Focused - 238: Knitting Our Parachutes

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

Welcome to Focused, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my fellow co-hosts, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hello, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? I am excellent. I have a secret when it comes to a podcast I make because I really like to be focused on single topics for the shows, Mac Power Users and Focused.

You know, I really think that's important signal to noise and all that. I actually love these feedback episodes because it's. gives us a chance to kind of like go broad and we get all these great questions they pile up don't know if we'll get to them all today but we got some excellent questions and today's a feedback show so i'm looking forward to it yeah we got some great feedback so thank you everybody who sent feedback uh like david said we got probably more than we can get through today so uh we'll definitely get through these uh we'll have to do more feedback episodes i guess yeah keep them coming feedback coming. We appreciate it. Yeah. But before we get started, it is September, and that means it's

Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and time for the annual relay for St. Jude Fundraiser. Yes, I am so excited about this. This is one of my favorite things that we get to be a part of just because it's such a great cause, and we've been able to make such a big difference. So September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and it's an opportunity for us to come together in the fight against childhood cancer, something we can all rally around. And for the seventh year, the Relay community is rallying to support St. Jude because together, we can make a big impact. Yeah, over the years, Relay has raised over $4 million for St. Jude.

And St. Jude's mission is really simple. If your child has cancer, they will take care of you. They'll take care of the child. They'll put you up in a room. They'll just take care of you. and I think there's nothing worse than the idea of finding out that one of your children is sick and knowing that there's a place like St. Jude to take care of people dealing with that just warms the cockles of my heart. And it's just so easy for me to give money. Daisy and I every year,

we save monthly for this. We always look forward to the big St. Jude donation. And it's time again. Yeah, and it's really cool. There's some statistics that I didn't know, as we were going into it this time, that St. Jude actually opened in 1962. So they've been around for a long time doing this, and childhood cancer was largely considered incurable when they opened. But today, thanks in part to the better therapies that St. Jude has helped to develop and then they share with the rest of the world, more than 80% of U.S. childhood cancer patients survive. They care for some of the world's sickest children, regardless of their race, ethnicity, beliefs, or ability to pay. Their patients receive the customized care they need to treat how childhood cancer and other

life-threatening diseases, no matter what barriers they face. And it's because of supporters like you and me and everybody listening that St. Jude can provide these children with cutting-edge treatments not covered by insurance at no cost of the families. That's the part that just blows me away. Yeah, absolutely worthwhile. If you're looking for a place to make a difference in the world, every penny you give to St. Jude is going to be well-used. So go check it out. Be part of the team. You know, the other thing is I'm so tired of hearing about, you know, geek culture, being a bunch of jerks and all this stuff. That's just not true. And a lot of us that are interested in this stuff also are very generous.

And we hear about it every year when we hear from St. Jude. And I just, I love being a part of it. And I don't know what else to say, except gang. Even $5 matters. If everybody in this audience gave $5, that would be a lot of money. So just go and do it. They make it real easy. If you want to give a few more bucks, you even get some cool rewards.

Yeah, exactly. So if you make an individual gift of $60 or more, you're eligible to redeem a digital bundle of campaign-themed wallpapers and a special screensaver. And donors who make a gift of $100 or more can redeem a 2025 sticker pack featuring six all-new host stickers. I've got a collection of those stickers. They're always great.

So if you want to donate and I encourage you to do so, please go to st.jude.org slash relay where you can make a donation today. and help give these kids more tomorrows. Go to St.Ju.org slash relay to donate, or you can actually even start your own fundraiser there as well. You know, Mike, something I'd like to take a moment to do before we get started because of the feedback episode.

Both you and I take our newsletters very seriously, but we don't talk about them very often on the show. Let's just take a minute. I would like to make a pitch for our newsletters. Why don't you go first? Okay. So I actually talked to somebody about this today. and they were like, man, how do you send a newsletter every single week?

Because the one that went out this week was all about how I take notes on books that I read, and then how I moved all those notes into an obsidian base, of course, 2,000 words, lots of screenshots, very detailed post, and I do something like that every week. Basically, if you could use a little help getting more out of your notes and ideas, whether you use obsidian or not, then that's what my newsletter is designed to do. It goes out every Monday morning. You can sign up for free, practical pkam.com. There's always an original essay, a link to something cool that's usually obsidian related,

and then my MyMap book notes from a book that I read recently. So practical pkm.com, and right at the top of the page there, you can just put in your email address to sign up for the newsletter, and I would really appreciate that. Yeah, that's a must read. I really enjoy getting yours every Monday. Mine is not every Saturday, but I try probably two or three Saturdays a month. Ideally, it would go every Saturday, but I have to admit I'm not as good about it as you are.

You know, Max Sparky, the idea of it is the intersection of Apple technology and productivity and kind of focused related topics. So they kind of vary between those, but it's like my thought essay of the week. I really enjoy writing them. And they're some of my favorites. I put one out just recently on why I love pencils that got a lot of great feedback. But it could also be on, you know, what's coming next from the iPhone or whatever. But it's a fun newsletter to write. It's one of my favorite things that I make every week.

And I'd love it if you would sign up for it. So we've got a link in a notes. You can sign up. You can read some of my recent ones and sign up for it right there. You'll get it every Saturday. And I would really appreciate it. Awesome. All right.

Shall we get to some feedback? Sure. All right. So the first question here comes from Sarah, who asks, have you ever intentionally chosen to not pursue a goal, even a good one, because it didn't fit your focus for this season. And how do you recognize those? Yeah, saying no to stuff you want to do is, I think, the superpower of all this. When you get to that level where you can turn down a good opportunity is when you're

on the right track. Yeah, I struggle with this more than I would care to admit. I have a hard time saying no to things but I think the key here is to realize that no really isn't no I'm not ever going to do this but it just means no not right now yeah so some of the things maybe let's give some some practical examples here of things that we have had to to prioritize I for a long time wanted to have kind of like a signature course which at the moment now is the practical PKM hybrid cohort. I call it a hybrid cohort because there's 84 videos and all of those videos are basically based off of the last live cohort that I did. So rather than try to do a live cohort and then also this video project at the same time, I recognize that there was a sequential

order to this which made a lot of sense. And I updated all of the slides. I have a problem with that. You know, anytime Obsidian changes just a little bit of their UI, I feel like I've got to re-record everything, but I did it. And then I had all this video chopped up in these keynote slides, and then after I did the live cohort, I took the same material, basically, and I recorded these self-paced videos and released those as the practical PKM hybrid cohort. And because I was able to say, no, I don't want to do that video project yet and focused on the live cohort first, I was able to do both of those things and get them both done much sooner than I would have. If I would have tried to do them, by doing them sequentially, it worked.

If I would have tried to do them in parallel, it would have been a disaster, if that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, and the thing is, you want to do this. It's not like something that is an easy know. This year, I got an email from a publisher who went through my productivity field guide. And it wasn't like a huge publishing company. but it was a respectable publishing company.

And they're like, you need to turn this into a book. You know, I want you to write a book for me. And I told them no. And the reason isn't because I don't ever not want to write a book on this. It's just like I know what that takes. I've got friend. You know, we know Chris Bailey and how much he goes through to write a proper book. And that's not a focus for me right now.

You know, I've got the Max Barky Labs. I've got the stuff that I'm developing as Max Parky. and I've got my family and I'm not going to take on that extra commitment. And it's okay to say no to good things. The key is to realize what's important. And I mean, all of this stuff just comes down to all productivity advice, productivity field guide, Mike's courses, whatever, got to say no to a bunch of stuff, say yes to the really important stuff, and just focus on that like crazy. In fact, this is a great segue, Mike. Did you know that I released an app? I have kicked the tires on this.

