Bookworm Transcripts

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It's new in Mike's world.

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Well, I got my podcast in gear that I mentioned in the last episode,

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but you may notice I am not recording from it because it is set up at my house

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and my office is not finished at my house.

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So I came to the coworking space so that you didn't hear the contractor

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putting up drywall below me.

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OK, but I am a big fan of the sure beta 87A.

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Nice.

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Have you what like what have you been recording with it?

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I recorded a screencast online module with it.

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Nice.

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And it turned out really well.

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I really like how natural it sounds.

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I think it sounds a lot more natural than the how PR 40 for my voice.

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I did notice through the interface that I use the Audient ID for.

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It seems like when I'm recording, because it's a condenser, Mike,

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and even though it's a super cardioid pattern, so it's picking up what's

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like right in front of you, it does pick up when I'm recording.

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I can hear the things in the background.

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But when I edit, it seems like those things aren't nearly as pronounced as I

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think they are when I'm recording them.

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So it's a condenser microphone.

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It picks up a lot more background noise than a dynamic, but I think it sounds

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better and it doesn't seem to cause any issues when it comes to actually

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creating the files from it.

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We use the the sure beta 87s for a lot of the singers and the speakers at our

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church, and we also have some of the beta 58s as well.

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And whenever I was trying to figure out which Mike I wanted to start using for

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podcasting, I grabbed both of those, brought them home, plugged them into my

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system and did some recording on both just to see what's the difference?

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Because the beta 58 is supposedly got a tighter catch on it.

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Like it won't have some of that background noise.

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And in theory, by all stats, that is true.

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But whenever I put it in place and actually started using the two of them

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side by side, just to see what they would do, I found that the 87 picked up

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less than the 58, the 87 picked up less than the 58.

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Yes.

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And the 87 seems to be more clear, it seems.

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That's that's my perspective.

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It seems to hold more true to a person's voice in the 58.

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But I cannot compare it to a high LPR 40 because I do not own one.

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And at the moment, I have no interest in owning one.

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Well, it's not the how PR 40 have had for a little while now.

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I actually got it from a five by five garage sale.

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So it's Dan Benjamin's old high LPR 40.

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It's worked really well.

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It I haven't hooked up to the focus right.

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Scarlet two I two at my co-working space and it works great.

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But I definitely am a fan of the audience interface over the focus right for sure.

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And I personally think that the show sounds better, but it's not like a huge gain,

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in my opinion, over the how PR 40 how PR 40 still a great mic.

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But for my voice, I think the show sounds better.

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I did share it with the screencast on on line crew.

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And the one of the guys that is part of the crew is JF who was on Mac Power

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user. So he does a lot of a lot of screencasting and he said he said it sounded

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great. So for whatever it's worth, go with the 87.

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That's what that means.

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Yeah, but it's a new toy and I like it.

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I like it a lot.

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I want to use it all the time.

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So for the listeners, I think we've been talking about podcasting gear at the

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beginning of the show, the like the last three episodes.

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And I think it's because we love this stuff.

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It's fun.

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And we think you should start a podcast with us.

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If you start a podcast because of this, you need to let us know.

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I'll say that.

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I think I have my wife convinced to start a podcast.

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What?

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Yep.

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You got enough Mike's lantern on.

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You should be able to do that.

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Exactly.

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So stay tuned.

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All right.

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There's a teaser.

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So on that teaser, should we do some follow up?

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Let's do it.

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All right.

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So morning pages, we should go back and forth on this because we both have a lot

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here, but I have kind of fallen off a little bit of the morning pages routine.

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I am still doing it just irregularly.

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It's tough to get the time.

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Like that's a hard thing to stick with right now.

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Exactly.

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Three pages is a lot.

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It is.

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It is.

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And I'm, you know, as we talked last time, I'm a stickler on that third page.

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And when I do them, I want to do them right.

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So it.

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Which is fine if you do them, but this is the classic battle in the productivity

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space is like, well, I don't have time to meditate for 20 minutes.

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So I'm not going to do it.

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Yep.

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Yep.

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So this is kind of what I anticipated and why I was a little bit lax when we

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recorded that episode about why I wasn't so set on like, well, yeah, it'd be great

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to get to the three pages.

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But I knew that if I was just implementing three pages, it was, it was

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never going to never going to stick.

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And I guess you go, you can go back to your point, but since I'm talking about it,

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I still am not on the three pages that you challenged me to get to.

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Yep.

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I'm still doing two, but I am still doing them.

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So yeah.

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And that's, that's the thing.

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Like, and part of my issue is, and this plays into one of my other follow-ups here

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is messing with my morning and evening routine.

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I've been, I've been changing up what I do in the morning and I've been changing

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up the order of operations of my morning routine and really trying to find time to do

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some of the things that I find relaxing and beneficial to my own mental state.

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One of those is morning pages.

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And it's one of those that I am trying to make sure that I have time for.

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And I, I don't always find it because I get distracted too easy sometimes.

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And I, I'm getting better about it, but I have some things I've been working on

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from the result of reading this book that may, the book for today that may help with

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some of that.

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But at the same time, it takes 45 minutes for me to write those three pages.

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And that's a pretty significant time commitment.

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I have a slot in my normal time blocked day for this to fit.

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I just have a hard time starting it, it seems.

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And I think, you know, that's the classic productivity hack of, well, just start one

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minute worth of the task and the rest will follow.

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Yeah, I get that, but I know that, which means that I don't want to do that one

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minute because I know what it leads to. So it's this weird back and forth that I

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have with myself, all of that to say I'm working on it.

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Nice.

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So my morning pages, I still am doing them, although I've modified this a bit and I'm

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about to modify it, I think a whole lot.

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So one of the follow up items, which I'll just go into right now because it's

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related for me was to try thinking on problems the night before and letting the

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answers come on the morning pages. So the way that I have done this is when I

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get done with my morning pages or throughout the course of the day, if I

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think of something that I'm like, Oh, that's something that I want to think on

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and I'm going to address the next morning, I'll write it at the top of the

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morning page for the next day.

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So when I come back the next day, I've had time to think through it.

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And then I write free form, you know, off the stream of conscious, like Julia

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Cameron would say, and I use that as like a writing prompt in essence.

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So the writing prompt that I wrote down yesterday was, would it be better to do

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morning pages in a digital tool like Ulysses?

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And I know that analog Joe is going to scream at me for this.

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So with Julia camera, she was talking about doing this long hand.

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Yes.

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On paper, but here's the thing that when I go through the morning pages and my

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mind wanders, the way my mind works, I end up usually writing about something

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that I want to incorporate somewhere else because a lot of what I do is content

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creation. I get those things in paper and I'm like, man, that was really good.

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I should put that sometimes I'll do lists, you know, I'm thinking through

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things and just making the list on on paper.

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And I know like this is an analog benefit.

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Like you can go through those things and you see those things and then you're

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like, okay, now I can take those and I could put those in my task manager or

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whatever.

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But I started my productivity journey by getting up early in writing and I did

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it on my computer.

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And so that got me thinking, what if I adapted my morning pages into something

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like Ulysses and I set instead of three long hand pages as a goal.

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I've got the thousand words or whatever.

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Like you can set those writing goals in Ulysses.

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Right.

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And then it turns green when you're when you're done.

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So then all I've got to do is start writing and I've got something now which

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I can take and I can repurpose in any way, shape or form in my personal

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professional life because I just have to copy it and paste it out of Ulysses.

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And I think that that's what I'm going to start trying anyways.

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Okay.

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I do this still on occasion, but I write a lot of my articles by hand.

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And although that sounds like I'm creating a lot of extra work for myself,

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cause I can see how you get there.

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I still find that that process gives me better ideas when I write my hand.

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The other thing too is trying to get it into digital is not a simple task always

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cause you end up trying to type what you've written, which depending on your

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handwriting is sometimes easy, sometimes hard and something I have found that helps

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with that and maybe you could try this.

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I don't know if it works or not.

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It's just dictating it and trying to use, you know, say Siri or one of the,

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uh, what is it?

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Dragon dictate.

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You could use one of those to get it from hand written form into digital form,

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but you're adding a step and sometimes you could see that as a good thing.

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And sometimes it's a bad thing.

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It just kind of depends on what you think of it.

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Siri and I don't get along.

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I use it very little.

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Yeah.

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Every time I try to use Siri, literally every time and I know that

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Siri's gotten a lot better, but I don't even think to use Siri most of the time.

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So when I do, it's really because I can't do it another way and probably 80% of the

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time it messes it up and I get, I just am so furious and like, I asked you one

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thing, you know, you can't do it.

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You had one job.

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Exactly.

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Exactly.

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And if I used it a lot, I'm sure I'd get up much higher success rate.

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It wouldn't bother me as much, but because it's like, okay, I need to use this thing

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now and it's got to work for me and it doesn't work.

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Like it's just infuriating.

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Yep.

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I get it.

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I get it.

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Uh, I've been messing around with my evening routine a little bit as well.

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And I think I mentioned this a little bit the last time as well, but I, I started

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taking a shower and getting myself ready for bed, save a couple of minor things.

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I've started doing that as soon as we get our girls down.

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In the evening.

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And this, that happens roughly an hour, hour and 15 minutes before I go to bed.

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And what ends up happening is that sets me up such that whenever bedtime actually

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comes around, I have very little that I have to do to get into bed and then I can

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grab some fiction and read that while I'm waiting for my wife to get ready for bed.

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And that has served me extremely well.

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I am definitely holding on to that experiment for life.

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If possible, just because that whole process means that whenever I get in bed,

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I'm not coming off of that adrenaline shot of hustling to get everything done so

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that I can get into bed.

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Like I don't have that hustle.

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It's just a relaxing ease myself to bed sort of process.

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And I really like that.

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I highly recommend it.

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That makes sense.

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It's a thing you should do.

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Just going to say, just going to say that.

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I don't know if I could read fiction.

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I think we've talked about this before.

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Yeah.

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Fiction to me just, I don't know.

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It's difficult.

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I'm reading the fellowship of the ring right now.

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Nice.

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That would be a great place to start, I guess, if you were going to try to get into

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fiction.

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Yeah.

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This is a really cool story.

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Well, I started with the Hobbit on that one.

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So I finished that one and now I'm on to the first of the Lord of Rings whole

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sequel series there.

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So that's that's what I'm working in.

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Did you meet Tom Bombadil yet?

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Nope.

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All right.

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Let me know when you meet Tom Bombadil.

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Who's an awesome character who didn't even make it into the movies.

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Got it.

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I'm not there.

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I've seen the movies, so it's probably ruined for me, but there's so much more that

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is so much better stuff that's not in the movies.

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They changed quite a bit.

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Yeah, I'm aware.

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I've learned that.

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But the books are always better than movies, right?

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Absolutely.

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It's not called movie worm.

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One other thing I've got on here, and I think you've got it too, is this

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artist's date and I've been doing them.

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I've been doing probably them more than I should be.

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Whoops.

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This because I have found that doing them once or twice, sometimes three times a week

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is extremely helpful.

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I get to learn a lot and I come up with some really cool ideas so much so that I've

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got some really interesting things going on in my business to grow it.

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And it may actually be doubling or tripling in the next few months, which is

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going to be a challenge.

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As a result of these, I am definitely sold on these artists' date, like this whole

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concept.

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I can't really tell you exactly what it is that I'm doing during that time as much

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as it is just letting me go do whatever I want and giving myself like an hour and

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a half to two hours to just go play and do whatever I think is interesting on the

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computer.

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And that has turned out to be an invaluable habit to start creating.

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You should do it.

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I think it's.

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Nice.

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So I have sort of implemented this since we've recorded last time.

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I've basically been on vacation the whole time so there really was no need for it.

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No need for an artist date.

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So you haven't done anything.

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I was off from the Friday before Christmas until January 4th, I believe.

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So that was a really good thing, but also a really bad thing.

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So one of the things that I have discovered and I've since read some research that backs

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us up is that longer vacations are actually bad for you.

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The ideal vacation length is about a week, anything longer than that.

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And it is very, very difficult to get back into the flow of things.

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But also since we've recorded last time, I mentioned that I was going to be doing

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my personal retreat.

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I called it where I was going to go with my parents of a place in Dork County.

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So I went up, went up there for a day and a half and literally just had thinking time

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about last year and where I want to go next year, I mapped out the first two 12 week

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year quarters based off of that time.

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It was really, really good.

