Focused - 264: The Accountability-Shaped Hole

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Welcome to Focus to Productivity Podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my dear friend, Mike Schmitz. How are you today, Mike? I'm doing great. How are you, David? Good. I'm glad you're feeling better. I'm ready to make some good focused podcast stuff. Before we get into it today, it's a feedback episode and thanks again, gang, for delivering. We got some great feedback questions that we're going to stump each other with today.

I just wanted to call it real quick my YouTube channel. I have been putting real effort into it the last three or four months. getting regular videos up there. I'd love you go see it. I put one up that I think is really fitting for the focus audience. It's about something really close to my heart, the Materium Super About Opus thing. And Mike, I almost pulled that video the night before it went out because it's very personal and just kind of a thing I do that kind of makes me, I don't know, makes me sound a little pretentious, I think, but it's something I do. And I let it ship anyway, and I got a bunch of really nice emails from people that really enjoyed it and got some

something out of it. So I think if anybody would enjoy this, it would be the focused audience, go check it out. I'll link it in the notes and sign up for my YouTube channel. Yeah, I'm glad that you're making progress on this. I know this has been a recurring theme on the podcast. Glad you're getting some consistency behind that channel. I think this is long overdue. Glad to see it. Getting some life. Yeah, I got a helper on that. And I think the, you know, and we're going to talk about this in one of the questions today. I think being committed to somebody else makes you more accountable sometimes, you know. Absolutely. And guess what, gang, it is September. And you know what that means, right?

Absolutely. It's time for Relay for St. Jude. It is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. It means we're asking the Relay community to come together and support the lifesaving work of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. This is one of my favorite things that we get to do every single year because St. Jude is just such an incredible organization. And we want to invite you to join Relay and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in recognizing Childhood Cancer Awareness Month before St. Jude opened in 1962, childhood cancer was largely considered incurable. But today, thanks in part to better therapies at St. Jude has helped to develop more than 80% of U.S. childhood cancer patients survive. And St. Jude cares for some of the world's sickest children, regardless of their race,

ethnicity, ethnicity, beliefs, or ability to pay. It's patients, the customized care they need to treat child like cancer and other life-threatening diseases no matter what barriers they face. And because of its supporters, St. Jude can provide children with cutting-edge treatments not covered by insurance. You know, I was with Stephen.

We were at Mackstock of all places, your place, and Stephen said, I'm thinking about doing this thing with St. Jude, and I don't know if it'll work or not. And now we've been doing it eight years. They've raised so much money to help it out. And gang, it's such an easy check to write. You know,

there's a thing about when you help somebody out how much it helps yourself and you're giving money to a group that helps kids with cancer. It's like it's such a simple thing. Daisy and I actually we say for it every month. It's kind of like on our plan, our financial plan. One of the nice things we get with our work is Daisy works for Disney and Disney does matching. So every year, actually she's the one who makes the contribution and we double everything that we give because the company matches it. So not only should you think about giving St. Jude some money, you should look into that. Maybe your employer will help out as well. Yeah, I think it's safe to say that that worked out. That was a good idea.

Yeah. Raised a ton of money so far. And let's keep it going, gang. So this September, help St. Jude give kids with cancer, hope for more tomorrow's. Again, we're inviting the Relay community to help us reach our goal. It's $700,000 this September for Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. As always, there are multiple ways to support the campaign. You can make a donation at St. Jude.org slash relay today, and your donation can unlock some fun rewards. Donors making an individual gift of $60 or more will be eligible to redeem a digital bundle of campaign-themed wallpapers and a MacOS screensaver. And donors making a gift of $100 or more

can redeem the 2026 Western-themed sticker pack. So give those kids more tomorrow's. Go to St.jude.org slash relay to donate or start a fundraiser of your own today. All right, Mike. We got a lot of feedback. Let's just dive in. So the first one is from Mark, and my heading for this is capacity, just another target. So Mark wrote, the discussion of three or four good creative hours was a relief at first. Then it became one more target to miss.

Some days I get two useful hours and I feel as if I failed before lunch. how do you use capacity as a limit without turning it into a score? We've had a lot of discussion recently in the show about that scorebook and metrics and Mark hits home with this question. He does. And I just got through a week where my capacity got thrown out the window. Yeah, happens, right? Yep.

So it's kind of a relative term. I don't think you can treat your capacity as something firm that you're going to commit to. a little bit fluid, as you mentioned in the notes. It's not a, not a daily quota that you're trying to hit. Yeah, that was my, my advice back to him. It's like, you got to stop thinking about it, like a quota, because that's not the way it works. It's like, it's a target. It's something you aim for, and, you know, life happens. You do your best. Yeah, you are not a factory trying to crank out widgets. So the whole idea of capacity, I don't know, I have a little bit of, a little bit of recoil when I hear that word now. You know, I just got done reading a book called The Goal, which is all

about the theory of constraints, which is a cool idea, but all of the metaphor in that book is around trying to increase the production of this factory. And I just don't like that, that imagery at all. Well, especially with knowledge work, it just doesn't apply, you know? Yeah. And, you know, a recurring theme on the show is effort, not results. And I think that applies to this question. You know, you do your best, you know, and you don't look at the result, you look at the effort. And did you give the most important, the best available attention that day? You know, and if you did, whether it was four hours or 30 minutes, then you're doing good. You know, don't beat yourself up.

The question is, you know, is that effort? Like if you get through a day and you found that rather than try to do the hard work, you spent the whole day, you know, I don't know, goofing off an email or in my case, let's just say hypothetically, vibe coding up an app that you're not sure you even need. That's a problem, you know. Think about the important stuff. Are you putting effort into it? If you are, you're doing it right. And I think that's as far as you need to go with that, Mark. I would not give yourself that goal of hitting a target every day. It just, it's a fool's errand. Yeah, I think the, the, the, thing when you make a any sort of number, a target, you end up trying to get to that specific point.

And the phrase comes to mind, progress, not perfection. You really just want to do a little bit more, a little bit better in the right direction with what you're going towards. So I guess depending on when you would want to apply this, I would say the numbers really don't matter at all. It's really the trends that you want to be looking at, especially if you're early on your focused journey. I don't know where Mark is at here. But if you're trying to establish a baseline, you know, you hear people talk about, well, I can only do four hours of creative work. So you may have that four hour capacity in mind when you get started, but maybe you can only do 30 to 45 minutes of a real focus work at the beginning. I would just, you know, recognize, okay, I did 30 minutes.

And then the next day, maybe I did 35. And as long as that's trending in the right direction, And you should feel happy about that. You shouldn't measure backwards from that four-hour target and be like, I'm not there yet. Yeah. So you bring up a good point. I think part of it is the muscle strong enough for four hours, right? Yep.

And so you got to build it. And so that's the first piece. But the second piece, even if the muscle is strong enough, you know, the universe, you know, what does it say man plans, God laughs, right? You know. I have a phrase, life will life you. Yeah.

So some days it just doesn't work even if you have all the muscles. But this led to me to come up with a question for you, Mike, I wanted to talk about, because I think it's related. How do we recognize a low capacity day and what do we do in response? Like, I know that you've had some struggles with stuff going on, you're moving, you've got, you know, things in your life. How do you recognize that low capacity day and what happens when you recognize it? Oh, we can talk about it. I mean, I wrote a newsletter about it. My wife broke her leg.

Yeah. Shortly after we recorded with Cat Mulvill. She broke her tibia and her fibula. She now has a titanium rod in her leg and a long road to recovery. When that happened, you know, all of the plans I had that week immediately got thrown out the window. So this is a little bit different than maybe a low capacity day, but I'll just talk about how I manage that. It is true, though. Like when life happens to you, then suddenly production is going to slow down.

