Focused - 176: Doing Less

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

David & Mike revisit the importance of saying no and discuss how to prevent taking on too much.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. How are you today? Doing great. How about you, David? Excellent. Looking forward to another episode of the Focus podcast. We've got a lot to talk about today. There's a common theme in my email inbox from people that I think we need to address on the show today about taking on too much. You and I both did our quarterly retreats. We're going to report in on how we did it, what we're doing, and how it's changing things for us. And we've got some other things on the

agenda here if we can get to them. So looking forward to a full show today. But you've got some news for us, Mike. I do. Yeah, so I have decided to finally heed the advice of a lot of different people who have been asking me to do something like this. And I'm going to be doing my very first independent cohort. I'm going to be doing it on the concept of the life theme, which is basically like the personal mission statement. And a life theme is just kind of my spin on that. I originally talked about it in my faith-based productivity course. And I've had people reach out to me after that and say, you know, could you help me? Or could you explain a little bit more? Like, how do you actually end up on a life theme or a personal mission statement? So it's kind of like a one

sentence version of why are you here? What sort of difference are you trying to make in the world? What's the dent you want to leave in the universe? And the things that come from that are motivation to show up and do the things that you need to do and clarity on what are the things that you should be doing and what are the things that you shouldn't be doing. So I've crafted mine and revised it over several years now, and it's really helped me a lot as it pertains to this process we're going to be talking about with the quarterly reviews. And I'm going to be doing a five-week cohort where I walk through essentially the five different pieces of this that have really clicked for me. So it's not rocket science.

You get out of it what you put into it. But essentially, the steps that I really like are thinking about what are the moments of impact, the times when you've really felt most alive, then thinking bigger, what would you do if you couldn't fail or if you had unlimited resources? Some people need, myself included, they need a little bit of permission to dream again about what are you actually capable of? And then you kind of define that. What does that actually look like tangibly in a day in the life of future you? Where do you wake up in the morning? What do you do during the day? Who's there with you? That kind of thing. And then identifying your core values, which are really like the non-negotiables in your life. And I believe those should be reflected in that day in the life of a future you. And then you condense all of that down into a single sentence life thing, which you can use for clarity on what to do and what not to do. And so that's basically the whole process, but it's the kind of thing that people typically don't, that they think, well, that's a good idea. I'll do that sometime. And then they don't get around to it. So that's the whole benefit of like these cohort-based courses is you show up with a group, you do it together. And I've had several people in the faith-based productivity community who

have asked me to put together one for this specifically. So this is the first cohort. I'm pricing it at $97 and it's basically five different weekly sessions. There'll be homework, just basic. I gave you the steps just now, but doing it together, you get inspired by what other people are doing. You have other examples. We can talk through some things live, Q&A, that sort of thing. But the goal is that everybody walks out of that cohort by the end of the fifth week where you've got your own personal mission statement. And then hopefully you can start using that to bring motivation, clarity, alignment to the things that you want to do and maybe eliminate some of the things that are just kind of taking up space that are contributing to that noise, right? This is really a big focusing mechanism for me.

So if you're interested in that, there'll be a link in the show notes. And for this first one, because it's the first one I've ever done, I've been a part of other big cohort-based courses like this before. But this is the first one that I've really done myself. So pricing it at $97. And then if people sign up for this one, I'm basically giving you access to all the future life theme cohorts. So if you want to come back and revise it, you can do that at no cost. But if that sounds interesting to you, there'll be a link in the show notes.

And it starts the week of April 24th. The first live call is going to happen April 28th. So it'll be right after this episode goes live. But if you want some help refining or defining your personal mission statement, love to have you join us. First thing I would say is, I find that having a North Star

makes it so much easier to get through the rest of your life. And this is exactly what I think you would get out of a course like this. So I would recommend it to anyone interested. And I'll give you, Mike, the same advice people keep giving me is you're not charging enough.

I know, I know. But I want to under-promise, over-deliver, especially on this first one. So I know the price will go up eventually as I get more confidence and I know that I can deliver a great experience for people. But I want to give people an enormous amount of value for being an early adopter, basically. We're going to talk about some of the things I'm wrestling through and some of the changes I am thinking about when we get later on in this

episode with plans for the next quarter. But this is kind of important to me. I want this to be a success. And I think the big thing that makes us a success is a number of people there to create enough momentum as a group that we're all doing this together. So I want to make it accessible for anyone who's even remotely interested in it. Yeah, I mean, we've been doing quarterly planning

in the Max Marketing Labs with some of the early access members. And I can tell you, it really makes a difference when you've got people you're accountable to and going through the journey with you. And I'm, I'm really happy you're doing this Mike as your friend and as an admirer, and I can't wait to see how this works out for you. Awesome. Well, thank you. So I've been getting a lot of email lately on the productivity topic. You know, as Max Sparky, I do tech stuff, but I also talk about productivity, and it comes out. And so many of the people writing me,

whether it's because they're overusing OmniFocus or they just have an issue, it seems to me that I think there's a fundamental question of productivity that so much of this boils down to, and I just wanted to acknowledge it on the show. In my mind, almost all of this boils down to taking on too much. I feel like almost everything in the world of productivity and focus is aimed at trying to figure out a way to be more efficient, more effective with your obligations.

But underlying this is the question is, should you be doing it at all? And I'll tell you that the first reason I put this on today is I just recently got an email from a person. She's a single mom. She got a job. She's trying to get good at automation. She's trying to do all the right things. And she's just overwhelmed. And she wanted my help to kind of teach her how to be even more efficient with things. And I actually talked to this person because I felt for her. And really, when we got talking, the problem was too much. The problem wasn't that she wasn't using the tools as efficiently as you can, and she wasn't asking herself the right questions. The problem was the inability to say no.

