Focused - 223: Solving the Actual Problem, with Ian Byrd

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast, but more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike, how are you today? Doing great, how about yourself? Excellent, very happy to welcome back to the show

after many years. Ian Byrd, welcome back, Ian. Hello, thanks for having me. Yeah, you know, Ian, you're one of my favorite people when I think of focus and productivity because while you don't write about it, you're not in the racket, as they say, just every time we talk, you share such mindful ideas

with me, like I remember one time years ago, I think on Mac Power users, you told me how your goal was just to use an iPad, and if anything required a Mac, that meant you could probably hire somebody for it. Yes. And I thought, what a clever way to think about your technology.

Thank you. Yeah. I've never pulled that off, but it is a good goal. It's a dream, right? It's a dream. Yeah. For people who don't know, Ian was a teacher who specialized in advanced children, you

know, the smarty pants, and turned that into a business where he now teaches teachers how to teach advanced children, in addition to teaching your own son, I know. And another thing that you used to do is you used to go out and speak at a lot of schools and give them training, but then you transition that, right? Yes, yeah, so everything's online. And nowadays I'm speaking directly to students for the most part, so I make lessons that teachers can just use directly with their class.

And everything's in video format, and it's sort of like a library of lessons that teachers can subscribe to. And where do they find that at? It's Birdseed.tv and that's Bird with a Y because it's my last name. Sure. That must be hard to make videos that could engage children. Like that's a level up there. How do you do that? Well, yeah, I've remade a lot of videos, because the library is about 12 years old, 13 years old. So a lot of the stuff I was doing at first was very like, lecture-y and a lot of it was aimed at

teachers. Yeah. And in speaking to teachers, you know, if you tell teachers how to do something, like they still have to do it, and so the bulk of the work is still there. But by actually making the lessons speak to students, then teachers can actually just use it, and it actually takes work off their plate. And so the big thing I realized was I had to break everything up into multiple videos and keep the videos

pretty short. So most tasks are maybe three to five videos long and each video is maybe like a minute to two minutes. So it's pretty much like I'm modeling what to do and then handing it over to students and then they have time to do the task. And then they can move at their own pace and play the next video when they're ready to move on. Yeah, I mean, I make the field guides for adults and looking at my numbers, the highest completion rate by far are videos that are three minutes or less. Oh, yeah.

Even with adults, you can't go too long. But then the problem is I want to say more. That's hard for me. It's a challenge. Yeah. So I get in and get out pretty quick. Yeah. Well, so you've had this business.

So you kind of turn that into your thing. And you're a very focused person. So I thought we'd just kind of catch up with you. What is the, so the iPad dream didn't work out for you. What is the technology stack you're using these days for your business? When I'm at home, I have a Mac Studio and I have a whole nice standing desk set up.

I have a big wide, I have like an ultra wide, some kind of LG, I don't know the exact model number. But I love that I can have two like full windows open so I can kind of switch back and forth easily. Probably the weirdest thing is I use a, I call it Wacom, or I don't know if it's Wacom or Wacom, but the tablet, the pen tablet, I use that as like my main mouse device

in my right hand. And then I use a trackpad in my left hand. And like that combined with the standing desk has really alleviated like a lot of RSI issues I was having. Yeah, I've tried that. Mike Hurley is a big fan of that and I could just never get it to work for me. Yeah, it took a while, but now if I don't have that,

I'm constantly reaching for the pen and anything that's in the corner of my eye that looks like a pen, I'll keep grabbing for it, like at a coffee shop or something. So right now we're vacationing, so I have a laptop and I actually bought like a smaller tablet, so I can have that. So I kind of have just a smaller version of my setup at home. And then I have an iPad Mini, and I mostly use that as just like a reading, you know, watching YouTube. Consumption. Yeah, but it is my main, like if I'm going to plan or reflect,

then that's my preferred device because it's so hard to do anything on it. Like, I'm not going to start like actually writing out videos or editing things. So that really helps me. The pen works on it, which I love, the Apple pencil. So I do a lot of like reading in Kindle and then I use Notability as like a note-taking app. So sometimes I'll put the iPad like landscape mode and have Kindle on one half and Notability on the other and just kind of go back and forth taking notes and doing like screenshots and putting it in the notes.

So I find that to be a really good tool for like that kind of reflecting where I purposefully don't want to get into the like nitty gritty work. That's an interesting workflow because a lot of folks, well, Mike will tell you, you should always buy physical books, right, Mike? Absolutely. But a lot of people struggle with the Kindle stuff because of that.

It's hard to take good notes and the interface where you tap in and then you tap one letter at a time on the terrible Kindle keyboard. That's not really acceptable either. I'd never thought of that. So you're just taking a screenshot of the page and taking notes in a separate app. Yeah. You can do some shortcuts on the iPad where it's pretty quick to take a screenshot. And then you can crop it and paste it in and then write around it.

