Focused - 61: The Morning Routine

Episode Date: November 27, 2018

Mike and David dig in on their morning routines. Mike finds himself entering the Free Agent arena like never before and David wants to start year-end planning.

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? Doing great and happy to be talking Free Agents again.

A few notes before we get started, however, Mike has a new thing. I do. Yeah. So I've been working for the last couple years on a project which has been accelerated the last couple months based on some circumstances, which we'll talk about a little bit later in this episode. But it's kind of the intersection of all of the things for me, and it is called Faith-Based Productivity. The subtitle is Connect to Your Calling, Discover Your Destiny, Live the Life You Were Created For. And this is really the message that resonated in my heart as I was going through my own Bible college experience, teaching the personal management class, doing a whole bunch of study online with productivity, eventually getting hooked up

to the Asian Efficiency Team. It's kind of like the spiritual why behind all the productivity things. So I want to make that explicit at the beginning. I don't want anybody to feel duped. It is definitely a Christian approach to productivity, but it is a video course, which is going to have a whole bunch of exercises and a workbook that goes along with it. My brother has helped me with it. He's a top-notch audio and video guy. And I'm really excited to see this thing get out there. I've got a special pre-order discount, I guess, if you want to call it that right now. So in addition to the course at a discount, you get the personal retreat course. We've talked a little bit about that on this

podcast, David. I decided that I would take basically all the advice that I gave you via text message and turn it into a video course. So you'll get that too. And then a couple of coaching calls with me, which I've done a little bit of in the past with agent efficiency. Well, I think this is great. And Mike's had some changes in his life. And I think this is a great example of how a free agent works that sometimes certain things shut down and then you pick up on other things. And I really feel like, Mike, this is going to be great for you. And I can't wait to see this get released. Something much more mundane is by the time this show releases, I will have a new field guide. But this is a fun

one. It's just called the gift wrap field guide because we talk about gift wrapping on Mac Power users so much. I thought just for giggles, I'd show you guys how I wrap a present and my favorite tools to do that. That's right. I'm super geeky about wrapping holiday gifts. This is a free field guide. No cost. Just go to learn.macsparky.com and check it out.

I've heard this teased. I am probably disproportionately excited to see this. You know, it's funny. I feel like it's almost like a Zen thing. I really love wrapping presents. And, you know, my daughter and I have this ritual. Usually we watch a Star Wars movie or one of the Doctor Who Christmas specials, and we sit there and wrap presents. And I just like to get them perfect.

And everybody thinks I'm a weirdo for it. So I thought, well, let's just push the gas down on that a little bit more. And I've got some really cool tools I use because I don't like any tape on the outside of my present. I don't like any seams. I bring a woodworker's mentality to wrapping gifts. Let's just put it that way. It's a free guide. Just go get it if you want it and have fun and happy holidays because I know we're going to be right in the middle of the season as this show comes out.

Right. Also, don't forget over at talk.macpowerusers.com, we've got a section in there for the free agents and it's very active and we'd love to have you join the conversation there. Yeah, there's some great conversation that's happening in that forum. Just in the last couple days, there's been some pretty active discussion and some pretty deep topics. So I'm really excited every time I go in there to see the quality of the community that's been built up at that site. It's amazing the people that listen to this show

and are a part of that free agents forum. Yeah, Yeah. The, um, so, uh, what are we going to talk about this month, Mike? The free agent survival skill for this month, I figured might be kind of cool to talk about the morning routine. And as I mentioned, I've had some changes in my life, which you gave me some advice and said, this is a great opportunity for you to rethink your routines. And so I did that. I went back to the drawing board and I thought about what are the things that are a part of my morning routine and what are the things that I really want to become a part of my morning routine. If I were going to go back and design my ideal day,

what would it really look like? And so yeah, that's the inspiration behind this topic. Basic information, I guess you need to know before we dive into the specifics. This morning routine, these are the things that you would do before work traditionally that make your work better. And there was a great example of this in the, as we're recording this, one of the more recent Mac Power Users episodes where you interviewed the productive woman. And she talked about basically if the morning routine gets thrown off, then everything that comes after that kind of suffers. And when you recognize that that happens, that's kind of a turning point for a lot of

people in terms of their productivity and the quality of the stuff that they're able to get done. in terms of their productivity and the quality of the stuff that they're able to get done. Because you don't necessarily connect what you do as soon as you get up with what you're going to be doing at two o'clock in the afternoon, but it really does have a big impact. Yeah, this is something I've really embraced the last few years of having like a morning routine. I also have an evening routine. Maybe at some point, we'll get to that as well. a morning routine. I also have an evening routine. Maybe at some point we'll get to that as well. But I call it the startup, you know, just getting my day started up.

And there's a lot of different kind of approaches to this. But we thought maybe one of the easiest ways to cover it in today's show would be just kind of talk through how we're doing it and why we think it's important. Yeah. And this is different than we had talked earlier about eating your frog and doing the most important task at the beginning of your day. This would come even before eating your frog. If all you did was roll out of bed and instantly start working on your most important task. Speaking from my own personal experience, that's kind of a recipe for feeling overwhelmed and like you can never get caught up. You never can disconnect. You never feel like you have any sort of distance from the work that you're doing. And it's easy to find yourself resenting the work that you're doing if you fall into that. So the morning routine is kind of the things that would fall into the

important but not urgent section of that Eisenhower matrix. The things that if you don't pay attention to them and prioritize them would typically fall through the cracks. So this could be something like going to the gym, but there are also some additional things that I would argue you should think about incorporating into your morning routine. But ultimately, this morning routine, whatever activities you select to be a part of this,

this is gonna kind of be like priming the pump for making the rest of the day as effective as it can be. And you have to be really careful about what you allow to become part of your morning routine. Yeah. And you want to strike the balance between getting yourself started, but also getting on with the day. Yeah. I mean, it's great to say, well, I'm just gonna do this and I'm gonna add this thing.