Yes, yes. So the way I handled that really was triage. And this is the newsletter that I wrote. I'll put a link in the show notes that people want to dig into this. There's a, it can be traced back. The word triage can be traced back to a surgeon during the Napoleonic Wars, where the officers were wounded and they were being treated as they came in. And traditionally, they were treated by rank. This one has a higher rank, so it gets treated first. And there was just too much to do. So the surgeon flipped the order and basically started looking at, you know, which soldiers are probably going to be okay whether they receive immediate medical care, which soldiers are probably going to die even if they get immediate medical care. And then the third category is which ones do the immediate medical care make the difference in whether they live or die? That's where I need to focus my efforts. That's kind of what I did with the stuff that was on there. Everything took second place to, I need to get my wife to the hospital. for her surgery. I need to be there when she comes out. I need to be there for whatever she needs. And then I was in the middle of a cohort at the same time. And my first thought was, well, maybe I can

make this cohort work. And I was like, no, that I quickly dismissed that. I sent the email to everybody and was like, you know, I have to modify the schedule. I'm sorry about that. And I thought everybody would be mad at me. I thought some people who I never, you know, don't have the relationship with, would ask for refunds. That didn't happen. Everyone was really accommodating. So that kind of filled in, you know, whenever I had some time, I was able to fill, I was able to do those obligations. And then all the other stuff that really was, it didn't have to happen that week. That stuff basically just didn't happen. All of the YouTube videos, all of the course videos that I was working on, I want to make progress on that stuff, but it just didn't happen.

And you know what? That was okay. Because the main thing was, I got to take care of my wife. Yeah. I mean, that's it. That's it. I had a similar experience in the labs with Daisy had her heart attack a few years ago. I had an event planned and that's the only event I've ever canceled in labs and I just told them the truth and actually heard from several members that are cardiologists, you know, asking me, all right, what can I do to help? You know, so it's just, you know, understand that people are much more forgiving. But I also think the capacity thing can be handled in advance and like you had an emergency capacity problem, but often we just have days that we have less capacity because you've got a lot on your plate. Maybe you've got extra meetings that

day or you've got just, you know, things going on in your life that are going to require you to to not have as much time to focus on the deep work. And I think that is absolutely predictable on the week level. And when I do my week plan, that's one of the questions I ask myself as I look at each day. It's like, what are the, you know, one or two days this week that I'm just not going to get much actual deep work done, you know, what are the low capacity days? And I know that going in. I also look at the opposite for high capacity days, you know, days where I don't have a lot of recording going on and I can really just sit at my desk and do hard work. And going in, I know, you're like, oh yeah, this is Tuesday. This day is going to be really busy and I'm not going to get a lot of, you know, the deep work done.

And that's okay. And I don't, that way I have the expectation going in. I don't feel disappointed at the end. but I also hold myself more accountable on the days where I don't have a lot because, you know, the down days are the one where it would be easy to go just like get lost in the wood shop all afternoon or, you know, just do something else when I really probably need to do a little work. So, so I think, you know, planning forward capacity is really useful to Mark. So I would look at it. Now, some people tell me they can do this on a week on a month basis. I can't, I can't at the beginning of month and say, oh yeah, that day is definitely going to be a hard day. But I think at the week level, you have a better idea.

You know, it's actually on your plate for the week and what days work and don't. So I would recommend on Sunday night or Friday afternoon or Monday morning, do a kind of a capacity audit for your week and see if that doesn't help. And as always, don't beat yourself up on any of this stuff. We're all doing our best. What do you think about the use of numbers with that? When you're doing the capacity audit, I think the way I do that is I just see, you know, if I've got a screencast online, that I got to do this week. I just know that that's going to eat up probably a day, day and a half worth of time that I would have spent making other things. So I just try not to put as much on my schedule, but I don't have any formal process for that. I'm not saying this is, you know, going to account for 12 hours. And so I've only got, you know, 14 other hours that I can assign to this type of activity. It's more just a feel thing. Yeah, it's not that scientific, but like on days where you've got back-to-back recordings,

even with a couple hours in between, you're not going to get any real work done. At least that's my experience. Whereas days that are widely open, then I think I can really like dig in and have, you know, six-hour block without an eruption. I used to, and we could talk about this on the show, I used to track the, what was it, I used to call them the move the needle hours, you know, where like how much time does I spend being a lawyer, how much time did I spend, you know, doing Mac Sparky stuff, like actual production work. And it was a good barometer for me as I was kind of like working on those muscles,

but I don't do that anymore. I feel like I'm just fine. You know, I know when I'm doing well and when I'm not. And when I'm not, I can kind of bring some of those tools back into the fray, but I don't feel them that I need to track moving the needle hours anymore, although I do think of that as moving the needle work, if that makes sense. the metrics that you choose to focus on should support more intentional application of your time, energy, and attention. But you shouldn't direct your time, energy, and attention towards boosting the metric. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this whole question from Mark came out of that episode about metrics, and I feel like I did a lousy job of it because that show was inspired a lot

by my Thien Wins book, The Score. And so I just say it one more time, that book is so good. And I just, I think Mike should read it for Bookworm, frankly. I'm going to just make a real pitch for that. But if metrics and things are, is a thing that concerns you or you feel like you get hung up on them, that is an excellent read. And just, just, I don't know, I keep saying it. It's a good book.

Go check it out. Julie wrote it, chronotype advice when you do not own the calendar. You and I always are talking about your prime time, your productivity prime time, and we are these two precious creators who have a lot of control over our schedule. From the year of 1992 to 2022, I did not. I was at the whim of judges and other lawyers and clients, and it was rough. But it's easy to forget. And Julie set me right.

She says, I know, basically she told me, okay, Mr. Fancy Creator. She said, I know my best hours are early, but those hours belong to getting children ready and commuting. My employer controls the rest of the day is knowing my chronotype useful if I cannot move my best work into the next window. You know, and I thought, well, Julie, thanks for calling me out. She was nice about it, but yeah, she's right. It's not always that easy, right?

It is not. although I would say that the chronotype, ideally you want to align with that. Sometimes you can't and sometimes that's okay. The way I transitioned from working with the family business to everything that I do online was I started getting up an hour earlier to write before I went in to the office. I am not a morning person and I started getting up at 5 a.m. And it was difficult at first. It got easier as I went.

I prefer not to get up at 5 a.m. But that was a season where that's where the time existed. So that's what I did. I think we can use the chronotype as an excuse sometimes. It's like, well, I'm just not feeling it right now. And you do, I mean, there's truth to following the energy and aligning this stuff as much as you can. But sometimes you just got to do the best you can with what you got to work with. Yeah.

Agreed. one of the things I told Julie in my reply was about borrowing against the future. And usually that said kind of in a negative connotation. Like you're working really late. I remember when we were in trial, sometimes we'd be up at 1 a.m. And I would tell the associate, look, we're just borrowing against tomorrow at this point. We're not at our best and we're going to lose sleep and we're going to wake up late tomorrow when we could have been doing better work.

And, you know, that's a thing. But I think in chronotype things, I think you can borrow against, the afternoon or the morning. So if your if your prime time is in the morning and and talk to your boss about that, say like, look, I'd really like to do my, my productive work in the morning. Can we, can I push meetings to the afternoon instead, you know? And look, if you're telling your boss, you're thinking about being more productive for them, they're going to listen. And I think you can, you can borrow against, you know, later in the day to kind of customize it. So I would try that. I would still try to find 30 minutes.

I would just, I would work at it. I understand it's difficult. I've raised children. I've had a job where you had very little control. But even just little wins of 30 minutes could really make a difference. So I wouldn't give up the ship. I would not throw in the towel. I agree.

And I'll also say that my getting up at 5 a.m., the reason that that worked was not just because I started getting up earlier and made no other adjustments. Yeah, sure. To your point about borrowing from tomorrow, if you're going to do that, you have to account for things on the other side. Yeah. So that's the one thing I would not do is just start setting the alarm earlier. Make sure that you're still getting the rest that you need and showing up sharp.

