Focused - 125: Professional Nerd, with Rosemary Orchard

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

Rosemary Orchard joins us to talk about juggling projects, automation, kanban boards, and keeping the jobby job.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? I am doing great. I am very excited to have the wonderfully talented Rosemary Orchard on the show today. Welcome, Rosemary. Hey. Hey, Mike. Hey, David. Thanks for having me.

I feel like I know both of you quite well. That's true. As we were talking about before we hit record, this is kind of the collision of all of the worlds. The productivity, the tech nerdery, the automation, all that good stuff. And so we're going to talk about that today. I mean, there's this whole side of Rose's life that I don't get to pick into. She makes the Nested Folders podcast, and I know she's super into productivity. But at the same time, she's a fiddly, nerdy programmer. And I want to talk about that

collision today, Rose. I want to get into that with you. Is that okay? Yeah, yeah, let's do it. Let's throw caution to the wind and have fun. But before we even get into that, you have recently done something in your life that I think is interesting to people trying to stay focused. And even some of our legacy listeners from the old days of free agents is that you have, or in the process, are resigning your position that you've had for many years as your jobby job, as we like to call it. And then you were faced with a decision, right? Do you go get another job or do you just become an indie and do Rosemary Orchard stuff all over the internet? Yeah. What happened?

Well, so for the last year, I've been decreasing my hours of my day job. I was very fortunate to be able to do this. decreasing my hours of my day job. I was very fortunate to be able to do this. Um, and, uh, you know, experimenting more and more with, you know, being, being indie, uh, and doing all of these things, you know, by myself and independently. Um, and on the one hand, I really, really enjoyed it. On the other hand, I realized that there can be a lot of stress involved with this. Either you have, you know, one big client client and they they provide most of your income um and that and you know you do most of your things with them and then odd little bits here and there with other people um or you have lots of different clients so you've got your ex

and lots of different baskets but you then have to chase all of your clients and it's kind of like herding cats um and i realized that i love recording podcasts. I love recording screencasts. I love writing articles. I love doing all of these things, but I don't want to be doing that 40 hours a week. I want to have another jobby job, which provides most of my income, which is nice and stable and secure. And, you know, you go in, you do your thing, you leave and it's over. And then in the evenings, I can have fun and really have podcasting and so on be a fun thing for me, which conveniently also earns money. But it's something that I very much enjoy, which makes me feel considerably less stressed about saying no, because no is one of those things that you really do have to say, but it's really scary to say it.

And I realized I was saying yes to a lot of things I should have been saying no to. And that was not making me happy. And I realized the best way to deal with that problem was to have a full-time jobby job again. And then I can say no to as many things as I like because I'm stable. There's a lot to unpack there. No, really, I get it though. I mean, like the first bit of that is the whole idea of, you know, having a hobby and then getting paid for it.

And like I had an experience when I was a younger man. I used to, I love making furniture and I have a wood shop. And if you come to my house, most of the furniture in my house, I've built myself. And I love the process of, you know, coming up with the design and slowly making something beautiful. And then somebody hired me to make their entertainment center. And this was like 20 years ago. And very quickly, I realized that as much as I love making furniture, doing it for pay, I hated it. You know what I mean?

Because they wanted me to do things that I didn't like. They wanted me to cut corners I wasn't really happy about. It was just the process of doing it for money really didn't work for me. Whereas I fell into making money, making podcasts. I mean, all the podcasts I started, we didn't have sponsors when we started, we just made it because we wanted to make the show. And fortunately got enough audience that we could, could get some money for it. And that's different for me, but I get that when you find something and you're like, oh, I'm not sure this is what I want as my main thing.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing, you know, I was there and I was very fortunate, David, when we started Automator is that straight away we had sponsors. And that was not something I was expecting. I was incredibly grateful for it. But, you know, it does add a little bit of extra pressure, but that's pressure I'm fine with. And Nesta folders, I started that with Scotty Jackson, that's pressure I'm fine with. And nested folders, I started that with Scotty Jackson, and that was just a, we want to do this thing, so we're going to do it. And now it turns out it does make money and, you know, it's enough to, you know, buy us coffees and stuff like that. It's not, you know, it's not suddenly turning into a Microsoft level of income or Google or Apple. But, you know, it's covering all of its costs and a bit more, which is lovely. And, you know, it's covering all of its costs and a bit more, which

is lovely. And, you know, I joined iOS Today with Micah Sargent because I really wanted to produce that podcast and I love producing it. I'm working on it. I shouldn't say producers, actual producers at Twit that do all of that hard work. I show up and make mistakes and somebody makes me sound intelligent, which I'm grateful for. But, you know, it's one of those things where I've realized, you know, there's a level of stress that I'm okay with and there's a level of stress I'm not okay with. And if I'm enjoying doing the work, then, you know, stress is mitigated. But if I'm not really enjoying doing the work or I don't enjoy doing it as much, then that stress, you know, it unbalances that seesaw. And suddenly it really

weighs you down and you start sliding down and that's not a good thing. And therefore, you know, I've made a decision that where the stress outweighs the enjoyment, I should not be doing those things. And therefore, you know, I'm scaling those things back or just saying straight up no to things. And, you know, it's very scary to be doing, but at the same time, it's worth doing, at least for me. A couple of things come to mind with what you just said there. You mentioned saying no, and also it kind of sounds like you have experienced some of the pain that happens when you go past your limit. But you still are

involved in a lot of things, plus have a full-time job. So I'm curious how you decide, this is what I can handle. And I'm going to say yes to these things and no to others, because from the outside in, it looks like you are not short for awesome opportunities. Because from the outside in, it looks like you are not short for awesome opportunities for people who say, hey, come do this thing with us. And it could be very easy to just take your side stuff and turn that into a full-time job, which is kind of the dream, I think, for a lot of people is they are trying to figure out how to make things work before they get to the end of that runway. You've kind of said, no, I'm going to keep the jobby job because I want to keep these things as the side things. And then maybe another point here is if you're willing to share, since it sounds like you've been there, what's your biggest advice to somebody who has overextended themselves. What would you say to someone who is in that position where they feel overwhelmed because they've overexerted themselves and they're not

quite sure how to get out of a hole that they've dug? Well, as somebody who was very recently in that position, I'm going to start with that because I definitely have overextended myself multiple times over the years. And that's, you know, resulted in loss of sleep because I've been staying up late doing things and just, you know, lack of enjoyment in a lot of stuff. And it's very difficult because realistically, if you've overextended yourself and you're overwhelmed, you're going to have to go back on some of your yeses. And that is an absolutely terrifying thing to do. That is like the kind of call or email that I hate making and writing because it's letting somebody down and disappointing somebody. But my

advice, if you're in that situation is you've got to remember if you're disappointing somebody else, they can find somebody to replace you. If you let yourself down by overextending yourself constantly, you're in for a world of hurt because burnout is not going to be fun. And I've seen it coming. I fortunately managed to avoid it so far. At least I hope so. But I've been very close multiple times and it's not good. You get to a point where you just start not caring and then you just don't do any of the things, including the things that you enjoy and everything, you know, starts piling up even more and more than it was because you've overextended yourself. So in that situation, you have to look at, you know, what have you got on your plate? You know, I've got a lot of things. And so I have to have a good system to keep track of all of those things,

because if I don't have a good system to keep track of all those things, I'm not going to get everything done. And I'm not going to be aware of my deadlines when I'm talking to somebody else who's saying, oh, can you produce this by next Thursday? And I'm going, yeah, sure, that's fine. I have three podcast recordings between now and next Thursday. When am I going to do that? You know, I'd like some free time as well. So you have to have a look at things and just try and decide. And there is no easy way to pick that. You know, I've often tried to pick the things where people have got longer to find a replacement or something like that. But at the end of the day, you know, you kind of have to use your gut and say, which of these is going to be the worst for me to do?

