Focused - 57: Chef = Boss

Episode Date: October 2, 2018

This episode is all about space. Mike and David discuss the role of Mise-en-place ("Everything in its place") with a successful free agency. Also, David talks about the effect of dedicated spaces on production, Mike is thinking about leaving his co-working space, and David is plotting a sabbatical, for more "space".

David Sparks and Mike Schmitz spent their careers working for the establishment. Now, they've had enough. They've rebelled against the status quo and are now seeking success on their terms. 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 co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Great. I got a lot of good feedback from the last episode.

I thought it went really well. And also thank you, everyone, for supporting me, going over to learn.maxsparky.com and a bunch of you bought the Siri Short uh course which came out really great and uh there's also a bunch of free stuff there too if you want um so check it out but uh we're here with a content show this week and we've got lots to talk about but first we thought we would cover the monthly free agent survival skill. You just read a book, right? Yes, as always. Yeah, I know that. Anytime you say that to Mike Schmitz, he can just say yes. I just read a book. This particular book is called Work Clean by Dan Charnas. And it's a productivity book,

but it's really distilling lessons in productivity from the culinary industry, so chefs. And there's a concept from the food world, which is called mise en place. It's from French cuisine, and it literally means everything in its place. And this is a really interesting idea, and I thought it'd be worth unpacking here on free agents, because when you go to culinary school, especially certain culinary schools, really a big part of what they teach you is personal organization. So when you're a chef and you're in the middle of a, you're in a kitchen and it's the noon rush or dinner rush, you've got to be efficient and effective in everything that you do. So chefs have a whole bunch of things, a whole bunch of procedures that they follow so that they can get their work done. And it's kind of all encapsulated by this idea of mise en place. And there's a, you can apply this to any situation,

but just to give you an example from the kitchen. So they even have specific ways that they position their cutting boards and they have the ingredients on the left and they have the finished things on the right. And each hand has a dedicated purpose and they're using them both at the same time. They're never stopping just to grab something with one hand. They are well-tuned food-making machines. And I'm going through this book and I'm realizing that if you're going to even survive in that world, you have to be organized. But when you're a free agent, you also have to be organized. You have to organize yourself in order to get your work done, because if you don't get your work done, you're the one who suffers. The problem, I think, is that a lot of us make things harder than they need to be. And I want to unpack this idea of mise en place and kind of apply this maybe to our

own personal situations. Yeah, I think this is here on a couple levels. I can see it on just an organizational level, like how much stuff do you have in your desk kind of thing. But I could also see it on just your personal procedures and methods for getting through your day. Is that fair? Yep, absolutely. So procedures, plans that you follow. Also, like you said, the organization of your actual workspace. So one of the things that I did right after reading this book is I bought a trash can from my home office. You didn't have a trash can? I didn't, right. And so this is the kind of thing where I never really thought I needed a trash can. I fill out this paper form every day where I plan my day the night before. And I recognize after reading this book that that is introducing friction into my workday

because I have to rip the one off from the day before and then write the plan for the next day. And I have to go upstairs to throw this piece of paper away. And there's just no place for that thing. And obviously, that's just one small example. You can apply this to pretty much anything in your personal or professional life. And I just want to use that one as a starting point here to get people thinking this way. But basically, anything that you have that is in your possession that you don't have a dedicated space for, I would argue, is a good opportunity to apply mise en place and get a little bit of extra headspace, which you can devote to doing the stuff that's going to pay the bills, the things that are really

important and going to move the needle. Yeah, when I moved into my new home office, that was one of my big goals was, I hadn't read the book, but intuitively, I've always felt like there needs to, in fact, I knew this thing growing up, everything intuitively, I've always felt like there needs to... In fact, I knew this thing growing up. Everything has its place, and there's a place for everything. So much so, Mike, that I bought foam liners for my drawers. That sounded weird. The foam stuff you put in your drawers, and you cut out the shapes.

If I have a Zoom recorder that I use when I record videos. There's a zoom shaped hole cut into my drawer so I can open the drawer and see exactly what's there and what's not there. You know what I mean? Yeah. You sent me a picture of this the other day and I was, I was blown away by this. I think this is a great idea. I actually don't have any drawers on my, my standing desk is doesn't have any drawers. It's just a top on top of a Jarvis by Ergo Depot. But, uh, I think that you can apply this a lot of different ways. Like another way that I've seen this is a lot of people have like the pegboards in their garage and they hang their tools there. Again, I'm not really a handy guy, so I'm not hanging my tools

on a pegboard, but sometimes you'll have like the chalk outlines. So you know exactly where each tool is supposed to go. I think there's a lot of value in identifying that stuff because then when it's time to put the things away you don't do what i've typically done and just let it sit there because oh i don't know where this is supposed to go and i don't want to deal with it right now or or just the whole idea of and everybody's done this where you spend 10 minutes walking around looking for a tool and you know i'm a woodworker i'm just as anal with that stuff as i am with my business and my Max Markey stuff. But it really does save you time if you know exactly where it is.