I think any productivity advice that relies on like force of will is probably not going to work. And just saying, well, I'm just going to start getting two hours. sleep a day. Well, buddy, that's not going to work out for you. Yep. And I've had to learn that lesson the hard way because I was diagnosed with epilepsy. One of the things that can trigger a seizure is not getting enough rest. So I got to be real careful that I'm doing everything I can to get a good night's sleep, getting eight hours a night. In some ways, that's been a pain because, well, it'd be nice to just borrow an extra hour here or there. But if it means that I'm not able to the next day or I shouldn't get behind the wheel and drive, then I'm not able to do that. So it's

kind of a forced constraint that I've had to learn to deal with. And I think that actually is a lesson that everyone can benefit from applying. Yeah, you've mentioned that before. And you definitely have higher stakes for lack of sleep than most of us. But I don't want to belittle the rest of us that aren't dealing with that because the lack of sleep is equally a problem. And I think that's something that you just got to just got to accept that there are minimum base values. Every time I meet somebody who's like, well, I can get by and five hours of sleep. I just don't buy it. You know, maybe there are some people that they can do it. But I feel like you're taking years off your life, in my opinion. I mean, I'm not a doctor, but it just seems silly. Get enough sleep.

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One more time, gustow.com slash focus. And our thanks to Gusto for their support of the Focus Podcast and Olive Relay. Keith wrote in about delegation and the management tax. He said, I use Kathy Campbell's Delegation Matrix and handed off two tasks I dislike. All right, good job, Keith. He says the work is getting done, but giving direction, checking it, answering questions, takes nearly as long as doing it myself. How long should I expect the management tax to last before deciding the delegation failed?

Keith, you're so close. Yep, yeah. Delegation tax is a real thing, though. Yeah, yeah. It costs time before it saves time, right? You have to accept that. And I do think that you have to look at thyself in this stuff. And I'll tell you, because I am a sinner here, I used to work with a lot of paralegals.

And it took me years to realize that they weren't all dumb. I was just the world's worst delegator. And like, I did not want to pay the tax. I just wanted to say, this is a problem. I need you to do it for me. And I just need it done exactly the way I do it, but I'm not going to tell you how that is. you know and to simplify and I think you have to really look at and when you're when you're bringing on somebody you have to distinguish good training versus bad handoff and and you know

look at thyself there because that's very important every time this comes up I always talk about make videos sit down with them because I've done it I've tried to do it the hard you know the easy way quote unquote and never works was the old Stephen Covey fast as slow and slow is fast and have you heard that one Mike that completely applies to delegation. You've got to go slow when you're getting people started. Yeah, I heard at one point there's a number for the point where if you are going to delegate a repeating task where it's worth it for you to continue to delegate it. And the multiplier versus how long it takes you to do it versus doing it yourself was something ridiculous.

like a hundred times. Yeah. Delegating something, you know, should take longer, but we don't have an idea for how much longer it's going to take. And really what that quote was saying is, even if it takes 100 times longer to delegate it, then it does for you to do it, it's still worthwhile in the long run. Yeah. So stick with it would be my advice.

And a couple of things, because I'm in the middle. We'll talk about this later, but I'm working with a VA. and so I've noticed a couple of patterns whenever I try to delegate things. If I try to delegate something and I explain something and it keeps coming back wrong, I don't assume that the person on the other end is not smart enough to figure this out. I'm saying I have not been clear yet about what exactly I want this to look like. Yeah. And the thing that helps the most with working with my VA and helping her to understand

this is what I want this to look like is recording those feedback videos like you were talking about. Not even here's the whole SOP, the whole process. Yeah. Now here, you know, this is what I want you to do from now on. Literally every time I make changes to a LinkedIn carousel or something, I'm recording feedback about my thought process behind what I changed, what I like, what I don't like. And I'm using Screen Studio to do that.

I can add zooms. I can add highlights. It's really, really simple. I'm not sure, do you use Screen Studio at all? Yeah, yeah. Okay,

it's great. It's like Loom Plus Plus. You can create these shareable links. So I'll record the video. I'll put it in Slack. And after a couple of revisions, she's really starting to pick up on it. So yeah,

there is a cost to this. It's worth paying. It's going to take longer than you think maybe it should. But just be as clear as you can, be patient. And I think the key for me is assume the responsibility for when it doesn't work and see how you can maybe be a little bit more clear going forward. And I'd tell Keith, the delegation is another muscle, right? And the first time you do it, it's going to be a lot harder than the second or the third time.

And you're going to learn doing it a few times, you know, what the common questions are. So you'll be able to kind of address those if you want. And there's a whole other discussion on this, we actually have a future episode about, working with AI and is it a distraction? And I think that delegating to AI is a whole another can of worms that is somewhat related. But we'll get to that on another episode. Simon wrote in dependence on accountability. I thought this was a fascinating question. External accountability works extremely well for me, he says. The problem is that I sometimes cannot act without it. Is that a weakness to fix or should I stop fighting the way I am

wired and build more accountability in my life. He acknowledges that he needs external accountability. I talked earlier about that YouTube thing by getting someone to help me. Suddenly, I'm doing more of it. So obviously, it works for me too. But I never thought of it as a weakness. What do you think of that question? It's a fascinating question. And I don't think it is a weakness. My brain immediately goes to the conversation that we had with Kat, because she talked briefly about the four tendencies by Gretchen Rubin. And she broke down those different categories of people and their response to commitments that they make to others. And if accountability to other people is something that really works for you, I would guess that it's probably linked to the way

that you're wired. I think Kat described that, or Gretchen Rubin describes that as the obligor, or you want to follow through on the commitments that you make to other people, that's not good or bad. That's not a personality flaw. That's recognizing that this specific mechanism works for me. And I think in general, productivity advice really is just, the approach to productivity advice in general should be do more of what works and ignore what doesn't. Yeah, I actually wrote, I wrote time back.

I'm like, look, don't complain about something that's working for you, It's good. Just go with it, you know. If you want to be less reliant on it, I had a couple ideas. One is, you know, try a few lower stakes items without accountability and see how you do. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. And I also thought, this might be a thing that you may want to use AI for. Like if you use a frontier model and tell it you're working on a thing and tell it to be your accountability partner,

if you don't want other humans involved, you could do that. That doesn't work for me personally. My experiments with it, I find AI to be a nag very quickly. I don't like it talking to me and telling me what I should be doing. I feel like it's a dumb robot and it shouldn't be doing that. But for some people, I think it works. And then the more I think about this question, it always comes back to the common thing I talk about in this show is reflection, right?

you know, what you get with external accountability is reflection from a third party. I think often when you can't do it without that, it means that you may not have enough of a reflective process yourself. And I didn't ask Simon about this, so I'm not throwing any arrows here. But just, you know, I think if you've got a good weekly review, a good quarterly review, and you're giving yourself tough questions and reflecting on them yourself, that fills the accountability shaped whole in your life a lot of times. And that can solve the problem. My own experience, like with this YouTube thing, was it wasn't enough.

I reflected on it every quarter and didn't do a damn thing. Finally, I got someone to work with me and it helped out. So I'm not saying this is going to solve your problems, but I do think that a reflective process can actually help if you're looking for other options. But if you've got a method that works, don't ever think of that as a weakness. It's just the tool you're using. Yeah, exactly. That's it right there.

It's just a tool. Grace wrote in one roadblock three categories. This was from Katz episode that came in afterwards. She says the logical, biological, and psychological categories help me see why another productivity system was not fixing the problem. My roadblock seems to live in all three categories. I am tired. The next action is vague, and I'm afraid the result will be bad. Sorry.

