Focused - 245: Fashionable & Functional, with Patrick Rhone

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Welcome to Focus, Productivity Podcasts, about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz. I'm joined by my fellow co-host, the one and only, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hello, Mr. Schmitz. How are you today? Doing great. How about you?

It's December and everybody's happy. Kids are looking forward to Santa and we have a guest, so it's what could be bad today. Focus is in the air. Yeah, focus is in the air. Patrick Rohn, welcome back to the Focus podcast. Well, hello. Thanks for having me. It's been like three years since you were here last. You're one of my favorite nerds to talk to.

I was telling you before the show, you're my fashion icon. I watch you on Instagram and your nice outfits. I'm like, we've got to get Patrick back on. So we can talk about my outfits? Well, yeah, that too, and focus, you know. I don't know. There we go. Today I'm wearing a Jay crew, by the way. Oh, are you?

Listeners. Yeah. And a unique little sweater along with my LLB corduroy cap. Just for the listeners who maybe aren't seeing any visuals, I need to, you know. Well, you know, that's pretty damn impressive, Patrick. You've outdressed me during a podcast. Although I have a thing on. It's made by a company.

It looks sharp, actually. It's made by a company in San Francisco, and it's the exact color of the Golden Gate Bridge. It's a little denim jacket I wear in the winter and I wear it almost every day. It's beautiful. I think one of the things guys don't understand is like you can upgrade an outfit with just like a little bit of pop, right? Just give a little color pop, something bold, like a red, like the kind of burnt orange you're doing, right? Just a little pop of color. Even all black, you know, Mike, you're wearing all black.

Hey, if you put a jaunty little scarf on with a little pop of color, oh my gosh, it'd bring out the whole thing. We're going to fix Mike today. We're going to get him upgraded. Rachel will be so happy. I've got a Tottenham Hot Spurs scarf I could go grab. See, oh my gosh. I didn't realize you were a Spurs fan. That's a whole, that's a whole thing.

Actually, we have good friends who are huge Spurs fans. They actually ran the, in Indianapolis, where they lived for a while. They were the creators and runners of the Spurs, the Hot Spurs Club there. you know fan club right indie spurs is what they were called wow yeah you know it's kind of funny because we just started doing a video version of the focus podcast um we've got a link in the show notes where if you'd like to watch the show you can look at how much patrick has outclassed us with his with his garb today i don't know that pop of color you're rocking is uh is is kind of shining the light on you, my friend. Well, you know, I have to say, if we're going to go there,

it also has an angled pocket, which is perfect for your reading glasses. Oh, my gosh. Look at that, guys. Look at that. Live demonstration. Fashionable and functional. Or a leatherman. A leatherman fits in there. A leatherman fits. Oh, my gosh. If I had only brought it upstairs to my office, I actually have an original leatherman that I love and is still in perfect condition is so much better than the ones they make today we but yeah don't get me started on edc patrick i i feel like the show's already off the rails well it is funny that uh that the show is called focus and we're having a really hard time staying so yeah there you it's not ironic well well patrick tell for people who don't know about you tell us a little bit about what you do wow

uh so uh the the the term i i the title i came up with for myself as master generalist. And the reason being is that I do so many disparate things, some of them even I get paid for, but they're all kind of over the place and not necessarily related on an obvious scale. So let's just start with kind of the main things I might be known for on the internet.

I am a writer. For a, you know, I've had a, I've had a blog forever. I had a fairly well-known one called Minimal Mac for many years. And Minimal Mac led to my book, Enough, which, you know, was kind of well-known. I was well-known in that minimalist space that was very popular for a while about 10 years ago. and that got featured in a Netflix documentary that The Minimalists did. And so that kind of expanded that area of my life quite a bit and might kind of be known for that. But yeah, so I'm a writer.

That's one of the things I make money from. I'm also a technology consultant in the Apple sphere and have been for, 30 plus years now, independent technical consultant who helps individuals and very small, micro businesses and very small nonprofits with their technology. I focus, you know, basically offices, five machines or less, or individual users. I keep it small. I've been doing that for quite some time. That pays me money. And then I have a few hobbies. One of them I call a professional hobby because it actually does make money.

And that is I restore old homes. I buy them and I spend years restoring them and then we sell them. You're what I call a flipper with love. Yes, yes, yes. I see that sometimes. And I hate the term flipper just simply because it denotes this like get rich quick money-making thing. And the truth of the matter is is that we lose money on any project we enter into. The only way it makes money is by not counting the hours I put into it.

If you take away the hours I put into it, sure, yeah. But, you know, if you were to count those at any standard contract, hourly rate, I mean, we'd be so underwater, it'd be silly. Yeah, because you bring, because I've seen the pictures, you really, you take an old home and you bring love back to it and turn it into, restore it. Yes, yes, yes. And that also kind of leads into, we actually own four properties. I could go into a long screen about reasons why or whatever.

I don't want people to think, oh my God, they got four houses, how they, rich people, blah, No, no, no, no, no. One of them is a home we bought for $7,200. No, I did not misspeak. It was $7,200, closing costs and everything. And spent a bit fixing that back up, getting it into occupable shape, and that's the house my dad lives in.

There's a house my wife, was the house my wife grew up in that we inherited that we are keeping and the plan is that when my daughter is done with college she will get she'll get the house we live in now and we'll move into that house

my wife and I and then there is the current project I'm working on which I actually keep a blog about with updates as when I'm I'm working on it at, it's woe to wow.com.

We'll put that, I'm sure, in the show notes or whatnot. Yeah. And so, yeah, I do that, professional hobby. I also, and this requires a little bit of explanation, too, I do circus rigging. Yeah. Last night, I got an email from you saying, I can't wait for the show, but tonight I'm rigging a circus, and he sent me a picture of a circus. Yeah, I did.

