Focused - 222: The 2025 Productivity Field Guide

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. How's it going, Mike? Pretty good. How are you, David? It's nuts here, man. The wind just keeps blowing really bad. My life is you wait until the wind wakes you up, then you check the WatchDuty app to make

sure there's no local fires, and then you go back to sleep. So that's, that's my life right now, but hopefully these winds will end soon and we'll be okay. Well, we don't have the, the winds or the fires. Um, it's been a negative 30 degrees Fahrenheit though. The last couple of days. I don't even know if I could do that. You know, I just don't know how I would survive that. It's a basic basically like Hoth from Star Wars. Yeah, and that's like the best look on it, right?

You know? Yeah. You add Star Wars to it. I was once in Minneapolis taking depositions and the whole downtown section is connected by tunnels. Like even the homeless people live in the tunnels because it was January, super cold. And the deposition was like three days.

And on the third day, the witness kind of cracked and gave me all the evidence I needed. So I was feeling really good. And I decided to walk back to the hotel, which was like one block away outside. I can't believe how cold it was. I just can't even get over it. But you know, growing up in California,

you just really have no ability to cope with it. Or no clothing either to cope with it. It's true. It's not the heat, it's the humidity that gets you. There you go. Either way, we are the Focus Podcast. Today we're gonna be talking about the new release of the Productivity Field Guide.

I have been working hard on that now for really a year. And this was the guide I released last year, but now I've been teaching it for a year, learned a ton from the people taking it, and made some modifications, and I've got an updated version. Yeah, you've been busy. Before we get into the specifics of the field guide, I would love to just ask you, you've been busy. Before we get into the specifics of the field guide, I would love to just ask you, you mentioned you incorporated a bunch of new stuff from teaching it the first time. What was the most surprising thing from teaching the material or what was the

biggest insight that you got from working with people going through it? The big insight was I had been living with this stuff for like 10 years and that's the problem. When you teach something you've been living with for 10 years is you take for granted certain ideas that you don't make explicit and people just coming into it will go down the wrong path. So I clarified a lot of that stuff.

Like a good example is a big tenet of this system for me. And we talked about it a little bit last year when this released, but to me the foundational element of my life are my roles. The father, husband, Max Sparky, all the different roles I fulfill in my life. I like to look at that as like kind of the top level of how I look at myself and try to improve myself.

But I use this Greek concept of arete, which is kind of the ideal version of yourself. And so one of the things I teach is that you figure out what your roles are, and then you figure out the ideal version of yourself for each role, and you use that kind of as a compass bearing, when you do your reviews, am I making progress? And one of the things people would tell me is they're like,

well, the problem is, I feel like I'll never get to RIT, so it's just constantly disappointing, and they're getting it wrong. I mean, you should not be judging yourself against the perfect version of yourself. You should be aiming at the perfect version of yourself. You should be judging yourself against the version of you three months ago that started the journey.

That's the only person you should really ever judge yourself against is yourself. Don't look at other people. Don't look at the ideal RIT. You look at am I closer now than I was before? The thing you and I talk about on the show about the gap versus the gain, a lot of people just kind of took for granted

that they're supposed to judge themselves against the ideal and that's not the way it works. Yeah, the gap versus the gain is a really powerful Powerful idea and just to summarize for people who aren't familiar with that the emphasis is on the progress that you're making not how quickly you are able to achieve a specific goal and When you approach it that way you can look back at where you started you can measure your progress forward as opposed to oh man I haven't achieved my

goal yet and that creates the motivation to keep going and ultimately I think leads to much higher levels of productivity and ultimately you're doing more of what matters so kind of the whole idea behind the Focus podcast, if you ask me. Yeah, and the concept of Aruite for me changes. Like, as a father, a good one is the dad one. Like, as a father, when I first started doing this, my kids were like in elementary school, and now they're college graduates.

Well, the ideal version of a dad to a fifth grader is a lot different than the ideal version of a dad to a high school teacher. And that's different. And so over time, you will adjust it. So you don't have to worry about, am I there right now? Because there is going to move on you. But the question is, am I pushing toward it? And that's the key. I mean, don't be hard on yourself. It's like that's a good example of where people were getting a little hung up and I was able to kind of

really address that with this updated version. All those hangups people were hitting going through it the first time and hopefully give people more of a path towards success. I taught this thing. We ended up with a couple thousand people going through the course in one way or another. I did a free course over the summer to high school and college kids. We had the customers that came in and a lot of people in the Max Barkie Labs were beta

testers in the process. So there's a lot of people that have gone through this and that gives you a lot of great feedback. Nice, so let's get into the details. What's new with this one? Yeah, so the course itself is 70 plus videos. I say plus because I keep adding more. As things come up.

You just can't help yourself. Well, yeah. Like I did one on analog tools. You'll like that one, Mike. I did it at my writing desk. And during the video I kept saying, well, there's an easy way to get my handwritten text to OCR now, and I'll show you to that later.

But the video came out really kind of nice as it was. When I was editing, I'm like, I promised to do OCR now, and I'll show you to that later, but the video came out really kind of nice as it was when I was editing, and I'm like, I promised to show how to do OCR, but I didn't really want that to be part of that video, so then I ended up making a tech video of how to use ChatGPT to get OCR of very bad handwriting like mine. So, you just keep adding new videos on.

