Focused - 85: The Depth of Our Madness

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

David and Mike reveal their obsession with calendars. They discuss time and tasks, maintaining motivation, and their own calendaring workflows for how they plan their day.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hello, David. Hello, Mike. Sounds like you're still a little bit ill, my friend. I am still battling the worst head cold I think I've ever had. The good news is that I feel way better than I sound. And we're going to push through this and talk about calendars today,

because I am weirdly excited about this topic. Now, we've talked about calendars a little bit with hyper scheduling in the past, but I've always felt like calendaring is one of the easiest on ramps to being more focused. It just it's a great way if you're having trouble keeping yourself on target. a great way if you're having trouble keeping yourself on target. Calendars are kind of a great way to wrestle control of all that stuff going on in your head and getting some actual work done. So we wanted to give calendaring a whole show. Yeah, calendaring is the ultimate tool for time budgeting, because no matter what you do, you will never get more time in your day. You'll never have more than 365 days in a year, unless you have a leap year. But the point being that you can't, no matter how productive you are, create more time to do

the things that you have to do. It has to all fit inside of this time landscape. And the calendar gives you a very clear picture of that. Yeah, it's interesting to contrast that with task management in the sense that when you talk to people about task management, they frequently double book themselves in terms of getting tasks done, you know, when you look at the amount of things they do. Whereas like with calendaring, there is that inherent constraint that is just obvious with the process. You can't book yourself to go to your cousin's wedding and to, you know, go to work and to go to Disneyland at the same hour on the same day, right? It just doesn't work. We understand that. So that's why I think it makes it so useful in terms of getting real about focus and what's important. This is the ultimate tool when it comes to applying

intentionality to the things that you're going to do in the time that you're going to do them in. But before we get into the constraints and some of the things about the topic of calendaring, we also have a special announcement to make. Yeah, for the first time, we have a focused product. Pretty excited about this, Mike. Me too. I have been using a form of this product for the last several years. Have you been using something like this? Yeah, but I think we're teasing too much. Okay, let's just get into it. Yeah, we are making a wall calendar, a year wall calendar for the Focus podcast for the year 2020. And it's fantastic. There's a great company called

new calendar and they, they make these wall calendars with just excellent typography. And Mike and I started talking about this well earlier in 2019. And we both agreed that if we were going to do this, it had to be made by new calendar. They're the company that makes the calendars that the wall calendars that we use. So we have a wall calendar. It's gorgeous. It says focused 2020 on the top. It says life is more than cranking widgets, you know, our kind of our subtitle for our show. And it's got great typography and you can hang it on your wall through 2020 and use it to get focused. Yeah, the website, if people are interested in what this is going to look like, we'll have a link to our specific calendar

in the show notes. But newyear.net is the website for the company. And the person behind it, Jesse Phillips, he's been doing this for a while. I've been in contact with him for a while because I've kind of always in the back of my head wanted to create a custom calendar like this. And so the time was right. It just seemed like the right thing at the right time to do this for Focused. And I'm very happy with the

way that the design has turned out. A couple other things that really set these calendars apart from just your standard year at a glance calendar. Because I think some people maybe who haven't seen a calendar like this, they're kind of picturing the big sideways, you've got three rows of four months, and there's these big blocks, and that's your whole year. But this is a continuous calendar. So where January ends and February begins, it's indicated on the calendar, but the days of the week flow together. And that makes it much more useful when you're planning out trips that you're going to take or events that you're going to go to. New Year calendar. And you'll kind of see the types of things that I put on this. And the way I use this is just big picture type stuff. So I have it hanging to the right of my desk and I look at it every single day and it kind of reminds me that, oh yeah, MaxDoc is coming up, or the Relay 5-Year event, or I want to launch Faith-Based Productivity on this date, or I've

got a speech contest that I'm competing on this date, like the big rocks of your year. And when I look at this, I can see that some months are really going to be pretty busy. And I should not try to take on a bunch of extra work or really deep projects in those particular months if I'm going to be going on... My June from this year was kind of crazy because I was at Craft & Commerce. And then less than a week after I got back, I left for a mission trip to Costa Rica. Okay, so if someone approaches me about a project and they want it delivered in June, I know just by looking at this calendar, that ain't going to happen. So it kind of gives you

a little bit of clarity and helps you rearrange these things in a way that all the stuff fits, which is really important. And hanging it where you can see it is real key. I did the same thing. I also put production schedules up there and key trips. And when someone calls me and says, hey, I'd really like you to speak at this thing. My eyes always are looking at that calendar and it's like, okay, wait a second. Looking at what's happening at and around that time, this is one where I need to exercise my no muscle, you know? Yep, exactly. It's just a great, and I think there's something to be said. We're going to talk a lot about digital calendars in this show, but there's something to be said to have that big analog

calendars hanging on the wall for you to see. And frankly, if you're working in an office for other people to see when they walk in before they saddle you with a bunch of work. Yes. A couple other things on our calendar specifically. So my current calendar just has one background color for the entire year. There's two columns and each column has six months. But the calendar that we're putting together for focus listeners has background shading for the four quarters. So basically three month periods. So it's kind of a visual indicator of the 12 week year if you decide to employ something

like that. That's what I use. It's kind of the basis of my personal retreat framework. And you don't have to use that if you want, but it's kind of cool how with just a subtle shading, you've got clear distinctions of where your 12-week years are going to end, assuming that you follow the same kind of format that everybody else does and you start at the beginning of the year. Obviously, you can start a 12-week year anytime you want, but this is kind of a visual indicator and it breaks it down nicely into those four different quarters. And on the bottom, there's a key with six different boxes.

And I think that you could use this a lot of different ways. But the way that I would personally recommend that people who really want to just put everything on this New Year calendar, they would use that as a form of implementing the 12-week year. So maybe you've got different colors for the different habits that you want to create during a 12-week year period, and then you can just put a dot on the days that you do the habits. And different colored dots for different days, and then you've got a very clear history of how consistent you've been with the habits that you've been trying to create. Kind of the don't break the chain idea. Yeah, exactly. Except you don't have to put a big red X over every single day. So there's actually a lot of information that can

fit on this calendar without it being really cluttered and complicated. And it's not going to be, we'll talk about some of our own calendar workflows. It's not going to probably be the only calendar that you use, but I do think that this is something that for people who are really, they really want to make the most of the time that they have available. This is a great tool in your toolkit.

Yeah, it's $29. We priced it to sell. Honestly, we're not making a ton of money off these because honestly, we just wanted them out there. This is something that we kind of wanted in the world more than we wanted to get rich on this thing, right? But it includes shipping. You can go to the link in the show notes and order yours today. We'll be talking about it off and on, particularly until we've sold all the ones we bought between now and the end of the year.

But Mike and I are both very happy with it. I think the thing I like about the product is it's something I really wanted on my wall, and I feel like a lot of listeners will want one too. So go check it out. Like I said, links in the show, $29, includes shipping in the United States. I'm not exactly sure what happens. We're shipping outside the United States, but it's going to be shipped directly from the manufacturer. So we'll get them to you as soon as possible. And Mike and I are just really excited about sharing

this. Definitely. All right. Should we get into our topic here for today? Yeah. Which is, surprise, surprise, calendars. Right. So maybe the place to start here would be to talk about the general overall role of the calendar. I think when you think about productivity tools, there's a couple things that people kind of have to have in some shape, way, shape, or form. One of them would be a task list, whether that is a task manager or just a simple list of a couple things that you want to do today. And another thing that I would argue everybody has to have is a calendar. What's interesting, though, as I evolve, I guess, on my own productivity journey is how I view the calendar and how it's morphed

from something that just showed me a bunch of appointments, meetings, and deadlines to recognizing it as the landscape for where and when everything is going to get done. And I think this kind of initially started to shift for me when I heard Patrick Roan way back in the day on a Mike's on Mike's podcast. And he was talking about how everything that you have to do must take place within the context of time. like we mentioned at the beginning, time is the one thing that you really can't get more of. We all have the same 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week, 52 weeks in a year. No matter how productive you are, you're not going to get more time. But the calendar is the place where you can apply the intentionality to make sure that the time that you do have is being focused in the right direction. Yes. I don't necessarily agree that everything gets on the calendar. But like I was saying at the beginning of the show, to me, the calendar

is a great on-ramp to inserting focus into your life. And we're going to talk later in the show about the difference between tasks and calendar items, because it's subtle. And I think a lot of people have trouble with that. But having a calendar system is just such an excellent way to wrest control of things. When I was flailing about for a while and realizing I wasn't getting the most important work I needed done, one of the most important steps I took was literally just getting out the calendar

and blocking time into every day for the most important project. And just saying this stake will not move and everything else is going to have to work around that. And then suddenly things started happening. Yeah, that's an important distinction. And I agree with you that not everything is going to go on your calendar. Not every task that I'm going to do appears on my calendar. But I do think that that is an interesting way of looking at the calendar,

recognizing, and it forces you to come to terms with the limits that you have to work within. Yeah, agreed. You can always put more tasks on your list, but you can't put more hours in your day, right? Yeah. And that's kind of the trap that we fall into is like, oh, I can just squeeze in one more thing and then one more thing and then one more thing and then you don't get to everything and all your motivation is gone because you promised yourself you're going to do all these things. You couldn't get them all done, so you broke your promise to yourself. And it's kind of a negative cycle and I've been there,

right? We've probably all been there. So recognizing that the calendar is a tool that could help you combat that, I think, is really powerful. And if you're going to do something and something is important to you, then carving out that time on your calendar for it is a great first step to take. As I was doing some research for this article, I was going through a bunch of articles that people have written and stuff like that. And I saw this phrase, some version of this, it said, I'm going to do A, B, and C by X date, and it will take Y hours. Now, if you're going to do that in a task manager, that sounds like a lot of mental overhead.