It was funny. Yes, yes, Grace, we are all with you. Which part should I address first? The sympathetic laugh. Yeah. Well, Kat would say start with the logical, then go to the biological, and then finally the psychological. These might be three different roadblocks, by the way. It's not just one roadblock that's keeping you from taking action.

So maybe this is one roadblock, three categories, but the one. way it's worded, I would actually think this is maybe three different roadblocks. And sort of like Dave Ramsey talks about with the debt snowball, you pay off the smallest debt first, like get some momentum, tackle the easiest problem first. That's what I told her. Go for the cheapest one first. Whichever one's the easiest one to fix, do that. Yep, which Kat would say is going to be the logical one. Yeah. So if I were to take this and the way I would approach these specific roadblocks, maybe this is helpful. Maybe this is not. I don't know. But if I am tired, I would see if I can't do something to increase the quantity and the quality of my sleep. I feel like the next day you would be able to

get feedback on that roadblock. The next action is vague. That one might be a little bit tougher because you can try to define it, but maybe you define it a little bit wrong. But I think you can again, figure that one out and add some specificity to the next action. The one, the one, one I feel like that's going to take the most work is I'm afraid the result will be bad. That one you're going to have to wrestle with. I wrote about that in my newsletter. For me, it came out on that episode, actually. I had some inner turmoil between this competing idea that social media is inherently evil

and I need to be on social media to grow my creator business. And rather than reconcile that, I just kind of avoided it. That's not the case anymore. I'm getting some progress there because I put in the work to reconcile that and ask myself, point blank, do I really believe that I cannot show up on social media in any way, shape, or form without being a hypocrite and making the people close to me mad at me? And when I looked at it that way, it's like, well, obviously, you know, I can figure this out. But I avoided it for a long time.

So that one, I think you might have to untangle a little bit. Yeah, I feel like a lot of the feedback we got in this episode was people inappropriately identifying with one of the blocks. You know, I heard from people saying, well, I'm not logical, so it's always an issue. I can't, I can't logically think these things through or, you know, I get hung up on, you know, psychological issues around work. And I feel like as soon as you start identifying with one of these things, I think that's a mistake. These are just, it's a diagnostic tool. It's like every problem or every project has these three goals or these three potential barriers. And you just diagnose which one is hanging you up and you move on.

You should not grab onto the identity of one of these things and make it a universal rule in your life. And so I don't really like that takeaway from this stuff. You know, just don't look at this stuff so heavy, please. Yeah. I think the immunity to change framework, you know, that's kind of fascinating to me. This is not, you know, why did I not follow through on writing the report that I was supposed to write yesterday? Yeah.

This is more long term. I've struggled with this thing for months, maybe years, and I cannot figure out why. It's a recurring issue. I think that's where this tool can be really valuable. All right. We heard from Tom about the accumulating task list. Yeah, this was interesting. So Tom emailed me directly, but I wanted to get these questions in here.

So Tom says, if I continue to add every interesting idea or thing to look into along with things that need to be done, I get way more tasks than I will ever get to. My biggest issue is during review after a lot of accumulations. it's too much to go through everything and eventually most of the list just stays where it is. So how do you organize your tasks so they're easier to start through during review? And do you call the list down each time and delete things or just move them to a someday maybe list so they're out of the way? I have thoughts. What do you do, Mike? This maybe sounds a little bit, a little bit bad, but I don't really worry about those lists.

And those lists can show up a lot of different places. It can be task lists. It can also be a read later list. That's the thing that came to mind with some of the description here. These sound like, you know, I want to read this article. I want to read this book, whatever. Reminds me of Oliver Bergman. I think it's meditation for mortals where he talks about the read later list as a river of items

that are just flowing before you. And it's okay to just let stuff go, drop off the end. and if something in that river, you know, if you open up your read later list, something at the top, whatever, jumps out to you, then you can pick it up and you can actually engage with it. But just because you captured it into a read later list does not mean you have an obligation to follow through with that. So the larger point for me is that I view all of those lists as sort of recommendation engines, but not lists of things that I absolutely need to do. Yeah, a list of lists. My task management system, I've kind of re-engineered it over the years. And the way it works currently is I have three statuses, the primary statuses. The first is an idea, like something I capture, and that is the recommendation engine. It's just a bunch of stuff in there. And then the next level up is the shelf. That's something that I'm thinking about I might want to actually do. And at any one time, I've got, you know, maybe 10 items on the shelf. And then I have the bench, which is one to three items that I'm actually going to get done. And, you know,

for me, it's just elevating things, you know, from the shelf to the bench and from ideas to shelf. And it's a kind of a random process. This is the thing where I do use AI, though. I occasionally, I have my AI occasionally go through the idealist and call it from things that are now untimely. Like if I wanted to write a blog post about iOS 26 on the verge of us releasing iOS 27, it'll just cut that out because that's not going to happen anymore. it's out of date or it's old or I've moved on. I'm not interested in something. So it's got pretty good at helping me call the junk out so it's easier to filter.

But I have no like attachment. And I am fully aware that everything on the idealist is not going to get done. That's fine, you know. Yeah. The other thing I think is it pertains to tasks. And I think you probably take the same approach there is we both have an analog component, which we treat as the actual list of things that we need to do that day. Yeah.

So whenever we look at the lists of lists, they're really just the recommendations. Hey, based on all the metadata that I have, these are the things that you should really be thinking about today. But just because the task manager that you choose to use says, hey, these are the 10 things that have a due date of today. I know I'm not going to get all 10 of those things done. So I got to pick the three that are most important, put those on the list, and that's what I'm going to focus on.

Yeah, I have more to say about that, too. We got some feedback about that. So we got that coming up in the show. Nice. one more question here from from tom on tracking inputs you want to tackle this one next he said for instance you check email and there are three different emails you need to deal with one urgent one do in a couple days and one interesting to look into how do you add each of those to the tracking system copy and paste it add a link to it do you put them in an inbox and decide right to put them

deal with them right there similar with slack or other messaging systems how do you add details so that you know what's about, but not repeating it at all in your input. It's really an inputs triaging question, like how deep do you go down with it? I have found that I am brutal about putting things into another system. You know, I don't want to go through email and stop and deal with it right then unless it is truly a very immediate thing. every time I try to do that, I end up spending the whole day in the inbox, right? You know, you go off and do a thing and you really lose control of your day.

So, you know, accept that you're not going to deal with everything, the stuff that you can deal. I mean, this again goes to kind of the Stephen Covey stuff and some of the, you know, the getting things done. It's like if you can deal with it quickly, you should deal with it. I actually still believe that for an email. But if it all requires consideration or thought, I push it forward. And if it's something I need research for, I can create a task related to it. I also, my email system has a delay thing where I put it to the afternoon and I can come back. Like sometimes I get an email that I just want to like linger in the, you know, subconscious for a while before I reply.

So I'll delay those and respond to them. but I do not spend a lot of time triaging email. I go through it. It gets dealt with. It gets deleted. It gets archived. So I just do not, I do not process deep things while going through email.

Yeah, I'm not great at email. I'll say that up front. But I'm okay with that. When I process email, I will go through and I will reply if I can do it quick and it's something that needs a reply.

If it's something that needs a little bit more thought, my way to approach this is to flag those items. And then I use the flagged items as the things that when I have an hour long email block and I need to reply, I'll crank through those. However, I still don't get through all of those flagged emails. And that is still okay. I wrote an article a long time ago for this sweet setup about lessons in email from Napoleon, bone apart. A lot of Napoleon in this episode turns out. But he had this process where he would have his secretary hold the mail for two weeks before she actually delivered it to him. And he took great pride in opening those letters and looking at all of the issues that had

resolved themselves. Yeah. I used to do the same thing with lawyers who wrote me urgently and I would just send them a letter back rather than email them. Yeah. Yeah. Just to slow it down. I think there's some truth to that. There's a story about Eisenhower when he got in the White House and they delivered his mail to him. It was in envelopes and he lost his mind a little bit. He's like, guys, I'm the president. You should not be delivering this to me an envelope. You should have gone through it and only given me the ones that I only need to see.