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One of the things I did is I went through actually another book called five and it's,

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it's kind of a workbook sort of thing that you've probably seen a lot of the content

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type stuff in the productivity space, but it's thinking through like, where do you

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want to be in five years?

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And then as you're writing these things and filling out the worksheets in this book,

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like things start to become, come clear.

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And that's exactly what happened with me as I figured out, like these are the things

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that I want to do in the next quarter.

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These are the steps I have to take in order to do that and really help me understand

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my priorities.

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So it's not a strictly artist state, but I did have a blank canvas.

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Okay.

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So I wasn't doing it to the letter where Julia Cameron was saying, like, you have to do

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something that's fun or creative because that's just going to get your creative

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juices going.

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Like the fact that you are physically doing this, this thing, but a mini version of this,

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I guess is this, this personal retreat, which I want to do once a quarter.

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And so that is already on the calendar, but in addition to that, I also want to start

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implementing the fun things where I've got a couple hours here or there to do things.

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And then whatever comes from those things in terms of what I would create, I think

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that that's the valuable process there.

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And so I lump these together because I think a lot of this is just letting your

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brain untangle stuff.

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I'm putting it in putting yourself in a physical location where you're able to do

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that.

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It doesn't always have to be you creating something.

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Like in my essence, like creating the plan, like I still view that as creative,

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but it's not something that I would have landed on if I had been in my normal

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environment, if that makes sense.

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But the takeaway here is that I, this is still on the radar.

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And so I still have to work into my normal, like weekly schedule.

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These artists states where I can just do things that I want to do.

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When you, when you do these retreats, do you have like a, an outline or an agenda of

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sorts that, that you find yourself working through?

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Or is this something where I'm just going to go up there and see what happens?

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Like, how do you, how do you approach that?

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Cause I've been considering doing something like this and having gone through a few

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things for an annual reflection point since we're just past the new year now,

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you know, having gone through that, I, I saw a lot of value in doing, like, take a

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day and just think that there was a lot to that.

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And I've debated doing that quarterly.

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So I'm exploring that.

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And it sounds like it's a thing that you do.

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I'm curious.

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What do you do?

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This was the first one that I did.

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Uh, and so I really had no idea what to expect.

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The only sort of structure that I had was I brought along that book five, which I

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have literally had in my possession for probably three years at this point, but

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never went through it.

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And so I started, I went up a Thursday night and then Friday morning, made some

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breakfast and sat down and was like, okay, I'm just going to finish this thing.

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I don't even care how long this takes and we'll, we'll go from there.

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And that's, that's kind of exactly what happened is I went through that, that book

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and realized, you know, these are the things that I want to accomplish in the

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next year.

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These are the levers that I want to pull that are going to get me closest to my

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ideal future or where I want to actually be in five years.

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And so working backwards and mapping out how to, how to get there.

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Uh, another thing that I did, which was not planned, but I went through and made

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a list of everything that I had accomplished the previous year.

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So there's this concept of the gap versus the gain.

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Are you familiar with this?

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Somewhat.

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Okay.

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It's probably going to be well served to explain it.

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Okay.

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So basically there's two ways that you can approach goal setting.

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Uh, and I guess really just how you view your life.

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And I think in the productivity space, especially there's a lot of danger to look

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at the ideal.

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So you've got a sense, imagine you've got three dots.

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Okay.

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From the top to the bottom of your screen on the top is the ideal.

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All right.

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And then in the middle is where you are, the danger is to look at where you are

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and compare it to the ideal.

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And especially if you're on social media, you see your peers, quote, unquote, who

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are projecting the very best of their lives and you're comparing it to the

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totality of your life, you will focus on the fact that you are not at your

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ideal yet.

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And you can very quickly become negative and discouraged.

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Okay.

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That's the gap.

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But the better way to do it is to look at the bottom circle, which is where you

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were.

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Okay.

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That's your baseline, like where you were last year and then look at where you

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are now.

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And when you do that, you can focus on the gains or the growth that has happened.

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That was a really interesting exercise because honestly, when I started and I

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was thinking like, well, so what, what did I accomplish in 2017?

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And at first I was like, did I accomplish anything in 2017?

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Like, how is Mike today different than he was last year?

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Like, what did I actually do?

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And as I thought about this for quite a while, I kept coming up with other

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things to add to the list.

00:20:25

And at the end, I look at the list and I'm like, wow, I crushed it last year.

00:20:31

And that obviously creates momentum to keep going and to set those goals.

00:20:35

Nice.

00:20:36

Yeah.

00:20:36

Cause I, whenever I sat down and did my annual reflection points, it was kind of

00:20:41

a time where I, I really had to take my business and think about it from a

00:20:47

higher level, which is a thing that I'm pretty good at.

00:20:50

I just don't take the time to do it regularly.

00:20:53

And that particular part of my annual piece was way more valuable than I was

00:21:01

expecting and seeing how the business itself could grow, even though I'm a one

00:21:10

man show, seeing that, that path forward was extremely helpful.

00:21:14

I wish I had seen it earlier, but I, I simply hadn't taken the time to think

00:21:18

about it at that level.

00:21:19

So I think this whole quarterly retreat process, I don't know what it looks

00:21:25

like when it becomes a regular thing.

00:21:27

And this is why I'm asking the question just because I'm trying to figure out how

00:21:31

do I structure this such that I get the most out of that time?

00:21:35

And if that means going to a pool somewhere and just hanging out, like that's fine.

00:21:41

But I want to make sure that whatever it is that I'm doing, I'm able to have

00:21:45

that thinking time and that thinking process.

00:21:48

I know that for me, it probably involves some form of going on a hike in the woods.

00:21:52

Despite how cold it is, like there's probably going to be some of that.

00:21:55

I just, I want to make sure that I understand it well enough to actually get

00:22:00

the value out of it that I want whenever I do these quarterly reflection points.

00:22:04

Yeah, I don't, I don't have any sort of advice, I guess, other than just give

00:22:09

yourself the space to think, because at least in my experience from doing this one

00:22:14

time, so very small sample size, but you get so busy with the day to day stuff that

00:22:20

even if you were to set aside some time during your day to think about things,

00:22:26

it's completely different than being able to fully unplug and know that nothing

00:22:32

else is going to come at you that day.

00:22:34

Like you're here for this one purpose.

00:22:36

It's like your brain is finally able to make that shift and just function the way

00:22:43

that it's supposed to.

00:22:44

And all of a sudden, like you'll be just be thinking about this stuff and following

00:22:50

these, these trails and these connections that it's making.

00:22:52

And all of a sudden, like the pieces of the puzzle start to come together and you

00:22:55

see a picture that was literally there the whole time, but you never realized it.

00:23:00

And, and I think that like that is just waiting to happen, but you have to put

00:23:05

yourself in a location and in a state where that is free to happen.

00:23:08

And it's never going to happen in the course of a day where you've got other

00:23:13

things going on.

00:23:14

I think ideally you've got even more than a day for this.

00:23:18

Like I know Bill Gates used to do his think week and no one would be able to

00:23:22

contact him for an entire week.

00:23:23

I think if you were able to do that, you'd, you'd achieve this to a whole not a

00:23:27

level, but for me personally, having a day has been really helpful for at least

00:23:32

cue one.

00:23:32

And all of what we're talking about is going to take time.

00:23:36

And thankfully, Mike, that's the topic of our book today.

00:23:40

Yep.

00:23:42

So the, the book that we've gone through for this episode is a hundred and sixty

00:23:48

eight hours by Laura Vanderkamp tagline.

00:23:51

You have more time than you think.

00:23:53

And when we're talking about like quarterly reflection points or when do you

00:23:58

do artist dates morning pages takes time.

00:24:00

Like all of that comes back to a hundred and sixty eight hours, which is the

00:24:06

number of hours in a week and trying to figure out what do you point your time

00:24:13

towards?

00:24:13

What do you take time for and how do you get the most out of that time?

00:24:17

This book was a listener recommendation.

00:24:20

So thank you to recommender.

00:24:23

I didn't write down the name of the person who recommended it.

00:24:26

Sorry about that.

00:24:26

But the part of the reason I picked this from that list was partially because I

00:24:34

feel like I haven't been the best at time management, which is a bit odd, given

00:24:40

how much I do in the productivity space.

00:24:42

And it's kind of embarrassing to talk about how much time I waste sometimes

00:24:49

and trying to figure out where is my time going.

00:24:53

And I haven't always been the most intentional with it.

00:24:55

So thus, here we are reading a book about time management.

00:24:59

Yeah.

00:25:00

And if I were to encapsulate this book in one word, it would be

00:25:04

which you just said, which is intentionality because the tagline, you know, you

00:25:09

have more time than you think.

00:25:10

Really what that's referring to is that a lot of people go with the leftover time

00:25:15

that they have when they try to build their side business or they want to

00:25:19

transition from having a job to owning a business or whatever they work with with

00:25:25

the leftovers.

00:25:26

And there is some truth to that.

00:25:27

You know, you have to work with what you have.

00:25:29

Don't despise small beginnings.

00:25:31

But if you want to do something or become something, it takes time, which is a direct

00:25:34

quote from from the book here.

00:25:36

And this whole idea of 168 hours, that comes from 24 hours in a day, seven days

00:25:42

a week, that's 168 hours.

00:25:44

And if you were to work backwards and be intentional about giving all of those

00:25:49

hours of job, just like, you know, Dave Ramsey would say, give every dollar a job.

00:25:52

If you give every hour a job, you'll be amazed at what you do have, have time for.

00:25:59

She says, you don't have to choose between having a good family and a good career.

00:26:01

You can do both.

00:26:03

But many people just go with whatever is thrown at them and put in front of them.

00:26:09

And there's this assumption that develops that you're overworked, even when you aren't.

00:26:14

There's a link in the, I had the ebook version of this to the, uh, what was it?

00:26:20

The American Time Use Survey?

00:26:22

This is pretty interesting because the amount of time that people spent on leisure

00:26:28

was just about the amount of time spent on, uh, on work.

00:26:32

And it was something like five point something hours, but I looked at it earlier

00:26:35

today before we were recording.

00:26:37

And it basically just breaks down like how people actually spend their time.

00:26:40

And if you track your time, you often will find that, you know, how you think you

00:26:45

spend your time isn't actually how you spend your time, which is really the point

00:26:48

she's trying to get across in this book.

00:26:49

Did you do that?

00:26:50

Did you track your time?

00:26:51

Cause this is a big thing that she pushed like the very beginning.

00:26:54

You need to track your time across like a week to see how much you spend, uh, on each

00:27:00

activity.

00:27:01

Did you do this?

00:27:02

I have a love hate relationship with time tracking.

00:27:05

Don't we all?

00:27:06

I have tried time tracking so many times.

00:27:10

I have used so many apps in order to do it.

00:27:13

And what always happens with the manual time tracking is I'll start a timer and then

00:27:20

I'll switch things three times and think, Oh, shoot.

00:27:23

I forgot to stop my timer.

00:27:24

So the way that I track my time is with an app called timing on my Mac, which is part

00:27:30

of set app.

00:27:30

Have you dove into timing yet?

00:27:32

Yes.

00:27:33

To an extent.

00:27:35

I am playing around with, I was given a free license to set up to explore it.

00:27:41

And I have been doing that.

00:27:42

And I ran timing on my Mac for about a week.

00:27:47

And I have thoughts on it, but I want to know your thoughts before I share those.

00:27:52

All right.

00:27:52

Well, timing is a gem in my opinion, because it, it tracks stuff in the background.

00:27:56

And I know that there are other apps will do something similar to that, like rescue

00:27:59

time, for example, but timing does a better job.

00:28:01

And timing also has a feature, which I don't, I don't use this, but you can put in like

00:28:07

what you were doing when you come back to your Mac so it can give you a prompt

00:28:11

automatically.

00:28:11

And so it makes it really easy to track everything.

00:28:14

I basically just track the stuff that I do on my Mac.

00:28:17

And most of the stuff that I do on my Mac is productive stuff that is actually work

00:28:22

related.

00:28:23

I don't typically spend a bunch of time on my Mac in, you know, looking at social

00:28:28

media or playing games or anything like that.

00:28:31

So it has limited value for where I am right now, but I understand the principle

00:28:37

behind this.

00:28:38

I just really have a hard time getting any sort of valid numbers.

00:28:43

I have tried so many times to get my brain to think this way.

00:28:46

Like when you were switching, make sure that you document this and it has never worked.

00:28:50

So I didn't like timing at all.

00:28:51

I'm so sad.

00:28:52

Why did you not like timing?