So, I think it's like about 20, at it's, I think it's like about 20, at this point I think it's 22 new videos. The book, because this one comes with a book as well. And the book went from 100 pages to 140 pages. I added a bunch of text, you know, talking about some of the different questions and ideas. The book is in three formats. It's in PDF, EPUB,

standard and EPUB flowable. So if you want to change the font size or whatever, you can do all that. So try to make it as easy as possible. And then there's two versions. That's a standard version. You get that stuff. For the plus version, you get all that plus a 12-week seminar. And that to me was another thing I learned last week. Doing the webinar was, I think, a huge plus because a bunch of people that were going through it together could get on the call with me

and just talk about where they were having problems and where it was working and challenges they were facing. And to me, the webinar course surprised me in how useful it was. I mean, you always know those are gonna be good, but for some reason, this topic really gets people talking about things that are important. And so I'm really looking forward to doing that again,

but that's a quarter long webinar series. And the way it works is I do them at different times because I have customers like in New Zealand but also in Germany. So you've got to have them at different times. I do some on weekends, but all of them get edited and uploaded to the course as well. And then with the Plus version, you also get the full webinar series from last year. So you get to watch all the webinar videos from last year if you want.

So it's a lot. And if you're listening to the show, you can use the discount PFG 10 for 10% off. Productivity Field Guide, right? PFG 10. And then if you bought it last year, you should already have received an email from me with a special upgrade discount. And if you did buy it and you didn't get that

email, let me know. I'll take care of it. But that's kind of the foundation of this. This is the one productivity product I make every year. To me, it's the most important thing I make. I mean, it's the most important thing I make. I mean, it's the big one for me. Yeah, I was just about to ask if that was the plan to release the annual updates. I know some people may not be thrilled with that, but if you look at how much new material

that you've added to this, the upgrade pricing that you're offering is still a pretty great deal. Yeah, it's a big upgrade discount. But what I tell people is, look, if you bought it last year and you're happy, you don't wanna get the upgrade, that's fine. But there's a lot of people

that do want more material on this. And I have a lot in my system I need to get out on this. And so I'm gonna do upgrades with it, and it's up to you, you know, it's fine. I'm okay if you feel like, hey, thank you a lot for that, I get it, now I don't need any more of these webinars, that's cool, but if you'd like some more help, there it is, and you know, part of it is gonna be

related to the market, there's a tremendous amount of work that goes into this, if nobody buys it, then I probably won't do anymore. To me, it's the, of my professional life, it's the thing I'm most proud of. Like when I look back, I mean, all the cases I won for clients, all the field guides I've made, none of them have ever got the kind of response this field guide got in terms of like hearing from people all over the world who are using it. Hearing from people.

I just got an email yesterday from somebody who, him and his wife went through in terms of hearing from people all over the world who are using it, hearing from people. I just got an email yesterday from somebody who him and his wife went through it over the holidays and now they're both on track and they're very happy with it. It's like, I love teaching about things like OmniFocus and shortcuts and that's awesome. And I'm glad I can help people with that. But you don't get emails and contacts saying

you changed my life because you taught me how to make a shortcut. Whereas this does have the potential to help people really kind of turn things around. And so it, you know what I mean, if you're at the end of your life, this would be something I look back on with some degree of pride, like actually I did help people.

And I don't know, I get kinda hooey when I start talking about this stuff. But it's just something I'm very proud of. Well, you should be. It's pretty impressive, everything that's in here. You mentioned the webinars, and I agree with you that going through it live with somebody is a different experience and you get much more out of it than when you just go through the material on your own. That's why I'm a big fan of the cohort-based course model

but this isn't exactly that and I think this is sort of your version of it though. Do you have currently the outline for the types of things that you're going to be covering in those webinars yet? Yeah, but it's not finalized as we record. That'll get added to the course that you outlined. A lot of it will be stuff from the course, but also some of it will be kind of new stuff that came out of doing it last year. But yeah, it's going to be 12 weeks and you're going to get your money's worth. Nice. But yeah, so that's been my big project is getting that kind of finished up and polished.

I spent a bunch of time, I spent some money too this year, I got a better mic and I just kind of like, every year the production values bump up a little bit as I get better at it and understand it more. So that, you know, it's been fun kind of putting all this together. I mean, the thing about this course for me is, this is stuff I developed just to help myself.

I didn't really know that I would share this with anyone, except it just started to kind of matriculate out from other stuff I was doing. Like it was kind of in the background of things I was making the OmniFocus and Obsidian Field Guides in particular are ones where I kind of made reference to some of the stuff and I wasn't sure if anybody would care. And it was very surprising to me how much people did care and how useful it was to others last year.

And like I said, it's a lot of good feels related to this product for me. Do you get into the tech stack at all? You mentioned OmniFocus and Obsidian Field Guides. Those are two separate products which are just specifically how to use those particular apps. How much overlap is there with this? None. None. I really, like all of the stuff I do in it, I largely use Apple Notes for almost everything I teach. This system does not require you to master any complex software. And in fact, you could do it with a legal pad.

And one of my goals is I want to remove as many barriers as possible for people to try and use a roles-based RIT kind of system. So I felt like me getting into using OmniFocus and Obsidian and all this stuff to do this is just too much. Like you're watching, you're like, wait, I gotta master another app just to do this?

