Focused - 241: Less But Better, with Austin L. Church

Episode Date: October 21, 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. Hello, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great. We have a special guest today. Before we get there real quick, I just want to mention the 26 Focus calendars are now available. They are 30 U.S. dollars, and you can get them from New Year. We have the same issue with international shipping, unfortunately. So I'll share the advice here that I've given to my email list, that if you can't get a calendar because of the international shipping, Jesse does offer a PDF version as well. So if you wanted to buy that one and print it off, just use a New Year calendar

period. We prefer you use the focused one. But if you can't swing the focused one because it's too much to get to your location, we understand. And just get a New Year calendar and start organizing your life. This is one of my favorite productivity tools. And I'm thrilled that we get to offer this through the show. There's lots of little additions we've added to this one, like the days are numbered for the quarter, the weeks are numbered. There's a little habit trackers in each of the boxes. But as we always mention, the real pro tip here is to get it mounted on foam core and use wet erase markers so that doesn't smudge when you write on it. But yeah, great productivity tool and available now for 30 US dollars. I'm looking at mine right now.

I hang it on the wall and it's just such a great planning tool. I would recommend getting one. It is. It is incredible. We also have an incredible guest, so welcome to the Focus Podcast, Austin L. Church. I'm delighted to be here. I've been looking forward to this. Awesome. So I met Austin a while back. I think really the first time we hung out was at the lab offline right before Craft and Commerce. We were seated at the table together for one of those sessions. And my takeaway from that time that we had spent together was Austin is a seriously smart dude. And then we got to

hang out at CEX again. And you gave a great talk there, which I want to discuss a few of the things that you brought up in that talk about systems and trying to do too much, things like that. But just real briefly to introduce you, you are the founder of a company called freelance cake. You help freelancers dial in their systems, make more money, live the life on their own terms, those sorts of things. You've got a background as a fractional CMO. So marketing advisory, business coach, what else do you want people to know about who you are and what you do? I'm an author. Father, a three husband, I'm endlessly curious.

You might have to rein me in for that reason. That's all right. Yeah. So you mentioned the author. Your book is called Free Money. And I bought it when we were at at CX. And that was one of my big takeaways from that conference actually was there was a lot of talk there about publishing a book.

I shared actually a couple episodes. ago about how I got back from CEX and decided I was going to write a book on personal retreat. So you had a small part to play in that. Happy to contribute. One of the ways you describe yourself in a video that I watched, though, was the sworn enemy of busyness and burnout. And when I heard that, I felt we are very kindred spirits. We need to have this guy on the podcast. where does that passion for for that come from? I burned out hard. That's the short answer.

It was 2015 and 2016. And that burnout came from two good things that when combined can be like fire and gasoline. One of them is high capacity. I'm thankful to have abundant energy, a lot of drive. but also I have a lot of varying interests and even though that is a gift too when you combine high capacity with a tendency to overcommit you may end up in the situation I found myself in

which was not wanting to get out of bed when I reached for that sort of perpetual motion machine of my energy that I was always used to having up there on a shelf metaphorically in my mind, I'd reach for that. I'd shake it. No energy came out. And it was just a disorienting time, not to mention there was low-grade depression involved. And I had that realization that I have devalued my own greatest asset, which is me. And what could be more short-sighted than buying into a lot of hustle culture that says, do unsustainable things,

to get to sustainability. And I just realized that's a lie. Like, how can that possibly work? In fact, if you look at startup founders, a lot of the big killers in terms of disease and a lot of the main mental illnesses are present at like three and four times rates. And so I experienced that.

And then I more or less said never again. And I think my wife said never again, too. We together said never again. And so I, as a coach and as a thinker and as a community leader, feel like it's part of my professional responsibility and part of my personal integrity to tell people to not do things that I think will only contribute to burnout. Austin that's you know really great because it's just kind of the inverse story of what our show is in the sense of we want people to find focus to find what's important but we don't talk enough about the costs that accrue when you don't do that you know I think it's in modern culture probably more than ever in history there's this myth that you can kind of gut your way through it and just keep going and that your energy is an infinitely refillable source and it's just not true you know and and you see it with with this this idea of taking on too much you know for you one day the infinite source turned off on you and that's not what we want right i mean you know that that that's a thing

though that a lot of people listening to my voice right now are heading for if they're not careful. I agree. I see it all the time in my coaching clients who come to me having already burned themselves to a crisp or burning down, which I do think there's a difference between burning down and having burned out. And so I talk to people when they're- Explain that. Yeah. So you can recognize the warning signs. For me, they were irritability, meaning things that I had much higher tolerance for or patience with months ago, just grind my gears now. I found myself being hypercritical of myself, of my wife, of my kids, of my business partner, of our customers, collaborators. I found myself suffering from that low-grade depression.

I had a very negative outlook. It's like the storm clouds were always on the horizon. The sky was always overcast and I just found myself lacking that energy. I just felt tired all the time. And when you're already feeling tired and then some new challenge or new problem crops up as they inevitably do and you feel like, oh, like can't I catch a break? And a lot of those obstacles are just normal life happening. Like this isn't some huge wall you have to scale. it's just an upset customer. Yeah. So those warning signs,

they can either be severe or not, but I will talk to clients who are exhibiting the warning signs haven't burned out in the sense that they don't feel like getting out of bed in the morning. They're in that sort of borderland between burning down and having burned out. And there's still time to intervene

in basically chart a different course. Yeah. I've had warning signs, I guess I would say, in my life. I had, the prior career I had was a very stressful one, and there were times where I felt all of those things, but I would find ways to back away from it. I have never gone through, I guess what you would call a classic burnout. I never woke up and felt like I couldn't get out of bed.

