Focused - 256: Calendar Modes & Transitions Rituals

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my intrepid fellow focused host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. How are you, Mike? Pretty good. How are you, David? I'm okay, but I really stumbled over that there, you know. I guess I'm having a little hard time getting started today. It's all right. It's early. Yeah, it is.

Anyway, today we are going to be talking about time architecture and getting through these things together. We both have more discussions on calendars and time. We did a show on this not long ago, but when we look at the questions that came out of that, it really kind of generates another show. So that's what we're going to do today. Mike, you want to start us off talking about task triage? Yeah, and I'll just kind of share some context

for where this idea came from because I had a recent newsletter post that I published about this, But I was really just thinking about the whole idea of weekly planning. That's what we covered in show 250. So it wasn't too long ago that we talked about that weekly planning. But then I realized that when it comes to planning your week, all of the things that we talked about in that show are really dependent on you having this foundational framework for how you want to allocate time for the things that are important. important. And it occurred to me that someone could listen to that show and just sit down with their

calendar and with their task list and think to themselves, okay, I'm going to implement this stuff. And if you just start taking all of those things that you need to do and the places you have to be, what you end up with is a mess. And the term that came to mind was task triage because if you sit down with your calendar. You know, I'm going to plan my week. And I got these meetings on there already. And I got all these tasks that I got to do. And you just start slotting them in. It's kind of like Sunday night calendar Tetris, right? And it's very easy to go through the motions of that, feel like you've planned your week and then feel really frustrated. Number one, I think you go into it, maybe even a little bit resenting the things that you have to do, the things that you've allocated the

time for like, why am I even doing this in the first place? But also it occurred to me that if you go into it with those big rocks, these are not movable. And you have no sort of template that you're basing it off of. Your week is kind of set before you even start to plan it. And I feel like if you just run with that mode, you're not going to like the place that you ultimately end up. It may take a couple months. It may take a couple of years. It may just take a couple of weeks. And you're just like this is not working. I don't want to do this anymore. Yeah, I mean, one of the key elements here to me is the concept of external control versus internal control. You know, building your weekly calendar based on obligations foisted upon you is much different than building your weekly calendar from a place

of intentionality, like knowing what is it that I want to do, what's important to me, and how do I make that the foundation of the calendar, not the repeating meeting from the boss or, you know, the, like I said, the stuff that comes to you externally. Yeah, but I think even if you have the things that you want to do as tasks on your list, yeah, over time, more tasks will appear on that list that are not in true alignment of how you want to live your life. If you were in complete control of things, how you would allocate the time that you spend your day. You always like take a little bit here, push a little bit there, and the end product just kind of slowly morphs into this thing that you don't really want to do. And so what happens, I think, when you allocate the tasks instead

of the modes, and that's a distinction I want to really unpack here in this episode, if all you do is put the tasks and the meetings on there, the things that you say matter the most, those are the important but not urgent things. They're not, you know, it doesn't have to get done this week. I don't have to spend time in the shop like we talked about in the last episode, right? I can try to make that up next time. Well, if you just keep trying to cram more things into a weekly plan, especially, like a daily plan is hard enough. A daily plan never goes exactly how you think it will.

Well, extend that out, you know, seven days in a row. You mentioned in the last episode, I think, about your daughter is saying you got to win the World Series, right? Four out of seven and you get the weekends. Like that just shows the failure rate for a lot of these daily plans. And so if you extend the timeframe to a week, I feel like that's right in the sweet spot of the worst possible way to plan your week for most people. because we overestimate what we can get done in the short term. We underestimate what we can get done in the long term. But the week is kind of like the short term extended out just long enough that I'm going

to pack a whole bunch of stuff in there. It's just not going to work. So the solution to this, I think, is actually not something original, but Cal Newport talked about this a while back with his idea, like the ideal week template. But before we get to that, you know, I think you need to think about this a little bit differently. And so instead of trying to cram in and schedule time for the tasks for the things that are important, I actually really like this analogy of time architecture where you've got your you're framing a house, right? And this is the living room. This is the family room. This is the

kitchen. They're set aside for different purposes. So I actually really like this metaphor for like identify for yourself what the important areas of your life are, have rooms set aside for those, and then you can decide when you are actually doing the weekly planning that we talked about in episode 250 what goes in those rooms. But I think we've got to step back a bit first and figure out what are the rooms that we should be putting in our house in the first place. Okay. So, and that's the idea of moats. Yeah, exactly. So each room that you would on that, that blueprint, you know, that would represent an important area of your life maybe, so work, family exercise. Those are all things that I would argue should be on like

an ideal week template. But it could also be something like deep work. You know, that's the, obviously the big example that Cal talks about with his ideal week template is protecting the time for that deep work to happen. Now, maybe you can't create an ideal week template for, you know, all of your, all of the hours available to you in a week. That's okay. Start where you are with what you have and control that. But it kind of reframes the question then because it's not, you know, I have this task that I want to do. Where is there space for this?

But you've kind of put up the barriers already with this template. And so now you're asking, you know, what am I going to put in this room? What is this room for as I sit down and I think about what am I actually going to do this week and what am I actually going to do this day? Yeah. So I would call those modes roles. You know, what are the roles you have? And where are you allocating time for them?