I got thinking, wait, is Patrick also a sailor? No, so, so, it just so happens that St. Paul, Minnesota, where I live, is home to the largest youth performing circus in North America. It's a circus school where kids from 2 to, well, 22, basically, learn, take classes in, after-school classes extracurricular in traditional European-style circus arts. So think Cirque de Soleil, but with kids and teaching kids to be able to do that level, that quality of performance and skill. They were one of my wife's clients before my daughter was even born. My daughter has literally grown up underneath that big top and spending now, well, depending on the season, but right now, about 15 hours a week, there doing various skills. the roles for like, you know, rehearsals and shows where you need more people are filled by

volunteers. And that includes the rigging team who are there for moving, moving set pieces, moving props, but also moving mats, setting up rigging or setting up equipment, right? So, So, like, you know, the flying net actually has to be raised and, you know, set and all of that by someone. And so, yeah, we, we, my team assists with stuff like that. You told me about this years ago. And I am, I'm really impressed. Like, at the time, I thought you were just doing it because your daughter was there. You're maybe, but it seems to me like this has really become a skill for you.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, I just want to highlight that, like, just like the kids are doing, say, you know, Cirque de Soleil level performance and have trained to be able to do that, we are doing to support that, Circta level rigging and operations and coordinations to be able to pull off, you know, those sorts of professional shows, right? And so, yeah, this is something that, like, if I really, like, if I really loved this enough to make a career out of it and to actually go work for Cirque, I could do that. Like, I have the skills and the experience to be able to go and, you know, rig those professionally and actually make a living at it. You know, so all of this circles around an idea I've been thinking about a lot lately in terms of productivity and focus. and that is this kind of maker. I haven't put a name to it yet,

but the idea that I've been thinking is that this new kind of, to think of yourself as a maker, as someone, a generalist, someone who can just take a problem and then go solve it. And you have those skills. You can go into a house and say, this needs a new mantle. You can make it.

You look at the circus. You can set the net up. And you can also write a book about, you know, things about doing those things right and and but i think there's something to this and i think we have been on a phase with the internet of getting so increasingly focused and i think i think that's unusual i think if you look back historically my dad was a guy who could do anything growing up when so we had to fix the car we fixed the car if we had to put some new roof tile down we did we ran electrical cable but we also you know it's just like this

whole idea of kind of returning to that, which I think is our natural state as humans is to go and figure it out and do it. There's something to that that I think enables it. It's an unlock for productivity and focus that I don't think people realize exists. And I want to do something around it eventually. But I'm still kind of just playing with it. I keep writing essays about it to myself. I've never published any of them. But I think this maker movement is something that really kind of triggers it from me. But these days, with 3D printers and YouTube instruction, there's just so much you can do yourself.

And, you know, AI, right, is so much of that. You know, I, and I think is, you know, not being given enough credit, but I can tell you with what's going on in my daughter's school around it, you know, is increasingly becoming this this tool that uh for education and for learning that uh that you know teachers are either like even like so even even the the concepts around that are changing yeah uh you know a recent example i i gave to the dean of uh the dean of education of curriculum at at my daughter school um was So I didn't know how to the right settings for making for making something in my instant pot. Let's just say, you know, beans, right?

Sure, there's a rice and beans setting that you just push that button or whatever. But sometimes for certain types of beans, that might not be right. And so I, you know, I asked, you know, Google, you know, white beans and instant pot, right? And it returned the result, but the top thing was Gemini, right? I didn't bother clicking further. I looked at the Gemini because it told me exactly what I needed to know. And so, yeah, I went and I cooked the white beans. It came out perfectly.

Everything's great. Now, did I use AI to do that? Of course. Of course I used AI. Did I intentionally go to use AI to do that? No, I didn't. I Googled it, and Google gave me the AI. AI, and it just so happened that the AI was what I was looking for. It was right, and there we go.

But here's the other thing, the other piece of that pie that I don't think we talk about enough. I now know and have learned from AI how to do that. I don't have to look it up again. I know it now. I have learned, right? And, you know, it's the same thing with, you know, going to YouTube to watch a video of how to, you know, properly unplug a stuck pipe, you know, or whatever, right? Or clog pipe, right? Or doing that. Like, yes, you're going to the Internet and you're doing these things, but you're also learning how to do it. And if you retain that information, and I think if you go into it with that spirit of, I don't, want the answer, I want to learn, right? Then that, then it becomes like an effective way of doing that and the result is the same, right? And so this is one of the things that's going on right now in education, right? Like if a student is using AI to get the answer, okay, well, well, great. Yes,

And I think for a lot of things, it's important to not just have the answer, but to know how you arrived at the answer. I understand that. But that's a problem of what is, you know, teaching students to not just seek the answer, but to seek the method. Right? Teaching students that knowing the method is just as important. Right now, my daughter, and I know I'm going off on a tangent, forgive me. My daughter is a senior in high school, and so she's applying to colleges. And so there's lots of college talk in my house and a lot of college thinking and a lot of like, you know, what does college mean?

What's the purpose of it? Why go to it, that sort of thing. And I think we have, I think I know we have as a society. completely ruined the value of college. And we have ruined the value of college by thinking that college is, I have to go to college to get to this career. And that if this college is not going to give me this career, then I choose a different college that's going to give me the,

that's not why you go. And the truth of the matter is, the heartbreaking thing that I, I have told my daughter, the heartbreaking thing I want everyone to understand and to tell their kids is this. All of that stuff in high school that you have to do, the grade point averages, the tests, the finals, the A's, the Bs, the all of that stuff. At the end of the, at the end of the day, the only people, the only people that matters to are college admissions people. And the moment that you get admitted to a college, none of that will ever matter again.

No one will care about your GPA. No one will care about your grades. No one will care about what classes you took. Nobody will care. And the even more heartbreaking thing is that you're going to spend possibly $100,000 a year, $400,000. Let's just call it what it is. And you're going to go to that college and you're going to get that degree. And that degree might even get you into that career.

And you know what? You can put down anything you want on your resume after that. You could say you went to Harvard and MIT and quadruple majored in astrophysics. And for most college, most people, most HR departments, they won't read that far. They don't care. So you have to ask yourself, why? Why am I doing this? you're doing this because you want to be a knower of things

and you want to be around other people who want to be knowers of things and you want to be in the world surrounded by people who are knowers of things right who know how to learn who approach life with a fascination with learning and with a desire to learn and then go into a job, a work world where it's all about, like, how much can I learn? Like, yeah, I know I want to do X,

but I'm not interested. Like, the goal is simply a focus. Getting back to the point of this podcast, by the way. The goal is simply a focus. What's interesting is the journey, right? And so, yeah, that's, Why do I do all these things, all these disparate things? Why am I so?