But tell me, what is that like? I mean, did it, like, was it a gradual thing, or did you just wake up one day and you had tipped over the line, whatever that is. This is going to sound like a contradiction, but it was both gradual and all of the sudden. Okay. Meaning I think the symptoms increase in severity over time.

I'll take irritability as an example. It's not like I woke up one day and I started snapping at every one. So I think the all of the sudden aspect had more to do with my awareness of the symptoms than the symptoms themselves. I woke up and realized I am not myself. Old Austin loved his work.

Old Austin was excited to get out of bed and go after that work. Old Austin was more resilient, was more patient with people. Old Austin was realistic in terms of his expectation of how much would go right or how much would go wrong. And so it was gradual that things worsened in that things worsened over time. And yet it was all of the sudden.

And at that point, for me at least, it was kind of too late. I had already burned out. I did not feel like myself again for months. And I don't mean to make it more dramatic than it was. Like I still had to go to work. I still had to figure out how to get my family. paid, but things were pretty joyless there for a while. It's like, is it like a mental surrender where you're like, I just don't even care,

or is it like you just cognitively just can't do it? For me, it was really struggling to muster the enthusiasm. So the first thing you said. Like an energy depletion. Like you're completely out of gas. And that's confusing and disorienting for. someone like me who like has always been known as a passionate, energetic person. It's harder to get me to shut up than to get me to talk. As soon as I find something, I want to share

it with everyone. As soon as something works for me in my business, I want to share it with everyone. So I kind of became a bump on the log there. And I'm like, this is just very, very strange. Foreign person showed up. Like, yes. Now, if somebody's listening to this, and they're like, uh-oh, I'm feeling, I smell smoke, to use your analogy, what should they do? Take inventory of everything in your life and cut everything that is non-essential. So easily said. Yes, and so very difficult to do. But if you don't create margin, meaningful margin in your life and fast,

the problem will only get worse. I actually think that I dealt with this not too long ago, not maybe to the extent that you're describing there, Austin, but something I just want to unpack with what you just said about stripping it down to the essential things. That sounds so simple. And when you're not in that place, it sounds so easy.

When you are there, it feels like could you have picked anything that could be harder for me to do. And one of the lies that I was telling myself was that everybody is counting on me for all these different things. And there were a couple of specific commitments that I had made that were costing me several hours a week. And there were things that I wanted to do, but I just wasn't in the right state of mind to be able to do them. And I needed the break. And it got harder and it got harder and eventually I hit the breaking point and I was like I just got talked to this person tell him I can't do it anymore. And so I called them like, hey, can we chat about this? And by the time

I felt like I was dropping the bomb on them like I can't do this anymore, they're like, dude, I told you that you should take in a break like two months ago. I was like, oh yeah, you totally did. So you bring something up which really is helpful and that is radical vulnerability and candor. it's difficult for those of us who don't necessarily like to show cracks in the armor, don't like to show weakness or need. But after I had burned out, and now I should point out that I had two business partners who sat me down and said, you're too independent. You need to ask for help more often.

So I don't want to say this was all circumstantial. Some of it was self-inflicted, taking on too much. But if you can muster the courage to tell people in your life that you are running on fumes, that you are burned out, I think you will be surprised at the empathy and the compassion and even the aid and relief that will come your way. If you are transparent, vulnerable, candid, that is part of overcoming the burnout problem, is asking for help, being honest. I think another thing I've noticed in people who have really burned out hard is there is a symptom that they all have in the sense of there's a very common belief that they have unlimited energy.

Like I've known people who are like, oh, no, I can do it. I always, you know, I love deadlines. I can work all night. It's no problem for me. And it's like, those are the ones that you're always like, uh-oh, you know, because there is a time when, first, as you get older, the energy does, you don't have as much. But also, I just think that that constant pressure on yourself to be superhuman, that comes with a toll. And if you're listening to this, you're like, well, I'm not even. close to burning out, but I'm Superman and I never burn out.

And I, you know, just put that thought in the back of your head that you are definitely susceptible here, buddy. So what you just touched on was a big issue for me. And that is my identity was wrapped up in my energy level. Yeah. I thought of myself as a high capacity and high output person. That was part of my self-concept. And so when I ran nose first into that wall of burnout, I had to renegotiate that self-concept with myself.

