Focused - 35: I Guess I'm Felix Unger

Episode Date: November 28, 2017

David and Jason discuss the importance of prep time, resetting your balance, gauging the value of your work, time tracking, managing ongoing commitments, getting sick and keeping clients happy, and the value of uncluttered office space.

David Sparks and Jason Snell spent their careers working for the establishment. Then one day, they'd had enough. Now, they are independent workers, learning what it takes to succeed in the 21st century. They are free agents. Welcome back to Free Agents, a podcast about being an independent worker in a digital age. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my fellow host, Mr. Jason Stell. Hello, Jason. Hi, David. How's it going? Great. Great. Here we are, another month of free agency.

Yes. We made it another month. Congratulations. Yes, we did. Congratulations to you, too. And, of course, this is our regular show, which it's only the second time we've done this. It's new. We got some nice positive feedback from people who like the format. Although I did have that moment where they're like, this is much better. And I'm like, what was wrong with it before?

But we made a judgment that we needed to do something different. So I think it's only fair for the listeners to agree. That's great. I'm glad that a lot of people liked it. We got some nice feedback about our Marco Arment episode from two weeks ago, which was also very nice to hear from people. And they had many questions for Marco. And, of course, the nice thing about Marco being on Twitter is that they would just include him in the tweets and ask him questions. And I hope he answered some of their questions about his workflow.

But it was nice to hear that people liked talking about uh like hearing marco's story right because they hear him all the time but they don't necessarily hear him talking about his his backstory like that yeah and you know it's funny because you know he's just like us trying to figure it out and uh the way his his time ended at tumblr to me that was a very interesting part of that interview if you didn't hear it go back and listen to that interview it's a good one a lot of people also seem to come out of the woodwork and say that they have the same productivity issue that Marco does. And I say issue,

I'm not trying to be pejorative here. A lot of people have like fallow time and then a huge burst of productivity where they work a whole lot and then they kind of fall out of it. And I, I even have that. I think everybody has that to a certain degree. And bless you if you're somebody who is just evenly productive all the time. But I definitely have that where I was writing a freelance piece yesterday.

And it was such a grind. I just wasn't feeling it. And it's like, I got company coming. You know, I got plans. I got all sorts of stuff going on in my life. And I have to write this story now. Like, I can't put it off. I can't wander around. I got to do it.

And it was a real grind. And I felt that moment of like, you know, it's nice when you can wait for the flow and go with it. And sometimes you can't. But it's interesting to see how extreme Marco's flow is sometimes where he'll just have downtime um for a while and then all of a sudden super intense and you get if you're lucky enough to be on the overcast beta that's when suddenly you're just seeing overcast betas all the time it's just amazing and that's the one time that i see it because the rest of the time he's working on code that we're not going to see for months but i can see it in the beta process sometimes where he's had that spurt of activity because he's got that productive moment in his mind.

Something I always noticed about myself was when I had a really big project like a trial where I was working long, long hours. I never am productive in the two to three business days following that. I might think I'm going to go in and get caught up on things or whatever, but for some reason my brain is just incapable of work at that point. And I think that's kind of related. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. So what's on your mind this month, Jason?

Yeah. So this is the part of the show where we talk about what's on our minds, isn't it? I had an issue, just for people who are curious, David and I are trying to just write down when we have issues in our lives and bring them that relate to being free agents and then bring them up. And I had something that happened that I wanted to mention about prep time. a while ago about how you interact with uh with other people especially people in your household about your boundaries yeah and i realized something that i had not realized before which is i have an invisible boundary which means it's on me i wasn't even aware of it it's definitely not on the person in my house who who stepped over the invisible boundary because she didn't know it was there. I didn't know it was there.

And I discovered it was there. But I thought it was interesting, at least, that I discovered it was there, which is I was getting ready for a podcast. And it is one – I do a lot of podcasts, but some of them are more intense than others. Some of them I had to play a more active role. When I do download here on RelayFM, I am talking to two people who are not usually there. And I have to interview them and plan out what I'm going to ask them about and juggle a conversation. And it takes a lot of mental energy to do that. What I discovered is about a half an hour before that

podcast was starting, and I do it at nine in the morning. So it's 830. My wife hasn't gone off to work yet. She's got a little bit of time. She's going to be there another 3040 minutes. And I pour myself a cup of tea. And I'm already in my headspace of I'm headed out to the office. And I've got to start thinking about this and working through the details of what i'm going to ask and i'm in this invisible but mental prep mode and she says um i want to talk about this uh important thing it was like prepping for a meeting about with school about one of our kids yeah and she starts talking about it. And I realized, wow, I am not capable of doing this. And that was that invisible barrier. And I said to her after she talked at me for a little while, and I felt bad because I was kind of not capable of processing what she was saying. which is we're 30 minutes out from doing download and i can't have a deep conversation about something that's important because i i need those mental cycles to prep for the show and i know i'm not i'm not in there yet although i will be and that's actually one of the things that i've come

out of this thinking is i need to plot myself down in my chair even though even if i get up a couple of times and get a cup of tea and all of that i kind of need to physically plot myself somewhere to prep um ideally because it sends more of the flag of i am working now but i was getting myself a cup of tea it was a perfectly and and i didn't have anything for half an hour it was perfectly reasonable time so it was it was in the end i you know we i got to communicate that and i said okay on on mondays and especially thursdays it's not a great thing to to go in deep on something with me because i'm mentally checked out because i'm i'm somewhere else working on this thing but i don't just flip the switch at 9 a.m basically well i mean that that show is is more than just showing up it's preparing you know right and that's part of the

