Bookworm Transcripts

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All right, Joe Bieling, I am back from sabbatical and ready to make a podcast.

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How about you?

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Party time back from my day job.

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Not a sabbatical, just normal.

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So today I may have thoughts on changing that when we're done with today's book.

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Exactly.

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This will be a fun one, but I did notice during sabbatical that's typically when

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I am poking around and wasting time on social media.

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And I see that you are doing a lot of live stream stuff, which is pretty cool.

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Yeah, it's been kind of a fun adventure.

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I've been like the folks who follow me on Twitch and who have joined in for those

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streams have seen that I was doing a lot of bullet journal stuff and still do.

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Like we talk about it a fair amount.

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I do stream like the monthly migrations and stuff, which has been fun.

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And at the same time we've been exploring apps and note taker tools.

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Actually, this past Monday, I announced and started setting up a new video course

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that I'm working on, but we actually started the process of setting that up live

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on the stream.

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I saw that.

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Do you want to tease that?

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I am very intrigued by this title.

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So the course is called working without apps.

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And the concept is that I've done so much to get off of like the proprietary

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tools, like this is, it started with me leaving Evernote and I've moved over to

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a lot of like the plain text, plain picture file formats and don't like being

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locked into things.

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So it plays off of that and plays off of me going to pen and paper with bullet

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journaling.

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So I'm basically moving down this path of not using any proprietary formats or

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apps of any sorts.

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And I continue to get lots of questions about it.

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And I thought it would be a cool topic to build a course around.

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So I committed to building the course.

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And once I did that, I needed to set up some of the stuff in podium and such,

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which I use for the online courses.

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So like I was setting up some of that and doing some of the outlining and such.

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So I was doing all that live on stream.

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So it's totally backwards from a lot of folks tend to do is like, Oh, no,

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I'm not going to share any of that until it's all done and out the door.

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We had a conversation about how to price the thing on the stream.

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So we did a lot for it.

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But anyway, all that to say, yes, I've been streaming more and more.

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It seems like so cool.

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Yeah.

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Fun times.

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I'm very excited to see where that that course goes.

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And you were telling me before we hit record that you've got a easier way to view

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your live stream stuff.

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Oh, yeah.

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So yeah, I saw this done by this is not a thing I came up with, but I purchased

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the domain, JoeBuleg.live.

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And that domain will redirect you to the stream.

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And I saw Mike Hurley do it with Mike.live.

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I saw Steven Hackett do it with ISMH.live.

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So I thought, Oh, that's really cool.

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It was super.

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I think it cost me three bucks.

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Here we go.

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So anyway, if you wanted to tune in, if that's of interest to any of these,

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any of our bookworm listeners, I've been doing those on Mondays at 1 p.m.

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JoeBuleg.live.

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There you go.

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Cool.

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There's the pitch.

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I guess mine would have to be bobblehead.live, which would just be confusing.

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Yep.

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Yep.

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I actually I attempted to purchase bookworm.live.

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Did you?

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But it's it's owned by somebody already.

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And they probably want like $10,000 for it.

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I hate it was like five, six hundred or something like that.

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It's like domain squatters.

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Yep.

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Not a thing I'm willing to flip that much money for.

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Right.

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So unless you are, it's going to remain in their hands.

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It's cool.

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It's cool.

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You've got a couple of follow up items from our previous book.

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How did you do on these action items?

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Yeah.

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So the last book, The Minimalist Home by Joshua Becker, I had three action items.

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One of those was to walk through our house with my wife and just talk about

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the goals for each room.

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And I can't say that we did that per se.

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We didn't actually walk through the house and do that, but we had a lot.

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We have had a lot of conversations about the goal of the house and how do we

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want it to feel in terms of like the us spaces as we were calling them.

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And that's led to, I wouldn't say any major changes as much as

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like mental shifts as far as like how we approach, how we approach what we're

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doing with like our main living space primarily.

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So that was a lot of fun to just to kind of work through with her.

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And it's led to kind of the process that we're now in where we're like maintaining

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that.

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And I would say it's been a positive.

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It's been a good, a good process to work through that with, with Becky.

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So that was one.

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The second action item I had here was to minimize my wardrobe.

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I had two and a half trash bags where the stuff I pulled out of my closet.

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That's actually less than I thought you'd end up with, to be honest, having

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gone through that myself.

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That was the first pass.

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Okay.

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So the thing here is that I don't like, I haven't been one that keeps a ton of

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clothes anyway.

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And I have sort of a wardrobe.

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I shouldn't say I have like two wardrobes, like two uniforms of sorts.

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Like I'll have a t-shirt with jeans.

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Sometimes I throw a sweatshirt on it.

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And the other is jeans and a button up.

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Like those are kind of my two uniforms and I wear those all the time.

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And I cut back on a lot of the button ups.

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I actually did get rid of a number of t-shirts.

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But again, this was first pass.

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I'm guessing if I were to make another pass, I could probably get a rid of

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another trash bag full.

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It didn't help that the day I was doing this, I received a t-shirt in the mail

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from Mac stock.

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So that didn't help things at all.

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So it's getting there, making some progress on it.

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So that part is underway.

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I would say it's still underway.

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Like I made a lot of progress with it, but there are still.

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There's another pass I need to make.

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I'm just not ready to do that yet.

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Okay.

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I would still be willing to give you credit for that one and say that one's done.

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Okay.

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That's fine.

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We can say it's two trash bags full of clothes.

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It's not a small amount.

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Yeah, I should say they're not small trash bags either.

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They're like the commercial restaurant.

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Yeah, trash bags.

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So there if you stand them up, they're like five feet tall.

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So maybe I shouldn't have said that.

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It would be like maybe four trash bags for a normal size.

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It sounds like a ton, but having done it myself, I understand.

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So it doesn't take long.

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No, it doesn't at all.

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The last action I had here was find a home for everything in my home office.

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And basically give it a place.

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And I've done a lot of that.

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You can't see it on stream here, but Mike, you can see it, but I put my bookworm.

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For all hanging that you gave me, the fracture you gave me and actually put it

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on the wall for the first time ever.

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I've always just had it moving around from office to office with me as I've

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been moving things.

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So it was good to actually put it in a home and have it stay.

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So it's kind of nice to have that.

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Done.

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And anytime I do streams and stuff, it's right there.

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So I like it.

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I'm a fan.

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So yes, I have been going through.

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I've got a lot of it done as I'm looking around here and have a lot of things

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purged.

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I got rid of a big box worth of junk that I didn't need duplicate cables.

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I told my wife that's an interesting thing as an IT person.

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I save all the cables because I never know when I'm going to need them because I do use them.

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Yep.

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Like it's not a thing that I can just get rid of.

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What I don't need is multiples of those.

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And that was the part that got me.

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So there were some like the micro USB cables.

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Yes, I will keep one actually in that case I'm keeping two, but I had eight.

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I had that I had a bank of many USB cables.

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So like I have devices and run across devices that use those and need them.

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So I did keep two of each of those just because I know there are times when I have

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one in use and it stays in use for a couple of weeks and I need a second one.

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Like I know that that happens.

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So I kept to got rid of the others and time I did all that I had.

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I want to say there was close to 40 plus cables that I was trashing.

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So considering I keep somewhere around 200, that's probably not actually that much,

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but it's a lot still.

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Anyway, all I have to say, I've done a lot with my office area.

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It's gone a long ways and I'm much happier for it because I feel better suited to

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sit down on my desk and work on things.

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Yep.

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So that's that's helped me out quite a bit.

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It's actually very well suited for.

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I don't think I wrote these down, but for some of the action items I have for today's

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book, I'm not trying to give you a segue here, but it does fit really well with that.

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Just from a keep it clean, keep things structured stands.

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Cool.

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Well, we'll take that segue.

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We'll jump right into today's book, which is shorter by Alex Suyong Kimpang.

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And this is the second book by this author that I have read.

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I had a gap book a while back called rest, but this one is really about rethinking

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the workday, the subtitle at the top of the book says work better, smarter, and less.

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Here's how.

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Which in my opinion, maybe is a little bit misleading for what this book actually is.

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It's not a formulaic.

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Here's how you do more work and less time, sort of a standard productivity book.

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There is not three sections.

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There's a ton of stories and the structure of the book, basically at the beginning, he

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talks about this design thinking process.

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And there's a picture where you frame it and then there's inspire, ideate, prototype,

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test, share, and then it's a circle.

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So it just keeps going around and around.

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Now, are you familiar with this design thinking process?

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Because he talks about this kind of from a developer's perspective at the very beginning.

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Yeah, I've heard of it.

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I have worked with a couple of companies that use it.

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He poses it like it's very, very common and you see it everywhere.

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That that seemed to be the way he pitched it.

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Maybe I just don't run in those circles or haven't been around them, but I don't

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agree with that thought that this is very, very common.

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Sure.

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There are other models that I see quite a bit, like the concept of an MVP.

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Get a minimum viable product out the door as fast as you can.

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Minimum design, minimum code, minimum, all the things, get it out the door and then

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iterate, which he's kind of using in the midst of this.

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I mean, it is a part of the design thinking process.

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I don't know if it's as widespread as he says it is.

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It could be.

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I just don't see that.

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It's very possible that it is just at much higher levels, like from a chain of

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command stance, it could be in those companies at a higher level.

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I just haven't seen it.

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So I can't speak to that.

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I don't think accurately.

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So what is your thought about using this model based on?

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I know you mentioned you have kind of limited experience with this, but what do

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you, what was your impression with using this to redesign the workday?

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Were you like, okay, I can see what he's doing there.

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Were you like, uh, this is weird.

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I feel like he shoehorning it in.

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Okay.

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He, he, he, I feel like he wanted to use this because if you read the exact

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terms he uses when he explains that process, you can tell that he really, really likes it.

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Yep.

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Like that is a thing, like that whole design thinking flow is one that he

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resonates with a lot.

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And when it comes to using that as a basis to talk about a shorter workday or a shorter work week, I, I feel like you're trying to force something.

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Okay.

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It could just be that he has, because there, there are a lot of different ways that you could do this.

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You know, you could potentially use the GTD model.

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Yeah.

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To talk about the same thing.

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You could do that.

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There are so many different processes and flows that you could use to talk about this.

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He just chose to use this one.

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That was kind of my perspective on it.

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I don't think this is necessarily, it's not bad.

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I don't think it's a bad choice to do that.

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But one of the things I struggled with was that it seemed like most of the book was a promotion for a shorter workday and shorter work week instead of actually explaining each of those steps.

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He had a hard time, at least I had a hard time connecting each of the steps with what he was talking about inside of them because it seemed to just merge from one step to the next.

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Yeah.

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So I had a hard time actually differentiating which chapter I was on.

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No, I agree with that.

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I think that's fair.

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In chapter three specifically, which is ideate, he's talking about doing trials, which seems like prototype and right, right.

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So I had a little bit of trouble following this model as he laid it out in this book too.

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So just to reiterate how this is laid out, there's really six chapters in this 260 some page book and they follow the six steps in this design thinking process.

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So frame, inspire, ideate, prototype, test and share.

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And he defines them right at the beginning.

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And I'll explain his definitions here because I think this will maybe give you a little bit of his background.

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So when he's defining the design thinking process, frame is reflecting on the problem.

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You really need to solve in the ways that you can go about solving it.

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Inspire is better understanding users needs.

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Ideate, use what you've observed and start generating ideas for products or designs.