I had to examine all of the sort of outlying or orbiting beliefs and recognize I played a part in this. I need to change those beliefs. I need to change my identity. And we were talking laughing about how it's not easy to like cut things. out of your life. Talk about difficult changing how you think about yourself, changing your identity, changing your beliefs. That's hard work too. But I look back at burnout and think, well, I'm glad it happened when it did because I would have inevitably burned out later if I hadn't burned out then. I think that the idea that pride of being a high capacity person

is something that is, that deserves question. Like, I would much rather, hear you say, I am a high quality person than a high capacity person. Or high kindness, for example. But just in terms of this type of, on this vector, I think that there's a lot of pressure on you from the moment you start school to be high capacity. And that is, I think that is what leads to a lot of,

lot of people going their entire life and not making their best work and nevertheless feeling exhausted all the time and like you know the idea of the focus podcast is to focus find the things that matter and make a real difference with those things and if you do that guess what you get the margin you avoid the burnout there's a whole bunch of benefits from that and you get to know you're doing your best work but um that is so countercultural to all of productivity culture and i think just in culture in general right now. And I think there's an element to this, which you touched on, Austin, you used this phrase, which I'd never heard it put this way, but this is maybe the best description I've ever heard

doing unsustainable things to get to sustainability. Like, if you just extend this out for 10 years, is this something that I can continue to do? No, but the whole hustle culture is built on, we'll just show up and crush today, right? And when you put it that way, it's like, well, obviously something needs to change. So it's kind of like just a nudge to take things from the long view, which I think maybe can help you see things a little bit more accurately. I hadn't renegotiated my relationship with work after my wife and I started having kids. And I think that's one of the reasons.

we keep doing unsustainable things. Maybe they were sustainable in the past when there were fewer demands on our time, when we had fewer commitments and responsibilities, when we had fewer priorities. But as soon as you factor in like a partnership, like a committed romantic relationship, as soon as you factor in kids, you bring business partners in, you're beholden to other people. well things that might have been sustainable 18 months ago aren't sustainable now have you actually taken a step back and thought what is the natural end of these different ways of showing up I have do I want what these ways of showing up are going to get me yes or no you know when

you describe it that way I get the picture from I think it's episode five the Empire Strikes back where Darth Vader shows up and he says, I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it anymore. Yeah, exactly. That is the existence of children, guys. That is it. That is it. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Incogni. Data brokers are in the business of collecting your personal information, which can be an uncomfortable thought for many of us. Nobody likes the idea of other people having access to our personal details. And that is why. you need incogni on your side. They reach out to data brokers on your behalf and request your

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Focus podcast and all of Relay. All right. So we were talking in the previous segment, Austin, about the things that contribute to burnout, which essentially is trying to do too much. And you shared a story during your talk at CX, which I think illustrates this beautifully. If you're willing to share it here. I would love to have you do that for our audience here about the realization you had while running through the park. Oh, boy. Well, David just mentioned kids. I had two at the time. And my wife went out of town. And it seems like most of my bigger mistakes as a father have happened without the corrective influence of my wife. Anyway, I was meeting a friend for dinner. I thought, hey, if I go run in the park with the kids in the stroller, I can get a

workout in before dinner. And I think I had maybe 30 minutes and the restaurant was pretty close. And I thought, okay, this is going to happen. I can make this happen. The park has a track that's maybe a third of a mile long. I had run, I don't know, five or six laps and everything was going great. But what I learned is that it only takes once. Only takes your stroller, catching the lip of the transition from the running path to this concrete bridge the wrong way. That only has to happen once. Anyway, what happened is I flipped the stroller with the two kids in it over and And then I fell on top of it. And so I roll off.

I pick the kids in the stroller up. Write the stroller. My son, who's maybe 18 months at the time, is just screaming. His face is bright red with blood. And my daughter, who was like in the back of the stroller, doesn't have a scratch on her. Anyway, I managed to get my son out. I'm holding him. I'm trying to unbuckle my daughter with one hand,

finally extricate her, managed to break down the stroller with one hand. I'm limping off. There was a teenage couple who had come over presumably to help me, but instead of helping me, they just argued with each other the whole time. And it was just a, picture even then of what happens when your ambition outpaces your systems, you crash. It's inevitable.

Like I said, it only takes once. I should mention that the stroller was not a running stroller. It was a regular walking stroller. It was not designed to be run with. And so that's the story I told it C-E-X just to set up that idea that we have values for excellence, values for growth, even in my case, values to spend time with my kids, values to stay healthy, like these are good values, but they can come into opposition with each other and cause crashes, especially if your systems haven't been updated to realistically get you the results you want. Yeah.

So what sort of advice do you have for people so that they don't get to the point where they crash and burn with all of these competing values? And how can you tell if your systems are able to, like what your systems are able to withstand? So I think a great place to start is by buying a jogging stroller. Just kidding. I think a great place to start is with the question, am I getting the results that I want? It sounds simple. It may sound overly simplistic, but if you are not getting the results that you want,

there may be any number of reasons why. sometimes you do have the right system actually let me back up i use a little framework right the framework i usually just call it for i'll just talk through it rather than naming it problem solution person process if there's something that isn't optimal in your business or in your life ask yourself well have i identified the right problem and if i know that I've got the right problem, have I identified the right solution? And if the solution requires a person, do I have the right person? And whether or not the solution requires a person, do I have the right process or approach? Often, especially with the folks I coach and just other

solopreneurs, entrepreneurs I talk to, we actually come to premature conclusions and think that we have the wrong solution. When in fact, we have the right solution, wrong person, wrong approach. And that framework is helpful for making sense of all of these signals in your business. Your business is trying to tell you that something is wrong. Normally, you know something is wrong. Sometimes if you're in the business, you don't have that outside perspective. You can't bring your own outside insights. And so I have to use these frameworks to help try to get outside of my business, gain some objectivity, long and enough to be like, what's wrong? What do I need to fix? So yes, sometimes the answer is you have to