Be that stress-wise, enjoyment-wise, pay-wise, whatever that is. You have to pick something and reverse your yes. And it's not fun. But if you're overextended, then you're going to have to do it. I do think that that painful process of turning something down that you already agreed to is, I mean, the pain actually serves a function. And once you go through it, then the next time you're tempted to say yes, that memory sticks and you're like, am I really going to say yes?

Or, you know, I don't want to be in the position again to tell somebody no after i said yes so that makes it easier to say no up front yeah yeah it definitely does um and say saying no to things you know i'm i am i'm aware in a privileged position where people have been coming to me with things and saying can you do this for us you know what kind of rate can you produce this at you know if we want you know this every two weeks or can you do it every this for us? You know, what kind of rate can you produce this at? You know, if we want, you know, this every two weeks, or can you do it every week for us and things like that. And, you know, saying no to things is indeed scary. But at the same time, you know, I'm, because I've decided to have a full-time job as well, I can look at it from the position of, what am I going to enjoy doing? And that, you know, that is something which I think even if you are, you know, doing this as 100% independent person,

freelancing all the time, you do need to enjoy your job. You know, if you're doing it eight hours a day, that's a third of your life. Okay, you spend a third of your life sleeping, third of your life working and a third of your life having fun. Well, wouldn't it be better to spend two thirds of your life having fun? Um, and conveniently that also earns money. Now, sometimes you can't do that. And I'm completely aware. Sometimes there are things that you just got to do the long, hard slog of whatever it is, uh, to pay the bills. But if you can pick some of the, you know, available offers that are more interesting and more exciting, then that can be, you know, helpful in that respect, at least for me. you find yourself not enjoying the things that you used to enjoy. Because I think that burnout is one of those things that's kind of insidious because you don't see it coming until it's too late. And at that point, you feel like you were describing where you just dread getting up in the

morning because you don't want to do any of the things that you have to do, even if, you know, a couple of weeks ago, you loved doing these things. So maybe that loss of joy, that's like the first sign that you're a little bit overextended and you need a little bit more margin. Yeah, yeah. And that is definitely something that, you know, people have to be aware of, because that's another mistake I made before I started reducing my hours and my day job. I was working 40 hours a week and I was doing a lot of freelancing as well. You know, full-time jobs worth of freelancing. I had zero margin. When I got sick, nothing happened. Only it was the day job and I still felt compelled to do the freelancing and things like that.

And I didn't have any balance. And so I reduced my hours and my day job. Again, I was very fortunate to be able to do that. And I realized that I was still filling the exact same number of hours per week with work. And that was the point where I realized, you know, this is a problem. You know, I'm still working in total the same number of hours, but I'm feeling more stress. And, you know know, things are, are not necessarily working out in the way I had originally hoped that they would. Um, and that's, you know, where I decided to, to take a step back and do, uh, you know, a weekend personal retreat. There's a pandemic, so I couldn't go anywhere, but, uh, I, I flipped my living room around for a weekend and did

everything in there. Um, and, uh, rearranging And rearranging my furniture helped. But I was able to sit down and look at things and evaluate it and go, ooh, yeah, okay, well, I'm seeing some of the problem here. And, you know, you can't see everything at once. There is no, not necessarily, at least it wasn't for me, a light bulb moment where everything was just suddenly perfectly clear. But starting that and then thinking about it over the next couple of weeks really helped me realize what was going on and where some of my problems were at the very least. Yeah, I do think because I know you had an illness for a little while. And I do think that is a great wake-up call for a lot of people. It's like you realize.

I mean, the analogy I always use is when you're a kid and you would run downhill. I remember it vividly. I was just a dumb kid. I would run down any hill, you know, and sometimes I would get to the bottom and sometimes I would just run so fast that I would just fall on my face, you know, because you lose control. I feel like that is kind of similar to what happens when you take on too much work. And it definitely is. It just takes one little thing to send you, you know, flying and, and it could be, it could be anything and you just never know when that's going to happen. But what you do know is that is going to happen and you don't have enough enough margin to to deal with it yeah yeah that is

definitely it so i spent a couple of weeks basically binge watching tv shows um because i i was ill and i was stuck on on the sofa and there was not a lot else to do because it was winter and it was cold and rainy outside uh at least over here in the uk some people probably had snow um and uh you know and I was just there going you know this is actually kind of nice to just have downtime where I can sit and watch TV when is the last time I just sat and watched more than one episode of something and I realized that that was years ago like for the last couple of years I've watched maybe like two or three episodes of things in a week if I was lucky um and I've you know I reduced the amount of time I spent gaming and things like

that and I realized you know while I'm being productive there is more to life than being productive you've got to have a bit of balance you've got to be able to enjoy things um and uh and you know that was the point where I was like, OK, yeah, this is this is something that I've realized, you know, I should be scheduling downtime. There's I think it was a straight A student by Cal Newport where he he has this daily planner and, you know, you you write you fix things on the left and you put your flexible things on the right. And he's like, you know, you put in, you know, watching this TV show or whatever, and you put that into your calendar. And that was, you know, I reread that book while I was ill, actually, because I was actually getting a bit bored with TV. Funnily enough, you know, I can't watch TV for eight hours a day and still, you know, really be concentrating and enjoy it. And so I reread this book and I looked at it and I was like, you know, I don't have time in most of my weeks to do that. I should do that. I should be able to do that. I should be, you know, giving myself time to read books and things like that. And so, you know, now I am working back towards, I'm not there yet. You know, it's a process, you know, as things are starting to change. But I'm working back towards having those blocks scheduled in. And they're flexible. They can move around.

But my personal rule is I can't delete them. If a crisis comes up, then obviously I can delete it. That's not a problem. But overall, I should be keeping these things. I can change what I do in them. I can change my hour of TV to an hour of reading, but the blocks have to stay somewhere in my day. Yeah.

You know, it's, it's funny. I just had a similar revelation. We were, we're always relearning the same lessons, but with the state of COVID right now, my whole family is vaccinated and Disneyland reopened.

So we bought a couple of tickets and we bought one for opening day. And then Daisy reminded me, she's like, you know, you said last year on May the 4th, that if it's open next year, you want to go because last year on May 4th, it was kind of sinking in that we were going to be on lockdown for a while. And I said, you know, I did say that. And part of my brain was like, well, you're taking the whole day off on April 30. Do you really want to take another whole day off four days later? And then I heard myself saying the thought, I'm like, of course you want to take another day four days later. You know, I'm just not used to doing that, but yes, of course

I do. And then we bought the tickets, we went in and had a great time. And sometimes when you do give yourself a downtime, like a true downtime, as opposed to something where you're checking email and doing work on the side, it's just such a great reset that it's just a way to remind yourself that, hey, buddy, you are doing a lot of downhill running these days. that, hey, buddy, you are doing a lot of downhill running these days. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the thing. We need to remember that this is like a Formula One race. We can have pit stops. And they don't have to be insanely fast, just enough time to grab a bite to eat and then get back out on the road.

They can be longer pit stops wherever we need them. And that is something I want to build in as well. we need them. And that is something, you know, I want to build in as well. I realized that, you know, I was getting a lot better at keeping my weekends for me and not doing freelancing or work at the weekends. And then I stopped doing that. And I think part of that is just a symptom of the pandemic where, you know, I've not been able to go places and I've not been able to meet up with friends and things like that. And I got rather fed up with online video calls with people because there's only so many hundreds of those that you can do before it's just like, not again, please. And everything was creeping back into my weekends as well. And it's like, you know, I have an entire stack of projects here.

