Good Life Project - How to Finish What Matters | Charlie Gilkey

Episode Date: September 19, 2019

Productivity - not a fun word for most people. Well, what if there was a way to quickly figure out what matters most, focus in on that, let go of everything else, then go from idea to done? To become a productivity Jedi. That is what we're talking about in today's powerful conversation with Start Finishing (https://amzn.to/2MRYpgA) author, and founder of Productive Flourishing (https://www.productiveflourishing.com/), Charlie Gilkey. We dive into Charlie's specific ideas around why so much of our effort to be productive fails, and how to rewire our brains and schedules and actions for finishing and finally feel good about what we're accomplishing. Along the way, we explore how Gilkey's highly-unique background as a philosopher, military logistics officer, productivity strategist and consultant to creative professionals, founders and fast-growth entrepreneurial teams has shaped his powerful lens of going from idea to done.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So two questions that I tend to hear all the time are, how do you figure out what to focus on on any given time? How do you choose the thing to devote, you know, all of your super precious waking hours to that is really the right thing, the thing that makes you come alive, the thing that is your best work? And then once you make that choice, how do you actually do it? How do you go from starting to moving through the entire process, to not dropping the ball, to not burning out, to taking that thing in your head, the thing that you really care about doing.

And instead of consistently sort of starting something and then not knowing how to get all the way through it and not knowing how to get it to that final place where it's done and you feel amazing, you just kind of walk away. So how do you go past that point and get it completely finished? This is why I am so excited to share today's guest. Charlie Gilkey is actually an old friend of mine. We have been working together, collaborating together, playing together for more than a decade now. And he is my go-to resource when I'm trying to figure out how to make things happen, how to go from idea to project to actually finished. And he has a new book out now called Start Finishing, How to Go from Idea to Done. This distills all of Charlie's incredible

wisdom, his models, his frameworks, his templates, his very practical real world tools that will show you everything from how to figure out what to be focusing on, how to choose among all the different things you're interested in, how to find that project that is truly worthy of your time, effort, and love, how to then walk through the steps of making it happen, of actually starting finishing and then finishing, finishing, making it real, making it done. Super powerful conversation. We talk a bit about how Charlie got to this place where he's sort of the guru of getting things to a place where they're actually finished. And then we dive into some really sort of the guru of getting things to a place where they're actually finished. And then we dive into some really sort of critical ideas, strategies, and touch points. You will be surprised. There's a whole bunch of stuff that I learn every time I talk to Charlie and some really

powerful wisdom points and strategies. Cannot wait to share this with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs.

It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology, it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors. For details, visit uvic.ca slash future MBA. That's uvic.ca slash future MBA. That's uvic.ca slash future MBA. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk.

The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. It's always kind of interesting for me when I sit down in the studio with somebody who is not only a friend, but I actually know really, really well and who we have actually been co-conspirators in business and life and all

sorts of different things. And as we sit here today, it is the eve of you launching a fantastic new book called Start Finishing. And we're going to dive into that a whole bunch. But I want to take a step back in time because what I've learned over the years too is that when I get to sit down with an old friend, there are also gaps because as it happens with friends, you kind of just hit the ground rolling with whatever topics you're interested in in your current life. And very often you don't actually know a ton about what got them to that place in life. So we're going to fill in a little bit of those gaps. So when we first met, it was, what, 10 years ago? It was about 10 years ago, yeah.

Ish, right? 2009, South by Southwest. I went to see you at, see you give your book talk of Career Renegade at the time. Right. What were you doing in Austin, Texas for, like, what was your intention at South by Southwest 10 years ago? You know, in 2009, South by Southwest was just one of those meccas for creatives at the time. We didn't have a lot of other conferences. And so this was deep enough into my work at Productive Flourishing that I just wanted to meet a lot of people.

And I just knew that there are these people that I've been reading and looking up to. That is like, this is my chance to say hi and how much they've inspired me. And so that was my main intention for that South by Southwest is just to meet all these people and put a physical face to a digital avatar. And so the primary connection there or the primary point was connection at that point. Yeah. I remember meeting you. Tell me if this actually matches with your recollection. We were at somebody's house in South Austin. I have no idea how I got there, whose house it was, what we were actually doing there. But I remember certainly bumping into you and I was like, this guy's brain works in a way that my brain absolutely does not work. And I need to understand this and go deeper and find out what's behind all of this.

What I learned really quickly is that you're this kind of weird blend of philosopher king and unshakable calm and also operating and execution brilliance. You think in systems and processes and frameworks in the way that my brain doesn't operate. And I know that not long before the time that I met you, you actually spent a chunk of time in the military. I'm curious, do these parts of you start to really become super developed there or were they showing up earlier in your life too? I think they were showing up earlier in my life and they were just cultivated to a way in the military experience. And so prior to joining the military, I was in Boy Scouts. I'm an Eagle Scout.

And I always was in this place of never having the resources that I needed to do what I wanted to do. And always having to figure out, like, okay, I want to go there, but I don't have what I need to get there. So how do I leverage or get in the right room or figure that out? And so there's always been that way of working backwards in that way that just was really, really amplified as an army logistics officer, because that's the point. Like you've got to get stuff here, you've got to get stuff there, and you have limited resources to do that. And, you know, that part of my life, especially being deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom,

it was the best and worst time of my life. How so? It was the best time because it really required being your full self in ways and stretching and growth in ways that are unimaginable for most people. You know, not just the combat aspect of things, but the being away from family, being in a new environment, being 24 and being responsible for 46 people and 20 vehicles. And then later on being the battalion plans officer, which is the guy that writes all the plans and makes sure everybody's getting where they need to

go. And again, that's an incredible responsibility at that age. And it was unrelenting in the sense of every day, it was just a growth opportunity every day. And you didn't have a chance to navel gaze or figure it out in that sort of meta way. You just had to do it. And so it was the best time because of that and some of the friendships that I formed in doing all of that. And it was the worst time because it pulled me out of my life. Before that, I was pursuing my PhD in philosophy. I was a graduate

student. That was the route I was going. And so it introduced this major break in my life. And again, being away from my family for a year, all the things that, you know, come with being a deployed soldier. So it was really terrible and really great at the same time. And I just came back a changed person and changed in a way such that those frameworks, that way of thinking about the world, the systemic way of thinking about the world doesn't leave you. And so, like, you know, I'll walk into a store and I'll start thinking just how is this operating and what could go better?

And what if they move this desk six feet to the left? What would that open up? And just small things and big things. And I can't turn that off. How much of it do you think, I mean, because, so it's interesting, like when I've talked to people who are all about systems process efficiency logistics in the past, and again, my brain doesn't work that way. So I'm fascinated by people whose brains do work that way. Usually that's been developed in the arena of money. So the end game is how do we optimize efficiency?