I personally am at the point now where I just jot down a quick list of things that I want to do. I don't want necessarily to figure out when am I going to do this and where am I going to do this and what context does it need to be in and what are the tags associated with it. does it need to be in? And what are the tags associated with it? But by putting it on a calendar, you kind of get all of the benefits of that by default without having to make all of those choices. It's kind of a more efficient way of putting in some more solid parameters around something rather than just throwing it on a list. And really the gist of this is that whatever gets scheduled, that's what gets done. Yeah. And it's an interesting kind of line to walk there because when you have a task management system, you're going to have days with very few items that don't really justify scheduling time blocks for them. For me, there's three primary

lists I deal with every day. There's my personal list, the Max Barkey list, and the legal list, you know, so it's my two jobs and myself. For a lot of people, it'll probably just be two groups. But today, or last night, when I was planning today, I noted there were two things on the personal list for today. I needed to renew the registration on the car, and you got to pay the state every year, you know, privilege of owning a car. And I needed to pay the electric bill. Now, those are two items to me that are simply done. That's on the list. It gets written down in my book. And then as I go through the day, when I need a little breathing room

between heavy tasks, I'll pay the bill. I'll pay the registration. However, a few days ago, my personal list involved a whole bunch of stuff. Like it was like seven or eight items and some of them took more than a few minutes. So on that day, I have a calendar block called personal tasks and it was an hour and a half because I knew I had so much stuff to do there that the simple existence of it on the list wasn't enough. I had to create time if I was going to get those things done. And I had to take that time into account when planning the day. Because if I put those seven things on my list, but I also filled up the day with legal work

and podcasts and field guide production, they would never get done. So they had to have their own real estate on the calendar. Yeah, exactly. Let's maybe get into the specifics here of what things get on the calendar and what things don't. But before we wrap up this section, I just want to hammer home this point that if you find yourself throwing more things on your to-do list than you physically can get done, and maybe you don't even know that at the moment because you don't go back and you look at what you got done during the day

versus what you plan to get done. So maybe you have to back up even a step before that and recognize your own limits. That would be the place to start. But I love this quote by Steven Pressfield that kind of encapsulates this whole idea. He says, the sure sign of an amateur is that he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow. And really, the reason that's a sign of an amateur is because the amateur doesn't recognize, hasn't taken into account the size of the things that they're trying to do. And so they procrastinate on those and they kind of believe that, oh, that's a problem for future me to consider. But whenever you get to the future, you find out that past me has really been a jerk and

overcommitted themselves. I think I have to start reading some Steven Pressfield books. I keep reading all his quotes, and I've never actually read any of his books. Which one should I start with? It's got to be The War of Art. I mean, that could be considered a holy text for Focus, to be honest. I mean, it's all about overcoming the resistance, the things that are not physically going to keep you from doing the thing that you want to do, but they're just kind of going to be in the background and they're going

to steal your attention and you're going to look back and you're going to feel bad because you didn't do the thing that you wanted to do. And then you're like, well, why did I end here? It's on my Kindle. I just haven't read it. I'll start that one next. All right. That's a that's a great book. All right. Well, we we want to talk about time and tasks right after this. Hey, freelancers want to save up to one hundred and ninety two hours. That is a lot of hours. And our friends at FreshBooks can help you do just that with their super simple cloud accounting software. They simplify tasks like invoicing, tracking expenses, and getting paid online. And they drastically reduce the time that it takes for over 10 million people just like you to deal with their paperwork. I love FreshBooks. I use it myself. There's a couple

things specifically that I just think are great. Number one, when you email a client an invoice, FreshBooks can show you whether they've seen it. So that eliminates all the back and forth, the email ping pong, hey, did you get it? And you don't have to guess anymore. You know when they saw it. And also they can automate late payment email reminders. So you can spend less time chasing those payments once they've seen those invoices and more time just working your magic. It helps you focus on the things that are going to help build your business instead of working in your business.

And if you're listening to this and you're not using FreshBooks yet, then now is a great time to try it. FreshBooks offers an unrestricted 30-day free trial for listeners of this show. There's no credit card required. You can start saving those hours now. All you have to do is go to freshbooks.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, and enter focused in the how did you hear about us section. Once again, that's freshbooks.com slash focused and enter focused in the how did you hear about us section. We thank FreshBooks for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. But this is something a lot of people get stumbled on.

I get emails about this all the time from listeners and readers. Where do you draw the line between something you write down on a task list and something you put in your calendar? Yeah, this is something that I've really been thinking a lot about lately because I'm kind of in the middle of rethinking my use of task managers and how I go about my day. Maybe we'll get to that. Maybe we won't. But one of the things that I recognize has always been a problem for me is whenever I have an idea, it goes into the task management system. And that's fine until you get to the point where you have so many things in the task management system that you're overwhelmed at looking at them and yeah you can put things on on hold and stuff

like that but really the question that needs to be asked and i found i wasn't asking this question when i was using my task manager was am i going to do this thing it was just like oh it's a possibility i'll throw it in there and then once once it got in there, there was kind of this pressure that I put on myself, whether it was right or not. This is just me telling on myself where because I had this thing in there, I'm like, oh, I need to do that sometime. It wasn't even a question of should I still be considering this? It was just, I need to do this. And maybe the time isn't right now. I'll just punt it till later. And future me can figure this out. Did you have some kind of review system in place?

I did. To be honest, I've always had some trouble with the reviews. But I have done the reviews in the past. I just, I don't know, having so many things that are on hold in the task management system always kind of weighed me down. Even if I didn't see them, even if when I was working on my day-to-day, the fact that there were so many things in there that I couldn't see right now, it was kind of this cloud hanging over me, if that makes any sense. You know, I get it. And I think a lot of people put that mental baggage on top of themselves.

And now that we've got digital task managers that can really manage an unlimited number of tasks, as far as humans are concerned, way more than you could ever accomplish. That's an easy trap to fall into. But for me, it's a mindset thing. You know, what was the guy in Hitchhiker's Guide? Was it Zaphod? But they put him in a room with the entire universe and everybody would go insane when they'd go in there. But he was fine because he saw himself as the center of it. That's me with my tasks because I look at them. These things are all here to serve me and I have the ultimate right to elevate them, to delay them, to kill them. I'm like the power

of the universe over these tasks. So to me, it is a collection of possibilities, not a collection of obligations. But that's a mindset thing. And if you don't have it, you won't drive yourself crazy when you start filling up your task list. Well, I guess the thing for me, and again, this is probably unjustified. I'm not sure. I know that I can only get so many things done in a day. That's the first battle everybody has with a task manager is they have all these things

in their task manager. Now they're going to get a whole bunch of things done, right? And beginner's mistake, they add 20 things to their to-do list and they can only get 10 of them done, right? So over the years, what I have picked for my things to do during the day has significantly decreased. It went from 10 at the very beginning to my five most important tasks to the three things that I want to get done today. And after reading Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zyrotsky, it is now a single highlight. All right. So if I'm going to pick a highlight every day, I kind of don't need 10 other things below the highlight or five other things or even two other things below the highlight saying, hey, think about me too.

That's again, that that's just me. And I am still using a task management system. Again, maybe we'll get there. Maybe that'll be a whole nother show. Yeah. But I'm really thinking through this question before I even put stuff in there. It's not just my inbox anymore. I'm making sure that the things that I put into my task management system are things that I really want to be doing. So I'm asking this question, am I going to do this thing? Yeah, but understand that that changes over time too, right? Yes, correct. Yep, it does evolve. And that's where something like a someday maybe list really

does come in handy. I might throw something in there, like plan a trip to Italy my wife wanted to has always wanted to go to Italy and she was a fine arts major in college she wants to go see all the fancy museums which doesn't really sound all that appealing to me but I want to take her because I know

she'll really enjoy it actually I want to see you walk through the museums I kind of would like to see that. Anyway. Well, maybe, maybe. But that's the kind of thing where I want that to come to my attention over and over again. So that would be something I would put inside of a task manager. So maybe that's not a very good example. But there's lots of other things that I recognize. I just throw stuff in there because it's on my mind right now. And I've subscribed to GTD for so long where on the paper, off the mind, right? But the paper for me has become this task management system.

