26: The Sleep Revolution by Arianna Huffington

00:00:00
I was collecting all the books that I need for a podcast with you.
00:00:02
There's a few. I was looking through my list yesterday of what I've all read in the last year or so.
00:00:09
And it's pretty impressive. I like going back and looking at my list of,
00:00:15
I think there were 33 books that I've read since we started this podcast.
00:00:19
Oh, wow. So every book we've read, I've got it on a one shelf and they're in order
00:00:26
from the way we've recorded them. And that's purely because I'm a creature of habit.
00:00:30
And every time I get done with it, it goes on that shelf.
00:00:33
I'm not going to rearrange it. So it just ends up being in the exact order that we've
00:00:38
read them. So it's kind of a fun, fun way to look at it and say, oh, there's Bookworm.
00:00:44
Like that is every book of Bookworm right there. It's kind of cool.
00:00:48
That sounds like a joke thing to do.
00:00:51
It's very Joe. Yes.
00:00:56
So but every time we record a podcast here, I have to go, of course, get the book that we're
00:01:01
going to talk about. And then now I have to grab the book for my gat book.
00:01:06
And then I need to grab the one that we're going to pitch for the next round.
00:01:12
So I always have at least these three books, but then I usually have like four or five sitting
00:01:16
on my desk at the same time. Nice. Let's just say I'm obsessed. Maybe slightly.
00:01:23
That's okay. We have a podcast called Bookworm. It's okay to be obsessed with books, right?
00:01:28
That's right. Although we missed National Bookday, I believe. I think it was
00:01:33
Saturday or Sunday as we record this. Because we're complete failures with social media,
00:01:38
apparently. I think that's okay though. At least I am. I was thinking about this this morning.
00:01:44
I was like, I am not so great at Twitter lately. I used to be really good at Twitter.
00:01:47
I'm not sure what happened, Mike. I used to be good at posting things and posting my articles.
00:01:52
And that's about... I post my articles and stuff, if I would write one, when they happen.
00:01:58
But past that, I really don't promote on social media at all. It's probably terrible.
00:02:04
That's okay because you know what you are good at posting? New podcasts.
00:02:08
I am good at posting new podcasts. That's fun.
00:02:15
So what Josh? What Josh? Wow. Rough morning, apparently. So what Mike is alluding to for the
00:02:22
listeners is that I have recently released a new podcast with another friend of mine,
00:02:28
Josh Rinch, called Theoretical Accountability. Oh, I thought it was a big friend of Mike.
00:02:32
Well, the first one kind of turned into that. I told Josh, I was like, I feel like we just
00:02:39
threw Mike under the bus and he's not here to defend himself. This is not cool. So, yes.
00:02:45
You can remiss for that one. Sorry about that. Sorry. I was confused. I get it now,
00:02:49
but I listened to all three episodes. So by episode three, it's transformed from the pick on Mike
00:02:54
podcast to the now we're actually going to hold people accountable to our goals podcast. Got it.
00:02:59
And it doesn't help that I've now got people sending me emails
00:03:05
getting onto me for not seeing Star Wars.
00:03:11
Yeah, it's an absurd number of people. I tweeted something about that. I don't want to pick on you
00:03:15
too bad, but you definitely need to need to see that. I like Josh's idea of making that one of your
00:03:21
12-week year goals. Right. Right. Yeah. That's okay. You can pick on me since we've picked on you.
00:03:27
You just don't start at the beginning. Skip the first three episodes and do them in a chronological
00:03:33
order. Do episode four, five, and six first. Okay. Okay. Why is that? Is that just because
00:03:38
that's where everyone else is? Those are the originals and they're way better than the
00:03:42
prequels or whatever you want to call. Okay. So at one, two, and three, those are the ones that
00:03:47
Lucas redid when he had a whole bunch of money. And he basically could do anything that he wanted
00:03:52
and there's a lot of just dumb cheesy stuff in there. The originals were the amazing technical
00:03:59
achievements of their day and they're still pretty cool. Even my kids like the four, five, and six
00:04:05
better. Nice. Nice. Well, I will keep that in mind. It sounds like I'm not going to live very long
00:04:10
if I don't. I don't watch these soon. So yes, for the listeners, that has all come out in this
00:04:18
other podcast, theoretical accountability. I'll drop a link to that in the show notes, but I'm not
00:04:24
going to belabor that one a whole lot here. Essentially, what it is is Josh and I started
00:04:30
holding each other accountable in theory on our 12-week year goals. And after about three months,
00:04:39
I realized we were spending more time having fun rants than we were actually keeping each
00:04:45
other accountable to our goals. And it's a fun conversation to have, thus theoretical accountability.
00:04:50
Nice. There's the plug. I'm done. I'll leave it alone now.
00:04:56
All right. So next one on the list here is mine, I think, to do versus OmniFocus. I assume you're
00:05:02
talking about my original statement about, "Maybe I'll get into to do." Well, Matt Ryan basically
00:05:09
talked me out of it. I've been watching from it. Did he want to talk you into it? He is. But also
00:05:14
in that podcast, he's like, "Well, I know that Ken Case from OmniFocus is," or the Omni Group
00:05:18
is mentioned that they're going to implement some of the features that I liked about to do that are
00:05:23
currently missing, like multiple contexts, for example. And I know that he tweeted a while back,
00:05:29
"Hey, anybody interested in a team-based version of OmniFocus?" And of course, the internet went nuts.
00:05:35
Who would so? Yeah. So I kind of feel like if I were to switch everything over to do now,
00:05:41
it's only a matter of time before OmniFocus comes out. And it's probably sooner rather than later
00:05:47
with everything that I'm looking for. That tends to happen to me a lot. I sit on the fence for a
00:05:53
long time, and then by the time I do something, the time has passed. Like, for example, we've had
00:05:58
time Warner Cable here in Wisconsin for a long time. I read the Swiercouter article about how you
00:06:05
can save 10 bucks a month if you get your own router. So I went and I bought my own router,
00:06:09
got it set up, and I'm like, "Hey, that wasn't so bad. I should have done it a long time ago."
00:06:12
About two weeks after I did that, they changed to Spectrum, and they got rid of the monthly
00:06:17
modem fee. So cool. Thanks, guys.
00:06:22
Nice. So then you lost money on it instead of making money on it.
00:06:28
Yeah. I mean, I do own my own modem at the moment, and I don't have any of the connectivity
00:06:33
issues that I was having with the older modem that I was using, but I'm sure I could have just
00:06:37
got a new one. Anyways, Tangela, we don't need to go down. But all that to say, the way my brain works,
00:06:43
I am now watching intently what is happening with Todo and OmniFocus, but I don't feel like I'm
00:06:48
in a place where I feel comfortable switching yet. I've seen a lot of these things come up.
00:06:54
To do is come up. What was the other one for a while? Todoist was very big. I guess it still is.
00:06:59
I would switch to Todoist in a second if they would implement start dates or defer dates. Come
00:07:04
on, Todoist. Seriously. This is basic task management stuff. You don't want everything due,
00:07:09
because you're going to go into your task manager and see all this stuff that's overdue, and you're
00:07:13
not even going to know what's really due, because you only have one option when to do
00:07:16
this, and that is to put a due date on it. You can't say, "Oh, I want to start thinking about this at a
00:07:21
particular date." This seems so simple. But if Todoist would do this, I would switch into second,
00:07:26
because you can add tasks via the Amazon Echo. You can integrate with a whole bunch of email
00:07:32
applications. Todoist has a great API. There's a lot of email apps out there that integrate directly
00:07:38
with Todoist, which OmniFocus does too, but only if you're on the Mac and only if you use certain
00:07:43
clients. I am looking for another iOS client that will go directly from the email client to
00:07:52
OmniFocus. There's two. There's dispatch and there's airmail. I don't personally do a whole lot of
00:07:57
email on my mobile device, and I periodically will delete the app, pull it off a period of time.
00:08:01
Yeah, I did. I recently put it back on for a season, but I'm going to delete it again. It's just
00:08:06
my cycle, I guess. But people ask me all the time at Asian efficiency, like, "Well, what
00:08:13
do you mail apps do you recommend for iOS?" I'm constantly going in there and seeing what's available.
00:08:18
Dispatch is the only one that has the direct link to the original message in the message URL
00:08:26
format. Airmail creates the link as well, but it's an airmail format, which means that if you
00:08:30
try to use that link on your Mac, for example, and you don't have airmail installed, that link is
00:08:34
useless. I don't know why dispatch is the only company that uses that message URL or gives you
00:08:40
the option to use it, but dispatch is kind of... It was a great app, and it seems like it's kind of
00:08:48
in maintenance mode now, and there's not much new stuff being added to it. It's a little clunky,
00:08:54
a little bit slow. Sometimes I'll find that if I were to archive a message in dispatch,
00:08:59
to move on to the next message, and then like archive or delete that one, sometimes it takes a
00:09:03
little while for it to register, and so I'll delete a message, and then it'll come back, and then
00:09:08
like, "Wait, what just happened here?" I'm sure you're just pinging the server, and it's taking a
00:09:12
little while, but little things like that that just don't make it a real pleasant experience,
00:09:18
but I feel completely stuck because it is the only application that provides that message URL
00:09:23
format. Very technical geeky ramp there, I guess, but yeah. Swipe still an number of folks.
00:09:32
So I was not expecting to strike a chord when I said to do it, but there you go. I've got an
00:09:41
email app I'm playing with, what's it called? Notion? Have you seen this one? So it does the whole
00:09:49
open width to where you can use the share sheet, and you can send an email to OmniFocus with
00:09:56
that. I just tried it on my phone, so you can do that, but it doesn't look like it sends the link,
00:10:01
it sends the whole content of the email. Exactly. That's what I want, and that doesn't make a whole
00:10:07
lot of sense from a task management nerd perspective anyways. Anyway, I threw it to do versus OmniFocus
00:10:15
on the list just because I knew you had mentioned it, but I've been seeing, like, Todo has been making
00:10:20
the rounds of pulling people from OmniFocus, so has Todoist for a little while, but I always
00:10:27
have to ask these questions of why, and what's it get me, and I rarely find features in those apps
00:10:34
that are compelling enough to get me off of OmniFocus. But some of the rationale that people go
00:10:41
through whenever they do that is the devices that they have that they have to use. So if I work in
00:10:48
a PC-only world, OmniFocus gets really hard to use if you can use it at all. But I don't work in
00:10:55
that world, and whenever I'm using my phone, people want a lot of features on your phone to do things.
00:11:01
I get that, but I just don't use it that way. My phone is the list that I'll work off of
00:11:08
versus my Mac. So I'll pull up my list on my phone, and that's what I work off of. I'm not really doing
00:11:13
any heavy lifting with my phone. I do all the heavy stuff on my Mac. Maybe that's why I'm so big
00:11:18
into Apple scripts. Who knows? But that's where I land on it. I don't get too picky with it, but
00:11:24
I knew that you were exploring it, but I was curious where you were headed with it.
00:11:28
I love to do at the moment. What makes me nervous is it's a newer app, and it's published by one guy,
00:11:37
and I love indie developers, but I am not willing to trust my entire productive life,
00:11:42
like how I get things done to one developer who may just decide based on an Apple change
00:11:50
in the new iOS operating system. He doesn't have a team behind him to implement new frameworks,
00:11:55
be like, "Oh, forget this." I'm just waiting and seeing with that.
00:12:01
I think Todo has some cool stuff on iOS, but again, I feel like OmniFocus is pulling in a lot of
00:12:08
those features, and they're pulling some stuff from some other apps that are very beneficial.
00:12:14
What to do has the repeating reminders. That's awesome. I use that regularly. Whenever OmniFocus
00:12:22
gets that, I will probably delete DOO from my phone. There's just no point in it at that point.
00:12:27
And Matt Ryan said in that episode that that's one of the things that is coming. In fact,
00:12:32
why don't we put a link to that episode in the show notes? If people are still listening to this
00:12:36
episode because they are using this sort of thing, Matt did a great job of explaining to do,
00:12:41
or I was explaining to do in that episode. This was on each and the efficiency.
00:12:46
Yep. I can get you the link, but he did an awesome job. I had to talk him into it. He was
00:12:53
nervous about coming on the podcast, but I thought he did a great job. He explained it very thoroughly,
00:12:59
but also it's very approachable. You don't have to be an expert in test management to understand
00:13:03
what Matt likes about Todo and how he's using it and stuff like that. I always think things
00:13:08
like that are helpful. Does somebody just show me your mental rationale on how you got to something?
00:13:13
I may not agree with you, but it's at least interesting, I think. Yeah, he even spun one of
00:13:19
the things that I didn't like about Todo, which is Todo has this built-in view where they have
00:13:24
these three bars, which indicates essentially the priority level. I'm like, "That's not right.
