Focused - 84: Focus is a Super Power

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

In this episode, Mike and David dive deep on why Focus is so important. They also share thoughts about Ultralearning and why sometimes survival alone is good enough.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hello, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Good. I almost kind of, I was going to introduce you as Liam Neeson, because you kind of have a Liam Neeson voice right now. What's going on? I am battling a cold at the moment. I probably

sound worse than I feel, but hopefully it's not too annoying for people to listen to. I think I think I can make it. And I got my mute button right here. I got my specialty should be good. So Wisconsin, the summer's over. What's your weather like right now? We're supposed to get snow tomorrow, actually. Yeah. Which I'm not looking forward to. It was 65 earlier this week. So these changing seasons are never a good thing for colds.

And then when you have five kids at home, you basically are guaranteed to get something. Yeah, I know. I totally understand the problems with the weather today. It's supposed to be 85, and I'm going to the gym, and I'm just thinking I'm probably going to have to wear shorts. I get it. You have to make these accommodations. We all have our crosses to bear. Yeah. All right. Well, actually, you found this video by Jason Freed. We'll put a link in the show notes about the idea of staying focused. Do you want to talk about that?

Yeah, Jason Freed is the CEO of Basecamp, which we are both fans of. I use it not only with you and Planning Focused, but also a couple different teams and organizations that I'm involved with also use it. We use it for my mastermind group now. The suite setup uses it. It's a really great product. And if you compare it feature by feature to something like Jira or a lot of other business project management software, you'll look at it and you'll say, this is too simple. It's not going to do what I need it to do. In fact, I have a friend who's in my mastermind group who switched over to Basecamp because I convinced him to,

and he was looking at it and he's like, well, this I don't think is going to work, but I understand the value of simplicity. But I don't think he really did because once he started using it, he's like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. The team loves it. And so they actually got a lot more productive because they're using this Basecamp tool that Jason Freed had created. I use that as an intro because Jason Freed has a little bit different take on the traditional productivity stuff. In fact, another tweet that he mentioned a couple of years ago at this point is something along the lines of productivity is for machines. Don't be productive.

And I had issues with that one. Lately, he's been doing this series on Twitter, just FaceTime videos. People will ask him a question. I think the hashtag is like ask JF and he'll record these quick little video responses. And this one in particular, the person asked, is focus overrated? And he responds by saying, it is definitely not overrated. Staying focused is actually underrated. And the video is short. I think it's about a minute long. A couple other things that he says in there kind of jumped out to me. One thing he said is that it's hard to do great work when you're scattered. And I wanted to bring this up here because I think on the surface, you could look at Jason Fried and say, well, this guy is pretty successful, right? And he's basically saying the same thing that you've

been saying for a long time, David, that focus is kind of a superpower. So I feel like it's worth unpacking here, but also how do you decide what are the things that are worth focusing on? That's the bigger question that's you know, I mean, looking at myself, I have two separate, entirely different businesses that I'm running at one time. And you say, well, I can't focus. I've got to be able to manage the law clients, but I've also got to be able to do the Max Barkey stuff. the reason why this podcast exists because once I felt like, and I'm never perfect at this, but once I got some degree of mastery over it, I realized how important focus was exactly because of the chaotic nature of life these days. And I just want to share the message. You know, I think people need to understand that. And you can have focus with multiple interests. You just have to be able to focus like I did that. Yeah. It sounds, what's the saying? It's simple, but not easy. Like it's not complicated, which is why I think the root of the question that was asked to Jason was, is focus overrated? Because in the business world specifically, there's an emphasis on what

did you ship? What did you make? And if you know anything about how Jason Fried runs his company, they do it a little bit differently. They're in the Midwest, so they don't have 85 degree weather all year long. And they recognize that being out in nature is important for people's well-being. So famously, they take off on Fridays in the summer. They still work their 40 hours, but they do 410s basically. And when you first started doing that, I know that was a pretty radical idea. And people were like, you take off an entire workday in the summer, that just doesn't make any sense. And you can look at a lot of stuff that they do from a

traditional business perspective and say, well, that doesn't make any sense. But having used the product for a while and kind of been following Jason for a while, I think that there's a lot of value to this approach that isn't necessarily quantifiable, at least immediately. You can't start taking off Fridays in the summer and then look at what you're able to produce and say, oh, look, it went up. That's not going to happen, I don't think. But you'll still be doing it 10 years from now, or you'll have a much better chance to still be doing it 10 years from now. You're not going to burn out, which is the real thing here that you don't really see it coming. We had Sean McCabe on the show and he talked about that.

You don't know how close you are to burnout until after it's happened. And then there's nothing you can do except try to reset. And it takes a lot of time. I don't want this show is going to turn into a Mac Power Users episode if I let it, but I too am a big fan of Basecamp. And I came in with the same attitude. I tried it out with a few clients and they liked it. But then when I tried to tease with all my clients,

a lot of them wouldn't do it. And I learned the lesson that when someone's paying you money to give them a service, require them to log into a website to talk to you is not going to go over well, you know, but yeah, but for my team and for a bunch of stuff I do, it became essential and I am, I'm going to renew my, my subscription and I'm, if anything, I'm using it more than ever now. But Jason wrote a book called, it doesn't have to be crazy at work. So now we're going to

drift into bookworm territory, but I really wish you guys would cover that on bookworm, frankly, because it's a great book. And it's, are you certain that they are doing four tens in the summer? The way I understand it is they just work one day less during the summer. They don't work extra. Actually, the article that they had posted from the Signal vs. Noise blog, which is kind of their blog where they unpack a lot of these ideas and then they take those posts and they turn them into those books that you see. Yeah. Uh, that article I admit was a couple of years old when I first saw it. So maybe they have evolved it. It wouldn't surprise me if they just take it off in the summer now. Yeah. That is, that is a good book. We haven't covered it for bookworm, but I have read it

and it's, it's a lot like the other books that they've written. So this is not the first thing they've written that speaks to, how do I want to put this? Countercultural, I guess, in terms of the standard business operating procedures. The first book of theirs that I read was Rework, which was actually illustrated by Mike Rohde, the guy who, sketchnote guy, he was on the last episode. So that book, I remember reading that and just the light bulb going on. There's so much stuff in there, like meetings are toxic. There's a whole little section on meetings are toxic. And that was the first time I understood if you have 10 people in a one hour meeting, the cost of that meeting is not one hour. It is 10 hours because it's one hour times 10 for all these people.

So if you're going to get all these people in a room, they're better. Darn will be a great reason for doing so instead of just sitting there for an hour listening to status updates. And that's why that's why they have the check-in feature in Basecamp. So people can just do the right and then you don't have to have a meeting. But yeah, they're great books. And if you manage people particularly, I would recommend checking some of these out because there's some great ideas in there.