Yeah. And there's something to that. And guess what? With AI, we can kind of get that. I am. Like one thing that has dramatically increased my relationship. with email is AI customer support stuff. Like we did a whole episode on this on the intentional AI podcast, but I built a machine

that essentially deals with repeatable, simple customer support questions for me, which used to be kind of the bane of my existence. I just, I hated going to the website, clicking the refresh password button and all that stuff. Now that just gets done for me. So, I mean, for people who have the ability to hire a personal assistant to do that for them, they've known this for years. but now those of us less fortunate can use AI to do some of that for them too.

But Tom, I feel you. But I can tell you my experience, every time I try to deal with substantive email while going through the email, it derails the day. And so I really firmly try to like my morning email buzz is fast, you know, and that's just the way it's got to be. Yeah, that's the larger point I think to this is if you can, at all. all. There are some professions like sales, for example, that maybe this is a little bit harder to pull off. But the, what's that, that Parkinson's law? I think that says the, the task will expand to fill the time that you give it. Well, no matter how much time you give email, it's not going to be enough. So put a time box around it. Say I'm going to do it for an hour in the morning,

do it for an hour in the afternoon. If you got to extend that, that's fine. But put some parameters around it and then disconnect from it and do the actual work. Yeah. The irony with email, of course, is as soon as you reply, you're inviting another email. Yep, exactly. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Keeper Security. One weak password is like an open door to all the stuff you wouldn't want anyone else getting access to. And Keeper slams that door shut on every account that you have with a strong unique password for each one, so nothing is left exposed. Keeper is a password manager that creates strong unique passwords.

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Our thanks to Keeper Security for their support of the Focus Podcast and all of Relay. All right, Mike, I got a collection of rapid fire questions we've had. I just had some good ones in the queue and I thought, well, let's just go through them. We don't need to give them a full treatment, but let's just answer them quickly. So let's go with it. What's the first thing you protect when every part of life has a legitimate claim on your attention. I don't know how to answer this.

So I take a little bit of issue with the word legitimate claim on your attention because I feel like there are different levels of legitimate claims. I think if I had to pick, I would say that the family stuff comes first, not just my wife breaking her leg and I got to get her to surgery. There are people in my family who think I am weird because I'll prioritize being at the soccer games instead of working the extra hours to make my business grow faster. That's okay. I understand the tradeoffs there, but I know that when I'm on my deathbed, I'm not

going to wish that I had cranked out more videos. So family, then I think when it comes to work, there are probably different levels of that as well. I would say the, I don't know how to describe it, but like the cohorts and the podcast, like the live stuff that I do, that would be the next level, next tier in terms of the priority list. And then it would be the deep creative work and then all the admin stuff. First thing, I guess, though, is going to be family. I realize looking through these list, these are not rapid fire questions.

But the answer is it depends. Because I teach that productivity field guide and I have a whole system of Artae and roles that I like to pursue and actually prioritize them. Like my wife is more important to me than my work makes sense. But it doesn't work that way, right? You know, sometimes the thing you're doing for work needs to get done more than making sure her life is as good as possible, you know? If she's doing fine, but there's still something I need to do for work, I need to do it for work.

So, you know, the answer is it depends. I just don't think you can have a hard and fast rule. But I do think it helps to have in your mind some priority of what's more important than other things. so when you get a tie, you know which direction to go. Exactly. And the one metaphor for this that I really, really like, and I'll share here, from the one thing, they talk about how you've got all these balls that you're juggling, right?

And the view is that they're all made of glass, and I don't want to let any one of these fall, but they explicitly say in that book that work, which tends to be the one that we prioritize, that one's made of rubber and you should feel free to chuck that one when you need to. That's a good one.

I never heard that before. What's a realistic focus practice for someone whose workplace rewards immediate replies? This is tough. I was in this scenario when I was working with the digital marketing agency.

I think you kind of just have to work with what you've got. So recognize that there are certain windows when you are going to have to be on call, and you are going to have to have some of those immediate replies. And that sucks, but it is what it is. Big picture, you can maybe try to establish some communication expectations.

That's what we did and get everybody on the same page. But even if you have no control over that, I think there are still pockets of time that you can find where you can disconnect from that. but I would look for the patterns, figure out when you can steal 30 minutes here, an hour there to focus on the stuff that you really want to instead of making sure that you're responding to the Slack messages. Yeah. What I told them was just look carefully at that concept of culture of immediate reply.

Like sales are the one we always talk about. Yeah, if a customer rights you're in sales, the sooner you get back. act the more likely. You're to close it. I get it. But there are a lot of jobs where there's a culture of immediate reply that's not really required, you know. And I think that open conversations with your coworkers and your bosses sometimes can help change that culture. Because usually the metric of success, to use a term, is, you know, did we do the job as good as possible? Did we, you know, did we make the widget as good as possible? And a lot of times, immediate reply is not the best method to get there.

And so think about whether you actually are in that culture. And if you are, then like we said earlier, just like, I think was it grace, just pull time out where you can do your best. But I had that, I feel like in my law practice, a lot of people I worked with, there was everything was go, go, go. And I was the one who started putting blocks of time in my calendar that was unavailable to do deep work. And the first response was to make fun of me.

And then within a year, everybody was doing it. So you could be the agent of change. Yeah, there's a story about that real quick from deep work by Cal Newport, where someone is in this exact scenario. Their boss keeps popping in, needs you mean it replies. And basically just ask them, what do you say I do here that is the most valuable? So it comes out of their mouth. And then, well, I don't get to do that.

because I'm always on call. Can I block two hours in the morning where I'm not responding to you when you message me? And at first, like, well, I don't know. I'm like, well, you said, this is the most important thing. This is the thing that adds the most value

to the organization. Okay, I guess we can try it. And then the same thing you described. Of course it worked and everybody's doing it then. I used to also, and I have shared this before, but I used to have a list of pending work I was doing like on paper. And I kept it in my top drawer.

And if somebody came and said, I need you to do this thing for me, I would pull it out and say, okay, tell me which, you know, where does it fit on this list, you know? Yeah. Is it more important than that motion you need me to write or is it more important that trial John wants me to go do? It's like, put it on the list, tell me where it fits, you know, and make them accountable for it. And often they'd be like, oh, you know what?

I'm going to give this to Mary instead. I'm like, great. Thanks. How much empty space belongs in a good weekly plan and how do you stop other people from filling it? Yes. I don't know that there's a formulaic answer for this. Yeah, there's no formula. But I think there should be some empty space. There should be. There has to be some margin. It has to be some margin for sure. One of the things that I do when I time block my day, this is not weekly, but even in the daily, I overestimate how long things are going to take. So I build in some of that margin for me. Some things will actually take longer than I think. Some will actually get done shorter. so it kind of evens out. You got to add a lot more, though, when you're talking about weekly.

When I'm doing my weekly plan, I'm putting one priority thing in the morning and in the afternoon. I'm not blocking all the hours. Like, that's the thing I want to do this day. So for today, it is record focused in the morning. You know, everything else that I get done in that morning at a weekly level is gravy. Yeah. And when you say you intentionally give yourself longer blocks than you need, you're probably not. you're probably giving yourself appropriate size blocks because we just have this human failing

of always underestimating how long it takes to do it. Yeah, there's an element of truth to that too. I do think I've gotten more accurate over time and I still always use one hour blocks. So if something's going to take a half hour, it gets an hour and that gives me some built-in margin just by forcing myself to use the larger units. I do kind of a soft form of day-thaming as I'm playing a week out. If I see there's a day where I'm doing a bunch of recording or a lot of commitments, that's also the day I'll put in things like today.