00:28:53

It's because, okay, so I ran rescue time for a long time on my Mac and it did a

00:29:02

pretty good job of telling me what apps I used and how much blah, blah, blah.

00:29:06

And it seems like timing does a much better job because it's a lot more granular.

00:29:12

Yep.

00:29:12

And I love that about it, but I hate that about it because in order to get things

00:29:19

categorized correctly, it seemed like I needed to spend an inordinate amount of time

00:29:24

trying to make sure that the rules are set up correctly, such that it would function

00:29:30

the right way.

00:29:30

And I think part of the reason that it doesn't work well for me and part of the

00:29:36

reason that I need to go through that process of setting up all these rules to make it

00:29:41

work is that I tend to use some apps for multiple purposes, which means I need to

00:29:47

set up the rules to handle like when I open this folder, it means it's client work.

00:29:52

If I open this folder, it means it's leisure time, like, but I'm using the same

00:29:57

app for multiple things.

00:30:00

And that's fine.

00:30:01

But in order for timings, aggregation and reporting to actually mean something

00:30:06

usable, I needed to spend a lot of time categorizing these activities.

00:30:11

And I was trying to figure out how to do that quickly.

00:30:15

And it didn't seem like it was going to happen quickly.

00:30:19

My perspective on it was that I was going to have to just let it record for like

00:30:24

two or three weeks and then go back and dig through all of that and spend a couple

00:30:27

hours categorizing things.

00:30:29

And I am just not going to do that.

00:30:31

It is just going to be too much to get it to work out the right way.

00:30:35

So it's just too much set up for what I want it out of it.

00:30:40

OK, that's fair, although I would say that if you have a whole bunch of apps

00:30:46

which are tracking both your work and your play, then maybe your work and your

00:30:51

play activities are a little too similar.

00:30:53

That's very possible.

00:30:56

I could see that.

00:30:58

I think this one may make more sense in that sense in that whole scenario is and

00:31:04

it's because one of the key things that I feel like I want to know and that an

00:31:09

app like Timing needs to tell me is how much time I spend on client work coding

00:31:16

versus my own personal projects coding.

00:31:20

It's still code.

00:31:22

You can still look at say sublime text and say it's development work.

00:31:26

That's fine.

00:31:26

But the difference between my side projects and my client projects, those

00:31:33

need to be separated in order for any form of time tracking to actually be

00:31:38

usable.

00:31:39

Those two things need to be broken apart and trying to get timing to do that

00:31:45

accurately is not simple.

00:31:48

OK, yeah, I guess I haven't really dug deep enough to try to do that.

00:31:53

But my understanding is that it if you were to set up those rules, you can.

00:31:59

Yes, you can do that.

00:32:00

Yes.

00:32:00

Which is something that is another level of control that something like

00:32:05

rescue time wouldn't have.

00:32:07

But I can I can totally see where there would be effort, additional effort

00:32:10

that would be required for that sort of thing.

00:32:12

I just don't think there's a way around that though.

00:32:14

And then I still think that those rules, like once you create them once and

00:32:18

theoretically they work, that is still much better than having to manually

00:32:23

press a button every time.

00:32:25

That's the thing that always got me caught up.

00:32:27

Yes.

00:32:28

And I think I may come back to timing because it's a tool that I think can

00:32:33

get me these numbers that I'm after and I can see the value because I thought

00:32:38

about doing something like with toggle and manually triggering these things.

00:32:43

But good night.

00:32:44

I just don't do it.

00:32:45

Exactly.

00:32:46

Doesn't happen.

00:32:48

And timing is very appealing to me in that sense.

00:32:51

And I want that to be something that eventually I think works.

00:32:57

I think that right now I don't dedicate enough resources and allocate enough of my

00:33:03

168 hours to systems development and management to make the initial

00:33:09

investment into that worth it.

00:33:11

I think time blocking or something along those lines makes more sense to me

00:33:15

right now than it does trying to track where my time is going.

00:33:18

That I'm like, where am I spending time?

00:33:20

Because I have a pretty good handle on that.

00:33:22

I can and I did manage to sit down and say, okay, well, how much time do I

00:33:27

spend on work period side projects, podcasting, client projects, you know,

00:33:32

lump all of that together?

00:33:33

How much time do I spend on it?

00:33:35

Like I can get at those numbers pretty quickly just by sitting down and running

00:33:39

through my calendar and calculating it.

00:33:40

And although that does help and it gives me some aha moments and things to tweak.

00:33:46

I think the breakout of within those sections is something I would like to get

00:33:52

out at some point in the future.

00:33:53

I just don't think it's worth going through the two or three hours of trying

00:33:58

to get timing to give me those numbers.

00:33:59

I don't think that's worth it right now.

00:34:01

That's always the struggle with these sort of systems though, isn't it?

00:34:06

It's like, well, this would be really helpful and would pay off down the road

00:34:11

because once I set it up, it's going to just collect this data and that data,

00:34:14

like six months from now is going to be really, really valuable.

00:34:17

But I don't have the time right now in order to set it up.

00:34:20

Yes.

00:34:21

So maybe you could use one of your artist dates to figure out time.

00:34:24

I know.

00:34:24

And I've debated that.

00:34:25

And this is not a thing that I'm saying I won't do.

00:34:28

I think that just right now because I'm looking at some business growth things

00:34:34

and trying to focus on that, which essentially, you know, it's similar to what

00:34:39

she's getting at with some of the areas later on that we'll talk about without

00:34:42

sourcing, you know, some of that is what I'm trying to get to with my business.

00:34:48

And that has potential to grow it significantly.

00:34:51

And if I focus on that right now, my schedule frees up more for side projects

00:34:58

and systems development, which I do have ways of monetizing that as it stands.

00:35:03

So there is potential value in that to me.

00:35:07

I am just at this exact, like this month in the next couple of months,

00:35:12

I'm probably not there, but looking at April and May or something,

00:35:16

I may take the time to do it just because I know I'll probably have some

00:35:20

free time around then that I could devote to it.

00:35:22

Nice.

00:35:23

Yeah, that makes sense.

00:35:24

And I think kind of what you're getting at is this whole idea of these core

00:35:28

competencies that she mentions in part one, which is you're 168 hours.

00:35:35

So really what you're saying is that you've got some business building

00:35:38

opportunities which are leveraging your core competencies.

00:35:41

These are things that make more sense for you to do right now than figuring out

00:35:45

a system which is going to accurately track your time automatically in the background,

00:35:50

which I totally get.

00:35:51

But backing up a little bit on this idea of this 168 hours, the big

00:35:57

point here with this book, I think is found in this section, which is that

00:36:03

everybody has the same amount of time available to you in a given week.

00:36:09

But some people are going to do a lot more with it than others.

00:36:13

And more is maybe not the right term because more invokes a picture of

00:36:19

like I checked more things off of my task list.

00:36:22

That's not necessarily the case.

00:36:23

It could be you've got more time so that you can you can do more quality things,

00:36:30

like spending time with your family.

00:36:32

She's got a whole bunch of statistics in here.

00:36:34

Like dad's only spent 15 to 18 minutes playing with their kids each day.

00:36:37

Like my heart almost stopped when I read that.

00:36:40

I don't want to be that guy.

00:36:41

Yeah, I know.

00:36:42

Mom spend 11 minutes part time.

00:36:44

Mom's spend 19 minutes stay at home.

00:36:47

Mom's roughly 30, but you know, the fact that they're their home more doesn't

00:36:51

necessarily translate into a lot of extra time spent with your your kids.

00:36:56

Like my wife and I went through this this exercise.

00:36:58

I think I mentioned it on the last podcast where we identified from our

00:37:01

our Schmidt's family core values, like what do we want our family to look like?

00:37:06

We want to have a great relationship with each other.

00:37:07

We want a great relationship with our kids.

00:37:09

We want them to feel free to talk to us about anything and everything.

00:37:13

And how do we do that?

00:37:14

You got to invest the time.

00:37:16

You can't invest 11 minutes a day and expect to have that platform in your kids

00:37:21

lives when they become teenagers.

00:37:23

And really the point here is that every minute is a choice.

00:37:27

I think I would back up a little bit and frame it as every hour is a choice.

00:37:30

Yes, every minute is a choice.

00:37:32

And she gets into some things where like some of the stuff that she does,

00:37:37

that she's sharing some of her examples, I'm like, man, you're just constantly

00:37:40

switching from one thing, one thing to the next, like that would be really

00:37:43

stressful for me.

00:37:45

But I think the easier way to grasp this concept is in the form of the hours,

00:37:50

like give every hour a job like we were talking about budget your time and make

00:37:55

sure that you're setting aside the time for the important things.

00:37:57

That's what we did when we had that meeting.

00:38:00

We figured out like, what are the things that we want to do as a family to make

00:38:04

sure that we end up at that spot.

00:38:05

And we're living out our core values.

00:38:07

One of the things we did is we set aside a time on our calendar.

00:38:11

And so far it's worked out.

00:38:14

But one of the things we've done is set aside an hour on a Friday morning.

00:38:18

So I take each of our kids one on one, so rotates every week.

00:38:22

We'll go out for coffee, go out for breakfast, whatever.

00:38:24

I'll just have that one on one time with them, which never happens in a house with

00:38:28

five.

00:38:28

Yeah.

00:38:30

You know, so putting that on the calendar first, though, being intentional with that

00:38:35

hour, what I've found, and again, very small sample size, but all of the work

00:38:40

stuff that would cause you to not have time for that.

00:38:43

If you put that on there first, and yes, I do have a flexible schedule.

00:38:47

So I've got a little bit, I've got a little bit of an easier, easier job in doing that

00:38:52

than maybe somebody who works a standard nine to five.

00:38:55

But I think the principal is still the same that if you put those things on first,

00:39:00

then all the other stuff that you quote unquote have to do is going to fill in

00:39:03

around the cracks.

00:39:03

It's the whole idea of a stick of Stephen Covey and the big rocks in the jar.

00:39:07

Like figure out what's important to you, make time for it, and then everything else

00:39:12

somehow magically gets done and everything works.

00:39:14

It's magic.

00:39:15

It's not magic, but it feels like magic.

00:39:18

You know, because you get done with your, your week and you're like, man, that was a

00:39:23

pretty awesome week.

00:39:24

We had our weekly date night.

00:39:26

I was able to do the one on one with the, with the kids.

00:39:28

So you're able to have people over for dinner on Saturday.

00:39:30

Like this is awesome.

00:39:31

Like this is our definition of, of a good life.

00:39:35

And it's, it's easier to accomplish than you think.

00:39:38

All you've got to do is figure out the things that you want to do and then

00:39:41

put them on your calendar.

00:39:42

There are, you know, depending on your situation, sometimes there are more things

00:39:46

that you quote unquote have to do.

00:39:48

If you're in a bad spot financially, you know, Dave Ramsey always talks about, well,

00:39:52

go deliver pizzas.

00:39:53

Like maybe you have to work a second job.

00:39:55

So you've got less disposable income, so to speak, when it comes to the hours that

00:39:59

are on your calendar, but you've still got some.

00:40:01

That's the whole point here with this 168 hours.

00:40:04

It's like, it's not, you've only got five free hours every week and you have to

00:40:09

spend those on this other project.

00:40:12

There's a whole bunch of other hours that you don't recognize a lot of times

00:40:15

because you're just going from one thing to one thing to the next thing to the next

00:40:19

thing.

00:40:19

It's kind of the emergency scan modality that David Allen talks about and getting

00:40:23

things done.

00:40:23

Like you can't see the forest through the trees because you're just so fixated on.

00:40:27

Oh my gosh, this is the thing that I have to solve right now.

00:40:29

The house is burning down.

00:40:30

How do I solve this emergency?

00:40:32

And that's, that's no way to live your life.

00:40:34

You'll, right.

00:40:35

You'll be stressed out.

00:40:36

You'll be burned out.

00:40:37

You know, you'll be no use to, to your employer, your family, anybody, really.

00:40:41

Well, she, she tells the story about, there was a study where they asked, if you had

00:40:45

an extra 15 minutes a day, what would you use it on?

00:40:47

And people had all kinds of answers.

00:40:50

I'd start writing my book.

00:40:52

I would, you know, start exercising like these, all these things.

00:40:55

And it was interesting because as she goes through the book, she starts like

00:41:00

debunking that like, well, 15 minutes.

00:41:02

No, you wouldn't.

00:41:03

You have that now.

00:41:05

You wouldn't do it.

