Focused - 133: Success & Failure

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

David & Mike do an audit of their productivity workflows and share what's working (and what isn't).

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'm doing great. I am on sabbatical, which I know people are a little bit annoyed sometimes me bringing that up. We're going to talk about some of the stuff that's working and not working for us today though and this is a big thing i think in terms of what is working for me and reducing the amount of stress that i uh maybe sometimes don't do such a great job of dealing with i think you're too sensitive i think we got like one or maybe two

complaints about talking about sabbaticals but i think it's okay i think a lot of listeners are interested in this stuff i feel a little little bit bad bringing it up, but this every eight weeks thing, this has been really great. And this is not just a me thing. I know a couple people, Sean Blanc, the sweet setup, that's

where I picked up this habit, but Sean McCabe has been doing this for a long time, and I've seen a lot of other people who are embracing this kind of regular sabbatical. And sabbatical is probably the wrong term, but a week long is not typically what you think of in terms of a sabbatical, but a scheduled break. That's been pretty awesome. Yeah, and put a pin in that. We're going to talk about that later today because I have thoughts and complications. Today is an interesting show. We've been covering a lot of ground lately.

And I know those of you that like our guests, we do have several guests lined up. We've just had some issues with guests having last minute problems and whatnot. So we do have some guest shows on the schedule. They'll be coming back. We're not just going to be talking me and Mike to you every, you know, episode now on, but we have been going pretty hard at some pretty deep topics. And I thought for today, it'd be fun to stop and catch our breath. One of the things I like about the show and one of the things we designed into it was the idea that, you know, neither Mike nor I have all the answers. And there are so many terrible books and podcasts out there in this

kind of productivity space that want to tell you they have all the answers. And the fact is nobody does. You know, this is a very personal journey for everybody and things that are going to work for me and Mike, or even things that work for Mike may not work for me. Things that work for both of us may not work for you, dear listener. But we would like to have you listen to the show and put together a tool set that does work for you. And I think one of the ways we can help is to talk about our own foibles and successes. And since we've been covering so much lately, I thought we'd just stop and catch our breath and share where things are working for us and where things are not working for us today.

And then we took a look at, we start working on this outline and suddenly we've got a lot of stuff in here. Mike, both of us are, are successful in some of the stuff and we're both struggling to at the same time. So you're not alone out there. We're all trying to figure this out together,

and today we're going to take a break and talk about that. And what's interesting to me about that, by the way, is that some of this stuff has kind of shifted and changed a little bit over the years. So it's not even where maybe in the past I would have thought, well, I'm going to nail down my journaling habit or whatever, and now I'm not going to have to think about it anymore. But the truth is, I'm constantly going back and asking myself, what is the right thing for right now? And I discovered putting together this outline that some of the things that aren't working are things that I thought were going to work forever. And it's forced me to kind of go back to the drawing board and ask myself why and figure out what I can do to make that work forever. And it's forced me to kind of go back to the drawing board and ask myself why

and figure out what I can do to make that work again. Yeah. And I want to get to that in just a minute. Before we do, though, I just want to self-promote for a minute. How is that for an uncomfortable laugh? But I'm doing a free webinar on Apple Mail in two days. And two days after the show publishes, I'm going to be doing just a little webinar. Lately, I've been kind of giving up hope on some of the plugins for Apple Mail, but I'm still using Apple Mail because it's the most stable of the lot. And I've been writing a bunch of custom Apple scripts and doing a bunch of weird automation stuff to make Apple mail work better for me. And I don't have a book to sell or anything, but it's just, it's just something that I felt like was helping me and I want to share it. So, um, there's no cost. Uh, you can go ahead and sign up. There's still some space. Um, if you can't be there, it's 9am on Thursday

of this week, as we publish this. Um, if you can't be there, you will get a link afterwards. You can watch it afterwards and, uh, I'd love to have't be there, you will get a link afterwards. You can watch it afterwards and I'd love to have you there. So we'll put a link in the show notes and see you Thursday if you're interested in getting a little better at Apple Mill. But getting back to the point, Mike, you just had a minute ago. You know, it is the idea that we are set in concrete, I think, is an easy one to make when you're trying to nail down these productivity and focus habits. And what works for you today does not necessarily work for you tomorrow. Life circumstances change.

And I do think there is a friction there. And journaling is a good one to discuss in that. to discuss in that because both you and I have over the years, uh, built before the show recorded. And since the show started recording kind of waffle back and forth between paper and digital and different digital tools and different paper tools. And, you know,

if it's a journal, it'd probably be best if you used one, one medium. Like I, I was, my wife and I watched a great show on HBO called Gentleman Jack. And it's about this, this woman who was really, I mean, ahead of her time, you know, she did not, this was set in, I want to say the, the mid 1800s. I don't remember, but you know, she wanted to run

own property and do a whole bunch of stuff. She's a set in England. And they made kind of a funny drama series about her, how society is engineered against her being her best self. But she does it anyway. And she's just like a force of nature. It's a great show. I'd recommend watching it. But the only reason we have her story at all is because she kept these very meticulous diaries. And she kept them in a

large format diary book and when she died it was scandalous to her family all the things she wrote in them because she also wrote some explicit stuff in there and instead of throwing them on the fire somebody in you know the mid 18th or mid 19 century decided, let's just nail them into the walls because I don't know why they did that, but they, uh, uh, it's, it's like they had a mansion somewhere in England and, and they were doing some construction and somebody literally stuffed them into the walls and put paneling on top of them. And that was the end of the story until recently somebody discovered these journals when they were refurbing the house. And now they have this great story of her. And it's all because she had this single format. She didn't have it in like day one and text files and some paper too. She had a journal that documented her life and they turned

it into a TV show. Interesting. I don't think I'm going to be stuffing my journals in the walls. Yeah. But I mean, at the same time, you look at the journaling legacy you and I are creating with our hot potato jumping, and you wonder, could anyone even put together the story of our lives or the way we keep jumping around? That's true. We're going to cover that in Deep Focus today, I think, because we've done enough in the main show on journaling. But I think we're going to talk about journal formatting and kind of where we are. But I do think that that's just a canary in a coal mine. There's a whole bunch of stuff we do as we try to get focused in tools that we adopt that make sense for some time, and then after a while, don't make sense anymore. Yeah. And my big thing with journaling lately has been an Obsidian plugin,

of course. So I'll share all the details with that in Deep Focus. By the way, we did this, but I don't know if we mentioned it, that the Deep Focus feed also is ad-free now. So if you want to support the show, you can do that, relay.fm.com. And then you get access to the longer episodes and the ad-free versions. Yay. One other thing we should mention here is that right now, as we record this, Relay is kicking off their

fundraiser for St. Jude. And this is one of my favorite things to be a part of every single year. I really love the work that St. Jude does. I really love the work that St. Jude does. I really love the personal connection to Stephen's family, and I'm really proud to help support this wonderful cause. I did not realize until recently that 80% of the cost associated with the care that St. Jude provides comes from donation support like this.