In a way, it sounds like kind of time boxing roles. Like, if you're a father, you're going to put time on your calendar to be a father, you know. And as an interesting concept. Yeah, that's exactly it. It is time boxing for your roles, which is why I wanted to talk to Max Barky about this, because I know you're a big advocate of the roles and goals. So it may seem like a really minor distinction, but I think it's important, right? So you mentioned I'm going to set aside time to be a father, right?

So I think when you're doing your weekly plan, you can say, well, I'm going to try to be there for the baseball game on Thursday night. Or I'm going to try to be at the musical production on Saturday. But what if instead of trying to do that every single week and saying, you know, what does my family have going on that I should be at? what if you just set aside every single week time to be in that father mode? How does that change how you plan your week? I think it does dramatically because now instead of like, oh, well, I guess I have an obligation I got to squeeze in here somewhere. Now I'm looking for ways to show up as that role in my weekly and daily plans.

And I feel like that's really the key difference there in actually following through on those things that are important. Because when when you're in the middle of something, workwise especially, it always seems urgent. You know, an urgency masquerades as importance, I feel like. The more urgent something is, the more important it seems to be. The higher, the discrepancy between, you know, how important something seems and how important it actually is. If something is urgent, that should be an immediate red flag. Like, I really need to step back and look at this for what it really is.

So this like mode-based approach to creating that template. And then from that template, you go ahead and you plan your week. Like I said, and not every hour. You're not time blocking your week that way. Actually, the way that I think this is most helpful is when you have that template that you're working off of and you look at that and you say, today is Thursday. And this is my ideal Thursday. And when I time block my day, how close am I to that?

And I'm not going to hit it 100% of the time, probably. any of the time that I create that. But if I see myself drifting further and further away from that template, that's kind of a red flag. I noticed that. And I see it over and over again. And it's like, I really need to take a look at that next time I do one of those personal retreats and really consider, is there something that is keeping me from living the life that I want to live and showing up in the way that I want to show up for the people that are important

to me. Yeah. And the time boxing thing also works for your work time if you do this system because you're setting time to do the work, but you're also setting time to do your other rules. So I think that would allow you if you feel, if you're the kind of person feels guilty when you stop working, I think this could be a nice tool to get over that to say, no, I had that time and I did that. Now I'm in this other role and I need to be dedicated to that now. Yep, exactly. And so the way that I think you do this is create this ideal week template. And again, like this is not original to me. Cal Newport talked about

this a while back, but it really is a template. That word template is the reason that I'm crediting him with this because that really resonates with me. It's a template. It's not a plan. You're focused on the modes. You're not focused on the task. It's going to help you protect the time for what is really important. And there's lots of different ways that you can use the template idea. You know, you could have daily themes for specific roles. I know our friend Mike Vardy likes to do that. This is my recording day. So I'm going to batch my recording tasks on this day. This is my meeting day. But also, like, when is your family day? When is your service day? You know, the areas of your life that maybe get squeezed out when things get busy. So this template then,

You can have these daily themes for specific roles if you want, but it's going to provide some regular rules and limits, and it's going to help with a term that Cal talks about is autopilot scheduling. Now, maybe this gets into something you brought up before we hit record with like the AI scheduling, and I'm not a big fan of that. So that's not really what I'm talking about here, but you don't have to create your weekly or daily plans from scratch when you've thought ahead of time what the components should be for this template that you create. And I think the template doesn't have to be set in stone either. I actually look at this every time I do a personal retreat, I draft one up because every quarter seems to be a pretty good cadence. There's a lot of different

seasons in your life. And so my schedule may look very different in the spring than it will in the fall. Kids in school, you know, we're not going to have those obligations in the summer. So it's going to look different. It allows you to kind of go with the changing seasons and it allows you to adapt as needed, but you're also not constantly going back and meddling with it and tinkering with it and, you know, reconsidering it all the time. I feel like that's where, that's where you can, you can actually waste a lot of time with this, this sort of thing. So you kind of just have to set it and forget it for a little bit and then you come back and you can adjust it later once you get some some feedback. I feel like the ideal week kind of falls in that category of strong,

strong opinions loosely held. Exactly. Exactly. I do mine quarterly too. I go through, but mine is not as intricate as yours. And I'll talk about the way I do it in a minute. But, but it's very interesting. We're going to share these screenshots with the show where we've got our planning calendars, ideal week calendars. And you have got way more granular. And now I understand why because you're specifically addressing all roles. If I could talk for a minute about mine, mine is largely work related. It is not multiple roles. And I'm closer to the Mike Vardy model, really, to me. Like, I try to keep Mondays clear so I don't have a lot of calls or recordings. That's changed recently because we've added this robot Builders Club on Mondays.

But other than that, I try not to talk to other people on Mondays, and that's the day I get like a lot of, like I write the newsletter that day and do a bunch of production work. And then for me, Tuesdays are generally podcast days. I record Mac Power Users that day. I do all the prep for that show and this show on that day. Wednesdays are for the Mac Sparky Labs. I spend generally the whole day working on them that day. And then Thursday and Friday, I call Thursday a production day.