You don't have to adopt them all. But it may help you make your people happier and get the work done in a better way. But, you know, kind of getting back to this point of focus, it really is, you know, the reason I keep calling it the superpower of the next 20 years is because I feel like it's under attack, like between technology and other things going on in society, people, a lot of people have a real hard time with focus. I mean, it's just so easy to go jump on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whatever. There's so much great content on TV now. I mean, it's just, just think of all the distractions. I mean, we live in like a garden of distraction and

we're expected to try and get some real work done. And to share just a little bit of my story, I quit my job. And in my head, I was thinking, this is going to be great. I'm going to still be a lawyer, but I'm going to be able to remove all those meetings from my life and all the nonsense. And I'm going to take all that extra time, and I'm going to plow it into making field guides and making better podcasts and be able to do more with Max Barkey, which to me is really the passion of my life. And guess what happened? None of that stuff happened. You know, I got started and I was good at answering email.

I was, you know, I was doing all the things except the thing. And that's when I realized I needed focus. And that's what kind of kicked me onto this journey. The hard part is deciding what is the thing, right? Because there's a long list of things that you could be doing. And this is kind of the thing I'm realizing with pretty much any task management system that's out there is that they are great at showing you a list of things that you must do within a certain window. So by a certain date or with OmniFocus and the start dates, for example, start thinking about

it at this point. But there's no way to, from that list, an application show you this is the one thing that is the most important right now. Yes, you can kind of hack that stuff with tags and stuff, but if you just have a library of things that need to get done and you don't want to sit there and manage them for hours every day, you're going to get this list and you have to be able to look at that, quickly discern, this is the thing that I should be doing right now. And again, you can define what should means to you and you can define your own priorities. Chris Bailey, he talked about if you want to sit down and binge Netflix and you sit down and binge Netflix, then that is being productive because that was the intention.

That's what you wanted to do with that time. But we tend to, and this is the situation you were just describing, is I make this decision, I set up these systems so that I can do this thing. And then when it is time to do the thing, I sit down and I get distracted by all the other things that are on the list. All the other things that are urgent because they have to get done by a certain point, but they're not the most important thing right now. And that's why I think the highlight idea from Make Time by John Zorotsky and Jake Knapp. We had John on the show. I love that episode. I get a lot of positive feedback from people all the time who comment on that particular episode. They talk about this idea of the highlight. And I think it's worth, at the

beginning of my day, I have this built into my form in GoodNotes where I'm going to define what the highlight for today is. The highlight for me today is to record this podcast because I'm not feeling that great. I know if I can get through this, I have had a productive day, right? Yeah. So all the other stuff can wait. If I get done with this and I have the capacity,

I have the energy, I have the mental bandwidth, I don't just feel exhausted, then I can go into the, I can go into base camp, I can go into the task management system go into base camp. I can go into the task management system. I can find additional things to do, but the highlight provides the motivation. Motivation is not the right word. Maybe it's momentum because you only have to think about this one thing. I would argue that the highlight provides the focus. True. And the focus produces the movement really is what I'm getting to is like, if I sit

down at the beginning of my day and I look at 10 different things, I can make a decision. You know, my process, I write that down on a piece of paper that are in my good notes template, the act of writing it down kind of puts a, solidifies it for me. It's like, okay, that is the thing. If I don't write it down though, an interesting thing happens because I can say, well, I should, I should do this right now. And then the exact situation you just described, I sit down at my computer and like, oh, I should reply to these emails.

I can change my mind at that point because I haven't committed, even if it's just pencil on paper and I can erase it later. The act of doing that is what allows me to move forward. It really is like making a contract with yourself when you write it down. I do it the night before and it's great. I wake up and I've already got a contractual commitment for the day. If you're thinking about this, listening to it, I would recommend, not if you're driving, if you're driving, wait till you get to where you're going,

literally take out a piece of paper and a pencil and say, for me, the thing is, and answer that question. Just stop and do that. You can pause the podcast. We don't care. We wouldn't even know. So there you go. But just find out about that power that you get from declaring a thing. And for me, that changed everything. Once I started saying, wait a second, I did all this so I could make field guides, and I'm not making field guides. That's what led to me suddenly saying, well, guess what? I'm going to take three hours a day, and that's going to be field guide time.

And that's going in the calendar. That's what got me started on hyper-scheduling, because I'm going to carve out time for the thing. And then all that other stuff that I was letting distract me, there's not time for that stuff now. So I have to maybe find somebody to help me do some of that stuff. Or maybe some of that stuff isn't as important as I thought it was. And it's like, it just, it starts you on a virtuous path. But first you've got to figure out the thing. Yeah. And you can figure it out on a daily basis. You can also figure it out on a yearly basis or quarterly basis.

This is kind of what the personal retreat does for me is it allows me to say, here's a big thing I want to focus on. This is my big highlight for the next 90 days. And then my daily highlights are usually derivatives of that because I want to make sure that the things that I'm doing are moving me in the right direction. The whole idea behind that personal retreat that I do is really the 12 week year. And this is the thing that kind of rocked my world when I first started doing it is this whole idea of like the wheel of life. You have all of these things that are going on in your life at any point. We've talked about this before, so I won't get, I won't spend a whole lot of time here, but

recognizing because the system forces you to pick one of those because you can't address everything at one time. And when you pick one thing and then you pick one thing that leads to that one thing, like you keep drilling down, it's no surprise that you're able to get results from doing it that way. That really is the manifestation of the superpower that you were talking about. Again, it's simple, but it's not easy because you have all these things that are screaming at you, hey, do this now, pay attention to me right now. And you have to develop the ability to just cut out all that clutter and say, this thing in front of me right now, this is the best thing I can do at this particular moment. And I want to talk about the fact that the idea of multiple things for just a minute, because it'd be great to say, yeah, the field guides are my thing. Every day, that is my thing. I'm going to wake up every day and make that the priority. But that's not the way it works. You know, like if it's my daughter's birthday and we're going to spend a day with her, the thing that day is going to be to be present

for her. If it's a day that I've got a bunch of podcasts, the thing that day will be the podcast. But I do have the underlying thing you know the quarterly thing or the monthly or weekly or however you figure it out and you do need to keep that in mind and you need to try and think about every day if you can put time into that that thing but it's okay to have multiple things and i know i'm making this more complex, but that's the way life is. And, and if you can hold on to that, you can hold on to the big overarching thing that you want to be doing in the background, but also being present every day for whatever that day needs. That's golden. Yeah. So let's unpack that a little bit because I think there's some nuance here. That's important.

Let's unpack that a little bit because I think there's some nuance here that's important. Ideally, I would say if you're just trying to start developing your focus muscle and you want to apply intentionality somewhere in your life, then you do have to probably pick just one thing to start with. But as you go, you kind of figure out where your limits are. You know what sort of load is sustainable for you if you're paying attention. But as you go, you kind of figure out where your limits are. You know what sort of load is sustainable for you if you're paying attention. And at that point, you can say, I can focus on the podcast and I can focus on the field guides at the same time. I have to be careful about how much time I devote to both of them.