Because I'm a learner. I want to be a knower of things. I like to know things. And knowing things is the goal. And you're curious. Very, very endlessly so. I have a son who is going through the process of looking at the colleges and things like that. And, you know, we are trying to get him to not.

just go down a default path, you know, don't just go spend all the money because that's what all your friends are doing. We went and looked at the technical colleges, looked at the trades. We've watched the Dave Ramsey documentary on the student loan racket, you know, all that kind of stuff. Just to get them to think, like, you know, there are other ways to get the knowledge. But the thing we really wanted to instill in our kids is we want them to be curious, lifelong learners. Yeah. And that doesn't happen. That doesn't end, you know, when you get your degree and you go off into, quote, quote the real world. Yeah. Yeah. I just, I have a good, a good friend who just got laid off from his

25-year job as a technical writer for a major security software company. And, you know, probably largely due to AI. Like, we don't need these writers anymore because, you know, we'll just have the AI, you know, write our manuals for us. But he's, he's always, uh, his hobby has been woodworking, which he picked up from his dad, who picked it out from his grandfather, right? And just, you know, he does this amazing woodworking stuff. And, you know, I, you know, in our talks about like, well, what should I do next? I'm like, dude, whatever you do, take this opportunity. You got the severance package. Maybe you want to do woodworking. And so, yeah, he just took a job with a cabinet maker in town. And now,

He's going to be, you know, basically this thing that he loves and has been passionate about. He gets to explore that at 55 years old, which is great. I do think with the AI thing, part of this maker movement also, though, is a bit of a rebellion against it as well. Like, you can learn from it, but you also don't want it to think for you. Right. And I think there's a lot to unpack there. But we're at a transition phase with this new technology. I agree. And it's a tool looks like social media, just like anything else. We should learn how it best fits into our already existing life and use it, you know, use it as needed.

One thing I got to say to you guys is both of you with the seniors, because I've been through this dance twice, have extra grace for your kids because this year is hard. When their friends start hearing back from colleges and they haven't heard from yet, it's tough. I remember my oldest at one point because she had a real big group of friends that were always together. And they would hang out at our house. We always tried to make our house teenager bait. We had video games. We had lots of soda and potato chips. And we wanted them to hang out here so we'd know her friends.

And I remember walking into the room once when they were all seniors about. March, I think it was, February March when there was just waiting for those acceptances and they were all just staring at the floor. None of them were talking to each other. And I just said, guys, it's going to be okay. You're going to all end up

where you need to be. It's just fine. Don't worry about it. But they have so much stress on them for their life. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. One of the reasons why Beatrix has applied early action to her favorite schools so that she can get that answer by December

15th. Yeah, well, good luck. This episode of the Focus podcast is brought to you by Incogni. Go to incogni.com slash focused and take your personal data back with Incogni. Use the code Focus to get 60% off an annual plan. Almost everyone experiences robocalls from time to time. If you ever wondered how they keep getting your number, the answer is data brokers. That's where Incogni comes in.

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slash focus, just go there, get that 60% off the annual plan. Check it out incogny.com slash focused. And our thanks to Incogni for their support of the Focus podcast and Olive Relay. Patrick, so what, you know, we talked, we've been dancing around Focus a little bit. I know. I haven't checked in with you for a while. You've got all these balls in the air. You're doing all this different stuff.

Yes. How do you keep it together? How do you stay on track? What's your trick? Calendar, calendar, calendar. Okay. Serious. So on the episode that I just listened to, I forget who the guest was, I'm sorry.

But, you know, he was talking about his and his wife's calendar and, you know, that they've got the kid. And she likes hers analog on the fridge, but they have the digital version on the Google. And, you know, all of that. And I'm like, yes, yes, yes. So you're speaking my language, give me that. Give me calendar. I love calendar. So for quite some time, for a number of years, I worked for Now Software, that back in the old Mac days, did a product called Now Up to Date, now up to date, which Now Up to Date was revolutionary.

shared calendar system that predates Google, that predates any other shared, shared networked calendar product that I am aware of. And it was beloved by Mac users back in the early classic Mac days. And I thought, I believe, just to get nerdy from it, I think that's the same team that went on to make busy cow. That is correct. They were, they were part of that team. They were I worked with those folks. I did QA for that company. But it was there that I really got addicted to the idea that a calendar, that a calendar not only was an essential tool for, you know, just your basic scheduling, but also an essential tool could be used as an essential tool for planning your life, planning your days, planning your tasks, you know, and people when I

I tell them, you know, that, uh, that to-do lists are wish lists, that every to-do list is a someday maybe list because there's no time attached to it. They, they freak out. They're like, what do you mean? I got my list of things. It's all right here. And I'm, I'm, I write out the most important things and I put the three things down and I get that done. Yeah, guess what? You're getting it done right now today. You've already put that on a calendar. You just haven't. made you haven't admitted it to yourself you haven't admitted to yourself that in order to do the thing you have to plan the time to do the thing and and even if it's a a some time today thing well that can be an all-day task on your calendar that you can then make sure to make the time

that that reminds me of the thing that you are known for in my mental rolodex It comes from an old Mikes on Mike's podcast, where you really stress the point that everything you need to do has to be done within the context of time. Yes. Yeah. Everything. Everything. Even this is being done in the context of time, right?

This is only happening because it was on my calendar and because I said this was important enough to be there and to be done at a specific time. And the reason it was important enough to be done in a specific time is because Dave told me it was important to do it this time. You know, so, so yeah, the point of it is is that, yeah, I am all about using the calendar that way. Before he became famous, Aaron Manky of the lore podcast fame, you know, he was. He was a graphic designer who also was kind of in the same space of productivity and stuff with Dave and, you know, and other folks and Mike Hurley early on was part, you know, all of that stuff, right? Like everything that you're seeing today with Relay FM and the Focus podcast or whatever kind of grew out of this smaller group of folks that were all ideating and creating around the space. and he made these index cards that are no longer available because he became famous, you see,

and God bless him for doing so, but I hate the fact that you can no longer get these. I hate it so much that, like, before he decided he was going to stop making and selling these as a side hustle, because famous, I bought as many as I could. And since then, every time I mention them, and part of the reason I'm mentioning these is because people then reach out to me and they say, you know, I got a pack or two of those just lying around that I know I'm never going to use. Would you like me to send them to you? I say, yes, please, yes. So now I have probably enough of these to last me the rest of my natural life. But these are index cards. three by five cards. What I love about them is that they have a light grid on them. They have a little color blocked space up here, so you might be able to write, wait for it, a date,

you know, and maybe some sort of subject or something like that. And then you can write those things that you're going to put on your calendar to get done because they're not going to get done otherwise. You can put them here, and they're two-sided, and they take fountain pen ink very well, which is very important to me since I use them, and gel pen and whatever you want to use, ballpoint pen, but they are really, really great, perfect. Yep, yep. I've got a whole, like a whole, this is just a portion of my collection right here.

