate this to somebody else. Nah, it's not that big a deal. It doesn't take me that much time. I'll just do it. And then not too long ago, I started asking myself, well, how much time do I actually spend on the post-production, the editing and getting this out the door, publishing it to the Squarespace site, you know? And it was more time than I thought. So it's helped me come to that conclusion that, yeah, this is probably something I should look to simplify. Yeah, I actually track bell to bell. I mean, from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed, I've got a timer running.

And the reason I do that, and like, for instance, I've got one called family time. And any time I'm spending time with my family, whether we're eating dinner together or watching TV together, or maybe hypothetically one day going back to Disneyland together, I'm tracking that time. And I want to see that in comparison to where I'm spending my other time, because I want to quantify, you know, am I, am I spending my life on the things that I really want to, you know, spend my life on. Because I'm tracking it, if I see that I spent, you know, 90% of my time working and 10% of my time with my family, then I know I need to make changes. Exactly. And you want to realize that before you get to the end and you say, oh, I wish I would have, right? So you check in periodically. I don't know how often you do your reviews. I tend to

review my data every week. But again, that's because I've got this dashboard set up. I'm not going in and looking at all of the details, but I'm looking at how much time I spent working and then the different modes because I have my different modes set up as tags, things like writing or webinar prep, or I've got one for firefighting, one for meetings, one for podcast recording, stuff like that. I want to make sure that I'm roughly spending the right amount of time in the different modes. And if I see one that is really high, like if firefighting is more than a couple of hours in a week, then I'm going to dig deeper and I'm going to ask myself, well, why was that number so high? What happened? What know, what system broke and what changes can I make

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help them get rolling with Squarespace you'll be glad that you did. Head to squarespace.com slash focused for a free trial with no credit card required and when you're ready to launch use the offer code focused f-o-c-u-s-e-d to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash F-O-C-U-S-E-D. And when you decide to sign up, use the offer code focused to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for the focus podcast. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. All right, so how does this affect the intentionality aspect of time tracking? David, I mean, we kind of talked at the beginning about how that's the big thing for both of us. What sort of impact is this having on your intentional focus day to day?

of impact is this having on your intentional focus day to day? Yeah, one of the things about time tracking, I think this is kind of a unique take for me, is I find ultimately, and while I do some automation, I really find the process of throwing the lever has an impact on my ability to remain focused. And so just bear with me for a minute. Like if you set up one of these systems and you're reasonable with the number of timers you have and you can build the habit of mode switching with a timer, that means every time you switch from one thing to the next, like you're working on client work

and then your daughter comes home with a pizza and says, dad, let's have a pizza together. So you open up Timery and you click family time and now no longer have you clicked client time. And in my head, it's like a switch is thrown that says, okay, Sparky, now you are in family time and you are going to enjoy eating a pizza with your daughter and not thinking about your client. And everybody listening is probably rolling their eyes right now. But honestly, this helps me because there's something about my psychology that makes it hard to mode switch, you know, especially if I'm really focused on something and then I try to go to something else and stopping and setting a timer is like, uh, it's like a switch in my brain follows

that. And I've been doing it so long that it's really become habit for me. And it really, the grooves are worn into my synapses where when I throw the switch, it helps. And independent of any value I get from the data of time tracking, the practice of time tracking I find has inherent value. Well, I know that there are a large number of people who, yes, probably are rolling their eyes, but I'm not one of them. I totally get it. I think I'm wired the same way. For me, the act of starting a new timer is the thing that kind of points me in the right direction and even gets me moving. Once you create some movement in a specific direction, it's a lot easier to maintain that. A lot of times for me, you can't steer a parked car. I feel like starting the timer is me slipping things into drive. And I've noticed myself that my brain does kind of click in,

just like you were describing, when I focus it on the task in front of me, and I go through that ritual of starting the timer. I don't know why it is that way, but I feel like this significantly reduces the switching costs that happen when you go from one task to another. I believe it's called a tension residue, you know, where your brain is just continuing to hold on to that previous task, especially if you weren't able to fully complete it. If there's anything left, any sort of open loop there, my brain will not want to let that go. But the moment that I hit the timer, it's like a Pavlovian dog response. It makes things so much easier. And that really is the key, I think, to sticking to my time block plan, which we're going to talk about in a little bit.