I don't want people to feel that way. In fact, this year, I have moved a lot of the roles-based Areté stuff into analog because for me personally, doing it slower with a pencil and paper seems to pay off some dividends that I didn't realize. And I apologize every time I mention that in the course because I don't want people saying, oh, now I got to go get a fancy notebook. It's like because I don't want people saying, oh, now I gotta go get a fancy notebook. You know, it's like, I don't want people to feel that way. This stuff is all doable with almost no tools.

So I don't get into those apps very much. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Jelly. Jelly is the best way for small teams to share an email inbox. Be clear who is going to reply to a conversation and have private discussions with your team right alongside the emails that you already received. And what's particularly wild is that Jelly is priced per team rather than per person. One price for your whole team, unlimited team members, and no need

to worry about the cost of adding one more teammate into the mix. The team building Jelly is a small team themselves. They know that communication between a small company and their customers is one of the most important factors in their success. Whether it's emailing with your existing customers or selling your products and services to new customers and clients, Jelly puts that conversation front and center and makes team collaboration easy. Jelly isn't only great for small businesses, though it's also great for small businesses though, it's also great for any small group that needs to share conversations among a few people.

Nonprofits, community groups, user groups, and more are already using and loving their shared inbox in Jelly. For Focus listeners, Jelly is offering a discount of 15% off your first year. Just go to letsjelly.com slash focused to sign up for Jelly and it's free to try. If you decide that Jelly is for you,

use the offer code focused15, F-O-C-U-S-E-D-1-5 when signing up for a plan, which again is price per team. One more time, visit letsjelly, L-E-T-S-J-E-L-L-Y.com slash focused and offer code focused 15. Our thanks to jelly for their support of the focus podcast and all of relay. All right. So with all of the videos that you added to this version, David, you gave me gave me access to it and there were a couple that caught my eye.

So I want to ask you some specific questions about some of the updates here. One of the new videos is titled Sparky's Happiness Formula. What is that? This is something that just kind of came to me in teaching it and living this stuff. So I kind of explained in the first segment,

to me the foundation of it is you pick your roles, you get your best version of yourself, and you keep iterating on that until you get better at it. And I was reading, I read a lot of classic philosophy, Hellenistic Greek philosophy. That started for me in college because I studied political philosophy and I had a great teacher who really pushed me

into all those guys. And I'm not on the stoic bandwagon here. Actually, maybe I'm more of an Aristotelian, I don't know, but I do definitely follow a lot of those writers, including some of the stoics. So I've read a bunch of stuff there, and the thing that's interesting to me back then was the really aim of philosophy in that era

was happiness. They're like, okay, what is this human experience? Like at this point, they have a civilization, they've got bread on the table, they've got a roof over their head. So the point of philosophy to them was really more of, it was a different tenor than it is today. Today modern philosophy is like,

let's sit around and able gaze about whether or not we live in a simulation, you know, that kind of stuff. Whereas they looked at philosophy back then, I think a lot more the way modern civilization looks at kind of self-help stuff, like how do I improve myself? And they really, a lot of them, were thinking towards, they called it euda-mania, but it's really happiness.

You know, what is, how does this human form I'm in become happy, given that I have my basic needs now satisfied? And a lot of them came up with some formula, because there's different ones, the cynics, the stoics, the, you know, the different schools, but they all came up with the kind of some formula to it, but a lot of them kind of resolve to ethical living plus something. And to me, it's ethical living plus the pursuit of your arati. And the reason I realize this is not only a way to be more successful and make progress on the things important to you, but I think it also leads to a happy existence. I don't mean that it frees you from suffering if somebody dies or you get sick or all the things that life can throw at you, but I do mean that in general, as a human being, if

you are pursuing intentionally the best version of yourself in the areas of life that are most important to you, and doing it ethically, it's hard not to be happy with your existence and not want to jump out of bed every day. And I compare the version of myself before I started exploring this stuff to the version of myself now, and it's night and day. So I call it my happiness formula.

I don't mean that I have some magic solution here that works for everybody, but it definitely works for me. And having taught the course now, I've heard from people for whom they are having similar experiences. And this is just something I cribbed from a bunch of 3,000-year-old Greeks. Everything is a remix, right? Yeah, yeah. But I fell into it, is my point. And this is just something I cribbed from a bunch of 3000 year old Greeks.

Everything is a remix, right? Yeah, yeah. But I fell into it is my point. I just kind of fell into it. I didn't mean, like when I started this exploration, I was in my 40s and I was realized I had gone adrift. You know, it happens to a lot of us, right? I was successful. I was a busy attorney.

I had wife and kids, but I felt like every day I just woke up and just did whatever was thrown at me, and I didn't have any direction in my life. And so I went back and started rereading the stuff from college and this stuff just kind of, it took years for this stuff to kind of fall in place for me, but then I look at myself now versus myself then.

Now it's 15 years ago, and my existence is entirely different, and I'm much happier. So I don't know, it's weird, but it's 15 years ago and my existence is entirely different and I'm much happier. So I don't know. It's weird, but it's true. This maybe is beyond the scope of the productivity field guide, but you talked a bit about Aruate and that obviously is very personal and you have to identify that for yourself. The ethical living piece, do you have a definition for that or at least what it looks like for you? I think you know, right? It's like that Supreme Court definition of pornography. I can't describe it, but I know it when I see it. You know as you go through your life if you're doing the right thing or not. And for me personally, that is a big deal.