Whatever I'm working on, it's a day to produce. And then Friday is a flex day. It just depends what went wrong that week. It gives me, you know, I always feel like trying to plan Friday is almost a fool's error because you don't know what you're going to be by Friday. But I try to keep as much availability on Friday as possible because you don't know where you're going to be on Friday. But the integration of additional roles into that weekly calendar is not reflected in my ideal

week. But I can talk later about how they do fit with kind of my mode shifting because I actually have a way to build that stuff into my days without as much structure as you have. Yeah, I think we are kind of in different seasons of life, right? My oldest is just graduating from high school. So we have all of the school things going on right now. Yeah. Yeah. And so my ideal week template gets blown up every single time I try to schedule my week. But what it does is it's got protected time for those different modes. And so when something shows up as, you know, we got a choir concert today, I'm going to consider that family time. You know, so it puts it in that box and then maybe I'll move

that box to the date of the concert. But everything else can kind of fill in around that. And what it does is it sets aside the time for the things that are really important. So actually, before I get to mine, I want to just walk people through this exercise of a hundred and forty, 168 hours. I'm not sure if you've ever done anything like this, David, but there's a book on this a few years ago. Okay. I haven't read that book,

but I remember doing this exercise with the productivity coaching that I've done in the past. And usually people are like, I just don't have time to do X. And it's like, okay, well, let's reverse engineer this. Okay, let's work backwards. And what would your idea week look like. Let's just go through all the modes, right? And that's why I think this is so

helpful. Sleep is non-negotiable. We're humans. We have to do it. Eight hours of sleep a night. How does that sound? Oh, that sounds great. I would love to sleep for eight hours. Okay, well, you need to sleep every night. Let's set aside eight hours, seven days a week. That's 56 hours. Okay, you've got a job, right? Full time? 40 hours. Okay. We'll put that down. And I know, some people work more than that. That's fine. Just go with me for the exercise here. The average commute, I think I read was like 35 minutes total per day. So let's just round that up. Let's say it's an hour commute every single day.

That's five hours. You've got hobbies. You know, you want to play in a rec basketball league or something. So let's set aside 15 hours for that. How awesome would that be? Oh, yeah, that'd be great. 15 hours for my hobbies every week? Yeah, let's do that.

Okay, well, you want to go to the gym, right? So let's say, you know, an hour. day, six days a week. You get a day off. That's six hours. Okay, well, you've got to, you know, clean your, and maintain your home. That's going to take a while, right? So let's set aside 15 hours for that. Oh, that's probably more than I need, but okay, you want to be a part of a service organization, go to church, whatever. So let's set aside six hours for service. Okay. And you just go through and you identify the modes that are important, the roles that are important, you add up all these hours. And then usually what people realize when they get to the end and they add it all up

is there's a lot left. All the numbers that I gave you so far, I did the math on these. This is actually mine right here. 143 hours. Okay. So I block now all the hours that are important, right? And I've got 25 hours left over. Where do those hours go? They get eaten. They get consumed by tasks that show up. And somebody's like, hey, can you quick just do this for me? Or I have some space to fill. So I start scrolling through the endless feeds. And I don't realize it till an hour later. Or, you know, I end up watching binge winging a TV show. You know, and I remember when Chris Bailey was on the show and he said, if you intend to watch Netflix for eight hours, watching Netflix for eight hours is the most productive thing you could do. It's when it's stealing that from something that

you wanted to do instead that there's a problem. And so I kind of just went through this and I was like, what are the areas that are important to me? And if I could delegate into my ideal week template, you know, what would that, what would that look like? And the end result is a screenshot that I'll share in the show notes, but it's all color coded.

And I have like the purple ones. Those are kind of like my creative work. So time to write or create or record videos or record podcasts. those are all on my weekly template. There's a lot of family time on here, board games, date night. You know, that's something that you never just find the time for. But if you prioritize it and, you know, set aside the time for it, you're much more likely to follow through on it.

My morning and evening routines are in here as green. All my, like, church stuff is blue. See, I've got like gym and running on here as orange. I've got thinking time on here, which is kind of like this reddish color. So I've got, you know, set aside a block just on Friday mornings usually for thinking time, but then also like the mastermind stuff is on here. I've got a couple of blocks set aside just for reading, rest and recovery. You know, like, and what this does when I look at this is it's like, yeah, this is, this is at least feasible.

It maybe isn't going to happen every single time like this, but this is the life that I want to live right here. This is what I'm shooting for. And the more that I can follow through on that intention and live my life in alignment with these things, then the happier ultimately I am. And so this provides clarity, you know, to, well, that thing sounds kind of cool, but I don't know where that's going to fit. Something's got to give here. So what do I actually want to remove from this template?

Nothing at the moment. Okay. Well, I'm not going to do that then. And it also creates, I think, motivation to show up in those areas that you decided are worth putting on there in the first place. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. And anytime you have a practice that gets you working on all of your roles or all of your modes, I think that's good. And if you're struggling with that, this seems like a really good tool to get you there.

Just lay it out. Yeah. And so if people want to do this for themselves, I'm, first of all, I would absolutely recommend that you create an ideal week template. I think it helps a lot in terms of deciding for yourself what is actually important and worth protecting time on your calendar for. This is not, you know, you're, I actually recommend that you have this as like a reference. So I actually built a tool to help people do this.

