Focused - 200: Favorite Productivity Hacks

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hello, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Episode 200 of the Focus podcast. Now, I know it started out with a different name and there was a different guy there, but now it's episode 200 and it's you and me.

And I think we should congratulate ourselves just a little bit. Yeah, that's a lot of focus. Yeah, there you go. I hope so. I mean, that's the goal of the show. It continues to be to help people find their focus in the age where it's very difficult. And we thought for today's episode, because it's episode 200, we'd do something fun. We're going to go to that place we don't usually go,

productivity hacks. And I gotta tell you, I'm not a huge fan of productivity hacks because I feel like they don't address the underlying problem. And that is how do you find focus, how do you find purpose? That stuff makes all that other stuff easier. But productivity hacks do have a place.

So we thought episode 200, let's go off book here a bit and talk about some productivity hacks. Yeah, let's do it. Let's unpack that term productivity hack for a second there, because I don't think the hacks are necessarily bad. I think that's kind of what you were alluding to, but just in isolation,

they can work to sabotage your focus as opposed to actually make you more productive. I think the danger with productivity hacks is that typically they allow you to get something done a little bit faster and so you get kind of like a dopamine boost from getting that thing done and then the reward for getting more work done is more work especially if you don't have any sort of filter to select the things you want to intentionally engage with there's always more for you to do so use these but use them in in uh service of being more effective not just more efficient yeah and the the point I would add, that my concern about productivity hacks is they don't let you know if you're pointed the right direction.

Like if you're, you know, to use my tortured analogy of the sailboat, if you're at sea and your life needs to be headed towards Tahiti, but instead you're aimed at, you know, Alaska, productivity hacks are gonna instead you're aimed at, you know, Alaska. Productivity hacks are going to get you to Alaska faster, but they're not going to really help you if anything, they're getting you farther away from where you need to be.

So just be careful with them. Make sure you do the hard things first and figure out the big questions, but they still help and, and they can also really get you out of a jam. I think if you feel stuck. So we've got some good ones here now that we've dumped on productivity hacks, we're gonna talk about them. But we've got some good ones here,

but just be careful. I guess my advice would be, if all you're doing is productivity hacks, there'll be dragons there, so be careful. Yeah, they've gotta be in service of some larger goal, which is the intention. You know, which, which way am I actually going? What am I hoping to accomplish here as opposed to just trying

to clear my plate so I can breathe a little bit. That's the, the, the spot where you fall into the, the, uh, negative cycle. Yeah. And just because Mike and I can't help ourselves, the last one is a big one. All of them are kind of little hacks and then we get to a big one. Each of us pick a big one.

That's because, you know, what are we gonna do? Either way, Mike, and I just want to thank you. We were at, it's episode 200. You and I talking about focus every two weeks is one of the joys of what I get to do for a living. And this is so important to the world and I just love doing this with you, man. Oh, thank you.

Well, the feeling is mutual. And I feel like the message of focused life is more than just cranking widgets is more important than ever as evidenced by a lot of the productivity books that you are seeing published right now, I would argue. We'll get to that maybe in a later section, later segment when we talk about what we're reading.

But Absolutely. So my first one, let's just dive into it. And I think this is like a productivity hack number one, most people encounter this and find it very empowering. Get a Pomodoro timer. And if you're not familiar with that, it started, I think it was an Italian guy who had the idea of he got a little tomato kitchen timer.

And I think the canon is you set it for 25 minutes and then you work for a 25 minute straight session, and then you take like a five or 10 minute break. And then you do it again. And it's a good way to get you focused if you've got something you wanna work on and you think you're gonna get distracted. Get a timer, put it on your desk and set it for some amount of time.

I'll tell you, I do them when I, I don't do them that often, but when I do them, I usually set them for 15 minutes and take 10 minute breaks. And I don't have a fancy Pomodoro timer. I just use the timer on my Apple watch. But sometimes when you just really need to dig in and you feel like you're having a hard day, a Pomodoro timer can, can get you started.

Yeah, this is a really effective tool whenever you find yourself battling procrastination. And I think the thing that makes it so effective is when you are procrastinating on something that you know you need to do, often it's because you feel like the thing you are about to do is such a heavy lift. It's such a huge thing and you just can't muster the strength to do it. You can't even. And then with the pomodoro, you basically are giving yourself an out by saying, I will just do this for 25 minutes is the canonical timer.

But even if you did a smaller segment, you say, I'm only going to do this for 15 minutes, 15 minutes, 25 minutes. That's not that long. I can do this for 25 minutes. Okay, I guess I'll just, I'll just do it, you know, and then you turn the timer over. If you have a physical one, I do have a couple physical Pomodoro timers. I don't use these consistently, but I do tactically whenever I feel like I'm really dragging my feet on something. Okay, let's just do this for a little bit. Turn the timer over, hear the sand falling down the hourglass. Okay, that's my cue. Let's get to work. And what often happens at the end of that is you have started making progress. so you don't want to quit. You want to keep going. So even if you were just using it to get started,

it's an effective tool that way, but then it's also an effective tool. I think if you were going to try to squeeze out the most productivity out of your day possible, this is honestly the best way to do it. Cause you can work for a little bit and then take a break. Those forced breaks doesn't feel like you need them. It's kind of like the sabbaticals every seven or eight weeks. You don't feel like you need them. And then once you start doing it for a while, you're like, oh man, I'm really glad I took that break. It really helps you kind of break up the monotony of the task and refocus. So you're able to engage at a high level again when you come back. refocus so you're able to engage at a high level again when you come back. Yeah. And we hear from people all the time that discover this and it's like they've