And it's kind of reversing now and it's becoming a piece of paper. Well, yes and no. And I think we're going to, I want to put a pin in that because there's so much more to task management. No, and I think we're going to, I want to put a pin in that because there's so much more to task management. There's people out there like me who have a task management system. Like as an example, this morning I was talking to a client who's in a contract he hates. And the way the contract reads is he has to give notice 60 days before it terminates in 2022. He has to give notice if he wants to end this contract. He's willing to put up with it for another couple of years, but we have to make sure it doesn't auto-renew. My task management system is handling that for me, and I will get all sorts of warning bells at the appropriate time in the year 2022 to deal with this. If I let him down, I'm not doing my job, right? So, for a lot of people listening, task management systems are more than just a list of possibilities. It's things that have to happen at certain times. So, I get it. But we're talking today in terms of calendars. And to me, and I think to you as well,

the calendar is like where the rubber meets the road between the task manager and the action. You know, task management is a list of possibilities or potential actions. The calendar is where the action happens. Yes. So the questions to ask, you know, am I going to do this thing? We've talked a lot about that. But then the next question is, when am I going to do this thing? And that's where the calendar comes in.

So you need a task management system that can surface the important things when appropriate so you can make time for them. And the calendar is where you make the time. Yes, exactly. And I think the type of things that would go on a calendar, either digital or analog, like a simple list of things that I want to do today, or your big picture, your year at a calendar, either digital or analog, like a simple list of things that I want to do today, or your big picture, your year at a glance. Maybe it's worth unpacking some of that stuff for what it's worth your example of the task that needs to come to the front of your attention, no matter what, a couple of years from now, that is a great place. A task manager is a great place to keep that sort of thing because it can do just that for you. It can do the heavy lifting. But for a lot of people,

it's just, I have a bunch of creative things specifically. I think it's probably the creative folks that deal with this maybe more than others, where I know I should write this thing. I know I should make this thing. I should create this video, right? But I have trouble creating the motivation to do it. I don't necessarily have somebody breathing down my neck in order to deliver this thing. No one is making you create a new field guide, right? So how do you maintain constant motivation and consistent progress towards achieving those goals? That's where something like a daily list comes in handy with a deadline, I would argue, of I want to get this thing out into the world by this date on your calendar. Yeah, but the one thing I would take issue there is I don't think this is just a

creative person problem. I think if you are an insurance underwriter, there are things that you need to do that you put off because you don't want to do them. The techniques we're talking about could help you get done. So, I mean, this is something for everyone. But kind of the way I look at it is if you have a good task system and you have the ability to surface those important things, when do they make it on the calendar is when you decide it's time to make it on the calendar or when you realize they're not getting done. You know, like the two examples we talked about in this show, for me, the one was the field guides where I wasn't getting anything done on

them. And I just said, you know, screw it. Every day from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., I'm working on a field guide. That's all I had to do. Sit down, make a repeating event Monday through Friday for the next month. And suddenly, I had time assigned to this thing that I wanted to get done. You know, the other way to do it, the other thing you deal with is, I guess, the example I talked about, the personal items. Suddenly, I realize I have a big chunk of personal items I need to take care of on my list. I'm going to say tomorrow, you know, from 2 to 3.30 when I'm, you know, kind of at the low period of the day, I will take care of these things. And I carve it out on the calendar.

care of these things and they get and i carve it out on the calendar this this this episode really dovetails a lot with you know hyper scheduling but i think i'd like to make this a little more generic in the sense that this is something everybody can use i'm not saying you schedule your bathroom breaks and all that but you use the calendar to turn hopes and dreams into reality yeah the calendar is the thing that can create the motivation to do the things that you want to do. And I'm glad that you called it out. Procrastination is a universal problem. But I guess my description of, and an improper description probably, of creative work is just the lack of the due dates associated, whether the deadlines associated with those things. So when it comes time to, I need to work on this thing,

you don't have anybody but yourself telling you, this is the time you need to get this done sometimes. So maybe there's a little bit of a difference there between when something is due and scheduling the time to actually work on it. Yeah, yeah. But even then, you know something is due and scheduling the time to actually work on it. Yeah, yeah. But even then, you know something's due, it is very easy to not appropriately calendar for it.

So you do it at the last minute and you do shoddy work as a result. You know, it's just these are universal problems. I think your term works. Right, right. Um, these are universal problems. I put it on my calendar. And as soon as I wrote it on my calendar, that was my deadline. That created the motivation then to show up every day and do the little things that I needed to get done before the course could ship. I had a real tough time maintaining the motivation day to day before I did that, before I actually picked the launch date. It's like as soon as I wrote it on my big New Year calendar, it became real. And then it was like, okay, let's do this. Yeah, because it's literally staring you in the face every time you look at it.

Yep. Yep. Exactly. And it wasn't just on my calendar. I wrote it on my big whiteboard in my office too. Everywhere I turned, it was yelling at me like, hey, remember, you said you wanted to do this. Oh, yeah, I want to do that. I guess I better do this then. You know, step one, step two, step three. We know a lot of times what we need to do. But if we're just viewing those things in isolation, just as tasks on a list, and we've removed the big picture from those things, it's easy to find yourself in the doldrums, you know, where you are just lack all lack all motivation to get that thing done. Yeah. And getting, you know, and I've been banging on this drum the whole show, but it is such, you know, it put, you know, to talk about doldrums, blocking time to do these things does fill the sails with wind.

It just happens. It's automatic because you've taken that step. And it's such a head game we play on ourselves. I mean, just because I wrote something down on this piece of paper on my wall or just because I created an event and an application on my phone, suddenly I have this built-in focus crutch that I can lean on. But it works. It does. The more that we talk about all this different stuff, I realize that most of the things that we cover on this show regarding focus and intentionality, what it really comes down to is motivation. And if we can just harness that and direct it

in the proper direction, that really solves all our problems, which is probably why people think it's not that big a deal because they think that they can do that at any point on their own. But it's harder. It's harder. What's the phrase? It's not complicated, but it isn't easy. Yeah. And you really do have to play tricks on yourself. I was just talking to a friend recently, a listener of the show, who said, look, I don't really understand this hyper-scheduling stuff, but I'm kind of interested in it. I don't really know how to get started. I said, well, pick one thing that you really want to do. You know, and he gave me a thing and I said, how long is that going to take? Three hours. I said, okay, what are you doing next Tuesday? He's like, well, it looks like I'm doing nothing. I'm like, okay, so next Tuesday morning, you're going to do that

thing. Write it in your calendar right now. He's like, well, I'll just do it. I'm like, okay, so next Tuesday morning, you're going to do that thing. Write it in your calendar right now. He's like, well, I'll just do it. I'm like, no, write it in your calendar, you know? And he called me the next Wednesday. He says, Dave, this is like a superpower. How did you, you know, how did you figure this out? I'm like, it's not rocket science. People have been talking about this for years. None of us invented this stuff. But for some reason, it's that step of turning an unfulfilled task into a calendar event. The event of creating the time allows you to get things done. If you're listening to the show right now, there's something that you really want to do that you know in the back of your mind you need to do. Maybe it's something you want to do because it's fun or something that's creative, or maybe it's writing the quarterly report that you hate. But look at the next four business days, pick a block of time, then figure out how much

time it's going to take, and then reserve 150% of that time on your calendar. And just see what happens. Just try it. You might be surprised. Yeah. But pick one thing. That's the big takeaway. Yeah. And start there. I mean, once you put one thing on a calendar and then follow through and do it, and you realize, like the person that you were talking to, oh my gosh, I have superpowers now, then

you can multiply that tactic over and over again as much as you need to. But you have to recognize that there are constraints you got to work within. And as I was thinking through this, I think this is the easiest way to think about it. We all know we can only be in one place at a time, but you can also, I would argue, only do one task at a time, at least the type of tasks that are going to appear on your list. Yeah. You know, in Chris Bailey's book, Hyperfocus, he talks about this multitasking because a lot of people have just heard, you know, multitasking is a myth. And he digs into it.

And basically, there's two types of tasks, ones that require your focus or your attention and those that don't. And it is possible to combine those two. You know, you can listen to a podcast while you're at the gym. I do that all the time. But I'm not doing two things off of my task list at the exact same time, because that's when the focus gets split and you're jumping back and forth between things. It's called context switching. Things take much longer that way. Yep. Agreed. So recognize, yeah, this is

the one thing I'm going to be doing now. I loved your tip about scheduling 150% of the time you think it's going to take. Or 200%, I mean, but not 100%. Yeah, give yourself a buffer. We are terrible at estimating how long things are going to take us. In the short term, we tend to underestimate. We think, oh, I can just do this quick in about 10 minutes, then it takes an hour. But we also are terrible at estimating what we're able to accomplish in the long term, something like a year or five years, because we don't think we can do as much long term as we really can if we create those habits. Not to turn this into a habit episode, but really the calendar is the place where you write down the plan of these are the things that I want to do. And then assuming that you can stick to the plan, which is another issue sometimes, but that gives you a history of the things that

you've done. If you just do those things every day, then you will be able to accomplish that big someday maybe goal probably in less time than that you think. This is kind of my experience. You know, we're coming up on November, and November is National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo. And I've dug into this a little bit recently. I'm fascinated by this idea that people can write 50,000 words in one month. That sounds like a whole lot of words. But if you do the math, it breaks down. It's like 1,667 words per day. That's totally doable. And that's kind of the approach that I took when I wrote my book. I didn't have a word goal necessarily, but I showed up and wrote every day for about an hour. And eight months later,

after lots and lots and lots of editing, I just got to the point where I just got to ship this thing. I self-published my book, but I was amazed. It only took eight months to get to that point where I felt, okay, this thing is now ready for the world to see. When I first started that process, I thought this is probably going to be a two or three year thing. And it came together quicker than I thought. Now, granted, it is a shorter book. It's not 50,000 words. But like I said, I didn't go into it with a certain goal. And NaNoWriMo just kind of shows that if you break things down and you show up every day, you can actually accomplish quite a bit in a short period

of time. Now, when you did that, you were working at the family business. And I know from talking to you that you had a habit of doing that first thing in the morning every day. Yep. Did you have calendar events for that or was it just kind of built in that you did it every day? Actually, at that point, I don't think I did have a calendar event for it, but I did have an alarm. I'm not really a morning person, but I started getting up at 5 a.m. every day because I recognized that if I was going to find an uninterrupted hour to write, it was going to have to be in the morning. I knew by the time the evening came around that it just wasn't going to happen. So looking back on that, if I were to do it again now, I would put that on my calendar.