So how do you like store that stuff? Like if you wanna go look up your notes on a book, do you just have that as a digital file in GoodNotes? I have everything in Notability. Oh, I'm sorry, I misspoke. Notability, because those are the two. I'm the GoodNotes user here. I'm the yin to yin to yang.

I actually have them both, but Notability is the one where I have, yeah, those kinds of notes. Yeah. Do you print them out at all? You just keep them in the app. No, I just have like a huge, I'm looking at it right now. I have this huge, they're called subjects and notability, but it's basically like folders. And so I have all these retreats that I've taken, like going back to, it looks like 2018 was the first one I have here. Yeah.

And then I have a category of books where I've gone through that. I find one of the reasons I like the digital, like I do buy paper books, but then it's hard, it's hard to see it all like this. So I like being able to look at this, what I'm doing, like a retreat But then it's hard to see it all like this. So I like being able to look at this, what I'm doing, like a retreat or reflecting or planning and I can see, like, oh, I forgot that I read that book and here's like all the stuff that stood out to me. So I find it's helpful to kind of review stuff that I thought was really important, like

six months ago and I've completely forgotten about. Do you have any other index of that or is it just in the notability? It's just in notability. Yeah, okay. Well, it makes sense. It's like separate from everything. I think notability, you can open it on the Mac.

So I think I can access it if I want to like look through it. But that makes it kind of fun. Your iPad is your little research device. Yeah, it is like totally separate from my typical workflow. Do you use the Apple Pencil with that? I do. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have the newest iPad mini. I know they just like re-released it. Yeah. But yeah, I think this is the Apple Pencil 2.

It's hard to justify updating iPads because the old ones still work pretty good. Yeah, I'm hoping they do something big with the iPad Mini soon. Like a real update. Yeah, exactly. The iPad Mini Pro is what a lot of people want, but I don't know if they'll ever make it.

One of the things you had mentioned earlier that I thought was interesting is just the fact that you're going back and improving upon prior content. And as you run this online business, how do you make the decision between what new stuff gets made versus where do you go and fix old stuff? Like where's the tipping point for you

now that you've got a body of content? Yeah, you know, at first, for the first, I don't know, five years or so, it was so much about just making stuff because I was figuring out what people want and because it's like a subscription library, you know, there has to be a critical mass of videos to make it worth it. And as the website started to take off, the thing that I would notice is that nobody was complaining that there aren't enough videos, but there were a lot of complaints about like not being able to find things or not being overwhelmed by the

library of videos. So that was like a clue to me that I had to adapt to like how the business had grown. And looking at things like how do I organize this so that people can find what they're looking for, or how do I help people get started, or like surface videos that match their needs. And none of that is as fun as like making a new lesson, because a lot of that involves like confronting old mistakes that I didn't realize that I had made and like kind of going back and looking, you know, then I see old videos and I realized, oh, this is like pretty outdated looking.

And you know, then I start to realize that I have a lot of stuff out there that isn't as good as I want it to be. Um, and so that, that has been a a big probably the last like two years, two or three years. It's I've really been like restricting myself from making new things, but instead like going back and trying to improve what's already there. Have you found that you are simply improving what's already there or has there been any sort of refinement like getting rid of things because you realize they're not really

in the sweet spot for what you are trying to offer. Maybe you tried some stuff but didn't really work and you end up cutting some things and what's that that process like? That has been a big lesson for me, is that it's really hard to get rid of stuff that's already out there. Because every time I've sneakily tried to remove a video, somebody has reached out and said, I was gonna use this video today with my students,

and now it's not there anymore. What happened to it? And so that happens every time I remove something. So I feel like I can't really delete things, which makes me more careful about like what I'm adding now. So some of it I've just had to live with where it's like, I don't really like this video and I feel like it doesn't fit. But I think it's the same thing with Netflix or any of those streaming libraries. If something goes away, people are suddenly very worried about that. But people aren't really reaching out to me and telling me what they're using.

So it's hard to realize, oh, there's hard to, it's hard to realize like, oh, there's people like, there's actually like thousands of teachers using these things every day. So I have to be careful about what I, even what I change substantially because it might interfere with like what they've planned to do that week. What about the, it sounds like you've maybe, one of the ways that you've improved things is through marketing the things that you have and

you mentioned thousands of teachers that are using this and I imagine that as this scales there's a whole bunch of other problems that pop up. How have you been able to retain the focus of the product, what it is, communicate that clearly as more and more people are accessing a library of content. And I guess just for context, my dad started a software company and he built a product, which sounds like it's fairly similar. It was a video library for low functioning students, teaching them functional independent living skills. So generalizable, you know, video modeling type stuff. And his,

his, his focus with that product was always, well, we just got to add, you know, more content and then we'll be able to reach more people because we have this other thing. But I, I've, I noticed working with my dad that the more that, you know, more content and then we'll be able to reach more people because we have this other thing. But I noticed working with my dad that the more that, you know, someone suggested, hey, you should have a program on this. So we created something that's off on the fringes. You lose some of the clear messaging as to what exactly is this thing? And you know, that doesn't help you necessarily get more new people in the door. So how do you how do you balance that with the marketing efforts?

