Focused - 90: Habits > Goals

Episode Date: January 7, 2020

David and Mike are not fans of New Year's resolutions but they are fans of creating new habits.

Welcome to Focused, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Well, happy new year, my friend. I hope you're doing well. Happy new year to you as well. I am doing well. And happy Focusedversary. It's about one year ago we rebranded this show

and took a more intentional approach towards getting things done. And it's been a lot of fun. We were talking before we turned the microphones on that both of us are just real happy with the way the show's coming out. It's such a strange productivity show that we make here because we're not going to give you the three easy ways to live your life and become rich, you know, like most of the productivity podcasts do. We're here on a journey, kind of sharing our thoughts, and we do try to bring real ideas to the table. So you leave every show with something you can do, but we don't have all the answers either. And if you're listening to the show, I'd like to ask you to try and share it with some of your friends, because I feel like we don't really attract the normal productivity people and the people that are just looking for, I guess you'd say, thirsty people that want to drink salt water. We're not looking for that.

We're looking for people that actually want to make change. And if you know someone like that, we'd appreciate it if you shared that. Absolutely. appreciate it if you shared that. Absolutely. Yeah, it's interesting because the people who are looking for the productivity stuff are typically the people, like you mentioned, who are trying to squeeze just a little bit more efficiency out of their day. They want to get things done a little bit faster so they can do more things and instantly fill that space. But it's kind of been a theme I've seen over the last couple of years, but I really think it kind of hit a fevered pitch this last year of the slowing down, the intentionality, the

Cal Newport deep work, Greg McKeown, essentialism. Like that seems to be a message that's really resonating with people. And so focus isn't going to be for everybody. And that's okay because the people who really want to be more effective, who really want to make an impact in the areas that they want to make an impact in and be intentional about the type of legacy that they're going to leave, that's who we want to help. So hopefully that's what people are getting out of the show.

Yeah. So leave a review, share it with a friend, and we are going to keep making focus as long as you'll keep listening. This is a new year, and I wanted to talk a little bit about new year, especially because this year I feel it more intensely because it's only a new year. It's a new decade. I know personally for me, Mike, it resulted in me doing kind of my annual review, which I usually do on my birthday. I did it on New Year's Day this year because I just, I think it was kind of the weight of the new decade. I'm like, okay, let me stop and take a minute to check how things

are going here and what I can change. Yeah. Honestly, that's the process that a lot of people go through, but they typically don't dig deep enough, in my opinion. So if we have this show called Focus, we kind of have to tackle this idea of the New Year's resolutions and the problems with that approach. Because I see it every single year. I have developed a fairly regular exercise routine. So the gym example is the one that really sticks out to me because beginning of the year, all of a sudden there's a ton more people in there and it's kind of annoying for the regulars like me because now all of a sudden I've got to wait

for the machines that I typically use. But I also know that it's only a couple of weeks before the motivation dies down and life happens. People get punched in the mouth and they don't have enough staying power to stick with it. And pretty much it's back to the regulars at that point. And it doesn't have to be that way. Yeah, my gym, you have to book your time.

And I always, like, with January, I'm booking. I booked it real early because I know it's going to be super crowded for a week or two, like you said. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, just the whole idea of New Year's resolutions, I think it's a, what's the saying? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I mean, it's a great idea, but I think the real problem with a resolution

is that generally a resolution is a stated result. Like I am going to lose 20 pounds or I am going to, you know, work, you know, it's a, you look at something and you talk about a resolution as a conclusion. And I think a lot of people, you know, that's great, but you don't, you don't build a mechanism to get to that that finish line and so a resolution is something that that really doesn't have a lot of impact for most people yeah and kind of this is fresh in my mind because i recently read the infinite game by simon cynic and he talks about the two different types of games. There are finite games and there are infinite games. Finite games are exactly what they sound like. They are games that have a specific ending point. And a lot of those types of games, you know who the players are, you know

exactly what the rules are, and you know exactly when the game ends. That is, to me, a lot like New Year's resolutions or even goals. I put in the outline why I think goals are dumb. As I read this book, I realized that goals can only take you so far because goals have a specific ending point. They have, by definition, they are able to be completed. And I've kind of experienced this myself because I set a goal a couple of years ago to run a half marathon, even though I wasn't a runner at the time. That was an appropriate goal for me at the time because it forced me to stretch myself. But I remember crossing the finish line, feeling great about running my half marathon

and then immediately thinking, now what? It's like, was that it? The year and a half of training culminated in this? There's got to be more to it. And that's where habits, I think, can help. Habits, in my opinion, are more like the infinite game because you're not worried about achieving a certain outcome. It's just something that you would do regardless of whether you ever achieved an outcome. New Year's resolutions fall a lot more into the first camp. Typically, they're like, I want to lose 15 pounds. I want to exercise more regularly. And actually,

the 15 pounds example, that's a better one out of the ones that I've heard because it's at least specific. A lot of New Year's resolutions are just like, I want to get in better shape. Well, what in the world does that mean? What does it look like? And an outcome can only motivate you so much. It'd be a lot better if you were able to identify yourself as the type of person who exercises regularly. And then you're just like, yeah, this is what I do. I build it into my daily routine. I show up every day. I enjoy this. If you can make it something that you enjoy, then you're much more likely to stick with it. Yeah. So for productivity people who talk about this stuff, it's very easy to say, you know, New Year's resolutions are dumb. Don't do them.

You'll never succeed. But I do think we should take a minute to just unpack the motivation behind them. You know, the idea of this renewing, you know, and it's silly because it's just another day on the calendar, you know. of this renewing, you know, and it's silly because it's just another day on the calendar, you know, but at the same time, if there's anything that motivates you to stop and, you know, take your head up from what you're doing, the grind of every day and look at yourself and say, oh, there are some places I would like to make change. I think that's a good sentiment to have, you know, and if you're feeling that, that's great. I think the problem is, like Mike was saying, I think a resolution is you're giving yourself a really tough hill to

climb because it doesn't really give you the tools you need to be more in shape or to be better at your job or whatever it is that you want to do better. You've got to turn it into actionable items. You've got to turn it into new habits. And that's really the goal for the show today is we want to talk about, instead of having New Year's resolutions, maybe changing the dialogue around picking up some new habits while you're feeling like making change. New Year's resolutions are kind of the wrong approach, but looking at the right problem. My dad has a saying that will stick with me forever, I'm sure. It's that when pain is sufficient, change will come. So a lot of the motivation behind New Year's resolutions is I'm unhappy with the way that things currently are. I want to make a change in this particular

area of my life. But the way that that change gets played out, the more effective way is not to set the goal, like I said. Because even for somebody like me who set the goal of running the half marathon and then achieved it, you instantly experience a letdown in the motivation to keep going with it. It's like, okay, I checked the box. Now what do I do? So habits are not outcome-based like goals are. They are identity-based. And James Clear talks a lot about this. We'll get into that later on in the episode here. But if you can identify with the type of person that you want to become, that is the real key to making this stuff stick. Because you can plan everything out perfectly and you can say, like I did, I'm going to

run this half marathon on this date and here's my whole training schedule leading up to that point. And the problem with those plans a lot of times is that everything does not go exactly according to plan. The enemy gets a vote too. And the enemy in this case is any sort of chaos, anything outside of your control that is going to be vying for your time and your attention. Those things will happen. If you've got kids at home, they're going to get sick. If you have a boss who's always popping into your office, you can almost guarantee that if you've got kids at home, they're going to get sick. If you have a boss who's always popping into your office, you can almost guarantee that if you've got a project deadline and you're trying

to figure out how you're going to get things done, you think, okay, I've got this plan, it's going to work. You can almost count on there's going to be some additional stuff that's going to show up on your radar. And if we recognize that that's going to happen, we're in a much better place, especially emotionally, I would argue, to deal with that stuff. You don't have to get upset when something happens because this is just the way it is. The obstacle is the way, as Ryan Holiday would say. So don't try to associate, I'm going to drop 15 pounds by this date. Instead, say, I'm going to cultivate a healthy lifestyle.