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Prototype is building and identifying technical problems with your design.

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Testing is putting the prototype before users to see what they make of it and then sharing where you share the work and the story behind it.

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And he's basically saying in the whole first chapter.

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So we'll start here with number one frame and we'll kind of break this down chapter by chapter.

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But in frame, he's basically saying that the problem is we work too much and he uses this Korean word, which I really liked.

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Gorosa.

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I think that's how you say it.

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It is the Korean word for working yourself to death.

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Right.

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And I don't think I have been guilty of working myself to death, but I definitely work really hard and wear myself out.

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And it's kind of a pattern and then I get sick.

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Yep.

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Yep.

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Just because my body shuts down, it's like I need a break.

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I'm done.

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And you're going to be done too.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, exactly.

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And this actually just happened a couple of weeks ago.

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We moved the last recording because I wasn't feeling real well.

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And my wife said that, you know, this is a pattern and I can see this happening.

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Like I can tell when you're going to get sick.

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And I was like, what do you can?

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Why didn't you say anything?

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So she's like, all right, next time I'll call you out on it.

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But basically I was in the middle of the calm inbox project and we've got

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sabbaticals built in.

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So I'm like, no, I got my structure.

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I'm good.

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You know, and she basically pointed out that even with all of that stuff, I still fall

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into this pattern where like I can't let go of work.

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And what she notices is that I start going to bed later and later because I'm so

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amped up from my work day and I'm still thinking about these things.

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And even if I'm not in my office working past five, six, seven o'clock at night,

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you know, my brain has trouble disconnecting from those things.

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And so I go to bed later.

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I don't sleep very well.

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And then enough of those days add up.

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And before you know it, you know, my body's saying uncle.

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I'm done.

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Yep.

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I hear you.

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So I've, I've tried to get better at this over the years, but I still think that

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I've got some room for improvement here.

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Sure.

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Yeah.

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I mean, there's, you know, coming back to like the design thinking set up in this

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first one being frame, there is from the couple cases where I've worked with this.

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Okay.

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When people hit that frame set up, like when they talk about that particular piece,

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they're trying to explain what the problem is, which he does a pretty good job

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of in this particular case, like at this point, he had me hooked as far as what

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are the stories and how are people framing the problem and explaining the

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problem of working too much, which is fascinating because I think there's a lot

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of, like, for example, you have your sabbatical week.

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I don't know if that would play into what he's saying.

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I would venture to say no, that that has more to do with taking longer breaks.

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That's more along the lines of rest, probably.

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Yeah.

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I don't think that would necessarily fit the shorter model, I guess, but it's

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at least a step, I think, to, to helping with the, the problem of overwork.

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It's, it's interesting whenever he starts explaining it, one of the things I

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started to think about, it was back in corporate days, whenever we would be

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pulling, say, 10, 12 hour days and the number of times that we were just

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hanging out having conversations because we were just putting in the time.

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And really what was going on was I was getting all of my work done by about 10

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a.m.

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And then we were just kind of putzing until it was time to go home.

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And that was not uncommon, super, super common.

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And the part that's hilarious is that I regularly hit my KPIs, my, you know,

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we would always set our annual goals.

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And the part that was strange is you would set these goals with the intent of

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knowing how you would hit them.

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You would, you would word them in such a way that you knew you could hit them.

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And even if you were behind, you could make it look like you hit them.

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That was a lot of what we did.

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But you could set these things up to where it looked impressive, but really you

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knew that you could get these things done very quickly.

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And the few years that I did that, I regularly, the goals would start January

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1 and I would regularly be done with my annual goals sometime late February.

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So, and then the rest of the year was achieving beyond that so that you looked

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good on the review and thus you could get promoted.

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That was the game I played and managed to get, I think, four promotions in two

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years.

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Like that's why it's because you can play those games.

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This is essentially saying, call a spade a spade.

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We don't need to work that hard that long to get the work done.

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And it's okay.

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Like it's okay to say that.

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And if we don't have to put the time in, we're going to be able to be more

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rested and be more creative.

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That's more productive.

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That's, that's essentially the, the thinking there.

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Yeah.

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And I think I know where you and I stand on, whether that is a right or wrong

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approach to how you do your work.

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But it is interesting to me that there's anybody who could think that that is, that is

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wrong.

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I get it though.

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I've known people who are like, well, if you're not putting in like honest effort

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for eight hours a day, then right.

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What are you doing?

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And he does talk in this book about the difference between somebody who just

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wants to avoid work and somebody who wants to work smarter.

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But he makes a statement.

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This is later on in the book, but this phrase, I think, perfectly encapsulates

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what you're just talking about.

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He says, become excellent and excel and you can take lots of coffee breaks.

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That's from one of the stories that he told.

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Yeah.

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I, I, when I read that particular piece, my thought was, Oh, right.

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Because when I worked corporate, that was a lot, I was a data analyst.

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So my job was to run Excel reports for the most part.

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I would spend, you know, there were times, you know, in order to hit this

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February goal thing, a lot of the time I would write macros and write VB scripts

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that would take the data from multiple places and kick out the report for me.

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So people would send me data and they're like, Hey, can you rerun that report?

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I know it's a lot of work to do.

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And I know it takes about a week to get that stuff done.

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But could you put in the time to do that?

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I'm like, sure, to send me the data.

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I'll, I'll dedicate some time to it.

00:22:00

I'm not going to tell you that that's a four minute project for me.

00:22:03

But that's what I did.

00:22:05

Automated all in Excel.

00:22:08

So yes, whenever I tell people that, you know, if you're going in data analysis,

00:22:12

learn SQL and learn how to write scripts in, in Excel and you'll have a lot of free time.

00:22:18

And that is the difference with this book, I think, is that this is from an

00:22:24

organizational perspective where a lot of the stories and things that he's

00:22:29

telling in this book are companies that are embracing this shorter work week.

00:22:34

So they're saying, if you can figure out how to do that, then just take the extra

00:22:39

time off, don't try to hide the fact that you can get this done in 15 minutes

00:22:44

instead of a week.

00:22:45

And that's important to call out here at the, the beginning.

00:22:49

And I know that's going to be difficult for some people because they're going to

00:22:53

read this and they're going to say, well, this sounds great, but there's no way

00:22:57

my company would do that.

00:23:00

My company is a junky corporate culture.

00:23:04

And this is just the way things are and it's, it sucks, but I just got to deal

00:23:10

with it and you feel completely helpless.

00:23:13

I'm kind of curious, you know, what you would say to somebody like that.

00:23:17

Because I know you have been in those, those situations.

00:23:22

Sure. What would you say to them?

00:23:24

If they were to read this and be like, well, that's great for you guys, but there's

00:23:28

no way I can do any of this.

00:23:30

Like it should that person even read this book?

00:23:33

I think it's helpful to read the part that's interesting to me.

00:23:38

And then I'm currently struggling with is because I was trying to figure out, okay,

00:23:43

what are the action items I'm going to have for this book because like, okay,

00:23:50

for example, my day job, I'm an IT director at the church and they have been

00:23:58

implementing the things I left at corporate over the last couple of years now.

00:24:04

And we now do annual reviews.

00:24:07

We now set annual goals.

00:24:09

And these are things that I've been grateful I didn't have to do because we

00:24:16

weren't doing that, but they're catching up with where all these things were 10

00:24:22

years ago.

00:24:22

And we're learning that these things don't work, but we're a church and we're,

00:24:26

you know, behind on a lot of that.

00:24:29

And I don't expect them to be up with the latest and greatest.

00:24:32

And let's, let's not use that word catching up because that feels like we're

00:24:35

making up lost ground.

00:24:37

This is actually maybe going backwards, you could argue.

00:24:40

There's that.

00:24:44

But one of the things that comes with that is a culture of putting in the time

00:24:50

and putting in the work.

00:24:51

Yep.

00:24:52

And coming from someone who's spent many, many, many extra hours

00:25:00

catching up from an infrastructure stance and are building to allow live

00:25:05

streaming, I'm not in a good place.

00:25:07

Like as far as how much time I should be putting in, I've put in way too much.

00:25:12

And trying to scale that back below 40 instead of down to 40, the,

00:25:21

the difficulty that I'm now seeing is if I want to back that off below 40,

00:25:27

there's, because I've experimented with this to some degree, there's kind of this

00:25:34

air of, are you just not doing your job?

00:25:39

Yeah.

00:25:40

Are you just neglecting your duties?

00:25:45

Like there's some of that.

00:25:47

And I think that it makes it difficult to figure out what to do with that.

00:25:53

And I mean, I can have a conversation with my superiors and I could do that.

00:26:00

I have a close enough relationship with them that I could probably explain

00:26:03

this really well and get their support.

00:26:07

The, the difficulty comes when a lot of what I do is, is fairly physical,

00:26:14

like physically pulling cables through a ceiling or physically putting

00:26:20

equipment on a stage and wiring it up.

00:26:23

And there's a fair amount of time that goes into that testing things.

00:26:27

What I wonder, and this, this is a question I would have for you, Mike, with this book,

00:26:33

one thing that doesn't seem to be called out is the difference between

00:26:39

mental work and physical work and the differences in the amount of time that

00:26:44

you put into that.

00:26:45

I'm thinking specifically of like construction workers who it's not uncommon

00:26:51

for 10, 12 hour days every day of the week.

00:26:53

Yep.

00:26:53

And I don't run across, maybe I just don't know them that well, but I don't feel

00:26:58

like I run across a lot of people who are exhausted because of that.

00:27:03

A lot of them tend to feel very fulfilled because they look at this building I

00:27:07

made. So there's not necessarily the same feeling with that.

00:27:13

There's no Excel macros for steelworkers.

00:27:15

Yeah.

00:27:17

Yeah.

00:27:17

So I don't know.

00:27:18

Maybe there's something there.

00:27:19

Maybe there's not.

00:27:20

Do you have thoughts on this?

00:27:21

Uh, I am not sure that I'm qualified to speak to this, but I will

00:27:28

say that there's a ton of stories in this book.

00:27:31

So he does talk about a lot of different, a lot of different companies

00:27:37

that do fall into the physical, you know, you can't just automate this and make

00:27:43

it faster, but still the company does better because they have shortened though

00:27:49

work weeks.

00:27:50

He talks about a bunch of restaurants.

00:27:53

He talks about nursing homes, you know, places where

00:27:58

somebody needs to be on call 24/7.

00:28:01

They just are not burning out their employees and they make them work four

00:28:05

days instead of five.

00:28:06

And that means they have to hire more employees.

00:28:09

So that's the perspective that he takes is like an organizational

00:28:13

perspective top down.

00:28:15

You know, you may have to have more people to cover all those shifts,

00:28:18

but ultimately it's going to be better for your business.

00:28:21

From an individual perspective, I'm not sure what to do there.

00:28:26

If you are a construction worker and you think, well, yeah, I should only

00:28:33

work four days a week, but the job is five days a week.

00:28:36

I don't think there's a whole lot you can do at that point.

00:28:39

I think with the knowledge work that he talks a lot about in here,

00:28:45

a big part of that is creativity.

00:28:48

And so there's more room for you to make your own

00:28:55

hours, make your own systems as long as you're producing the work, you know,

00:29:00

who cares how long it takes you to do that.

00:29:02

And there are definitely gains to be had there.

00:29:05

Coming off a sabbatical, I can tell you, for example, that like,

00:29:08

I didn't do anything that whole week.