time block plan, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, you know, that this is the thing that really is like the icing on the cake for me. It's incomplete without this piece, because this just kind of automatically gets me moving in the right direction. Yeah, I agree. I mean, so much so that recently, you and I were talking to some friends about time tracking in our mastermind group. And a bunch of people in the group made the argument that this is just not worth your time. And I thought, well, let me see if it is. And I took a day off, actually two days off time tracking. And I felt adrift. It was like I would switch to different projects, but I was having attention

residue problems. And it's just such a stupid little brain hack, but the process of setting the timer for me after doing it this long has really set into the perfect mode shift. Going back to the pizza with my daughter example, when we finished the pizza and I got to go back to work, it's very easy for me to just linger on having spent some great time with my daughter and not work but it's the exact same thing in reverse i throw the the client timer switch and suddenly my brain is okay to set that aside and move back to to work mode and this is to me the most valuable part of manual time tracking. You know, where I say the most valuable part of automatic time tracking is keeping myself honest with,

you know, dog harness shopping. The most valuable part of manual time tracking isn't necessarily the data, which is useful, but it's the benefit I get from the mode shift and it's just something you're gonna have to try to see if it works for you or not but having a simple way to to go and throw that switch really helps and i even you know i like to keep myself honest i i even keep the um the toggle app they have a mac app open on my mac so I can see which timer is running. And occasionally my eye drifts to it to see if I'm actually working on the thing I'm supposed to be working. So it really is an unexpected benefit for me. The mode switching, I think this is easy to overlook, but it's extremely important. And I would make the argument that if you work from home

even occasionally, this is absolutely something that you should try. Because when you don't work at home, there are other things that you can use to mode switch, like your location. You get to the office and you're in work mode. But for me, it's hard when my office is in my house and my kids are right outside my office door. And the moment that I open that door, you know, maybe I've got to go upstairs to use the restroom. But as soon as I open that door, hey, dad, let's play ping pong. Hey, dad, let's go shoot hoops. Right. And I can't do that all the time. I do need to make sure that the work gets done, but I do want to cherish those opportunities as well. I want to take advantage of those while they are still here at home and they want to spend time with me. Like if I'm going to have

to take a break at some point in the day, anyways, I may as well spend it with my kids and go shoot hoops while they're here. Yeah, I totally agree. Another benefit of time tracking with the Timery slash toggle method that we've been talking about. If you go back, we did a show maybe over a year ago now called moving the needle. And it was where I talked about the practice of, you know, this is actually a sub genre of time tracking, I guess you'd say, uh, I wanted to keep track of how much time I was spending on the work that actually moves the needle. And at the time I defined that as actual production of a field guide, you know, actual production of a podcast or actual work for a client that I get paid for. Yeah. You know,

there are things I do that, that really move the needle. They're the things that, you know, get me paid or, you know, really make a difference on, on my priorities versus the things that don't, you know, like goofing off an email and spending time on admin and things that don't move the needle. And so at the time, I think I was paper journaling. And at the end of the day, I would just write down. I'd look back over how I spent my day, and I'd put down an estimate. Well, I spent two hours moving the needle on field guides

and an hour and a half moving the needle on the law practice, and I would track that time. Since we recorded that show, what I've done is I've taken the saved time entries in toggle slash timery, and I've attached a flag because you have the ability to attach flags and toggle. I only have one flag. It's called move the needle. And like the client work toggle timer has the flag attached. The focused toggle timer has that flag attached. And as a result, when I get the reports out of Timery or Toggle,