00:41:06

And like, just to kind of show some of the math, I guess on it is, you know, you got

00:41:11

168 hours in a week, seven days.

00:41:13

And say you spend, call it nine hours in bed.

00:41:18

So you're getting more sleep than recommended at nine hours across those seven days at 63 hours.

00:41:25

So that means you've got 105 hours outside of sleep to work with.

00:41:30

If you've worked a 40 hour workday and a lot of people think they work more than that, but

00:41:35

if you time track it, it's not actually as much as you think it is in most cases.

00:41:38

So if you work a 40 hour workday, now you're sitting at 65 hours from sleep and work removed from that.

00:41:48

So what are you going to do with that 65 hours?

00:41:50

And, you know, when you stop and look at, you know, meals and you look at, you know, commute times, like you start

00:41:58

dropping a lot of that pretty quick.

00:42:01

Even if you spend three hours a day on meals, like that's still 21 hours across that week.

00:42:08

Subtract that from your 65.

00:42:10

Now you're at what?

00:42:11

44.

00:42:12

But you still at 44, even outside of meals.

00:42:15

So where's it going?

00:42:16

Like, what are you, what are you doing with it?

00:42:18

Like that's, and that's kind of humbling.

00:42:20

I think when you look at, okay, 44 hours, what?

00:42:23

Where's that going?

00:42:25

What am I doing?

00:42:26

And it's not an easy thing to answer.

00:42:30

You know, here's an example.

00:42:31

Whenever I sat down and wrote out how much time I spend at work versus how much time I spend at different places, you know, doing some of my IT stuff and things.

00:42:40

I tend to think that, you know, pre doing this exercise in my mind, I was working close to 50 hours a week.

00:42:47

And whenever I actually calculated it out, it's actually about 37.

00:42:52

Like it's not even a full 40.

00:42:54

But I work in a week.

00:42:55

It's like, oh, that's interesting.

00:42:58

And starting to look at how much time I spend with our girls, how much time Becky and I spend together in a week, those numbers are pretty high in comparison, especially relative to what she has in this book.

00:43:11

Like some of those, it's like, we spend on average 30 minutes a week.

00:43:15

And to me, that category was nine hours.

00:43:17

Like, oh, okay.

00:43:19

Well, that makes me feel pretty good.

00:43:23

I don't know that comparing myself to some of those numbers is a good thing, but at the same time, it's helpful to see how do I match up to what some of the studies show and seeing that at least I'm on the right path.

00:43:37

I don't know that that number is the right path that I want to be working on.

00:43:42

But at the same time, it's a thing that I'm glad that I'm doing this.

00:43:46

Like it makes me feel pretty good about, you know, where I'm headed with it right now.

00:43:50

And I want to keep doing that.

00:43:51

So it is a bit revealing whenever you sit down and try to number where your time goes.

00:43:58

And I think that part is something I would highly recommend trying to use a time tracker to get there.

00:44:04

I don't know how well that's going to work, but trying to get at these numbers is helpful.

00:44:09

That's what I'm getting at.

00:44:10

Yeah.

00:44:10

And that's that's exactly it.

00:44:13

That's why she starts off by saying you need to track your time because you need to understand what the discrepancy is between.

00:44:21

The reality and what you think.

00:44:23

I personally think that once you understand that the numbers really have limited value, but until you understand that the numbers are going to be the thing that are going to help you to see it.

00:44:35

So like you said, the hunt, the if you break down that 168 hours and you've tracked your time and you realize that like the average American, you watch 30 hours of TV a week, you spend 6.3 hours a day dealing with the number.

00:44:51

With email, like until you have that measuring point, you can't make improvements.

00:44:57

What can't be measured can't be can't be improved in essence.

00:45:00

But then once you understand, okay, this is where I am, now how do I get better?

00:45:04

Like working backwards with that 168 hours, you'll be amazed at how much time you have to budget for those hours.

00:45:11

If you're intentional with them, I actually did this as part of a product for Asian efficiency on planning your perfect week.

00:45:17

And we do this 168 hours exercise and you work backwards.

00:45:21

So let's say you sleep eight hours a night, seven nights a week.

00:45:24

That's 56 hours.

00:45:25

You work full time.

00:45:26

That's 40 hours.

00:45:27

The average commute for an entire week is something like three and a half hours.

00:45:31

So round that up.

00:45:31

You're at four hours.

00:45:32

Let's say you want three hours a day during the week for a player leisure.

00:45:37

Find that's 15 hours.

00:45:38

You want to get to the gym every day for an hour.

00:45:40

So that's six hours.

00:45:41

You take Sunday off, let's say cleaning and maintenance.

00:45:43

So you set aside 15 hours for that.

00:45:46

Like me, maybe you're involved in your, your church or a service organization, five hours a week for that, even with all of that stuff, which if you were to add it all up, you're like, wow, that's, that's a lot.

00:45:55

I'm doing a lot with my week there.

00:45:57

That's only 141 hours.

00:45:59

You still got an entire day, an entire 27 hours that isn't accounted for.

00:46:04

And that's where they can get wasted is if you don't account for them.

00:46:08

But there's this mindset shift that that happens when you become intentional with how you spend your time, just like when you

00:46:16

become intentional with how you spend your money and you actually do a budget the way that it's, that's supposed to be done.

00:46:21

And you're budgeting the money that you have in your bank account as opposed to just guessing what your expenses are going to be.

00:46:27

When you do that, you'll be amazed at what you have time for, which is why she says, like, what would you do if you had an extra extra 15 minutes?

00:46:36

Well, you don't have an extra 15 minutes.

00:46:38

You probably have something like an extra 15 hours hidden in your schedule, but you don't even realize it.

00:46:44

If you don't take a step back and look at it, just like with budgeting, where if you wait until the end of the month to set aside whatever is left over for the kids college fund or your, your vacation that you want to take, like, it's never going to happen.

00:46:58

That money just magically disappears by the end of the month.

00:47:01

And if you go back and you look at the numbers, like, this is where they can be helpful because it'll show you that you went to Starbucks an extra five times and got the, the grande, whatever latte, you know, that was five bucks a pop.

00:47:13

And you, you went out to eat a couple extra times and, and you don't think about that when you're making that decision, though, you don't think of it in the context of, let's just use, like, the month as a picture.

00:47:23

But when it comes to your time, it could be the week as a picture, you know, these 168 hours when you recognize that you can assign these to anything that you want and those things that you could assign them to could get you to your ideal future, then what you're comparing instead of like when you get home at night and you're tired and you just

00:47:42

sit down, veg out on the couch and you turn on the TV, what you're thinking at that particular point is I just need some time to unwind.

00:47:51

And there's, you know, we could get into a whole big thing about how that's not actually helping you recharge.

00:47:55

But when you understand the plan, the intentionality that you've assigned to these hours, then when you get home at night and you're going to sit down in front of the TV, you're comparing that hour, two hours, three hours, whatever that you would spend in front of the TV with

00:48:12

the better activity that you had assigned those hours to.

00:48:16

And it's a lot easier to say, you know what, I had planned on doing this thing right now.

00:48:20

And this thing doesn't have to be a work related thing.

00:48:23

It doesn't have to be negative.

00:48:24

It can be a positive thing.

00:48:25

It could be like I was talking about setting aside that time on the calendar for spending time with my kids and spending time with my wife.

00:48:31

Like that can be the thing that you have planned.

00:48:35

And then when you compare it to the time waster, it's a really easy decision to make.

00:48:39

But without that context, you know, you get sucked into wasting these hours, which is a travesty, honestly, because like a lot of people want to change their situation, but they feel powerless.

00:48:50

And it's just because they aren't looking at their situation through the right lens.

00:48:54

I do want to point out, we've kind of given time tracking a bad rap here.

00:49:00

And I don't want to discourage listeners because it's a thing that I know there's a lot of value in.

00:49:07

And if you're someone who can do time tracking with something like toggle, go for it.

00:49:11

But she does offer a process for doing this that I think can work partially because my wife tried it because I got to talking about this book with her.

00:49:22

And she doesn't always know where her time goes.

00:49:25

And she's a stay at home mom and she wonders, what did I do all day?

00:49:29

Like she asked me that on occasion.

00:49:30

It's like, I can't answer that.

00:49:31

I wasn't here all day.

00:49:33

I don't know how to give you the answers to that.

00:49:36

So at least the thing that she recommends is that you take a day, start tracking your week.

00:49:43

And whenever you think of it, sit down and write down the tasks that you did since the last time you did that.

00:49:52

So when you get up in the morning, you know, writing down how much time you spent getting ready for the day, how much time you spent doing breakfast.

00:49:58

And if you don't think about it again for a couple hours, that's fine.

00:50:03

And at that point, sit down and write down how much time you spent on things.

00:50:06

It doesn't have to be exact, but you can get pretty close.

00:50:09

You know, if you're thinking about it just two hours after it happened, you can usually get a pretty accurate number on it.

00:50:14

And having seen my wife go through this, she didn't do the whole week.

00:50:20

She only needed to do a couple days, like two or three days to figure out because most of her days are the same.

00:50:25

In those two or three days that she did that, she saw a lot of value from it.

00:50:32

She learned that she has very small time spans that tend to add up very quickly,

00:50:37

that just somehow managed to get taken up with little things that I'm not going to discuss on the show because it's not exactly pleasant to talk about with little kids and diapers.

00:50:48

So we'll leave that there.

00:50:49

But I do think that if you're wanting to figure out where your time does go currently, that process, I think, is at least a good one to start with.

00:50:58

And it's not too overwhelming, I don't think, to at least get your feet wet with it.

00:51:03

And the next step then is to shift how you're actually spending your time to focus more on your core competencies or the things that are important to you.

00:51:13

It's not a very difficult process, but you have to start with that baseline before you can make any changes.

00:51:19

I agree with that.

00:51:20

Did you find-- because she's got this-- I guess we haven't mentioned this, but her book is broken up into four sections.

00:51:27

Like she talks about the 168 hours, then she talks about how to apply that at work, and then again at home.

00:51:34

And then she kind of wraps it all up in part four.

00:51:38

But part two, the work piece, I thought it was kind of weird that she was talking about finding the right job.

00:51:47

This strike, you was strange that she was doing this somewhat, but I guess I kind of resonated with it a little bit too.

00:51:56

Because I kind of went through that whole soul searching process a couple of years ago.

00:52:03

And I think that the tendency can be to-- I'm in this situation right now, and I'm scared of the unknown.

00:52:12

So don't even think about whether this is a good fit or not. Just deal with stuff.

00:52:16

And I think that that can be dangerous.

00:52:19

So there's some stuff in here I don't necessarily agree with. If you love what you do, you'll have more energy for the rest of your life too.

00:52:27

That could be true, but you can't just do the things that you love to do.

00:52:33

I like the way that Mike Rowe, the guy from Dirty Jobs, says this.

00:52:36

He said, "Don't follow your passion, but always take it with you."

00:52:39

Like you can love what you do, even if the description of the job that you're doing isn't something that you quote unquote enjoy, if that makes sense.

00:52:48

Yes. But there's a lot of truth to happy people, our productive people.

00:52:53

If you've got a good mood one day, then you're going to be more creative in the next day.

00:52:57

She had some characteristics of the right job where you've got autonomy, but it's also challenging.

00:53:02

Like I think that all of that stuff is true.

00:53:04

One of the things I wrote down as a discussion point initially in my MindNote file,

00:53:10

but then I kind of got rid of this because I think that this is going to be very different for everybody.

00:53:16

Is how do you not find but create the right job or the right career?

00:53:22

Because that's really what this book is all about is creating your ideal week, creating your ideal future,

00:53:29

recognizing that you're in control, recognizing that you have responsibility for the outcome of your life.

00:53:34

If you don't like the job that you're in, if you're not personally growing, like maybe you should change your job.

00:53:39

I think Jim Morone is the one who said, "Work harder on yourself than you do on your job."

00:53:44

But when you're at your workplace, like your boss maybe isn't going to see it that way.

00:53:48

If you have a good boss, they will.

00:53:50

But otherwise, maybe your focus is just on survival.

00:53:55

Get your work done or as much of it as you can get done before you have to physically leave for the day.

00:54:00

And you're just trying to get as much done as possible.

00:54:04

That's not a real positive environment.

00:54:07

That can very quickly lead to burnout.

00:54:10

But I don't think that there is an easy answer to this other than to identify the core competencies that she mentioned in the previous section.

00:54:20

So core competencies really is kind of like a business term.

