Focused - 134: Finding Space with Sean McCabe

Episode Date: September 14, 2021

Sean McCabe comes back to report in on what happened when his year-long sabbatical smacked into a pandemic and how he keeps his focus while winding up a new business.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? It is going great. And I'm really excited today because we have probably one of my favorite guests for the Focus podcast back. Welcome back, Sean West. Oh, wow. Thanks.

I'm excited to join again and honored to be one of the favorite guests. and that's because every time you come, you just bring these buckets of gold nuggets and I just feel like our listeners deserve more gold. So I'm really happy anytime you're willing to come on the show, Sean. Oh, thank you. I'm always excited to join. So yeah, yeah. Looking forward to getting into some fun stuff today.

Yeah, we've got a very interesting outline that I'm looking forward to getting started on. Before we do, Mike and I just wanted to take a minute to talk to the listeners about the ongoing relay fm plus saint jude um monthly fundraiser this is september childhood cancer awareness month and uh we've talked about this on prior episodes of the show but i just wanted to take a minute to remind you again how important this is i mean there's nothing in the

world that i think everybody can agree on easier than the fact that kids with cancer need help. And that's what St. Jude does. If you're a family and you find out that you're dealing with cancer with one of your children, you go to St. Jude and they take care of it. And Stephen and I, just in the most recent episode of Mac Power Users, talked about this, where he got the diagnosis for Josiah when he was just six months old. And all these things go through your mind, like, will my child be okay? Will we go bankrupt? How are we going to get through this? And St. Jude gives you all of that support. They take care of you. They fly you to the hospital, they feed you, they give you a support network, and most importantly, they take care of your sick child. And I love being a part of this fundraiser every year.

Like I said on MPU, if you've got $5 to throw at this, man, that's the best way you could spend $5 a day. Or just think about, you know, your monthly starbucks budget and just drink bad coffee for a month and help a family out that could really use it so um we really would appreciate you considering this um this is the month to do it uh relay just crossed an important threshold it really has now raised a million dollars over the last was was it three years, Mike, that we've been doing this now? Yes, this is the middle of the third year. So I think when they started, they had no idea they would reach that milestone this quickly, but it really is a pretty big deal. And you mentioned that for patients of St. Jude, they don't have to worry about any of the extra costs, which that adds up real quick. I found out this year that the most common form of childhood cancer is, I'm probably going to

mispronounce this, but acute lymphoblastic leukemia. And the average cost to treat just one child with that form of childhood cancer is $203,074. And that probably doesn't include the hotels and the meals for the family and all that stuff, which St. Jude provides for free. And it just is a very, when you think about it, you think that's the way it should be, right? No parent should have to worry about how am I going to pay to keep my child alive? Well, St. Jude just eliminates all of that pressure, but also 80% of the cost of operations for St. Jude come from fundraising efforts like this. So this is a great opportunity to support a very worthwhile cause. And no matter what you can contribute, I would ask that you do that. I'm going to contribute like I have every year.

I know, David, last time you said you budget this in as part of your yearly budget for the Sparks family. Cause we both believe in. And it doesn't matter if you've got $1,000 or just a couple of dollars that you can contribute to this. We just ask that you contribute something because it does add up quick. Yes, it does. And they're now over a million dollars.

Let's go for two, you know, let's do everything we can to take care of these kids. So please donate. We'd really appreciate it. And thank you for listening to us talk about this. It's very important to me and Mike and the entire Relay Network. Yes, stjude.org slash Relay if you want to contribute. And as we are recording this, the podcast-a-thon is coming up, which is a big part of the fundraising efforts for this. That's going to happen on September 17th from 12 to 8 p.m. Eastern Time. And that's going to be at twitch.tv slash RelayFM. All right, Sean, thank you again for coming back.

As I said earlier, you were a guest on episodes 56 and 101. And on episode 101, you convinced me to do a sabbatical, which I want to talk about later. But also at the time, you were getting ready to do your seven year, it's every seven years, right? Your full year sabbatical. Yes, and it was my first full year sabbatical that I was going to take. Yeah, and just to catch up the listeners, if you didn't happen to catch that episode, is Sean does this really remarkable practice where he works six weeks and takes the seventh week off, just like professors do their sabbaticals every, I believe, seven years. Sean took the idea, well, why don't I do it with weeks? And it had a very profound impact on his ability to get work done and keeping him fresh to come up with new ideas. But then he also decided, well, I'm going to do that for years as well as weeks. And so at the beginning of 2020, it was your seven-year

sabbatical. What could go wrong in 2020? Just take the year off, right? Yeah, I didn't get the memo about the pandemic. Yeah. So how did that go? Yeah, we moved out of our house. So no house, no car, just a backpack. And wife and I hit the road, went to the West Coast, kind of worked our way up the West States and then go to Europe and even Australia. And none of that ended up happening. And right before we went to Canada, I was going to go to Vancouver. We were having these meetups in the different cities and we're having a great time. But yeah, so pandemic put a damper on those plans. Part of the idea of traveling was to figure out where we wanted to live. So we had lived in Texas,

but didn't feel particularly attached to where we lived and thought we might try out some other places. So we're kind of scouting out where we might live long-term. And we were in Seattle when the pandemic hit the US and ended up driving to Boise and staying for some months long-term in Airbnbs. And we thought, well, it doesn't look like travel is going to be opening up anytime soon. We might as well settle down here because we really liked it in Boise. I didn't really get the appeal of Idaho, but I had never been. So once I was there, I was like, okay, I get this now. I get in trouble for talking about how much I like Idaho because everyone's like, no, don't move here, don't move here.

But we settled in Boise and we've been here over a year now. We got a lease on a place for a year and liked it so much, we just renewed. So yeah, that's where we are now, but kind of ended up stopping the sabbatical travels. Yeah. kind of ended up stopping the sabbatical travels. Yeah. So, I mean, to you, going into the sabbatical, I know that you were kind of trying out locations. And boy, I love the idea of that.

Just saying, let's just sell everything and get in the car, and then we'll figure out where we're going to put Roots down. I mean, that is such, it's like an Indiana Jones level leap of faith, you know? It's very freeing. Indiana Jones level leap of faith, you know? It's very freeing. It's so strange realizing how little you actually need. You know, you just got a backpack, literally just a backpack with a set of clothes and toiletries. And, you know, when you first start out, it's like, oh, what about toothpaste? And it's like, hey, it's going to be okay. You can buy toothpaste in other cities, you know, you don't have to stock up. Uh, but yeah, it was very freeing. Um, but, but also a bit disappointing, frankly, you know, with the pandemic, I'm, I'm, I'm so far from like feeling like I have any room to complain because so many people had it worse. So like, I don't even,

you know, I, I feel uncomfortable even talking about it, but like, I felt like I was really, really burned out, you know, just over the, you know, the decade of, of workaholism. And in recent years, I've, I've struck a better balance with that and, and don't work as much, but I still, I felt like I wanted to make up for all of the overworking by just having a year of nothing. And then when it was just like hunkered down in a house, you know, lockdown, not really doing anything. It's like, okay, I guess I'm on my sabbatical year, but I kind of just want something to do and ended up going back to work and starting this new business.

Yeah, but the grand adventure never happened. I mean, barely, barely. Are you going to, like, have you decided when things get better, maybe you'll resume that? Or are you going to have to wait another seven years? Well, I definitely thought about it. I would love to. The only thing is my wife actually decided to go back to school to become a therapist. So she's actually going to school here in Boise State and so

probably won't be traveling the world long term, but hopefully get a few trips in. Yeah, I had signed up to go to a conference in Boise and when I started looking at like the pictures and like the hotels and everything, I was like, this place is gorgeous. I had no idea that Boise was this gem, but I never made it there either because of the pandemic. It's beautiful. Yeah, Mike, you've been. Yeah, the conference that David was going to go to was the Craft and Commerce Conference, and I'd like to think I had a small part in convincing you to go to that, David. Yeah, but it didn't happen. I went the year before and just absolutely loved it. Heard Nathan Berry speak, who actually I originally heard him at your conference, Sean, back in the day in Austin.