And, yeah, just all of that is to say that you cannot get these anymore. I'm sorry, but these roll my life. They completely roll my life. I will, you know, write down not only tasks I want to accomplish, but I use them for taking notes. I use them for other things. I keep one in a, once again, all of this stuff I left downstairs because I ran up to my office to do this podcast. And it's all sitting on my workspace downstairs. But I use a Levenger pocket briefcase to keep these in.

So I have a nice firm backing for being able to keep it in my pocket and take it out and write it down. And, yeah, yeah, these, these frictionless cards that are no longer made. It's remarkable the number of guests we have that use analog for the last mile of their system. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to figure out of just that we just select people that are like that or if that's more common. But I do think that it's a real good hack if you haven't tried it to commit to paper for the very end of your process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I realized I didn't have to get up because I had some in.

Oh, God, who's the guy who makes this guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right. So you know, you put them in there and then you can have them on your desk and you have this nice little platform for just so you can see what you. what you want to do and you can take it out and write notes it's wonderful or if you're a clever woodworker you just make your own oh yeah yeah i could have just gotten my friend to like make one of those for me but i i wanted to support a small business um yeah so so all of that is to say that between my three by five cards um my um i also have kind of a master list of of things i want to do This is my wish list, right? And I call it the big list. And I do that in a notebook. Right now, that's a Nami 7C's notebook. It's got Tomei River paper in it, so it takes fountain pen ink really well. And because that paper is super thin, it's got like 480 pages in a notebook that is only about that thick. So it's great.

And about once a quarter or so, I will brain dump into that. For that brain dump, I use, and unfortunately, this is unable to be found anymore because it was on old Twitter a long time ago. But one of the coaches for David Allen's company at GTD Kelly did a guided, oh God, a guided capture on Twitter, like a tweet thread before like threads were a thing. It was tweet after tweet after tweet that I hand copied and pasted into a text file. that is a really wonderful guided capture prompt sort of thing. And I have that printed out, folded in half, stuck in the notebook. So every time I go to the notebook to do a guided capture session or a brain dump, as I call it, I take out that sheet and I follow those prompts. and I, you know, I go through that.

Like I said, I've just got it in a text file. You know, technically it's copyright David Allen company, but, you know, I can put that text file out there for people to be able to download if you have a place to stick it. I want to go back, Patrick, to earlier, when you're talking about the fact that the calendar is kind of where the rubber meets the road and talking to friends who have listed, that they love and you were explaining.

That's just a list. It's a someday list. I think that for a lot of people, I understand there's resistance to that because there's kind of a to-do list mentality. But I think for a lot of people, even I found this for myself, as I kind of realized the limits of my time

and deciding what on that list actually makes it to the show, you know, gets done. I think there's liberation in that. for people. Because there's so many people walking around with these lists and they fill this mental debt that they're not getting the list done. And really, I think you're doing it wrong if you're thinking about the lists that way, right? Because the idea is not that you're going to do everything in the list. You're going to get the stuff done that actually makes the cut. Yes. And that's hard to get through to people.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, and also, yes, there is a level of commitment when you put something on a calendar, when you give it a date and time, when you say, say, this is what I'm doing that time, that day. It is so much less scary to just have it on a list and be like, you know, you. know, yeah, I could do that right now, or I could check out the latest video from, you know, at Charlie X-E-X. You know, it's like, like, yeah, to be able to say, you know what, I'm not going to check out that video because it's not on my calendar, but that is,

is a really, it's a scary thing to do. Well, because you don't want to let yourself down, right? what you don't want to do, you know, is you don't want to, like, put down, you know, having lunch with a friend you've decided on December 17th that you're going to get for lunch and then December 17th comes around and you just, you know, I don't feel like doing that. I'd rather watch the Charlie X, the X, the X, the X video. And then it just goes to your friend, right? Well, you don't do that. Anything you put on your calendar in general is something. that you, that you, you don't want to, you make a commitment and you don't want to let people down because then people get mad at you. And then people don't like you very more and they

stop inviting you to lunch. But you do it with yourself all the time. All the time. Yeah. You put things on the list and then you don't do them. It can be a virtuous cycle or it can be a vicious cycle depending on how you approach it. Exactly. And so, So by paving the thing on the list and putting it on the calendar, you're saying, yeah, that's, that you're committing it. And if you let it, if you don't do that thing at that time, yeah, you're letting yourself down and you are, you're not liking yourself very much anymore if you do that enough. If you don't believe in yourself then. And you're not, and you're not, and you're not, you know, you're, what you're saying is that, yeah, I'm, I'm not important enough. all right so so practically patrick how are you doing this like today what's what's on your list today and how is that reflected in your calendar are they all day events or do you block time what what do you do ah ah okay uh well so i have some some repeating things uh so every every every two weeks uh i have a now page where uh is a derick severs thing yeah me too you know where like you know you have a page on your website where you just talk about what you're doing right

right now. What has your focus and attention right now? What things are you thinking about? What are you reading? What have you? You can put anything you want there. But the bottom line is like right now, what's what's happening in your life? I've got one of those that would go months and months and months without me ever updating. And so I said, you know, you know the way to solve that? It's to make a repeating event in your calendar every two weeks to update your now page. There you go. There's one of them, right? I'm recording this podcast. And then after the podcast, I actually need to, I'm going to Menards to get a, to get a smart thermostat. Basically, my Google Nest, EOL is one of the original Google Nest, and I need to, I need to replace it.