update your system, but sometimes right alongside a system, it's a person or it's an approach. You know, in my case, I was doing a lot of the right things in my business. That's still the case. sometimes it's as simple as, oh, I'm not putting in enough inputs like with marketing. I'll talk to folks who are like, hey, things aren't great in my business. I'm like, how much time do you actually spend starting conversation? Well, not much. Maybe nothing is broken except the number of inputs. So I know that was sort of a winding answer, but I think you have to start with some kind of little

framework to get objectivity to even find out what you need to fix yeah you know another angle of that like even with your your stroller story and and your clients i call it the sparky theory of cascading failure and uh for um for you don't know you and i aren't we didn't get to meet i didn't go to the conference so we're kind of just meeting today but i was a business attorney for 30 years before i hung that up and like every time there were a big failure and I ended up in a lawsuit or something that I was involved with, I found this trend that you could wind it back to some decision made on a small thing. And it was a decision made in a hurry without adequate consideration. And that led to a little problem and the response

to that led to a bigger problem and the response to that led to a bigger problem and the cascading failure. I mean, it's like in your case, it's like, okay, well, I'm trying to do all these things with the kids, but I also made a decision not to buy a jogging stroller. And all of this combines into an epic wipeout. And with your clients, a lot of times you see the same thing, which is my way of saying, I feel like a lot of this also, again, is the failure to slow down. It's the failure to be intentional in the moment. I mean, my wife, when she got back in town, she said, why didn't you just go on a walk instead of going on a run? Yeah. easy afterwards, right? Wives are good at that.

But she wasn't wrong. She had a point, which is the, and you mentioned this in terms of like the cascading problems or the ill-considered decisions. It was hasty. A lot of the decisions were hasty. They were ill-considered. And so I do think you're right. Do you have a cadence for slowing down? I have found that my subconscious mind and my rational mind, are actually quite forthcoming with insights if I slow down long enough to just write about it. Yeah.

And once you realize the rule of cascading failure, you see it in your life all the time. Like, you know, I was out this morning in the wood shop. That's one of the things I got back after my kids grew up. And I was cutting a joint with a very sharp chisel and the thing was bouncing around. The piece was bouncing around. table and I thought well I've got a clamp four feet over there I could go get it but you know I know

what I'm doing I'm fine and then the cascading failure rule popped in my head and said if you aim that chisel wrong you're going to drive it right through your finger or your foot or whatever you're like oh yeah cascading failures go get the clamp you know it actually helps you if you if you start to think about life in that way you catch that stuff I mean hopefully most of the big ones, but we all fall into the trap and it all comes back to the same thing. We're all trying to do too much and we all feel like we can do it all. And it's just not the way to live your life. If you don't want your life to be a constant train wreck or stroller wreck in my case. Yeah, but the outline for the framework that you had there with the problem, the

solution, the person, and the process, if I'm remembering those four things correctly. You shared some business application with that, but it seems like that could be applied to your personal life as well. And so you really just need to figure out what is the thing that I am optimizing for. And the law of cascading failure that you're talking about, David, it seems to me that that beginning, you know, the snowball beginning to roll down the hill may have started as a work problem, but could very easily affect everything at home as well, which really leads to the point I want to make is that we tend to think of work and life as two separate things. But you're really talking about systems, and they may be separate systems

for work and life, but those systems are both independent and interdependent. They affect each other. So what happens over here doesn't stay over here. It affects everything else as well. Austin, how do you, as someone who has had a burnout, how do you avoid that now? What is your bucket of water? What are you doing in your life to make sure that you don't fall into the same traps? Great question. I just got back from vacation. And even though historically I have sucked

at vacationing, I did manage to not bring my MacBook. I managed to not answer any emails. And sure enough, I came back feeling rested, clear-minded, tranquil. So time away from work is incredibly important for me. Beyond that, and I've talked a lot about this with folks recently, growth by subtraction. We kind of joked that it's hard to cut things from your life when you've already burned out, but I just don't see another way now except to strategically subtract and to create a kind of spaciousness in my life because life is full of curve balls. And so if you don't have, let's say, 20% of your bandwidth that you have reserved or set aside for curveballs, if you're always operating at 100% of what you could do

instead of 80%, there's no cushion or margin left. And so having to remind myself that not feeling fully committed is what's sustainable because something extra will always fall on my plate last minute. That has helped. And also, we kind of touched on this before, but I have a much better rhythm now for reflection. I ask myself a lot more questions now. I would say my life is more examined and my business is more examined now than it was in 2015 and 2016. So I catch those warning signs a lot earlier.

There have been multiple times since I have realized, oh, I'm burning down and then I can intervene and I do the things that I need to do. Sometimes that looks like exercise. like I'll give you a very clear example. My wife had a major surgery last October, which meant that I was going to be a single parent

while taking care of her, while running a couple of businesses. And that, like that extra responsibility was open-ended because we didn't quite know when my wife was going to recover. Yeah. And I won't say this was like a moment of prescience. I will say 2015-2016 was probably in the back of my mind, but I wrote down what I called my oxygen mask ritual.