00:13:29
There's only one priority level. It's either priority or it's not." He's like, "Yeah, that's true,
00:13:34
but the thing about Todo is that you can use it however you want." They say that in the tagline,
00:13:39
GTD to XYZ and everything in between. They give you the framework, essentially, they're basically
00:13:45
like, "Yeah, use this however it makes sense." What he did is he took those priority levels and he
00:13:50
made those energy levels. I was like, "Oh, that makes so much sense because I've tried to implement
00:13:55
energy level-based context before." They just never stick because it runs into that problem again
00:14:02
where you've only got one context per task. Does this really belong in low energy or does this
00:14:07
belong in studio, for example? It may be something I need to do in my studio while I have low energy
00:14:12
or he gave the example in the podcast. It's something that you want to do when you're in New York
00:14:17
with your brother. What do you do with those use cases and one of the ways he got around that
00:14:23
was implementing the priority levels as energy levels, which I thought was a brilliant hack,
00:14:28
if you will, to do? We tend to hack these apps. It's kind of fun. How could I use this feature to
00:14:37
do what I want in a way that they didn't want me to use it? Do that a lot. Let's shift off.
00:14:42
Probably enough about Tasmid. Yeah, I was like, "We could spend a long time on that."
00:14:46
I want to revisit grit from last time because you and I were both thinking through ways to help
00:14:53
our kids when things get hard and helping them develop more grit. How's that going on? You're in.
00:14:57
Well, this is one of the things that is kind of hard to measure. I can tell you that one of my
00:15:06
specific action items was implementing that hard things rule. We have that actually on our agenda
00:15:13
for the next family meeting. I've talked to my wife a little bit about this outline the different
00:15:18
steps essentially. She's in agreement with the principal of it. Now we just need to figure out
00:15:24
what is everybody's hard thing. That being said, we are doing this already. I just want to get it
00:15:31
in writing. We've got our daily habits, our daily rituals. For example, play guitar on the worship
00:15:39
to my church. I practice that. I practice other things that I do consistently in my kids. They're
00:15:46
playing piano, so they're practicing every single day. I just want to get it formalized essentially
00:15:54
and then just make sure that we're recognizing that, yes, we are consistently doing these hard
00:15:59
things and then having a formalized record of that.
00:16:04
Nice. I've been trying to notice when, especially our oldest, is working on something and then she
00:16:11
just wants to give up and go do something else. I've been trying to catch those moments and try to
00:16:17
encourage her to keep going. You did this. Let's add one more level to it and see if you can get
00:16:23
that done. Well, I want to go do this other thing. Well, no, let's stick with it just one minute
00:16:28
longer and just trying to slowly build that into her because she's like me. She likes to bounce from
00:16:32
thing to thing. I think she's got a tendency towards the ADHD thing from an attention standpoint,
00:16:37
not necessarily hyperactive, but trying to help her with that. She doesn't like it at all.
00:16:45
So that'll be a process to continually help her with that.
00:16:48
On this topic, this is an interesting observation that I've noticed. I'm not saying that there is
00:16:58
100 percent value in this, but just one of the ways that I've seen this play out
00:17:04
really just brought to my attention after reading that book. As I mentioned in the last
00:17:08
episode that we got an Nintendo Switch, and the only game that we have for it at the moment is
00:17:12
the Zelda game. My nine-year-old loves Zelda, but he's really bad at it.
00:17:22
And so I noticed that at the beginning, he would prefer to watch me play it because I've played
00:17:31
those types of games for a while. And some of the racing games and things like that, he can do
00:17:36
circles around me. But that type of game, that's not something that he has typically played in the
00:17:41
past. And so he would like to see me beat the monsters and be more successful because it is a
00:17:48
very difficult game. I mean, even for me who's grown up playing those types of games, it's very,
00:17:53
very difficult to get used to. You do die a lot in that game. So there's a lot of failure built in
00:17:59
to the game. And I've noticed a shift in him, though, where he's gone from preferring to watch
00:18:05
me play it to him actually playing it, even though he's way behind me in terms of where he is in the
00:18:12
game. I'll come home because we limit the time that where kids spend playing video games every day.
00:18:18
And he'll, like, first thing he says when he goes get in the door, he's like,
00:18:22
I made it to Kakariko Village or I feed that rock monster. And I'm like, yeah, way to go, guy.
00:18:26
Because yeah, it's just, it's interesting how like even something like video games,
00:18:32
build confidence. And I would say grit. Now, obviously, I'm not going to say, oh, this is their
00:18:37
hard thing. You know, that's, that doesn't count. But it is interesting to recognize the
00:18:42
different arenas that this, this plays out in. Nice. Nice. I think working with kids on this
00:18:47
stuff is not simple. And if you've got something like that, that's awesome. I'm trying to,
00:18:53
I'm trying to find something like that for my oldest, but I haven't nailed it down yet.
00:18:56
Because she's not old enough to be able to to determine that on her own. So she's going to need
00:19:01
some help with it. But it's way goes. I want to talk about your, oh, no, before we get to this
00:19:08
Apple script, Angela Duckworth's TED talk. You said you were going to watch it, did you?
00:19:13
I did. I watched it. It was really good. She's a lot younger than I thought she was.
00:19:18
I thought the same thing. She looks like she's maybe 30, 35 in that video. Right. And she's talking
00:19:26
about, obviously it's, it's while she was doing her research. So when you read grit, she's got
00:19:32
a whole bunch of research projects that she's done. And she's explaining what she found during
00:19:36
the research. And some of those things you can tell that she is completed and some of those that
00:19:40
she's in the middle of when, when she gave the talk. And I think the talk was from like 2013,
00:19:46
2014, if I remember right. Yeah, somewhere in there. Yeah. A lot of the key concepts from the book
00:19:51
surface in, I think it's six and a half minutes or something like that. But she did a great job,
00:19:56
I thought. And really, like, if you were going to look for a six and a half minutes synopsis of the
00:20:01
book, definitely check out that, that TED talk. She talks about the West Point things. She talks
00:20:06
about how she doesn't necessarily know how you develop grit, which she kind of talks about in
00:20:12
the book too. She can say like, these things are linked and successful people have this
00:20:16
grip, but there is no formula for teaching this stuff. She talks about the growth mindset, which I
00:20:23
think is a really important key. She doesn't say like, this is the way to do it. But she basically
00:20:27
alludes to, well, there isn't a formula for this thing. People who have the growth mindset seem to
00:20:32
be able to develop this stuff do better. And so I really liked that part of it. But I thought
00:20:37
she did a great job on the talk. It's very, very entertaining. Yeah, it got me wanting to watch
00:20:42
more TED talks. Well, go to my world. I love TED talks. I'm always watching them. It seems like
00:20:49
there's, there's enough of them out there that you can fill in time with them all, like in regular
00:20:53
scenarios instead of watching YouTube, I find myself on TED. Yeah. So one of my goals as of
00:21:01
maybe a month ago is to actually give a TED talk. I was at a Toastmasters competition,
00:21:08
I think I maybe mentioned this last time, where I made it past the first round,
00:21:14
made it past the club speak off, whatever, because you have to choose one person to represent your
00:21:20
club. Next round is like the, I don't know all the different terms, but there's like multiple
00:21:26
clubs that are there in your region or section, I don't know, Josh would know, because he's like
00:21:32
the regional director. So basically I got past that first regional round and made it to the second
00:21:37
regional round where I took third. And so at that point, if you take first, you go to the bigger
00:21:44
region. And then from there, I think it's international, if you do well there. So I took third, which was
00:21:50
pretty good. I blanked in the middle of my speech, which was just completely nerves because I've
00:21:55
given that speech a bunch of times and I had it down. There were a couple guys that were there that
00:22:00
were very animated. The guy who won was a ex-marine and kind of told his personal story during his
00:22:08
talk and just played up the fact that like he's not your stereotypical Toastmasters speaker and
00:22:12
everybody's telling them you can't, you can't do this, you can't do that. And he's like, well,
00:22:16
I have to do that because that's who I am. Yeah. So flaws and all here I am. So I was, it was cool
00:22:21
to meet him. He had a very inspirational story. I'm glad that he won. But everybody, him and
00:22:26
then the guy who took second, they both came from a different club and they're like, man,
00:22:30
your speech was so good. They're like, the guy who won, he basically, he's like, I may have won,
00:22:36
but your speech, like you're going to give a TED talk someday. He's like, that was so good.
00:22:41
And I'm like, oh, cool. I never even really thought about that. But I dug into it a little bit and I
00:22:46
think that would be awesome. And kind of right up my alley. Yeah, are you going to shoot for a TED
00:22:50
X or the legit TED? Well, I think TED X is the place to start.
00:22:55
Looking at the process, it looks like that one is quite a bit easier to get into. I don't really
00:23:01
have public speaking credentials, so to speak. So that's probably the place to start. Nice.
00:23:07
Nice. That would be really cool. I would do what I couldn't be there if you do that, my friend.
00:23:12
But Toastmasters is great. Like I never even considered myself a public speaker. I've been
00:23:17
involved with Toastmasters now about a year and a half. And just seeing crazy growth in that area
00:23:24
where now it's something that I really enjoy doing. I still get nervous every single time.
00:23:28
Good. But I guess, as long as it doesn't make me forget what I'm speaking. Well, that was the hard
00:23:34
part is like, you don't, for the speech competition, you don't get a podium, you don't get any notes.
00:23:39
Like you're up on the stage and you're giving your five to seven minute talk and you're just
00:23:45
giving it. Like it's different than even at the club level, like I would, I don't usually use notes,
00:23:53
but I have them up on the podium with me just in case. So just not having my notes there was
00:23:59
enough to freak me out to the point where I just completely forgot where I was at one point.
00:24:03
Yeah. Josh is talking about he's doing this Minneapolis Ignite. He's got a talk on bacon that
00:24:10
he's doing. And he mentioned that his slides auto advanced. They're all timed and they just move on.
00:24:16
No one's hitting the button. No, he can't trigger it. It's just he has to go.
00:24:20
That would freak me out. That's exactly what I thought. Like, I don't think I could do this.
00:24:24
No, no, not at all. And you know, it sounds like Josh is a lot further in Toastmasters than I am.
00:24:32
So I can't say that like this is not the spirit of Toastmasters. But my understanding,
00:24:36
the way our club runs, like you've got a word of the day that they give you and then you're
00:24:41
supposed to try to incorporate that into your speech kind of gets you to think on the fly.
00:24:45
And if you say the word of the day, then everybody wraps on the table.
00:24:50
Nice. Just as like recognition that, hey, you did this. And so one of the things that I've tried
00:24:57
to incorporate in Toastmasters, because I tend to be very rigid and I write everything out and
00:25:00
I've got everything planned. And then I just try to stick to the plan, which is why I try to make
00:25:04
our talking points fluid for you. Yeah, exactly. Like this is good for me. This is good practice.
00:25:09
I think that for a lot of speeches, and maybe the one at the Ignite Conference is a little bit
00:25:15
different. So again, not trying to say, Josh, you're doing it wrong or anything. But one of the big
00:25:21
benefits of Toastmasters that I get is that you kind of think on your feet. And even if you've got
00:25:26
your outline, even if you've got your speech down, the ability to adapt that as you go based on
00:25:33
what the audience is doing, even, if you say something and you're like, "Oh, wow, they really
00:25:37
responded to that. Hammer that home more, really spend a little bit more time on that point, whatever."
00:25:42
Again, it's going to be different depending on the format of the talk that you're giving. But
00:25:48
that's one of the things that I like about Toastmasters is that it doesn't have to be so
00:25:53
word-for-word memorization. And I'm trying to get away from that, I guess, is the short version of
00:26:01
that big spiel. How would that play into doing a TED talk? Because those are word-for-word scripted,
00:26:07
right? Usually. I mean, most of the people that you see give TED talks, it seems like they've got
00:26:13
it scripted. But even in the Angela Duckworth one, you can tell she's got a joke in there. And
00:26:18
at some point, she delivers the line, and then everybody laughs. So what do you do when everybody
00:26:24
laughs? If you are so focused on, "I've got to get done by a certain time," that's going to throw
00:26:30
you off. But that's not a bad thing necessarily, unless you make it because you've got everything
00:26:34
timed out perfectly. That's just weird to me that for whatever reason, they wouldn't give
00:26:41
them a clicker, so you can't at least control it. Don McAllister did that, by the way, at the last
00:26:47
max stock. He had the video from one of his screencasts online things, and then he narrated it live.
00:26:53
He did a great job with it, but when he started, I was like, "This is not going to end well."
00:26:58
Yeah. He even acknowledged that one. This might not turn out well, but I'm going to narrate a video.
00:27:04
So, good luck, Josh.
00:27:08
Yeah, I've got tickets to that. I want to see how he does. But I guess every single one of those
00:27:14
talks is going to be that way. So I don't know, if we'll see. I will let you know how it goes. That
00:27:19
comes up here in a couple of weeks, so it'll be good. Let's talk about your Apple script,
00:27:25
or rather that it probably won't happen. You're still the only one that donated to it, Mike.
00:27:32
Dang it. Well, we tried. I tried more accurately.
00:27:39
So, I'm going to kill it. I'll send you your donation back.
00:27:44
Okay. There you go. Thanks.