I think the first thing you got to do is you got to go through that 168 hours exercise that I just kind of walk through and figure out what are the modes that are important to me. What do I actually want to protect time weekly for? Right. And then you just sit down and kind of like you would time block your day. You give every hour a job. That's actually what I would recommend people do in terms of creating their ideal week template. You could just do the work stuff if you want, but I want to be intentional with all my hours.

And we've got a lot going on, which is why I have mine from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. those are my waking hours. And I actually built a tool to help people do this. I wrote about this in a recent newsletter, but it's at idealweek.practical pkam.com. It's kind of just like a standard calendar interface. You can drag the blocks and choose the labels. You can theme your days up at the top,

and then you can export this. So you can export it as a PDF. You can export it as an image. You can actually export it as a dot-ICS file. So if you wanted to create a planning calendar in your calendar app of choice, you could bring this in and then just toggle on and off the planning calendar as you're doing your digital time blocking. And of course, because I'm an obsidian nerd,

you can also export it as a markdown file. So with the personal retreat template that I have, I actually can link to that ideal week note and have the bullet list of all this stuff when I'm doing my personal retreat in obsidian. pretty happy with how it turned out. It's completely free. So if you want some help, creating your Ideal Week template,

ideal week.practicwit.practicm.com. This is great, Mike. I really like it. I've been playing with it as you've been talking. What a nice tool. And you get different colors here, so I would associate different colors with modes or roles. Yep, exactly.

And then pull it together. All right. Now, I want you to address something people are going to listen and say, well, wait, this is way too prescriptive. I'm not going to block out every minute of my day for the week. That's nuts. What do you say to that? Well, you're not blocking out every day of the week.

That's the thing. This is the term ideal week. When I hear ideal week, I'm not thinking planning my perfect week. I'm thinking, in a perfect world, if I was living my dream life, this is what it would look like right now. And what that does is it kind of creates this picture of this is where we're going. It's when I do it, I want it to feel realistic like this is attainable. It can't be like a five year in the future sort of a thing. Wouldn't it be great when I can do this?

Yeah. But that is, I think, kind of where you start is like, this is what I want my week to look like or my life to look like. My wife and I actually just wrapped up the life theme cohort. And that's one of the steps that we walk people through is what is a day in the life of future you look like. Where are you? What do you do?

who's there with you, what kind of car are you driving, you know, all that kind of stuff. Whatever is important to you, put it on that list, right? And then working back from there, how can you live elements of that rich life that you described right now? How can you move just a little bit closer to that every single time you do a personal retreat? And hopefully over time, you know, you're doing things, you're getting feedback, and you are getting closer to that ideal. But I think I would tell people for this template to go nuts, give yourself permission

to dream big with this, but recognize that this is not a plan. It is a template. Yeah. Okay. So that is an important distinction that makes sense in my brain. Maybe it doesn't for everybody. But when I say template, like, wouldn't it be great if I could use this? And really a template implies this is a starting point. If you are trying to throw all this awesome mode stuff on there, like wouldn't this be awesome? And then you try to plan it and you expect that you're going to hit it 100%. I feel like you are going to get a little bit discouraged. That's probably the root of the situation that you're describing there, there, David. So I would say, you know,

give yourself permission to dream big about what, what this ideal week should look like for you right now, could look like for you right now. Maybe it's a better way to put it, but then hold it lightly. Yeah, I feel like I would take the attitude that this is an opportunity to document your intentions before the world intrudes. Exactly. Perfect. I love the way you describe that. And so you do that and then you do your best. And I think that really gives you a starting point. You know, getting back to the point I said earlier, we have to bring, I mean, the whole point of this show,

and I think all productivity advice is figure out what's important to you. None of us are getting out of this alive. Figure out what's important to you. Figure out a way to do that. And then you will have a fulfilling like that is the ultimate expression of productivity. It's not emptying your inbox. It's not shipping all the things. It's about figuring out what's important to you and making sure you spend in your limited amount of time doing that.

And it's very easy with calendars to actually work against that goal for the reasons we're talking about at the beginning of the show. I think an ideal week calendar is your way to exert your own influence over your own time. But you don't get hung up on it. And just like Mike and I do, check it everything. three months, see what's adjusted, and use that as a compass bearing as you're figuring out what you're doing. The compass analogy is perfect for this. One of the things I say in the Life theme cohort is you need a compass, not a blueprint.

And the point of that maybe competes a little bit with the architecture analogy I used earlier, but the point is that you don't need to have it all figured out before you start building. You just need to know what is the direction that I need to go. What is the correct trajectory of the next step? And then once you do that, the path will appear before you, I believe, if you continue to reevaluate. And like, you know, you've got enough water under the bridge now. Toby, you said, his finishing school. You probably remember the day he was born and it feels like it was yesterday. And the time you spent being a father over the last 18 years was precious. And soon you won't be able to do it that way with him.