How do we get more stuff done more effectively? Because at the end of the day, we're trying to grow a company or a business, an enterprise, an organization, a nonprofit, whatever it is. But you develop those chops. The arena for you, the cauldron, was life and death. Very different stakes. Very different stakes. Very different stakes. And there's a degree of intensity that comes with that.

Because if you make a mistake, people might not go home. Well, they might not go home alive. And so you take it seriously in a different way. And there's that sense of continuous improvement in the military context. It's not, again, maximizing profit. It's maximizing the efficiency of your troops to accomplish the mission, but more important than that, bringing everybody home. Because no one wants to write that letter to families. And no one wants to be that person that made a mistake, and that mistake cost them.

And there are so many things that happen in combat and in the military that are beyond your control. And so, yeah, it definitely took that. And so even now the stakes are not nearly as high, there's still that drive to smooth things out, to make things more streamlined, and to really do the best with what we've got. The way I see it now is, whether it's my company or some of the companies that I'm consulting with,

these are people's lives. You know, we spend so much of our life at work. And when you look at the amount of waste that happens at work, and more important than that, when you look at the amount of heartbreak that happens at work because people are not utilized well, because leadership is not focusing them on what matters most, people are not being appreciated for what they do, it just breaks my heart to see how much heartbreak happens at work. And it breaks my heart to see how many people spend decades of their life doing something because of the story they've told themselves about how they need to be in this world. And then looking back and saying, is that it? All this time I put in, I've still am not fundamentally happy. I still have not done the things that I know I could have been doing.

And while you may have, you know, zeros in your bank account or not, there's that sense of meaning of fulfillment that is lacking. And I think that's really heartbreaking. Um, we have this one short life that we know of. And life is really fickle. That's the other thing that you learn from being in the military and being deployed is that a quarter of a second or a quarter of an inch can make the difference between someone going home and someone not. Between you going home healthy, between you going home not being able to walk. And it's sometimes really, it's just a matter of luck.

And so we don't recognize how lucky we are every day to be able to do the things that we do. Sometimes it's just moving and walking, right? That we take for granted. And so to spend decades of your life of this opportunity that you have in front of you, not doing the things that fire you up and not making your unique contribution is really heartbreaking. Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting to have the experience that you had where you had so much on your shoulders in your early and mid-20s and awaken and then come home and awaken to the fact that, okay, you saw this when you were deployed and now you come home and you sort of see a similar pattern, but in a different context, a much broader context that for most people will last the vast majority of their waking years. Was that the reason? I mean, it's one of my curiosities has been, you're pursuing your PhD in philosophy before you go, you end up being deployed. You develop this fierce expertise and operational capability when you're actually in the military. And then when you come back home, instead of immediately diving back into the academic path, which I know you have a fierce desire to learn, like you're somebody who loves to

devour knowledge and you did that to a certain extent, but the next move for you was to actually turn around and effectively start a company to be of service to other people. Is this all partly what was behind you launching this endeavor, which I guess even back then was called productive flourishing? So yeah, it's really interesting because I came back and two weeks after being redeployed, I was back in class, back on my life, right back doing my thing. I had figured all that out, set everything up so that I was just going to slide back in, not missing a step, getting back to it. And I'm glad I did that at the same time that there philosopher, it wasn't the way that I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the academic echo chamber, talking to each other about all sorts of abstract things, because I was like, we are the people that should be in the world

solving problems. Like there are real things going on right now. And it felt like such a waste of potential. It felt like such a waste of people's lives. And I'm not trying to dismiss academic philosophy or anything like that. I just knew for me that there was more to life than that and being in those classrooms. And what I was studying a lot of was ethics, social political philosophy, and especially economic development. Because what I understood and saw when I was overseas was, yes, we're in the middle of this war of ideology, quote unquote. But at the same time, we're in the middle of this war of ideology, quote unquote. But at the same time, we're in the middle of this vast contrast between the lives of people in the Middle East and their economic livelihood

and the lives of people in the first world. And if we didn't address that gap, we're always going to be in this situation. We're always going to be in this situation. So I started studying a lot of that. And I started applying it to my life. It's like, if I'm really about thriving, if I'm really about helping people live the most of this one life we have, where can I do that? What's going to be the best place for me to do that? And the next best available option for me was to start productive flourishing, start teaching people that. And I kind of came to that after I started productive flourishing because what I, my main pain when I started productive flourishing was I was this creative idea bomber

and had a bunch of ideas and a bunch of knowledge and a bunch of stuff that had to get out of me. And I found a really frustrating contrast between my ability as a logistics officer to move battalions of equipment and to do joint force military logistics coordination and at the same time struggle with getting a 5,000-word essay done. What's that about, right? How can I do this and not do that? And what can I apply from this world of getting stuff done at this really excellent level? And I don't have to say this, but the other thing I've recently learned about myself, recognized, is that I served with the 101st Airborne Division, right? That was the parent unit that I was attached to. And that is one of the Army's elite forces. So it's not just that I learned logistics in a military deployed context. I

learned it under the 101st. And excellence was just the way everything was done. Everything was done. And I would say that was my first real professional experience as an adult. Again, I was 24. And in my brain, that was just the standard, right? And so, when I got out and didn't notice that standard, I was like, huh, what's this gap here? But rolling it back a little bit, I started productive flourishing because I had this problem and I was reading all of the literature and I was trying to synthesize it and translate it. And I was like, well, if I'm already doing that, you know, fundamentally, I'm a teacher and trainer, right? And I was like, I'm already doing this for myself. Why don't I share it with the rest of the world? Because

blogs were a thing then in a different way than they are now. And so that started, and it started with very terrible names and very terrible niches, because my first attempt was teaching academics how to get stuff done and live a bigger, bolder life. And what caught on was a lot of the creatives and entrepreneurs found my work and loved it. And I was like, this is really interesting. I didn't anticipate this. So I started writing more for creatives and more for entrepreneurs. But it came to this point where I was like, you know, there's this fork in the road that I have in these careers that I have because I was simultaneously that still in the army,

still in like a three-quarter time position with the army. I was still pursuing my PhD and now I had a business on my hands. And I reached that point that Seth Godin calls the dip where I realized I was not going to be excellent in all three of those. I was going to be mediocre at best and be struggling and juggling. And I didn't want that for myself. And so it was really picking which of these most advances the unique contribution that I have and allows me to live the fullest life possible. And it was with productive flourishing.

And so it wasn't, you know, a lot of people start their businesses because they either hate their jobs or they're in a soul-crushing managerial environment. It wasn't that for me as much as it was, what's the best way for me to do what I'm out to do? And that continues to evolve. And there may be some point in which there's another, you know, I get back in academia or whatever, but it's always that sort of evolving question for me is what's the best way to do this thing that I'm here to do? Yeah. Is that a regular prompt for you? Like, do you wake up once a week or once a day and sort of

ask some variation of that question? It tends to come for me in seasons, actually. And so summer is my stupefaction and depression cycle. So every summer, I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I don't really want to do much of anything. I'm much less motivated. I'm just thinking how many other people listening to this go through something similar? Yeah. So it's a seasonal thing for me a lot of times. And so every summer about, I'm like, hmm, as I start ramping up into fall, am I ramping up in a way that is really pulling the best of what's possible for me now? Or am I playing last year's script? And what do I want this next year to look like?