I've got a self-watering herb garden I want to set up. I want to put these legs on this bookcase. I don't want to assemble that bookcase. I've got a dining room tableing herb garden I want to set up. I want to put these legs on this bookcase. I don't want to assemble that bookcase. I've got a dining room table in my hallway that I need to assemble, but I need to sell the old dining room table first. I've got all these things that I want to do for me as a person instead of for me as a person who works. I should have time for that and I should be doing that. So I need some margin back so that I can get my personal things done as well as my professional things. And one of the angles for me

on that is, and we've talked on this show about how I use roles as my like foundation of my kind of pyramid of my life. And I put my roles in priority order and all the personal stuff you know dad parent and friend all that goes above max barkey and lawyer and i every day i'm forced to look at that list i'm reminded that those things are not the most important thing on the list you know the the lawyer and the max barkey and i even do the same thing like if you go to my email app, my personal email shows up before the other stuff. If I go to my OmniFocus list, you know, everything, I just constantly reinforce to myself that you've got to take care of yourself first.

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apply. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. So before the break, Rose, we were talking about balancing different areas. David had mentioned a very insightful tip, which is basically keep work at the bottom. I'm curious to you, because you were also talking about how you took stock of your life and you realized that you weren't watching these shows that maybe you wanted to watch. And then you kind of jumped in and watched a whole bunch of them. We've had Chris Bailey on the show before. And he said in the first episode we had him on, he talked about how if you intend to watch Netflix all day,

that's the most productive thing you can do. So I'm curious, like with all of these different pieces coming together, what does a productive day look like for Rosemary Orchard? How do you define productivity? Well, defining productivity is an interesting question. And somebody who hosts a productivity podcast is on a productivity podcast. You'd think that I'd know how to do that. But for me, a productive day is a day where I feel like I've accomplished something. And that something is a very nebulous

concept. So one of the things I have been doing relatively recently is I bought a day per page planner. And it was really, really cheap because, you know, I bought it in like March. So I'm quite pleased that I grabbed that. But at the start of the day I just pick one personal thing, one work thing and then one other thing that I want to accomplish today. Now on days where I have my jobby job I also set a goal for within that period of time that I would like to accomplish

which I review during my working hours and I pick that. And ideally, I will check, you know, the worky thing and the fun thing off. At weekends, I have two fun things on there. And that could just be, you know, watch an episode of Scrubs, which takes 20 minutes, so it's not a huge time investment. Or it could be play a song through on Beat Saber on my Oculus Quest, which was a recent purchase. You know, it could be play a song through on Beat Saber on my Oculus Quest, which was a recent purchase. You know, it could be something that's really, really small, because I know I've got a whole bunch of things to do. But at the same time, you know, I'm trying to remember that I need that

balance in my life. And so that means I need to accomplish something from both the fun side and the professional side. Because if I don't have fun, then it could be a productive day, but I'm not going to be feeling great at the end of it. And so I need to put something fun on there. And so something that takes three minutes or 20 minutes might be the appropriate one. Or I might put an episode of Once Upon a Time on that list, because I'm still only in season seven. I know I finished ages ago. That doesn't matter to me. And those are much longer and those are great. So yeah, I try and pick something and I scale the time based on what else is on my task list. But I pick one larger work thing and then a fun thing as well. And if I check those off, I say my day is

productive. I think that's the secret to making something like time blocking or hyper scheduling work. I've seen some of the feedback that you've gotten, David, in the forum regarding hyper scheduling. And a lot of the negative feedback seems to be from people who just bristle at the idea of scheduling every hour of their day. But the people who I've worked with that have pushed back on that idea, you look at what they're scheduling and they don't include that fun element. When you put time on your time-blocked plan to go play video games, you look forward to that. It makes everything you're doing before that easier and you're more motivated to get it completed because you know at this point,

you know, I get to do this fun thing. It's like a reward for doing the things that you don't really want to do. And I know we talked a lot about finding meaning in your work and keeping things fun, but ultimately work is still work and it gets in the way of the things that you really just want to do. I mean, you work for a reason so that you can go make money and live the lifestyle that you want, but you make concessions with that and that's totally fine. That's a trade-off that every single person is making. And I think that we don't think about those trade-offs as often as we we should when we do we they don't seem like such a big deal because it's no longer being taken from us it's something that we're we're trading so that we can do something else that is more motivating to us

that we're that we really enjoy later on yeah and that's something i do do with time blocking so i actually have uh two time blocking calendars i have a fun one and then i have time looking um and so i can drag those blocks around and i can i can move the regular time looking stuff around from day to day you know as i need to if if something comes up today i can move it to tomorrow but ideally i want the fun one to stay there um and it can move up and down in my day, but it can't move to tomorrow or yesterday because yesterday already happened and tomorrow never comes. As my grandmother always says, you know, time that's gone, you just have to move on. And, you know, whatever happens tomorrow is going to happen tomorrow, but you're in control of today right

now. And so I always try and have something fun there and it can shrink and it can increase, but I want a minimum of at least one fun block there, which isn't overlapping with something else because I have tried that. I have tried watching TV while eating and it does not feel like I've really relaxed. You know, I can do it. I can watch an episode of Scrubs while I eat dinner, but I haven't really enjoyed my food and I haven't really enjoyed the episode. So I found I'm better off having some music on while I eat, and then I watch an episode afterwards. And it means it takes longer, so I'm less productive, but it also means that I'm happier. So that's real productivity there, because actually being happy is important.

That's real productivity there because actually being happy is important. This whole idea of multitasking fun is like a fool's errand. And that can be eating or watching TV or both. I went to a Zen retreat over a weekend many years ago, and it was right after I lost a trial. And I don't like losing trials, but you know, once in a while I lose. And so I got the verdict, you know, took a pounding and got in my car and went off to this retreat. And I was sitting there eating dinner and the whole idea of Zen is one thing at a time really. And we had dinner and we're all sitting there eating dinner together. And my teacher walks up to me, she's like, what are you eating? And I tell her what I mean. She's like, no, you're not, you're eating your problems. I'm watching you. And she was so right. You know,

I was sitting there eating dinner and all I was thinking about was, well, what did I do wrong? Or how did this happen? I had no idea what I was eating, you know, and it was such a great lesson. And I carry that with me. Like if I decide I'm going to watch TV, I am not going to have an iPad on my lap. TV is either worth watching or it's not worth watching, but there's no TV that's worth watching while you're working on an iPad. You know what I mean? That is something I've been there and done that. I had a very fallow period at work in my jobby job where I was expected to be around. And people were just like, yeah, like fix little things if you want. But, you know, just for a couple of days, we don't really need anything from you right now. We'll see what happens after, you know, after this. And, you know, so I was sitting there and I was watching TV and

working and I did not actually work. But at the same time, I was also taught, you know, it's a couple of days, just sit and hold tight because if you do something, there's a very good chance it's going to be wasted because we'll go in a different direction. You know, there's like eight different directions here. None of them have got any overlap. So whatever you do, it's going to be wasted probably. And so, you know, and I was there and it's like, okay, well, I could, I suppose, set up some more email filters. No, I'm just going to keep watching. And, you know, I didn't really, you know, do a lot. And I made a point of, you know, after the first day going, yeah, okay, so I can't do that.