discovered the existence of electricity. It just people who haven't tried this and try it get really great results from it. So it is a very good quick tip to get started. And you know, that just to kind of build on what Mike said that it is kind of a snowball builder right you have a problem you're resisting it once you hit the pomodoro timer you start getting your snowball rolling and you get an inertia and it's just a great way to get yourself out of the rut. All right my first one I'm going to give a shout out to Sean Blank for this because he talks about in his focus course, this idea of personal integrity and the action item he had associated with this. When I went through his course, this just really hit me and it has stuck with me for a very long time. Side note, by the way, Sean told me one at one point that I was a customer

number one for the focus course. So I have a history with, with the block media, obviously take that with a grain of salt. But, um, in that first lesson on personal integrity, he talks about setting out your clothes for the next day, the night before. And the idea with this is that you are making a promise to yourself. This is what I'm going to do. And then you are able to do it. But the kind of productivity, unexpected productivity benefit of this for me is in the morning. I mean, I work from home.

I wear jeans and a T-shirt every single day. It's not that hard for me to pick out an outfit. But even so, if I don't put my clothes out the night before in the bathroom, so they're there when I shower in the morning, I find myself just going through the closet of t-shirts and be like, which one am I going to wear today? And it's so much easier at the end of the day, before I go to bed to just put all my clothes in the bathroom and they're ready to go. And I've actually taken this to another level with my church clothes specifically because Sunday mornings can be a little bit hectic because I play on the worship team. I have to be there early. And we've got five kids who we've got to get up

and get dressed and they got to look nice. They got to have their hair combed shoes on the the right feet before we get to church, right? So Sundays can be a little bit more crazy. And those are the days that I actually have to dress up. So what I did is I bought a couple nice pairs of pants and a couple of nice shirts from Ministry of Supply. And I have those hanging. There's like a closet, a small closet inside of our master bathroom and I've got a hook in there and my church clothes basically are just always hanging there. So I don't ever even have to think about this when it comes to Sunday. People look at me probably on Sundays be like, man that

guy's boring. He wears the same black shirt and gray pants every day, or every Sunday, but I don't really care. It's comfortable. It looks nice. And I never have to think about it, which means that I have more energy for the decisions that really matter. Well, you, you've stumbled on a kind of a second level tip to picking your clothes and that's make a uniform. And I did that when I worked at the law firm. I had several nice suits for court days,

but for when I went into the office, I had, I think it was Lansin, had these great dress blue shirts and gray slacks. And I got like, over the years, I ended up with like 10 blue shirts and three or four gray slacks. And I had a sport coat that matched and I wore it every day to work.

And it became, the people at work didn't notice it for like six months and then they realized it and it became like a joke about me. But who cares? I mean, I looked nice every day. I didn't have to think about it. I got up and got dressed. Or, you know, Steve Jobs used to do that too

with his turtleneck. I mean, I think there's a thing about a uniform, and I do that at home now too. When it's cold, I have a kind of a jeans and t-shirt uniform, and when it's warm, I have a khaki and light shirt uniform. But I like the idea of it, I like the ritual of it, and to me that represents the fact that while I didn't put a lot of thought into my clothes,

after I'd picked the uniform, it meant that I had more mental bandwidth to focus on more important things. And so I do that to this day. Yeah, and another version of this, which I'll mention, so I'm gonna cram three tips, I into one. But related I packed my gym bag the night before as well because I have this co-working space that I go to downtown and it's right by this trail

right on the river. I really like running down there it's just a really nice setting you're running through the woods the water is right there but It's just a really nice setting. You're running through the woods. The water is right there, but it's 20 minutes from my house. And more than once, you know, I've thought, Oh, well, I've got everything I needed. Just grab my bag. I go in the morning, I get down there and I have forgotten something and it's so fresh. And he's like, Oh, it's a beautiful day for a run. I got done with my work a little bit early. I've got this time block. This is perfect. And I forgot my shoes or I don't have my socks, etc. So I have built a habit of when I am putting out my clothes for the next day, if I think tomorrow is

going to be a running day, I'm going to make sure that everything is in that bag, ready to go. And it takes, you know, another two minutes just to make sure that that everything is there. But now I don't have to think about it. I don't worry to worry about it. And it just allows me to disconnect from it and just relax and that's kind of the goal. All right, I've got another one for you. And I think this is probably my favorite recommendation for people trying to get more focused and get the hard work done,

and that is just block your time. You know, I call it hyper scheduling. There's a million books on this. Uh, Benjamin Franklin did it, you know, it's been going on forever, but blocking your time just makes such a huge difference. And this is from personal experience. Uh, and I've, uh, I've been doing it off and on in different forms for over a decade and my best days are the days where I block time and, uh, I've been doing it off and on in different forms for over a decade. And my best days are the days where I block time and I could honestly just stop there.

It's a big topic we've covered on the show. We've got shows on it. Um, but you know, just a few basic tips is, you know, pick reasonable amounts of time. Don't give yourself, you know, not enough time to do the work. Try to treat it as kind of sacred time, just like any appointment you would make. And let your manager self decide those blocks at some point in advance with it be in the morning of the night before and let your make yourself just stick to the blocks and stick with it and see how it goes and see what it does for you.