00:54:24

She talks about these as providing potential access to a bunch of different markets.

00:54:28

They make significant contribution to the perceived customer benefits.

00:54:31

They end product difficult for competitors to imitate.

00:54:34

Like that's all from section one, not the work section, which is kind of weird.

00:54:38

But if you were to focus on those things, like what are the things that you do that provide the most value?

00:54:42

It kind of gets into like the whole idea of deep work by Kale Newport.

00:54:46

Like what's the stuff that you can do that's going to bring value to the marketplace?

00:54:49

That's not easily reproducible.

00:54:51

What is your strategic coach would call it unique ability?

00:54:54

You know, I might say in my book, what is the thing that you were created for?

00:54:59

Like when you figure that out and you click into that, like you have the autonomy, you have the challenge, but it's it's rewarding.

00:55:07

We've talked about that whole idea of grit and the growth mindset a lot and a lot of the books that we've we've read.

00:55:13

But I think that you really have to believe in what you're doing in order for that to to happen.

00:55:19

It's it's a lot harder to maintain that growth mindset and overcome those obstacles and those challenges and grow from them and learn from them.

00:55:26

If you aren't connected to the vision of what the work that you're doing is is actually like the impact that it's making in the world.

00:55:35

I think there's and this is a thing that I think we're going to hear from maybe is not everyone has control of their work day.

00:55:44

Yep.

00:55:44

And you and I do significantly, you know, if if something comes up and I need to take the day off of work, it's about a five minute process and I'm out the door.

00:55:56

Like it's not hard and I can set up my entire work day to be exactly what I want.

00:56:04

I can do the types of tasks whenever I want within the day or within the week or some of them within the month.

00:56:10

Like I can dictate that having come from a corporate background.

00:56:14

I know that that's not always true for people, which is where she has this four step process for time freedom.

00:56:21

And she comes from the same environment that you and I currently work in.

00:56:25

So I I'm a little bit like I don't put as much weight on this.

00:56:31

I think there's a lot of value in it.

00:56:34

But at the same time, I know that she doesn't necessarily have a lot of that restrictive corporate type background that that leads to this.

00:56:45

Maybe I'm misunderstanding some of that and you can correct me there, but that's just a thing I want to preface this with.

00:56:50

No, you're absolutely correct.

00:56:53

I think that the four step process for time freedom, like you can apply this in smaller doses, but you could be reading this and you're working a corporate job.

00:57:01

And all of a sudden, this four steps for first step process for time freedom doesn't apply to 168 hours.

00:57:07

It applies more to like 10 hours.

00:57:08

Yes.

00:57:09

Yes.

00:57:10

So you got a much smaller sample size to work with, but that's okay.

00:57:13

Like it doesn't matter where you start what matters is how you finish.

00:57:16

And if you're completely okay with the trade offs that you are making in terms of your time, then that's that's fine.

00:57:23

But don't blindly make those trade offs.

00:57:26

I think is the advice that she would give here.

00:57:28

Yes.

00:57:28

So the four step process, again, sees control of your schedule, but sees control of the parts of the schedule that you have control over.

00:57:36

So for me, I was working with the family software business and I wanted to write this book and I had no time to do it.

00:57:42

I wasn't a morning person, but I started getting up early anyways.

00:57:45

So like it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.

00:57:48

And in fact, I actually liked it a lot.

00:57:51

So maybe my schedule at that point isn't like from nine to five.

00:57:56

Maybe it's not even after work because we've got family commitments and responsibilities, but I can control the couple of hours before my kids get up.

00:58:05

Then I'm going to take control of that and I'm going to be intentional with that.

00:58:07

And that's a very valid, valid approach.

00:58:10

So start where you are with what you have is the advice that I would give in terms of implementing this four step process.

00:58:16

But yeah, number one, sees control of your schedule.

00:58:18

Number two, don't mistake things that look like work for actual work.

00:58:21

That's tough.

00:58:22

Again, like there's so much value in this that you could apply just about anywhere.

00:58:26

Don't I might rephrase this is don't mistake things that you think are productive for things that are actually productive.

00:58:33

In the productivity space, there's a lot of focus on the mechanical side of productivity and doing things efficiently.

00:58:39

But like we've mentioned on this podcast, Peter Drucker, you know, nothing is so useless as to do efficiently that which should not be done at all.

00:58:45

So don't just do things for the sake of doing things and marking them off, but take a step back to think about are these the things that you should really be doing, which is really the next point.

00:58:54

Get rid of those non core competency tasks by ignoring, minimizing or outsourcing them.

00:59:00

And I've got an action item related to this, which is not work related.

00:59:05

So, you know, a lot of times you hear these terms, core competency tasks and you hear something like outsourcing.

00:59:10

You think, well, that's great if you've got a secretary, but I don't have anybody who

00:59:15

can help me out with this stuff.

00:59:16

There are options available and it doesn't have to be just a work context that that happens in.

00:59:20

And then the final one, boost efficiency by getting better at what you do.

00:59:24

I think there's a lot of value in this too.

00:59:27

Although I would caveat this because I think if you are constantly looking for ways to make systems more efficient, especially if you're not in control of your own workday, you may end up wasting a bunch of time.

00:59:42

You can create or you can identify and see the value of implementing this new system at work.

00:59:48

And you can go through the effort of creating the documentation for it.

00:59:51

You've got everything set up.

00:59:53

It's ready to be rolled out.

00:59:54

You show it to everybody and everybody else hates it.

00:59:56

Like it's not going to happen.

00:59:58

And the same thing with with that at home, if you've got a significant other and you you want to change some things like you have to cast the vision and they have to get on board with it.

01:00:07

Otherwise, it's it's never going to work.

01:00:10

You have to get everybody in the organization, whether it is personally or professionally and you have to get them pulling in the same direction.

01:00:18

So you can focus on the systems and lose sight of the people, which is a very real danger when it comes to productivity.

01:00:24

So looking at these four steps, the thing that kind of bugs me and I had some of this angst with the book overall and some of it.

01:00:34

But I found that there are a lot of things with this that they're kind of vague.

01:00:41

And I really wanted some of this book to be very tactical.

01:00:45

Like I wanted some of it to be, I guess more user friendly.

01:00:51

Maybe that's just me being picky with it.

01:00:53

But this particular four step process is one that I did struggle with a little bit simply because I'm not real sure what to do with this.

01:01:03

Like, yes, these controllers schedule great.

01:01:05

And I can do that with the entirety of my schedule.

01:01:08

But what do you mean by that?

01:01:11

And I really wanted some more tactical uses of this.

01:01:14

Anyway, that's that's me being picky.

01:01:16

One of these that that really kind of stood out to me is the do not mistake things that look like work for actual work.

01:01:22

And I think in the productivity space, one of the things we would typically say with that and go along with that is spending more time working the system instead of working on the system.

01:01:31

And this I think comes back to my thing with timing because although that system would be something very helpful, I'm working on the system instead of working on code in that world.

01:01:45

And it's very easy for me to see how I could be working on writing systems and hacking together things that create efficiencies later on.

01:01:58

But that doesn't pay the bills in most cases.

01:02:01

So why would I do that?

01:02:03

Anyway, these are things that I wonder about.

01:02:06

I like these points, but at the same time, I'm not sure how actionable some of them are as opposed to just like, okay, it's a cool thing to know.

01:02:15

And it's a fun thing to be aware of.

01:02:18

I'm not really sure how and when you would take this four step process and actually employ it.

01:02:23

Am I supposed to sit down for three hours on a Friday afternoon or a Sunday morning and do this?

01:02:28

Or is this something that you're just aware of and you try to apply where you can?

01:02:32

Like those were some of the questions I had on this.

01:02:35

Yeah, I think the answer is yes.

01:02:37

So it's not an either or and it really the key here is in this whole section, she defines work as activities that are advancing you toward the career and life that you want.

01:02:47

And that gets into she's got another list here, which will just go through real briefly the anatomy of a breakthrough.

01:02:53

And there's some really important points in here.

01:02:56

I think number one, know what the next level looks like.

01:02:58

So know where you want to get to number two, understand the gatekeepers, understand the things that will keep you from that level.

01:03:05

Number three, work up to the point of diminishing returns.

01:03:08

Number four, spin a good story.

01:03:10

So the story is important because if you have a story of how you're going to get to the next level, you can.

01:03:17

It's a lot easier to engage with it and to take possession of it.

01:03:21

And that's one of my action items is that story file, which I'll mention when we get get there a little bit more context on that.

01:03:27

But so spending a good stories number four, number five, be open to possibilities and plan for opportunities and then number six, be ready to ride the wave.

01:03:35

So again, this comes back to when it especially from a career perspective, don't just get stuck in where you are constantly be looking for how do I grow?

01:03:47

How do I improve?

01:03:48

How do I get to the next level?

01:03:50

How do I get to my ideal future?

01:03:52

And if you are doing the things that are going to get you there, then great.

01:03:56

But those things don't happen by default.

01:03:58

And so I think that there's just a lot of value in recognizing these things.

01:04:02

And if you're saying right now that figuring out timing is not an activity that's going to advance you towards a career in life that you want, like be OK with that trade off, even if you think that, oh, that is a good thing.

01:04:12

I should do at some point.

01:04:13

Yes, tall of things.

01:04:15

So I want to move on to the home section because I feel like you and I might be fairly passionate about this particular.

01:04:21

Why do you say that?

01:04:22

We're pretty particular with family time.

01:04:27

And I think you guys are too.

01:04:29

And I know that a lot of what she says in this book kind of goes against how we do things.

01:04:38

And I'm curious as to some of your thoughts on it.

01:04:41

So I'm just going to jump in here.

01:04:43

And she walks through a number of areas in home life and works through ways to gain time, to point them towards core competencies as she refers to them.

01:04:55

And she goes through things like don't do your own laundry.

01:04:59

And how do you outsource some of food preparation?

01:05:04

And she does preface all of this with, you know, if this is a thing you enjoy or you want it done a very specific way, don't outsource it.

01:05:11

She does say that.

01:05:12

But I get the impression from her on this that if you're going to find time to say spend time with kids or spend more time with your spouse, if you're going to do that, one of the best ways to do that is to, you know, outsource the work on your house or hire someone to mow the lawn for you.

01:05:34

Like there are all these things that she she pushes to to gain time.

01:05:39

And I don't disagree with the intent.

01:05:42

I think I sometimes disagree with the financial aspect of it because doing all of that is quite expensive.

01:05:50

And if you have the money for it and want to do that, go for it.

01:05:52

I think the perspective is that you should be trying to get the money to do that.

01:05:56

At least that was the perspective I was coming away from it with.

01:05:59

And I didn't really agree with that because I see that trying to come up with the dollars to get some of this off of my plate so that I can spend more time with my girls.

01:06:10

Like to me, that's it's backwards.

01:06:12

Like I should be incorporating my time with them into those things so that they can learn about it as opposed to trying to completely separate those two things and say they can't overlap.

01:06:22

That was my complaint with it because I definitely see how sometimes with little kids, you can't run a saw or I can't install trim on a door with them.

01:06:31

But at the same time, we can pick up the house together.

01:06:35

Like we can do some like you can hand me screws like you can help me install things like you can do that.

01:06:40

And I think trying to figure out how to do that is of greater value than trying to get the stuff off my plate entirely.

01:06:48

I agree. I think that there's definitely some things that you don't want to do.

01:06:54

And if you could outsource them, that would be a benefit.

01:06:58

I also think that her approach with delegating the things that she doesn't want to do, she's a little bit in a privileged situation, even compared to people like us.

01:07:07

Like you have to consider the source.

01:07:09

She mentions in this book that she lives in Manhattan.

01:07:12

So I mean, I don't even have something like TaskRabbit around where if I wanted someone to come put a desk together for me, for example, that they would even be able to do that.

01:07:21

Right.

01:07:22

But if you're living in Manhattan, you've got more disposable income for those sorts of things.

01:07:25

Like the work that you are doing is producing more money than it's exponentially greater than the cost that it would be to hire somebody to do that.

01:07:35

So you've got more options.

01:07:37

But that's really the metric I think you have to measure this by is like, what is your time worth?

01:07:42

And then the things that you don't want to do, can you find somebody to do those for you where it would cost you less than that hour is worth to you?

01:07:52

But until you know what that hour is worth to you, you can't really make that decision regarding the whole idea of at home here.

01:08:00

I do think that there's a lot of value in planning and prioritizing your family time.

01:08:04

She has a statement in here that I really liked.