actually, I find the reporting, as much as we bash on the Toggle app, the Toggle website does excellent reporting in graphs. So I actually do the reporting on their website. But I can run the filter of the move the needle tag. So I can see how much time, you know, how am I spending my time overall, but I can also see a fairly accurate reporting of how much time I spent moving the needle in the day, the week or the month. And that is again, quite useful data for me. And it allows me to quantify moving the needle in an easier way than I was historically doing it. Have you considered combining tags at all? I mean, I love the fact that you have like that as your singular tag, because that's obviously the most important one. And I love

the example that you shared of being able to slice your data by that tag and say, I have this much time associated with moving the needle. I think that the different tags and projects, there's different ways that you can slice this. And it is worth thinking about how you set this up because you do kind of have limited options with this. And also you don't want to just dump everything in there because then you've got a thousand tags and probably some

duplicate modes between those tags. I've fallen into that trap before. So kind of how do you determine what is tag worthy? Well, I mean, for me, moving the needle is a real easy definition. And if you apply the tag in the Timery app, it sticks to the save timer. So I never have to think about it again. I think I could make the argument that moving the needle is more than just the stuff that actually gets bills paid. Like I feel like I'm working out meditation. There's some things I do that also, in my opinion, move the needle. And I'm really kind of evolving that. We'll talk about it sometime on the show. I think that might be another show someday, but I'm really reconsidering what is

moving the needle for me because I think the, the initial definition I use, which is stuff that basically gets me paid, um, is probably too narrow, but I haven't really worked that out yet. Maybe that's a nice discussion for the forums, but I am, but at least for that part of it now, I'm very easily tagging that. And, and maybe that would be a second tag for me, like stuff that moves the needle that doesn't get me paid. I'm not sure. I have to think that through, but as it is, I mean, just this one little digression is

great because in the reporting, I say, show me the moving the needle time. It'll show me, you know, field guide production. It'll show me podcasts. It'll show me legal work. So I already have that stuff broken down because of the saved timer that it's attached to. Yep. Yeah, exactly. And that's the genius part about it and and i guess maybe is a mistake that people could fall into at the the beginning is

just trying to create too much in terms of timers and tags because every option that you give yourself kind of works against you with the intentionality aspect of this because you now have to make more decisions before you start your your timer So be careful with that. Now, the other point I want to make here is at this point in the podcast, you're thinking that Mike and Dave have lost it and they're wasting a ton of time on all this. No, I'm serious.

I mean, if you haven't tried it, that would be what I would think. Sure. But having done this, the time investment in time tracking is trivial. I mean, with the timing app running, your time investment is the time it takes to install the app and the time you spend looking at the data. And also there's some configuration stuff, but that is almost a non-factor. So if you just go with the timing route there's almost no investment of time

and with the timery slash toggle timers you will spend a couple hours kind of figuring it out and setting it up at the beginning but the amount of time you spend with the timing app is is pretty trivial i mean they've got the app built for iphone and iPad. They're working on a Mac version, and you literally tap a box. I used the pizza example because that actually happened to me yesterday. And I took my phone out of my pocket. I opened the app, or if you're Mike, you just go to your home screen. You press one button, and now the timer has been set. So the hard part is not doing it.

It doesn't take that much time. I think the hard part is developing the habit muscle of remembering to do it as you mode shift. But it's a virtuous cycle. As you do it more, it becomes easier, and then you get that extra benefit of actually a mode shift trigger in your brain. So I would argue that this is something that anybody could really incorporate without a ton of effort. Yeah, there's definitely more resistance to it at the beginning than there is actual effort once you get things set up.