And so that makes this stuff seem really, really important. And that's because it is. St. Jude doesn't just take care of patients and strive to improve the lives of kids with cancer, but they share their research as well. So this is an absolutely worthwhile cause that I'm thrilled to support. As we're recording this today, we've got over $43,000 raised for St. Jude. The goal this year for Relay, and this will go on through September, is $333,333.33. And if you can donate $100, great. If you can only donate a couple dollars, that's completely fine.

I have donated to this every single year. I'm going to do it again, and I would encourage our listeners to do the same. Yeah, this is something we actually budget for, and the Sparks Family budget. There's a few charities we support, and this is one of the big ones. And I'll tell you, it feels really great sitting around the dinner table with your kids talking about what we're going to do this year for kids who have cancer. I mean, we live in a

society that is far, far too polarized right now. And it's nice, I feel like, when there's something we can all agree upon and, and kids having cancer needing help is something we should all be able to agree upon. So hopefully everybody can, can help out a little bit. And if you can only afford $5, that's okay. Cause if you think about the number of people that listen to the show, if they all contributed $5, that's an incredible amount of money. So it would really be a big help. So anyway, please give it some thought. And you'll be hearing about it more over the next month as we work towards hitting that goal. There's some cool stuff going on with the different

milestones with this too, by the way. I believe on the page $55,000, Stephen's going to disassemble his next cube on stream. There's the podcast-a-thon that is happening on September 17th. So we're not just going to hear about this. There's some cool stuff that's going to be happening as we hit these different milestones. Yeah, all good stuff. All right. So because I'm an optimist, I think let's start our show today about successes and failures with some success. Okay. Let's talk about the things that seem to be working for us. And the one, I think maybe the biggest thing that's working for me and was frankly, one of the hardest habits and like practices to adopt is the shutdown. It literally took me years to get

a reliable shutdown in my system. But, you know, the idea that you will just take as gospel that, you know, the last hour of the day before you get really tired, you'll stop and just kind of look at the mess of the day you just went through and, you know, tie up any loose threads, maybe deal with email, definitely look at tomorrow and make plans for tomorrow about what you're going to do and just kind of finish the day with a, with a bow tied around it and have a plan in motion for the next day. And I'll, I'll asterisk that that. Some people will tell me that I can't plan tomorrow. At the end of the day, I'm too tired or that's just not the way my brain works. I need to do it in the morning. That's fine. But I find planning the next day, the night before

just makes, I mean, it is such a bang for the buck improvement in my life. I just can't get over how much more I get done when I wake up with a plan already in place. I mean, it's not like 10% better. It's like 100% better. And it happens every time. I mean, it's like so reliable that if I spend the time to shut down and plan the next day that I'm more, more successful the next day. I feel better about myself. I'm in a better mood because I'm getting work done, but I also am not killing myself and getting all stressed out. There's just something about it that's magical.

And yet it is such a tempting habit to not keep. I don't, I don't know why, because it's like, it's so obvious that you're going to get this thing. It's like, if somebody said, Hey, you know, just take 10 minutes and you're going to get an extra $100 tomorrow. All you got to do is take 10 minutes to do this. You would do it, right? You wouldn't even think twice about it.

But for some reason with this productivity gain, I guess it's just a little too, you know, it's a little too cryptic for your brain to just accept that, you know, you will get this huge payoff for spending an extra hour now. And as I was developing the habit, I knew that it worked for me, but I would skip it like half the time. And it's just crazy that I would do that. But at this point, I've got to where it's a habit now. It's not, it's no longer takes active willpower for me to do it. It just happens if that makes any sense. And I'm so glad I have that habit. And it really just works if you, if you're out there and you've been hearing me bang on about this on the show for a couple of years and you haven't tried it, I can't recommend enough

trying to do this, but I do understand how hard it is to develop this habit. Because when you get to the end of the day, there's two things you're going to be tempted to do. The first is just try to squeeze out another hour of work, you know, because you're, you're in the flow or whatever, or just stop. You know, it's like, I've had enough. I want to go play video games. I want to go hang out with my kids or, or take my dog to the park and, you know, just plan your day around it. For me, it's about 4.30 every day that I just, it's a hard stop and I got to shut down. And if I have more work to do, I may do it after the shutdown, but I do not put off the shutdown.

Interesting. So you occasionally shut down before you're completely done working? Yeah. I mean, like yesterday is a good example. I wanted to put more time into the outline for today's show. And there was a variety of legal things that happened yesterday that took over my day. And I got to 4.30 and I was like, well, I should work on the outline for tomorrow's focused episode, but it's shutdown time. So I'm going to shut down. So I shut down. Then we, I had dinner with my family and then I sat down and worked on the outline in the evening. And that happens sometimes, but you know, in the old days I would have put off the shutdown,

done the outline, but then I never would have shut down when I got to after dinner, I would have just goofed off. I would not have bothered shutting down. But I find that the payoff is just so tremendous that I have to build. I mean, it's like a permanent block in my schedule. I know we've talked about the shutdown stuff before, but do you mind real quickly just running through what your shutdown routine involves? Yeah, I mean, it varies on workload and what I'm doing. Like certain days are more legal focused. Others are more Max Barkey focused. But the first thing I do is I ignore email and most communications throughout the day,

even text messages and Slack to a large extent. So the first thing I do is I go through all that stuff. And if there's any email that came in that, that requires urgent reply, I'll take care of it right there. If there's, you know, all my Slack and message stuff, I'll go through and answer all that. So first thing I'll do is I'll handle the comms, you know, and then the next thing I will do is, is look at, go back and look over the day and see if there's any follow up items. Like a lot of times I'll have a phone call with a client and there'll be additional work that comes out of that. And maybe I'll capture into OmniFocus or just take some notes or whatever, but I will,

I will, I will get whatever work I agree to do into my system. So I'm, you know, I'm bringing all the plates to the ground from the day. And this is kind of speaking generally. And then then once I've kind of finished today, then I turn my attention to tomorrow. And the first thing I do is I look at the calendar and then I look at my OmniFocus tasks for the next day and I plan the day. And like if I have too much lined up between the calendar and OmniFocus, I start pushing things out. Maybe there's some calendar events that go away, or maybe there's some tasks that get pushed further into the future or deleted. I also, at that point, I have a script that sends out confirmations for like client meetings, like a call or something. There's an email that gets sent out to them, just confirming that we're talking tomorrow at 2 PM. So all that kind of gets handled.

out to them, just confirming that we're talking tomorrow at 2 PM. So all that kind of gets handled. And then the last bit of it is that I block out the next day. You know, I, I make my blocks for tomorrow and that's where the rubber meets the road. You know, if I have all my blocks in and I see that I still have tasks that are unaccounted for, I, I push them away, I get rid of them or whatever, but I start the day with a realistic plan. And the reason I think that works so well for me at the end of the day is because I'm tired at the end of the day. I go hard all day. And the 5 p.m. version of Sparky is much more realistic about what can get done in a day than the 7 a.m. version is. 7 a.m. Sparky thinks he can conquer the world and will definitely take on more work than he can do in a day. 7 a.m. Sparky sounds like a fool.