I'm recording this morning. I'm doing the Robot Club at noon. And then I'm getting a haircut in the afternoon because I'm going to be spent. I know ahead of time this day is not going to be a great deep work day for me. Whereas Thursday of this week, I currently don't have anything on my calendar. And I'm really kind of protecting that as people are asking me to do things. I'm like, well, I'm not available Thursday. So I think getting that margin in can be done on the planning basis if you're careful.

So think about it. You should have some margin. Give yourself plenty of time for the big blocks. This next one I really liked. How do you plan for a season when you know your capacity will be lower, but do not know by how much? And from personal experience, I would answer that one. Assume your capacity is even lower than you think. If you know going in, you're going to have a rough time, it's going to be rougher than you think.

So do not overcommit. I think that's pretty great advice. One of the things that helps with that, by the way, is the focused New Year calendar. It's in the video version behind me. If you can see all your big commitments coming up on that year at a glance calendar, that's kind of a visual indication for me. Like, maybe dial it back a titch this week quarter, whatever. Another good question.

I think this one was aimed at me, but I want you to answer it. what do you do with a project that still matters but hasn't been that has been abandoned three times? So you got a project. You think it's super important, but you can't, you keep not doing it. What do you do, Mike? I think you got to be real with yourself and say, maybe this isn't as important as I think it is. Yeah.

I think it's okay to continue to punt it. But honestly, if it was me after three times, I would let it go. I kind of have this three times rule. that's usually a pretty good indication. Even with things that I capture, you know, sometimes I'll capture an idea and it'll sit in my capture bucket for a while before I curated into the long-term storage and actually turned it into something. And if something sits in that capture bucket for a while, I just delete it and I don't worry

about it. And trust that, you know, if I'm going to continually chase the things that are piquing my curiosity, and that's something that is important, it's going to come back to me. So after three times, you know, something that I thought was important, I'm not taking action I've got to be real with myself, say, this probably isn't as important as I think it is. But if I'm continuing to engage with projects that I think are leading me down the right path, and this is important, then it will come back to me at some point. Yeah, I agree.

And I think if you're hesitant to do that, then I would give it what I'd call it a long punt and just say, you know, put the next review day on this in 18 months. And if you go 18 months, you haven't thought about it. it, then it wasn't as important as you thought. If you get three months, you're like, man, I really want to do that thing. Then you've got to make time for it. Okay, last one of these. What happens to focus when you leave a career or role that supplied most of your identity? Great question. Did I get a little context? This is from a last member who recently retired and he's struggled. Yeah. And well, you go first.

I was going to say, I don't know that I'm equipped to answer this question, but this is my approach to it. I don't view the work that I do or my occupation as my complete identity. I don't even view it as a significant portion of my identity. It is a way that my identity gets expressed. Everything I do connects back to a personal mission statement that I call. a life theme. My life theme is I help people multiply their time and talent, leave a bigger dent in the universe. So the things that I do professionally connect to that, and that provides the motivation and the why behind the things that I do. But also, it's a reason that I coach soccer. It's a reason

that I volunteer at church. It's a reason behind all of the things that I do. And there is no distinction for me between work and life when I'm trying to figure out how do I best use the time that I have available. It's just my life and I have to figure it out. And I'm glad that I get to do the work that I do. And yes, I do have to work to pay the bills so that my family can live. And if you are in a job where you don't really feel like this is my true calling or vocation, I get it. That's fine. You can go do your not. to five and that's how you pay your bills and that's fine and then you scratch the meaning itch somewhere else. I think that's a totally fine approach. You have to figure out for yourself how you want to

do this stuff. But I think what I would, how I would approach this, projecting forward when I actually retire, is I would just look for different ways to live out my life theme. You know, this is what I think I'm here for. I've actually got in my obsidian vault two different notes. One is my ideal future where this is where I want to be five years in the future, something like that. And then the other one is my eulogy, which is what I want people to read when I die. And so there's a lot of different ways that, you know, I live that stuff out, whether I'm in the workplace or not. I would look for ways to express that the best that I could.

Yeah, I really think people, no matter what job you have, no matter how important you are, you know, the CEO of, you know, Apple or whatever, if your identities attach that job, there'll be dragons, you know, and, you know, there will be a time when that's no longer your job. So what is your identity at that point? I think if that's something, as you listen to this, you're thinking, oh, I do identify with my job a lot, then you need to immediately figure that out. Like, you know, I have the productivity field guide. Mike's got his cohorts, he does as well. I think that your identity should never be what you do. It should be an expression of what you are.

And there are other parts of your life that are equally and probably more important. And you need to identify those and pursue those. And so no one thing is going to become the entire identity. And I've seen it happen. People crash really hard when they don't have that figured out. And that is coming for all of us. So make sure you figure it out. But, yeah, the way to defend that problem, it's like the Chinese proverb,

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That's Daylight, D-A-Y-L-I-T-E dot app, code Focused 50 for 50% off your first year of daylight. And our thanks to Daylight for their support of the Focus Podcasts. All right, Mike, we talked earlier. You've got a virtual assistant. You mentioned it on a prior show that you'd hired one, but I put a note and I wanted to follow up

with you on that because now it's been a few months and I guess the first question is how's it going? It's going pretty well. The reasons for it not going really well are mine and just the season of life that I happened to be in. I'm not able to delegate quite as effectively as I would like. We've got daily meetings, which are just a half an hour long. And in the last couple weeks specifically, a lot of it has been reminding me, hey, I need this from you. And it just is what it is. So I know full well that I am not maximizing the hours that are available to me with my assistant. I'm okay with that. As I shared previously when we were talking about this, My definition of success for this is that I have someone who manages my social media calendar and I'm

able to post a couple times a day. If I got nothing else out of my relationship with my assistant, that would be a win and that would still be worth it for me. And that has worked. So minimum viable product for this has worked. However, there's definitely room for improvement here as well. And I am looking forward to dialing this in even more and adding more, adding more things to my assistance play, being able to delegate other things, including at some point email and calendar management. That really excites me. Yeah. I mean, and you've got things going on. So that is interesting. Do you feel like pressure because you're paying her and you feel like you're not fully utilizing her? I do.

And I know that one of the things I should be doing is tracking time. You know, I've talked to her about that. I want to eventually have these reports where I want to know how you're spending your hours, not so that I can micromanage it, but just so that we can look at it and decide which of the efforts are worth continuing. to do and which ones, you know, just aren't worth it and we should focus on something else. We're not at the point where that really matters, and I don't have the capacity to review those. So we've talked about it a couple of times as like we're going to dial this in at some point in the future, and it's not happening currently.