00:27:47
What are you going to do for a... Do you need a nagging thing? I don't know what else to help you
00:27:53
with on that. No, probably not. It would be nice, but that's okay. We'll figure this out.
00:27:58
You could use "do" on your... I suppose whenever OmniFocus gets their thing out, you could set up
00:28:06
something potentially on the Mac that does it through OmniFocus. If they've got the recurring
00:28:11
alerts, that might work. Potentially, this may be the thing that gets me to finally figure out
00:28:20
Apple Script. I know enough about Apple Script to piece it together based off of examples and modify
00:28:25
some stuff to make it do what I want, but just sitting down with a blank slate and writing it,
00:28:30
that's above my head at the moment. I don't recommend people do that ever. Whenever you're
00:28:37
starting out coding, I rarely recommend... Actually, I don't think I've ever recommended that you
00:28:42
start out with a blank slate, because you don't know creating the framework is not going to be
00:28:46
simple for you. If you find something that already exists, you'll be better off. If you
00:28:52
found something that interacted and put things in today one, you could start with that. Then
00:28:58
you'll find something else that has a recurring alert on it and try to combine the two.
00:29:03
Yeah, I do know, by the way, I wrote a workflow post for the sweet setup on piping things into
00:29:12
day one using IFTTT. I know that you can automatically get things into day one that way.
00:29:17
Maybe the thing to do here is not the prompt, but just more documentation of what I'm doing
00:29:24
through the day, storing that in day one automatically and then periodically, weekly, monthly, whatever,
00:29:31
going through and looking at those posts. Nightly. Nightly might seem... That seems like a lot, but
00:29:40
perhaps. I don't know. That's kind of what I do whenever I do my journaling at night. I try to
00:29:44
reflect on what I did that day. Then that helps me set up tomorrow. That way, I'm not continuing
00:29:50
down a road on some things. This reminds me that the sweet setup thing that I need to defend myself
00:29:55
for this back burner context. This is another thing that you guys roasted me on. Well, I should
00:29:59
Josh kind of got you on that one. Yeah, so let me give you an example of how I use this. I have
00:30:06
a lot of content that I create. I sat down and thought about it this week. I'm like,
00:30:13
what do I all create content for? My regular content creation schedule, what does it look like?
00:30:19
So I do the weekly productivity show. I do the biweekly bookworm with you. I do a biweekly
00:30:30
workflow post for the sweet setup. I occasionally write articles for the sweet setup. I'm working on
00:30:36
one on Pomodoro apps. I do a monthly article for Screencast Online in the magazine.
00:30:42
And about monthly, I do a 45 minute video screencast for Screencast Online.
00:30:49
Then there's the faith based productivity stuff that I've been building up in the background,
00:30:53
which I guess, oops, I kind of announced that now. So I guess I have to get some posts up before
00:30:58
we publish this one. Okay, here you go. Accountability done. Yeah. So like, there's a lot of content
00:31:05
there, but none of this stuff, I can wait until the last minute and then just crank it out.
00:31:10
So these are all the types of things that I would put on the back burner context. I know the next
00:31:16
four workflow posts that I have to write for the sweet setup. And they don't take me super long
00:31:21
to do. They take a couple of hours. I got to create some screenshots, stuff like that. But
00:31:25
those are the things where I don't want to go back into my review weekly. If I get to Wednesday
00:31:31
and I've got an extra two hours and I'm feeling energized and I can do some deep work, I can get
00:31:36
some writing done, I'm going to go to that back burner context and look at the whatever writing
00:31:41
content creation piece I want to focus on and start working on that. And having that stuff
00:31:47
instantly accessible without having to do a full review is invaluable to me.
00:31:51
So is this back burner context? Is this, so I assume this is a technical thing in OmniFocus
00:31:58
since you're still on OmniFocus? Is this a context that's on hold? Or are you flagging the projects as
00:32:05
on hold inactive? I forget what the actual term is there.
00:32:10
Well, most of these, I don't follow the test management philosophy to the T, which is break it
00:32:16
down into the smallest step possible because workflow posts, for example, I will sit down on
00:32:20
those. I will usually finish those in one sitting. So I'm not going to create separate tasks for
00:32:26
outline the article and then download the app and create the screenshots and send the
00:32:33
the finished version to Steven Hackett is the guy that I report to essentially with
00:32:39
the, I create the content, send it to him and then he takes it from there.
00:32:42
So I'll just have a task for creating this workflow post and it'll be sitting in my back burner
00:32:49
context because I basically want it to be ready at any given moment. This is my sixth man off the
00:32:54
bench talking NBA playoffs. Like you got to be ready. You know, monogenably hot off the bench.
00:32:59
So I don't want to have to go into my my whole review and search through all my contexts and all
00:33:06
my projects and things like that to get this stuff. But at the beginning of the day, I might not know
00:33:10
that this is something that I want to work on either. It kind of depends on how my day goes.
00:33:14
Sometimes because I'm creating content majority of the time, I will just feel brain dead and it'll
00:33:22
take me a really long time to write whatever article I'm supposed to be writing, create obviously a
00:33:26
lot of content and videos and things like that, which aren't even wasn't even on that list for
00:33:30
Asian efficiency. And so like that'll be the stuff that I make sure it gets done first. And then
00:33:35
at the end of the day, if I've got anything left in the tank, essentially, that's where the
00:33:39
back burner context comes in. Okay, I was getting ready to ask, like what are the scenarios or the
00:33:45
tools, locations and stuff where this back burner context gets pulled out that you start working on
00:33:49
it? Yeah, so essentially, like when I do my weekly review, I'll identify that the next workflow
00:33:56
post, which is due in two weeks, that's a prime candidate for something to be worked on whenever
00:34:00
I've got a little bit of time and a lot of energy. So I'll throw that in the back burner context.
00:34:04
And then during the next week, if that opportunity arises, I will pull that out and work on it.
00:34:09
Otherwise it does have a due date by a certain date. So if it doesn't get to, if it doesn't get
00:34:15
done at that point, then eventually it does become something that would fall into the normal workflow.
00:34:21
What is the Asian efficiency pushes a context? And I don't know what product it is. It's something
00:34:28
to do with OmniFocus. There's a context that they tend to talk about called, what does it do?
00:34:33
Do is that right? I use that one all the time. Okay. And essentially, that's the one that
00:34:40
doesn't fall into a specific context, specific place, but it's something that you've just got to do.
00:34:48
So in the past, for example, you might have had separate contexts for Mac, iPad, whatever.
00:34:55
And that would have made sense because the iPad would be more limited. And there were some things
00:35:00
that you could only do on your Mac. And there are some things that I have a Mac context still
00:35:05
because I prefer to do them on my Mac. But a lot of the things can be done on a myriad of devices
00:35:12
and myriad of different places. So if you're thinking about context in the GTD sense, the person
00:35:15
place or thing that you need to get the job done, while the person is me, the place or the thing is
00:35:21
really anywhere because I've got this stuff with me. So I'm just going to put this as something
00:35:25
that I've got to do. It's the catch all context where this is basically always available.
00:35:31
Yeah, I stopped thinking about my context as the things that are required to do the task because
00:35:39
that's where you start wanting multiple contexts for a given task. But if you shift it over to start
00:35:46
thinking about which tool is best suited for that task, like I can make phone calls technically
00:35:52
from my computer or my phone. So the question there is, well, which one is better suited for that?
00:35:58
If I can only pick one, which one is it? Well, my phone, duh. In that case, that's pretty simple.
00:36:05
But if it's something like Google, what am I, what's one I'm trying to do? I learn how to create
00:36:10
better gluten strands in whole wheat sourdough. Here you go. Though we make homemade sourdough.
00:36:15
There you go. With that, I could do that research on my phone, but it's better suited for my Mac.
00:36:24
Now that one's a bit odd because I have a context called learn because I know that that one,
00:36:28
it's a little better on the Mac, but it's pretty easy to do at the same level from my phone. But
00:36:34
you get the idea. I mean, I'm trying to select the context that's best suited for a task as
00:36:40
opposed to the ones that are possible because so many times I've got some that are possible
00:36:44
to do from any and all devices or in any place. But it's better and more effective if I do it
00:36:52
at home with my laptop set up in my docking station on my desk. Like that's best case scenario for
00:36:58
like any development projects. Those are going to be better suited if I'm at home in that world.
00:37:04
Does that make sense? Because it's just so much better to do a task that way.
00:37:08
Completely agree. But what happens when you need to do that task and you don't have your preferred
00:37:14
tool available? Chances are that nowadays you can still get that task done using a mobile
00:37:20
application, for example, even on your phone. So that's where the do context comes in is if you
00:37:27
can set up all your contacts so that everything is compartmentalized and you never have fires that
00:37:33
you have to deal with, great. Do that. But in the case that there is and you need to be able to see
00:37:40
these are the things that I can do right now. Like I am on my phone. I'm looking at my phone and
00:37:46
that task, get back to the client X because it's set up in the mat contest because that's where I
00:37:52
prefer to do it. That doesn't show up. Depending how your workday and your workflow plays out,
00:37:59
that could be a bad thing. Yes, but I don't ever deal with that because I have a lot of clients
00:38:04
and I deal with fires all the time. That's a lot of what I do. So every night we'll move
00:38:12
under a book and this will make a lot more sense here soon. But every night I go through all of
00:38:18
the available tasks that I have. So an omni focus I'm cycling through that context perspective
00:38:24
that's built in. And I've pruned and worked on the projects and such that are actually available
00:38:30
so that those lists are showing me the active project tasks only. And if I'm going through that
00:38:37
every night, I know what needs done tomorrow in order to keep up. And the only fires that would
00:38:43
come up that need taken care of that aren't already on my radar would be through email.
00:38:48
And if those come in and there's a massive fire in email, I'll take care of it right away or prioritize
00:38:55
it depending on how everything else I have going on fits in. But I don't really deal with that
00:39:00
scenario, I guess. Maybe this is because I'm doing that review each night. I don't know.
00:39:05
It's just not something I deal with. And I feel like I deal with a lot of fires, Mike.
00:39:09
You probably do. I would say that the less maintenance you do with your system. So if you
00:39:15
don't check your system every single night and ideally, I would agree that you should. But if you
00:39:21
don't go through things every night, then that's where the value of a general catch all context can
00:39:28
really benefit you because you need to be able to see the things that you can do at any given time
00:39:34
filterable by context. And so if you haven't gotten to the point where you've divided up your day
00:39:41
to the point where you know that I'm going to be able to do this thing in this particular place,
00:39:45
then you're going into this scenario that I described earlier where it's like you need to
00:39:51
be able to see what you have to do even if you're not at your preferred tool in order to get it done.
00:39:55
Yep. I need to throw chapter markers on this episode. Not a bad idea.
00:40:00
Yeah. The whole topic of task management I think does play into the book that we read for today,
00:40:07
which is the Sleep Revolution by Ariana Ariana. Ariana. Ariana Huffington.
00:40:15
And there's a lot of stuff in here. I put even a note here for page 167 about emergency scam
00:40:22
modality, which we'll get into, we'll get to in a little bit. But this book was really interesting
00:40:26
because she talks in the first section about the problems that we have to deal with, which
00:40:32
lead to us not getting enough sleep. And then the second part of the book, she talks about
00:40:36
some of the tactics and techniques, things like that, that you can use to get better sleep.
00:40:44
But this was my choice. And I picked this book essentially because I heard about it in the Asian
00:40:50
efficiency dojo a while back. And then like I mentioned in the last episode, I actually bought
00:40:54
this while I was in Woodstock, Illinois for a max stock. And you were with me when I bought it.
00:41:00
Yep. So every time we did bookworm, I'm like, oh yeah, I bought that book with Joe. We should
00:41:05
really cover that one. And so now we covered it. There you go. There you go. I really liked this
00:41:11
book, Mike. I think that's probably because I struggled to get enough sleep.
00:41:15
Nice. Yeah. This is a sleep is a topic that is very important to me personally.
00:41:23
Because when I was 18 years old, summer after, summer before my freshman year of college,
00:41:30
I was diagnosed with epilepsy. And epilepsy is a genetic disease disorder, whatever. So my
00:41:39
grandma had it and it typically skips a generation. And so they told me basically that I had it. And
00:41:44
I have had two seizures in my life. I haven't had one in now, gosh, almost 15 years. So it's
00:41:53
completely under control. But one of the things that I've had to keep tabs of ever since I had my
00:41:58
first seizure was one of the things that told me that the contributor is not getting enough sleep.
00:42:02
And actually on page 19 in this book, she says that we all have a seizure threshold,
00:42:08
where if we don't get enough sleep at some point, your body is just going to completely shut down.