Met Matt Raglin there, who's been a guest on, focused on a lot of other really interesting people doing some really cool things. But I remember being blown away by just the environment of Boise itself. the environment of Boise itself. I took one picture specifically where you're downtown and you're looking up this road and you see like downtown ish, big buildings. And then in the background, you see the mountains and I'm like, man, I could live here. It's, it's really beautiful. Um, one of, one of the nice things is, you know, when we hit the road for traveling on the sabbatical, we didn't have a car, you know, no car or anything. And so when we settled down here, we still didn't have a car. And it's been over a year now and we still don't have a car. We actually just bike everywhere.

Like we live a couple of miles from downtown and everything we need is super accessible. And I saw a tweet recently that was talking about just how underrated it is to live in a place where you can walk or bike or use a scooter to get around to places that you need. And I've just loved that aspect of not owning a car. Yeah, I did the same thing when my second daughter got her license. We had four people and three cars and two of them are college, and one of them had a job at the time.

And so for about a year, I didn't have a car. And what I would do is just I had a little e-bike because I live in the hills, and it's kind of hard to bike yourself up some of these hills. So I got a little help with a battery occasionally. So I got a little help with the battery occasionally. But whether I was going to the grocery or the market or wherever, or just Starbucks to work, I was able to get around my bike. But occasionally, I would have to go to a client meeting that was further away. And I just got a Lyft. And I'd always talked about that if I was grossly rich, the one thing I would have would

be a car and a driver because I don't get that much joy out of driving. I'd rather take a nap or do some work or whatever in the backseat. And so for those few occasions I needed, and it turned out to cost me about $150 a month in lift fees, which is way less than a car payment and tires and registration and insurance and all the other stuff that comes with a car. There's so much of that. You don't even realize until you don't have it anymore. It's great to not have to deal with. Yeah. The hidden costs. Yeah. But now I have three cars because everybody's stuck home. I'm curious, Sean, you mentioned that you sold a whole bunch of stuff. You were kind of surprised at the fact that you didn't need as much as maybe you thought

that you needed. Just talked about how you realized you really don't need a car. What were some of the other surprises that you noticed when you made the decision to sell all your stuff and move? What was the easiest thing maybe that was a surprise? Like, oh, I thought I would really need this and it turned out I didn't. And maybe inversely, what do you really miss? Yeah, I will say, so I attempted to go iPad only on this sabbatical year. And it worked, but I did not expect how much I would miss my Mac. And I think it's just because I'm a Mac power user, you know, and I miss all of my macros and

shortcuts and things that are just set up the way that I like it. I'm just so much more efficient. I get so much more done. So yeah, that was unexpected. I thought, what's the big deal? As long as I can type and write and access a browser, it'll be fine. But I really did miss my Mac. On the other end, there's this idea where you've got all this stuff and you can try putting something in a cardboard box, taping it up, putting today's date on it. And if you don't open the box six months from now, you just get rid of the box blindly, which is really scary. But I just realized there were just so many things. There's so much stuff in the house that you think you might need. Oh, I've got this cables box of

old cables and adapters and things. Surely I'll need that at some point. And you really just don't and you don't miss it. But it's so hard and it's so scary to get rid of stuff in the moment. Yeah, a good friend of mine once recommended just rent a moving truck once a year, pack your entire house into the truck, drive around the block, and then unpack it and just see how much stuff you get rid of. And I thought that was a great idea. I don't know if I'm going to do it, but...

How hard was it as a Mac Power user to dismantle the studio which you spent quite a bit of time creating? I benefited from you breaking down that studio. I think I bought your multi-monitor stand. It's sitting on my desk right now. But I imagine for someone who takes pride in the gear that you use, being someone who really enjoys using the Mac, that was a little bit difficult. It was definitely time-consuming,

but it was the studio that I had previously had come together over the course of many years. So it was a bit Frankenstein, bolted on, things added on. And so the cable management was not great. And so it was actually nice to get to set that up again. And one of the benefits of the fact that I was still on this sabbatical year when we settled down into a house is when I set up a studio again, I was able to take several weeks to do it, which was definitely a luxury, but really getting the cable managing nice. And I got this standing desk and I took great care to set up the cable management so that everything is clean, whether it's in standing or sitting mode, which if you've ever tried to set that up, you know just how difficult that can be so it actually was it was kind of nice to get to redo everything from zero because it just feels like it all goes together now yeah anybody who has never used a standing desk that's the problem is you've got to have enough slack in your cables to be able to have it sit or stand and that's where you know the road to madness lies because suddenly you can't just tie down all your cables and be done. assigned to different buttons. But of course, that wasn't enough. I wanted to be able to use my voice and tell the desk that I was standing up. And there's no standing desks with HomeKit support, unfortunately. But I found these little switch bots, is what they're called,

with a little mechanical arm that'll push a physical button like a coffee maker. Or in my case, I've got a couple of them for the different heights memory button on my standing desk. And then using Homebridge, I'm able to get them into HomeKit so I can tell my HomePod or my phone or whatever that I'm standing up and the desk just stands up for me. You're my kind of nerd, Sean. That's all I'm going to say. I understand the frustration with the iPad, though, because it is a great device, but it has definite limits. And then at the time you chose to say, I'm going to be iPad only, is the exact same time that Apple started releasing Macs that had all-day battery and cool performance. All this stuff, many of the advantages of the iPad jumped over to the Mac at the exact same time you were switching over to the iPad. So that must have been frustrating. Yeah, yeah. The iPad, it definitely wasn't there then. It's still not

there now. It's better. And you can get a lot of things done, but it's just not, it's not Mac OS. Well, and that's okay. I think the thing that people like you and me have to do, and I've recently had this revelation myself is I have to stop trying to hit a square peg into a round hole. I mean, there are things an iPad is very good at. Like as a lawyer, reading contracts and annotating PDFs, it's excellent at that. But it is not a good thing to manage files or run automation or a lot of the automation that I do. And suddenly when I just stop trying to make the iPad do stuff that it's really good on the Mac, then suddenly I like the

iPad more. But yeah, I'm with you. I don't think I could work from just an iPad either. Yeah, well said. Like annotating is great. I think a lot of people don't realize you can annotate on Zoom calls. If someone's sharing their screen and you're on iPad, you can use the Apple Pencil to annotate. And it's actually quite a bit easier than using a mouse on your desktop. So yeah, there's a lot of things that are really convenient and easy to use an iPad for. I find writing to be nice. You can go somewhere just distraction-free. It's taking up the full screen. You don't have these other apps pulling your attention away. But

like you said, as long as you understand that it's not going to be a Mac, it can do some stuff even better, I think. This episode of the Focus podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com slash focus and make your next

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I've been using Squarespace for MaxBarkey.com and my legal site for years. I just got tired of dealing with the other guys and all the headaches they had. Squarespace solves all those problems for me. And when I wanted to do a redesign of Max Barkey last month, dealing with the other guys and all the headaches they had. Squarespace solves all those problems for me. And when I wanted to do a redesign of Max Barkey last month, I just spent about a week fiddling with some of the templates until I found what I liked, made some tweaks,

and I had a brand new redesign that looked beautiful. So if you want to try out Squarespace like I did, head over to squarespace.com slash focus, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, for a free trial with no credit card required. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code focused to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's squarespace.com slash focused. And when you decide to sign up, use offer code focus to get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the Focus podcast. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. So Sean, we were talking about you and the idea to go iPad only. I'm curious what sort of facilitated the switch back to the mac did it coincide with this

idea for the new business which we alluded to at the beginning we really haven't unpacked this a little bit but this daily content machine that that you do now for you break apart assets and that that people give you and into daily clips that that they can share was that the result of just a lightning bolt inspiration or you were trying to do something on the ipad and it just didn't work so you went back to the mac and you were playing around with things and all of a sudden it clicked or what what kind of walk us through that that process of that business idea and the technology pieces that you put back together as you formulated the new studio to let you do these sorts of things. Yeah. So the idea for Daily Content

Machine I had a few years ago, actually, I wanted to build this for myself where I was recording podcasts. I filmed my podcast. So there's a video component. And I knew there were all these moments throughout this hour long show or so that would make great video clips, short clips for social media. That seems to be how a lot of people are consuming these days is just, you know, quick, all the social media platforms, whether they started text focused or image focused, that everything's going towards video, no matter the platform. And so I was wanting to create these clips, but I didn't want to have to make something every day. I didn't want to have to record or create every day to be able to post something every day. I wanted to just record once a week and then chop that up and

distribute it daily. But I didn't actually want to do the work. I didn't want to do the actual editing part myself and rendering and adding captions and just all of that stuff. My dream was show up on the microphone and the camera, record for an hour, and then I'm done. Like someone else, go find, I know I said some good stuff in there, go find it for me. I don't want to tell you the timestamp, Just go find it, edit it out, remove my filler words, remove my tangents, put a title on it, add captions, render a square landscape portrait video, and then post it. That was the dream for me. So I built this machine for myself.

