Focused - 80: The Power of "No"

Episode Date: August 20, 2019

Mike and David tackle the challenges that come with saying "No" and why a well-intentioned decline can make all the difference.

Welcome to the Focus Podcast. I'm David Sparks, joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hey, Mike. How you doing? Hey, David. Doing well. How about you? I am great. And actually, no, I'm terrible. I just want to say no today. Yeah. So today I wanted to talk about something on Focus that is my own personal hill to climb with respect to getting work done. And that's The Power of No. There's a book called The Power of Yes. I decided somebody should write a book called The Power of No. There we go. Have they already done that? Maybe you've already read it on Bookworm. I

didn't realize it. No, we haven't covered it for Bookworm yet, but I'm sure it's out there. It's a really powerful idea. And I think it's important. It's very much in line with kind of what we're trying to build with focus, being intentional, not just being more efficient, doing more things. And it's something that everybody at some point in their life is going to have to address. As much of a people pleaser as you are, you are going to at some point have to learn to say no to things.

Yeah, and that's a big deal. And I think it's almost a gating issue for unlocking a lot of the stuff we talk about. But before we get to that, a few announcements. First is, this is August and it's member drive time over at the old network RelayFM. Relay is celebrating its fifth anniversary. Mike and I are going to be together in San Francisco playing Family Feud on the Relay Network Family Feud show. I hope we're on the same team. I had the same thought. Yeah. But either way, it's going to be a lot of fun. There is a, we'll put a link in the show notes. There's a form, you know, the survey form. I have not looked at it. Have you looked at it, Mike? I haven't. It's taken every ounce of

willpower I have not to. I'm good at that. I never cheat. I never look at my Christmas presents. So this is the same thing in my head. But anyway, so anyway, everybody listening can see the questions before we can and go in and fill out the survey. When you are a member of RelayFM, there are some benefits. You get to listen to some members-only shows. There's a crossover show they do once a month. I've been on that several times over the years. They have a newsletter. And every August, most of the shows create extra content for members only.

And that's really a lot of fun. Rose and I over on Automators are going to be playing Mousetrap with Sal Sigoyan. Steven and I are going to be doing a draft of our favorite Apple hardware on Mac Power Users. But the best one, the best one is what happened on Focus because on Focus for the members only show this year, there was, I guess you'd call it a podcast takeover. Yes, our show was hijacked by our wives. And I have not listened to any of the audio from this. I have no idea what to expect from this. But I imagine there's a good amount of making fun of the ridiculous productivity things that that we try to implement in our families.

Yeah, I think so. All I know is I was in there, I pressed record button, I left the room and 30 minutes later, she just smiled when she walked out and said, OK, I'm done. I don't know what that means, but either way. So that's going up. I think we should let's just pledge, Mike. Let's neither one of us listen to it until it's live. All right. So we will find out when everybody else does what the contents of that members only episode contain.

All right. So that's that's what's going on. If you want to sign up to be a member, we'd really appreciate it. This is how Mike and I pay for our shoes doing this stuff. If you head over to relay.fm slash focus, there's a button right there to sign up for membership. And we'd really appreciate it if you're already a member. Thank you so much for your support and enjoy all those great member shows. And if you're an Overcast listener, Marco made it easy. There's a little button on the bottom that you can just tap to go straight to the membership page. Oh, nice. Nice. That Marco, he's always helping us out. I know, right?

All right. So today I wanted to talk about something that is really near and dear to my heart. For me, it is a fundamental problem in my life is uh saying the word no and um uh it's always been an issue but it really became an issue as the max barky stuff started to take off then people asked me to guest on their shows and do collaborative projects and you know write things together and all these things it was like oh, oh, people love me. They, what's that Sally Field quote? They like me, really love me, whatever. But it's like suddenly people are asking you to do stuff,

and you feel valued, right? And then you start saying yes to a bunch of stuff, and then before you know it, all hell breaks loose. Yes, that's basically it in a nutshell is you kind of hit the nail on the head that you say yes to a lot of things because it makes you feel good. It makes you feel valuable. I've been there myself where I've ascribed my value to the things that I was able to do, the things that I created. And that's not a very healthy or sustainable way to live. It's difficult to get out of that, especially if you tend to be a people pleaser like myself.

But it's interesting too, because as a parent, I was thinking about this. You know, my two-year-old has no trouble saying no. In fact, none of my kids have trouble saying no like I do. So what point along the way did I grow up to the point where all of a sudden this is an issue for me? Yeah. Is it self-worth? I don't know. Yeah. I'm not sure. But we can take a lesson from our kids in this particular sense in that it's okay to say no to things. It's okay to know what's important to you and to prioritize those things. Maybe that's kind of the heart of it is we get so caught up, so busy. We try to do things more efficiently. But as we talked about, you know, your reward for doing things more efficiently, at least in a work context, is you get to do more work.

And so we just keep spinning the hamster wheel faster without taking the time to even think about why we're on there in the first place. What is the thing that really is important to us? And when you don't know what your yes is, you can't say no to things because you don't know if the thing that you're going to be saying no to might actually be the yes. So you just sign up for all the things, you try it all out, and hopefully something sticks. But a lot of it doesn't, at least in my experience. With a little bit of intentional thought, a little bit of foresight, planning, you can always change what your yes is down the road. You can try something and then say, well, this really wasn't the thing for me and evolve it later. But I would argue that that's really the first step is to really identify what is it that you want out of life?