And I thought, what do I have to do for myself every day so that I'm in a position to take care of our three kids and take care of my wife? Because if something happens to my health, mental or physical or emotional or spiritual, then everything falls apart right and it's amazing to me looking back at how much I was carrying last fall that I did not have a health crash of mental crash the business did quite well I don't think I was inordinately grumpy with the kids so if you see extra circumstances

in your life coming up that are going to change the demands on you, like go ahead and refactor everything in advance. Like don't just hope it will work out, be strategic plan. And so if I had to pinpoint one thing, David, that has helped me avoid another major burnout catastrophe, it would be ongoing reflection. I think that's excellent. It's something Mike and I both strongly believe in. But one of the things I was thinking about is, like, you needed more margin when you had your

burnout. And I think that's another thing people really struggle with. What type of, you know, where did you make those sacrifices in margin, you know, to get yourself righted? How did you do it? Just as an example, what are some of the sacrifices you made for folks listening that are struggling with this? It really helped me to say, what do I? I value. And then once I had values, I could use as a compass or as a decision-making rubric

when an opportunity to go to a cocktail hour or networking event came up. In the past, I might have just automatically said no, but I'm like, hey, as much as I love being out in the community, especially helping other entrepreneurs, meeting new people, no, family comes first. Yeah. And as much as I might like... like to sleep in more if I want to show up at my best physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, relationally, I've just realized I cannot set down breaking a sweat four to five times a week. I just, whether I like it or not, I don't show up at my best. And so it seems like this constant negotiation between two different values or two to three different values and

using values to decide what to cut, what is non-essential, that was kind of the only way I was able to do it. Because I'm also a recovering people pleaser. I'm not one of those people who is great at saying no. And maybe David, that's another funny little very tactical thing. I literally have a list of creative ways to say no, that I can pull out anytime my gut surfaces some tension or sort of unease. And I'm like, oh, it's because I don't want to do this and I don't know how to say no. I will pull out that list, pick the framing or phrasing that is most appropriate, it, say no, and then always immediately feel relief that I didn't say yes. Know how to say no.

That's a huge part of it. I got a whole list of those. I call them my declination snippets, and I have collected them over the years. And I get them from, like, famous authors. My favorite is from E.B. White. Somebody asked him to do something, and he said, I cannot for secret reasons. Oh, yes, because now they're super curious. Yeah.

I pulled a bunch of mine from Greg McCown's book, Essentialism. Yeah, sure. I just read Time Anxiety by Chris Gillibow, and there's a section in there on essentially Memento Mori. Remember, you're going to die someday. And he encourages people to just say, when someone asks you to do something you don't want to do, just say, no, I'm going to die someday.

Leave it at that. Yeah. But see, this is the thing, right? for a lot of folks, I'm trying to think of people struggling with this because I think all three of us are kind of recovering on this. But for much of my life, it was very difficult. The story I like to tell is when my first daughter was born, it ended up being a difficult birth. It ended up being a C-section. My wife was in the hospital, and the baby was there with her. And my work at the time, FedEx worked to the hospital for me to do. This is 19, this is a long time ago, 1996. So they FedEx work and I did it like

a fool. So we all kind of struggle through this. So we've all been there. But I know there's people listening saying, yeah, that's really easy to say for these fancy podcasters and bloggers to say, oh yeah, you can say no to more. But, you know, with real deal careers, you can too. And it's just as urgent that you do it and the thing i just can't say enough is it's like when you're in the pool and you're trying to get a little kid to jump in the water and you say no the water it's really comfortable in here it's nice the water you know it's like but they're like no i'm not it's cold i don't want to go you know it's like you don't know until you do it and i guess the best way to do it is just to take baby steps but you've just got to get margin if you don't get margin

and you're headed for a crash, or you're just headed toward a life of not doing your best work. You have to remember the stakes. I have never been able to track down who first said it. I think it was a game of cultural telephone. Regardless, the line is,

discipline is remembering what you want. And it's so much easier for me to say no and get that margin. if I remember what the stakes are and I'm like, no, I said I was going to be the dad who is always around. I said this year

I want to start showing up as a world-class non-fiction business writer. That has not changed in importance. I therefore must turn this down. So whether you have to put it on a post-it note and put it on your monitor, I don't know, but...

The hardest part is always at the very beginning. You really can build out a no muscle. You know, I don't think I've talked about it on this show, Mike, but I made an app. Did I talk about it on the show? I don't think I did. You maybe mentioned it briefly, but the no list. Yeah, if I coded an app called the no list where you can, on your iPhone, write down every time you say no.

The thing that's shocking is when you start saying no, that people are like, oh, okay, you know, it's not a big deal. 100%. And like, I, because. now I have a little bit of visibility as a thinker in like the freelance and solopreneurship space and get a lot of folks asking for free consulting, free coaching, hey, could I just pick your brain, get a little bit of your time? It's amazing to me where when I say, because I still feel bad sometimes when I say, hey, my calendar is really full

through the end of the year. If this is still a priority, reach back out to me in January. in the meantime here's a blog post that will help and here's a podcast episode that will help and ask me how many people reach back out yeah very few this episode of the focus podcast is brought to my gusto payroll HR and benefits simplified get three months just go to gusto dot com focused you started your business to do what you're good at not spend hours calculating tax withholdings. That's where Gusto comes in, to take the stress out of payroll benefits in HR, so you can focus on why you started your business in the first place. I was a business lawyer nearly 30 years, and so often I saw people with good ideas get