It can take a little bit of time maybe to set things up. set up. It can take a little bit of time maybe to set things up. I think that's the big thing with not only timer because you have to create your your saved timers. So you do have to think a little bit about what you want to track and why you're tracking your time in the first place. But with with timing, you know, that is kind of set it and forget it after, you know, a week, you can go in there, you can look at your time and anything that's not assigned to a specific project, you can create rules for. You just hold down the option key and you drag the time that you spent in this application or this specific website into the appropriate project. And now you've got a rule going forward so you don't have to do it again. It just automatically

gets classified in the right place. So all of the effort basically for this, I agree with you, happens before you actually start the practice. And then as you go through the practice, the other thing I would tell people is if you occasionally forget to start or stop a timer, don't really worry about it. Yeah, you want your data to be as accurate as it can be. That's why I've got timing running in the background. So I've got a backup if I absolutely need it. But I'm not really trying to get the exact numbers. Really what I'm trying to get from looking at the data is the big picture so that I can make necessary adjustments. And as I'm looking at my data, it's not that like I get a huge inspiration every single week when I look at that. But every once in a while I do. And then when I

make those adjustments, that actually has a compound effect because it doesn't just change it for that one time. It changes it for every time going forward. You're not looking for second or even minute accuracy. I think you're probably looking for hour accuracy. Another example, if my daughter comes in and says, let's have a pizza together. And then I'm 10 minutes into eating pizza and I realized the timer, I didn't switch the timer. I can pull out my pocket. I'll just throw it then. I don't care. You know, at the end of the week and the end of the month, as I look at this data, 10 minutes here or there is not, is not the important thing to me. It's the hours that I'm looking at. is not the important thing to me. It's the hours that I'm looking at. How do you use the data, Mike? I mean, what do you do with it after you've collected it?

I don't keep like a large historical archive of the stuff. That's kind of what I've got timing for because I can go back years and I can see things. But with Timery, you mentioned that it actually can sit on top of the free version of Toggle. So the free version of Toggle is not going to let you go back beyond a certain time period. I don't know how often it is, but basically what I'm doing is I'm looking at the data for the week, usually on the weekend, noting any insights that I get from it, and then making adjustments from there.

After that, I'm basically done with it. I'm not going back to it. I don't have like a list of, these are my target times that I want to hit. I do have like a couple of basic questions, you know, like the, we've talked about my key questions asked, but just about everything, you know,

what should I start doing, stop doing, keep doing? That kind of applies when I look at these numbers too, because I'm really looking for the story that the numbers are telling me. And I know that if my writing timer is not the highest one on the list, then I'm not setting aside enough time for writing. If there's anything that my time is going to that is going beyond that, with the exception of a webinar when we've got a product launch or something like that, occasionally that will be the case. But anything else is going to be out of the ordinary. And I'm just going to ask myself, what do I want to do next time to remedy that? And then I'm just not going to worry about it anymore. I do it largely the same. I do a weekly, monthly, and quarterly review. And I'm going to look at the timing and timery data to see for things that stand out to me. I'm always looking to see how much time I'm spending on my most important projects. I want to see how much time I spent moving the needle and I want to find any kind of outlier, you know, like maybe I'll find like,

like recently the big one that has been popping up is too much time on legal admin. And that's, that's resulting in some changes. You know, I've got an assistant that's getting more of that work now, so I can get that number down and I will occasionally, not every week or every month, but I will take a screenshot of the report in, in toggle and just put it in my, my quarterly, monthly, weekly review, since I, I do those largely digitally. So I can just save a screenshot to see how I was doing. And it gives me kind of a time slot, but I don't find, I go back and look at those much later. how I was doing. And it gives me kind of a time slot.

But I don't find I go back and look at those much later, so I'm not sure if that's even worth the trouble. But I do kind of report to myself about moving the needle and just an overall view. Am I spending enough time in family time? Am I, you know, just, you know, all of us have unique situations and we're all trying to figure out things. And we all know that we have certain areas of our life we want to spend more or less

time in. And this just gives you a tool to keep yourself honest. This episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by express VPN, high speed, secure and anonymous VPN services. high speed secure and anonymous vpn services go to expressvpn.com focused to get an extra three months for free a few decades ago it was easy to be a private person what's changed well the internet think about everything you've browsed searched for watched or tweeted the sad truth is that data can be crawled through collected collected, and aggregated by third parties. Having your private life exposed for others to see was once something only celebrities worried about. But in an era where everyone is online, everyone can be a public figure. To keep our data private when we go online, we can turn to ExpressVPN. There are hundreds of data brokers out there, and their sole business is to buy and sell