00:29:11

And what that allowed me to do on Monday when I came back is crank out

00:29:15

a 3000 word article in three or four hours.

00:29:18

Sure.

00:29:19

So the rest, which he does talk about later in the book, like,

00:29:25

having that day off, because he's advocating for the four day work week,

00:29:28

really, that day off allows you to be more creative because your brain is

00:29:32

doing all sorts of stuff behind the scenes.

00:29:33

And that's that ultimately produces better work.

00:29:36

I do think there's some truth to that, where if like you don't give yourself

00:29:39

the space, you just constantly had done doing the work, you know, you can put

00:29:42

in the hours, but a lot of it is spent staring at that blank cursor and it's

00:29:46

not really being productive.

00:29:48

But even in my situation, I'm not going to just like disconnect for a day

00:29:54

and no one knows where I am.

00:29:56

So I feel like a lot of the advice that he's giving you in this book,

00:30:00

you do kind of have to temper it and figure out what does this mean to me?

00:30:05

Where are the areas that I can maybe apply some of this stuff,

00:30:10

knowing that I'm not in the CEO position to roll this out across an entire company?

00:30:16

You know, what's the low hanging fruit in this?

00:30:20

For me, the areas where I can apply this and don't get frustrated because

00:30:25

you can't just cut out an entire day out of your work week.

00:30:28

Yeah.

00:30:28

The chat has a good point to there's physical work, mental work, and don't

00:30:34

forget being on call, but not actually doing anything work.

00:30:37

Yep.

00:30:38

So there's a good point there that there are folks who are on call.

00:30:42

And I think this is a good point to bring up to because this is what I do.

00:30:48

I have a lot of physical work that's a part of my day job, a very large amount

00:30:54

of it is mental work, but I'm also on call when I'm not there.

00:30:58

Like there are so many classes and things that happen nights and weekends,

00:31:03

even though my actual job is in a normal work day.

00:31:06

So it gets messy as far as when are you there and when are you not?

00:31:10

And I don't know, you know, the other side of this too, is I do enough side things.

00:31:16

Like we're recording this at 1 p.m. on a Friday.

00:31:19

So obviously I'm not working on my day job currently.

00:31:22

So I have taken off the afternoon, which is fairly common.

00:31:26

Like for me, I generally take Monday, Wednesday, Friday afternoons off from my day job.

00:31:32

Now that's something I've kind of been doing for the last couple of months or so.

00:31:36

Uh, maybe longer than that now, but that particular process is one that has allowed

00:31:44

me to work on some of the side projects that I've got going on.

00:31:47

And I don't know if Alex would say that's a good thing.

00:31:52

Or if I'm just working a normal eight hour day just on different things.

00:31:57

Like what does, what qualifies and what doesn't.

00:31:59

Yeah, because he does point out that some people they go to a four day work week.

00:32:05

So they're putting in 32 hours.

00:32:07

And then on the Friday, they have a side job that they work.

00:32:11

And it seems as though he says that's a good thing, but I, you know, when you, you

00:32:18

stop and think about it, I don't know if that actually works out that way.

00:32:22

I'm speculating.

00:32:24

I want to say it works, but yeah.

00:32:27

Let's, uh, okay.

00:32:30

So I want to talk about that, but I think the next section actually kind of speaks to this.

00:32:35

So let's go into section two, okay.

00:32:37

Inspire because this is where I think a lot of the always on got to be on call stuff comes in.

00:32:44

Okay.

00:32:44

So he mentions a 2017 Gallup poll or 46% of people check the email before getting out of

00:32:50

bed and 47% checked, work email occasionally or frequently after hours.

00:32:55

That is like being on call and that is absolutely connected to things like burnout,

00:33:04

recruitment and retention issues with work, life balance, organizational

00:33:08

sustainability, lack of creativity.

00:33:11

Those are all things that he calls out specifically, like you should consider the

00:33:16

four day work week if you are struggling with these things.

00:33:20

So I think that you have to recognize that when you are on call, you are still

00:33:27

working in some capacity, even though it's not like you would think of my full

00:33:33

attention is on the work.

00:33:35

Sure.

00:33:36

And I would say to that person, absolutely do whatever you can to break that

00:33:41

somewhere if you can.

00:33:43

And I get it that not everybody's going to be able to do that, but that is definitely

00:33:51

impacting your mental wellbeing, your like creativity is the one that stands out to me.

00:33:59

I wholeheartedly believe that if I am able to just think about things as part of my

00:34:06

workday, but not actually produce things, then it allows my brain to kind of

00:34:10

synthesize the information, connect the dots and what I end up coming up with is

00:34:15

is a better product.

00:34:17

So like we're recording this podcast about a book that we read.

00:34:21

A lot of people would say, well, I just don't have time to read.

00:34:26

I think you and I both have kind of like worked this into our day and view this as

00:34:32

an aspect of our work because the dots that we collect from this impact, the other

00:34:37

stuff that we do as creators.

00:34:40

So the challenge for me with all of this is recognizing that reading the books is

00:34:45

work, recording the podcast's work, the stuff I do with this suite set up is work.

00:34:50

And not to burn myself out by trying to do all those things, but I wholeheartedly

00:34:55

believe also that those things are kind of interconnected in the stuff that I read.

00:34:59

And the podcast that I make, like ultimately that makes the work that I do with the

00:35:03

suite set up even better.

00:35:04

So it's not wasted time.

00:35:06

It's not stealing from the company.

00:35:08

But at the same time I was hired at the suite set up to do a specific job.

00:35:13

So I got to make sure I put in that on a Stafford and fulfill the expectations.

00:35:17

I don't want to steal from the company or go behind anybody's back.

00:35:21

You know, I want to be transparent, but like this is the way that I produce my best

00:35:26

work.

00:35:26

And as long as everybody's cool with that, then then we're good.

00:35:30

Not everybody's going to have an understanding boss is like, yeah, make your own

00:35:34

schedule work when you want.

00:35:35

I want to, some of them are going to be like, I want to be able to get ahold of

00:35:38

you on Slack anytime I want or via emails even worse because you got to go in there.

00:35:44

You got to look forward or you're constantly getting all those things.

00:35:47

Yeah, text.

00:35:48

That's what mine is.

00:35:49

Yeah.

00:35:50

Which is almost worse than all of them.

00:35:51

Yep.

00:35:52

Yep.

00:35:53

So this particular section, basically what he's saying is that you should consider

00:35:59

this because as a company level, you may think, well, we're not working this this one day.

00:36:05

So we go from five days, four days, let's say that that's 20% less time.

00:36:10

So productivity is probably going to drop about 20%.

00:36:12

But he makes the point here in the second chapter that it actually drops about 10%.

00:36:18

And that's just the productivity side that's not the people burning out and then they

00:36:23

leave and then you got to hire somebody else and get them trained up.

00:36:26

You know, there's a lot of other areas that help you recoup that cost.

00:36:29

Creativity, like I mentioned, that's a big one.

00:36:31

And then the other important aspect here is that you got to have the right

00:36:36

people in the organization.

00:36:38

And he says, sort of working hours is not about working less.

00:36:41

It's about working better.

00:36:42

I know people who have totally been in the, I just want to work less.

00:36:48

Camp.

00:36:49

And that's not me.

00:36:52

Like I said, I have trouble disconnecting just because I care so much about the

00:36:57

stuff that I'm making.

00:36:58

No one's forcing me to think about this stuff after hours.

00:37:01

I just am because I want it to be the best that it can.

00:37:05

Right.

00:37:05

Right.

00:37:05

So for me, this whole book is inspiring from the, from the perspective of what are

00:37:12

the boundaries that I can put in place to protect myself from me, not from a

00:37:17

boss is saying, sure, you got to work all the, all these hours.

00:37:21

Uh, but just recognizing like in this section, he talks about, in creative

00:37:25

and knowledge intensive industries, the work is never done no matter how many hours

00:37:28

you put in.

00:37:29

That's totally true.

00:37:30

So we got to put a box around those hours and then Parkinson's law kicks in.

00:37:34

The work takes as long as you give it, you know, and, uh, by timeboxing it, by

00:37:41

forcing it into a smaller space that helps it be more effective.

00:37:46

That is exactly what, you know, one of the things that I've done, I had it as an

00:37:52

action item.

00:37:53

And it's what you would think is talk to my superiors about doing something like

00:37:59

this.

00:37:59

So I don't have it as an action and I'm because I already did it.

00:38:02

Maybe I should record it and then say done, but I did have this conversation.

00:38:08

Uh, and my direct boss.

00:38:14

Had the comment that I don't think I'm comfortable saying you can go home.

00:38:19

Every single day because I told him, and this, this kind of ties a few things

00:38:25

together, me working on my side projects is a refresher for what I do there.

00:38:31

Exactly.

00:38:31

So it becomes a form of rest and, you know, doing things like bookworm or

00:38:37

energizing for the things I do in my day job, building a web hosting company is

00:38:43

energizing for bookworm and for my day job, you know, doing analog Joe is

00:38:48

energizing for all of those, like doing those things and working on them helps

00:38:52

all of them in collection.

00:38:54

So me knowing that, uh, I've done a couple things.

00:38:59

I've talked to him about it and he's cool with me cutting back the amount of

00:39:05

time I work for the church and my day job.

00:39:10

But what we're doing is you've been to our church building.

00:39:13

There are a lot of different places you can work in that building pretty much

00:39:17

uninterrupted.

00:39:18

Sure.

00:39:19

And the joke is always Joe's hiding.

00:39:23

Like people think I'm hiding all the time.

00:39:25

Like that's, that's always the things like Joe, where are you?

00:39:27

And they can never find me at times.

00:39:30

It's like, Oh, well, I'm just, you know, right here in sound booth.

00:39:35

But what I'm doing instead is instead of going home, I'm just going somewhere

00:39:41

else.

00:39:41

I'm working on my own projects at that time.

00:39:45

So namely every afternoon now, I'm still people know I've been going home

00:39:50

Monday, Wednesday, Fridays after lunch.

00:39:53

That's already unknown, but I'm simply adding Tuesday, Thursday to that as well.

00:39:58

And just staying in the building.

00:39:59

And some of that comes from, I have a night or two or three,

00:40:05

sometimes where I am at the building after hours and people know that they

00:40:10

know that I've got connections and emails and stuff that happens sometimes

00:40:14

after hours, which actually doesn't really happen that much anymore.

00:40:17

But there's also Sunday morning, which is technically work hours for me.

00:40:22

So I don't think I will get to a four day work week as Alex likes to promote.

00:40:29

But I can at least scale back the amount number of hours I'm spending on that.

00:40:35

During the day, now I will tell you.

00:40:38

This week, so as we're recording this, I spent this entire week on that schedule.

00:40:43

And I didn't work on a lot of my side stuff this particular week, mostly because

00:40:51

I needed to see like I didn't want to plan for that because I needed to see if

00:40:55

I could get my actual day job stuff done in that amount of time.

00:40:59

I wasn't sure because there's such a physical component to it.

00:41:04

I wasn't sure if it would work or not.

00:41:07

It seems to, it seems to work.

00:41:10

The only real issue I've had all week is when a volunteer didn't show up and

00:41:16

they were supposed to, but thus volunteers.

00:41:20

But it's been an interesting process to work through that.

00:41:24

It's also nice to know that my boss has my back on it.

00:41:27

It's not a thing that I think will make public to the church or to the staff,

00:41:32

though I'm telling the world here.