So I'm going to set myself a goal of something little to accomplish before anything else happens on those days. And that was fine. It was just a couple of hours here and there. And then somebody actually made a decision and stuck with it. And I was able to get back to actually cranking the widgets and programming the programs. But it was one of those things where I was sitting there going, yeah, I'm not really doing either of these very well at some point. And it's like, I'll just put my laptop to one side, watch an episode of something, and then come back and check in and make sure everything's okay. Obviously, it was on loud, so somebody pinged me for something that I was able to immediately stop. But yeah, I was not great at multitasking in that context. And if you have a problem with that,

if you're somebody who feels like you need to have a TV on while you're working, like I have tinnitus, so I like to have noise in the room. So I get that. But what I would recommend is a kind of an intermediate step to get yourself off that train. There's some excellent channels on YouTube that focus on non-interactive really TV. Like there there's there's some where somebody will just go hiking through the alps for four hours and you'll have four hours of 4k hiking video with some soft music or um if if you're a star wars nerd like me there's one where it's like yoda's hut and it plays star wars music for like three hours um and just like stuff like that would be something that'd be much more easier to work during, but there's no story, you know, something like that, or just music,

just turn the TV off and turn some music on. But I do think that if you think you can pull these things off together, you're just, you're not going to get anything good out of that. You're not going to enjoy the TV and you're not going to get the work done. just you're not going to get anything good out of that. You're not going to enjoy the TV and you're not going to get the work done. And I think that's the thing, you know, you need to focus for want of a better word. You know, it's one of these things where splitting our attention and trying to do multiple things at the same time. Sometimes it can work. You know, I can frequently manage to listen to podcasts while sorting files or something like that. That's the kind of multitasking I can do because the actual sorting the files isn't too bad. And if I, you know, need to, you know,

pause for a minute and actually read a document before I sort it, then I can hit pause and I can rewind 15 seconds or whatever it is. But actually being actively mentally in the flow zone whilst also doing something else, that rarely happens for me. So I have music in the background or there's this great app called Dark Noise, which I use and I combine things. I also recently found a nice artist on Apple Music called Piano Peace, where they've got instrumental versions of lots of songs because I get carried away and I like to sing along to things. But if there's no lyrics, then I tend not to sing along. And also there's some of them which have got like nature sounds overlaid. So there's rain, there's sea, there's a forest one. They're all good options. And so i've been listening to a lot of piano piece to the point where apple music is making recommendations based on that which i'm not annoying i'm not

annoyed at so there's a something i want to go back and revisit where you mentioned for the jobby job things could have gone in several different directions and basically whatever you would have picked would have been wrong. Yeah. I think that's a fascinating topic because sometimes the most productive thing you can do is nothing. Yeah. And that never feels right. You always feel better even if it's counterproductive, picking something to work on so you can say, look what I accomplished. But I think that real productivity, really it's measuring how close you're moving towards your ideal outcome, your goal. And I have issues with goals too. But really, if you're measuring the long run, that's really what matters. But when we think about, was I productive today? We tend to measure the little things. And without zooming out and getting a bigger perspective, it's easy to say, oh yeah,

I was productive and you prioritized the wrong things. I think maybe meditation is like a microcosm of this. David, you were talking a little bit about this, where just even breaking out like 10 minutes from your day to focus on your breath and not do anything that feels very counterproductive, but actually it's one of the most productive things you can do. Just to stop and recenter. Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. And in all these cases, I had like, I think it was like two and a half days in total to wait. And it was because I was finished on something else earlier. And so I was aware, A, if I start working on something, there's a good chance it's going to have to be thrown away. B, two and a half days is not enough time to accomplish any one of these.

And honestly, even if I had managed to finish something, it wouldn't have made a difference when they were making their decision because the fact that the work is already done doesn't factor into whether or not they're making the right decision. And if they make the right decision based on, well, this one's already finished, are they really making a great decision there? We don't know. And also, there was a good possibility I was going to be interrupted because something was found with something else that, you know, they needed my help on. And so, yeah, the correct decision was to do nothing. And that was quite a scary decision, you know, and I checked with several different people to make sure, should I be doing, you know,

anything in particular right now? And the answer from all of them was no. And that, wow, I was surprised because usually, you know, when you get to that point, there's always somebody going, oh yeah, there's this thing over here. And if you fix that for me, that would be great. Or if you can, you know, do this little thing over here. And, you know, there genuinely wasn't any from at least the five people I spoke to at the time, you know, there genuinely wasn't any from at least the five people I spoke to at the time. They all said, no, you're good. And it's just like, okay, then I'm just going to sit and wait for somebody to tell me what to do. And, you know, a couple of tiny little things cropped up, which took me five minutes to fix. But the worst part of it would have been if I'd started on

something, I would, A, wouldn't have been able to finish it. And B, it would have been the wrong thing. So I would have both not had the sense of accomplishment and actually not had a sense of being productive because it would have been thrown away. And so, yeah, I'm glad I picked the right thing to do, which was nothing. Yeah. And we've already established in the first section, you're not lazy. So it's not like you're trying to actively avoid work. you're not lazy. So it's not like you're trying to actively avoid work. No, no, definitely not. Though I have to say a couple of days of very slow, you know, little trickles here and there was a nice way to recharge. Because, you know, I'm usually on the go from when I get up to when I go to bed in some way or another. So it was quite nice to have a

bit of time to just sit back and relax, as it were. going to do. Work being basically anything personally or professionally that's important to you that you want to accomplish. And I've got my framework for that. David, you've talked about personal retreats. We don't have to get into that real deep here, but I think it's worth calling out that that's really what the personal retreat sort of thing does, is it gets you out of the day-to-day long enough, which really it doesn't need to take that long, just a day or so. That's enough for you to really see how things are really coming together in your world. And it's a lot easier once you do get outside of your normal routine to see what things are hitting the mark and which ones aren't. It's very easy to think that things are hitting the mark and which ones aren't. It's very easy to think that things are hitting the mark. But when you take a step back and you

actually get things in focus, you realize that you're not hitting the bullseye at all. You're missing the mark entirely or you're just off center. This is something perhaps I'm more familiar with the most. I wear glasses or contact lenses. And so not wearing those glasses and contact lenses gives me the feeling, you know, everything's a bit fuzzy. And it's kind of easy to think, yeah, that's about right. And then you come back in later with your glasses on and you go, oh, yeah, I didn't really clean that mirror well at all or whatever it is. And so being able to take that step back and actually have a look at things and get things in focus can let you think whether or not it's better. I love that description. It reminds me of that scene from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs where Sam Sparks is walking around without her glasses.

And the moment that she puts them on, you can kind of see like everything's foggy and she thinks that Flint is like the super handsome guy. And then she gets the glasses on and is like, whoa, that's what you really look like. There we go. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to help you build your online presence and run your business.

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use the offer code FOCUSED to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for the FOCUSED podcast. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Kind of an overriding concern I think a lot of people miss out on when you're trying to stay focused is getting lost in the weeds, you know, being in the trenches and making whatever it is that you make every day and not stopping to indulge the manager inside of you. I wrote a post about this at the website and, and I got a lot of interesting email feedback and, and one of the readers told me that he feels guilty spending time on manager

because he feels like it's not making things. And he identifies as somebody who makes things and why would I spend time planning and actually now that I say this it kind of goes back to the whole complaints about block scheduling and the complaints about having too many task managers all this stuff to a certain mindset gets in the way of making things where I feel like it liberates you to make things but but this whole concept of your inner manager and how important it is, are you guys thinking about that at all as you try to work through these problems? Well, for me, I definitely have to think of myself as a manager and a maker. I mean, I spend a lot of my time making things.