I got to put up boundaries to make sure that I stay on track when it's time to do one thing. But if you find yourself working a nine to five, constantly feeling overwhelmed, have no idea where to go next, I would say the best course of action at that point is to pick one small thing to start applying intentionality to. Control what you can control. You're not going to be able to take control of your entire day and map out every hour because it's just not where you are. That's okay. And to be honest, if you were able to do that, maybe it would be a bad thing. A lot of people want to work from home

and then they have the freedom to do that and they lack the discipline to follow through on it. You got to build that up. But what is one thing that you can do, whether it's just getting up a little bit earlier so that you have time to read or to meditate or whatever it is, just start applying intentionality in those little things and start building those positive habits. in those little things and start building those positive habits. That kind of gets into the next section here, but we won't go there quite yet. But start small, basically, is what I'm trying to say. Don't try to apply intentionality to every single moment or every single day because you're not going to be able to do it. And if that's your definition of success, then you're going to feel like a failure. And if that's your definition of success, then you're going to feel like a failure. Yeah.

And Mike's description of this as a muscle, I think, is a great way to describe it because it does get stronger if you just start doing it. So start doing it. Got to go to the brain gym. Yeah. The brain gym. I think I would, it's not even a brain thing. I feel like it's part emotional. There's a lot to it.

But everybody knows that feeling when you sit down to do something hard or when you know that you need to do something hard that day. And it's just, you can't get started with it. I mean, I think our very first episode together we did was about eating your frog. And I think there's just something to it that's much deeper than just in your brain. Yep. Yeah, totally. I guess the emotional aspect of it, the attention aspect of it, there's probably other physiological aspects of it, though I think they are kind of all interrelated. Yeah. So if you were to look at, for example, not to make this a meditation episode, but if you were to look at the benefits of meditation, it's going to affect all of those

different areas. And meditation, especially mindfulness meditation, I would argue is basically learning how to focus. You're focusing on your breath. It gives you one thing and you fail over and over and over again. And that's part of the process. And every time you fail, you get a little bit better, a little bit stronger. And you just keep doing that long enough. And you see all of these positive benefits that are related to that one skill that you are developing, which is the ability to focus. this journey, you know, and, uh, but you're right. This is not a meditation episode. Focus is the superpower. You can do it. Just start and everybody can become a superhero. Just, just start somewhere. Right. But start today. Don't wait. Exactly. This episode is brought to you by bottomless, a product that reorders coffee based on your consumption. Now, this is interesting because

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your first bag of coffee for only $10 at bottomless.com slash focused. We thank bottomless for their support of focused and all of RelayFM. All right, Mike, you have, we have a topic here called Mike's beef with Ultra Learning. Tell us what ultra learning is, Mike. Sure. Well, you mentioned Bookworm. This is a book that Joe and I read recently by Scott Young. Scott Young also has a pretty awesome blog at scotthyoung.com.

Very smart guy. And he credits Cal Newport and thanks for his book. So if you're familiar with Cal Newport, digital minimalism, deep work, there's a lot of overlap here with Scott Young and the stuff that he talks about. Very smart guy, but this book, the basic idea here is to take something that you want to learn and to apply this ultra learning concept to it where it's very intense and it's for a short period of time. Just to give you an example, one of the things that he did is he wanted to change his career. He wanted to get a computer science degree, I believe from MIT. So he figured out the free classes, the free online classes he'd have to take, which would be an equivalent. He

didn't get the degree, but he got the knowledge. That's what he was after. And then he got all of that by going through an entire class and taking the final exam every single week. So he got his computer science degree from MIT in about a year. Pretty crazy. And in the beginning of the book, when he tells you that story, it's really powerful because it basically changed his life, right? But as we were talking about this on Bookworm, I kept thinking about this concept of ultra learning. And other than the few examples that he shared where you really have to get this thing done by a certain time because you want to make this pivot or go off in this new direction,

have to get this thing done by a certain time because you want to make this pivot or go off in this new direction. Is there a place for this for the average person or even the person like me who has five kids at home and is not going to go abroad for three months in order to learn a language because that's the most effective way to do it? So I've been noodling on this and while Scott Young is no doubt a very, very smart guy, I wanted to talk about this as it pertains to focused because I feel like this is the kind of thing that our audience would eat up, right? Except that I think ultra learning is maybe not the right way to do it most of the time. So I'm curious though, because I've read through this book, I've described it to you. What's your first impression with this whole idea of ultra learning? Well, I looked into it in researching for the episode, and it's an interesting kind of take on things.

It certainly is something that you have to have the bandwidth to do, because ultra learning is steeping yourself into something to learn it. It's immersion training, I guess you would say. But do you have time for immersion? I mean, the thing I thought reading is like, I don't have time for any of this stuff. I've got too many things going on to use this technique. But also, for me, I've always, I've never considered myself someone who's particularly sharp. You know, it takes me a while to put things together sometimes. And, you know, I've always felt like the, the, the knowledge of that was, you know, the self-awareness of that is the reason why I, I have all these systems and why I do reviews and

do all this stuff. I feel like that's my, that's the way I get around that. And, um, so this, you know, I don't think I'd be any good at it was my takeaway. Sure. Well, I tend to agree. I don't think I would be good at this, even though if you were to look at my life and my story, the last several years, how I've kind of pivoted on the surface, it kind of looks like I've applied some of this ultra learning stuff to my own life. But the more I dig into this, the more I realize that there's some very specific things that are required when you do ultra learning as he describes it, which the number one thing that stood out to me was having a clear definition of what you hope to achieve when you are done with the project.

So for the MIT thing, it's to complete all of the courses that he defined ahead of time. For the language examples, he told about some other people who went to four different countries throughout a year and mastered four languages. There were three months in each location. That's awesome. But they knew that they wanted to achieve these fluency tests and they wanted to achieve a certain level on those fluency tests. That was their barometer for success. When I started podcasting, when I started writing, when I started doing any of the things that I'm doing right now, I didn't have a clear goal of, I want to be able to do this. I could have maybe, when I started podcasting, defined success as doing a podcast with David Sparks, you know, but I didn't do that. I just knew that the next step was I needed to, I needed to record something. And then once I recorded something, I noticed all the errors that I made and I'd course correct and I'd do something else. these ancillary things that were connected with it and talking into a microphone actually

translated into being able to speak in front of an audience. And I found other things that were interesting to me. And so it was kind of just take a step, look around, take a step, look around, take a step, look around. I feel like that's very different than the ultra learning that Scott Young talks about here. And I think that there's a very narrow use case for ultra learning as he defines it. But I wanted to call it out here because I feel like the best process for most people is to take one small step, do one small thing, ship one small thing, and then reconsider and look at what the next thing is. I feel like you'll be much better off if you do that than trying to acquire all of these skills

so that you can say at the end, I've acquired all these skills and look, all these pieces of paper, whatever, these credentials, this is going to be the difference between me and somebody else. Now, again, there are situations where that's important. If you're trying to climb a corporate ladder and you need to be able to develop skills which are going to set you apart from the other people who you graduated with, who are competing with you for those jobs that you're trying to get, then I can see where this can be very valuable. But for the average person, the person who listens to Focus, who just wants to be a little bit better, more effective, get a little bit more joy out of life. I feel like this is kind of dangerous.