work and when you're talking to somebody i mean it's it's know right and that's part of the work and when you're talking to somebody i mean it's it's that mental preparation that you have to do before you start before you flip the switch um you got to be ready when you flip the switch to go so it's like if you're in a presentation if you i think i think not everybody has a podcast right but uh if i were to put this as something that maybe has a broader use, if you are giving a presentation, a PowerPoint presentation or something, I don't know, to a client, if you're or, you know, for you, maybe, you know, in your in your days in court, like, you don't just roll in having not thought about it. You talk about prepping in the car, like the minutes and half hour hour an hour before you have to be on talking to people i mean i i know different people are different but at some point in there you need to get your kind of like set up together mentally to go in and give a presentation to talk to other

people you can't literally cannot be laser focused on some other subject and then walk through the doorway and be ready, I think. Yeah, I'll give you an even more everyday example. For me, I'm negotiating a contract with a big company for a client right now. And we've got this Word document where we've been tracking changes. And I have a call scheduled today at 2 and at one 30, I have blocked a half hour for me to go through all the changes that we've made. So when we pick up the phone at two o'clock, um, and the other guy saying, well, let me file it, find the file on my computer. And he's, you know, scrambling to figure out what's, which, which direction is up. I will already have kind of gone through everything and be settled about what's important to me in that phone call.

And I do that all the time. I mean, I don't do it for every call. But for a lot of, if I'm doing something that's important, I will take a half hour or even sometimes as little as 10 minutes to prepare for something. Because I think when you get on the phone with somebody and you sound jumbled and discombobulated at the beginning of the call, it's a really bad image to set for your clients and the people you're working with. But also, it just gets in the way of productivity. Taking that time in advance to prepare for that stuff can make a huge difference in how the real thing that crystallized for me, which I said when I talked about the invisible barrier is there is a difference between visible work and invisible mental work, but it's real. And it can lead to issues if you have no, if there are no clear boundaries there. And so just as somebody who is often working in an environment where you've got other people around, being aware and trying to figure out what the boundaries are and working with them

to set those boundaries so that you have that prep time because it's not some hippie thing. Like we sometimes talk about hippie feeling things, but this is like serious mental preparation before you do a thing. It's part of the process, even if it's not visible, even if it's all just happening in your head and being able to communicate that and say, like, if you when you had when you had the little the little kids in your house. Right. It's like for that period of time, you probably weren't going to be distracted by them because that would be difficult for the prep. Yeah. And the way I i do i actually go into my office and shut the door shut the door yeah but the um but it sounds to me what caught you is you were you were probably sitting in your kitchen drinking tea yeah i was just pouring pouring a

cup of tea and thinking about it i mean i i had actually gotten up uh put down the tablet you know as we're like all right here we go ready to go and then yeah this is what happened is that you know i i had moved on into prep mode and was just getting a cup of tea to start the the you know pacing and walking and and then sitting in my office and and doing the doing the work and uh but i didn't i wasn't wearing i wasn't waving a flag saying don't talk to me now and to lauren she she's like, there's my husband sitting there, and now there's something we need to talk about. And I've got half an hour, right? I mean, on that level.

So it was recalibrating about, like, my work day doesn't start at 9 when I'm doing a podcast. And it's just something about myself that I had not thought about. So that's fine. thought about. So that's fine. Maybe this is a weakness, but I get really focused on things to the extent that I lose attention for the rest of the world. And everybody that lives with me or around me kind of knows when I get a distant look in my face just to not bother. I remember when my mom died, one of her friends told me that when I was a little kid, one day I was reading a book and I walked through the house and I literally walked through a pile of laundry. It just was a pile of laundry getting folded on the floor. And I walked through it. And she said to my mom, well, are you upset with him for doing that? And she says, I don't even think he realizes

he did it, but, uh, I, I, that's a good thing, but, but i guess you do have to have a way to tell other people when you're when you're going to go into that zone so uh so you don't walk off a cliff or or cause trouble when they want to talk to you about something important yeah yeah what what else is uh going on in your uh in your head speaking well the um we talked last month about this resetting balance idea and it's still very prevalent in my mind um i i feel like my big letdown of going out on my own was uh i to a certain extent building the same cage i had when i was working for the man um i feel like i'm doing too much legal and not enough of the books and things but i finally did get a book out last month

and i've been doing this time and experiment i'll'll talk about that in a minute. Cause that's kind of a whole separate thing. But, but I'm, I'm really being trying to be mindful of where I'm spending my time as to what sides of the business. It's weird having two businesses. Most people that go free agent don't do two different things than I am, but something that, that did help me, you had talked about looking at the finances to figure out, you know, what's important is I just had, I'm meeting with my accountant and I'm trying to get her more involved and, and just looking at the overall income and taxes, uh, and seeing where I was making money kind of helped me put me at ease in terms of,

oh wait, I could put some more effort into this other stuff that I want to do. It could make enough money to keep the, you know, the whole ship afloat if I were to put attention in there. So, so I, this whole balance thing is still with me. I don't feel as anxious about it as I did last month though. I think the, the timing experiment really helped and it's starting to give me some ideas about what I need to do next between the two. And I guess this conversation in my head will really never be over because, uh, you know, I always want to keep an active client list and I enjoy being an attorney. I always want to keep doing max Sparky stuff and, um, you will never find a perfect balance. I think if you do find a perfect balance, that'll be good for about 10 minutes until something else comes up. So, so I'm trying to