00:42:13
You're going to have a seizure. And in her case, she hit her head on the desk and she woke up in a
00:42:17
pool of blood, as she said. Sounds pretty graphic, pretty major. But when you think about it,
00:42:23
there's a lot of bad stuff that can happen from not getting enough sleep. She talks about the
00:42:29
concept of micro sleep and nodding off when you're driving could be fatal, not only for you, but for
00:42:34
a lot of other people. And so we kind of think that we've got this superhero syndrome going on,
00:42:40
where, oh, I can survive on five hours of sleep at night or whatever. And no, you can't. Unless
00:42:46
you're in the 1% of the population, that's a short sleeper. Everybody thinks that they are in that
00:42:51
1%. That's the thing. You're probably not. You're most likely not. I'll go far and say you're
00:42:59
definitely not. You need to recognize that your body functions only the way that it's supposed to
00:43:06
only when you have enough fuel, only when you have enough sleep and your brain is able to
00:43:10
recover and restore the stuff that gets used up throughout your day. And most people just don't
00:43:18
give it the time to recover. I will say at the beginning of this book, she did a very good job of
00:43:23
explaining, I guess, the dangers of not getting enough sleep or sleep deprivation. And I dealt
00:43:29
with a lot of people. Well, I shouldn't say dealt. I deal with a lot of people who fall into that
00:43:35
category for sure. After doing the sleep questionnaire at the end, Mike, I realized I'm not really in
00:43:40
that category despite me wanting more sleep. But I deal with a lot of people who are zombies.
00:43:46
You can get them to say yes to just about anything it seems like if you lead them right
00:43:51
way. Would you have to be a little careful with? Because I feel like I have to take responsibility
00:43:55
for some folks because they're not in their right mind to be making decisions. And at what
00:44:00
point do I take responsibility for them? Because they're not doing their part. I hate that.
00:44:04
But I feel like I have to do it. Before we go too far down this, I want to talk about
00:44:08
our sleep habits pre-book. Because I have a feeling that they changed, at least what we want to do
00:44:16
change it. Am I wrong in that? Because I definitely wanted to change some things.
00:44:20
Well, did you want to change things? Sleep is something that has been pretty important to me
00:44:27
for a long time. Focused on not only getting enough sleep, but also getting enough good sleep,
00:44:35
quality sleep. So I've understood the different stages of sleep, the effect of blue light,
00:44:40
stuff like that, which we'll get into in this episode. So I've known, I guess, for a while what
00:44:47
I've wanted my evening routine to be. And I have intermittently stuck with that. But what this
00:44:57
book did is it reignited the desire to really cement that in stone. To really implement on a
00:45:06
daily basis and basically not compromise even one time. Because that one time becomes another
00:45:12
time becomes another time and then pretty soon instead of going to bed at 10 o'clock, you're going
00:45:16
to bed at 1130. Not just the one time, but every single night. And that's where you get this cumulative
00:45:22
effect with this, this lack of sleep. So my sleep habits on paper haven't really changed a whole lot,
00:45:31
but we'll see, I guess, whether this really sticks. Essentially, what I try to do is not use my phone
00:45:40
after APM. I've been bad at this especially recently. Part of the problem is that
00:45:49
Tann and I play Carcassonne on iOS all the time. And he's always making moves late at night and
00:45:54
I get the notifications. Is he in a different time zone than you? No, no, he just is a late gamer,
00:46:01
I guess. So, but I try to not use my phone or my computer after eight o'clock. And then after the
00:46:10
kids go to bed, because eight o'clock is there, their bedtime, usually try to read and not stare
00:46:15
at a screen. Again, not been great at this. My wife and I have gotten into Mystery Science
00:46:21
Theater 3000 is on Netflix now. So we've been going back and watching those at night after the kids
00:46:26
go to bed. Probably not great for the quality of sleep that we get. And I've also tried to
00:46:31
make sure that I go to bed at 10. But like I said, I've seen that creep where I've been going to bed
00:46:36
essentially consistently at 11. And I usually get up about six, six, 30. So still getting seven and a
00:46:43
half hours of sleep essentially. But right. If you go to bed earlier, you get better sleep. So I
00:46:50
definitely want to want to shift it that way. Are you a nap or at all? I'm not. I have a hard time
00:46:57
falling asleep. And so whenever I've got like a half an hour, 45 minutes, I'm like, I'll take a nap.
00:47:03
Then it doesn't usually work for me. Okay. The exception though would be last Friday.
00:47:08
When about 1 p.m. I just felt completely thrashed and completely useless. So I like
00:47:14
just stopped what I was doing, went home and took a nap. And I fell asleep instantly. I knew that
00:47:20
last week was a was a busy week for me. And so by the end of the week, I just I had nothing left
00:47:24
in the tank. So it was a good thing that I did that. Nice. But generally, I do not nap.
00:47:31
I'm not much of an apper either. But I so I go to bed at I start going to bed at about nine.
00:47:38
It's about nine 30 quarter to 10 before I'm asleep. Actually getting in bed. Well,
00:47:44
time I get in bed. I read for a little bit. Well, let me back up. So at about 830,
00:47:52
I will start like getting breakfast ready for tomorrow and getting my clothes out for tomorrow
00:47:57
and making sure the house is is tidied up and doors are locked. Windows are shut. Blah, blah, blah.
00:48:02
So I do all that stuff ahead of time. That way the house is ready to go for tomorrow.
00:48:08
And then whenever I go upstairs, get myself ready for bed, crawl into bed. I'll read
00:48:12
a little bit of fiction at night. So I've lately been reading the Hobbit, Mike, which is fun.
00:48:18
I'm not I haven't really been a fiction reader for a long time. Like really ever.
00:48:24
Yeah, me either. Judge me. No, I I cannot actually read fiction. I don't know why. I just have a
00:48:31
really tough time doing that. It's. Is it put you to sleep? No, it's just I guess there's so many
00:48:39
nonfiction books that I know I want to read that it feels somewhat indulgent or I kind of feel like
00:48:46
a slacker like I should be doing something that's actually building me in a personal development
00:48:51
standpoint. So it has to be productive. I guess, which I know like even verbalizing that sounds
00:48:57
sounds like yeah, yeah, but I don't have any other justification for it.
00:49:04
I do it because it helps me fall asleep, not that I need help falling asleep. I'm one of those that
00:49:09
if I lay down and I'm I'm done with life for the day, I can be asleep in mere minutes.
00:49:18
Like it's not hard for me to fall asleep. My wife kind of hates it on occasion because,
00:49:23
you know, we'll kiss rollover, go to night, go to sleep that whole thing. As soon as I roll over,
00:49:28
I maybe two, three minutes and I'm out and drives are crazy.
00:49:33
No, yeah, that's not me. I don't know if that's because I'm just exhausted every day or
00:49:40
if that's just a skill that I've picked up. I've been that way for a long time, a very long time,
00:49:46
pre college even. So yeah, it's something I've been good at. I typically, you know, again,
00:49:53
that's nine thirty quarter to ten before I'm asleep and then I get up at five a.m. So I still
00:49:58
hit that seven seven and a half range. I think just from how I feel, I think I need around seven
00:50:05
and a half to seven forty five somewhere in that range. Not quite eight o'clock, eight o'clock,
00:50:10
I tend to be unruly according to my wife because I'm just I got too much sleep and I'm rambunctious.
00:50:16
So she doesn't like it when I sleep that much. But I yeah, I shoot for about that range.
00:50:24
I can take naps pretty easy, but I don't. I again, if I lay down now, naps are a little bit harder
00:50:31
for me to fall asleep, but still it's 10 minutes and I'm out and I'll take about a 20 minute nap.
00:50:36
I'll wake up and I'm good to go, but I haven't done that in months, months, months.
00:50:41
So do you use an alarm clock in the morning? I do, but it's usually not necessary.
00:50:46
Well, I shouldn't say that. It's necessary since we had our third child. Pre third child,
00:50:53
I was waking up just a few minutes before my alarm. What I don't know, Mike, is is that habit
00:50:59
because I know the alarm is going to go off or am I actually rested at that point? I think those
00:51:04
are two different things. Yeah, it could be. But I would say that the quickest way to figure out
00:51:12
exactly how much sleep you need is like for a week, don't use your alarm clock. Yeah,
00:51:16
I that is as scary as it sounds. I realize that and not everybody can afford to all wake up when
00:51:22
I whenever I wake up, but also people tend to go to sleep a lot later than than they should.
00:51:30
But the reason I point that out is like you said, you get seven hours, seven and a half hours of
00:51:34
sleep every night. In the book, she talks about how two weeks of only six hours of sleep. So that's
00:51:40
only one less hour of sleep. If you were to get one less hour of sleep, you're maybe not even
00:51:45
going to notice it the day of. But if you do that for two weeks, it is the equivalent of going 24
00:51:52
hours without sleep, which she also elsewhere in the book says is the equivalent of like a 0.1
00:51:59
blood alcohol level. So it's essentially being legally drunk.
00:52:02
Yeah, but it doesn't take a lot to get to that point. One less hour of sleep for two weeks, I think
00:52:12
probably anybody who's quote unquote busy has been there. But if you were to unpack it, which is
00:52:20
why we're talking about the sleep habits and the evening routines, you could probably go to
00:52:25
bed an hour earlier. You don't have to watch Game of Thrones or whatever TV show, Mr. Science
00:52:29
Theater 3000 before you go to bed. Yeah, you could cut that stuff out, but it's no fun.
00:52:35
That's what everybody think. That's what people are sitting here thinking. It's like, yeah, I could,
00:52:40
but I don't want to. But right, but feeling good is what is worth more than staying up on your
00:52:47
favorite TV show. That's the thing. And most people don't realize it. They think that I can do both.
00:52:53
You can't do both. And what this book really heightened for me was there is a choice to be made
00:52:58
here. You cannot do all of these things that you want to do. David Allen, you can do anything,
00:53:04
but you can't do everything. You have to say, notice some stuff. But when you say, notice some
00:53:09
stuff and when you say yes to getting enough sleep, that makes everything else that you're going to do
00:53:14
better. So if you were to just look at it from a productivity standpoint, well, I've got too much
00:53:18
to do. I can't get enough sleep. If you were to get enough sleep, the stuff that you have to do
00:53:22
gets done quicker and better. The quality of your work improves and you do it more efficiently.
00:53:26
At least that's my hypothesis. Yeah, I think that's true because I had a period where I was
00:53:32
taking naps regularly. And that's when I was working corporate, which was, it was not approved
00:53:39
by our corporation, especially from a culture standpoint. What I would do, this is kind of funny,
00:53:45
I would, after lunch, I would go out to my car. So we had our own parking garage, but it was
00:53:51
very dark and cool because it was somewhat underground. And I would go out to my car,
00:53:57
kick the seat back and take a nap in my car, which was fine until Minnesota winter came around.
00:54:03
There you go, cold, but right. Yeah, you do what you can. But I would take naps there. And that was
00:54:08
mostly because we had our first child. And I was not used to the lack of sleep that that brought.
00:54:16
So that meant that I was trying desperately to get some sleep. And then I would take those naps,
00:54:21
but taking that 30 minutes to go do that for me seemed like I was losing a lot of time.
00:54:28
But I knew that if I did that, I would get a lot more done in the afternoon. And that's something
00:54:33
that you don't really trust that that's going to happen until you try it. It feels kind of two.
00:54:39
It's one of those things. Yeah, yeah, it seems really weird to try it because I feel like I'm
00:54:44
going to lose a lot of someone's going to notice that I'm missing because I was used to meetings
00:54:48
all day long. So I would decline a meeting to go do this. And one, that didn't really go well,
00:54:54
because people would see that it wasn't on like I didn't have room on my calendar. So I started
00:54:58
booking meetings with myself over that time period so that it looked like I was busy at that time,
00:55:02
even though I had nothing going on. That was very fun. You can you can spoof exchange in Office 365
00:55:09
doing that. It's pretty easy. Well, if they're like most meetings, they were probably much,
00:55:17
you were probably much more productive taking the nap instead of going to the meeting.
00:55:21
So since then, I've learned what makes a good meeting and what's not. And I realized that I had
00:55:26
very few true meetings. I had a lot of time that I spent on the phone and in the room with other
00:55:32
people, but meeting to actually accomplish something was fairly rare. And yet I was on the phone or
00:55:39
in a meeting room all day long. There you go. Death by meeting corporate America.
00:55:44
So so far, we've talked about meetings and task management.
00:55:47
Yeah. Welcome to the sleep revolution.
00:55:48
So yes, I had a period when I was doing napping and I think I'm going to try to get back to that
00:55:56
per this because although I feel like I'm getting pretty good sleep at night, it's disrupted.
00:56:02
I know that because we have a four month old. So my wife is in and out of bed,
00:56:06
taking care of baby in the middle of the night. I'm not really able to help in the middle of the
00:56:10
night and she knows that. So I don't even try. But yeah, there's that whole thing. So I feel like
00:56:18
I want to try taking naps in the day because I don't think I'm getting enough at night.
00:56:22
Sure. That makes sense. And by the way, my wife and I have an understanding as well.
00:56:27
So I don't I don't judge you. Some people honestly, honestly, I am a very deep sleeper.