And just all of the emotion and fear that comes with trying to scale back to a level that makes sense. And I think this is, in the modern world more than ever, I think this plagues us. I agree with you. It's kind of interesting the reasons why you might have trouble saying no to things. I recently read a book for the Bookworm podcast called Master Your Motivation by Susan Fowler. And it kind of talks about the key, there's three areas that contribute to motivation. And motivation is an interesting topic to me because unlike willpower, I mean, motivation seems like you can summon that if the need arises. You hear stories about these tiny little moms who their kid is caught under a car and they

can lift up the car and save the kid, right? Well, that doesn't really matter how much willpower you have left at that point when your kid's life is in danger. All of a sudden, the motivation is there to take that action. So that's always been an interesting topic to me. But one of the things that Susan Fowler talks about that drives that motivation is this concept of, do I have choice or do I have options and do I have control over those options? And I've been reflecting on this a lot for myself personally, and I feel like one of the things that keeps me attached to the commitments that I've made previously is that I don't feel like I have those options or I don't have as much control as I would like

over my current situation. And a lot of that is just perspective. Well, I have realized that situation doesn't have to change just the way you think about your situation does. And all of a sudden you feel like you have a whole lot more control and you have a whole lot more options. But that's a big driver of FOMO for me is I feel like, well, I can't let this one go because I don't know when the next one is going to come. Well, I'd like to even go back a step further. I was thinking about it in comparison to my father. Like my dad didn't have a college degree. He's a Korean war veteran. He comes back, he works in a lumber yard and in his his life, his option was to go to work and then come home and take care of his family. The internet didn't exist.

And I think one of the reasons this is causing so much strife and grief for people is that there is an abundance of options now. grief for people is that there is an abundance of options. Now there's abundance of opportunities for you to explore and try things. And just thinking about this person that I talked to, I don't want to get into too many details, but you know, when you have children, they make you feel like you're a lousy parent if you don't have them in 17 activities. And then when you go to take the kids to school, then they want you to be in the PTA in America. That's the Parent Teacher Association. And then the same thing can happen when you go to church. It's not enough that you go to church. They want you to be on a committee

at church. And just the little extra bits of your life start taking pieces of you. And then you've got a job. And let's say you're a knowledge worker. And they don't want you just to do the knowledge work. They also want you to sit on the hiring committee. And then all of a sudden, you start looking at your life. And there's literally no oxygen left for you. And even though you're trying to do right by your kids, you're spending more time managing the PTA than you are

finding out what's going on in their heads. And it just happens because it's there now. And I think a lot of people are so ill-equipped for it. And we take on the burden. Somebody told me once that, a doctor told me once, if you're dehydrated, when your body starts telling you you're dehydrated, it's too late. Have you ever heard that saying before? If you don't have enough water in you, you don't realize it. You don't start seeing the warning signs until it's too late. I feel like it's the same thing with busy or taking on too much. You don't start to see the negative consequences until you're already underwater. And I think this is, so part of the, you know, this taking on too

much for me is I feel like we should all get much more careful about saying yes and being intentional and knowledgeable when we take on new obligations and really, really understand the consequences of it. Because I think in the modern world, it's very easy to say yes and take on an obligation without really considering what the cost of that is. Yeah, when you're describing busyness just now, it sounded a lot like the definition of burnout that Chris Bailey shared. Where you don't realize it,

and you're right, by the time you do realize it, it's already too late. The events have already been set in motion. And I think that this is a worthwhile question to ask, is what is absolutely necessary? During COVID, we were forced to ask that question and consider alternatives. And we were very careful. We've talked about this before, but I still feel like my family, we are reaping the benefits

of recognizing that we don't have to sign up for all the sports and we don't have to do all the extra stuff. We also want to give our kids the options if they want to participate in those things. But I think it's important that we frame it. And this is what we've tried to do just personally is, well, you can pick something and you don't have to make a marriage decision with that. It's not forever. You can decide to do something else, but you can't do all the things. So what is it that you really want to do? And then we'll figure out a way to make that work. But also, we're not just going to do the status quo just because everybody else is in three different sports and four different extracurricular activities. We're not going to

do that. We're going to pick a couple things. We'll do them well, but we're also going to protect the margin because we recognize that we don't feel the effects of that until it is too late. That's kind of why I built in the stop doing question to my personal retreat process, which we've talked about before, so I won't go into the whole thing here. But I think that's kind of like a systemic way for me to make sure that I'm not getting into too much, is that I'm constantly, every 90 days, picking at least one thing that I'm going to stop doing. And sometimes, you know, it's the right thing and it really makes a huge difference. Sometimes it is pretty insignificant and I got to, it didn't have the impact that I thought it was going to have. And I got to, I got to try something else. But the, uh, the act of continuing to, to look for things to let go of is a valuable exercise. And I know the first time I did it, it was really, really scary. It was really uncomfortable. What are they going to think

of me when I say I can't do this? I was manufacturing all these narratives in my head. Oh, they're going to think less of me. They're going to look down on me. The opposite is true. People actually are like, wow, good for you for sticking up for yourself. And I wish I could do the same sort of thing. That's something people tell us a lot.

You can. It's just your perspective. You got to get over the fact that you may disappoint some people, but that's not as big a deal as disappointing the people that are most important to you or ultimately disappointing yourself because you're so drained and exhausted and burnt out by the end of the day to do anything, any of the things that you really want to do. Well, and I think that's maybe the next thing I want to talk about with this respect to this question is, you know, what is the real cost of this? And to me personally, the cost is excellence, you know, and I know that sounds very arrogant, but I want to do the things I take on in my life with quality. And I'm very

aware of, you know, the amount of time I left, and I want to spend it making good things. And going back to my decision a year and a half ago to stop being a lawyer, hard to believe it's been a year and a half since I made that decision, but it has. And one of the prime motivators was Max Barkey was getting big enough that I didn't have enough time to do it the way I wanted to do it. And all the time I spent on Max Barking meant I wasn't doing the law stuff the way I wanted to do it. And so instead of doing one thing really well, I was trending toward mediocrity in both. And that was a highly offensive problem to me personally in my own self-image, right? And I think that is something

that you have to face up to if you decide to do the charity board, the PTA, the committees at work, and all take on, if you want to say all the yeses, that means you do not have time to do the thing that is most important to you as well as you can do it. And that is, it's almost like a law of nature. There's no way you're going to be able to do that thing right, whether the right thing being raising your kids or creating a novel or whatever it is. There's no way you're going to have time to do that the way it deserves to be done if you have this overabundance of yeses. So the cost is significant.