And there was a very powerful prompt that I got during meditation a few years ago. So I'm about 40 now. I'll turn 40 in January. And about the time I was 37, I was sitting there meditating one morning, and just this prompt came to me. It was like, what are you doing today to set up the season of your life that will be your 40s? Like that season of your life. And I was like, this is really where, first off, where is this coming from? But second, how do I want that season of my life to be different than this season of my life? And I got some answers I didn't like.

But so it comes for me every year, but it does come in sort of instantaneous. Like, what are you doing now, Charlie? And are you stuck in last year's frame? Are you keeping your eyes open to the possibilities that have been created or that you've created over the last year? If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs. It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges.

From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology, it's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors. For details, visit uvic.ca slash future MBA. That's uvic.ca slash future MBA. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Two things jump out at me from that. One is that you, wherever that prompt came from, I've seen that reflected in the way that you move into your decisions for years now. There's this really interesting, unique ability to think out ahead, to not be stuck in short-termism. But we're gonna circle back to that a little further because you're also not a fan of thinking too far ahead. So there's a really interesting tension there that I wanna circle back to.

But the other thing that jumped out at me is, so you mentioned summer is sort of like the season for stupefaction and depression for you. And so people couldn't see your face when you're talking about that, but you weren't bummed about it. You were kind of smiling almost like matter of fact, like, well, this was almost, it was kind of interesting slash, you know, like good for me to recognize and acknowledge this and just know this is just the way I am. And I don't, every, every summer, it it's not like this is a thing I have to battle.

If I accept that this is kind of a thing that I just noticed in the pattern of my life, then it allows you to sort of make peace with it and then build around it to a certain extent. Absolutely. And thanks for saying that. were talking a decade ago, I may have felt much different about my summer cycle. Because you're not supposed to feel that way, and you're supposed to blah, blah, blah, and all those things that we make ourselves. But one of the traps we fall into is that we think of ourselves like robots. And we don't necessarily cognize that a lot and make that a conscious thought. But we think that we should have a constant or a sort of regular amount of output, a regular amount of the way that we feel. And we're just not that.

We're organic beings that respond to temperature and environment this planet and I'm sensitive to the seasons has given me a lot of peace and compassion for myself. But it's also from a strategic perspective, I know where to put projects and where not to put projects, right? And so during the summer is where I can't usually juggle 17 different projects, right? I do better having one project that I can work on two to four hours a day. And when I'm done, I'm done and be at peace with that as opposed to my winter cycle, which is I call my supernova cycle, where I can do a lot of things. I can work long hours and it's just sort of a natural, natural thing for me. And so that's where I put that type of work usually, right? This year's different because of the book launch coming up.

And so I've had to, I've had more head trash around what I'm supposed to be doing right now and where my energy is. And most days, the more sane part of myself wins. Says, you know what? Like no matter what all you think you're going to do or you think you're supposed to do, you're only going to do X amount. So that X plus Y, the plus Y, it's just a tool to beat yourself up with. You're not going to do it. So how are you going to adjust your plans to do X? And how are you going to make peace with the fact that X is what you got? And in many ways, it's been a great relearning experience because it's a decade after. It's like where I started.

I wasn't able to do everything that I wanted to do. How am I going to do it? Except for my approach in this season of my life is different than that season of my life. Because in that season of my life, it was do more and do better. In this, it's accept where you are and leverage what you can do to the best way possible and learn to let the rest go. Do you feel like your sort of annual cycling is, because you've worked with so many people now, like founders, creative professionals, larger organizations. So you have an interesting data set, an interesting lens. Do you feel like this cycling that you feel on this sort of like annualized basis is unusual, unique to you?

Or do you think pretty much everybody goes through it, but we just don't identify it? I think pretty much everybody goes through it. And where your energy may lie may be unique to you, but I think everyone has these ebbs and flows and organizations have ebbs and flows. And that's where inattentive leaders and managers get stuck and not stuck. They create a lot of problems for themselves and their teams because they're not recognizing that, wait a second, my team's natural energetic state is here. I want them to be twice that. So how do I crack the whip? How do I motivate them?

How do I, quote unquote, empower them to get to where I want them to be as opposed to how do I shift my expectations and my priorities to be clear on what they can do in this amount of time. So I think everybody has it. I think most of the time we don't slow down enough to really get that. Like we, you know, slow down a little bit and it's like, well, I just need to drink more caffeine. I just need to, I need to alter who I am through other practices as opposed to saying, where am I and what matters now? Yeah. It's so interesting that you say that. My sense has been I've experienced some pretty major burnout over the last few years at different moments. And it has taken me way longer to own that than it should have because I would like to think of myself as somebody who sort of could perform at an extreme level

for an extended period of time. And it's brought me to my knees, you know, and I've had to own the fact that no, I actually cycle as well. And what's been interesting for me to note also is that my, you know, nobody performs at the peak of their game on a sustained basis. It doesn't happen in athletics. It doesn't happen in music. It doesn't happen in business. It doesn't happen in relationships in life. And it's just like, we were wired to sort of go through

this, you know, like sine wave. And I think one of the big learnings partly from you has been that, you know, so you describe it as when you hit winter, it's your supernova window where you can be, then when you actually hit that natural window, then you don't have the juice left to actually perform at the level you know you're capable of, and it becomes even more frustrating. It's like this compound effect that really creates a negative spiral. It absolutely does. And I think the more you hone your cycles like that, like I realized at this point that during that period where I'm on supernova, I am going to create enough work and problems and opportunities in that period that me and my team can work on for the rest of the year. Right? Like I don't have to create at that level for the rest of the year for us to do it. And in fact, if I did,

I would burn not only myself out, but my team out, right? Because there would just be such an influx of new projects and new energy and new opportunities and new things. You know, my team has a codex of all the sort of hashtags and shorthand language that we use. And one is brace for impact, right? And it's when I've been on a trip or when I've been hanging out with friends and I show up Monday morning and I'll just preface it with Brace for Impact, right? Because I just know what my team is going to get on that day.

I think I'm gonna need to start using that too. Yeah, and so, but you can't expect your team to do that at that level at all times or else you end up in that scaling trap that so many businesses get into to where their team is constantly out of breath and constantly just trying to do their best work from the bottom of the emotional and cognitive barrel because they've been worn out for so long. And so I look at it from a long game because if you choose your best work, if you choose that

thing that you most want to do, you want to do that for the long haul. You're talking about many decades. How do you do that over that amount of time sustainably? And how do you do it so that you don't go through these burnout cycles to where you eventually you throw out the baby with the bathwater? You're just like, I'm so burnt out. I can't do this. This is not for me. Well, it's not that it's not for so burnt out. I can't do this. This is not for me. Well, it's not that it's not for you.