And I guess one last bit of advice I say every time is it's okay if the blocks have to move. They're not carved in stone, but block your time and try and stick with it. It's just such a huge productivity boost. I like this one a lot. And the thing I want to just mention with this is that you don't need to time block your entire day in order to leverage what you're talking about with blocking your time. If there's something that you just feel like,

I don't know when I'm gonna do this, then put it on your calendar. And I know that some people resist that because they have trouble honoring the commitments that they make to themselves, but just by putting it on the calendar, you've kind of already decided where you're going to be and when this is going to happen. And I feel like by making those decisions, you are much more likely to follow through on the thing that you intend to do. I saw this in in live action just a few weeks

ago. My wife at her job has a little project she needs to finish up that she has been putting off for months because there's the push of the day job, right? There's always other things to do, but there's this little project, she's saying, man, I just cannot get this project finished. I said, well, how long would it take to finish it? She says, probably three hours.

I said, well, get your calendar out right now and pick three hours next week, one day, and just write it down. And she did, and you could see this sense of relief on her face, right? So the immediate benefit was like, oh, I have finally accounted for this thing that has been using up, you know,

bandwidth in the background for months. So she immediately felt that relief. And then she did it the next week and she came home and said, yeah, I did my block today and that thing's off. I said, now pick another thing like that. You know, so just one thing a week, get it on. That's a, that's a good way to get started with this stuff. And, um, it just picks something that's nagging at you, put it on the calendar,

pick enough time to finish it and then live up to it. That's all there is. That's the way to get started with it. And then once you start to get some wins with that, the next level is, okay, so now not the thing that I know I need to do because it's urgent, but those things that are important but not urgent that I can never seem to find time for, put those on the calendar. And then you show up and you write for an hour every day and 10 months later you've written your book or whatever you know so this is a really effective

strategy and I feel like once people start using it it's just gonna exponentially grow and that's kind of the point. All right my next one I'm gonna say pick MITs. And I'll explain that in a second here, but MITs are the essentially most important tasks. And I use this terminology, pick three MITs, because I think the temptation for a lot of people is to pick a bunch more, especially if you use a digital task manager, because you can put in the metadata and the promise of the digital task manager is that this thing is now going to show me based on what I have put in there, project, context, due date, start date, whatever. These are the things that you have to do right now.

We've talked about this, about the difference between the brain and the list. So task managers are great at giving you a list of things that you should consider doing. But the temptation is that we fall into this list of 12 things that I should consider doing today. Oh, the task manager is telling me I need to do all of these things. And so you add all 12 of those things to your to do list today and you don't get all 12 of those things done and now you feel stressed. And more importantly, going back to my first tip about the personal integrity, you have now proven to yourself that you can't follow through on the things that you said you were going to do. And that is a very dangerous place to be. When you start to believe that,

it's kind of like, well, what's the point? And that's when you feel completely overwhelmed and you're trying to bail water out of a boat that is sinking. So by selecting only three, these are the things that I absolutely have to get done today, hence the name, most important tasks, then no matter how busy my day is,

three is kind of the magic sweet spot for me. I guess you can kind of play with this and figure out your own number, but I think three is generally a good spot for most people. Three things, this is what I'm absolutely going to get done today. I can make some pretty considerable progress

by selecting three sizable things that I'm going to do every three sizable things that I'm going to do every day and making sure that I follow through and do those three things. It doesn't feel like it when you just look at a single day, it's like, well, I got done a little bit early. I could have picked five things. No, you don't want to push yourself to limit. You want something that is more sustainable. And if you can consistently ship the things that you are selecting, this is what I'm going to do today. You kind of build up proof

and evidence in your head that whatever you are deciding you're going to do, you have the capability and the power within you to get these things done. And that eliminates a lot of the procrastination and like, Oh, I don't really know how I'm going to get this stuff done. Like every once in a while I have those days where I do have to do more than three things and I feel it. I do whatever I can to get back to the, the, that is kind of like my baseline. I can only do that a day or two in a row and then I have to dial it back. Otherwise it's not long before I'm just exhausted.

So this is the thing I would encourage people to do when you're planning your day, pick three things and go ahead and block your time. You know, when you're going to get these done, but fight the urge to over schedule your day, fight the urge to pick off more tasks than you can actually complete. Okay. So I'm going to add onto this one, just to point out if you did three things a day, uh, five days a week, 50 weeks a year.

So I'm not giving you weekends or your vacation. You're going to do 750 important tasks over the course of a year. That's a lot of tasks, you know? So first of all, it is very productive. And the thing you find, and I've worked with a lot of people on this over the years, is that when you have the long lists, you don't get the three things done. It creates this noise layer where you're buzzing around

and all the little stuff and the big stuff doesn't get done. And that's the problem at the end of the day. You know in your heart, you actually didn't do the most important tasks. You did some of the white noise tasks, but maybe you did one of the important tasks when you could have done three. And it's not a question of math,

it's a question of importance. So this is a great way to kind of get that focus. This episode of Focus is brought to you by ZocDoc. We all know there are things in life that you have to compromise on, but when it comes to your health, there is no compromise. So don't go back to that doctor that you don't feel really listens to you just because they're available right now or they take your insurance. This is where ZocDoc comes in. ZocDoc is a place where you can find and book doctors who will make you feel comfortable, listen to you, and prioritize your health.