I'm going to become a healthy individual. I'm going to identify with somebody who goes to the gym on a regular basis. to become a healthy individual. I'm going to identify with somebody who goes to the gym on a regular basis. And as you do that, then when you're not worried about the scoreboard, which in the gym example is looking in the mirror and seeing if you've lost the weight yet, because you go for several weeks and you don't see any changes. Maybe you step on the scale and you don't even see any changes. But if you do it long enough and you do it consistently enough, then the compound effect kicks in and you will produce those results that you're looking for. But when you're so focused on the goal or the outcome, or I have to achieve this score, I have to win this game, you know, it's a lot easier to get

discouraged when something unexpected happens and you start to get even a little bit off track. And I want to talk about that in a minute. But before we get there, I want to talk a little bit about if you're feeling this, you know, this new year thing, this new decade thing is inside you, you want to make some change, you want to change some habits. How do you figure out what it is actually you want to work on? Sure. I mean, it's not that easy. I mean, we all know the usual suspects, you know, I'm going to be healthier, I'm going to go to the gym, I'm going to lose weight, I'm going to meditate, I'm going, you know, everybody's got the, you know, the usual suspects. You know, I'm going to be healthier. I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to lose weight. I'm going to meditate. I'm going, you know, everybody's got the, you know, the usual suspects.

But I think one of the things you need to do here is not just pick up something and say, this is what I'm going to change now. I think you need to have some introspection, spend some time looking at yourself and think about really what it is you want to change. and think about really what it is you want to change. Absolutely. And give yourself some time and some space to do this. So a couple of specific resources I'll throw out there. I mentioned previously, I've got my own personal retreat workbook that I go through.

But I also recently have gone through this myself using Sean Blanc's Plan Your Year Workbook. And there's a lot of different things out there that you could use, but I find it helpful. And I want to mention these things specifically because I think for a lot of people, it can be intimidating to be alone with your thoughts. You sit down and you say, okay, I'm going to just think about what areas I want to change in my life without any sort of direction or guardrails, any sort of framework to kind of guide your thinking in a specific direction is a little bit intimidating. And it's usually not very long before you just want to throw in

the towel and you want to quit. But because I've gone through both of those things specifically before this year, I've kind of landed on some things for myself, which we'll get into later in the episode here. I've kind of got two words that are going to be my themes for the year. And I think that you do have to spend a fair amount of time doing some introspection before you really land on those things. Maybe you find yourself in a place where you know that there's this one thing that's causing me a lot of pain in my life, and I just want to fix that thing. That's essentially what I do. And if you know that, great. But in my experience, usually you have to dig a little bit deeper than just whatever happens to appear on the surface before you really can figure out what

those things are. And we're going to talk about our kind of experiences with this later. But just to give you an idea, one of the things I did on New Year's Day this year was I sat down with a piece of paper, actually several pieces of paper. And for me, it's kind of boiled down to there are four areas of my life that I kind of think about. I think about my role as a father, husband, you know, and friend. Can I group those together? Other people. How am I taking care of other people that are in my life? I think about myself as Max Barkey.

How am I taking care of what I do as Max Barkey? I think of myself as a lawyer. How am I doing as a lawyer? And then how am I doing in terms of self-care? How am I doing in terms of taking care of myself? And for each one of those, I just sit down and say, you know, in the last whatever period of time, and you can do this on a monthly, quarterly, yearly basis, whatever, but you know, what went well? And I sit down and I, I give pat myself on the back for a little while, I come up with a list of things that went well. And then I start saying, well, what didn't go well?

You know, what went poorly or had problems? And I surface things out of my brain in this process that I would not have thought of otherwise. You know, every time I do this exercise, it takes several hours. The reason, even though I'm, you know, I wrote a book called Paperless, and even though I am well known for being a digital guy, I like doing this with a pen and paper because it intentionally slows me down. I can type or dictate much faster than I can write with a pen. And I try to write in a way that I can read it later, you know, so, but that intentional slowdown kind of lets the gears grind a bit.

And going through that process, every time I do that, I come out with much more knowledge of what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong than I would have had otherwise. And I think if you're going to engage in this process, that would be a great way to start. Yeah, slow down to speed up, definitely. That's kind of at the heart of what we're talking about the very beginning, the effectiveness over the efficiency. You force yourself to go slower, but that's the thing that provides the clarity. I'm the same way. I use a fancy pen and my Barenfig notebook for a lot of the stuff that I did. And that does a couple of things. Number one,

it provides a little bit of joy in the journey. But number two, like you said, it forces you to slow down. And when you couple that with asking the right questions, I feel like you've really got something powerful regardless of what you decide are the correct questions. You can decide for yourself. But I think the ones that you mentioned already are a great place to start. Basically, what's going well? What could go better? I've got a couple questions that I ask as part of my personal retreat, where what should I start doing? What should I stop doing? What should I keep doing? And I force myself every single time to pick

something to stop doing because the tendency is as soon as you've got a little bit of margin to fill it with something. And I don't want to do that. I want to be able to give my very best to the things that I have decided are important. And I have come to terms and come to peace with the fact that I cannot do everything. David Allen, I think he's the one who said, you can do anything, but you can't do everything. The more I progress in my own productivity journey, the more I realize that that is true. And the more things that I say no to, the more effective I am able to be in the things that I say yes to. That's important to me. And that kind of gets back to this whole goals and habits thing too, because with a lot of goals, you think about some sort of winning,

some sort of conquest. I'm going to conquer this thing. I'm going to achieve this thing. And that's because goals tend to be this sort of pass fail. You either do it or you don't. And I found this tweet by Jason Freed, and I don't agree with everything Jason Freed does, but this one I thought was really good. He says, business Freed, and I don't agree with everything Jason Freed does, but this one I thought was really good. He says, business is not war. You don't target customers. You don't fight for talent. You don't capture a market. You don't hire headhunters. You don't pick your battles. You don't make a killing. He says, eschew the language of war. Put your mind in a positive place. When I read that, I'm like, this totally applies to personal productivity as well. It's not just business. It's not just achieving the

goals. I think habits are a better way to maintain that positive approach to the things that you do. And ultimately, in the long run, that's going to allow you to be more effective and have a bigger impact in the things that are important. Because as you go, you create more and more motivation to do the thing. It's not like, oh, I'm almost at the finish line and pretty soon I can quit. It's more like I get to do this for the rest of my life. Awesome. Yeah. But I do think, like I said, that the starting point is some reflection. It is not just like I'm going to sit here and brainstorm a couple ideas and then I'm off to the races. By taking the time, and you don't have to do it with a pen and paper. Do it with a computer if you want.

Sit down and talk to your significant other for an hour about things that worked and didn't work. Find a method for you to get that out of your brain. Because once you finish that process, you are going to see things that you want to improve. And suddenly, figuring out what the habits are you want to work on will become obvious. And we're going to talk next about, you know, what do you do with that information? This episode of Focus is brought to you by Pingdom. Start monitoring your website performance and availability today and get instant alerts when an outage occurs or a site transaction fails. Use offer code FOCUSED to get 30% off through January 31.

So what is Pingdom? Well, Pingdom is a way to make sure your website stays on the internet. Do you have a website and does your website have a shopping cart, registration forms, or contact us pages? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you need Pingdom. Nobody wants their critical website transactions to fail. That means a bad experience for your users and could mean lost business for you. And what you really don't want is to get an email or see a Twitter notice telling you that your website is down. The good news is you can

set up that transaction monitoring with Pingdom. Transaction monitoring will alert you when a cart checkout form and login pages fails before they affect your customers and your business. So you'll know before anybody else does. Pingdom will let you know the moment any of these fail and whatever way is best for you, you can customize how you're alerted and who's alerted depending on the outage severity. Pingdom cares about your users having the smoothest site experience possible. And if disaster strikes, you'll be the first to know. It's super easy to get started. Go to pingdom.com slash relay FM right now for a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.

And when you sign up, use the code FOCUSED, F-U-O-C-U-S-E-D, at checkout to get a huge 30% off your first invoice. If you're running a website for your business, you need Pingdom. Go check it out. Let them know you heard about it here on the FOCUSED podcast. Thank you, Pingdom, from SolarWinds, for support of Focused and all of RelayFM. All right, Mike, so we've done some navel-gazing. We've got some ideas about things we want to change.