Yeah, that guy, well, he's an optimist. We all like those optimists. But then, you know, 5 p.m. Sparky's like, man, what'd you do to me? I feel like I worked all day and I only got like, you know, 20% of it done. What's wrong with you giving me all this work? You know? So, so anyway, the end of the day is, is for me the time to do it. I think one of the, the ways you can tell whether that makes sense for you is if you're a night owl or if you're a morning person.

And I'm definitely more of a morning person than a night owl in the evening. My, my ability to think critically and work hard really drops off. But I know people who like really hit their stride at 9 PM and they go to like 2 AM. I don't think those people should be planning their next day at their prime time. You know, we,

we've used that term before, so I would not plan my next day. If I am a night, night owl, you know, we, we've used that term before. So I would not plan my next day if I am a night owl, you know, wait till you wake up in the morning and you're kind of getting rolling, or maybe you wake up at noon if you stay up that late, but you know, whenever you get up, then you plan your day. Then I think the idea is the low energy part of your day is the time to do that planning because I think the low energy version of yourself is more realistic with the planning. Because I think the low energy version of yourself is more realistic with the planning.

Sure. But yeah, that shutdown is sacred to me. And it took a lot of hard work for me to turn that into a routine. And I am super into making sure that happens. All of a sudden, we're able to leave the house again. And so we're able to go to Disney again, which is really fun. But I still make a point when I get home from one of those trips to plan the next day before I go to bed. Because I don't want that shutdown. I don't want to have to go through the pain of trying to turn that shutdown into a habit again.

Sure. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. You got some momentum. May as well keep it. What's working for you? The number one thing that is working for me is delegation. We talked, I think, in deep focus not too long ago about the fact that I have a VA now and it's going really well. I am offloading more and more things to the VA, things that I never thought I would offload because they were sacred tasks to me. One of the things that I'm currently experimenting with is I record these sermon sketchnote videos after the Sunday a.m. services that I attend.

And I just share my sketchnote and walk through kind of what I was thinking when I take the sketchnote. And I have a set process for editing those. And those are very important to me. But I realized that if I can offload this, then I can do more of them. this then I can do more of them so I created the SOP for it I just videoed myself going through the whole thing uploaded that and got my my VA screen flow so they could do that the same thing that that I do and I haven't actually gotten one back from them yet but all the pieces are there for me to just record it upload it and then the idea is that they can handle eventually all of the editing uploading to youtube posting to wordpress and all of that i'll be involved at the beginning just because

i care so much about these that i want to make sure that they are the way that i would have done them but i'm learning through delegation here that i'm really not as great at some stuff as I thought I was. Even though I care a lot, there are people who are better at things than me. Yeah, I feel like delegation is kind of the gift that keeps giving. If you start getting better at delegating and get some people you can rely on to do the work for you, it just never stops. You know what I mean? The, the ability, like I am, I have a couple people that help me and now that is like part of my filter system. Like we're going to talk, if we have time, I'm not sure we're going to get through all these today, but if we get to, if we get to mail, like right now I'm thinking about delegation with email. And I think that

there is something that, you know, having that as a that as a tool on your belt, the ability to hand some work off can just really, really feel life changing in terms of like getting control of where you actually spend your time. Yeah. And the stuff that I'm delegating, I realize it doesn't have to be like a huge investment. Maybe you're listening to this and you think, oh, isn't Mike fancy? He's got a virtual assistant. Well, I'm really not paying them a whole lot. It's just something they can do a few hours a week

on the side. But it's a few hours where I don't have to be thinking about those few hours the rest of my week. That's where a lot of the stress comes from. There's another piece to this too, by the way, with the other two podcasts that I do, which is the Bookworm podcast I do with Joe Buehlig and then the Intentional Family podcast I do with my wife, that those I have offloaded the job of editing those to my son. And that, again, was very difficult to do because I consider myself a pretty good podcast editor.

My wife will watch me and I'll be doing it on my iPad using Ferrite. I'm editing Intentional Family. She's listening to it. She's like, wow, you're pretty good at making that sound like a very smooth conversation, which I think is part of the art of podcast editing is you don't want to edit out every or filler word, but you do want to make it sound natural. You don't want it to be distracting. And so there's kind of like this fine line there, in my opinion. So I was concerned about my 13-year-old son. Is he going to be able to understand the nuance there? And he's doing a really great job. I think every time he does an edit, I find just a couple of spots that i'll point out and

say this is how i would edit this and he's like oh yeah that makes sense and he's just learning a ton he's getting really really good at it and it's saving me a lot of not just time and effort but like i was talking about the fact that i need to edit this so i can publish it by a certain date fact that I need to edit this so I can publish it by a certain date, now that's not on my plate. And so when I am sitting down to do anything else, that's not weighing on me like it would have. And I didn't realize how much that stuff was weighing on me until I started delegating a few of these things. So between the VA helping with some of the faith-based productivity stuff and my son helping out with some of the podcast editing, this has eliminated so much stress. And with the podcast editing in particular, that was kind of spurred by the fact that he's got some friends who are getting fast food jobs and he wants to make some

money. I'm like, well, if you really want to do that, I mean, I guess you could, but this might be a better option. Yeah, yeah. You know, why not learn a marketable skill? And actually, since he started doing that, we mentioned on Intentional Family that he was doing the editing, and he's actually got another offer from somebody to do some podcast editing. So I'm hoping he's starting to see that kind of the Cal Newport deep work style, like if you have valuable skills, then the marketplace will reward you for that. And just don't go do what everybody else does just because that's what you see. There are other options out there, which is kind of a common theme with

my next one here too. Well, I do think one thing you mentioned that I would recommend is if you decide to bring someone in to help you, and there are so many options in the modern world. I mean, you can get somebody in a different country that will help you. Like at my law firm, we did a lot of dictation and it was before the dictation software is much better now than it was back when we were doing this, but we actually hired a transcriptionist in the UK. And the beauty of it was she would work while we would sleep. So we would, at the end of the day, we'd have this pile of dictation for her. And we come back the next morning, it would all be done. And there's just so many interesting

options available to you right now, but the handoff is just so important. Usually the reason why people try a virtual assistant and doesn't work is because it's usually the fault of the person hiring the VA that they just didn't do a good enough job explaining or instructing. And this is something where screen capture software is so useful because so many of these tasks are computer based. So with my, uh, my assistant, any new job I give her, from the simplest to the most complex, I make a screencast of how I do it. And I just give her the video. And we have this now library of videos, and they're properly titled and organized. So if I give her a task that only happens once every three months, I don't feel bad about giving it to her in three months because she may have forgotten how to do it, but she needs to go back and watch the video again. Yeah. I'm building up my library of

those screencasts as well. Part of me wants to break them apart and have text for all of the individual settings and things like that. But I'm kind of fighting against that at the moment because I know that's going to slow me down. I'm okay with going back in and adding those things where it's appropriate. I think it does make sense for these are kind of the settings that I use for the transitions in ScreenFlow and things like that, but not doing that on the front end, which is where I typically would think to do it, that's where my brain wants to go. It's not finished until I document all of that stuff. That makes it a lot more tenable to build these things.