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I've got one for you. One that sounds like an alcoholic telling you not to drink, uh, pick your apps and commit. Yeah. I think that for a lot of people in productivity, it does become a fun game to try the new latest and greatest productivity app. We know at some level that we're not getting the stuff done that we want to be getting done and the answer, ladies and gentlemen, is not another app.

The answer is figuring out what's important, but it's so easy and it's so much more fun to think that the answer is another app. And if I just get this one app, that will solve all my problems. But I don't recommend that instead find apps that you like that please you and commit to them and learn and use, you know, you become a power user of them so you get the most out of them. But don't switch every month. That's bad.

I agree. I realize over time, and I'm not exactly sure when this happened, that I kind of got boring with the type of apps that I use. And it's kind of highlighted by the fact that I do screencasting for screencasts online because I have been using the same apps for quite a while. And every single month when JF's like, okay, so what are you going to do a show on? I'm like, I don't know, I've already done the ones that I use every single day. So yeah, the temptation can be, well, this new app has this new feature and that's gonna allow me to do this new thing, but really the more valuable thing

is just finding what works and then leveraging the tools. Not that you don't want to learn new things and try to improve your workflows, but I think that those sorts of things are probably best left to specific blocks or specific timeframes. Like I know you mentioned when you do your, was it your yearly review? That's when you do your tools audit? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, look at those things,

but kind of put it inside of a box and then the rest of the time just use what works. I mean, I cover a lot of apps because that's my job. As Max Sparky and I spend a lot of time in apps, but you know, when you look at the apps I use to get my work done, I've been using OmniFocus I think 15 years now. I mean, that's a long time for one app.

And, um, I tend to find an app and really dig in on it, uh, for this, for my actual work, and I think that's the way to go. So, you know, pick your apps and commit. I like it. All right. My next one is probably pretty basic, but I feel like we need to, uh, to have this in the list and that is absolutely no multitasking, which honestly is easier said than done even for a cohost of the focus podcast, uh, it's easier said than done. Even for a co-host of the Focus podcast,

it's easy to fall into the place where I'm doing this thing and then the phone rings or I get a message from someone and oh, I have to do this thing right now, but I don't wanna disconnect from the thing I was doing. The quickest way to fail at both of those things is to try to do them simultaneously. And if you're new to the Focus podcast and you're not familiar with this whole idea of multitasking, I feel like this has kind of been around for a while. But there is this research done by a University of Minnesota

professor who discovered that when you switch from one task to the next, what happens is part of your attention stays on the previous task. And they call that attention residue. So if you think about the ability to focus, really just directing your attention onto the thing that you're doing, and doing it with quality and excellence, you really can't do that if you're constantly jumping

back and forth between things. And then the't do that if you're constantly jumping back and forth between things. And then the other thing that we'll hear sometimes is, I've heard this anyways, I'm not sure if you've gotten this feedback, David, but some people who work in really like, I guess, Cal Newport would call it the hive-minded settings where they're constantly switching back and forth between things. They feel like, well, I've just developed the ability to multitask. I'm really good at it. So maybe other people can't get as much done if they multitask, but I'm the exception. No, you're not. What you've learned to do is this cognitive switching where you just are able to go back and forth between things really quickly. But the same principle applies. You're losing a little bit every single time you switch. It's like some of your attention, your energy, the mental resources

you have available falls through the cracks. It's like putting money in a bag with holes in it. You're not as effective. And there's so much research that shows if you try to do eight different things at once instead of doing them one right after the other, you're so much more productive if you just focus on one thing at a time. Now, how do you do that? Like I said, it's easier said than done. But the best thing I think is just to think about the place that distractions can come from and put up intentional boundaries where you can. You don't want to completely shut everybody out. You don't want to be completely unavailable to your teammates, for example.

But if you can protect some time, like maybe you put an event on your calendar, you could just put, you know, I'm busy during this time. You don't even have to put the event, but those two hours in the morning when you first get to work at the office, those are your protected deep work hours. You know hours. The fact that it's on your calendar means that no meeting is going to pop up over that. Or turn off your email, turn off your notifications,

and all those types of things. But the real root of all of those things that we talk about is this whole idea of multitasking. It is toxic to ultimately your productivity, what you're able to, to actually do that that matters, but it absolutely destroys focus. Well, I would add onto that, that this goes, this pairs nicely with my block your time recommendation, because if you have reliable blocks, I mean, my days are almost themed at this point with repeat blocks. And I know that like I'm going to be doing blog stuff on Monday. And if email and stuff comes in on that, I just put it off until then.

And I do it all at once. And as a result, my brain stays in that mode the whole time. And it doesn't jump back and forth between the various different things I do every day. And that's been a real benefit for me. And, and I, and I all add on with Mike, anybody who tells me that they're good at multitasking, I'm holding up air quotes, you know, they're, they're diluting themselves and just our brains are not wired that way. The science is there.

If you can stop multitasking, you will get more work done full stop right there. If you think you're good at multitasking, I think probably my follow-up recommendation would be start tracking your time because that's where you can really measure what you are actually able to get done. You may feel like you are being productive, just like with time tracking, you may feel like you're spending your time in specific ways, but the minute that you are staring at the data,

you can't fool yourself. The numbers don't lie, essentially. So that the feeling and the output can be two totally different things. Yeah, one way I get myself caught in this trap is, and we all do, right? Mike and I give advice, but we also break it ourselves, is email.