It's the way that you're doing it is not for you. Yeah. I think that's so important because I think for me, the burnout didn't come because I was doing a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't want to be doing. I just wasn't doing it the way that was healthy or intelligent. You know, I actually loved a lot of what I was doing. I had to rewire the way that was healthy or intelligent. I actually loved a lot of what I was doing. I had to rewire the way that I approached it. So as we sit here in the studio today, you've been, I guess, about a decade into Productive Flourishing, developing a tremendous body of work, frameworks, process systems, working with so many different people. And you have a book out

called Start Finishing. So my curiosity with this is why did you feel the need to write this? There's no lack of books on the market about, you know, like getting stuff done about productivity. It's a big category. And I also know about you that you don't do things just because you can. Like there's, there's gotta be a reason. Like what, what did you see was missing that made you say, this is something I need to do? Because writing a book takes a lot of time and energy and takes you away from a lot of other things. So what in your mind, knowing the way your brain works, justifies you saying this has to happen?

So part of it is strategically, there's a book-shaped hole in my business of this book, because if you go to Productive Flourishing right now, before the book is out, you can't get the cohesive journey, the cohesive material and coherent material on all the stuff that I've been creating for the last decade. And so it ended up being this sort of gap in that people would want to really start doing more of their best work. And it's hours of clicking around, productive flourishing, trying to figure out what it is as opposed to a systemic or a systematic approach to it. So that's one. But more importantly than that, I think it's more of what's the heart of my work that makes me continue to write about productivity. And it's really interesting because, Jonathan, you know,

around 2014, I wrote a post called Foundations Are Meant to Be Built On, Not Flown Over. And what I found with so many of my entrepreneurs and executives and things like that is we love to talk about the big ideas. We love to talk about the big strategy. We love to talk about all that stuff. Except for when you look at where the real constraint in their business was or where the real constraint in their opportunity set was, was the fact that they couldn't execute on the ideas they already had, right? And we just wanted to fly over sort of this scheduling and time management and project management and, you know, alliance building. We wanted to sort of fly over all of that and just talk about the big ideas.

But those big ideas weren't happening. And so it came from the sense of frustration in a lot of ways with some of my set of clients and peers. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. We're not skipping over this piece because it will trip you up at some point. So that was sort of facing that set of people. But when I looked out in Scandi, the productivity literature

and even the personal development literature, I think there wasn't the hybrid I wanted to see that took the real reasons why we do and don't do things and mated it with the real ways we can get stuff done. There was always this divorce between deeper motivation and deeper systems and deeper processes for getting stuff done. And so we ended up in this sort of bipolar literature and bipolar place where you end up with really good mantras for how to get stuff done, but doesn't actually help you once you start getting into the thrashing of the project,

or doesn't help you once you start it, or you have a bunch of solutions that don't solve the real reasons you don't get stuff done. And so for me, I needed to create it for that reason so that I can say like, okay, this book does both, at least to the best of my ability, right? And looking at some of the other book ideas and other things that I want to write about, it's going to come back to getting stuff done because I'm neo-Aristotelian in the sense of we become by doing, right? So no matter what you want to do in the world or what you want to be in the world, there's by doing, right? So no matter what you want to do in the world or what you want to be in the world,

there's some doing that you have to do to become that. And whether it's being a great parent or whether it's being a great member of your community, whether it's being a great pillar of your church, it doesn't matter what that is. All that being has some doing attached to it. And enough of us, I think, are overcommitted to the being side of things. And we try to be all of the things and we don't fully understand

how much doing we've also committed ourselves to doing until we look around and there's just a field of dropped balls and broken promises and regrets. And so, interestingly, one of, well, I find it interesting, is that one of the pillars of my sort of principles of productivity is actually self-compassion. And I wanted to write the book for multiple reasons, but one of them is so that people can see what's going on in their world and understand that they're not uniquely defective, that they're not constitutionally wired to never be able to get their shit together, that they're not fated to struggle.

They're just making more promises with their mouth that their hands can't cash, right? They're promising themselves and they set up expectations for themselves that then there's no way possible for them to actually live up to everything that they've said they're going to do and be. So when we pull down and say, you know what, there are fewer things that we're going to focus on and commit to, but we're going to do those well and we're going to finish them. Then we start to see the sense of satisfaction. Then we start to see that sense of happiness. And then we start to thrive in our careers because we become those creatives that you can trust. When they say they're going to do something, they're going to do it. When they set out to achieve a certain goal, they're going to do it. And there's a rare breed of creatives. You know, we have a bad sort of rap of being all talk or

being a lot of talk and not so much follow through. But it turns out time and time again, I've seen this with people that I've interviewed on my podcast, all the research that I've done, all my clients, like the name of the game is follow through, right? And you increase your ability to finish the things that matter most. You knock out those three projects of the year that really, really matter. And you let the rest go. That has this compound interest effect on your career that you just don't get when you're half finishing 17 things. Yeah, completely agree. And I feel like there's also, when you shift those gears,

and you actually, you learn all the steps in the process and the way to actually focus in on the smaller number of things and actually go from idea to completing it. You know, like when you start finishing and you do that repeatedly, it's, I feel like once you do that, you go through that cycle a handful of times. It's almost like But you start to identify as the person who's accomplishing,

who is doing the big things. And you identify as somebody who is actually completing and putting good things out into the world. And that shift in identity creates this sort of like spiraling effect. Have you seen that also? Absolutely. Absolutely. Because at a certain point, you develop this theory of yourself. And when you're not finishing, a lot of times the theory of yourself is that you're not a finisher,

that you can't get it done or that you overcommit. You have all this head trash about who you are. And then that's what you project out in the world. And that's what you see. You develop a confirmation bias about that. Once you do start finishing, I think what you realize is the word can't, for all intents and purposes, doesn't exist in your language. It's you're choosing to do certain things over choosing to do other things

because you've done many great things already. And that shift from, can I do it? Or that sounds like a good idea to like, no, I can do a lot of things, but what matters most now? Yeah, it's such an identity shift. And I've seen it in the way people carry themselves in posture. I've seen it in the way that people mysteriously start losing weight, right? I've seen it in the way that people mysteriously start losing weight, right? I've seen it in the way where all of a sudden money starts flowing their way. There's all these outer changes that happen from that inner identity shift. Because I think, you know, I call it creative constipation.

And creative constipation is just kind of what it sounds like. You take in all of these ideas. You take in all of this inspiration. You watch all the TED Talks. You read all the books. You take in all of these ideas, you take in all of this inspiration, you watch all the TED Talks, you read all the books, you listen to all the podcasts, and at a certain point you get full, but you're not pushing it through. You're not doing anything with it. And you become toxic. And you become to that point to where there's this resentment of a new idea or a new thing coming in because you know that you're not going to be able to do it because you've got everything else going on. And as humans, we do one of two things.