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We thank ExpressVPN for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. One of the biggest benefits that I've found from time tracking, though, is that it helps me make better plans when I time block my day. That's the other bookend to this. And so we should probably check in with where we're at with time blocking, how we're doing it, what tools we're using, things like that. things like that yeah it's evolved for me because for a long time i was doing time blocking all of this analog you know i just had my um my planner that every day i would write it down and and i've moved frankly to digital tools for some of this stuff for a number of reasons the the first was really the apple watch and and the widgets on the iphone and just the fact that

now if you put this stuff into a digital system you can have it on you a lot more ways than having to go find your paper notebook and look at it so um for a while now i've been doing all my time blocking with fantastical and then i can look at my watch or my phone or whatever and see all my blocks for the rest of the day. And that's been working for me, but I feel like I'm kind of at a crossroads right now. Like I've been trying, there's a, there's another third party app called sorted, which is really a time blockers app. You know what I mean? You can put in blocks of things you want to do and how long they take. You don't even have to attach times to them. So it allows you to move them around easily. It can automatically schedule

them for you. If you want to do that, it's a really great app for people who want to time block it. It combines task management and time blocking into one app. So I would give it a two thumbs up, but I've been thinking, well, do I use something like that? Do I go back to my paper? There's something, there's something off about my time tracking right now. I'm not sure what it is. I'm sorry, not time tracking, but time blocking. And I'm not fully happy with the way I'm blocking. And it's fine, and I'm using it, but I think there's something missing. Sure. Well, I will echo the recommendation for Sorted. It is a solid app. And I feel like if Cal Newport, because he wrote the, he's the one I picked up time blocking from, he had a post back in the day about it. And then he since wrote his time block planner, which kind of teaches the method and then gives you a paper-based version for doing it his way. But I feel like if he were to make an application, it would be sorted. Because Cal talks about how, and in the notebook, it's kind of this wide page,

so you can write your time block plan on the left. And then the minute that something gets messed up from that point forward on the right, you re-time block the rest of your day. With sorted, you know, something happens, you can just go from that point down and just drag everything and drop it, you know, a couple of hours so that you can deal with the thing you need to do. And then everything else gets moved at once. It's, it's pretty genius. And that's really the thing about time blocking that people need to understand, I think. And maybe some of the friction that people have towards it is, well, I can create this plan and it's never going to go exactly like I planned it. And that's missing the point. Dwight Eisenhower, the Eisenhower Matrix guy, he also said that plans are worthless, but planning is everything. on my fancy notebook, which is right here on my desk. I do this still every single day, paper,

pen. I never really got it. But the moment that I started doing this, like that clicked for me because the value is not in, can I stick to this a hundred percent? The value is in now I have given every hour a job going back to that concept of like time budgeting, time blocking is creating the budget. Time tracking is making sure that you don't go past your limits, right? So I can use that when I create this plan. I can say, well, my plan yesterday was garbage, and this is what actually happened, so I should temper my expectations maybe a little bit for the next day. And I give every hour a job. And that means that at any point in my day, I am never stuck wondering what is the best thing to do right now. And if that is the only benefit that I got from time blocking, it is still worthwhile every single day to do this. Yeah, agreed. And it just gives you that reality pill about what

you can and cannot do. Like, if I want to spend three hours a day working on a field guide, I have to turn away some legal work because there's not enough time to do everything, you know, and I have to make big boy decisions about that. You know, can I afford to, you know, give the bird in the hand away for maybe a bird in the future? You know, it's just, and, and that being real about that is way better than deluding yourself about that. Yes. Because then you actually are not steering the ship anymore. And, and time blocking gives you that power.