And I heard about this crazy life hack over here, so I'm gonna add that. And pretty soon your morning routine now is three hours. And when that happens, you're not gonna be doing any of it. Pretty soon you're not doing the things that are the most important. Things like just my morning routine,

I'll use as an example, as I'm going back and I'm redesigning this thing. Number one thing I want to do, I want to make sure that I read my Bible and I pray first thing in the morning. I want to make sure that I stretch. I had an injury when I ran my half marathon last spring. And so I've got to do some stretches to make sure that that doesn't happen again. Meditation, reviewing my daily plan. sure that that doesn't happen again. Meditation, reviewing my daily plan. And one of the things identified I wanted to add was I want to drink 24 ounces of water when I wake up because that

kind of gets your body awake and moving in the right direction. You feel more alert because you're pretty dehydrated when you first wake up in the morning. But if I were to add, also go for a run and also cook breakfast and do all of these other things, pretty soon my morning routine is so long that I'm not going to have time to get to those things. And so if I start compromising on one of them, pretty soon you've compromised on all of them and you're not doing anything anymore. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting for me because to me, I have some distinctions, I guess I would say morning habits versus a morning routine. When I first started doing this, I had things that I wanted to do every day. I wanted to take, where I live, it's a very easy two-mile hike that kind of goes up and down. It's got a lot of climb to it. It's great for your heart rate. And I wanted to start doing that more regularly. And I do it so often that now it's, I'm not even sure I consider it part of the routine. It's just something I do every day. But for me, the morning routine really works hand in hand with my idea of time blocking my morning. You want to just walk through your routine, Mike, and then I'll share mine. Yeah. And you mentioned the two-hour hike, and I like that distinction between the morning routine

and the habits based on time blocking. That's an important point and why you won't see exercise as part of mine. So we should come back and revisit that in a second. But I flew through mine pretty quickly. So I'll run through it item by item. So first thing, when I wake up in the morning, I want to make sure that I'm drinking that 24 ounces of water, like I mentioned, because that's going to allow my body to get where it needs to be focused.

I'm able to think clearly about things as quickly as possible. You wake up after sleeping all night and you're usually pretty dehydrated. From there, I am part of a group Bible reading plan. We use the Bible app on our phone. So, the guys at my church, we have a group plan and I'll read that. I'll comment on that. So, you get the little check mark next to your face and everybody knows that you did it, the accountability. Then I've got my own private prayer time. I'll do some meditation to help me

focus. I'll do some stretching. I've actually got an inversion table now, which is something that I, my wife got for, got me, got as a birthday gift for me a couple years ago because I had some, some back issues. I had some pain with the sciatic nerve and then version table really helps. So that's another thing that I want to add into my daily routine. And then at the very end of my morning routine, the last thing I'll do before I sit down to do the work is I'll review the daily plan that I had outlined the day before. And that is using that template that I created, which just basically breaks down all the things that I plan to do based on the hour that I want to do them in, rewriting a couple of my goals for the quarter, and then listing out my most important tasks, which is an analog reproduction of what is in

OmniFocus. And some people maybe are listening to this, they caught that and they're like, well, why would you create it twice? I find having this one page thing that I create that again, the night before usually takes about five to 10 minutes. And then that's on my desk, on my desk, right in front of my face as I'm working all day, the next day, that's really helpful. And so I'll review that before I sit down to, uh, to work. And then in terms of time, like when do you start this and about what time are you like in the saddle doing work? Well, like I said, this is kind of in flux. And I've added a few things to this, which honestly, I've not been consistent in doing lately. So I guess the ideal time would be

that I would wake up at 6am, hit this routine, and then all of these things I know I can get done easily within an hour. So by 7am, ideally, I am ready to hit the ground running in terms of my workday. Does that always happen? No, as we were talking about before we hit the red record button. A lot of this is figuring out where you went wrong and trying to fix it for next time. So that's kind of where I think I am right now. But also, I would say that it's valuable to create like a shorter version of this for if you're traveling, or you do sleep late, whatever, you don't have as much time as you normally do. Having an abbreviated morning routine where these are like the essentials, the things that you absolutely have to do. That can be valuable too. So the things that you absolutely have to do,

that can be valuable too. So the things that I will make sure that I do no matter what are going to be the Bible reading and the prayer time. The reviewing daily plan, if it's done the night before, that's another thing that I absolutely will not miss. But I have to confess, there have been times when I'm tired and I just don't take the time to plan my day the night before. For the most part, I'm pretty good with it though. Yeah, see that's, I mean, and that to me kind of spills over into some of the stuff I do in the evening in terms of preparation for the next day. I, and I know there's kind of two schools of thought on this. A lot of people like to plan their day in the morning. To me, I like to plan it at night. And, and one of the reasons why is I feel like I'm at night, I'm more realistic about what I can get done the next day than I am in the morning.

In the morning, I'm always way too optimistic. But anyway, I'm like you, and this is always in motion for me. And I think it's one of the great things about being a free agent is that I have so much more control over this stuff now. When I was working for the man, I mean, a lot of my morning routine was getting, you know, to the office and dealing with the initial office thing. You know, when you work in an office with a lot of people, everybody wants to talk in the morning and while they're having their coffee,

they want to do whatever. And it always felt to me like it was like 9.30. Even if I showed up at 8 or 7.30, it was like 9.30 before I was actually able to start work. So to me, a big part of the morning routine is getting things rolling early. And this is always kind of in motion for me, like I said. But right now, as it stands, my perfect morning routine is actually I have a whatever's bugging me. You know, you always have something that's bugging you, whether it's a, in my case, it might be a specific contract for a client or a

blog post I want to get done or even, you know, some screencast editing or whatever. But I usually use that first hour. So like from six to seven to deal with whatever's bugging me. So I don't, I don't, you know, this is kind of the opposite of a morning routine in some way, but it is my routine. Is I eat a frog first thing. Wake up, just get up and eat a frog. And then I think I got this from you, Mike, or one of the many books I read on your recommendation.