And then I realized other people want this. So I knew even before the sabbatical year, I knew this is a service that I wanted to offer, but I kind of pushed it forward to 2021 when, when I would have got off my sabbatical year. But what I will say that the iPad contributed, you know, trying to go iPad only is the idea of creating a business that I could run from an iPad, whether or not I enjoyed using an iPad as my primary device, the concept where it's like, okay, really, all I can reliably use is a browser, a text editor, and maybe like a messaging app and email. Limited to those tools, could I create a business that I could run from an iOS or iPadOS device? And so that was actually really instrumental in not making a repeat of what I'd done before,

which is creating a business around myself that required me in order to operate. And it wasn't so much a problem that I didn't enjoy what I do, because I do enjoy my work. It's more just the idea that I had to do something in order for everything to run. So I knew with this daily content machine,

I needed to make something that would run without me. And that's essentially what we built. And instead of starting in 2021, sitting at home, locked down last year, it was like, well, might as well get started. Yeah, we had a guest on Mac Power Users, Ian Bird, who's an educator and a speaker. And he treats the iPad that way.

Like he looks at the iPad as a gating device. If he's using the iPad and he realizes this is really hard to do on the iPad, then he gives the work to somebody else to do. That's how he figures out stuff he shouldn't be doing. That's so good. I thought that was really smart. Yeah. That's definitely a weakness for me, or at least something I have to work against is

you just want to jump in and do the work, especially if you're good at it, especially if you like it. And that's the hardest stuff to delegate is the stuff you're good at and you like, but really someone else can do so you can focus on higher level things. And I really wanted to get to a place where I'm working on the business and not in the business. So how do you do that? I mean, because I think that is a challenge a lot of people face. We are all definitely very good, or often we're very good at the stuff we delegate. Sometimes we're terrible at it, but we think we're good. But how do you get to a point where you can turn your babies over to somebody else?

Yeah, yeah. I've thought about this a lot. The first thing is it comes down to defining what you should delegate. And the two things you should not delegate are voice and vision. So your message, what it is that you have to say, and your vision for the future, where you see this thing going. Everything else is something you should ultimately delegate, whether you're good at it or not, whether you like doing it or not. Everything else is something you should delegate. And the difficult thing is superhero syndrome. We're good at things and

we want to do them well, and we're afraid that other people aren't going to be able to do them as well. But what you'll ultimately find is if you delegate things, you have 20 things on your plate, but the person you're delegating to maybe only has this one thing or two things. They're not only going to be able to meet your expectations or your level of perfection in that area, but they'll also be able to surpass it because it's their area of focus, whereas it's only one of 20 for you. So it's a bit of a mindset shift. But then as far as the actual process of delegating, you want to have defined success for that thing before you delegate it. And this

is where it's actually really good that you've got in there and got your hands dirty and done it yourself because you know what it looks like, you know what it takes, you know what the output needs to be. And so you're able to define success before you delegate it. Where it can be difficult is if you're trying to delegate something you've never done. So is that the point you were at at the beginning of the sabbatical? You mentioned you had the idea for the delayed content machine previously, but did you have the process figured out or did you use the space and the margin that you had from the sabbatical to kind of figure that stuff out and delegate it to people? I had the basic process down. It wasn't quite as refined.

So when I was just kind of sitting around, you know, on the sabbatical year and decided, because I had trained a guy to run the business while I was on sabbatical. And so he's running things and I'm sitting at home and I'm like, we might as well just start building this. And so we kind of refined that process in 2020 and created a spreadsheet of all the steps and everything. But yeah, it kind of was roughly outlined before and then refined later.

The business that you mentioned previously, that was the Sean West business, correct? Which is your personal brand. In essence, we talked about the origins of that in previous episodes. And then Dilly Content Machine is the new one. And you talked about how you don't want that one associated with you as an individual. I feel like you have more gold nuggets to share with us with this process. What else do we need to know about making the shift from the personality-driven business to one that we can delegate to other people and they don't even know that you're the person behind it? The most challenging thing is, well, focusing what it is that you want that business to be about,

what it is that you offer or what it is that you want that business to be about, what it is that you offer, or what it is that you sell and to whom. And it's very, very tempting to try to be everything for everyone because you know you could be, at least in theory, but you're just going to be so much more effective and get traction a lot sooner if you focus what it is that you create and focus who you're trying to serve. And so this is actually, I think, what I credit a lot of the success of Daily Content Machine to is really narrowing down. And so just a little bit of behind the scenes, Sean West, that was the original business. It still is. It's basically courses and community at this point.

And then there's Sean West Media, which is an agency, a services agency. And our flagship service is Daily Content Machine. We do actually have a couple other services that we kind of sell on the back end. But we focus the front end on daily content machine to keep it simple. And I decided from the beginning, well, one of the struggles previously with the other business is I was trying to sell to budding entrepreneurs, essentially people who were maybe leaving a day job and wanting to go out on their own and maybe do some coaching or consulting or sell some digital products, things like that. And they wanted to know, how do I make a living from doing this type of work that I love? How do

I price my services? How do I get customers and clients? And how do I market? And so I'm helping these people who are coming from working a full-time job to starting a business. And the problem is, sure, there are some people with golden handcuffs, six-figure salaries, where they're making a lot of money and they have money to invest in their own thing. That's definitely a market. But a lot of people who were trying to do their own thing didn't have the expendable income. And so it was kind of this uphill battle where you either have to sell cheap or you sell premium, but to fewer people. And so I was working at kind of a level 11 effort to make money. And I decided I wanted to flip that around instead of

selling, you know, there's kind of this matrix, right, of money making products or services and nice to have products or services or, you know, that don't necessarily make money for people. And then on the people side, there's people who have money and people who don't have money, if we're generalizing. And the easiest way to make money is to sell money-making products or services

to people who have money. And my thought is like, then if you want to sell other things or even give away other things to people who don't have money, you have the means to do so. So my thought was, I'm going to focus on money-making services and sell to people who have money. So there are people who know that if they market more, if they create more content, they will sell more of their products and services. So helping businesses produce more content with no effort on their end, they just show up and record for an hour and then we help them be everywhere every day, that's going

to make them money. And as far as the people to focus on, I decided I'm going to focus on the low end, six-figure business owners, because they have money to invest in the services. So it was very difficult to narrow down that much because I felt like this could help so many more people or different people or different ways, or we could do so many different things. I could help people produce a course. I could help people write a book. But just saying no to everything else and focusing on one thing allowed us to get really know, get really good at that one thing. It always comes down to focus, doesn't it?

And so you decided to put it together while you're in the middle of your sabbatical. But then I guess at that point, are you sabbatical bankrupt at that point and just like back to work? It kind of happened that way. You know, I only worked on things that I wanted to. So technically, it was still fun and sabbatical and restful. And if I didn't want to, I didn't have to. But by the end of 2020, I was pretty much working every day. I was very excited about it. It seemed like we'd kind of struck something that was resonating with people. So it kind of just blended back into work mode. It wasn't really like a full year off, you know, sitting back reading books.

But yeah, it's kind of a, I don't know, it's kind of a weird, not really sabbatical year. But then again, I don't think anyone had a normal 2020. Yeah, no kidding. No kidding. But you know, it's also, there's an angle to this. That's interesting to me that like, as someone who makes a thing, you know, and the thing you made was seanwest.com, the sabbatical kind of gave you the freedom to make a different thing. Like if you were still in the weeds with the first business and running that day to day, what's the likelihood you would have ever come up with this new thing? I really don't know. Like it's this space away on a somewhat frequent basis every seventh week.