I mean, everything falls apart if I don't live ethically. And it's a challenge when you're a lawyer because there are so many ethical challenges you face every day and you have an obligation to your client, but you also have an obligation to the truth. It's tough. That job really puts you in a sticky place sometimes. But that's one of the reasons why I'm happy

not to be doing it anymore. But you know it, and anybody listening I think should probably know if they're living an ethical life or not. I just kind of leave it at that. I don't try to define it. Sure. The other thing that stood out to me from something you said already

today with recording, but also you've got a video titled Sparky's OCR trick. I think this ties into the analog tools. We can't just let that flow by. We got gotta dig into that a little bit. So what is this? So I've never been able to take a picture of my handwriting and have it turned into text reliably. I write in block caps like an architect. And I've done it since I think I was a senior in high school. My handwriting has always been printed block text.

So much so that when I took the bar exam in 1993, they used to make you write out a handwriting exemplar just to kind of to prove it was you. Back in the day, that was how they did. I'm sure they do something more sophisticated now. But they say, hand write out this paragraph, and that would be used against you if they thought you sent someone else

to take the test for you. I couldn't remember how to write a Q. I'm so stressed, I'm in this three day test. I'm like, how do I hand write a Q? I hadn't written one for like 10 years. So anyway, I write out. And when you do the block text, OCR gets constantly confused, it makes it all caps,

or it just doesn't do it well. And one day I thought, just for giggles, what if I gave it to ChatGPT? So I wrote a prompt explaining that I write in all caps, like an architect, block text, you know, the capital letters are bigger than the non-capital letters. So I wrote out, like I took a few minutes

to make a prompt that I thought would work, and I took a picture of a page of notes, and it got it right on the first shot. And then I've kept that kind of prompt in my chat GPT history, and I keep throwing more at it and whenever I see mistakes, I explain to it what mistake it made and now it's almost like a perfect engine.

I can put almost anything into it and it gets it out of its text. So for people who do traditional handwriting, they've probably had for some time now the ability to get their handwriting turned into reliable text on a computer, but for me I finally got it with ChatGPT. And so I made a video showing how to do that.

That's like the most techie video in the whole course. So good on you Mike for finding that one. Yeah, well anything AI I'm kind of fascinated by. On that note, a couple AI notes. Yeah, well, anything AI, I'm kind of fascinated by. On that note, a couple AI notes. The arite statements, a couple people who went through the course last year wrote me and they would write their arite statements and then they would, and the way it works is like,

you pick like, okay, let's use the example of husband. Like, okay, I've got an orite statement of what is the ideal husband. So here's a couple of them. It's a bunch of bullet points for me. I put Daisy's needs and concerns above my own. I always keep my promises with her. I'm fully present.

I give more than I take. I look for secret ways to make her life easier. And it goes on for like, I've got like 15 of these points. And so I write them out, and that's the RTA statement that I look at, and then when I do the reviews, I read that and say, how am I doing on some of these things here I could improve upon? But some of the people went through the course,

took theirs, and then they sent it to ChatGPT and said, you know, this is a list of my ideal virtues as a husband. What do you think I missed anything? And people would basically ask chat GPT to read it and give them ideas for additional points. And I thought that was really good. I mean, whatever it takes, right? So I threw some of mine at it

and it didn't really give me much. I think I maybe took one or two on the whole list, but I thought that was an interesting use of AI. And then another one was, I took, as I was prepping the update, I took the, because I wrote a book, I recorded seven hours of video, I put all the transcripts of all the videos,

and then I took all of the transcripts of all the videos, and then I took all of the transcripts of all the webinars from last year. So it ended up with like hours and hours of these transcripts, and then I fed it all to Notebook LM. And then I, so I made the world's expert of the productivity field guide in Notebook LM, and I started asking it questions like, what was the most difficult thing for people to do?

And like, I started asking questions to get feedback. And I had made a list of additional points I wanted to make as I was going through teaching it, but it was good to have that feedback mechanism from notebook LM also giving me ideas of things that I should make more clear and improve upon with this new edition. Nice. Yeah. I've heard a lot of people talk about notebook LM and I think the way that you're using it is pretty interesting.

I have not done anything with that. But I think that's the real value of the AI stuff, is it can summarize everything that, and use as a data set everything that you've created around a particular topic. And if you take the time to put your own arate statements, and for me it would be a life theme, but same sort of idea, you know, all this stuff in there, and you've created this tool where you can kind of

just query like, hey, what's the thing that I should do in this situation? And it's gonna search all that stuff and spit some things back to you. Which again, isn't the thing that you just wanna automate, but it's an interesting data point and using it as a conversation partner. Be like, hey, you said this was really important to you.

Maybe you should think about it from this perspective. Oh yeah, I guess that makes a lot of sense. I guess I'll do this then, because it's in alignment with my vision and my values. I think that's pretty cool. Yeah, it really was useful that way. Another thing I did with this new edition was I published my entire RTA statements

for all of my roles, which was a little intimidating. Last year, when I released the initial version, I think I just gave a partial list for a couple roles. But I felt like that stuff is so private, I felt like I shouldn't share that. But one of my big lessons teaching it is people just need examples to get an idea of how to make their own.

And the more I read it, I felt like, there's nothing in here that's secret. It's just like, these are the roles I'm pursuing and how I wanna become better at them. And I just did a block and copy. I didn't read them again. I just put them in a book without like checking it because I knew I would edit myself if I did.