I don't know who, was it David Allen who said, you just deal with a two minute email, just deal with it right there? Yeah. That's bad for me. I mean, because first I'm bad at estimating if it takes two minutes. I went through because I'm a first I'm bad at estimating if it takes two minutes, like I went through my email a few days ago and like, you know, there

were a couple things in there where like one of my, you know, payment providers needed a form and then I went on the line and did the form that I ended up spending like, you know, way too much time in email. And to me going through email should be, you know, routing, deleting, archiving, and putting things in the right place so the next time I do admin work, then I can follow up on that thing the payment provider wanted. I shouldn't do it at the same time because it just diverts the day and then suddenly I spend way too much time doing email and I'm behind on other stuff.

The other stuff is frankly what pays the bills around here. So I feel like email is an easy way to get caught in the multitasking trap. Well, let's, let's pull on that thread just a little bit here because I think David Allen didn't actually talk about email being the thing, but if a task takes you less than two minutes, you should just do it. And the problem with that coupled with email is that email is a to-do list that other people can write on. So now there is no filter. Anyone who has your email address can give you things to do. And if you just automatically say yes to everything that appears on that list,

every email when you first look at it, oh yeah, I can reply to that in two minutes. But now you can easily find yourself going through your entire day just responding to these emails that breed like rabbits. You send one email like there, I think I cleared it, but actually there's 12 other follow-up emails that are gonna happen because you took the time to deal with that thing. There's a lot of negative momentum that can be built there. You gotta have a filter for should this thing even be done in the first place? The two minute rule is not enough anymore. My next one is one that's just kind of a general, uh, productivity tip that I find very useful is automate the tedious.

And I am constantly looking to optimize for this. This is something where technology is your friend. You know, we had just the other day that we ran out of dog food, but we have a service. You know, it's nom nom. They send us dog food every time. And like, I knew a new order was coming in that was taken care of, I didn't have to handle it.

You know, all the stuff in my life, the little tedious things that I need to do, I have like a process for. Amazon returns, we have a ton of Amazon orders where they are consumables and they just show up. We don't have to go to the market or the store or whatever to get them. That is like a pet peeve of mine. Anytime I have to spend clock cycles on things that are tedious

and that can be automated, I automate them. Of course, that shouldn't surprise you. I make a podcast called The Automators, but it goes way beyond Apple scripts on my Mac. I am looking for ways to get all the stuff in my life to just manage itself so I don't have to think about it. I love this one. And the word automation, I I think maybe is a little bit of a

unintentional roadblock for some people who maybe don't think that they're real tech savvy because like you said it doesn't necessarily require an Apple script in order to do all these things or keyboard mice show or anything like that it could literally just be subscribe and save and Amazon where you never have to think about these things. But you should look back at I would argue you should look back at all of the things that you do regularly. And if you notice any sort of patterns, those are prime things that you could figure out a way to automate these things. I guess in the past I've used the three times rule for this, where if I find myself doing something over and over and over again, the first time it's like, okay, well, I don't really want to do this thing, but I'll just

do it. Second time it's like, okay, here we go again. And then by the third time, it's like, there's got to be a better way. And that's usually the trigger for me to invest the time to figure out an automated solution. Because if you try to just automate everything that annoys you or everything that you don't really want to do, you could find yourself spending so much time automating things that you're really not doing often enough to get that payback. But yeah, the three times rule is something that I use to identify, you know, this is something that I could figure out a potential solution for. I put those things on a list and every once in a while when I've got some time, I go try to figure out ways to systematize that stuff. All right. My next one is to optimize for sleep. And this is a big one. This has maybe lots of different ways that you could implement this. But I'll just start with the overview here, which is that sleep is probably my most important productivity

tool. And the reason I say that is if you don't have energy, then you're not going to be able to do the things that you need to do. And this is kind of highlighted or magnified for me because when I was 18 years old, I was diagnosed with epilepsy. I had a seizure standing in line at a McDonald's and there was a nurse there who was able to keep me safe till the ambulance came, went to the hospital, came to and went through all the tests and kind of what they found was they don't really know what happened other than my grandma had epilepsy. And there are certain things that can trigger a seizure, but you really can't tell when something is going to happen. So other than, you know, a possibility of having a seizure, my quality of life is not diminished at all. But because I know that one of the big triggers of this is a lack of sleep that can cause your brain to misfire. I am very careful about how much sleep I get and the

quality of sleep that I get. Now, one of the worst ways to get more sleep is just to lay in bed and be like, okay, you have to sleep right now. So I've gone deep down the rabbit hole of all the things that I can do to put myself in a position where it's easier for me to fall asleep. We've got the weighted blanket on our bed. We've got the blackout curtains in our bedroom. We play white noise through the HomePod minis. I wear the blue light blocking. I have this blue light coating on my Warby Parker glasses. So it diminishes the blue light. I disconnect from my phone by 9 PM every night. Usually go to bed about 10, 10 30. We have bedtime tea that we drink. Like it's a whole ritual, but the there's a couple of things to call out here. Number one, the evening ritual does a lot just in kind of signaling to my body that, hey, it's time to

start ramping down and get ready for sleep. And that process has to start at least an hour, even better, an hour and a half before I would go to bed. If I start it at an hour early, I can, I can sometimes fall asleep right away, but usually I have a little bit of a little bit of trouble. But if I start thinking about it about an hour and a half before I actually. Climb into bed. I have absolutely little bit of trouble. But if I start thinking about it about an hour and a half before I actually climb into bed, I have absolutely no trouble falling asleep. And, uh, it's, it's kind of this progression and, um, I,