But once I get through an hour of work, it feels great knowing that, hey, you know what? No matter what happens today, I got a an hour of work, it feels great knowing that, Hey, you know what, no matter what happens today, I got a good hour of work. And, and then I have a little notebook. I write down every morning, something I'm thankful for, you know, whatever it is this morning, it was the fall weather. We finally have fall weather in California. And then, then I,

um, the routine is I, I put on my hiking clothes and I go for a hike. You know, it's like a two mile hike. It takes about 40 minutes and, you know, fills my rings, gives me a chance to just to kind of take a walk. And in a perfect world, I don't listen to podcasts. I just take a walk and just kind of let my mind drift and then come back, shower, do some meditation. And then I go back to the pile of work. And then so I usually try to put

another hour of solid work in. And then I have a block every morning around 10 o'clock called startup, where I go through all the email and try and get some time into the forums and whatever other, you know, kind of busy work stuff I have to do. But in a perfect world, that stuff doesn't get blocked until 10. So between the time I wake up and the time I get to actually opening email, I've had a couple hours of solid work and kind of the morning routine run. And the way I do that is I use in Siri shortcuts, I have a thing called the daily list and I just push a button and it creates all those events for me. And boy, when I can do that, it sure is a good day usually.

Nice. Yeah, that's interesting because my approach I think is a little bit different than yours, but I'm sure that that's partly due to the different circumstances. Yeah, my kids aren't little anymore. So yeah, yeah, I've got five kids at home who are going to be up by 7am. And once they get up, who knows what happens. And for me, the things that I absolutely want to make sure that I do are the little things for my own personal well beingbeing that I can easily, if I'm not careful and I don't protect that time and I don't create that regular time for them to happen, that I will quickly forget about. I'm not going to forget about the thing that has a deadline or the thing that is

important, my frog. When it's time for me to sit down and work, whatever time that work happens to be, I'm pretty good at just entering into that, that state of work. And I'm able to focus on that thing, crank it out, but I'm not so good at protecting the golden goose. And so those are the things that I make sure that I, I prioritize on my, my morning routine, which is probably the traditional way that a lot of people think of, of morning routines, just based on some of the stuff that's been written out there. Like one book in particular. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, but that's okay. And that's really the, the really cool thing I think about this stuff is that you can find somebody who teaches this system and this is absolutely the thing that works for them. Doesn't mean it's gonna work for you at all,

but that doesn't mean that there's no value in it either. There's some principles that you can glean and you can apply them to fit your specific situation. So I think that's really cool that you're doing that. I will throw out there for people who are interested, the book that kind of got me going on this whole idea was The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. He was a young guy who got in a major car accident, almost died, and had to create a morning routine of self-care stuff that allowed

him to become a functioning adult again. And he credits this morning routine with completely saving his life. You can read the book. It's pretty short if you want more information, but he'll give you some example categories. He's got the savers, not algorithm, what's the word I'm looking for? Like the S means something, the A means something, you know, and I can't remember exactly what they represent. Is it an acronym? Yeah, an acronym. There we go. And like I said, I've modified it to the point where I don't remember what the things were, but just a couple of ideas for people who want to start thinking about what are the things that I could do from a personal self-care perspective to add

to my morning routine. A couple of them we mentioned, silence, prayer, meditation, reading or inspiration. I know a lot of people, whether they're reading the Bible or a sacred scripture or whatever, even if it's just a motivational book, having a little bit of time in the morning where they read, that kind of inspires them and gets them motivated to go through the rest of their day. I know people who do affirmations or visualizations. So those statements that you repeat out loud, the Stuart smiley, you know, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me sort of a thing. But they actually work. You say it long enough,

and you start to believe that stuff. I think the AM thanks thing I do, it really helps set me right as the morning starts every day. Yeah, gratitude is another great example. That's something that I incorporate into my evening routine. So you could make the argument, yeah, I should incorporate it into the morning routine too. But that's just the where I've chosen to draw the line on the number of things I'm going to add there. And then you mentioned exercise, stretching, or yoga. This is something that is not on my routine because I like to use this going back to the

time blocking thing that you mentioned earlier. I time block my day and I know that if I'm going to sit down and write at the end of the morning, for example, for a couple of hours, I'm going to feel pretty drained by the time I get done. And so I've got a gym, which is only a couple of a couple minutes from my house. And I will go to the gym in the middle of the day, because I find when I go, it gives me more energy for the afternoon, it's kind of a physical reset where typically the afternoon I've eaten lunch. That's the point where a lot of people crash. If I go to the gym, I can actually overcome that. And I find I have more than enough energy to get

me through the rest of my workday when I'm able to put it in that early afternoon slot in my day. And I think that the good news for all this is if you're a free agent, you've got the ability to do what works for you and put this on your radar and start experimenting with it. Like I said, I don't feel like my morning routine is anywhere near done. It's always kind of in flux. And it's always kind of in flux. Yep, it's an evolution. And the key takeaway here is to put yourself in the best position to succeed for the rest of your day. Take whatever is important to you and make it a part of that morning routine.

I forget who said it, but I heard a saying one time that if everything's a priority, then that just means nothing is. Well, this is your chance to identify what are the things that really are a priority in your life. And then if you set aside a little bit of time at the beginning of your day, typically an hour is more than enough, then you can make sure that you're doing the things that are moving you to where you want to end up, whether that be personally, professionally, relationally, whatever. You can select the activities for your morning routine, which are going to create the habits that are going to take you to the place you want to end up.