We've accepted that a resolution is probably a bad vehicle to create change, and we've got the listener on board. They want to try and change some habits. Let's talk about that. Sure. Well, the number one thing that I would add here as the place to start for probably most people, and this is not in the outline, but it came to me as we were having our discussion before the break, that typically you'd want to fix something that's broken in your life. You want to get rid of some pain that currently exists. How do you do that? The default tends to be, I am going to do X. So we talked about the exercise example. I'm going to exercise more regularly. You are going

to add exercise to your routine. The problem is that you only have so much time to work with. So if we're trying to figure out how we want to affect positive change in our lives, I would argue that the very first thing you should consider is not what can I add, but what can I remove? what can I remove? What is there that I am doing currently that is maybe contributing to the current state of things that I want to see the change happen in? So instead of an exercise, this is where the exercise example falls down because you can't really get in shape by not doing things as it pertains to exercise. But when it comes to getting a little bit more space, a little bit more calm, a little bit more emotional clarity or control, then removing things is absolutely the place to start.

You know, I just started listening over on Cortex. They're doing their yearly goal show. They do that every year. And I'm only about 10 or 15 minutes in, but that was a point that Gray made as well, is that starting with subtraction rather than addition is a great way to make some change in your life. Find things you can take out. Yep, absolutely. Then once you have the space and you then want to start implementing some positive changes, then you can start looking to add some things. But the first step, I would say, it should be, what can I remove? And then

what are the habits that you want to add back into your routine or your day-to-day? And again, habits are the way to do this. Not goals, not New Year's resolutions, because habits are more sustainable. They have intrinsic versus extrinsic value. What I mean by that is when you develop a journaling habit, for example, it becomes something that you want to do, not something that you have to do, if it's going to stick anyways. Probably the same thing for you, David, with meditation. You know, anything that started off as maybe this is something that I want to create eventually has to cross a threshold where instead of something that I have to do, it's something that I look forward to doing because I can see what it does in me. Not necessarily it produces X amount of units, so I'm that much, that percentage closer to my goal,

but I can see the fruit from this decision impacts who I become, not necessarily what I achieve. Does that make sense? Yeah, I can put that in the context of a real basic example. Last year, in 2019, I noticed that every time I went to my dresser drawers to get socks, underwear, t-shirts, whatever, it was a mess. And I could never find what I wanted. And I realized that I have too many t-shirts, too many socks, all this stuff. And we do laundry regularly in my house. I don't need 30 pairs of socks. And I just decided I don do laundry regularly in my house. I don't need, you know, 30 pairs of socks, right? So, and I just decided I don't want to do this anymore.

When I go to the dressers, I want to be able to find exactly what I need and get it and get out. And I want it to be nice and tidy. So I, you know, I did what nerds do. I watched some YouTube videos about the best way to organize your drawers, right? Because that's what you do. But then I did it. You know, I got rid of like half of the stuff, half of the t-shirts, half of the socks. I cleaned out a whole bunch of stuff. And then I have a practice. Once the

laundry's done, I immediately go and put it away. And I fold the socks and underwear a certain way in the t-shirts and everything is exactly as I want it at all times. And that was a practice for me for a while. You know, I had to remind myself, oh, laundry's done. I need to go do that right now. And now, um, I guess I'd started that maybe March of last year. Now it's just something I do. It's just part of me and my drawers are always organized. I know this sounds silly, right? You're listening, you're going like, who cares about Dave's underwear? But it's no longer a habit for me. I guess it is a habit, but it's no longer something I consciously think about. It's ingrained. And that to me is the beauty of this process is you start it with some intentionality, but after a while, it just becomes you. It just

becomes what you do. And then you can move on to another problem in your life. And this one is solved. And it feels great. And I would argue that that one actually started being solved even before you got to your sock drawer. Because I remember you sending me pictures of these custom foam inserts you put in your tool chest. Because you were already on the path, whether you recognize it at that point or not, doesn't really matter because you were already taking action along those lines, but you were becoming the type of person

whose drawers are organized. And you identified with that. So at that point, it's only a matter of time before the rest of the drawers get organized. That's the real key though. It's not, you're not viewing it as, well, I need to organize my drawer because if you just view it as something that you have to get done though it's it's not you're not viewing it as well i need to organize my drawer because if you just view it as something that you have to get done it's a goal it may be

organized for a little while but if you don't have the routine or the process or the habit that will sustain it because you don't you aren't really invested in it you don't really care that much it's not that long before that drawer isn't going to be organized anymore so that that switch has to be flipped no and i agree and it's not something it's not that long before that drawer isn't going to be organized anymore. So that switch has to be flipped. No, and I agree. And it's not something, it's not like particularly a point of pride for me, but it's just what I do. And it's just part of my being at this point.

And I feel like good habits have that result, you know, and, but, you know, the thing about habits is you're always making them, whether you're intentional about it or not. Like if you go down, you know, if you go to the refrigerator every hour and pull out a cookie, you're making a habit. You're probably not realizing it, but that's a habit, you know. So you've got, you know, the intentional habits you make are the better ones. And you might as well try and make them work for you instead of against you. Yeah, the intentional approach that applies not just to habits, but really everything.

We've talked about time tracking. We talk a lot about focus. I mean, these are all related to this idea of intentionality and being aware of whether how you want to spend your, how you want to spend your resources is how you actually spend your resources, whether that be time, attention, money, whatever it is. It could be intentionality for someone who wants a little bit more, a little bit more control over their finances could be a budget. Something that provides a little bit more intentionality for somebody who cares about their could be a budget. Something that provides a little bit more intentionality for somebody who cares about their time is a calendar. There's lots of different places that this can play out. It's not just the habits. But the big thing is to make sure that you

are the one applying the intentionality. Chris Bailey was on. I remember him saying that if you wanted to spend eight hours watching Netflix and you spent eight hours watching Netflix, then that was absolutely a productive use of your time. But if you don't mean to spend eight hours watching Netflix, if you intended to do something else instead and you got sucked into that, that's where there's a problem. And so to your point, your habits can be made intentionally or they can be made unintentionally, but your habits are the things that you repeatedly do. The more that you do them, the more they become ingrained. And for someone who's just becoming aware of their habits and they want to apply some intentional change, don't be discouraged

if it takes a little while because you've got a lot of stuff that you maybe have to disassemble first. But also, I think the positive note of this is you can change your habits. You can start that today, like every time you go to the fridge, rather than by getting a cookie out, getting a carrot out. And if you do that today and tomorrow, you have started a new habit. It's not necessarily ingrained yet. It's going to get there, but you've got to stick with it. It takes a certain amount of energy when you're starting new habits.

That's why I don't think you can do a lot at a time. Like when I hear people say, oh, it's the new year. I'm going to lose weight. I'm going to learn to meditate. I'm going to, like, they give me this laundry list of things they're going to do. I realize they're not going to do any of that stuff because. Nope, not happening. Yeah, you've got to take time, but you can change a habit.

And like Mike was saying earlier, a habit comes ingrained with the identity. It doesn't become a goal. It just becomes a being. It becomes an it. It's what you do. And that is the goal. One of the best things I did last year was I read the James Clear book called Atomic Habits. And if this stuff is at all interesting to you,

I recommend we'll put a link in the show notes. Just go buy that book. I think it's one of the best self-help books I've read in a long time. Absolutely. I completely agree with that. Going back to what you were saying about building the habits, I would add to that, don't be discouraged if it takes longer than 21 days, because it will take longer than 21 days. That's kind of the common myth, I think, that's out there is that it takes 21 days. Another common number that gets thrown around is 66 days. But on average, it's something like 197 days. I forget the exact number, but it's a lot longer than people think. So if you're trying to start something from scratch, and you're doing it for three weeks, and it doesn't become automatic at that point,

something from scratch and you're doing it for three weeks and it doesn't become automatic at that point that's that's just part of the process yeah and i think like looking for when is this habit ingrained you know at what point does it matt does the switch magically flip in my head that's really the wrong way to go about it anyway just think day to day am i doing it today like one of the things i'm doing with my fancy focused calendar, which are still available, by the way, you can still get those if you want. But the is I've this year, I'm putting some of my habit stuff I want to do, like I'll talk later about my big one that I'm working on right now, it's going to have a little tick mark on my daily on my wall calendar. So I can see for the whole year how I'm doing with that just by looking up from my desk. And I like the idea of some accountability on it.