You shared the test flight with me, but I had not known that this was publicly available until you mentioned it in your newsletter. Yeah. So what did you build? Okay, so for like, I don't know, 10 years I've been mentioning occasion on Mac power users and on this show, the idea of a no list.

Like, I think because this no muscle is so hard for me, I feel like I need to work on it. And the times I've really got myself in trouble is when I said yes, when I shouldn't have. And I was an indiscriminate yeser for a long time. Like even stuff that didn't really light me up, I would still say yes to it because somebody asked me. You know, it's like, oh, well, this person's important. And they asked me to do a thing. So I'm going to do that.

That's not a good way to, you know, to run a railroad. And so I kept getting in trouble with that. So I started writing down the times I said, no. And then when people ask me to do something, I look at all the things I've said no to, the good stuff that I've turned down. And it puts a perspective kind of over the question in front of me as to whether I should say yes to this. So I've mentioned this, like I said, over the last 10 years, I thought somebody might make the app at some point, but it's not really a commercial enterprise, an app where you just make a list of things you've said no to, right? And I've actually tried to build it for like 10 years. I feel like.

I keep going into Xcode and fiddling with it. It's never quite right. And recently on Mac Power Users, we interviewed a vibe coder. So I said, well, what the heck? I'll try and try it again with the help of AI. And AI gave it the code and it told me what I was doing wrong and kind of straightened me out. And before I knew it, I had a working app. And I have been saying I would never release this stuff.

You know, vibe coding is not really that cool, right? I mean, the proper developer should be making apps, not someone like me. But it's kind of useful and it's very simple. So I released it and it's out. We'll put a link in the show notes. I think the focus audience would probably dig it. It's called the no list. And you just write down things you say no to.

Nice. But there you go, Sarah, right? You get some stuff and write it down. If you don't want to use the app, write it down in an Apple note or on a piece of paper or scratch it into a shovel like Abraham Lincoln. I don't know. But figure out some way to work on that. no muscle.

Yeah, that's good advice. Building the no muscle. And then like I mentioned, realize that saying no doesn't mean that you're never going to do this thing. It just means that right now is not the right time for you to be focused on this. So that makes it a little easier for me when I realize that this isn't, you know, being written in stone and I can change my mind about this. You know, a couple of things I would say about saying no, since it's on my mind lately with this app, is don't give excuses when you say no, because then they just argue with you about your excuses. Just say, no, I can't do it right now. Don't say, I'm too busy with this or that or whatever, because then they'll tell you why you should give this or that up. So just say, no, I can't do it. Thanks, but no, thanks. The other thing I would say is that if you are habitual person that says yes too often, you don't have

have to wait to turn down new commitments if you're in over your head. It's okay to look through it and say, you know what? I know I said I'd do this, but it's just not going to happen. There was a point in my legal career where I realized I just didn't have the bandwidth to do a lot of heavy litigation. And most of them, I finished, but some of them were very early in their life cycle. And I said, you know, I don't have the bandwidth to do a trial for you, you know, a two-month trial. We're early in the case, I'm going to give you a list of three really good lawyers, and I'm going to help you hand it off.

And it's okay. People will appreciate that because they'd rather you say that than do a lousy job or get overburden and not be able to give them what they need. Yeah. All right. The next one here is from James, and I definitely need you to set the stage for this one. James just hit 30 and wants to start knitting his parachute. Trouble is imposter syndrome.

Did you ever deal with that? Feels debilitating. What is knitting your parachute, David? I promise this wasn't planned. But this is also out of my newsletter. I wrote a newsletter, I don't know, six months a year ago called knitting your parachute. And my point was that, like, if you get to a point where you want to do a career change, you can't just wake up one day and decide that.

You need to plan for it. And so I called it knitting your parachute. You know, like, when you bail out of the airplane, you've got to have a working parachute, but you can't make one of those, you know, in a flash. It usually takes a while. And sometimes you don't want to bail out of the plane. You get pushed out of the plane. So you need a parachute.

And so I wrote James after I got this. He's, and he was saying, look, I read what you said. I think I need to start working on that. I'm in my career, but I want some options, you know. And he's interested in also, like, something like we do, like create. or some kind of, you know, web business on the side. So he's trying to figure out how to do that. He's early enough.

You know, you can take, like, Max Sparky ran for over 15 years before I actually stopped being a lawyer. So I, there was a lot of overlap when I was knitting my parachute, quote, unquote. But his big problem was imposter syndrome. He's like, every time I start, I feel like I don't belong here. And he said, do you ever deal with that? That's what he said. Like, James, we all deal with it.

I mean, it's like, I don't think anything I've done didn't start with a little voice in my head saying, you should not do that. You know, you're not qualified to do that. You're not good enough to do that. I've been listening to that voice since I was seven years old. And the thing that I want to emphasize here, and I told him, I want to tell everybody in the audience, as far as I can tell all of that negative self-talk that I gave myself throughout my life, I mean, from the last 50 years, every single bit of it was false. Like, the negative voice in me has never been right. It has never told me that I can't do something and I went out and found out that I actually

couldn't do it. Granted, I haven't told myself I want to be on the All-Star NBA team, right? I guess it depends on how you set your goals. But in my own instance, I think that voice has lied to me 100% of the time. Give that some thought. Even if it's not 100% of the time, that inner voice is generally a liar. And that's what feeds imposter syndrome. And don't worry about it.

Just get up and do the work. I 100% agree with that. And I never really thought about the, percentage hit rate for the negative voice in your head but I think you're probably pretty close to accurate with 100% and even if it's not

100% fully the I think it's natural to magnify the times that you have failed at something instead of recalling the times when you have

succeeded at something I just got back from the Content Entrepreneurs Expo in Cleveland last week, and there was somebody speaking there, Amanda Northcut from Level Up creators, and she shared a personal story of burnout, which was really kind of emotional, and then gave people some questions to think about things differently. And one of the questions that she shared, which I could kind of tell most of the room sort of rolled their eyes when they when she said it but she she asked the question now what would you do if you knew that you couldn't fail and that's a question that i included my life theme process also just

as a trigger to get myself to think bigger about things because it's very easy to find the evidence to support the imposter syndrome which a lot of times is false even to this day i still struggle with this. Like last month I was publishing a YouTube video every day. I published a whole bunch of shorts. This month I'm changing my focus to LinkedIn, kind of building these systems one-on-one, layering them on top of each other. But as soon as I started, you know, again this month, the imposter syndrome kicked in again, and it's like, you don't know what you're doing here. And if you were to talk to the people who have the big audiences on the platforms, They would admit to you that they also don't know what they're doing here.

They've just taken enough shots to know, you know, this has a higher chance of succeeding than that. And they haven't let the imposter syndrome keep them from shooting their shot in the first place. Well, and I do think there's some wisdom there in that, like, once you can give up imposter syndrome, you're not afraid to ship things. and iterations of development are hugely beneficial. So, like, if you have imposter syndrome, you're afraid to ever ship, you're never going to get better at it. Whereas if you put it out, even if it's not perfect, like, look at me with this app. Like, I'm not, look, I'm not trying to become a big time developer, but I got it out.