get comfortable with the, with the fact that I will never have perfect balance, but at least get a little better at aiming for better balance. That's good. That's all you can do. I don't think, I mean, we, the fact that we talked about this several times suggests that it is an ongoing thing. And I think I mentioned last time that for me, it's, it really is about like, you get more information, you reset, you know, you're immediately going to start getting out of balance about it. But at least if you know that and you do a periodic reset, you are, you know, you're making your best effort to keep yourself honest in some way. Yeah, I'm trying to be a little bit more forgiving towards myself about it, if that makes sense. But at the same time, I'm also trying to say, okay, if you're not happy, what steps have

you taken today to remedy that? So a little more accountability and also a little less um extreme anxiety about it all yeah it's tough it's hard i mean i mean when you work for somebody they give they give you the balance they tell you this is what you're doing and when you're on your own that's a whole set different set of muscles you got to work on yeah um i had something related a little bit to that this is all interrelated of course that i had on my list little bit to that. This is all interrelated, of course, that I had on my list, which is to touch base on engaging the value of your work. And I don't have a sermon here. I don't have a solution here either, but this is something that I've been

going through. So, I wrote a few years ago a book about using the new Photos app on the Mac. And it was a great opportunity, actually, because even though writing a book, especially from scratch, is hard, that was a brand new app that was replacing an old app, which meant – and you did something on this, too, right? Did you make a video about this? Yeah, a video about this yeah and it was a great moment of opportunity because apple was replacing an old standard iphone with this new app photos and they were very different and there was a lot to talk about and a lot to write about and i got the opportunity to write that book and i did it and it was a lot of work i spent a large portion of my summer writing that book and getting it out.

But it did pretty well. And one of the things that was really interesting about that, and you talk about like your, because I didn't get an advance or anything because it was an ebook. It was very much like I got a percentage of sales. And so I was putting work in without getting money back right away. And then there was initial sales. And we started to judge the, essentially it's hard to do.

I did this with my first book too, which didn't sell very many copies. And I realized that the first book I wrote, which was in the nineties, um, I probably mentioned this before. Uh, if you divide the amount of money I got out of it from the amount of hours I, I put into it,

if I wanted to do it for the money, I should have just gotten a minimum wage job. like french fries yeah exactly right just serving burgers at mcdonald's so um this one you know you do you still do those calculations and it did okay in the fall and i when it came out and i was like all right well that was that was a not necessarily a huge money maker for me but uh it brought in money for the work I did. And what happened is, it's a book, it's an e-book, it kept selling because more people wanted to move to photos and more people wanted to move to photos. And for the first year, and arguably the first couple of years, it sold way better than I ever expected. And I'm not saying like I could buy a house with the money i made

it's not like that at all but it was more than i expected and so it ended up ended up being a good investment of my time but it took a lot of time to have it be revealed that it was actually a good decision and not a bad or meh kind of decision one of of the challenges with that, though, as a kind of annuity is a book, then books have to be have to be kept current. And you know, this with your videos and your ebooks, like they need to be kept current. So with photos, every year, there's a new version of photos. And the challenge is, if I don't update the book, the book is worthless my entire investment in it is is gone because nobody wants a book that is not right because it's about last year's version unless you're using last year's version but almost nobody is doing that who's buying these books so this year

i had a very busy summer the sales last year i did an update last year a fairly large update that i brought in a bunch of iOS stuff. And it was a bigger update than I had done the year before. And the sales were okay, but they weren't great. They were okay. But I definitely got the sense that they're trickling down and that I'm never going to get the big return that I did the first couple of years, it's going to be, uh, put in some work and, uh, and get some return,

but it's never going to be a whole lot more than that. And, uh, this year. So I had this challenge, summer, super busy, a lot of trips,

a lot of kids stuff going on. I got other work things going on, the stuff that I'm working on. It was a busy summer for my other stuff that i'm doing and i've got this track record of it not being very very uh uh profitable the last year so um i talked to the publisher who is now joe kissel it was adam and tanya before but it's now joe kissel and we were talking about maybe uh he said you know i'm easing away from the format you used and i'm going to a new format

maybe you could write a new version of it with in the new format um and i thought one i don't know if i have time to like yeah that's even more time rebuild rebuild the whole thing and two i'm not sure i want to prioritize my time that i have this summer to update this book because is it going to be worth it? And in the end, I decided I wanted to do it, but I didn't prioritize it. And I did it in the last month. So that book's going to come out late. It's going to come out in December. The OS update with a new version of photos came out in September. If you know, that decision means i lost two months of potential of sales or of being considered as a resource for people who are upgrading and

that was a decision i had to make by gauging the value of my time over the summer so i wasn't ready to let it go completely which sounds like me doesn't it somebody who is like it's very hard for me to completely disengage from something it takes a lot of work i may stick to it kind of guy but um what's funny is the the uh the act of updating it made me think maybe the best thing to do would be to kind of do a new version of this where i put in the work but it actually is uh is better book, I will have to calculate whether I think I will ever get my money back from the time I put in. But my larger point here is just, this was an interesting challenge in terms of gauging, in extreme cases, the value of my work. Because

it's like, this money might come back. It might not. But it's not going to come back for some amount of time. What else do you have to do? And I did make the decision this summer to say, no, I'm not, I don't have the time this summer to do this. Maybe talk to me in the fall when it comes out. So rather than working on beta versions of software, which is extra, extra work, right? Because they keep changing. I just decided I'm going to, I'm just going to wait. I'm not going to put in any of that extra work and I will do an update when it's done and not before. And that was a decision I made right one or wrong one. I don't know, but I had to weigh everything else I was doing and all of my other commitments and say, I'm going to, I'm going to deprioritize this to a certain degree. I'm not going to kill it, but I'm going to deprioritize it. Yeah. Well, you did it smarter