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slash focused. And our thanks to Gusto for their support of the Focus Podcast and all of RelayFM. All right. So, Austin, you had mentioned

that one of the things that was different now was that you ask yourself a lot more questions and I'm kind of curious if you have specific questions that you ask and how do those questions

help you build better systems? Most of the questions I use aren't originally. to me. I'm a collector. I have a notion doc full of these questions. I'll share some of my favorites. One of the ones I use most often comes from my friend Jay Papazon who wrote a book called The One Thing with Gary Keller. And the question that the book revolves around is, what's the one thing such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or necessary. I love that one. It's so clarifying, right? Another one that I ask a lot is what's most

important right now. And I mentioned this earlier. If I stop and ask myself what's most important right now, I usually know. So can we build, can we pump the breaks at various times throughout the day? I will ask, what does my business need from me right now? Sometimes the answer is, focus on what you're already doing sometimes the answer is stop you know farting around and do the thing you've been avoiding sometimes i'll ask what do i really want what can i do to get that what am i afraid of what's the next step those questions in that order came from j claus i've asked all of those questions. I really like the order he uses. So I love collecting questions anywhere I can find them. And then when I'm feeling stuck, if I just pop open that list of questions, they're really

effective at getting me unstuck. Yeah, the questions that you ask, I feel like if you ask the right questions, the answer is usually become clear. It's kind of amazing how you, like you mentioned, if you ask yourself what's most important right now most of the time you know what it is like you have the answers inside you you just need someone to shine a spotlight yes it's like there's this emotional debris that accumulates on top of the insight we already have and by pausing and asking certain questions we clear out the debris and then we can see the insight and we're like oh there's one final one that has been really helpful to me recently, and that is, who can do this instead of me? Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy wrote a book called Who Not How. That Who Not How idea came from

Dean Jackson originally, but I've needed to think more like a CEO and less like a technician, and it has really helped me to break the reflexive, oh, I must be the one to do it, tendency, and instead just say, I ought to delegate, I ought to hire out, I ought to ask for help. I think that's another common trait with people who find themselves in burnout is this idea that only you can do it. Yes, it's a lie that we tell ourselves. there are certain things that only you can do, but they're probably not the things that you think they are. You know, I was thinking through the four things you mentioned earlier

about the problem, the solution, the person, and the process, and how that, how I've actually, I can retroactively see how I've applied that to my personal life because my wife and I got away, I don't know, must have been like 13 years ago at this point, our oldest was fairly young. And we created this document of, I wanted to call it Schmidt's family standard operating procedures, but she wouldn't let me. So it ended up being guiding principles, you know, and it was identifying what outcomes we wanted. And there was one specific one about the, again, the problem, you know, when I grew up, my dad was a business owner and he wasn't home very often. And so,

By the time I was a senior in high school, he sold his business, now he's got time. I don't really have the relationship with him. And so it's hard to talk about the difficult things, right? So going into it, I'm like, that's not going to be my relationship with my kids. My kids are going to feel comfortable talking to me at any point in the journey about the stuff that people typically like, oh, I can't talk to dad about that. And then deconstructing that, how do we get to that point? the person that has to show up and build the platform in my kids' lives in order for that to happen

does have to be me. But if I'm trying to in the moment decide, well, do I do the one-on-one every week that I've got scheduled with my kids or do I do this business thing? Because in the moment, that's on the task list. That seems like more important. But you ask the question, can somebody else do this? like, yeah, I could hand that off to somebody else. And I could go do the thing that is ultimately the most important. And it's just amazing how when you frame things the right way, by asking the

right questions, you know, the answers are obvious. Clarity just always comes to the forefront. Yep. So that's obviously like leads into a discussion of reflection, journaling, all that kind of stuff. You know, how do you take the insights that you get from asking these questions? and incorporate them into systems and improvements. Like do you have a quarterly, you know, planning routine where you're going through this stuff and you're identifying these are the changes I'm going to make over the next couple months or, you know,

what does that look like for you? One keystone habit for me has been using a physical planner. I have used a physical planner since September 2019. I use full focus planner. that Hyattco has put out. And I don't think anyone who wants to use a physical planner has to use that one. It's just the one that I use. I do like some of the structure.

It brings it, it tends to automate some of the reflection because as soon as I reach the end of the Q3 planner, I need to get ready to use the Q4 planner. And so it creates this need to be like, well, what goals am I going to fill in in the front? So that's one thing in terms of structure. Second thing in terms of structure and systems is also sort of friendly pressure coming from the outside from my community. I started doing monthly retrospectives. So at the beginning of October, I talked about what happened in September, specific. related to the goals I set for September at the beginning of September. And now that I've

started doing it, my community members have started to expect it. Well, I don't like to sort of leave my workout partner hanging. A little bit of accountability is helpful. And so I write these things. They don't take me very long. But even just spending 30, 45 minutes helps me first of all celebrate like why doesn't that get talked about more often we don't just have to think about reflection as being like what what all am i doing wrong there's a lot of room to celebrate how far we've come and so those monthly retrospectives combined with quarterly retrospectives quarterly planning i always do annual planning and again i normally just schedule a workshop. Sometimes it's paid. Sometimes it's free. But I'll sometimes invite other people

to subsidize my own annual review, annual preview process. So those are the three big things that come to mind. And then I normally practice gratitude every day. And then some days I'll just set a goal to fill one page. It's not quite the artist's way morning pages, three pages. It's normally just one. But I've found that I can actually get some clarity, even just writing one page. Then what I'll often do is take any insights, put those into notion so they're more actionable. And then anything that I need help with, I'll put that in a Slack message to my VA. So when you're writing all this stuff in your single page, I have to ask, are you using a fountain pen for this? I love fountain pins, but I'm left-handed.