So, I mean, someone could be looking at the way I'm managing this project and spot a whole bunch of red flags. And like I said, I'm honestly okay with if it never got better than it is right now. it's still worth it. It's pretty inexpensive in terms of a commitment for me. And honestly, I kind of love the fact that it's able to help someone on the other side of the world do things that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise. Like, for example, one of the things that happened a couple weeks in was they were,

my assistant and her son were walking back from school or something and he got bit by a stray dog. and so they had to take him in and get rabies medication and stuff like that. And the fact that she has a part-time VA job now, they can afford the medicine. Like, I love the fact that I am able to support her in that way. Yeah, there's a lot of capacity things that, a lot of capacity to be, to be filled yet. And we're going slow. One of the things I talked about when we did the interviews was she wants opportunity to grow. And I basically said, you know, I want a part.

partner in my business. I want you to handle as much operationally as you are able to. So yes, of course, there will be opportunities to grow as much as you're able to handle, basically. There have been tools that we've used that have made this a lot easier. I'm paying for the Slack, whatever, team account. And the reason that paying for that is I want to have the of all the conversation there. We use Claude as well on the team level so that can pull in Slack conversations. It can connect to Notion and it can find all of the dashboards and things. Like right now, what she's doing is she's taking all my newsletters and she's running these Claude skills and breaking them apart into these social posts. She's editing them slightly. I'm going in. I'm editing them

more and I'm making it my own approving it and then she's actually scheduling it. So the tools have really helped a lot as well. We've got granola, so all of the meetings get transcribed, and she can just say, hey, know, what are the things that Mike asked me to do today? And it gives her the summary inside of Slack, because everything is connected. And we just go back and forth asynchronously in Slack on the stuff that we need to chat about. And we have those daily calls. I think the daily calls have been really helpful. Daily calls that are just 30 minutes, and then every time I go through a night. I like redo a carousel or something, I'm recording that live and I'm giving that video feedback. Not as in like make sure we adjust it this way, but just as I mentioned earlier, here's my

thought process behind the changes that I'm making because she's new to me, she's new to practical PKM and all the stuff that I create. So trying to help her understand, you know, how I think about things. And already I'm starting to see that that's been helpful because it changes the way that she asks the follow-up questions as she starts to wrap her head around some of that stuff. What do you think of granola? Everybody keeps talking about granola lately. Is it that good?

It's okay. It's kind of expensive. I think it's $15 a month if you pay for it, but it's got an MCP so it can connect to everything. There's actually a, are you familiar with App Sumo? They've got like all these, yeah, like the one-off, you know, lifetime deal, sort of a stuff.

They have a tool that they built, the big one that they sell is called tidy cal it's kind of like a savvy cal or or calumly replacement yeah they've got a new one now called meeting coach which is a direct competitor to granola that's like a five dollar you know pay once so people are interested in that sort of thing and they just want it as a record of things that's the place i would i would have people look first but i've used granola for a long time and and i actually really like it and because it connects to slack it's great because you know you can ask questions about what do we talk about and yesterday's meeting, you know, and it's going to surface all that stuff.

And it's worth it, you know, just not to have to go running around trying to find all that information when you need. So now in this case, you're a, you're a BA. You aren't really getting found time because she's actually taking on a thing you weren't doing before, right? Exactly. Yeah. It was a thing that I struggled to do.

But I don't think, honestly, it was a time issue. as we talked about with the roadblocks. I think there was really something else there, but the external accountability has been enough for me to follow through and actually do this. The idea of a 30-minute daily meeting to me sounds just terrible. I just can't imagine doing it. I can't get myself to do it.

It's actually pretty great. I look forward to that meeting every day because we show up. And if there's something specific that I want to help, with. You know, I go in with that. Like today it was, I'm almost done with the newsletter and I want you to turn this into a substack post so we can publish it on substack on Wednesday. So make that, you know, put that at the top of your list. And then she's doing a really great job of identifying the other things that she can do that are helpful. So she's say, you know, what about this?

You know, can I, can I do this? I'm like, oh, yeah, that is actually something that you could do. But I realize I haven't shown you how to do that yet. So here's the big picture, you know, how this fits into everything. I'll record the walkthrough. She's making all of the SOPs. So I walk through it and I like, hey, can you turn this into an SOP? She creates it using a structure that, you know, I have general ideas for structure for SOPs, but honestly, she's the one that's going to be using them. So like whatever structure you want, I'm good with. She'll put it together. We'll review it together in the call. I don't like this. I think we should change this. Oh, this right here should actually link to this other thing. So it's just a couple of minutes for me to go through that stuff with her live on the call instead of having something show up.

Hey, can you look at this at some point? So in some ways, it's also good going back to a question we got earlier about responding to things, you know, when they come in. By having that space every single day instead of getting Slack requests, hey, can you look at this? Can you look at this? We can batch them together in 30 minutes. I used to, that was the rule when I had people under me at the firm is we would have a meeting where they'd come and ask all their questions at once rather than bugging me all day. And I just, I'm like Keith, I hate to pay the management tax. This is a failure of my own behalf. Like, I think you should meet with her every day. And probably as you're doing that, you're going to develop a better relationship. You're going to find more that you trust her to do.

And that's probably the recipe for success in this long time, long term. Do you regret it at this point? No, I don't regret it at all. I wish I would have done it a lot sooner. Can you say, are you willing to say how much are you spending? I don't know if you want to talk about that. We can cut this. Yeah, I don't mind because I mentioned that I use the service online jobs. pH. And there are a lot of different ability levels of assistance that you can find on that website. So there are online assistance that you could pay thousands of dollars a month because they are really, really, really, professional video editors or something like that. But that's not the nature of the work that I wanted to do. So I purposely put out a very small budget at the beginning. I wanted to keep it under $1,000 a month. So I pay her $200 a week.

That's actually a little bit more than the agreed upon amount. We agreed on $750 a month. So it ends up being like $180 something. I cover some fees. And then I pay her every week using Y. There is the concept of the 13th month when you're working with assistance in the Philippines. And so that's basically at the end of the year. You give them an extra month's worth of salary.

That's an additional cost. And it's sort of a cultural expectation. Sure. Completely okay with that. And again, I'm okay upping that amount as she takes on more responsibility. But at this point, you know, just what she's. doing it I feel like this is a a win-win situation and it's just gonna just gonna get better but I think the key is that I've been very patient going into it I'm in in this for the the long haul yeah

I'm not looking for red flags and reasons to pull the plug I'm looking for places that I didn't delegate effectively yeah and whenever I recognize those and I accept the responsibility for it and I try again. And I spend the extra time to make sure that she is clear on what exactly I want her to do. She's been able to figure it out. I've been very pleasantly surprised. The bottleneck has always been me, basically. Yeah. And is that, I forget, is that 20 hours a week that you're getting for that? That's full time. I mean, she's not putting in full time effort at this point because I cannot keep up with her. And I told her that and she understands that and that is completely okay.

It's expected that her workload is going to grow and I've told her, you know, when you feel like you're reaching your capacity, then that's where we really got to start paying attention to how long each of these things is really taking because we have to make decisions about what to cut and what to keep. But I feel like we're a long ways off from that. And even if it never changed from what we've got right now, I still think it's worth it. And then how do you find that? As somebody, you're familiar with agentic AI and you've got it doing a bunch of work for you, where do you see the lines drawn between a virtual assistant and AI assistance?

I don't know to tell you the truth. I think a lot of the things that I'm having her do, I could, if I spent enough time with the different skills and projects and things like that, I could probably have AI do a lot of these things. I don't think they would do them as well. I think I would get a lot more AI speak in the drafts that I have to look at. And that just kind of drives me crazy. I also don't trust AI to do some.

of the things that I'm having her do. Like she's making some judgment calls based on taste and things like that. This is the format of the slide that we should use here or this is the visual that we should include on these slides for this carousel. And that's something that I wouldn't ever ask AI to do. I would just accept that, you know, that's something I'm going to have to have to do. So I think AI could maybe get me about 80% of the way there, but I don't think I would be getting quite the same product. And I definitely wouldn't have the same accountability to an AI that I do

with an actual human showing up every day talking through things. I think if I was trying to do this with AI, I would still be stuck and not publishing consistently. I really feel that people are overestimating what AI can do for them. Like there are things that absolutely can do. We've talked about some of those during this episode, but there is a, there's a ceiling on that, despite what everybody's telling you. Yeah. And, and I think the trick is to embrace this stuff it can do and then go get a human for the rest, you know? Yep, agreed. This episode of focus is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online.

So whether you are just starting out or scaling your business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings with a professional website, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place. I've been using Squarespace in some way, shape, or form for at least the last five years. It's the host that we use for the intentional family podcast that I do with my wife. It's the platform I recommended, and we used to build a new church website that I didn't have to maintain, and it even powered my personal brand for quite a while. bottom line, if you would rather focus on the content instead of connecting all the technical pipes, then you should definitely check out Squarespace.