I got some feedback. There's a couple people with bugs, and we're getting that sorted out. And, like, there is an iteration happening, and I'm going to be better at this in six months. And you've just got to be willing to start putting stuff out there and getting me that voice. I feel like one benefit for me personally of getting older is that voice has much less real estate in my head than it used to. And I also look at it very skeptically. I think when I was younger, I believed the voice and now I'd look at it like a crank, you know, like you walk out and there's some crazy guy with like a, you know, a pot for a hat, you know,

like in the old cartoons, you know, wearing a barrel with the suspenders, yelling stuff at you. He still lives on my street, but he's not in my head. And James, that's just something that we all deal with. And, you know, good luck to you, buddy. Start knitting your parachute. This episode of Focus is brought to you by nexos.ai. nexos. AI is an all-in-one secure AI platform for enterprises.

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It's the safe path to innovation, faster, smarter, but without losing control. Prevent confidential data leaks, create custom reusable AI assistance for repetitive tasks, and help your team save time and work more efficiently on a secure unified platform for enterprise. Go to nexos.ai slash focused right now to get a 14-day free trial. That's nexos.a.com slash focus to try it free for 14 days. Our thanks to nexos.ai for their support of the focus podcast. podcast and all of Relay. Mike wrote in, how do you distinguish between procrastination and productive incubation

when you're not doing something important? Productive incubation. That's quite a term. That is. I like it. You know, the word procrastination here, I want to unpack this a little bit because I just finished reading a book kind of about this. talk more about it, I'm sure when we get to what we're reading. But I don't know that procrastination

is always a bad thing. We think about it in the turn, like through the lens of I should be doing this thing and for some reason I can't make myself do it. And that is not ideal. But if you are selective about the things that you choose to procrastinate on, I think that's what he's getting at with this productive incubation. And I think productive incubation, or procrastinating on purpose, if you want to label it that way, there's a whole book on that by Rory Vaden.

That basically is deciding, going back to Sarah's question at the beginning, that now is not the right time for this thing. And there have been lots of times when I knew I wanted to do something, but it didn't really match the criteria for. This is the thing that should have my, dominant focus for the next quarter and I've punted on it and focused on something else

instead. And I think the thing that is the tell for me as to whether I should really be focusing on this thing and trying to move the needle on it or whether I should just, you know, let it simmer on the back burner is the amount of clarity that I have in what the path forward is. If I am not clear on what exactly I'm trying to accomplish here, what the end product is going to look like, or even what the next step is in order to move this forward, then I don't necessarily force myself to just lock myself in a room and think about this until I figure it out. Sometimes I just be, I just am okay saying, well, that's not the thing for right now. And I'll go to the thing that I do have

more clarity on and focus on that instead. I think this almost goes back to Sarah's question too a bit that you know we feel this pressure to constantly be producing and moving forward on things and that can be a symptom the fact that you're just doing too much like i feel like if you're really focused in on this stuff that's truly important there is a little bit of downtime available to you and you should look at the if that that constant feel of a press to uh to keep going is maybe a warning sign that you're in over your head. Yeah, if you don't have clarity on something, you really kind of have to ask yourself why. And if it really is just that you haven't taken the time to figure it out, then maybe you do

just figure out what the next thing is for this project, if you really are convinced that this is the right thing to do. But I think it is perfectly acceptable to say, you know what? I don't know what the next step is for that. So I'm just not going to do anything. And trust that over time, you know, your brain is going to get more information. It's going to grab more puzzle pieces. And as you put those in, the path forward may merge for this particular project.

And that's the time to engage with it. So, yeah, you can say no to something. It doesn't mean that you're deleting the project from your database and you're never, ever going to do that thing. It's just, I'm not going to do this right now. The term productive incubation reminds me of a concept I've talked about in the past called cooking ideas. And to me, productive incubation, to answer his question, is the active touches on an idea. Like, if I'm incubating something, I'm actually touching it. And for me, that's often a mind map or an outline that I just step into once in a while and add ideas.

I find that my subconscious mind is really good at solving puzzles in terms of new projects. and if I go in it for, you know, 15, 30 minutes a week over a course of two or three months, often at the end of three months, I've got a really much better and clear idea of what I'm doing than if I just sat down and tried to dedicate two days to it. And so that to me, that's the triggers I hear with a term like productive incubation. It's a cooking idea kind of thing. Whereas if I'm just not touching it, if I decided I'm just not going to think about this now, that is not incubation to me.

That's just, you know, delaying to another day. Maybe, maybe not. I agree with you, and I'm glad that you called that out because I think that what you just described, the cooking ideas, that definitely could be a form of productive incubation, where you're not necessarily trying to move something forward to trying to figure out what something is by cooking the idea a little bit further, mind mapping it, stuff like that. I've definitely used that as well. However, I do think that it's possible to incubate something simply by not touching it. I don't think necessarily, you know, punting on something and saying, I'm not going to do this right now. That is the same thing as incubating it. But it's almost like if you don't know what you think about something, then you can't force yourself sometimes to figure it out.

sometimes you just put it on your, I remember we did an episode a while back of like the Richard Feynman's favorite problems. Put it on your favorite problems list. And then you continually just kind of turn it over in your brain every once in a while. And then all of a sudden you get inspired by something, which is the key to unlocking the path forward. And it's like, oh, okay, now I get it. Could I have gotten that a lot sooner? Yeah. But I didn't know what was the thing that was going to unlock that either. So I think it's okay to just kind of put it in the back burner and just, leave it there for who knows how long and sometimes that's the most productive way you can incubate something yeah agreed uh jennifer do you ever build sabbaticals or intentional nothing

weeks into your year for focus recovery and uh jennifer we talk about this often but we haven't checked in on it this year and i thought that was that was a good it's a good opportunity this year i have talked about kind of reset weeks and i did have one it wasn't a sabbatical where I didn't touch anything week because I explained at the time there was some stuff going on and one of the people I was working with became suddenly unavailable so I couldn't just like walk away from everything but it was a bit of a reset I had one planned literally for next week as we record this but we ended up we're taking a small vacation you know and my wife walked in the studio she looked up in my big focus coming

and she's like, oh, I see next week, you were going to take some time off. I found something for us to do together. And so, like, I'm not really complaining. I've really had, like, three vacations this year. This will be the third. They're not huge vacations, but they're little vacations, and that's good. My wife had a medical thing last year, and I really want to spend a lot of time with her this year. But I have not done that well on the kind of down-week idea that I had going to,

the year, I haven't given up on it, but for a variety of very good reasons, it just hasn't really happened yet, but I'm still working on it. How about you? I love the idea of this so much, and I have not been able to implement it yet. I need to to tell me the truth. I am definitely feeling, I don't want to say, burnt out, but we're trending that direction. I got to be careful, which is really the whole idea behind the regular sabbaticals. And when we talk about sabbaticals, we're not talking about taking an entire month off like Stephen did. We're talking about kind of the regular weeks where we have nothing planned a la Sean

McCabe in the seventh week sabbaticals and kind of what Sean Blanc does with the Blanc media team. And I feel like that regular rhythm is really good. and it's a very positive thing. I aspire to get there, and I'm hoping that I will be able to before the end of the year. I mentioned the YouTube stuff.

I'm working with our last focus guest, Max. He's been a big help in getting regular YouTube videos out on the channel. So if you look at some of the newer videos versus some of my older videos, you can definitely see the quality has been increased as of late. A lot of that is Max. He's just got an eye for this stuff.

stuff. And we're getting into a rhythm with that. At the same time, I have another person who is helping me up part-time with my community, the library. And so we're figuring things out and we're creating the systems, but also where we're at right now, I can't disappear for a week. We are making progress, though, which is why I say I aspire to do this by the end of the year. I think that is feasible. but I have failed miserably with this so far this year. Yeah, and I, like you, have made progress, and I think that there will be a time when this will happen. I don't know if it'll be before the end of 2025, but I think likely in 2026, maybe, maybe December, I don't know. But the, it's something I'm working on, and I'm not trying to be too precious about it.