Not having to worry about, did I capture every single thing in text form as well? Because I think that it's probably just my preference. I would want to see that checklist. So I assume that everybody else does. But the truth is that going back and adding all that stuff means it takes twice as long to make the documentation for it. Maybe they don't even need it. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Timing. Go to timingapp.com slash focus for the automatic timing app for macOS. Use this link to save 10% on your

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having to lift a finger. You can trust it to always give you the complete picture, and you don't have to worry about starting and stopping timers. But Timing's intelligent time tracking doesn't stop there. It detects when you are in a video call and lets you record what the meeting was about afterwards. And there's even more magic like this in Timing to make recording your time as easy as possible. And if you are collaborating with colleagues, Timing's Teams feature lets you share projects with them and record everyone's time in a central location, with them and record everyone's time in a central location, which lets managers get a quick overview of where their team members spend their time while preserving their privacy. Because which apps, documents, and websites each team member's used stays private and is not visible to managers. I've been having trouble lately with manual timers. I just keep forgetting to set them,

and then all my time tracking data kind of turns into garbage. But I've always had Timing running in the background and Timing is the time tracking app I really rely upon. It's so easy to install and set up. You can customize it to learn the way you work. So it tracks time for the areas of concern that you have and it's always just there taking care of it for you. You don't have to manually press any buttons and that makes a huge difference. So if you want to take control of how you spend your time and improve your productivity,

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Our thanks to Timing for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Another success for me has been habit tracking. We did a show on this about three or four months ago. And at the time I was looking for an app to help me out with it. And there were a lot of apps, Mike recommended streaks. And I, uh, that one stuck for me. I just like what they've done. They've got a version on the Mac, on the M1 Max now that's great. You can track your habits on your watch, your phone, your iPad, your Mac. They just make it really simple. And the mechanic of whether you're doing it once or three times a day, they make it really simple. As an example with streaks, I've been trying to track my food lately

and I have it as a three-time-a-day check. I check in, you know, in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening with my food tracking, make sure I didn't miss anything. And that, you know, just, I've always been good at building new habits, but Streaks is like bringing a power tool to the game, and it really has stuck with me. I complained at the time we did the show that it only allowed you to track 12 habits and in the interim they've added the ability to put more pages of habits and i don't know if you're aware that mike have you are you still using streaks i use it occasionally i have some shortcuts set to automatically log things as complete when I do certain actions on my phone, but I am not

using it a whole lot for manual habit tracking because my habits are pretty established at this point. Well, I'm using it and they've added the ability to add more habits, but for after complaining that they didn't have enough, I'm not using any of the new ones. It's fine. I'm good. that they didn't have enough, I'm not using any of the new ones. It's fine. I'm good. So, and like Mike, I also agree that if there's a habit you have every day, like meditation is a good one. I've got that in there and I recently finally took it out because I've been meditating since 1992. I mean, I don't need to track that, you know? Um, yeah. So it's, uh, that was dumb to have that. And there's a habit. So either way, um, it, I think it's really great. And, and some things that I'm working on with myself, um, having kind of a little reminder on my wrist

or on my phone makes a difference. And, uh, this, this app has really been the best experience I've had with trying as a mechanism for developing new habits. And I've tried a lot of apps. Yeah, this is a good one. I think it is a phenomenal tool for creating a new habit. And I have been thinking about recently what other habits do I want to create or what current habits are not serving me well that I should modify or potentially remove. And Streaks is phenomenal at helping you build those chains. One of my favorite features of Streaks is that you can set up widgets for individual habits that will give you all of your streak data.

For a while, I was actually maintaining a habit dashboard on one of the screens of my iPhone where I would have the six different habits that I was tracking, and I would have the three different views and the widget stacks, the small widget stacks. And that was pretty cool to look at, but I realized i don't really need to go in there and log this as complete every day and i don't get that dopamine kick from

extending the streak anymore it's my habits are just basically things that i i do consistently that's probably an indication that i should be looking for something else though. Yeah, well, I definitely agree with that. Like I don't get hung up on the data. Like I don't like to go and marvel at my calendar with all the little check marks on it. This is very much an in the moment thing. The app is there to help me make sure I hit this on a daily basis.

It's not there for me to try and make me feel good about myself that I clicked a box in an app three weeks ago. I do think there's value in that though. If you're trying to get something to stick, that's a great way to do it. Yeah. If you're building a new shutdown habit, for instance. Exactly. One thing that's working for me, I have this vague title here, but I can't think of a better way of defining this other than changing the rules. And what I mean by this is engaging in things on my terms. One of the best examples of this that I have is the fact that I am an assistant coach for my son's middle school soccer team.

I have two sons. One's in sixth grade, one's in eighth grade. And I played soccer in high school. I was pretty good at it. And I've always enjoyed playing it. I wanted to have something fun to do with them, but I didn't think this was even a possibility for me. My wife kind of talked me into this because I knew they had a need for an assistant coach. But the group that we're a part of, it's a homeschool group. They actually have games against other smaller schools, but they draw from a larger area. Practices are 25 minutes away and they're three nights a week, one of which absolutely never works for me. And the other one works about 50% of the time.

So when it was brought up that there needs to be an assistant coach on the right away, I'm like, oh, that would be really fun. I would enjoy playing soccer with my kids and coaching the middle school kids because they're at the level where I'm still, my ability is high enough that I could still teach them some things, but also they're good enough where they understand more than just the basic elementary principles. And so it's kind of like the sweet spot for me. But I didn't even think it was an option because I was only going to be there about 50% of the time.

My wife is like, well, you should just talk to the coach. So she set up this phone call with him. And I was kind of annoyed when he called because I didn't really want to even have the conversation. I'm like, they don't want me to do this. I can't commit to it. And I told him as soon as he called, so here's the deal. I would love to help out. I can make Mondays.