I'm a former web developer. I know how to do all that stuff, but sometimes it's just not worth it to have to maintain all of that stuff. You just want something that allows you to get your content out there to the world that will look good no matter where people are accessing it, and that is what Squarespace gives you. And when you use Squarespace, you can get discovered fast with integrated SEO tools because nobody wants to build a beautiful website only for zero people to see it.

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Squarespace.com slash focused F-O-C-U-S-E-D to sign up for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code focused, and you'll save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Once again, that is Squarespace.com slash focused, offer code focus to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for the Focus podcast. Our thanks to Squarespace for the support of our show and all of Relay. Speaking of AI experimentation, I just kind of wanted to share my daily note journey. I wrote a newsletter about it a few weeks ago and got a lot of feedback on that.

I'm always thinking about what's the best way to stay on top of what I have to do. And because AI does know a lot about me with, especially my work, because I've got all that in this one Obsidian database, a couple of months ago I started this daily note experiment of having it, you know, assemble notes for me on a daily basis of what's on my list. And it already does a good job. Like I have a thing that gives me every day to kind of help me triage. So I thought the natural next step was to have a daily note.

So that's a thing I've been working on, sort of. And it failed. It failed. Okay. So you have to tell us more about that. But when you're talking about daily note, you're talking about like from the, in the obsidian sense, this is everything that would, you know, relevant to today. Yeah.

So the idea would be you look at the note for today and it tells you your calendar. It tells you the things that you must do. It gives you like upcoming events and upcoming deadlines and just gives you kind of like, it's like having that, you know, executive assistant walk in your office and tell you the daily brief before you get started. It's a great idea. So why did it fail? It just, it didn't work for me. And for me, I do a lot of future playing too.

So like I would think like, I want to write the newsletter on Thursday. So I tell the AI and then it shows up on Thursday and I don't think about it anymore. To give it a little more context, I am. have a thing called the dispatch. And that is generated for me every morning. And that kind of is a version of that, but it's not boiled down. It's just kind of like, it is more of the triage. It's like, okay, these are all the tasks you have. These are the things that were on your list that didn't get done. These are the upcoming events and, you know, upcoming sponsor deadlines, upcoming recordings you need to prepare for. It just kind of gives me all that stuff. But then it says,

okay, what are you actually going to do today? And then I just hit the, uh, the, uh, the, open mic button with whisper flow. And I just read through it and talk. You know, I say, item 17, push to Thursday, item 18, delete. I'm not going to do that. You know, I go through and then, you know, I just kind of talk through all that. You know, item 20, send Mike, you know, prepare an email confirmation of Mike that he's available, you know, stuff like that.

So I do that on daily basis. But the boiled down daily note piece that came out of it, I just never looked at it, you know. I've got to like, you know, dig through a digital device to find it. And I just found it just, it wasn't getting any traction. I tried it and then I paused it. Then I tried it again. I tried to make it more whimsical to attract me to it more. And I just found that none of that stuff for me could replace a note card.

All right. So what do your note cards look like? What, how many of them, you know? Yeah. We've talked about these note cards or field notes, like a little notebook. And so what I find is when I go through that dispatch in the morning, what I usually do is I write down a list of things for the day. And then that's what I work from. And then I've got little trays on my desk.

They sit on, so they're like in front of my face all day. And I also have a stack of them that I filled out for the next couple weeks. So if I say I want to do the newsletter on Thursday, I just pull out the note card for Thursday. I write it down in the top line, so it's sitting there when I get to Thursday. So in essence, get the same benefit, but I'm using an analog version of this. And that is, to me, more sticky than the automated daily note, which in a lot of ways is more efficient, creates a permanent record, is searchable. I mean, and the AI can auto, like, I can say put newsletter on Thursday for the rest of the year, and it will do it for me every time instead of me having to write. it down on Sunday, right? But, you know, again, fast is slow and slow as fast. So I just find

the daily note cards work better for me. Which I think is an important observation that we can all learn from. Focus on what actually works. I kind of think with your note cards that there's Let me back up. I think with the note cards that you're working with now, obviously if it works, you know, continue with it. But I can definitely see an evolution of this system as you go. I feel like the dispatch that you're describing there is such a max sparky thing. Yeah.

That's got to click at some point in the future. Yeah. Well, you would think, but I keep trying it and it doesn't quite do it. You know, so much so that I finally just told the AI just to unwire all that stuff. just get it out of the system. Because you're also using up tokens to generate these things. And to go a little deeper, the Ugmont cards, we've talked about them. We've had Jeff Sheldon on the show.

So we're definitely in the bag for these guys. When you get a pack of them, there's the white ones, which are the daily cards. But then they have like beige ones and brown ones. And the beige ones, I always put the quarterly planning, monthly planning, weekly planning primary goals on them. And those are in front of me. all month. You know, I just see it right there. I can tell you right now. My big three for quarter three are circle transition, no side quests and a decision on robot builders club, which by the way,

has been made, you know. So, so like those are the three related to work that, that are there, and it's sit in front of my face. And then the brown one of your obligations there is don't do something. Yeah, no side quests. Well, that, that, we talked about that on the Q3 show. Yeah. Then on the brown ones, I put like kind of one off list. Like, I decided to do another season of robot I have a card here with everything I needed to do to get launched and I checked them all off. All this stuff would work in a digital system. But, you know, I'm not overly analog. I need the digital system to keep me afloat.

But for some reason, for me, this last 10 yards on these cards works. I've also done it with field notes. Nice thing about field notes is you can put them all in a book, put it in your pocket. I go back and forth on those things. But I actually kind of like the line spacing of the cards. And Jeff just did such a good job making the air. They're so kind of bespoke. They're very fancy.

And I've done the thing where I've left the house and stuck a stack of cards in my pocket. And we had a medical thing in the family too. So I spent a lot of time in the hospital last few days. And I was going through my carts. And I don't know. For some reason, that last 10-yard bit doing that digitally has just not landed with me. And it hasn't for a long time. And I think I've just got to kind of accept that.

Yeah. I've heard you talk about that. last mile, and that was going to be my question, is do you think that you will always have an analog component to that last mile in your productivity system? I think so. And I'm not, I, partly is just, I think the act of scratching it into paper, like, makes it real for me. I think I also like the romance of it a little bit, if there is such a thing as romance and analog, right? But most importantly, I like the physicality that I've got them in front of my face. I can move them around. And as much as I like all the digital tools, at some point, I don't want to look at the screen anymore.

Yeah, I think I'm the same, that there is something about the switching mediums from the brain to the list. That is going to be a permanent part of my workflow. Even if it's not a truly analog note card and pen, like I've been doing it lately on the Supernote Nomad with my digital planner. technically that's that's digital but it feels analog it's more analog the digital in my opinion and that there's something about that that translation into that that last step that makes it much more effective i haven't got fully disciplined on this practice yet but i if at the end of the day i take a picture of it and give it to the i i know it goes in the system it says oh i see he wrote the newsletter okay that's done you know and um because i check

it off on a card. It's kind of funny, right? You know, so the robot is ingesting the card as well. The analog robot. Yeah. All right. We are the Focus Podcasts. Thanks for listening. We appreciate your support. Thank you to our sponsors this week. Man, we did good. We had several sponsors, Gusto, Daylight, Keeper, and Squarespace. Thank you very much. If you'd like to become a deep focus subscriber, get an ad-free extended version of the show. You can do that. Go to relay.comfm slash focus and sign up there. We'd love to have you. Today on Deep Focus, Mike and I are going to talk about systems for bad days. That inspired out of one of the questions we answered today. What are the actual systems we put in place on a bad day? And I thought that would be kind of fun. So we're going to do

that. Thank you again for our sponsors. Go support St. Jude, everybody. We'll see you next time.