And we had a furnace issue that is only partially resolved right now while we're out of town for Thanksgiving. And so kind of as part of resolving that, I need the smart thermostat. And I don't want to get another Google device. And then our QuickBooks, I need to update our QuickBooks. My wife and I have a, have a business. Basically, you know, she also is, she's an independent consultant. She's got, she's way busier than I am. She's got a number of clients.

I have my, as you know, my constellation of things. I do. Any money that flows from that flows into a business. and then that business pays us, right? And so I've got, I'm the one who enters all of the transactions from our checking account into QuickBooks. Same thing with our joint accounts. We have a separate QuickBooks file for that. And so those are the three things I must get done today that are on my list. They're outside of those things that are scheduled. I have a meeting this afternoon. I'm rigging at Circus tonight. And so,

So, yeah, that basically takes up my day. The errand and the QuickBooks, is that a calendar event? Yeah, yeah. All of those are actually in, I've put those in my all-day events with the exception of the, of the, of the, the errand. The errand is actually on my calendar at 11 a.m. So, and then the other question is, how far forward do you plan those things? Like, do you know what you're going to be doing two days from now, or when does that happen? No, in general, in general, with the exception of the things that are recurring, like the QuickBooks and the Now page, right?

So, like, I can go two weeks from now and tell you when those will happen. Yeah. In general, it's a daily thing for me. So I kind of look at what things, you know, think through, write down, look at the big list, figure out what I, what time I have for tomorrow, what I have to get done, and boom. Sometimes I'll do it the night before. Sometimes I will throw things on there ahead of time. Sometimes if it's like, yeah, I need to call the doctor's office and make an appointment for this at this date and time or whatever, I will schedule those in advance. And in general, put them in the all-day event.

area of my calendar. I think that's the way to do it. Honestly, if you can, if you can be fluid with the stuff that gets promoted from list to obligation on kind of a daily or weekly basis that gives you the flexibility you need. And the other thing is, I would say, if somebody's trying to pick this practice up after listening, it's just be mindful of what you actually can do in a day. And at the end of the day, if you can't do it all, don't be. yourself up to say, okay, well, I learned that tomorrow I have to take less. Yeah. Eventually, you'll find your balance.

Yeah, you'll find what's realistic for you. And even more importantly, I think you'll also kind of find how long things really take. Yeah. You know, that it would be easy for me to think that like, oh, I just need a half hour to run to the hardware store and get the thermostat and come back and, you know, move to my next thing. But it actually might take longer. you know parking wise or traffic or whatever depending on the time of day and so you can kind of gauge that stuff and fit in and fit it inappropriately once you start to pay attention yeah i think a good

practice there when you're starting is think what you think is a reasonable estimate and 2x that and you're probably pretty close yeah yeah and i would say that you know in general for like you know i want to be clear right this is going to work different ways for different people depending upon the sorts of things they do, right? I don't have, I'm not, you know, I'm not some, you know, at home job, eight hours a day, Zoom meeting, a focused, you know, project sort of, I don't have that life. And so it may, you may find that, yeah, in order to really, like, focus in on a coding task, for instance, say on a software developer or something, you know, that I know I need a good 90 minutes, right?

You know, 90 minutes to really, like, I, you know, in the first half hour, I'm kind of like poking my way through getting in the groove. And now I'm in flow state, right, at about, you know, at about an hour. But I know that if I go past an hour, I'm going to start to get a little like, okay, my brain just can't focus in this flow state for that long. I need a break. I need a snack. Great.

You know, you figure out what's right for you. Start to really pay attention to time, and then you'll be able to know, like, what's best, what time blocks you need, what certain things take, what can be an all day, like, just throw it out there, I can get it done at any time versus I need to call at this date and this time, or I need to do this, or I have this time between Zoom meetings, how should I spend it? There's another element to this that I just want to touch on briefly here, which is you can hit on this, Patrick, when you're talking about the task list, those are all things that we put on there and we feel like I need to do those, right? But those are really just the suggestions list.

And that's a pretty big mindset shift to go from. These are recommendations that I can pick from and things that I have to do. And I came across a podcast episode a couple weeks ago maybe by Nathan Barry, who is the CEO of Kit, and he talked to Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, the guys behind the Design Your Life Framework. They teach the class at Stanford about designing your life. And they had this phrase, which I thought was great. And it was, stop shitting yourself. Yes. And that can apply to other people who say, you should be here, and you should do this. Or it could be self-inflicted to your point where you just add things on a list. That's a problem for future, Mike. He'll figure that out later. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

You know, people, you know, often say, you know, well, you know, gosh, what's it like to, like, work for yourself? And I'm like, yeah, your boss isn't, yeah. Right? You know, seriously, because you are your own worst critic, you are your own worst taskmaster, you are your own worst blamer when things go wrong, when something doesn't get done, when, you know, they just, you know, are, you know, our. internal cassette tapes just play on a constant shame cycle and and and um we really need to work against that battle against that uh and and uh and cheat for it right you know cheat for the fact that that yes if i if i make this commitment the the the only the person is the matter most to, if I don't make it, if I fail, is going to be me. And so how can I be honest? How can I give

myself grace? And how can I take it and turn it from a source of disappointment and shame into a lesson that I can then use to make it better tomorrow? You know, every time this comes up, I hear from people saying, well, that's really nice for you to say you're an internet creator you know you get to be very special but i was a trial attorney for 30 years and it's the same thing look the lists are more important when you have a fancy job but you still have the same number of hours in the day and you still got to make those hard choices and pick the stuff that's actually going to get done every day yeah and you know i would I would argue that, you know, attorneys have to be acutely aware of every minute, a heck of every

second and how they spend it and who they bill for it, right? Let me start it on that. Yeah, right. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Indeed. If you're looking to expand your team this year, join the 3.5 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you know. need. So stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites and use Indeed

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Well, in the minute that I've been talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed data worldwide. So there's no need to wait any longer, speed up your hiring process right now with Indeed, and listeners of the Focus podcast can get a $75-sponsored job credit to get your job more visibility when you go to Indeed.com slash focused F-O-C-U-S-E-D. Just go to Indeed.com slash focused right now, support our show by saying that you heard about Indeed on the Focus podcast. That's I-N-D-E-E-D.com slash focused. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed is all you need. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of Relay. All right, so armed with your calendar, how, where do the things get hard, Patrick? You know, where, where, uh, where, uh, where, uh, where, uh, where, uh, where, uh, where, uh, where. Where do things fall through the cracks maybe?

