Focused - 76: A Failure Across the Board

Episode Date: June 25, 2019

In this episode, David and Mike dispel a myth about their feelings toward time tracking and David outs himself about exactly how unproductive he was on his last trip. Mike's getting serious about bullet journaling and also has a distinction between Personal Retreats and Greycations. Also, imposter syndrome is still a thing.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing well. How about you? You know, I am feeling the love for Focus. I talked to several people. I was up in San Jose for WWDC. A bunch of people pulled me aside to say how much they love the show. We've been getting lots of good feels in the email basket lately. I don't

know. I'm just feeling it right now. So I'm happy to be on the mic and talking about being focused. Awesome. Yeah, I got some good feedback too from, or positive feedback, I should say, regarding episode 75, which was the last one that we recorded on intentional constraints, where we kind of continued to talk about the theme of moving the needle. And it sounds like that's something that people want us to continue talking about. But we do need to clarify a few things. And one of the things we have to get out of the way is the fact that we don't hate time tracking as much as we've ragged on it the last couple episodes. Yeah, I got approached in San Jose like, Dave, so I thought you did time tracking.

You hate it now? Somebody actually used the word hate with me. Wow, that's a strong word. I don't hate anything, man. Life is too hard to hate stuff. But the point we were making, or I was trying to make, was i feel like people look at time tracking as a catch-all as a solution to many problems and i i look at it as a solution and we'll talk more about this in a minute but i look at it as a way to find problems with the way i'm spending my time i think

it's very good at that you know uh you know to find where you know did i just spend two hours on twitter a day or whatever? So it's good at finding problems, but I was finding trouble using time tracking to move the needle. That's kind of how we started that whole conversation two episodes ago. So I didn't feel like time tracking was a good solution for that. That doesn't mean time tracking isn't useful. Right, exactly. I agree. I time track myself, but I do think that the information that you get from time tracking is not, like you just said, the be-all end-all in terms of a solution for magically, all of a sudden, doing the right

things at the right time. What you do with that information can inform the decisions that you make, but just because you started tracking your time does not mean that all of a sudden you are being intentional about how you are spending your time and you're able to stick with your plans. There's a lot more to it than that. Yeah. Like for instance, one of the things I think time tracking helps me with is dispelling bad information. Like one of the concerns I used to have was, you know, cause I did a screencast on OmniFocus. I talk about

OmniFocus and high-end task planning often, you know, I don't use a simple napkin for my task list. I have too many clients and too many podcasts and obligations that I can't use a simple system. I need something kind of complex. And people email me to say, I can't believe you spent all this time on this stuff. And I actually believed the propaganda for a while. I was thinking, man, I do spend a lot of time doing that stuff. Maybe I should reconsider until I started time tracking. And I time track every minute I spend on task planning. And so long as I do it every day, it was like maybe 20 minutes. It wasn't that much time, but it is one of those

gardening things. You got to prune the garden every day or it could become a big thing. But just with daily management of my task management, it was trivial compared to other things that I do with my time. And the only way I could find that out was by objectively tracking my time and actually looking at the numbers. Because in my perception, I thought I was spending more like an hour. Yeah, well, I suppose it's easy to assume that you do spend a lot of time managing your tasks when you release something like the OmniFocus Field Guide with hours worth of video on all the things that you do inside of there. But you're basically saying that you don't do all that stuff all the time, that the actual day-to-day usage of it really doesn't take that much. And I think that's the

point to get to for a lot of people. I struggle myself with keeping the garden weeded, to borrow your analogy. And when you neglect it for a while, you do find yourself having to go through there and spend hours cleaning things up. But if you just stick with it, you know, it doesn't, a little bit of effort goes a long way. Yeah. Agreed.

And, and let's, you know, I did spend hours and hours mastering that program and figuring out how I could make it serve me best. But the payoff for me is that it doesn't require that much time now. Yeah. So how do you,

how do you get to the, how do you get to that point? We know with, with the payoff. I mean, part of it's automation stuff, it doesn't require that much time now. Yeah. So how do you get to that point? We know with the payoff. I mean, part of it's automation stuff, making sure you capture tasks right, make sure you set up automatic project creation. You know, some of the stuff I covered in the course, frankly.

But also, I think with OmniFocus, the key is the perspectives, getting it to the perspectives that make sense for you and finding ways to manage those. The other thing that's a big deal for me, and we talked about this in the last episode, is the idea of shutting down every day and planning the next day. Just, I mean, that's one of the biggest lessons for me personally in the last year or two is just how massively profitable it is for me to spend time shutting down every day. Sure, Yeah.

We talked about this. I mean, and I'm not trying to say I'm doing it the only way that it can be done. That's kind of the overriding caveat to everything we say on this show. But for me personally, if I spend time in the afternoon planning the next day, I have massive payoffs. And way more than if I wait until the next morning or after I exercise, whatever. I just, for me, the afternoon when my brain is kind of cooked anyway, spend an, you know, spend an hour, do the final like thorough email check, journal the day, you know, get the tasks out of OmniFocus for the next day. I even write them down in a book and just, I get to wake up the next day and it's just like, you just jump

out of the starting block, you know? So for me, that's the key, but that's one of the reasons why I don't need to spend that much time in OmniFocus because I go in there every afternoon and I do it. Yeah. So maybe let's talk a little bit about how, for somebody who's just getting started with the idea of time tracking, how that can lead to the scenario that you just described. Because what you just mentioned is kind of the system that you've created based off of the knowledge of how long things take you and how long certain tasks or what time amounts certain tasks are going to require of you. And maybe at the beginning, you don't know that stuff. So that's kind of what I would argue would be the first

level of information that you can get from time tracking that can really help you out is if you have your work that you're doing and you're working in an eight hour day, let's say, and you just have time tracking running in the background, watching everything that you do, you're not pushing any start stop buttons at this point. You're just putting something that's going to tell then maybe David, you can share some from your journey, where I will do that. And it's going to show me a couple of things. One, that my max for certain types of activities is less than how long I can spend doing other things. So if I'm screencasting, for example, or I'm recording audio, I know that I'm only going to get a couple hours of that done in a day. Even though I may have 12 hours to work on something, there's no way I can be screencasting

for 12 hours because I'm just so mentally fried after doing that for a short amount of time. That's something that requires a lot of energy from me. And so I would look back at... Let's put a pin in that, Mike. We need to talk about energy at some point on this podcast, but not today, because I think that's the part of the equation we've left out so far. Yeah, you're right. You're right. So I guess just kind of backing up a little bit, high level, what I'm noticing from my time tracking data then is that no matter how many days I go back, I can see kind of like two, maybe three hours if I'm really

feeling it that day. That's kind of like the, maybe three hours if I'm really feeling it that day. That's kind of like the max when it comes to those types of activities. So now when I am planning my week, planning my day tomorrow, I know that it's foolish to try to bite off more than that. And I may be able to try some different things in there, move into a different mode. The low energy context is something that you hear a lot about. I have my own issues with that, by the way. Maybe we can talk about that in another episode too. But my experience, when I'm doing one thing in one state, I have to kind of completely change my state to do something else. It's not as simple as, well, this was a high energy and now I'm going to drop down to a low energy. I have to kind of do a 180 and go the other way, do something else, go for a walk outside,

go to the gym, something else to kind of reset before I can come back and do something that's really intensive, requires a lot of focus like that. So I guess, you know, from a time tracking perspective, what I'm saying is that you kind of recognize your limits and then you can use that sort of as a baseline based on historical data. And you use that and don't apologize for it. You know, if you look at it and you say, well, I've only been able to get done two to three hours worth of work in an eight hour day. Well, maybe, yeah, depending on the type of work that you do and be okay with that. You know, don't try to stretch it because you have more time to fill, but recognize your limits and then plan accordingly. For me, the kick in the pants for time tracking

was the first time Michael Hyatt came on the Mac Power Users, which was, I don't know, three years ago, maybe. I don't know how long ago it was. I guess I should say, well, first of all, as a practicing attorney, I've been tracking time for over 25 years. I mean, that's what you do with a lot of our stuff. And then you start working on a project, you write down when you start and you write down when you end, and that's how you bill for your time.