00:41:35

Our little secret side note, but I don't think it'll be a public thing mentioned

00:41:40

at staff meeting or anything like that.

00:41:42

It's just a, this is a thing I'm doing.

00:41:45

Yep.

00:41:45

And that's as far as it goes.

00:41:46

The key for this is really if you are in a worker position, you are not an

00:41:54

executive and you're not able to affect change throughout the entire organization.

00:41:58

You have to get buy in and everyone has to think that what you are doing is fair.

00:42:03

But that doesn't mean that it is not attainable, at least in some way, shape or form.

00:42:09

So he mentions that the four day work week is the thing primarily that he's

00:42:14

focusing on and the companies that have done that.

00:42:16

But there are other ways to do this, like just shortening the workday from eight

00:42:23

hours to five or six hours, you know, or another alternative that he talks about

00:42:29

in the next chapter, number three, ideate is the free Friday where people are still

00:42:38

at work, but they're free to do exactly what you were describing, where you can

00:42:43

work on your own personal projects.

00:42:45

And he talks about at Google, they used to do this.

00:42:48

I don't know if they still do this.

00:42:50

Where one day of the week was just for your personal projects.

00:42:55

And I know for a fact, not from this book, but from other stuff that I've read that

00:43:00

some really awesome innovations have come from Google based off of those free

00:43:07

Fridays where people were just screwing around with their personal stuff.

00:43:09

And then they're like, Hey, this is an idea for YouTube or Gmail, whatever.

00:43:13

What do you think?

00:43:13

And then they're like, Yeah, this is cool.

00:43:15

And they roll it out to the entire company.

00:43:18

So that is inspiring to me again, because my focus on this is like the creative

00:43:23

benefits that can come from maybe rearranging my schedule a little bit.

00:43:28

But like I said, I'm not going to try to cut my hours drastically either because

00:43:35

there is an expectation there with the Blunk Media team, like this is what we

00:43:40

hired you to do.

00:43:40

I don't want to go back on that.

00:43:44

But ultimately, we've also talked about like, what is the kept promise indicator,

00:43:50

the KPI?

00:43:51

It's the quality of this stuff that I'm able to make.

00:43:54

If I'm putting in 60 hours a week and the stuff I'm writing is garbage and the

00:43:58

courses are no good.

00:43:59

Ultimately, you know, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

00:44:04

That's a bad thing.

00:44:05

Right.

00:44:06

Right.

00:44:06

So for me as a knowledge worker, I feel like I'm in this kind of weird spot where

00:44:14

I if I were to sit down and talk to Sean, we've got buy in on this concept already

00:44:20

because it's built into our sabbaticals.

00:44:22

The idea behind the sabbaticals is that the every eighth week the company takes off.

00:44:26

So because that is going to recharge us and it's going to allow us to do better

00:44:30

work when we get back and we're going to do eight weeks of work and seven weeks of

00:44:34

time and we do that over and over and over again and it absolutely works.

00:44:38

So I think it'd be interesting to talk to Alex about this because I feel like that

00:44:44

is in one sense, a version of this shorter work week, just that sabbatical

00:44:51

formula where I'm putting in the roughly 40 hours for seven weeks in a row, but

00:44:59

then the eighth week is typically when we take off and that is kind of getting into

00:45:02

the other book rest, you know, two, but I think an argument could be made that it

00:45:07

fits with this as well.

00:45:09

Because ultimately with a four day work week, what you're doing is it's kind of

00:45:14

like you're sprinting for a little while and then you're taking a break and then

00:45:16

you're sprinting for a little while and then you're taking a break.

00:45:18

Kind of reminds me of Scrum without the constant upping of what you're able to

00:45:23

sure the constant reasoning of the bar.

00:45:25

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:45:27

And the big thing I'm thinking about through all of this is what does it mean?

00:45:38

To be productive?

00:45:39

Like, what does it mean to function as the best version of yourself and the

00:45:44

capacity for the role that you've been hired for as a, as an employee?

00:45:49

And it's impossible to separate out just the work piece of that.

00:45:54

You know, if stuff's going on at home, then that is going to affect your work.

00:46:01

And so the thing for me is like these flexible hours that I've got, how do I

00:46:08

put in an honest day's effort at the day job?

00:46:11

How do I make sure that everything else is going well?

00:46:17

All the other plates are kept spinning.

00:46:20

And how do I do that in the most effective way possible?

00:46:24

And I like the permission basically that the author is giving us to rethink

00:46:30

how all that stuff gets done.

00:46:32

And I know I'm in a weird position where I have total control over my

00:46:36

work day and I can dump it all out and put all the pieces back in, you know,

00:46:41

how I want them.

00:46:42

But if nothing else, it makes me grateful for my situation that I'm able to do that.

00:46:46

Yeah.

00:46:47

Cause essentially like you could, like you could do a six hour work day and people

00:46:52

probably wouldn't know it.

00:46:53

Like it would be possible to set it up to where I think about that with, if,

00:46:59

if you're working remotely, unless you've got a company that has like the,

00:47:03

keep the green light on scenario, unless you're in that position and you're allowed

00:47:08

to set your own schedule, people don't really know how much you're working.

00:47:12

Anyway, so you could scale it back and just not tell anybody.

00:47:17

I am not saying you should do that.

00:47:19

True to you, Mike, or anyone listening to this.

00:47:23

Here's the thing though, what defines work, you know, is it just the writing that I'm

00:47:28

doing?

00:47:28

No, I would argue it's all of the learning.

00:47:31

It's all of the experimenting.

00:47:32

Like today, this morning I was going through a course on Rome research.

00:47:39

There it is.

00:47:41

Just identifying different ways that people are doing stuff.

00:47:45

Cause I am working on an article about GTD style task management in Rome and where

00:47:50

does it fall flat?

00:47:51

Where does it really shine?

00:47:52

And I'm messing with a whole bunch of stuff, doing a whole bunch of experiments.

00:47:56

I didn't write any words, but I spent four hours.

00:48:00

I would argue working on this article.

00:48:03

Yeah.

00:48:03

Right.

00:48:04

Cause that knowledge that I'm getting is going to translate into a piece of content.

00:48:10

It's just not as simple as sit down on the keyboard.

00:48:13

Okay.

00:48:14

Right.

00:48:14

Words.

00:48:14

Yeah, I get you.

00:48:15

Cause there's, there's a lot of times I do that with writing code.

00:48:19

People don't realize that when you have a code project, there's a lot of times when I'm

00:48:24

going to go spend time with it.

00:48:27

I can't tell you what I'm going to change before I start.

00:48:31

I can't tell you what features I'm going to add necessarily.

00:48:35

That's because I'm the only one working on them.

00:48:38

So a lot of times it's, I'm going to go spend time with the script I'm working on.

00:48:44

Is it going to be completely done when I'm finished tonight?

00:48:48

Uh, probably not, but am I going to add new features to it?

00:48:52

Probably.

00:48:53

What are they?

00:48:54

No clue.

00:48:54

No clue.

00:48:56

I'll find out whenever I'm in the middle of it.

00:48:57

The number of times I've sat down is like, okay, I need to make sure that whenever I get a

00:49:03

kickback of information from a payment gateway, that it does X, Y and Z and I go and I set it up

00:49:09

and I run it once just to see how it's going to work and see how I'm going to make an

00:49:13

alteration.

00:49:13

And I realize, Oh, that button should change colors when you click on it, which should then trip off a

00:49:19

few other UI changes that way the user knows what's going on.

00:49:23

Okay, let's get that done so that I know where it's at and the flow of the process.

00:49:28

And then I don't ever touch the part I thought I was going to work on because I was being creative

00:49:35

with the process and the user experience on top of that.

00:49:38

Now I will eventually get to that, but that's still a similar, like, I'm going to go spend time with

00:49:44

this, not necessarily have a set thing I'm going to kick out, but that's still work.

00:49:49

Like you're still going through that creative process.

00:49:52

Exactly.

00:49:53

And it's hard to measure the output from that.

00:49:56

And in the past, I would have maybe thought to myself, well, I didn't write any words.

00:50:04

So this was wasted time, but I have come around on the whole process of creativity.

00:50:10

We've talked about this before, Austin, Cleon, steal like an artist.

00:50:13

All of those dots that you collect, those are not wasted.

00:50:16

Right.

00:50:16

Even if you don't automatically make the connections, they're there and your brain will do it if you

00:50:23

give it the space to connect those things.

00:50:25

And so that's part of my job is giving myself the space to connect those things and shaking it all up

00:50:31

and seeing what comes out.

00:50:32

And so, you know, I don't feel bad anymore about spending that time messing with stuff.

00:50:39

I mean, you got to put limits around it again because I could spend a hundred hours testing out

00:50:45

all of these different applications.

00:50:48

So you do have to constantly be asking yourself, basically, like, what is the best thing to be doing

00:50:55

right now?

00:50:55

But as long as you have that approach and you have a company that understands that's part of the

00:51:02

the process, then this is this is pretty great.

00:51:07

And not everybody's going to going to recognize that.

00:51:10

You know, that's the hard part, I think with this is.

00:51:12

And this is all the design thinking process, right?

00:51:15

So a big part of this is you have this hypothesis, you test some things, you measure whether it worked.

00:51:24

What are the ways that you're going to measure the output from this?

00:51:30

And this is kind of where he talks about in this chapter with the trial.

00:51:33

He mentions that the usual trial is usually three months, about 90 days, where you share what's working.

00:51:39

You call the fact that you're calling it a trial is important because you're basically at that point,

00:51:45

not saying that these shorter hours are privileged.

00:51:48

This is the way things are going to be going forward.

00:51:50

It's we're going to try this, see what happens.

00:51:53

And there is a possibility that it's going to fail.

00:51:56

But I kind of think that the beauty of this design thinking process that he outlines in an as the approach

00:52:04

for redesigning your workday is that there isn't a simple formula for you to follow.

00:52:10

And you're able to apply it to your own situation.

00:52:14

And even if your organization isn't all in with this, like you were just saying,

00:52:17

like you can get somebody on your side who's going to allow you to try different things.

00:52:23

And ultimately what that's going to do is provide you not just what you want,

00:52:27

but it's going to improve the quality of the work that you you do.

00:52:31

So you can apply this a lot of different ways.

00:52:35

But the trick here is that you've got to figure out like, what is the way you're going to measure this?

00:52:42

Not just try to duck the green dot on Slack for a while.

00:52:46

Yeah, there was a group of folks at corporate that had mouse movers.

00:52:53

Oh, my goodness.

00:52:54

So if you let it sit still, it would nudge your mouse about every four minutes

00:52:58

because it would trip to a way at five and that was a corporate policy,

00:53:03

like a policy management tool that was a part of the domain.

00:53:07

So if your computer, like you couldn't override it.

00:53:11

And people would get these mouse movers because there were browsers that could do it.

00:53:17

Apparently.

00:53:18

So you could open a browser URL and it would move the mouse for you.

00:53:23

So it would keep that little green light on.

00:53:26

Oh, my goodness.

00:53:27

That's not surprising to me, but that's kind of the exact situation that he's saying to avoid.

00:53:33

Yep.

00:53:34

That's the kind of culture that's toxic.

00:53:37

If you're in that sort of situation, if I was in that situation, I'll just apply it personally.

00:53:43

I'd be looking for a way out.

00:53:44

Yeah.

00:53:45

Yeah.

00:53:46

I get it that there are other things that are sometimes more important than calm work environment,

00:53:54

but I don't know.