But just really, I think the battle is one day to day. And don't worry about at what point is this going to be something I just do, you know, to go back to the silly underwear drawer. I don't know what point that became something that just happens. But now it just happens. You know, I'll put a YouTube video on when the laundry's done and get my drawers put in order. And it's just great. And I don't think about it consciously anymore. But there wasn't like a magical day when I woke up and said,

hey, that one's done. Now I can move on to something else. It doesn't work that way. Yeah, yeah. Maybe we should talk a little bit about the mechanics of habit formation here. You mentioned the James Clear book, which is amazing. But the one that people probably have heard of prior to that was the Charles Duhigg one, The Power of Habit. And he shares in that book, kind of the popular framework for habits, which is cue, routine, reward. And think of it as like this habit circle. So you've got a cue, which is the thing that triggers the habit loop. And then you've got the routine, which is the habit itself. And then that's reinforced when you get a reward at the end of the habit. My problem with this model has always been the automatic process from the cue to the routine, where it's almost the way that it's described. As soon as you see the cue, you have no choice but to follow through with the routine itself, which if you're trying to remove some bad habits, maybe you want to quit smoking this year, for example.

There is an element of truth to that, but James Clear adds an additional step, which I think is very, very important, and it shows that you still have a choice. His model, you've got the cue, but in between the cue and the routine is the craving. So there's four steps as opposed to three. And you cannot deny that in certain situations, there will be a cue and it will trigger a craving but you still have a choice at that point whether you're going to follow through with the routine and then obviously at the end if it's a positive habit you want to reinforce then you stick a reward on the end of it and it it helps it become more sticky but i think that's really important now obviously there's a whole bunch of other things at play in here. Willpower, for example, motivation. But the fact that you are experiencing a craving doesn't necessarily mean that you have to default to a certain behavior, whether that behavior is

good or bad. There's an element of choice that's involved here. But once you recognize that that exists, you can kind of play with some of these different pieces. And that's what James Clear does a great job of in his book as he explains the different laws that pertain to each of these different steps. He has different variations for whether you want to create positive habits, remove negative habits. But there's lots of different levers you can pull once you recognize that just because a cue exists doesn't mean that you're automatically going to default to the routine itself. And just to kind of put that in the real world, for an example for me is last year, I realized that I have an Apple Watch and it tells me I need to stand up once in a while. And if I just get stand up and walk around in my studio,

that's not enough to trigger a standing, you know, tick mark with the Apple watch. So, but it was a good idea anyway, to get up and move around. So I would go downstairs and I found that I would go downstairs on days I'm working from home. My studio is on the second floor. I'd go down and I'd end up in the kitchen inevitably. Right. And then I would eat something stupid. Right. And then I get to the end of the day and I'd have eaten, you know, a pile of cookies or something not healthy for me. So last year I started, when I go to the market, I'd always make sure to have, like, I like spicy carrots. I'd have carrots there. I'd have edamame or some vegetable, you know, maybe fruit in the summer, but I'd have something healthy. So when I'd go downstairs and I tried to change the habit but the cue was you know my wrist would

go off you know the craving was okay I'm gonna eat something and you know you can you can apply this stuff to very simple things in your life but you can also you know up take it up to something more complex yeah and the cue isn't always what you think it is so you use the apple watch example that's one of the things when I started trying to create some more intentional digital habits, like using Headspace to meditate or using Day One to journal, I kind of thought because I had my notifications trimmed down that I would just turn on notifications for the things that I wanted to create habits for, and then I'd be able to follow through with it. Didn't happen at all. The more I got those

notifications, the more I just ignored them. But also, I've been on this Duolingo kick and they've got a little streaks calculator in there. I've done it 141 days in a row and I never respond to the notifications for that. In fact, I have notifications turned off for that. So there's a different cue that is triggering that habit. And it's not just the thing that's going to appear in front of my eyeballs and say, hey, by the way, maybe you should think about doing this. For me, it was removing Twitter from the front page on my home screen and putting something else there instead. So when I opened it,

oh yeah, hey, there's Duolingo. I guess, you know, got a few minutes instead of surfing Twitter and the endless feed, the infinity pool, I'm going to stay out of there and I'm going to practice some Spanish instead. That's the thing that really speaks to me about all of this is kind of going back to what we were talking about at the beginning about how you have to spend some time unpacking this and really identify what the things are that you want to change. Well, you also need to spend some time unpacking what are the actual cues and then the routines that you want to create. It's not an obvious connection a lot of times. In The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, he talks about one of the habits that he uses as an example in there is the example of somebody who is

in Alcoholics Anonymous and they want to stop drinking. And the thing that triggered that for them, a lot of times the routine of going to the bar and getting a drink was just simply wanting somebody to talk to. And it happened to be the bartender that they ended up talking to. It's not alcohol related. It's not health related. It's emotionally related. And you wouldn't necessarily make that connection on the surface. You got to dig a little bit deeper for you really understand how, how your brain is actually working. I agree, Mike. I think this stuff is not easy. It takes some work. It's a lot harder than just, you know, making some empty resolutions, but it actually can change your life. Yeah. It's so powerful. It's so important. It feels so good. I, I, you know, I, I really reading that James Clear book really kind of opened my mind. I read the Duhigg book years ago, and it's very, I felt it was very scientific, if that makes any sense. You know, there were some good practical examples in there, but James Clear, I think just really summarizes it nicely. He makes an actionable process to make habits,

to help yourself and also to, you know, to give yourself good habits and to get rid of some of your bad ones as well. I'm going to have to read that book again. It's been a year, but I feel like even just sitting here talking about it, I want to go back and read it one more time. It's phenomenal. I gifted several copies of that book last year because I read it actually in 2018. Yeah. But it is the book for building or eliminating habits just because it's so practical. I mean, some of the other things we have in our outline here, like struggles and common pitfalls, James does a great job of explaining what to do with each of these things.

Like number one is what do you do when you miss a day? I mentioned Duolingo got a 141-day streak. Well, if I miss a day, that disappears, and I got to start over at zero. That can be really discouraging when you have to start over if you're going to track things that way. Now, I have a little bit of an issue with those streaks. I know that that's kind of the mechanic behind a lot of the habit trackers that are in the iOS app store specifically.

Like streaks, for example, is a great one. But the fact that you missed one day doesn't undo all of the positive change that has happened up until that point. And kind of the point that James makes in his book is it's okay to miss one day, just don't miss two. And if you can get in the habit of when I mess up, I've got this system to fix it right away and not just being discouraged immediately about, oh man, I guess my streak is over. No, you just missed one day. You made one tiny mistake. It's not something that undid all of the positive change that you've done so far. Just don't miss again. I would even argue with your language of saying you messed up. It could be that you didn't mess up. It could be that your son had the flu and you spent the whole day taking

care of him and you didn't have time to practice your Spanish that day. That's not a mess up. That's life. And that happens. And I do think like, this is a common theme on the Focus podcast. We all have these goals and we all want to get better at this stuff. And we all occasionally fall off the wagon for good reasons. Sometimes, um, like I was doing really good with my rings and then I bruised a rib and my, what's in my specula, scapula, I forget what it's called, a bone in my back. So I was like messed up for a couple of weeks and I couldn't go to the gym and my rings fell apart. I didn't like beat myself up over it. I just said, okay, once I feel good enough to go back, I'm going to, and that's that, you know? And I think so often in life, especially if you're new

to this stuff, you take this all or nothing approach. And that is the worst attitude to have about this stuff. You also see it with people who diet, like they're really good on their diet. And then they go to work one day and there's a pizza day and they eat seven pieces of pizza, you know, instead of one, you know, because once you like fall off the wagon, the least you're like, okay, I'm done. Now I can, you know, go back to really bad things. So, um, yeah, don't, I don't be negative self-talk about this stuff. Just it's okay. Like I said earlier, a habit is something you do two days in a row. So if you fall off the wagon one day, just get back on the next day. Don't give it any more thought. Yeah. More important than the fact that you missed a day

is how and when you recover. Yeah. If you can reestablish the routine, then you're still making progress. You're still establishing a new default. And I'm glad you brought up the Apple Watch example because I follow a few people online who have posted recently about how they've closed their rings every single day for an entire year. And mad props to those people, but I will never be one of those people, even though I go to the gym six days a week. And at the beginning, I was kind of discouraged by that. I'm like, well, I guess, you know, I'm not as into this as these people are.

And then I caught myself and I'm like, well, first of all, I'm comparing myself to somebody else. That's just dumb. I'm in the best shape of my life. I should be celebrating that fact and the fact that I actually want to go exercise six days a week. It's not something I have to force myself to do anymore. And I think a big reason that that has worked for me is because I refuse to do anything on Sundays. I intentionally break that streak every single Sunday. That's my rest day. I'm just not going to do it. And because I've got that built in, there have been times where it's like, you know what? Actually, it's a nice day out. I do feel like going for a run today. And I'll go do that instead. But I don't feel the pressure that I have to show up those days.