And like I said, at a glance, I can see what's there and what's not there. One of the things in my drawers is because I have different bags. If I'm going to a client meeting, I have a briefcase. If I'm going to Disneyland for the day, I have a backpack. It just depends if I'm going to a client meeting, I have a briefcase. If I'm going to Disneyland for the day, I have a backpack. It just depends where I'm going. But I have a group of stuff that would go into my away bag organized in the foam cut out. I've cut out a slot to hold my Advil bottle. I refill it all the time. And my daughter was looking at that and said, Dad, you are absolutely manic. But I know whether I have my Advil bottle or not, because

it's either in the drawer or it's not. But anyway, I think this can be really helpful. I also think there's a potential downside to it. It can become a distraction. You know, you can say, well, I've got to get my mise en place together and you don't do your work. So you've got to be careful about it. even if it does take you some time to create those systems. One of the things that I did, because I've been reading a lot of books, I've not always had the giant bookshelf that I have in my home office. I tended to leave books all over the place because I didn't have a place for them. And then I'm going to pick up my book and I'm going to read it, but I have no idea where I left it. And I got to dig through things and find it. By the time I find it, I don't want to read it anymore. So having a place for it

to go, that eliminates some of the decisions that I have to make. I read one time that the average person makes 35,000 decisions every single day. I think mise en place can help you eliminate a lot of those decisions and focus on the ones that really matter. No, let's move to that piece of this too. Because in addition to having your recording device in the exact same spot every time, there's the question of mise en place applied to your procedures as to the way you do something. Just like a chef has a certain way that they grab a bowl, a certain way that they do different procedures. I think that is real fertile territory for someone who wants to work for themselves and be able to consistently get good work out.

Yeah, and this is another thing I picked up from that book is that the word chef literally means boss. And so if you're a free agent, you're your own boss. You're making a lot of the same types of decisions. And I think the default, maybe for a lot of people who haven't embraced this idea of mise en place and really just struggle with organization, and I would argue that I tend to fall into that category, is that you don't even recognize how difficult you're making things. But the system side of this that you mentioned, I forget where I first heard it, but I've always, the last several years, I've been reminded of this saying, the simplest solution is invariably the best solution.

And I think that when you're thinking about the way that you get work done, noticing how much time you're spending doing things and recognizing that, hey, this thing took me three hours to do. There's got to be a simpler way to do this, a better way to do this, a more efficient way to do this, or even a more effective way to do this. So for me, you know, writing, podcasting, a lot of like knowledge work, a lot of creative work. Sometimes it's not the mechanics of the thing that's hard, but it's being in the right mental state, knowing this is the right time to do this sort of thing. I think that kind of falls into the procedures and policies

as well. I think one of the things, one of the advantages of that moment where you decide to jump out of your day job and turn it into your free agency is you have the ability to reset all of your day-to-day procedures. You have the ability to reset not only what time you wake up, day-to-day procedures. You have the ability to reset not only what time you wake up, but what you do first, how you plan your day. All that stuff is on the table. And you get to create an entirely new set of habits. And when you were telling me about this book, that's what came to my mind is the idea of saying, okay, what if I did that mindfully? What if I thought about what's the way I'm going to do this or that every day? And I think that can really make a difference.

Absolutely. I did this on a small scale with the time blocking that I do when I plan out my day. Because I have a home office now, but I haven't always. And there have been times when I've been traveling from place to place. And just mapping it out, how I'm going to spend my hours the day before, makes it a lot more efficient. I don't drive across town and then realize that, oh, I've got to be back here at this time for this thing, you know, just because I got a notification on my calendar. And I can coordinate these things and I can plan out my route. And it's a lot easier to

do it that way. But there's a lot of different ways that you can apply this. Now, the good part is, as a free agent, a lot of times you have the flexibility. You can create these systems. The bad part is that no one's going to do it for you. In the book, they talk about how these world-famous chefs, they bring these people in and they teach them all this stuff. And it's kind of trial by fire and people figure it out. And then it produces benefit that translates to every area of their life. As a free agent, sometimes you don't have anybody who's going to do that by fire and people figure it out. And then it produces benefit that translates to every area of their life. As a free agent, sometimes you don't have anybody who's going to do that for you. So unless you recognize that this stuff isn't functioning at an optimal state, you know,

you have to take control of the situation. You have to do something about it. Yeah, it's tough. But I mean, I think if once again, I think the trick is to be aware that it's happening. Because you're going to be setting the methods and ways you complete your work every day. Now, I think I am pretty anal retentive, honestly. But I do a shutdown procedure every day. When I get to the end of the day, I go through and I journal the day. I plan the next day. But when I do that, I do a lot of it in a paper notebook. That's,

that's one of my few concessions to analog Mike, I think it's your fault, you and some of the other folks that you talk to. But the, but I, when I do that, I have a certain place that the ruler gets kept. I have a special pen I use for it.

You know, I mean, everything is like decided for me. So when I sit down to do that, all I have to do is think about the brain parts and the rest of it just happens. And I stretch that into everything. That's why I do so much of that scripting and OmniFocus where every new project gets, you know, built out automatically. So I don't have to think about what the steps are and I just do them. Yeah, I think that's a great example. I think another

example of that is this whole idea, again, from the book, but that tomorrow starts today, just recognizing where the forced constraints should be. So that's, in my opinion, why analog works for you. It's why it works for me too, to a certain degree, although I'm definitely not as analog as somebody like Joe Bulek. But the forced constraints, there's a lot to be said for that. When you dial down all of the opportunities, all of the different things that you could be doing, it's a lot easier to find the thing that you quote unquote should be doing. Yeah. Well, I think there's something to that. And I guess the message this week and the

free agent survival skill is spend some spend some thought thinking, spend some time thinking about how thoughtful you are about these things. Have you gone through, I mean, do you have your tools where you want them? I mean, that's the basic level, but the deeper level is, do you have, you know, your methods set? Can you do your best work or are you spending a lot of time spinning your wheels on things you shouldn't be? Do you have your calendar where you want it to be? I mean, that's really the idea behind Tomorrow Starts Today. It's like setting the intentionality like you were talking about with how you're going to spend your time.

I think if you apply just that piece to it, you would see a lot of benefit. You'd also see a lot of benefit if you just applied the implementation of your actual tools and making sure that your workspace is organized. But what I really like about this whole idea of mise en place is that you can apply it a lot of different ways. But I think pretty much every way that you apply it, it works. Yeah, well, I want to at some point talk more about block scheduling. I think I made Jason miserable as much as I talked about hyper scheduling.