00:56:33
My wife is a very light sleeper. And then also a couple with the couple that with the fact that
00:56:37
my seizure threshold is a lot lower, I guess, higher. However, you want to say that because of my
00:56:44
diagnosis, it's it's basically we don't want to take any chances. Yeah, haven't had seizures in a
00:56:48
long time. My doctor even the last time I went to him is like, well, so you want to come off your
00:56:52
medication? And I'm like, well, sure. But what could happen? And you know, he's like, well,
00:56:57
you might have a seizure. So do you drive? And yes, I drive everything. Oh, don't do it.
00:57:03
So it's just kind of like not worth the risk, essentially. But yeah, it's it's it's interesting,
00:57:10
though, because the this book really highlights to me the fact that like you can't play the superhero,
00:57:18
you have to figure out how much sleep you actually need. And she's got a lot of different phrases
00:57:24
and stories in here where I think just kind of like articulates you are in the camp of not getting
00:57:30
enough sleep if this fits you. One of the things that stood out to me, because I've totally been
00:57:34
here and done this, even with my professed attention that I give to getting enough sleep and getting
00:57:41
enough quality sleep, page 46, she says, most of us force our reluctant brains, indeed, our
00:57:45
reluctant selves to wake up with multiple alarms, often set five minutes apart on our phones,
00:57:51
insistently nudging us toward what passes for consciousness. So I still do this when I have like
00:57:57
a meeting or something early in the morning that I have to be at. For example, I went to Austin,
00:58:05
Texas not too long ago. And you know, I'll set my alarm in the morning there because we've got
00:58:09
our meetings at 830. I want to make sure that I absolutely 100% do not oversleep and miss that
00:58:14
that meeting. And sometimes, you know, the alarm won't wake me up. I'll wake up before the alarm.
00:58:19
Anyways, but that's just not not a chance I'm willing to take. But essentially, when I read this
00:58:26
quote, it hit me that like the fact that I have to do that at all just illustrates that I'm really
00:58:31
not getting as much sleep as I really need. But you're waking up without the alarm, most of the time,
00:58:37
right? Sometimes. I use an app called Sleep Cycle, which all right, I've heard of this,
00:58:44
kind of gets into the sleep tech that I put near the end because she's got a whole chapter on the
00:58:48
technology. But this is one app that I think works pretty well. I've used some other stuff that
00:58:54
does not work pretty well. Maybe we can talk about that when we get to the sleep tech session. But
00:58:58
essentially, what Sleep Cycle does is you plug it in and you turn your phone over, you put it by
00:59:03
your bed. And it uses the microphone to determine what sleep cycle you're in. So she talks in the
00:59:10
book about the four stages of sleep. And essentially, there's the progression from when you just fall
00:59:16
sleep where you're in light sleep to very deep sleep. And then the REM, the rapid eye movement
00:59:21
sleep, that's where the restoration for your brain comes in. And so you go from light sleep to deep
00:59:26
sleep back up to light sleep. And your breathing changes as you go through those different cycles.
00:59:32
And even in the book, she talked about how your body temperature cools. And you basically like,
00:59:37
don't move at all. When you get, when you get down to the deepest sleep, so the microphone will pick
00:59:42
that up and determine which stages sleep that you're in. So it gives you analytics, essentially,
00:59:47
of how well you slept, it even gives you a sleep score. But also, you can set an alarm, but it'll
00:59:52
be in a range of 30 minutes. So if you say you want to get up by 630, what it will do is it will
00:59:57
monitor your sleep between six and six 30 and pick the ideal point to wake you up. Because if you
01:00:04
get woken up when you're in that deep sleep, then you wake up and you feel groggy, disoriented,
01:00:10
and it's really hard to get going with your day. And sometimes that feeling lasts the entire day,
01:00:15
like you just can't shake it. But if you get woken up when you're coming up out of your deep sleep
01:00:19
and you're in your light sleep, then you, then you wake up in your alert and you feel refreshed,
01:00:24
and you're ready to go. So this actually does make a huge difference. And to me personally,
01:00:32
anyways, where I've started using this app, and so it'll kind of pick the ideal point between six
01:00:37
and six 30, when you're in your lightest sleep possible, and the alarm will sound at that point.
01:00:43
I tend to avoid apps like this, and it's not because they don't work, or I don't think they
01:00:48
would be helpful. It's because I run my phone in airplane and do not disturb mode a lot,
01:00:54
or I have the I have it on vibrate instead of the volume up. That's a more common one for me.
01:00:59
And they don't always go off. Like they can't override some of that stuff.
01:01:04
Like the built-in alarm can. I wish I could use this stuff, but I am not good about making sure
01:01:11
my phone is set correctly to allow it to go off, and then it won't go off at all. And now I have
01:01:16
an even bigger problem. So I wish I could use these things because I think they're kind of cool,
01:01:21
but I don't because I forget. Is that bad? No, no. There's another version of this, obviously,
01:01:31
that's not not built around an application. Actually, there's a lot of different ones. You
01:01:36
could use a Fitbit, you could use those Apple Watch apps, for example, people sleep with their
01:01:40
Apple watches on. I personally don't know how you can do that because the battery doesn't last long
01:01:43
enough. You're gonna have to have watches. There you go. Actually, CPG Gray, I believe,
01:01:48
talked about how he did it. Exactly. Do that at one point. But there's also hardware options
01:01:53
for this. And let me just look this up real quickly because I backed a Kickstarter project.
01:01:58
Yeah, here's the website. It's hello.is, and I will paste this here so you can put this in the
01:02:06
show notes. But this is a little, it's like a little globe, and it looks kind of fashionable,
01:02:13
but you set it on your nightstand, and then essentially it does what Sleep Cycle does.
01:02:18
It's got lights that go with it. And the same concept, it will track your sleep and then wake
01:02:25
you up in a 30 minute range when you're coming up out of your deep sleep. And then the way that
01:02:29
you turn the alarm off is you just wave your hand over it, and it turns the alarm off. So,
01:02:34
absolutely phenomenal idea. Implementation has not been great.
01:02:39
Do you have hardware things? I do. Yeah, like I said, I backed it on Kickstarter,
01:02:44
so I got the first gen one, and it was like six to eight months late. Finally got it was super
01:02:50
excited, and the app was garbage. They do update it consistently. I don't know how much they can
01:02:57
update the hardware. But it looks like it's gotten a lot better. I just had not a great
01:03:04
experience with it, and I tried to use it for quite a while, and eventually gave up on it just
01:03:09
used Sleep Cycle, because if I'm traveling, for example, I'm not going to have this with me anyways,
01:03:14
so I don't want sleep data in multiple locations. I believe now that kind of is remedied with the
01:03:22
health kit stuff, so I think Sleep Cycle ties into Health Kit now, and this does as well.
01:03:26
That wasn't the case six months ago, a year ago, whatever, when I was messing around with all this
01:03:33
stuff, also this thing, in addition to having this unit that you plug into the wall and puts on your
01:03:38
nightstand, there's a little pill they call it that clips on your pillowcase, and that's the thing
01:03:42
that actually has the microphone. That has a round battery that you have to replace about every year,
01:03:50
which isn't a lot, but I don't want the battery to die, and then my alarm not go off, because I
01:03:57
forgot to change the battery. It says, "We'll last about a year. I've never actually tested it to see
01:04:04
how long it will go." I just see a lot of failure points with this that I'm not willing to take a
01:04:11
chance on, but it's a really cool idea, and you can even get multiple sleep pills at home, so you
01:04:16
could have one for you, one for your wife, and then you can even have separate alarms based off of
01:04:21
that if you wanted to. It can handle multiple user profiles, so to speak. The problem I have with
01:04:27
all this tech, since we're going to go ahead and start on our tech, is that I don't travel a lot,
01:04:36
but when I do, I don't want to be tied to these other systems. There are some occasions when I'm
01:04:44
in a place where there's not a good internet signal, and I may or may not have an outlet that I can
01:04:50
use for it. I get a little bit leery of using stuff like this, because I don't know. I don't want to
01:04:57
become dependent on it, I guess, as my hang up, because I feel like if I become dependent on it,
01:05:02
then I've got another issue where I'm somewhere new. I'm visiting someone, and now I can't sleep,
01:05:08
which just adds to the stress of a situation of the whole travel bit, and I just don't want to deal
01:05:14
with that. I agree, but I also don't go camping as much as you apparently. When I travel,
01:05:22
it's actually more important for me to use this type of stuff, because this provides a little
01:05:27
bit of familiarity and systems when I'm traveling where all the other stuff I have no control over.
01:05:32
I went to Austin, my flight got canceled because of quote-unquote weather, but United wouldn't pay
01:05:39
for a hotel even though it was no weather. You were brave on United. Well, it was before the
01:05:45
guy got dragged off. That's the point. I was complaining for a few days, and then I'm like,
01:05:49
"I guess my experience wasn't so bad." It could have been a lot worse. Yeah, but in that particular
01:05:55
instance, there was a lot of stuff going on in Austin. I couldn't find a hotel room. I had to
01:06:00
stay at some hotel that I normally would not stay at. It was not a real great experience.
01:06:05
Pretty loud. Walls were pretty thin. In that particular scenario, like I said,
01:06:11
sleep's really important to me. If I don't have the supports, then it could be a very long night
01:06:18
and a very long next day, which is what happened anyways, because I had to get up so early. I had
01:06:22
to get up at four in the morning. Having to get up that early through my body off anyways, but
01:06:28
not being able to have these tools in place. Another thing that I use whenever I travel,
01:06:34
I have special headphones for blocking out noise. Let me see if I can find these real quick.
01:06:41
Are these the Bose? They're not. They are called bed phones.
01:06:47
I found them. Let me send you the link here. This, again, was, I think, if not a Kickstarter,
01:06:55
like some sort of crowdfunding project. I've had these forever. Essentially, what they are
01:07:01
are very thin headphones with a huge cushion on the actual headphone itself.
01:07:07
If you fall asleep like the person in the picture on the right and you have a headphone in,
01:07:14
you're not going to wake up and your ear is going to be hurting. Interesting.
01:07:18
They have a very slim profile. They're not like the Apple EarPods or anything like that
01:07:22
where they are hard. They stick out because that causes, obviously, a lot of discomfort.
01:07:28
I have a pair of these that I will bring whenever I travel. Just in case I'm in that hotel room,
01:07:33
for example, and there's a lot of noise, and I will put on some low instrumental music to help
01:07:39
me fall asleep. Something like brain FM works great for this. They've got sleep programs in there.
01:07:44
There's a lot of applications that you can buy now with those, what do they call them,
01:07:48
binaural beats or whatever. They're like the sound patterns which are proven to help you fall asleep.
01:07:55
I never really got those to work very well, but the headphones are a big help sometimes.
01:08:02
Interesting. Essentially, the way my brain works, I always think worst case scenario while I'm
01:08:07
traveling. What's the worst thing that happened? Then I try and control what I can.
01:08:12
Makes sense. I just got back from a trip down in St. Louis. One of my wife's friends has got
01:08:18
married down there. I get it. Sleeping in hotels, I've done a lot of that in the past.
01:08:25
I'm not a huge fan because there's enough other people that have such different sleep habits that
01:08:30
just make zero sense to me whatsoever. They'll keep me up regardless. Maybe they'll wake me up early.
01:08:37
Well, they won't wake me up early. I'll wake them up early and pay back.
01:08:42
It's not fun. For me, it has a lot to do with what pillow do I use and how comfortable is the bed.
01:08:52
My wife has gotten to where she sleeps with a white noise machine. She's got an app on her phone.
01:08:57
I couldn't tell you what it is. She has that running. That seems to help quite a bit.
01:09:04
Drowning out some of the other stuff. Outside of that, it's all the habits that I have and how I
01:09:10
go to bed that help me out. I don't really get into the tech thing.
01:09:14
I think that's okay. The tech, I would say, that my big takeaway from the technology section of
01:09:20
this book in particular is that a lot of the technology just isn't there. I used Hello as the
01:09:26
example where it's a great idea, implementation-wise, the technology really doesn't match up with the
01:09:35
desired and promised user experience. Even the jawbone up and the Fitbit and all that type of stuff.
01:09:42
It's great in theory that this thing can sense exactly when you're coming up out of your deep
01:09:47
sleep and wake you up. I question how effectively it can really monitor that.
01:09:54
A sleep cycle does a pretty good job, but it's on my nightstand. It's not right next to me.
01:10:01
How does it really know? If I turn to the other way or I turn over in the middle of the night,
01:10:06
does that throw it off? I'm sure that they've got team and researchers that is accommodating
01:10:13
for that. They recognize that that stuff is happening. It feels to me right now,
01:10:18
people are understanding how important sleep is. There's this technology that's coming out that's
01:10:22
trying to help facilitate that. We're in the early stages of this yet. There's not really
01:10:29
anything that's like, "Yep, this will work 100% of the time. This is foolproof. This is awesome.
01:10:33
I haven't found anything like that yet." This is also why I tend to avoid some of the activity
01:10:38
trackers. If I start using tech like this, I do one of two things. I either become dependent on it,
01:10:47
which I don't want to do, because then what happens if it doesn't work or the update breaks
01:10:52
it or something? I just don't want to depend on it in that way. If I start using this stuff,
01:10:59
it can, doesn't always, but in my case, I think it would. It would keep me from paying attention to
01:11:06
my own body. If I wake up and I'm tired when I first get up, I didn't get enough sleep.