And it makes the rest of the days that I do show up much more enjoyable. Yeah. Those habit apps, I feel like that is a downside of them is that, again, it's kind of an all or nothing attitude. And that's just not a healthy way to go about this stuff. Another thing I would say is habits require, you know, change requires energy. You've got to fight against momentum and you can't take on a bunch of habits at once. That's one of the reasons why I think the whole new year thing can be harrowing for people as they try to take on too much change. Like if you do the self-reflection we talked about, you sit down and you journal yourself out and you say, okay, there's three things here I'd like to

change. That doesn't mean you have to change them all immediately. It just gives you a, you know, gives you a shopping list. You start with one until you get that sorted out, and then you move on to the next one. Don't try and do all this at once. I think that is the biggest benefit of the yearly themes is it does not imply that all of these things have to be done at the same time. It's just whatever happens to be next, I'm going to filter it through this lens of does it help me achieve my theme of X? And I think that that's a lot healthier than saying I'm going to do A, B, and C by the end of quarter one. Yeah. What are some other struggles with habits that people run into? I think one of the biggest ones is unnecessary friction. And this can appear a lot of different ways. It could be like picking a gym. Gray talked about this on the latest episode of Cortex, where he picked a gym that was four minutes closer to his house. And

that was the thing that allowed it to stick. And we think that that isn't going to make that big a difference. I'm smart enough. I can overcome that sort of thing. But you're not as smart as you think you are. You're going to default to whatever is placed in front of you a lot of the time. And if you are trying to create a new exercise habit and you are already a little bit drained at the thought of even going to the gym, then that little bit of unnecessary friction, that's going to be the thing that causes you to not go. For somebody like, for a digital example, would be journaling. Just sitting down and writing a page about what happened during the day

is intimidating to a lot of people. So I made it simpler. I created some prompts. And day one makes this really easy now because they've got the templates. But even before that, I figured out a way inside of shortcuts to show these specific questions, save my responses as variables, drop them into a table. And it was a little bit more work on the front end. But what it allowed me to do is sit down at the end of the day, record what I wanted to record in a couple of minutes, and not have to think about it. Because at the end of the day, if I have to think about it, it's just not going to happen. I'm drained. I don't want to think about anything. I want to disconnect. And so I was able to eliminate some of the mental friction in that particular case, which allowed my journaling habit to stick.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's good advice. And then let's talk about new and shiny a bit. Well, this I put on here, we were talking about this a little bit before the show, before we started recording. But I think that it is very easy to hear about something like journaling or meditation or whatever it is and say, that sounds like the thing for me. I am going to add that thing. But you need to be selective in what habits you're going to try and create because you cannot do everything. If you want to work out every single day, if you want to meditate for 20 minutes, if you want to make sure that you journal, if you want to plan your day, if you want to spend 30 minutes reading, like all of these things add up and on their own individually, they all sound great. But what are the ones that are the most

important to you? Start with those. And then I've even come to the point where I've got a whole bunch of things that are ingrained. So the traditional advice regarding habit stacking would be just add one more thing on top of those. But I think there's a limit even in that where you have to stop adding things at some point. And if you're going to start adding things, you're going to have to start removing other things. There's only so much time in your morning or evening routine. I kind of feel like there's so much advice out there in the productivity space that if you implemented everything, you would literally just have a morning routine, you would have a midday

meal, and then you'd have an evening routine and you'd go to bed and you'd start over. There would be no time for work or play or relationships or any anything else. Because there's just all of these things that you should do. And you're the one that gets to decide what you should be doing. And it's not going to be everything. Yeah. And I do think like the idea of new and shiny, there's nothing wrong with keeping a log of ideas of things you may want to try someday. But, you know, just put some distance between the idea and the implementation. And whatever you're working on currently, whatever habit you're working on, I mean, for me, it's usually really just one thing at a time. As silly as it sounds, socks and underwear drawer for me was kind of a thing for a month or so, just trying to get that

sorted out. But whatever the habit is that you're working on, just do that until you've kind of got it down. Don't overload yourself. I guess I've restated this several times over the show, but if you have other ideas, put them on a piece of paper, write them on a computer, and then come back to them when you have space for them.

But don't try and immediately do them all. And don't give up on whatever you're currently doing until you really feel like it's a bad idea and it's not working for you. Don't give up just simply because you think you have a better idea. Actually try and finish what you're doing. Once you start to have a little faith in yourself that you can complete an implementation of a new habit, then it's going to feel like a superpower. Yep. And to bring this all the way back to the beginning of this segment, a lot of the pain that people are experiencing right now may not be because they are not doing something. It could be the result of something that they are currently

doing. And again, the first place that I would look to resolve some of that pain would be to look at the things that I can remove, not look to add one more thing. The new and shiny, that's kind of assuming that you're looking to add something new because you heard about it, whether it be a habit, a routine, a practice, or even an app. You know, this app is going to solve all my problems. No, it's probably not. But we think that it might. So we try it out and then we spend a lot of time recognizing or putting everything into it. And then we realize that actually this task manager doesn't help us get things done any more effectively than the previous seven that we tried. Yeah, agreed. effectively than the previous seven that we tried. Yeah, agreed. you want to create an online store. Maybe you want to create a portfolio. Maybe you want to create a blog or even launch a podcast. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that lets you do any of those things with nothing to install, no patches to worry about, and no upgrades needed. You don't

have to worry about any of that stuff because Squarespace has got it covered for you. They have award-winning 24-7 customer support if you need any help and let you quickly and easily grab a unique domain name to go along with your great idea. All of those award-winning templates are beautifully designed for you to show off your great ideas. And I'm looking at Squarespace right now. I'm building out a project that my wife and I are working on. And I know how to build websites. I know how to install WordPress and set up servers and all that type of stuff.

But to be honest, it's just more work than it's worth. And Squarespace makes it so incredibly easy. And I know that whenever we have something that we want to add to this project, either of us can log in and we can add the thing. And I don't have to be the one that's managing all this stuff. I don't have to make sure that all the plugins are up to date. I just have to set it up and Squarespace takes care of the rest. I know it's going to look great on mobile devices. I know that people will be able to access it anywhere, anytime.

And you can't put a price tag on that sort of peace of mind. Squarespace plans start at just $12 a month, but you can start a trial with no credit card required by going to squarespace.com slash focused. That's F-O-C-U-S-E-D. When you decide to sign up, use the offer code focus to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain and to show your support for focused. Once again, that's squarespace.com slash focused and the code focus to get 10% off your first purchase. We thank Squarespace for their support of this show and all of Real AFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. So Mike, it is the new year and neither one of us are too excited about new year's resolutions, but I'm sure there is some sense of renewal and some ideas you have going into this new decade.

How, what are you doing and how are you implementing it? Yeah, well, I mentioned earlier that there was a process that I went through over the last couple of weeks. And I went through both my personal retreat course, which I try to do every couple of months, and also Sean Bonk's Plan Your Year, which takes a little bit longer. It's a little bit thicker and it's a little bit different approach. But I combined both of those things to kind of land on what I considered to be my words for the year. And this is something that I originally heard from Mike Vardy and Michael Schechter back in the day, the Mike's on Mike's

podcast, which is no longer around, sadly. But this was kind of like the first version of the yearly themes that I ever came across. And they used to pick three words for every year. I don't know if Mike still does this, but I really liked that idea. I've tried to do that the last several years. And this year, I went through these different processes, and I recognized that I landed on two of them. So I didn't have three, I didn't have a single yearly theme. But when I thought about these two words, it did something inside of me. I could tell that these were the right things. It was kind of an internal confirmation, if that makes any sense. So these are kind of like yearly themes,

if you wanted to think of them as 1A and 1B. My two words for the year, which are written on the top of my 2020 focus calendar, which is hanging on my wall right next to my desk, are rest and relationships. Now, we did our annual check-in episode not too long ago, and I talked about how I feel like I'm in a much better place at the end of the year than I was at the beginning of the year. A lot of that had to do with some margin that I had created. But as I reflected over the last 12 months, I also recognized that at the beginning of the year, I was pushing pretty hard on a lot of different things, the big one being faith-based productivity. But that had an impact not just in the first six months where I was trying to get that thing launched, it actually had a much longer impact than I initially realized. I dealt with some health

stuff at the end of the year. I had bronchitis basically for almost three months. And I think that that is because I was kind of physically worn out and my body couldn't fight it off like it should have been able to. And I don't want that to be the norm. I recognized when I did my reflection that I've still got some room for improvement here. So that's where rest comes in. And I'm defining rest as anything that is play, fun, or non-work. I tend to be like Robin Williams in the movie Hook. Do you remember when he goes to Neverland and they're sitting down at the table? And then he pretends to throw the food at the kid's face and it hits him. And then one of the other kids is like, you're doing it, Peter. You're playing with us.