We either create or we destroy. And there's a certain point when you're in creative constipation and you're not shipping what matters most to you that you'll start destroying the things around you. You'll start destroying the relationships and through your resentment and frustration and you being the martyr and you finding ways to insert yourselves into other people's lives and projects. You'll destroy your resources. You'll go on shopping binges or you'll go, you'll eat a bunch or you'll do whatever thing that you have and or through all the ways you find evidence about why you can't do something and why you're uniquely defective and why failures of the past mean that you're going to have a failure tomorrow. So I think we don't fully recognize the cost of not doing our best work in that way.

Like we think it's something we can get to, but I would want to put it more on just an essential way to find your happiness, both long term, but also in that presence. Because there's that shift when this week you made a dent in your best work. This week you got something done versus being the to-do list ninja, you know, where you put 82 things on your list, you crank them out. At the end of the week, you look back and you're like, but really, like, I didn't do the thing. I'm no closer to doing the thing. And everybody has a thing. That's the other thing that I've noticed. Like, I talk about best work and it's got a few unique factors to it, but it's that work that your soul most yearns to do. And everybody's got a project they put in a physical drawer, in a mental drawer, in a virtual drawer that they're going to get to at some point when, you know, someday when the

time is right or when their boss is less of a butthole or when their kids are in college or whatever. We've always punted that to someday, some later day. Everybody has that. But there's that sense of deep satisfaction when you quit the bullshit, when you quit the quote unquote researching, when you quit all the conversations about doing the work and you actually do the work. And it's surprising how simple it is to actually do it. And yet we don't. Yeah. It's interesting too, because you hear a lot in sort of self-help, pop psychology, this line, you can do anything. Maybe for a heartbeat when you're listening to you speak, you're like, oh, that's what he's saying. I can do anything. But in fact, it's like you're saying

the exact opposite. Yeah. Displacement is a real thing. And displacement is just the idea that choosing to do one thing means that there's a near infinity of things you've chosen not to do. Right. And so we too often conflate you can do anything with you can do everything. Right. And while I might say you can do anything,

I would also say, what are you going to choose not to do so that you can do that thing? What are you really going to commit in your life to be able to do that thing? And there are some things that, you know, I'm five foot 10. I'm never going to be a world champion basketball player, right? It's just not possible, especially given that I'm 40 and I don't like basketball. There's a lot going against me with that, right? So I'm not going to say I can be, you know, LeBron James. I can't do that. So within the realm of creative space, though, there's a lot of room to maneuver and grow and become whatever you want to be. And it's going to come at a cost of all the things

you have to choose not to do and choose to do to get there. And so I talk a lot about displacement in the sense of I want people to really understand that we have this one precious life. And I've been talking for a long time about what I call project world. And project world is the idea that when we look at our lives, it's kind of carved up in the three to five year chunks of a project, capital P project, both personally and professionally. Right. And so I'll talk personally first. We go through these phases of relationships. We go through this phases of growth.

Like if you're a teen, if you're a kid, you know, you go through that sort of pre-teenage stage. Then you go through these phases of growth. Like if you're a kid, you go through that sort of pre-teenage stage, then you go through that teenage stage, then you go through that leaving your parents' house, which could be college, it could be whatever, but there's sort of three to five-year chunks that define your life. Relationships, a lot of times, like getting married, there's a three to five-year cycle. We can go through that time and time again. In your career, it's the same thing. You take a job, you're in a position for three to five years, and you move on to another job. And so life is sort of split up into these chunks. And one of the reasons people, I think, get stuck and decide not to do their best work is because they think

they're making a non-reversible lifelong choice. Like if I do this thing, I have to make this one choice. And then for the rest of my days, I'm going to be doing that thing. You know, the grace about Project World is win, lose, or draw, in three to five years, you're going to be moving on to something else, right? You're not making that lifelong sort of decision. And what are you really focusing your time, energy, and attention on for this next three to five years? As I was doing research for the book, I stumbled upon an insight from Stuart Brand via Kevin Kelly, via Tim Ferriss, and one of his either tribe of mentors or tools of Titans. And Stuart's idea was any significant project takes at least five years to see through. Any real significant project takes five years to see through. And of course, I did what I do. And I was like, okay, so most of us live to be 85 is a reasonable conjecture when you look at

lifespans in the United States. So take your age, subtract your age from 85 and divide by five. That's the amount of significant projects you have left in your life. Does what's on your schedule next week reflect what you would want to be on that list? And if not, how are you going to make that change? Because if you don't make the change, what you're going to look at is all of these years, all of these projects that you didn't get to because you chose to do something else in your life. And I know, especially in productivity and personal development, there's so much emphasis on the choices we make a lot of times that are divorced from the actual context of our lives, right?

And I understand that some of us have different degrees of privilege that allows us to choose in different ways, right? If you've got more money, you have a broader range of choices that you may be able to make than if you're a single mom who's working two jobs to put food on the table. And what I would say in certain scenarios like that is that be honest about those priorities that you have, right? If your priority is to make sure your kids have a good life or that you do the best you can, that is a project. And so in my language, a project is anything that requires time, energy, and attention, not just economic work. And the reason I talk about it that way is because after thousands of conversations with people, what they tend to think is that we have this mental switch that goes off. And it's like a new day equals 16 hours of open space of things to do. And so I should be able to fill that with all this.

But every new day starts with 12 hours of routines and habits and stuff you got to do before you even like wake up. There's that much work to do. But because we have so cleanly made the division between economic work and life, we only tend to count the economic work. And then we wonder why we're not getting things done nearly as much, because that's actually a small percentage of our life. Right. It's like, oh, you're not spending the time you say is really important with your family,

or you're not spending the time to exercise on a regular basis or create healthful food or develop relationships. Yeah. Because those are the things where we just think, well, I'll just get it done in the margins. I'll just get it done in the margins. And I was talking to somebody, I think Angela would be fine with me talking. So I'll say it was Angela, because it was in fact, Angela, where we were talking about her fitness goals and how she wanted to work out. And I was like, well, so now I'll pause here. Angela is also a coach. I'm a coach. And when you have a partnership where you're both coaches, it can be quite precarious, right? To have these conversations, because sometimes you're not wanting to be coached by your partner. But it was one of those places.

Probably substitute sometimes for pretty much all the time. Pretty much all the time. And so it's always a precarious conversation. And this is also my body of work, which makes it even worse, right? So she's like, oh, no, I know what's coming on this one. And so she was talking about going to her classes and things like that. And I was like, so how are you scheduling it? How are you doing that? And she's like, well, you know, sort of look at my schedule. And then I try to find a class that fits my schedule.