Sean calls them sabbaticals, which I think carries a lot of baggage with it, for, especially we have a lot of people in academia listening. I mean, to them, a sabbatical is like proper. It's like, you know, semester or a year off. And we're just talking about giving ourselves a gap week to, you know, to just catch our breath once in a while. So I'm not sure sabbatical is the right term for it. But I do think that when you're going with this type of work that we do, it's very easy to work seven days a week often. And, and you do need to give yourself a break. So I'm glad you're working on it. Mike, and we got to keep each other honest. And Jennifer, at some point, we will report that we have done it, and we're just not there yet. That's right.

All right. Carlos asks, what's one system or habit you thought would improve your focus but didn't, and what did you learn from it? Oh, I have an answer to this one. It is, you remember, was it Staples? The U.S. Office Supply Company had the commercial with the easy button. And they would sell them. You could go in there and, you know, for a few bucks, get a button that's it easy on it.

Every easy button solution I've ever sought out. And then the last year, I keep reaching for the easy button. Whether it's hiring, you know, someone or, you know, looking at AI, you know, that kind of stuff is not a easy button solution. Every time I try to treat it like that, it bites me. That stuff has to be very intentional and very slow. and I just that's something that has come up in my reviews recently it's like okay sparky you've got to stop looking for quick solutions to to getting the kind of help you want to take sabbaticals you got you've got to do this methodically and I uh that's a lesson that I continue

to learn how about you yeah um so a couple things come to mind I think uh one system or habit that I am convinced could improve my focus, but I have tried many times and it has not, has been mindfulness meditation. I think I need to come to grips with the fact that maybe that's okay. It's just not clicking for me. And so rather than continue to feel like I am a failure because I can't make this work and what's wrong with me,

everybody else seems to be able to get all these benefits from it, I, at least for the moment, I'm okay saying that one just didn't work for me. I think another one, which worked for me in the past, but now no longer works for me, is getting up early and starting my workday early. So I, for a while, was getting up at 5 a.m. This was several years ago. And I was making sure I was writing and doing my most important work before my kids got up. and before I had to go to the day job, and that definitely worked at that period of my life.

That's what allowed me to self-publish my book, and it got me connected with all the other people online that gave me the opportunity to do all the things that led to what I do now. But I try to do it now, and it feels impossible, partly because we've got older kids now, but we still have some where we've got to do bedtimes and can't get them all in bed by 8 p.m. anymore, which means that we don't get to bed as early as we used to. And then I've got a biological constraint because I was diagnosed with epilepsy when I was a senior in high school. So one of the things that can trigger a seizure is not getting enough sleep. So I am very careful about the quantity and the quality of sleep that I get.

and almost every single night I'm getting at least eight hours and that means that if I don't get to bed till later I don't get up till later and I realize that that is a little bit of a privileged position to be in I was at a point where I had to be at an office at 8 a.m.

when the workday started so I get it and I empathize for people who have to work with that schedule but for me now the tradeoffs they can be very, very negative if I'm not careful. So that's one of those boundaries that I'm just not willing to bend. Every time I hear that early wake-up thing, you know, there's like YouTube videos. A lot of like productivity YouTube loves early wake-ups, you know, former Marines and all that, right?

To me, the missing component of every time you have that discussion is step one is you have to get enough sleep. You know, if you're not getting enough sleep, waking up at 4 a.m. is not going to help you. And I feel like any time you want to try practice like that, you've got to make affordances to get enough sleep. If you want to wake up at 4, you've got to go bed at 8. And if you can't do that, then you shouldn't be doing that because it is going to bite you. And I just feel like people don't acknowledge that. But, no, I have no problem with waking up early. I think it's a great idea.

I still do it often because it's the quietest time of the day. My brain really engages in the morning. I get some of my best work done. But I will not do it like if I'm up until 11 the night before. Because I need, you know, if I don't get enough sleep, I'm just going to be a mess. Exactly. And so I've got kind of a built-in excuse for that because you really can't see a seizure coming. you just got to do what you can to prevent it, basically.

And I've got it under control. I haven't had one in 20-something years. But I feel like there's a lot of people who will embrace that. I'll say kind of macho mindset where you maybe need that much sleep, but I can get by with less than Latin. And no, you can't. You don't realize the effect that it's having on you. but everybody, their health and even just their work performance suffers when you do not get the rest that you need.

And like you talk about that in relation to epilepsy, but I think we all have that excuse. We all need the sleep. And I think that is way more important than what time you wake up. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Squarespace, Go to Squarespace.com slash focused to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code focused. You know one way to share your intentionality with the world? It's to build a website.

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slash Focus with the offer code Focus to get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the Focus Podcast. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of the Focus Podcasts and Olive Relay. Am I wrote, when is it time to abandon a focus area that just

isn't serving you anymore? And this one touched me because I just wrote an essay to myself about my law practice. I gave it up three and a half years ago, almost four years ago now. And I feel like now I've got enough distance to actually think about what it meant to me and what happened. It's really taken this long for me to get there. And so I've got like this 5,000 word essay I've been writing that we'll probably

never see the light of day, but it's helping me sort through things. And that was a big deal to me. That was a role in my life that fed my family and was the purpose of a very long and arduous education. And one day I walked away from it. And I think that having an open mind to that is super important as you go through life. And the only way I was able to get there was with the reviews. I just feel like, you know, reviews are so important to touch base with yourself on your roles and see what you're thinking about them. That's not something that you just decide one day. It's something that you evolve to. And for me, the moment that it happens, and didn't take long at all. It was actually during a call with some of my friends. Mike is in

a group with me. We call ourselves the Creators Guild. There's a bunch of people that make stuff like us. And I was talking about trying to find the balance. And the members were like, well, maybe you should just stop doing it, you know? And like, I just needed to hear it one more time. It was like, yeah, maybe it's time. But it wasn't like that was the first time I'd ever heard the idea or even thought about it. It was years into making it. It was years into making. Like I said, I spent 15 years making that transition. And I think it's touching into the idea frequently and finding out over time that a role no longer serves you. I don't think it's like a bolt of lightning.

I think it's a slow drip. I agree 100%. And I also think that the term focused area doesn't necessarily need to apply to changing career. careers. That's a great example. And I'm glad that you shared that one. I remember that call when you were trying to figure out how to how to reconcile these things and make them both work. And then you could kind of see the lights going like, what if I didn't have to be a lawyer anymore? But for me, I basically have a process with my quarterly personal retreats where I force myself every single time to pick something to stop doing.

And so I kind of have this built-in review process. I think that's the key is the review process where you consider the commitments that you've made. That's what I would consider the focus area. And then you sort of figure out, you know, if I had not already committed to this and this was presented to me new today, would I say yes to this? And if the answer isn't yes, an obvious yes, then you kind of have to unravel that. You've got to ask, why do I feel like I am so attached to this then? Is it because I made a promise to somebody? Is it because in the case of the walking away from the law firm,

you know, maybe it's this is something that I know is going to pay the bills for my family and I have no idea whether I can make the creator stuff work and that's really scary. But you have to kind of figure out where the inertia is coming from and consider if that is it's still a positive, a net positive for you. And if not, you know, having the courage to have the tough conversation or be willing to have people, you know, be disappointed in you because you've decided to do something that is in your own best interest. It's never easy.

