Bookworm Transcripts

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I don't have any follow up this time, Mike.

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Oh, you don't.

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That's right.

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It's just me.

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So I got three items of follow up.

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See, this is the way you need to do these books.

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Don't have action items because then you don't have to do follow up.

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There you go.

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All right.

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So my three action items were to not justify one saying no, which I failed as

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soon as we finished recording.

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Nice.

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Although I've done better since then, you know, because we were as soon as we hung up

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we were talking about the next recording time and you threw out a date and I was

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like, no, I can't make that work because and you're like, no, no, I don't need to

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know.

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I didn't even realize that I was still doing it.

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It was like three minutes.

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Yep.

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Three minutes.

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Yeah.

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After I said, I wasn't going to do that anymore.

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I was doing it, but that that event did kind of solidify my mind.

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Like this is a big deal.

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You do this all the time.

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You don't realize it.

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So I feel like I've done a better job with this since then, although I haven't had a

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whole lot of opportunities to just say no.

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So to things, it's been a little bit of a crazy couple of weeks, but it's okay.

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You know, I'm pushing through the last couple stages of some, some things, some projects.

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And, uh, you know, I suppose I could just jump in and say, no, I don't want to do

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this anymore, but I do want to do these things.

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Yeah.

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And October, basically beginning of October, next 12 week year, I've got a clean slate.

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So I'm sure I'll have a lot more opportunity starting then to just say, no, I'm not going to do that.

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All right.

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Next one.

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Don't say I feel you and this is a little bit more context.

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This is like when you're talking about things specifically with your significant other,

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at least that's why I remember it from the book where you're talking about the way that you feel

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and you, you couch it or you frame it kind of like, I feel that you do this, you know, and that kind

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of gets back to the fact that we judge others by, uh, by their actions, but ourselves, by our

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intentions. So, you know, we don't think like we're really all that bad because we didn't mean to do

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that after all, you know, but we kind of project that intention behind other people. And that's the

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way I kind of viewed that phrase. Like, I feel you did this. Like it implies that there's some sort

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of evil intention behind it. And so I, I have not done this. And I've been very careful about this

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because there's been a couple, a couple of conversations my wife and I specifically have had

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and working through some things. There was definitely an opportunity, but this was fresh in my mind.

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And I was really, really careful about how I chose my words. And it definitely went,

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went better because of that. I feel. Good job, Mike. I'm proud of you. The third one I had was

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the digital boundaries. And this, I've done a pretty good job of, although I don't take it to the

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degree, I think that they probably would have liked me to, according to the last book that we

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read boundaries. So they would basically say, like, turn off completely everything. But I've even,

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like, just to give you a couple of examples, like I still, I still have my, my phone in, in my

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bedroom because I use sleep cycle, people can still get ahold of me if they really want to.

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But I've identified some of the, the major culprits that can demand my attention. Like a lot of the

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stuff I, I set the stuff up ahead of time. So like there's several Slack teams I'm involved in

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where I don't get notified unless somebody actually tags me in it. Nobody tags me in it because nobody

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knows how to use Slack. So I just going to check it, check it whenever. But since we read that book,

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I also turned off notifications on a couple other apps where I just kind of keep, I don't know,

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it's not that I'm going in there all the time, but I kind of keep tabs on like these forms sort of

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things. One of them is like the Mac Power users form that you built. So, so good job on that one,

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by the way. I like that one. So I've turned off, you know, all the notifications for, for that

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type of stuff. And then I also deleted a couple Slack teams from my, my Slack instance on my,

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my iPhone. So I can get to them when I'm on my computer, but I cannot be notified when I am not

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at my computer. So I feel like I'm moving in the right direction with this. And I'm not completely

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turning them off. Like the authors probably would like me to, but I'm pretty happy with where I'm at.

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Hmm. I feel like you're just getting started. With digital boundaries?

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Probably. Yeah. Although this is the guy who periodically completely deletes email off of his phone. So,

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yeah, it's on there temporarily, but it's not not going to be there long. I can tell you that.

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Fair enough. I get more and more dissatisfied with the state of email clients on iOS anyways.

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So every time I'm dealing with an email, my iOS device, I'm like, this is, this is such garbage.

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Like, why am I even doing this? This isn't worth it. You know, and there's maybe like one or two

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instances where I will need to get to an email on my iOS device. And that's the time when, you know,

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I'll reinstall the Apple Mail app. And then I just leave it on there for a while. Forget it's

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in there because it's in the catch all Apple folder with all the apps that you never used to be able

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to delete, but now you can. So every once in a while, you know, I'll go back in there and I don't

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use this that much. I'll delete it. And then, you know, three months later, I need an email.