I can't make Thursdays. And Fridays are going to be 50-50 for me. So I totally get it if you want somebody else who is able to be there all the time. And I was kind of shocked when he's like, no, actually that would be great. So now I'm a soccer coach and it's been really, really rewarding. It's been going on for the last couple of weeks and it's one of my most favorite things to do. Uh, and it's the kind of thing that I'd completely written it off because I had a, I had a view of the expectations that was, wasn't really accurate. And I found from that experience that if I just voiced my opinion, like, well, yeah, I could maybe do that, but I'm going to do it this way, that actually people are a lot more open to that than I had anticipated.

So that explains this email you sent me last night that says you'd only podcast today if I sent you a bag of yellow M&Ms. No, no, I'm not Van Halen. no no i'm not not van halen well i do think that is um an option people forget about that like there's yes and there's no and then there's conditions right and conditions is an option i live in conditions that's because i'm a lawyer the lawyer side of my life, a lot of conditions. Sure. And it's the kind of thing that you maybe don't give yourself permission to think that way. And I would encourage people to do so. I'm not guaranteeing that you're going to have success every time that you try to say, well, I'm going to do it, but I'm going to do it this way. But what if it happened, you know, 50% of the time or 30% of the time, how much better would your life be,

whether that's personally, professionally, if you did get your way a little bit more? And I'm kind of discovering that I just need to ask. discovering that I just need to ask. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Something that's working for me is just, you know, this sounds silly, but you know, we're kind of, we're getting past COVID in a lot of ways. I know, I understand there's still this Delta variant, but having been vaccinated and wearing a mask and being careful, I'm feeling more comfortable leaving the house. And at the same time, anybody who knows me from my other shows knows that my wife was a Disney employee up until the pandemic. But we're all big Disney fans in our house and we like to go together. And now they've restarted their past program. So you pay one fee and you can go whenever you want.

And being able to leave the house with my wife and go to Disneyland once or maybe even twice a week and just hang out with her for a couple hours is like doing wonders for me. I mean, I just can't get over how much I needed to get out of the house. I didn't realize it until we started doing it, but that has been really great for me. Nice. Yeah. We put so much emphasis on doing the work, but really the fun stuff,

that's the reason why we do the work in the first place. Yeah. And it's weird because our kids are in college, my, our kids are in college and like we had a couple of friends that had kids go to college and then they ended up getting divorced and it got us thinking, well, what, why is that, that these empty nesters suddenly can't stand each other? And, um, I felt like, I don't really think that's a risk for us. We've had a great relationship, but we thought we should do some stuff together. So we decided in addition to going back to the park, we started a YouTube channel together. And it's like the most unsuccessful YouTube channel in the history of YouTube.

Like, you know, I mean, we don't have that many people watching, but we make these short little videos when we go, but it gives us like kind of a mission when we go. And, uh, it is funny how, I guess I create work even when i'm playing but the it is fun and we're having a great time and uh that is something that's definitely working for me right now you know i always look forward to to hanging out with daisy for a couple hours and taking a little trip nice to tell you the truth the intentional family podcast I do with my wife is that version of that for me. I have no expectations in terms of listenership, audience size, whatever. It's just an outlet and we get to do something fun together. One thing that's working for me, I mentioned at the beginning, the sabbaticals, which when I say sabbatical, I'm basically talking about a scheduled vacation.

Every eighth week at the suite setup, the whole Blanc Media team takes the week off, which was really kind of weird at first. And I've heard Sean McCabe describe this in the following way, where the first time you do it, it does feel like a much needed break. And you come back and you feel recharged. And then the second time that you do it, you feel guilty about doing it because your body is kind of caught up a little bit from the break you took the last time, but isn't ready to disconnect again because you can see all the other work that needs to get done. And then by the third one, you really start to relish the week off and you look forward to it. That's what I've been doing. And when I say look forward to it, I mean, you look forward to a vacation as well, but this is

a little bit different. What I have found from my sabbaticals is like, this is the week where I get to just play. I get to chase all of the rabbits down the holes as far as I want to take them without having to think like, oh, I need to make sure that this thing happens work-wise. That's where some of the journaling stuff we're going to talk about next actually came from, is I just spent a day messing around with some plugins and trying out a bunch of things, and then finally stuff clicked, and I'm like, oh, this is awesome. I've also found a whole bunch of just little projects around the house, which I'm not a very handy person. So I don't really do a lot of that stuff, partially because when I see it, I figure it's going to take me a lot longer than somebody else could do it. it's going to take me a lot longer than somebody else could do it. So we tend to just hire a handy man to come do those sorts of things, except during sabbaticals. When there's sabbaticals,

I'll go get some tools and I'll figure out how to do it by myself. And I really enjoy doing that kind of stuff. It's not to the point where I want to continue to do those things outside of the sabbatical, but when I have the time and I don't have any obligations, I really do enjoy just putzing around with some of that stuff. And it's helped out a ton in terms of my mental state. I was thinking about this, not this last year, but the year before, which was after my first full year of working with the Blanc Media team and having these eight-week sabbaticals, I thought back, you know, end of the year, I guess that was 2020 or 2019, where was I, you know, this year compared to where was I last year. And I recognized that I was in a way better mental spot. And I think it really is because I forced myself to just disconnect from

the work other than recording the occasional podcast, which doesn't feel like work sometimes. But ideally, even that wouldn't happen, I guess, during a sabbatical week. I am a totally different person on sabbatical. My family, they had a term for it. I forget exactly how they said it. But basically, they said, you're a lot goofier when you're on sabbatical. I just am enjoying being around the house, acting like the goofy dad, I guess. All the jokes and the funny voices and the accents and things like that and just not having to think about work for a little while, I realized that doing that on a regular basis has been really, really good for me. And even if you can't take a whole week off every eight weeks or whatever, I would encourage people to think about how you can

implement this in some way, shape, or form, even if it's just for an afternoon, a month, or something like that. you need a break before you realize you need a break. And I'm realizing now that having done it consistently long enough, I like who I am as a person much better now. Yeah, I'm one of those that crashed on the rocks of the second sabbatical. I did one. And we talked to Sean about this, but it's really hard for me. If I was just doing the Mac Sparky gig, I think it would be something that would be a lot more practical for me to do. And I don't do like real, real intensive work for any single one of them. But every week stuff comes up for a few of them that needs my attention. And then you put that on top of the Max Barkey stuff.

I find it really hard to take that much consistent time off. I mean, even when we go on vacation, I've got a laptop with me because something always comes up. And I'm just really blocked on that. But that kind of gets into something that's not working for me. So we'll talk about that in just a little bit. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Gabby. How often do you notice the price of something being increased? It can happen with a lot of different things. Gas prices, price of groceries, clothes, and more. Prices seem to steadily creep up. And if you're looking to cut costs and find ways to save, you can start with your auto insurance.