At that point, it was just the simplest solution was the best solution. And just being up at the right time was the trigger. Yeah. And I don't think you need to have a calendar entry. I think it's a crutch and it's a way to kind of mentally remind yourself, but you kind of did it without the calendar entry, but you had a set time every day that it was done. So it in effect was the same thing. True. Yeah. And this is something that I have kind of been thinking a lot about. And I've gone from pretty much never using a calendar except for meetings and scheduled phone calls and webinars and stuff like that to the other extreme where I am literally scheduling every hour of my day. And I've been thinking about what is the correct

and correct. Obviously, it depends on your situation, but what's the correct solution on what your calendar should look like? I have a Mike, I have a lot of thoughts on that and I want to talk about that, but let's do it right after this break. Okay. This episode is brought to you by Bottomless, a product that automates your supply of coffee. But Bottomless is not just some coffee subscription

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the store over and over or micromanaging different subscriptions. And it's effortless. The scale lasts 12 months on a single charge. Just set it up with Wi-Fi once, then cross coffee off your to-do list for the year. Now let's talk about the coffee. You've got plenty of types to choose from, like espresso, dark roast, fancy single origins, which happen to be my favorite, or simple house blends. The best part is that the orders are shipped straight from the roasters to you. And the roasters that they have as part of this subscription are legit. There's one in particular that I discovered when I was in San Diego for a conference called West Bean. I went to San Diego and the first thing that I did when I got there is I searched for pour over coffee and Yelp. And this was quite a while ago. So third wave coffee was

not really a thing yet. But I found this place that was kind of close. I walked into this West Bean. And because I'm a huge coffee nerd, I ended up talking to the owner of the shop for about an hour and just was fascinated by their whole process. Well, West Bean is one of the roasters. You can get West Bean coffee from Bottomless. And it gets shipped straight from the roaster to you. That means whatever type you like, it's always going to be super fresh. Bottomless is also more efficient than other ways of distributing your coffee. So they pass on the savings to you by covering free shipping on every order and giving you the scale for free. And of course, Bottomless has a special offer for Focus listeners. When you go to bottomless.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, you will get three months of free shipping and your first bag for only $10. That's right,

three months of free shipping and your first bag of coffee is only $10 at bottomless.com slash focused. Our thanks to Bottomless for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. All right, Mike, before we take the break, we're starting to get into the subject of what exactly does go on our calendars. And, you know, the obvious ones, as you were talking about, were the things that you would traditionally think that go on a calendar. Usually something involving another human, like a meeting, a dentist appointment, maybe a deadline. I think we should probably talk about deadlines. But the traditional idea

of a calendar is something where your body needs to be some other place, or you need to do something with some other person. Yeah, as I was thinking about this, it really broke down into two different categories to me, things that you're committed to doing with others and then things that you're committed to doing yourself. And this is the one that I know a lot of people will struggle with because they have trouble viewing something on their calendar, a commitment they've made with themselves as something that they cannot break. But I think that that is an important mindset. Having that thing on your calendar be something, it's a commitment that you cannot break,

no matter who it happens to be with. So this is where things like scheduling deep work time or even downtime and vacation, exercise could be one of these things. time or even downtime and vacation. Exercise could be one of these things. I used to have a calendar when I had a bunch of stuff going on to make sure that I had enough time to get to the gym every day. I had a calendar that in Busy Cal is the application that I use called Goose. And the basic idea was to protect the golden goose. So I made sure that I scheduled my runs on that calendar, the time that I was going to be going to the gym and occasionally there would be other things that would pop up in there like

if you wanted to schedule time to meditate for example I'm trying to think what other things I had on there and it was something that I used only for a period of time so I didn't need it anymore once I got into the habit I really didn't need to carve out that time on my calendar anymore but that kind of gets back to the thing that I was mentioning just before the break is how much of this time do you need to manage on a calendar? I think it's probably going to be different for different people. I would say that the simplest solution is probably the best solution. But also, the more that you have going on, the more important planning and scheduling becomes. If you're trying to balance a bunch of different things, and you're going to wear all of these hats in the same day, then having a calendar for all of those things in a digital calendar,

like BusyCal or Fantastical, with different colors and seeing how they all line up and overlap, that can be really powerful. But don't feel bad, I guess, if your lifestyle is simple enough that you don't need to manage your time to that degree. Yeah. I mean, make it as complex as you need it, but no more complex than that. Yep. You're not adding calendar events for vanity. It's like if you've – this morning I worked on some legal stuff for a couple hours that I and I didn't have that time blocked. I'm not going to go back and add a block for calendar legal work in that block.

That's already happened. It's you know, this is a planning thing, right? The but I do think that this idea of the relationship between habit building and using calendar as a tool. It's another way that calendars can be a big help. For me, a habit I've been working on for multiple years now, which is still not ingrained for me, is the process of planning the next day. And I talk about this on this show all the time because I find it so useful. I know it's useful intellectually in my heart. Many days go by where at the end of the day, I'm like, I'm cooked. I worked all day. I don't want to stop and think about tomorrow.

I don't want to plan tomorrow. I'll just wake up early tomorrow and do it then. And you know what happens tomorrow morning, right? Yep. I mean, so I have not been able to ingrain that yet. And as a result, if you look at my calendar on just about any day, sometime around 430, there's a one hour block called shutdown. And that block, I'd love to get rid of it, but I need it because when I don't have it there, I let 430 go by and I don't shut down. And that's the beginning of the ruination of the next day for me. I mean,

I don't know how else to put it. And it's just silly. But so the calendar is a crutch I'm leaning on to do something that I know is good for me. And I know that absolutely works for me. But for whatever reason, I can't bring myself to do without having it written down on my calendar. Yeah, it's a support system, right? And you can view it as a crutch, I guess. I think that analogy does make sense. But I also feel that the word crutch makes it seem like a negative thing, perhaps. Yeah, that's true. And I think that really, it's a very positive thing, especially if you have the right mindset. I mean, kind of one thing we haven't really talked about in this episode, I didn't even put it in the outline because you probably heard the story a million times already of Stephen Covey and the

big rocks fitting in the jar, right? Where you got to get the big rocks in and then you place the smaller rocks and then the gravel and then the sand and then the water. And the moral of the story is that if you don't put the big rocks in first, then you're never going to get them in at all. Well, the big rocks, the things that are going to go in your calendar first, those are the things that are important to you, but they're not necessarily urgent. And there's a bunch of things that are working against you to prevent your big rocks from getting in there. Number one for a lot of people is probably email because email is a to-do list that other people can write on. It is the water of Stephen Covey's analogy. There is as much of it as you want. Yep. And meetings would be the sand or the gravel for other people. But the

bottom line, though, is that maybe you can't control everything. Don't worry about what you can't control, but don't let the fact that you do have to respond to email or you do have all these meetings that you have to attend. Don't let those things be the reason why you can't get your big rocks in. Like you mentioned, the support or the crutch, and I like the term support because for the time that is available to you, you do get to choose how you're going to use it. Maybe the amount that you've got control over changes over time. And I've kind of made some lifestyle choices the last several years where I have more control over that than I used to because of priorities in my life. I've got kids who are growing up and I want to make sure that I have the ability that

at any moment I can say, you know what? This is the most important thing right now is just to go spend time with my family. We're going to go to the little farmer. We're going to go on a field trip or whatever. I want to have that ability to say those things. And it wasn't something where I just snapped to have that ability to say those things. And it wasn't something where I just snapped my fingers. And because I threw those things on my calendar, now I had the ability to do that. But I started with what I had. Going back to my writing story,

I knew that that was going to be something that led me down that path. I didn't know exactly what the steps were going to be to get to the destination that I'm at right now. But I knew that this was the next thing. So where does this fit? This is the most important thing right now. Where does this fit with all the other obligations and things that I have to do? And it was early in the morning. And taking that approach of what are the things that I really want to do, and then what time do I have available to do them in, putting those on your calendar first, that significantly increases the chances of all of the unimportant stuff that might pop into your peripheral view during those times, whether it's before work,

after work, on the weekends, whatever. It helps you stay focused and keep focused on the important thing and keep the main thing the main thing. So if you need any help along the journey, which we all do, then putting things on your calendar is a big tool in your toolbox. The two leading indicators for me falling apart are number one, when I stop reviewing my task management projects. The review for me is so essential. If I fall off the wagon on that, then I'm in trouble. And when I stop doing the daily planning of the following day and blocking time, like if I wake up and I look at my calendar and the only thing on there is like recording a podcast with Mike, I know I'm already behind the eight ball to a certain extent. And so it just works in so many ways. Now, I want to talk a little bit about this process of taking a task list and turning it into a calendar.