So I knew that practice, but I didn't really have a system for tracking all of my time and getting an idea of big picture where I'm spending my time. And when I left the firm and tried to split my life into these two pieces, I really was ill-equipped in terms of knowing how I was spending my time. We talked to Michael Hyatt and he got me inspired to bring in extra people to get some help, but I didn't know where I wanted the help. So I use time tracking as the jumping off point for that. I just basically went into data collection mode and you could do this a lot of ways. You could get an app like the timing app, which is sometimes sponsor of the show.

It just automatically tracks time that you do on your Mac. You could, you could use some of these web services like toggle. That's a very popular one. You could literally just get a piece of paper. Or you could look at your calendar at the end of the day. I mean, this does not need to be tracked to the minute. I think that's one of the problems, one of the resistance levels, is you're like, well, I don't have the ability to track my time to the minute. Well, you don't necessarily need to, but you do need a way to track it accurately. You can't just use estimates and memory.

So you look at your calendar at the end of the day and you write down, you can like, if you block schedule like me, you already have some time tracking built into that. And just be honest about, well, I had blocked two hours, it took two and a half. You know, get it accurate to a half hour to begin with if that's all you want to do.

But just start collecting data with no judgment. In my mind, the idea is, don't worry. For the first two or three weeks you're doing this, don't try and change anything. Just try and get accurate data. That's the most important job for you. I was shocked by how little time I spent in OmniFocus because I was getting accurate data, but my prejudgment was wrong. And that's great information to get later because you're going to not only find things that you spend less time on than you thought, you're also going to find things you spend more time on than you thought. Like for me, one of those was some administrative tasks with respect to the law

practice. And as soon as I realized that, wait a second, I'm spending like four hours a week doing all this nonsense. And this is stuff that I don't need to personally be doing that I could train a smart person to do for me. It was a very easy job to go find somebody to do that for me and then recapture four hours a week. It's like getting a time travel machine in your office. So that's's for me, the beginning point was find some way to accurately collect data and collect data for a while and then look at it with an objective mind and see what stands out for you. Yeah, exactly. So let's talk maybe a little bit about how we do that, because I agree that getting accurate data is an important piece. And I've kind of mentioned my failure to do that using the start and stop timers, which, you know, as I was listening

to you talk about the different use cases for time tracking, we did very quickly skim over probably the most popular use for that, as you mentioned, where you have to track your time in order to get paid as a freelancer, for example. The type of work that I've been doing as a freelancer, I guess, kind of falls into like a project basis. But that is the other side of time tracking where you want to do the work as efficiently as possible because the least amount of time that you spend on something, the more money per hour you're getting paid. And time tracking can help you with that too. It could help you identify what Jocelyn K. Gly would call the golden hours or your biological prime time. You may realize that when you try to write a 1000 word article at 10am,

you can crank it out in 20 minutes. But when you try to do it at 2pm, it takes you two hours. That's important to realize too. But the data that I use, I use timing on my Mac, and I pretty much only track time on my Mac because that's where the majority of my work gets done. in iOS, which basically tells me how much time I'm spending in social media and other time-wasting type apps, which has been going down lately. So that's great. But the timing data that I use, I use it periodically. So I don't go back and I look at this every week, but this was something that was very pivotal at a certain point because I realized that the majority of the time that I was spending on my Mac at that point was not productive, that I was, quote unquote, wasting it, you know, playing Civilization or something like that. And when you have the data looking at you in the face, you think, oh, I just played it, you know, just one more turn, right?

But then three hours later, you've wasted quite a bit of time on your device. And how you think you spend your time is not how you actually spend your time. So that's one point I really want to hammer home. Make sure that you have something that you can trust. You have to have some sort of system that you can trust. And if it works for you starting and stopping the timers, then that's great. One of the things that I'm really curious about with the new versions of iOS and shortcuts is where that ends up going. Because if you are able to, when you launch an

application, start a toggle timer, for example, in a specific category, that's really powerful. Then you've taken all the work out of starting and stopping the timers even on an iOS device. I think that could be pretty cool. But for me right now timing is the only thing I've found that gives me reliable data because I just never have to touch it. Yeah, Rose and I talked about that over on the Automators podcast

that one of the new triggers is actually launching an app. I mean, the Siri Shortcuts team has a trigger that whenever you launch an app. I mean, the Siri shortcuts team has a trigger that whenever you launch an app, an automation can run. And one of those automations could be fire off your toggle timer. So that may be really powerful.

I don't know. I mean, it's still in beta and we'll see how it all plays out. But the automation level is important, but the most important thing is an accurate way. If you're willing to sit down and be deliberate about it and you can keep that practice, that's good. I do think that does come at a cost of mental energy to remember to do it. Yep. Yeah, definitely. So what do you use? What I use is timing is always running. I mean, because it's free in essence, you know,

I paid for the app, but it's free in terms of mental overhead. And I really like the accuracy of the data because not only do I spend a lot of time in Safari and Word, I spend it doing stuff for different clients and different, even different enterprises. So I need the granular data that timing gives me. It actually tells me what documents and what webpages I was on. And the other nice thing is with Timing, I don't want this to be commercial. You always have this weird thing when you talk about an app you love,

but it also happens to sponsor you. You don't want to ignore them in the future because it sounds like a commercial, but at the same time, it's a weird thing. But anyway, with Timing, you can categorize certain web pages to a certain project or task. So really, the automation is quite powerful

and the data is quite good. But I don't work all the time on my Mac. I also work on mobile devices. And I kind of have a few states of time tracking, so timing is always going. But then about every, let's say every six weeks, I will do a full, I will give a week at full time tracking treatment. That makes sense. And I'll use toggle for that. And I will track only the time I Mac I'll track the time

from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed. You know, I'll, I'll track nap time. I'll track, you know, saxophone time. And I've just set up some timers and toggle and using my automation prowess on my iOS devices, I've made it very easy. It's not as accurate though. I, whenever I compare the data, I always, I think timing is better data, but it gets me in the ballpark and, and I've been doing it for years now. So I don't have the measure bias that some people may have, you know, like when you've been doing it for years now. So I don't have the measure bias that some people may have, you know, like when you first start doing it, you'll actually change what you do because you know, a timer is running. Yeah. I don't have that. I mean, I'm like, whatever,

I'm tracking time this week. Okay. I'll do it. And, um, and at the end of the week, I'll take a look and see if anything jumps out at me. It's kind of like a, uh, a little audit process. And occasionally I find things, but I don't feel like I have to do it all the time every day. It's too much overhead for me to do it all the time. But if I have to do that, you know, once, probably twice a quarter, I'll do it for a week. And the data has been pretty stable for me, but I I'm doing it with the idea of looking for problem areas or also opportunities to delegate. Yeah. I think the opportunities to delegate is an interesting idea. I've tried to delegate stuff in the past and it's not worked. And I'm sure that it was because that was before

I saw the light in regards to time tracking. I feel like looking at the data from timing, which is in my face right now, I would have a much better idea today if I were to try to work with an assistant, for example, what types of things that I could offload. So for example, I've got my time spent in applications for the last seven days, time spent in applications for the last seven days. And a good chunk of this is spent in Safari. And actually, a large percentage of that time is research for different things. Some of this stuff, I can't delegate like the ScreenFlow stuff. That's five hours and 30 minutes in the last week. Day one, because I was working on recording some day one videos, one hour, 55 minutes. one because I was working on recording some day one videos, one hour, 55 minutes.