And there is the clean freak perfectionist that hates dragging my left, the side of my left hand through all that wet ink. And so I have to use an inner gel because the ink dries very, very quickly, and then I don't ruin my beautiful journal. so I have fountain pins I love them they normally don't work for me unless I'm willing to write very very slowly that's fair I'm even more basic I use a pencil the graphite I love it I think the reflective process is just a key piece of this

and it's always interesting to me whenever we interview someone so often the people who figure their way around these these barriers have some sort of reflective process so thank you for sharing that one of the things that you talk about that I just love this concept when I read it is that the concept of don't optimize trash and what a great turn of phrase but you know what a universal truth at the same time we've been talking about kind of the signs of someone who could burn themselves out I think that's another great like signposts it's like, yeah, I'm going to be the best at doing this thing that has absolutely no relevance. I've fallen down that trap plenty, I'll tell you. How did you discover that rule and how do you

help people get past it? Peter Drucker has this quote that goes something like there's nothing quite as useless as optimizing what should not exist at all. Now, I got that wrong, but the idea is there. Elon Musk, say what you will about him, but he has this five-part algorithm that informs how he thinks about engineering. And one of the first things, one of the first, it's either the first or second step in the algorithm has to do with questioning the rules or assumptions, breaking the rules and assumptions. And so, both of those ways of thinking help me also questions is this necessary can i remove this step should this exist and honestly i've had so many painful experiences of tidying deck chairs on the sinking

ship that it's like how many times do you have to learn the lesson before you develop some corrective measures or reflective practices If there's one thing I would send people away with, it's this idea that experience doesn't automatically become better results. If you think about it, experience only becomes expertise and wisdom and better results. If you analyze what happened recently, you isolate a handful of things to improve, you go try to improve them, and then you start the analysis or the reflection all over again. So there is this false belief that if I simply accumulate more experience, I'll get better

and nothing could be further from the truth. I think reflection is just so important for meaningful improvement. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Indeed. Join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide, using Indeed to hire great talent fast, just go to Indeed.com slash focused. Right now, there's a talented person out there who could take your company to the next level. Do you want to hope they see your job posts before your competitors, or do you want to match with them with Indeed-sponsored jobs? Hiring Indeed is all you need.

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and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on the Focus podcast. That URL one more time, Indeed.com slash focused. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, do it the right way with Indeed. And our thanks to Indeed for sponsoring the Focus Podcasts and Olive Relay. Austin, we always like to wrap up sharing some of our favorite new shiny new objects. What's new in your life that's bringing you joy and delight?

After a 20-year break, I have started learning German again using the Duo Lingo app. Okay. And I have loved it. Yeah. Now, are you catching? mean any of it having taken a 20-year break or do you feel like you're starting from scratch? There is a lot that is coming back. I'm like, oh yeah, there's it's. That means seat. I remember that now. And even I'm in the section right now on all the vocabulary related to traveling.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, I remember that. So it's been fulfilling. As a kid, I spent a bunch of time with my French-Canadian grandfather. I could curse like a sailor and French when I was a kid and I could get by and now I have completely lost it. I always wonder if I went back and tried to relearn it if I would have any leg up. But I think after this many years, I think I'd probably be starting from scratch. What about you, Mike? Well, I want to just follow up on the Duolingo comment because I've been using Duolingo for a long time, but I actually am just kind of using it as, I'm not trying to become fluent in Spanish, but I'm trying to do something every day. So just the other day, I hit a 2100 day streak. Wow. But I, I can't have a conversation in Spanish.

It's just like five, five minutes every day just to, you know, say that I did it. And it's helping a little bit. You know, I can recognize some stuff. But I feel like if you're coming to it as someone who is reviewing, you know, I used to be able to speak this. You probably are. I still way, way ahead of me. What do you guys think about the fact that the technology is now showing up to give us the universal translator like you can talk to a german person if you've got the right aeropods it's going to translate for you does that discourage you at all from learning in the language i don't think it does for me but also i'm a little bit skeptical about the practicality of of that sort of thing yeah at least for now i personally find it irritating to talk to people

who are wearing AirPods yeah so i don't know if there's any sort of social stigma that might actually prevent people on the receiving end from wanting to help someone who's wearing AirPods. Yeah, I do think that like learning the language is far superior, but I do like those technologies at the same time. I think it's, you know, it's, it's really neat, right? And it's like promising, but when you think about the human connection from even trying and embarrassing yourself, when I have embarrassed myself, trying to speak language. People who are native speakers will always rescue you. And it's this instant connection and camaraderie because they can see you're trying. And I don't want to sacrifice

that. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the thing that spurred me is my wife and I went on a mission trip to Costa Rica, where they're trying to talk to people. We don't speak a word of Spanish. So I kind of left there and like, next time I'm going to be able to at least know, Abla Español. That's right. Just a little, even a poco. Unpocco, so much.