And then my attempt at doing that on a bigger scale that just gives me the space and margin to really re-evaluate regularly if I'm doing what I want to do, if I'm working on the right things, if I'm going where I want to go. And I don't know where I would be if I didn't have that space. I don't feel like it would be a better place though. Yeah. I really feel like margin is the missing element for so many people listening to the show right now and on most days myself. It's just so hard to find that space and to give yourself the freedom to take it even if it is there or make it happen. And I really feel like that's the missing element for a lot of people. It's a mindset shift because everyone I talk to, they think margin is a luxury. And I'm trying to drill it into their heads that

margin is not a luxury. I was just talking to this young guy, he's probably 21, and he had this runaway success YouTube channel. I mean, he's hardly posted any videos, but the videos he does post, they're so well scripted and edited, they blew up millions of views. He just skyrocketed to half a million subscribers in a matter of months. I mean, just runaway success. And the guy knew my history with burnout and my passion for sabbaticals, and he reached out to me and he was like, I'm burning out. I wake up, I don't want to get out of bed. I'm feeling cynical. I don't have the energy. I'm wondering what's the point of all of this. From the outside, everyone's on the edge of their seats waiting for his next video. It seems like he's just doing

amazing. Everyone loves all of his work. And he's in the worst place right now. And I don't know how to get people to realize how terrible of a place that is before they've been there. But if you don't have margin now, burnout is in your future. So you have to see margin as something that is a necessity. You have to bake it into your day.

It's not this luxury, because if you don't have that regular oil change with your car, your car's going to break down at the worst possible time. Yeah, I see that. You inspired me to do the sabbatical that worked good, by the way, except I didn't get to the second one. You know how you said the second one's going to be the hard one? I am one of your lost orphans. And I really think that for me, and this isn't, you know, I don't want to, well, let me just talk about myself for a second. But because I have two careers,

and it's really hard to find space between the two of them. But it has been weighing on me as, you know, Mike and I occasionally bring the topic up on the show. And so much so that the last time I took some time off to kind of like work on the business, I realized that, you know, I don't have a sabbatical friendly business. I actually need to change the business to be sabbatical friendly. And I'm actually taking active steps now to throw some clients overboard and, and, you know, get less money so I can have a little more margin. But I realize the import of it, but it is very hard in the day-to-day rumble.

Like everybody else, we struggled a little bit through the pandemic. My wife lost her job. And it's like, is this the time to be throwing business overboard? But it really is because exactly what you're describing, I think is a risk for all of us. Well, tell me, tell me more about the, the difficulties and the challenges. Cause I know it's not, it's not unique to you. Well, I think for a lot of people crashing on on the rocks isn't necessarily the full-on burnout. I think people listening are thinking, well, I am able to get out of the bed in the morning and do my job, unlike the YouTube guy, so I'm okay. But the fact is, I think this stuff manifests in a lot of ways that aren't so dramatic, but equally bad.

It's your body trying to communicate with you the best that it can. It's a premonition of sorts. If you're seeing the warning signs, you want to pay attention because the sabbaticals and time off and all of that, it doesn't cure burnout. Burnout, once you're there, I mean, I don't want to scare people, but it can take years to recover. And often you don't want to go back to the industry in which you burned out, which can be really devastating. And there's no amount of sabbatical that cures it.

It's not like, oh, if you take a month sabbatical when you burn out, then you bounce back. No, it's a process. I think sabbaticals and margin is prevention. It prevents burnout, but it doesn't cure it. So if you're asking the question, if you're wondering, then you're headed that way. I think a lot of us are operating at that chronic low-level burnout. And we just keep pushing, you know, just pushing through, pushing through. The to-do list piles up, you know, pushing through. And it's not going to a good place.

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Indeed delivers four times more hires than all other job sites combined. So join more than 3 million businesses worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. Get started right now with a $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at indeed.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D. Get $75 credit at indeed.com slash focused. That URL one more time is indeed.com slash focused. This offer is valid through September 30. Terms and conditions apply. And our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus Podcast and all of RelayFM. Before the break, you were talking about how this sneaks up on you. And I really do think this is, there's a big overlap between the creep of burnout and a desire to become more quote unquote productive.

I think that's, it's almost like a self-medication that a lot of people do as they see this coming for them. And I'm not sure that that's the answer. I mean, that's one of the reasons why Mike and I keep apologizing about making a productivity podcast, because I think this stuff, there's a lot more to this than just, you know, making a good checklist. Yeah. It's a productivity can be somewhat of a, of a cult, you know, where it's just like blindly trying to make things more efficient. And I've certainly fell prey to that before and found that the more efficient you make the wrong things, the faster you go to a place you don't want to go. It's not like productivity in and of itself is the answer. Productivity can help you be more efficient and take you somewhere faster. But where is that? Where is that place? Do you actually want to go there? Does your life look like the life you want to live?

Does each day look like the day you want to live when you go there? Are the things you're sacrificing along the way to get there, things you really want to sacrifice, are you missing out on things? So productivity is a great tool, but if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, you know, and that doesn't necessarily produce the results you want. Now, when you hear from someone like the YouTuber who says, hey, you know what? I can see some warning signs here. What kind of advice do you give a person like that?

Got to slow down. You've got to pull back. You've got to make rest routine. If you're like me and you're just like, go, go, go, or you have the workaholic tendency, or you just love what you do, I certainly did, and you just love productivity, you have to be careful because you can burn out doing things that you love doing. And I knew I was never just going to slow down. I didn't know what it looked like to slow down. I just know how to be on or off.

Like if I'm doing this, I'm going to give it my all. You know, I'm here on this podcast. I'm just, I'm on this podcast. I'm here. You know, there's nothing else right now. And that's just the way that I operate. And I think that it's a strength, but like all great strengths,

they can be our greatest weakness. And so I knew I was never going to slow down. I was never going to rest unless I made it routine. And I knew if I had to think about it, if I had to think to rest, well, I would just think myself out of it and it wouldn't happen. So that's where the sabbaticals came in because back in 2014, I just put an event on my calendar that spanned a week, called it sabbatical week and said, repeat every seven weeks. And then I never touched it. And then it took the thinking out of it. I didn't have to think about it. I just looked at my calendar the same way as if you had an event

that said you're going to a conference. It's like, okay, well, I'm going to the conference, right? It's non-negotiable. That's how I was able to solve it. So what I told him is, you know, you've got to make rest routine. Now, if you're to the point where you're actually burning out, like you're in the process of it, or you feel burned out and it's getting pretty bad for you, which first of all, don't feel alone. You know, a lot of people feel this way, more and more people feel this way just from pandemic burnout, you know, that's ongoing. The thing you have to do to start the process of coming out of that place and understand that it's a process.

It's not going to be tomorrow. It's not going to be next week. It can be months. It's often years. I just want to prepare you. Like, I don't want to, you know, sugarcoat it or anything. Just be aware of that. And it's not going to be like this bad for another year.