But it took a really long time for him to be able to get to that point. He's there and he's frustrated. He's like, where's the food? And they're like, just pretend. And he's like, no, that doesn't work that way. I recognize as I do some retrospective that that tends to be a lot like me. And I tend to validate a lot of the things that I do under the guise of, well, this is important, or this is productive, and I need to just let things go. The other word, relationships, kind of goes along with that. Relationships I just define as other people. I want to prioritize other people. And this was something that kind of percolated as I was talking to Joe in the Bookworm podcast. I forget which book it was. Maybe it was Margin, where the phrase came up, am I interruptible?

And I recognized that I am not as interruptible as I would like to be. Obviously, if something is critical, I will be interrupted anyways. But I would prefer to have the margin to say, yeah, I'm going to drop everything and go be with my kids. And I think the family aspect of this is the more emotional one for me, but I also want this to apply to just friendships in general. I don't feel like I have been a very good friend in the last several years just because I get so busy with what's in front of me and I get so focused on getting a job done or getting a thing produced, getting a project finished, that I kind of lose sight of the people that I'm doing it with. And so one of the mindset shifts I want to make this year is people over productivity. And people are not always productive. A lot of times they're unproductive. A lot of times they are inefficient. Having to stop and do something for somebody, or even if you're working on something with somebody,

recognizing that it's more important that the relationship be built than the thing get done in the quickest way possible. That's something that goes against the way that I'm wired. But I also recognize that that's also very important in that without the relationships, kind of whatever you could achieve, going back to the goals or produce, it has limited value if you don't have anybody to share it with and to celebrate with. Yeah, a couple years ago, I realized that an old friend had called and I had this wonderful time talking to him and I hung up and realized it had been months since I had done that, like talk to a friend, just talk to somebody about nothing, right? And that was like, why am I working so hard if I'm not enjoying the little

things in life like that? And so I set up an OmniFocus project because that's what a nerd does. And so I get reminded every week now to call a friend. And it's been a really great thing where, you know, once a week I take a little time and find somebody to get on the phone with and just shoot the breeze. Yeah, and that's the hard part. I mean, that system sounds great. And I've also heard different versions of that where you've got a list of people that you rotate through and you call each one of them once a month.

And you've got four people then that you talk to a dozen times a year. I've never been able to get those to stick. So I have spent some time thinking about how I want to do this. And I recognize that one of the ways that I just really get a lot out of it every single time that I do it is meeting people for coffee. And if I make some small adjustments to my morning routine, I can build in the space into my regular day-to-day where I can consistently meet people for coffee. And that's the place I want to start with this. I do want to figure out some sort of system.

And system sounds so cold and mechanical. I don't mean it like that. But I want to create a habit or a routine of reaching out to people who are not just in my little corner of the world as well. But in person, that's the place where I want to start. Well, and I want to just take on that idea of system being cold and, you know, like me having a task that says call a friend every week, show up. I make all these systems to do the jobby job, you know, to get the work done, the stuff that pays the bills. But why can't I make a system also that helps me get the good parts of life as well? And I don't think there should be any guilt about that. I think if that's what it takes for me personally,

all it was was a repeating task that shows up once a week with a flag. Flag items get real importance from me. And it says, call a friend. And I don't have like a systematic list. I just think, well, you know, who haven't I talked to in a while? Who was I thinking about recently? Like this week it came up and I thought about one of my high school friends

that we went and watched all the Star Wars movies together as kids. And I just saw the new one. So I called him up and we had a real fun time catching up and talking about the new movie. So, you know, it just kind of, it's just, it's that easy, but it is a system

and it has made my life better. Yeah, definitely. I'm glad you called that out because I think you're right that system doesn't have to be necessarily work related. And in fact, if you're taking a focused, intentional approach to designing the life that you want to live, a lot of the stuff that you create systems for is not going to be work-related. I don't have any of that stuff in my task manager at the moment. What I have done so far, though, is I've started to use some different colors on my focused wall calendar. I sent you a screenshot. I've made some more changes since then. I've got red, which is associated with rest, and blue that's associated

with relationships. And so I've got some things on there where I'm going to go visit people or I'm going to go to a conference, not professionally, not to present. I'm going to just go because I want to be around people. Or family vacations, things like that. I've got my sabbaticals on there. I've got other things that I want to do regarding family stuff. I kind of put that under rest, but that could also be in relationships like people's birthdays. I don't want it simply to be a reminder to get a card. I want it to be something like, I'm going to take this entire day off and we're just going to do whatever you want to do. That's kind of the goal with this sort of stuff. And I feel like the year calendar is a great place to start with that because that is kind of the big rocks principle. If you put that stuff on there, then you see it coming from a long ways

away. It's a lot easier to protect the space around those things for those moments to be special. It doesn't have to be an afterthought, but you do have to think about it early. And the whole year calendar forces me to do that. Yeah, I mounted mine on foam core and I've got it up on the wall now and I'm having fun with it because I'm the kind of guy who has fun with a calendar. Calendars are fun. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Timing, the automatic time tracking app for macOS. Use the link in our show notes to get yourself 10% off your timing purchase. So let's talk a little bit about why you should be tracking your time.

For anyone billing their hours, this should seem obvious, but even if you are employed or billing per project, you still need to estimate how long a specific task is going to take. Time tracking helps you stay on track with those estimates to make sure you don't end up in the red with your projects and that can help you to make more accurate estimates in the future. So enter timing. Timing doesn't require you to physically push buttons in software or write a bunch of scripts. It just works. Instead of making you start and stop timers, timing automatically tracks how much

time you spend on each app document and website it shows you exactly when you were working on what and when you slacked off and how protective you've been so you know how to improve your productivity but you know work doesn't just happen on your mac so timing automatically makes suggestions for filling the gaps in your timeline this is one of my favorite features when i step away and then i come back it hey, you were gone for a little while. What did you do? And you can put your time in very easily right there. And that way you'll never again forget to enter a meeting. And with the automatic sync feature, your track time will magically appear across all of your Mac. So even if you work on the go with your MacBook, you'll

have the full picture on your iMac once you get back to your office. You can track on the go with your iPhone and make use of Zapier integration that lets you connect timing to services like FreshBooks and something for fans of shortcuts. Timing has shortcuts ready for you to use to make time tracking even easier. I really like the idea of automatic time tracking because, you know, the whole point of tracking time data for me is getting good data and timing is just the best at that. Not only does it show me I was working in Microsoft Word, it shows me what document I was working in so I know exactly which client I was working for. Or even like with the web, it doesn't just show me I was in Safariari it shows me which websites i was on so i can see when i was actually doing show prep and when i went off on

a tangent looking you know for the perfect bag or the new wallet you know we all do stuff like that right timing keeps you honest timing is so confident that you'll love their fuss-free approach they offer a totally free trial download it for a free 14-day trial today by going to timingapp.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D. There's some videos there that I made for them a while back showing you how I use timing and kind of getting you started.

And if you use that link, timingapp.com slash focused, you'll get 10% off when you purchase. So stop guessing how you spend your time and instead focus on doing what you're good at. We thank timing for their support of this show and RelayFM. All right, Mike. So new year, new decade for me, I've been thinking about this stuff as well. I don't actually have like a yearly theme in mind as I sit here. For me, everything has been very kind of on the ground for me, trying to solve specific problems and going through, you know, I usually do the big annual review on my birthday, which is in February,

but this year I did it on January 1. And I think that was partly because the new decade, as silly as that sounds, just going into a new decade for me, added some, some gravity to it. So I said, okay, I want to do this. And I've been kind of feeling out of sorts lately anyway. So I knew that if I spent a couple hours with the, with the pen and paper, I would kind of get to the bottom of what was going wrong. And the, one of the things I realize is that, you know, autopilot is killing me right now. That's very appropriate, given our discussion of habits and routines.