The way I do it, as I've been talking about throughout the show, is usually the afternoon before. It doesn't have to be the afternoon before. It could be the morning or the afternoon, you know, whenever works for you. But for me, it's just the afternoon is when I'm most realistic about the following day. I think it's a thing where I'm kind of tired. And in the morning, I always give myself more than I can actually finish in a day. And then afternoon, I give myself about the right amount of work for the following day. It's just my own personal foibles. But the way in which I block that time off varies, and it's evolved over time. I don't necessarily block every minute.

I rarely have blocks smaller than an hour. I mean, if something is less than an hour, I'm not going to give it a block of time. But another thing that's interesting for me is, let me just take the legal side of my life as an example. I have projects a client will give me that's like a two-hour kind of significant research and writing or drafting project. So I may have a block the next day that says, you know, Smith client. And then I know that that's where I'm going to write that contract.

And that may be two hours. But I also have sometimes just a collection of little things related to the law practice, you know, send the email to the client, reminding them that they need to, they need to give notice that they're, um, they're leaving a contract or, you know, just the small ticky tack items that are, that are very important to get done, but none of them alone are enough to justify a block. So then I'll have a separate block that I'll call legal flags.

And in OmniFocus, those tasks are flagged. So I've got a view in OmniFocus, a perspective that just shows me those legal flags, and I'll block an hour to knock through those. It doesn't show up every day because some days I don't have that many flags. But when I do have enough, I give it its own block. So there's really kind of two flavors of these blocks based on the type of work I'm doing, where one may be, here's some time to catch up a bunch of little things, and then here's some time to do one big thing.

Does that make sense? Yes, it does. And I think that's a great approach. The different categories, the different hats that you wear, that's definitely one of the more popular ways maybe to think about the different types of calendars that you might have, especially if you're using a digital calendaring solution. I push back a little bit whenever people say that I've got a work calendar and I've got a personal calendar, because if you're going to take that approach, I think it's worthwhile to have a calendar for all of the different hats that you are going to wear and stack them all up. Because in a digital calendar, it doesn't matter how many of those calendars that you have. And what you're able to do then is you're able to isolate individual ones like my protect the golden goose calendar that I used for a period, family calendar, stuff like

that. So don't necessarily try to keep it small is my general advice to people in terms of the number of types of blocks that you're going to use. Don't feel bad if your life is complicated, I guess. Just roll with it. They're free. Make as many as you want. Do you want to share the depth of our madness when it comes to the calendars that we've created in our own personal calendar systems? You want to do that now? Sure, let's do it. All right, you go first.

All right, so my calendaring and scheduling workflow has changed a bit lately. So I'll start at the top with the New Year calendar that we talked about. And for me, this is the place where all of the important dates go. So I've got, I'm looking at it right now, set aside time for when I was at the Focus course in January, the camp that I helped out with at our church, the vacation that we took to Florida, conferences that I went to, MPU Live where you, me and Chris Bailey had Nando's. All that stuff is on there. And then from there,

I've got BusyCal, which is all of my digital and shared calendars. I have a personal calendar in BusyCal, which really is only used when scheduling things with others. And the service that this is tied to is when.works, although that's going to disappear at the end of the year, which makes me very sad. I liked the ability to have something iOS native where I could set up the rules and say, if someone, so if someone wanted, because I get these requests every once in a while, hey, you want to grab coffee sometime i can just send them a link and then they can book a time on my calendar based on parameters that i set up which i think was like monday mornings or friday mornings

7 to 8 a.m you know if you can find time on there go ahead book it i'm happy to to meet with you but that way it forces it to stay within the blocks that I've kind of set aside for that. And then if it's not there, you know, when I go to schedule my day, then I can work around that. A couple other calendars I've got in Busy Cal, I've got a shared family calendar with my wife, which has all the information for all the different places that we have to be with our kids. Sometimes we have to be in more than two places at the same time, which is a challenge. So stuff like, we just got done with fall soccer. We would have two people at two different soccer fields and piano lessons downtown at the same time. So having the addresses of all of the soccer fields

in those calendar events makes it a lot easier when we have somebody else who, hey, can you drop this person off here or pick this person up? Having that all in one place really helps us get everybody where they want to go. We've also got a calendar for Blanc Media. That's a Basecamp calendar that has a subscription. So that's got like the sabbaticals and then the big events on there. I've got one for podcast recordings. We've got one for Focus. I've got one for Bookworm that I share with Joe Bielig. And I've got one other calendar that we use fairly frequently. My parents have a place up in Door County, which is kind of the touristy part of Wisconsin, the thumb,

which in the fall right now, it's nuts up there because the trees are changing colors. And that's kind of where everybody wants to be, Wisconsin in the fall, right? And so we have a shared calendar that we just use to show who's going to be up there when to make sure that there are always enough beds for people to sleep in. It's a fairly big place. We could probably make it work if we were all there at the same time, but it's just good to know. And also things like when the cleaning people are going to come or they have work being done on the house, then that's going to show up in that calendar as well. Someday I want to spend enough time in a climate where the leaves change color to really appreciate it. You know, I've, I've been there while it was happening,

but I want to kind of like spend a couple months there or something and just kind of watch it happen. It's pretty beautiful. You know, I've, I love running outside in this, this weather because I'll be running along my normal route, you know, And then all of a sudden you're just like, oh my gosh, those trees are crazy colorful. So you've got to stop and take a picture. Yeah, it doesn't really work that way in California. But that and the northern lights are both on my bucket list. But yeah, it sounds like you've got, we've got analog stuff we want to talk about later in the show but

digitally for me um though you know i've kind of explained the wall calendar like you it's a it's a big ticket item calendar and it's there one of the main goals of the wall calendar for me is when i am on the phone and thinking about taking on another commitment, it's something to like, it's like there to argue with me about taking on other commitments, you know? And just kind of a big idea of what's going on. Another nice thing about it is my wife can walk in the room at any time and look at it and say, oh, okay, he's doing this then.

So we need to plan for that. But digitally, I, like you, have a lot of calendars. I have a personal calendar, and it's more, it's not tied to a service. It's just my personal calendar. It's got my dental appointment, my doctor appointment, my, but other stuff too, like I talked about earlier, I needed to make a block the other day to deal with personal flags. That was in the personal calendar. And, you know, so I had an hour and a half to deal with a bunch of, you know, bills and that kind of stuff. So I have the personal calendar. The other thing we have is a family calendar that we've had for many years that shared between all

of us. We don't do that many things as the all four of us, my, you know, my oldest doesn't live with us anymore. And I find that the family calendar becomes a problem because some people don't really in the family occasionally accidentally use it when they don't mean to. And then I have a bunch of stuff showing up my calendar. That's not really for me. I've actually, as my kids have got older, I've really been encouraging everybody to use their personal calendars and send out invites. You know, encouraging everybody to use their personal calendars and send out invites. You know, like if we have a, if we're going to all go to Disneyland, we'll all, I'll send an invite to the,

you know, to the three members of my family. And it's my personal calendar, but it shows up on their calendar through invites. And, and it's, it's a good way with teenagers and older kids that they kind of acknowledge and are aware that the event exists because if we just put it on their calendar through a shared calendar there's a good chance they won't show up so i'm kind of moving away from that shared calendar for the family purpose uh then i've got uh max barky has a bunch of calendars i have the main max barky calendar i have a blog production calendar that comes out of base camp with the the person that helps me get all the blog posts up. And that gives me a single event every day for planned blog posts. Something I've added over the last six months is kind of this general push to being more efficient about how I make field guides is I have a field guide production calendar.