01:11:14
If I wake up and I feel rested and I'm ready to go start a fire, if I wake up that way,
01:11:20
then I know I got enough sleep. If I wake up tired, that tells me I should probably take a nap
01:11:24
that day despite me not doing it. That's my sense, is that if I start using these things,
01:11:32
these trackers and such, I might lose that touch of understanding of myself and that sense of,
01:11:39
"Am I in a good place or not?" I really don't want to lose that sense, because I feel like that's
01:11:44
extremely helpful in the long run. I completely agree with that. I think where technology can help
01:11:51
is as a substitute for the sleeping pills that she mentions. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah.
01:11:57
That whole section really made me angry. She talks about how some of the different ones
01:12:05
caused people to do things. Yeah, and Lunesta, I think, was another one, where they actually
01:12:12
have in the warnings, you may do a whole bunch of stuff and not realize it until the next morning,
01:12:17
which just scares me. Essentially, the whole idea behind the sleeping pills, even if you're not
01:12:23
doing those, even if you're doing something mild, you can get melatonin pills, which, again,
01:12:28
I bring those sometimes when I'm traveling, because I usually am pretty anxious at night
01:12:33
when I'm traveling. If I just want to not take a chance, I'll take a melatonin pill, but that's
01:12:38
natural. Your body's producing melatonin anyways, as long as you're not staring at blue light
01:12:43
till midnight, but we'll get into that a little bit. But she mentions that 14% of people are taking
01:12:50
these sleeping pills not occasionally, but every single night. And she had a phrase in that section,
01:12:57
she says, "We're overtired, but we can't sleep," which obviously there's a bigger issue here then.
01:13:04
Sounds like our baby. Yeah. That gets into the whole test management thing, I think. But before we
01:13:11
get there, the whole idea behind sleeping pills, like from a marketing perspective, this is genius,
01:13:18
because your target market is everybody. And essentially what they're doing is they are
01:13:25
the answer to a manufactured need that potentially everybody deals with. There's a lot of manufactured
01:13:32
demand for these sleeping pills, especially as it becomes more and more important, and people
01:13:41
start to realize the importance of sleep. She had a whole section on the history of sleep,
01:13:46
which personally I didn't really like kind of reminded me of what's that book we read, The Shallows.
01:13:52
It was shorter, thankfully. But to sum up that whole section, she talks about how sleep used to
01:14:00
be really important. People thought it was great, and then people started shifting and believing that
01:14:06
you didn't really need that much sleep, and it was kind of a badge of honor not to get enough sleep.
01:14:10
And now she's kind of advocating for, and I believe what we're kind of at this tipping point where
01:14:15
people are again realizing the importance of sleep. And all these uber productive people are saying
01:14:20
that the reason that they're so productive and the reason they get so much done is because
01:14:24
they are well rested. Like that sounds great. And everybody wants wants to achieve that now.
01:14:32
But they're so anxious, and there's so many other things, there's so much stimuli, there's so much
01:14:37
stuff that we're dealing with throughout the day that when it comes time to go to sleep,
01:14:41
you're like, okay, now I've got seven hours, seven and a half hours to get sleep.
01:14:45
Let's go to sleep right now. And they can't. So then it's like, well, how do I do that?
01:14:51
I know I'll take a pill. That's the easy button, but we're not dealing with the root of the issue,
01:14:58
we're just treating the symptom. And if you just treat the symptom, it's really not helping the
01:15:05
disease at all. In fact, she says that the sleeping pills on page 58 only give you an extra three
01:15:11
to 34 minutes of sleep. But then, like I mentioned, they have tons of side effects.
01:15:16
Right. And some of which scare the crap out of me.
01:15:20
Yep, definitely. I just don't want to think about that.
01:15:23
Tell me about this blue light thing. You've mentioned it a couple times,
01:15:27
and I know that it has a pretty big impact on you. And I feel like it has an impact on me,
01:15:32
but why don't you explain it? It has an impact on you, whether you think it does or not.
01:15:37
I get that. Maybe that's what I should say.
01:15:41
Hunds or research. If you go to the first people I really noticed
01:15:45
took an approach to solve this with the technology is flux. So the website, I believe, is JustGetFlux.com.
01:15:54
And flux is an application which has been on Mac and Windows 2, I believe, for a long time,
01:15:59
which changed the color of your computer monitor after you went to sleep. So blue light is essentially
01:16:07
the light that is emitted from your electronic devices, your television, your computer, even your
01:16:11
phone, that makes your brain think that it is still daytime. So your body is naturally wired to,
01:16:21
once the sun goes down, maybe you'd light a candle or something, you'd have some warm,
01:16:26
orange-ish light. But your body still knew that it was night and it would produce the melatonin,
01:16:32
which would eventually help you fall asleep. But if you're staring at these screens, they are
01:16:36
emitting this blue light, which is much more similar to the type of light that you see during the day.
01:16:42
So what it's signaling to your body is that it's not nighttime yet, so don't produce the melatonin.
01:16:47
So if you're staring at your computer screen or you're staring at your phone until 10 p.m. at night
01:16:52
and the sunset four hours ago, your body naturally has this cycle where it gets ready for sleep,
01:16:59
but you haven't started that yet. And so you're continually telling your body, "Go, go, go,
01:17:04
push, push, push." And then you get to the point where you are exhausted, but because you've been
01:17:09
looking at this blue light, you can't fall asleep. And so your body may be exhausted, but your mind
01:17:14
is still racing. Exactly. So what Flux does is it changes when the sun goes down and it can even
01:17:21
use your location to look at your local sunset sunrise. It will change your screen and you can
01:17:28
control the temperature, but over time it will make it more and more orange-ish to represent the
01:17:34
warm light of a candle light as opposed to the harsh blue light, which is just jolting and keeps
01:17:40
your body awake. So iOS now has a feature called Night Shift, which somewhat does the same thing,
01:17:47
but prior to Night Shift, if you were to ever take your phone in the middle of the night and unlock
01:17:52
it, for example, and you're blasted with this light, you're like, "Ah, my eyes." That's the intensity
01:17:58
of that blue light. And so even if you don't realize it, using something like Flux or Night Shift to a
01:18:05
certain extent, but Flux is a lot better, in my opinion, it's a lot more severe, a lot more harsh,
01:18:10
and some people will say, "Well, it looks so orange. I can't use my screen." Well, you shouldn't be
01:18:13
using your screen at this time anyway, if Flux is that. You shouldn't know that. But what it does
01:18:21
is that it severely reduces the strain on your eyes. If you don't believe the blue light thing at all,
01:18:29
it's just causing your body not to work as hard. But the Flux website, they've got tons and tons
01:18:34
of research papers which show essentially what I just unpacked in a couple of minutes in much
01:18:40
more detail. And so if you have a scientific brain like Joe's, maybe you want to go read that research.
01:18:46
Some of it, I suppose, can be interesting. It's all interesting, Mike. It's all interesting.
01:18:51
The gist of it is that Flux gives you indications that, "Hey, you shouldn't be using your computer
01:18:57
anymore." And then even if you have to, it makes it easier for you to fall asleep when you do.
01:19:02
It'll even give you notifications saying, "Hey, you've got to get up in nine hours."
01:19:06
So, dummy, put your computer to bed. Yeah. Have you the Night Shift thing, maybe it's not Night Shift,
01:19:11
the alarm part of iOS has a bedtime feature now. Have you seen this? I use this. I love this.
01:19:17
Yep. Yeah. I think it's a really cool idea. But again, iOS is getting to the point where
01:19:24
they're recognizing that this stuff is happening. People are using their phones all hours of the
01:19:28
night and they're trying to implement this stuff to get people to make more effective habits. I
01:19:32
think that's awesome. I also think that it's not as good as something like Flux though.
01:19:39
And I don't want to diminish what they're doing because doing it at all is good.
01:19:45
But for me, like I said, I discovered Flux a long time ago. And in my opinion, it's way better.
01:19:51
The people behind Flux live, breathe, and eat this stuff. Their mission is to develop this
01:19:58
application which is going to give you the maximum benefit in this particular area.
01:20:03
Whereas Night Shift is just a feature, the bedtime thing is just a feature that,
01:20:06
yeah, you can use it. Hopefully people will use it. But if they don't use it all well,
01:20:10
they're still going to use all the other features that are built into the operating system.
01:20:15
It's more a case of this is one of many things versus this is the only thing. And obviously,
01:20:21
the company that this is their only thing, it's going to be, in my opinion, a better product.
01:20:26
Yeah. The reason I like the bedtime feature, there's two things. One, it has the alert that
01:20:34
tells you, hey, you should not be on your phone. You should be going to bed now. I like that because
01:20:38
it's kind of an indicator to me that, okay, at this point, I should not be on my phone or it's
01:20:43
going to impact my sleep. It's pretty helpful to me to have that. The other thing I really like
01:20:48
about it is the sounds that it can use for an alarm are not jarring in any way. They're slowly
01:20:56
progressing. They come in easy and then they progressively get louder. I love that because it
01:21:02
doesn't. One, my phone, I don't do any of these tracking systems that know where I'm at in my
01:21:08
sleep cycle at all. I don't know any of that. And I don't know that I want to. I think I would
01:21:14
rather worry about my bedtime than I would about my time getting up. But anyway, that's beside the
01:21:19
point. I'll get there in a minute. But I like that the sounds that they use are slowly progressing
01:21:24
because then it slowly pulls me out instead of jarring me and giving me that adrenaline shot
01:21:28
and making me like, "Whoa, it just happened." I don't want to do that in the morning. I like the
01:21:34
slowly get me up thing, but at a certain time. For some reason, I like that. So that's the part I
01:21:40
really enjoy about the bedtime piece. It does do some tracking to know, did you sleep that long?
01:21:47
It's only tracking, when did I set my phone down and plug it in? It's working off of that,
01:21:54
which isn't very accurate in some cases. It's pretty accurate for me. But that's mostly because
01:22:01
I go to bed when that thing tells me it's bedtime and I fall asleep very quickly. So it's fairly
01:22:07
accurate for me, but I would imagine for the general public it's not at all.
01:22:11
Right. Now, so the situation that you just described, then this is the thing for you.
01:22:20
Hello, I'm your keyboard. Yeah. And I have one of these as well.
01:22:24
This is an enormous alarm clock light, essentially. It's the Philips HF 3520 wake-up light with
01:22:35
colored sunrise simulation. Oh my gosh. So this is the inverse of the sunset and the flux effect.
01:22:43
All right. So if you want to get up early prior to the sun getting up and you want to be naturally
01:22:52
led out of your deep sleep by a specific time, then this is the thing because what this will do
01:22:57
is if you were to crank this all the way up, it is very, very bright. But let's say you set your
01:23:02
alarm for 6 a.m. on this. What it will do is it will both with sound and with the light,
01:23:08
there's a bunch of different sounds you can choose from their little nature sounds, waves,
01:23:12
birds, things like that. Things that are not jarring. Okay. So let's say you set it for 6 a.m.
01:23:17
at 5 30, it will start to glow and the sounds will start and it will get progressively brighter
01:23:22
and progressively louder until the time that you have to be awake. Interesting. And so as your room
01:23:28
gets louder and as it gets brighter, your body naturally is coming up out of that deep sleep,
01:23:33
but it's not just blaring the song that you chose for your or the sound for your alarm.
01:23:38
Right. At that specific time. So this also can do what you're talking about. The thing I don't like
01:23:42
about this, just me personally, is that there is no way to turn off that clock display.
01:23:48
Oh. So that means that if you were to wake up in the middle of the night and you see that,
01:23:54
oh my gosh, it's only three in the morning. Oh, and then me, like I'll take that time,
01:23:59
whatever I woke up be like, well, if I can fall asleep right away, I can get two more sleep cycles
01:24:03
in. So that obviously is counterintuitive. I don't like to have the time displayed in my
01:24:12
bedroom at all. We have that done already. So I like to know that. And honestly, it's helpful to
01:24:18
us because then we know when Hazel, our youngest is waking up or going to sleep and does she need
01:24:23
to go back to sleep? Did she eat an hour ago? So she doesn't need to eat right now. We use it for
01:24:29
that because then you know, have the head two hours? Yeah, we kind of need to know that.
01:24:35
So I already have a clock that shows the time right now. My thing is,
01:24:39
this might be perfect for you. Maybe. But the thing is, I get up at five and my wife doesn't
01:24:43
always get up until about seven, seven thirty. Yeah, that's the other issue with this is that
01:24:49
you could mean, obviously, you could set it on one side of the bed and maybe it'll wake you up
01:24:55
and not your wife. You can press a button and then have it instantly turn off again.
01:24:59
Yeah. But my guess would be that it would affect the other person as well.
01:25:04
Yeah. I think if we got to have the same time, that would be awesome.