Those types of things, I recognize that's my unique skill set. So those are the things that I would continue to do. But looking at the data, it is pretty obvious looking at this that there is some things that are kind of easy wins in terms of delegation, which was definitely a mistake that I made the first time I tried to do that. Sure. Like Keyboard Maestro Field guide released a few weeks ago. And I realized that I'm the one who records and frankly does a lot of the edits on those videos because that's what I do. And I can't offload that. I mean, that's something, in fact, that's what I enjoy doing. That's my

favorite part of that whole process, But uploading the video to Teachable, giving it a title, putting it in the right place in the order, uploading the closed captioning, uploading the description, all that stuff was things I identified through time tracking that when you're doing to 76 videos like that course with 76 videos, it adds up to substantial time. And what I did was I made a couple screencasts of how I do each step. And I have a really smart person that works with me. And all I have to do is give her that video and answer any questions she has. And she does it just as well as I would do it, if not better. And it costs me money, but saves me time. And that was a piece of that whole project that I

didn't really touch. I mean, getting those videos into Teachable wasn't on my list for that, for that production. And when I do the next one, I'm going to do the exact same thing. Yeah, that's a great point and is probably something that I want to discuss in the next section regarding my bullet journal experiment. But maybe we should take a break before we get in there. All right. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move with Squarespace. Squarespace lets you easily create a website for your next big idea, giving you a unique domain name, award-winning templates, and more. So maybe you want to create an online store, or maybe you want to create a portfolio. Maybe you want to create a blog. Maybe you want

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look great on any device. It was going to give us all of the pieces that we needed, like the ability to record people's information as they signed up for this free basketball tournament that we were hosting. And we knew that it was going to work anywhere, anytime. And it was just way, way more efficient to do it through Squarespace and have them worry about making sure that everything works rather than trying to do all that ourselves. Squarespace plans start at just $12 a month, but you can start a free trial with no credit card required by going to squarespace.com slash focus. That's F-O-C-U-S-E-D. When you decide to sign up, use the offer code FOCUS to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain, and to show your support for FOCUS. Once again, that's squarespace.com slash FOCUS,

and the code FOCUS to get 10% off your first purchase. We thank Squarespace for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next this show and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. Now, Mike, I don't know if you've noticed in our little text message thread you and I have between each other, but occasionally you'll see the three little dots lighting up like I'm typing something and then nothing arrives. That is because like three or four times now I've been wanting to say, what's going on with your bullet journal? But then I realized, oh no, I want to hear it on air.

I want to know if this is a success or failure. You got to tell me right on air, man. So what's happened since we last spoke about the Mike bullet journal experiment? Well, I went back and listened to that episode, listened to your advice again about how to implement this. And I realized that after watching the video, there were pieces of the bullet journal method that I just knew right away were not going to work for me. So one of those things is the page at the beginning, which tells you, you know, this is my task list essentially. And you link to like the different pages where you're doing things that just seemed like way more work than it was worth. But there were a couple of pieces to it that I really liked. I really liked

the idea of having a single page that you work off of throughout your day. And I also liked the idea of planning your week ahead of time. And so as I was thinking about how am I going to implement this, because I was sold on creating a PDF template and putting it into my GoodNotes application as a custom journal, I realized I have a lot of these pieces already. They just needed to be tweaked a little bit. So as part of faith-based productivity, for example, I have an exercise where I walk through and I plan my perfect week. And I actually do that as part of the personal retreat course as well, where once a quarter, I'll kind of redefine how I want my week to go. But I realized I could take that exact same template, throw it at the beginning of the week in my bullet journal template inside of GoodNotes. And I could very quickly sketch out for the week

my major commitments and basically block my time the same way I do every single day, just not spending three hours trying to craft this thing because I know it's going to get blown up. So I've been doing that for the last couple of weeks and it's working. What it does is, I mentioned it in the last episode, plans are worthless, so planning is everything, right? So by not taking the time to color code

all the stuff and make sure that all the different areas of my life are covered in there, but just very quickly drawn an arrow for blocking off certain hours and making sure that I have the time set aside for the things that are really important or the deadlines that are coming up, the trips that I'm going to take, because I know further on in this episode, we're going to talk about some of your travel stuff. I actually took a trip to Kraft and Commerce as well. So being able to put that on the week ahead of time, that actually helped a lot. And then I've got the daily template, which I was already doing. So the one missing piece here is kind of the recurring tasks or the things that I need to be reminded of at a specific time. A lot of time as I'm trying to consider the best solution for this.

At the moment, I'm continuing to use OmniFocus, but I almost feel bad going in there because I'm using it at a very low level. I do not need all of the features that are in there. Even the review, which OmniFocus is amazing at, because I have so little in there, it's kind of pointless to go through and review it every week. Sure. little in there. It's kind of pointless to go through and review it every week. Sure. So I've thought about trying out Things because that is an absolutely beautiful application.

And I know some people who really like that. Sean Blanc is a Things user. He really likes it. And just looking at the app, it is a joy to use. And so that's been weighing into the equation. But also, WWDC happened and Reminders is getting a pretty substantial upgrade, where you can have flag tasks, you can have a today view. I think that the new version of Reminders is going to be enough for me to handle all of that stuff. And then I use my GoodNotes, Apple Pencil combo for everything else. Sure. But unfortunately, I can't get to that yet because I'm too chicken to install the beta. And who knows when that actually drops sometime this fall.

So I'm rolling with OmniFocus for now. But I have a feeling that that's how this is going to end up. now, but I have a feeling that that's how this is going to end up. I am 100% on board with the, maybe I shouldn't call it bullet journal idea because it's not strictly or truly the bullet journal method. But as we're recording this, I feel much better about using a handwritten, even though it's digital, digital way of planning my week and my day. In the past, that kind of was nagging at the back of my mind as, you know, that's probably not enough. You're probably missing something somewhere. But as I've thought about this over the last several days, I've kind of come to peace with this situation where that's going to be enough for 80% of what I have to do.

And then reminders can take care of the rest because I don't need a reminder that says, here's the 12 different steps for publishing a focused episode. I just need the reminder that you have to publish the episode today. So I feel like the new reminders with the lists and especially with

the Siri integrations, like being able to remind you of something when you're talking to somebody, that's a really cool feature. I feel like that's going to be enough for me. Yeah, I think that application

will be very popular. And I'm really glad that it got kind of the notes treatment like Apple Notes got such a big improvement a few years ago. I feel like this is on that same level.

And for a lot of people, I think it's going to be great. I continue to need the power of OmniFocus. I mean, I have a lot of clients, and I have a lot of things I'm doing, and everything is important. It's interesting to me, like the bullet journal method, I watched the video. In fact, I even bought the book since we last talked. I haven't read it yet. I just maybe ever got 30 pages into it. But there's a whole bunch of stuff in there with the idea of saying you're going to run

your whole system out of this book. And that is never the intention for me. If anything, the notebook is a analog manifestation of something much bigger and omnifocus. Sure. And I still need that time and omni-focus to to dig the gold out i guess for lack of a better word you know but i do like the idea of you know on the ground using the notebook to kind of track it and i think part of that is just i get a certain amount of joy from using fancy pens and paper um and I just thought for some, for whatever reason, it's a nice way for me to do that.