And, you know, it's just very easy in the world of meetings and schedules to forget that. And this is a way to exert influence over that father role or whatever roles are important to you into the process, into the consideration. Yeah, that's a great way to put it is exerting influence. And the practice of creating that ideal week template, I feel like you get a pretty big return on investment in terms of the influence that you're able to exert with it. It takes 20, 30 minutes maybe to think through and create it. And it's definitely going to buy me back a lot more than that in terms of intentionality over the next 90 days. I wish I knew who came up with the soup analogy because I heard it once and I've never been able to track down who came up with idea. I want to give them credit.

but I think it's a really good idea. And they talked about building your calendar is like making soup. And it doesn't matter if you put the salt or the pepper in first so long as you put the salt and the pepper in. And one of the things of this ideal week that I like to consider, and this is the reason why mine doesn't have as much structure as much structure is Mike is I like to think of it like, yeah, these are the components that need to go into the soup of this week.

I'm not as hung up on when I'm going to put the ingredients in or what order. And that gives you a flexibility to be more agile during the week. But I think you could make the same argument with what you've done here. What your ideal week is, it's the list of ingredients. It's not a list of how the ingredients are put in the soup. Yeah, intentionality soup. I like that. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to by Vitally. Your co-pilot for AI-powered customer success. Get a free pair of of AirPods Pro. When you book a qualified meeting, just go to vitally.io-focused. Vitally's purpose-built AI is for scaled customer success. It's there to help you better understand

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Okay, I have a follow-up topic that relates to all this, which also came out of that show, and I feel like it's the concept of transition rituals. I don't think we talked about it enough. and some questions I got really rose it in my head that this is something we need to talk about more. But we've talked about these blocks we're going to put together and these ideas that during the day, I'm going to go from one role to the next or one task to the next. I think one of the things people get really hung up on is trying to be efficient in that transition

or even just not being intentional about the transition. And I think one of the most important things you can do if you're working from blocks or if you're trying to be more intentional is really take a moment when you transition from one mode to the next. And I don't mean that just like, okay, put down the work thing and pick up the personal thing. I think you need to stop, acknowledge, and move on. And I think you should have rituals built into that. I agree. what kind of rituals are you talking about here? Are we like broadly describing these?

Because one example that comes to mind for me is like switching the timery timers. I don't think that's what you're talking about here though. But that actually helps, right? It does. If you have a timing system like timery, the process of physically pushing the button, I think in your brain sends a signal that says, okay, I'm no longer doing that, I'm now doing this. And that is really the purpose of this transition ritual.

By far, the most successful ritual I've had is interstitial journaling. And this comes up often on the show, journaling topics. But doing journaling in between mode shifts as part of mode shifts, I think is just a dandy way to make that a better process. And what I'll do is just like I primarily use day one. Sometimes I use paper. It kind of depends on my mood, but mainly day one. I'll just create a new entry. They got a menu bar tool. I just click up there and say, okay, I just finished writing four blog posts, feeling good about that. They're in the production cycle

now. Now I'm going to switch to, you know, writing the newsletter or going out to lunch with my daughter or whatever. But just taking a moment to document it really helps. And you can talk through the work you've done. I think that's the most important piece because it allows you to set it down. if you have open loops on the thing you were doing, this is a great time to document that, whether it's in your project documentation or in your journal or wherever. But just like if you got 80% of the way there, take a minute to acknowledge what you've done and what's left to do.

Now you may say, well, Sparky, I can just keep that in my head. I don't need to write it down. But there's something about writing it down that allows you to set it down. And that's the whole point of this transition ritual. is when you get to the next thing, you're thinking about the next thing, not the last thing. And I think a lot of us struggle with that.

Oh, man, hearing you describe interstitial journaling just now, I think you've given me an action. It's not hard, Mike. It doesn't have to be a long entry. It's not. It's not. I even, for my practical PKM course, I wrote down,

I created videos. on like all the different parts of that PQMStack framework and one of them is reflection, right? So what are the different ways that you could journal? And I have the workflow built for interstitial journaling in Obsidian. And I feel like I'd never really liked the idea of interstitial journaling because I didn't want to just create a running log of the things that I did that didn't seem that valuable to me. However, as you were just describing, wrote these blog posts or whatever. I forget the specifics of the example that you shared. But as you were saying that, it was kind of hitting me in the face that, like, I tend to,

when I am working, crank on something for a set period of time, I think I have a little bit of ADHD tendency where I get absorbed in the thing that I'm doing and I totally lose, lose awareness of anything else that's going on. But then once I'm done with that thing, it's very easy for me to get pulled into something that I really don't want to be doing. I'll go check email or I'll check how many responses I got on my social post.

I'll check YouTube stats. Those are all things that I should be looking at at some point, but I look at them more often than I. I want to because it's like, okay, I'm done. Now I need like, if I'm honest with myself, I'm really like chasing a dopamine hit, right? Yeah. But I feel like that's the perfect place to recognize, okay, I'm done with this thing. Let's write a sentence about it, you know, because it's just a couple of keystrokes for me and it gets appended to the daily note. Once I'm done with that, I feel like that's enough to, to keep

me in work mode as opposed to, okay, I'm tired, I'm exhausted now. I deserve a break. Yeah, yeah. And turn the page to the next, the next important thing on on the list because it's not that I don't want to do the thing that I've decided I is on my plan for today. It's just that it's not, I don't know. I feel like I go deep. I come back up and I feel like interstitial journaling kind of helped me be a little bit more, more level or consistent throughout my day. Yeah. So I think you're onto something there. And the, you know, the idea of documenting what you've done helps you set it down. But also letting, documenting what needs to be done on that helps as well.