Yeah, well, it just, you know, I feel like, and I've talked about this on the show throughout 2019. And I'm sorry to keep banging on about this. But, you know, I've come up with this practice where I kind of plan the day at the end of the day prior. And I've said it on the show that when I do that, I'm way more productive the following day. And yet I routinely fail to do that. You know, I get to the end of the day and I'm tired or something comes up and I just don't make time for it. And then I look at what happens the next day and it's never really ideal. And looking at where I think I've fallen down personally and professionally over the last three or four months, I think that is the culprit. That makes a lot of sense. And it's a problem that I know that exists. So I've decided that, you know, I, what I want to do as I go into this new decade is I want to get real about, you know, fixing that problem, you know, and, and it comes

down to habits. You know, I want to be a person that always journals and plans the next day that the exception for that is the very rare example where something truly comes up that gets in the way, not just a convenience that gives me an excuse to not do proper planning. And really, for me, it goes across the board. I mean, there have been periods of time when I've been pretty regular about doing it every Sunday, like a kind of a week in review. And the way I do it is just like I described at the beginning of the show. I mean, look at, you know, the areas of my life that are important. And over the last week slash month slash quarter, you know, what went right, what went wrong and taking the time to do that. Now, if you do it on a weekly basis, it does, it takes about an hour.

If you do it, you know, the longer you take the, in the, the longer the period of time, you know, the more time it kind of takes to unpack yourself. But having myself kind of remind myself on a weekly basis of where I need to improve, that just makes such a huge difference. And when I do it, I'm more productive. I'm happier. I'm better about not getting myself into commitments that I shouldn't have taken

because I've got my eye on the ball. And all this stuff just comes down to me adding somewhere between, you know, 30 and 60 minutes a day to keep track of this stuff with the day and planning and shutdown. So Mike, I've got to stop talking about it on podcasts like it's something that you should do and just make it something that's as automatic as my sock drawer. So how do you do that? That's a good question. One of the things I've done is I just set. I mean, one of the things I did yesterday after I went through all this stuff is I opened the calendars app and I just said from 4 to 5 p.m. Shutdown. Repeat every day. every day you know sure and it's

on my account where before I had to run automation to create the the day routine that included that I'm just going to say it's really now it's something that I have to physically go in and remove it's already on the calendar I did the same thing with weekly monthly and quarterly reviews they're automatic now so they're already in my calendar forever. But that's great. And those are little games we play with ourselves. But what it really has to be is when four o'clock shows up every day, I have to do the hard work. I have to change the momentum. And I'm okay because I've done it already. It's not like this is a brand new practice for me. I've been doing it for over a year, but I've just been so irregular about it that I want to bring my intentionality muscles to bear on this problem.

Sure. One thing I like, you mentioned that you have it recurring on your calendar, and I think that's worth calling out because that's a great place or great tactic for anybody who's looking to implement some positive change is to create the time for it to happen. That doesn't necessarily, like you're talking about, mean that you will always follow through and do it. There will be times when you get to four o'clock, see that on your calendar and consciously make a decision that I'm just not going to do that today because I'm doing something else. And you can argue about whether the thing that you're doing is actually more important than the shutdown routine. But that's kind of beside the point. It's really creating the space to do it. That's kind of step one.

And I think there's a lot to unpack here. So the first thing would be that 4 p.m., that's not typically the end of a workday. Typically, the end of the workday is 5 p.m. the end of a workday. Typically the end of the workday is 5 p.m. So a lot of people may look at that and they have this thing on their calendar where they're going to follow through and they're going to do something like a shutdown routine and they're going to say, but I have more work to do. And the tendency may be to just continue to do the work. How do you fight against that? Some days better than others. Right. Well, you know, like a client can call with an emergency and that would be a day that I would, I would push through. But what I find is that when I was trying to do it at five o'clock

at five 30, my daughter comes home from school or my wife comes home from work and suddenly we've got stuff for the family going or maybe i want to have dinner on the table for them and i need to get started at five so i found that if i push it to later it doesn't happen the other thing i the other trick i tried to play was say well i'll do it at like seven you know we'll do the initial family thing then i'll go back and do the daily shutdown well guess how successful that was you know know? Not at all. And so, so I just decided if this means I get less work done that day, if this means that I get an hour less work done in legal work or on a field guide, that is a price I'm going to pay. Because in my

opinion, this is actually a net gain. I, you know, and I have, you know, moving the needle numbers to prove that days that get planned out, I move the needle more. So I'm going to get the time back in my opinion. So I'm going to do it. And I just have to remind myself of that because at four o'clock, it's really easy to say, well, why don't I just go for another hour on this thing that I'm doing? Yep. But then the next day, um, the needle doesn't get moved. And that's just as weird as it sounds. Uh, I have found a very, um, I have found a very magical solution in the sense that like, it's something that doesn't take that much work and it almost always gets results for me. And that's not going to be true for everyone. I mean, I know some

people have tried doing this. They've written me and said it didn't work for them. That's okay. But for whatever reason, whatever combinations of ones and zeros are rattling around in my brain, if I do this, it works. So why am I not, why isn't this already just a thing that I do? Why isn't this habit just part of me now? And it's because I keep dancing with it. You know, I do it for a while and then I fall off the wagon. And then I, you know, I just, I'm just not, I've never given it the energy it deserves and it deserves, you know, the energy. So I've said it publicly now, so I don't really have a choice. I'm going to have to do it. I can't, but, but I'm going to hold you accountable. Yeah. I'm going to try and be better about that because I definitely see results from it. Yeah, I'm going to try and be better about that because I definitely see results from it.

I'm willing to give up some, you know, moving the needle time at the end of the day every day to make this happen. And, you know, I can see myself on some days having additional work that still needs to be done but not urgent. And I can see myself saying, okay, that's great. It's 4 o'clock. This is when I do the shutdown. I'm going to shut down anyway. And then I'll come back and work on that afterwards and let's see how far I get, you know, but I'm going to start treating this shutdown process is more sacred than I have. One of the things that comes to mind is like the morning routine. Mine is typically about an hour, but when I'm traveling, sometimes I don't have a whole hour.

So I've got like a shorter version. These are the key elements that I'm going to do. Do you have a short version of your shutdown routine where even if you don't have an hour at four o'clock, it's still 30 minutes? These are the mission critical things that I'm going to do and say, I completed this? Yeah. I completed this. Yeah. I mean, for me,

it's just like finishing out, looking at the task list for today, doing the Omni focus, you know, um, audit to make sure, you know, I checked off what I got done and get planned tomorrow's tasks and get them

into the book for tomorrow and skip email and skip cleaning out the files on the desk and skip some other stuff. I mean, there's a faster way to do it. And that's going to be shut down for me too. I mean, either one to me is acceptable, but something has to happen every day. At a minimum, it's that stuff. Sure. I like that. And one of the things I'm going to do now that I've got this calendar hanging on my wall,

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to like show these calendars on you for listening, but it does kind of help having it on. I have a little orange marker and I've always used a code system, like a plus is you did good on it, a slash from top to bottom, like a single hash up and down as you did okay, and a slash, what we call, I guess, horizontal from left to right is you did poorly.

And I'm going to, every day, I'm going to put a little tick on the wall calendar for the shutdown. Nice. I want to see a picture of that after you've done it for a little while. Yeah, I've got to get it because I want to, like you, I want to color code some things. Another thing you did with your wall calendar

in the picture you showed me was you built in some sabbatical time. And I think I really just need to do that. So I'm going to be looking at that. I've got to, my, it's not in shape for me to share with the world yet, but I'm, I'm having fun with this wall calendar, but, but to me, I don't really have a big theme for the year, but you know, I, I feel like this problem of not shutting the data down properly and kind of going with that as the weekly, monthly, quarterly reviews, because they really allow me to identify problems that need to be fixed.

You know, and I'm thinking, look, I've got another kid about to start college. You know, I'm still in a very expensive time of my life, but also am I going to make this thing work? Am I going to continue to be Max Barkey and a lawyer who has the solo practice? Am I going to be able to, for the rest of my life, make a living off this? And the stuff I'm doing on the ground every day is determinative of that. I mean, you may not think of it that way, but it is. And so I've got to treat this as a real thing, you know? And I feel like adding this, this is the one thing I can do to make the likelihood of that continue.