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totally free. That's Gabby G-A-B-I.com slash focused. Go now to Gabby.com slash focused. Our thanks to Gabby for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. All right. So the first thing is not working for me. I kind of teased this before the break is that I still do not own a time machine. And that is super frustrating to me. You know, the, um, we've talked on the show about my kind of analogy of running downhill. That's the one that like resonates with me. And if you haven't heard me say this before, it's like when you're a little kid and you would get like a new pair of sneakers and you thought you could jump higher and run faster and inevitably you'd start running downhill. And when you run downhill, it's exhilarating because you're going really fast. But if you just stumble a little bit, you end up on your face. There's no room for error. And that is sometimes I feel like my whole productivity setup is built around me running downhill, which I am actively

trying to stop doing because I don't want to be on the verge of crashing every moment. So I'm getting better at it, but I am not entirely over it. And that's something that's still not quite working for me. I was thinking about in preparation for today's show, I was like, why is that? I mean, the why is pretty simple. I've got a lot of work. I make three podcasts. I make books and videos. And I have a daily blog. And I have a bunch of legal clients and clearly there are some areas in there where I could throw a little work overboard and flatten out that downhill. And I haven't done it yet. You know, I have started to do it and where I'm doing it is frankly in the legal practice. I'm being even more careful now about what work I take on and what work I don't do.

If a client gives me weird feelings, like they're not really listening to me, I just get rid of them. If they want me to do something that I'm not that familiar with in the old days where I just go do all the homework and research it, you got to do the job right. But now I'm not going to do that. I'll just hand it off to somebody that does that and I won't take the work. And so I'm starting to like get a little better at it, but the, the rate at which I'm making those decisions isn't fast enough, you know? So that's another why, you know, why am I not getting better at this faster? And I think it's just like right now I'm feeling, I mean, just between us, I'm feeling the pressure. You know, I've got two kids in college, one's in grad school,

one's in college, but it's the same thing. You got to write those checks every quarter. And, you know, Daisy lost her job because, you know, COVID and, you know, we're paying for insurance and we don't have her income. And it's like, suddenly it's like, I, it's hard for me to not say yes to work. And I know this is something a lot of people struggle with. And this is something we talked about, you know, in the old days on the show of free agents, it's like, well, you got commitments and you can't take risks because you have commitments. And as much as I've told people, hey, you just have to have faith sometimes,

I'm not showing it myself. I didn't really recognize that in myself until prepping for today's show, but that's really what's happening is I feel that kind of underlying tension. And even though if you stuck me in a corner and said, hey, tell me the truth, if you get rid of some of this work, will you still be able to make everything work? And I think the answer would be absolutely yes. But without really sitting and like forcing myself to answer the question, I was kind of defaulting to like, no, no, no, things are tight right now. Take all the work you can get. And I'm still doing it to myself, Mike, which is like the exact opposite thing I recommend to people. So, so that's something that's not working for me right

now, but honestly kind of going through the process of, of identifying this for today's show has been, has been helpful for me. Now I need to start, start taking more steps. Well, I would encourage you, you are taking some steps. I mean, one of the things that was working well was taking the time off going to Disneyland, right right so don't be too hard on yourself but i also feel the that that pressure and that i don't know what the right word is it's like the siren song of uh of the opportunity yeah you don't want to let something pass because you don't know whether this is going to be something that turns into something big. And it's hard to say no to that stuff, but ultimately I'm happiest when I do say no. Yeah, and also just kind of looking at the analytics of it.

That's another thing I've done in the last 48 hours as we prep for today. Let's take the example of taking on some unique legal problem. The way I bill my clients, I generally don't bill for research time because I feel like if I have to learn something to do the work for you, that you shouldn't have to pay for my education, right? So when I look at like the numbers on some of these unique problems I took on in the last six months, I didn't make particularly a lot of money on them. It was really a time sink in a lot of ways where if I just handed it off, it would have netted out way better for me. And like, so I think the, um, the natural thing when you are feeling pressure is to

follow your gut and your gut says, take the work, you know, get as much work on the books as you can, but you need to be more discriminating than that. Like, well, what kind of, how does this work pay? You know, that's something you have to ask yourself. Is this the kind of work where I can get an hour's pay for an hour's work? Or is this the kind of work where I'll get an hour's pay for three hours of work? And you have to look at that stuff and make a better decision. And paying attention to the analytics of where you make money and where you don't when you're taking work because you feel money pressure.

I think that's something that not enough people do, myself included. So I'm like, I'm making a checklist now for new projects. And so anytime I take on a new legal client project, I'm going to force myself to go through the checklist. And one of them is going to be to check, is this something that financially I can afford to do? Because if it's the type of work where I can't charge for half of it, I probably can't afford to take the work. Sure. I like that. I'm curious

to hear how that checklist works, because I can see a scenario, not with you specifically, but probably with me, where I have the checklist and I go through it and the data from the checklist says, you shouldn't do this. And then I manufacture a reason why it will be okay anyways and engage with the project. So here it is. Here is how it stands right now because I have an Obsidian template for it. Is this in my wheelhouse? Can I afford to take this work, which is aimed at the thing we just talked about? Do I have time for this? Is this a quality person? So I use a quality person. If somebody asks me to work and I don't believe they're a quality person, I don't do work with them. And then the last one is, are there

no other warning signs I should be paying attention to? Because sometimes you do see warning signs and you ignore them. So I, I, you know, my, my promise to myself is that when I, every time I set up a new project in obsidian, this template drops this checklist in there and it's the first item on a new project. And I forced myself to actually answer the questions you don't just mindlessly click four boxes and move on you know you know you have to like answer the questions and even just like i think what i'm probably going to do is insist that i answer them by typing an answer and you know and that way i need to have a good yes to each one of those or nowhere you know are there

no other issues no there's no other issues but you know i mean so i need to uh to substantively respond to that but but i so so there's a the problem i have is i'm still taking on too much work and that gets in the way of things like oh can i take a whole week off for a sabbatical with my current workload there's no way that's going to happen you know um can i take a whole week off for a sabbatical with my current workload there's no way that's going to happen you know um can i take an afternoon off to go to disneyland when i feel like it yes you know can i even take a few days off probably but the um but you know like every eight weeks take a week off that is just not in the cards for me right now which i would argue is maybe an okay compromise if you want to implement a regular disney thing and you're going there for an afternoon every other week or whatever instead

of taking a whole week off every eight weeks that's totally fine you know so i i don't think the format of it is quite as as important as the fact that you are taking the time off to disconnect. But I still am curious. I love those questions that you shared. The one that is most interesting to me is the red flags. I would love to hear at some point if there is a project where you jot down red flags and you decide to take it anyways, and what happens with that project? No, I've been burned by that before you know i practice law now for almost 30 years so um like when i have a new client come in one of my questions to them always is what's your goal you know what is it that you want i mean if my job is the quarterback to get the ball in the end zone how do you define the end zone and i i asked

that question for a reason because i need to understand what their expectations are because if their expectations are not something i can do for them then i will never make them happy yeah and like i once had a guy come in and it was a partnership dispute and he was very angry with his former partner this is back when i litigated cases and he wanted me to sue his partner for him and i said well what is you know what's your goal at the end of this what do you want to accomplish and he said i want to make sure that his kids can't go to college i want to make sure that he has nothing wow and i said okay um you know i don't have time for you right now but let me see if I can find somebody for you. And I had a friend that was starting a new practice out and wanted work.