So, Mike, you know, there's a great place you could share your morning routine. Yes, there is. The free agent forum. So yeah, that's a great idea. Have people, we'd love to hear what you've incorporated into your morning routine. Like I said, mine's kind of in a state of flux right now. So if you have any suggestions, I'd be happy to look at them. This episode of Free Agents is brought to you by FreshBooks. Everyone likes to save time, but it is especially important, with their super simple cloud accounting software for freelancers and free agents. By simplifying tasks like invoicing, tracking expenses, and getting paid online, FreshBooks has drastically reduced the time

it takes for over 10 million people to deal with their paperwork. One of the things I like about FreshBooks is the notification center. It's kind of like your personal assistant. You always know what's changed in your business since you last logged in because it shows you what needs to be dealt with pronto. And there's a new projects feature which allows you to share files and messages with your clients, contractors, and employees. This makes it a lot easier and a lot quicker to get things done when all of your conversations live in one place. Now, if you're listening to this and you're not using FreshBooks yet, now is the time to try it. FreshBooks is offering an unrestricted 30-day

free trial for listeners of this show. No credit card required. All you have to do is go to freshbooks.com slash freeagents, one word, and enter freeagents, two words, in the how did you hear about us section. That's freshbooks.com slash freeagents, one word, and enter freeagents, two words, in the how did you hear about us section. We thank FreshBooks for their support of freeagents and RelayFM. All right. So as we've alluded to, I have a little bit of an announcement to make. You certainly do. My work situation has changed. And as I put in the show notes for this episode, I am a free agent for reals. The official statement is that Asian efficiency is going

in a different direction. And my position is no longer a part of future plans. I don't really want to get into the specifics more than that, but the short version is that I am no longer with Asian efficiency. I am no longer the host of the productivity show. I no longer coordinate the blog content for Asian efficiency, which puts me in kind of a weird spot. for agent efficiency, which puts me in kind of a weird spot. As we talked about when we started this show, I never really thought I was a great fit at first because I wasn't a true free agent. You basically told me, David, that that didn't matter. I had the right mindsets. But now I'm in it. And it's kind of what I expected, but there's a couple things that I didn't expect. Somebody asked me the other day how I was feeling, and I wrote a short newsletter post about it.

I said there's basically two emotions, one excited and two terrified. I'm not terrified because I don't have options or terrified because I don't have the skills to get another position. I could go find a bunch of freelance work tomorrow if that's what I really wanted to do. But as I mentioned at the beginning, I've been working on this faith-based productivity thing. This is something that while I've been working in the productivity space, the faith-based angle to it is not something that I've seen before. So there's always that question in the back of your head is of, is this going to work? And there are no guarantees. And so when you told me about your change in circumstances, I felt like, as I told you on

the phone at the time, I know that you're passionate about this faith-based productivity thing, because you've been talking to me about it the entire time we've been friends. And I know that it's something that's important to you. But I also know it's something that you never really had time to pursue, because you were so busy, you know, with that gig. And in my mind, that's just being me, but I feel like this is going to give you wings. It's like suddenly, there's a lot of ways you find yourself being a free agent. Sometimes it's because you make all these plans and you have this whole thing that comes together.

Other times you just find yourself suddenly that the gig you had isn't there anymore. And sometimes I think that's the best way to get yourself kickstarted. Yeah, no, I completely agree. You've given me some great advice. A couple other people have given me great advice. And as I think about the potential outcomes for this, it kind of makes it potential outcomes for this, it kind of makes it less uncertain. I guess in the newsletter that I wrote, I basically talked about the motion of fear and trying to figure out why was I feeling this way? Was I scared of failing? Because that honestly doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I know that I can create quality stuff. And as we

talked about before we hopped on here, I accidentally sold my first copy before it was ready because somebody had found it and decided to purchase it. So the signs are showing that, you know, the worst case scenario is not that no one will buy it because somebody already has. So what's the other option? Am I afraid of success? I mean, that sounds stupid. Who's scared of being successful? That's what people dream about. And so I think the truth is a little more tricky and somewhere in the middle and the best analogy that I could come up with was being in the arena. I'm not going to go through the whole newsletter, but just kind of distilling my thoughts as I wrote this thing. the arena is the place where you either

succeed or fail. And it can be a scary place because there's only two outcomes. You've basically drawn the line in the sand and you're forced to pick sides. So you either believe in your thing or you don't. This is the point where a lot of people are happy to spectate. They're happy to talk about the thing. And if I'm honest with myself, I look back at the last couple of years and that's kind of where I was. It's like, well, I've got this idea for faith-based productivity and talking about it is almost enough to a certain degree. And then when it's time to finally take action on it.

Time to put up or shut up. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you're getting in the arena. And really the inspiration for that analogy comes from Teddy Roosevelt. One of my favorite quotes is from a speech he gave. He says, it's not the critic who counts. It's not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error

and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. And so that's kind of the point I'm at. Yeah, me too. Teddy always has a good quote in him. And so that's kind of the point I'm at. Yeah, me too. Teddy always has a good quote in him.

Yeah. By the way, side note, but he's a really interesting story because he started off as a very sick kid and couldn't do anything. And he basically disciplined himself and established habits and became a naturalist, a boxer, you know, all these other things that people said, there's no way you're going to be able to do that thing. So if you know his story, it makes that quote even more powerful, because this is the guy who everybody had written off that he couldn't do this thing. And really, what I'm recognizing is that this is the time now I have to, I have to step out and do this thing. And if, if nobody, like I said, it's not true that nobody's going to buy it because I've already had a couple of people buy it. But to throw it out there and if it flops, then that's not the worst thing that can happen. If something fails,

you just figure out what you did wrong and you fix it for next time. But the fact that there is going to be an outcome associated with this thing now, for whatever reason, is exciting and terrifying. Yeah. You know, it is great, though, that you're doing it. And I have so much confidence in you, Mike. I think there's just no question in my mind that this change is going to be the best thing that ever happened to you. is going to be the best thing that ever happened to you. I appreciate that. And I think that that's true.