But I think that's the thing for me is just to consider, you know, know, if I hadn't already been doing this, is this something that I would want to do right now? Yeah, that's as good as I can do with that one. Melissa wrote in, I'm interested to hear how deep work versus shallow work is managed, like when are people most productive with mundane stuff versus deep stuff, what unique work rhythms have people experimented with. I think this is different for every person.

something we've talked about several times is finding out your kind of what they call productivity prime time when you feel like you're most efficient and most creative and protect that time for the for the protective and you know creative work and that's not the same for everybody i just got done telling you guys it's for me it's usually the mornings the afternoons i'm not as good and um i i often have to regulate myself like i know when I'm making videos and like production stuff that I'm going to share with the world, that if I shoot it after like 3 p.m., the next day I'm going to look at it and throw it in the trash and start over again because it's just not very good after 3 o'clock, you know?

And I accept that about myself. And I've finally learned it enough that I stop at around 3 o'clock doing that kind of work, you know, but once in a while I still play myself and like go a little too farther, work a little too late, and find out the next day that what I made was junk. So for Melissa, I think the answer is to experiment on yourself and figure out when your creative time is and do everything possible to protect that time to do the creative work. Yeah, the idea of the biological prime time, I think we have to attribute that to our friend Chris Bailey. I first heard about that in the productivity project. Yeah.

And if you want to find somebody who has done all of these experiments, Melissa, Chris is your guy. that's literally what the productivity project is he spent a year running all the experiments how productive was I when I worked 20 hours a week how productive was I when I worked 70 hours a week and then when he gets 12 hours of sleep per night versus when he gets six hours of sleep per night and he basically did all of these experiments and took copious notes and shared these were the results and your mileage may vary but I think that you you do kind of have to figure this stuff out for yourself and there is a little bit of trial and error involved. That being said, I think there are some general principles that are

important here. You already kind of hit on the biological prime time. So when are you most focused, most in the zone, that's when you really want to focus on the deep work. When you are laser focused on one specific thing and you want that thing to probably be the highest value thing that you are going to do today. However, I think a more general application of this comes from the book, Eat That Frog, that's actually what I was reading the last couple of weeks. I reread it for Bookworm. It's the first productivity book I ever read. And I wanted to reread it because the fourth edition came out and I wanted to see if it's still held up. Or if my view on productivity had changed enough that I disagreed with a bunch of it. Bottom line, I still think it's really good. And the

general idea behind eat that frog coming from the Mark Twain quote, if you got to eat a frog, do it first thing in the morning, then you go through the rest of the day knowing that nothing worse is going to happen to you. And so the application of this for the work that we do is the thing that feels the hardest to do. That's what we should tackle first. We should overcome the procrastination, just do the thing. And just by embracing that and tackling the hard thing, a lot of times that clears the log jam. And then it's a lot easier to just flow to the next thing and the next thing after that. So I think the, if you're going to do deep work, that's generally the most valuable stuff. The earlier you can do it, the better. But your mileage may vary.

Like our friend, Mike Barty does his deep work at 9 p.m. And that works for him. One thing, thing observation i'd make about this that has occurred to me recently is that you can use the same intentionality towards shallow work in terms of when are you best at shallow work and think about that too like i am in the max perky labs we do a thing called momentum club and it's every two weeks it's a two hour session where just a group of us get on a zoom call and we talk for like five minutes and then we turn off our microphones and for two hours we work and then afterwards we check in kind of like as a little break, you know, and kind of like a little reward for having work for two hours. And most people that show up for it come with like deep work style projects, stuff that they've

been dreading, that they're putting it off. And then now they've got two hours committed to it. But because I run it, I've got to deal with people that show up late and like, you know, I just got to kind of be present for it. And that doesn't annoy me because I've realized that this is a great opportunity for shallow work. So often I like catch up. with email and do admin and stuff while we're all sitting there that I look forward to every two weeks having that two hour shallow work break in there and I can put things into it. So think about that too. It goes both ways. Yes. I think that the big thing is getting clear on what are the things that are most valuable for you to be doing. So a lot of times that work will be the deep work.

Maybe not necessarily though. And that is the thing that I would say overrides the deep versus shallow work distinction. If you can get clear on these are the three things that are the most important for me to do. And then you prioritize the time to get those things done. If you can line them up with when you are naturally kind of inclined to do that thing well, even better. But a lot of people just check something off their list because they're not clear on what the most important things are that are on the list.

And you need that frog, Brian Tracy mentions, and he's got a whole bunch of research to support this sort of stuff that three of your tasks on your list and he's working primarily with busy executives whose lists are dozens if not hundreds of items long and he's trying to get them to pick the three things that are the most important because he said those three things will account for 90% of the value you are able to create this day everything else is just kind of like the cherry on top but without that clarity you kind of are stuck in this emergency scan modality and oh this new thing came in I better take care of this right now. It seems like it might be important. You know, you really have

to figure that stuff out before you, before your day starts. If you're trying to figure it out during your day, I think you're negotiating from a place of weakness. Yeah, that's a, that's a running theme here that both of us believe strongly in shutdown and planning. Fernando writes in, how concerned are you about studies that show AILMs have a negative effect on people's decision making, critical thinking and analytical reasoning and kind of a related question. How do we navigate people in our work and creative lives who become dependent on AI LLMs at the expense of thinking their way out of constraints? Basically, is AI rotting our brains and how do we deal with other people that are being rotted? Well, I don't know how you feel about this, but I think the answer is unequivocally,

yes, it rots your brain. If you hold it wrong. I actually presented on AI during the Mac stock conference this last year. And as I was preparing those slides, I came across a research study, which I will try to find for the show notes, but basically showed how people who use chat GPT specifically as sort of a, I don't know what the answer is. I'm just going to ask chat GPT to fill in the blank. they use it that way for long enough and they lose their edge, they lose their ability to think critically. And really it's just, they've gotten cognitively lazy. So I don't think that has to happen with AI and LLMs. That's the thing. I think you can use it certain ways just to

make this thing be done quicker. But that isn't necessarily the right way to use it. I like to use it as a thinking partner. But if you are just using it to get unanswer, that sounds like it could be correct, then if you do that enough, yeah, I think it's pretty obvious how that can have a negative effect on people's decision-making critical thinking and analytical reasoning. Now, how concerned are you about this? I'm not terribly concerned about it because I don't use it that way. And I think that the people who learn how to leverage the tools, I'll say correctly, even though I don't know that there's 100% best practices around this sort of stuff yet. But if you can use it intentionally, then you have an advantage in the digital marketplace.

I think AI is not going away. LLMs are just the beginning. And we shouldn't be scared to the technology, but we also shouldn't just use it as the easy button that you weren't describing either. My daughter is a high school teacher, and she was just telling me the other day that there's like these new memes and phrases being passed around, around kids today to categorize people who go to AI for all their questions. Like, you know, that's a thing now. Like, we all know somebody that does that. And apparently there's the one that's kind of like her kids are saying is sloppers. You're a slopper if you just, because, you know, sling slop and then you sling it back. But the other one that made me laugh is botlickers. But that's a thing. Like, it's a negative

connotation, you know, somebody who goes AI for everything. And frankly, I mean, we're covering this. We just cover this a few days on the episode Mac Power Resources that released a few days ago. But I have a theory that LLM development is slowing down. It's not, it's not at the rapid pace it was. Like chat GPT5 doesn't feel to me like the jump that we had from three to four, you know. And maybe we're getting some limits about what you can do with an LLM. It's definitely getting cheaper. That's something people need to realize. It's going to be way more available, way cheaper, but it's not a lot smarter. And it still does a lot of really stupid things. But, and like I said, we just covered on MPU, so I'm not going to cover it all again.