And I said, okay, I'm going to refer this guy to you, but let me tell you how he answered that question. And then like two years later, my friend that I referred the case to called me up and says, Dave, that guy you sent me, now he's suing me for malpractice. I'm like, well, I told you, you know, I mean, someone like that, you know? So, so yeah, I have seen red flags before. I've been burned by them a few times, but in general, you know, one of the good services given to me by the attorney who kind of taught me the ropes was, you know, when you see those red flags flags you run from them because there's just it's just not worth it right yeah so is that a deal breaker then if you list a red flag yeah that's it they're out yeah and i mean i would think i can't i mean just remember the

overall goal here for me is to flatten out that downhill run so the default should not be i can't wait to take everything on that comes to me. It should be what is so good, you know, was that it was their book, like, um, not just yes, hell yes, or something like that. I forget what it's called. Yeah. The Derek Sivers book. Yeah. So, I mean, I feel like, especially with legal work, it really has to get through because the fact is I'm really passionate about the Max Merky stuff. I've got a bunch of field guides half-produced. I want to get them done and out the door. There's stuff I want to be doing that is not lawyer work.

And I'm not looking to give up being a lawyer. I like being a lawyer. I help people. But I'm also just looking to be more focused about what I do with that. And one thing that's not working for me right now is I don't have the mix right. Well, one thing that's not working for me, and maybe this is a surprise to some people, but I have actually taken a break from time blocking and time tracking. And I do that during my sabbaticals anyways.

But even the last couple of weeks before the sabbatical, I found by the time we had shipped the To Obsidian and Beyond course for the suite setup that I was pretty burnt out. And I was recognizing that the time blocking and time tracking, it provides a lot of value. You mentioned this earlier, some of the things that it does give you. It gives you the intention by planning your day the day before. I don't have to worry about what I'm going to sit down and work on when I get down to my office to start work. Time tracking allows me to see whether the time that I think I'm spending on a project

is what I'm actually spending on the project. And as much as I've time tracked, I still feel like I work more than I actually do. So I still find that stuff valuable. But I found myself in a spot where I actually had more wiggle room in my schedule than I realized. And I was getting frustrated because I was attaching too rigidly to my time block plan. Does that make sense? Not really. Honestly, time blocking is so useful to me. I don't really understand how it's not helping you, but you know, that, you know, see my initial discussion at the beginning of today's show, everybody's different, you know, that, you know, see my initial discussion at the beginning of today's show, everybody's different, you know, but give me a more concrete example. Like what kind of day were you hitting where you're like, oh, time blocking is doesn't make sense anymore. Well, it doesn't make sense. And I'm going back to it after this sabbatical, but I needed to

force myself to not be so rigid with my plan. Maybe that's just my situation with five kids at home. But I found myself in the spot where I would plan my day and then my wife would say, hey, could we do this? And my immediate reaction was not just no, but I felt this tension starting to creep up by the fact that I had to say no, because most of the time it was something that I really wanted to do. Like, hey, can we go grab lunch together or something? And I would say no, and then I would just continue to work according to my schedule, and I would get done earlier than I thought I could. And then I would be upset that I actually did have an hour and a half where we could have gotten lunch together. And so what I'm

trying to force myself to do, and I feel like you're better at this than I am, is to just roll with what happens during the day a little bit more. All right, Mike, let me give you some wise advice here. You've probably never heard this before, but Eisenhower once said that planning is everything, but plans mean nothing. See, I know that, but I have trouble applying it because I'm so rigid. And so I'm forcing myself to just not be rigid at all and prove to myself, see, stuff is still going to get done. It's going to be okay. Because a lot of the work that I actually have to get done doesn't, it's not in a task manager. It's not something personal anyways. It's all kept in

notion for the suite setup. And so I have a lot of flexibility more so than I was allowing myself to function in. And so I'm trying to break some bad habits of rigidity, if that makes any sense. You are being way too hard on yourself with this thing. You do have to be flexible. When you told me that you felt stressed when your wife asked you to go to lunch, I'm like, oh, well, there's your mistake. You're doing it wrong. You really are. I mean, just to give you an example, my time blocks, like I make them the night before I have a shortcut script that I run that looks at my calendar and just pulls out every event and makes it a simple text list that has the start time and the event. And it just makes a text list. And then I drop that into obsidian.

And in my daily note for the day, there's this heading called the plan and that's the day plan. And then underneath it, I have one called the day. So there's day plan. And then underneath it, I have one called the day. So there's the plan and then there's the day. The plan was the plan. The day is the day. And as I go through the day, I vary from the plan. It may be because a client calls me or because my wife wants me to do something with her or my kid has a problem that I didn't know about. And I don't feel guilty at all. But having that plan, and a lot of times the plan doesn't get interrupted and I get through the day with the plan in place.

But a lot of times it does get interrupted and that's okay too. I just log it all. And that's also good information for me to know that like, okay, I can only stick to the plan some days. That's all right. I think you've got to be easy on yourself. But I still think there's inherent value in having the blocks. I agree.

And I am absolutely going back to time blocking my day as soon as I go back into work mode on Monday. But yeah, basically what I found was I have the ability to stick to my schedule most of the time. However, that is not necessarily the best use of my time. Basically, what I want to get better at doing is throughout the course of the day, be quick to answer what is the best thing to do right now. And maybe it's not the thing that I decided the night before i would be doing it this time and then be okay with that being different yeah i mean like last night um daisy

came down and she's like because the disney passes were made official yesterday as we record this and she's like hey you want to just go down there and get a corn dog, you know, because she was excited about having it. But I had, you know, because of the way yesterday went, I'm like, I can't. I got a plan for focused. And, you know, so there are some times when I do have to say no to her and I have to stick to the blocks. But if it wasn't for just the way yesterday went crazy on me, I absolutely would have said yes. And we would have gone for a corn dog at Disneyland yesterday. So,

so it, you know, you just gotta, you gotta know how to draw those lines. That's all. Yeah. But I think you're okay, man.