What is the thing that you really want to say yes to? Yeah, I think that's like the second layer of this. The first layer is just that desire to please. Someone asks you for something, you want to give that desire to please you know someone asks you so for something you want to give that thing to them I that is a hang-up I have you know and and it just I think a lot of people have it right but I think the second level of it is you know D what is your big yes you know have you thought that through because I think once you do,

that suddenly starts making it easier to have a filter to put those requests through. Yeah. And the filter is the important thing because what we really want is freedom. We want to be able to live life on our terms. But if we don't figure out what those terms are, then it's very easy to default to living by somebody else's terms and saying yes to things, like you said, because you don't want to let somebody down. I kind of had this picture in my head as I was thinking about this. We've talked about finding we've talked about saying, finding your yes, and then saying no to everything else. And I feel like in that sense, the yes is a good thing, because it allows you to say no to the other stuff. But the initial scenario that you described, where you're saying yes to a bunch of other things, which really aren't the thing,

where you're saying yes to a bunch of other things which really aren't the thing. What is happening when you do that, and I'm guilty of this myself, is that you are decreasing the amount of freedom that you actually have. And this is dangerous because you keep chipping away at that margin like we talked about with Sean Blanc. And eventually, your limit is at the point of your load. And there's no room for anything that isn't going to go exactly according to plan. It just takes one little bump, one little hiccup, and then all the plates that you're trying to spin come crashing down. And for me, when I recognized that what I really wanted was freedom, what I really wanted was to design the life

that I wanted to live, to live life on my own terms. And then I viewed all of those requests that came at me as a potential, how do I wanna say this? Like if you have a gauge of the amount of freedom that you have, you know, each one of those requests, that gauge is going to go down a little bit like gas in your tank. And eventually, you know, you add up enough of those and you've got no freedom left. And that makes it, in my opinion, my situation makes it a lot easier to say no to those things.

Not ascribing ill intent to any of the things that people are asking me to do, but recognizing that they're not the ones who are responsible for designing the life I want to live. I am. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple points there from my perspective. When I first left the firm and went out on my own, I thought I was going to get all this work done and publish all these field guides and I was going to have this perfect life. And what I realized instead was I was spending more time working on everything and getting less work done. And I found myself feeling like I did when I was a little kid and I would run downhill as fast as I could. And if you remember that feeling, It was kind of exhilarating,

but you also knew you were going to land on your face with the slightest stumble or trip. And I realized that's no way to live. And I think one of the reasons I put myself there was the fear of saying no. And one of the things you had said earlier was about you don't want to let somebody down. You know, you say, you don't, you don't, you say yes, because you don't want to

let somebody down. But something that I had to learn kind of the hard way is that you are always letting somebody down. When you say yes, or when you say no, when you say yes too much, it just changes the people that you're letting down. Is it somebody on the internet? Is it your kids? Is it yourself? Who are you going to let down with the decisions you make? And you have to keep that broader perspective, I think, when those requests for commitments come in. And this is not a problem I have solved in my life, but it's something I'm at least aware of now.

Yeah, and awareness really does make a really big difference. I agree. You know, kind of the tipping point for me was recognizing that there were work things that were encroaching on the quality of time and the quantity of time that I had with my family. I was working with the family business and I was managing a development project and we were working with a team that was literally all over the world. And from a standard productivity context, my first experience working in a situation like that, I'm like, this is great. I can work during the day, answer all their questions. They can work at night. I wake up in the morning, you know, but what ended up happening was I was responding to the things that they were asking, even though I wasn't at work, I was checking my

phone when I was at home. And kind of the aha moment for me is kind of the same thing as Jake Knapp in the book, Make Time, you know, where I'm sitting there with my kids and they're pointing out like, hey, why are you always on your phone? And I was like, oh my gosh, I never wanted to be this guy, but I am totally that guy. And I'm like, this has to change. What can I do about this? Start setting up some boundaries, you know, turn my phone off as soon as I walk in the door, put it on the counter and don't look at it again until the morning. It was difficult. And until you reach that point where you're dissatisfied with the way things are, I would argue, it's going to be really difficult to make an intentional shift like that. If you can before the stuff hits the fan, that's ideal. But for whatever reason, it seems like a lot of people, they have to be in the middle of it and the light bulb has to go on before they decide to do something about it.

I'm dealing with it this week because for a variety of really good reasons, I'm recording a lot of podcasts this week. Plus, I've got several unexpected but urgent matters for clients. Plus, I'm trying to continue you know towards the end here of finishing the shortcuts field guide and it's all happening at once and i have travel next week and and i'm dealing with too many yeses and knowingly so um but the you know it's hard for me to kind of back out of any of those commitments because i've you know i've been scaling back i probably need to scale back a little bit further so I don't have weeks like this, but it's going to happen to you. But I do think this idea of awareness is important.

If you carry around the knowledge of what too many yeses can do to you, I think it can really help you avoid putting yourself in that spot. Yeah. Well, thank you, I guess, for not letting me down and showing up to record the podcast today. No, it's like, I'm not trying, that's the same thing. You know, it's like, it is just one of those things where, and we'll talk later about some strategies to help deal with this, but it's not something that I feel like is ever a solved problem for most people. Right. Right, right. And I guess, you know, even me saying that,

that just kind of illustrates the point that you don't want to let other people that you've made commitments to down. In this particular case, we've got to get an episode out the door. So it's not just me, it's all the listeners who would show up on a Tuesday and not have an episode to listen to.

But all of those things are external factors. And I would argue not as important as some of the internal ones that typically we tend to ignore. So kind of the main idea that I took away from that whole experience where I was constantly connected to my phone and working even when I wasn't at work, I recognized that the people that were the most important to me were the ones that this was encroaching on. My wife, my kids, I want to have an awesome relationship. I want to have a maximized marriage. I want my kids to be able to talk to me about anything when they get older. I know I got to be building that platform now. And I kind of had that light bulb moment where I realized that this isn't sustainable. If I keep going on this path, eventually I am going to end up in the situation that I completely want to avoid. And at that point, I'm not going to care

about how quickly I responded to some people on the other side of the world who were working on a product that we were building. So I needed to make a change, but it wasn't an urgent thing. It's one of those important but not urgent things that are going to make the big difference in the long run. But when you're just trying to keep plates spinning, you feel like, oh, I can just set that off to the side and deal with that later. No, you really can't deal with that later. The choices that you make today are going to influence the future that you're going to have tomorrow. Your future is a product of the choices that you make today, the habits that you create.