Yeah. There's a couple of things that come to mind. First is I kind of understand the climate in which this concept becomes appealing. You know, it's like the, uh, like the first example he used is the MIT degree. Well, I mean, I can tell you right now, my entire family, almost every decision we make is, at least in terms of finances, is run through the filter of, don't forget, we've got two kids, one in college and one about to start. And how are we going to pay for all this? And that is a big deal. I mean, families put all of their resources into getting that piece of paper for their kids where the, the knowledge as the author discovered is, is already out there. You can get the courses for free. You are, uh, people are mortg courses for free. People are mortgaging their

houses and students are mortgaging their futures through student debt for the piece of paper, not for the knowledge. The knowledge is free, largely. So, you know, I can understand why he would say there must be a better way. I get it. I do think, however, when you do this, I don't think there's much room to ask yourself why once you start down that journey. And I think what Mike is referring to, like with the podcasting example, is asking yourself why while you're on the road is just as important as asking yourself why before you get on the road. is just as important as asking yourself why before you get on the road. Yes, absolutely. Basically, what you consider to be a success is going to evolve, at least the way I have applied. I don't even want to say my flavor of or version of ultra learning. I think what I do

is probably something completely different at this point. But whatever you're going to start with, that's not going to be what you end with. And being open and willing to adjust along the way. Now, I recognize that part of this is just my personality because I tend to lock into, this is the definition of done for this project, and we are going to stick to that. That's the way I would prefer to work. But the reality is, and my life kind of shows this, is that you have to be able to course correct. You have to be able to, to chuck the plan when you find something a little bit better. I feel like ultra learning maybe doesn't allow you to do that. Now, again, ultra learning, you're doing this very

intense. You're doing it for a short period of time. So you could make the argument that we'll just finish it and then you can reconsider. I think that is a valid approach. But I also think for the average person where we're talking about focus is a superpower and you need to be able to develop that if you want to create the life that you want to live, then if you were to listen or read something like ultra learning and you're like, oh, that sounds amazing. I'm going to use this as a mechanism to create focus in my own life. You're not going to be able to do it. To be able to apply ultra learning as he defines it requires an insane amount of focus, especially

if you have other commitments or obligations that you basically have to just completely disconnect from for a short period of time. I think the better way is to apply this in small doses. And one thing specifically I want to use as an example of this is my experience with Duolingo, which he specifically calls out in this book as a terrible way to learn a language. But I've been using Duolingo for, I think I've got a 56-day streak now. And my goal with using Duolingo was not to become fluent in Spanish so the next time that I go to a Spanish speaking country, I can converse with the locals. I don't know when or if I'm ever going to go to

a Spanish speaking country again. That's not the goal for me in learning the language. My goal in using Duolingo is to reclaim the downtime that I have. And I wrote about this over at the suite setup. I'll put this link in the show notes. So we talk a lot about intentionality here. We had Shahid talked about how he eliminated all of the endless feeds and the affinity pools. I have to admit that when I first listened to that, I'm like, yeah, it's a great idea. I immediately did it. And then one by one, they came back and I delete them again. And one by one, they came back. So this is something that I struggle with, right? So, okay, I can't quit this cold turkey.

Maybe what I should do is replace it with something else. So that's what I did. I put Duolingo on my phone. And now when I have a little bit of downtime, I'm doing some Spanish lessons and I'm not checking Twitter. And that's a win for me because I know that learning a second language is doing a whole bunch of stuff to me physiologically. It's developing my brain so that I can focus more on the things that really are going to move the needle for me when it's time to do that. But again, becoming fluent in the thing is not the goal. Now, Duolingo, the method that they use specifically too, he's kind of got issues with, and I think it's a little bit inaccurate the way

he describes it in the book. You can kind of tell that he just talks about the very surface entry level stuff and doesn't really get into it a whole lot because as you go with Duolingo, you're basically, they'll give you, you listen to a sentence in Spanish and then you have to type it out on a keyboard. There's no like just picking the bubbles and arranging the sentences. It's like that at the beginning as you're learning your vocabulary, but as you go, it definitely gets harder. has on their website a link to a research paper that was done by an external organization that originally wanted to quantify the effect of Rosetta Stone and compare it to a college class. So the research showed that 55 hours of Rosetta Stone was the equivalent of a semester's worth of college Spanish. But Duolingo, which is completely free, by the way, 34 hours of Duolingo is equivalent to a semester's worth of Spanish. So that sounds pretty impressive. And if you were to compare that to

taking a whole semester's worth of Spanish classes, that's considerably less effort. But it's also very much not the ultra learning that Scott Young is describing. So I think that there's certain, I think there's levels to this. I think if you absolutely want to learn a skill in the quickest way possible, yeah, go ahead. Ultra learn. Pick one thing. Don't think about anything else. Go away to your cabin in the woods and just think about

that thing. Learn that thing. Come back three months from now and be a master in that thing. But it's not the only option. And I think a lot of times it's not the best option. I think that part of your reaction to this idea is just the fact that where you are in your life. I mean, both of us, I mean, there's some bias for us. We both, we have children, we have careers, we have obligations. The idea of ultra learning as described here is not on the table for either one of us. That doesn't mean we can't improve ourselves. You know, this is just one option. I think if you were at your point, maybe, you know, you're,

you're young, you've got very few commitments and you want to boot your life into a different direction. Maybe there's something here for you. Um, but for me, it's, it's really not even on the table. Yeah. So for everybody else who is like us, and this is not on the table, what do you do? And that's where I think habits fit in. Yeah. Habits are the exact opposite of ultra learning because it's one small thing that you do, but you do it consistently. In the middle of everything else that's happening, you make sure that this one thing you do for five minutes a day, whether that be a meditation habit,

journaling habit, learning Spanish and Duolingo, whatever it is. Picking the one thing for the next day habit. Yeah, exactly. And so if I were to give somebody a piece of advice who is new to the podcast, new to this idea of focus, and again, just feels overwhelmed, it would be start building habits and don't build a whole bunch of them at once. Pick one at a time. So do one, do it for five minutes a day. And then once you have that and it's just automatic, then go ahead and stack another habit on top of that. Again, James Clear, who actually wrote the introduction for the Scott Young book. So I had very high hopes for this, but Atomic Habits, we talk about that all the

time on this show. That's a phenomenal book. It's a great dive into how you can put all the pieces together when constructing the habits that you want to build or inversely removing the habits that the bad habits that you don't want to do anymore but that's the place to start i think for a lot of people is what's what's the one thing you can do every day it's easy and then just make it automatic and and that thing that mike said about you do it until you don't think about it anymore, that is so important. And I've read various books that say, well, it's 66 days or everybody's got some like quantifiable number about how long you do a habit before it becomes ingrained. I don't I think all that's nonsense. I agree. You do it until you don't have to think about it, until you just start logging your food or doing the meditation or planning the next day.