Yeah, the marketing is what I've, that's become like a big focus of mine, is like trying to explain what this is to people, because a lot of teachers don't have experience with something exactly like this. People will think that it's like an online conference or there's something like that. So that is one of those, exactly like this, people will think that it's like an online conference or something like that.

So that is one of those. I didn't start the business because I wanted to explain what I do, but it's something that I've had to really work on. And the more that I have been working on that marketing, to me, it keeps opening up more things that I could be doing. So for me, the number one marketing channel is this blog that I started while I was still teaching at Birdseed.com. So I get a lot of traffic through there and that's all free, but it's it's just text.

And so, so I've, I've spent a lot of time like figuring out how do I use like this asset that I have where conferences are recommending this or like bosses are recommending it to their teachers. I go into my stats like once a month and like look at, you know, what is the most high performing page or what, where are people coming in from? And that's like, that can be depressing because like the top five pages are things that I did 15 years ago, like really old stuff. But that's the thing that people keep coming back to. So I look at those pages and it's like, how can I use this page as a way to, as like an entry point into the paid business and the library of videos?

So that's something I'm doing right now is like trying to figure out how do I make sure each of these top five pages connects in a natural way to like the next thing that teachers could move on to. Yeah and that is that is an interesting struggle. I noticed something that sort of related to that when I started making stuff related to Obsidian. You know I've been making stuff for other people talking about productivity and creativity for years and when I

went independent I figured that's what that going to be my niche. I was just going to continue to talk about that stuff. And I would make content and get a few likes, a few shares. But anytime I talked about how I was using Obsidian to do that stuff, I would get like 10 times the attention. And so there's a phrase that I like, which is make noise and listen for signal. And I think kind of the numbers are sort of irrelevant there. It's really the trends. But yeah, you have to like look at what's working and then sort of deconstruct it and figure out why do people like this so much? Yeah. And a lot of times it is for me, it's taking some kind of work off of somebody's plate.

I think I've learned a lot that I used to do a lot of giving information, and now I try to solve people's problems. So those are the things I see as the most popular are the things that actually solve a problem rather than just explaining information to people. I laugh because experience with my dad's company, he was very successful before I was ever in the picture. So I have to, you can't really argue with someone who has done it well for so long, you know, but I was basically in charge of bringing the software over to the internet and kind of, you know,

that's a whole different world. And when it came to the marketing though, we tended to still gravitate towards the information side of it. I was like, well, people just need to know what we have. And it's like, no, they have already too many emails to read and yours isn't going to pop up to the top. It's like, well, we used to send these catalogs and we would just get orders. It's a totally different game. And yeah, I think kind of speaking to the culture and where we're at right now, and there's definitely a focus topic here where there's just so much information out there today. You have to do something and it doesn't have to be sleazy. It doesn't have to be click baity. It doesn't have to be, you know, use car salesman ish, no snake oil, but you got to do something

which is going to help you elevate above all the other information that's out there and get somebody's attention as like, Hey, this might actually help me. Yeah the other information that's out there and get somebody's attention as like hey this might actually help me Yeah, and that that's David had mentioned that I I used to do a lot of speaking at conferences That was like my initial when I left the classroom. That was my initial income was like keynoting education conferences and I did I got kind of burned out from that because all you can really do when you're giving a talk is like give people information. Like it's hard to solve their problem

when you're talking on a stage. And so that has been a nice way of explaining what I do now is that I don't just talk about a problem anymore, but now I try to like solve the actual problem for teachers. I mean, another point, the show's called Focus, right? And we like people to learn how to hold a focus, but also you have to ask your question,

where do you direct it? And speaking for myself, there are things I make that are fun to make, and some things that are more fun to make than other things. And honestly, making new stuff is really fun, right? It's the ultimate expression of creativity. You're starting with a blank page and you're gonna have a thing at the end. But it is true, sometimes you gotta work

on the existing things. And just making that choice like an adult is, should be easy, but it isn't always. So good on you for actually finding that distinction. Yeah. You know, I think about, I was born in 1980, and so I grew up with Star Wars, but there was like nothing new,

there was no new Star Wars stuff for like my entire childhood. Yeah. You know, and then there was, then eventually like there was some books and stuff in the 90s. And then now there's so much Star Wars stuff. And I think that, you know, George Lucas was kind of like a solo business person, even though he was making those huge movies. And he had like, it had lost his attention, or he personally wanted to move on from Star Wars stuff,

but it left this huge like hole of, as a kid, you know, I would have loved more cartoons, and you know, more Star Wars stuff. And I see that with my kid too, where there's certain, I don't know, certain things that he gets into, and they just don't, nobody has really filled, they haven't sufficiently like filled his interest with stuff that we could buy or you know, TV shows and stuff.