Or where are the struggles or the challenges for you in maintaining this focus? Well, the truth of the matter is is that, you know, while, you know, those of us who are young and single and carefree and we have no other obligations and, you know, we don't have, you know, we have these easy, well-defined jobs and, you know, they end when we leave them. And, like, all of that stuff, you know, where it gets hard is that I don't live like that. I've got a wife. I've got a daughter. I've got a whole bunch of things that suddenly might pop up. Things I have to do or things that, like today, like today, right? A perfect example.

I was coming up to do the podcast episode right before I did. My wife was like, hmm, what time does your, what does the episode get done? It looks on the calendar like 11, yeah. Let's go get a Christmas tree. I'm like, oh, a smart thermostat, a hardware store. I got to get, and she's like, hardware store, yes, Christmas tree. I'm like, yes, yes, they do sell Christmas trees at the hardware store, not at the one I was planning to go to, but I can go to the one that we're going to go to, and we can pick out the Christmas tree.

Guess what? Now, the thing I had planned to take, I don't know, half hour, 45 minutes, now has added time, now has another person involved, now has a whole other set of logistics, going to a whole different place, getting the tree, sticking tree. tree in the truck. It's like all of these things, right? And so, yeah, if you have your own calendar and you're the only person who has complete control over your time, God bless you, boy, do I envy you? Because most of us don't. Most of us have things that pop up. We have the coworker that pops they're heading to the office and says, hey, you know, can I get some help with this? Or you have the boss who's like, yeah, I know you're working on this, but I just had a meeting

with the higher-ups and they need this today, right? Other people do tend to complicate things. Other people do tend to complicate things. So, yes, my biggest pain point, you know, my biggest complication, the hardest part is other people. And not to say that I don't love those other people. And I actually derive a lot of personal pleasure. A lot of my personal pleasure comes from helping others, comes from pleasing others. It's just how I'm designed, is how I'm built.

And knowing that I'm helping and pleasing others is a big part of what drives me. So I just want to make clear. I don't mind it at all. But, yeah, number one, you got to have, if you have a calendar, it's got to be shared if you're in a household. And my wife also operates, that's the other thing, too. This is the hardest part is that, like, people have to operate either, A, respect the way that you operate with the calendar, or B, they have to operate the same way that you do, right? And you have to respect, you know, and if they don't, then you have to respect them, too, right? You know, so, you know, my wife does not put tasks on the calendar.

She uses Trello, by the way, those who might care. and she swears by it, her Trello list, which she shares with me, which I never look at. Yeah, I know what she's doing at almost any given moment of the day. I know what my daughter is doing at almost any given moment of the day. I know what I'm doing. And I know where I can fit into their list. They know where they can fit into mine. Like I said, my wife looked at the calendar.

She knew what time this recording was scheduled to, and she knew I can fit there because, long story short, tasks that only apply to me, I put into my personal non-shared calendar. So I have the calendar that's shared with everybody, and then I have my personal calendar, which is where I block off my time. And the reason that I don't share that one is so that, actually, she's not like, oh, he's got this thing and I can't ask him about the crisp. No, no, ask me about the, it actually might work into part of the schedule. You know, no, I want that, I don't want you to see that that time is filled so that I can control whether or not I say yes to that, so that I can tell you, yes, ask me, and I can say yes or no, right? And she can respect that. And also, I mean, you get the hallmark moment with your

sweetheart. You could go get a Christmas tree together. I know, right? Is there's even a light snow outside? This is like, you know, bring out the camera and the sound crew. Yeah, but I think, you know, it's easy as you like adopt a practice like we're talking about of trying to be mindful of being focused on your day to look at that request like your wife says, hey, can we get a Christmas tree? Your daughter says, hey, can, you know, can you take me to get a pair of shoes? Or, you know, it's like, you look at that like, and your initial reaction is tense, like, oh, I had a plan.

Now you're messing it up. But, you know, which you have to, I think that kind of the pro level of this is to look at those as opportunities to, you know, why are you doing all this stuff? You're doing it so you have these good relationships. Right. You just lean into that. It's harder to do with coworkers. But I think there's a healthy way to go about that, too.

And, you know, be careful. Like I said, I think the final level of mastery of this is to make the plan but be flexible with the plan and just kind of go through your day. Because that's all we do is we go through a collection of days and then they put us in the ground. So make sure you enjoy it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, like I said, you know, part of this is like how. Hmm. How could I modify my plan, my day, my this, my that to also, you know, not going to, because we have to get a Christmas tree at some point. Why not now?

All right. We like to talk about two topics in time, shining new objects and what we're reading. Mike, I see you have a shiny new object this week. Would you buy, Mike? I do. So we're recording this right after Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And I signed up for the lifetime pro-writing aid plan, which is sort of like a grammarly alternative. The thing that got me with pro-writing aid is number one, as I was going through the page, I noticed a lot of language about the ethical use of AI and the emphasis on the human writing process that even have. like a community as part of like the premium one where they have these writing sprints and kind like the co-working visual mirroring calls for people to sit down and actually write. And the thing I love about it, though, is that they have a desktop extension that actually works. So I can use it in obsidian, finally, spelling a grammar inside of obsidian. And so how does this, how does this compare to grammarly? I'd say it's similar to grammarly, except instead of having the little green G that hijacks the interface and you can't click the buttons below it,

you can position this one exactly where you want it, and then it pops up a pallet of tools and it opens a thing on the side as a separate window where it can change, you know, improve it for tone or clarity or whatever. I haven't done like a side-by-side comparison of the actual effectiveness of the spelling grammar checking, but for the type of writing that I do, I feel like it is just as good. I don't notice any difference. And lifetime payment, so like I paid for it once. I don't have to, you know, up every year, those sorts of things. And I just kind of like the whole vibe and the ethos behind the company that put it out there. Yeah, I never, I wasn't even aware of it. So I'll have to check it up. I had heard about it. I think way back in the day it might

have been a part of set app like when it initially launched. And so it keeps coming up like, on the side, well, pro-writing A, that's a thing. I've already used grammarly. I don't need to worry about that. And then I saw the big, big sale and I was like, I should really give that a shot. And yeah, it works great with obsidian. So I'm very happy. Patrick, you've got any new thing, new and shiny you want to share?