And those are two things. Those are the three-hour event things that I block out, you know, when I'm in the middle of production, when I was talking about earlier. But there are also all-day events that run for months at a time. Like right now, if I look at mine, it says for the following week, Keyboard Maestro update production. And because i'm working on an update to keyboard maestro field guide right now that's a all-day event that runs for about a week and a half and then there's a couple days break and then you know it's back to the photos field guide and that runs for like two months you know so it's an interesting kind of way for me. I just started experimenting with

these all day events and I really like it. Like last week I had a bunch of corporate minute stuff because we're approaching the end of the year for the legal. So I put all field guide production back a week and just made the all day event through the week was legal minutes and, you know, a legal admin. Cause I knew that was the focus of last week. So not only have I gone to focus for one day, now I've been going to like focus for the week. And I do that through these all day events that often run a week or longer. Yeah, the all day events are underrated, in my opinion. But you do have to be careful with a bunch of all day events that stack up on top of

each other. Because a lot of calendar apps, they put them at the top of a week view, for example, in this tiny little space. And when you got a whole bunch of stuff up there, I find that to be a little bit distracting. But I do like the ability, if you are going to organize your life based on areas of responsibility or the hats that you have to wear, by using the all-day calendar, you are essentially guaranteeing that you are not going to try to squeeze in one more thing from that area of responsibility during that day. So it definitely can be useful that way. Well, also for me, it's just, once again, it gets back to focus. It's like, okay. And, and something I didn't say earlier, the advantage of, of making a block of time to do that important thing next Tuesday is that it, if it's something that's important to you, it's weighing on you, you know, it's bothering you that it's not getting done. You're kind of

getting back to that guilt thing you were talking about earlier with your task list. As soon as you create a block, at least in my experience, as soon as you create a block of time to do that thing, the guilt evaporates. And you're like, okay, I have set a time to manage that. So now the fact that it's not done no longer bothers me, right? Yeah. It's like there's this annoying little voice in your head that's like, when are you going to do that? When are you going to do that? When are you going to do that? And then as soon as you put in your calendar, it's like, that's when I voice in your head that's when you can do that when you can do that when you're gonna do that and then it says you put in your calendar it's like that's what i'm gonna do that it instantly turns it off yeah shut up i've got a calendar you know it's good yeah now the you know you got a cat you got you don't have to write that check you have to be able to cash it you know so true you have to do the thing at the time you designate

it and once you do it once, you know, as you do that over time and you begin to trust your system that you like, oh, actually, when I calendar time, I do live up to that promise and I do it. That voice just goes away entirely. Well, I do it on more of a meta level with those production calendars where like I want to be working on a field guide all the time. I mean, that's kind of the thing I love doing the most. But, you know, I also have this second career that I have to manage. And the stuff that was going on with legal at this time of year is really important. So by moving the production calendar for field guides back a week and a half and just saying,

OK, for the next week and a half, I'm going to get all this legal stuff done. I didn't feel guilty about not having that three-hour block running every day to get all this field guide work done because I knew I was working on something equally important and that there was light at the end of the tunnel and I'd get back to where I wanted to be at that time. And by having those production calendars and those all-day events just run across the top of the screen, it's great. It really does kind of satisfy that little voice in a different way. It allows you to manage the ebbs and flows too. That's really something that we haven't spent a whole lot of time talking about in this particular episode, but we have talked a lot about is just how your plans are going to get messed up. And when it happens, don't freak out. Don't

think that you're terrible at this. The more that you do it, the more realistic your plans will end up being and the less changes there is going to be, but there is always going to be changes that will come and just learn to roll with them. That's really where the analog part of my planning process comes in. Yeah, but just to emphasize that point,

if you create a block next Tuesday to do that thing, and next Tuesday you wake up and your kid is sick, or one of your important clients calls with a big emergency, and you have to move it back a day or two, there should be zero guilt involved with it. That is not breaking a promise to yourself. That's just dealing with the ebbs and flows of life. And that's okay.

Cause you're still going to do it at that time. You don't need to treat this stuff. Like it's stetched in stone. You can move it around as necessary, but it sure is nice when you don't have to, you know, but, but,

and, and most often I do not have to move things around. I'm usually pretty good at planning it out. But when I do, I don't feel bad about it because I'm still making a commitment and it's going to get done at some point. And in terms of technology for all this calendar stuff, I, you know, the main place I run calendars is on my iMac. And I have extra monitors. So I've got like a monitor to the right. It's a widescreen monitor turned on its end.

So it's vertical. And the top half of the right monitor next to my iMac is always the calendar app. That's the only thing that goes in that space. And it's there all day. Usually I have it displaying week view, but sometimes it's a month view. But, you know, you can jump between them as you need. And then the other thing I do is I run Fantastical on the main screen of my iMac.

And it's one of the only full screen apps I use. But it's because Fantastical has this great view where they show you the next two weeks in vertical days. And if you have a 27-inch monitor and you stretch the next 14 days out over that, it's very readable. And all I have to do is swipe with four fingers, you know, using the magic of the Macintosh to get to that calendar. And that's the main way of calendar. So basically you have two wall calendars, one digital and one analog.

Well, I mean, the wall calendar is the whole year, whereas the digital one, the year view doesn't work digitally. It just doesn't. But I have two calendars often digitally and a third one hanging on the wall. But that's just how important this stuff is to me. And I don't look at the Fantastical calendar. It's not my main display. Cal calendar. It's not my main display. Actually, I, you know, I have a fourth calendar too, because I also have a wallpaper on my Mac that shows. Oh yeah. I've seen that wallpaper. Yeah.

I'll share. I think I posted, I'll share a link to it in the show notes, but it's the, I was thinking, I was thinking about taking a screenshot of my, you know, my big calendar and I decided that just was too ugly. So I just made a thing, an OmniGraffle, where it shows the next six months and it has two or three things I want to be doing during that month. And that's on my wallpaper. So anytime I don't have an app open, that's staring me right in the face too. So there's no escape for me or Mike, apparently, from our obligations. It's true. It's true. So I use BusyCal, not Fantastical, for a couple of reasons. Number one, BusyCal is in Setapp, and Setapp is amazing. Number two, I'm not sure actually Fantastical does this now,

but back in the day, BusyCal was the only one that allowed you to have a custom week view. You've got a two-week view, so it sounds like maybe they've added this now. But I like having eight days. So if I'm looking at this on a Wednesday, it's going to show me everything today, but it's also going to show through everything next Wednesday instead of a normal week view going from all day Wednesday to all day Tuesday. That makes any sense? Yeah. Yeah.

It's also got little touches like I was looking at it earlier today and I noticed that there's this shaded bar at the bottom, which it's looking at when the sun sets and it's showing basically when nighttime is. And because as we record this, this weekend is daylight savings. On Saturday, it like jumps up an hour. I'm like, well, that's kind of weird. What's going on? Oh, it's showing me when the sun sets,

which when you live in Wisconsin and in the winter, you've only got so many hours of daylight. That's kind of nice to know. I was going to say, isn't it just always dark? I thought. In January, it is. It's kind of nice to know. I was going to say, isn't it just always dark? In January it is. It's always winter, never Christmas. But yeah, and so I've just been

using it for a long time. I really enjoy it. It syncs with every calendar service that I've tried to use it with. iCloud and Google are probably the biggest ones. Well, people in the Apple ecosystem have an abundance of riches. I mean, I think BusyCal, Fantastical,

and even the Apple Calendar app are all good. Yes. They all do a good job at multiple time zone support. Fantastical, and I think BusyCal has this feature too, where I can put my time zone on the left and Mike's time zone on the right, which isn't a big deal. Mike and I are only two hours apart. but like when I deal with Rose and in Vienna, I just can never get in my head what time

it is there. And so I just have the, the application show me her time zone when I'm working on that calendar. And I didn't finish. I also have shared podcast calendars for each of my podcasts. And, um, I have a separate legal calendar. So I've got a bunch of them. Over the years, I've tried like a habits calendar where things I'm trying to build habits with. And, you know, what I do, I usually end up just putting those in the appropriate segment of our life. If I'm building a legal habit, I just put in the legal calendar or personal habit, I put in the personal calendar. But, but you know use whatever you need to make work for you on ios i access calendars more than i work on calendars but i like fantastical and and the

calendar app i really like fantastical for the parsing engine i kind of know the shorthand of it so i can just type a few things and it creates events with alarms in the right calendar and that's great um we won't go into in great detail here but automation is a great tool if you want to get better using calendars to get more focused like you can create an automation to automatically create those blocks if you know what they are and if you're interested in that at all i would recommend automators episode one the very first episode of the automators i did with rose was all about calendar automation. And it's got only easier with the new shortcuts. So there's a lot of technology out there. But something I'm interested in talking to you about, Mike,

because I know it's kind of new for you, is analog calendars. So let's talk about that next. So let's talk about that next. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Blinkist. Read over 3,000 plus books in 15 minutes or less. Start your seven-day free trial. Just go to Blinkist.com slash focused. So what is Blinkist, right? For me, it's a solution to a time management problem.