So I think about that as like when you're a solo person and you can just kind of decide what you want to do, you could be leaving a lot of like meat on the bone where people are really hungry for more of that. And sometimes you have to, yeah, you have to say, maybe I'm not personally interested in this anymore, but there's so much appetite for this that I can, I can keep going back to this one thing that I'm kind of ready to move on from. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by back to this one thing that I'm ready to move on from.

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And our thanks to Squarespace for their support of the Focus Podcast and Olive Relay. Ian, one of the nice things about the changes you've made, you've gotten off the keynote speaking treadmill. You work from home, you got your studio set up at home. You've mentioned you have a son, a young son, and a great family, And like, how do you find, you know, those lines with a seemingly endless desire for your work,

but at the same time, you want to spend time with your family. How do you get those, how do you sort that out when you're working for yourself? I just, I try to keep a pretty like normal work schedule. And like, I kind of try to keep a nine to five. Um, on a typical day I'm going to be working from nine to five. At home I have, we have an extra bedroom so I use that as the home office and I can close the door and kind of work up there. We've been homeschooling our son so that, so we're all home.

So it has become more difficult as he's gotten older. He's going to be seven and like a month. So it was easier when he was younger and he, you know, he wouldn't like wander in and start talking to me about stuff. So I think a lot of it is, is setting up a schedule and trying, trying to make it feel like I have a regular job, even though it does have so much flexibility. But then that flexibility is there, like when we need it.

If my wife has to do something, it's pretty easy for me to take an hour, you know, and hang out with our kid, or if we're gonna go on vacation, we can go on an off peak kind of time. Yeah, so for me, it's like not taking advantage of the flexibility unless I actually need it. And it's just there when we need it.

But otherwise, trying to keep a pretty strict and normal routine. How about you? How do you handle it? My life is easier than it used to be, because my kids are grown. So I've got a lot more, so I mean, I'm like living in the margin now

because like for 30 years, I was a lawyer and you don't have any control over your schedule or seemingly almost no control. And now I've got nearly complete control over my schedule. Like you, I do the same thing though. I work pretty regular hours. I am flexible when needed, but I do find that in order to get the work done,

I gotta like stay at it. But that's also a work ethic I've had my whole life. So it's not a problem for me to work hard. If anything, I almost need to work on like getting away from it more often. Mike on the other hand has five children. Yes, and we homeschooled them also. So I know what that struggle is like.

So the way that I remain focused with five kids who are home all the time is I get out of the house. I have an office at a co-working space and there's a lot of benefits that come from that. One is my office, which is at home. It's in the basement, there's no windows. I called it my focus cave for years, because I would go in there and crank on something,

but no sunlight, so I can't stay in there too long. And then the minute that I opened my door, everybody else is there. So I made it work for a while, but when I was able to have a separate place to go, that allowed me to turn this into a studio, which I do a lot of YouTube stuff and video stuff, so it's kind of nice.

It's kind of a mess. David probably would not like it because there's lights everywhere and there's cables everywhere. My desk is a mess, but the shot looks really nice so I can come turn stuff on, record, I'm kind of optimized for ease there. And having a separate place where I do the rest of the regular work, the commute, first of all, kind of primes the pump I notice when I get there. I start thinking about things so I can hit the ground running when I get there. I find because of the nature of the space, it's very well lit, it's overlooking some water and some trees. It's a really great location. There's a trail right there. I tend to be more creative in that environment. It's easier for me to sit down and, and write.

I can get things done quicker. So I probably spend less time working. Uh, maybe it's close with the commute, but it's still probably considerably less than, you know, the, if I were going to do the same amount of work from home, but I feel like I get more done even with the travel time. Yeah, but we used to live, we lived in Portland for a while, in Portland, Oregon, and there was a great co-working space. When my kid was first born, I started working out of there, and they had these, the hard part I've had with co-working is that I need to do the like narrating, like record my narration. But this place had these little phone booths that enclosed and they were totally soundproof. So I loved it. That was like, it was the perfect

amount of like social time. And like you mentioned you mentioned, I had, I had like a 15 minute walk to get there and that was, that was a nice barrier, you know, like transition time that, that I don't have anymore. Um, that, that definitely helped separate, um, family and work life. Um, so that's something then with the pandemic, that whole company went out of business, but, um,

that is something I haven't been able to replicate was that particular coworking setup where I could really do all my work, including the recordings there. Those phone booths, were those rooms, was that the name of the brand, do you remember? It might've been, yeah. I've seen them a lot now in different places, but yeah, it was the first time I had seen those. There's a

lot of different, different kinds of those now, but room was the one that kind of the original, um, I think. And, uh, I've used those before. They're kind of creepy, like they'd black out so much noise feels like you're stepping into a portal or something. But they do make ones that are like they've got more space in them and they've got like the natural wood desk instead of just like the carpet to absorb all the sound. Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking at their website.