Maybe you recover to 60% after this many weeks or months and then 70%. But you have to be kind to yourself and you have to redefine what success looks like for each day. Right now, most likely, you have too great of a definition of success for your day. The way you define success is too tall of an order. Well, if I do this, this, this, this, this, and this, and move these projects forward and respond to all of these people and manage that, it's like, it's too much. You have to redefine success for each day and start smaller. And the worse you're burned out, you know, to the point where you don't even want to get out of bed, you know, the closer you are to that,

the smaller you need to redefine success to, and I'm not kidding, the point of, I brushed my teeth today. You know, today is a success if I showered. Today is a success if I walked around the block. You know, like, and if that's too much,

whatever it is, go smaller. But redefine success until it's going to actually feel absurd. But that's how the recovery process works. And if you have too tall of an order on yourself, you're just going to keep yourself in that burnout. I want to put a pin in that. I want to come back to talking about making a plan for your day and how you do that, because I know you have interesting thoughts on that. But there's one segment of the audience that we haven't addressed. So I'm fancy. I'm self-employed. So the way I'm working towards getting a more regular sabbatical is by getting rid of work. But there are people in our audience that put on a suit and tie and go to a jobby job where they get a paycheck and they get

two years of vacation a year and they got a boss that is going to say one week off every seven weeks, get the hell out of here, you know? And those people have burnout problems and all of the issues we've talked about. What can we tell them to help? Yeah, yeah. I remember trying to figure out what can I do for someone in that situation? They can't take off every seventh week. You know, their job would say, forget it. But they're still going through the same experience, the same emotions, the same struggles. And so what you can do if you have a jobby job is take a weekend sabbatical. And I have a video and an article about this at sabbatical.blog.com. And the idea is you take off the last weekend of every month. And what does that look like? What does that mean? Very simply, just put an event that spans Saturday and Sunday, or if your weekend is Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, Monday, you know, that's great. Whatever your weekend is for your job. But you just set an event that spans two days, call it sabbatical weekend, and don't schedule

anything. So it's the same as if you were going to a weekend retreat. You know, if someone says, hey, can you meet for coffee on Saturday? You look at your calendar and it says retreat. You say, oh, no, I'm busy. How about the next weekend? Same thing here. Sabbatical week or sabbatical weekend, set it to repeat every month and very simply don't schedule anything for the sabbatical. And the only rule that I've imposed for myself that took me a couple years to get to, to actually reap the restful benefits of sabbaticals, is don't schedule anything for your sabbatical,

including things that you think you'd want to do. And the reason for that is not so that you sit and stare at a blank wall, but that you get there with the freedom to say yes to anything in the moment. And what I've found is when you get to that sabbatical, whether it's a weekend sabbatical or a week sabbatical, you often think you will want to do things, but past you doesn't know future you. Past you is in work mode. You're on right now. You don't know the version of you that wants to be off. Maybe they don't want to go to coffee. Maybe they don't want to work on that course or write that blog post. Give future you a gift. Give them the gift of freedom. And it's just the freedom to choose to do anything in the moment.

So when you get there to that weekend, you can do whatever you want. You can hang out with your kids. You can watch a documentary. You can work on your course. And don't be surprised when this is what it is more than half the time, do absolutely nothing. You may actually want to just sit and do absolutely nothing or go on a walk. And so just creating that time for yourself with the space you do have, even in a full-time job, can make a really big difference.

And I can testify to this because although I have not been able to get a regular seventh week sabbatical, I have done exactly with, I read that article when you wrote that and I thought that was a great idea. And because I'm self-employed, I can actually sometimes make it a Friday through Sunday sabbatical or something like that, where I can actually get away for one work day and just hide from the world. And that has restful benefits. If you're listening and you're struggling with your jobby job, you can find a way to

make this work. And it's not going to be ideal, but it can really help. I want to add to the jobby job scenario. I think it's valuable when you are in a situation like that that you're listing the pros and the cons of your current situation so maybe you hear Sean talking about the sabbatical week or the sabbatical year man that would be amazing but I don't see how that could work in my current situation and the place I'm in is contributing to this sense of burnout that you guys are just describing. That's a negative. That should go in the con column. And I think you need to recognize the impact that your current work situation is

having on you and dare to imagine a better future if that's not in alignment with your values and your vision for your future. I kind of went through something like that with the family business and I saw the way that my dad was working and all the time that he was putting into the business and how much it was affecting him. You carry it home with them. And I was just like, I don't ever want my kids to see me like that. And that's not the only factor that goes into it, but it is a factor. And you can find a different job. It may be difficult, and maybe ultimately you decide you don't want to do that. But recognize that the situation you find yourself in, you know, that there, maybe it's doing something to you

that you're not okay with and be okay with not being okay with it and give yourself permission to look for something better if, if that's your dream. Or at least just understand that you always have options. You should never be in a job where you feel like you have no other option. Yeah. Cause there are options. I mean, um, when mean, when I first, you know, I was a trial lawyer for a long time. And that's how I made a lot. You know, you make good money when you're a trial lawyer. When somebody sues somebody else, it's like a bonfire of $100 bills. And when I stopped doing that, I did that because I wanted to have more time to make podcasts and do field guides and things that were more important to me.

And, you know, I realized that none of us are getting out of this alive. And this is what I want to do with my time. I can tell you the amount of money I lost that year, you know, and if you look at how much money I made before I stopped doing trial work to after, I can tell you the exact cost of happiness for me, right? I mean, I have the numbers. It's a benefit. But if you're out there, you can buy happiness. I can tell you because I did it. It may be very expensive for you, but you have that option. It's so true. I love that reframe that you gave, Mike. And it's, yes, to be clear, it is great being able to run your own business and control your schedule. But it also comes with challenges because when you, you know, work in a full-time job and you get a salary, that salary is going to come every couple of weeks and you don't really have to think about it that much. But when you run your own business, you know that your income is largely

tied to your efforts. And when there's that direct connection, it actually is really challenging to stick to taking that sabbatical week and trusting that this is going to be in your long-term benefits. Like, well, I could just put in the extra effort and just work this week anyway, you know, instead of taking a sabbatical and I'll probably make a bit more money. And I mean, that's essentially what I did for a decade. And it just, it took me to not a good place. And, you know, I share my story in other places about, you know, like the relationships that fell by the wayside, my physical health that fell by the wayside, but it's just worth it, I've found.

And for me, I know unless I just set it and forget it and I put that calendar event that's repeating, then I'm not gonna do it. But I'm so glad that past me did that because the current version of me benefits from it every time. And it just takes all of the thinking out of it. I just get to the sabbatical week and I'm like, okay, you know, this was a gift from my past self and that's what the calendar says. So I'm going to do it. Which is nice because past self usually is a jerk.

So I'm glad your past self was nice to you. Your version of you now was future you at one point, you know? So I just, I guess I treat future me with, and this is maybe, well, it's definitely easier to say than do. And I don't know exactly how you transfer this mindset. I guess it's kind of short-term versus long-term, delayed gratification, et cetera. But just learning to see future you as a real person that you care about and caring about them as much as you care about the you today,

that is just transformational if you can get there. I want to ask you, because you've spoken to the productivity aspect and how burnout hinders that. You kind of touched on some of the emotional stuff that you have to process through as you're recovering from burnout. But you're also a creator and you run this daily content machine business. How have you seen burnout affect your ability to create going back to the YouTuber that you were talking about? I mean, it's devastating. This is why I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy

and why I've made it my mission to help people implement sabbaticals both for themselves, but also in their companies, or their employees, because it's just devastating and it's so long lasting. And it's just like, it's this block, you know, you want to share, you want to create, you're a creative person and you don't know why you don't have the energy. It's like some part of you really wants to do it and you don't know why you can't summon the energy. And so I've just decided I'm going to put all of my energy into preventing that because curing it is just, it's so much more intensive and it takes so long. Is it purely energy or is it, do you think part of the idea creation, like your ability to do that sort of thing is hindered as well? What was your experience with it? Did you always have an idea for what to create, just lack the energy to do it? Or did you find yourself kind of in this, the scenario I'm picturing is, I know I need to create a video. I have no idea what I'm going to create. I know I need to do the work. I don't feel like doing the work, but I'm ready to do it anyways. And I don't even know what the work is. It's definitely complicated. And if you, if you work through it in therapy, it's

connected to so many different things and, and identity and, and all of that. So it's very complicated, but if we, if we simplify it, it seems to be crossing that threshold of going from choosing to do something, getting to do something, and having to do something. And there's a myriad of reasons why that shift might take place. But once you find yourself in a place where you feel like you have to do the things, whether those things were something that you wanted to do at one point, things, whether those things were something that you wanted to do at one point. The fact is, right now you feel like you have to do them. That will take your energy. And it doesn't matter what the thing is. If it's writing, if it's making a course, if it's sending an email, the difference between having to do it and choosing to do it is everything. Because if you have to do it, even if you once loved it, it'll take your energy. But if you find yourself in a place where you can choose to do it, then it gives you energy.