So my shiny new object is a video game, believe it or not. I am a big soccer guy, football for you Europeans, a big Premier League fan, Tottenham Hotspur, my team. I got to tour the stadium when we went over to London

for the relay 10th anniversary show last summer, which was kind of a a life highlight for me. And there is a kind of like, you know, Madden comes out every year for the NFL. There's a used to be called FIFA. Now it's FC26. You know, it's the new official soccer video game. And it came out a couple of weeks ago and I have been playing this a lot.

I know enough about soccer. I'm not, I was never, you know, amazing. as a player. But I understand it enough that when it comes to playing people online with these video games, I can get pretty good at it. So they have these seasons where you play 10 games. And if you win a certain number of games, you get a certain number of points, like three points for a win, one point for a draw. So you get to a certain number of points. You get promoted to the next division. And then if you get even more points, you can win the title for that division. So you start off at division 10 and you work your way up. A couple of years

ago, I was at the highest division and winning the title consistently. There's no like leaderboard like number 315, you know, ranked players in the world. But I was, I was up there. You're like, I'm pretty sure I would be on that leaderboard if it exists. No, I'm sure there's a lot of people who are a lot better at it than me. But it is still satisfying when my kids who are way way more into video games than I am, they're like, hey, dad, let's play FIFA. And I can still smoke them. Yeah. Well, it's like you got impress your kids some way, right? Some way. That's right. For me, mine is something my wife turned me on to. We talked earlier that we, we like both digital and analog tools and I like my pencil. But I was telling her, like, I want to highlight some things in the stuff

I write down, but I hate those bright colored highlighters. And she's like, oh, you need a mild liner. I'm like, I don't even know what that is. And she got me some, and they are highlighters that are mild. Did you guys even know such a thing existed? No, but I'm with you. It's a highlighter, but it's a very, it's a very like soft pastel blue or gray or red. So when you're working in your paper and you want to highlight something, it makes it

less objectionable, you know. You don't get that bright yellow or that neon orange. It's a mild lighter. And I was just thinking, I'm so grateful to have this thing in my life now. It's so silly, but when you're writing down, you just want to highlight a date or something. I just hate that bright highlighter. So there you go, gang.

That's a good one. Mildliner. You can get them on Amazon. You can have them tomorrow. The other thing we like to ask, Austin, is what we're currently reading. I will go first, since I went last on the last one. A couple of years ago, I heard that they had published a set of Victor Frankel essays. A Man Search for Meeting is a very definitive book in my life. And so I bought a yes to life, his collection of essays. And it sat

on my shelf for two and a half years. And last week, I picked it up and could not put it down. It's excellent. If you think that your life is rough right now, read Victor Frankel. It'll help set you straight. No joke. That is a really good book. I remember seeing that one come out. It was a new release not too long ago. And it's like, what? A new release from Victor Frankel. Yeah, they had found these speeches he had given and they put them into a book. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is really good, though. Good choice. Good choice. What about you, Austin? What are you reading? Mine seems rather crude and embarrassing by comparison. I'm reading 100 million money model 100 million dollar money models by Alex Ramotsi.

I bought it when it came out and I've been wanting to show up like a pro when it comes to the overall revenue model I'm using for freelance cake. Yeah. Hey, no judgment here. I bought that book also. So I should caveat this, I guess. Alex Hormosey, the personality, I don't really care for. Alex Hormosey, the business author, shares some brilliant frameworks and models for making your business better.

So I would recommend his books too, but you do have to kind of go in there just recognizing that you're going to have to take what applies and spit out what you don't like, which I think is actually a great advice for any book that you would read, to be honest. Yes. can you learn from lots of different people that even the ones you find distasteful in certain ways everybody can teach you something yeah uh i just finished sponsor magnet by our mutual friend justin more um so i bought this book i think i pre-ordered it and then he gave out copies at

craft and commerce and i have accumulated several copies of of sponsor magnet i knew it was going to be good because I know Justin. I have been putting it off simply because getting, like dealing with sponsorships feels like, oh, yeah, I should do that at some point for my business. And I don't even want to think about that right now. Corey, my friend, my co-host for, for Bookworm, he picked this as the next Bookworm book. And so we, we dove into it. And it's so good.

It's like a business master. masterclass in a book. You don't need to be an independent creator, I think, to benefit from Justin's experience and the stories that he's sharing here. And, you know, talk about someone who thinks in systems. I mean, he's got lots of that stuff in there, uh, in there as well. I would definitely recommend this one to the, uh, the focused audience. Well, you guys are giving me more books to buy. Thanks. That's why we do the segment. Uh, Austin, if people want to learn more about what you're up to. Where should they go? I'm still pretty active on LinkedIn. They can find me at Austin L. Church on LinkedIn. My website is freelance cake. There are all sorts of really good

free resources there. So people just want to like explore a little bit. They'll probably find a post or an episode or a download that will help them solve a real problem they have in their business. freelance cake.com. Go check it out, everybody. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at Relay. dot FM slash Focus. If you go there, you can catch up with old episodes. You can also sign up for Deep Focus, which is the ad-free extended version of the show. We'd love to have you join that. Thank you to our sponsors today, Gusto, Indeed, and Incogny. We'll see you next time.