Yeah, that's totally what it was. Yeah. My ears would sort of like plug up at first because it was the pressure was like different. But yeah, they're seriously soundproofed. So I know some people who I don't know if they bought those and they brought them home or if they just got the inspiration and then they decided to build something at home like that. Because I feel like you could you could probably if you were handy, David could do this. I could not. You could build something like that fairly easily.

Cause they are really expensive, but I think that's a cool idea. If you don't have the option of going someplace, you need somewhere where you can just go and have quiet and record something, I guess, as long as you're not doing, you know, video and you need a backdrop or anything like that. Pretty, pretty tiny. Yeah. And I think a room can get actually too dead. Like you want a little bit of a room noise.

In my opinion, it sounds weird if the person is completely in a dead room. Yeah. And that's exactly what these sound like. It is a little creepy, but. Ian, as things evolve, as the boy gets older, do you think at some point you'll go back to that or you're gonna find a way through this? You mean working at home? Yeah. Well, we live in Astoria, Oregon,

and there's just like almost no options. It's such a small town. There's no real like co-working. Wait a second. Isn't Astoria, isn't that the Goonies town? Yeah, and Kindergarten Cop. Oh my goodness. And Short Circuit. Oh wow.

Well, I may have to come visit, you know. It's a really cool town. Yeah. But yeah, so I would have to probably do like a full office, you know, like rent an actual office. And then I feel like I'm like too isolated from people. I tried that once for a few months and like the room was too echoey and it just like, it didn't work out. So I think as long as we're in that place, I'm going to be up in the, uh, up in the office,

but it's a great, it's a great room for recording. I can get all my work done up there, but it, it, sometimes it is hard to convince the family that I am actually working. Sometimes it is hard to convince the family that I am actually working. I went to an office for almost 30 years and like, you will get me out of a home studio with my cold dead body, right? I do not want to go somewhere else to work again. I love being home with my dog and when the kids are around, I love seeing them. I've got the room isolated enough that it works. Well, you built a whole, you built your whole studio, right?

Yeah, I built a room. Like from the ground up? Yeah, I did. Yeah, that's cool. But even before that, I was working in corners of the house and stuff and I wasn't gonna move then either. So it is, I guess to each his own really.

But I get it, if I had five kids Mike's age, my strategy may change a bit. But even just more generally, I feel like there's a lot of people out there who are thinking about becoming more independent or through kind of the ups and downs of COVID have become more independent. I do think it's really hard to find that balance and figure out how much you put into work and how much you don't. Let me just say that if you,

it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. So you may decide that I'm gonna make it work at home as often as I can, but still it would be nice to get out of the house one day a week. You know there are a lot of co-working spaces that will offer something like a flex time membership where it's five days a month or something and every time you show up that's that's a day but if you decided that you know Friday was the day that I just need to get out of the house and you could kind of batch certain tasks

for when I am in that space and instead of being home where I know I'm going to get interrupted every so often, that might be a good intermediate strategy. And there are lots of other places that you can go that don't require money too. I mean, the library is a great option. They usually got these rooms that you can reserve for free. I used to jump from coffee shop to coffee shop and just, you know, go to a place and work until I hit a wall with this specific task. And then I would get in the car and use that as a reset as I was going to

the next place. And I had this little circuit that I would would go through whenever I just needed to get out of the house. So you can get creative, but there are other options. Yeah. And there's definitely certain tasks that I want to do offsite, like a lot of email stuff or tricky things I have to write. Those are things where I'll grab a laptop and go to a coffee shop or some kind of public space where I can work. That is the real interesting part of this. I know you mentioned at the beginning that you've got a Mac studio and a little bit jealous. But the truth is that even with all the video stuff that I

do, I have a M three max MacBook pro that I bring back and forth. I am never waiting for this thing. Even though it's a laptop, even though it fits in my bag and I could take it everywhere with me, a desktop computer does not offer me a whole lot at this point. And even if you've got a, an M one MacBook Air, you can do a whole lot with that. M1 MacBook Air, you can do a whole lot with that. And so that flexibility and that portability is just kind of a given at this point, I think, with Apple Tech, but it really is a huge benefit.

Apple Silicon kind of changed the game. I mean, even I, I've got a desktop, and I got tempted recently to like trade it in for a MacBook Pro, but it's like, oh, it would cost too much money to make the switch, so I'm not gonna do it. But just for some stuff going on in my life, like I wanna do some edits and I can only do them

in one room in the world, you know? And that would be nice if I could do them elsewhere. Yeah, I'm on a MacBook Air, an M2 right now. And I don't, most of my video creation, I don't really like film myself, so it's all kind of built in keynote and it's more like animated than actual like 4K video. Yeah. But yeah, I can do all of that work from this laptop. Like I've never had any kind of problem. But I like the, what I like about that desktop,

it was the first desktop I've bought since I was like in college maybe. But I like that it's always plugged in and I don't, when I was just using the laptop, I would run into those like disconnect and reconnect and like things have moved around. So I like having that desktop because it's always set up in the same way and I don't have to deal with the occasional

lost monitor connection or something. Yeah. Ian, you do require focus to get your work done. You don't have someone looking over your shoulder. When does that get hard for you? I mean, it's just so easy during the day to go off and just like go off on a tangent and not even realize that I've totally lost, you know, what I had set out to do.