Yeah, and it's amazing how that works with the human brain. Like, I love woodworking. I've made half the furniture in my house. And there was a time in my life I thought, well, that's my out of all this. If I ever get tired of being a lawyer, I'm going to open a cabinet shop. And then somebody offered to pay me to make a cabinet for them. And I immediately discovered that I could never do that to earn a living because the whole dynamic changed for me. But whereas the Max Sparky stuff, I never intended to make any money off of this stuff. And I love doing it now just

as much, even though there are, you know, I do get paid for some of it. So it is something I think you really have to just explore for yourself. I tweeted the other week, maybe your hobby shouldn't be a business. Just maybe. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Timing, the intelligent time tracking app that you can trust. First, let's talk about why you should be tracking your time. For anyone who bills their hours, this may seem a little obvious, but even if you are employed or you're billing per project, it can be helpful to estimate how long a specific task is going to take. And that's where time tracking can help you with those estimates. They make sure that you

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when you're in a video call. This is one of my favorite new features. And it lets you record what the meeting was about afterwards by giving you a pop-up window and you just fill in the details. There's even more magic like this in Timing to make recording your time as easy as possible. And if you're collaborating with colleagues, Timing's Teams feature lets you share projects with them. You can record everyone's time in one central location, which lets managers get a quick overview of where their team members are spending their time without compromising their privacy. Because which apps, documents, and websites that each team member use stays private.

It's not visible to managers. Personally, I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with time tracking for many years. When I first started trying to get into it, I was using manual timers and I would forget to turn a timer off and it would say that I spent six hours commuting to the co-working space downtown. Things like that just really bugged me and it made me think that time tracking was not for me. I saw other people doing it, but thought I couldn't actually make it work myself. And then I discovered timing. And I really loved how I could just install it on my computer. Once I gave it access to my

applications, then it could track the time that I spent in those applications. And it could even track the time that I spent on specific documents, like specific sheets as I was writing in Ulysses or specific documents in my web browser as I was prepping outlines for podcasts and things like that. That took all of the effort and the stress out of time tracking for me. It made me think for the first time that it was possible for me. And I learned some things from that automatic time tracking. I learned that how I was actually spending my time was not how I thought I was spending my time. I was able to make a few adjustments.

I was also able to see which were my prime productivity times, my golden hours, if you will. And so I tried to start prioritizing the really important tasks during those times that I could see in Timing's dashboard. And the ease of use really is the killer feature in Timing. If you're like me and you just don't think time tracking is for you because you've tried it before and it just feels too difficult, definitely give Timing a shot. It can give you just about every benefit of the manual time tracking method without any of

the overhead of having to remember to start and stop those timers. It really is a phenomenal application. So if you want to take control of how you spend your time and improve your productivity, download the free 14-day trial today by going to timingapp.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, and you'll save 10% when you subscribe. That's timingapp.com slash focus to try timing for free and save 10% when you subscribe. Our thanks to Timing for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Sean, you were talking about the difference between choosing to do something,

getting to do something, or having to do something. And I'm curious how you tip the scales in the direction of choosing to do something when it comes to creating on a schedule. Is it difficult having to create every single day? Well, for me, yes. Even things that I like to create, it is difficult to create every single day. And that's kind of what inspired the daily content machine where I could just create once a week and then it turns into a daily output. And for me, that was enough. I could find a way to want to do something once a week, like choose to do it. This is something that I enjoy. I get to do this. I could get myself in

that mindset once a week. And I used to do every single day. I used to record a show, actually film a show, have someone come over to my studio and every single day film a daily show. And I liked doing it at the time, but then I was exhausted. And so for me, weekly is kind of a sweet spot. I don't know, it could just be me, but I find that if I create weekly and then find a way to distribute daily, that's a really good rhythm. At least create in the sense of something big that gets shared, different little pieces. I do still think it's great to write every day, whether you share what you write, just because I think there's so many benefits to writing in terms of getting mental clarity. Have you explored the concept of personal knowledge management at all? Because I feel like that's a very important piece

of it that a lot of people miss is the output of the information or the knowledge that you're collecting. And I tell people it doesn't matter whether it gets published, whether it ends up in a video, a podcast, whatever, even if it's just you're making an opinion based on the information that you're collecting, that's enough of an output. But writing is the magic piece of that for me, where I take what I read in a book and I force myself to write an opinion about it and my thoughts become clear as I type on the keys. I do have a sort of hacked together what people would call like a personal knowledge management system or outboard brain or second brain. There's different labels for it. I've been doing this for maybe three or four years with some combination of Ulysses and things.

It's not terribly sophisticated and it does lack cross-linking, but using folders and projects and things like that and tools that maybe weren't purpose-built for it, I do have something to that effect. Not to the point where I feel like it would be super helpful to show other people because it's kind of just a, it's a little bit of a mess, but it makes sense to me. Sure. Which is the key piece is that it makes sense to you. Why don't you talk us through a little bit your schedule, like how you, you talked about how you create weekly. So I'm assuming you have like a day when you're doing the filming or whatever, and then other days maybe are devoted to other things. What does a typical day look like for you? How do you create this cadence where you are releasing these

little bits and pieces all the time? Yeah, so just full disclosure, where I'm at now is, you know, I had taken off of doing the podcast, which was kind of the main way that I was creating content that ended up getting distributed because of the sabbatical year. about it. It's kind of, I'm torn because I like podcasting and I like sharing the journey as I go. And at the same time, I was trying to see where podcasting fit in, in the whole piece of things, you know, essentially is marketing. Right. And like, we were trying to market this service and I was like, Mike, it probably just is my all or nothing kind of thinking, which is maybe not the healthiest. But I was like, there's probably other things we can do that are more effective to market the service right now. And so I haven't actually got back to weekly podcasting like I was before my sabbatical year. But if you want, we could talk about what I was doing as far as recording podcasts then,

or I can talk about what I'm currently doing now as I'm building the agency. I actually kind of have an interest on that second piece. And like, we've talked a lot today about your sabbatical ideas where you have a sabbatical and you don't have a plan. But what about the other six weeks and the other six years? I mean, you're somebody who's accomplished quite a bit. I mean, do you block out your days or do you have a way that you plan what you're going to get done? I mean, this kind of goes also with our discussion earlier about burnout resulting from being too aggressive with how much you can get done in a day or a week or a month. But how do you handle that personally? Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts on calendars. So if you see my calendar week view, there's dozens of blocks. Every day just has tons of blocks. And there's kind of two ways

to think about it. And I also share this with my team. So we all kind of operate with this system. There's proactively filling out your calendar and there's retroactively filling out your calendar. So going into a week, I want to see more or less most of the things that I know I want to do for that week on the calendar. So you can think of it as time blocking. Obviously, there are meetings, there are appointments. In our case, we have daily stand-up meetings,

we have a weekly team call on Fridays that's a bit longer, and I have client consultations and strategy calls and interviews and things like that. So those blocks are already there. But then there's internal meetings like operations and processes and finance or training and things like that. And then there's kind of deep focused work, which has changed for me over the course of this year, as I've gradually delegated, you know, I've done all the work in every corner of the agency from the actual production work to training and hiring and interviewing and onboarding and client management and communication. And so gradually, I've been delegating each of the pieces slowly. So I'm out of operations. I've more recently delegated marketing and

outbound outreach. And then kind of the last thing for me is sales. So I'm still in sales myself, but that's kind of the last thing for me to delegate. So those focused blocks of time for me right now tend to look like creating the processes and training for delegating myself out of a job so that there's no area in the business where I'm still working in it

and I can ultimately be in a place where I'm exclusively working on it. And then I was going to talk about proactive versus reactive, but I know I said a lot, so I'll pause there. I'm kind of curious about that piece too, proactive versus reactive, and also in context of what you just shared

regarding personal and professional goal setting. Do you have goals that you set that you work towards? I like the idea of the sabbaticals being the built-in time for you to feel free to just pivot course and do something completely different, kind of like what you did with the daily content machine. And I'm curious what your process is for that. Is it just, you know, these are the habits, this is what my day looks like, and we generally know the right direction that we're going. And once we get to the point where we take a break, that's when you kind of think through things. Or do you have concrete, you know, we're trying to get to this number by this specific date? We're trying to get to this number by this specific date.