01:08:06

She said, time is too precious for us to be totally leisurely about our leisure because I've definitely been guilty of this where I'll plan out all my work stuff, but then I won't plan out any time to recharge or do the fun things.

01:08:19

And that's been an action item on my on these episodes more than once where I make more time to play.

01:08:26

But that is all the good things I can say about this section.

01:08:31

She gets into this idea of alignment, which just really drove me nuts.

01:08:37

She says, if you combine activities that utilize different parts of your brain, particularly if one doesn't require a much active mental engagement, you can deepen relationships while filling your time with meaningful things or fit more time for leisure pursuits into your day.

01:08:53

Generally, BS, that is not true.

01:08:56

You cannot deepen relationships while you are working on something else that you don't want to do, which is kind of getting back to your original point is like all of these chores and things that maybe she wants to outsource.

01:09:07

What she's saying in this statement right here on alignment is that you can deepen these relationships while you're trying to do something else.

01:09:16

And that just is not going to work.

01:09:18

And she talks in the book about her kid.

01:09:21

And I think if I'm remembering I read this a couple of weeks ago now as we're recording this, she's got a lot of work.

01:09:26

I've got one kid and he's like a toddler at most.

01:09:31

Yes.

01:09:31

OK, I've got a 10 year old, an eight year old, a six year old, a four year old and a three month old.

01:09:37

The 10 year old and the eight year old, like as they get older, they aren't happy with just being in the same location with me.

01:09:44

They want my attention.

01:09:45

And that's like saying, well, you know, we can sit down and have a nice family dinner and I can answer emails on my iPhone.

01:09:53

No, you can't.

01:09:54

You're not engaged with your family.

01:09:55

You're going to miss stuff and your kids are going to notice that and they're going to get disconnected and eventually they're just going to shut down.

01:10:01

It's like, oh, dad doesn't care.

01:10:02

He's always on his iPhone whenever we're whenever we're together.

01:10:05

I don't want to be like that.

01:10:07

And the way that she phrased this, the section of the book, when I read it, I was like, well, yeah, maybe you can get away with that right now.

01:10:15

But if you do that in the future, like it's it's not going to work.

01:10:18

It there is going to be a breakdown here somewhere.

01:10:21

So I'm going to tell a story on my oldest who's currently four.

01:10:24

She will be five here in a few weeks.

01:10:27

And this happened here.

01:10:30

Ah, when was it?

01:10:31

It would have been Saturday.

01:10:32

Essentially what happened was there's a time in the afternoon when we do, quote, unquote, rest time slash nap time.

01:10:40

Our youngest will take a nap and the older to do rest time, which is just there.

01:10:46

They go off in a room on their own and spend an hour to an hour and a half there.

01:10:50

Our oldest spends about 45 minutes in rest time.

01:10:54

So she comes up early and she gets a little bit of one on one time with mom and dad.

01:10:59

And when it's Saturday or Sunday, typically what ends up happening is my wife and I are either reading a book or we're doing some research or talking through something that we're trying to solve, like scheduling or, you know, something along those lines.

01:11:14

And Emma, our oldest will either work on a puzzle or play in some form on her own.

01:11:20

And this particular day, I was reading a book.

01:11:24

My wife was reading a book and Emma was on the floor playing some game.

01:11:29

I don't even know what it was, you know, trying to write out letters and such.

01:11:33

She's starting to to read and write of sorts.

01:11:36

So it's kind of fun to watch her do that, but that's what she was working on.

01:11:39

And although she's happy doing that, she kept asking me questions about what to do next, which was weird because she doesn't normally do that.

01:11:48

She's pretty good about coming up with what she wants to do next on her own and going forward with that.

01:11:54

And that's fine.

01:11:55

I love to see her do that.

01:11:57

But there was just something weird about how she was asking these questions.

01:12:01

It's not like I was ignoring her because we're right there.

01:12:05

I'm just a few feet away from her and answering her questions and trying to be engaged with her.

01:12:10

And yet at one point, I look over and she's sitting there staring at the piece of paper in front of her.

01:12:17

And I asked her to come over.

01:12:19

And the moment I picked her up, she started crying.

01:12:21

And of course, that always melts your heart whenever something like that happens.

01:12:25

I don't know what just happened.

01:12:27

And it was kind of an eye opening thing there where even though you're doing something that you consider highly valuable or not an ignoring activity with your kids, such as like reading a book.

01:12:40

And I'm right here with you, spending time with you by being in the same room.

01:12:44

There's still an aspect of attention that kids tend to want and need.

01:12:50

And even though we're doing something valuable, being in the same room and doing things together doesn't necessarily mean that I'm building into, in this case, my oldest daughter.

01:13:01

And it was kind of an eye opening thing for me to see that, yes, this is a thing that I consider valuable.

01:13:08

And I considered that time as something meaningful to her because I know that quality time is something that matters to her.

01:13:15

And yet I fell down in actually achieving that.

01:13:20

So that was like, as soon as she starts crying, like, okay, book goes down, talk to me.

01:13:25

What is going on?

01:13:27

What happened?

01:13:29

And it became a thing where I needed to sit down and work on the task with her because she needed some of that attention.

01:13:38

And I don't really know what led up to that.

01:13:40

I think there was some things earlier in the day where she felt a little bit neglected.

01:13:45

And I'm not really sure what prompted that.

01:13:47

But something throughout the day led her to feel like she didn't have the attention that she was after.

01:13:53

And I think that's a lot of what you're talking about is that even though you may think that you're building into them by trying to do two things at one time,

01:14:00

even if those activities are very noble, they don't always necessarily align with what the other person needs.

01:14:08

And in this case, you know, kids.

01:14:10

So I think you're dead on that even if you're trying to essentially multitask, that doesn't always follow through when it's relationship building.

01:14:18

You can work on something together and that can be a helpful thing.

01:14:21

Like guys do that all the time, but that doesn't always work.

01:14:25

And sometimes trying to multitask in that sense, and most times it probably doesn't work.

01:14:30

I just don't see that as something that's worth putting a lot of effort into trying to do two things at one time.

01:14:36

And I think that's what you're getting at.

01:14:37

Exactly.

01:14:38

You know, that Chris Bailey, the author of the Productivity Project, which we covered for Bookworm said that the reason for productivity is people.

01:14:46

And so this whole approach of like, I'm going to check things off on my task list.

01:14:51

And I'm going to build relationships at the same time.

01:14:53

That is never going to work.

01:14:56

The only way I can ever see this playing out positively in my own life is, for example, my brother works remotely to for a company in California.

01:15:06

But he lives lives nearby.

01:15:07

So occasionally we'll meet up at a coffee shop with the understanding that we're both going to work, you know, and we're focused on our work and eventually we'll take a break and we'll we'll chat a little bit.

01:15:17

But that's not how it normally happens.

01:15:21

And the relationships are the important thing.

01:15:24

If you and I were getting together for coffee and we're sitting at the same table, we're having a conversation and in the background, I see you working on some project and you're always looking at your phone or your computer or whatever, even if the conversation is not impacted, which I guarantee that it is at that point, because you're not

01:15:46

devoting all of your attention to that thing.

01:15:48

But even if it's not the image and the message that you are sending is, I don't really care about this.

01:15:53

Like, I'm not calling you for coffee again.

01:15:55

And I quickly think that if you were to embrace this mindset that she talks about here, you will burn a lot of bridges.

01:16:06

And I kind of am shocked that like it hasn't happened to her.

01:16:11

The fact that she's advocating for this seems really weird to me.

01:16:15

Now, I also want to explain that I read this book a couple of years ago before I took the job with Asian efficiency.

01:16:22

When I read it the first time, I thought that this book was amazing.

01:16:27

Like, in this whole idea of alignment, I remember this sticking out to me then.

01:16:31

I'm like, hey, yeah, that's actually a pretty good idea.

01:16:33

The more I dig into this, though, I'm just like, no, this is very, very dangerous.

01:16:37

You have to recognize what you are doing.

01:16:40

The more life experience I gain, I guess.

01:16:43

The more I understand that in terms of the productivity and getting all of the things done, it doesn't matter.

01:16:50

It does not matter when you compare it to the quality of the relationships of the people that are around you.

01:16:54

That's what's really important.

01:16:56

Regardless of whether you are introverted or extroverted, you need people, you need relationships.

01:17:02

And I think that this advice in the section on alignment can quickly destroy those.

01:17:07

Yes.

01:17:08

OK.

01:17:09

One other point I want to make from this section in the whole idea of alignment, so not specifically with the relationships, but the doing two things at once.

01:17:16

This just totally does not not work.

01:17:19

Multitasking is a myth.

01:17:20

We know that the only way this works is like if you're going to mow the lawn and you want to listen to a podcast or something and you're completely OK with not getting anything from what you're listening to.

01:17:28

But this is also where I believe she mentions Mahali.

01:17:32

Yep.

01:17:34

So I wrote down under alignment, WMD.

01:17:36

What would Mahali do?

01:17:37

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

01:17:40

Yep.

01:17:41

Mahali shows up a lot in our books.

01:17:43

Great fun.

01:17:44

Yeah.

01:17:45

All right.

01:17:45

So part four, 168 hours, day by day, you can create the life you want.

01:17:50

I don't know that I would disagree with this.

01:17:52

Like, I think if you sit down and schedule how much time you want to spend on certain things and put them on your calendar and stick with that, I think there's a lot of value in doing that.

01:18:05

I think there are also potential downfalls to it.

01:18:08

And some of that comes back to like procrastination and actually following through with the time blocking that you've created on your calendar that I think is very difficult to do for some people.

01:18:20

Some folks, you put it on the calendar and it'll just happen.

01:18:22

It's easy for them.

01:18:23

I am not of that flavor and wish that that happened for me.

01:18:28

But putting it on the calendar is in my mind a suggestion.

01:18:34

It doesn't always follow through.

01:18:36

So I have to really work at following through on what I put on my calendar and trying to essentially trick myself into following through on it and doing what shows up.

01:18:49

Otherwise, it just doesn't happen.

01:18:51

So I get the feeling that this is a simple thing for you, that if you put it on the calendar, it just happens.

01:18:56

Is that true?

01:18:58

I think that that probably is true, but that's because I have to rely on the calendar as a tool to balance everything.

01:19:05

We're really involved with our church.

01:19:07

We want to make sure that we have set aside time for family stuff.

01:19:10

And then obviously there's the work stuff.

01:19:11

So making all of that line up requires a calendar.

01:19:16

And I kind of wish sometimes that I could just show up and work off my task list and not pay attention to the time.

01:19:24

Yep.

01:19:24

Yep.

01:19:25

But that's just not the situation that that I'm in.

01:19:28

And so I kind of view like her perspective again, you have to recognize the message in context of the messenger.

01:19:34

She's jumping from thing to thing place to place all day.

01:19:37

So I'm sure she relies on her calendar as well.

01:19:40

I wouldn't necessarily view it as a bad thing that the calendar isn't the thing that makes this all stick.

01:19:45

The calendar is the obvious one because everything that you need to do does have to take place in the context of time.

01:19:51

But I think that there are other tools that you could use to make this sticky.

01:19:54

And then she has a quote, the hard work of having it all.

01:19:58

Yeah, which I don't know that you can have it all.

01:20:01

Exactly, exactly.

01:20:03

The better phrase from this section is that the key message of this book is that there is time for anything, anything, not everything.

01:20:10

That's a very important distinction there.

01:20:13

Yes.

01:20:13

But you have to draw a line somewhere.

01:20:16

You can never do it all.

01:20:17

You can't have all the things, but you can create the life that you want.

01:20:22

You can be intentional about how you're spending your time, how you're budgeting those hours and making sure that the activities that you're investing them in are the things that are going to get you to your ideal future.

01:20:32

But again, like the way that she writes this, I think there's a lot of danger in just taking this at face value, just taking out the quotes or the text from the book.

01:20:40

Because it kind of comes across as like, oh, yeah, there's always time to squeeze in just one more thing.

01:20:46

No, no, not just one more thing.

01:20:48

But if it's the right one thing, yes.

01:20:51

It's the classic.

01:20:52

You can do anything you want, but not everything you want.

01:20:55

Like that's the classic quote.

01:20:56

I don't even know where that comes from.

01:20:58

It's David Allen, I believe, by the way, is it?

01:21:00

Yep.

01:21:00

I feel like it comes back.

01:21:02

I feel like I've seen it attributed like the Benjamin Franklin or something along those lines.