And so you're saying karma is real. Yep, yep, exactly. But we don't think about it that way. We think we can cheat the system. We think that we're smart enough that when that crisis comes, we'll figure out a way around it. And so we'll just please the people today and we'll figure that out tomorrow. Don't steal from future you. You know, I forget exactly how this saying goes, but a lot of people who end up

in those situations is kind of this, this phrase, like past me was a jerk. You know, they put me in this spot. Don't be, don't let past you be the jerk who steals from future you. I am, like I said, this is something I always struggle with. And this is a tough week for me. And like I said, I've had some kind of client things come up. And my wife started this wonderful tradition when my kids were little. And I wasn't there for most of them because I was at the office, you know. But every year on the first day of school, she has tea. When they come home, they have a tea party.

And she has little, you know, little snacks. And she gets out the, you know, the fine china, you know, the stuff you get when you're married that you never use. We use it every year on the first day of school. So we have the China out and the kids come home from school and we have our first day of school tea. And yesterday was the first day for my daughter, who's now a senior in high school. So this is her last one, really. I mean, for all I know, she could be on the other side of the world a year from now. This is her last one, really. I mean, for all I know, she could be on the other side of the world a year from now. And the, but I've got all these people pressuring me.

Hey, I need that thing. I need that contract. I need this podcast. And my wife's like, hey, you know, we're going to do the tea at three o'clock. And inside for just a minute, you know, I'm thinking, oh, that's something that I can skip today. And I can get a little bit closer, just catching up with all these people that I'm trying to keep up with, you know? And then,

and I immediately caught myself like, wait a second. That tea is the reason I do all this stuff. You know? Yeah. What am I doing? You know? So I,

three o'clock, I took a half hour off and went and had a good time yesterday. but it's like, it is this no yes battle inside you that rages all day. I, I good time yesterday. But it's like, it is this no-yes battle inside you that rages all day. I don't know, maybe I'm just worse at this than most people, but this is one for me that's really hard and I struggle with it every day. No, I think it's not just you, but the thing that can kind of cause you to say yes to the urge that you just described of, oh, I can get a little bit ahead here, is the fact that we don't want to miss out on anything. That's really a big key to this,

I think, is that FOMO. Now, you can flip that on its head though, and you can remember the reason why you do the things like you just described, somebody defined that as the joy of missing out or JOMO, which I really like. So you were able to course correct in that moment because you remembered the reason why you wanted to do the things that you're doing, which were contributing to the stress that you were feeling to get ahead in the first place. That's really the key, I think, is to keep the main thing the main thing, to recognize that work is always going to be there. I think it was the one thing with Jay Papasan and Gary Keller, where they talk about you are juggling all of these balls, which represent the different areas of your life. And a lot of them, family, relationships, social, like that type of stuff, those are made out of

glass. You got to keep those in the air, but the work one, that's the rubber one. That's the one you should feel free to chuck at any time. And obviously, if you are working in a nine to five, there are limitations with that. If you have a boss who is saying like, you need to get this done and you've signed up and you've agreed to the expectations, you've kind of created the situation yourself, you have to honor that, I would argue, especially for me, you know, integrity and character is really important to me. I would feel pressured to follow through with those things. But to the degree that you can, and most of us have a lot more ability and control over those situations and we realize we should recognize that ultimately

the buck stops with us and we have the ability to say, no, I'm going to go have tea today. Yeah. I mean, and for so many years, it wasn't a possibility because I was at work or at court. And this year it's possible. Why on earth would i miss it right yeah same thing with frankly taking care of myself i mean even though this is a really busy week i worked till 7 30 yesterday and i did not continue i stopped you know and you know went and spent some time with the family watch a little tv went to. I didn't work bell to bell. When you get in these pressure situations, it's easy to do. So I woke up today refreshed and ready to go, which I probably wouldn't have if I had gone until I fell into bed last night.

Right. And I've been there. I mean, it does happen. But don't beat yourself up either. If it does happen, just recognize that, oh, I messed up. I'm going to course correct. I'm going to do better next time. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Blinkist. Read 3,000 plus books in 15 minutes or less. Start your seven-day free trial. Just go to Blinkist.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D. So let me tell you about my secret weapon for learning new things and getting ahead. It can be hard to find time to read when you don't have free time, you can't read

or work on personal development. Blinkist takes the best key takeaways and need-to-know information from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them into just 15 minutes for you to read or listen to. Successful people are known for reading lots of books. With Blinkist, you can finish a book during your commute, lunch break, or while you do the dishes. I like Blinkist because I listen to a book when I take my walk. And my walk is long enough that I can finish a book and also have the rest of the walk to think about what I just listened to. What kind of takeaways am I going to get from that Blinkist book I listened to? How am I going to turn that into action in my life? And you can listen to them or you can read them. They've got both covered.

The very first productivity book I ever read was The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. They've got that covered. It's one of the Blinkist titles. You could read it. If you want to work on your habits, they've got Atomic Habits in there, the book that seems to come up on every episode of Focused. With Blinkist, you get unlimited access to read or listen to a massive library of condensed nonfiction books. That's all the books you want for one low price. Right now, for a limited time, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash focused to start your free seven-day trial. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D to start your free

seven-day trial. Go there now and you can listen to all the books I recommended and more. That URL one more time is Blinkist.com slash focused. Our thanks to Blinkist for their support of Focus and all of RelayFM. Some help with this stuff. One thing I think you need to do is be okay once you get underwater and stuff like this. Just be honest with the people you're working with and just tell them. You know, I mean, you put all these expectations on yourself. I've got a client I called this morning and said, hey, I promised I'd have that to you by this morning. It's close, but I need to do just a little bit more work on it to make it right. I'll get it to you by lunch.