And in the short wink of an eye that we have an existence on this planet, it could mean the difference between satisfaction and being old and sitting there feeling bad because you never did that thing. So I would argue that the cost of this is quite expensive. But then if that's the case, how come everybody isn't just doing less? And then I started kind of like pulling apart what the causes are. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. You can stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, sell just about

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Yeah, well, I think part of it is there's a certain amount of pride that we take in being able to do all of these things. There's probably also a little bit of expectation setting for ourselves personally. We don't realize maybe the effect that the culture that we live in and the messaging that we hear all the time is having on us. And so without even maybe deciding, we feel like we have to keep up with all these people that are doing these certain things. I heard somebody say one time and I felt like I'm probably going to butcher the phrase, but it was pretty brilliant. It's like we buy, we buy things with money that we don't have to impress people we don't like. Yeah. But that's, that's kind of the general undertone of all of this busyness stuff. I feel it's not that, oh, well, we really want to hang out with the Jones family. I mean,

if we really wanted to hang out with the Jones family more, we could invite the Jones family over. Right. But we're, we're both too busy because we're all in all these, these different things. So we kind of hide behind all of that. And we try to maintain this standard of, of existence, standard of living that we probably never consciously chose. It was just, well, this is what everybody else is doing. So we should do the same thing. Yeah. I think that's definitely part of it. I think for me personally, when I meditate on this, I think fear underlies all these yeses. Like fear that if I don't say yes, then nobody will ask me again to do something. And suddenly I won't have things to do, you know, fear that the income, if I give up the

income that's represented by that, yes, that I won't be able to take care of my family, you know? And I think that's a big part of it, but frankly, it's the more of the emotional fear of not having something to work on that is terrifying for me. And this is partly the result of being self-employed, but I had the same problem when I worked in the, when I was an employee, you know, when I was a W2 employee at the law firm, anytime somebody needed help on something, I wanted to do it because I wanted to feel valued. And I wanted them to say, oh,

Sparky's the one that gets it. In fact, at the old firm, somebody once made a comment in a meeting. They're like, when there's a problem, we stick David in a cannon and we fire him at it and the problem gets solved. And that was such a point of pride for me. This was earlier in my career. for me. This was earlier in my career, but for decades that compliment landed in my head, right? And so every time there's a problem, I'm like, load me in the cannon, boss. Let me go fix it. And it was troublesome because I was overcommitting the whole time. I mean, I look back at how much time I spent working during some of my kids' formative years, and I am ashamed. I don't know what else to say. But I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.

Well, I think you have to be careful here because I think if you had consciously chosen the canon, that's fine. But you didn't realize the choice that was before you, right? And I guess it really comes down to thinking about who you want to be and what sort of legacy you want to leave and who do you want to be remembered as. I know one of the things that you've said over and over that really sticks with me is I don't want to be known as the guy who got back to you quickly via email. That's a choice that you made. But taken in isolation, you would probably answer, do you want to let people down via email? No. You just view all these choices in isolation and, well, I'm just not going to, I'll figure out a way to make this work and I'll figure out a way to make that work. Eventually, all of those things compound to the point and it gets to the point where something has to give.

And this is why I really like the life theme stuff, because if you think about, you know, what are the real non-negotiables for me, then it's easier to spot which of those things really shouldn't have the importance that gets attributed to it when you take it in isolation. Mine is, I want to help people answer the question, why am I here? I want to help them connect to their calling, discover their destiny, live the life they were created for. And taking that into consideration, when I go into a project, I'm always looking for that connection. And sometimes it's obvious and it brings motivation to, yeah, this is really something I need to do. Sometimes it's not so obvious, but I want to try it out, right? So I'll go into it and I'll see if I can find that

connection. But I can tell you, if I don't find that connection, it's not real long before I start to get real frustrated because I feel like I chose the wrong thing. And constantly asking yourself, what is the right thing is another key piece to this. And now we're going to talk about the quarterly stuff in a little bit, but just ask the question frequently. Every 90 days, I've got an opportunity to right the wrongs. If you only do it a couple times in your entire life, then you really got to nail it. But if you have a whole bunch of smaller feedback loops, then you can try something. If it doesn't work out, try something else. And eventually, you just get a little bit closer, dial it in a little bit more, gets a little bit more clear. Then it becomes a little bit easier to say no to certain things.

And eventually you find, oh yeah, this is really the thing that, to borrow your term, moves the needle, right? This really hits the mark for me. Yep. Agreed. But kind of getting back to the context of that in terms of doing too much, on further reflection, I realized that almost all of this fear-based avoidance of getting clear of too much is lies. You're lying to yourself. The income, if you say no to some things, you will find ways to make income on the things that matter. Everybody I know that's had the guts to do it reports that. And I, I had the same impact. You know, I, I gave up a bunch of money when I stopped being a lawyer and I got a bunch of it back, um, by doing Max Sparky better. Um, the, the, you know, the idea of letting other people down or letting

yourself down by trying to do everything at once that goes away quickly too. Like Mike said, people actually respect it when you tell them no, if you do it in a caring and loving way, of course. It's like there is a, it's a smoke barrier. It's a, you know, at Disneyland, they have this great room on the Indiana Jones ride where you go into a room and you're in this car and you're racing down the hallway and it looks like there's a wall in front of you and you it's it's actually made of smoke it's just a it's a a visual effect and if you've never seen it before i'm sorry i spoiled it for you but at

the end you just go through smoke and that's what this is too you just have to have the guts to say no to some things and my friend that i had the call with is already realizing benefits of just having the guts to say no to a few things and starting to get things a little more calm. And then that allows you to become more intentional, which is what leads into kind of my quarterly retreat and what we're going to be talking about later today. But I wanted to take a little time, and thanks for letting me go down this journey. I think this is something a lot of people are going through. I think in the modern times, this is an, is an epidemic level problem for people. Most people aren't aware of it, but my advice to you is that you can get past it. You just got to make some tough decisions.

Right. All right. Um, so we were actually going to start today's show talking about quarterly retreats and, and quarter planning, but I, uh, I took us on a little journey. But let's get back to the thread. Mike and I want to talk about how we did our quarterly planning and how things are going. But I thought before we even got into the weeds, how did you do your quarterly retreat, Mike? Well, the quarterly retreat process for me always happens in Obsidian. I've kind of talked about this before, so I'll keep it short, but I've got my personal retreat framework where I revisit my, well, actually, first thing I do is I review all of my journal entries. And then from there, I review my core values. I go through the wheel of life and I rate my satisfaction in eight different areas, which

for me are spiritual, career and work, love and family, health and fitness, personal growth, fun and recreation, social and finances. I've got different headers then for each of those areas, and I just make a bunch of bullet points on what are the things that contributed to the score that I gave those areas. I've got a retrospective process where I spend a bunch of thinking time thinking through what did I accomplish, what went well, what could have gone better. And then the big three for me are what should I start doing, stop doing, and keep doing. I do all of that and then I figure out what are the goals that I want to set for the next 90 days. I want to set for the next 90 days. And as I was reflecting on the last quarter, I realized I had kind of been hit or miss with the goals that I had set, which were to dial in my regular writing

rhythm. I did that very consistently at the beginning, had a lapse in the middle, picked it up near the end. I had a goal of focusing on my newsletter, which kind of slipped through the cracks with just craziness and the day-to-day stuff, which is going to lead to some changes as we get into Q2 probably. And then the other one was I wanted to focus on the faith-based productivity community that I mentioned, and I was able to consistently do some webinars and stuff there, which I really enjoyed doing. So two out of three, I feel like with this quarter specifically and everything that happened ain't bad. How about you? Yeah. Well, did you go off-site for your quarterly review? I did. I actually always go off-site.