But I still have to put the effort in on the digital end to, to unearth the stuff that's important. And that's why I have done all these courses on OmniFocus and have all these fancy perspectives. So I've got a kind of a weird balance, but I don't think it's that weird. I was talking to a developer friend of mine who said no a lot of people use a digital task management system but also have an analog into it i don't i don't think it's not i don't think it's that unusual so um but it sounds to me like you're kind of finding peace with it while we were talking i just sent you today's uh i sent you i texted you my my sheets for today it's got some

client names and so i can't put it in the show notes but you can see it's very simplistic the way i do my days with it yeah no i i like that and i i like the flexibility of the the bullet journal system and i guess you know i've taken it to a different level with the templates that i already use where and we've talked about this in the podcast before, so we don't need to spend a whole lot of time here, but I time block my day and then I've got my quarterly goals, which I write out every single day. And then I've got up to five tasks that I'm going to be working on. And some people who have an OmniFocus with 10,000 tasks in it will look at that and be

like, only five things that I would love to only have five things to do in a day. But the five things that I pick are usually pretty big things because I'm not documenting every little piece of the thing. And that's one of the things that always, I felt like I was doing it wrong when it came to OmniFocus. It's like, you can have all of these checklists, you can have all of these templates, but I never use them because I don't need to be reminded that I need to prep the outline on this day and then record the podcast on this day and then upload the recording to Dropbox on this day. I just need one reminder for this is the day that I'm recording with David, or this is the day that the thing is publishing, or, you know, today I'm going to work on these

screencasts. You know, I don't need to identify each individual video that I'm going to be working on or whether I'm writing scripts or recording audio. That just seems like more overhead to me than it's worth. It takes, there's energy again, you know, I'm trying to try not to go there, but it's part of the conversation. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I feel, I feel like that takes more out of me than just sitting down to do what I know I need to do intrinsically with the, the, the project in front of me. And when you have different projects from different places, you know, it's really not worth documenting each little piece of it separately because then you have to translate all of that back over into the other systems.

One of the systems that I've been playing with a lot recently is Basecamp because that's what Sean Blanc uses, the suite setup. And it's growing on me. At first, when I started using it, I'm like, how can anybody run a business off of this? Because there's so many things that feel like they're missing when you're used to something that's more detailed when it comes to how you manage projects at a company level. But their whole ethos is calm company, right? So I don't know, even though it's weird not to have like instant chat via Slack or something and have all that stuff take place in Basecamp, now that I've been doing it for a little while, it feels kind of nice. I can just know that this article needs to be published on this day and I can sit down to write it and I don't have to worry

about which pieces of it am I doing and am I documenting the work that I did. It's taken a little bit to get used to it, but I find that I like working that way. And I feel like the bullet journal is enough for me when I'm sitting here in my office at my desk to make sure that I'm applying the intentionality and moving in the right direction in terms of what I'm trying to do without having to manage all the details. Yeah, a couple things I want to unpack from that.

First of all, if you look at the page I just sent you, I think I've got like 14 items for today. And as we record this, I'm about two-thirds of the way through the list. I mean, even though I have thousands of things and I'm a focus in many clients, last night I was able to figure out these are the things that I need to complete today. And the other thing you look at the second page I sent you in the gang. So I said what I sent Mike

was what I described last episode, I have a one page for the day where I put the priority for the day, it just helps me to say, okay, there's one thing for the day. In this case, I cheated, I realized because my thing for today was two excellent podcasts because I recorded two shows today and I didn't want to play favorites. So I actually kind of cheated. I have two priorities. Normally, it's just one thing listed there, but it's in the same category. So I feel like I'm okay. Then I write down a meditation and then I have just the plan, which is the days I scheduled out when I went to bed last night and the list, which is those things that I got out of OmniFocus. And then when I get to the end of the day, I'll go and I'll mark these done in OmniFocus and I'll use my prowess in OmniFocus to put

together another list for tomorrow. And then the next thing I do on the second page is I just run a log of the whole day. I just, everything I start doing and I try to break it into blocks because I do block scheduling as we've talked about in the past. So I'll have a legal block. I'll have a podcast block, a Max Barkey block. But then the other thing you'll see as I log the day, a lot of times I'll write notes in there. If I have a funny conversation with my daughter or something, I may write something about that. But then on the right column, there's a bunch of numbers, 1.0, 0.2, 0.3.

Yep. I was curious about those. You know what those are? I'll give you one guess. I have no idea. That's me moving the needle. That's me moving the needle. So I write it down. So like I got this morning from 5.30 to 6.30, I got 1.1 hours of moving the needle. And so that's how I keep myself honest as I go through the day. You can see in the morning I move the needle a lot. And then in the afternoon, not so much.

But anyway, so that's kind of the way I do it. Let me ask a question about that then. So these are basically, you're either moving the needle or you're not moving the needle. And you're just keeping track of the time that is spent actually moving the needle. There's no, what's the term I'm looking for here? Those aren't like values for the time. Those are just strictly the time spent, correct? That is the time that I spent moving the needle. Like for instance, and I know for listeners, this is weird because you don't see it, but I have an entry at 1045 legal admin. And then there's not another entry till 1120 when I'm doing my prep for the show today for the focus show.

So I've got a period of time in there. And if you look to the right column, there's no recording for moving the needle in that block. Yep. Because that work didn't move the needle for me, but it's something that had to get done. And I had to get it done this morning because this afternoon I'm going to Batuu. So you can see, but those are warning signs. That's the stuff that surfaces in time tracking.

And like even this morning, I'm thinking, why am I doing this again? Can I hire somebody? Can I not do this? You know, I'm going through my moving the needle list in my head. But so I only, the right column numbers are only time that moves the needles, but I report the whole day as I log the whole day as I go through on a very rough basis. Gotcha. Okay. Anyway, so, and that,

that may take a page or two pages, or if like I went out to lunch with my daughter the other day and suddenly I had like a whole page of just kind of journal entry based on that conversation that just dropped in the middle of that log. So that's the first thing I want to unpack is kind of how I'm doing it. And the second thing is you had talked about Basecamp. And let me just say, I'm a believer, too. I bought a year's worth of Basecamp for the legal practice. And that's been a, I'll say, semi-successful experiment. I've got a couple of clients that really like it, but a lot of them that won't never do it.

But when I realized, oh, wait, people that are paying me money don't want to have to go log into a website to do stuff. But then I realized the people that I pay money to, the people that are helping me, they'll do whatever I tell them to do. And some of them aren't that tech savvy. So Basecamp has been a very good solution for that. So much so that I'm pretty sure I'll renew. Yeah, that's the crazy thing about it, I think, is what you expect from the application will determine whether you think the world of it or whether you think it's garbage going into it. I kind of had the perspective of, well, everything needs to be in here and we need to have Kanban boards so we can

track the things that we're doing. And Basecamp's just like, nah, you don't need any of that. You just got to answer the prompt. You know, what did you work on today? Yeah.

And then, and then the, the chat, i hesitate to even call it chat but there's like the campfire for the the different offices or projects whatever uh that's so rudimentary compared to other tools that i've used and for some companies that rely on instant communication, I can see that just not meeting their needs. And so it felt really weird at first, but now I kind of like it. I kind of like the fact that you can throw something up there and you don't have to expect a response right away.

Or likewise, if somebody asks something of you, it's kind of inferred that they are probably not online and there's no green badge next to their name to indicate that they're online. So they don't, they're probably not going to respond to you immediately either. It's a totally different approach to the way that people work. And I think I like it. All right. So do you want to move production of focused into base camp? Oh man, that's tempting. Uh, I would do it if you really wanted to, but I'm cool with what we got too. Quip seems to be working fine. I just, you know me, I always want the new and shiny. I like the shiny. Yeah, maybe we should give it a shot and report back for the listeners.

All right, let's do that. Cool. Now there's another piece to this that I want to talk about because you've got, you sent me something else in a screenshot recently, which I feel like that's part of what makes your journal method on your fancy paper with your fancy pens work. And I've got a little bit different version of this where I've got my quarterly goals from my personal retreat that I'm writing out every single day. But you have a different method of keeping that stuff front of mind. Yes. So, gang, let me just tell you what Mike has to deal with having me as a podcast partner.