Well, you know, the new shiny is going to be the new furnace we're getting. But that's a whole other story. And it's too big for me to hold up to the camera here. But one thing I wanted to talk about, and this is kind of new and not new, shiny and not so shiny, but important for the topic of the podcast, and especially what I just talked about, like working with the other people in your life and such. Once a year, every year, around the first of the year, my wife and I take a couple's retreat. The two of us take just an overnight or two somewhere. Traditionally, it's been in Duluth, which is a couple hours north of the Twin Cities on Lake Superior, but it might be elsewhere this coming year.

We'll try something new. But we use that time to work through this thing called the year compass. And we do it together. We each have our year compass, right? And she and I each, you know, we kind of go through it, page by page together and work on it and fill it out. Um, it's, it's great, you know, because it starts with kind of capturing, like, what did the past year look like? Just look at your calendar and look at your tasks and look at what you got done and

everything else and just, and, you know, vacations, whatever. Like, what are the things that stand out to you about the past year, right? And you kind of go through this, it's a workbook that you, that you do by going through your past year, figuring out what your past year look like and what you got done and kind of what are the themes that pop out of it how you know how were you feeling about it that sort of thing and then you use that as a kind of launching point to okay what what do you want this year to look like based on how last year looked you know were there were there things that didn't go so well how do you want to change that this year were the things that went really well how do you want to continue that into into the coming year and to do that and to do that and have that

time to connect on that as a couple and to actually sit down and and and to say hey going and getting that Christmas tree kind of spur of the moment that was actually a lot of fun let's make sure next year let's get let's just do that in the middle of a random Tuesday you know let's not wait let's let's let's just go get the tree right yeah like that could be a thing, right? And it's nice to connect. We'll be doing it again this year. We've started to kind of ideate around the wins and the wares of that, but it will happen towards the end of this month or the beginning of the next. And it's something that I really, I love and I look forward to. And when it comes to the things that really matter and are really important, it all

really revolves around that, you know, what, what do I want to put on my year compass next year? At the same time, you're kind of creating a little time machine and you can go back. Yeah. And you need them in the future and see where you were at at this point in the marriage. Yeah, yeah. Well, because, you know, where will next year start? Next year will start with an evaluation of what went well, what didn't this year, and how do we want to together approach that?

Yeah. I don't really have anything shiny and new, but I guess I'll say I'm prototyping a new card holder, so that's kind of fun. I got a little strip of walnut. I cut some 10-degree grooves in the end, and I used to half-inch radiance, a hand plane to scoop it out.

So I'm making a little thing for my desk so I can put my note cards in and have them poking up at me. nice i've got a couple different sizes i'm just trying to figure out what's the right size i haven't finished it yet um i think at some point i may like laser engrave something on the front of it and just make it really nice but right now i'm just trying to figure out what's the right size for me but that's that's my new shiny little just a little side project i'm working on yeah any any thoughts of turning that into a into a thing uh that people can buy eventually you know no no

no this is just for you yeah i don't have time the stuff and the stuff and the shop is really it's one of the practices i like to try and do slowly like if you turn it into a business you have to suddenly do it quickly yeah and uh i would rather be at something where i just take my time and like scooping out the the pencil rest with a hand plane a lot of people would say well just get a router and blah blah blah and i'm like no i just want to do it quietly and slowly that's the whole point of being in that place that space for me. So what are we reading, guys? Mike, you've always got a book.

What are you reading these days? Yeah, I am reading a book by the, I believe it's the person who develops the Excaladry Obsidian plugin. It's called Sketch Your Mind. And I'm going to butcher this name. I apologize. Zolt Vixian. It's really about, he defines it as 4D PKM.

and that part of it really doesn't appeal to me, but the larger point does, which is really when you're trying to make sense of things, you've got all these ideas that are bouncing around in your brain, you've got all these notes that you've collected, right? How do they connect together as these mental Lego blocks for you to make something new out of them? And I'm about halfway through it.

We're reading this one for Bookworm. It's a self-published book, which I feel like I'm leaning more towards those lately. They hit different. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's bad. But I feel like you get more of the true authentic tone voice message of the author when you pick up a self-published book because they don't have an editor in the middle

that's telling them, well, you should reframe it this way and cut this part because nobody cares like some of those nobody cares parts are the ones where I find the the gold yeah yeah yeah yeah when I wrote the books for Wiley Press I felt like the editor really did a disservice to my voice and so I get it yeah and and that's that that is a really hard part right because your your voice I've long contended this you know, that one should learn how to write well enough and know the rules well enough that they know how to strategically break them

because it is in that strategic breakage that you will find, quote unquote, your voice, right? My voice actually contains a lot of English no-noes, sentence fragments being the most egregious one, right? But it is those sentence fragments that actually are my voice. You can tell, you can tell its mind by how I strategically use those. I know that they are grammatically incorrect, and any editor would be, you know, with their red pin all over my page, and I would be like, yeah, but if I get,

get rid of those, it sounds like any old Joe Schmoe off the street. Yeah, that's the tough part. I do think it's, I don't know, I feel like there is a little bit of maybe rebellion against the big grammar where people are more tolerant of that sort of thing lately. And it's cool because I have another son who is about to turn 16. I'm taking him actually to a young writer's retreat. in August it's basically like he's a he he likes to write fan fiction things like that and um just trying to encourage that that skill you know i think that there's a lot of value in that especially at a young

age of finding your voice and expressing it through through writing especially in school where you are trying to navigate all the rules right and you get docked points if you don't follow them in certain ways i think that that's uh that's an important skill that that everybody should should should figure out at some point. And I'm a big advocate of everyone is creative. Everyone should write. You don't write just because you have something to say. You write because that's how you discover what you have to say.

Well, you know, one of the, like I said, one of the things going on my daughter's school is this battle against AI use or, like I can't figure out. It depends on the day you talk to them, whether they're for or against it. But they're certainly against it being used by students to basically short. cut the work, you know, my, you know, talking with my daughter, I'm like, you know, here's, here's the thing. You know how to write. You're a really good writer. She's actually an excellent writer, right? And the truth of the matter is, is that if you're a really good writer and you know how to form thoughts and say, you don't have to use AI, right? Like, like, the AI is not going to do better than what you are already doing, right?