You keep doing that until you don't have to remind yourself to do it. And then you can start thinking about the next one. Yeah, totally agree. There's a lot of different things that influence how long it really takes to make that habit. So it's not even worth trying to pick a number and shooting for it. It's just start doing the thing and start tracking it, I would argue, too. Now, one thing I want to share here, because I have used a lot of different habit trackers and they've worked for a while and they haven't worked. And the reason they haven't worked for me is having to go in and

manually tap on the thing that, yes, I did this. That was a deal breaker for me. Kind of like time tracking. I forget to start and stop my timers. And it's frustrating when you're tracking things in an app and then your streak gets broken because you did the thing, but you forgot to go check it off. So one thing that I learned recently and credit to Rosemary Archard for this is that streaks actually integrates with the Siri automations. So you can say, for example, I have a couple like read my Bible every day and pray every day. I have apps that I use for those things. So when I open that app, the Siri automation runs and it ticks the thing as complete inside of Streaks. That's been a game changer for me.

Yeah, because one of the automations with shortcuts now is you can go to an application. Yep. And we don't have to go all the way down that rabbit hole, but I do want to use it as an example of consider how your technology can reinforce the behaviors that you want. how your technology can reinforce the behaviors that you want, not just default to the algorithms and really the research by the psychologists who designed these things to be addicting. Figure out how you can become not just another piece of data, but how you can use those things and leverage the power of that technology to design the life you want to live. Yeah, I actually do it analog. I print out a piece of paper every month. It's a number spreadsheet that's got one through 30 or one through 31 down the left column. And then

there's a bunch of columns that have categories and they are the things that I want to foster, you know, father, husband, you know, Max Barkey, legal, it's just the areas of my life. And then I just have a simple system every day. I score it, you know, it gets a plus sign. If it's a good day, it gets a vertical line. If it's an okay day and it gets a dash, if it's a bad day. And that is in essence, my habit tracking. And if there's something I want to get better at, then I just add a column for it. Yeah, I think analog is a totally legitimate way to do it. In fact, James Clear mentioned earlier, he has a Baron Fig notebook, which has a whole

bunch of habit tracking stuff inside of it. So I have one of those. I don't use it personally because I have a different system, but it is well done. And so if people are interested in an analog version of this, you could just buy a blank notebook and do it like you were talking about, David. Or if you want a little bit more structure, check out that Clear journal that Baron Fig did in conjunction with James Clear. Well, it doesn't sound like you are passionate

against ultra learning. It's just really not for you. It's not for me, but also I think it's easy to look at people who have achieved a result and they say, this is the way to do it. And then you're like, okay, I'm going to go do that thing. I feel like Scott Young used ultra learning very strategically, got a great result from it, but I would caution anybody else to just apply it because he did it and was successful. I think the process can be effective, but it's not where the majority of people should start. So on the one hand, yeah, it's just not for me. But on the other hand, I also don't think it's for a lot of people. And I think it's also like a confirmation bias. It's kind of like, I think it was James Clear

who talked about how goals are kind of meaningless because you hear the people, the players after they win the Super Bowl, the NBA championship, whatever, World Series, and they say, oh, we knew we were going to win because we had a goal a year ago and we worked really hard every single day until we accomplished that goal. What about the other 25 teams? Exactly. There are 30 other teams who had the exact same goal who didn't get the result that you did. Right. But because you see that, that one person who was successful on TV saying that you're like, Oh, that's what I got to do. I got to set these

goals. That's kind of what I think ultra learning is, especially after reading the book is he tells all these stories about all these people who were really, really successful. And that's great. Maybe it worked for them. I wouldn't expect the same result. In fact, another book that Joe and I read, Range by David Epstein, he talks about how specialization, which is a big thing that Scott Young talks about in ultra learning, is if you're going to teach ultra learning to your kids, for example, you got to start young, you got to specialize. And David Epstein in that book, he's got a whole bunch of research that shows that that's actually not true. The more effective way is to dabble.

It's to try a bunch of different things. You know, you see the story of Tiger Woods. He was dragging around a putter when he was in a diaper, right? And yeah, he's the world's greatest golfer. But what about the world's greatest tennis player? Like he shares a story of Roger Federer and how he didn't play tennis till high school when he switched from soccer because he tried a whole bunch of different things. And that is the more likely path to success for a lot of people is to try a bunch of different things. And as you do,

keep notes, mental notes, whatever, of what you liked, what you didn't like, what worked, what didn't work. And eventually you'll figure out a way to connect all those things into the thing that is really you. And that's when you become successful. When I was a really little kid, I really wanted to be a baseball player. That was my thing, you know, and I used to practice in the front yard and there was an old guy in the neighborhood who kind of took me under his wing and he was a great kind of baseball coach and so i would go visit him all the time and he told me i think he told me about a thousand times fast is slow slow is fast you know every time i would want to do something he'd be like nope fast is slow slow it was like his mantra and later i found out he was this guy was like he was during world war ii he was running

around um france behind enemy lines blowing up bridges and so this guy was like, he was during World War II, he was running around France behind enemy lines, blowing up bridges. And so this guy was kind of an amazing guy. But I've carried that in me just that when I was like eight years old, he put that in me. And I still think about that every time. And when I hear about ultra learning, that's where I have resistance because I have this ingrown bias about the idea of the tortoise versus the hare. Yeah, that's a great analogy. Fast is slow is fast. I love that. That really is the truth. And there are no shortcuts. We have an episode called You Can't Hack the System. That's what I kind of feel like ultra learning is. It's an attempt to hack the system. And you may

catch lightning in a bottle, but you might not. Yeah. Yeah. I think I would agree. Hey, free agents, do you want to save 192 hours? You can with FreshBooks. Our friends at FreshBooks can help you do just that with their super simple cloud accounting software. By simplifying tasks like invoicing, tracking expenses, and getting paid online, FreshBooks has drastically reduced the time it takes for over 10 million people to deal with their paperwork. And with FreshBooks, they've got some great new features. They have a new notification center that's like your personal

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Another thing I wanted to talk about was inspired by a recent Mac Power Users episode where you had Dave Hamilton on. And Dave Hamilton is an interesting guy. He's got another podcast called the Small Business Podcast, and he runs a business. And he mentioned something in the context of running businesses on that episode, which really stood out to me. He said something like, the bullets are always flying. And I thought about this in the context of focus, because kind of what we've talked about in this episode is if you can pick the one thing you want to focus on and focus on that thing, do what you intend to do, that's great. But there are times when the bullets are flying and you don't have the time to say, okay, stop everything and pick the one thing that I'm going to be working on, sometimes just surviving is a very viable option.