But I do think putting constraints on yourself with respect to your time allows you to choose what gets your time. But that's probably a discussion for another day. Sounds good. This episode of the free agents is brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move with Squarespace and enter offer code free agents at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase. Squarespace lets you easily create a website for your next big idea with a unique domain, award-winning templates, and more. So what do you want to create? Maybe it's an online store or a portfolio. Maybe you want to start the next big tech blog, or maybe you're just looking for

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They look beautiful and amazing. Squarespace plans start at just $12 a month, but you can start a trial with no credit card required by going to squarespace.com slash free agents. When you decide to set up your free agent business, just go to Squarespace. When you decide to sign up, use the offer code free agents, that's one word, to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain and to show your support for the free agents. Once again, that's squarespace.com slash freeagents and the code FREEAGENTS to get 10% off your first purchase. Mike and I thank Squarespace for their support. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. Mike, following up on mise en place, I've been bemoaning on the show the last couple

months about, oh, I'm not getting any work done. This whole office move and all this stuff is just a big, huge time sink. Guess what? It's paying off. Yeah, I noticed. You've been busy lately. Yeah, all of a sudden, it was weird because I felt like I was getting nothing done. And of course, I was actually doing a lot.

But in terms of production, I wasn't doing anything. And in my mind, if I'm not producing, I'm not working, which is probably another problem, another hang-up of mine. But getting the office set up just the way I wanted, you know, getting all the pieces in place. I am putting out two different field guides in a month. I've never done that. It's just kind of a circumstance where OmniGroup just finished the OmniFocus field guide. I'm sorry, OmniGroup just released OmniFocus 3 for Mac. And I was waiting for that to do the new field guide for them.

And then Apple released Siri Shortcuts with iOS 12. So I had two massive, massive projects that were going on at the same time. And this Office is really, it's really worth it. It's just amazing how much I'm able to get done now. Yeah, I think the Office is an interesting example of sharpening the saw. And it's not always an example of sharpening the saw. You can definitely get into the category where you're just fiddling with your system and you're not getting the work done. But there is something to be said about figuring out the best way to work and then putting in the initial effort

so that you create the atmosphere for that to happen. And I would argue by the fact that you're releasing those two different field guides that it's working for you. So kudos to you for that. Yeah. I mean, there's still some stuff to figure out. There are some small pieces of the office that I have put on a shelf that I, or I guess that's the wrong phrase. There's some small pieces that I've delayed making decisions on and a couple of things that are still left to do because suddenly I had a, uh, an, an urgent need to get some product out. So I had to like put that stuff on hold, but in large part it is done. And in large part it's working, but I mean, this is obvious,

right? I mean, how many people are trying to run a business out of a corner of their bedroom? You know, it's just, it's stupid. And there are some dangers to it because now it's really easy to go and just bury yourself and work for hours at a time because you've got a dedicated space for it, which is a whole nother problem. But the, but man, I, I'm really happy I did this. So I, I don't want to turn this into the home office show, but I'm curious because I know you used to have your work environment in your bedroom, correct? Yeah. Okay. So what's the biggest benefit that you've seen from creating its own workspace?

Or what's the biggest thing that surprised you, I guess? I mean, it sounds like just changing up the location, creating the space you wanted, you're able to get a lot more work done, but is it exactly like you thought it was going to be or what's, what's surprising about the change? Um, you know, I, I had my own office when I was working for the man for years, but I've never had my own office for doing the Mac Sparky stuff. You know, that's always been the side hustle corner of the bedroom kind of thing. And what's surprising to me is how easy it is to switch gears because I generally, when, you know, I'm in control of my schedule, I try to spend from, you know, 7am to about. to about 1 p.m. being a lawyer and 1 p.m. on being Max Barkey.

And I'm actually trying to work. I'm actually trying to change that. I'll talk about another time. But usually the mornings goes to the law, the afternoon goes to the nerd. And switching gears between those two and transforming the office from law office to recording studio happens very fast. And I had planned all that out, but I just didn't realize how easy it would be. And so now I'm like able to release more videos with me on screen talking about products or incorporate more interesting pieces into the Mac Sparky content I make, or even just like decide, oh, I'm going to

make a little screencast about this feature that I really like. Well, I can set that up and get rolling on production on that so fast now that I'm just doing it more. It's cool to hear you say that. And I think that that's something that is maybe an underrated benefit

of creating its own space that a lot of free agents maybe never thought about is this whole idea of procrastination and the initial friction that comes from sitting down to work on something when you don't have a dedicated space. It's significantly harder and it's hard to identify a specific number, you know, like 30% harder. And I actually, I would argue it's, it's a lot harder than that. But I've experienced the same thing. Having everything set up in my basement office allows me to, when I go downstairs and go into my office, just enter right into work mode. I don't have to

ramp things up. I don't have to get all psyched up. I don't have to be motivated to work on the thing. The resistance that you encounter when you sit down to work on a big project is a lot less when you've got it all set up and you're ready to go. Which again kind of ties back to mise en place, I think. Yeah, I know. I feel like this is just a continuation, really. But the, well, you know, when I was working out of the corner of the bedroom, that's office, that's space I share with my wife. And I understand that she, you know, it's her bedroom. Right. So, of course, she has a right to put stuff around.