And he said, fine. You know, and and, you know, just be honest with people if you feel like you're getting behind. But, you know, every time you have to go and and explain that you're going to miss a target, that should be a warning that you're you're saying yes too much. Yeah, totally. A couple other things you've got in this list here. that should be a warning that you're saying yes too much. Yeah, totally. A couple other things you've got in this list here,

the Node Journal or the text file. I like this idea. I actually have not been keeping one of these, but I think you might inspire me to start one. Do you do this? Yeah, so like I said, this is a known enemy for me. So one of the things I do as I've gotten better, my no muscles have gotten stronger, is whenever I say no to something that sounds like a good thing, you know, like, it's not just saying no to the stuff that obviously you don't want to do. That's the easy

part. The hard part is saying no to stuff that is truly an opportunity, but just not part of your big yes. Does that make sense? Yep. And say no to those is hard. You know, I've had friends ask me to do projects with them that I've had to say no to. I have turned down speaking engagements and the, um, and every time I do one of those, I write it down and I just do it in an Apple note. Um, but you could do it in a fancy pad with a fancy pen. I always toy with the idea, you know, every once in a while I work with Xcode just to kind of have my arms a little bit around the idea of programming. I always toy with the idea of just releasing an app where you write down all the things you say no to. If I were to make an app, that would be the app I made.

If someone has already made it, let me know. But honestly, you don't even need an app. You could just, like I said, write it down anywhere. But the idea is take a moment to document your victory in saying no. And then in the future, when someone asks you to say yes, take a look at that no list and the things you've already turned down and compare what you're being asked to do to the things you've already said no to. Make sense? That's a great tip. Yeah. In the moment, you know, you're worried about saying no to something and missing out on an opportunity. But when you can look back and say,

well, this was a bigger opportunity. I said no to it and it turned out all right. It gives you a little bit more conviction to say no to that thing. Yeah. And, and one of the reasons you say no is to give yourself the margin. This episode really bookmarks with the Sean Blanc episode because, you know, it's not just saying no just to get the other big yes done is a good reason, but also saying no to give yourself margin is also a very good reason. One of the things I do is now I just tell people when they ask me about a commitment, you know, because a lot of the commitment requests I get are from people I know or people who I sort of know. And I don't want to disappoint them, but I just tell them flat out, even if I'm going to say yes, I always sleep on it. I just have a rule now. I don't say yes without a night's sleep.

always sleep on it. I just have a rule now. I don't say yes without a night's sleep. And as silly as that sounds, giving it a night's sleep quite often gives you a little bit more perspective as to whether or not this is something you really want to do. Sure. Yeah. I like that. If you jump out of bed the next day and you're super excited about the project and your subconscious mind has been planning how to do it, then maybe it's something you should do. about the project and your subconscious mind has been planning how to do it, then maybe it's something you should do. Right. Yeah. One of the things that I do, which doesn't necessarily create a bunch of margin immediately in the day-to-day, but is a system that is fairly easy for me to stick with, and I would argue consistently helps me maintain that margin, is this retrospective process, which we've talked about even on this show, but it's also in my

personal retreat course, where I force myself to spend like an entire day thinking about three questions from the last quarter. What should I start doing? What should I stop doing? What should I keep doing? And I always make myself pick at least one thing to stop doing. And sometimes that's really tough. Sometimes there's things like I'm in the middle of letting something go now that I have done for years and I really enjoy doing it with people that are really great to work with, but it's just not the right thing for me anymore. It's hard to say no to them, but they've been great about it. You know, so part of this is like, we project that people are going to be offended or hurt or whatever, but

this particular example, they completely understand. They told me they saw this coming. I knew I wasn't going to be doing this forever. You know, I just felt like I needed to be loyal and continue to do the thing. But letting go of that thing is something that isn't going to pay off immediately. But I know six months from now, 12 months from now, it's going to significantly decrease my load. And it's going to help me get more centered. And it's going to give me the margin that I need to see things the right way. And ultimately what that's going to do is it is going to allow me to say yes to something that is even more in alignment with the life that I want to create. But I have to build in that system of saying no and letting

things go in order to be able to say yes to those things that are truly the things that are worth saying yes to. Yeah. I mean, you get lost in the fog when you say yes to those things that are truly the things that are worth saying yes to. Yeah, I mean, you get lost in the fog when you say yes too much and you don't even know which way is up. Yep, exactly. One of the things I also do, I mean, this journaling habit

that I started at the beginning of 2018 just continues to pay dividends for me. And we just went to MaxDoc together a few weeks ago. And on the plane ride home, I got out my fancy pen and paper and I journaled MaxDoc, you know, what happened, the fun things I enjoyed. And then the last part of that was for me, the idea of, was this worth my time? Is this something I would do again? Like in the immediate aftermath of the commitment. And it's something I've started doing for every one of those. Like every time I do a speaking engagement at the end, I evaluate whether it's something I want to do again or whether it

made sense for me or not. Mac stock, by the way, made the cut. I'll go back to that. But the, but the, but there are some other things that I have done in the last year and a half that didn't, you know, when I sat down after finishing it, I also do this like big legal projects, just, just sitting down and journaling, you know, what went well, what didn't go well, you know, how much time did it really take, you know, and what was, you know, was it worth it to me? And the, the idea of doing that as kind of like right afterward has been really effective for me in terms of figuring out where to say no in the future. Like there, you know, I did a speaking engagement for one group and,

and I realized at the end, it wasn't worth it. When they asked me to come back later, that was an easy no. And that kind of stuff I think really helps. And for me, the best time to do it is right after I finish it, because that's when I've got the best information. And then I can always go back and read it again if I'm on the fence. What did I think after I did this the last time? Right. Yeah.

I like that. There's one other thing here, which we kind of talked about earlier with finding your true yes. And this is another thing that I wanted to unpack a little bit here because recently I have kind of gone on a journey. I read for Bookworm, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, which I did not like. You sent me a message. You didn't like it either. It's not my thing. Yeah.

Yeah. We don't need to get into the specifics of that. But kind of along the same at the same time, I was also listening to an audio book that was recommended to me by a friend in the in the mastermind group that I'm in. me by a friend in the mastermind group that I'm in. And that is Life and Error by Steve Cook and Sean McCloskey. If you're going to read this book, I do recommend you listen to the audiobook version because it is a narrative. It's like a fable. If you're familiar with Patrick Lencioni, those leadership fables, like the five dysfunctions of a team, it's kind of in that vein. But it's about a family that is doing very well financially, but they're completely stressed out and essentially their family's falling apart.