Yeah, agreed. I'm going through that this week. It's funny when you brought this up because I just shipped the latest field guide. Thank you, everybody who purchased it. I appreciate it. It was a great launch. And my intention this week was to go straight into the update for the keyboard master. I'm going to do an update you know a free update for that one and i have a bunch of time blocked to do that and i realized i can't do that i've got a bunch it's like you're in corporate minutes i've got a bunch of legal stuff that's kind of got backed up because i've been so busy on the shortcuts thing and i had to just stop and the one thing has to get pushed back for a while.

And I just need to kind of survive the hustle bustle of the other part of my life for a week or so before I can even deal with it. Yeah. And I think we've all been in that place. Yeah. If we're honest with ourselves. And it would be great if you could apply intentionality to every single moment, every single hour, even of just your working day. And let's just stick with Monday through Friday. So those 40 hours out of your entire week, if you could apply intentionality to all of those, it would have a huge impact.

Going all the way back to the beginning of the episode when we're talking about Jason Fried and how focus is underrated. But sometimes you just can't do that. Sometimes you are just putting out fires. And that kind of is intriguing to me because the fact that you're putting out fires, I used to view that as absolutely this is a terrible thing. It means that some system somewhere is broken. And it could mean that some system somewhere is broken. And if you make changes to those system, then you don't have to put out the fires anymore. Or it could just be that you're having a bad day

and the crap hits the fan. You just got to deal with it. Yeah, exactly. And don't get bent out of shape if that happens. As I was thinking about this, I think this is a good analogy. As I was thinking about this, I think this is a good analogy. Maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I grew up playing sports. So there's offense and there's defense. And offense is when you are implying the intentionality, applying the focus and picking the thing that you want to do, moving the ball down the field, trying to score the touchdown and ship the thing, whatever. But sometimes you do have to play defense. The red flag, I guess, is that if you find yourself always playing defense, then you're never going to score.

You cannot win by just playing defense. You have to play offense at some point. And if you never get your offense on the field, then there are some systems that you need to change most likely. But just the fact that you're playing defense, that's not necessarily a bad thing. That's a normal ebb and flow that is going to happen. The thing I do to make it work for me, I guess, is and this is a kind of nerdy details, but I have a calendar in my calendaring system. It's, and it's called field guide production. Once again, that's my one thing. I'm always trying to come back to that. So I have all day events in there for various phases of whatever I'm doing. You know, after I shipped the shortcuts field guide for, for two weeks. I had a shortcuts launch as the all day project for

two weeks because, you know, there's all types of customer feedback and all the things that come with launching a new product. But then I had one called Keyboard Maestro Update and it was throughout this whole week. Well, once I realized that, you know what, I can't do that now. I have to play defense for a week to get caught up on other things. I shifted the calendar. So if you look at my calendar, it's not even on my calendar this week. And mentally, I don't know why that works for me. Seeing that, oh, that's not there. I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to feel bad about not doing it. I've given my permission, my self-permission for this week to step back and take care of this other stuff that was going to linger if I didn't do it now. Yeah, exactly. And I think the other thing to note here is that

the difference in the approach when you are playing offense and defense. I think that playing defense and defense. I think that playing defense feels much more intense a lot of times. Going back to the analogy, the bullets are always flying. When the bullets are flying around you, that's not the time to say that this is unfair. When the bullets are flying around you, how you got there really isn't important. It's just getting out of that situation and staying alive. Just don't get shot. Exactly. Exactly. So once you escape that situation and you have a little bit more breathing room, that's the time to say, what are the changes that I need to make and maybe the game plan so I don't end up in that situation again. Because I feel like I've been bad at this,

that I've been in those situations where the bullets are flying and it's like I'm yelling at the bullets as they're going by like, you shouldn't even be here, right? But it's there and it's a very real threat and you got to do something with it. And at that point, going back to David Allen and the getting things done, kind of like living like a firefighter, that's kind of held up as the example of this is

what you don't want to do, right? Yeah. Well, when you're playing defense and the bullets are flying, that is what you want to do. Because if you're just focusing on one bullet, you're not going to see something that's coming out of your, your, the, the blind spots, right? So you have to have your, your head on a swivel to borrow the, the football, the football term, right? But you can't, you can't stay there. You gotta, it's gotta be temporary. I wonder if a technique to help address this, just like I know, like,

because in my calendar, if I look forward enough days, I'm going to see that that field guide project is going to return to be there and it's going to be getting my focus again. But the knowledge that it's in the future gives me some relief. It removes the guilt of not doing it right now as I deal with this. I wonder if rather than screaming at the bullets as they go past you, maybe when you find yourself in that fireman attitude, maybe you stop right then and schedule time sometime in the future to reflect and try and figure out what happened. You know, just give you put it on the calendar. Say, you know, this is madness. I shouldn't be working like this next Wednesday. I'm going to spend the afternoon figuring out how to keep this from ever happening again.

But you put it on the calendar. You block the time. And this is a mind thing. It works for me. I don't know that it works for everybody. But having that scheduled brings me relief. Yeah, I think that having it scheduled could bring relief. Putting it in your task manager could bring relief. Writing it down somewhere, just recognizing that this is the

situation, this is what I'm feeling, can bring relief. Going back to journaling, there's a lot of different tactics that you can use in the moment. But the more I think about this, the more I feel like this is something that is naturally happening all the time, is this transition from offense to defense. And maybe it's not life-threatening. Maybe the bullet analogy falls down at some point. But I think you have to kind of figure out for yourself what that rhythm looks like. And the big thing for me is recognizing that just because you are on defense at some point does not mean that you have failed. Yeah. And in fact, you almost need to plan for defense. You know, coming back to me with this story I've been telling, I should have probably planned on not doing anything

on field guides this week anyway. I should have known that this was going to be necessary. Yeah, well, that's the thing though, right? You can have a game plan and Mike Tyson, I think, is the one who said that everybody's got a plan

until they get punched in the mouth, right? And life will punch you in the mouth. And at that point, you do have to transition to defense. So you could look at it and say, well, yeah, my plan wasn't good enough because I am having to play defense here. That is one way of looking at it. And there probably is some value in looking at it that way. If you want to avoid ending up in that situation again in the future, but don't stay there, like glean the lesson from it, make the changes you're going to make, and then try again.

And if you fail again, don't worry about it. Just constantly adjust and repair. Well, I feel like the entire episode today has been an argument for taking retreat time, finding time to go out and figure out your one thing, figuring out how to avoid future bullets. All of this stuff can be addressed by some introspection. Yep, definitely. Introspection can provide the direction, but it's also something that you have to do on a regular basis. The way you phrased that about how it, my mind initially went to like the personal retreat

thing. Yeah. And it'd be great if every month even, or every other week, you were able to go away to the cabin in the woods and make sure that you're still on the right path, but it's not going to happen. away to the cabin in the woods and make sure that you're still on the right path, but it's not going to happen. So however often you can get away to set like the big direction, that's great. But then constantly come back to that term, adjust and repair the little things, the daily things, every single day. Journaling is so valuable in the sense where you can jot down the things that are broken,

the things that didn't work for you, the things that maybe you thought were going to work because you heard somebody talk about it once and you tried it and you didn't get the same benefit that they did. So taking a little bit of time to kind of think through why that is, and maybe you can make some modifications to that or try it a different way or try something else completely. So always be learning, just don't always be ultra learning, I guess. Yeah, I write my journal for myself. I don't write it as something for my kids to read after I'm, you know, worm food. And if you read it, it would be really kind of boring because so much of it is introspection on what's working and what's not working in my life and how I'm going to fix it.