If you're using a robot, it's just it even helps more because now it knows that you have unfinished work on this. Then I think the bonus points is to say, okay, in my next segment, I'm going to do this. And that's the beginning of that shift. I also think, like when you talk about, like I finish a hard session and then I go into social media or things that, like you said,

things that you can do but aren't urgent enough to merit interoperable. of this important system you have, of the intentional work you want to do. I feel like that is another opportunity for context and mode shift when you write it down, okay, take a look at your energy level. I just worked really hard on these three blog posts. I think they're really good, but I don't have it in me to write a newsletter at this moment.

So then I've got this hatch. Okay, every day at the top of my note, I've got these little boxes you know um one says s or shop one says b for bonsai and one says e for exercise and and they are sitting there as an escape valve throughout the day so i finish writing these blog posts and i'm like okay you know what my brain is a little cooked right now if i go out and plane a board and cut a joint for an hour i will come back and i will write a killer newsletter and so I don't have that in the ideal week. It's not the plan, but my day is built in a way and I'm flexible enough in my life now.

Back when I was a trial lawyer, this wasn't as easy. Then I'm like, okay, I'm hitting the escape valve for the shop now. Or I'm hitting the escape valve to go trim a tree. And I do that two or three times a day as I work through the day and I come back and I feel refresh. And guess what I do when I come back? I interstitial journal. I do it again.

So you got a whole bunch of journal entries. How many are you creating every day? I have thousands in my day one. Thousands of, I think, I don't know. But a lot. And these are not there for future me to go back and ponder and read upon. They're a tool I use to get through the day. But when I come back from the shop, I say, wow, I feel really refreshed.

That was great. Next time I'm out there, I want to cut the other joint. Now I'm going to write a newsletter. And then I go conquer that. And it's just a process that allows you to transition to do a mode shift between tasks that really works well for me. I like that. I guess the way that I've been implementing transition rituals has kind of been location-based. And even if you look at my ideal week template, I've got usually...

work and then there'll be usually an exercise block in between the next work block. Sometimes there'll be multiple blocks because I'm going to be in different places. I remember back when I first started writing and was working with the Asian efficiency team and I didn't have an office at home. I would go from like coffee shop to the library to coffee shop, whatever, just like go write for these short bursts and then get in my car and go somewhere else. I've actually been doing that a little bit more recently. And even the work blocks, the creative blocks, those I've been going to the co-working space or they're actually, they just built a new library in my town, which is really,

really nice. So I like going there to get some writing done. There's just something. Maybe it's because end of school and all my kids are homeschooled. Our house is just kind of crazy all the time. So I've been getting out. But then like the running blocks that are on there, I just continue that location-based reset, basically between the different modes. So I'll get done writing at the library

or the co-working space. And it's a two-block walk to the YMCA. And that's where I'll, I keep my stuff. It was like another $8 a month to have a permanent locker there and keep my running stuff. They've got a laundry service. So when I get done, I throw it in the bin. They wash it and they put it back in the locker for me. So it's ready to go for next time.

And I use those periods of like walking to the Y and getting not having to carry my gym bag with me. Like those sorts of things are my resets. And I can't tell you how awesome it feels. like it's such a small thing, right? But I can walk into the Y with just my water bottle. And I can put my running stuff on, go outside, run along the trails by the river. It sort of feels like a boss move. Like if Mike had unlimited funds, he'd still be doing this because it's so cool.

It makes me feel so good. And that is a transition ritual. You know, what I would say, like I know there's people listening to this, they don't have that luxury. and, you know, as a practicing lawyer, I'd work on the Smith case, and then I'd work on the Jones case. I still did transition rituals between that because it helped me to disengage my brain from the problem that Smith had and re-engage my brain with the problem that Jones had. And you can do this if you're sitting at one desk all day.

I don't know. I just, I feel like we didn't cover that enough in the past episode. And I would encourage people to experiment with it from my experience, interstitial journaling is the power move here. There's a lot of ways to do it. You can literally write it on a scrap, a legal pad at the end of the day, throw it away. I don't think its value is necessarily as a historical artifact. Its value is in the making. And just give it a try. Let me know what you think. All right. Challenge accepted. I know Michael build a script in day one and have it very, very well-regulated, but it doesn't have to be that fancy.

Yeah. Well, I know exactly what this is going to look like. And of course, it's going to be an obsidian for me. I use the daily notes for journaling already anyways. That's like a hidden gem, I feel like, with obsidian. And I'm sure other apps have the same sort of thing. But using it for journaling already anyways, I may as well just trigger the automation, write it out, help my brain turn the page.

That makes perfect sense. One thing you said that causal little reaction is automation. you have to write it out. Don't let it like analyze what you've done and write it for you. No, you have to stop and mentally type the letters or speak the words into dictation. But you have to be the agent of this transition, not something else. Yeah, when I say automation, just for clarity, because if people are interested, maybe this is too far down the rabbit hole.

But I have some automations already for like anywhere in obsidian. I can run a keyboard shortcut, pop up a prompt, you know, and capture a gratitude entry that gets put on my daily note. I'm thinking the exact same thing for the interstitial journaling. It'll be an interstitial journaling section, and it'll put in the time codes, and I'll just have all that stuff, create the running log. And I do think it will be valuable to go back and look at that at the end of the day as well.