So we had talked about personal retreats before, so I tried to have like a theme or like a focus for like a quarter, for like three months or so. And then things kind of build off of there. So I might be just focusing on, like I wrote this email sequence last year, and it took me months to get it all written out. There's like 30 emails that go out. So if I know that like my focus right now is on building this like marketing sequence or I'm revising a certain like category of videos, that helps me because it's not one specific thing I'm necessarily doing, but it's sort of like a category of where my focus should be. So for me, that's a nice chunk of time where I have enough days in that period to really finish the project that I'm working on.

But it does allow for flexibility within there. As certain things come up, I have to like, somebody will will report an error, and I have to, like, fix something isolated like that. I use Notion as, like, my organizing tool. So I have, like, a dashboard, and I just have, like, a big bold on top. It has, like, what I'm working on. Like, I'm working on refining marketing right now. So that helps me to come back to, oh, yeah, this is, like, the main idea I'm working on, like I'm working on refining marketing right now. So that helps me to come back to, oh yeah, this is like the main idea I'm working on

for these like two or three months. What do you do though, when you find that halfway through the day you've gone adrift? I mean, sometimes it's something I have to just finish, you know, but for me, like, if I can, especially like after lunch or, you know, but, but for me, like, if I can, especially like after lunch or, you know, after a break, if I can like restart my work time by reviewing, um, by reviewing that like theme and the things that are included in that,

it helps me that helps bring me back to what I'm supposed to be doing. And I think part of it is just like, don't beat yourself up. Like it's going to happen once in a while. Right? Yeah. And there's stuff that, that you, that I do have to do that doesn't necessarily fit in with the larger theme, but yeah, it is, it's hard. It's hard to, to stay focused on like the thing that I thought was important a couple of months ago. Like, do you do any, like when you start a week, do you kind of know to stay focused on the thing that I thought was important

a couple months ago. Do you do any, when you start a week, do you kind of know what you wanna do each day, or how do you future plan? I don't know what I'm gonna do each day, but I have a week, a task that I wanna get done. So for me, I hired somebody about a year ago. So I have one employee now and we do a Monday check-in.

And so part of that is I do have somebody who I like tell her what I'm going to be working on. So that is a huge motivator to actually have done that thing that I said I would work on for our next like Monday check-in. So that's like a, during this week, I want to get like this one task done. That's a big motivator

because I'm going to be checking in with somebody. Yeah, it's funny how that, like, I have the same experience, I'm working with someone now, and to a certain degree, he makes me more accountable to myself because yeah, there's another person here. It's easier to let yourself down than somebody else. Yeah, for a while I would tell my wife, Mary,

I would tell her what I was working on this week. And it's not like either of those people are really checking in on me, like they're not my bosses necessarily, but yeah, there is like a personal responsibility of I don't, I want to be able to say that I did the thing that I thought was really important on Monday. Do you have any way of like measuring your progress towards the intentions that

you set with the personal retreats or is it just, this is what I decided on the state and yeah, there'll be things that pop up that aren't in alignment with that, but I'll do whatever I can to maintain this direction. Or do you use some sort of like estimation, you know, sprint points, whatever, to figure out how much margin you've got

for the stuff that isn't in alignment. I don't really have anything like super systematized. I have in Notion, I have a database of for me when I set the thing that I want to work on, a key is to get really specific about the individual tasks. Or otherwise, like I'll come home from the retreat and I feel good, like I feel like I have a direction. And then when I sit down to work, I haven't given myself enough structure.

So I do have this database in Notion of specific tasks that I want to do. And so I can go through and check those off. So I do have a way of seeing what I've actually accomplished and what I have still to do. And then each of those tasks is like a page in Notion, so I have, you know, I've tried to get pretty specific in what this would actually be. It's like that getting things done kind of mentality. Like you want to make it like an action

so that you know exactly what it is. Instead of just like brainstorm ideas, it's hard to know when you're finished with that. So I've tried to really get specific with each of these tasks that fit into the larger goal. And you've said you've been doing personal retreats since 2018. How is that going?

To me, it's been like the most powerful, like single thing that I've done, like with regards to my business, but I guess also for my family, because when I do the retreat, I am like thinking about my whole life. But those are the times where I've had like the biggest realizations and I've made these decisions, you know, to like completely stop doing the traveling and realizing that I had this, I had something that I could really, I, there's so much more to be done with the video library.