He gets random messages at all hours with very strange pictures in it. Oh, wow. I know how that sounded. It's not like that. But he gets these strange pictures in it. Oh, wow, I know how that sounded. It's not like that. But he gets these strange screenshots and whatnot. And sometimes I offer explanation, and sometimes I just send the picture. And something that's been on my mind,

maybe because of the Focus show lately, is Mike Schmitz is getting to me, and I am trying to do more forward planning and think things through. I read the 12-week year, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I just wanted a way to keep the big goals in front of me all the time. And I have a notebook that has them written down in it. I have them in my calendars. So like Fantastical has, like I'm currently in production on the next field guide. And if you look at my month, there's all day events stretched throughout the month of research of the

next field guide. I'll tell you the title probably next time, but, but anyway, it's, it's in work in progress, but I wanted a way to kind of have that better. And I have a wall calendar and that's great.

And I looked at the wall calendar, but I really wanted it in front of my face. And, and I was looking at my calendar, various calendar apps to see if I could just leave one open with that on, but nothing was really scratching the itch for me. And then it occurred to me, why not just make it my wallpaper? So I went in OmniGraffle and I just put down the next six months titles of June through November. And in each month, I have a couple of the big things I want to get done in that month on largely field guide projects.

And then the hard, like out of town commitments like MaxDoc is in there and the family vacation in November is in there. So there's a couple things there. But now it's on my screen and I'm going to have to share it at some point. I know. Maybe I'll share it by the time this goes up. I'm not going to promise here because I've got some stuff in there I don't really want to share it at some point. I know. Maybe I'll share it by the time this goes up. I'm not going to promise here because I've got some stuff in there. I don't really want to share just yet, but we're recording this early. So maybe by then I'll have just come clean.

But it's great because now it's just in front of me. I've got a version on my desktop and I also made a version from my phone because I don't have apps all over my phone home screen. I can actually, every time I look at my phone home screen. I can actually, every time I look at my phone and saying, Hey Dave, this is something you wanted to do this month. What have you done to move the needle on that? And it's great, but it's kind of manic too. I'm not sure if it makes me insane or if it makes me like a productivity guy. I'm not sure what it makes me, but I've been doing it and I like it. I like it too. I think it's genius. You also have a Mac version of this,

we should point out, because the first one you sent me was your iPhone screen, but then you also have a Mac wallpaper, which you mentioned you keep on your reference monitor, which is probably the place that I would recommend if people were going to try to do this, that you start. The iOS one, I have to admit, the first thing I thought of was there's no way this works unless you've only got a couple icons on your home screen. And I don't know, my home screen is very similar. I've got a row of apps up at the top. I know that's not what most people do on their smartphones. And so I think for a lot of people maybe who are listening to this, maybe they're saying, well, that's kind of pointless because I wouldn't see it anyways. You have to have a totally different approach to your phone, at least in order for that to work. But having it on your computer, especially if the computer is the place that you work, which as we talked about earlier with time tracking, that is primarily the place that I work. That is tempting to me. I haven't gone ahead and created my own wallpapers yet, but you've got me thinking about that. Yeah, well, I updated.

Now it's no longer on my reference screen. Now it is dead center main screen, and I like that even better. So maybe it'll be slightly redacted. Let's just put it that way. But I will put something in the show notes so you can see what I've done. And like I said, feel free to judge me i feel like

it's a little bit insane to put this on your wallpaper but it has an effect i mean i've only been doing it a week now but i i look at that during the day and sometimes i'm like oh you know the resistance kicks in i could take a nap or i could go do you know play a video game or whatever and i look at that i'm like june july august what am i doing uh-oh get back could go do, you know, play a video game or whatever. And I look at that and I'm like, June, July, August, what am I doing? Oh, get back to work Sparky. You know? Yeah, no, I think it makes so much sense. I had a different version of this. It wasn't on my computer. It wasn't on my phone. But when I was getting ready to launch faith-based productivity, I basically made a list of everything that needed to be done on the whiteboard in my office and had a date with a circle around it that every time I walked in here to get work done, I looked at that and like, oh yeah, I got to launch this thing by this date. I better get cranking. I better make sure that all the pieces are there because especially once you announce something that's coming, you got to follow through and get it out there. And this was the first major product

that I've launched myself. It ended up being way more work than I anticipated. And I guarantee I would not have hit my release date had I not seen that on my whiteboard every single time I walked into my office. But every time I did, it kind of centers me like, okay, that's right. You know, there's a mission here. So what's the word I'm looking for? It's not like it recycles

or restarts your motivation, but it's kind of the intentional constraints that we talked about in the last episode. It's the guardrails. So when you're thinking about, oh man, I don't have, I don't have that much energy today. I don't have the drive to sit down and do what I know I need to do. And then you see that and you're like, oh, that's right. I got to follow through. You know, that's, that was enough for me. Most of the, most days when I, when I walked in here, even though, you know, it was, it was a lot of work and it was a lot of long hours. That was the thing that, that kept me going. And so if you can put that on a digital device and you look at it all the time, I think it could have the same effect. But I think it's really powerful.

I definitely think people should figure out a way to bring those goals or maybe not even the word goals kind of has a negative connotation. I feel lately because some of the stuff I've read is that goals don't really matter. It's the habits that you create that are going to produce the results. Everybody has a goal of winning the NBA championship, but only one team is left at the end of the year. So winners and losers, when it comes to achievement, can both have the same goal. That really doesn't make the difference. So maybe I hesitate to use that term. But you can define for yourself what it means to be productive, what it means to create

the work that you love, or I don't know. You can fill in the blanks for yourself, but then bringing those things front of mind consistently, I feel like is a very important step to actually achieving those results. Yeah, well, I know we've been kind of circling around this goals versus process thing for, it's been an ongoing theme on our show for a while. And I think process is most important. And I think we'd all agree with that if you think about it. But goals are important too. And I feel like being aware of where you want to show up really helps. And I feel like this whole thing I've done with this home screen or this desktop screen is really just

kind of a variation on a theme with respect to that moving the needle thing. It's the reason I write down the little digits on the right side, right column is I want to kind of keep this stuff at the top of mind that, no, my goal of, you know, if I want to continue to work from home and support my family, if I want to continue to live this life where I don't go have to work for a big company, I have to be accountable and I have to move the needle and I have to get

projects shipped. And, uh, both of these things kind of helped me keep that at the front of my mind. Cause it's easy to push that in the back when you're in the middle of things. Yeah, exactly. All right.

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It was a huge win for Mac Power users. We got to interview an Apple executive. But I just remember the whole week I was on this show talking about how I finally cracked the nut of traveling and getting work done and how I have a time blocked every morning to get things done and it's just going to be perfect. And I just thought I should publicly confess that I did everything wrong. Once again, on this trip, I got behind on email. I got behind on client work. My journal, I brought my journal with me.

I even brought a fountain pen on an airplane, which is a risky proposition because, but I wanted to have it with me. I didn't, I got to interview an Apple executive. I didn't even do a journal entry that day. Uh, meditation fell apart. I was a failure across the board last week on this thing. And just like we were talking about earlier about pruning the garden, I got back. I had a ton of email to dig through.

I had a ton of task management stuff to figure out. I had client things that were starting to catch on fire without me even realizing it. And I was a terrible traveler in terms of Mr. Focused last week. I just thought I should publicly confess. Well, I'm not sure that anybody is a productive traveler. I have yet to find someone who is able to stick with their routines when they travel. That's why a lot of people will advocate for making a simplified version of your morning routine, for example. Instead of trying to hit all seven things, you've just got like the two that you're absolutely not going to miss. But when everything's a priority, nothing

is. So until you identify these are the things that are mission critical, it's easy to just chuck it all. And I was on a trip too, and I also found myself not following through and doing some of the things that I knew I needed to do, but I had thought through prior to that because I kind of knew that was, that was going to happen. I knew I was going to, I went to the craft and commerce conference in Boise, Idaho, which is the conference that's put on by ConvertKit. Met some really cool people who hopefully will be guests on the show in the near future. We mentioned Matt Raglin a couple times in the last couple episodes. I got to see him speak.