I want to share with the free agents listeners, because I'm going through this right now, like if you are in a similar situation, again, the free agent forums is a great place to share that stuff. But I really want to encourage people because I have been encouraged by you, David, by multiple other people who have gone out of their way to say, no, man, you've got what it takes. You know, that's how I ended the newsletter is that you have what it takes, even if it requires

everything that you've got. And so if you're in a similar situation, just know that there are other free agents who are pulling for you. Yeah. And I remember when we first started this show, I was thinking that, you know, that took a lot of moxie for me to say, okay, now I'm going to make a show about being a free agent. What if I fail miserably? Because at the time we started the show, it wasn't clear whether or not I was going to survive the journey or not. I guess it really never is clear, you know? I mean, you never know when things will dry up on you. But at the end of the day, I said, you know, it's just worth sharing and talking through this stuff, because I think we

all struggle with it. And it's really easy to be hard on yourself. I mean, this is something I talk about all the time on all my podcasts. But I think as humans, for some reason, most of us are just wired to be, to have so little faith in ourselves. And that, I mean, I think so often the difference between succeeding at this stuff and not succeeding at this stuff is just to give yourself a little credit and, and, you know, be a little patient with yourself. Don't expect everything's going to work perfectly the first time, but if you're dedicated and you keep, you know, keep swinging, it's going to work. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. And I also, as I reflect on this, this journey that I've had, there've been, there've been a couple different defining moments or tipping points in my career where I've had to

make a tough decision and you weren't really sure exactly how things were going to work out. So this isn't really the first time that I've felt this way. But looking back, I can also see that those times when I was the most uncomfortable were also the times of greatest growth. They were the transition from one stage to another. And so that doesn't necessarily mean that if you're going through a difficult time, that you're automatically being upgraded. You need to have some wisdom and figure out maybe the situation that you're in is brought on by some bad choices that you made and you're reaping the harvest of some negative habits, but not necessarily. And also that transition, that change doesn't happen without the pain.

Like you have to go through some things in order to get to the quote unquote next level, whatever that looks like. I would add to this as well, that whenever you find yourself in one of these transitions, whether it's something you've planned or something that just kind of happens to you, be careful about the way you define success as you start whatever you're going to do next. Yeah. I think it's really easy to go into it

and try to say, this is what I need to do to be successful. But you're entering the field, a different field that you have not fought in before and you don't really know what success is. Yeah. And I think it's really hard to, to try and give yourself these conditions that of your happiness with whatever

you're doing before you even know how it all works. And, and I think the more realistic approach would be to say, I want to do something that I feel is enriching. You know, obviously you want to make enough money to support your life. But, you know, don't go real far beyond that. And just let, you know, give yourself the freedom

to define what success is as you get deeper down the road. Yeah, that's a really good point. A couple things in response to that. I know right after it happened, I talked to you and you mentioned, well, let's talk the spreadsheet. How much are you looking to replace because I've got provide for my family? It's maybe a little bit easier if you don't have so many people who are dependent on you. But then the other thing that you just mentioned here is finding something that is meaningful and purposeful for you. That doesn't mean that it's fun. I think we've talked on this podcast before about how I hate the traditional definition

of the word passion because people think it's like, oh, I'm just going to find something I love to do and do that, something I'm passionate about, which isn't really what it means at all. It means the word actually means to suffer. So, it's things that you're willing to suffer to see come about because you care about them so much. And that's kind of where I am with this faith-based productivity thing is like, this is who I am. So, it's something that I have to just get out of me. I can't keep it inside. And maybe people will respond positively to it. Maybe they won't. The outcome almost doesn't matter. It's something that I have to get out into the world

just to see if it does have those wings. But I like what you said about being able to But I like what you said about being able to evolve that definition of success. So if faith-based productivity is not a grand slam, it's not a home run. People indicate that they really aren't that interested in it. Being willing to go back to the drawing board and try something else and figure out how to course correct and what the next step is. If there's one thing I've learned through my free agent journey the last several years, it has been that you don't know where you're going to end up. All you can do is figure out what is the next thing

and then the next thing after that and the next thing after that and the destination that you end up at might be a lot different than where you thought you were gonna be when you started out. Yeah, I mean, one of the best benefits of being a free agent, even a small company that you run, is that it's. Yeah. I mean, one of the best benefits of being a free agent, even a small company that you run is that it's extremely agile. I mean, you can change your mind about what technology makes

sense or what customer you're looking for or what type of work you do. And you can implement that in an afternoon. Whereas in a big company, that's like a thing that takes months and months and lots of committees and all this other stuff. Okay. So that's the a thing that takes months and months and lots of committees and all this other stuff. Okay. So that's the good news. The bad news is you need that agility to survive because you're a free agent and what's working today isn't necessarily going to work tomorrow. And what you're thinking is going to work tomorrow may not be the thing that actually works. It's always a winding path. So, you know, just as you start on this, be willing to wind a little bit, but, but I do feel like, you like, Mike, you have got such a great launching point.

You've put so much work into the stuff that you're passionate about. And you've got this great idea for this product that just doesn't exist out there. I'll be shocked if this doesn't really scratch the itch for you. Well, it's fun to work on, at least in the moment. That's a good sign. That's a good sign. Yeah. Well, Mike, I am, you know, I, like I said, I'm one of your biggest fans and I, I, I have so much faith that this is going to work out. Talk about faith-based. I have faith in Mike. But I do think that this is going to work out and I'm really looking forward as the show goes, to talking to you and how things are going and where the surprises are.