And I produce podcasts or I record podcasts and let other people do the hard production work. I record screencasts. I write things. I create code and programs. Uh, so I'm, you know, spending a lot of my time making, but I don't necessarily get to spend that time making if I don't manage myself. myself. Because if I don't manage myself, I won't remember. I have three deadlines this week. One of them's on Tuesday, one of them's on Thursday, one of them's on Friday, and I need to do them in the right order. Even though the one on Friday sounds like it's going to be a lot more fun to do than the ones on Tuesday and Thursday, I need to do Tuesday first, then Thursday, then Friday. That's, you know, that's how it works. And so by giving myself some time to sit and do the planning and the review and say, these are your tasks, you must do them in this order because otherwise things will blow up and, you know, be unhappy, means that I can really enjoy my making time. And I try to avoid spending a lot of time in meetings, but I book meetings with myself once a week to plan this stuff out because it's part of my review, it's part of my system. And if I don't keep on top of my system my stuff just falls apart yeah so um i think i have a little insight that i recently got from this based on things that i am doing with the suite setup

because lately i have been taking more of an ownership of the editorial calendar. So Rose knows this because she's a contributor, and I've been talking to her about some of the stuff that she writes for the site. And I'm realizing that when I am working with other people, I have to spend time in a manager mindset, defining the pieces, putting together outlines, so that when I hand it off to somebody they know exactly what this is supposed to look like and they have a clear definition of done

and basically eliminate as much friction as I can for them in order for them to make the thing and I'm realizing that when I do that for myself it helps a lot as well. So I am spending quite a bit of time and I have a category set up in my timery now for planning. And I spend a significant amount of time every single week, probably eight to 10 hours lately, just thinking about what are the things that I want to make and what are they going to look like rather than just sitting down at the keyboard and cranking out words, for example. I've never been able to do it with screencast. Whenever I sit down to record any sort of video, I have to have a very clear path of where I'm going or I freak out and just keep making all these mistakes. But I'm realizing that that time that I spend

in manager mode is beneficial, not just for when I'm working with other people, but for myself. And I'm feeling the relief that comes from that. And I'm realizing that this is time well spent, and I need to keep this up. I also feel like being, even if you've just got a jobby job, and I don't mean that in a derogative fashion, I just mean like if you have a jobby job and then you've got a personal life and so on, you still need to do some management with that, whether it's I have a dining room table that I need to assemble. In order to assemble the dining room table, I need to get rid of the old dining room table, which means I need to clear off the old dining room table, polish it, take some photos,

list it for sale, have somebody come and collect it, and then I can assemble the new table. So this is my first task, you know, clear off the table. You know, it's quite good to have a bit of manager time to be aware of that. You know, you could be on your own, you could have a family and a partner that you want to do that for as well. But you need to spend a little bit of time thinking about planning everything out just so that you don't then disappoint yourself. You know, if you're at your jobby job, you've got a bunch of different things and people keep pulling you in all different directions. Spending half an hour, you know, sitting down and unpicking that puzzle is well worth it because then when people come to you and try and pull you in yet more directions, like you're an octopus and

all your legs have to go in every direction, you know, you can say, but I've got all of these other things as well. And you know those things and either you can deal with it yourself or you can get a manager involved if you need to. But being able to be on top of all of these things is a great stress reliever and can also help you reintroduce margin if you feel like maybe you're short on that. But you know, we sit here and we say this on a podcast and we claim to like have some idea of what we're doing in terms of productivity. But I can tell you, this is a constant challenge for me. I mean, we talked on the show about how hard it is for me to have a consistent shutdown. This is a year's long thing and I still miss it. I didn't shut down yesterday. It's a good example. It's the most effective way to guarantee a productive next day and I routinely fail to do it. Another one is we talk about reviews and a weekly review or

monthly review. I was looking at my calendar and I'm like, huh, it's May. I never did an end of April start of May review. Just totally blew that. You know, and I don't know why, if it's a human thing, if it's a, if it's just like a fear of not being productive enough thing, but it is so much easier to pull the trigger on producing things than to take that manager time and do the stuff that we know. Have personal experience makes it easier, but I still find it difficult. Well, quantity is easier to measure than quality, right? So for a lot of the

stuff that we create, we can say, oh, wasn't that great? I didn't put that much prep into it and I cranked out a podcast or I didn't spend that much time and I wrote a blog post and it was a thousand words. But I whenever I do that, I look back at those things and those aren't the ones that I'm really proud of. You know, the ones that really stand the test of time are the ones where I have switched mindsets and I've spent some manager time thinking about things. And every time I stop and think about it, it's like, yeah, of course, why wouldn't I do that more? But then you get to the end of the day and you want to measure how successful you were. And you ask yourself, well, what did I actually ship? And those are competing ideas. And the quality one seems to not have an advocate in my brain sometimes. Yeah. That is why I frequently end up skipping my weekly review and then come Tuesday the following week, I'm regretting it because I don't know what it is I'm supposed to be producing because I skipped it and I don't know anymore. My manager's gone missing and I can't find them anymore. And that's because my

manager was there on Friday and I said, no, no, no, no, no, it's good. I'm going to go and I'm going to eat some ice cream. Don't worry about it. We're all good. And you know what? I was lying to me. I was lying to myself. And it's okay to do that every once in a while, but consistently missing these things definitely causes me to fail myself, at least to an extent. So I'm trying to be much better at listening to the manager side of myself as well as the creative side of myself. Yeah, it really is a challenge. I'm actually relieved to hear you both suffer and struggle with this too, because I don't know anybody that finds it easy.

If you're listening and you're like, this is impossible for me, it's not. You know, you just have to build a habit and you have to be really forgiving with yourself. Like when I realized that I didn't do the April, May review, I didn't beat myself up over it. I just looked at my calendar and I realized, well, I'm busy this week, but Friday afternoon,

I could probably make some time and it's going to be a week late, but I'm still going to do it. And, and that was that, you know, and I'll get it done on Friday. So be patient with yourself, but, but this stuff really does, in my opinion, it's probably the most bang for your buck you can get with your time. I would agree with that. And I think one of the things that really helps me without needing to do a whole bunch of heavy mental lifting is my journaling habit with the daily questions. And I know we've talked about

that in depth, so we don't need to revisit that entirely. But I think the key thing there is that you rate yourself not on what you actually accomplished, but on your intentions. And when you base it off of your intentions, then those are kind of signposts that can keep you moving in the right direction. But if you mess up any one day, you don't feel a whole bunch of guilt about, well, I didn't shut down this week or I didn't plan this week. If you were basing yourself off of your intentions, you don't feel so bad about the fact that you didn't do a planning thing on a Friday afternoon because you were at Disneyland instead, right? Yeah. But in the moment, all you think about is like, oh, well, I should have done that.

Obviously, I say this is important, but really what happened is you decided something else was more important, and that is completely okay. Yeah. In this case, though, the problem was it didn't even occur to me. Sure, sure. Yeah. In this case, though, the problem was it didn't even occur to me. Maybe that's the topic here for a second. One of the ways I've made it way easier for myself is I've thought out the roles as the foundation of my personal life, and I've built templates for weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviews based on those roles. So to me, it's a template I open up and go through. So there's very little friction to entry on this. And I think that if you don't have some sort of system, you know, Mike has his system. I have one where I go through and we've talked about it on the show before. I'm kind of curious, Rose, do you have like a template system or something in place to do your reviews? a template system or something in place to do your reviews? So I have a checklist. And this is actually something Mike and I were chatting a little bit about the other day that templates,

a checklist is a kind of template. And so I have a checklist that I go through, but I have been recently attempting to rework this into a template so that I can fill things out. At the moment, it's more, you know, do these things, you know, make sure that you know about that, block these things into your calendar as is appropriate, and so on. So especially my weekly review, it's always got, you know, review from last week, okay, now look at the upcoming week, make sure to add time blocks for each podcast, and so on. But I feel like I week, make sure to add time blocks for each podcast and so on. Um, but I feel like I should, you know, be adding questions to myself there. And so Mike, I'm going to be taking a leaf out of your book and possibly just straight up stealing your