They're trying to figure out why. This guy leaves in not a great mental state, stumbles into a coffee shop, finds a guy that he knew in high school who just seems to have it all together. And they start meeting and he starts mentoring this guy basically. Because on the surface, he looks like he is super, super successful. He just hangs out at the coffee shop all the time. He knows all these super influential people. And so the guy who's going through this stuff is like, man, he just must be killing it. He must be making millions of dollars. Turns out he's not, but he has taken the time to identify what is important to have millions of dollars. It is to identify what is abundant life. What does that look like to you? So kind of bookends here, you know, Tim Ferriss, the whole idea behind the four-hour workbook, he even says this, is to live the millionaire lifestyle without the millions.

Yeah. Okay. And then this book is basically saying, no, you don't need all of the fancy cars, the big house, the stuff like that. If you want that, that's completely fine. That can be part of your vision. But don't just default to those things because everybody else is. And the question that they ask in here, which really messed me up, was what does prosperity look like to you? So I listened to this. I had my wife listen to this. So I listened to this. I had my wife listen to this. And then we sat down and we were talking about that. What does prosperity look like to us? And it's not a dollar amount. It's not having the house paid off. It's not the types of material things that you have. It's the kinds of experiences, for us anyways, that that would entail. So, as we've been thinking about this, every couple days we'll text each other as we think of something specific and say, prosperity to me is fill in the blank. And we've kind of been collecting a list of these things. And I wanted to share this because this has really

helped us. And I have a feeling for a lot of people who are completely overwhelmed where they are, are having trouble saying no to things, developing a vision like this might be really helpful. So I'll just share a couple of these things we have on what's called our life and air vision. So I've got an amazing marriage and great relationships with our kids. I kind of talked about that already. I choose to work instead of having to and only on the things that I consider worthwhile. Now that's not something I can do immediately. That's going to take some time to get to that point, but this is what I want my life to look like. So throwing that out there, being in control of how we spend our time by living a simple,

uncomplicated lifestyle where our time isn't already spoken for. I want the freedom and the margin, both with my time and with our finances, take people out to dinner, coffee, whatever for any reason. And kind of the phrase that goes along with that is I want to be able to make people feel like a million bucks even if we don't have a million bucks. I want to eat every meal together as a family without being in a rush to be somewhere. I want to be involved in homeschooling our kids. I want to be able to sit and play Lego games, sports with my kids and not think about anything else. I want to get to the point where I can be an extravagant giver. And really, that starts now. If I want to give away cars, houses, whatever, I need to be able to give away

the small things now. I want to be able to have a comfortable home. Maybe that's our current house. But if it's not, I'm willing to sacrifice that to accomplish the vision, you know, where people are always, they always feel welcome and where we can relax. And I want to be even more involved in discipleship at our church, investing in men specifically for me and families along with my wife. So that's a lot of personal detail there. But I feel it's important because this is the kind of stuff where I've been asking people this lately. Like, what does prosperity look like to you?

And they always come back to me like, oh, I'm debt free. I'm like, no, that's not quite it. You got to have more meat on it. What does it look like? What are you doing? What does it feel like? But this has been really helpful for us in figuring out what really our yes is and what we can say no to. That's a great exercise.

If people want to share that in the forum, that would be a nice place to do that. I think it's a safe space to do that. But I'd never really thought about it, but for me, it means like going to the first day of school tea. You know, I have an interesting perspective in the sense that I used to do a lot of litigation at a law firm, which, you know, litigation is a bonfire of $100 bills. There's, you make good money when you do that for a living. And I left that, you know, so for me, it's like, kind of, I look at like, what's the price of happiness? I actually know, because the price of happiness is the difference between what I made when I did the firm. And now that I'm out on my own making little field guides and doing the type

of law practice doesn't make as much money, but I enjoy doing more. I can tell you the price of happiness. It's pretty expensive, but you know what? It's worth it because you're only on this planet so long and I want to be happy. And so, you know, it's just, I have kind of gone through that journey a little bit with the stuff I've done. And I, it's a very, I'm going to listen to this book. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. It's, I will, disclaimer, it is a little bit over the top. There were some parts of it where you just are kind of like, that's a little bit absurd. That's a little ridiculous. But I feel like the main premise is pretty good. They do have like a four point thing in there, which a lot of financial planners have latched on to. But for me,

that wasn't the powerful part of the book. The powerful part of the book was that simple phrase, what does prosperity look like to you? And then having to wrestle with that question in identifying what does that look like? Once you figure that out, then the no's get a lot easier. Exactly. So maybe some of your no's are pretty extreme. Do you need a couple of vehicles? Do you need to own a house? Could you just rent? Is that in line with what prosperity and an abundant life looks like to you? Because, I mean, not to get all into the financial side of this, but every single one of those things that you sign up for, that's essentially the same thing as saying yes to something. You are sacrificing some freedom

in order to have that thing, which is, again, completely fine if you want to have those things. One of the pieces of the story as they tell it is that they're walking through, this guy's talking about his vision and he wants to have this 38 foot boat. Okay, well, that's fine. Why do you want a 38 foot boat? And they drill down and they basically find out that he doesn't really want the 38 foot boat. In fact, if he had the 38 foot boat, he would only use it a couple times a year. It's tied back to an experience he had when he was in college and this guy that he looked up to and he recognized that he was the supplier of fun for everybody who was on that boat that weekend. And he's like, that's going to be me someday. So then the question is, how can you start to live out pieces of that ideal future now? How can you be the supplier of fun for the people

around you now? And that's the second piece of this, which is really powerful because kind of the traditional advice, and again, I don't want to get into the specifics here and debate, you know, what's right, what's wrong when it comes to financial planning. I'm not qualified to talk about that. But the general idea is basically you get a good job, you work real hard, you retire, and eventually someday you live the life you want. Well, that's fine. There's a lot of value in doing that. But what are some of the ways that you can live out pieces of that right now? Like Like as I'm going through my life and your vision, I recognize that some of this stuff we already do. Like I have on there a weekly date night with my wife and a getaway every three to six months where we get away from the kids and we go stay somewhere overnight, kind of like a little mini honeymoon sort of a thing. And if I reflect on where we're

at right now, we've pretty much hit date night every single week for the last several months. And actually she's coming with me to the relay thing in San Francisco. So she'll be on two trips with me in the last six weeks. So that's a win. You know, the, the weekly one-on-ones that I do with my kids or the daddy dates, we've already done that. That's, that's a win. Those are pieces of, those are things that I can do right now to start living out that life and their vision. The next one for me, by the way, is the family meal stuff. That's one that I know is going to be a little bit harder.