But I'm finding that it is very useful to me for what I like to call donkey work. And now in the age of MCP, for instance, I've got Claude connected to my Notion database. And it does all kinds of work for me. I mean, 30 minutes before we recorded today, because I do a thing in the labs called the lab report. Every Friday, I make a little like 10-minute podcast summarizing Apple tech news for the week. And I just said, you know, go into the database and create interesting. for the Lab Report podcast to publish on Friday for the rest of the year, you know, and I gave it a few more details, and it went through and created all the entries for me.

That, to me, is what I want AI doing. I want it going and doing things that would take me 30 or 40 minutes to do, where now I can just give it to a LLM and have it go in the background and do it while I'm actually thinking and writing and doing good stuff, you know. And that's what we all need to be aiming for. And the good news is it's becoming more and more available to, us. So that's all good. But Fernando, I understand where you're coming from. And I don't think people are doing themselves a favor. They think the LLMs have all the answers because they're just so

frequently wrong. Yes, I agree. And I have another example of a place where AI really came in handy for me. But then I also want to share an example of where I refuse to add AI. So I actually do not want AI inside of my obsidian vault. I use my notes to create things and I know there are

lots of plugins that can add AI into your vault and I don't want AI trying to make those connections because making those connections the hard way is like going to the cognitive gym

in my opinion. Yeah. And so there is a net benefit net cumulative compounding benefit from wrestling with this stuff myself instead of asking AI, you know, pick three sources where it talks about the Pomodoro method. You know, I want to work that stuff myself. But I did come across some things. I was trying to build a business dashboard and there was an app that I was playing around with called numerics where it integrates with different business software. You can pull in a number of YouTube subscribers or a number of email subscribers,

things like that, but they integrate with a whole bunch of different apps. One of them, though, is not ConvertKit. So I'm trying to figure out, you know, how can I create a widget inside of this numerics app that shows the number of new subscribers today on this dashboard? And I figured I could set up something with Zapier and just write the number to a Google sheet and then pull that number in from a Google sheet. So down the rabbit hole I go, I get into Zapier, I look at the kit integration, and it doesn't give me the thing that I want.

But Zapier has this co-pilot AI now, which basically has access to all the API documentation, so you can say, I want you to build this kind of connection for me. So I'm clicking on Kit, and I'm looking at the options that they have. They have five, six different options. None of those are what I want.

And I say, I want you to grab this number of total new email subscribers from Kit and then write this to the Google sheet. And it live vibe codes it, you know, on the side of the screen for me. And it creates this endpoint, this action for this integration that didn't exist. And I know nothing about developing and writing code for taking data from these different APIs. But within 30 seconds, I was able to build something like that to serve the exact need that I wanted.

So yeah, you got to figure out where this stuff really adds value. But in terms of actually doing the critical thinking and the creative stuff, that's where I draw the line. I guess one other thing I'd say to Fernando is don't be. too judgy, you know, people are still figuring all this stuff out. And if it's a true friend, you know, someone that you can talk to, sit down with them and say, hey, don't be, you know, don't be a slopper, right? You know, understand this stuff is wrong about a lot. And if you're okay with that, I think it makes a huge difference. The other thing, because he talks about navigating people in our work, creative lives who become dependent on AI and NOLAM at the expense of thinking

their way out of constraints. I had a conversation. with a friend of mine recently who was dealing with this directly, he was a marketing director for a local school district and they had somebody that came in who basically refused to believe anything anybody else said unless it came from chat GPT. So this is, you know, the marketing plan that we should work with. He's like, well, did you ask chat GPT? And then he's like looking at what chat GPT says in the meeting while my, you know, as my friend is, is there presenting the information. Okay, yeah, I guess, you know, chat GPT said that's, that's, that's, that's, a good idea. Yeah, yeah. But he's a higher up position in the organization. So you got to

recognize, you know, what are my options here? I can just kind of put up with this and this, this is what it is. Or I can find a different situation. I can find a different job. Ultimately, that's what happened with my friend. He's, he's looking for a different role. So the people that you allow to speak into your life, if you decide that I don't really want to be around these people who are just blindly accepting everything that the LLMs and the AI models are spewing at them, you know, you can change your group. Now, sometimes it's difficult to do and you may decide that it's not worth it. But even if you don't actually disconnect from some of those people, you can choose not to give them the platform to speak into your life that maybe they had

previously. Or maybe you can compartmentalize it. You know, this person I'm going to listen to for this sort of thing, but I'm not going to listen to them for some other sort of thing. There are a lot of people who have been very successful financially who have been divorced four times, and I'm not going to listen to them about relationship advice, right? So just figure out, you know, who are you allowing to speak into your life? What effect is that having and is that okay? This episode of The Focus Podcast is brought to you by Incogni. Go to Incogni. Go to Incogni.com. focus and take your personal data back and use the code focus to get 60% off an annual plan.

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And our thanks to Incogni for their support of the Focus Podcasts and Olive Relay. Lisa wrote, what's one analog practice? Inside journaling or reading that helps you regain clarity and focus when your brain feels cloudy, I actually wrote her back because I wanted clarification on what she means by analog practice, you know. And she ghosted me, Lisa, if you're listening to this, why didn't you write me back? So I'm going to go broad with this. I think that if you work with digital things a lot, having a break from it is a really good thing. It helps your brain reengage. And this is nothing new.

We've talked about this on the show before, but I really find like going out into the wood shop or taking a walk or playing music for 30 minutes when I come back to the computer can really open my mind up to a better way to solve a problem. Whereas if I just sat at the computer and tried to grind it out for those 30 minutes, I'd still be stuck.

And you just have to experience it to believe it. But yeah, analog or just getting away. I always like to use the idea of like working with your hands as opposed to working with your brain can really help you get unstuck with stuff. So find something to do with your hands away from your computer on occasion and you'll find that it really helps. Agreed. I have a very specific answer for this. Planning your day, time blocking. Yeah, okay. I think if you've got a list of things bouncing around in your brain and you're not really sure what the most important thing is, which when Lisa's talking about

clarity and focus, when your brain feels cloudy, that is typically what this looks like for me. And it's shocking to me, and I'm a little bit ashamed of how often I just convince myself, oh, I don't really need to make the list, or I don't really need to sit down and write this all out. I know what to do. but every single time that I do write it out it's like a huge weight has just been lifted off of my shoulders. So it doesn't even necessarily need to be time blocking, although time blocking and planning your day ahead of time. I think that's the place that this provides the greatest

benefit for me. And that is definitely an analog practice. You could, I guess, argue that you could do this digitally, but I think there is something about grabbing a pen or pencil and a piece a paper and just writing down everything that you have to do. And Brian Tracy and eat that frog, I think would say the same thing. It hits different when you write it out than when you type it out. And if you are feeling cloudy, I think that's one of the best things that you can do. Yeah, a workflow update on that. So for the last three months, I've been using field notes for that.

historically I was using the little note cards, the analog cards, and I switched over the field notes because I had a box of them and I hadn't touched them forever. I do find it's kind of nice because I can stick it in my pocket. And it's got not only today, but it's got the next several days in so I can write things down into the future. But I also kind of miss my note card. So I'm very torn on this decision. But it's either a note card or field notes, but it is kind of nice having a little thing you can carry around with you with your list. And there is something about writing it down with a pencil that feels kind of like a contract. Yeah, exactly. I have not given up on the note cards. In fact, I've doubled down on the note cards. This is not my shiny new object, but it could have been. Did you see that UGMunk has a new form of card? They call it a capture card?