templates there because, uh, stealing from somebody else, uh, who was it to say great artist steal, um, whoever it was, they were smart artist yep yeah you just got to start by stealing somebody else's and then tweaking until it works for you um and uh the way i usually approach these things is i steal from multiple people who are much smarter than me and i put them all together and then i look very smart because i have this amazing system but the truth is is i've just taken it from all of the places and combined it to suit my needs. Well, everything's a remix, so feel free to steal anything. But that's essentially what I've done as well, is I find these things and they're not quite right. So I figure out a way to modify them and then they work for me. On the topic of the

checklist and the templates specifically, this is something that people definitely undervalue. I am currently reading Greg McKeown's new book, Effortless. And it's a great book basically talking about how you can make the things that you have to do, the essential things, how you can make them easier and more fun. And so it's not as earth-shattering as essentialism was when I first read it, but a lot of the stuff in there makes a ton of sense. And he tells a story which is also in the Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande of this airline pilot. They were basically trying to decide which company they were going to go with for these planes that they needed to

build for the U.S. Army. And there was a Boeing plane that had twice as much range. It could haul twice as much weight, but it was more complicated to fly. And they had this major, Ployer P. Hill, he was the one who went on the test flight for this Model 299. And shortly after takeoff, they see this thing, and this guy's a 17-year vet. All of a sudden, they see this thing just kind of turn to the left and crash into the ground because he had forgotten to do something super basic, and it caused the plane to crash. And at that point, they said, okay, we're not going to do this because it's too much of a mental load. And the big takeaway from that is that if you have a checklist for the things that

you must do when flying an airplane, you're not going to forget those super critical things. And a lot of checklist manifesto, Tulkuwanda, he's a surgeon, right? So same thing in the medical industry. If you have a checklist checklist you are much less likely to make a simple stupid mistake and that's not really a when those mistakes happen it's it's not a judgment on the people who make them it's the complexity of the things that you're you're going through and when you make it a checklist and you just have to follow the steps, your brain doesn't have to try to juggle all of these things. And at least the way my brain works, if I don't have those things that lead me to connect those dots easily,

especially for something more complex, I want a whole standard operating procedure of all the individual steps for this thing to make sure that I don't mess it up. When I don't have that, I feel super stressed. Yeah, that's one of the first things that I don't mess it up. When I don't have that, I feel super stressed. Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the first things that I do, actually. Whenever I'm going to get a project, I make a list for it.

You know, I'm being given an assignment, make this video. I make a checklist for it. And I then save that because if I need to do a similar video again, then I have a template that I can use. And I can, you know, modify it as is needed. And sometimes, in fact, most of the time, let's be honest, this is me. I'm from the Automators podcast. It was written on the lid.

I have systems which automatically create documents and stuff for me as well as part of this. So, you know, say I need to make a video. Well, it's going to start by creating a note for me so that I can you know gather all my links and put together an outline um and then it's it's going to either create the template file for me or you know download the template file is going on my checklist and stuff like that um and then everything's there and I have to go through it in order um and I mean I can mark things off without having done them. I can do that, but I don't. Because if you start not doing things on your checklist, then it becomes problematic. And I've also made checklists for things that I think I know how to do. And it's entirely automatic to me. And so this is how,

you know, I do a complete backup of my systems ready for a migration to a new machine. I have a list because you know what? I'll forget to deregister Apple Music, guaranteed. Like it's going to happen and I'm going to have to boot up the old machine and then deregister it and stuff like that. And it's just a pain in the neck when you forget these things. And brains honestly are stupid. You know, they're always fascinated by whatever the new shiny thing is,

like an up squirrel. Okay, what was I doing? I've got thing is, like an up squirrel. Okay. What was, what was I doing? I've got no idea. There was a squirrel. I've forgotten. Ooh, cheese. You know, that that's my brain basically on a good day.

You don't want to know what my brain is like on a bad day. It's basically going chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, purple thing, purple thing. And so I have checklists because that way my brain can be going chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, purple thing, purple thing. The purple thing is OmniFocus. And there's a checkbox. And I check it off. You know, I do the thing.

I upload the file to Dropbox. And I check it off. And I'm done. That's it. And that makes life much easier. Well, I'd give you more credit. I feel like our brains are really good at analysis and making connections, but they're not data storage devices. Like a list is not going to fit. And that, that book, that checklist manifesto book, I just want to give that like two thumbs up when that first came out. And it has to be at

least 10 years ago. I read the book a long time ago and it was transformative for me. There are tons of things I do as Max Parkey and in the legal practice and that go through a checklist. And if you haven't explored that, that is an excellent way to increase your focus because you don't have to like carry all that stuff around in the gray matter ram between your ears if you make a list. Yeah. And it doesn't just, it's not just checklists. It's not just checklists. It's not just templates. The same sort of concept applies to meeting agendas, applies to podcast outlines. I mean, just the fact that you have an outline, we've kind of chucked ours today with this conversation. But the fact that it's there, that's the thing that allows me, the way that I'm wired, to engage in the conversation because I know that I have that safety net that I can fall back on. And if you start to look for the different areas of your

life where these things can provide some benefit, there are lots of opportunities to make things, as Greg McKeon would say, a little bit more effortless. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Go to expressvpn.com slash focus to get high speed, secure and anonymous VPN services and an extra three months for free. How did you choose which internet service provider to use? The sad thing is most of us have very little choice because ISPs have a lot of control in the regions they serve. The problem is they can then use this control to take advantage of customers with data caps, streaming throttles, and the list goes on. Worst of all, many ISPs

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That's e-x-p-r-e-s-S-V-P-N dot com slash focused to get three extra months for free. Once again, go to expressvpn.com slash focused right now to learn more. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. So Rose, we talked about at the beginning of the show that you have this podcast called Nested Folders. And I feel like if there's a Venn diagram of focused listeners

and potential Nested Folder listeners, I feel like it's a circle. Like it's just 100% overlap. Because it's an excellent show. It talks about a lot of the same things. And recently, you guys were talking about project, you know, juggling projects and managing projects. And I think that fits right here. Let's talk about that a little bit. Well, first of all, thank you both for saying Nesta folders is nice.

And also because you gave us the topic for that show, David, because you posted about your status board with your different areas and what projects you've got going on in them. And that made me realize that I didn't have a great overview of all of those things. So I split my projects up. I use OmniFocus as my task manager. And I have folders for different areas of things.

So I have a folder for podcasting. And inside of that, I have subfolders for automators, nested folders, iOS Today. I've got a folder for screencasting. I've got a folder for my jobby job. I've got a folder for all of the writing that I do. And I've got a folder for personal stuff. And then that's split into a variety of different subcategories. And I realized that OmniFocus is a great place to, you know, check off the tasks, but it's not necessarily a great place to get an overview of all of that. I created an Airtable base for my projects where I pretty much use it in the Kanban board view,

where I can have my projects in different areas and I assign them different statuses. And that means that I can, so I try not to have too many projects in any one category, which are fully active at one time. And when I say fully active, I mean, I am deliberately going to be doing something on them. Waiting for a parcel to arrive is not an active thing for me. It's a waiting action. So it's on hold. And I could be, you know, waiting on things to arrive for eight or nine different projects. I've got some electronics projects going on. And so I had to place an order and you have to pay for postage. So I was, of course, going to cram as much into my order as possible. So I've got a bunch of stuff that's just arrived actually for like 10 different projects. I'm not making all those 10 projects active. watering herb garden. That's the next one out of those. And that's going into active as are the other two, which are partially already complete, a door sensor and some fans that I need to just

hook up to help the air circulate a bit more. But that's my limit. And okay, I've done something on the others, but I don't need them to be active. And so I try to have a good balance between these things. Now, for the purposes of my overview, I've combined podcasting and screencasting and writing to be one, which is just, you know, professional nerd. It's the name of the category. I decided to have fun with these. Um, and, uh, that's, um, you know, that means that there can be quite a few projects which are theoretically active in there. So I sort those by, by due dates just because it's the most logical way to do it. Um, and, you know, personal projects never have a due date. So I, I, well, at least not with things

like creating a self-watering herb garden. So I try to just pick those based on interest. And yeah, but that's, it's one of those things where I realized I need a big picture overview of what's happening in my life. And that, that was thanks to you, David. Well, is it helping? It is. It really is. Because I realized I had so much in my jobby job columns and I had so much in my professional nerd columns and I had a bunch of things on the back burner for my personal stuff. And I realized that none of it was actually active. None of it, literally not a single thing was active. And that was the point where I was like, well, things are really off balance here. You know, like if my

life was a triangle, it wasn't, it was a line. Um, and, uh line. And so I fixed that and I've made some things active and I've deprioritized some other things and told some people no, because now I have a big picture overview. And that is actually part of my weekly review, looking at that to make sure it doesn't get out of hand. Why am I not surprised that Rosemary Orchard used Airtable to automate her focus? I wouldn't say it's automated, Mike. I'd say it's more a case of I wanted a tool that I could easily add my projects to quickly and change things around without having to, you know, manually drag things around.