Yeah, I keep it. But I don't want someone listening to feel like they have to. Yes. Yeah, exactly. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Keeper Security. Between work, banking, and shopping, you have a lot of logins to keep track of. Keeper stores everything securely in one place and organizes it so you can log in within seconds. Keeper is a password manager that creates strong, unique passwords for all of your accounts,

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sent you. Once again, that is Keeperssecurity.com slash focused. Our thanks to Keepers Security for their support of the Focus Podcast and all of Relay. All right, got any shiny new objects, David. Yes, Mike. I have a sound for you. Ooh, music to my ears. All right. I am a serial clicky keyboard failure. I have tried multiple times to get one to work and they never work. Stephen Robles over Mac Power Users loves his. You love yours. And on my Apple keyboard,

the colon key failed, you know? Just failed. And like I popped it open, cleaned it, put it back together. It was like a $200 keyboard I bought like three years ago. And I was just frustrated. So I was going to get another one. But then I started to look in again.

And the, and they have a key crunch. keyboard now that is so much it is my spirit keyboard it's called the key cron k2 h e have you seen these mike yes this is the one with the walnut on the sides i came across this and i was like david's going to get this keyboard yes it's so pretty it fits right into my aesthetic um doesn't have a volume knob on it uh it doesn't obviously have a touch id but you know the key kron launcher software is so good. Like I've remapped the N-key to F-13, so that's my dictation button now. And like, it's just, it's working. I've been using it a week. And that's the longest I've

ever used to click a keyboard without giving up on it. And I kind of like this one. It does make noise, as you heard when I put it to the microphone, but it's not really loud. It's got magnetic switches in it. Have you ever used a magnetic switch keyboard? I have not, although that sounds really appealing. Yeah, you can you can actually tune how sensitive the keyboard is because in the app you can say, okay, like when I barely touch it, trigger it. I can, or I can make it, you got a full press to trigger. You actually have control over that, which is kind of cool, but I've just left it at the default. I didn't want to turn this into a big thing. If this sticks around, I'm not going to be replacing the key caps or the switches. I just want a keyboard. I'm not that.

to keyboards, but this looks beautiful, makes me smile when I look at it, and it's been working for me. And I've been getting over the lack of touch ID. I 3D printed a little box where I can put an Apple keyboard in if I want to use the touch ID. But I haven't even gotten that out. I just, when I need it, I just type my password and it's not the end of the world. Or if I'm wearing my Apple Watch that day, I can click a button. But yeah, for the first time, I feel like I may be sticking with a mechanical keyboard. Well, this is the one that I thought, if anything is going to get you to stick with a mechanical keyboard,

this is the one. It does look great. Yeah. And the magnetic switches, I've been curious about those. Problem is I already have like four clicking keyboards that were pretty expensive. So haven't, hasn't tempted me enough to pull the trigger on this one, but it does look great. And a side benefit was my Apple keyboard was the full keyboard with the number pad on the side, which was occasionally nice, but really not that required.

And having my mouse closer to my keyboard actually does feel better. It's kind of nice. So I like that too. KeyCron, I think, is like kind of the Goldilocks for me in the sense that it's not a really bespoke fancy keyboard. But it's not junk either. And the price is about right. I paid like $120 for this. And I like it.

So I'm doing it. We'll see. I guess we'll check in in a month. See if it's still on my desk. Now, Key Crown makes good stuff. If you're looking for a quality mechanical keyboard as like a first, first keyboard, this is the one that I would recommend to just about everybody. And I think 99.9% of people would never go beyond this.

Yeah, that's probably me. That's probably me. Yeah, the really expensive ones, they're not that much better. They're just that much more fiddlier. And this one's nice because it's got Bluetooth in it, so I don't have to keep it cable to the computer. Yeah. And it has LED lights, but I turn all that off. I don't know what that stuff.

That's nice. What is your shining new object, Mike? Yeah, well, we had a garage sale recently, and I sold a whole bunch of leftover audio video stuff. I've had a bunch of it over the years. I've dialed in my home office studio now. So I tried a bunch of things, had a bunch of stuff and had it out in this garage sale. And really, you know, garage sailors are not tech people for the most part. And so I had some like microphones out there, my old power beats, stuff like that. And most people didn't even look at it. They just want baby clothes and lawn furniture.

But somebody came by who happened to live down the road from us, actually in our neighborhood. So I guess I should talk about this rummage sale. It's a huge rummage sale. It's like a hundred different houses. It's like the biggest one in the area. And it happens to be right in our neighborhood. If you're not part of the rummage sale, it's really annoying because there's just so many people all over the place.

When you participate, it's great, though. So we use it as like a spring cleaning sort of a thing. Anyways, this guy comes by and he's looking at these microphones and we start talking. Turns out he's a musician. And I was like, oh, you know what? I have this Neumann KMS 105 that I've had for a long time. But I don't use anymore. I have a different microphone at my desk because I think it just looks better if it's going

to be on YouTube. The audio quality. Actually, I think this one sounds a little bit better for my voice anyways. So I've been using this one for years at the other desk. I've got, you know, microphones. I have plenty of high quality of microphones. I don't. And so the noyman has been sitting in the case.