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I use flags a lot in email of things I need to come back and actually do something with because

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a lot of emails I can respond to and kick out a response, you know, right away. But there's quite a

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few that I have to do something like I've got to go tweak the code and then respond right away.

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So I'll flag those oddly enough. It seems like a lot of iOS email apps struggle with flags.

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I don't know why that is. But it seems like they don't always sink across or I don't know.

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It's weird. iOS email apps are garbage. There are no good ones. There's the standard Apple Mail.

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That's really the only one that's usable in my opinion anymore. I used to love dispatch because

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you could use the standard message URL format when you send stuff like OmniFocus stuff like that.

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And I suppose if you're all in with something like Spark or airmail, you know, you could use

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something like that. But even even though it's like I've noticed the behavior that you're talking

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about, they're not that consistent and they try to lock you into their proprietary format.

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I don't want to use Spark everywhere. I would use Spark on my iOS device if it just gave me

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a great iOS email client and I could access those things that I send to OmniFocus in my other email

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client. Like when I'm on Mac, I want to be able to reply to those things in Mailmate. But I don't

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know why. Like that's just not the way that iOS email app developers think. And it's really,

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really frustrating. Really, contact managers are the same way. It seems like they all want to

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put their own little notes or their own formats in the notes field. It's like just,

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can you just use the default setup? So I don't have to rely on anyway. We're going to get in the

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weeds on that one. Yeah, exactly. Okay. But I have to have to rent on this for a second.

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iOS developers, give me the tools I need to do my job and get out of my way. Do not try to solve

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all the problems I do not have. That is so frustrating to me. Why is it so hard to just get some basic

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tools? That's why Mailmate is so great on the Mac. It gives you nothing except what you need.

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You can't even doesn't even show you images. It's all Markdown based. It's text based. But that

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allows you to get in, crank through your email and get out of there as quickly as possible. They're

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not trying to make your experience as pleasant as possible. And hey, check out this other app

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that we develop. No, I don't care. I want to get out of my email. That's true. You do have

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me sold on Mailmate. I don't remember if we've talked about that here on Bookworm, but you did.

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So that's become my email client of choice. And I don't have email on my phone at all right now.

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So like that's my one and only. It's gloriously ugly. It's my one and only viewport into email

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at all. So yes, you have me sold. Awesome. What's it for follow up? Should we jump into the

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book? Yes. So today's book, Work Clean by Dan Charnis. Did you look up there's another version

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of this floating around? Did you look this up at all? No, I mean, I only saw the one version on

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Amazon. The one I've got has got like the little green plus in the middle with the four letters,

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Work Clean, what great chefs can teach us about organization. Is there another one? Well, there's

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the other version that is out I think is called everything in its place. Okay. And that came out

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in December of 2017. And I was not fully aware of that until after we had decided to read this one.

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So I don't know the difference between the two, but it's by the same dude. And I think maybe what

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happened was he had the original and they wanted to make some revisions to it and did that like

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right away, but wanted to make more money on the same idea. Maybe I don't know. So there was a book

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I read back in the day that did that. I bought the audio book and I think it was called The Way

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We're Working Isn't Working. Okay. And then I went to look for the physical book later and I

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couldn't find it. I'm like, what the heck? Where did this go? Turns out that it's a different name

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now and I forget what it was. Got it. It also could be that because Work Clean is hard back.

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And I think everything in its place is paperback. Well, you always go for the hard cover.

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Yeah, because if you pull up everything in its place on Amazon, it even says right there,

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previously published in hardcover is Work Clean. So I think it's the same book, just under a

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different title for paperback versus hardcover, which is so weird to me. Why would you change the

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name just based on the binding of the book? Everything else is the same, I would think. But

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Yeah, I didn't look at the other one. So well, I guess somebody read the other one,

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they can compare notes with us and let us know the inconsistencies.

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Because they were both recommended on the Bookworm Club. That's the only reason I brought it up,

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because there was a slight conversation about it. Sorry, we're not going to read them both though.

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Nope, because now I feel like reading the other one would be a waste of time. Anyway, there's a

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long prelude to Work Clean is about chefs in the kitchen and how they go about creating food and

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meals for people in restaurants. And it all revolves around this concept of Miesenploss,

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which I know you were happy I said that word last time. But side note, my wife is big into

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like French cooking and actually works at like a gourmet kitchen shop part-time.