Because so much of it is introspection on what's working and what's not working in my life and how I'm going to fix it. You know, talking about your retreat in the woods. So I've been struggling with that. I haven't really talked to you about it. But I've been doing more retreats. And I'm holding up air quotes. I have not gone to the cabin in the woods. That's possible here in California. You can go up to Arrowhead.

There's cabins available. to, um, you know, Arrowhead there's cabins available, uh, but the, uh, but just getting away from the family for two or three days, it just doesn't seem, I just never feel like there's a good time, you know? And, um, and it seems hard and I was using that as an excuse not to do it. So what I started doing about four months ago is every time I finish a big thing, you know, every time I ship a big product or finish a significant transaction or whatever, I go down to Starbucks for the afternoon with a planner. I write, I don't bring anything electronic

and I just sit and write and ask myself the questions, what's working, what's not working? How can I get better at this? And I just spend an afternoon writing and that has been working for me. I don't think it's kind of the full experience you've described, but if there's people out there like me that are having trouble finding time for it, I do find that that afternoon is a good investment of my time. Yeah, absolutely. It's the small wins that matter, really. I mean, kind of, if I were to

use the sports analogy one more time, the personal retreat, maybe that's halftime, right? And what you're describing is kind of like a timeout. Yeah. Feel free to take a timeout. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I'll get there eventually, but it's just, it's hard. I don't know. You know, it's funny, Mike, my, my youngest is a senior in high school now, and I'm acutely aware of the fact that she's probably going to go away to college. And I just don't want to miss any time with her at this point. I feel like I'm at the very edge of losing her, you know, not losing her, but you know, the phase of our life where she lives with me is going to be over very soon, I'm afraid. Yeah, well, that's completely normal and a good perspective to have, I think.

That's very much in line with a lot of the things that we've been talking about here. You've defined that as much time as you can spend with your daughter, that's the most important thing. So that's what you're focusing on. And in a short while, maybe that's a different season and your focus changes. That's the way it should be. The problem is if you'd never define what the focus is, and then you have all of these voices that are speaking in your head, you should be doing this, you should be doing that. And that's where I think a lot of people, because they get so consumed or focused on work specifically, that was my aha moment was recognizing that I had fallen into that trap and I needed to establish some boundaries because

I knew in my heart that my family was the thing that I wanted to be focusing on, but I wasn't able to do that. So if you just live by default, there's always going to be focusing on, but I wasn't able to do that. So if you just live by default, there's always going to be something else to do. Somebody else is always going to give you another task, especially, I mean, we rely on email a lot, but this is the fundamental nature of email is it's a to-do list that other people can write on. And you got to be able to take control of that and say, no, it's not going to be that way. What if somebody is listening to this saying, I'm standing in an open field and I'm facing machine guns, you know, I'm never playing offense. How do you get started? Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. Uh, I think it's similar to what we were talking

about in the last segment with the habits. Yeah. So what's the smallest thing you can do right now to transition from defense to offense? And maybe it's what is the one thing you can do right now that is going to, I don't like the analogy, but stop the bleeding, right? You recognize that you're in a situation, this is not a good situation, and it's not sustainable long-term, but you do have to have your head on a swivel right now because you are in this situation. You got it at that point, you do kind of have to multitask, right? You do have to continue to look for those things so that you can put out the fires. But at the same time, nothing is going to change until you can impose your will on even

a very small segment of your day. Control what you can control, but you got to control something. That would, that would be what I would say. Yeah. I would, I would get, my advice would be like, we talked about the top of the show. You figure out what your one thing is, figure out what offense is to you. Take some small step towards it. I'm reminded of my friend, Jean McDonald. She's the lady that made AppCamp for girls. And she was talking about that for years, but she could just never get started on it. She never seemed to be able to find time for it. And finally, she got, someone gave her $50 and said, here's $50 towards AppCamp for girls. I

want you to use it to start the AppCamp. So suddenly she had to do something and she took the $50 and she hired a graphic designer to make a logo. And you know what? Then AppCamp for girls happened. I mean, that's what it took. So if you find yourself not playing any offense and you know what your offense is, take a step. If you don't know what your offense is, figure that out first. Yep. Yeah. And start small again you know what's what's the simplest thing that you can do to start moving in that direction this episode of focus is brought to you by squarespace little startup company you may have never heard of them they help you make websites make your next move with squarespace squarespace lets you easily create a website

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Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. All right, we've got some feedback, Mike. Yeah, there were a couple things in the form I wanted to call out. Before we get there, though, I do want to mention we had Mike Rohde on the last episode, and I think that it would be cool to see people's sketchnotes. Yes, I've heard from several people personally about how much they enjoyed that episode and how Mike had talked about the basic elements

and that was kind of the key to making it work for them. And that was my experience too. So if you are starting sketchnoting based on that episode, or even if you've been doing it for a long time and you want to show your work, do that in the forum. I'd love to see what people are creating. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And with our audience, I would just kind of be fascinated to see what they have sketchnoted. Yeah. Another thing which I wanted to call out here, going back to the Jason Freed thing, the blog, the Signal

versus Noise, there was an article that somebody shared about some of the things that Jeff Bezos does. And I wanted to mention that for Jeff Bezos, a very polarizing person, figure, obviously. I think the contents of this article are good, though. He talks about how the things that are important to him in terms of his success now is that getting eight hours of sleep a night, puttering, and high-quality decision-making. I want to just encourage people to, whenever they hear even stuff like this episode or read something online, recognize what is valuable from that, tease that stuff out. And then the stuff that you don't agree with, feel free to spit out the sticks is the way that I put it in the forum. So obviously, there's some political stuff that you could apply to this. The article itself really isn't speaking to that at all.

But I think that that's an important skill for the focused audience and really anybody is to recognize when somebody is saying something that you don't agree 100% with, kind of like the ultra learning thing. Like what are the things that I can apply out of this to get the results that I want without having to just do everything,

you know, and completely agree with the person or the source. And so it would delight me if a listener owned an independent bookstore and used Jeff Bezos' tips to compete with Amazon. That would delight me. That would be awesome. But yeah, but there was some real basic blocking and tackling in there. I mean, you know, get a good night's sleep. You know, the idea of puttering is just the idea of having downtime. And we've talked about that on the show before. I think it's so important.