And, you know, the, the thing that I keep resonating on is this simple concept, you know, tasks are infinite and time is finite. Yeah. And it's very easy to have an infinite list of tasks. But where the rubber meets the road is when you look at the number of hours you have in a day. Right. And the thing that I think a lot of people don't like about time blocking, especially if you use it just for work, I actually take the opposite approach, I guess, with how I time block my day versus the time that I track in the timers. I'm not tracking everything that I do, but I am planning everything that I'm going to do from the moment that I get up to the moment that I go to bed. Now, part of the thing that makes this work is that all of my time blocks are at least an hour. They can be more than that. So they can be an hour and a half, for example, or two and a

half hours, but they can never be less than an hour. And that kind of builds in some margin as I go throughout my day. But then I also time block for the things that I want to do, the fun things. My wife and I have a date night. We try to do it every single week. That is on my time block for today, 5 p.m. till 8 p.m. is our date night. We've had to get creative with these a little bit with the COVID stuff, but I time block that, and now I have the space for that to happen, which means that it will actually happen as opposed to, oh yeah, we really should go on a date and spend some time together because we say that our relationship with each other is the most important one, but how we spend our time, that's the real reflection of our values. Our time can tell a different story of what's important to us than what we would tell. And so I use that time track data and I make the adjustments. I put that stuff on the plan and I have found that since I started time tracking, my plans are much, much better.

I'm having to make less adjustments as I go. Things aren't getting blown up quite as often. Another thing that helps with that probably is the fact that I limit the number of tasks that I try to get done in a day to five things. I've got my five checkboxes to the right of my time block plan on the page in my fancy notebook, and I never let myself go over that. And I know every time I describe this, people are like, oh, well, aren't you fancy, Mike? It must be nice not to have more than five things that you try to do in a day. Sometimes I do do more than five things in a day, but those are the five things that I'm going to plan on

doing. So if I have extra margin, if I get done early, I can absolutely go find something else to do. Usually it's work-related. I'll get a jump on tomorrow, but I am not going to commit to more than that because it's more important for me that I'm able to follow through on those every single day. That is like a forced constraint that makes what I am trying to get done feel more realistic. Yeah. And it's a virtuous cycle because as you hit those five things routinely, you start to have faith in yourself and your system. Whereas if you put a hundred things down on that list every day, you feel a little more defeated. Exactly. Yep. When do you do your blocking? I mean, do you in the morning and the evening, you know,

what time do you block your day? The goal is to get it done at the end of my work day. So I actually use do on my iPhone because of the nagging reminders. Yeah. And that is the one recurring reminder I have in there is to time block tomorrow at 5 p.m. every day. And sometimes, you know, I'll have forgotten to do it before I step away from my office and so I'll kick that out a couple of hours and it'll bug me to do it the night before occasionally but this is pretty rare I will kick it until the morning of but that happens maybe once every couple weeks most of the time it's happening either before I leave my office when I'm done with work,

which is usually about 5 p.m., or I'm doing it at night before I go to bed so that it's ready for me the next morning. A couple variations on your system that I use is I will make blocks smaller than an hour, but usually those are because they're containment blocks. Like email gets a half hour block and that's, I stopped after a half hour. So I try to spend in the half hour,

I can always get the most urgent and important email and the rest of it. I get as much as I can, but 30 minutes is up and I need to stop. And I do that twice a day. I also, like you, am a big fan of planning the night before. There's just something about going to bed and having your blocks lined up for the next day. But like I said, I'm not entirely happy with what I'm doing right now. And I've been experimenting with sorted. I'm thinking, well, do I need to go back to just paper and pen for this? One of the advantages of the paper and pen system is that you can do the kind of Cal Newport trick where you draw a line down the center and you have the plan versus how the day went. With digital calendar systems, that's really not that easy. I guess you could make separate

calendars and you could do something kind of fancy. What I do often is I'll take a screenshot. So I do a lot of my planning on Sunday for the week because on Sunday I've got it, you know, I know how much time I want to spend on field guides and that's largely a.m. time. I try not to make a lot of engagements in the morning. And so I plan out the mornings for the week and then I'll have holes in the schedule