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So she's a Miesenploss, yeah. So she works with a trained chef on a weekly basis. So

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I get the benefit of understanding a lot of those terms and understanding how all the details work.

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So I get it, I get some first hand, I guess I would be secondhand knowledge from

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a chef through that. So anyway, this is interesting. The tagline on this is what great chefs can

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teach us about organization. And Dan Charnis goes through the process of basically trying to figure

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out how is it that chefs can do a whole lot of work in very small spaces and in very short time

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frames and with extremely high consistency. And I feel like that's kind of like if you were to

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look at productivity from, I guess a cliche or a stereotype to view, that's probably the goal

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is to crank out work extremely fast and extremely well at high levels. That would be

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the quintessential goal of productivity. I think that's probably a fair assumption there. And this

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looks at that from the view of a chef, which I thought was very fascinating to dive into.

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Yeah, later on in the book, he basically talks about how chefs need to have this stuff nailed down.

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Page 46, he says, "Shafts don't plan well because they are better than us. They plan because if they

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don't, their career is dead." Yeah. So a little bit of trial by fire, but I think that there's a lot

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that we can learn from this. And I like the analogy, at least for the first 150 pages.

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Sure. Sure. I think it's really interesting. And in the first section, they talk about the whole

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idea of mise en place and he calls out two specific things between the kitchen and the office,

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which I thought was really interesting from a productivity perspective. So the main ideas that

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pertain, especially to the chefs that he was talking to, because these are like the world-famous

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chefs, the ones cooking on TV and the really fancy restaurants. It's not the guys working at TGI

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Fridays. No, no, not exactly. Yeah. So there's an idea that he unpacks in the book of craftsmanship,

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which totally makes sense from that perspective. And that reminded me of the craftsman mindset from

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when we read Deep Work by Kael Newport. And in there, he talks about, not to rehash that whole

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book, but there was one story in particular that really stood out to me about the guy in Wisconsin

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who made Viking swords and how there's no market for these Viking swords, but he gets paid a lot of

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money for each one he creates, even though it's so much work, because he's developed this craftsman

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mindset towards it. And I think that the really good chefs, they do the same thing when they apply

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that craftsman mindset towards the dishes that they are creating. And I think that that's a really

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powerful idea that people need to apply to their own work, whatever it is. And if you apply that

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idea of craftsmanship towards what you are creating, even if you are cranking out widgets, like you're

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not, maybe you're not a knowledge worker, you don't do quote unquote deep work, like you can still be

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invested in what you're doing, do it to the very best of your ability, and really approach it like

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a craftsman. And that's going to have a very positive impact. The other idea, which is,

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which is really interesting to me and something that I've talked about recently that I've struggled

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a little bit with chefs, they leave work at work. They're not going to take their mushrooms home and

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cut them at night, you know, I'm bringing back to the restaurant. And they're kind of forced to

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do that because of the way that their workspace is set up. But how many of us, you know, myself

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included, like, I'm done for the day, quote unquote, and then I'll go upstairs. And we're just talking

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about email on my phone, you know, like, I'll go check something. I'll find something somewhere

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which can pull me back into thinking about work, if I'm not careful. Because there, there isn't

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that physical place change that happens. I don't hop on a train and commute every day and like,

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okay, I'm done now. It's, it's a lot harder to make that mental switch. But one of the reasons

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that these chefs are successful is because that's what they do. And that reminds me of a lot of how

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like life on the farm that I came from, where I grew up, because it wasn't a matter of trying

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to keep track of the work you needed to do, because you'd walk out the back door and you could see,

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like, oh, the cows are hungry. I guess I should feed them. Okay, gonna do that now. But it's not

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possible for me to take the chore of feeding the cows home with me at night. Like, it doesn't work,

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but you have to go to them to do that. Like, I can't do that in my kitchen. You can't worry about,

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I wonder if the cows are. Yeah, right. Like, plain. Okay. It's not gonna be anything. So,

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it's just different. Whereas, you know, when we were talking about some of the stressors of,

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you know, running businesses and stuff before we started recording, and one of those that,

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like, I've seen that a lot lately is just how often I think about client projects

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over dinner with my family, which is frustrating. But how do you go about stopping that? I don't

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know. I don't know that you fully can. I mean, in theory, you can. But if you start quizzing people

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who say that they've beat that, well, it does still crop up once in a while. It still comes up

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fairly regularly. So, I don't know that you'll ever fully beat that in the world of knowledge work.