I try to go overnight to my parents have a family cabin up in Door County, which in the winter, it's great because there's nobody else up there. It's real quiet. It's a great place to think. Surrounded by trees, it's your typical cabin in the woods if you look up those stock photos. But even if I can't get up there for an entire day, which was actually the case this time, I do try to get away for a significant amount of time outside of the normal work environment. So I leave my house and I actually went downtown for this one. I've got a co-working space where I actually dump my stuff and then just went and walked the trails for hours

and jotted a whole bunch of things down inside of Obsidian and then picked it up when I got back. As I knew we were going to be talking about this, I've kind of been revisiting and adding things to some of these different things as we went. So I guess there's a lesson there in that I try to do at least eight hours for this thing, but sometimes it's got to give a little bit.

And so I kind of broke it up into a couple of four hour chunks. Yeah. I did mine at home as well. Although I don't have five children, minor minor grown. So I get some degree of solitude anyway. Uh, Daisy and I all have one car. So me going away for a few days can be a problem unless I like take a bus or something, I guess. But the, uh, I did mine and I, I do mine in day one. I've kind of settled on that. I've, we've talked about on the show, our various workflows over the years. And at this point, day one has really landed for me. And I've got some templates for these quarterly reviews and I'm not going to go through the whole roles-based thing that I do. We've talked about that enough on the show already. But I did give it a whole day and just mark it off that I'm not going to do any production.

It is manager, not producer day. And I like to do it largely on an iPad. And I dictate most of it as I go through. And I don't do it at my desk. I just, you know, I've got a comfy chair here. I'll sit and think about it for a while. And then when I'm home, I'll go out into the wood shop or the garden and just like take little breaks and I take the dog for a walk or whatever and just kind of like meditate on it and come back and do it again and i uh i did it this year i also shared some of it with that labs group like uh like i was talking about earlier

which i found a very kind of it's an increasingly interesting and useful experiment to have some accountability for this but i did mine as well and And looking back, so like you, I start kind of looking back, how did I do in the prior quarter? And for me this year or this quarter, in fact, let me just, can I put a little side note here? I feel like this idea of quarters is so much better than years because they come every three months instead of every 12 months. I mean, the 12-week year was a great book, but I don't even know if you need to read that book to get the idea. I get a New Year's Day every three months. And the sense of renewal that comes with that,

the opportunity to change course, all the stuff that people feel every January 1st, I get that four times a year. And that is such a powerful concept. If you haven't tried it, I would strongly recommend it, but either way. So as we're heading into April 1st, I did mine. I was very conscious of coming into this year, into this 2023 year that I was exiting a transition. You know, I had a year and a half ago, I decided to stop being a lawyer. There was a bunch of work involved with stopping being a lawyer.

It's not a job where you just walk out the door and you're done with the career. You've got to hand off clients and you've got to deal with the bar association and all sorts of little things that take a lot of time. And then I started being Max Barkey full-time, but I added the Max Barkey Labs to the mix. So that was creating a whole new kind of product and community and all the things that are involved with that. So I spent last year doing that, building a studio out. And it really was, in hindsight, a transitionary year where I was trying to get things rolling. But what I really wanted to do heading into quarter one was get past transition. I feel like

there's a kind of an underlying criticism of myself I've had emerging over the last three or four months that I am the source of drama too much, if that makes sense. Like, oh, poor me. I'm trying to like stop being a lawyer. Poor me. I'm trying to set up this, you know, this community of the Max Barkey labs and, you know, all my problems and all these things I'm trying to figure out how to do. And I can't get as much done as I want and blah, blah, blah.

You know, I feel like I'm whining when I talk about it and I want to get beyond that and just be the guy who makes the stuff. Right. And so the idea of this quarter for me was transitioning from transition into production and going in, I knew that wasn't like a switch that was going to be thrown, But I've been very conscious of transition style tasks and admin tasks. And I'm really putting effort now into not doing that anymore and finding ways to either get help or not do those things and convert blocks in my calendar into actual production. And I think overall, I've made progress on that. In the last quarter, I've offloaded some work that I used to do. I've been very conscious of figuring out what is my ideal

week and like, what are the moving the needle items that I need to be spending time on every day. But I'm not 100% where I want to be yet on it. And I didn't go into the quarter thinking I would get this solved in three months, but I've made progress on it and I'm happy with that. That's the goal though. Progress, not perfection. I think we can get locked into, well, did I achieve my goal? Did I not achieve my goal? And if I did, it was successful. And if I didn't, it wasn't. But really, if you made progress in the direction that you wanted to go, that is successful. And then like you were talking about the quarterly format, this is absolutely the way to do it. You don't have to do it by quarters, I guess. You could

break it down into even smaller timeframes if you want, but don't just click into the Gregorian calendar and every new year's decide you're going to try something new. Have multiple points throughout the year where you reconsider things and give yourself permission to make adjustments if you want. Yeah. And I feel some degree of comfort, just like I was talking about earlier. One of the problems of doing too much is not being aware that you've taken on too much. I feel like right now I've kind of got my eye on the thing I'm working on. And it is this idea that getting out of transition mode and now just being Max Barkey in the day job and making that work and making good stuff that people like. And being aware of that is half the battle, I think. Because every day I wake up thinking about what am I doing today in terms of production

as opposed to other things, you know, kind of getting back to our old move the needle discussion. But so I made progress on that. The part of that getting more tactical is I haven't released a field guide yet this year. And I don't have one that's ready to release as we record this, but I'm working on it. It's on obsidian, which is a hard thing to teach as you know, because it's, it's complicated and you want to make it easy to understand. But, uh, I made progress on that. You know, things are rolling. I almost think I'm, I'm at the downhill portion of it now where it's getting easier, but, um,

but it just takes time. What's it matter? I'm going to release it when it's right and it's ready. I'll give myself a pat on the back for making progress on that. Then the third thing for me, which I kind of talked about as my theme to the extent I have one, it's just to really double down on intentionality. I think I told you just jokingly at the new year that I wanted to take intentionality to like dangerous levels or something like that. I forget the term of our names, but I say I want to be an unhealthy amount of intentionality in my life. And the reason for that is because for so long as a lawyer,