than me. Cause I did a video for me to update. It's a massive project. I have to re excuse me. I have to rerecord the whole video. Yeah, I know that, that, that I had to. I have to re-record the whole video. Yeah, I know. I have to retake every screenshot in the book, but retaking screenshots is a huge amount easier than reshooting video. But I'm going to do that one at some point. It's on the list probably for next year. And I just said I'm not going to do it as frequently. One of the things I did, um, I think it was last year or the year before is I started, I raised the price of my entry. You know, all my products that were always were historically $10. And I realized that the return on investment for the time was getting to where it was really difficult to make that work for me, you know, at $10. And, and I said, well, I need to, and there's only so many

people that are going to buy these nerdy books. I don't know that necessarily the volume is going to increase exponentially, just magically. So I decided to raise the price to $20. And I did that with the thought of, look, this will either work or it won't. And if nobody wants to buy it for $20, then maybe that's a sign to me that I shouldn't be making these. Yeah, you got your answer there, which is don't do it anymore. Yeah. And it worked out great. People were super happy to spend. I mean, I'm sure there were some people upset, but very, very few complaints. And honestly, the way I sell, I'm pretty, you know, somebody, I probably shouldn't say this on a podcast, but sometimes people write me and say, look, I'm a student. I don't have any money. I usually just

send them a copy. You know, I mean, I'm not that, I'm not a big corporation, so I'm, I'm pretty easy going with people, but the, uh, but you know, raising the price of $20 made it a feasible business. So, so my kind of plan for upgrades now is I want to get a new thing out and then an upgrade out and I just do it the cycle. And, and that doesn't necessarily mean I can keep up with Apple schedule or anybody else's schedule, but I still think I can get good content out. But, you know, but that's whole thing is part of this balance, you know, getting the balance right is, is always hard. And not everybody listening is writing books and making videos. But I think this applies to no matter what you do.

Yeah, if you've got, ultimately ultimately you've got probably if you're a region, you've got different ways you're getting paid and different places you have to invest your time. And it's that same calculation. And sometimes it, I, this struck me because it was an extreme example. Cause it's like, it's sort of depreciating over time. What the, what the return is, uh, out of this major investment and then there's that it's it reminded me actually a little bit of having a car where you've got a huge amount of value in this case that like is gone when you drive it off the lot but over time you have that moment where you're deciding how much money you need to throw into it well that's your work

and the value of it is your payment and there comes a time where you have to say uh with some of these these kinds of projects this isn't worth it for me anymore compared to your other stuff i mean that's just that's just it so i think that's the taking the broader view is always keeping an eye on it and and making those tough decisions and thinking about like is it worth putting in this work for this ongoing project or client and a subtlety here is and jason and i are both aware of this because we're in this space is there was a unique opportunity when apple said we're no longer making iphone we're now making photos it's a whole new world and everybody needed to figure that out so there was a space there for people who wanted to

figure out they wanted to get some additional materials um no matter how much time you spend in this new version it's going to be the third or the fourth version of something that came out several years ago most people that wanted to figure it out already have so yeah just the audience is never going to be the same or the customer base is never going to be the same again until they replace photos with the next thing. It's, it's, it's a,

uh, it's shipping a new product versus maintaining an existing product. If you're somebody who's like a software developer or something like that. But I think it might also be like, yeah, an old client you picked up at a certain rate and they're still giving you work and you have to look at it and say, I need to,

I need to deprioritize that because it's, it doesn't make sense anymore. It could be something like that too. Well, we've got more on our list. I know, know, but we should probably take a little bit of a break. Let me tell you about our first sponsor, which is FreshBooks. Everybody out there, probably a freelancer, although I know we have other people too, people who are at churches and in universities and things like that. But you know if you're a freelancer how important it is to make those smart decisions for your business. Our friends at FreshBooks can save you up to 192 hours. That's a lot of billable time with their cloud accounting software for freelancers. It's

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small companies this year. If you're listening to this and not using FreshBooks yet, give it a try. They're offering an unrestricted 30-day free trial, no credit card required. So don't even worry about being one of these deals where they take your credit card and they charge you if you don't cancel and all that. Just 30 days, they're not going to take your credit card. You can try it out. Just go to freshbooks.com slash free agents, enter free agents in the how did you hear about us section that'll let them know that you came from this podcast. Thank you to FreshBooks for the support of 10 million users and free agents. So David, you mentioned the timing experiment. Yeah, I had a lot of feedback from listeners about that. So I talked about last month how I was timing myself and I

had run these apps to kind of keep track of everything I was doing from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, which is completely insane. But it was not that difficult for a nerd. You know, I set up scripts and different things. So it wasn't that easy. It wasn't that difficult to track. But I just wanted to see what information I'd learned. And I didn't even really know what I was going to do with it. But it just felt to me, it was at the time when I was really feeling out of balance, and I wanted to get a better idea where I was spending my time. And I learned a bunch. There were some things that I was thinking were time sucks really weren't. And some things that

I wasn't thinking about were actually pretty big time sucks. So it was a good experience to do it. Now I, um, I've wrapped up the experiment. I'm no longer tracking time. It's a, I don't want to be doing that forever. I may go back and do it some, you know, in six months, if I feel like I need kind of that reset again, but I did get a list. And what I decided I'm going to do with it is, as I call it my snipe list, you know, looking at where I was spending my time, I picked three things on that list that a, I don't, it doesn't need to be me to do these things. And, and, you know, B, I don't like doing them that particularly that much and see it's something that I could easily offload to somebody else. So going through my reports about where I'm spending time, I picked a couple of things.