00:53:55

The further I get along with the stuff, the more I realize the importance of that.

00:53:58

Sure.

00:53:59

And how it's not just a convenience for me anymore.

00:54:02

It's a necessity.

00:54:04

Yeah.

00:54:04

Makes sense.

00:54:06

I'm just a much better human when I'm not in that situation.

00:54:10

Yep.

00:54:13

I am not as angry if I'm not.

00:54:17

Yeah.

00:54:19

So let's let's move on here to number four prototype.

00:54:24

And again, these definitions are kind of not great, but prototype is really where you are

00:54:33

trying out your new system, even though in the last section he was talking about the trials.

00:54:37

This is where he mentions the become excellent in Excel and you can take lots of coffee breaks.

00:54:44

This is also where he gets into some tactics.

00:54:48

And I think this part's kind of cool.

00:54:51

There are a couple of things specifically that stood out to me here.

00:54:54

First of all, he mentions the four day work weeks requiring adjustments to how you do meetings.

00:55:02

And again, you know, this is the thing that I read.

00:55:04

I'm like, yeah, yeah, I totally agree with all this.

00:55:06

And then I was instantly like, there's a lot of people who are going to be really

00:55:09

mad at this section because they can't do anything about it.

00:55:12

Yeah.

00:55:13

I was literally as we record this today doing a calm inbox implementation strategy session yesterday.

00:55:20

And there were some people there and the thing they were talking about, every single one of them, it wasn't about

00:55:26

they have trouble with email.

00:55:28

It's all the other inboxes, all the other tools that their companies are using to communicate.

00:55:32

And the fact that they're all stuck at home and they're having to work from home.

00:55:37

And the way that the higher ups are solving this problem is just all of these meetings that are

00:55:43

designed to serve them and give them the information that they want.

00:55:46

The net result for the employees is that they have back to back Zoom meetings all day, every day and no time to do the actual work.

00:55:53

Yep.

00:55:54

Yeah.

00:55:55

I remember one of the virtual, well, the first virtual company I worked for,

00:56:01

Beck AG was the name of it.

00:56:03

And my job towards the later part was to be building a set of software for us to use internally.

00:56:10

And it didn't go well at one, because at one point we had this big confrontation with the board of directors because

00:56:19

they kept wanting to know when will this be done?

00:56:23

What's the timeframe for all this, you know, how far are we like they wanted these things all the time?

00:56:29

But instead of us putting together one call, say once a week where we pushed all those updates,

00:56:37

we met one on one with each of the board of directors every week.

00:56:42

And they all had different levels of information that they wanted.

00:56:47

So these calls, each of them could be an hour and a half long.

00:56:50

And you start adding that up.

00:56:52

There were 15 board of directors.

00:56:54

There's your 40 hours.

00:56:55

Yeah.

00:56:56

I couldn't get anything done and the guy that I was working with, the two of us that were splitting up the work,

00:57:02

like forget getting any of it completed.

00:57:04

Like, so at one point they had a big board of directors meeting.

00:57:10

I think it was in Omaha and we all flew in for that meeting and they wanted us to do a great big presentation of how much we'd got done.

00:57:19

And I got up.

00:57:21

I was the one that was ahead of the project.

00:57:23

So I had put together a single slide that showed the timeline of what we originally projected and then how much we had actually completed.

00:57:31

And then there was a lot of questions of why are we so far behind?

00:57:35

We were only like a tenth of the way along from where we should have been.

00:57:38

And they wanted to know why.

00:57:40

I was like, well, here's my schedule.

00:57:42

And I pulled up my calendar for the last two weeks and showed them like, here's where my time went.

00:57:48

I was talking to all of you.

00:57:51

If I could stop talking to all of you, I could do that.

00:57:54

I'll back over.

00:57:56

Well, they, it was a light bulb moment for them.

00:57:58

They realized that that wasn't actually being helpful because they didn't realize everyone else was talking to us as well.

00:58:05

Yep.

00:58:06

No one knew that they were all doing the same thing.

00:58:10

So that one actually took us from the point of doing 20 plus hours where the meetings down to a single 45 minute meeting in a week.

00:58:18

And we got a lot more done after that.

00:58:21

But I can only imagine like people right now and this COVID season who are in those scenarios that have all these higher ups that don't know like they've never worked in these scenarios.

00:58:32

So they don't know how to do this.

00:58:34

So they're putting all these processes in place so that they can get the information that they need to continue doing their job, which is fine.

00:58:43

But they don't necessarily see the ramifications of all the other people doing the exact same thing and eventually leading to developers not actually developing, just updating on why they're behind schedule all the time.

00:58:55

So yeah, it's a mess.

00:58:58

Another issue with going from in office to remote work is that I learned this yesterday too.

00:59:08

A lot of the companies and organizations never had a conversation about, okay, this is the way things will work now.

00:59:16

And so the impromptu person to person meetings at the water cooler where you have a two minute conversation, hey, can you do this thing?

00:59:26

Yeah, okay, I got it.

00:59:27

Now instead it's an email and then a Slack message and then a text message.

00:59:32

Yep.

00:59:34

Because there's no process for that and they want to make sure that the message is being received.

00:59:39

And now there's all these different inboxes with all these different tasks coming in too.

00:59:43

So it's just a nightmare situation.

00:59:47

Right.

00:59:47

So I honestly don't even know what to do about that kind of stuff.

00:59:53

I understand that a lot of times having the conversation like you did, that's a big piece of it.

01:00:00

I can see a situation where the higher ups just don't care.

01:00:04

I'm willing to believe that most people have enough humanity that the default at least a little bit would be like, oh, we didn't realize.

01:00:17

And so let's make some adjustments.

01:00:19

Yeah.

01:00:19

And that would be the advice that I would give people, I guess, is like, if you've been avoiding that conversation, have it because only good can come out of it.

01:00:27

At least if they say, no, you know what you're dealing with now and maybe that's the time you start to play in your exit.

01:00:34

I don't know.

01:00:35

Because that sounds pretty miserable to me.

01:00:37

I will say that in my case, so using that confrontation that I created, I didn't do it blindly and I didn't do it without some form of a warning.

01:00:53

This was a conversation I had been having with the CEO.

01:00:57

I directly reported to the CEO.

01:00:59

So I had been having this conversation with her.

01:01:03

And then I also had a co-worker who was kind of at the same level, but was on the board of directors.

01:01:09

It was weird.

01:01:10

So I had talked to him about, like, here's what's going on.

01:01:15

Here's why this isn't going.

01:01:17

Like, is it appropriate for me to call this out?

01:01:23

Not having had this conversation with everybody.

01:01:26

So between the two of them, they helped us figure out how to frame it correctly so that we weren't insulting.

01:01:33

Yeah.

01:01:34

At the same time, because the problem we had was that this was a virtual company.

01:01:40

They should know how to do this and had been working virtually for 18 years.

01:01:44

Like that was not a new process for them.

01:01:47

They should have this figured out and didn't.

01:01:49

Yep. So it was bringing something to light that they had never considered.

01:01:53

So I wouldn't say just blindly go put a presentation together for your board of directors.

01:01:58

Don't do that.

01:02:01

But being willing to at least have conversations saying, here's my calendar.

01:02:05

You're asking me for these things and here's why I can't get those done.

01:02:11

Yeah, exactly.

01:02:12

If I'm going to be engaged in the meetings that you're setting up, I can't do my job.

01:02:18

Yeah, it's perfectly fine.

01:02:20

I would think in most situations to say, this is what you expected me, correct?

01:02:25

Yes. OK, well, I want to deliver that, but I can't because of XYZ.

01:02:30

What do you propose we do about this?

01:02:32

Yeah.

01:02:33

Yep.

01:02:33

Obviously you can do that nicely or you can do it like a jerk.

01:02:36

Yeah.

01:02:38

But yeah.

01:02:39

But the approach, I think, is is fine.

01:02:42

Now that being said, you know, again, this is kind of this rest of the chapters.

01:02:48

Uh, tactics that you can use if you are the one driving the, the change.

01:02:53

Uh, so I would say that some of this stuff, maybe you can't say, this is what we're

01:03:00

going to do.

01:03:00

You can still advocate for it though.

01:03:02

And you could still, again, using that design thinking process, test it.

01:03:06

You know, so we talked about the four day work, we're requiring meeting

01:03:10

adjustments where you reduce the total number of meetings, you shorten the meetings

01:03:13

and you keep the meetings focused and purposefully talks about instead of just

01:03:16

using a default hour, maybe scheduling 45 minutes for meetings.

01:03:20

Okay.

01:03:21

So that's the kind of thing that you can't just go to your higher up and be like,

01:03:24

meetings are a waste of time.

01:03:25

We need to cut these down.

01:03:27

Every single one should be 45 minutes instead of an hour.

01:03:30

But you could say, you know, for this project, maybe we should try this.

01:03:34

And then see how it goes.

01:03:37

Yeah.

01:03:37

And once you have some data, like, Hey, this was actually just as effective.

01:03:42

If not more effective, then you have some ammunition.

01:03:45

You could say, okay.

01:03:45

So maybe we should consider this on a larger scale.

01:03:48

Sure.

01:03:48

And I feel like that is a perfectly acceptable approach to a lot of reasonable

01:03:53

organizations.

01:03:55

And again, I know the Trump card is always going to be, well, my organization

01:03:59

isn't reasonable.

01:04:00

And I don't know what to do with that.

01:04:02

I don't know what to do.

01:04:03

I would just, you know, I wouldn't survive there, I guess, you know, I, it wouldn't

01:04:08

be long before I would say something that would, that would cause conflict for sure.

01:04:13

Having come from scenarios like that, I didn't know a lot of what I know now.

01:04:20

I don't think I like, thankfully I'm in a position where I don't think I need to go

01:04:24

back to those scenarios ever again.

01:04:27

But if I had to today, I know how to play the game, like the whole rat race, like,

01:04:32

I know how you play that game.

01:04:34

And a lot of people know that as well and will quite often have side projects

01:04:43

that they start and simply go the flow, like, if you want me a meetings all day,

01:04:48

sure, that's fine.

01:04:49

And they'll be sending emails during the meeting, like everybody else, but they're

01:04:53

building a business.

01:04:54

Sure.

01:04:54

Yeah.

01:04:55

On the side, they're not doing work emails.

01:04:58

They're doing external.

01:04:59

So I've seen that.

01:05:01

I've also seen where people do like what I did and they're done by 10 AM and they

01:05:06

would then do blogging or they'd start some other thing in the afternoon because

01:05:10

they got their actual job done.

01:05:12

And they don't want to be too far ahead.

01:05:13

You don't want to be like, you don't want to go so far that you're now making up

01:05:20

new work for yourself to do so that you can fill the time.

01:05:23

Like you don't necessarily want to do that because then you're seen as an over

01:05:26

achiever and you can lose some of the political game of corporate as well.

01:05:31

So you had to be kind of careful and walk those lines when you're when you're

01:05:36

doing that.

01:05:36

So I don't know.

01:05:37

That's what I've done in the past.

01:05:38

And if I had to go back to it, it's probably what I would do today.

01:05:41

Like, you know, you want to have this big, long drawn out meeting.

01:05:44

That's fine.

01:05:44

But I'm gonna bring my computer in, take notes like everybody else.

01:05:48

Sure.

01:05:50

Yeah.

01:05:50

As I'm researching, who knows what?

01:05:53

Oh, man, I'm so thankful.