I had very little control over my calendar. You know, if a judge decided to tell me to show up, I had to show up. If a client had something go wrong, I had to deal with it. So I was more like a fireman than I was an intentional knowledge worker. And I'm kind of basking in the fact that I don't have that anymore in my life. And I do kind of basking in the fact that I don't have that anymore in my life. And I do have the ability to be more intentional. And I've really been paying attention to that. I don't think I'm living as intentionally as I would like. I still find myself getting sidetracked easily sometimes and in ways that are hard for me to recover from. We had a plumbing problem in the house the other day,

and it suddenly is going to be a big deal, and I got to get people out here. And it's like, which I understand happens to people, and you deal with it. But I found myself, after dealing with it, unable to do good work. I had to let it sidetrack me, and I'd lost the thread. So there's work to be done on that for me. I would say with all of my quarter one goals, I made progress. That's the big win right there. This episode of the Focus Podcast

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of VPNs out there, but ExpressVPN is ridiculously fast, which you want when you're watching shows. There's no buffering, no lag, and you can stream in HD. ExpressVPN works on all your devices, phones, media consoles, smart TVs, and more. So you can watch what you want on the big screen or on the go. So if you want to get access to hundreds of new shows, go to expressvpn.com slash focused right now, and you get three extra months of ExpressVPN for free. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash focused. Expressvpn.com slash focused for that service. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for their All right, so I want to talk about what we're going to be doing in quarter two. What are your plans for the next 90 days? Not that different. next 90 days. Not that different. I mean, the advantage of the quarterly is that it really gives you a chance to sit down and consider, can I move on to the next thing or not? And it keeps

me honest. But it also is a time to just check and say, no, you know what? This needs new work. You need to rededicate yourself to this and give this problem another three months. So coming out of it, I am, again, focusing on the intentionality stuff. I find that some of the things I discovered during the first quarter of trying to be more intentional is time tracking and journaling are really great tools to help you do that. And the fact that when I journal at the end of the day, uh, I can kind of reflect on how I did. I'm getting myself a lot of feedback. So I feel like it's, it's paying dividends.

Like I feel myself more present with people when I talk to them and, you know, all the things that you get out of a kind of like getting started with meditation. I feel like I'm taking it to another level with this and trying to make it like, not just something you do while I'm on the cushion, but just from one moment to the next. And I'm never going to be perfect at it, but I think I'm getting better at it by being mindful of it and following up with it. I also discovered that the days that I don't do a shutdown and don't like properly in the day is a very good barometer of how intentional I was that day. If I get so off the rails that I don't do a proper shutdown and plan the next day,

it's just a leading indicator of poor intentionality for me. So I'm trying to take advantage of that knowledge to force myself to do those things, even when I don't want to, in order to kind of like rein myself in a bit. So I'm working on intentionality and trying to learn from the lessons of the first quarter. Well, that's the first one, but I've got some more. Why don't we take turns? What's the first thing on your list for the next quarter? Sure. Well, the first thing for me this quarter, I've kind of already mentioned, that is the life theme cohort. And I guess this would be a good spot to kind of talk about the thought process that kind of led to this. for me taking the day job was this Derek Sivers essay about the work and the art and keeping them separate. And I thought, hey, yeah, that sounds like a pretty good model. I'm going to try that

out. I'm not sure that's working as well as I would have liked it to. Going back and thinking about my word for the year, it was that I wanted things to be stabilized. It was the year of stabilization, and there were additional words that kind of went into that, you know, convergence, alignment, structures, systems, and I feel myself kind of being pulled in different directions. I don't know exactly what the path forward is for future Mike, but it's really got me just questioning everything, going back to your initial topic of doing too much. I feel like I'm doing too much. In fact, as I was reflecting on my wheel of life and the satisfaction with different areas. Another model that you talk

about all the time that really kind of stuck with me is like going too fast on your bike or your skateboard down a hill, feeling like you're going to lose control at any moment. That's kind of how I'm feeling right now. So I've been really thinking through just what are the options for me? What are the things that I know to be true about all the different things that I'm doing? And I realize I got a lot of questions about the faith-based productivity stuff yet. I don't know exactly how I'm going to make the time to lead a cohort, but I'm going to give it a shot. I'm going to commit to it. I've already announced it. I've already actually sold seats to it prior to this recording. So it's something that I am going to have to show up and do. And I have a pretty good idea that I can do it really well.

I know what it's going to look like. But now I got to show up and do it. to look like. But now I got to show up and do it. And I feel like once I actually do that, then I will be able to see what other options are on the other side of having done that cohort myself. I have different ideas of what could be over there, but I feel like taking that next step, this for me is the next step. And then once I do that, I think I'll get a little bit more clarity about what happens next. Yeah, I didn't want to rock your boat too much, but I always questioned the reliance on that Derek Sivers essay, because I feel like you have a lot inside of you you need to get out. And so I'm curious to see how this goes. But it sounds to me like the second quarter for you is really going to be a lot of self-evaluation and consideration.

Yeah. And it's going to be a lot of kind of testing things. I think I talked about that last year. That was kind of my big theme was testing things and kind of establishing what is the new normal. And I feel like I found it and I'm not super satisfied with it yet. So I'm going to repeat the process and ask some of those questions again. We're all a work in progress, right, Mike? Yep, exactly. I don't know. I never felt like I really had a midlife crisis. I never felt the need to get a Porsche or whatever. But I am aware as I get older that I have less time

left than I have spent, if that makes sense. And to me, the effect of that is it really gives me a driving urge to produce good stuff and way less patience for anything that's in the way of that. And I don't know. Yeah. I don't want to sound like the old guy on the podcast. So I'm trying not to like overly state that, but I do think that definitely plays an underlying role with all of my thoughts about this stuff at this point in my life. And, uh, I would like to see you spend your life

making great stuff. So see where that goes. The other thing for me kind of going into this next quarter really is, you know, I've been writing checks for production, you know, getting good production out and I just want to start cashing them. You know, I want to start seeing the fruits of that. I'm already seeing it, honestly, like the Mac, Mac Sparky lab stuff. I've got so much more efficient at making it and the quality is better. The frequency is higher and it's like better across the board because I've been spending time figuring out how to make that work. I feel like I need to do the same thing with the field guide work and a few other things. There's one thing I would like to add. I don't want to add a whole lot right now because I've already got enough on my plate, but I want to make some free YouTube videos at some frequency

and of good quality. And I think I'm about ready to start doing that too. So I've got a couple things I want to do, but I really want to see production results in the next quarter. And I think I'm about ready to start doing that too. So I've got a couple of things I want to do, but I really want to see production results in the next quarter. And I'm not going to put too, I'm not going to quantify that to say, I'm going to release this many videos or I'm going to finish this field guide. I don't want to like give myself artificial goals like that, but I just want the day to day work to reflect better and more frequent production.