Like I do a newsletter for Max Barkey once a month and it's a lot of readers don't want to go follow the RSS feed or read it every day. But they like a nice summary at the end of the month of stuff that I thought was important or interesting. And I do a feature article and a couple other things that are kind of fun. And I've been doing that a couple of years now, but I realized that's like a four-hour project, which doesn't, it's hard to believe, but when you actually time yourself, it's to get that done and put together and issued and outright, it's like four hours. And I thought, you know, that's something that I could hand off a big piece of that, you know, you know, in terms of mining the existing site. And this is a, I could probably get my time into this thing down to less than an hour if I hired somebody

to help me with a big part of that. So, so that's on my site list. Um, financial management, we've talked in the past about getting an accountant and I realized I'm still doing a lot of the accounting and, and I, you know, I sent an email to my accountant, we're going to meet next week. And I'm going to say, look, how do I get more of this on you and off me? And the other one I noticed that I was spending more time on than I thought was client onboarding. When I get a new client in the law practice, there's a whole bunch of stuff you need to go through engagement agreements and setting up files and billings and all this other stuff. And, and those were three that I thought I could easily get off my list. So I have an action plan, you know, maybe by next month, those three will

be off the list. And I'd like to add, you know, a couple more to the snipe list. So, so I really feel like in my mind, a manageable way to solve the, some of these delegation problems is just to pick two or three items and say, okay, I'm going to solve those now. I'm not going to pick 20 items and try and solve them all at once, but I'm going to pick two or three that are bugging me and solve those right now. And then next week or next month and look to see what's bugging me next month and see if I can't knock those out. And I'm feeling pretty good about it. I haven't really done a lot on it yet. I'm sick right now. So I, I don't want to be like meeting people and spreading germs, but I do feel like I I'm onto something, you know what I mean? You

know, cause sometimes you get that feeling that now this might be the solution for me. Yeah, that's good. That's good. I like that idea of the, of the snipe list of what, what are, where, where are places where i could be better using my time or things that i could stop doing the um that i always found back in my business days working for the man that one of the valuable things we always had meetings and discussions about what else we could be doing yeah we never had meetings about what we could stop doing yeah and there's value in in what not to do the what not to do list is just as important i think we've said that before here as the what to do list yeah absolutely and what's your thing yeah exactly right you only

have so much time you're a human being right i mean you only have so much time that is usable work time even if you're a super worker, you still are finite in your time, right? That we are all biological entities. And most of us, there's a limited number of hours in the day that we are capable of that work. So you got to use it wisely.

Maybe one of the reasons I'm sick is because I'm trying to do too much. Maybe. I do think that a lot of people that go out on their own, free agents, are control freaks. And I definitely fall in that category where you want to control every piece of it. That's one of the reasons, I mean,

honestly, in the back of my mind, that's one of the reasons why this was so attractive to me is I don't have to get anybody else's permission to make a decision about how things are done on a very micro level. But I do need to start letting go of some of that. And so that's something I'm working with. though it's fun though um it is uh ongoing commitments and this this goes back to your snipe list it's a very similar thing i have aspects of my job that are not um directly tied to a particular amount of revenue in the sense that i write a story and i get paid for it or i'm doing this work and there's an hourly rate.

I have some stuff that is amorphous. And I mentioned the book thing, which is really amorphous because it's literally you pour time in and then see how many books you sell. But I have subscriptions. So I have six colors subscribers who get, this is not an ad but just to explain what it is they get to support the site and they also get a monthly newsletter and they get a weekly podcast that dan warren and i record that is just for subscribers it's fun um and they get the warm feeling of knowing and there's a membership slack area that they get to be a part of and they get the warm feeling of knowing that they're supporting me and dan in doing our job and that's like why we charge 60

a year is it's like the tote bag for public radio the tote bag doesn't cost 60 there's not there are better content deals for 60 but part of what you're getting is support you are you are supporting us um as a result though though, when I write stories on Six Colors, especially since on the advertising side, the ad market for indie blogs is not great. So a lot of times I don't have sponsors. In the end, then, my writing on Six Colors is entirely this amorphous, I want to bring in readers and serve the readers I've got. But I also, you know, I have this thing to live up to for the people who are supporting me, which is they're supporting me so that I can write on six colors. So I should be writing on six colors, right? Because they shouldn't support me if I'm not writing for them.

So it's interesting, and The In incomparable has this to a certain extent, but what it means is it's added this other, it's harder math to do, which is when do I take a freelance assignment, which means I'm not writing something on six colors. And when do I not take freelance assignments and not take that extra money? Because what I really ought to do is write on six colors. And where I have gotten to right now is I'm trying to set myself some goals for six colors, even though it's not a direct visible one-to-one. And so what I try to do is I'm going to write, you know, two or three pieces a week on six colors, and I'm going to post this many links on six colors or

whatever it is, some combination of those things. And I'm still working on that. I'm actually trying to get myself on a little bit more of a schedule there, but it varies. But that's sort of what I'm trying to do because I feel like I had a schedule and I kind of got off of it in part because I felt a little bit adrift. Because when you don't have a sponsor sitting on your site every week and you're like, I need to generate traffic to make the sponsor have their sponsorship be worth the money. And instead, it's more amorphous of like, I need to post things so that I can be visible and make the subscribers happy. I got out of the clearer schedule of posting things. So now I'm trying to motivate myself essentially internally, provide myself slots and deadlines and expectations for myself that are not actually

connected to real expectations. I don't really need to post that story every Friday afternoon. But if I say I'm going to write this kind of story on a Friday afternoon, and I'm going to write a piece on a Wednesday, and I'm going to write a piece on a Monday, then that's good for me. Even if the need isn't real, it's something that I've constructed so that I can do what I feel like in big picture I need to do, but have no direct feedback about. But it's a challenge because, again, it's not you write this and you get paid. It is a much bigger picture thing. And I'm not even mentioning the fact that also writing big pieces on Six Colors gets

links from other places. And those people, there's a little thing that says, if you like this, maybe you should be a subscriber. And that does happen. I do get subscribers when I get linked to from sites that get a lot of traffic. People read my stuff and they're like, oh, I like this. Or they're like, oh, I remember Jason. I forgot that he was out in his own now, or I didn't even know. I'd love to subscribe to his newsletter. Like literally, I have a newsletter you could subscribe to. So I'm trying to figure out a way to structure it because it is much vaguer than a very simple,

I need to write a column for Macworld this week because they're paying me X. And I know like exactly what it is and how long it needs to be and when I need to get it to them. That's easy. The hard part is this amorphous part. Yeah, I am. It's funny because I, the way I grew Mac Sparky, you know, I wasn't working for Macworld. It was just, I was just a guy writing a blog.