And I was like, honey, like we own our small, we own our own business. You could find the classes that work for you first and get those scheduled two or three weeks in advance and then build your work around that, right? Build your economic work around that. And of course, she knew it in a certain way, but it requires prioritizing herself in a certain way. And so when you dig two or three levels under why we make sort of decisions like that, what I was really your worth and your value, and you need to see that this particular goal that you have is more important than the economic work that you're prioritizing. And until we are willing to claim our importance and claim that things like that matter on the

personal side, quote unquote personal side, where you're going to default to prioritizing, actually prioritizing economic work. And then what happens in the moment, in the year, or over the course of a lifetime, is that it's actually this personal stuff that truly does matter to us that gets kicked into the someday maybe land. And then we look back and you're like, but I never went on those trips. I never ran the marathon. I never built a guitar. I never did the things because I never could justify it economically. I never did put it in my schedule and say, I'm doing that. And I think when we start looking at everything as a project that requires time, energy, and attention, and looking at the fact that what

is fundamental to our thriving is often not economically relevant, then we can say, yes, economic work is really important. And it's just a portion of my life. It is not my life. All of these other things are important. So yes, I am making this choice to make less money or to do less work there because this two weeks of spending time with my kid or my aging parent or or this new puppy, or fixing my backyard, or whatever it is, is actually critical to living the good life. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

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The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Part of your ability to then make the decision, but then actually make it happen, is also getting sometimes, I guess, I would call it brutally honest about the bandwidth that you actually have available to accomplish any of these things. And my experience has been that I lie to myself about that. And everyone who I've ever worked with lies to themselves about that as well.

Your approach to, you have a process which basically really helps you get very honest about it very quickly and then reorient the projects, the personal projects, the career projects, all these different in a way that reflects what you truly have available. It's this approach by framing it as deconstructed, as analyzing, like, what are your available blocks? Walk me through this concept of blocks, because I found that just extraordinarily powerful and also eye-opening. When I actually understood, okay, so explains so much to me about why I'm not doing certain things and why I'm doing certain things and what I might be able to rework in order to actually create a much more satisfying overall balance. Yeah, thanks for that. So a few things about block planning first, right? One of the traps that we fall into is that we actually think that we have any sense of estimating time of how long something takes.

And we're terrible at it, consistently terrible at it. So, we can't tell the difference between something that's going to take 75 minutes and 90 minutes, right? But we make up a lot of stuff. And so we end up just trying again to treat ourselves like robots, like we have that degree of consistency and we don't. And so once you let go of that idea and we go into sort of a block planning, it's much more intuitive. So there are four types of blocks that I encourage people to think through. So one is a focus block, which is that block of time where you do the highest level work that you can do, whether that's creative work or whether that's strategic work. It's usually solo time of just when you get what's ever inside out of you.

And those blocks are 90 to 120 minutes long, right? And why that long? Because that's about the time that it takes you to really dig into getting something done, do all the transitions, do that thing and start to exit. And it's about the time that matches our biorhythms as well. If we go through circadian rhythms, about every two hours, our body will recycle, right? That's when you need to go to the bathroom because your body goes through these natural two-hour cycles. Yeah.

After about two hours, I realized I've just read that sentence the third time. Third time. Still not entirely sure what it says. Yeah, and so it accounts for that. And what I do need to say, because sometimes people confuse it, no, that's not two hours of you sitting there typing. That's that entire block of time where you do all of the coffee getting and you do the bathroom, but you don't switch to another project or you don't switch to another tool.

So those are your focus blocks. The second is your social blocks. And these are the blocks of time that you are interacting with another human, right? And so it could be a meeting. If you're in a service profession, it could be that that's the time that you're working with clients and things like that.

Those also tend to be about 90 minutes to 120, even though, or 90 to 120 minutes, even though we like to tell ourselves it's gonna be 60 minutes and we stack ourselves from meeting to meeting. So why is it 90 to 120, even though, or 90 to 120 minutes, even though we like to tell ourselves it's going to be 60 minutes and we stack ourselves from meeting to meeting. So why is it 90 to 120 minutes? Because when you look at the amount of time that it takes you to really transition into prep mentally and emotionally for a meeting, and then to down cycle, and then the reality is most of the time where you meet with other people, there's work that needs to happen that's generated from that, whether you need to send email, so on and so forth.

Right. And so we don't give ourselves nearly enough time for this. And then we end up in task debt because we don't have a place for that in the schedule, which leads me to admin blocks, which are 30 minutes to an hour long, where you do all the email and the phone calls, and you just batch all of that stuff and get it done. And you're in that mode, right, of getting it done. And then the last one is your recovery blocks. And, you know, interestingly on this one, Jonathan, I used to not talk about recovery blocks, because it's on that self-care side. So recovery blocks are what they sound like. They're when you do the self-care or the bits that are you treating yourself like you're human. So there could be meditation, it could be sleeping, it could be eating, it could be exercise, it could be whatever it is that helps you recharge

and take care of yourself. And I didn't talk about them a lot, except for I noticed in my work, I would be times where I'd sit down with clients. And I'm one of those people that I don't really have an emotional difference between helping someone figure out what their schedule needs to look like versus figuring out what the business model of their, you know, or their team composition. It's all work to me and it's all equally enjoyable. And so I would just be looking at their calendar

and be like, so where's lunch? And you look at, you look at six meetings stacked back and back, like, where are you eating? And like, oh, well, I just kind of fit it in. Except for, I also remember the conversation that I had with them about them not eating lunch. It's like, you're not actually fitting this in, right? Where's exercise? Where's all of these things? And so I became more adamant about people thinking about their recovery blocks and making sure that they're on their schedule. Because otherwise, work or other things slide into those blocks. And you just don't get it done and it becomes one of those things.

But fundamentally, what I want people to focus on when it comes to their best work projects or when it comes to doing the work that they most want to do is those focus blocks. Because we have far fewer of those than most people think. And that is what drives your projects. And if you don't have enough focus blocks, you're not going to get the momentum that you want. And if you have none, what you're going to end up doing is committing to ideas that don't have room on your schedule to do. And so there are just things to think about. Like what I will tell most people is if you can't find three focus blocks for a project every week, you won't actually make any momentum on that project.