And but, you know, that was friction for me because I want to work. But this thing is in my way or whatever. And now I've got this space where, you know, the joke in the family is I said, you can store anything in my office you want. So long as you don't mind that goes to Goodwill or the trash can within 24 hours. But having my own space, I mean, this is all obvious stuff. I'm not sure I'm adding anything to the conversation here, but it's really nice. And I guess my advice would be if you are setting up your own space, give some consideration to the steps you take into towards getting work done every day. Like I intentionally put two desks in here. I have one desk where I do technology and

one desk where I do analog. And that kind of phase shift from one to the other is as easy as pushing my chair to a different desk. And it just works just like phase shifting from legal to video production, it really doesn't take long. And if you can remove the kind of friction for mode shifting in your life, it can really increase your productivity. value or don't anticipate how significant those things are going to be. That's one of the main reasons that I got my office at the co-working space, which I've had now for quite a while. But I put in the show notes my co-working space predicament because I'm not sure that the co-working spaces is long for this world, at least in my world. So here's kind of what's going on in my head. I've, I've had this office offsite for a couple of years now. And when I finished the home office, I had said, I'm going to keep this because I'm getting such a great deal. It's downtown Appleton. It allows me to get out of

the house and go be around other people, even if I only use it once a week. It's probably worth it. However, I've recently kind of come to this understanding of finances in a little bit different light. So this is kind of what's going around in my head. I had somebody explain to me the value of one of those like masterminds that you might go to for a couple of days and you get around a whole bunch of people and they pick apart all the things you're doing wrong with your business and you get a different perspective and then you figure out what you need to change. Yeah. Okay. So those are typically pretty expensive. And just to keep the math simple, let's say that you are running a business and it costs you $1,000 to go to this thing. So typically, the belief is that, well, if it generates another $1,000 worth of revenue, it's worth it. it. Okay. The revelation that I kind of got though, is that depending on your business, maybe you are a quote unquote freelancer and you get paid by the hour and you can increase your

rates and you can make it back real quick. And that's, then it, then it's worth it. But a lot of people who are running businesses, revenue does not equal profit. And so if you're, if you got a 10% profit margin, really, if you make another thousand dollars, you're really only making another hundred dollars in profit. So that means that to make this thing worth it now, you've got to make $10,000 instead of $1,000. Hopefully you can kind of see where, where this is going. Okay.

So even though the coworking space is not a whole lot of money, what I'm realizing is that it's not really necessary. And maybe I've been justifying this in my head as like, well, I've only got to make a couple hundred dollars more a month to justify having this office. Maybe it's a lot more than that. Maybe my operating margin, because I'm not very good with the numbers stuff. Maybe it's higher than it should be. And maybe there's some things that I need to pinch some pennies, and that's really going to make things a lot easier. And so I'm kind of going back to the drawing board and reevaluating all these different things. But the co-working space, I'm kind of

recognizing, I've got this space. It's nice to go downtown once in a while. I really don't need it. I've got to maintain two desks, two to all the different things that I would need there to power supplies. And I've got a lot of that stuff already. But really the tipping point for me came when I wanted a pair of studio monitors in my office at home so I could edit podcasts and videos and things and not have to wear my headphones all the time. And those are expensive. They're a couple hundred bucks at least. And I'm like, I've got a pair downtown that I haven't used in months. So I went and brought them back. And that for me, I think was kind of the nail in the coffin for the co-working space and really just made me realize that I use it a little bit. It's

probably not enough to justify the actual cost of keeping that space. So it sounds to me like it's not really the co-working predicament. It's just you're looking at your expenses. Yeah, exactly. And it's something that I never saw before that way. And I think a lot of free agents maybe view and justify expenses the way that I have a little bit too liberally, where it's like, oh, it's only a couple hundred bucks, whatever. But if your operating margin of your business is whatever, you know, you have to figure that out. Kind of comes back to the whole idea of like, what is your time worth? And it comes back actually to the episode that we recorded before this,

when you were talking about how you were letting go of the car and you were going to get an Uber, you know, once a week and the math worked. Well, if you're honest about the numbers for something like the co-working space in my particular scenario, the math doesn't really work. It's actually a lot more than that. Whereas in your example that you shared in the previous content episode, it was actually a little bit less than that because you could do work in the car and you could redeem some of that time while I'm spending time to go there. And like I already mentioned, you know, the couple hundred bucks that I pay for the office itself, really like that's coming from profit, not from revenue. And so maybe I can double my profit by letting go a couple hundred bucks a month. That's the thing

that I think free agents need to understand is not every hour is created equal like we talked about. Not every dollar is created equal either in terms of revenue that's coming in. And there's got to be some low-hanging fruit there that's going to be easy for you to, whether you're applying it to your business or for me personally, what are the things that you can cut out that are going to move the needle? It's funny you say that because I've been thinking about the same thing. I was looking at where am I spending money that I don't need to be. And when I first went out on my own, I got a fancy telephone service, you know, where a human answers the phone if you call my office number. And they're very friendly. It's a

great service, but the price keeps inching up. Now it's towards almost $300 a month to have a person answer the phone for my law practice. If you call the number that says Sparks Law, they're up in Portland. But they have an app and they send me the recorded message. And it's done very well. But since I started on my own, I have got out of litigation, which means I don't have a lot of opposing counsel calls coming in all the time, you know, and I am been really trying to get those hours I spent on being a lawyer down from six to seven a day to more like three to five a day. And so I'm actually getting rid of some of the problem clients and the good clients all have my cell phone number. So now I realize I'm spending $300

a month for basically marketing people to call me and sometimes a new client out of the blue to call me. And do I want to spend $300 a month on that? Or would I rather have, you know, $3,600 a year back in my pocket and have them go to an automated system where, you know, I don't have to spend nearly as much money. And that's, I've got the exact same thing as you, Mike. And even just talking it through right here, it sounds like the decision's clear, but it's hard for me because I've always felt like, you know, law practice should have a human answering the phone, but is that really what I need? And is that just me spending money for the sake of spending money? Yeah. And maybe your needs have changed. You know, when I first got the office at the co-working

space, I didn't have a place I could record a podcast quietly or do a webinar or any of that. So I needed it, you know, I don't need it now. And really the question that I'm trying to ask myself is not, you know, taking the fact that I already have this thing out of the picture. If I were to sign up for this thing afresh today, would I do it? Instead of just maintaining this thing because, oh, look, I've made it work. I can continue to make this work. But maybe it's not worth it to continue to make it work. Evaluating what are my current needs versus what were my needs back then and not just accepting the fact that I made this commitment, this obligation years ago and continuing

to maintain that. And that can apply to not just finances, that can apply to time commitments too. Yeah. Well, it sounds like we're both dealing with that now. Yep. Well, I'll tell you, I've got one more. And this is one that is a result of this show, largely. You were talking, I believe, two months ago, how you take a, what do you call it, a retreat? You take every month, I forget what you call it. Yeah, personal retreat. Yeah, personal retreat. We had Sean McCabe on the show. We had Sean Blanc on the show.