But it was a very foundational step of all the stuff I've developed as Mac Sparky. And I kind of look at it as the underlying place. And I've always felt like that's the place I get to make deposits with the audience. If I can come up with good posts with good ideas for productivity or, or thoughts or whatever, um, I can make those deposits there. And later when I decide to sell a book or a t-shirt or whatever, um, I feel like that's part of the, the value proposition for my audience is that they get good content at Mac Sparky. And, um, and I always try to remember that, you know, and think about that as the reason why you do that stuff. But, um, and I always try to remember that, you know, and think about that as the reason why you do that stuff. But, um, I think no matter what business you are in, there are things that

don't have immediate, um, pecuniary pecuniary benefit attached to them, but then nevertheless are foundational to keeping the whole ship afloat anyway. And, um um and that's just something i think we all struggle with yeah absolutely so anyway for what it's worth it is the i i i i don't think of myself this way sometimes but i'm such a uh a person who adheres to deadlines because i am a writer and editor and so i just have decided to assign myself deadlines arbitrarily for things that are not actually needed. The problem is that I know they're not needed, right? See, editors do this all the time.

They assign people things and it's like, well, I'm going to tell him he needs to turn in on Tuesday because he's always late and I really only need it by Friday. And then they say, oh, can I have an extension? I'm like, well, okay, I'll give you till Wednesday. And then they turn in Thursday and you're like, great, I got it before I needed it on Friday. Problem is, I know my own, I can't hit myself on the head and be like, oh, geez, I got to get it to myself by Friday for some reason that I can't remember. The jig is up, so I just have to pretend. It's kind of hard to be simultaneously in front of and behind the curtain.

It is. It is. You end up just kind of like having a curtain draped over your face, and it's no fun. So it's uncomfortable. We've got, I think, a couple more things on my list, but maybe before we do that, we should talk about our next sponsor. Yeah, and that's our friends over at Squarespace. This episode of Free Agents is brought to you by Squarespace.

Enter code FREEAGENTS, in all caps, at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase. And I'll just tell you, I love, love, love Squarespace. As much as I'm a geek and like being on the internet, I was never happy with my web publishing solutions. I never had the appropriate plugin updates, and people were getting hacked, and all these problems. When Squarespace came around, I moved Max Sparky and even my legal website over to Squarespace, and it just solved the problem for me. Squarespace lets you easily create a website for your next idea with a unique domain and award-winning templates and more.

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And they do have it covered with their award-winning 24-7 customer support. You get any help you need. I've occasionally run into problems with my Squarespace site. I send them a note, they get back to me right away. They have customer support services placed kind of throughout the US and I think they even have one in Ireland now. So they're always awake and always ready to help you. They let you quickly and easily grab a unique domain name so you don't even have to go to a separate vendor for that. And all of those award-winning templates are beautifully designed for you to show off your great ideas. And you're not stuck with the templates. You know how some of these places you go and they've got a template and you can actually recognize which service they're on by looking at the website. Squarespace isn't like that. You can start tweaking it and making it look the way you want and it'll be customized to you. So since I've moved Mac Sparky over, I've had a great

experience with having just a beautiful looking website. Occasionally I get linked by a big website and an influx of traffic. My site never goes down. Squarespace can ramp up and give me all the backend support I need. In fact, sometimes this stuff happens without me even knowing it. Sometimes you get linked and you're out at Disneyland for the day or whatever, and you don't even realize that your website is blowing up. It doesn't matter. Squarespace is there covering it for me. Now, the Squarespace plans start at just $12 a month, but you can start a trial with no credit card required by going to squarespace.com. Now, when you decide to sign up, use the offer code FREEAGENTS to get 10% off your first purchase and support for the free agents.

This is a great step if you're getting ready to go out on your free agency. That was the first thing I did when I quit my job is I got a Squarespace account and made the Sparks ESQ.com website. And it was just a great feeling to put it together. We thank Squarespace for their support. Squarespace, make your next move. Make your next website. All right.

So people who are listening to this podcast have noticed you don't sound totally healthy. You've been sick. You've been sick. You've been sick. I've had a rough month or so, Jason. I came down with a cold. And the way we record the show, sometimes they're out of time. So it probably sounds like I've had a cold for the last six months, but whatever. But it was just a cold.

You know, colds to me are always like background illness. You just keep going with a cold. But then last week, I got like a new cold. I thought I was finishing one. I got a new one and it is like the monster cold. I've never had one so aggressive and I ended up with an infection in my ear. In fact, as we're recording, my right ear is not working, but eventually I'm told it will be sorted out. But it got me thinking, we did that show on getting sick and what do you sell to clients. The last time I was sick was with the kidney stones, which was kind of a big deal.