It'll continue to be one of those things that you're like, oh, I'll do it next week or I do it next week or I do it next week. And you'll continue to punt it. And it's not that there's anything wrong with you. It's just there's not enough room in your schedule. And you're trying to do, you know, we learned about block planning in school. If you had those little shapeshorter things where you like got to put the triangle in the triangle hole and the circle and the circle hole. But unfortunately, what we do when we actually look at our work is we keep trying to cram the square into the circle hole, right? We keep trying to cram our focus time, our focused work

into the in-betweens of meetings and social media and emails. And we wonder why we're not getting anywhere because it really does take, you know, 90 minutes to two hours to dig into that, make significant progress and exit from that. And a lot of times I've noticed that because of the way people stack their days, they're not even allowing themselves the chance to get into doing their work because they know they don't have enough time to get into it and get out of it. So what's the point? Might as well jump to Facebook. You know, you might as well, you know, see whatever deals on Amazon that you didn't need today, but you're going to find out anyways, right? And so changing that and just saying, how do I reorient my schedule to put my focus blocks during the times of my day where I'm most

likely to be creative and focused and high energy makes a world of difference. And we're just playing with time here, right? We're not, we haven't changed the amount of available time. We just changed how we've used that time in ways that are better at getting you to where you must want to be. Yeah. So, I mean, it's a combination of one, owning the fact that the focus blocks, like the work that we need to do in those

focus blocks is invariably going to take, you're just going farther and farther and farther behind and then beating yourself up and then becoming, you know, just own the fact that, and this is going to take way longer than I think. Yes, even I'm smart, I'm accomplished, all the yada, yada, yada, and still it's going to take more than I think it's going to take. So let me set aside the time so that I actually feel like I can get real work that matters done. blocks per week on a regular basis to do that for a project, then it's probably a really good idea to say no to it. Because the only thing that you're going to be building into your week in your life is frustration rather than momentum. Absolutely. And here's where displacement comes back in, right? Saying no to that new project, what you have to get real about is you are prioritizing

something in your life already. And so rather than saying, no, I can't, right? Because I don't have time. The real true story is, no, I'm choosing not to do that project because I'm choosing to do these other things. And that can be a point of frustration for a lot of people, right? Because they don't like that that's actually what's going on. But I think that is the wedge in your life that allows you to start saying, okay, if I want

to do differently, I need to choose differently, right? And the other thing about focus blocks that are really important is it's 90 to 120 minutes. When we look at how much time we're watching TV, when we look at how much time we're on distracting sites, when we look at how much time we're shopping, when we look at how much time we're doing things that are either wasteful or if we really had to counterpose those activities versus the work we're most called to do, it's a no-brainer, right, to do the work. So it's not like you have to go dramatically change your life. It's just you have to start stealing time from things that are either wasteful or don't nourish you as much. And so this is, you know, three fewer Netflix binges, right? This is two less, you know, two times of you not going out to eat because that's

really time intensive when you think about it, right? There are ways that you can steal back this time. And, you know, whether we want to tell the John Grisham story where he wrote most of his novels two hours in the morning before he went to work, like, there are so many stories where we have stolen that time and put it to things or people who take longer lunch breaks and work on their projects during their longer lunch breaks. other thing that I want to remind folks is that we'll really squander a day, right? We will really like a full day. That's what we hope for. Like I just want a full day or I want a full week, and then I'm going to do the thing. Except for when that full week happens, what I've seen across countless clients and countless conversations is one, that's when your body tries to claw back all the recovery that it hasn't been getting. So you end up sleeping a lot and venting out because it's like, oh, I can do it now, right? I actually have space in my schedule.

And the second thing that will happen is that you will start thinking, okay, how am I going to spend this whole day working on something? And you'll burn your body out. Instead of saying, I need a whole day, I would want you to be thinking, okay, what are the three focus blocks for the day? What are the three significant chunks of a project that you can do in those three hours? And be super clear about what that needs to be so that you don't get at the end of that full day and you're like, I just been clicking all day. Like I'm no further along, which creates the story and this head trash and this pattern to where you start resenting doing that because you look at every time you've done that in the past and you've either slept the whole day or you click the whole day and you haven't gotten what you wanted out of it. And that makes a lot of sense.

And I have experienced that personally, as I'm sure a lot of people have. The other thing that I think it makes sense for us to touch on while we're in this zone is the idea of time of day. I have for two reasons, right? One, I have found that my brain works in different ways at different times of the day. If you ask me to be hyper creative and hyper productive at four o'clock, it's going to be a completely different experience than if you asked me to do it early in the morning or even late at night. And so when you think about not just how many of these four different blocks do I have in my life realistically, and then how many of the focus blocks do I have available to get the stuff that

really matters done? The other thing I found super helpful, I know you're a big advocate for, is understanding when in your day does it make sense to actually build these into your schedule? Because it can make, I have been so surprised, it makes a profound difference what time of day I actually do these. Absolutely. And that experience is not unusual, right? There are, roughly speaking, three different chronotypes that we all fall into. And that's that early morning, sometimes called larks. That is the night owl, which we normally call people who have later sessions. And then there's this emu, this third, Dan Pink calls them third birds, but I like calling them emus, right? That are people who are really on fire in the afternoon, neither in the morning nor in the evening.

Like the afternoon is their sweet spot. And again, unfortunately, we live in this industrial reductionist society that puts us on this first shift nine to five schedule. And that's when you have to do all your work. And even when we go solo, we adopt that mindset, right? That nine to five is when you work. But really, if you're a lark, the reality is about seven to maybe one o'clock is your peak zone, right? Outside of that, you're going to be doing lower level work. You're going to be burnt out. You're going to be tired and so on and so forth. And even if you get an evening session on top of that, like working in the afternoon is just not going to be your thing when we start talking about focus blocks. And you just sort of invert that for every chronotype.

It makes such a huge difference. And the reality is, and I want to be more stark about this, if you try to do your deepest work in an off-peak cycle, it's going to be a road of frustration because you're not going to do it. Or you're going to do it and you're going to wake up and look at what you've done and be really frustrated about how bad it is and how much time you wasted in doing it, right? And so, again, using displacement as our friend here, it's really helpful to think, if I don't, I'm a morning person myself, right? If I don't do it in the morning, it's not going to happen. It is not going to happen. So choosing to do all the other things besides that in the morning means that I have also chosen not to do this thing. And that choice or that sort of recognition is really powerful when it comes to how we focus and how we set ourselves up for success. And again, I want people to really be

thinking, yes, you can talk about taking every day. And if you're a morning person doing it from seven to two and doing all that, yes, that's one way you can do it. But I'd also want to say, maybe it's just Monday, Wednesday, and, that's one way you can do it. But I'd also want to say like, maybe it's just Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in the morning that you steal one block. Every one of us, like the world can live without you for two hours. I promise you, right? The world can just do whatever it's going to do

for that amount of time for you to focus on your work and what matters to you. And that's where we start talking about boundaries. Because a lot of times we don't set the boundary that we need for that. And so whether it's a scheduling app or whether it's whatever it is, we know we work better in the morning. And yet we still take morning meetings.