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addition to all these digital tools have strayed into the analog world for our calendars you want to talk about that yes yes i do uh before i do that actually i You want to talk about that? Yes. Yes, I do. Before I do that, actually, I do want to chime in real quickly. You mentioned Fantastical for iOS. I also use Fantastical on iOS. It is by far the best iOS calendar app that I have used. And I use that when I am on the go and I'm making an appointment, like I have to bring my car in for an oil change, and does this time work? No. How about this time? Okay, we nail that down. And then I'll quick use the natural language to just add something to my personal calendar. But when I start the process of planning my day, I do it actually the day before. And this is something that you and I have talked

a little bit about, something I've been experimenting with for a couple of weeks now, kind of tying back to the thing that we hit on a little bit earlier about how plans are going to get messed up, right? So I, at the end of my workday now, have a shutdown routine where part of that is as I'm emptying my inboxes, as I'm closing all of my browser tabs, and all of the things that I did not get done yet are still front of mind. And I am going to, at that point, plan my day using the custom template that I've designed. And I do that in Good good notes. So that part is the same other than I'm not doing it the night before or the morning of. I am doing it at the end of my day. And the reason that I'm doing it at the end of my day is that we talked a little bit earlier about how you've got

a bunch of motivation at the beginning of your day. At the end of your day, you're kind of beat up. And so I feel like that's the best time to think about what you're going to do the next day is when you're tired, because you've minimized the chances that you're going to overcommit to stuff. Whereas at the beginning of the day, you're freshest. That's kind of the whole idea behind eating your frog, right? Is that that's when you've got the most mental resources available to you. So go ahead and tackle the hardest thing you got to do. Not a great time to actually plan out the things that you're going to do because you project that you're going to

feel like that the entire day and really you're not going to. Yeah, it's like it's key time for me. The morning hours are when I'm most alert. So that's golden. I don't want to waste that time figuring out what I'm going to do from OmniFocus. I want to spend that time actually doing the hard stuff. Right, exactly. So the task manager, this is something I posted about this in the forum too, because someone had asked a question along these lines of how do you use a task manager in your analog planning system? I kind of got this revelation from looking at a video that Sean Blanc had posted as part

of his All the Things course. system. I kind of got this revelation from looking at a video that Sean Blanc had posted as part of his All the Things course. And he defined the task manager as the brain and his paper list as the boss. Okay, I liked that idea of having the list that you create being the boss. And the task management does the heavy lifting for you and shows you the things that you need to do, filters those things to the top, and then, okay, yeah, I should figure out when I'm going to do those. The problem for me has always been that I've worked with different companies and organizations that have managed tasks in different places. And no matter what task manager I used personally, it was never the single source of truth. So I could use my own personal task management system to filter the things that are important to me. And those are

things, again, big rocks that I want to prioritize, right? So at the end of the day, I'm going to put those things in my plan and inside of my custom planning template in GoodNotes. And then I am going to, because I've wrote those things down, walk away from all of the things that maybe I didn't get to today. That allows me to kind of just check the box, turn the page and not think about those things

until the next day. At the beginning of the next day though, what I do is I use a fancy fountain pen, which I blame you for, you and Joe Buelig. You're welcome. And a paper notebook. And I just write out by hand three things that I want to get done today. And that may be some of the things that are on my daily plan, that daily plan may have changed significantly because at the same time, I'm also checking in to Basecamp and seeing if there's anything that is really urgent for me to help the team out with.

Something that just needs to get done that could derail my entire day. And because I did it the day before, it's kind of like it gives me permission for that thing to be wrong. I still do my best to make that thing accurate. And I also have a section in there where taking the idea of like the biological prime time, I've got that shaded my hours from 9, 10, and 11 a.m. Those are kind of my biological prime time. And that's where I'm going to try and put the most important thing that I have to get done during that day. So I'll use that when I sit down to do my work in the morning. But I find a lot of joy through the additional filtering step of creating a much shorter list by hand

using a fancy pen. And by the time I'm done with that, I'm off to the races. Yeah. So that's kind of my process at the moment. I'm sure it's still going to evolve, but I'm really enjoying it. All this stuff changes over time. And I have been doing the analog thing as a supplement to digital now for over a year or so. And like at some point I was looking at, well, do I really want to do anything analog with applications like GoodNotes and the Apple Pencil? You know, there's a case to be made. This isn't necessary. But ultimately I found that the, because I do so much digital stuff, separating myself, actually in my office, I have two desks. I have an analog desk and a digital desk, but separating myself from the digital for that process, that last step of planning

actually helped me kind of like get more perspective on it. And the amount of time it takes to write it down in addition to having it into your digital systems is trivial compared to the amount of time that I waste every day. So it really is not a big deal to take that extra step. And there's something to be said for me, at least, with the way I do it in the afternoon. There's a whole bunch of stuff I do in the shutdown, but part of it is this daily plan. There's something to be said by waking up in the morning, opening up my binder, my notebook here, and saying, okay, here's the marching orders for today. Get to work. And it just, it just works for me. Something I do on the daily list that I didn't hear you do

is I have a, I've been using the Levenger disk system now for a while. And I have the punch, you know, where you can just take a piece of paper and punch it. So I bought some, that's, I think it's like 32-pound printer paper, very thick paper. And I made a form, an omni-graffle, that basically splits the day into three vertical columns. So the first column, and between the first two columns, it's got the hours listed from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. And just a horizontal line under each number. So, and the left column is the plan. And with the term I use on the right column, it is the day.

So when this is the plan, when this is the day. So the night before, I fill out that left column with the plan. You know, what are the blocks going to be? And then as I go through the day, I log what actually happened with the day. Sometimes I'm close. Sometimes I'm not. You know, and then that final right column is where I write down just the few things that got surfaced out of OmniFocus that I'm actually going to work on.

And even then, it's a shorthand version. So like if I have four things I'm going to do for the Smith client, it just says Smith client. It doesn't say each thing. I don't spend a lot of time like because I have the details in OmniFocus if I need them. I just need kind of the trigger word to get working on that. And then every day I have the accountability of looking at what was my plan versus what did I do? That solves a couple of problems for me. The first was I was very bad at estimating time. So if I plan that it's

going to take an hour, you'll see I have blocked out an hour. And then I look at the actual day, and it took three hours. That's like a feedback loop for me saying, okay, next time I do something like this, I need to account for more time. Because as soon as I make a bad time estimate, the wheels fall off, everything breaks, because the stuff I'd planned to do isn't going to get done because it took longer than i thought if i'd been more realistic at the front end then the day would have gone better and i would have been more realistic and maybe i wouldn't have done that three-hour thing because it's not as important as something else but i thought i could squeeze it into one hour so i put it in i mean it's just like like i said it's a feedback loop for you

to get better at this stuff and then the other piece of this is that right column where I wrote down the Smith client and the other things I was going to do. Anything that's not checked off, I have to acknowledge that I didn't check them off. And then you ask yourself, well, why did I give myself that if I didn't have time to do it? And so as time goes by, you get better at this. And there's more I do with the journaling, but that's kind of the calendaring element of logging and planning the day. The other piece I do is I do have a monthly paper calendar, like the whole month in one day. And I just kind of have big items on there, you know, like recording dates and dentist appointments and things like that. And sometimes I've got that in my digital calendar.

Frankly, I look at it in the digital calendar more than I do on the paper one. But if I'm sitting with a client and they want to schedule a meeting or something, I can look at that real quick to see what days are good. Sure. So quick question. You mentioned you have the plan and then you document how long things actually took. So when you book an hour for something and then it takes three hours,

you have that documented. Do you have specific ways to go back and reference that later? And how often do you do that? So let's say you created a task for a certain activity type and you recognize in the moment that this took way longer than you

thought? Do you, I guess, I've tried to do that sort of thing in the past. And what happens for me is I forget about it. And there's no quick way for that to be surfaced the next time that I'm going to schedule that same sort of activity. Maybe it's three months into the future. And I'll have forgotten how bad I was at that, at that particular moment. So how do you surface that and remind yourself, oh yeah, you're not as hot at this as you thought you were? I see general trends and most of the stuff I do from a legal perspective isn't the same. It changes all the time, but I get a better idea. I mean, what I learned from it a lot of times, if I'm consistently underestimating,

then I start stretching out my estimates. I don't look at it as like, oh, I did something just like this four months ago. Let me go back and see how long it took. I don't really do that. But I think intuitively, as I see daily errors, then I start adjusting for it. And frankly, if you're thinking about doing this, I would recommend, like I said, 150% earlier, maybe 200%. if you're thinking about doing this, I would recommend, like I said, 150% earlier, maybe 200%, because the other thing that comes with this, if you're going to do an hour and a half of focused work, you're going to be spent at the end of that. So if you block two hours, give yourself a reward,

you know, go take a walk or, you know, watch a little TV for a few minutes, you know, so to break out two hours. And if it takes an hour and a half, give yourself a little break. Because if you did an hour and a half of solid work, that's more work than most people do in an entire day. So you're okay to take a half hour off, go meditate, whatever, you know? Yeah, the thing for me, kind of where I'm at with this is by outlining the plan at the end of the day, that's really all of the direction that I want to give to my workday or my day period because I have more than just my workday on there. The next day, I'm trying to create more flexibility for myself. Because I am the type of person who, if I schedule something, I will just get into the mode where this is the way things happen. They have to be this way.

And what I'm recognizing is that the more I work with other people and the more things that are outside of my control influence what I'm able to do with those time blocks, the more frustrated I find myself, the less people want to be around me. So I'm trying to build in a system that allows me to kind of just roll with the punches more. I need something that flows with change is what I wrote in the page that I sent you as I was thinking through this process and what I'm hoping to get from this. Well, one of the ways I deal with that, let's say I've got the perfect plan,

and then I have a client call with an emergency that's just going to take the whole day. I will take the blocks that were destined for that day, and I will move them to the very early hours of the next day. So like if I had planned two hours for the Smith contract, but the Jones client calls, I need the whole day for that. I will move that two hour block to like 2 a.m. for the next morning. And this is why I have a calendar block for shutdown that is sacred because I have to deal with that by the end of the day. So when I get to the end of the day, I'll see that block.