01:05:55

I don't have to worry about that.

01:05:58

Sure.

01:06:00

I it's hard for me to even speak to that.

01:06:04

And I don't think Alex does a very good job of it either.

01:06:08

Because he talks about in this chapter, respecting the clock.

01:06:12

One thing they mentioned from one of the Japanese companies is that 901 is not

01:06:16

nine o'clock.

01:06:17

And that I think is really important for all these virtual meetings.

01:06:22

Yeah, it's a complete waste of time that people are showing up late.

01:06:25

Like that just drives me up a wall.

01:06:27

Fortunately, it doesn't happen very often where I work.

01:06:31

People understand that because we've been doing it for a while.

01:06:34

Another point he makes is that people value the things they make,

01:06:37

including systems and processes more than those that they don't.

01:06:40

So I think that's worth calling out if you are in a position where you are

01:06:45

thinking about doing this for an organization, get people to help you create

01:06:48

the systems, because then they'll take ownership of it and they'll be more

01:06:52

effective than if you just top down.

01:06:55

This is what we're going to do.

01:06:56

Another thing that I really liked in this section, which I think is ammunition

01:07:00

for people who work with clients and because I've heard this, especially

01:07:06

with the sabbatical stuff, it's like, well, if someone needs to get a hold of you,

01:07:10

what do they do?

01:07:11

Right.

01:07:12

They don't.

01:07:12

We're not there.

01:07:14

Like, well, what?

01:07:15

Like I could never do that.

01:07:17

I have to be on call for my clients.

01:07:19

And again, these advocating specifically for the four day work week, same principle,

01:07:24

though, like if I want to, if I'm a client, it is assumed I can get a hold of

01:07:28

somebody at the office on a Friday if I want.

01:07:32

And I think there's a couple of things here.

01:07:36

First of all, not all hours are created the same.

01:07:40

And one of the questions that they ask is, are clients buying our Monday hours

01:07:44

or our Friday hours?

01:07:45

Sure.

01:07:46

Yeah.

01:07:46

Which is framing it that way is like, you want the good ones or you want the leftover

01:07:50

ones.

01:07:51

No one wants the leftover.

01:07:52

Right.

01:07:53

Right.

01:07:54

So just having that as something you can use to describe why you are going to a

01:08:00

four day work, we can say we're not going to be on call on Friday.

01:08:04

It's kind of like, well, oh, yeah, I guess because I don't want subpar work

01:08:09

when you're burnt out from everything else that's going on.

01:08:12

I want to be the one that you're thinking about when you're well rested and

01:08:15

Monday morning, you know, and he does say that some clients will still feel

01:08:19

nervous about needing emergency access.

01:08:22

So sometimes you just got to leave the door open.

01:08:24

That's the thing I like about this.

01:08:26

It's not a hard, fast rule.

01:08:27

Like this is the way that you got to do it.

01:08:29

I would say that and he kind of backs us up with some of the stories that he

01:08:33

tells if you were to do that and say, okay, fine, you can get a hold of me on

01:08:37

Friday if you really want to, but it's going to be an emergency.

01:08:39

And so like, uh, let's just say, you know, this is off hours.

01:08:44

So it's time and a half, whatever, but if I'm really there, if you, if you

01:08:47

really need me, you can get ahold of me.

01:08:48

No one's going to do it.

01:08:50

Yeah.

01:08:51

Just test it and you'll see that like you really don't need that access.

01:08:56

And so then you can either, you know, charge more for it or feel free to just

01:09:01

say, no, this is not what I'm going to do.

01:09:02

I'm going to take this day off because it's going to result in better work.

01:09:05

And that's what you're hiring me for anyways is the work.

01:09:08

And it's also possible that you need to get rid of that client.

01:09:12

Yep.

01:09:12

Yep.

01:09:13

To get the better ones, you know, and the other side too is like if you're in a,

01:09:18

you know, like the chat saying, if you're in a 24/7 business, like the tech world,

01:09:22

you need support with some tool, some service, zoom is down.

01:09:27

Like if zoom only was available Monday through Thursday for tech support, that is

01:09:33

a problem.

01:09:34

So they can't do that.

01:09:37

But what they could do is take everybody's work week to four days and then put them

01:09:42

in different places.

01:09:43

So like you could do that as well.

01:09:46

But at the same time, if you're able, like from a client stance, generally having

01:09:52

done the gig economy thing, like generally Fridays are quiet.

01:09:55

Yeah.

01:09:56

People generally don't make contact.

01:09:59

And he points that out a few times like Fridays for most industries are not busy.

01:10:05

Like everybody's looking to the weekend.

01:10:07

They're checked out by noon.

01:10:10

They're not going to send a bunch of emails hoping to get big responses that

01:10:15

afternoon, like they're just not doing that.

01:10:18

So it's fairly easy to eliminate that day or at least cut it short.

01:10:22

So there are a lot of ways you can make that work.

01:10:26

But I don't know, like this is, this is the thing I've thought about quite a bit as

01:10:32

I'm looking at building a web hosting business right now.

01:10:35

I, what level of support do I need to offer and how often?

01:10:40

Yeah.

01:10:40

Like what are the hours that you put in for that?

01:10:44

Probably not going to be 24/7 considering it's just me.

01:10:48

So you're not going to get a response if you're at 2am.

01:10:51

Mm hmm.

01:10:53

So there are pieces of that that I've got to figure out.

01:10:55

I don't know what the answers are, but I'll try something.

01:11:00

You know, we'll get there.

01:11:02

You know, sometimes it's easy to do 24 hour turnarounds on those things, but I don't

01:11:07

know.

01:11:07

I think a lot of it is expectations, to be honest.

01:11:10

And this kind of leads into the next section, number five test.

01:11:14

Cause this is where he mentions a typical client response is that's amazing that

01:11:18

you guys can do that.

01:11:19

And he makes a couple of points with this.

01:11:24

Number one, the, a lot of clients will be impressed with the model and want to adopt it

01:11:32

themselves.

01:11:33

Basically they're on board with the idea.

01:11:35

Those are the clients that you want.

01:11:36

Yeah.

01:11:38

The ones who are advocates for the way that you work and then fire the rest of them

01:11:42

kind of to your point, which is scary, but the limiting belief here is that I need

01:11:49

to be able to respond right away or my clients will leave me.

01:11:52

So number one, we've kind of talked about maybe you need some clients to leave you

01:11:59

because it's not not a great fit, which is always, always sounds like it comes from

01:12:06

a position of privilege.

01:12:07

I get that.

01:12:08

But it's something I really do believe a lot of people need to adopt this.

01:12:13

This mindset that you have the ability to fire clients and find different ones that

01:12:17

will be better.

01:12:18

Yep.

01:12:18

Uh, the other thing is that the response, it's amazing.

01:12:22

You guys can do that.

01:12:23

I have heard this with the sabbaticals that we do.

01:12:27

And, uh, I know that it can be scary to communicate this to clients, but you could

01:12:34

argue that we are in the position selling the courses that we sell where we should

01:12:39

have somebody on call 24/7 to respond to someone's having an issue logging in,

01:12:45

whatever, to the thing that they bought.

01:12:46

We don't.

01:12:47

We still take the sabbatical.

01:12:49

Uh, and the way we handle that is that the person who does the support still logs in,

01:12:57

but at a reduced capacity.

01:13:00

And so the response time is going to be slower, but you will still get a response

01:13:04

that week.

01:13:05

It's not like ghost town until Monday.

01:13:08

Sure.

01:13:09

So I do think that maybe there's creative ways to apply this, but also I think the

01:13:16

lesson to be learned there is like you, again, you could make the argument that we

01:13:20

should have somebody 24/7.

01:13:21

And, uh, the fact that we've been doing it now kind of proves that you don't need to.

01:13:27

So think about your situation and really that's the whole idea behind this book is

01:13:31

challenge everything that you know, don't assume that things have to be the way that

01:13:38

they have been shorter work weeks.

01:13:41

You have to go into it thinking that this is a possibility and then tinker with things

01:13:46

and figure out how can I make this work?

01:13:49

But if you have that approach, I think that it is possible more often than not.

01:13:54

And maybe it's possible for every single situation.

01:13:58

That seems like a very general statement, but I think it might be true.

01:14:01

It's impossible to prove.

01:14:03

But I would wager a guess that in every single organization, there is a way to do this.

01:14:09

Yeah, whether it's known or unknown to your superior, we won't say.

01:14:13

Yep.

01:14:14

Yep.

01:14:15

Or to yourself.

01:14:16

And that's the thing is like you have to assume that you don't know everything.

01:14:20

If you assume that you have a whole bunch of prior knowledge about the way things work

01:14:23

in your situation is unique, you will always be able to prove that true.

01:14:27

Sure.

01:14:27

Yeah.

01:14:28

I think one of the, you know, one of the things I want to test because I'm looking at

01:14:34

I'm shortening my day job down currently to see how that plays out.

01:14:43

But something else I'm doing and I'll reiterate this later, but I'm also I'm

01:14:50

taking advantage of my ADD brain and combining it with this concept.

01:14:55

And what I'm trying to do, so I have essentially four side endeavors that I do.

01:15:04

One is I just call it Joe Buellig.

01:15:07

So it's like the blog, any YouTube videos, the Twitch streams.

01:15:10

So those kind of fit into one category.

01:15:13

I have analog Joe, the membership site.

01:15:16

I now have graphics, this web hosting business that I'm that I am working on.

01:15:24

And I just blanked on the other one.

01:15:25

Oh, bookworm, duh.

01:15:27

That's why I couldn't think of it.

01:15:31

I'm in the middle of it.

01:15:32

So there's those four.

01:15:35

And one of the things I'm trying to do is I split out the different types of tasks

01:15:40

that I do, writing, recording, video editing, actually streaming, putting

01:15:45

together webinars, social media, like those are all things that I split out.

01:15:49

And normally when I would do that, I would give myself around an hour, hour and a

01:15:55

half for each of those tasks whenever I did it.

01:15:58

But whenever I put them into the calendar, I've been trying to like schedule this

01:16:02

out.

01:16:03

And when I did that, I gave myself 30 minutes for those tasks when I would

01:16:09

normally give myself three times as much.

01:16:11

And I'm I haven't started this.

01:16:13

I don't know if it's of any feasible nature at all.

01:16:18

But next week, I'm running that experiment.

01:16:21

I think this is kind of what he's getting at with this design thinking process.

01:16:26

And I have a point to make about this whole thing when we're done here.

01:16:29

But I want to experiment, shortening the individual blocks as well.

01:16:36

I'm curious to see if shortening the block speeds up the movement that I have in

01:16:43

those and makes me a little more productive in that knowing that if I only

01:16:47

have 30 minutes to write an article or at least write, will I do that as opposed

01:16:54

to knowing I have an hour and a half?

01:16:55

Am I more apt to be more focused during that and knowing that I've only got 30

01:17:01

minutes and then in 30 minutes, I'm going to shift over to a completely different

01:17:04

project and a completely different type of work.

01:17:06

My ADD will just snap over and jump into that.

01:17:12

That's my theory.

01:17:14

I don't know how well that'll hold up, but I'm playing games with myself.

01:17:18

You're the guinea pig.

01:17:20

We'll see how it pans out next week.

01:17:22

Nice.

01:17:22

Now I love that.

01:17:24

And I think that's kind of the important thing from all of this is to tinker with

01:17:30

things.