01:25:07
Yeah. So I think that for this to really work, you would have to have an agreed upon sleep time
01:25:15
and wake time. As much as I would love for that to happen. We had this conversation. So when we
01:25:23
were coming back from St. Louis, my wife got a little interested in this and I told her I was
01:25:29
a little bit behind on reading it. I wasn't sure I was going to complete it before we recorded this
01:25:34
morning. So she was kind enough to read it to me as we were driving. And so it was interesting
01:25:39
because that led to a few conversations between us about, you know, how much sleep do you need and
01:25:44
does that affect how you go to bed and all this? It was an interesting conversation, but
01:25:48
she was very clear to call out, yeah, she needs close to nine hours of sleep. She's one of those
01:25:52
that needs more than most. And this would not go over well. Like us getting our wake up times to a
01:26:00
line would require going to bed at different times. And we don't like doing that. So we have to
01:26:05
shift at one side or the other. Gosh, this thing would be cool though, but I would become dependent
01:26:11
on it again. Let's back up a little bit and talk about the test management thing and
01:26:20
yeah, that relates to sleep because this was one of my big takeaways. Okay, I sense this common theme
01:26:27
kind of throughout this this whole book. In page 63, for example, she talks about how millennials are
01:26:33
the most stressed generation, almost a third saying that they can't sleep because they are
01:26:38
thinking of all the things they need to do or did not get done. She talks about how 60% of people
01:26:44
have fallen asleep while holding their phone. She talks about how lack of sleep can cause
01:26:49
irreversible loss of brain cells. On page 102, she talks about how sleep allows you to process
01:26:54
things better and less emotionally because the amygdala can't hijack things. The amygdala is the
01:27:02
emotional response that triggers the fight or flight response in your brain. And essentially,
01:27:07
as I'm reading all this stuff, I'm thinking of David Allen in the whole mind like water concept.
01:27:13
How if you don't have a system that you can trust, then you can't respond appropriately to any of
01:27:20
these given impacts. David Allen would say that like he uses the example when you throw up a pebble
01:27:24
in into still water. What happens is that the the ripples will emanate from the point of impact
01:27:29
in direct response to the size of the impact. They're not going to be
01:27:34
bigger on one side and less on another side unless you threw it at an angle or whatever.
01:27:40
In essence, his approach to task management then is that you want to respond to things
01:27:45
appropriately. You don't want to fly off the handle when things are not a big deal.
01:27:49
When something is really major, you want to be able to recognize that you want to be able to
01:27:53
get your family out of the house immediately when it is burning down. But you don't want
01:27:59
to respond to that email immediately with a super emotional response. You want to sleep on it
01:28:04
for a night before you. And then usually after that, you don't want to send that email.
01:28:09
So little things like this. And what I got out of this book and pertaining to this is that
01:28:16
sleep is one of the things that can cause your system to go haywire and can instantly throw you
01:28:24
into that state of emergency scan modality that David Allen talks about.
01:28:29
Page 167, she says lying about putting out imaginary fires is one of the most
01:28:35
draining things we can do. And instantly, when I read that, I'm like, yeah, emergency scan modality.
01:28:39
Where you're living your life like a firefighter, you know that your system can't handle everything.
01:28:44
You know, you can't keep up with everything. You know, there's a bunch of stuff you're not
01:28:47
getting to. So what you end up doing from a task management perspective, getting things done
01:28:53
perspective, David Allen perspective, is that you are scanning the horizon, looking for the
01:28:58
next thing that you forgot to do, looking for that fire to pop up. And then you go and you
01:29:03
deal with the thing that is urgent. And then you go back into your emergency scan modality,
01:29:07
you're just scanning the horizon looking for the next fire that you got to put out.
01:29:10
And when it comes to productivity and goal achievement and creating the future that you want,
01:29:18
which really is the heart behind bookworm, I would say is that we want we're reading these books,
01:29:24
not just to check them off on a list, but because we want to improve ourselves.
01:29:30
And I think last time you asked me like, how do you actually implement the stuff that you read?
01:29:33
And I mentioned that I believe it has a cumulative effect. It gives you a bigger toolbox with which
01:29:38
to solve your problems that that you encounter. And I 100% believe that that's true. So if we're
01:29:45
going to do all of this stuff, then let's make sure that we don't throw it all out the window
01:29:51
by not getting enough sleep. You can have the best system. You can read the most books.
01:29:58
You can do everything right. And if you're not getting enough sleep, you are in Ariana Huffington's
01:30:04
words, you're legally drunk. We would not advocate for people coming to work and doing their job
01:30:11
when they're drunk. But we would, and we hold people up on a pedestal who come to work and do
01:30:18
their job even when they're tired, even when they're exhausted. But the decisions that they're
01:30:22
making, especially if they are higher level, if they're management level, if they're CEO level,
01:30:28
if the decisions that you're making are affecting other people, like this is the worst thing that
01:30:32
you can do. Yeah. And it just creates a lot of mind. Yeah, it creates a ton of problems. Those
01:30:39
bad decisions, they can be fatal, not just by you deciding to get in a car and drive when you're
01:30:44
drowsy. You know, it's same decision getting in the car deciding to drive when you're drunk.
01:30:48
Like if you haven't sub-24 hours, there should be a test that you could do to pull when you pull
01:30:54
people over and go to jail because your blood alcohol level, essentially, your brain alcohol
01:31:01
level, because you haven't gotten enough sleep at a certain point. Your brain sleep level is too low.
01:31:05
Yeah, you're putting people in the exact same situation. You're putting all their people's lives
01:31:10
at risk when you do that sort of thing. And that's just like the severity of that when I read this,
01:31:16
like, wow, this is a really big deal. One of the sections I really liked was the part where she's
01:31:22
explaining how to get good sleep or how to get to sleep. And so my process that I use whenever I go
01:31:30
to sleep is very simple. I try to kind of go into this whole fantasy imagination world,
01:31:36
which sounds kind of weird, but that's where the Hobbit has come in from me lately because
01:31:39
it's definitely a fiction world. But I've done this a lot, like just made up stories in my mind
01:31:46
whenever I'm going like I lay down and my mind just starts running with random fictional stories.
01:31:50
And I think that's what helps me fall asleep is because it's not I'm not worrying about work.
01:31:55
I'm not worrying about code that I'm writing or anything like that. I'm just off in this fictional
01:32:00
world. And she didn't really talk about that, but I've talked to some folks who do the same thing.
01:32:05
And I feel like that's a fairly common thing for people who fall asleep right away.
01:32:09
Folks who are like me who less than five minutes you're out. That seems to be one of the things
01:32:15
that people talk about, at least that I've run into, that that's how they fall asleep right away.
01:32:20
Have you ever heard of this? Am I just really weird and running across really weird people?
01:32:24
Maybe, like I said, I naturally have trouble falling asleep. And so she talks about this
01:32:30
478 method, which I've tried a couple times. I haven't gotten to the point where I've fallen
01:32:36
asleep using it, but I think I can see the effect that it has. I think it's a trigger.
01:32:43
That was what I thought. I think it's just developing the habit. What is it called?
01:32:47
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, where you're creating that trigger where your mind knows
01:32:51
what to do. And that's what that is.
01:32:54
Yeah. And so essentially just to summarize this real quickly, the 478 method, you breathe in for
01:33:02
four counts, and then you hold it for seven counts, and then you breathe out with, as she described
01:33:07
it, a whooshing sound for eight counts. And you do this over and over again. And when I was doing
01:33:14
this, what I found is that holding it for seven counts and then breathing out for eight counts,
01:33:20
after doing this a couple times, felt like I was a little bit short of breath, which maybe is the
01:33:25
desired effect. I could see that being the thing that if you just do that consistently,
01:33:30
that's enough to knock you out. Because she says if you do this consistently, you can get it to
01:33:35
the point where you can do this and fall asleep consistently after only one minute.
01:33:38
And this is not the first place that I've heard of this either. So I do actually believe that this
01:33:44
works. But I don't know, just following the process, the way my brain works, I'm so focused on,
01:33:50
okay, did I do this exactly right? That I don't think I could.
01:33:53
You're worried about it before 70. Yeah, exactly.
01:33:55
Was that three and a half or was that four? Exactly. Like that, seriously, this is the
01:33:59
stuff I think about in my holding this long enough. Am I going too fast, too slow?
01:34:04
Like she didn't give me enough details. That's what's going through my head as I'm implementing
01:34:08
this. And I'm just like, this is completely counterintuitive, counterproductive. This isn't
01:34:12
going to work for me. So I'm sure that it. Yeah. One of the other things that she said, though,
01:34:17
that I think I can totally see this having a big impact on me is on page 211 not to go back to
01:34:24
task management, but kind of. She says, finish every day, finish every day and be done with it.
01:34:30
You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
01:34:33
Forget them as fast as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. My takeaway from this is when you are
01:34:38
done with the day, finish the day. And this is where the evening routine, evening ritual comes in.
01:34:44
But a big part of this for me is to not think about what happened anymore.
01:34:49
And so I've got this daily reflection template that I've set up in day one in Launch Center Pro,
01:34:54
and I do it occasionally. Yeah. I know theoretically, intellectually, that I should be doing this
01:35:00
consistently. And this, when I read that, it just reminded me that like, that's what that is doing.
01:35:06
It's not just to have a record of this stuff. It is so that you can wipe the slate clean at the
01:35:12
end of the day, and you don't have to think about these things anymore. And even if you've got a
01:35:18
task management system, I find myself still struggling with this, where I can have everything
01:35:23
in my task management system. But because I haven't formally erased the blackboard of my mind,
01:35:29
which is what journaling and reflection does, I have trouble disconnecting from that stuff.
01:35:35
At the end of my workday, I do a shut down ritual. We've talked about this before.
01:35:40
And part of that for me has incorporated a brain dump. Like what she's talking about. I just go
01:35:47
through what is it I use? I'm going to look it up. I'm going to find a link to it. I use,
01:35:53
there's a trigger list that David Allen has for GTD whenever you do a brain dump. And I run
01:35:59
through that thing, which is long, to be honest. But I run through it very quickly, and it triggers
01:36:05
anything I think I may have to do. And I dump them into inboxes. And then in the morning,
01:36:10
I go through my inboxes. So that serves as kind of a brain dump for me. That way, I know the system
01:36:15
at least has things captured. And then I can go through them later. And that helps me a lot to
01:36:20
not worry about it. But I do it at the end of my workday, not before I go to bed. And I do that
01:36:25
because I don't want to be thinking about work stuff when I go spend time with my family. That's
01:36:29
why I do that. Yeah, and that makes sense. But even from a non work or task perspective,
01:36:34
I find personally that I can be thinking about what happened during the day, even if there's no
01:36:40
action item associated with it. Like you have to follow up with this person on this. Yeah,
01:36:44
it's just constantly thinking about, well, you know, that kind of stunk or yeah, I really enjoyed,
01:36:49
you know, that experience. And I find that I will continually throw these things around in my brain,
01:36:57
roll them over and over and over and over and over again until I actually get it off the,
01:37:02
off the mind and on the paper, so to speak, even though it's digital paper.