Because if I'm obviously not going to do it at 2 a.m., I'll say, okay, there is a pending item. And I will figure out where it goes when I do the shutdown and planning for the next day. It may go the next day. It may go three days from now. I don't know when I'm going to decide it fits. But I had to move it. I don't want to delete it because it's still something that needs to get done.

But I don't try and plan that at the moment. When an emergency comes up, I just get rid of it from the calendar by pushing it to the next day. And it's just like managing your tasks at the end of the day as opposed to managing them one by one as they come in. I do the same thing with calendar events.

Gotcha. Okay. I guess the best way I can think to describe this, as much as I mentioned at the beginning of how email is the to-do list that other people can write on, and you need to carve out the time for the things that are important to you. I have erred too much in that direction of just building the barriers and saying, no, this is the way things are going to be. Just some of the things that I'm involved with right now, I need to be available to help people with stuff. And I've signed up for that. I'm okay with that, But I just need to have

a system which allows me the flexibility to just completely chuck the plan, even though I created the plan to the best of my ability the day before. That's kind of how I view this. The brain is the task management system that surfaces the things that I want to do. I use those as I am planning my day for tomorrow inside of GoodNotes. That's basically my best guess on how I would spend my time if it was completely up to me. And that's great. By the time the morning comes around, there's enough space there. It's kind of like it's given me permission for that thing to be completely wrong. And by the time I check Basecamp and see what everybody else needs help with, it may be completely wrong. And by the time I check Basecamp and see what everybody else needs help with, it may be completely wrong. And that's okay. Just having

done it the night before, I feel like it's not a waste. I feel like I can crank through that in a couple of minutes because it's going to change by tomorrow anyway. There's enough time there where it gives me the ability or the maybe the grace maybe or the freedom to have it be incorrect. Whereas before, if I was doing it the night before or even the morning of, it was kind of like, okay, here's the plan. Now we got to roll with this. And just for me personally, stage of my life, I guess, I'm kind of realizing that for me, Chris Bailey talked about this in the productivity project,

how people are the reason for productivity. And I need to function a little bit less like a machine and bring more of a human element to it. So I use the calendars as tools, again, to provide the structure. But really, for me, the really important thing is knowing that at any given moment, I can just chuck the whole thing. Because I've got the system in place to fall back on when the crisis is diverted,

in place to fall back on when the crisis is diverted, you know, or whatever it is that I needed to jump in and help with has been solved. But I don't know, just writing it down and it's like it gets simpler as it goes, where we've got the task management system, then we've got the simple one-page plan. And by the time I get to the morning, it's literally a handwritten list of three things that I'm going to do. And I'm trying to get that down even to one with the highlight from Jake Knapp and John Zyrowski's Make Time. But I feel like this whole filtering process has been healthy for me. No, and I think it's something that you have to go through in order to get down to the one to three things.

You can't just pull that out of a hat. An interesting thing for me was I had kind of the exact opposite problem as you in that for so long, and it's part of it is an identity thing. I mean, for so long, the only way I paid for my shoes was being a lawyer. And when I left the firm and started my own small firm, you know, my own little solo practice, I also wanted to make these field guides, which is one of the biggest passions of my life. I mean, I know that sounds stupid and nerdy, but it is very fulfilling to me. And, but I always let that take a backseat to legal And legal is like the water tap, you know, in the big rock story. It just constantly throwing things at you. I just never could make time to do

the thing that I really, really wanted to be doing. And so I just had to be kind of robotic about it and just say, no, that time is taken. And when somebody calls me at the last minute and they say, well, I need you to do this. I'm like, okay, well, I won't be able to do it tomorrow afternoon because in my head, I don't tell them this, but I've already blocked time for field guides, but I will be able to do it tomorrow afternoon. And almost, if not every time they'd say, oh, that's fine. But before I wouldn't, in my head, I thought that was a huge problem, and I just would not make time for the important things. So I kind of had the opposite problem as you, and I still suffer from that. It's still easy for me to fall back into those habits.

So the calendar blocking and all this stuff is really something that helps me make the main thing the main thing. something that helps me make the main thing, the main thing. Yeah. Going all the way back to the beginning, you know, it's a support system to help keep the wheels from falling off. And that's really all of this stuff is we know what we're supposed to do. We can define what exactly that is, but we have trouble following through and actually doing it. So we're going to trick our monkey brain into doing the right thing at the right time. And you're listening to this saying, man, you guys just spent an hour and a half talking about this. It sounds like so much work and such a waste of time to spend all the time managing all this stuff. I know that I tell myself that every once in a while

is an excuse not to do it. What I can tell you is I've run time tracking on this and it is a trivial amount of time to set this stuff up with a massive payoff. I mean, in terms of bang for your buck, I don't think there's any better way to spend your time. If you haven't tried it, I recommend trying it. Yep, definitely. Let's talk about some tips and potential pitfalls. Let's talk about some tips and potential pitfalls. Sure. So a couple things to take away from this. The first thing I would say is plan every day. It doesn't have to be planned on your big New Year calendar that you're going to want to get.

get. But whether it's a form in GoodNotes or an actual calendar or something like BusyCal or Fantastical, make sure that you're putting the important time blocks on your calendar. Make sure that you're answering the questions, am I going to do this thing? And then when am I going to do this thing? And prioritizing the time to make those things happen doesn't guarantee that it's going to work, but it'll definitely increase the likelihood of it happening. Another tip I would give is if you do one thing and it works, that doesn't mean you should schedule eight hours of it the next day. Yeah. Yeah. You've got limits, you know. Start small and work your way up slow. Yeah, that's a big mistake a lot of people can make at the beginning

is over-scheduling yourself. So, yeah, knowing your limits, very important. Kind of related to that, making sure that you schedule more time than you think you'll need. I liked your ground rule of 150% time estimate, although maybe you need a little bit more. At a minimum. Yeah. Maybe you need more than that as you start off. Don't feel bad about saying this thing is going to take a lot longer than your brain is telling you when you put it on there,

because your brain in the moment is going to be wrong. Yeah. And that thing I do at the end of the day with the shutdown where I look at how much time it actually took, that middle column on my paper notebook is a good feedback for me to see how well I'm doing at that. And I still make mistakes all the time, usually by underestimating. I mean, I think this is something that as humans, we're just terrible at. estimating. I mean, I think this is something that as humans, we're just terrible at. Yep, definitely. Which kind of leads into the next point on here, the feedback loop on your time estimates. I think that's important. Like I said, I kind of struggle with this one a little bit. I think that this is definitely something that you need to do for things that you're new

with. It's definitely worth considering, okay, how much time do I think this is going to take and how much time does it actually take? There's different ways you could implement that. You could use a time tracking app like Timing, which has been a sponsor of this show. I love that app because it'll give you granular data on not even the applications that you use, but for Ulysses, for example, it'll show you the specific sheets that you were working on. So if you set aside, for me, for example, two hours to write an article

and it takes you four, you've got that data and that's valuable to know. It's also, for me, a benefit of that is it just documents the day. And I don't rarely go back and look at it, but if I need to, it's there. Mike had a good suggestion, Schedule time for fun stuff. I mean, if you're going to go to all this effort, make sure

you carve out time for the joy as well. Yeah. So don't make your entire life feel like a job by putting on just the things that you have to do and then going from thing to thing to thing because your calendar is going to fill up. I forget what the rule is, but there's actually like a law that says that work expands to fill the time that you give it. Well, that's going to happen with your calendar too. So put the fun stuff on there, put it on there first, and then you may find that you're looking forward to the things on your calendar instead of trying to avoid them. The way I do this generally is if there's fun stuff on a weekday, it gets put in as a block. But I usually try to stop the blocks by like six o'clock. And in the evenings, I can hang out with

the kids, you know, hang out with my wife, watch TV, do whatever. And I really try not to have blocks on weekends. But occasionally I do because life is hard. Yep. Something else I would say, if you try this out, you're going to have some success. You're going to have some failures. You eventually fall off the horse. You just have to get back on. I mean, I do it all the time. I had two or three days last week where I didn't do any shutdown. I just, I got busy. I talked earlier in the show, I was busy on this minutes project for a bunch of corporate clients. I just worked through the day for like three days and I didn't, I did a lousy job of planning and a lousy job of journaling. But, you know, I realized,

hey, that was dumb. And then, you know, one day I woke up and started doing it again. Yep. It's okay. We all do that. There's one big takeaway from Focus. It's that we all stink at this stuff. It's okay. All right.

Well, that was a lot on calendaring. I hope we helped you out. We're going to have, obviously, the posts in the forum. If you want to go check it out, go over to talk.macpowerusers.com, and there is a forum there for the Focus podcast. I'd love to hear your thoughts on calendaring and how you help it use calendaring to stay focused and your ideas. It's a great conversation to have.

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