But I put them all in there and I just figure heck with it. I mean, if this helps people learn it better then it's okay with me. with it. I mean, if this helps people learn it better, then it's okay with me. Nice. All right. The other thing that you have talked to me about a little bit, I know it's a work in progress and probably worth unpacking here is the whole idea of softer time blocking. Yeah. Want to talk us through your evolved approach to your time block scheduling? Yeah, I mean, so the course,

in addition to all the heady RTA rules stuff, there's also a tactical section of the course. So I think the most important is the beginning where I explain this whole system and you kind of come up with a way to pursue your better self. But then I also share some of my favorite tactics and I'd call that hyper scheduling for years.

I really probably should call it block scheduling. I think hyper scheduling has an implication that it's hyper, right? You know? But either way, so I, there's, we do work, I work with the people that go through the course on doing block scheduling. A lot of people are intimidated by it,

or a lot of people are like, look, I got a job where I just can't block that much in advance, you know, and is there a better way of doing this? So I came up with a couple alternatives just in teaching the materials, and one of them, I ended up using myself, and I still use it as a daily driver.

So my scheduling and block scheduling has changed a bit. My life has got to a point because of choices I have made where there's a lot of reliably repeating blocks. Often on Mondays I write blog posts for the week and I write a newsletter and often on Wednesdays I record the lab report, a podcast for the Max Markey Labs, and there's just certain days that I do think, certain days that I podcast on and do podcast prep.

So I have a lot of repeating stuff, and that would make it easy to block the whole week out very easily, but not everybody can do that. So the softer approach, what I consider, is where you write down the blocks that you wanna do. Like maybe you start with a week list. And I'm just using myself as an example. Like each week I spend two blocks of sponsor time.

You know, whether it's recording ads or corresponding with people about ads at the website or recording ads for the shows and about ads at the website or recording ads for the shows and all that stuff. I do it usually on Monday and Thursday, and it's about an hour each. I know that's a block that I'm reliably going to need. In my list of weak blocks, I'll have sponsor one, sponsor two. Then on Sunday, I'll handwrite in.

I can do this analog or digital. You can pick your poison in terms of tools, but you can say on Monday and Thursday I'm gonna give a block to them, but I don't put the time in. And some of this grew out of talking to Khrushchev, who talks about kind of like giving yourself the out of not picking up a block every day,

but just considering it. But mine are a little more firm than that because I actually do need to get these done. But I give myself flexibility as to when it gets done. And that's just an example. I have them for writing. I have them for research time and all the different things that I do. And I've got a series of these each week that I kind know, I kind of make fit in as I go through the week and as the week evolves.

Like if something happens with the family and I need to spend, you know, a bunch of time dealing with that, then those blocks won't happen that day, that's okay. I can push them to the next day. But they don't really get a time until the morning of. And then, or the night before, because I actually do it the night before.

But when I'm actually right on the day, then I'm saying, okay, I am gonna do that sponsored block, I'm gonna do it at 1 p.m. tomorrow. And that's when I kind of like lock it in, whereas the way I would originally teach it is like you would do that on Sunday for the whole week. And I try to be just more flexible with myself about these, so then when you don't put it on the calendar early,

that gives you an easier excuse to move it around as needed. So that's a piece of it. Make sense? It does. It's interesting because the planning your week on Sunday, for example, which I've heard you talk about previously, I've always felt kind of bad because that never has really worked for me

I tend to to time block just the day before but I've kind of adapted my approach to a little bit and and I like What you've before I get to that I like what you've done. We're basically if I were to summarize it You're sort of mode blocking before your task blocking. Yeah, is that accurate? Yeah mode blocking before your task blocking. Yeah. Is that accurate? Yeah. So you're figuring out, this is the mode that I want to be in during this time. And then you're figuring out when right before you get there, this is what I'm going to be working on. I think even, you know, if, if people are averse to the whole idea of time blocking your tasks,

you probably don't even need to go that far. As long as you know, I'm going to be writing during the next hours, when you get there and you sit down to write, you often know this is the thing that I need to write. And that's the trick with all this stuff I think, is identifying enough structure that you know what to do when you get there and you've removed the barriers to doing the task, but also you've not spent hours fiddling and planning just to have your perfectly time blocked day completely get blown up because life has life to you.

Yeah, exactly. In fact, that's a whole nother topic. I did a whole video on adaptation because I feel like as important planning is, the skill of adaptation is just as important because everything changes on you. Another even simpler block scheduling technique I teach is for people who are adverse to it. People are like, look, I don't want to do all this time blocking stuff. I just don't want to do it. And one of the approaches I would teach is like, okay, that's

fine. You don't have to, but tell me the one thing that's in the back of your mind that you can't seem to get done. The sales report or the, whatever it is. It could be a personal thing too, the taxes or whatever. Okay, so let's say just pick the one thing that's really bugging you. Block just that. Figure out a time you can do that. Say next Tuesday you. Block just that. Figure out a time you can do that.

Say next Tuesday I'm gonna do that, next Tuesday afternoon I'll do the taxes. All right, write that in the calendar. But don't do any other time blocking. Do your life as normal. But next Tuesday, don't miss that appointment. Do the taxes and then see how you feel. And like it's always the,

the way people feel is always the same. There's a sense of relief the moment you put it on the calendar, cause it's like, that's no longer the boogie man that is just haunting you. No, you've addressed the boogie man, you put him in a cage on Tuesday, and then on Tuesday you'll slay him, and then you'll feel a little more confident.