Our kids are all involved in stuff. But I really do believe that if we agree together that this is a yes, we can say no to some other things and create the space for that to happen. It's just how bad do we want it? Yeah, my wife and I have this joke that if we actually want to get our kids to really tell us what's going on in their lives, all we have to do is take them out to eat. It's like, it's like some, for some reason, the shields come down and they just, maybe it's because they know we're buying them food and that's somewhat of a bribe. I don't know. But we get so much more information if we just go out for, you know, nachos.

I can't explain it. Right. Yeah. It really is kind of magical, the whole idea of like sharing a meal with somebody, which is why, you know, that's the next piece for us in terms of our family vision. But also on there is the ability, both having the financial freedom and the time freedom to do that with other people. You know, I want to be able to see somebody in our church, in our community, you know, interact with someone and recognize that I can help them. I have something that they need and be able to give them the time that they need.

Because that's really what it comes down to is time. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And so you buy them a meal, you're showing them that you care about them and their situation. Well, we've covered a lot of ground with this, but I think that it's all good. Give some thought to what does prosperity look like to you. Maybe it will help you out. And please, please don't say yes to everything. You are asking for trouble.

As someone who has the battle scars to prove it. We've all got scars. That's the other thing that we should really call out. We've mentioned it a couple times here today, but I feel like we really need to drive this home is that you're not going to nail this a hundred percent of the time you are going to fail. You're going to find yourself in a situation where you're like, you idiot. Why did you say yes to this thing? Don't you remember when you said

you were going to say no to a bunch of stuff and avoid situations like this. And at that point, the worst thing you can do is sit and feel sorry for yourself. Sometimes you do just have to push through and get out of that season, but then do things that you can right now to make sure that tomorrow is going to be better. Maybe in addition to a no list, I need to have a regrettable yes list. There you go. Yeah. I like that. Something that helped me with this was a book.

It's called Essentialism by Greg McCown. And it comes up on the show quite often. It seems like a lot of guests like that book. But I don't know how old it is, but I read it years ago. And it's on my yearly list. I have a couple of books that I read once a year. And this is one of those because it just kind of helps get me back to center on this question. it just kind of helps get me back to center on this question. And, and the whole book talks about,

you know, you know, finding the big yes and, and, you know, putting the, applying that filter. I think some of it is just giving yourself a little space between the question and the answer to, uh, to hopefully not say yes to everything, but, but, you know, let us know in the forums, how it's going for you. And like Mike said, you're never going to completely nail this, but if you can get better at it, it will improve your life. Yeah. I also like the idea of in the forums, if people want to chime in and share kind of their vision, I'll call it a life and your vision because that's the first time I heard it in that specific context from that book.

But really, it's just a picture of what the life you want to live looks like. And again, it's not tied to a dollar amount. But if you want to share that sort of thing in the forum, I think that might be really interesting. The people that I've challenged with that question, a lot of them have had trouble coming up with an answer. They can't picture the scenario of sitting down and having tea. They immediately go to, what does that look like financially? But the whole idea of margin is it's not just the finances. It's all the different areas that Sean talked about. For me, the big one is time. I want to have more time margin. So what does that look like? If I had more time margin, what does that allow me to do? Those types of things. But I also feel like the focused audience, these are the people who would understand this. And when you get a bunch of people sharing that sort of thing, it might spark some ideas for yourself.

some ideas for yourself. Yeah. It's funny you say that because when I knew Sean was doing a course on margin, I thought that all it was about was time. Before I saw the course, he covers finances and he covers a whole bunch of topics under the idea of margin. In my head, the only thing margin that counts is time because that's the one I struggle with the most. Yeah, right. Yeah, I legitimately didn't think that there was anything to the course except time. And of course, it was much more. Yep. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Squarespace.

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and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. Okay, Mike, we got some feedback, starting with a note on the forums from Petey. Yeah, this is a fairly lengthy post, so I'm going to try to summarize this. I do think that I will probably diminish a little bit of the impact of the message. So definitely go read this for yourself. But PD is struggling with a couple different things. They mentioned that they use OmniFocus. It's a mess. They subscribe to the GTD mantra, getting things out of your brain, but they feel like they don't have a lot. They don't feel like they have much focus. They're trying to grow their business. They're

trying to get their ducks in a row. They're trying to develop these systems. A lot of days, they mentioned they stare aimlessly into their screen or task managers like they can't decide what to do. They end up watching YouTube for hours. Sometimes they feel like a huge failure because of all of this. And I guess the first thing I would say is that we've all been there. You're not a huge failure. We've all succumbed to that sort of thing. Maybe it's not YouTube. Maybe it's something else. For me, it's civilization. Yeah. That's the one game I go back to all the time. And now it's on my iPad. So one more turn, one more turn. Yep. Just, just one more turn, you know, and then