There's a combination of all of the above. The ultimate mission, and the team knows this, is about sabbaticals. So it's my mission by the year 2047 to get every company in the world to pay their employees to take off every seventh week. And Sean West Media, the agency for me, is a cash flow engine to get to that point. I want to spin off enough cash to be able to fund this sabbatical mission, meaning whatever it takes, writing books, giving speeches, consulting with organizations to implement sabbaticals. I want to be able to pour money into that.

I think ultimately that sabbatical group, for lack of a name, could be profitable in and of itself, just consulting with large companies on implementing sabbaticals. There's quite a bit that goes into it, especially with multiple sabbatical tracks, different people on and off at different times, but that's the ultimate mission. And so the team knows Sean West Media is a way to get there, but we also have various milestones and the systems and processes that we've built. I'm very, very passionate about processes like the, after a year of refinement, the team performs 1300 tasks each week per client, per batch of content to produce their content. And it's all like, it's very streamlined.

We use like 5,000 Zapier tasks every month. And so the systems we've built can support dozens or hundreds of clients. And I actually do have ambitions to grow the agency to that size. Because at this point, it's kind of like these little flywheels. You can spin up different teams and scale it pretty effortlessly at this point, it's kind of like these little flywheels. You can spin up different teams and scale it pretty effortlessly at this point. So there are certain milestones and accounts and revenue and different services that we want to develop that we're saying no to now so we don't get shiny object syndrome. But along the way, there's these little checkpoints of me being out of various things and then helping my team adopt that same mindset where your job is to get rid of your job. If you want to elevate yourself in the organization, you have to learn how to systematize what you're doing, document what you're doing, create a process for it, and train the next person. And so you want to keep getting rid of your job so that you're able to think at a higher level. So is that kind of the focus on you planning your days then is how do I work myself out of a job? Exactly. That's exactly

it. Yes. Yeah. When my wife went through the Disney management program, she was a manager at Disneyland and she had a really great manager at one point. And the manager told her, my job is to train you to be better at my job than you are, than I am. But I didn't say that very well. Her job was to train my wife to take over her job. And I think I like that. I like the fact that I feel like that's a sign of a great manager, someone who's building a team underneath them. every seventh week, whether it's on sabbatical track one or sabbatical track seven, someone else needs to be able to take over their responsibilities in their absence, which means no one can be

irreplaceable, which kind of goes against the advice you get with jobs, which is like, make yourself irreplaceable. But if you're irreplaceable, you can't take sabbatical weeks. So it forces you to document how the work is done, which there's just there's so many benefits so that, hey, now you can elevate yourself and someone else can come in and do that work. Or, you know, there's just a lot of benefits to that. But before we lose it, I do want to share proactive versus reactive when it comes to the calendar.

So what I tell my team is in advance of the coming week, you have your priorities, you have your projects, time block when you want to work on those projects each day next week. And sometimes that will be around meetings, or maybe you have a doctor's appointment or whatever, you know, just time block when you plan to work on those things. So this is the proactive piece. Here's what I want to work on. And that can change and adapt as various things come up in our stand-up meetings. Maybe priorities change and you have to adjust. That's fine. What's counterintuitive that I think very few people do, but we find is tremendously helpful, is reactively... uh, sorry, I think I said reactive and proactive. What I'm,

what I meant to say was retroactive. Uh, so proactively and retroactively updating your calendar. So you get to the end of your day and you're like, I feel really exhausted. Like, I don't know why. And you look at your calendar and you're like, I only really worked on two projects today. But if you actually went through your day and someone was watching you, you know, they were documenting and writing down what you did each day, you might have had a lot of things happen differently than what you planned. And if you don't retroactively update your calendar to reflect reality and what really happened, you can't look back on what you actually did and understand.

So for instance, maybe you've got this project that you set aside an hour, you time blocked an hour, and you get to that hour and you really needed more time than an hour. Here's the problem. People try this time blocking thing and they guess at how long something will take. They get to that time block, it takes longer, and then they give up on time blocking. The missing piece is retroactively updating your calendar. So, okay, you blocked an hour, but it really took two. Well, adjust that calendar event to take up two hours instead of one. And what this does for you is the next time you go to book something, you can check the previous time. Well, how long did this take last time? Well, look at last week on the calendar and you can see it actually took you two hours.

So this time you can block two hours and it's actually going to work and it's actually going to be accurate. And over time, you get a better sense of how your time's being spent, how long things take, what you actually did in a given day or a given week. Yeah, Sean, I do the same thing. I look at a future calendar as a planning tool and a past calendar as a historical tool. That's brilliantly put. You know what I mean?

Once the day goes into the books, if you update your calendar, it really does help you with that problem. Because human nature, when you do time block, especially if you're new at it, is you will always underestimate how much time it takes and yep you know um time tracking time blocking a lot of the stuff we talk about on the show are just like blunt instruments to help get it through your brain that stuff takes time what i've found and what i tell my team is if you are planning you know, proactively

planning your future calendar and your time blocking something you want to work on, and this thing is new, meaning you've never done it before, triple your estimate. Yeah, that's a good rule. Pretty accurate. I agree. Now, how do you hold yourself accountable, though? Like you get to the end of the week and you had blocks. I mean, do you, do you have a, for yourself, do you have a process where you look back to see how things went? Yeah. So we, in our case, we have, um, we have daily standup meetings and then we have weekly team calls that are a bit longer and then also weekly one-on-ones. So we've got these kind of review periods built in and this is, it works so well for work. I really should apply I think my personal system is broken. Oh, I would always miss that review stage of the GTD or whatever, right?

And that doesn't work if you're not reviewing on a weekly basis. Yeah, like if the one thing you could change about the world is to bring sabbaticals to everybody, the one thing I would want to change about the world is to have everybody have a proper shutdown to their days where they look back. I just feel like it makes such a difference, but it is hard to convince people. I'm curious, Sean, do you do any sort of time

tracking or if you're going back and you're updating the calendar events, is that good enough for you? It does work pretty well to do it in real time. So if I have a meeting for 30 minutes and actually went 45, and my team knows this as well, most of our meetings are internal, I will adjust the calendar event and extend it to 45 or sometimes they beat me to it. And so doing it in real time works pretty well. But a very easy thing to do for anyone is just install rescue time in the background, even if you get the free version, that will let you know on an hour by hour basis where your time went, you know, which application was in focus. So if I ever forget to update, I can always check that and get the answer. Yeah, automatic time tracking makes it a lot easier than it used to be. Full disclosure,

timing is a sponsor of this episode, but I've been using that the same way for three years. And I do now do the manual time tracking with the starting and stopping of timers, just because I like the intentional focus shift where I'm done with this task and I am now as I press the button on my iPhone going into this mode, you know, but every once in a while I forget to start and stop the timers and then my data gets messed up, right? But timing is in the background. Same idea as rescue time. It just runs in the background and shows you everything and then you got the data and you can't argue with the data. You know, if you think, oh, I only spent 20 minutes when I checked Twitter, but the data says you spent two hours. You can't, you can't argue with that. How do you

block in the tasks that you're going to work on? And maybe this is kind of poking a pain point that you currently have, because you mentioned you have a whole bunch of things in your today view inside of things. But as you're planning your day and you've got your meetings that you currently have, because you mentioned you have a whole bunch of things in your today view inside of things. But as you're planning your day and you've got your meetings that you have to take place at certain intervals, what's your process for the other work that's going to get done around those? Honestly, I think the reason I've been able to get away with my overflowing personal inbox is because my calendar is somewhat of a, of a to-do area, right? The things that are actually going to get done at whatever times are on the calendar for me anyway. And then everything that has been accumulating in my, in my to-do management is kind of like

vying for that time on my calendar. Probably not the best system to have, but yeah, the things on my calendar, that's what gets done. I don't think that's necessarily all that bad. There was a point where that would have caused a visceral reaction from me, you know, but I've come around on this, I think, where ultimately everything you need to do needs to take place within the context of time. So for a lot of people, until you define the time and the space that you're going to get something done, it is just going to pile up and your task manager is going to just yell at you, hey, do this, do this, do this, until you decide this is the confines of when this task is going to be completed. It's almost like my Fantastical is a visual to-do management system

where I see what I'm actually going to do when and what's going to be done before that. And I can think about what headspace I'll be in and how much focus and energy I'll have. And I really do try to think in terms of managing energy instead of time. So I can look at a day and see what meetings I have. Or if it's a podcast interview like we're on now, I don't want to schedule something that requires a lot of energy for me right after this. So next I'm going to follow up with a prospect. That's just an email. That doesn't take a lot of energy for me. So when I am looking at proactively filling out my calendar, I am thinking about, um,

managing my energy in addition to my time. Do you have any way that you quantify that? Uh, I'm, I'm, I'm curious, is it just like a gut feel sort of a thing or how do you manage your energy as you plan your day? I mean, you have to know yourself. It's different for everyone, but for me, um, and there were days early on in the agency where I had not delegated a lot of things where my, this is pretty bad, but the record I have is 10 hours of just meetings and delegating. And I want to even get out of that because for me, it's the calls that take my energy. And as an agency owner, the problem for me is I run probably 95% of the calls that I'm on. It's not like I can just show up on mute and sit back.