And I'm like, then after that, pick the next thing that's in the back of your mind, the next boogie man and put him in a cage. And you don't have to do any more than that. Don't go any further. Don't do any other additional blackmailing, but just use that one trick,

just to take care of the one thing in the back of your mind, or maybe two things. And then, you know, so I taught that in the course, a lot of people like that kind of approach, but it's funny to me, because then like three months later, those same people would write me and say, oh, now I'm fully blocked scheduling.

It's almost like a gateway drug, but you don't have to go all the way with it, but that is at least a way to get started. Sure. Yeah, I like the putting the boogeyman in the cage via intention setting. That's an interesting visual. You should definitely get some art made for that one. Yeah, I like the putting the boogeyman in the cage via intention setting. That's a interesting visual. You should definitely get some art made for that one.

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So I have my, my own, uh, update on, on time blocking, which I wanted to touch on real briefly here and it kind of ties back to the, uh, the AI thing because we got a, an email from somebody who I'm not going to spoil the thing that they shared because I think this is actually a cool idea for a future show,

but they had plugged a prompt into chat GPT to ask for a term for something. And I thought that was pretty brilliant. So I have been doing this like modified split time blocking ritual and I didn't have a term for it and then I just took this approach and what I came up with or chat GPT came up with is block priming. Now this is basically doing my time blocking two separate times. Once at the end of the day as part of a shutdown routine and once at the beginning of the day as I am getting clear about what I'm actually going to be doing when. And that sounds maybe like repeat effort, but actually what I've found is it's splitting the effort. I don't think it's

any additional effort, but what it does by doing it at the end of the day, the pre-time blocking, is I actually am more effective in hitting that shutdown routine which I've always struggled with and the way that this works for me to get into the nerdy details for a minute is I have mentioned on the show an app called Morgan which I have fallen in love with it's got a whole bunch of calendaring features but it's way more than a calendaring app it's kind of hard to explain if If you just go look at the, the website, it'll look like a calendar app,

but really it's a scheduling app and it helps you find those spots in your schedule where you can take intentional action on the things that are important to you. And, uh, not too long ago, they added an integration with obsidian, which is like catnip to Mike Schmitz. Yeah, yeah. So I've got my whole Obsidian task management system. I've got the dashboard, which shows me the tasks, and I can go look at that and kind of get my bearings

for what's going on. But then those tasks, which are using the Obsidian task plugin, can actually get piped into Morgan and with Morgan you've got an interface where on the left you've got the tasks. That's like a sidebar sort of a thing where you can see everything that's due tomorrow, due today, things that are overdue, things that are coming up in the next week, and they're all broken down into the categories. And

then on the right you've got the calendar so you put in your calendars and you can drag your tasks then from that sidebar into the calendar and it's not just a specific app. So this is you know to me this is better than dragging something from an app like OmniFocus into Fantastical because if you work with other people you probably have tasks in multiple places. So in Morgan you can have obsidian tasks, you can have notion tasks, you probably have tasks in multiple places. So in Morgan you can have Obsidian tasks, you can have Notion tasks, you can have ClickUp tasks, you can have Todoist tasks, they can all be listed there, and then you can drag those onto the same calendar as you plan your day. And so what I do is I look at the things

that are coming up tomorrow in my Obsidian tasks specifically. That's the the one that really I'm focused on right now. Although as I continue to work with more people in Notion, I'm probably going to bring that stuff in there as well at some point. But I'm looking at the things that are due tomorrow in Obsidian. I'm going to the daily page for tomorrow in Morgan, and I'm dragging those important tasks onto the time block plan before I shut down for the day. So I'm not time blocking the whole day, I'm just figuring out you know this specific task that I have to do, I'm gonna do it at this point. And then the next day when I get to the the co-working space generally, I like going

there, getting in the car, having that transition time of a you know 15 minute commute, it's not that big a deal to me. And it helps me get into, okay, it's time to work mode as I walk into that co-working space. Then I'll get there, I'll open up the fancy notebook, I'll open up the Morgan plan for today, and I will use that as the foundation, but then I'll fill in a couple of gaps with the rest of the time until I've given every hour a job. And then from there I've got the time block plan and the fancy notebook. I'll write down the three tasks I'm gonna do

on the note card, prop that up in front of my desk and work off of that as I go through my day. And I love this. I don't even know how to describe what a difference this has made. And it could be just anchored to the fact that I'm actually shutting down now at the end of the day and I'm able to disconnect from the

Open from the things that have happened during the day and I'm closing the open loops before I go spend time with my family Or go to the basketball game or whatever but this has been a huge benefit to me and thank you to to a listener TJ for the idea of using chat GPT to coin the term block priming. I looked at Morgan I also looked at motion which is another kind of AI planning calendar tool. I don't know if you're familiar with that one. I've heard of it yeah. For me they For me, they just don't really resonate.