He did a great job. So I'm hoping that he'll come on the podcast and talk to us about bullet journaling and intentionality and all those things. But when you're in that situation, and WWDC was probably that for you too, where you have an opportunity and you have access to people and experiences that you wouldn't normally have. And so in the back of my mind, I kind of already was prepared to just chuck the routine if I needed to, in order to spend time with the people that were there. And I think that's okay. You know, if as long as you are conscious about that choice ahead of time, and you know that you're not going to be able to do all the things, then that's completely fine. No, I agree. And I knew that going in like this,

this interview was a big deal. I really wanted to get it right and do the prep. And I did the things I needed to do while I was there. But everything else, man, just completely went down the drain. And when I was getting back and kind of catching up with email, I had a couple emails from some customers that are like, hey, you haven't responded to me. And usually you're very quick. And I got thinking, well, this isn't what I want to be, right? I don't want to be like this. And even though I had perfectly good intentions when I was up there, you're right. I am, you know, in hindsight, kind of looking at what went wrong. It was a lack of preparation and reality on my part.

I said, well, you know, I got this licked now. I'm just going to do my system. But then, of course, you get up there and you have late nights. So waking up early is hard. You still need to get enough sleep. I mean, I don't want to show up to interview an Apple person and be falling asleep. And you're right. There are people there that I get to see once a year.

And I want to make sure I have attention and time to focus on them. Because I'm not going to get that chance when I get home. But what I didn't do was accept that going in. Why didn't I figure out, okay, I still need to get through the email to do at least a triage through the email once a day. I have to. And if I'd made this smaller list of things like that, and I still need to accept the things I have to, you know, and if I'd made this smaller list of things like that, and I still need to accept like the things I want to do going forward, I was actually writing notes about this. I made myself, I wrote out a whole explanation to myself, kind of a debrief on the problem. And now I'm going to make myself read that every time I go on a trip, that's my, my punishment, but, but hopefully I'll, you know, the, the gray matter will start to sink in. But I'm going to delegate even more.

I've never been someone that just hands off some of this email to my assistant, but I'm going to the next time I go out of town. And I'm going to make sure that things don't get as crazy because I don't want to come back to spend two days riding the ship again. Right. Yeah. That's a very good point because if you don't deal with something while you're there, it's not usually the case that that thing goes away. You're going to have to deal with it at some point. And the process for you is probably the same thing that I've had to battle every single

time that I've traveled where it's like, oh, I'll be over there anyways. And I can squeeze in one thing here or an hour here to do that sort of thing. When you're traveling, it just seems like you lose a lot of control that you would typically have in your day to day. So for me personally, I know that now, because I've made the mistake enough times that I just don't schedule anything while I'm traveling. I am not going to assume that I'm going to get any work done because frequently the case has been that I have not been able to get any work done. So even if it's not that much time,

So even if it's not that much time, I kind of go into it with a worst case scenario mindset where assuming I'm not going to be sleeping well because I'm not in my own bed and my time is going to be spoken for, I don't want to have to try to find some time to squeeze something in. So I just, as a blanket rule, like there's going to be no work happening while I'm here in this place doing this thing. Now, if it's a vacation, that's maybe is a little bit different. You know, if you're going away for a week vacation and you decide during that vacation that you're going to one of those afternoons, try to find some time. You have a little bit more wiggle room, I would say. But if you're going to

something where there is a specific purpose, you are going to be doing something, your attention is already spoken for, I feel like that's where it's a slippery slope for me. And it's almost always a failure if I try to squeeze in just one more thing, even to the point where I won't even try to get work done on the plane. Because yeah, maybe I'll be able to pull up my iPad and write something, but maybe the person in front of me is going to put their seat back and there's going to be a ton of turbulence or my plane's going to be delayed or whatever. And I just, I have no idea what the day is actually going to look like. So I don't try to plan anything. If I do anything on a plane now, it's read a book or play a game. That's kind of the only thing that happens in that space. Yeah, I did that once.

I left something that I had to do to the last minute for good reasons, but I got on the plane and I knew I had a four-hour flight and I was going to be great. I was going to get it done. And as soon as the plane took off, I opened up the iPad and Microsoft Word said, activation error. You cannot work

because you haven't activated. I'm like, I activated, but I'm on an airplane and now it's not, you know, just like, it's always something like that. But another mistake I made with this last trip was

I just, I let things piled up. The other problem I have is I do client work where you don't have control over that. I don't know that I'm not going to have a big rush on my hands in a couple of days. And it was, I had a bad string of luck in that way. You know how sometimes you just need a couple things or even just one thing to break your way and be easier than it should be so you can get everything done and stay on top but i had a couple weeks leading up to this trip where various client matters all broke the wrong way you know um you know the the other side of the contract wanted to make it super complicated and just like everything every time i opened up my

email or checked in base camp i found that some other multi-hour project had just landed on me because something didn't break my way so it was just crazy so i left on the trip feeling stressed which is never good and um either way i you know we get on the show and talk about how smart and fancy we are but i thought i should just share that uh we all are subject toibles. And I had some big ones last week. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. And I'm curious, kind of as a follow-up to that. So sometimes things are just going to break the wrong way. I think especially when you're doing client work because you don't have complete control over those things. If somebody needs

something right away and you have promised to deliver that, then you got to figure out a way to make it work. Do you have any advice though for people in controlling those types of things when you are heading up to a trip? Well, one thing I did with some of my clients was I just, I was just honest with them. I'm like, hey, this just came up, but I'm traveling and I'm doing a work thing. So I have limited time. And my clients are used to me turning things around relatively quickly. So that's unusual for them to hear. But I just say, look, I can't promise you I'm going to have this done in a couple days.

Is that a problem? And that's the way I would ask them. And the couple said, no, that really is a problem. And I need to get this as soon as possible for those clients. I just, you know, I was in the middle of the night in a hotel room figuring things out for them. But several of them say, no, that's not a problem at all. And so I had created this artificial stress on myself about something that wasn't stressful, if that makes sense. So being honest with them. And so that gave me a little bit of breathing room. But then of course I got back home on Friday and I spent the whole weekend getting caught up with all the stuff that was much further, much later than I

would have liked it to have been. But the whole thing is just a little wacky, but I'm very disappointed in myself in the sense that I really like a little wacky. But I'm very disappointed in myself in the sense that I really like this journaling habit. And I really wish I had done a good job of journaling last week because it was a special week for me and I didn't really capture much. But live and learn. I got four trips now in my next six months. I can tell because I'm looking at my wallpaper. So I've got a lot of excuses to practice and get better at this in the next six months. Sure. I'm curious, when you go on a trip like WWDC, do you find that you, even though the journaling may fall by the wayside, that you continue to maintain a presence on social media. And the reason that I ask is that as we

record this, there was a New York Times article that was published on basically how great day one is. And one of the things that struck me from that article was the author was basically saying that they're building their own social media of things that they want to remember inside of day one. And I was very intrigued by that idea. I think maybe it's just we're not used to thinking about it that way, where, oh, this cool thing is happening, I need to share this, as opposed to, oh, this cool thing is happening, I want to save this. Yeah, I agree.