I like it. My second one is going to be a lot of the same theme. So I've got another project that I am collaborating with somebody on and kind of going slow because I don't want to get to the point where we are, as we discussed earlier, where I am doing too much. I recognize that if I keep saying yes to things, something has to give. And I've got the, what should I start doing, stop doing, keep doing. I'm not sure I'm ready to talk about some of the things that I'm going to be stopped doing here, but I have a direction. And this is one of the key ideas that I think I just need to kind of expound on this a little bit is high fact finders like me specifically tend to want to have all the details, right? We want to have the plan and we

got to know exactly what steps there are there, but you don't really need that. You just kind of, you need a direction, not a plan. You need a compass, not a blueprint would be a visual way to say this. And I feel like I've got the bearings, right? So now I've got to test a few things and see what sticks, what doesn't. So I've got this collaborative project that I'm working on that I'm pretty excited about. It's probably a pretty long-term project, but just kind of kicking the tires on this and building it slowly. I'm not ready to announce what this is yet, but hopefully the next month or so I'll have

some more details that I can share. But I'm pretty excited about this one. And I really like doing things with other people. I've never been somebody who likes to work alone even though I do a lot of creative stuff and writing is essentially like a solo activity. The things that I really enjoy like the podcasts like this they're all co-hosted podcasts always somebody else that I get to bounce ideas off of. I feel like when you when you do that, the end product is better. So I'm excited about working on this thing with somebody else that I look up to and respect.

Yeah. I mean, it seems to me, Mike, like you've got an exciting quarter ahead of you. I do. I do. I just got to go slow, right? Progress, not perfection. Not put all the pressure on me to ship all this stuff, but really it's just move the needle on some of these things and see what opportunities open up from this. It's all about progress, not results, right? And if you're making progress, you're going to get the results. And I think it's really easy with these types of annual or quarterly goals to weigh yourself down with a results-based goal that is a binary thing when we are humans and nothing is binary for a human.

So when you're picking these things, try to pick about making progress towards things rather than saying, I'm going to get another million dollars in clients. But what if you get $990,000 in clients? Did you fail? You know? Right. You know, so it's, um, I think, and it's also just very hard on yourself when you give yourself those hard numbers. I mean, it's in the world does that to us enough. We don't need to do it to ourselves. Cut yourself some slack for sure and one um one kind of uh results goal i have is to

kind of nail down a better idea of my ideal week in my case it's an ideal two weeks i work on a two-week cycle with the way the podcasts go like this shows every two weeks and so is automator so i'm trying to figure out a cycle where I have built-in time blocks to do all the production stuff for my podcast obligations, the labs obligations, but then also build blocks in there to work on the field guides and some of the other stuff I want to produce on to make that just something that happens, not something that I have to fight for. And so that is more of a goal for the next quarter. And I've already started playing with it and I'll probably share it in the labs as I start working on deeper, but I

think this is something that would make sense for me. And hopefully anybody listening that is struggling with getting enough time to do production, whatever production is to you, um, having a system where it's built in, uh, makes it a lot easier. So I'm going to try and figure that out. I think I'm going to steal that one, honestly. Okay, it's all yours. Free of charge. I do have one other project which I want to kind of pick at. It's intentionally third on the list because this one's not urgent,

but I also have been thinking through with these different side projects that I've got going on here, the ideal week and what does that look like for me and where are the time blocks that I can consistently work on these things. So I was sort of thinking about that already, but hearing you say that you've actually kind of built that into as an official third thing that you're going to do, I feel like I need to do the same thing. And that's the one I'm going to commit to right here is I want to actually have mapped all of this out for not just where I am right now, because I do look at that as part of my personal retreat process. But I want to take a little bit more liberty with this.

I want to kind of blow it all up and not attack it through or embrace it through what is feasible right now, but really just give myself permission to follow the life theme format. Think bigger. If you could really just craft your perfect week, what would that actually look like? And that's something that I haven't really thought about in a while. I tend to anchor on like, well, what are the roles and responsibilities and the things that I have to do, right? And then I look for the small changes that I can make in the time blocking versus the time tracking, right? You can see whether you're following through on the plan that you set. But I want to be a little bit more brave in considering what are the options available to me in terms of the ideal week, especially as we head into summer.

My kids are going to be done with school. All right. So opportunity here, I feel, to spend some intentional time with them. If I figure out when and where that's possible, that significantly increases the chances of that happening. Okay, dear listener, that sounds to me like in a month or two, you're going to hear a show where we will report back on how we did on that and what we're doing and the process we use.

So Mike, consider that official Focus Podcast homework. All right. consider that official focused podcast homework all right this episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by indeed go to indeed.com focused and join more than three million businesses worldwide using indeed to hire great talent fast the thing about running your own business is every single hire counts, and no hiring partner understands that like Indeed. Indeed is the hiring platform where you can attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Don't spend hours on multiple job sites looking for candidates with the right skills when you can do it all with Indeed. You can find top talent fast with Indeed's suite of powerful hiring tools like matching assessments and virtual

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indeed.com slash focused and get started today hiring quality employees. Terms and conditions apply. Cost per application pricing is not available for everyone. Do you need to hire? You need Indeed. And our thanks to Indeed for sponsoring this show and all of RelayFM. All right, so we talked through quarter one, we talked through quarter two, got a little bit of time left here. There's a couple things that we should check in with on feedback. First one here from Mark wants to know, how do your weekends vary from your work days? How about it, David?

I don't think in terms of weekdays and work days, weekends and weekdays, I don't really think in those terms now that I'm self-employed. So that's a privilege, I guess, of being self-employed. So I think more in terms of blocks than in days. By that, what I mean is at the beginning of the week, I have blocks to do certain things. And some of those blocks will be work-related and some will be personal-related. Like I had a thing that my daughter needed to help on that took a half day and she was available to do

it on a Wednesday afternoon. So that afternoon I took the day off and we did the thing and got it done. But then on Saturday I spent the morning doing work. So I just didn't really think, and I didn't feel begrudged or feel bad about it. You know what I mean? I just, I tried to think that the blocks are balanced, that I have personal and downtime in the blocks, but I want the blocks to happen and they can move around. I feel like that was kind of a rambling answer. Did you get it? I got it. And you've inspired me. Oh, good. So yeah, I'm not quite sure what to do with that quite yet. So my weekends are very different from the work days because everything that happens in the work day revolves essentially around the day job.