It's something that I didn't have for a long time. I think I'm doing better at that now. And it is definitely helping. So that stuff is all useful. Yep. There's some talk in the forums about the full focus planner and just kind of planners in general. And I wanted to check in with you real quick. Where are you now with your journaling and bullet journaling and various options?

I'm still using my custom page template that I created myself inside of OmniGraffle, which is a phenomenal tool for doing that sort of thing, by the way. But I recognize that not everybody is going to make their own template based on a whole bunch of stuff that they've tried and mixing and matching the elements that they liked. So there's a lot of systems out there which are pre-made, which are great. That's where this thread on the full focus planner comes in. And I know you mentioned that Daisy likes this. Yeah. Yeah. I am. I gave a blurb to Michael for the focus book that he wrote and, um, the, uh, they sent me one and I, cause I kind of roll my own system. I gave it to Daisy and she loves it and she carries it with her every day. I was just looking at the other day she had it on the kitchen table and like she is she

watched the videos on YouTube. He's got a great set of videos on YouTube saying how to use this planner. She's bought in and it's working for her. And we're, you know, we're going to get her on the subscription because she it's basically a 90 day planner, but it's very well put together. I really liked the way it's done. And, and she's, you know, she's gone back to work in the last few years and she's trying to like figure out how to manage that stuff. And this has been a big benefit for her. Yeah, it's a, it's a good system. I have one of the full focus planners here on my desk. So I think it's a great analog system specifically. If you want something more

structured than just a blank page, the full focus planner is definitely a good option. In the thread, one thing that was interesting was someone had linked to Tom's Solid Digital Journal. This is a PDF templated system that you can buy and use inside of an application like GoodNotes. And I did want to call that out because the Tom's Solid Digital Journal does look pretty good. I looked at the site. If you just went to Etsy and searched for GoodNotes templates, for example, you'll see a whole bunch of stuff though. And it's very easy to find a digital system if you do like that sort of thing. So if you like the idea of like the full focus planner, but like me, you want to use your iPad pro to do it. There's lots of options out there for you. If you don't want to go into OmniGraphle and put up with the hassle of creating your own pages.

There's lots of stuff out there. And it ranges in price, obviously. But like the Tom Stahl Digital Journal, I think Michael had mentioned that there was a coupon code that he used. So it was like 10 bucks because it's near the end of the year. You can definitely find some affordable options. And mine has evolved. I'm always evolving it.

some affordable options. Mine has evolved. I'm always evolving it. I still like the idea of doing it with a pen and paper because I do so much digital. I find the separation kind of helpful. And, you know, we were talking earlier about how I like to plan the day at the end of the day. Well, I spend the whole day at my desk in my office.

So usually in the evening, I'll go down. Maybe I'll go sit in the backyard or down on the couch. I just like to get away and I bring the paper for that. But I have evolved my day sheet. And what I did was I bought a ream of very expensive, I think it's 32-pound paper. So it's very nice paper for a laser printer. And I created a template in OmniGraffle.

But I print it out and then just punch it and put it in my book. I've been using the Levenger system for a while now and I'm pretty happy with it. So you can just punch it and insert it. And what I've done with that sheet is at the top it's got the month pre-formatted. I change it every month.

So I just write in the day and I write the daily one thing at the top. And then below I've got a, um, a listing of hours. Let's, let's imagine if you could visualize this, the, the left two thirds of the page is, is a, uh, a series of horizontal lines with the hour next to it, you know, 6 a.m. through like 19, you know, 1900. And then I draw a line down the middle. And so I plan the day on the left side of the page. So the left one third is the plan that I make the night before.

And then the right column of that is the actual day as it went down. So I just like to compare what the plan was versus what happened. You know, I think there's a lot of value in that approach. And then the right one third is just a list of the things that I really want to get done today. And there's a, there's a category of personal for Pat Max Barking for legal. And then I write down the night before the things out of OmniFocus, the real things I really want to do. And then so that sheet is in my book in the morning as I wake up.

And then I just kind of operate from that. And it changes. Like right now, your friend Chris Bailey, I found out that if you compete with him with an Apple Watch, he takes no prisoners. This guy works. He like works out a lot, you know? So I had planned this morning just to do a basic hike, but because Chris and I are in a competition, he's getting so many points. I have to now restructure my day to go to the gym or I'm going to fall too far behind. But, you know, but so that's the thing I do, but you could do that

with a good notes sheet too. You could just put that into good notes but this has been an evolution for me and everybody's different i think you have to kind of just make one for yourself and then find out what works and what doesn't yeah i 100 agree and i i think that's uh something that people should feel free to say, this doesn't work for me. And the real value comes in understanding why it doesn't work for you so that you can try something else. But just because the full focus planner works for Daisy does not mean that it should also work for you. And there's nothing wrong. You're not wrong. You're not broken if these systems don't work. But that's one of the most valuable things you can do is figure out what is the thing that really is going to work for you. There is something out there and you may have to try a bunch of things

before you land on it, but feel free to make it your own. When Daisy was trying to get more serious about this stuff, if I had told her you need to open OmniGraffle and design your page sheet, do you think that that would have never happened? That's just not how she's wired, you know, but the idea what Michael Hyatt has done with this full focus, and there's other people that have them as well. I mean, Mike Hurley even has one now, but the, but just by laying it out for you,

it makes it so much easier for you to, to just get through this stuff. And she really likes it. Yep. It all comes back to the structure that allows you to keep the trains moving, keep things on the rails. Yeah. I, well, it's the, the benefit of the journaling having been at it a couple of years now for me is number one is planning because planning, uh, really helps me and planning the night before specifically in my case, lets me get started in the morning and get a lot of work done and keeps the one thing in the top of the mind and all that. And then the other big benefit, in addition to planning, to me is the reflection at the

end of the day. And that's the mini retreat, I guess you'd call it. I guess we've used up half time and time out. I don't know what you what this would be but but it right it helps me and um it does that reflection does help more than because i i thought it would be a waste of time honestly it's like really am i gonna sit there and write down about you know gazing at my navel every day but actually find things of value value to write in there. Yeah. On the topic of templates and digital systems, day one now has templates. And again, not to make this NPU, but the templates that they have

as examples are pretty good. And one of the systems that I know people use to get into a journaling habit is this five-minute journal. They actually have a five-minute a.m. and a five-minute p.m. template inside of day one. So this doesn't just have to apply to how you plan your day. You can use this, a lot of different contexts, journaling being one of them as well. Yeah, yeah, it's great. Well, Mike, I always enjoy the guest shows, but I also really enjoy just talking to you about this stuff. And I think we covered a lot of ground today. Yeah, it's fun to nerd out about being focused.

All right, so we are the Focus Podcast. You can find us over at relay.fm slash focused. You can participate in the forums over at talk.macpowerusers.com. We've got our own little wing of the Mac Power Users forums. Thank you to our sponsors so much, Bottomless, FreshBooks and Squarespace.

And we will see you in a couple of weeks.