01:21:06

I don't know.

01:21:06

One of these days, I'll look it up.

01:21:09

Probably not, but that's it's a quote that I like.

01:21:12

And it's one that I kept thinking of whenever I was reading this because it does.

01:21:19

You know, the book overall has a very you can do everything you want feel.

01:21:26

Like it seems like because she has a lot of stories, she explains a lot of case studies

01:21:32

for people who are doing a lot of different ventures and they have very full days and they're very excited

01:21:39

when the day is done.

01:21:41

And I understand that.

01:21:44

But at the same time, there's a bit of a danger to coming at it from that stance

01:21:49

because I think it's easy to fall into the trap of, well, I can just add this.

01:21:53

I can say yes to everything.

01:21:55

And that's not the case.

01:21:56

Like saying no is one of the most powerful things to learn.

01:21:59

And this book kind of gave me the empowering feeling of saying yes is OK.

01:22:07

To everything.

01:22:08

Yeah, exactly.

01:22:10

That that was something that kind of shocked me and I was a little bit afraid of.

01:22:15

Yeah.

01:22:16

It's yes without boundaries, which is a very dangerous message.

01:22:20

Yes, initially, but then that has to be followed up with a no.

01:22:25

You can't just keep adding things.

01:22:28

You have to at some point start pruning things.

01:22:31

In that process, there is a lot of value in the addition and then subtraction.

01:22:35

Sometimes just subtraction like that creates a creates addition.

01:22:39

That's kind of what we were talking about at the beginning with like the person

01:22:42

will retreat like if you were to sit down and look at all the things that you're

01:22:46

committed to, it can be easy to say, well, I don't have a day and a half to

01:22:50

devote to that.

01:22:51

Right.

01:22:52

And it's a chicken and egg situation because once you do it, it becomes like

01:22:56

the vision becomes a lot more clear.

01:22:58

Everything has a lot more purpose.

01:23:00

Everything becomes a lot, a lot easier to do.

01:23:03

So from the perspective of having done it, again, just once, but it's almost like

01:23:10

I can't afford not to do that.

01:23:11

Because of the benefits that it provides for everything else, but you have to get

01:23:17

above and slightly outside your current situation in order to recognize the value

01:23:21

in that thing.

01:23:22

And so I kind of view this book as being in the midst of the day to day, like

01:23:28

trying to squeeze out another hour to do one more thing, but it's kind of missing

01:23:34

and it's not completely missing, but it is not emphasized enough, in my opinion,

01:23:39

the fact that you do need to cut back on the things that really aren't in line

01:23:43

with those core competencies and aren't moving you towards your ideal future.

01:23:47

We have a lot of action items here to work through.

01:23:49

You got anything else you want to go through before we do that?

01:23:51

No, I think that's that's basically it.

01:23:55

Like I said, a little bit ago, this book, I remember reading it a few years ago and

01:24:03

absolutely loving it.

01:24:04

Like it was the first time I've been open to this whole idea of time management.

01:24:08

Had a very different reaction this time.

01:24:10

I know we'll get into author style and book reading in a little bit, but I do want

01:24:14

to kind of because we're talking about that last section, 168 hours day by day.

01:24:18

This was a really weak ending to the book I felt.

01:24:21

She talks about the key concepts in the year 168 hours.

01:24:26

That's where the meat of the value in this book really lies in my opinion.

01:24:29

And then she threw in part two and part three, working home just because work

01:24:33

life balance, you know, which again, I don't really agree with.

01:24:36

There's just your life and it's up to you to balance it.

01:24:39

What you do at work affects what happens at home and vice versa.

01:24:44

And then part four is like, okay, now just go do it.

01:24:46

Well, good luck.

01:24:48

Okay, Miss Manhattan, like my situation is totally different and I really have no idea

01:24:55

what this looks like other than a few of the worksheets that she gave at the at the beginning.

01:25:02

And I know she's got a bunch of stuff sprinkled throughout the book, but I just

01:25:06

felt like this could have been a third the length, even though it's not a very long book.

01:25:10

Like the value here is in the first section.

01:25:14

Yes, I agree with you on that.

01:25:16

So for action items, I've got a couple here and I'm kind of in the middle of both of them already

01:25:22

because I finished this about a week, week and a half ago.

01:25:25

And the first one of these is what I've been calling my extreme calendaring experiment,

01:25:32

where I have I have something on my calendar for every minute of the day,

01:25:38

clear down to the putting sleep on it, which is purely there just to fill up the time

01:25:45

and and show the calculation on it.

01:25:48

But I have been putting this in place just to see, you know, here's where I spend time doing client projects.

01:25:55

This is the time where I'm going to spend some time reading.

01:25:58

This is where I'm going to do some morning pages, like whatever the thing is,

01:26:03

this is where I'm putting it on the calendar and this is when it's going to happen.

01:26:06

And whenever I lay that all out, it does show me that I have things balance the way that I want.

01:26:13

The trick for me is following through on it and that's the continuing part of the experiment, Mike.

01:26:18

So we'll see how that all plays out, but it is proving interesting, at least,

01:26:23

to see what I'm going to spend time on and where.

01:26:27

I just don't have it to the point where I follow through on the commitments to myself.

01:26:34

That is where I tend to struggle with it.

01:26:36

Yeah, I can understand that I used to do something fairly similar where I had,

01:26:43

I think I called it a canvas calendar and I would budget every hour of my day.

01:26:49

I didn't put sleep on it, but it was a totally separate calendar where I would put down the one hour blocks, essentially,

01:26:57

at least one hour blocks.

01:26:58

And there was a lot of good things that came from that, but I recognized after a while that it basically looked the same every week.

01:27:05

And so I kind of stopped doing it after a while.

01:27:08

But yeah, I think that's a cool thing to do.

01:27:11

And if you've never done it before and you're listening to this, I would definitely recommend that you try it out.

01:27:16

Yeah, because I think it's interesting just to see, because mine's the same every week for the most part.

01:27:20

And it's a bunch of repeating calendar events, which is fine.

01:27:26

It's kind of like what you were talking about earlier, it's helpful for me to see that because it gives me a layout of what's going on in the week.

01:27:32

And if I know I've got one of my artist dates coming up sometime tomorrow,

01:27:37

it's easier for me to stay motivated on the client projects today because I know that break is coming.

01:27:42

So it does provide a lot of little benefits in there as well.

01:27:46

And going through a lot of that has prompted some conversations with my wife, which is my second action item.

01:27:53

And she has been working through a number of, you know, where does time go?

01:27:58

Because we're in the process of getting formally started with homeschooling.

01:28:01

So that whole process is prompting a lot of difficult conversations about time and idea, task, management of sorts versus physical actions.

01:28:13

Like those conversations we're having a lot, which is proving to be very helpful to me as well, because it forces me to process things in my own schedule.

01:28:22

While I'm helping her through that.

01:28:24

So I'm planning to continue those with her over the next week or so.

01:28:28

Nice.

01:28:29

So my action items and this first one, this came to me as I was reading this, but I don't think this came from the book itself.

01:28:37

Because the place I put this in my outline was in part four, where you doing your 168 hours day by day, the action item that I put was evaluate.

01:28:47

And then these three questions, this is something that I stole from what we do at Asian deficiency with our sprint retrospectives.

01:28:55

But the three questions are, what should we start doing, which is really what this book is all about.

01:29:00

And then the second one is, what should we stop doing?

01:29:02

So this, that's where the balance needs to be, in my opinion.

01:29:06

And then the third one, what should we keep doing?

01:29:07

So I've used these in a professional setting and a business setting, and it's been really cool to see what's come out of this.

01:29:16

And I think that you can apply these questions to any arena.

01:29:20

And I'm excited to apply them to our family.

01:29:22

I think that there's a lot of stuff that we just do because it's something that we do.

01:29:26

And after a while, you lose sight of why you're doing this thing.

01:29:30

And so checking in occasionally and being like, do we still want to do that thing?

01:29:34

Do we still want to be involved in that?

01:29:36

Like there's a, there's a lot of value in that.

01:29:38

Just making sure that the things that you're committed to are the right things consistently.

01:29:43

You don't get stuck just jumping from thing to thing in emergency scan.

01:29:48

Modality, you're just looking for the, you know, got to get kids to this thing, putting out the next fire.

01:29:51

Right. Right.

01:29:52

No, it makes sense.

01:29:53

That sounds cool.

01:29:54

I think we've been trying to play around with family meetings at all.

01:29:57

My wife and I tend to talk about a lot of logistical things throughout the week,

01:30:03

just because I feel like things change quickly enough on us that trying to do it at one time in a week doesn't seem to work well for us.

01:30:10

But I like those questions a lot.

01:30:13

I may steal those.

01:30:13

Feel free.

01:30:15

Next one is to create a story file.

01:30:17

This is something that as I was reading this book, I also had a call with my speech coach, Aaron Beverly, which I mentioned that I got connected with him at the district Toastmasters Conference.

01:30:30

Right.

01:30:30

So he, when, when we had our initial get to know you type call, he's like, so what is your goal?

01:30:38

And I told him, like, I want to win the world championship of public speaking.

01:30:43

He was a finalist in 2016.

01:30:46

I think he took second place.

01:30:47

So he kind of knows what it, what it takes.

01:30:49

And one of the things that he told me at the beginning was to create a story file and a story file.

01:30:56

I'm keeping it in day one where it's just, I'm going to jot down notes of stories that honestly, I've used this sort of things in the past.

01:31:06

Like in my book, I have a whole bunch of stories.

01:31:08

Whenever I'm creating content, I have a whole bunch of stories.

01:31:10

Whenever we get on this podcast, we tell a whole bunch of stories.

01:31:12

So this is just a formal process for capturing those things so that in the future, if I'm working on a speech or I need to give a talk, whatever, I can go to this separate journal inside a day one, which has all my stories.

01:31:25

And initially, I'm just capturing the story ideas there.

01:31:28

But then he gave me a six step process for turning that into like a little mini speech.

01:31:34

So essentially, you've got these components that you can plug into your speeches or your talks.

01:31:39

They're kind of canned already, but it's based on your personal experience and things that have happened to you.

01:31:44

So I think that's a really cool idea and I want to start doing that.

01:31:47

And it kind of brought, was highlighted again when she's talking about the six steps to breakthrough.

01:31:53

And step number four, I believe it was, was spend a good story.

01:31:56

A lot of times the stories, the things that have happened to you, I'm recognizing that those do make good stories.

01:32:03

But if you never take the time to think through them and formalize them, they're pretty lame.

01:32:07

So I want to make them cool.

01:32:09

Yeah, that sounds like a really cool thing.

01:32:11

It sounds like it's going to take a lot of time though too.

01:32:13

Yep.

01:32:13

It's something that you are never really done with.

01:32:16

So it's just something that I'm working on going forward and who knows how much work this is actually going to be before it's a point where it's really usable.

01:32:23

Yeah, but I've got five or six in there already.

01:32:25

So good.

01:32:26

Cool.

01:32:27

All right.

01:32:27

Next one, create an outsourcing budget in WineAb.

01:32:30

I recently read the book, You Need a Budget, which was released I think the day after Christmas.

01:32:37

Yeah.

01:32:37

It's a really good book.

01:32:38

If you're interested in WineAb at all, it is not based on this is how you use the tool.

01:32:44

It's really just the system.

01:32:46

And there's a lot of great information in there, even if you decide not to use the tool at all and he calls it out.

01:32:51

He's like, I want to give you the information that you can use to track this on a spreadsheet if you want.

01:32:55

Because that's what I did initially.

01:32:56

You don't have to use WineAb.

01:32:58

There's some some great stuff in there.

01:33:00

The big takeaway I got from that book was the whole idea of budgeting versus forecasting.

01:33:05

So working with money that you already have instead of guessing how much you're going to get and thinking how much, you know,

01:33:11

guessing how much things are going to cost.

01:33:12

And so with through that lens, I want to incorporate into our budget outsourcing.

01:33:19

And that's not just going to be for me for things that I don't want to do, but getting back to one of my action items a couple of episodes ago, like, how can I help my wife?

01:33:30

So maybe there's things that she doesn't want to be doing anymore that if we set aside a budget, we could figure out how to make stuff easier for her because she's homeschooling five kids.

01:33:41

She's running a small business.

01:33:43

Like she's busy too.

01:33:45

So recognizing this in the family context as it pertains to our budget.

01:33:50

That sounds like it could be extremely helpful.

01:33:52

And I kind of want to do that.