hours later. But I, the thing that stood out to me initially when I read this was that this is very much in line with a lot of the stuff that we've talked about today. There is some more, more stuff here, which we can, we can kind of unpack, but specifically the staring at your task manager and not knowing what to do. I've been there. And this is my issue with task managers is that it's a list of all the things that you should be doing. It doesn't show you the one thing that you should be doing. That was a big takeaway I got from reading Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky was that idea of the daily highlight. What's the one thing that I'm going to do today? If I got this thing done, then today is a success. That's really helped me. It's just picking that one thing and not going off of a list. Because if you have a list, there will be times when you don't get through the list. And then you've got stuff that's already carried over until tomorrow, you're already behind. It's kind of a system set up for failure. Yeah. And this is stuff i think i kind of talked about when

we talked about hyper scheduling but it's just you have to be realistic in your expectations of yourself and you know if you if you just have a bunch of white nose if you're in the fog to use the term i used earlier you just don't know which way is up you don't know what to do to me that whole process of in the evening the day before writing down writing down. So I have OmniFocus. I use it. I'm a big OmniFocus user. I need all that task management because I have many clients that rely on me and I have many people I work with. So I need that kind of big boy task management. But at the end of the day, big boy task management. But at the end of the day, that gets transcribed, you know, by my chicken scratch onto a piece of paper that usually is somewhere between five and 12 items for the next day. And when I wake up and I show in my office, it's sitting on my desk and I just start doing

those things. I go from manager to maker and I just start doing the thing on the list. And I think giving yourself like reasonable, rational limits every day is a really good start because if you've only got three left, you're not going to be tempted to go on YouTube. You're going to knock those three things down. Then you can go on YouTube. Yeah. I like that. If you've got another, if you've got a thousand things in there, what's the point? Just start on YouTube at 9am. Yeah. Right, right. I think another important piece of what you what you just shared is that you have the things prepped the day before. If you the first thing you do in your day, and I know a lot of people who do this,

but for me, it's never worked, where they will get up in the morning, and they will select the most important things. That to me sounds like it would contribute to the state that PD is describing, where there's all these different things that they could do, and they've got the freedom to do those things. But the indecision, that's the thing that's really difficult. And that's the thing they have trouble with in the moment. So for me, I've found it helpful to plan out my day the night before, whether that is picking five tasks that I'm going to work on or just simply selecting this is going to be the highlight for the day tomorrow. But that allows me when I get up to go through my morning routine, get ready for the day. And then when it's time to sit down and actually do the

work, I know exactly what to do and I'm able to just step into it. And I think that it sounds like that's what you do. I, again, like I said, I know a lot of people who do it the other way. They'll identify the things they're going to do at the beginning of the day. But I would say try it the other way. Try planning it, selecting the things the night before and then eliminate the friction in the morning if that's going to be one of the things that can cause you to get off track or get stuck. Yeah, well, I'd recommend you try them both and see what resonates with you because everybody's different. But I know that morning David as a manager is an idiot. Yeah, he gives me way more work than I will ever finish.

And he's just way too optimistic about how much we'll get done in a day. Whereas afternoon manager, David is beat down from the prior day. And he realizes much more realistic, realizes how much I'm going to get done. And, um, it just, it was when I made that switch, when I tried to immediately worked for me, it was like, it was not like gradually, it immediately worked for me. It was like, it was not like gradually, oh, this is, this may be better. It was like, oh, this is way better. And the other thing is Morning David, although he's a lousy manager, he's a great worker. So Morning David has that list on his list. He just immediately just goes at it like a, you know, like a crazy man. And so that, that's just what I found. And, you know, you combine that with the blocks of scheduling. You know, if I just listened to manager David, my life would be so much easier,

but so often I don't, even though I know it, even though I have a podcast about it, even though I know better, even though I read the books, Mike tells me to read, I still, I still blow it sometimes. But, but if I, if I, if I do have afternoon manager set up the day, there's such a, there's a significantly better chance that I'm going to do. Okay. Yeah. I think there's a lot, uh, a lot of parallels by the way, to what you just talked about at the end of the day, when you're, you're beat down and your energy levels aren't super high, you're more realistic when you're planning your day. I feel like that's kind of the natural tendency. So you could leverage that to your advantage.

Kind of in my mind, I view planning your day at the beginning of the day sort of like going to the grocery store when you're hungry. You end up buying all this stuff that you're not going to eat. Yeah, exactly. And then you just have that overhead. I mean, that one of the things I'm reading from PD's email is just, you know, the sense of overwhelm, you know, it's like, okay, I'm buying the tools people say I'm supposed to

buy, but I'm still not getting anything done. And I feel overwhelmed. Well, you just got to, you know, I, I really think the idea of separating, maybe we do a show on this someday, you know, manager me versus employing me. Well, even if you're working for a big corporation, you still have manager me in your head that needs to help you figure things out and separating the, you know, figuring out what I'm going to do versus doing the thing, putting those in two different boxes can really make a difference. Yeah, absolutely. Hang in there, Petey.

Yeah, let us know how it goes. Kind of related, we've got another piece of feedback here from Bob, who basically is wondering how to track different projects when they are collaborating with other people. That's kind of the gist of this that I'm teasing out here. So they throw out a bunch of different apps and suggestions. Evernote, OmniPlan, Apple Notes, OmniFocus obviously doesn't really work with Teams. So how do you keep all

that straight when you're working with other people? How do you communicate, make sure that everything stays straight? For me, I don't try to put those things into my system necessarily. I'll just use the system that somebody else is using. Sometimes that can get complicated. And that's one of the things that kind of moved me away from OmniFocus being the single source of truth in terms of my tasks is that at one point, I was working with five different teams working in five different online task managers at the same time. And to manually copy all that stuff over into OmniFocus was just ridiculous. I, you shouldn't have it in two places. Yeah, it was enough for me to know that at this point, this time, this day, I'm going to be working on this thing.