there's not one specific thing here that has just kind of made this easy. I do think it's a combination of, of all these things, but by taking it seriously, what it has done has allowed me to do all of the things that I do. I mean, even with the epilepsy, the way I got into making stuff online was getting up early and writing for an hour before I went into the day job with the family business. And I feel like you don't need to have a medical condition in order to benefit from this. All of the books out there that talk about sleep, they all start with some story by the author who thought, you know, I was a superhero. I don't need that much sleep. I can get by in five hours. Then they crash and burn. And then they have to take

it seriously. And then they realize, oh my gosh, I'm way more productive now. So I would just encourage everyone to, uh, not under value rest. You need this more than you think you do. And if you start taking it seriously, my guess is that you will not just feel better, but you will also get a lot more done. Yeah. I mean the, the science is if you don't get enough sleep, it's like being drunk.

I mean, you really, it's not safe. The other thing I would say is that there is this like fringe of the productivity literature and space. That's all about like the 5 a.m. guy. I'm the 5 a.m. guy. I get up at 5 a.m.

and I've got more done before you've got out of bed and blah, blah, blah. And I always feel like those are silly like you just The trend should be about sleep. It shouldn't be about what time you wake up if you want to wake up at 5 a.m That's great. But you better go to bed early enough to get enough sleep Because well, I can have a 5 a.m If you go to bed at midnight means that you're just gonna be a mess the whole day Mm-hmm. So be a mess the whole day. So be careful. Think about your sleep. It does really help. And we've done shows on that. So you can go check them out in the archive. We had a couple big ones. We couldn't help ourselves. So we added a couple big ones to the end.

And mine is, I think the fundamental tenet of productivity is do less. You have to do less. It's just that simple. I mean, it seems to me every productivity book is like one different angle at getting to the point of you have to do less and you have to say no more. And I think for a lot of people they're like, but it's so hard to say no, I don't know how to do that. And I just want to say yes and please everybody.

And the answer really is figure out what's really important to you and then say no isn't that difficult. But you have to get to that point. And I don't want to get into it all today. We talk about this on the show all the time. I've got a productivity field guide, Mike's got a personal development course. There's a whole bunch of stuff you can go to, but you've got to figure out what's important and learn to say no,

so you can actually do the stuff that's important while you still have time. It's just, that's it. That's productivity. I think that's all that you need to say. You could have a two word productivity book, do less, and it would be right. Yeah, just to kind of pull on that a little bit,

the temptation, the reason people don't want to do less is they don't want to limit their options. I want to do all of these things that I want to do. But when you try to do all of the things, you end up doing none of the things. I remember talking to Sean McCabe when he was on the show and he talked about how you can be known for something and you can pick it or you can be known for nothing. And that's kind of the lesson here with do less really the focus and the intention. I know you said we're not going to get into the weeds of this, but just real quickly, like you have to figure out what is the most important thing. But just real quickly, like you have to figure out what is the most important thing. And once you have that,

then everything else becomes less important, becomes trivial. It's like you have an instant filter. Now it makes it easy to say, this is the thing. This is not the thing. Yeah. If you, if you figure out the big yes, the nos are easy. Exactly. Exactly. All right. Uh, my last one here, um, you could argue that I maybe should have saved the sleep one for, for last, but, um, this is the one that if I could pick one thing to put on my tombstone,

like this is the, the parting advice. I want to leave the world. I would say set goals, but don't chase them. I feel like goals are one of those things kind of like GTD. When you first come to the idea of productivity, uh, Pomodoro's things like that, you start to hear this advice about you need to have goals. You need to set goals. And the next thing you hear is you need to have smart goals. They have to be specific. They have to be measurable. They have to be action oriented. They got to be realistic. They got to be time-based. And I feel like that is actually detrimental to long-term productivity because when you get so focused on the goal, all you can see is the completion

of that goal at the expense of everything else that potentially really matters. Now, there are things you can do to mitigate this. Essentially having regular reviews where you're looking at the things that are important to you. I know we've both built that into our regular routines, the personal retreats and things like that. But I think goals can actually do more harm than good when you are so obsessed with completing the goals. I've told the story before, so I'm not going to get into the specifics, but the thing that kind of helped me learn this lesson was when I was training for my first half marathon, I overtrained, I hurt myself because I remember crossing the finish line and thinking to myself. Now what it was like one moment I'm crossing the finish line.

There's this euphoria. I've set this goal a year and a half ago. I finally accomplished it. Yes, I can do anything. The ultimate test of mind over matter. And then immediately after that is like crushing depression. It's like, what do I do now? I set another goal. Well, I hurt my knee. I got to go to physical therapy. I know I'm not going to be able to run again for a while. Oh, that sucks. So the better thing to do here is to establish these regular habits or

routines where you show up and you do the thing. You're not so concerned about measuring the progress, but because you're doing the right thing, the result takes care of itself. If you want to write a book, don't think, well, I'm going to write this book and I'm going to get this published within six months, 12 months, whatever. Create a habit of getting up and writing every day. It's kind of goes back to atomic habits by James clear.