In fact, there was a recent episode of Hurry Slowly where the guest had talked about that. And I don't remember which one it was, but I'll put a link in the show notes. But the idea of rather than posting it to the whole world, just post it to your journal. You know, I mean, we're essentially public journaling with some of the social media. And that's okay, except some of your journal entries people can use against you. And maybe you should be mindful of the ones that you want to share publicly and the ones that would go into a private journal. Now I did some,

the day we, the day we got to go to the keynote and we did the interview, I did a bunch of posting, but it's also like we got, we aren't even allowed to talk about some of the stuff we were doing until it was done. So I couldn't share all of that, but I didn't think we should talk about it until it was done. I don't think share all of that. But I didn't think we should talk about it

until it was done. I don't think we actually had agreed not to. So I don't know. Actually, I was more than a little disappointed in myself, just the general way that all went down last week. And I thought I'd just share it here. I think this is an ongoing thing for me. I'm not good at traveling and holding it all together.

And I don't do it enough to get good at it. But a couple of takeaways for me from this one was, you know, the plan of cutting time out every day is a good one. And especially on work trips. I mean, vacations, be on vacation as much as you can, please. But these I consider work trips. And the other one that one of the hallelujah moments i had coming back was like you know what a bunch of the stuff that i like get behind somebody else could have taken care of for me while i was gone sure and and i just have to figure out what the best way to do that whether i just give my assistant access to certain email accounts or i just go through every day and forward a bunch to her. I don't know what the answer to, I'm going to research that between now and my next trip. But, um, there were things I could have done to make this less painful for everyone involved. Sure. Well, you get another,

another crack at it and, uh, when you come to Mac stock. So I'll, I'll ask you about it when I see you there. I get another crack at the end of June, frankly, I've got another trip then too. So it's a, yeah, it's a, you'll hear about it at some point gang. Hopefully I'll get better. If you've got advice on this, please found off in the focused forum. I need help. This is, this is a call for an intervention. All right, there you have it. Go, go help out David. All right, let's take it. Go help out David. All right, let's take a break here and thank our third sponsor. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Timing, the app that tracks your time automatically instead of manually. In today's fast-moving world, the next distraction is right around the corner, which makes it harder and harder for you to stay on track with your projects and determine how much work you actually got done. And that's why you need an app to help you stay

on top of your time. Manual time tracking can interrupt your workflow. We talked about that earlier. It never worked for me, but timing is different. Timing automates your time tracking to save you as much time as possible. So first, it automatically tracks how you spend time in your Mac. It's broken down by app, website, document, and timing's functionality is similar to iOS 12 screen time, but it's on yourates it and it looks awesome in dark mode. You can still end up with a lot of data to work through. So timing lets you use drag and drop to create rules that automatically categorize your time so you don't have to do it over and over again. It'll suggest to fill in gaps in your timeline so you never forget to track a meeting, and it can even automatically ask you what you did whenever you return to your Mac.

With the automatic sync feature, your track time will magically appear across all of your Macs. So even when you work on the go with your MacBook, you'll have the full picture on your iMac once you get home. We talked in this episode a lot about time tracking and it never really stuck for me until I tried timing. Timing just made the whole thing effortless. And it really opened up my eyes the first time that I looked at that data and I realized how much I was spending on things that I thought I wasn't spending much time on. I was able to make the adjustments and timing is able to run in the background. So I don't really even have to think about it all that often. But every once in a while, I go back in there just to make sure that I'm still on track, that I'm still working as much in putting enough effort towards

the things that I think I'm doing as I actually am doing. How you think you spend your time is very different than how you actually spend it. So timing gives me that picture and the confidence that I need to know that I'm hitting the mark. Now, timing is so confident that you're going to love their fuss-free approach that they have a totally free trial. You can download the 14-day free trial by going to timingapp.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, and you'll save 10% when you purchase. Once again, that is timingapp.com slash focused to save 10% when you purchase. Timing, stop worrying about time and focus on doing your best work instead. We thank Timing for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM.

So Mike, let's talk a little bit about personal retreats versus graycations. Yes, so graycation is from CPG Gray in the Cortex podcast. And I feel like I've heard people use graycations and personal retreats somewhat interchangeably. And I've got a little bit of a bone to pick here because they are definitely not the same thing. Yes, I think it was Marco talk about this on the ATP podcast. And I think he even used the term like a retreat for his graycation where he went to a different location in order to work on a specific problem that he was trying to solve. And that particular problem, he was able to do the work that he needed to get done on it. Turned out that it wasn't really something that was shippable anyways, which is a whole separate topic if I'm remembering the conversation right. But the thing I want to focus on is the amount of work that

you're able to get done when you go to a different location in order to work. And I know this is a luxury for a lot of people, but I have tried this. And there are some very important differences between a graycation where you go to work on a project and a personal retreat, which in my opinion provides clarity and makes all the work that you're going to be doing for the next time period a lot more effective. Agreed. And the one Marco described to me, I thought that qualified as a graycation. He went to solve a specific problem. It wasn't about navel gazing.

Did you see it the same way? Yes, exactly. But that is not a personal retreat. And I think that a lot of people maybe are viewing the personal retreat that way. The difference, I think, is most clearly seen in your mental state at the end of a graycation versus a personal retreat, because I have done

both. When I was trying to get faith-based productivity out the door, I went to the same cabin that I go to for my personal retreats because my wife is amazing and she recognized that I just needed to get away and get some work done. I wrote the entire 120-page workbook for faith-based productivity in one day during one of those work sessions because I can go there, it's the middle of nowhere, I'm not going to be distracted, and I can get like 14 hours of work done in a single day. Now, that's not sustainable though. I can go do that for a very short period of time, usually one day. And then the next day, you are just completely exhausted because you have pushed yourself so hard. Now, that can be great when you really

need to get something out the door. The question in the back of my mind every time I did that, though, was, is this really necessary? So not only am I leaving my family in order to do this, which in a sense kind of feels like running away, but also I just don't think that's healthy to have to do that for any period of any sort of frequency. I know that is completely colored by my current situation because I've been pushing very hard for a very long time to get faith-based productivity out the door. I recognize now that because I push so hard that I am pretty exhausted, not just physically, but mentally, emotionally. And I guess I just want to put out a word of warning for anybody who thinks that this is a hack to get more work done. Because in the short term, it may look that way, but in the long term, it is definitely not sustainable. And then the personal retreats on the other side of that, every i do that i find that when i

am done i am excited i'm energized because now i can clearly see the path forward it's a very different feeling than i've got this obstacle in front of me that i have to figure out how to get over does that make sense all right are you the mountain or are you looking at the map? Yeah, exactly. I agree. I feel like the graycation is a variation on the idea of someone who works in an office who wants to go to the coffee shop for a break or go home and work or someone who works at home who goes to the beach or whatever. I mean, it's like you go somewhere, just a change in scenery to help kickstart your brain into doing something. And that can work.

I find often that I get to wherever I wanted to go and I have the same stumbling blocks I had when I was at the last place. So sometimes it doesn't work for me. But I remember when J.K. Rowling was finishing the Harry Potter book. She talked about how there was a hotel in Scotland somewhere she would go and hide up for like a couple weeks just to get the book written. And I think that's something that can work.

And I know it works for Gray, and it sounds like it worked for Marco. But I agree with you. In fact, I listened to that same episode of ATP, and I was thinking, I didn't write this in the outline, but I was thinking at the same time, I'm like, yeah, that's great. But that is not, that is not a personal retreat, you know, personal retreat to me. I used the term navel gazing earlier, but it's a different thing where I kind of look at myself honestly, and kind of get my thoughts together on it. There's things, you know, banging around between my ears that I just want to bring to the front and address. And that allows me to do that. And that is a different thing. You're right. Yeah. And the personal retreat, I would argue nothing but good will ever come from that. And if you can do that every three months, you absolutely 100% should. Whereas I view the

great occasion, the extended work session in a different location, I mean, I get it. I mentioned I've done that myself, but every time I did it, I was like, man, I hope this doesn't become a habit. Ideally, I do none of those. Ideally, my work life is in control and it's calm enough that it doesn't require that. And so if you find yourself in a situation where you're looking to do something like that, that should be the first indication to start asking some questions about how did we get here? There's probably something broken in the system that produced these results. If I could manage it, I never want to do another one of those again. Yeah, I've never actually done that or I left town to finish a project.