And at that point, I'm going to have this website open, which is going to have all the task information that I need and all the communication that goes along with it. There probably is some point where it is worthwhile to bring all of those things into a single silo. But for me, I've just embraced that everybody's got their own system they're going to use. I'm going to work with those and I'm just going to be okay with keeping my own stuff in my own thing and all the other stuff in the different silos. How do you handle this? I have a very similar idea, but maybe from a slightly different perspective. I feel like I'm not my brother's keeper, right? If I'm working with someone on a project, I don't care what they use, you know, whether they use an online system, whether they use a napkin, whether they use OmniFocus, I don't care. I mean, they have

the parts they're supposed to do. I track the parts I'm supposed to do in OmniFocus because that's, you know, my weapon of choice. You know, of choice. There's a whole lot of reasons I like it. But either way, that's where I do most of that. Now, occasionally, you have information collaboration type things where you need to keep track of what each other's doing. And I use cloud services for that. As an example, on this shortcuts field guide I'm working on we've got a massive error table and there's three people working on it there's me there's an editor and there's kind of a production person and we all have different tasks and you can see in there who's doing what and what their status is with just an air table database i use basecamp with

some other stuff you know but those things are just it's the barest of management it's just saying this person has this job to upload this video to this website was it done or not it's not like tracking them going through the steps of doing it so i like to just keep my stuff in omniFocus. And then to the extent there is web services connecting people, I just like to see that for status. And that's just the way I do it. Sure. I like that. And that kind of touches on another piece of this maybe is they had asked, what are some effective ways to keep ongoing projects in my focus on a daily, weekly, even monthly basis?

ongoing projects and my focus on a daily, weekly, even monthly basis. So in this scenario you just described where you're not tracking all of the individual pieces of something, you're trusting the other person to do what they say they're going to do. But eventually you want to reconsider everything associated with that project. Maybe it's just you want to bring it to front of mind during a review and you want to consider there are better ways of doing things with this particular project. I would say go ahead and throw that sort of task in your OmniFocus. OmniFocus is, by the way, the best app in terms of reviewing things. I don't know why no one has copied the OmniFocus review tab. Me neither.

But it's killer. So you could say review this every month, every three's, it's killer. So you could say, review this every month, every three months, every six months, you know, you may have a task in there, David, to evaluate whether I want to keep doing focus with Mike every six months. I don't know. Like that's the kind of, that's the kind of thing though, that like OmniFocus makes easy because you can just put that in there and not even think about it. And then you just go to do your weekly review and oh, there's, there's the thing. I guess I'll spend some time thinking about that. Yeah, and one of the things I do

on those collaborative projects is I will have a thread of tasks related to checking in. If I'm assigning work to people, I'll get a check-in task in two weeks to say check in with Leilani to make sure this is done. And that's just a task I do out is done you know and and that's just

a task i do out of omni focus and it's not doing her work or even like calling her it's just checking to see that it's okay and if i see any kind of problem i can email her or give her a phone call and get to the bottom of it you know so um you can manage this stuff you know however you want and and getting and i comment i want and getting into a common web-based task management system where everybody sees everything everybody else is doing. That can work too. I don't think there's one answer to this, but for me, I don't want all that noise. I just want to be responsible for the stuff I need to do. And I work with people that I can rely on to get their pieces done too. And that's the best way to do it. I guess if you're in a big company and you can't necessarily rely

on other people, that may change your strategy. Sure. Yeah. We've got one other piece of feedback here related to project management in a roundabout way, which is tied to the metaphor of life being a marathon. So this is from somebody, Ken, who is a marathon runner. And they've got a few pieces of advice for us. They mentioned that during a marathon, they use the practice and training that they've carried out. They take a steady pace until about 16 to 18 miles. Then they switch tack and they do a run walk strategy where they'll run for eight minutes

and walk for one. Just like real life, it's good to approach any project time period or phase of life with a strategy, which includes practice, awareness and the willingness to switch tack

dependent on the circumstances. It's not a sprint. It's not a plod, nor is it a fixed path. Sometimes dependent on the running surface, you need to switch shoes. No point running on tracks

in road shoes. I point running on tracks in road shoes. I thought this was great. This encapsulates so many different things, even that we've talked about this episode, where you don't really know exactly how things are going to unfold, but you do know what the next step is going to be. And it's okay to say, I need to change my strategy for this particular season of my life. Yeah. I mean, that's just so much. It really encapsulates what we're trying to do with this show.

I mean, we're not trying to give you all the answers. We don't have them all. But we have a few wounds and scars and a little wisdom along the way. And I think being flexible and trying to apply some of the things we talk about as you make your way through life might help out, hopefully. Yep. One other thing here. This is a tweet from Kyle's Q9. And they took the moving the needle idea and implemented it into Todoist.

Yeah, that was cool. Yeah. and implemented it into Todoist. Yeah, that was cool. Yeah, so let me see if I can kind of summarize this right because they've got a couple different filters here. They've got moving the needle general, personal and projects moving the needle, and then work moving the needle. And so I had asked a follow-up question with this, like how are these filters configured because I don't really use Todoist myself.

I know really nothing about the app. Kyle says they're using P1 priority for moving the needle tasks and they set it up to show them the P1 tasks for that day and overdue tasks as well. I think this is a great idea and they basically also say

that it's helped them deal with the overwhelm that comes from looking at 20 things that they have to do and not being able to discern, to Petey's point, what's important, what's not, what they should be doing at that moment. Yeah. And he was dealing with the same problem of having so many tasks, but not knowing what was the big one. Yep. I guess to check in on moving the needle, I mean, I'm still using that system every day and it's a great way to keep myself moving forward on the most important projects.

And hopefully help me say no more often when I see that the needle isn't moving much. Right. Yeah, we've got a couple guest episodes coming up with some additional ideas on how to implant moving the needle. So stay tuned for those. All right. Well, I think we covered it. Say no more often, gang. I have this joke

when I talk to people about productivity and it's not even really a joke. I feel like everybody spends so much time talking about this stuff and reading books. We make podcasts about it. But at the end of the day, if you can just say no more often, a lot of this stuff gets a lot easier.

It's true. Yeah. Yeah, we know what to do. We just have trouble doing it. Yeah. Anyway, we are The Focus Podcast. Thank you so much for all the listeners that have been writing in,

tweeting in, and participating in the forums. Thank you to our sponsors, Squarespace and Blinkist. And we'll see you all in a few weeks.