01:17:31

My action item from this book actually comes from this chapter because they

01:17:37

talked about in one of the stories building into the workday because again,

01:17:44

advocating for the four day work week that Fridays were the life admin day.

01:17:49

And I like that approach.

01:17:53

I don't think I'm going to try and build it into a single day.

01:17:57

Like this is when I'm going to get caught up with everything around the house.

01:18:01

But I do like the idea of reframing that instead of like after work, I'm doing

01:18:05

my personal stuff.

01:18:06

How can I build that into my workday?

01:18:09

And I have been starting to get up a little bit earlier and do the focused

01:18:16

writing stuff at the beginning of the day, because that's when I'm most creative.

01:18:21

That's when stuff just kind of flows.

01:18:23

He talks about creativity in this section too.

01:18:25

So that was a something that I've all been working on.

01:18:31

So I didn't write down as an action item, but sure kind of reinforced it.

01:18:34

Like understanding how physically draining knowledge work can be and then

01:18:40

designing your schedule in a way where you put yourself in the best position to

01:18:45

do the things that the based on your biological prime times, basically,

01:18:49

recognizing that I do write a lot easier in the morning.

01:18:53

So just building that into the routine every single day and not wasting those

01:18:58

golden hours for lack of a better term.

01:19:01

Yeah, by doing other stuff during that time and then cranking out the words in

01:19:05

the morning and then in the afternoon, you know, that would be kind of admin

01:19:08

time anyways.

01:19:09

So that's when I can do some of the life admin stuff and my brain is still going.

01:19:14

It's still thinking about all these different things because this is really

01:19:17

the point here from the creativity section is that the four day work week

01:19:20

boost creativity improves problem solving capacity, provides more time for

01:19:24

those creative creativity, boosting experiences and it fosters an innovation

01:19:28

mindset in the organizations.

01:19:29

And I think that's just because he's got the space to connect those dots.

01:19:33

Well, kind of like the Cal Newport productive meditation thing, like I can

01:19:37

take the dog for a walk and be thinking about something and get inspired.

01:19:40

And now I have the solution when I come back home.

01:19:44

So kind of the mode switching, like you were talking about in on one level,

01:19:48

you could say, well, you're not working at that moment.

01:19:51

But I think if I do it right, I still am.

01:19:54

Yeah.

01:19:56

And I can still measure the production and the output for the quote, unquote,

01:20:01

day job from doing those things just simply by rearranging the blocks that

01:20:07

are already there.

01:20:08

I will say this, the concept of shortening and well, I shouldn't say this shortening,

01:20:14

the shortening of those time blocks that I'm talking about come from reading this

01:20:18

book, but the concept of putting a bunch of very disjointed things next to each

01:20:24

other in that time blanket.

01:20:25

Time blocking comes from me spending time setting up monitors and microphones

01:20:31

on a stage over a two hour period.

01:20:33

Cause I had the time, like I was physically doing something completely

01:20:38

different.

01:20:39

And for whatever reason, it some dot in the brain connected and like, oh, my

01:20:45

80s really good at jumping.

01:20:47

If I shorten things and I make them very like widely different whenever I jump

01:20:52

from thing to thing, my interest is peaked every time I switch.

01:20:56

Yep.

01:20:56

And I'm more apt to make a lot more progress whenever I do that.

01:21:01

Again, I have, this is untested.

01:21:03

So I have no idea if this actually works, but that idea came from doing

01:21:06

something completely unrelated.

01:21:08

I think that's true.

01:21:09

I think you will find if you are able to measure that in any way, shape, or form

01:21:13

that that is a productive approach.

01:21:16

Yeah, we'll see.

01:21:17

I also think that switching things up like that keeps things fresh, keeps

01:21:22

you engaged and is directly connected to in the last point I want to talk about

01:21:28

from this, this section, the less absenteeism, which are essentially sick days,

01:21:33

but a lot of times those sick days are not actually sick days.

01:21:37

Right.

01:21:37

In my experience, people just don't have the energy, you know, so they're like,

01:21:43

I can't bring it today.

01:21:45

I'm going to use a sick day.

01:21:46

Right.

01:21:46

And he mentions that these four day work weeks, because it gives you the space

01:21:51

to connect all these things, be more creative, yada, yada, yada, that one of

01:21:55

the companies where they measured this, their absenteeism dropped by 75%,

01:22:00

which is not a small, not a small number.

01:22:04

You know, they don't say specifically what it was before and after, but I got to

01:22:08

think that ultimately this is saving the company money by switching to this

01:22:14

four day work week.

01:22:16

Yeah.

01:22:17

He also kind of mentions, you know, to the earlier point on page 200, that these

01:22:21

unsolved problems that are fresh in our minds get more attention from our

01:22:25

creative subconscious than problems that we work on casually or we tried and

01:22:28

failed to solve a long time ago.

01:22:30

So that's why that space and the time to just let your brain noodle on these

01:22:34

things is, is so important.

01:22:37

The next and last section here is number six share.

01:22:43

There's not a whole lot that I really want to talk about here.

01:22:47

This is where he kind of summarizes the new work paradigm where leaders

01:22:51

define problems that everybody solves them, focus hours, beat long hours,

01:22:55

boundaries are good, attention is social, ask questions and find answers,

01:23:00

communicate openly and intelligently, never stop evolving, all that kind of

01:23:04

stuff.

01:23:05

But he does mention here that entrepreneurs are more likely to deal with

01:23:10

serious mental health issues, like burnout, anxiety, ADHD, ADHD and substance

01:23:15

abuse.

01:23:16

And I thought this was interesting.

01:23:19

I wonder if you define yourself as an entrepreneur.

01:23:23

And also I think maybe it's possible to have an entrepreneurial mindset,

01:23:28

even if you are not a true entrepreneur running your own business, so to speak.

01:23:33

Yes, to both.

01:23:34

So I do identify as an entrepreneur.

01:23:37

And I think it is very possible to do that without running a business,

01:23:45

simply because you have a tendency to look for ways to make money off of

01:23:49

different endeavors and that endeavor, maybe just changes so often that it

01:23:54

never becomes a full business.

01:23:56

And I think that's totally fine.

01:23:57

People like doing that.

01:23:58

I have friends who every time I talk to him, which is, you know, maybe every three

01:24:04

or four weeks has left the thing he was doing to make side money before and is

01:24:09

now doing something different every three to four weeks.

01:24:11

Yeah.

01:24:12

It's some, it's just crazy to me.

01:24:14

Like I feel like I move very quickly, not in comparison.

01:24:18

I can't keep up.

01:24:19

But I mean, it's very true.

01:24:22

Some of the downsides that come with that.

01:24:26

I think the difficulties come when that is your main source of income.

01:24:33

Sure.

01:24:33

I think that's where a lot of that comes from.

01:24:36

It's partly why, you know, we had this conversation on, uh, was it focused at the

01:24:43

time or was it still free agents whenever I joined you and Sparky and we were

01:24:48

talking about me leaving the free agent world and going back to a full time

01:24:54

position and like why did that happen?

01:24:57

And I think that's part of why I did that was to let go of the stress that comes

01:25:06

with trying to make sure you're providing an income and having something a little

01:25:11

more stable and then being willing to use what you were doing as side income as

01:25:16

well.

01:25:17

It's partly why I made that move from a mental health stance.

01:25:20

It was a positive thing I needed to do.

01:25:23

I think that's a lot of what he's, he's sharing like the difficulties that come

01:25:29

from not doing that.

01:25:30

And when you are a hundred percent as an entrepreneur, like that's where the need

01:25:35

to go 80 hours is coming from because there's the stress of I'm not going to

01:25:42

make enough if I don't work this long.

01:25:44

Yeah.

01:25:45

So I can definitely see that.

01:25:46

Yeah.

01:25:47

I think I would define myself the same way, you know, an entrepreneur, maybe not the

01:25:52

person who is running the, the company, but still the big takeaway is watch out.

01:26:02

Yeah, because the personality is just keep going.

01:26:06

Notice of the grindstone.

01:26:07

Just keep cranking, just keep hustling.

01:26:10

And the big takeaway from the book for everybody, I think, whether you define

01:26:15

yourself as an entrepreneur or not is, and this is really what he hammers home in

01:26:20

this last section, you have to be willing to rethink everything you assume is an

01:26:24

absolute truth, including the five day work week.

01:26:27

So I don't know, there's not a whole lot here.

01:26:30

Like I said, this is kind of a summary of everything that he's talked about.

01:26:33

He's made his case.

01:26:34

He's told all the stories.

01:26:35

And at this point, he's just like, okay, so this is what I told you now.

01:26:40

Be willing to change.

01:26:42

Go there for and do it.

01:26:44

Yeah, exactly.

01:26:45

Pretty much, which is easier said than done.

01:26:47

I know, but yeah.

01:26:51

So that's the book.

01:26:53

Anything else you want to say about this?

01:26:54

I want to just make a point about the whole design thinking process.

01:27:00

Because I where it comes from is the realm of designing products.

01:27:07

And it's, I don't want to say that's all it is because it is way more than that.

01:27:12

But the places where I've seen it do great things, and I don't know if they still do,

01:27:18

but at one point, Apple used this with some of their products.

01:27:22

Sure.

01:27:23

And at least that's the way I understand it.

01:27:27

And if you look at it from the stance of designing products or designing a graphic

01:27:34

or a website or something that act like is classic design, this process works really

01:27:41

well.

01:27:42

So you're framing the problem you're trying to solve or the problem people

01:27:46

don't even realize exist.

01:27:47

You're create like showing why there is a problem.

01:27:50

You're inspiring somebody to do something about that problem and showing how you

01:27:55

can solve that problem.

01:27:57

Through the ID eight process, which is coming up with what are the potential

01:28:03

ways to solve that problem?

01:28:04

Is it how it fits in your hand?

01:28:06

Is it how the balance of it is like you're trying to come up with what could make it

01:28:11

a good thing, then you prototype each individual component of that.

01:28:17

And once you have those, each individual prototypes, you test each of them to see

01:28:22

how they're going to work and share the results of those.

01:28:25

That's the flow of that design thinking process from a product stance.

01:28:29

And I think that works really well when you're trying to design something like that.

01:28:34

I know that I can't say that I followed this exactly, but I tend to use a lot of

01:28:39

these steps whenever I build things with wood, whether it's a piece of furniture

01:28:44

or molding or putting it a flooring.

01:28:47

Like you tend to use these steps when you're trying to figure out how something

01:28:51

should fit or how you're trying to build something.

01:28:56

So it works really well in those scenarios.

01:28:58

I don't know how well that translates to thinking processes.

01:29:04

Your life as a product?

01:29:06

Yeah.

01:29:07

You know, how well does that translate?

01:29:10

Yeah.

01:29:10

I don't know.

01:29:11

You know, seeing how he tries to shoehorn his shorter workday into this process,

01:29:19

there's a lot of bleed over between these steps.

01:29:22

Like prototyping and testing are kind of the same thing in this context.

01:29:28

IDA and inspiration are kind of the same thing in this process.

01:29:35

And that's not true in a traditional design sense.

01:29:39

There's a very clear delineation between those, but I don't think I've seen that

01:29:44

with the way that he presented this.

01:29:46

I'm not trying to jump to style on writing.

01:29:47

It's just kind of this.

01:29:48

I don't know how well this fits here.

01:29:52

And I don't know.

01:29:53

I don't know how well to recommend that process for thinking systems.

01:29:59

No, I agree.