And that was a whole different consideration. Now I'm just sick for about a week. And what do I say to clients then? And it kind of got me back to the whole questions I was asking the first time we covered it. And it's interesting to me. In general, I don't tell my clients I'm sick. They don't need to hear about it. They don't want to hear me time we covered it. And it's interesting to me. In general, I don't tell my clients I'm sick. They don't need to hear about it. They don't want to hear me whine about it. The ones that are really close to me, sometimes I'll tell them, say, look, you know, I'm just not feeling that well. If you can give me a day or two on this problem you have, and they're pretty

good about it. But it is interesting to me. Like I have a fancy pants client that I, that called kind of with an immediate need. And I said, okay, but listen, I've got this ear infection and I'm, you know, I explained, I'm not really feeling well. I'm like, okay, that's fine. So, but can you get it to me today? You know, just, it's just like, like when it went out the other client didn't care, you know, and I didn't get upset about it because that's just kind of the way of life. And if you're going to serve people, you got to be there for them, even when you're not feeling up to it. And, uh, that's another joy of a free agency, I guess. It really is. Um, well, we did, uh, we did do a show about it a little bit, but it's tough. It's,

it's, uh, it's tough and you feel yourself getting behind and you try to work when you shouldn't. And I always struggle with i struggled i struggled in my job with getting sick back in the day um and especially i struggled with for me it was the um and i'm pretty sure i've told this before but i i was a bus commuter so it would be the walk out the door and then it's about a 10 minute walk to the bus stop and that was that was two hurdles right so it was like not just i'm fresh out of the shower and ate breakfast and i feel okay okay enough to go to work it was okay i have to go out the door i have to walk to the bus stop and wait for the bus and if i get on the bus i can't come home for hours and and that was i still made that mistake a lot and got on the bus and then

it'd be like 11 in the morning and i'd be like oh my why did i do this to myself and i'm stuck i'm at the office unfortunately like that those barriers became better for me in terms of being able to say i'm not going to go sometimes i would still take a shower and get dressed and go to and get ready to go to work and put my bag on my shoulder and i would look at the front door and i'd be like oh no yeah i just can't or and this happened like at least a half a dozen times i got out the door started walking down the street and somewhere between my front door and the bus stop just turned around and was like no what am i doing right But it's a lot harder to do that when you're just in your house. Yeah.

Well, and it's weird because this time of year is a, is a corporate compliance kind of stuff on the legal side. So end of the year for a lot of my corporate clients, I'm meeting, I have a lot more meetings than I usually do at this time of year because I'm meeting with clients who are writing their annual minutes and kind of just catching up for the year. And the one thing I did as soon as I realized this is a real illness, not a background illness, is I called and canceled all those appointments. Because I just don't want to be spreading germs on people before Thanksgiving. Oops, I guess I let it out when we recorded this.

But I just didn't want to be spreading germs. And with that part, I was totally honest. People said, look, I'm sick. You don't want to be near me now. And we'll put it out a week or two. And now I'm going to be super busy once I get healthy. Yeah. And there's nothing you can do about it.

That's just how, how it is. You just got to deal with it. This last one you put in is something I am anxious to talk about. Oh, good, good. So, so office space. So I built my office when it was a home office. And although I had the inkling, as we've talked about, that I was going to go out on my own, the fact is I was building it plausibly as a home office. It was, it was going to certainly be first used as a home office. And I didn't know, you know, I'd never worked in the garage right i mean it was a garage wasn't even there wasn't even a door to the rest of the house at that point it was outside it was cold concrete floor and i built this home office so i've got a little desk and i've got a i've got

a giant carpet that covers the floor that's actually a rug but it's made from a giant carpet remnant basically an enormous like 10 by 10 foot carpet remnant. So it looks like the, the, the room is carpeted, even though it's a, it's a rug. I bought some Ikea furniture, um, and I use it as my workspace. Now I've been doing that now for three years. So now I am a three year user of this and being a free agent and my priorities have changed my understanding of my work environment has changed because i've been doing it all this time and how i like manage all my stuff has changed i didn't have any stuff when i started it was just setting up the home office and this has led to a few things one of which is i've discovered and this is so strange

i swear i'm not one of these i've never felt like i was one of these people who was super finicky like a a for people who watched the odd couple when they were kids a felix ungr type but i discovered my workspace is appreciably less pleasant to be in when there's visual clutter around when like like i have literally had trouble writing a story and vacuumed the floor and felt relief or or picked some stuff up i had at one point somebody in my family who shall go unnamed uh dumped a bunch of dirty clothes in here to be to be washed and they were scattered all over the floor. And I had to go pick them up and put them in a basket and hide the basket away kind of in the corner where I can't see it because it was driving me nuts.

And it's just, it's a funny thing that the visual clutter has completely hit me where like right now, because we have company, we've uh the extra bed out here for my daughter to sleep on and the bed is unmade and yesterday i actually made the bed and then i got a queen-sized uh quilt and put it over it to like spread it out and have it be like super calm and clean because i'm sitting here working on my computer but like if I'm surrounded by junk and dust and stuff, it's no, it's not a fun place to be. It's not a good place to be.