Yeah, with a little punch in it so you can put it in a binder. I don't know that it has a punch. it's basically like the size of two note cards side by side. But there is a system that they sell with a metal tray where the stack is lifted a little bit so you can slide one in on the bottom. And I've actually got one that stacks the larger capture cards they're called on the bottom. They're almost squareish. And then the analog cards on top of that.

And the capture cards are great because they give you twice as much. much space to write things. So if you need to sketch something out, you can, or they're perfect for recording podcasts. I'm jotting down because I don't want all the clickiness of my clicky keyboard in the background. When something is mentioned, I'm capturing time codes, I'm capturing links. If you say something that I want to make sure that I go back and I hit on later, I'll make a little note of that. And yeah, the capture card by the end of the episode is going to be completely full. It's kind of the ideal size for me. And I have basically two, two drawers for these cards, one on top of the other, right underneath the stand that my

monitor is on. I love these things. Yeah. No, I've got those, too. I misunderstood. They also have like a disc-bound analog system. Yes. And then now they also got the card bar. I don't if you've seen that, but that seems like right down your alley where you can prop them up on your desk. Although, I looked at that and I'm like, that's like five minutes in the wood shop for me to make that. So out of a nice piece of walnut. But that's on my list. I'm going to make one of those. Nice. All right, Lisa, thank you for loudiness to talk about analog. And I wish you would have returned my email. That's all. Rachel, what role does physical space play in maintaining your focus and how do you optimize your environment? We haven't touched on this in a while, but I, you know, I spent

a lot of money in time setting up my studio just the way I wanted. And I have made small modifications over the three years I've been in it, but I absolutely love it. And I come in here and like my brain engages and I've done some of the best work in my life since I built it. And I highly recommend trying to customize your space no matter what it is to be, you know, to facilitate take you doing your best work whatever that means 100% agree and one thing I'll add to this is I think the tidiness of your space matters also we talked about this not too long ago on a focused episode about the geniuses that you see the pictures of their crazy messy desks and things like that. And I spent an entire day not too long ago making sure that everything was tidied up

and put exactly where it needed to be. I've got a lot that happens inside of my small little office here. I've got a section where I shoot the YouTube videos. I've got a section where I do a lot of the writing. There's another section with a couple of microphones where Rachel and I will record the intentional family. And if there is stuff that is kind of all over the place, everything's got a place now, but if the things aren't in their place, I feel like it's, it's really hard for me to sit down and actually engage with the creative work that's supposed to be happening inside of this studio. So it's not even just are the tools that I need to do the thing in the place, but also

what are the other aspects of that place that either help or hinder the type of work that I am, I'm wanting to do here. There's a lot that goes into this. We had the person who wrote the extended mind of blanking on her name. Anne Murphy Paul. Yes, yes. Anne Murphy

Paul. She had a whole section in that book about the environment and the role that it has on your ability to think. So if you can throw some plants in there, get some natural light, you know, those are all things that can

that can help as well. Yeah, I'm a believer. In terms of the clutter thing, I'm less stringent. Personally, for me, it's super important to have a clean space. My brain, the problem is I use that as an excuse not to think. If there's stuff around, it bothers me so much, then I'm like, oh, I'm looking at that plate of crackers. I've got to get that out of here.

And I'm not doing the work. So that's a fault of mine, I guess. there are people out there that can have complete clutter and do great work. So that's not, I'm not, I don't think that's a rule. Like, that's just you and I have a preference for that. But I do think the fundamental point is true that you need to figure out what space makes sense for you and work towards it. And understand that you're not going to get it right the first time. It's an evolution and you've got to move things around and figure it out.

But if you're conscious of the fact that the way you design the space can improve the way you do the work, you're always going to be looking for ways to get better at it. Exactly. A key question, I think, is what are you optimizing for? And then recognizing this is the thing that I want to facilitate. So then really, if you could condense the entire message of the focus podcast and productivity in general into creating boundaries which keep the bad stuff out and the good stuff in.

Yeah, I'll take that. Melissa said, what's your strategy for staying focused on your own work when you're constantly exposed to others' achievements on social media? All right. Well, you want me to take this on first? Because I'm wrestling with social media currently. Okay. So I think I understand the question.

And I also understand that when you are scrolling through social media, there is a tendency for people to share the highlights. And what happens is you look at the highlights of what other people are doing and you compare them to the reality of the situation that you're in and it can feel very discouraging. And that's where it's really hard to stay focused. Now, I don't think all social media platforms are created equal. I for a long time was using Twitter or X as my primary social media platform

and disconnected from the person who owns it, there is a vibe on Twitter or X that is distinctly that platform. And Threads has its own vibe, blue sky has its own vibe, Mastodon has its own vibe and LinkedIn has its own vibe you have to consider the vibe though I think when you are looking at the messages that you are receiving

so I'm focused on LinkedIn for the month of September I'm trying to post there every day and that is because I feel like it is the one that has the most potential for me business-wise and also is the nicest one the rules of LinkedIn basically are you find other people in your space.

So people who are maybe peers of yours or they're a little bit bigger than you or maybe they're aspirational people that you want to be a part of their audience. And you find the stuff that people are sharing that you like. And then you comment on it and you kind of layer on top of it. So you're not saying, well, actually, I disagree with that because of X, you know, that's the type of stuff you will find on other social media platforms. But LinkedIn, you're kind of like contributing to the conversation. I do think that with LinkedIn, there is this maybe natural bent where you are going to hear

people talking about their achievements. But I also think on LinkedIn, it doesn't bother me as much as it does on some of the other platforms. It feels less look at me because everybody is. is there, at least the people that are in my feed, they're all trying to build their businesses and everybody that is showing up there, they're nice people. I'll comment on their stuff and they'll comment on my stuff. And it's kind of a rising tide that lifts all boats.

So I think my strategy for this is to not try to hang out all the places that maybe you think you should hang out or you have traditionally hung out or where the people who are making you crazy, but they used to be close friends of yours still hang out. Consider where is the place that you want to hang out? Where are the people that you want to be associated with? And if you decide that, you know, they're just not on social media, that's completely fine. But in terms of, you know, with LinkedIn and YouTube, I think is social media also for me. But my goal with those is to make quality stuff and then share it with people. And if I don't share it, then people don't find it and it doesn't help anybody. So you do kind of have to get over this,

you know, if I'm talking about these things that I've made or these things that I've done, on the one hand, it's hard for me because it feels a little bit like shameless self-promotion. But it's really not if you've done it the right way. So I think there's a lot of nuance to this question. Yeah. And just to go further down the rabbit hole, I think one of the ways you do with it is just don't do social media. And that's been kind of my solution. I just don't do much social media. I don't feel even as someone who is a quote unquote creator that I get enough bang for the buck to justify it. And that's separate from kind of the feeling inadequate because you see other people sharing what they're doing and their achievements. That's really a bigger question. Like even if you

didn't have social media, what about the guy next door who has a nicer car than you or whatever? And I feel like this problem is solved going back to Sarah's question at the beginning of show by focusing on what's really important to you. If you have that laser focus on what you want to accomplish and you're a short time here and it is a short time, then all that other stuff kind of goes away. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Hello Fresh. You may have heard of Hello Fresh. They send chef crafted recipes and fresh ingredients to your home. But this summer they made their biggest menu upgrade yet. This isn't. the Hello Fresh that you remember. It's bigger because Hello Fresh has now doubled its menu,