I don't feel like I need AI to help me plan my day. I know what's important. In fact, I've kind of gone the opposite direction. So the way I do it now is I use the blocks as the driver. So a good example earlier, I'd said I'm gonna do two sponsor blocks. Well, what am I gonna do during those blocks? Well, in OmniFocus, I've got a list called sponsor and there's, let's say there's, you know, 15 things in there. I'll go in and do as many as I can in the time

allotted it and then I move on and I don't think about it anymore. And like if I have a list where I'm consistently not getting the stuff I need done, then that tells me I need to give a bigger block to that thing in my life. And it just allows you, using the calendar blocks as the foundation, it puts that limitation on you because you only have so much time in the day and you can only have so many blocks. I mean, one of the reasons why the Automators podcast went away is because I realized I had more blocks

than I had time to do it all. And I had to like give some things up. And so I gave up one of my shows. And that's the way I've been doing it. So I kind of call it block-based task management where the block is the unit and the task manager is just the list you go to. Yes. So I agree with that. I don't keep an insane list of tasks in Obsidian either. So

it's just like some big things that show up in my daily list. However, I do find that having the tasks and the calendar events in one interface, which I can use then, which is sort of designed to be a time blocking tool, has been really helpful. And just to be clear, like Morgan, the way I'm using this, you can drag the tasks into the calendar. You can drag them in from multiple places. And if you go to the website, they'll talk about the AI features. I don't use those at all. I'm just using this as a calendar app with the ability to,

at the end of the day, spend five minutes to decide where am I going to do the thing that is due tomorrow. And also kind of get a handle on, you know, if there's too many things in that list, then I have got to be ready to to cut. But I like knowing that the day before, as opposed to I'm walking into today and, oh, my gosh, look at all these things that I have to get done. If I if I see five things in the due tomorrow list, I'm going to decide right then and there this one's not getting done. If I, if I see five things in the do tomorrow list, I'm going to decide right then and there, this one's not getting done. And I'm going to bump that to next week or, or whatever.

The other thing about, about Morgan is it's actually a great calendar app. It is not cheap, but neither is fantastic. And it's got the booking pages and all that kind of stuff. So you can, you can, it's, it is a scheduling tool, you know, it's got the booking pages and all that kind of stuff. So you can, it is a scheduling tool. You know, it's given you everything that you need, not just to plan your tasks by using a time blocking, but also to wrangle schedules and calendars with multiple people.

And I think it's really well done. Yeah, no, I get it. And like I have used the feature, the way you described where you drag a task out of OmniFocus and put it on to Fantastical and it creates a task for it. But I just don't do that either. I really just, I think we're kind of doing the same thing.

I'm just doing it the hard way and you're doing it more technically, using the link between Morgan and Obsidian and your other applications. I think the important thing for me is that we are both bumping up against the limitation of time when we do the planning, which allows us to be a little more realistic about what we do. Yes. And just to be clear, the way that the integration works, you're not syncing back to Obsidian, I'm gonna do this task at this time.

It's literally just a planning tool. What is nice is that at the end of the day, when I am doing my block priming, I'm also looking at the tasks that I scheduled that day, and I can just check them off. The only thing that gets synced back to Obsidian is that this task was done. And then whatever repeating setting I have for those,

like for example, I've got one for publish the focused episode that goes every two weeks, and it's linked to the checklist that I've gotta go through before the episode gets published just to make sure that I don't forget anything. And because it's all plain text using that Obsidian Tasks plugin, I can check the box in Morgan and then next time I go into Obsidian, it's deleted that previous version of the task because that's the way I have it set up. And it's created the next version and

it's adjusted the due date appropriately and all that kind of stuff. So that's the way I have it set up. And it's created the next version and it's adjusted the due date appropriately and all that kind of stuff. So that's the thing that really clicks for me is that it's not just an add-on sort of a thing. They actually worked with the developer of the Obsidian Task plugin, which is the foundation of my crazy task management system, which I've got a video. I'll put it in the show notes that people really want

to see what that looks like. But that's really the glue for this is that it's built off of that Obsidian Task plugin. And that integration is just so nice. And it's got these little visual flourishes. So like when you check the box to complete the task in Morgan, you get the little confetti, you know, the little dopamine hit like, hey, you got something done. Good job. you get the little confetti, the little dopamine hit, like, hey, you got something done, good job. So yeah, I'm very impressed with this app. And I've seen people talk about it for a long time. I mentioned this in the video I did on this block priming. Danny Hatcher is one person who I've heard rave about Morgan for years. And I've looked at it and it's kind of, I don't really get that. Why does anybody need this? And then when they added the Obsidian tasks integration,

I tested it out for myself. And I was like this? And then when they added the Obsidian tasks integration, I tested it out for myself and I was like, oh, I get it now, this is great. Well, I guess I gotta look at it again, Mike. But yeah, it is a nice looking app. And it definitely looks like kind of like the calendar for Obsidian, right? So that's a whole different thing.

Like if you're all in with Obsidian, why not? This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Indeed. Go to indeed.com slash focus and join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast. If you're looking to expand your team this year, join the 3.5 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need.

Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites, and their sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates, so you can reach the people you want faster, and it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed Data,

Sponsored Jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. Whenever you're looking to hire, it always seems like there's an inverse relationship between the time that you spend looking for a candidate and the quality of the candidate. Well, you can blow up that equation with Indeed because Indeed gets you great options very quickly.

You actually get to have your cake and eat it too because you can find people quickly that are absolutely qualified. And with sponsored jobs, there's no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts, and you only pay for the results. And how fast does it all happen? Well, in the minute I've been talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed,

according to Indeed data worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed, and listeners to the Focus podcast will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash focused. So just go to indeed.com slash focused right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on the Focus Podcast.