Um, so, so for me, that's been really powerful. The thing I wasn't sure was like, okay, so I've kind of, I feel like I've made the big decisions. Um, will it be worth it to like keep, you know, going to a hotel for a couple of nights and like going through this stuff. But I do find that it keeps giving me, like I keep finding more benefit in taking a little bit of time to get away from the office and to just like think about how things have been going and like intentionally plan

on what I want the next three months to be like, and kind of do some more of that long-term thinking. Every time I do one the battle in my head is you don't really need another personal retreat already and then after I do it the thought is I'm so glad I did that. Sure yeah yeah and a lot of it for me is just like looking back at other retreats I've gone on and like reviewing my notes and just like realizing how easy it is to forget these ideas that I've had in the past and to get kind of bogged down in just those day-to-day problems that pop up.

I think that a question I often get from people, because all three of us advocate this stuff is that, well, should I talk about my personal life? Like is, is the personal retreat about anything more than work? And I am a firm believer that you need to be almost very holistic about it. Cause I think it all kind of fits together. And that's true if you work for a big company or if you're a fiddly creator like the three of us. I do think that it really needs to address

kind of the whole enchilada. I think my response to that would be, well, do you want clarity just in your business or would you like clarity in the rest of your life as well? Yeah, and it's easy. To me, it's really easy if you don't purposefully step away would you like clarity in the rest of your life as well? Yeah, and it's easy to me, it's really easy. If you don't purposefully step away, it's easy to get stuck in a rut and not really realize the things that you,

that are like killing you in your day to day life, you know, and you just like, you kind of get used to that stuff. And with the retreat, I found that, you know, I, I try to identify those things, like what is really bothering me or I use the what's draining life from me phrase, um, and then you can, once you like identify that stuff, you can, a lot of it, you can start to make a plan to minimize it or remove it from your life.

Um, and so that so that works with business stuff and with personal stuff. Yeah, one of the keys of my personal retreat is this two hour block. And it's at least two hours intentionally where I ask three questions. What should I start doing? What should I stop doing?

And what should I keep doing? And those questions are purposely vague because after about 20-30 minutes you've got a couple of bullets for each one of those and these are just you know you're jotting down all of the options all the things that come to mind. These are all things that you could start stop or keep doing. And at that point even though I've done it every quarter for years your brain brain is like, okay, that task is complete onto the next thing. And you're like, no, stay with this for a while. And about an hour and an hour and a half in, that's when you start to get some real creative ideas. And

those are the things that end up being the needle movers for me. And again, I'm not doing all this stuff, but these are all just possibilities. And it's like, once you force your brain to stick on something long enough, it's like, okay, we're not getting out of this. I guess, you know, we'll activate the full mode here and thinking about this. And it's always astounding to me, you know, look at those bullet lists. And I, when I review that, that personal retreat, I keep it all in obsidian. So I look at it. It's linked to all my periodic notes.

So I look at it and I look at those first four to five bullets like, oh, those are okay. And then I get the wow. Okay. So all the good stuff is always at the bottom. Why is that? Right. Yeah. Yeah.

That's interesting. I also, I do those three questions, but I also do, what will I continue to not do? So like things in the past that I've decided not to do. Some of those I want to, some of those I might start or pick up at some point, but I also like to like reaffirm that I'm not going to do any more speaking

or I'm like, I'm not going to write a book in the next three months or start a book. Uh, cause those are things where I, I will start to drift and start thinking about, Oh, maybe I should write a book or maybe I should do one conference talk. So I like, I like the continuing to not do also. That's a great idea. I may have to add that to mine. I tend to view my personal retreats as just a retrospective on the last quarter and then planning for the next quarter. And I think there's some benefits to keeping it confined to that time frame

as well, though, because I'm looking at my, my current obligations, for example. And when I asked those three questions, you kind of hit on something that happens with me all the time where, Oh, I should consider doing this. It's always things that I should add. Those are the things that are interesting to me. That's my shiny, shiny new object is I want to try something new. And I'm the type of person who, if commit to something I'll kill myself to get it done and I will to my own detriment you know in the past have just added all these things without

taking anything out and obviously you know how that's gonna end so I built into my personal retreat where I have to pick one current obligation every single time I do a personal retreat that I am going to stop doing. And what that's going to do is it's going to create some margins so that I can try some of those things, which I'm inevitably going to add anyways. But that way I don't crash and fall on my face as I'm running down the hill to borrow David's analogy. Yeah. To me,

the big part of the retreat out of those questions that I ask, that what do I stop doing, especially when I first started the retreats, like that list should be much longer than the list of what am I going to start doing or even like continue doing. But yeah, a lot of it is for me, it was like realizing that there are things that I have to stop doing in order to make space for the other stuff. Do you have any sort of like, wheel of lifestyle exercise that you do to kind of locate yourself and how things are currently going? Or what's your process for that?

I don't know what I don't know what a wheel of life is. Okay, sorry. It's basically like, I guess the name is a polar area graph. If you've seen one of those circles, and it's cut up into the little slices. And then I've gone through this exercise a bunch of different times and then I kind of modified it, made it my own. But you fill in the little slices of the pie for, this slice represents family, and you rate your current happiness on a scale from zero to 10. So you shade in that section,

and then you go to the next piece. You probably have a visual for what this would look like now. And they've been used a bunch of different places for many, many years. And it's kind of just an exercise to get people to realize, you know, where they're at with things. Yeah. Now I don't do anything quite that like systematized.