I was using it as a travel microphone for a little while, but I really didn't have a reason to keep it. And he's like, oh, man, I'm a vocalist. This would be, this would be perfect for me. Let me see if I can swing it, you know, and because I lived right down the road, I'll come back and I'll let you know. So I get a text message later.

And he's like, I can't, I can't afford to buy it off of you, but would you be interested in a trade? I was like, well, what do you have in mind? And he had this acoustic guitar, which I play guitar, but I primarily play bass at a church now, so I haven't played a whole lot of guitar. This acoustic guitar, there's a story behind this. It's a custom-made guitar. It's a Gibson Spruce body with a Martin Mahogany neck.

And guitar players will probably know what that means. Martin is the neck of a Martin is like the best feeling neck on a guitar I have ever come across. Yeah. So it's kind of like exactly what I would look for in an acoustic guitar. It's made by this guy in the area who like builds these guitars, builds a couple of them a year. And he builds them specifically for like worship pastors at churches. The inside piece of the darker wood around the sound hole, that's actually. olive wood from Jerusalem.

It's got a custom pearl inlays on the fretboard. It's a beautiful guitar. I'm looking at a picture and it is a beautiful guitar. The thing you don't see in this picture is that he also put in an onboard preamp for it, which is

like a $300 preamp. So I definitely made out on this deal. And it's great. It's gotten me to just crack open the guitar case and noodle around on on a guitar again at home. Most of the time I'm I'm practicing because I'm trying to learn a song on the bass or something like that. And it's it's kind of nice to have an instrument that is just so enjoyable to play, even if it's not, you know, I'm trying to do my scales or

anything like that. It's just something I do purely for fun at this point. Yeah. In the woodworking community, they have a term of grail tool. Like, which your grail hand playing. You know, this is the Grail guitar for you. I can't imagine you're ever getting a better one. No, I love it. Your in-game guitar. It's beautiful, Mike. All right, what do you read these days? We are reading a book for Bookworm, which is not the typical, like, productivity style book. It's called what you're made for by a guy named George Ravelling. Does that name ring a bell for you? No. Should it? Probably not. I had a... never heard of him either, but the foreword for the book is written by Michael Jordan.

Okay. So I was like, who is this guy? It turns out he has quite a history. He was one of the first African-American collegiate basketball players in a time of segregation, became one of the first African-American coaches. He's had a very successful life, but has had to kind of fight every state. step of the way. And he's got connected with a lot of really famous people and made a lot of impact in a lot of people's lives. Very interesting guy. And Ryan Holiday met him at like a San

Antonio Spurs practice and is like, this guy has some amazing stories. We need to get this in a book. So he helped him publish this. Now I'm inspired. I think I'm going to have to read this one. It is a fascinating book. The chapters are broken down by what you're made for, right? And so like the first chapter is to be a trailblazer. And he's sharing his own personal stories of how he was a trailblazer. He decided when he got to college at Villanova, basketball was kind of his ticket out of a bad situation that he wasn't as he couldn't dominate people like he did in high school. So he figured, I have to get really good at something nobody else is good at. It happened to be rebounding. So he's I'm going to become the best rebounder.

He ended up working on all that, like creating all these rebounding drills, all that kind of stuff. He's got a whole section in there about how he loves to learn things and read, talks about how he's got 2,500 books in his house. I'll scroll away in different nooks and grannies. Like, that is, that's my house. Just a really, really interesting, interesting guy.

And I kind of like this whole, this whole, like the whole vibe of this book. Yeah. I feel like, uh, even though I, I'm not, I don't know, I'm not, I'm not young. I'm not, I guess middle age, whatever. But I've kind of always thought that there are a lot of older people who have a lot of wisdom to share, a lot of really cool stories that younger people can learn from, even though I guess I'm technically not, you know, a young person anymore.

But it's kind of a shame how like they don't get the chance to share those stories as often. So those are some of like my favorite. conversations is finding somebody and just hearing their story. That's what this book feels like. You're just hearing George's story and his stories are fantastic. I'm buying it, Mike. Thanks for the recommendation. I don't even need to wait for the episode on this one. No, you don't. It's good. I am finally picking up an aspirational book that I've had now for a couple years and wanted to read. It's called The Morality of Happiness by Julia Annis. I've talked often in relation to my productivity field guide stuff about Greek philosophy and how it was an interesting time because

they were really thinking about how to be happy and virtuous. That was their goal. You know, for one of the first times in the human experience that we had enough comfort to be able to think, okay, we're here. What do we do with it? Kind of to get back to my point earlier in the episode. And this is a groundbreaking book. It's dense. It's thick. It's very academic. But I bought it aspirationally because I felt like I really want to read this book. And I finally got started. This is going to be a background process for me. Like when we talk about books in the future, I will still be reading this book.

It's going to take me a while to get through it. But I have cracked it open. I've got through the first section and I'm really enjoying it. And if you're interested in those kinds of concepts and you're willing to dive deep, the morality of happiness by Julia Annis is my recommendation. Awesome. All right, King. We are the Focus Podcast.

Thank you, everybody, for listening. We want to thank our sponsors today. That's our friends over at Vitally and Keeper. If you are a deep focus subscriber, stick around. We're going to check in on Mike's new meditation practice, see how things are going. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.