So I turns out, I guess I am finicky at least a little bit. I am a Felix Unger, at least a little bit about my workspace. Are you going to do something about it? I mean, what are you thinking? Well,

so I have, I understand now that, um, if I'm having these issues that I do need to straighten up, I, I do that a lot where, you know, things start to kind of collect. And then once a week, I will make a point of saving a little bit of time on a Friday afternoon, maybe and straighten up. Or maybe on the weekend,

I'll put things back in their drawers or back in there on the shelves, and I'll throw things away and put things, you know, elsewhere. And I'll vacuum and I'll do all of those things because that helps. That actually makes it a more pleasant space. And then the other thing that's going on is I'm going to buy some new furniture because I realized that I didn't know, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't know what I was getting into when I did this. And my assumptions were very basic. Let's get a desk and let's get i you know and then i went to ikea like three months in two months in and and thought i need to get some extra furniture because i need um some other things to put things on and some drawers to put things in and i realized i

have way too much stuff now in terms of all this technology stuff that I collect because this is my job. I have adapters and cables and I have tripods and mic stands and all of this stuff. And I don't have enough stuff to put it. And some of the old furniture that I just repurposed because it wasn't being used and I've shoved things on or in is not really appropriate. It works, but it spills out and is ugly. not really appropriate it works but it spills out and is ugly and um and i just i've reached the point i had this it was a moment of realization a couple weeks ago where i was like you know what i'm gonna buy some new furniture i'm gonna buy some new office furniture i'm gonna buy some like cubbies with baskets and organize some of my junk um in i need more storage i need more accessible storage um and it's just it's not something I would have known three years ago. So that's an interesting thing that I've discovered is after doing this for

a while, I have a much more clear appreciation of what my ongoing needs are, which how could I have had those when I, when I was getting started, I had no idea how it was going to go, but now I do. And, um, and I need to make some changes. So I'm going to go to probably just go to Ikea at some point and buy a bunch of stuff. So you, but you want to stay in the garage. You're not looking to like move somewhere else. No, I'm not. I'm not interested in that.

The garage is too perfect. I mean, it is, it is too perfect in all those ways. I think you should consider hiring a contractor and like putting up some drywall. No, I don't want to do it. I don't, I appreciate the suggestion, but I don't want to do it. I don't want to, I actually really appreciate that this is the space in here and any drywall that got put up to kind of turn this into an office is going to, I don't think I would, it removes a lot of flexibility from the room or it will give me claustrophobia because it will be too small an office and I kind of don't want the small office space. So that part of it works. I

may actually push, you know, push the curtains back a little bit to create more like official office space. But, um, but really for me, it's about like getting some extra, uh, moving, moving around how I use the space space maybe taking out some of the old stuff the old chef's carts and things that i just repurposed that were present so i used them but they're not the right thing to do and just give it a give it a little bit more of a rethink now that it is very clearly a permanent office for me and i know how i use it and that it's not quite right well my um the reason this is exciting for me is my daughter is next year changing schools and she's probably going to, well, she is going to be moving out, assuming everything

follows the plan in about eight months. And part of me is terrified about her leaving because I'm one of those parents that's not anxious for my kids to leave. And I know it's going to be rough. that's not anxious for my kids to leave. And I know it's going to be rough. And part of me is just fantasizing about turning her room into my office and feel a little guilty almost how, how badly I want that space. But the, um, so I, that, that is a thing that's just starting to percolate in the back of my mind. And I know it would make my life easier because as we talked about on the show, my office

is a corner of a master bedroom and that's just the way it has to be with the way our house is laid out currently. And like, uh, even just last night I was up till midnight working on a project and then I went to bed two feet away from my desk and laid in bed for an hour. And I feel like part of the reason why is I was in the same room in literally the same space trying to go to sleep that I'd been working very hard just minutes earlier. And, um, and, and I, I, uh, I will admit fully that visual clutter bothers me and my wife, uh, hates throwing things away. So my, my master bedroom does have a lot of extra stuff in it that I wouldn't, uh, that I don't like looking at. So, uh, if this all happens and this will probably be something you dear listener are going to hear about on the

show, cause there's no, I'll be able to avoid talking about it as it comes together. But I, I am starting in the back of my mind. I'm already starting to think little thoughts about setting up, uh, you know, Max Barkey headquarters and I cannot wait. Good. I I'm looking forward to forward to hearing uh hearing more about that in the in the future yeah so we've been going for a while now we had a big list um but before we go i wanted to at least cover a couple of things that have come in from listeners we would love your prompts and questions and stories best way to reach us is go to relay.fm slash free agents and click on the contact link in the sidebar to send us an email or tweet at us at free agents fm yes and fm at the end yes and you can

also go to our facebook group facebook.com slash groups slash free agents group there's a lot of people talking the facebook group about health insurance it It's scary right now. I just got my notice for next year. My premiums went up significantly, but I'm just going to have to work hard and pay it. But there's a bunch of folks in the free agents group that are concerned about getting or losing insurance. Right now is a very key time to be working on that for the enrollments for some of these different state and federal programs. May or may not be available as this show goes to air. If you haven't solved the problem yet, you need to. And my advice to you is that, number one, it's going to cost more because, you know, politics, I'll just leave it at that. But get yourself a broker. There's people out there that make their living by getting a little kickback from the insurance company for signing you up.

And they understand the policies. And I know that you worry about that they may be motivated against you. There are very good brokers out there. Just find a good broker who will get you the best solution for you. Because you cannot wait until January to solve this problem. I think you're going to have a bunch of doors closed to you if you do. And if health insurance is at all an issue, stop everything right now, get it figured out, or get a broker to figure it out for you.

I don't have any more advice than that. It's super important. All right. Well, that, I think, is going to be that for this time. But we will be back with a good interview that we've already done just a little uh little hint we already have done it john vorhees uh who we mentioned a few um weeks ago or months ago about uh going full-time another lawyer who has become a full-time yeah person who is not a lawyer uh actually which is really really interesting. Yeah, he went all the way.

Yeah, he went all the way. That'll be in two weeks. And then we'll be back with another open episode like this one. So send us your feedback. Send us your questions. You help guide the conversation here. Go to relay.fm slash freeagents to get all the links. And until the next Fortnite, David, it's been a pleasure as always.

See you next time. Bye, everybody.