I do, I have the two questions of what's giving me life and what's draining life, which I got from somebody else. But I find that those two really like kick off my, like how I'm going to be thinking about the retreat. They definitely pull from those areas where, and I like those questions because I don't really have to think about them.

Like if I ask myself, what is draining my life right now? There's one or two or three things that like really pop up right away. And then, yeah, then the retreat sort of starts to become about like, how can I get rid or minimize these things that are draining life for me? And how can I maximize the things that are really giving me life?

and how can I maximize the things that are really giving me life? Yeah, I find that the, you know, keep the framework simple is important. Another piece of this that we do get questions is, you know, just do you have to go off site? And like, it's relevant to me right now, because I haven't owned a car for like eight years. My wife and I share a car and she needs it more than I do. She works off-site, she doesn't work at home. And that's always been a challenge for me. It's like if I want to go off-site and do a retreat, that means she has to stay home with no car

for like three days, you know? And it's funny because we've increasingly had problems about this, you know, in terms of not just the retreat, but just like if I want to book a dentist appointment, when can I do it, you know? So we were talking about like, you know what? It's time to get a car. And one of the very first thoughts that occurred to me

when I said I'm gonna get myself a car was now I can do more off-site retreats. It's like it was immediately like they broke free for me, you know? And it's like, you know that that's on my mind because I have had my most successful retreats offsite too. I mean, it's not easy medicine to hear if you've got a bunch of kids

and you're busy with your career and a spouse, but if you wanna get more out of it, I do think offsite is the best. Yeah, that's funny that you say that because we've had one car for a long time. And so I would actually like rent a car sometimes to go and like, I usually just like drive 20 minutes and stay at a hotel in the neighboring city.

But yeah, I mean, Mary is super supportive of the retreats because she's, you know, she's seen how, um, you know, how much change that they've created in our life. But yeah, we, we do now have two cars, so it is a lot easier to get away. But yeah, I couldn't do it at home because it does require so much, um, like attention. It is, it's that kind of work. That's like, I'm not sweating, you sweating, I'm not like lifting heavy objects, but it is a lot of energy that gets used,

like trying to stay focused or like Mike said, like sometimes it's that stuff that two or three hours in, you really start to get to the stuff that's really gonna make a difference. So I don't think I could do it at home and sustain that attention long enough. I don't think it's possible to do a real personal retreat in a place that you always go.

I think it does require a different setting. Now, maybe that means that a personal retreat is just not in the cards. And I think that is okay. But there are different kinds of reflection and different exercises that you can use to help you get clarity. But if you're going to go through the effort of doing, you know, setting aside all this time to think about this stuff. I feel like you're doing yourself a disservice if you're trying to accommodate, you know, this is what I've got to work with in terms of a setting. I recognize that it's difficult for certain people to get away, but I do

think it's a necessary component because there's research that shows that when you get into a different setting, your brain just activates different modes. And that's really what's required to do this effectively, I think. Although I would argue that if that's just not an option, you can do yourself some good at the local Starbucks in an afternoon. You shouldn't just give up. There's other reflection opportunities available to you

that will move you in the right direction. But I think in terms of the effort and investment, personal retreats at the top, but it's not a personal retreat if you're gonna do it in a place that you always go and you can't get to that level of thinking. And until you do it in a different setting, that's going to sound probably a little bit pompous. But once you get there, you'll realize like, yeah, I can't, I couldn't have done this at home. Yeah, I think there's like a decompression that I feel, you know, when I was a teacher and like summer break would start, there was like a week where my brain was getting used

to the idea that we're not like, that year is over and I'm not going to see students for for a couple months. And I feel like that first night when I go off site is there is like a process of like decompressing from the typical work week and like now it's going to be you know it is like a different place and we're going to be thinking in different ways. So I think I mean almost like that walking to work gives you or driving to work gives you a transition period. I do feel like there you need that transition period to get into the mindset of reflecting and planning And I'll even say, you know, there will be sometimes when I know I need a personal retreat So I'll schedule it and I'm going and I know that the stuff I have to wrestle through is some pretty heavy stuff

like the one where I wrestled through it am I really gonna quit my job and go independent? And I remember that retreat specifically thinking, like dreading the whole drive to get to the little tiny cabin that I had rented. So it was almost like not just going through a transition period like you were describing Ian, but it was almost like stages of grief

before I had to really wrestle with this stuff. Yeah, that's interesting. All right. Well, that wraps it up. Thanks so much, Ian, for checking in with us. Congratulations on all your success and your continued focus. It's always great and enlightening speaking with you. Thank you to our sponsors today. That's our friends over at Squarespace. And for those deep focus subscribers, stick around, that's the ad for extended version of the show. The Goonies has been raised during the show,

so I think we gotta talk about the Goonies. We're gonna do that. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.