Because, you know, you're in for a few. Yeah, yeah. We'll learn as we go. We'll learn together. And as you make this transition, how's your family been? Have they been supportive? Yeah, family's been very supportive. Family has been very supportive. Everybody that I've talked to has been very supportive and said that this will be bigger than you realize, which is interesting. As I reflect back on this journey, I remember the first time I talked to you, you mentioned you got to start building your own thing immediately. Any ideas what that could be? And as I was explaining faith-based productivity, I basically was saying, but I don't know how big this can be. And you cut me off.

You're like, no, you don't even understand. So I've had, you know, multiple people do basically the same thing, which is very encouraging because that's another thing. Maybe it's just me, but I'm guessing it's probably a lot of free agents out there is that you tend to think that your abilities are limited, that no one really wants the thing that you are able to create. And you don't really know until you get it out there. But I've had several people help me crush that limiting belief. So again, time will tell whether that proves correct or incorrect, but at least for now, it seems like it's moving in the right direction. And a lot of the motivation and the support that I've gotten that's helped me to follow through and work on it has been from people who are willing to say, no, man, you got this. All right, we believe in this vision as much or more than you do.

Yeah, and I think the trick going forward, you know there'll be setbacks, but you just got to just dust yourself off, get up, and just keep going. And I think you're really on to something. Yeah, your setback is the setup for your comeback, somebody told me once. So we've got a – next month we are going to do a show for December, kind of talking about free agent planning going into the new year. So I wanted to just call out this month that I'd like you all to do some homework. As we head into the new year planning show as a free agent next month, spend some time in the next month getting some numbers for yourself. Find out where you're

making money and find out where you're spending your time. I think those are probably two of the most important things you have to have in front of you as you start planning for the future. And we're also going to talk about hippie stuff, about what you like doing versus what you don't like doing and all that. But if you want to continue in this gig, you still do have to make a living. So if you've been doing time tracking, we've talked about on the show, if you've got an accountant helping you, if you're doing your own financial management,

before you listen to next month's show about planning, I want you to spend a little time getting some solid numbers in front of you about how much time are you spending on your free agency? Where's the money coming in? And where's the money not coming in? And I think that'll be a big help for us next month. Cool. Anything else we should be looking at before we do the planning show, Mike, for folks? Well, one of the things that I do with the personal retreat stuff, and I think that there's a free agency approach to this as well, is the whole concept of the wheel of life, where you rate your current satisfaction with the different areas of your life. If you go online, you'll find lots of different examples of this and you can fill out whatever areas you want in this wheel of life with the basic ideas that you rate them from one to 10. And then you focus on

the lowest ones. So as you're looking at how you are spending your time and where the money is coming from, I think it's also valuable to think about what itches those are scratching for you. So there's a lot of people who listen to the show I know who are not a quote unquote free agent, but they like the mindset or they've got some side gig that they do, which maybe is never going to become the main thing and they're completely okay with that. Recognizing that, in my example, the screencasts that I do for Screencasts Online, while I may not ever become an Apple tech blogger or create all these video courses like this Max Barkey guy, that I enjoy doing those things,

that not only provides some income in terms of free agency, but it also scratches the tech itch for me. Yeah. Also give some thought to some big things you'd like to do in 2019, because we're going to talk next month about how are we going to incorporate your big plans for your free agency into the following year. And we also have an exciting announcement about the show next month, and I'm just going to leave it at that, so you're teased. Okay, before we move on, I want to talk about our next sponsor, and it's actually an appropriate sponsor for that last discussion,

and that's our friends over at Timing. This episode is brought to you by Timing, the app that tracks your time automatically instead of manually. So let's talk about why you should track your time. For anyone billing hours, this is obvious. You need to track your time to instead of manually. So let's talk about why you should track your time. For anyone billing hours, this is obvious. You need to track your time to get paid. You got to report that to your clients. But even if you're employed or billing per project, you need to estimate how long specific tasks are going to take. You know, where are you spending your time? Time tracking helps you stay on track of those estimates to make sure you don't end up in the red with your projects.

And that can help make you more accurate time estimates in the future. One of the big deals about taking on work is you got to know how long it's going to take. And if you don't have some sort of way to track your time reliably, you just don't know. As humans, we are terrible at estimates or times. It's just I don't know why it is, but it's true. So that's where timing comes in. Instead of making you start and stop timers, timer automatically tracks how much time you spend in each app, document, or website.

If you are on Amazon for four hours a day, sadly, it's going to tell you. It shows you exactly when you are working on what and when you slacked off and how productive you've been so you can know how to improve your productivity. It even has a way to rank websites and documents and folders in terms of their actual productivity. So if you're spending time in work-related folders, you're going to get a higher score than you're spending time on Twitter. So it's just a great way to give you immediate feedback about how you're doing. And timing's functionality,

it's similar to the screen time in iOS 12, but it's for the Mac. And in a lot of ways, it's even better because it does such a great job of all the reporting. And manual tracking and adjustments are still possible with timing's automated approach if you want to as well. Like when I go away from my Mac and I come back, I can just type in the timing word I was doing, and that goes into my data.

And it's got this great new gorgeous dark mode that looks great. So if you like dark mode with the Mac OS Mojave, you're going to be fine with Timing. But your work doesn't just happen at your Macs, And that's why timing does automatically make suggestions for filling gaps. And with the automatic sync feature, your track time will magically appear across all of your Macs. So if you've got a laptop, you're going to see it go right across. When you work on the go with your MacBook, you get the full picture on your iMac once you get home. I think this stuff is great. I've been using timing.