If you want to write a book, then identify as a writer. What does a writer do? They write, but disconnect from, I got to do this many words or I got to run this distance or I got to do it in this time. All those measures of superficial productivity, just show up and do the thing. And if you show up and do it enough, then you're going to be, you're going to accomplish the same result, but you're not going to have all that pressure and you're not going to beat yourself up because it's not happening as fast as you think it should.

Yeah. I, one of my favorite little quotes that shows up on my Vesta board occasionally is, is effort, not results. And that's it. Yep. When you control the effort, the score takes care of itself. This episode of the Focus podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com slash focused right now and save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code

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up to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for the Focus Podcast. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of the Focus Podcast and all of Relay FM. All right, Mike, let's talk about our shiny new objects. Squarespace for their support of the Focus podcast and all of Relay FM. All right, Mike, let's talk about our shiny new objects. What are you playing with these days? All right, well, I got recently the Focus timer, the little hourglass thing, going back to your first pick of the Pomodoro timer. This is a digital hourglass where you can set the timer

by turning the base and you can set different time periods. But I like it because it's a physical object you can put on your desk that shows you how much time is left on your timer. And then it has a satisfying ding when you get to the end. So this is a Kickstarter that I backed a long time ago. And I first saw this actually when Mike Barty brought a prototype to our retreat.

So I've known about this for a long time. Mine actually showed up a couple of weeks ago and it's pretty cool. I like it. However, I don't use it a whole lot primarily because my son has stolen this from me. He uses it every single day for his schoolwork. He absolutely loves it. He thinks it's the coolest thing

in the world. So I don't know if I'll get it back, but that's my shiny new object. Well, that's cool. When a productivity object becomes the possession of your son, that's a good thing, right? Yep. I want to talk about the Vision Pro briefly. I bought one and I know that a lot of reporters and what they're saying that it's nice version one and Apple's going to get better, but right now it's more of a proof of concept, but I don't find that true at all. I'm really digging the ability to put myself in focused spaces. You put yourself in these environments. I've got a writing environment,

a journaling environment. I'm working on more and being able to, you know, put yourself in a different context really helps. Yeah. I asked you before the show if this was going to be its own separate segment because I have so many questions about this, but you probably need a little bit more time with it. I was listening to Mac power users the other day and I heard you mention that you only do your writing at Yosemite. and I thought that's brilliant. You have all of these different contexts for the different environments that you would use inside of your vision pro. No, I actually have not had a chance to try one. The nearest Apple store is a couple hours away for me. So I haven't had the opportunity to do the demo or anything, but I do see the potential with this as a focus tool.

And I cannot wait to dive deeper into this. Once you've had some time to figure out how it can support your focused workflows. And what are you reading right now? Mike, I am reading a couple of books. So the first one is Slow Productivity by Cal Newport because I read everything that Cal Newport comes out with. At this point, he is one of my favorite authors. I really like his style.

Slow Productivity, I feel like this has been a long time coming for him. And I've gotten into the Cal Newport podcast recently. I really like that. That's one of my regular podcasts I listen to, part of my rotation now. And so he's been talking about these concepts for a long time. And I feel like this is a really important message mentioned earlier that like, there's a lot of things being written about this whole idea of kind of more intentional productivity, meaningful productivity, slow productivity as Cal's take on it. And I really dig this this book so far. I think that

I'm a little bit biased because I've been hearing him talk about it for a long time that maybe I think it's going to be more than it really is. Like maybe he didn't write this for me. Maybe this is for the person who doesn't listen to the deep life podcast every single week, uh, more of an introductory, uh, version of this, but there's so many good ideas in here. One of the things I like about Cal is he kind of just like throws stuff out there almost as experimental, like let's see if people will get mad at me for saying this.

And the stuff that he says always is like, well, if you could do that, that'd be great. And he kind of just keeps pushing to see what he can get away with, you know, where people are going to pick up the pitch forks and be like, no, that is impossible. You don't know what you're talking about. He's trying to find that, that line with his writing, which when I,

when you think about the idea of focus, I think that's, that's absolutely brilliant. The other one that I got to call out here because in deep focus last time we kind of had a little bit of a, uh, we talked about, uh, our dislike maybe with, um, Robert Green's 48 laws of power. Okay. Well, my bookworm cohost has selected another Robert Green book 48 Laws of Power. Okay. Well, my bookworm co-host has selected another Robert Green book for us to read for the next time. I'm reading Mastery.

And at the beginning of this book, the idea of Mastery sounds very promising. I mean, you could make the argument that the whole goal of developing your focus muscle is so that you can practice mastery and do better work and be more excellent with the things that matter. So I'm trying to go into this one with an open mind, but I just picked it up. So just read a couple of pages so far. I will report back whether I think it's better than 48 laws of power. How about you? I want to follow up on yours first. I would say that I would defend Robert Green. I think he writes with good intention. The thing is, there's like bros out there that read his book about like

the laws of power and like, oh, I can use this to manipulate people. And I think it's almost a defensive measure for us to read his books to know like when we're being manipulated So I kind of get it. I I'm not totally against Robert Greene. I think he's a smart guy and Sincere with what he does but but I'll have to check that book. I haven't I haven't read mastery As to slow productivity, I last week had a short trip I went visit my daughter But as a result I spent 10 hours on airplanes over the course of a few days. So I was able to finish Slow Projectivity,

thought it was really good. And it's definitely, I think, kind of required Cal Newport reading. And it kind of lays out his case. He does a good job of telling stories, but also putting out advice and ideas. In fact, one of the ideas in this book is something we're going to talk about today on deep focus,

the idea of pull-based productivity I thought was interesting. So I always get an idea or two when I watch or listen to something he makes. And I would recommend that book. And I also like the cover. It's just a fun cover, I think it was cool. This whole idea of slow productivity though,

I think there is a movement afoot. For so long, as technology got better and faster, we all got into this mindset of how do we get more done, how do we check more things off? And I think there's a real push against it right now, culturally. I mean, I would say our friend Chris Bailey's book, Calm, was one of the first books to kind of address this.