for legal stuff that'll come up and legal stuff that's planned. So I do a lot of the block scheduling on Sunday for the entire week. But then every night I do a check in on it for the next day and make adjustments. And I'm really torn because I like the advantages of paper, but I also like the advantages of digital. And I don't think it makes a lot of sense to do both. And I'm not really sure where I stand on it right now. Yeah, my workflow probably has a little bit of room for improvement too, because I actually don't plan the week. I just plan the day before. I do look at the commitments that are upcoming. I've got my fancy focused wall calendar right behind me in my office

here, which has all of like the published dates for all the podcasts, things like that, important dates, webinar dates. If I'm going to be out of town, that would typically go on there, that sort of thing. But I don't actually plan what's going to get done on what day for the week going forward. I also, I guess, you know, just haven't found a great way to do that. And things change rapidly in my world. So I feel like time blocking for the day gives me the intention that I need to follow through on the plan. But looking out further than that in terms of actually creating a plan doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. Yeah. See, the advantage for me with the week is clients, if I leave a lot of space, like if I don't plan out the work I'm doing the field guide for the week, and on Tuesday,

I get a lot of calls from clients. It's very easy to fill that time throughout the week and then it's very easy to fill that time throughout the week and then push out some of the work that's most important to me. So I really look at the week plan as getting those big rocks on the board before something else takes their place. Sure. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. But I do client work and you don't. So I think that probably gives you a little more freedom there. That is true, which is also the thing to reiterate here is that this is going to be different for every single person. You can take kind of the principles behind it, but then you really have to make it your own in order for it to stick.

I don't have a lot of appointments and meetings that I'm trying to juggle. have a lot of appointments and meetings that I'm trying to juggle. And so my time block plan is going to look very different than yours will, David. But that doesn't mean my way is right or your way is right. You know, there's, you got to kind of figure out what works for you. But the thing that you're looking for, in my opinion, is that ability to just enter in and focus on the work that you are trying to do as quickly as possible. And I would encourage everybody, regardless of your work situation, to consider both of these, time tracking and time blocking as bookends for helping you to do that, especially if you haven't tried it before. Absolutely. It's transformational. I mean, I don't know how else to put it.

I've heard from listeners, I've heard from friends that like pick this up from my hyper-scheduling posts and everybody that tries it swears by it. You know, I think the time blocking even more than the time tracking, but I agree with Mike.

I think they work together splendidly. We'll put a link to your hyper-scheduling post in the show notes for people who want to revisit that. That's a great primer for this. I've also, as we're recording this, I've developed a time blocking course for this. We'd set up a while back. We're launching a time tracking course as well. And actually those are being combined into like a simplified time management product. You can get just the time tracking piece if that's the only one you're interested in or you've already got the time blocking piece.

But there's usually like a launch week discount associated with this. So if you're interested in that sort of thing, there's a course which covers both of these over at the Suite Setup, which we'll put the link in the show notes too as well. And if you're not doing this, I can't encourage you enough

to just give it a try for a month. You know, see how it goes. I mean, a month goes by pretty fast. You may be surprised how much more productive you can be. Well, that about wraps it up for time tracking and blocking. Before we leave, I want to point your attention to another show on RelayFM

you may be interested in called Roboism. Roboism is a show by Alex Cox and Kathy Campbell exploring how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital assistants are affecting our culture. It's very funny, but it's also very informative. Explore the humanity behind the bots that are quickly becoming a part of our everyday life at relay.fm slash roboism or search roboism wherever you get your podcasts. We are the Focus podcast. You can find us at relay.fm slash focus. We've also got a little forum there on the Mac Power Users forum. It's just a little room that's got some really smart listeners talking about ways to remain focused. You can find that at talk.macpowerusers.com. Thanks again to our sponsors, Spokes, Squarespace, and ExpressVPN, and we'll see you next time.