Yeah. And so all the podcasts that I record, and I'm fortunate that I have flexibility in my schedule that I can carve out time for these sorts of things. But the end result is that the, in the words of Calvin and Hobbes, the days are just packed. By the time I get to the weekend, I don't want to do anything. Saturdays are essentially my do nothing days. I'm currently training for a half marathon. So those are the days that I'll go for a long run. But other than that, I try to keep those as, as free as I can. And then, uh, Sundays we're at church pretty much all day and that is an intentional choice and I'm totally okay with, with that. But, um, then Monday it starts again.

Right. And, um, I, like I shared a little bit earlier earlier i feel like i'm trying to pack a little bit too much into those those work days so not not sure what adjustments to be made there yet but do feel that something needs to to give there and i am very intrigued about the idea of having the blank slate and what really is the difference between a weekend and a workday. I'm reminded of a CGP Grey video that I saw a long time ago about the weekend Wednesdays. That's a cool concept. What would it look like if I was able to take a day off in the middle of the week? That would be pretty awesome. And I don't know how to get there, but that's kind of the thing I'm thinking through spurred by this question here from this feedback. So thanks, Mark, for opening up a whole bunch of open loops for me.

historically her job has been very off and strange hours, you know, and sometimes she'd work through the middle of the night. Sometimes she'd get up and leave for work at 4am. And sometimes she'd just have a normal day. It just would depend on what they needed her for. But her job has recently changed where now she's on a Monday through Friday, basically eight to five job. So now her downtime is weekends. And that affects my blocks, because if I want to spend time with my sweetheart, I need to do that largely on the weekend. So the blocks will migrate to Saturday and Sunday to be with her. But I just don't feel like there's a block wall between them. I'm back to my smoke wall, and I just don't care. wall between them. I'm back to my smoke wall and I just don't care. I am very conscious, however, of not working seven days a week. I feel like the ideas of burnout and taking on too much are really a risk for me personally. So I really like to make sure I block time at the beginning of the week. I've really been enjoying, on this show a year ago, I said I was going to start a wood shop. Well, now I've got it back running again. And I spent the last week flattening my bench. I made a bench 30 years ago, Mike. And of course, it's out of flat. And I've been out there with a big jointer plane, you know, the thing you just press across. And my shoulders are sore. And I've been loving every minute of it. And it's just so fun flattening that thing. And so I'm conscious of making time to do things like that that are not related to the job.

And I think it helps me think and makes the stuff I do when I am on the clock better. But I don't think in terms of days and weekends. And that is something that not everybody has the privilege of doing. If you've got a job where you have to be with your butt in a seat Monday through Friday, well, then that's how you plan your weeks,

and your weekends are definitely going to be different. But if you're lucky enough to be able to have freedom, I would recommend to not follow those same rules because you've got options. Find out what works for you. One follow-up question I have for you on that is do you have different morning and evening routines for your work days versus your your weekends or do you have the same routine that you do every day every morning i get up and do my journaling and my

meditating and i do some max Barkey email every day because the garden gets weedy very fast if I don't. And I do a shutdown every day. And sometimes it's just, I'll reflect on the day and there wasn't a lot of work to talk about, but I try to do it. Those are seven days a week kind of things for me because I find the benefit of them is just too valuable. Yep. I'm the same way, but I do think that there is a potential there maybe to have different routines that get triggered when you've got more time potentially on a weekend versus a workday. I was just curious what your approach was. Yeah. There always are exceptions. I mean, as we're recording this, we're the week following Easter. On Easter Sunday this year, we had a bunch of family over. And at the time I would

have been doing my normal shutdown, I was talking to family and laughing and cooking and all that stuff. And I didn't do a shutdown that day. Because, I mean, what do you say? Excuse me, everybody. I need to go into my studio and shut the door and quietly contemplate my day. You don't do that. So there's exceptions. But, I mean, in general, I try to do that stuff every day.

And it really helps keep me on track. day and it really helps keep me on track. I, you know, sometimes I wonder, Mike, if I'm not like the way my brain is wired, sometimes, you know, we're all on this spectrum of, you know, being just, you know, too anal retentive, or I don't know what the word is. I'm sure there's a medical diagnosis, but when I look at the way I am about about getting rid of stuff that I don't want and trying to stay on these patterns, I wonder if I'm entirely healthy the way I do it. But it works for me. So there we go. That's the key. Yep. From Jason, we got a question. So you've talked about taking action on the books you read. How do you make it stick? And I put this one in, Mike, because I know you've talked about taking action on the books you read. How do you make it stick?

And I put this one in, Mike, because I know you've got thoughts on it. You've got a whole podcast where you read a book every week. But let me go first because my answer is probably going to be shorter than yours. I do drastically highlight and I kind of incorporate the good parts of books into the Sparky OS, which I'm constantly refining and playing with. And I find that really helps me. The second thing I do is I try to take action items out of good books. Like if I read a book, like really the 12-week year book was one that inspired me to say, well, what if I just treat every 12 months as a new year? I'm sorry, every 12 weeks as a new year. And that was, I don't know how many years ago that book come out, but that stuck with me. And I'm always trying little things

when I read a book and sometimes they stick and sometimes they don't. And the third thing I do is the spaced repetition system. I cannot put enough love towards the ReadWise service. It just works so well for me. And I get that it's not for everybody, but I have all these Kindle highlights and they randomly appear for me every morning as part of my morning routine. I read 10 of them and I'm inspired by it every morning. I love it. And that's a great way to get reminded of something that you thought was important maybe 10 years ago when you read a book. Yeah, I've been playing around with that, by the way. I do like the highlights feature, and I've never found a good way to store the quotes

from the books that I read in Obsidian. So I've been messing around with manually creating those in Readwise and then having them appear as I do my review. I guess I'm getting a little bit ahead of my process here, but I am also experimenting with that service and can definitely recommend it. So for me, I've got a blog post I wrote a couple years ago which I'll link to which kind of dives into the really nerdy details here but I capture all my notes from the books that I read in a mind map format using mind node and the action items from those I denote as tasks inside of my notes so I can find them easily when I am putting together the notes for Bookworm or just processing my notes as I transfer them all into Obsidian, which is ultimately where all that stuff resides. Now, there are two different types, I think, of action items here