Everybody's building in space in their schedules. And I've always known that's important. You know, I just intuitively, I know it's important, but this is the weird thing. Like I've been, so I'm now 50 years old. I've been in this racket of being a full-time worker for over 25 years, you know, and I've always been the guy that gets up and goes to work every day. And often I work on weekends without thinking about it. I've never built in space. I do kind of come up with ideas. I do, now that I'm out on my own, I do have the ability to cancel the day and spend the afternoon with my daughter when there's a good reason to or something like that. But I've never had programmed space in my life.

I know it's something I need to be doing, not only because people are telling me it, but I know intuitively it's something I should be doing. I cannot figure out how in the heck to do this, Mike. You know, not to bring everything back to mise en place, but this is a part of it too, is they make the connection in the book about how when you are a chef and you leave the kitchen, you leave work at work. Like it doesn't matter. You can't be chopping mushrooms in your living room at home. You got to do it in the kitchen. You got to do it at the right time and in the right place.

And, uh, I get it. That's, that's hard. And Sean talked a lot about that in the last episode too, about how he was working crazy hours and he needed to create this system in order to force himself to take a break. I think that anybody who has any sort of people who are driven, people who have a lot of ambition, they want to they want to do things like the natural reaction is to just keep doing one more thing. I'm curious. You know, I think a system is the answer, but only you can answer the question, like, what does the system look like for you? Do you have any initial thoughts about how to start winning back some of that margin? Well, I mean, right now I am in full production mode between the two courses and the law practice

where routinely I wake up at 6am and I stop working at about 9pm, which is just, that's not sustainable. I know that. But now that the OmniFocus field guide is out, I think I'm going to try. I can't take a week off. It just doesn't work. And see, that's the other problem is I'm an attorney. People call me all the time with something that nobody knew existed until one morning, and they need help within a few days.

But what I'm thinking is I'm going to try and take either two or three weekdays off. In fact, I'm going to commit right now between now and the next content show that I will have done that. I'm not exactly sure. Help me out in the Facebook, I'm sorry, in the, not the Facebook, in the discourse group with some ideas. I'm going to try and find a way to take two or three days off, maybe even try and get up into the mountains or get away for a day or so. But I'm not sure where the structure is to it, but I think I just need to commit to it. And if I don't make it a full week and a client calls with an emergency, I can probably push it off a couple of days. Or if I have to, I can do a little bit of work on this, this break, but I've got to figure it out, Mike. I think it's important. Well, I would encourage everybody to

go back and listen to that interview with Sean McCabe, because he did a great job explaining the whole idea of the sabbaticals. As he was explaining that I was thinking about you and I'm like, I wonder if there are any lawyers that take sabbaticals like this, but I think that you're right. If you even did it for a couple of days, that would help a lot. I've had mine. I'm actually taking one as we're recording this in a couple of weeks. And it's been on my calendar for a couple of months. In fact, I pick it out at the beginning of the quarter. I typically do it every three months. And I just take an entire day and a half really to just go think. Also, a little bit more context for that, because I've got a family and I've got five kids at home, it's something that we have to create a balance. So it's not just me that's

doing this. I do this for my wife as well. She had hers as we record this last weekend. I took all the kids and we left and she had a day to herself. So it's more complicated with more people juggling more schedules, but we're able to make it work because we prioritize it. And so I definitely want to follow up on this and see if you actually did it and then also see what kind of benefit you got from it. Yeah. I mean, as we record this, I'm not sure what the particulars are, but I think it's something that needs to happen. And I'm looking at it as a baby step for me. Like I said, I'm going to commit to two days. But as I record this, I think three days would actually help me because I always feel like even when you go on a vacation, it takes a couple days before you kind of get into the mode. At least that's what I find. So I'm not sure two days is enough. Yeah, that definitely could be, especially if you don't have a regular cadence of doing this sort of thing. I think it takes harder to get into it. That's kind of what Sean was talking about with the sabbaticals where, you know, I think he said it took him three times of doing

it before it really clicked with his body. And I would imagine the same sort of thing would be true for a smaller version of that. But that rest and recovery, that is definitely something that's super important, especially if you're burning the candle on both ends, cranking out the courses. It's fine to do that for a little while, but recognizing your limits and knowing that it's not sustainable,

that's really important. Sounds like you're taking steps to address it though, so we'll have to follow up with that. Yeah, I mean, when I hear about guys like Sean McCabe or Sean Blanc or people who build into their schedule a week off every set period of time, I'm super impressed by that. I mean, I think some people may listen to that and say, well, that guy's lazy or that guy doesn't have much work to do. And I know how busy those guys are. So to me, it's just the ultimate display of prowess with respect to these things. But for me, the hang up has always been the law practice. Because it's just really hard to, I mean, I'd be able to do this a lot easier if all I did was Max Barkey stuff, but I don't want to just do that.