01:30:00

And I had the thought and I grabbed the book from the bookshelf, his previous book, Rest.

01:30:06

I was thinking what sort of approach did he take in this book?

01:30:10

And this is very different.

01:30:12

This is almost the traditional three part, you know, where he's talking about the

01:30:16

problem of rest, the science of rest.

01:30:18

And then that's kind of the introduction.

01:30:20

And then there's two parts stimulating creativity, sustaining creativity.

01:30:24

And so I kind of wish he had taken that approach with this one.

01:30:29

I agree with you that it doesn't fit real cleanly into this design thinking model.

01:30:34

But I do like the idea of your life as a product.

01:30:41

I do think lifestyle design is a very real thing.

01:30:48

And so I'm not quite sure what to do with this.

01:30:51

I guess move to action items.

01:30:53

That's fine.

01:30:55

I'm trying to find I'm looking at my shelf up here.

01:30:58

I have a book.

01:30:59

Is it called lifestyle design?

01:31:02

It's something along those lines.

01:31:04

I can't find it.

01:31:05

I'll have to hunt it down when we're done here.

01:31:08

I have a book that's about that concept.

01:31:12

Where do you use design processes to build a lifestyle?

01:31:16

Okay.

01:31:17

Essentially.

01:31:17

And, you know, it's an interesting concept.

01:31:21

I'll just say that to do thing.

01:31:23

It's basically intentional living is essentially what you're talking about.

01:31:27

And, you know, using design principles to put this stuff together does seem to work.

01:31:33

I just don't know that this one does.

01:31:36

Sure.

01:31:37

All right.

01:31:38

So what do you got for action items?

01:31:40

So I have the one that's already done of talking to my boss.

01:31:45

And so that one I've kind of started and then shortening my work segments

01:31:50

for the side things, which is only because I've shortened that work day.

01:31:57

So trying out those two individual components outside of that.

01:32:04

I don't know that I'm doing much.

01:32:06

I think there's potential to have like follow up action items once those are

01:32:12

complete.

01:32:12

Sure.

01:32:13

But I don't know what those are currently.

01:32:15

So that's where I'm starting.

01:32:17

Okay.

01:32:17

How about you?

01:32:18

I've got one official one.

01:32:20

Like I said, I'm kind of in the process of redesigning my work day anyways,

01:32:26

where I'm doing the high priority writing at the beginning.

01:32:29

And part of that is because we've shipped Coleman box.

01:32:32

I don't have a product I'm working on right now.

01:32:34

So I'm trying to get back into a regular writing rhythm.

01:32:36

And I've got a couple of big articles that I'm working on.

01:32:39

So that one's kind of in progress already.

01:32:42

It's not really official.

01:32:43

Sure.

01:32:43

The other one that I did jot down as an official action item was to build my

01:32:48

life admin into my work week.

01:32:50

Typically right now I get so focused on work tasks.

01:32:53

And there are pockets of time.

01:32:55

I know where it's like, I should be working right now.

01:32:58

And I feel that pressure and I just don't go do the things that I should be doing.

01:33:01

And then everything adds up on like a Saturday.

01:33:04

And instead of that being a rest day, I got a whole bunch of home related stuff

01:33:09

that I got to do.

01:33:09

Sure.

01:33:10

So I'm kind of thinking through like, is it possible to work all that stuff into

01:33:13

my normal work day and have that overlap, you know, where I'm going to take the time

01:33:18

to think through things.

01:33:19

And at the same time I'm doing chores around the house, taking a dog for a walk,

01:33:22

whatever, I kind of think that there is the possibility to tighten all this stuff

01:33:27

up together.

01:33:27

So I'm going to try to do that.

01:33:30

Cool.

01:33:30

Sounds fun.

01:33:32

So styling rating.

01:33:34

Yeah.

01:33:35

So I don't know what to do with this book.

01:33:40

On the one hand, I love the idea of lifestyle design.

01:33:44

I see what he's trying to do with design thinking process.

01:33:47

I feel like I should get it more than I do, but I don't.

01:33:52

There's a lot of bleed over here.

01:33:55

I feel like a lot of this is a commercial for a four day work week, which is a very

01:34:01

powerful idea, but maybe doesn't require 260 pages.

01:34:05

Sure.

01:34:08

I don't know.

01:34:09

I did enjoy reading it.

01:34:10

The stories are interesting.

01:34:13

He's a good writer.

01:34:16

I've went through it pretty quickly.

01:34:18

So I was pretty entertained by the book itself.

01:34:21

I do think there is a possibility that if you're not the CEO or C level type

01:34:28

employee in your organization, especially a bigger organization, you're left kind

01:34:32

of with, well, this sounds great, but how do I actually do any of this?

01:34:37

So I'm not sure that it's something that everybody necessarily should read.

01:34:42

I get why Michael Hyatt liked it.

01:34:44

Yeah.

01:34:45

Yeah, for sure.

01:34:46

I don't know.

01:34:47

I think I'm going to rate it at 4.0 because I do think it's a good book.

01:34:51

I do think there's some really powerful ideas here.

01:34:53

I do think the way that he presents them is well done, but I do think there's

01:34:59

a possibility that you read this and there's like no path forward.

01:35:04

So I don't know, I got something out of it.

01:35:07

And I think that if nothing else, that understanding the idea of a shorter

01:35:16

work week, how powerful that can be and then just looking for opportunities to

01:35:19

champion for that, even that alone would provide benefit to a lot of different

01:35:25

people, but I think it would be limited.

01:35:26

Sure.

01:35:27

I found the book designing your life, how to build a well-lived, joyful life.

01:35:32

This is by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

01:35:34

All right.

01:35:35

As far as like, you know, I, I've shared some of my concerns with the style and

01:35:41

the choice of using the design thinking model.

01:35:45

I, I think there are potentially some shortcomings with choosing to do that, but

01:35:50

I would guess that there's a lot of thought put into why Alex chose to do that.

01:35:56

It may just be that it's different.

01:36:00

I mean, it could be that to some, this fits really, really well.

01:36:05

It could be playing off of a trend of design thinking becoming more of a thing.

01:36:11

I mean, it could be all sorts of reasons as to why that was chosen.

01:36:16

It just didn't resonate with me, I think in this particular case.

01:36:21

So good or bad?

01:36:23

I don't know.

01:36:24

I think you nailed it on the rating though, 4.0, because I think that there's,

01:36:30

there's a lot that you can glean from this and it resonates a lot with what you and

01:36:34

I tend to think about these topics.

01:36:37

So I'm not arguing with the content itself.

01:36:40

I think my concerns are just around how it was presented and like all the bleed

01:36:43

over and the difficulties with trying to follow, like, cause you made a good

01:36:49

point, it's easy to read, you know, it's engaging.

01:36:53

But when you start trying to like conceptualize and trying to like understand

01:36:59

all of the individual components, I think it got a little difficult because

01:37:03

like so much of this is you need to work less.

01:37:06

Here are some ways to do that.

01:37:08

Try it out.

01:37:10

Like that's really what I was.

01:37:12

A lot of people that are doing it.

01:37:14

Yeah.

01:37:14

Like I show me some examples, show me why, you know, like that I get.

01:37:19

I, I don't know that it needs this design thinking model put on top of it.

01:37:25

So I think that's some of my concern.

01:37:28

I think the way it's presented makes it difficult.

01:37:30

The, the topic itself I'm totally on board with as an over worker myself.

01:37:35

I think that's something I needed to hear and need to be willing to say to.

01:37:39

So I don't know.

01:37:41

I'll stick with it at the 4.0.

01:37:44

I think you got it dead on there.

01:37:46

All right.

01:37:47

So let's put shorter on the shelf.

01:37:50

What's next brainwash by David and Austin Perlmutter.

01:37:54

A father and son, by the way.

01:37:56

Yes.

01:37:58

So brainwash, have you started this one yet?

01:38:00

No, I came today.

01:38:01

OK, looks fascinating.

01:38:02

Mine just came in today as well.

01:38:05

So I've not started it, but it's a an interesting.

01:38:11

I think it'll be a different topic for us because it's, it's more along the

01:38:15

lines of how do you cleanse your brain from a lot of different aspects.

01:38:20

So it'll be an interesting topic.

01:38:23

I am definitely fascinated by the topic.

01:38:25

I'm looking forward to going through this one.

01:38:27

It'll be fun.

01:38:28

It's classic Joe.

01:38:29

Let's find something completely different.

01:38:30

The one after that is one that I have wanted to read for a while.

01:38:37

I have it already.

01:38:39

And that is the Motivation Code by Todd Henry.

01:38:42

Todd Henry wrote a book a while back that I really liked called Die Empty, which

01:38:46

is kind of a motivational find your purpose, sort of a book.

01:38:49

So I'll write up my alley and I don't know much about the motivation code other

01:38:53

than a lot of people have said it's a really good book that I respect their

01:38:57

opinions.

01:38:57

And I love the topic of motivation.

01:39:00

I feel like this is more important than pretty much any of the self-management

01:39:04

stuff.

01:39:05

Sure.

01:39:05

Like all the willpower stuff.

01:39:07

You know, we've kind of talked about that off and on throughout this, this podcast

01:39:11

where a lot of people are like, Oh, conserve your willpower, conserve your

01:39:15

willpower.

01:39:16

But when you got motivation, it kind of doesn't matter.

01:39:18

Right.

01:39:19

Right.

01:39:19

So I have no idea really what to expect from this other than a good book by a good

01:39:24

writer.

01:39:24

Can any get books?

01:39:26

Actually, I finished this one.

01:39:27

It might have been a gap book earlier, but I finished Get Together, which is

01:39:33

about community building by Bailey Richardson, Kevin Hwing and Kai Elmore Elmer

01:39:37

Soto.

01:39:38

It's a really cool book with a lot of visuals and a lot of thought provoking

01:39:45

questions about how to build the communities for things that I do like bookworm,

01:39:50

for example.

01:39:51

So we'll have to have a conversation about this one, I think.

01:39:54

Sure.

01:39:56

Sure.

01:39:57

Once again, I have no gap books, but I've been making more time for reading too.

01:40:01

Like this one I finished quite a bit ahead of time.

01:40:04

Normally I finished them like the night before or day of that happens more than

01:40:09

I'll care to admit, but I finished this one earlier in the week and it'd just

01:40:14

been kind of without a book for a few days.

01:40:16

I was debating grabbing another one.

01:40:18

I was like, I'm not going to get too done before our next recording, but I've

01:40:21

been getting better, so we're getting closer.

01:40:25

So maybe next time.

01:40:26

Maybe, maybe.

01:40:27

All right.

01:40:28

Well, thank you to everybody who listens to the show.

01:40:31

Thank you to everybody who joined us in the live chat on Twitch and thank you,

01:40:36

especially to everyone who is a bookworm club premium member who's willing to

01:40:41

give us five bucks a month to keep the lights on if you want to join the bookworm

01:40:46

club and get access to all the MindNote files for all the books that we read.

01:40:51

I take all my notes and mind maps and so I put those up in the special member

01:40:56

section of the club.

01:40:57

You can go to bookworm.fm/membership.

01:41:01

Surprise.

01:41:02

You don't do that in Rome.

01:41:03

I'd ends up in Rome eventually.

01:41:04

OK, I should have known.

01:41:07

All right.

01:41:08

Well, if you're reading along with us, pick up brainwash will join join us in a

01:41:12

couple of weeks and we'll go through that one together.