You know, it may be able to give you the facts. And certainly if you want to use AI, you know, and this is why it's like, if you want to use AI to like kind of get the data, get the facts, that's great. But for God's sakes, don't just copy and paste that. Take that, learn from it, and then write, you know, because that's going to be so much better, you know. So Patrick, what book are you reading these days? I wanted to highlight a couple of, as opposed to a single book, I wanted to highlight a couple of writers that I don't think get nearly the attention that they should. One of them,

some folks may know well. That would be Derek Severs. We just, I brought them up earlier on the podcast as like one of the creators of the now page idea. But also he has a series of books, which are just wonderful. And I've got a collection of them, of course, that I'm looking at right now. But I have off-camera if they're over there on my bookshelf. But don't worry about that. If you just go to his website and just Google Derek Seavers, you'll find him. I believe his website is actually like S-I-V-R-S or something like that or S-I-V-R-S. This is his last name with a dot randomly randomly placed, which is kind of fun. You know, all the books are there right on the front page, and they're all excellent,

every single one of them, and I highly recommend them, even the ones that you think might not appeal to you, like your music and your people, which he kind of wrote, a lot of people may or may not know that Seavers created and founded CD Baby back in the day, which was a way for musicians to independently publish. and promote and sell their CDs outside of the big labels. And that's kind of something he wrote for those people, like how, you know, how is in it. But you think, oh, this is about music and bands and things like that.

There's nothing in here for me? No, there's tons in there for you, tons. You know, replace musician with writer, with creator, with hobbyist, with whatever, and you're going to find the meat around that. And I'll add to that that Derek was a guest on episode 232. So you can go back and listen to him on the show, too. He is one of these people. Like if you were like, you know, hey, you can have a great night of dining dinner party with anyone, you know, that you know that you know about from the internet's, he would be at the head of my table. He's he's one of those people who I just, fine fascinating and friendly and graceful. And like despite the fact that in my mind he's this really super famous person, he actually personally responds to emails you send him. He's just wonderful.

So yes, buy his books, read them. They're cheap. They're great. Buy the paper copies. Get the paper copies because you'll get the digital for free. And it's nice to have, I'm a big believer in paper copies. I did that too. I read his, because he gives away the e-pop. And one day I said, you know, I just want to give him money. And I bought the whole set of his books and they take space on my shelf. I love them. Yeah, yeah, they're great. Second, and this is when I'm certain, a lot of people have not heard of.

His name is Nicholas Bate. He's from the UK. Actually, I believe, taught at Oxford for a while, but he lived in Oxford, England. but he has a strategy and consulting firm. I believe he currently resides in France, but all of that doesn't matter. He has a blog that speaks directly to that thing that you were talking about earlier, David, about like we are at our heart makers, and we are people who make and build tools for doing tax. and we are learners.

And he has this blog called Hunter Gatherer 21C, 21st century hunter-gatherer. You know, with the idea that, like, we are still at our roots, hunter-gatherers, right? And that we cannot escape that. We need to be honest and true to that. How does that affect what we're doing here in the 21st century? And he uses that blog not only for daily doses of wisdom

and inspiration and everything else. But he also has books. Some fiction books, which are actually also very good. That's fine. But the thing I am into is he's been doing these kind of short, Kindle, how do I put them? What does he call them? But they're short.

They're not really books. They're kind of nuggets of, you know, of essays of wisdom. He has two out now. One is called How to Beat Chat GPT, which is actually a really great take on AI. If you're looking for a take on AI that is not like, oh, scary and raw, it's, you know, his take is like, yeah, what I told my daughter, if you want to beat Chat GPT, you actually just have to be better than it can be. And that's actually kind of easy because there's something that the AI can never be, and that's human. And so as long as you're human, you will always beat AI. And he also has another one called Meds, a wellness strategy.

Meds stands for, let me get this right, meditation, exercise, diet, sleep. And it really is kind of just a healthy approach to mental and physical wellness. that I think is an important message for us to hear these days. And he's got another one coming out soon. I think he said sometime around the first of the year that's 70 tools of excellence, I believe is the name of it. And all of this is to say is like, here's this under the radar guy who's got this blog that like a few people is like

one of those if you know you know sort of things that I think deserves a much wider audience and is writing to writing doing some really useful stuff for right now for what we're talking about for what we've talked about here on this podcast for all of it so yeah I just signed up for the RSS feed and I'm going to probably check out some of this books thanks for this is a great recommendation thanks no thank you I'm like I said very happy to be shining a light on him because he's fantastic I'm just going back I started earlier this year about he didn't finish the book but I'm going to try and finish it by the end of the year. At the end of the year, I kind of like to do my own personal audit of my systems.

This year, I have incorporated some kind of officially some hybrid analog tools. I'm not as far down that rabbit hole as Patrick is, but I do find that that last mile of analog works for me. Mike seems to be down the rabbit hole, too. I just want to point that out. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think as you saw, like for me, my list needs to be digital, because a lot of it involves responding to emails and things related to Max Sparky.

So I can't go like it with a fancy notebook like you have Patrick. But for the last mile, I'm going analog. And I have found this year just a real interesting mix of journaling between dictation and handwriting. And this book by Roland Allen called The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper really kind of resonates with me as I kind of think through this stuff. Excellent book, by the way. Yeah. I started it, and now I finally am in the process of finishing it. I want to get that done before the end of the year and get on with it.

All right, we are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at Relay.fim slash Focus. You go there. You can sign up for DeepFocus, which is the ad for extended version of the show. We'd love to have your support. Thank you to our sponsors this week in Cogney and Indeed. Patrick, we're going to have a bunch of links for you in the notes so people can go check out the things you're up to.

is there any website you want me to call out right here on the show that people should go check out the easiest way to find all the things is patrick roan dot com if you go there that'll point you to my blog it'll point you to the circus rigging they'll point you to the house stuff i'm doing like that's the central like starting point for everything me yeah and roan is spelled with an h r h oh yep like the river in france or coat of rhone wine phone with an r you know you you get the idea. Go check it out, Gang Patrick. Like I said, one of my favorite people on the internet.

Go check them out. And thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.