And I do get satisfaction out of being a lawyer, too. But it's very difficult. I remember when I was a young lawyer, a friend of mine had an attorney in his firm who took six months off to go sailing and came back and a bunch of his clients were gone and they fired him because his clients were gone, you know. You know, that was a very instructional moment for me as a young lawyer. And I think that always rests in the back of my mind. Yeah, I think there's probably a negotiation that has taken place in your head. And some of the things, you know, there's trade-offs, but as long as you're okay making them, then that's fine. I mean, I would think not having any experience as a lawyer, but I would think that, you know, sometimes there are things that are urgent that you need to take

care of. But also, even if you're not a lawyer, sometimes solving other people's emergencies can be pretty lucrative. So it's okay to say, well, for this period, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to do these, these sorts of things. But I also think that, like you said, achieving that, the balance, figuring out where to draw the line is important because you don't want to slip into, to burn out. And like Sean was saying, you know, you may not even realize that you are burnt out until it's way too late, you know, and then not even realize that you are burnt out until it's way too late, you know, and then you really have to do something. Yeah. So this is the part you may want to like save the clip because maybe someday you can bring it back and throw in my face. But

the, you know, I've been doing this for 25 years. I've never felt anything like burnout, you know, and I definitely work a lot. And I think maybe it's because I have a meditation practice. I think also it's because I've always pretty much limited myself to things I really enjoy doing, but for whatever reason, that's just never been an issue for me. But, but the thing that really attracts me to the idea of, of, of downtime is, is, is that space and the benefits that come from that space. And I think that there's something to that that I am definitely not able to enjoy because I'm just not doing it. I got to figure it out. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think that the space and the margin

really comes from operating in different modes a lot of times, which is kind of why in the notes, I put my second point here, Mike is a gamer again, because I've been building this stuff into my schedule. I've been taking the personal retreats. I've been making sure that I don't work on Sundays specifically. But I've also found myself feeling a little bit burnt out. And I've been thinking about my morning, or sorry, not my morning, my evening, like my shutdown routine. And I've noticed some things that I'm not real happy with. So typically, I get to the end of the day lately and I'll throw on a baseball game or I'll watch a movie, which is fine if you wanted to do that thing because you wanted to

watch the movie or you wanted to watch the baseball game. I've been doing it basically to zone out. And I know because I've been working in the productivity space long enough that that's not restorative at all. And so I've been thinking about what are the things that I can do to replace that. And I was going back through show notes for Bookworm. And I mentioned quite a while ago to Joe, like, I'm going to embrace this whole idea of play. And I'm going to get into video games because I used to be a big gamer when I was in college. I'm going to get into video games because I used to be a big gamer when I was in college. I played Call of Duty on the Xbox and Halo and all that stuff. And everybody in the dorm was doing it. So we have big LAN parties every night and it was a lot of fun. When I left college,

I didn't really play video games anymore. Especially when I got into the productivity space, you kind of view like video games are a complete waste of time. Well, not necessarily. Number one, I know a couple of people who are very, very successful playing video games for a living now on Twitch. Number two, even if you don't make any money from it, if it's something that you enjoy doing, there is some restorative benefit to that. So I was listening to Playing for Fun, episode seven with Mike Hurley. And I'm blanking on... Tiffany Arment? Tiffany Arment. Yeah, yeah. And they were talking about The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild.

And I loved that episode. I loved that video game. We bought a Switch when it came out, because I figured it was pretty family-friendly. And Zelda Breath of the Wild was the only game that came out at launch. And so I got into it at that point. I played it quite a bit. I never beat the game though. And hearing them talk about it kind of stirred in me a desire to boot it up and play it again. And since I'd stopped playing it, there have been a couple of expansions that have come out and there's a whole bunch of other stuff that you can do, which is kind of an open world game anyways. So basically, you can never kind of run out of things to do,

places to explore, stuff like that. After I listened to that episode, I went and I fired up the Switch. I went to load my previous game and it had been over a year since I had turned it on. And I didn't realize that. It didn't feel that long. And it made me kind of think about, well, could the fact that I'm not emphasizing the fun stuff, the play, could that be contributing to the fact that I just feel kind of worn out and I don't have the energy that I think I should have to devote to these things because I'm getting enough sleep. I'm exercising every day. I'm doing all the things that I know I need to do, but something's still just a little bit off. And so in the last couple of weeks, I've become a gamer

again. And that's something we can talk about or we talked about on the members only show so because i am also a purveyor of zelda nice nice yeah it's a it's a great game uh and what's cool about it is that you don't have to be quote-unquote good at video games in order to play it because you can just walk around do whatever there's all the different side quests and all the different things that you can do i mean literally if you just wanted to walk around and cook things which sounds really dumb but if you played zelda you get it like you could do that but and isn't that one of the reasons why we do this free agent stuff i mean why do you give up the corporate benefits and stock plan and all the other stuff it's because you want to have control of your time and if being a free agent means that you never have any time to play zelda or um go do basket

weaving or whatever it is that makes you happy then why are we doing it exactly i mean at the if you were to distill it down like we're motivated by a couple different things either the avoidance of pain or the pursuit of pleasure so So I would say a lot of people who are free agents, they are free agents because they envision a future which is pleasurable to them. They have the flexibility in their schedule to do the things that they want to do. So maybe you do really love your work and you could just do that all day every day and that would be fun and restorative for you. I'm not that way. As much as I love recording podcasts, as much as I love creating videos, as much as I love writing, I can't do it all the time. And it became a bit of a chore for me because it's something that I have to do. This is what pays the bills. And that's actually another

side topic. That's the danger with allowing the passion project to become the main thing that you do. When you start making money on something, you kind of lose the license to just do this thing for fun, especially if you've made the leap and, okay, this is what I do now. And I recognized that I just needed to have some more fun. And it's been a huge benefit for me. It's kind of allowed me... I've noticed, and I don't have quantified numbers, but I've

noticed that in the last couple of weeks, since I have been focusing on doing things that I enjoy, not doing things that I know are going to get me to where I want to go, not reading the books that are going to give me the ideas that are going to produce the content that I want, but just allowing myself to say, I'm going to do this right now. I'm going to have fun doing this. And even if nothing else comes from this, that's okay. That's helped a lot. To all the freelancers out there, you know how important it is to make smart decisions for your business. Our friends at FreshBooks can save you up to 192 hours with their cloud accounting software for freelancers that's ridiculously easy to use. By simplifying tasks like invoicing, tracking expenses, and getting