I think you're okay. I do think that if anybody wants to try time blocking and they feel like that, that is a concrete thing that they must do. I don't know how you could do it. I don't know how it would work. You would be miserable. You'd be like, it's like self-determination versus determinism, you know, where everything is already decided for you. It doesn't work that way. All you're doing by making these blocks is saying, is acknowledging what your big priorities are and trying to make space for them, you know, and sometimes a bigger priority shows up and a bigger priority is definitely

your wife. I agree with you 100%, but monkey brain Mike still screams when the plan gets changed. Now, something else you said that I think we are both are struggling right now. I am struggling with manual time tracking. You know, we did a show on it. You know, the Timery app has got some really cool upgrades, but for some reason, the last three weeks, I have tracked almost no time. And I just get off, I've just got off the train. I have trouble like getting the timers going. I actually like the idea of setting these timers because I

feel like it's another like mindfulness trigger like okay now i'm setting the timer for client work so now i'm going to do client work but for some reason i just got off the track and um i've been you know i do i still get good data because i use the timing app and gang i know we did an ad for timing today and i had no idea that was coming but the fact is i've been using the timing app that doesn't require you to manually throw a switch. But so I've been getting data out of that, but I haven't been using my usual time tracking stuff. And I want to get back on that. I think that does help. I like,

like I said earlier, you know, the two benefits for me are number one, actually the act of throwing the timer helps me get kind of my brain into into gear and getting the data at the end of the week but i i don't know man maybe i won't do it maybe i'll just because the timing i get the data i want out of the timing app i mean this is primarily about you know moving the needle and getting work done and all that's done on my mac anymore so So yeah, I don't know where I stand with that, but I like, like it's not working for me. And we talked about it on the show, like it was the easiest thing and everybody should do it. Now I'm finding that I'm having a real hard time doing it. Well, that's the thing with this stuff that isn't working. I don't think

you can correct me if I'm wrong, but looking at the things we have on the outline here, I don't think any of this is stuff that we're just like, oh, forget this, I'm not doing this anymore. It's just the way that we were doing it, we realize isn't quite hitting the mark, isn't quite moving the needle. So my next one is task management doesn't mean i'm not managing tasks but i did realize that the majority of my work happens in notion and do you mean obsidian well the creation of it happens in obsidian but the tracking of it for the suite setup happens inside of Notion. The podcasts, I don't have anything other than my big new year calendar behind me and the dates that we're going to publish things and then calendar events for when we're actually going to record them.

That's good enough for me. And so I've found that I don't have a great system in place for the personal stuff. I've tried a couple different things. I've added things in the Do app where it gives you the nagging reminders that something absolutely has to be done at a specific time. Most of my writing is going to happen inside of Obsidian. That is the app that I have open all day, every day. That's where the journaling is happening. I've kind of resisted dumping tasks in there too, but maybe that is the right thing for me. So kind of what I'm toying around with here are two potential solutions. One is just to put everything in Obsidian. And there are plugins that allow you to replicate a lot of task management functionality. The one that looks the best to me is called TQ. And you can do repeating tasks,

and you can use filters and queries to find whatever tasks wherever they are that meet certain criteria. I mean, it's basically essential task manager functions, but inside of Obsidian. essential task manager functions, but inside of Obsidian. The other one that I think is probably where I'm going to end up is to use Todoist. Not too long ago, Things released their Markdown update and everyone was going nuts about the fact that you can write in Markdown now on Things. And that got me thinking, well, what other applications support Markdown? There's actually a few of them. Todoist is one of them. So you can use Markdown in Todoist, not just in the descriptions for like the notes and things, but you can have Markdown formatted links in the Todoist titles. And then you combine that with the Obsidian plugin, which has gotten a lot better and it looks good on mobile now and all that.

I can use Todoist web filters to put tasks into Obsidian pages. If I wanted to track tasks for an individual project, I can do that there. And then with that plugin, I can also add tasks to Todoist from Obsidian. I don't know. But the thing I want to land on here is a simple solution. And Todoist does have all of the bells and whistles that a full task manager has. And maybe I don't need all of that stuff. Maybe just having tasks inside of Obsidian is fine for the personal stuff. is fine for the personal stuff. Yeah, it's funny because I went through a test recently on this where I thought, well, what if I threw OmniFocus overboard? It's like one of my favorite apps, but I do so much in Obsidian

and every client project at this point gets an Obsidian page where it's kind of like this central location for the project. What if I just put the tasks on that page? So I did a serious test for several weeks about working in that way. And what I found was that the thing, it just wasn't powerful enough. You know, even with the plugins, everything was very fiddly and took more time to manage. Where I've got OmniFocus focus which is a task that's actively developed and has a bunch of really great features in it where like i was rather than you know getting

on a yacht i was you know climbing into a clunky sailboat and thinking i could cross the ocean and um and it just wasn't going to work and And the bottom line is also OmniFocus has URL links built into it extensively. So like every page, like for a client project, has a markdown link to the word OmniFocus. And I click on that and it opens up that project in OmniFocus. And so I have immediate access to my task list. It's not embedded in Obsidian, but it is in a companion

application that has a bunch of power tools attached to it that Obsidian doesn't. So I felt like I spent a lot of time coming to the conclusion that this is not a problem for me. The current system is the right system. And I just kind of moved on with it. I didn't, didn't go down that anymore. So I'm curious to hear how that all works out for you. If I didn't have client work, it might be something I could pull off. But like I, I have a client just yesterday who has, I just helped negotiate a lease agreement for him. But the way the agreement works, if he doesn't want to renew he has to give notice in a very specific window of time four years from now omni focus is all set to do that for me like

it's already in there four years from now omni focus is going to tell me remind the client to deal with that and i'm not sure i could put together a system in obsidian or to do us that would give me the same level of comfort that I have that OmniFocus will take care of that. You couldn't. Yeah, it's not going to work. But in terms of managing writing tasks, which is most of what I do, Obsidian's probably fine.

Yeah. Well, you know what? That was a fun show. We actually have more on our list, but I think we've gone long enough today. Maybe we'll do this again sometime. If anything, I guess it was a mutual therapy session. a lot of time talking about techniques and tools and ideas, but you need to understand that this is a journey for all of us. And some of the stuff we're good at and some of the stuff, you know, we turn out we're not so good at and, and it's, it's difficult for us to, um, so keep that in mind as you're trying these things on, don't be afraid to throw things overboard and try something different if what you're doing doesn't work for you. Yeah. And I would be interested in hearing from the community what is working or what is not

working for you as well. So in the focused forum for this episode, if you've got something to share of something that really just has clicked for you or something that you've really tried to get to work for a long time. It just doesn't doesn't seem to be hitting the mark. I'd love to hear what those things are. You bet. You bet. Before we go, let me tell you about another show here on Relay FM, and that is Clockwise. Host Dan Morin and Micah Sargent invite two guests every week from a diverse pool of tech professionals to cover four tech topics in 30 minutes. Go to relay.fm slash clockwise or search for clockwise wherever you get your podcasts. You can find show notes for this episode at relay.fm slash focused slash 133. And the forum can be found at talk.macpowerusers.com. Thanks for listening.

Thanks to our sponsors this week, Timing and Gabby. And we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.