But I do, like I said, on a much smaller basis, sometimes repot myself just to kind of get things going again. But at the same time, I often find that, you know, that was just a form of resistance. Like, why work now when I can spend the next half hour getting everything together, getting on my bike, riding my bike to wherever it is. Once I get there and I get all set up with my fancy devices, I feel like I'm going to have the same problem that I had when I was sitting here doing this. Yeah, it definitely could be that way. For whatever reason, the cabin in the woods worked for me. But also, the cabin in the woods worked for me. But also now when I go there, I have to fight the urge to get work done. When I go there for a personal retreat, I have to really fight now to tell my brain, no, we're not going there. We're going to do this instead. Because it's just kind of been

trained to work in that mode. And I feel like that's dangerous, especially if you don't recognize that it's happening. You can default to always running at a breakneck pace, and then you can find yourself exhausted, which 100%, I admit, I'm in this place right now, and it's my own doing. I've created this monster, and I just don't want to end up here again. I want the next product that I launch to be a lot more calm. And there's some extenuating circumstances around this one. So hopefully this doesn't have to be like this again. How can I accomplish the results without all the stress?

That's kind of the thing that's going through my head. But on the flip side, I think sometimes repotting yourself or putting yourself in a different location can really be conducive to getting the hard work done, as you discovered with your trip. I mean, you've got five kids, Mike. It's probably not going to be possible for you to work 14 hours when some adorable little child knocks on the door and wants to go play catch with you, right? some adorable little child knocks on a door and wants to go play catch with you, right? That's very true, yeah. But I guess, you know, just my ethos, I don't want to have to work 14 hours. Yeah, I know. As I said the words, I was thinking that, yeah. Yeah, to me, that's an indication that something is broken, you know? And I think, you know,

I bring it up just because I feel like for a lot of people, they just accept that this is the way things have to be. And I don't want to have to accept that this is the way things have to be. I want to take control and design the life I want to live. And I feel like that's possible, but it requires a little bit of insight and maybe foresight. And time tracking can help with that. A lot of the things that we talk about on this podcast can help with that. It's the intentionality where you don't find yourself in that situation where it's like, okay, now I got to figure out a way to get this done. How do I avoid getting to that position? Yeah. The personal retreat thing is still a challenge for me.

I definitely get a lot of benefit out of the personal retreat, navel-gazing stuff I do. I do it daily with a journal, which I think has been great. But like I talked earlier about my birthday, where I took most of the day to really run deep on this stuff, and now it's been several months, It's probably time to do that again. But for me, it's just so hard to get away for several days because of my family and commitments I have there and other things. And that's the point of resistance for me. So what I've decided is I am going to, by the end of June,

spend a day doing that again. And I'll probably drive to the beach or somewhere, but I'm not going to make it a multi-day trip. It's just going to be one day I'll get up and I'll say, today I'm not going to get anything done but that personal retreat thing. And that's a halfway step compared to what a lot of people do, but I think at least that's a start. Yeah, for sure. We got a lot of feedback. One of the things, the feedback that came in is said, Mike and Dave, please stop apologizing. I thought that was kind of funny. It is, it's hard. I'm apologizing and explaining the not apologizing comment, but I just, I really feel like we are fellow travelers.

We don't have all the answers. We do have a journey to share and hopefully it helps you. And so we are going to qualify it once in a while, just because it just rubs me so raw when somebody says, oh yeah, just do what I say and everything will be fine. Well, guess what? It's not, it doesn't work that way. Um, right. Um, the other thing is, uh, there's a really active thread in the feed about imposter syndrome. And one of the listeners wrote in and says, well, I don't really experience imposter syndrome because I acknowledge that sometimes I'm a novice at something, and I thought that was a really healthy attitude towards it. But I also got thinking, well, how do I deal with things like that in my life? And for me, one way to solve it is make a podcast about it because that's apparently how I roll.

But also, I feel like I've been at this meditation game. I think it was 1984 that I first started taking classes in it. So I've been doing it a while. And one of the things that come out of it, if you do it a while is, and this is seeing me not apologize, I'm sharing my inner thoughts here, gang. But, you know, meditation in a lot of ways is a practice about how to pick apart

the errant thoughts of your brain, you know, your brain, the rebellious organ. And particularly negative parts that are going on, if you find yourself feeling angry or jealous or feeling yourself feeling imposter syndrome, one of the meditation practices they'll teach you is to pick that apart during a meditation session. And don't look at it on the surface. Don't say, well, I'm angry, so I'm going to sit here and be angry. Say, well, why am I angry? And what is the source of the anger?

What's the person? What's, what's the underlying thing that makes that thing happening? Make me angry. And so often for me, it, the source is some sort of fear or some sort of, um, you know, there's some base emotion on it. And then once you, you break it down to its component parts for me, quite often, it's just like it dissolves. I don't know how else to explain it. And then once you, you break it down to its component parts for me, quite often, it's just like, it dissolves. I don't know how else to explain it. Once you understand what the source of all this stuff is, then it's really not, it's no longer about the anger or

the fear or the, or the whatever. And, and I apply that to imposter syndrome as well, which I would consider to be kind of a negative thing for me. And so that's a, I can't really walk you through it, I guess, but to kind of explain for me, at least when I start feeling really frustrated or like a fake or whatever, I will sit on the cushion, you know, and, and then work through it and it does help me. And I'm sure Mike, you've got ways you deal with that stuff too. Yeah. Well, we had devoted a whole episode to this, I believe. And it's still something that I struggle with. I mentioned I was just at

Crafting Commerce. And I mean, if you want to talk about imposter syndrome, I'm like one of 400 attendees and Pat Flynn is speaking on stage. Matt Raglin, Seth Godin has spoken there before. Like there's some really very competent, very smart people in that room. And the majority of the people that are attending could very well be on that stage. still, at least for me, you are in the place where you are an imposter because all of these people are doing the thing that you want to do, but they've done it at a level higher than you've been able to get to. And it surprised me because basically the very first thing they did at the conference, they have the emcee come out and has everybody, raise your hand if you feel insecure, if you feel like an imposter, You know, everybody's hand goes up. So you're not alone in feeling that way. I feel like the thing that contributes to that is not recognizing that you're on a journey

and not recognizing the growth that has already occurred. and not recognizing the growth that has already occurred. So to give you an example, ConvertKit, which is the company that put on Craft & Commerce, they have these t-shirts that they gave away with the different company core values on them, like create every day, default to generosity. One of the ones that really struck me though was teach everything that you know. And I feel like if you admit that you're on a journey, that you don't know everything, but you're willing to share everything that you do know, the things that you have figured out, that that produces an authenticity that maybe helps in the battle against imposter syndrome. Because nobody has ever fully arrived. And I feel like the moment that you have to project that you have fully

arrived, that's when the imposter syndrome kicks in and you feel like a fraud. I really like the subtitle for the show that life's about more than cranking widgets. But I feel like nobody has arrived would also be a very good one yeah that's true

well either way we have arrived at the end of another episode of focus see how I did that very nice yeah

thanks so much everybody for sending in the nice feedback I hope the show is helping you out we are the focus podcast you can find us over at relay.fm Thanks so much, everybody, for sending in the nice feedback. I hope the show is helping you out. We are The Focus Podcast. You can find us over at relay.fm.

Thanks to our sponsors today, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Timing. And we'll see you in a couple weeks.