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unrestricted 30-day free trial for listeners of this show. You don't need a credit card. All you have to do is go to freshbooks.com slash freeagents and enter the code freeagents in the how did you hear about a section. That's freshbooks.com slash freeagents, all one word, So Mike, we got some feedback this month. Yes, we did. Chris sent us a rather long email, which I'll try to summarize here. It says, Hi, David and Mike. I'm a huge free agents fan. Wanted to share a brief success story with you and say thanks for all the awesome work that you do on the podcast. Chris finished a, in his words, crappy first draft of a fiction novel that he's been working

on for a year and a half. Been a lifelong dream to write a book and he's done it. So thank you for sharing that. And kudos to you, Chris. Says, I finally arrived, had no idea what to do with it. Wanted to self-publish, saw dozens of barriers, couldn't fathom being able to jump all over them or over all of them. I had no idea how to run a Kickstarter, form a business, work with graphic designers, editors, market my work, overwhelmed. I think that's a lot of people. Listening to the podcast provided a confidence boost. I'm so excited to hear people say that because that's really the reason why we do this sort of thing.

Not to say, go quit your job. He even says, so I quit my job. Just kidding, David. Pressed on, stumbled my way through the process with a lot of help from some very awesome people. Yeah. I mean, success is never a straight journey. You're going to stumble through some stuff, but just keep going. And learned a lot of different stuff along the way. We talked about that with Sean McCabe, that growth mindset, that importance of keeping growing. Summarizing this, so thanks for all you do. Can't wait to see where you guys take the podcast. Take care. Thanks again. Thanks for listening, Chris. And thanks for sharing this

story. I can't wait to hear what the next steps are. A lot of this overcoming resistance, there's, I guess I'm trying to figure out the way to say this. We think that like, this is the obstacle standing between me and the next level. And as soon as I overcome that, I've arrived. That's never the case. As soon as you overcome one obstacle, you see the next one. Yeah. You never get there. You just got to keep going. Exactly. Exactly. You never really arrive. But finishing a first draft of a book, that's a pretty major first step. That's my story. That's how I got connected with Asian efficiency and a lot of the things that I do now. So keep going and keep looking for the next thing. Don't expect it to be clear. Don't expect it to look exactly like you envisioned it would. A lot of the things that I'm doing now are

derivatives of what I started off doing. But as you explore these different things and you figure out what works, eventually you'll land on your unique ability, the thing that you're the best at, the thing that is really high value that only you can contribute to the world. And I just want to say thank you to Chris for sharing this and encourage other people to do the same. Have you ever done rock climbing, Mike? I have not. I'm scared of heights, so that terrifies me. It's really fun. They have places like here in Southern California. I'm sure they're all over the place where they're indoor rock climbing where you know

where you're going. And the thing about that is when you climb a rock, you see where generally where you're heading, but you don't really know how you're going to get there. And every step you take is just like, well, where's the next toehold for me? And you don't know what's going to be after that, but you find that one. And then you realize, oh, you know what? I'll find the next one after that. And I feel like that's so much of this stuff is you figure out with good focus where you're

going next, but you don't know further down the road where it's really going to lead you. And that really inspired me listening to Chris and reading his email. The other thing he talked about in here that I thought was really useful was how much help he was getting from other people. He talked about the shows, but also just people in his life helping him out. And I do think that is a big resource for you if you're going to try and pull this off. did successfully launch this thing. He's got a crowdfunded publication. He says, I launched the Dreadful Objects last week and have a stack of books sitting in my office. So I don't have a link to this, but if you are interested in Chris's work, then definitely check out the Dreadful Objects. Yeah. We heard from in the forum, a lot of comments. Shelco wrote in saying,

I'm curious whether anybody that does freelance work does it under their given name or a separate business name. We did a show ages ago about business entities. And one of them was, well, if you're a sole proprietor, you can just say, I'm doing business as Mike Schmitz, or I'm doing business as Bobblehead Joe Company. And setting up a fictitious business name, It's a simple process to be able to do that. And there was a lot of interesting answers to this. And it really comes down to what is it you do? I think if you're branding it on your own name, then there's no need to do it if you're going to do a sole proprietorship. But if you're making like a product or you want to

have a brand, you know, put that in air quotes, then you probably need to get a fictitious business name. How did you land on the name for Mac Sparky? Because you've kind of done that, right? I mean, that's your quote unquote fictitious business name. Yeah. I mean, it's a company at this point, but when I first did it, I just made a list of names. I mean, Sparky, everybody's always called me Sparky, you know, with the last name like Sparks. And when I was growing up, it was so, there were seven people living in our house, you know, three generations in our house. Plus someone named our dog Sparky, which was really crazy. Well, it was an inherited dog that was kind of named after our family.

Well, it was an inherited dog that was kind of named after our family. So people would call up the phone and say, Sparky there. And you'd be like, well, there's seven people and a dog. Which one do you want? So I thought it would be, I always like going by it. It's fun. And then at the time, the iPhone didn't exist yet. So it was all about Apple made Mac stuff. And I was super into the technology.