You know, I love David's status board. It's done in OmniGraffle. It's pretty. It's wonderful. My projects come and go quite quickly. You know, if I'm writing a quick tip for the suite setup, that's not going to be on my project radar for a month. That is probably going to be on my project radar for a couple of days, maybe. Because it, you know, I shouldn't be spending all of that long on something which is supposed to be a quick tip for other people. It's supposed to be quick. It's right there in the name.

If it was going to be a long tip, it would say that. So I try to keep it so that it's easy for me to add things. And I have a shortcut. Anybody waiting for that keyword? Congratulations. Which lets me add a project to OmniFocus and it adds it to Airtable at the same time for me so that then I can keep my projects list synchronized.

There is no actual synchronization involved. It's review that keeps them synced. Okay, can I make a confession? Yes, David. I'm very hesitant to do this because that, for whatever reason, that status board thing got me a lot of like, not angry, but like weird email from people like, why are you doing this? You're adding an extra step.

And so since I published that, they've added a data. What's the plugin in Obsidian? Data sure. Data view. Data view. They've added a plugin in Obsidian where you can run a formula and automatically generate these things. And they've added a Kanban board to Obsidian. The last two weeks have been doing it all in Obsidian.

And I haven't said anything publicly because I'm like, oh, no. What is going to happen if I do this? Well, confession time. to happen if I do this? Well, confession time. Mike recently made me aware of this plugin called DataView, which I'm very excited about. And I'm considering switching my status board to Obsidian because one thing I didn't mention about my shortcut, it also creates a note in a folder called project information or project support material actually in obsidian um so i have i have a link um to to my notes for the project where i can just chuck in you know all sorts of stuff um and i really ought to you know draw this all together but at the same time i was very aware when i was setting up my

status board rabbit holes rabbit holes happen all the time. I am definitely much more of a dog that goes, oh, fun scent and runs off over here and gets very excited all about this fancy new tool and gadget and gizmo, things like that. And I forget that the purpose of the tool is to help me focus, not for me to get very excited and spend an hour and a half writing my own custom web interface for this or fiddling around with that and tweaking CSS. And that's something I wanted to avoid because I was looking at this. I was actually having a chat with some of the people in the RelayFM Discord. If you are a sponsor focused, then you should check that out. The productivity channel is amazing. So many lovely people.

And somebody half jokingly said, but what about Airtable? Because I do everything in Airtable. And I had to think and I went, actually, Airtable is great for this. And so I put it in Airtable because I know the tool. And I think the thing when you're creating anything like this is it's so easy to get distracted on the quest for the perfect tool. The perfect tool is the one that you know, and that, you know, you can accomplish this in right now because you can,

you can do your task and then you can come back later and go, it would be great if I also had this available or if I could consolidate that. And if I can do that, then, you know, then, then I'll upgrade my system later.

So I'm probably going to be upgrading to Obsidian. Okay, and I want to put a pin in that because there's a bunch of listeners that do not want to hear me talk about Obsidian anymore. But we're going to go on deep focus today, and we're going to kind of go into mechanics of how the three of us are doing this. Because I think it is kind of an interesting topic, but it is kind of a little bit of field which is the perfect topic for deep focus mike are you doing anything for like tracking your projects how do you keep track of them yeah well a lot of my projects are writing projects and uh this is kind of deep focus related but I'm using that Kanban plugin to manage the actual columns. And then all the writing happens in Obsidian. And then I do some crazy stuff with DataView afterwards.

What I would say, though, to people listening is that the reason I did this is I felt like I didn't have a good enough handle on everything. And I know that I can see these in Perspectives and OmniFocus and even Obsidian. But what really led me to the idea of making the thing in OmniGraph, well, I haven't necessarily given up on that, but I'm trying these new technologies right now. It's just I wanted a place when I got to the end of the day just to look at the overall view of everything. What got me thinking about it was the Cal Newport World Without Email book. And he talked about in there the copper works for the Pullman car factory. And this is like 19-0 something. This is over 100 years old.

But they found that they were very inefficient, and things weren't getting done right, and they brought in a guy to figure out how to make things more productive and efficient. And he made the world's first Excel spreadsheet without a computer, where he took an entire wall of the factory, and they set up a grid grid and they put everything up on the grid. So anybody at any time could look at that and decide what status every project was in and who was working on it. And I got thinking, man, what a great idea. Wouldn't that be nice

if I had the ability to have that on the wall in my office? So I could just look at the wall and say, okay, on my lawyer hat, what is, what is hot right now? What's on the back burner, uh, as podcaster, as a field guide producer, and just at a glance, have everything in front of me. And I realized that my current systems weren't really giving me that. And as a result, I felt like I had this underlying anxiety that I was dropping the ball somewhere, but I wasn't sure where it was. So I didn't have a factory wall to use. So that was out. With my studio set up, I thought, well, maybe I'll just get a big whiteboard or just install

a big piece of glass against the wall. But there's not enough wall space where I'm at, you know? And so that's not going to work. There's literally, it's a high ceiling room so i thought well i'll install it and get a ladder and climb the ladder and just do it up there you know i literally thought about that for a few minutes i'm like that is dumb you know i mean but but i thought about but eventually i thought well i've got a big monitor i'll just dedicate a screen to it so i can swipe over into it at any one time and that's what led me to wanting to use some omni-graphle and still kind of on the table for me but but i do think the whole idea of having one place you go kind of getting back to the moral of the story and being able to at a glance see where you stand on your

projects is a fundamentally good idea and if you don't have that in your life, you should figure it out. Yeah. And I would also say that Kanban is the way to get that view. I mean, you can use a powerful task manager and create these custom perspectives, which are going to sort through the thousands of tasks in your database and surface just the ones that you should be thinking about in whatever context you want to see them. But there is something about seeing them in those columns and that you see things as you work on them move from left to right and eventually be done. That is extremely satisfying to me. I would agree with that. And I would also agree with the idea of having something that gives you a big picture overview. I know I can look at a list of things in OmniFocus. But you know what? It's a list. Sometimes changing the shape of something

changes how you see it. So taking those list items and making them into cards and sorting those cards into columns based on their area of your life or their current status. That to me makes a big difference because then I look at them and I go, huh, you know, this has been in this spot for a really long time. Why is that? And it's very easy to see that when you change things up a little bit. An example I have of this, which is not productivity related at all, but the same chocolate tastes different in different shapes. So for example, if it's in the shape of an all, but the same chocolate tastes different in different shapes. So for example, if it's in the shape of an Easter egg, that same chocolate will taste different

to when it's in the shape of a bar. And it sounds crazy, but it's true. It is true. I look at everything the same way. You know, if I change the way I look at this, am I going to see something different? You know, if you stand really, really close to a fabulous painting,

you're going to see all of the individual brushstrokes and you'll notice mistakes. But when you take a step back, then you see the whole picture and you realize how beautiful it is. Well, sometimes with our projects, we need to take a step back and look at them in a different shape so that we can see that whole picture. And it's very easy to get caught up in all the tasks, which is why I love the status board. And I have it as a sort of Kanban system. It's more of a grid, really, because I have the status. The status is actually going downwards. And then my areas of focus are going from left to right right now. I will adjust that probably in the not too distant future. And that's something that I'm having to do

sort of outside of Airtable. I have one Kanban view for each status of projects and then one for status, which is, yeah. Either way, it's something that, you know, you have to tweak these things to how it works for you. But I found it's very useful to have a different perspective on these things. You know, you guys, as we're talking about this,