from books that I read. There are intentional action items and there are unintentional action items. So I'll read a book sometimes and not have action items that I've jotted down from it. And the minute that I get done reading that book, it's not obvious sometimes how much that impacts me. But I'll talk about other books that I've read, and I'll find that some of those that I really didn't like, like How to Read a Book is one of these that initially when I read it, I didn't really like it. And I'm like, there's no way I'm going to follow that format. And it comes up, it's kind of a running joke on Bookworm, I feel like I mention it almost every single episode. It really, like the further I get from

it, realize that that really has influenced the way that I read books, right? So I'll read things and those dots that I've collected, I may not even realize how they're being connected by my brain into other things that I read, but that's the whole idea of like the, the, uh, syntopical reading, right? Is that your brain is connecting these things and sometimes you don't even realize it, but the more books that you read, the more it's shaping your own thoughts and opinions about some of these things. So some of that stuff, like there's benefit from that that I don't even jot down.

But then the ones that I actually want to do something with, those will get transferred over to a task management system or to Bookworm. So I thought about like snarkily answering this question. How do you take action on the books that you read and start a podcast? Because that's

kind of the truth for me. The genesis of Bookworm was that Joe and I wanted to read more books and we wanted someone to hold us accountable to following through on what we said we were going to do. And so it has definitely been that for me, but not all the books that I read, I read for that podcast. There is definitely some benefit to that public accountability though. It's one of the reasons we decided to talk through how we did in the last quarter. What are our plans for the next quarter? You mentioned that I've got a whole bunch of homework. I'm going to take that seriously. I'm going to have to answer to what I said I was going to do. Whereas if you just tell yourself, hey, I'm going to do this thing, it's

easy to, oh, I don't want to do that anymore and brush it under the rug. But ultimately, I would say, if you're wanting to take action on the books that you read, if you capture these things down and you go back and you look at them later and you decide you don't really want to do them, don't feel like you need to do them. We just got done talking about how we want to do less, right? Less but better is kind of the mantra. And a lot of this stuff from of the mantra. And a lot of this stuff from books that you read, a lot of productivity books specifically, they just kind of grind my gears how it's like, I'm a guru and this is the five-step system and you just do this and you're going to save three hours a day every day for the rest of your life. It's never that

simple, right? So I'll jot down not the five steps to the system and, oh, I'm going to do this. It's going to be, well, they suggested this one thing on this one page and that was an interesting idea. So I'm going to try that one thing, right? And I'll try it. And if I don't feel like sticking with it, I'm not going to stick with it. And I'll just report back to Joe, like, hey, that one didn't work, right? So just because it worked for somebody else doesn't mean it's going to work for you. But that's the tone of a lot of these productivity and business books is like, well, this obviously works. So you just need to do this. No, you got to decide for yourself if it's really important, if it's really going to move the needle for you and give yourself some permission to say, no, that's really not that

important. Going back to how to read a book, it's a conversation with somebody and they're making their arguments and you have to weigh them and decide for yourself whether they are valid or not. I read a lot of productivity and business books now where I just decide, you know, I don't think that that point is valid. I don't think that that system is valid, you know, and I'll reject the whole argument. I guess the more books that I read, the more confidence I have in doing that sort of thing. So it's kind of where the quantity produces the quality there. I think you're right. I mean, I think you've read more of these types of books than anybody that I know. And so it's interesting to kind of hear you say that, because I do think

there's a lot of repeated themes in these books. And there comes a point where you don't get a lot of new ideas out of the books. And the new idea is the exception, not the rule. That being said, I think anybody who reads any kind of productivity type book, and I'm using productivity with some air quotes here, you should work out a method to try out anything you find interesting from it. Because it takes the most amount of time to read the book it takes very little time to actually create some action items out of it or some kind of space repetition to kind of remind you of it and if you don't do that i feel like you're really it's like marching the the football down to the one yard line and then walking off

the field you know it's just like it doesn't make sense to not try and turn it into some actionable change. Yeah, I agree with that. That's kind of one of the principles of how to read a book. It's an older book by Mortimer Adler, who was the editor-in-chief for the Encyclopedia Britannica back in the day. And he's got different steps to how to get the most out of these books that you read. But one of the last questions he recommends you ask is, so what of it? So you just got done reading this book. You heard all these arguments that the author has made. You decide for yourself which ones are valid. But then, yeah, what are you going to do about it? And sometimes it's interesting. Sometimes I'll read a book and I'll hate the book. I'm not getting a whole lot out of the book, but there'll be

one or two things that they'll say a couple different places, and those are action items, and those things really stick. So you don't have to agree with everything in the book in order to be inspired to try that one small thing. And I would argue, you're right, you should always pick something that you're going to try out of it. Occasionally, there are books that I go through and there's just nothing that really jumps out to me. But that is the exception, not the rule. If you're going to put in the effort, it's worth it to take the final step and just try something from it. When my kids were little, I would always tell them that you can learn something from anyone, even your worst enemy. And when they were kids,

it's like, well, dad, what about Darth Vader? I'm like, oh yeah, you could totally learn something from Darth Vader. And so it was like a kind of a running joke. And this is when they were quite young. But recently I was with one of my daughters and there was an objectionable person nearby. And she's like, but dad, you can learn something from him too. I'm like, yeah, you're right. So I feel like that's true for books. If somebody got a deal to make a book, they probably got something to say. And if you're going to read it, see what you can get out of it. But I like the question. That's the reason why I wanted to talk about it.

I don't think you have to turn it into a job. This book does not become your life pursuit. But with some easy steps, you can try out a few experiments on yourself, see if something sticks or doesn't. There are plenty of books I've tried things on that I ultimately didn't get anything out of. But I did learn that that thing, that book suggested didn't work for me. And that may be good enough. Yeah. I guess that's the last piece of advice I would give is a lot of productivity books, specifically, they'll have like designated action items for you to take. And I typically don't really like those. They're very prescriptive.

They're trying to get you to follow their system, right? And sometimes you do have to go through those different steps. But developing the ability to read those types of books and create your own action items from them based on simple little like one or two sentence statements that sometimes have nothing to do with the main ideas that they're talking about. If you can do that, you'll be a lot more motivated probably to take action on these action items than if you tried to just do whatever the author tells you to do. Yeah. All right. Well, let's wrap up there. We are the focus podcast. You can find us at relay.fm slash focused.

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