And being a lawyer, I wanted to have fun. And this was a little bit of joy in my life. And I decided to give it a fun name. So Mac Sparky was available as a dot com. And there you have it. Nice. Yeah, I guess that's something worth calling out is if you are going to be doing something public facing, especially maybe, you know, like, for example, my name, Mike Schmitz, I don't have Mike Schmitz on Twitter.

I don't have Mike Schmitz.com because there are so many Mike Schmitz's out there. So maybe in that particular case, if you can't secure your own personal identity, maybe it is worthwhile working on a derivative of something like, like Max Sparky. Yeah. I heard from a bunch of friends that this, you know, I talked last week or last month about, um, no longer having a car for myself. And it was interesting. Cause I got a bunch of email from California based friends that are like, are you crazy? I can't believe you're doing that. But then a lot of people just laughed at me like did Jurati did in the forum. She said, I love the show, but I was giggling at just how different the cultures are because in DC, everyone Ubers

everywhere. So I'm not such a special snowflake, Mike. It's just, just hasn't, hasn't arrived in California where we've got this commuter culture. Yeah. I go to Austin, Texas about once a quarter for Asian efficiency meetups. And, uh, I think that that's actually the home of South by Southwest. And I think that's where Uber got its start. So there, you know, everybody, Uber is everywhere. But I remember the first time I came back from there, landed in the Appleton, Wisconsin airport, which has all of six skates, I think. Yeah.

And I open up Uber on my phone and there's no cars. I'm like, oh man. Yeah, I mean, that experiment is working great. It's no longer an experiment. It's just the way I do things now and it's working great for me. Yep, yep, definitely. And I think that things have

changed a little bit around here. So if I wanted to do that, maybe I could. But I also think that the larger principle is something that people should be thinking about, not just with ride sharing, but really listening to that episode again, thinking about like, if you had quote unquote Steve Jobs money, if you had an extra $5,000 a month, whatever, to spend on things, what would you do? And then is there a way that you can achieve a little bit of that? Because maybe it's meal prep. You know, there's lots of things like HelloFresh or Blue Apron where you can just have everything

delivered right to you and it's ready to cook and you don't have to worry about that sort of stuff. You know, even in Appleton, Wisconsin, I can get that. Yeah, agreed. I mean, there are and with the way the world is now, there's more of those options than there used to be. And looking back over the last month, I spent less money on transportation than I did on my fancy phone answering system.

So that there's a thought. Boy, I hope those guys aren't listening. I think some of them listen to the show, but I may have some bad news for them. Chris Upchurch says that you shouldn't beat yourself up about your unproductive month and says that many of the things that kept you from doing your usual level of work

can be seen as investments in your future. Most obviously, the new office is an investment that will make it possible for you to produce better video content, perhaps do better work in general. I think we kind of weighed in on that today. Yeah, it's funny because when Chris wrote this, it was like the hopeful message.

I needed to read that. I'm like, okay, he's right. And then the practice has proven out the theory because since he wrote that, it's been absolutely true. I've been a monster lately. Nice. And then continuing on, going to MaxDoc, meeting me. He's writing this to you, it sounds like. Yeah, we met at MaxDoc and that was awesome. An investment in the future, the Free Agents podcast. I think last content episode I mentioned, first one we've recorded

since I actually got to meet you. It's definitely different for me. I feel a lot more relaxed and hopefully the content is a little bit better. You know, you mentioned one of the benefits of being a free agent is the ability to take some time off in the middle of the week to recover. And he says, I encourage those of us who are still working for the man not to discount this option. Really important point. I think it's a perfectly legitimate use of a sick day.

And I completely agree. He says any reasonable employer would rather have you take a sick day than be able to get back to work and rather than be mentally trashed and unproductive for the rest of the week. Although there are many unreasonable employers out there. His words, not mine. Yeah. No kidding. I agree though. I agree though. The good employers recognize that happy people are productive people and they won't they'll be OK with you taking even like a mental health day. You know, if you just aren't going to be able to function at your peak. A lot of times we manufacture this belief that if I do that, people are going to be ticked at me.

And I would encourage everybody to really consider your own situation. Obviously, you got to know what the expectations are of the place that you work. But don't just write it off and really explore this as an option. Because I think a lot of people maybe discount this when maybe it would be perfectly okay, given where they work. Well, Mike, I have committed between now and our next content show to do some sort of sabbatical or downtime. I don't know. I'm going to have it branded next time we talk. I don't know what it's going to be here, but I've committed to this. I think you should commit to something. I feel like we've got to bring the balance to the show.

Right. Well, I've already committed for my personal retreat, as I mentioned. That's coming up in a couple of weeks. But do you have something else in mind? I don't know, man. I'm just dropping this on you. This isn't the outline, gang. I'm just dropping this on them. All right.

Well, I'll do it for the show. I'll carry a commitment. That's okay if you don't want to. Actually, it might be interesting to compare notes on the personal retreats in the near future. Maybe we don't need to spend an entire episode on it. But I'll have had mine. You'll have had yours. I'm going to totally talk to you offline to get some tips.

So we'll talk about that in a month from now. We'll have a guest between now and then. And I think we'll wrap this one up here. Cool. And I want to throw this out there to the listeners, too, that if you do this, if you have your own personal retreat, then let us know that in the discourse forum, which is located over at talk.macpowerusers.com.

And then there's a free agents room at the Mac Power Users Inn, so you can let us know your own experience. You can find me, I'm at bobbleheadjoe on Twitter, mikeschmitz.me on the web. Where can people find you, David? You can find me at macsparky.com and check out the new

learning site, learn.macsparky.com where all the field guides are. And that pretty much does it. Cool. The show is on Twitter as at FreeAgentsFM. It's on the web at relay.fm slash freeagents. Thank you to everybody who joined the membership and is going to get access to the special bonus episode, which has been published already. So even if you joined after that episode launched, you'll still get access to it. And we will talk to you in a fortnight.