01:37:06
Getting into a screen. We've been going on this for a while now. Let's shift over to action
01:37:14
items because I think that's going to incorporate like, what are we going to do for our sleep habits
01:37:17
now that we've read the book? I think that's going to incorporate that. Yeah. So for me,
01:37:22
I'm going to go to bed. That's all I wrote on this list. Because I know,
01:37:29
I say that I go to sleep at 9.30 quarter to 10 ish, but I've been pretty bad, especially the last
01:37:38
month or two about, you know, it's pushing 9.30 before I even start going to bed, which means it's
01:37:43
10 10 15 before I'm asleep. And that's not good. You know, that puts me down below that seven hours
01:37:49
of sleep. And that's not a good day if I do that. So I want to be better about that. So I'm going to
01:37:54
be more particular about going to bed and starting my evening ritual of getting me ready and getting
01:38:00
to bed. I'm going to be a little more diligent about that. To kind of go with that, I'm going to
01:38:06
try to get my nap habit back. It's been a while since I've been into the nap habit that since I know
01:38:12
that I can fall asleep pretty easily. And I know that I like when I take a nap, I don't need an
01:38:19
alarm of any kind. I will just wake up 20 minutes later after I fall asleep. I know that. And it's
01:38:25
never failed me. I don't know why I can do that, but I love that I can do that. So sorry for those
01:38:30
of you who can't do it. I'm going to take advantage of it because I can. So I want to get that habit
01:38:37
back. It's pretty easy for me to notice that I'm pretty tired after lunch, since at that point,
01:38:42
I've been up for seven hours, seven and a half, eight hours almost. So I'm going to try to start
01:38:48
developing that habit of taking a nap after lunch whenever I go back to quote unquote work at that
01:38:54
point. We'll see how that goes. Hopefully that'll help me to get to a point where I'm getting enough
01:38:58
sleep in a day. That's my goal in all of this is I don't think overall I'm getting enough sleep
01:39:04
per day. And I'm trying to get I think roughly 30 to 45 minutes more on average. That's what I'm
01:39:11
shooting for. Nice. So my first action item is actually relating to a section which we didn't even
01:39:19
get to which is okay. There's a lot of good stuff in this one. There's yeah, there's a lot of good
01:39:22
stuff in this book, which is how do you get enough sleep with kids? Let me just real briefly touch
01:39:29
on this and say if you have kids, because it's hard, it's even more important to get sleep when
01:39:35
you can you have to be even more diligent and even militant. Yeah. Bedtimes and things like that,
01:39:43
because you can't just accept the fact that oh, my sleep is going to be terrible for a period
01:39:48
because it does have real very real impact. And essentially, if you are robbing yourself of sleep,
01:39:55
you are robbing the people who you love of the real you going back to the emergency
01:40:01
scamodality. Like I don't want my kids to remember me as super emotional, fly off the handle. Everything
01:40:06
was a big deal with dad. Yeah, that's not that's not the memories I want them to have. So
01:40:13
I want to instill in them that sleep is important, but also this is one thing that she brought up,
01:40:19
making bedtime fun and positive for my kids. And I don't know exactly what this looks like yet,
01:40:24
but I can tell you that couple of my kids with older ones, they totally get it. They are fine
01:40:29
going to bed, but the younger ones, it's like it's time for bed. No. Yeah. So, my goal is to think
01:40:37
about how to change that reaction. And we do have a routine that we follow and we do like read
01:40:43
stories at night before we go to bed and stuff like that. But I need to think on this and see if
01:40:49
there's anything else I can do to just encourage them that the bedtime routine is not only important,
01:40:55
but it's also fun. So we had a bit of an issue with our oldest not wanting to go to bed. This
01:41:01
probably been about a year and a half ago. She was about two and a half at the time. So she's younger,
01:41:06
so keep that in mind. And what we started doing was telling her, bedtime will be here in 10 minutes,
01:41:13
like just warning her that it was coming. And then here, when was it? It would have been this past
01:41:19
Christmas, my in-laws at our request got them a one of those time timers, time time, I think
01:41:28
that's what it's called. It's where you turn the dial and it has the red background and the red
01:41:32
disappears as the time ticks away. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes, but it's super
01:41:37
handy because I can turn that to set it for bedtime. And then the girls know, even our two-year-old,
01:41:44
she can't read numbers. And even our oldest kind of struggles with it at the moment, we'll get there.
01:41:50
But she, both of them can see they're still red on the clock. So it's not bedtime yet, or it's
01:41:56
almost gone, which means it's almost bedtime. And for some reason, knowing that it's coming and
01:42:01
then seeing that time tick away, whenever it goes off, they are the ones that say bedtime and then
01:42:07
they run upstairs. Like they are the ones that do that, not us, which is super helpful because then
01:42:13
I don't have to worry about them throwing a fit at bedtime. Yeah, I think that's good. And we do
01:42:20
something similar with the wake times. We have this, it's called the okay to wake alarm clock.
01:42:24
Oh, yeah, I've seen these things. Yeah. Essentially what it does is it's an alarm clock for kids that
01:42:28
turns green when it's okay to get up. So we have this okay to wake alarm clock where,
01:42:34
especially the younger ones, they know you can't come out of your room till the clock is green.
01:42:37
Right. We have it set for 7 a.m. And what that does is it gives my wife and I a little bit of a buffer
01:42:41
in the morning to make sure we can get our morning routine done. Right. And so this kind of sounds
01:42:47
like the same sort of thing at the end of the day, but I think I want to go even deeper with that.
01:42:51
Like how do I get them excited about bedtime, if that makes sense. And maybe excited is not the
01:42:56
right word because you don't want them all jacked up, obviously when they go to bed. Right. But looking
01:43:00
forward to it, not just like, oh, I've got 10 minutes, I'm going to finish what I'm doing. But
01:43:05
yay, we get to go to bed now. I don't know. Maybe that's impossible with kids. I don't know. I figure
01:43:10
this out. I can make a product and sell it to parents everywhere. Yeah, you know, billion
01:43:15
are there. That's that's the need I'm recognizing. And I have to ponder this a bit more. But yeah,
01:43:22
there's got to be something. We found that and part of what helped us was that both of the older
01:43:27
two both love reading books. They love it when we read to them. And we just made sure that we
01:43:32
incorporated that as one of the first things we do when we're getting them ready for bed. And if
01:43:38
we do that, they're super excited to go do that. That's that's what eventually got them to the
01:43:44
point where, you know, we set the timer and they're like excited for it to go off because they know
01:43:48
what means we need to go read a book. So that's what helped us. But I have not
01:43:54
I don't think I ever met your kids. So I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know what they specifically would
01:43:59
mean this near. They're also different. Why are they also different? I don't know. I don't know.
01:44:04
So that's the first action item. Second one, no eating after 7 p.m. There's a whole section
01:44:11
in the book about exercise and diet and how that impacts your sleep. And there are a couple days
01:44:19
during the week in particular where we're going until nine, sometimes even later. And if I'm not
01:44:26
careful, what I can end up doing is eating dinner after I get home. And what I want to do is
01:44:31
essentially figure out a way during the day to get the meals that I need in without having to resort
01:44:37
to eating right before I go to bed. Because those nights I can I can tell I don't sleep as well.
01:44:41
So no eating after 7 p.m. And then I mentioned with sleep cycle and stuff like that. When I
01:44:47
started reading this book, I've started using that again. I've kind of gotten away from it again.
01:44:52
Like a lot of this stuff is just it's stuff that I've known and it's stuff that is stuck for a
01:44:58
little while. And I'm hoping that you know, because you're holding me accountable on a podcast that
01:45:02
it can actually get stick. But but the whole thing is adjust and repair. I mean,
01:45:09
I don't think I don't think that it's healthy or productive to say I'm going to make all of these
01:45:20
huge changes every two weeks every time I read a book, which kind of gets back into what we're
01:45:25
talking about at the beginning of the last episode, I believe, where people are like,
01:45:28
how do you implement all this stuff? Just implement what makes sense. Try it. See if it sticks. And if
01:45:34
it doesn't stick, you know, it's it's not a huge deal. Don't beat yourself up about it because,
01:45:39
oh, I used to do this and now I don't anymore. It's every every day, every week, every year,
01:45:44
like, adjust and repair and then just make sure that you're moving forward. So I just want to
01:45:49
throw that out there because I think that there can be a tendency to if you have a mind like mine,
01:45:56
beat yourself up like, Oh, man, I stink at this stuff because I said I was going to do this. And
01:46:00
now I don't anymore. Like, oh, well, make a decision start today. Right. Right. Cool.
01:46:07
What would you think of her writing style? I liked it. The only part I didn't really like was the
01:46:14
history of sleep chapter, like I mentioned, but I thought it was really good. I thought it was
01:46:18
really approachable. I thought it was a very easy read. You pick it up and it's pretty big. It's like
01:46:24
286 pages or something and there's a bunch of appendices in the back, including a whole list of
01:46:29
hotels that she recommends because they help you fall asleep. I was pretty cool. A bunch of links
01:46:35
to research, which obviously I didn't read, but maybe you will. Oh, come on. So yeah, I thought
01:46:42
it was a really good book. A lot of this stuff, like I said, I've known this stuff conceptually
01:46:48
before. I understood the concept of blue light and the sleep cycles and all that because I've done
01:46:52
that part of the research anyways myself previous to reading this book. But for people who are just
01:46:58
getting into this, this is the definitive resource, I would say. You should look at this.
01:47:02
I'm going to write this four and a half stars.
01:47:06
Nice. I also enjoyed the book. I agree with you. It was very easy to just
01:47:13
pick it up and go to town on it. She had one, well, I would disagree with you on the history
01:47:21
thing, but I love history. The whole biophysics sleep thing where you sleep three or four hours
01:47:29
and then you get up for an hour, hour and a half and then you go back to sleep for four hours.
01:47:32
That's always intrigued me. I'm not going to experiment with that.
01:47:36
The history piece I always think is interesting. I like to know where we came from because then
01:47:44
it helps me put things in context. Anyway, I really like that. But the chapter that kind of
01:47:48
made me stop and pause was the dreams chapter. I'm like, "Okay, this is getting a little
01:47:53
frou-frou for me." But I understand people love recording dreams and they think there's a lot
01:47:59
to them. It's not for me. I wish she would have scaled back on that one because you can tell she's
01:48:05
a big believer in that and spent a lot of time on it. I wish she didn't, but that's the way it is.
01:48:11
Again, I agree with you. A lot of great examples. It was made it very easy to read.
01:48:18
I had some small qualms with the dreams piece. I felt like she used a lot of examples that
01:48:24
seemed to repeat each other on occasion. It seemed like there was a number of the sports
01:48:28
stories. I was like, "Okay, here's another one and here's another one with the same thing." It
01:48:32
seemed like it was repetitive in that sense. But I'm not going to dock it too much for that because
01:48:38
it was still very helpful to see that. I would put it at a four out of the five. I liked it a lot.
01:48:47
So, upcoming books. The next one's mine.
01:48:50
Yep. Because it was your choice. Out of our minds, Sir Ken Robinson,
01:48:55
you got another couple TED Talks you need to watch for this one, Mike.
01:48:57
You're going to be a TED Talk master here before long.
01:49:01
I actually did not have a specific book in mind that I absolutely wanted to cover next. I went
01:49:07
back to the recommended list. I found the seven habits of highly affected people by Stephen Covey,
01:49:12
which I think I probably know all of these habits already, but I've never read the entire book.
01:49:17
Yeah, I've never even picked it up.
01:49:19
This is just obviously a productivity classic. So, yeah, excited to read that one.
01:49:24
It's like required reading.
01:49:25
So, the next one up would be Out of Our Minds, Ken Robinson, and then seven habits of highly
01:49:32
effective people. Out of Our Minds is, it's about creativity in school systems. If it's the one I
01:49:40
recall, and I remember picking it, I didn't pull it up to look at it specifically.
01:49:43
Yes. So, yes, the tagline on it is learning to be creative. And Ken Robinson is on this whole path
01:49:51
of school systems and how they don't encourage creativity. They actually inhibit or destroy
01:49:57
creativity in our kids. So, I'm interested in that. We each have kids, so I'm hoping this will
01:50:03
help me understand how to teach them. What do you have for gap books? What are you reading
01:50:08
between here and there? I am reading a book that Tan actually gave me. And it's an internet marketing
01:50:16
book, but it is fascinating. It really dives into the whole idea of funnels and internet marketing.
01:50:22
And a lot of, I'm getting a lot of stuff out of this. I've started it already. I've read actually
01:50:27
100 pages the first day that I picked it up. Nice. And it's dot com secrets by Russell Brunson.
01:50:32
So, this is a book that if you don't like the sensational celebrity personalities like Tony
01:50:40
Robbins, stuff like that, you probably wouldn't like this guy. But, and I personally don't like that
01:50:46
that personality either. But the content in here is just really, really good understanding
01:50:52
the psychology behind internet marketing and all that. So, very beneficial for anybody who works
01:50:57
online. Nice. Nice. I am picking up the end of absence tagline, reclaiming what we've lost in a
01:51:05
world of constant connection. I might be obsessed with this topic. I like learning a lot about it.
01:51:12
I think it's partly because I want to know how to teach my kids the right thing. I think that's
01:51:15
why I'm obsessed with it. Yes, there you go. So, a lot of books here, if you have one, and since
01:51:22
Mike is starting to step into pulling things from our recommendations list, and I think I'm going to
01:51:27
start doing that soon as well. But, if you have one that you would like us to go through, bookworm.fm/recommend,
01:51:34
or go to the home page, hit the big button on the right that says recommend. It'll get you to
01:51:39
a form. You can fill that out and tell us what you want us to read. And if you want to see what
01:51:42
else has been recommended, just stick out there on the website. There's a list, bookworm book list.
01:51:49
What's the URL bookworm.fm/list? And you can see what all we've been through.
01:51:55
Yeah, and if you want to help other people find the show, going over to iTunes and leaving us a
01:51:58
review would be very helpful. We want to dislodge that other radio station podcast.
01:52:02
We're going to get there. Yeah. And if you want to engage with us on some of the books that we've
01:52:08
read, you put together a discussion site, the Productivity Guild, which I believe is the Productivity Guild.com.
01:52:14
Yeah, just Productivity Guild.com. I rebranded the discussion site. So, it's the same thing. I just
01:52:20
give it a different name. I need to get new logos and stuff for that at some point. But there you go.
01:52:24
But if you're into this and you've been reading along with us, especially with this one, I would
01:52:31
be interested on this particular episode to go to the guild, if you would, listeners, please.
01:52:36
Let us know what your sleep habits are, what you're trying to do, what you're going to change.
01:52:41
I'm interested to see what other people are doing, especially those who are along on the trip with
01:52:45
us on Bookworm. So, yeah, go out to the guild. Share your thoughts. What are you up to? And if you
01:52:52
are reading along with us, be sure to pick up out of our minds and we'll go on a journey with Ken
01:52:56
Robinson next.