It's the way I find work that I can offload to people because I start to say, hey, wait a second, I spent a bunch of time doing this task that really isn't something that I need to do. And when I see the time, it's great. It's also interesting to me to find things that I think I'm spending too much time on. Like I always have this idea in my head, I was spending too much time planning and omni-focus. And then when I look at the actual reports, it's actually not much time on. Like I always have this idea in my head, I was spending too much time planning and OmniFocus. And then when I look at the actual reports, it's actually not much time at all. And it's so helpful. It's like a great bang for my buck. And I felt even better about doing it because I realized that I wasn't spending nearly as much time in that planning as I was spending doing. And that's one of the advantages of having timing. So they're so confident that

you'll love the fuss-free approach. They offer a totally free trial. Download the 14-day trial today by going to timingapp.com slash free agents. And make sure you go to free agents. That gets you 10% off. And I recommend everybody just download it for at least the 14-day trial, because then you're going to have data to talk about next month when we talk about planning your next year. So even if you don't buy it, use it for 14 days and see how easy it is. So stop guessing how you spend your time and instead focus on doing what you're good at. And thank you, Timing, for all of your support of the show. Once again, that website is timingapp.com slash freeagents for 10% off. We had some good feedback this month, Mike.

We did. I picked a couple of them here, but there were quite a few that probably could have made the list here. We might have to do a feedback show at some point. The Legend of Leo, though, I wanted to talk about this situation. I thought this was interesting. It says, I'm 22 years old. I'm a free agent straight out of university working as a freelance musician where I transcribe music and turn it into sheet music, which allows me to

travel, work as much as I like, and unlike most music jobs, has a far more free agents kind of setup in that it involves being at a computer at home for the bulk of it. I love this job and the lifestyle that goes with it, but even at my maximum capacity, it only covers about 80% of the amount I need to bring in every month. What I want is to pick up some kind of work that is similar in nature, home-based, relatively casual hours-wise, but also doesn't compromise how I currently live with too many commitments. I don't want to get rid of everything I've worked for over the last year just because it's falling slightly short. I'm curious if anyone has experienced something similar. Thanks, everyone. I love the show. Any advice for the legend of Leo? Well, I mean, he clearly has a marketable skill

with music. So if I was in Leo's shoes, I would start looking for music gigs. There's a lot of people working from home in the music business these days. Yeah, somebody in the thread, and I'm having trouble finding it right now, but I thought this was interesting. They recommended that since you work in the music industry and you're familiar with the tools, something like podcast editing might be a skill that's in demand. And I know for a couple of the podcasts that I've done in the past, I've had to go through that process of finding an editor for them. And it can be difficult to find someone who you're confident

that they know enough about the programs to make you sound good. But that's a big time commitment too, is editing those things. So again, there's some details that are missing here in terms of how much you make and that's going to influence whether podcast editing might be worth it for you. But I thought it was an interesting option. I think one of the things to take away from this is when you've got an existing free agent business and you've got existing clients, you're just not making quite enough yet. I would spend a lot of time looking at my existing clients workflows. You know, what are they doing? Like he's doing a music transcription business. Does do they need to do layout? I mean, is there, is there another piece of their workflow

that he could pick up where he's getting more business out of the existing customers? Because those are the easiest ones to get. They already know you're great. They already work with you. They're already used to writing you checks. So I would take a good look at your existing clients to see if you can somehow increase volume with them or find some other piece of what they're doing that you can bring into your business. And this doesn't just apply to music. Any service business you're doing, a lot of times you can find additional work you can pick up from your existing clients. Yep, that's great advice. clients. Yep, that's great advice. One other thing I'll throw out there, because I've not done this,

but I know several people who have done this, is that when they have something like this that is the majority of what they need, but they still need something to fill in the gaps, the gaps. A part-time job with a company that is unrelated can help you get to the point more quickly where this does grow into the thing that is the only thing that you do. So somebody, I think it was Bowline, mentioned like a barista job, for example, because I know companies like Starbucks, for example, will give you full benefits if you work part time, sometimes. So if you're able to get that sort of gig, not only do you not have to work that much to fill in the gaps, but also maybe you have to work less than you even would have if you did something else, because now you're not having to set aside money for some of the benefits that you would have to with the independent worker tax. Or UPS is another one where I know that they have seasonal help, they get busy. And again,

they're a company that it's kind of a demanding physical job, but I know people who have worked there because they can do it part time and it's going to give them the benefits. And then they're able to devote the majority of their mental resources towards getting their thing off the ground. Yeah, I have a friend who's a musician who wanted to get into the video game scoring business and he did just that. He was a barista for several years and got the benefits. The advantage for him, as he told me, was it's a brain-dead job. He doesn't have to think about anything, so he doesn't use any mental energy, job he doesn't have to think about anything uh so he doesn't use any mental energy gets his benefits in a few bucks but then eventually the the video game thing turned into a busy enough gig that he was able to to step away from that yeah as i'll read this inside joy wrote in says i'm looking

into creating a course and webinars and using some type of crm like system i'd love to hear what other people are using and why. Building a course, I've been looking at Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi, I'm not even familiar with that one, to create my own courses and sell them on my site. I've also thought about testing courses first on Skillshare before putting them on my own site. I know David sells his standalone assets. I'd love to hear why. What does Asian Efficiency use for their courses and webinars? They've been looking at CrowDust, WebinarJam, GoToWebinar, and Zoom. And for CRM, they've been looking at true CRMs like Pipeline, Capsule,