Because this is, I really am happy with where I'm in my life. And I want that to continue. So what's, you know, I feel like the one thing I can do right now to improve that is to get better at this process. Sure. So it's a big deal to me. You know, it's a bigger deal than my sock drawer. But the, but, you know, I've been dancing around this problem now for over a year. I spent a bunch of time getting hung up on, well, how am I going to do it? Which pen am I going to

use? Which notebook? You know, I fell down all the usual traps. But now I've kind of got that settled. I've got a system that works. Now I just need to do it every day. And that's the hard part. Yeah. You know, to play devil's advocate, I would say that you kind of do have a yearly theme if I'm hearing you correctly, and that is anti-autopilot. Autopilot being the thing that intrinsically you mentioned you want to be able to keep doing this. So the natural tendency for me anyways would be, well, there's this opportunity, there's this project, I can squeeze this in because it's going to pay X amount of dollars and it's going to allow me to keep doing this. But actually, the thing that's going to allow you to keep doing it is to rebel against that and push back and say, I'm going to stop working now and I'm going to plan my work, I'm going to sharpen my saw. I can't think of a better example of that classic sharpening the saw metaphor than what you're talking about with your shutdown routine. But the tendency is always to just keep going with the tools that you have. And I can chop down this tree before I have to stop and sharpen it again. And then you go on to the next tree and the next tree without taking

the time to sharpen the saw. But Every time that you do, you recognize that, oh, this is so much easier. This is so much more effective. Yeah. I mean, every time, like if I didn't do it the night before and I get going the next morning, I know I have some client stuff I want to work on. And I'm like, well, I can plan after I do this. And then a phone call comes in and then I'll say, well, I'll plan after I do this. And before I get it, I get to the end of the day and the day was completely driven by other people. And I didn't get the stuff that I really needed to get done. And, and quite often, like even the actual time I spent moving the needle is significantly less than it would have been if I had been, you know, captain of the ship. Right. You know, it's just,

it's just such an easy fix. And I know that's why I feel so stupid even admitting this on the show that I'm not, you know, I'm still having trouble incorporating this because it's like, I know it works. It's not even like a hypothetical to me. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like, well, if I try that, maybe that would help. No, this works. I know every time I do it, it works.

And some part of me just doesn't get it done way too often. Well, at least take solace in the fact that you're not alone. We all struggle to do the things that we know that we should be doing or we have to do in order to stay where we're at. But the daily battle and daily struggle, that's where your future is won or lost, is going all the way back to the beginning, the creation and the formation of these habits. But it needs to get to a point where it's like my socks, where it's just something that happens. It needs to be a subconscious action. And it needs to be like, I don't even, it's just given that at four o'clock I do this. And I'm not going to stop until I get to that point.

I don't know if it's going to take me three months, six months, three years. I don't know how long it's going to take. But right now, this is what I'm focused on. And who knows? My guess is if I really just buckle down on this, I can incorporate this habit, you know, inside the year 2020. At some point, I'll say, okay, I'm doing better at that. That's kind of, I don't know if I say solved, but it's managed. Now, what else can I work on?

But right now, this is going to be the only thing. Sure. Are there any other, it's kind of off script here, but any other habits that you're looking to implement in 2020? I've got a couple I could share off the cuff if you don't have any. Well, let's hear. Let's hear. Yeah, what do you got? Okay. So I mentioned that one of my big themes or words for the year is play. We actually bought for as a family Christmas gift this year. We kind of redid how we did Christmas, and some people might think this is boring, but we got two things for the entire family. One was a puppy.

Oh no. You didn't tell me that. Yeah. We got a gold doodle puppy, puppy named Lucy. Oh man. It's, it was a long time coming to be honest,

because our kids kept asking, when are we going to get a, get another dog? Our little girl would walk around the house with the collar from our previous dog and make, make dog noises. Oh my God, that would melt me. We knew that there was a void in our house, so we got a puppy. And we also got a ping pong table.

Okay. I used to really enjoy playing ping pong back in the day. And we got a pretty nice one. And my kids are getting into it. And I recognized that I wanted to play more, even in my daily, like during my workday, I want to be able to take a break, go play ping pong. And I recognize that if my kids really do like this, which they were all really jacked about the idea

when we floated it by, I'm like, hey, should we do this? Like, yeah, yeah, let's do it. So they all like playing ping pong. And now when I need a break in the middle of my workday and I get done with a writing session and I just need to let my brain clear for a little bit, instead of going through Twitter or going and finding something mindless to do, I can go build relationships and have fun at the same time with my kids by playing ping pong. I tell you, one of the best ways I've found to communicate with the kids in my life is playing games with them. It's like the shields come down when you

start playing a game with them, whether it's ping pong or a board game or a video game. And they just talk to you about anything and you can ask them questions. I think it's because it's not time focused on talking to them. I feel like they feel a little safer, but you're going to find that you have many interesting conversations with your kids while you're playing ping pong. Around that ping pong table. Yeah, I could totally see that. So already that has shown some signs of working out kind of the way that I had hoped that it would because they really enjoy it. And then another thing that I'm going to start doing, I talked to my wife about this. I wasn't sure she would be on board with this idea, but we've got this project that we want

to work on. And I don't feel like I want to talk about specifics here quite yet, but it's something that we're working on together. And we don't really have a lot of built-in time to work on it together, even though we want to work on it together. And the word work really isn't even the right word for it because it's something that we both want to do and we both really enjoy it whenever we talk about it. It ends up coming up in a lot of just natural conversation. So I have been a part of a Toastmasters group for a very long time.

My wife attended as a guest once and she liked it, but it was every other Thursday in the middle of the workday and I hadn't gone in like a year because it just never worked out. So I did some searching and I found a new group that meets nearby on Tuesday evenings, which is typically our date night, every other Tuesday. So again, people may think this sounds really cheesy, but my wife was really excited about it and I think this is going to be great. Our typical date night is we go out to eat. We've established the habit at least of a regular date night, But then it's like, well, what do we do now? I don't know. I guess let's go home. Because we don't want to just

be out shopping and spending money. That kind of defeats the purpose of some of the other areas that we want to make sure that we're intentional with how we're spending our money. So we recognize that that is a recipe for disaster. And we're going to build in this, going to this Toastmasters group as part of a regular routine for this project that we're working on. This is kind of like the alignment of all of the things. It gives us a little bit more structure because of the location.

It makes it a lot easier to basically go dinner, Toastmasters, and then there's a coffee shop nearby, which is open later. And we typically don't go all the way out there if we just are going to pick somewhere to go on a date night. But by being more intentional and planning ahead, basically, we're building in the system where after we're done, we can go grab some tea and we can talk for a while. And I feel like this is going to make even just the date night part of it much more effective because we have this thing that we want to work on as well together. And again, work is probably the wrong word here. It's something that we're both really excited about and both like talk about all the time. This is going to be a habit

or routine that's going to allow that to happen on a consistent basis. Nice. I really don't have any others, man. I was thinking about it while you were talking. This is the one thing for me right now that I'm working on. Which is fine. You know, if we were going to give people advice on making habits and routines, it would be pick one thing. Yeah. Start there. It's kind of got multiple elements to it because I'm not just saying I want to do the shutdown every day. I also want to get better about the weekly, monthly, quarterly review stuff. So there's several pieces to it.

And, you know, poor me sitting here whining about taking an hour every day to do this shutdown. But I do think it'll help me. And I'm looking forward to fixing this problem. It's like I'm not dreading it at all. It's like, okay, this has been going on long enough. I'm going to put my attention at it, and I'm going to solve this problem. I have faith in myself. This will work.

I've done it before, you know. Yep. Anyway, so we have a forum. You can find over at talk.macpowerusers.com. And we'd love to hear what you're thinking about in terms of habits as we head into the new decade or how are you going about this? Maybe resolutions work for you. Let us know. Or maybe you've got something else entirely you do this time of year. terms of habits as we head into the new decade or or how are you going about this maybe resolutions work for you let us know or maybe you've got something else entirely you do this time of year

i'd love to hear what you're doing we are going to be doing a feedback show coming up so uh definitely put your ideas into the forums that's the best place and um we'll be talking about this stuff in the near future. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Pingdom, Squarespace, and Timing. And we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.