I'm actually looking at the internet at a library sliding ladder. I mean, this is totally not off the table for me at this point, putting it up on the wall. I mean, I don't know. I'm going to message Dave, Daisy and your daughters and just say, David's looking at buying a library and let them loose on you. Yeah, I know. And I'm not sure that that would pass muster. But I do think that, you know, taking the nerd element out of it and getting like a big 3M sticky board

or a whiteboard or putting a piece of glass over a white wall, I do think there is real merit to the idea of having it analog and right in front of your face all day. Yeah, 100%. And I think honestly, if you're not ever used anything in the Kanban style, that's the place to start. And really, that applies to really any tool. I mean, that's the beauty of analog is that you can make it do whatever you

want. And then you can add technology and you can scale your system. But a lot of times, if we don't ever stop to think about the way that we're working, we're scaling the wrong things. I think analog is great as well, because you have a physical space limitation. So I don't have full space that is easily available. I mean, I could use, you know, the ceiling in all of my rooms that's available. Or I have some wall space in the hallway, but it's semi-frequently blocked by a clothes dryer where you just, you know, stand it up and you hang clothes over it to dry, not, you know, an actual dryer dryer. And so that's not ideal. So instead, I have an A3 sketchbook and Post-its. And I stick Post-it notes in my A3 sketchbook.

You know what? You can't fit that many Post-its on an A3 piece of paper. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. Because I have a long list of things. If I can't fit it in that A3 piece of paper, I can't do it right now. And that's okay. And that helps me prioritize because I have a massive, massive, massive stack of post-its color coded, of course. And, you know, I rearrange things based on what I can actually fit on the paper. important information on a piece of paper you stick to things but like to like do your do your own um kanban analog kanban that would be good because you can move them between categories

without having to rewrite or regenerate the document yeah and also it's in a notebook in this case so it's you know i close i close the a3 book uh when when i'm i don't need it out um so you know nothing can go flying away. I would just like to mention something I recently discovered while I was hunting around online, because I was also looking for a whiteboard solution. You can get static cling, like sticky things, which basically they cling to your wall. They're not actually sticky and they're a whiteboard like material. So you can write on them with dry white markers. Now you're going to have to be careful cleaning these so that the marker doesn't come off and like swipe onto your wall as you clean it. But that sounds pretty cool.

And I've been looking at those. I've used smaller ones to help like organize schedules in places before for conferences and stuff where we've got all of these different sessions and we rearrange things to meet, you know, needs and interests. And they're great for all sorts of things. So that's something that I've been looking at, but I don't really have the wall space that I can get to so easily. You know, I could stand on my sofa, but that doesn't feel particularly safe. These are pretty, I agree, these are handy. And you don't need to necessarily to put them on the wall. There are lots of different ways that you can use these. We have some at my house.

They're called McSquares are the ones that we have. And they're actually on the refrigerator. And we have their squares, the ones that we have. And they're about maybe one foot by one foot. And so we've got four of them on there for each of our kids that are school age and we homeschool our kids. So that is the list of the things that they must do every day. And then they work off of that checklist basically. And having those things, those physical things to your point in your face all the time that makes schooling so much easier so everybody knows exactly what they're what they're supposed to do

so not a kanban but another application of of this kind of status board thing the ones i was looking at were called magic whiteboard um and that's here in the UK on Amazon UK. But there's a lot of, if you search for static cling whiteboard, you will find tons of products, absolutely guaranteed. So I think to start with, just pick whatever's cheapest if you want to try it out, because you can, of course, put it on a table to write on it and then cling it to the wall to be able to see it. So if your walls are not so accessible, then that can be an approach. Or even just get sticky notes and stick them to a glass window. I mean, there's so many ways to solve this problem. You don't have to go vertical.

You can have a horizontal service like a tabletop as well. But the problem this is attempting to solve is when you get to the day end review and you get to the week and the monthly reviews you've got an easy place just to see where everything stands like one of the things i do with this board system is i have a category i mean my categories are very simple it's um active hold um completed or abandoned and anything because i had more categories when i first started but i've simplified and like if i'm waiting for an answer from a client or if i'm waiting for something to get done it goes hold and the um and that that peers over to omni focus like i said we'll get into this deeper and deep focus but um i just go through on a regular basis on everything and hold and

it's a list of emails like if if I'm waiting for a client, I send them the client, the email saying, Hey, what's going on with this project? Or, you know, what are you doing?

And it gives you a way to keep things rolling without you being the, the bottleneck. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting. You guys covered that. I would recommend going to listening to the whole episode of, of nested folders on project. Cause you guys had a lot of great ideas there. I thought, and, um, this is an area that's

increasingly coming to my forefront of attention that I need to be actively pursuing a way to keep track of my projects in a way that's more obvious than burying it in an application somewhere. Well, Rose, thank you so much for coming on today. I think it's funny that we got through like 10% of our outline. So obviously we have a lot to talk about when it comes to focus with Rosemary Orchard. We're going to have to have you back someday. Well, that would be lovely. I'm always willing to talk to you, David and Mike. So you for having me i'm going to keep this outline so i can save myself the work that we're already here um rose where do people go to find the stuff you're doing these days uh well if you go to rosemary orchard dot com then you get links to books podcasts and so on uh the the place i'm publishing most

regularly outside of my podcast is uh over at theweetsetup.com, though, where there's lots of great stuff, including Mike posts there as well and does all sorts of magic and amazing things. Mike just did a post over at Sweet Setup. It is Mike's opus on Rome Research and Obsidian. And I know you put a lot of work into that, Mike. I think we'll put a link in the show notes. You put a lot of work into that, Mike. I think we'll put a link in the show notes. You guys should go check that out if you're curious, because it's the most thorough explanation of which is the right tool for you that I've seen from anywhere.

And this was a question that I had when I was starting down this road. Yeah, I've had the same question. I spent a lot of time in both camps. So I get asked this a lot, and I did what I do, which is overthink it and then write 6,500 words and create a quiz. I like the quiz. That's cool. Well, we are the focus podcast. You can find us over relay.fm slash focused. We also have a very friendly forum over at the Mac power users at talk.macpowerusers.com. We've got our own room there.

And there is a very nice group of people there that are on the same journey with us and have some really good and insightful and supporting comments. So I would recommend going there if this stuff is of any interest to you. Thank you to our sponsors today. And that's our friends over at Indeed, Squarespace, and ExpressVPN. Before we leave, I want to mention one other show on RelayFM that I like called Top Four. With Top Four, hosts Tiff and Marco Arment can make a Top Four list out of anything, and it will probably make you delightfully furious. I think they get it wrong so often, but I can't stop listening. Indulge in the randomness and listen for yourself at relay.fm slash top four or search for top four wherever you get your podcasts.

Nothing can escape Margo and Tiff's hilarious judgments. Go check it out for yourself. And once again, we are the Focus Podcast. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.