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But I think there's a lot of things you can do to somewhat alleviate that or build cultures that

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alleviate that. So, yes, I'll have to say, in today's world, it's very different than the world of,

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like, a kitchen or a farm. It's just a different setup altogether. Yeah. And I think that there's a

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lot of similarities between those two, which we could probably unpack except I have no idea of

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what really goes into being a farmer. But one of the phrases that stood out to me in this first

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section was that tomorrow starts today and they get everything ready. It seems to me, like,

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if you're going to be up at the crack and dawn and you're going to be doing X, Y, and Z on the farm,

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you have to have thought that through ahead of time. You have to know what the next thing is

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all the time. Is that a fair assumption? Yeah. I mean, at least the farm that I operated on,

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it was pretty easy to just know which fields you need to take care of and what the animals

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need every day. So, you're building routines and processes that happen every single day in

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order to know what comes next. Yeah. But farms are big sometimes. Yeah, it's going to be like,

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I'm going to go do, let's see, what do I feel like doing? I know I'll go do this thing and you go

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way over to the north end of the farm and then you're like, oh, I forgot, I'm supposed to feed the

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animals, go way back down to the south end of the farm. You know, like, you can't do that. It's not

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going to work. How many of us knowledge workers, though, would take that approach to our day,

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true, wake up in the morning. It's like, well, what should I work on now? Better check my email.

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Oh, look, there's something I need to respond to. Yeah. You know, which is why I printed out that

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sheet and I fill it out every day because that provides for me enough direction that I kind of

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know, like what the next thing is. I don't, I don't feel out of control anymore, where you are

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constantly being thrown back and forth about like, what is the next best thing to do right now?

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Like you have some plan for your day and yeah, maybe it gets thrown off, but that's okay. The

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intentionality that you applied to it, like that's really the important thing. And that kind of gets

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into the three values of, of me's and plus from this book. Number one, preparation, number two,

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process, and number three, presence, which I think maybe you could use the word mindfulness here,

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like being aware that this is the best thing. You're not just like going through the motions

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and doing a road task just to check off a box, like applying everything that you have to the

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thing at hand. And then preparation, having all your tools, everything ready to go. So when you

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sit down to do it, everything is right there. And then process standard operating procedure,

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you know, this is the way we do things. So that makes it easier to do it. But ultimately,

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the thing that makes it high quality is the mindfulness aspect of the presence of the third

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part of that. Yeah, and there's, I think you're right with the presence to mindfulness piece.

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And I think there was one place where he even made that jump with the office setup. Because I

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think that's something that comes up quite a bit. How many times have we talked about meditation

00:19:00

on this show? And how many times have I said I'm going to try it and don't fully follow through

00:19:06

on it? That part struck me, I guess. Yeah. That's funny. I didn't even think about that. But yeah,

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I can totally see how you could go there. I don't think you talked a whole lot about that aspect

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of it throughout the book. Not throughout it. No, I can totally see where your brain went.

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I made that jump right away. I'm projecting a little bit there. But I was thinking about it

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in the back of my head. He refers to a lot of scenarios where the chef is doing something

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very stressful and very high intensity. And yet they're in like a zen-like mode. And every time I

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saw that analogy or that reference, I was like, "Okay, so how do you translate that to the office

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setup?" Well, I guess that brings us back to the world of meditation again. We're stopping

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and taking a breath. How good are you at this, Joe? Quite terrible. And yet if we look at action

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items, I have nothing around this. So I thought about it a lot, but yeah, I'm still not going to

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put an action item on it. I may have to force you to read 10% happier or something.

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What was the big one that everybody talks about with meditation? Probably 10% happy.

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That's the damn near story. It's not a typical self-help type book. It's more his story,

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but he was the NBC Nightline guy who had a panic attack on the air. And he's like,

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"What's going on here?" And then tried meditation and his unscientific estimation,

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he said it makes him about 10% happier. Yeah. Well, I know that I always struggle to know

00:20:48

if that's the right book or not, because I think of the tagline a lot versus what the actual title

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is, which has something to do with meditation for skeptics or something like that. That's how I

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think of it. But yes, please don't make me read it. Do I have to read that?

00:21:04

All right. Well, I won't let you read it now anyways. We've got our next couple books picked up.

00:21:12

On that topic, though, it's interesting. They had a statistic in here that Americans spend more

00:21:17

than $10 billion per year on self-help. Holy cow. So if you've been to fit from Bookworm,

00:21:24

send us a couple of bucks. So how does Bookworm get into that category?