And there's a bunch of books being written now along the lines of this idea of do less but more important. But as you said at the beginning, this is what we've been talking about on this show for 200 episodes, so yes, we agree. And we're welcoming everybody to the party. The other book I did is on the way back, I finished Slow Productivity on the way out,

and then on the way back, I didn't have another book, so I looked through my Kindle library and I found Company of One, which I had skimmed, but purchased the whole book years ago, and it was mentioned in this low productivity book. He mentioned the author in one segment. So I thought, well, I'll just go back and read that book. And I thought company of one was a really good book as well.

Um, it speaks to me because I am an owner of a small company and I'm not interested in turning Max Barkey into, you know, a media global powerhouse. I'm much more interested in doing good work and, and focusing on what's important to me, even if the audience isn't huge. And that book, you know, resonates because it tells me things that I already believe in, but it also had some good advice in there. I thought if you have a small company and you're interested in other options other than growth, you know, this is a good book to read.

I agree. I've read this one a while back and enjoyed it a lot. At the time, I was working with a team. So I kind of read it because someone had recommended it, but not through the same lens of how do I actually apply this in my solopreneur business. So it's actually on my list to go back and reread. But yeah, I really like that recommendation. I'm curious, you mentioned you read the physical book on the way out, the Kindle book on the way back, and you actually sent me a screenshot of something you highlighted in the physical book. And I was like, this warms the concholes of my heart to see you reading these physical books. But you did go back and you read a Kindle book. So the next book that you read, are you picking up the physical one or the Kindle one?

LR I am enjoying reading physical books again. We've talked about a bit on the show. I had law school post-traumatic stress syndrome about physical books. But these books are small and I can read one at a time. But I have to, you know, I destroy these books when I read them. I crush the spines. A couple things I picked up was like my annotation. I just had a pencil with me, so I just used a pencil for all my annotations. So I've got a little code in the margin. I keep it pretty limited.

But the other thing I did was, in this book, I put in the front of the book, near the table of contents, my own table of contents, like pointers at concepts or ideas that I thought were interesting. So what I did with the physical book is I wrote down in the spine, the date I read it so I can go back if I ever want to read it again. And then I wrote down different things that I thought were interesting. Like the word pseudo productivity is defined on page 22 and overhead

taxes defined on 56. So I wrote down basically my own table of contents. Does that make sense? So things I wanna go back, and this is stuff I would do digitally in the old days. And then what I did in the back of the book was I just started writing things down. I'm gonna just send you a picture of this.

I guess we can put in the show notes, I don't really care. I don't think there's any state secrets on it, but I just, it's scribbled, and this isn't a great picture. I'm sending it to you, Mike. So I just, in the back of the book, as I was reading through the book, if I saw something that I wanted to think about further,

I just wrote it down in the back of the book with a reference to the page number. He's got a thing in here about betting on yourself, and I was thinking, yeah, I did that with this studio build. I spent a lot of money after I quit my job, which I didn't really, wasn't entirely smart to spend that much money, but I felt like if I was gonna do this right, I needed to do this build.

And that was my own personal example of like if I was gonna do this right, I needed to do this build. And that was my own personal example of something he was talking about in the book. So I wrote down back here, consider bet on yourself content related to Indoor Studios build. And just like I wrote down some of the ideas he had to explore later, like one of them in here is he said he recommends a five year plan at page 129.

I'm not a big fan of five year plans and I thought I might talk to you about it. Like maybe we do a show on five year plans. Maybe you and I take a stab at it just to see. Although I'm not sold that that is worth my time. But either way. So I just wrote that, so I wrote references in the front of the book and I wrote questions

in the back of the book and that worked fine. Although this, if we do put this in the show notes, I guess we have to know that I've mentioned it. Let me just say that I did write this while on a bouncing airplane. So my handwriting suffered. Yeah, that's, that's fair. But I think that what you're doing here is essentially creating like a personal index. And that is a really cool idea. By the way, I guess I should, should tease this here. This is the perfect spot to do it. I'm going to be doing a live reading workshop in the next couple of weeks. By the time this goes out, I'll have the link to sign up for it. So if you are interested in digging deeper into this

about how to find good books to read, how to develop a reading habit, how to actually take better notes from the books that you read with a bunch of different workflow examples, all that kind of stuff. That's kind of the goal of that workshop. So people are interested in that, come check it out. Well, when I heard you were doing that, I thought there's nothing better that Mike Schmitz could do. I feel like this is gonna be great. Awesome, well, thank you.

All right, we are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm slash focused. Thank you to our sponsors, Squarespace and ZockDoc. For those of you that are Deep Focus subscribers, we wanna thank you for your support. Deep Focus is the ad-free extended version of the show you can get, you can subscribe for that over at relay.fm slash focused.

Today we're gonna be talking about my initial experimentation with pole-based productivity, that's gonna be fun. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.