I-N-D-E-E-D dot com slash focused. Terms and conditions apply. Are you hiring? Indeed is all you need. And our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus Podcast and Olive Relay. All right, Mike, what are you reading these days? I am reading a book for Bookworm naturally,

but I wanted to make sure that I mentioned it here because it's fascinating. It's Poor Charlie's Almanac. And the story of this is it's a book by Charlie Munger. So it's talking about his life. It's got reflections from his kids. It's got talks that he gave. But the real interesting thing about this is that it's published by Stripe Press. and there is a free online version of this book that is just absolutely beautiful. It's a incredibly well-designed webpage. So I will put the link to this in the

show notes for people who want to take a look at this, but the website has a bunch of additional photos and things from the life of Charlie Munger, which I guess people aren't familiar with him. He's the right-hand man to Warren Buffett with, forget the name of their company, Berkshire Hathaway, is that right? That's it. Yeah, so very successful investment firm. And it's a lot of interesting tidbits from his life and just kind of the lessons that he's learned

along the way. I mean, you always get the blurbs of the books and they're always a little bit fantastic or extreme, but there was one from somebody who said that this is a million dollar education in a book. And I don't think that's necessarily wrong because it's edited versions of a lot of his real popular talks that he gave at business schools and commencements and things like that. So I am really enjoying this book so far. And everyone should go check out the free online version. I will check it out.

I am not reading a book. I've been spending all my time on this update, but I bought a book. Does that count? Sure. Yeah, so I've got a book that I haven't read here. I can't recommend it, but it was recommended to me by a listener.

And it's called, I've Got Time by Paul Lumens. I don't know if you've heard of this book. It's called, The Zen Monk's Guide to Calm, Focused, and Meaningful Life. So somebody told me, you should check that book out. He says a lot of the same stuff you do. So I don't know if it's any good or not. It's sitting here on my shelf.

As soon as I get this Productivity Field Guide shipped, that's the next book I'm gonna read. Nice. Speaking of your shelf, I think maybe we'll talk a little bit more about that in in deep focus for yes You do it looks very nice All right, you got any shiny new objects you go first I need to think Okay, well I've got a long-term shiny new object

Well, I've got a long term shiny new object. The seed was planted on this podcast a long time ago when we were talking about how I don't really have anything that I do for fun, just for me, like just just for fun. There's no productivity benefits to it at all. And I think I mentioned probably on that episode, I don't remember which episode that was, that, you know, I've been intrigued by this idea of the, uh, the steam deck. Are you familiar with the steam deck, right? Yeah, it's a PC in a, in your palm. Yeah, it's kind of like a very, uh, ergonomic Nintendo switch plus plus.

And I know they just announced the, uh, the new Nintendo Switch. So maybe the timing on this is terrible for me, but I did get a Steam Deck. And the thing that pushed me over the edge is that I am a huge Civilization fan. Are you familiar with the Civilization games by Sid Meier? Yeah. Yeah, so Civ 6 came out, I don't know, 10 years ago. And I've been starting to see all

these ads all over the place for Civ 7, which is coming out in a couple of weeks. And it is Steam Deck certified. So I have pre-ordered Civ 7 and I've gotten a Steam Deck, and it is going to become my civilization machine. Nice, nice. And you can play it in bed. Exactly, yeah. I've got a couple other games that I've collected

over Steam over the years. Steam is available on Mac now, so a handful of games are, if you buy them via Steam, you can play them on your Mac. So I've got a couple of those too, like Firewatch, and I think there was a deal on Skyrim a couple weeks ago, so I bought that. And yeah, I got the Steam Deck actually yesterday as we record this, so I haven't had a whole lot of time to mess around with it. But I have played with it a little bit.

I got the OLED version, so the screen looks great. The blacks are really black, which for some of those, atmospheric type games is important. But yeah, this is gonna be fun. Hopefully I don't lose too much time to playing the Steam Deck. Yeah, just whatever you do, stay away from Ghost of Tsushima. That game will take all of your time if you find it.

I remember you talking about the open world Harry Potter game that's available on the steam deck as well. Yeah. I've resisted so far. Yeah. Look out. Yeah.

I, you know, I really haven't, I don't have any thing shiny. You knew I have upgraded some of the gear. Like we said during the show, I bought a new microphone. I got a shotgun mic on your recommendation and that helped the audio and stuff, but I have just had my head down on productivity field guide so much. I'll tell you one thing I did buy. The plotter has now got me on their whale list,

because I bought the book, I bought the notepads, and they sent me a thing out where they had a time-limited notepad with a foil stamped cover of a Japanese temple. And I just bought it. I didn't, I'm sitting here looking at what am I going to do with this thing? It's like, it's the same, you know, you can pull the paper out and put it in notebooks and all that. But yeah, that was kind of a splurge buy for me, but I haven't really spent much money lately. I've been too busy getting all this together.

So I don't have anything really too shiny and new lately. Maybe in the future. Well, that's all right. Yeah, I made up for you, I think, this time around with the OLED Steam Deck. Yeah. All right, well, that wraps it up for today. If you wanna check out the Productivity Field Guide,

there's links in the notes for the plus and the standard version. Don't remember that discount code, PFG10 gets 10% off. Go check it out, let me know what you think, and I really appreciate your consideration. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm slash focused. Go there.

If you want to sign up for Deep Focus, the ad-free extended version of the show, you can focused, go there. If you wanna sign up for Deep Focus, the ad free extended version of the show, you can do that right there. We appreciate your support, helps us a lot. And today on the Deep Focus segment, I think we're gonna be talking about my bookshelf project and curating my books, so that'll be fun.

And otherwise, we'll see you next time.