So those take a lot of energy for me. Days where I don't have calls, those, I can just get so much focused work done. I love those days. So I'm trying to optimize for more of those days. One of the things that I've done that has helped a little bit is just within our organization, we do audio only meetings Monday through Thursday, and then Friday it's video. It's been shown that specifically seeing yourself on video, like the self-view of your video call is what takes a lot of your energy. You can hide that view, obviously, but definitely just being on camera, seeing people, you know, making sure you're giving the right facial reactions, that takes a lot of energy. So just making it audio only, that also has really helped me. Well, it's a challenge for everyone.

So I really appreciate you sharing some of the ways you're trying to get through these things. And I can see how you can get one week off every seven weeks with that degree of discipline. Well, it's a, what do you call it? It's, um, is it Parkinson's law? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's my issue is I'll just, I'll just go, go, go. And unless I block myself in, I'll just keep going beyond that. I got into block scheduling or hyper scheduling several years ago. And for me, it really was a missing element because it's the calendar that is like the glass of cold water in your face when you're planning your day, because there's only so many blocks that are going to fit in that day. And if you're realistic about how long it takes

to do something, you're much less likely to saddle yourself with, I guess I would call it like, you know, task overwhelm, where you're going to give yourself 20 things. And at the end of the day, you're going to only finish two and feel bad. Whereas if you're block scheduling, and you plan for two, and you crush them, at the end of the day, you feel great. Nothing has changed. You've done the same amount of work. But your attitude about your work changes entirely. Oh, that's so true. That definitely rings true for me. What sort of rules do you give yourself around your time blocking?

For context here, I'll just give you an example. Like one of the things I do is I never block time that is less than an hour because even though I may have a call that's 30 minutes, maybe it'll go over, maybe it won't. If it doesn't go over, then I have some built-in margin. And I've found that by using at least one hour blocks, that kind of all evens out in the wash

by the end of the day. So maybe stuff goes longer than I thought it would, but some other things will go not as long as I thought they were going to, and I'll make up the time I lost there. That's a good one. For me, if I'm doing an interview or a consultation or a strategy call, something client facing, I will put a 30 minute preparation block before that meeting, just so I'm not running the risk of rushing into that maybe from a call before or something else.

So I can get the Google Docs ready, get the meeting ready. So that's really helped. And then just simply starting and ending my day at specific times and setting rules in my Calendly so that calls can't be blocked outside of that or booked outside of that. And then also using Calendly's max events per day is also really helpful. So if you know you don't ever want to do more than one podcast interview in a day, you could set that in your calendar settings. Yeah, that's the stuff that I like. And I think it takes a little bit more effort to set that up because you do need to think through what's the scenario

where I am doing so many of these podcast interviews or so many of these client calls that I am just completely worthless the rest of the day. And then once you figure out what that number is, setting that as a limit, like you mentioned, the Zoom calls going from 10 hours of Zoom calls, which is too much for anybody, any human on the face of the earth to two hours a day and recognizing that's my limit, capping it at that. And then if you look at a day and you notice that you have a little bit more than that, you readjust some things knowing that this is going to be a big boost to future me in terms of what I'm actually able to do. Yeah. And just back to defining success. I used to wonder why recording a 90-minute podcast

would exhaust me, especially if it was on video or in person, on camera, that type of thing. It just took a lot of energy out of me. And then I would feel bad because, okay, it's mid-afternoon. I still have several hours left in the workday, but I felt like, ah, I just can't get anything done. And then I would just feel bad. So I would feel bad. I'd get nothing done and I'd feel bad about not getting anything done. And I realized I could just kind of redefine that or reframe it and say, hey, you're recording this one podcast once per week that's going to turn into all this content that you're

able to post every day. It's okay to have that take a lot of energy. And maybe you don't get as much done the rest of the afternoon. Maybe you just take the rest of the day off and feel okay about that and call the day a success if you recorded a podcast. And that reframe was everything I needed to the point where, and I felt so good about myself, sometimes I would actually do more work. Yeah. No, I agree. And yeah, that's kind of a little podcaster problem we all face. A lot of people listening probably don't realize it, but it does take a lot out. For me, there's an accumulation effect too. Like if I do two

days in a row or three days in a row, it's bad. I definitely need to have time in between in order to bring my A game. I really think there's room here for technology to help. I think that the stuff we're talking about are advanced uses of calendars that calendar apps, frankly, aren't there yet. I mean, why wouldn't a calendar app say, hey, Sean, you're booking two podcasts that day, or hey, you know, three Zoom calls is a limit, or, you know, this is a high-energy task. You shouldn't have a high-energy task right after this one. I think that there's room for developers to get involved and help people with these problems. There's one that I don't use it myself, but someone I know who's, you know, consulted with them a little bit has told me about it. It's called Motion.

So I think usemotion.com, that might be the one. But yeah, it's a pretty interesting tool. It's like a calendar, but mixed with a to-do app with rules that's sophisticated. And yeah, it's very, very intriguing. Yeah, and I'm familiar with that one.

I believe that one is a web only tool. But I just think that I think we're in early days of that. But I do think that there's room here for people like the way people fail at block scheduling because they underestimate how much time it took. Well, if you had a good calendar app that would know on average how long it takes you to do that task and you blocked yourself half of the time it would actually take, wouldn't it be great if the app would help you set that right in the moment? And it looked like and worked like

Fantastical. Yeah. Well, Fantastical is a subscription plan. Maybe they're listening. Either way, Sean, like I said at the beginning of the Maybe they're listening either way. Sean, I, like I said, at the beginning of the show, I am a big fan of the stuff you make. And I, I wish you the greatest luck with this new venture. In fact, I just think it, you have a knack for finding things that people need Sean. And I think that, I think that you're on the right track again. But most importantly, I really appreciate you sharing with us some of the wisdom you've accumulated in finding ways to be productive and have successful business, but at the same time, having enough self-care and margin in your life to enjoy the journey.

Well, that's very kind, David. Thank you. I pretty much am on this mission of learning and sharing what I learn as I go and really just hoping I can help other people avoid a lot of my mistakes because it feels like a lot of the things I've learned, I've learned the hard way, but maybe I can save other people the trouble. Yeah, the best teachers are the ones that have made the mistakes. I absolutely agree. And thank you so much. Where can people find you, Sean? I absolutely agree.

And thank you so much. Where can people find you, Sean? Well, you can find me at Sean Wes on Twitter, Instagram, places like that. If you wanted to check out the service that we have, dailycontentmachine.co. And then I have kind of like a, for people who like the productivity stuff, I have like a little side project called savetetime.blog with just quick tips for doing things faster on Apple devices. In fact, we are going to be following up with Sean on Sean's tech tips in the Deep Focus segment today. So that's going to be fun to talk about. We are the Focus Podcast.

You can find us over at relay.fm. You can also sign up for membership there. We have that great membership program for the focus podcast. You can find us over at relay.fm slash focused. You can also sign up for membership there. We have that great membership program for the focus podcast. Now where you get the additional segment and the ad free version of the show. We want to thank our sponsors today. That's our friends over at indeed timing and Squarespace. And we'll see you next time.