01:33:55

But I also know that I don't like spending money on stuff like that.

01:34:00

I'm kind of stingy with that sort of thing.

01:34:02

So I will see.

01:34:04

No promises on that one from me.

01:34:07

And then the last one that I've got here is an idea.

01:34:10

This is directly from this book.

01:34:12

I think this is probably the only thing I got directly from this book.

01:34:15

Make a list of 100 things that you want to do.

01:34:20

And she kind of makes a point that this doesn't have to be like super expensive way out there.

01:34:25

Pie in the sky type bucket list things, just 100 things that you want to do.

01:34:30

And I think that there's going to be a lot of value in making that list.

01:34:33

And then once you have that list, you can start sliding in the time how you're budgeting your 168 hours to start doing some of those things.

01:34:40

Cool.

01:34:41

So author style and rating going through this.

01:34:44

I I appreciated a lot of the stories that she shares because it makes things very real.

01:34:49

We've talked about this before.

01:34:51

We love it whenever people have stories to help us realize what this thing could look like.

01:34:55

In actuality.

01:34:57

So I really enjoyed that.

01:34:59

I think there were some qualms that we've already covered here with the material itself, which I don't know that that's a first, but I think this is the first time we've both come at it saying this is just wrong.

01:35:11

I don't know that we've really had a book that we felt that way.

01:35:15

At the same time, the concept of 168 hours and being very intentional with that is a thing that I've been aware of.

01:35:26

And it's a thing that I know a lot about, but I don't think I've seen it in this light before.

01:35:32

I have not sat down and done the math on it in in the past.

01:35:36

And that is something that she prompted me to do.

01:35:39

And no one's really done that before.

01:35:42

So kudos to her on that piece.

01:35:44

So I'm really conflicted on how to rate this thing because part of me is like, no, I don't know that I want you to read this because there's some things I'm concerned about at the same time.

01:35:53

If you're new to time management in its entirety, this could be extremely helpful.

01:35:57

And this could be something that really sets you on the right path to understanding time and how to allocate it correctly.

01:36:05

So because of my conflict mentally, I'm going to put it at three and a half because I just don't think it's more than that, but I don't think it's less.

01:36:15

I don't know.

01:36:16

It's somewhere in there, but that's that's kind of where I land with it.

01:36:19

I do think it's a book I will recommend to specific people.

01:36:23

Like if you're into the time management world, I will probably just explain it to you in two or three sentences and be done.

01:36:30

But if you're completely new to it, there's a lot of value in this, I think.

01:36:34

I agree.

01:36:36

However, if you pour a little bit of motor oil on a pizza, it's going to ruin the whole thing.

01:36:42

So I again am conflicted with this.

01:36:48

She even has a phrase in this book.

01:36:51

She says productivity, like religion is subjective.

01:36:54

So again, I am applying my own interpretation of this.

01:36:57

And like you said, I think there's a lot of great stuff in here.

01:37:00

I think that there is a section of this book that is extremely dangerous and very toxic where it kind of makes you feel like you can just do all the things.

01:37:09

That is, you know, we've talked about it already in this episode, but I can't overstate how wrong I think that part of this is.

01:37:18

So if you're able to take out, I guess if I were to if I were to rate part one, it's probably like a 4.5.

01:37:26

If I have to rate it in context of everything else, man, I just have trouble.

01:37:33

I have trouble removing that one part from the book and being like, oh, yeah, the rest of it is OK.

01:37:38

So I'm going to give what I think is a generous three stars.

01:37:43

I think the only thing that I've rated lower than that was the shallows, which I just extremely didn't like.

01:37:48

And there was a bunch of stuff in there, too, that I disagreed with.

01:37:51

There wasn't a whole bunch of stuff in here that I disagreed with.

01:37:54

But I also think that there's a lot more like if you're going to just accept this as truth and you're reading through this like I did the first time.

01:38:02

And when I was just starting out on my productivity dream, I was like, hey, yeah, that's a really interesting idea.

01:38:07

I'm just going to align all the things.

01:38:08

I'm going to get all the stuff done.

01:38:10

And you were to make that your default mode of operation going forward, like, especially if you have a family with kids, like that would be a disaster.

01:38:19

And so I don't feel good rating it any higher than that because I really want people who read this or in that situation to understand the danger that is that is there.

01:38:30

Because it's really easy to look past it, I feel, especially with the tone of this book.

01:38:35

I mean, you have more time than you think you can do anything you want.

01:38:37

You can do everything you want.

01:38:38

Like, no, not, not really.

01:38:40

So, so yeah, I'm going to go three stars for reference.

01:38:44

You gave art of asking a 2.0.

01:38:46

True.

01:38:47

I forgot about that one.

01:38:48

And also you gave out of our minds by Ken Robinson.

01:38:52

You gave that one a 2.5.

01:38:54

That's right.

01:38:55

Maybe I should make it a 2.5.

01:38:57

No, I'll stick with it because there is some good stuff in here.

01:38:59

Just stop reading after part one.

01:39:01

I was trying to remember.

01:39:05

It's pulling up the site to look the shallows you gave a 3.5.

01:39:08

What?

01:39:09

No way.

01:39:10

You did, man.

01:39:11

I have to have to look back at these these ratings.

01:39:13

I guess the the the longer I go from those episodes, the more polarizing I either love or hate it.

01:39:22

No, the more my my rating moves up or down.

01:39:25

Yep.

01:39:26

I was trying to remember.

01:39:28

Innovators dilemma was one that we both struggled with.

01:39:31

And yet you gave that one a 3.5.

01:39:33

So that was great information.

01:39:34

It was dry, but it was great information.

01:39:37

Anyway, this one's not dry.

01:39:38

She's got a lot of stories.

01:39:39

Like I really like her style.

01:39:40

Yeah, I just think the information is wrong.

01:39:43

All right.

01:39:45

So upcoming books, you're next.

01:39:47

What what we what we doing?

01:39:49

We are doing how to read a book by Mortimer Adler.

01:39:52

We've been talking about this topic for a long time.

01:39:55

Yeah, I've I've started this one.

01:39:57

It's like 370 pages.

01:39:58

It was originally written in the 1940s.

01:40:01

He's got some interesting points, even at the beginning of it,

01:40:04

where he talks about he compares, like reading a book to listening to the radio

01:40:09

and how because of the engagement that's required in the different mediums,

01:40:12

you're less likely to retain information from radio.

01:40:15

And I'm thinking podcasts and audio books.

01:40:17

Yeah.

01:40:17

So this one, I think, is going to have some some really interesting ideas.

01:40:22

And he's got a system for how to do this.

01:40:25

So you get the most out of a book because he kind of takes it through the lens of

01:40:29

you're not doing this for entertainment.

01:40:30

You're doing this because you want to retain the information and you want it

01:40:34

to change the way that you live, which is obviously a great fit for for Bookworm.

01:40:39

So yeah, and we've we've had it on our list to do an episode on how we read books

01:40:43

for a long time.

01:40:44

So this this will be the catalyst, I think.

01:40:47

We'll finally do that episode.

01:40:49

Yep.

01:40:49

It'll be fun.

01:40:50

So I I shuffled around because I've got a series of books that I've selected

01:40:56

that are all listener recommendations, like the one we did today.

01:40:59

And I moved all those back because a certain person was mentioned in this book.

01:41:04

Yet again, I wish I knew how many books we've read that have mentioned

01:41:08

Mahali, but I decided to move all those back and put flow by Mahali.

01:41:13

Cheeks sent me Holly on our list for after how to read a book because we keep

01:41:18

having flow talked about and we continue to have Mahali brought up and quoted in

01:41:24

book after book after book.

01:41:25

I figure it's about time we actually read his book.

01:41:28

Yeah, definitely.

01:41:29

So yes, so that'll be after after your choice.

01:41:35

What are you doing for a gap book?

01:41:37

This is one that I finished already, but I have to throw the word out here about

01:41:41

30 lessons for living, tried and true advice from the wisest Americans by

01:41:44

Karl Pillimer.

01:41:45

This is a really interesting book.

01:41:48

OK, so let me preface this a little bit.

01:41:50

So if you've ever gone to a nursing home, you walk in the doors and you see a lot

01:41:58

of the people that are there and they just have a negative attitude towards life.

01:42:02

But if you spend any amount of time in these nursing homes, you'll usually find

01:42:07

like one or two people who are just super peppy, positive people.

01:42:10

He basically went and sought out those people and interviewed like a thousand

01:42:15

of them on their biggest lessons for living a good life.

01:42:18

And he broke down all of those interviews into 30 lessons.

01:42:24

And he's got a whole bunch of stories from the people that go along with each lesson.

01:42:28

But he presents it as like I did this experiment and he interviewed, he calls

01:42:33

them experts and distills it down into these 30 lessons.

01:42:37

And I just think that this is such a cool idea.

01:42:40

It made me want to go find some some older people that I could have as a as a

01:42:44

mentor because there's a lot of value in these people who have lived through these

01:42:49

things like the people that he was interviewing.

01:42:51

This is like the golden generation.

01:42:52

This is the last generation that really had to sacrifice something as they went

01:42:57

through, you know, the world wars and the depression and stuff like that.

01:43:00

So they have a totally different perspective than anybody else.

01:43:05

And so this is a this is a really, really interesting, interesting read and a lot

01:43:10

of the stuff that he shares in here.

01:43:12

Some of it is things that you might expect.

01:43:14

Some of it is not.

01:43:15

So this is something that I feel just about anybody could pick up and get a lot

01:43:21

out of.

01:43:21

And it's a really entertaining read.

01:43:22

Cool.

01:43:23

So I am putting principles on this for my gap book.

01:43:28

And it was on my list last time as well, because I was trying to do it on top of

01:43:35

the artist way and that was not smart.

01:43:38

So I'm finally dedicating time to it.

01:43:41

I will be done with it by the time we do our next just because I'm going to

01:43:45

finish it and then go into how to read a book and they'll be good.

01:43:48

That's what I'm doing.

01:43:48

So yes, that one's still on the list.

01:43:50

Good book.

01:43:50

I recommend it.

01:43:52

Eventually you could just make that a bookworm book and then you you'd have to

01:43:55

finish it and I'd have to read it to.

01:43:57

Yep.

01:43:58

I could.

01:43:59

I'm not not yet anyway.

01:44:01

All right.

01:44:01

If you want to recommend a book like the one that we covered for today, and I

01:44:07

know we've got a couple other recommendations that are coming up here

01:44:09

quickly, you can go to bookworm.fm/list.

01:44:14

There you will find a list of all the books that we have covered, the ones that

01:44:18

are planned.

01:44:19

And on the right sidebar, there will be a button to recommend a book.

01:44:22

And are we still trying to beat out KCRW?

01:44:26

Is that still a thing?

01:44:27

Yes.

01:44:28

Okay.

01:44:29

Sorry.

01:44:29

I don't check these things.

01:44:30

Whoops.

01:44:30

Sorry.

01:44:31

Uh, so we're still trying to beat KCRW.

01:44:34

So that means if you don't mind, take a look at a bookworm on iTunes and click

01:44:41

the little review button, give us a rating, help us to to beat them out.

01:44:46

We want to be the number one listing when you search for bookworm on iTunes.

01:44:50

Uh, another way you can help out the show.

01:44:52

And I don't think we've talked about this one a whole lot.

01:44:54

I think we've mentioned it every once in a while, but if you want to support

01:44:57

the show in some fashion financially, uh, there are affiliate links in the show

01:45:03

notes.

01:45:03

So if you're going to pick up a book or you're going to order something on Amazon

01:45:08

of sorts, uh, you can help us out by clicking on one of those links before you

01:45:11

do that.

01:45:12

Uh, that does help us out.

01:45:13

Pays for some hosting and a few other things that we, we have going on with the show.

01:45:17

So that's, that's another way to help us out.

01:45:19

I don't think we've mentioned it much.

01:45:20

So we would greatly appreciate that.

01:45:22

Uh, one other thing that you could do is you could leave a star if you

01:45:25

listen to this in overcast, which a surprising number of you do overcast accounts

01:45:31

for an insane amount of podcast traffic.

01:45:33

So, uh, that would be, that would be great as well.

01:45:36

And, and yes, we, I mean specifically, I have a personal vendetta against KCRW.

01:45:41

I will not rest until we are the number one iTunes ranking.

01:45:44

So please do that.

01:45:45

If you're following along, pick up how to read a book by Mortimer Adler and we'll

01:45:50

see you next time.