Why? Right? Because your client needs it or because somebody needs it. Turns out time and time again that we have far more ability to choose our schedule, even in a corporate environment, right? Then we really assert. And so we end up in these periods to where we're sitting in the meeting right during our peak zone and know at a certain point that the work is not going to get done. And yet we still try to take it home with us and get it done. It just makes such a difference. So hard that it's, if people were to do one thing, I would say, you know, take the time to figure out

when you're at your peak and experiment with putting some focus blocks in there and just stealing two hours at a time. Yeah. How would you recommend that people actually do that? Is there a simple process to figure out what time of day that zone is for you? Yes. So we have some tools on our website that helps people track this. But what I've learned is a really great tool, a really great way of backing into it, is think about how you would operate on a vacation when you've already rested. It tends to give you an idea of when you would naturally do different types of things, right? Because you don't have the external constraint of other people's schedules and other

people's priorities, right? So part of it can be momentary journaling where you look at every hour and say, how do I feel on a scale of, you know, one to 10? Am I creative or am I not creative? Would be another way that you can do it. What I've experienced with this one, Jonathan, is most people already know. They really do know. And they haven't allowed themselves to make their schedules match their chronotype. They keep trying to make their chronotype match their schedules and it doesn't work. Yeah. Right. And then you end up being a person who either never finishes stuff or you're finishing all the stuff that doesn't matter. And then you start, and then you go into that cycle of, you know, like I am the type of person who doesn't finish it. And

that labels you as an identity of that person. And then the thing that also stood out to me from what you were just sharing is this idea of so many of us, I think, feel constrained. We feel like we can't actually choose that in our work and in our lives because, you know, so I'm a parent. And I know that for, you know, like many years, a certain time where I am hyper generative and creative and productive would be a time where I actually want to be really present for my family. So I have made a choice to give up a certain amount of that because one of the things that matters to me most in the world is being there for the people that I love most dearly. But also it's actually what I realized over the years is it's more complex than that. It's more nuanced than that. Because when I do that every day, I feel great about the fact that I'm showing up for my family.

But then slowly over time, what starts to build up is a certain recognition that I'm not coming close to doing my best work professionally. And there's a certain amount of that flows through to my mode of being all day, every day. And then when I think I'm, you know, oh, I'm here and I'm present for my family, I'm actually a little bit frustrated and pissed off when I'm with my family because I'm not actually doing the stuff that fills me up and nurses me on the contribution side of things. And what I think I'm doing in the name of being present for my family is actually not only hurting my ability to do my best work in the world, but it's also hurting my ability to be fully present and loving and open when I'm with my family. And I've realized over time that I really do have to do this balance where sometimes it actually makes sense for me to say, you know what? One of the best things that I can do for my family is to actually take these two hours and go and do incredible work. them, I'm going to really be there. My state of mind, my state of being will be very, very

different. And that's a much higher quality of time with them. But that's not an easy thing to come to. Yeah. I'm so glad you put that out as the example and also that you were honest about the frustration and resentment that comes with that, right? Because I think there's not enough space, especially for parents who are creative folks, to be in that tension. But you feel shame owning that, actually. Yeah. Because you're like, I shouldn't feel that way.

Yeah. So I used to call it mom guilt, right? Because I've noticed so many of my clients and students who are moms, they have this huge sense of guilt about claiming that boundary and going to the coffee shop for two hours, right? And leaving their kids behind. But more importantly than that guilt is the guilt they feel and the shame they feel about being frustrated and resentful about that choice and what's not happening and the shame they feel about being frustrated and resentful about that choice and what's not happening. And the story that they start telling themselves is, I'm not able to do,

I'm not able to do my work because of my kids, right? And so, they start pushing their challenges and struggles on their kids when they realize it's really about their choices. And so in that scenario, I agree with you 100% in the sense of the simple choice is to be present, be omnipresent, right? The cost of that choice is that in the end, you're never really present, right? And there is that sense of fulfillment, completion, satisfaction that happens when you carve away that two hours or you carve away that morning. And let's be frank, if you got a teenager, the mornings are a great time to steal anyways, because it's not like they want to interact with you in the morning anyways, right? And then you come back and you're whole in a way, and you can

be extraordinarily present, extraordinarily generous with your time, extraordinarily focused because you don't have all the wheels turning in the back of your mind about like the way that you're going to have to recalibrate your schedule or your project or what choices you're going to have to make because you didn't get it done. And you know, how you feel about the fact that you didn't get it done. And so, I think too many of us approach our relationships with our emotional, creative, mental, and spiritual wells empty in the name of being present. But how are we showing up in those moments? And is that the type of presence you would want to have? I would much rather have, personally, I would much rather have an hour or 30 minutes of

Angela's really clear, focused time where she feels like she's gotten everything that she's needed outside of her relationship. I'd rather have 30 minutes of that than four hours of sort of that quarter time where she's trying to do everything else and trying to be with me and trying to do that. It's like, no, no, no. Like I can wait, right? Go do your thing and come back. And I try to be that way with her and with my friends. And in the sense of like, if I'm not in that place, I'm going to tell you, like, I'm really not in that place right now. And I'd rather, unless it's a really momentous occasion, like someone graduating or someone leaving, and you just have that period of time, I'd rather us find times where we're

aligned energetically, we're aligned in interest, and we're aligned in sort of our general life satisfaction to hang out and be truly, truly present than to be projecting that frustration or that tension into the relationship. Because it's got to go somewhere. Yeah. And I think it's the difference between just being present and bringing your most fully actualized, aware, and available self to that moment of being present. It's not an easy thing to do. We all have complex lives. We all have people outside of quote work, you know, who play various roles in our lives and who we want to be there for. And at the same time, when we are not doing work that in some way allows us to actualize that deeper part of ourselves, it flows through to

everything else. And that's why, like, when I think about the work that you've been doing, when I think about this book, Start Finishing, it's on the surface is about, yes, like, here's a really cool methodology to start finishing the work that you're doing in the world. But bigger picture, it's actually a methodology to allow you to do the work that matters most effectively so that you can then spend the greatest amount of time being present and engaged in all of the parts of your life that matter most to me. I guess it comes full circle

because in the beginning, I asked you like, why this book? And you're like, well, it's kind of part productivity book, but it's also kind of part, you know, like self-improvement book. I think it's just that ripple effect. I think so. And I would want to say it in a bit more nuanced way. What I want people to really get into

is the work of their lives, right? So that we see that they're, and work is not a four-letter word for me in the sense of it's something we want to get away from, we want to minimize, so on and so forth. It's this really sacred stuff that we get to do. Only a parent can parent their child in the way that they're going to do it, right?

Only certain people can be leaders in their communities in the way that they're going to do it. Only a particular creative is going to create in the way that she creates. Whatever that is, I want people to see that this life work can be prioritized. I won't go as far as to say should be prioritized, because people have their own priorities, but it can be prioritized. And that for many people, that's where deep satisfaction,

deep flourishing comes from. And so, yes, it's a book that will help you do your economic work. I'm just as excited about the fact that it's a book that will help you do the work of your life and make sure that what you need to do to become the type of person that you most want to be is on your schedule and is on your project deck and has the group of people around you supporting that goal, just like what you would do any other economic work that matters to you, right? Yeah. This feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So hanging out in the studio today, in the context of this container

of the Good Life Project, if I offer out the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Do what matters most, right? And I'm going to focus on the doing, right? I won't say stop talking and start doing, but I will say like, if you know that you've been doing a lot of talking and a lot of, a lot of ideating, but you haven't been doing a lot of making or doing or leading or whatever your thing is. Just understand that that gap between the good life you want to live and where you are is probably bridged by certain types of doing that you have to start doing. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button

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