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about Hello Fresh. It encourages us to try new things. Like the pork toostata Supremas with green pepper, lime crema, and pico de gallo, or my absolute favorite, the BondMe style beef tacos of pickled cucumber and saracha mayo. I love how we can prepare these meals, a lot of times in 30 minutes or less, which is important for us because we're running back and forth between soccer games and drama productions. So it's nice to have something that we can make quickly when we do have just a little bit of time to eat dinner as a family. But the thing that really blows me away is how much everyone in my family loves these meals. Even the picky eaters who generally don't like trying anything new, look forward to trying the new Hello Fresh

meals because they are so good. If you want to try them for yourself, the best way to cook just got better, you can go to hellofresh.com slash focused 10 FM right now to get 10 free meals plus a free item for life. One per box with active subscription. Free meals applied as discounts on first box, new subscribers only, varies by plan. That's hellofresh.com slash F-O-C-U-S-E-D-10 FM to get 10 free meals plus a free item for life. Our thanks to HelloFresh for their support of the Focus podcast and all of relay. all right mike what is shiny and new in your life well we had max on the podcast and he talked a lot about video games um we talked a little bit about the the switch two and after that podcast i looked and saw if i could

locate one in my vicinity. I was able to locate one and I bought a switch too. And I kind of love it. Nice. Nice. And the kids are probably loving it too. Yeah. So I don't think I get to play it very much because they all are playing it. But it is a fun system. So the switch was kind of severely underpowered to the point where a lot of the sports games that I typically like to play weren't coming out for it because the hardware just couldn't support it. That is not the case with the Switch 2. This is kind of the ideal version of the product. The controllers are so much better. The hardware is so much better. We've been playing a lot of Mario Kart. We got the bundle that came with Mario Kart because we've always liked Mario Kart. That's a fun game to play together. But I saw that there

was a they call an upgrade packs for a certain games so uh Zelda Breath of the Wild had an upgrade pack which basically applies the higher graphics and textures and things to the previous version of the game and Zelda Breath of the Wild looks so good in 4K it's it's so much fun okay I swear that we have not talked about because if you're listening to the show this is going to sound like a setup right I didn't even tell Mike what I might thing was until just now. After Max, I also bought a Switch 2. And the only game, well, we are playing the new Mario Kart because that's a family thing. The only game I've played is Breath of the Wild. In fact, when we were talking about AI earlier, I was like one of the ways I know it's

bad is because like I'll ask it a question about Breath of the Wild and it's just wrong. Like that sword doesn't do that, you know, or that room, you know, whatever. you know it's just yeah yeah but it's kind of fun playing an eight-year-old video game because if you get stuck somebody has made a YouTube video to show you how to get unstuck and uh and I'm not putting a ton of time into it but I am reacquointing now I remember how to play it again because the last time I touched my stay it was like three years ago and uh and I am loving it it's just such a fun game and this is what Nintendo is so good at is making a game that's kind of delightful and not going to make you feel weird when you play it. And it was all because

of Macs. I went and bought it. And again, I'm sharing it with the kids and we're all having a good time with it. But yeah, we both bought video games this month. That's awesome. Yeah, Zelda, Brother of the Wild is so much better on the Switch 2. In addition to the graphics being better, it just is so much smoother. It feels like you are finally experiencing the game it was meant in the way that it was meant to be played and the funny thing is like two years ago three years ago my daughter and her boyfriend for christmas bought me the subsequent game tears of the kingdom i think it's called and i have not played it yet and my idea was well i want to finish breath of the wild first but i'm enjoying the way i play is very meandering and i'm probably

in this thing for another six months to a year before i can even play the new one Yeah. And I don't care. You know, I'm just not in a rush. And anyway, so this is fun. Yeah, that's, that's so funny. We both bought the same thing. All right, what are you reading, Mike? Well, I mentioned earlier I read, Eat That Frog, the fourth edition by Brian Tracy. And I picked it for Bookworm because it was the first productivity book that I read. And I was curious if it stood the test of time. And the spoiler alert is, is yes, yes, it did. Yeah. It's really good. And it's a hundred, roughly 100 pages. I think it's 114 pages. And there is zero fluff in here.

I enjoyed it probably more the second time that we read this than the first time. And there is a little bit of, you know, set these audacious goals and focus on your most important tasks and get after it. I mean, but there's, there is a fine line between focusing on. and not procrastinating on the three things that are the most important for you today and the hustle culture, which is just always work all the time. In fact, one of the big things that Brian Tracy talks about in there is when you're at work, work, when you're at home, don't work. Like very clear. If you're going to be working, you may as well be working, you know, work all

the time that you are working, I think is one of the ways that he put it. It's just so much great advice in there. So many great tactics. It's one of those expanded and updated books, but I really can't find a way that he expanded it much. I think maybe he included some new information, but I also feel, which is contrary to a lot of productivity books, that it's a lot tighter than even I remember it being. It was never a very long book to begin with, but such an easy read, such an entertaining read, and very little wasted space, wasted words, just a really, really good book. you are interested at all in productivity systems or tactics.

You know, tactics aren't necessarily bad. We use the word tactics and we think a life hacks, which is like, just do this thing every day for the rest of your life and you'll save an hour a day, you know, till the day that you die. And that's not really what it's about. It's really a book about overcoming procrastination. And really, that's focus, you know, do what you intend to do without being distracted by things that are less important. So two thumbs up for me for Eat That Frog.

All right. I have discovered an author that I really enjoy, Donald J. Robertson. He got a philosophy degree. Now he's a therapist, but he's very into kind of the ancient wisdom kind of stuff. And I generally, when people say they want to read about this, I say, go read Socrates and Aristotle and, you know, Epictetus. Don't read books that tell you about what they said just read what they said i think that's the best way to approach this stuff but i on a whim got this book how to think like a roman emperor and it's a story it's the story of marcus aurelius but told in a way i've never seen it done before it talks about his relationships with other people his teacher his brother it gives you a lot more insight into the man's life and it has changed my opinions of marcus

aurelius in some ways like um we're hoping we may get him on the show in the future we're still else getting things scheduled. But I think it's just, the book was delightful and enjoyable. I bought his, he also made one, How to Think Like Socrates, so I've got that now. And I'm just always happy when I find an author who brings a voice to me that speaks to me and this guy does. So if you're curious, go check out Donald J. Robertson. The one I would start with is how to think like a Roman emperor. All right. Well, with your prompting, I have bought both of these books. I think they actually came today, so I haven't cracked them open yet, but I do admit that they look intriguing. The one, how to think like a Roman emperor, it looks like it's got the marble statue

of Marcus Aurelius, but he's got like the ear pods with the white, white cord, which I think is kind of clever. Well, honestly, that stuff was a turnoff for me. Like, you know, the hip Marcus, and like even just like, oh, I'm going to be a Roman emperor, but it's not that. It's like, I feel like the book is way better than what the title and picture imply, you know, to me. So I thoroughly enjoy them. I hope you enjoy them as well. Maybe you will. Maybe you won't.

I mean, just to kind of like share, you know, I always felt like Marcus Aurelius, you know, wasn't, quote, unquote, the real philosopher. You know, like he, a lot of the meditations is him quoting other people. But the more you learn about his life and like, this guy was, he was, you know, the most powerful human on the planet during his life. And yet he stuck with this disciplined philosophy when he could have done and had anything he wanted. And that is remarkable.

So anyway, hopefully we get Donald on the show and we can talk more about it. But it's a good book. And if you have any interest in that stuff, I would recommend checking it out. Nice. If you're a deep focus listener, stick around.

I'm going to be talking about e-books and book reading. in general. I have a lot to say, but if you want to sign up for that, go over to relay.fm slash focus, you get the ad for extended version of the show. Regardless, thank you to our sponsors, Squarespace, Incogni, nexus.aI, and hellofresh, and we'll see you next time.