Infusion, and several others, and just looking for what the best email marketing solutions are. It's a lot of questions, actually. It is. The reason I picked this one is that I just answered all these questions myself when I put together Faith Face Predictivity. Yeah, that's true because you're doing it now with your product. So where'd you go? Well, for the course itself, I looked at a lot of different things and even purchased a MemberPress plugin for WordPress because I've

done WordPress development in the past. And I'm like, I can figure this out. Nope. Couldn't figure it out. At least not. And it wasn't easy enough for me to figure out where I felt confident that I could get this thing out there in a timely fashion. So I started looking into Teachable because I know you had used that, David, for some of the OmniFocus and shortcuts guides that you gave me access to. Yeah, it's the whole back end to learn Mac Sparky is Teachable. Yeah, and I was really impressed with the look of your courses. And so I thought Teachable is probably going to be one of those things that's easy to use, but it's going to be limited in its

functionality. Maybe I'll have trouble connecting it to my domain, setting up the affiliate program, whatever. But I've been blown away with how nice Teachable is. And I can't recommend it enough, honestly. Asian Efficiency used another WordPress plugin for their stuff when I was working there. I think it was LearnDash. And there's lots of different options. The plugin itself really doesn't make the product. You still have to create the things. But Teachable is just so simple. You create the lessons, you create the individual topics, and you say, I want a video, I want text, whatever, you just upload it and it's good to go. And it handles all of the payments, handles all of the crazy European taxes that I don't

understand. I don't have to worry about any of that stuff. It handles all the payouts for the affiliate stuff. It handles all the refunds if people were to request a refund. So I think for somebody who's just looking at getting into this, Teachable would be great. And also, I want to advise, I don't want to say maybe advise against, but I would say approach Skillshare with caution. Skillshare is great. I love Skillshare. I know some people who create Skillshare courses, and some of them are top notch. The problem with Skillshare, in my opinion, is that you are developing these courses for Skillshare. They own them. And I haven't gone through all of the terms, but that's just my initial thought since it's on their service, their domain. They are the ones who are selling it and they're paying you based on how many people enroll in your course, that sort of thing. Kind of like the blogging thing where you want to own your stuff, I would say definitely you want to own your own courses.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things I did that was smart was I was very public when I said I'm switching to video off of the traditional iBooks stuff I was doing. And I had lots of good advice from people. And I was seriously looking at setting up my own WordPress install of something. And, in fact, Rose Orchard was going to help me out with it. And we were looking at things. We had a couple of mock-ups and then had so many people writing me to tell me that I should just use Teachable. And I went up and set up a test account and I quickly realized, you know what, this is what I need. Because it's kind of like the Squarespace of video release.

It's like you do have limited options. You don't have complete control like you would with your own WordPress, but everything's just handled for you. And I don't want to have to employ a full-time developer to keep my site running. And I feel like with WordPress, that's a very possible thing where there's some kind of update or something where things will just stop working. And so Teachable, I've been quite happy with, and for all the reasons Mike explained. And it does look nice. So that's good. It does. And it's incredibly easy to use. It's mobile friendly. And Teachable is definitely the place I would start with building the course. Now for webinars, I'm not sure if you have any

experience with some of these programs, David, but I've used Webinar Jam, GoToWebinar, and Zoom in the past. And for the traditional webinar, like you want to present to hundreds of people, I think GoToWebinar is too expensive. I think Webinar Jam is decent. But if you can get away with using Zoom, Zoom is definitely the best and easiest to use option. I know Tim Stringer uses Zoom for his Learn OmniFocus webinars, which I was a guest at one point, and I loved it. There were, I forget, maybe 20, 30 people there, but you have the video and you can mute it while you're doing the presentation, and then you can unmute it so you can interact with people. If I were going to do a webinar for Faithways Productivity, Zoom is the tool that I would look to use first.

I were going to do a webinar for faith-based productivity, Zoom is the tool that I would look to use first. Yeah. And then for CRM, I, for the longest time, used MailChimp. As I kind of built out the Learn.Mac Sparky course, I switched over to ConvertKit, which is much more powerful. You know, it's more expensive, but it gives me a lot more ability. Like, I really like the ability to send the people that purchase courses a little email a few days afterwards saying, hey, thanks for buying it. And, you know, here's some other stuff you may be interested in, or just saying, you know, if you need, you know, let me know how it's going. And I don't go super nerdy on, you know, the, you know, the email marketing, because I just don't think that's really appropriate. But I do a little bit of it and ConvertKit makes that really easy. ConvertKit is awesome. Again, I can't recommend ConvertKit

enough. First of all, ConvertKit integrates with Teachable. So you can kick off a sequence in ConvertKit when somebody buys your product in Teachable, which is pretty great. And then ConvertKit is just so easy to use. And it still gives you a lot of powerful features. So in my opinion, like MailChimp for the personal one, it's I think 10 bucks a month or something. So it's pretty, pretty inexpensive. But whenever you want to start doing a little bit more with it, it can add up pretty quick. ConvertKit is just the one option as far as I know. But they give you everything that you need. I saw the owner of ConvertKit, Nathan Berry, speak one time at the Sean West conference and just liked him immediately. He's a really sharp guy. And the goal of ConvertKit is something like helping

creators make a living. And so that comes through in the design of the product, in my opinion, where you go in there and it's just, you don't have to figure out a whole bunch of things or a whole bunch of features, which are really weird and tied together in crazy ways. It's pretty straightforward and you can tell that they understand this stuff. So I will use ConvertKit for the foreseeable future. Yeah, and it's like one of the nice things is it tags, it'll apply tags when people buy or download things. So like I have inside ConvertKit a tag list of everyone

who bought the Siri shortcut field guide. So I'm in the midst of preparing an update for it and I'm going to send out an email to the people who already bought it saying thanks for buying it and you can go download the free update and here. And I'm going to send out an email to the people who already bought it saying, thanks for buying it. And you can go download the free update. And here's what I changed. And so, you know, just like allowing you to address portions of your audience that way is just ridiculously easy with ConvertKit. Yeah, so I guess we're both in agreement on that one, too. Yep. All right. So some great feedback. If you want to join the conversation, please do so at talk.macpowerusers.com. Let us know what you're going to add to your morning routine. And don't forget to do your homework for next time.

We'll have a guest in a couple weeks, but the show after that, we're going to be talking about planning for 2019. Awesome. Thanks to our sponsors for this episode, FreshBooks and Timing. You can find us on Twitter. I'm at bobbleheadjoe. You are at maxsparky, correct? That's right. All right. The show is at freeagentsfm. You can find the show on the web at relay.fm slash freeagents.

And we will talk to you all in a couple of weeks.