00:21:29

Yeah, I know it couldn't. I saw you in my mind maps. There you go.

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This one's pretty big. And I also started doing something a little bit different. I put

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little emojis next to the things that I wanted to call out for the outline.

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Really just to review. So I've got my I use my node and I create action items,

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so tasks for my action items. And then key ideas, I put a little key emoji before.

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Quotes that I wanted to remember, I put a little quote bubble. And then the talking points,

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I have the speaking head. So that made putting together the outline for this actually really

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easy. I just went and found all the little speaking head icons throughout stuff.

00:22:07

Nice. I have to ask you before we move on to the next section, though. What did you think of this

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story about Jeremy? Which one's the one about Jeremy? The office story at the very beginning,

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the guy who tells his wife that he's going to be there for soccer or something, and then

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his entire day gets thrown off and he forgets everything and does nothing. It sounded like a

00:22:26

lot of managers they used to work with in corporate. Okay, I kind of had the same reaction to that

00:22:33

story as the story at the end of boundaries. I'm like, okay, we get the point, dial it back about

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sure. Five notches. But here's the thing though, like I didn't feel like that one was far fetched

00:22:44

in this case. In boundaries, I felt like it was forced and he exaggerated some things. Okay.

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But I can think of about three people who had that experience or worse on a regular basis.

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So to me, I'm not sure I would think that one was far out of line. But at the same time,

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it's pretty intense. I think about the people that I know now and my life and how things work now,

00:23:10

it's like, that is intense. Did I ever work like that? That was what went through my head,

00:23:15

Mike, was like, did I ever do this? One specific detail of this story that just stands out to me

00:23:20

is the fact that he's in the meeting daydreaming about something he's supposed to be doing and

00:23:24

then agrees to do something he doesn't even know what he agreed to. I was like, nobody does that.

00:23:29

Yeah, they do. I'll admit that I wasn't paying attention. Hey, can you repeat that one more

00:23:36

time before? Oh, yeah, yeah, no problem. And that one actually bit him because it came back and

00:23:40

it was something he had to have done that day and it applied to, yeah, he ended up missing a

00:23:45

whole deadline because of it. So, yes. Well, I'll defer to you, I guess. If you say that happens,

00:23:50

I'll believe you. But I read that and I was like, okay. I kid you not late last week,

00:23:56

I had a client that did that to me. I asked if something was okay by a certain time frame.

00:24:00

They said yes. And then we followed up on it earlier today and they don't remember that

00:24:06

happening at all. I have a recording of this. So, I can prove that this is something you agreed to,

00:24:17

but they had no clue. So either they were trying to get out of it or just completely

00:24:22

spaced on it. It happens. It does. Sorry, Mike. All right. Yeah. Like I said, I'll take your

00:24:27

word for it. In that case, these people, they definitely need these 10 ingredients we're about

00:24:31

to talk about. Sure. Sure. But you've got four of the 10 here. Do you want to read all 10 of them

00:24:36

off? And then we'll do a talk about four of them? Yeah. I think it's probably too much to go

00:24:40

through each one. And I don't think each one really deserves. Yeah. There's some pretty sweet

00:24:45

explanation. But there's a couple of them that think stood out to me. So, yeah, let's run through

00:24:50

all the 10 ingredients as they call them in the book. And then we'll pick out a couple,

00:24:56

which, by the way, backing up just a bit, there's again, this book is split into three different

00:25:00

sections. Yeah. But because it's based in the world of chefs, they call it first course,

00:25:06

second course and third course, which was at least clever. First course is the power of working

00:25:11

clean, which is kind of what we talked about with Mise and Plast introducing that idea. The

00:25:15

second course is the 10 ingredients of working clean. And then the third course is working clean

00:25:19

as a way of life. So the 10 ingredients, real briefly, the first one planning is prime.

00:25:25

Second one, arranging spaces, perfecting movements. Third one, cleaning as you go.

00:25:30

Fourth one, making first moves. Fifth one, finishing actions. Sixth, slowing down to speed up.

00:25:36

Seventh, open eyes and ears. Eighth, call and call back. Ninth, inspecting, correct.

00:25:42

Tenth, total utilization. So lots of different stuff there. A lot of these are productivity

00:25:49

principles that I'm familiar with, but they phrased them a little bit different. Some of the stuff

00:25:54

is really great advice. Some of it, I'm not sure I agree with, which is why I picked out just a

00:25:59

couple of these. And if you want to talk about any other ones, feel free to put them in here.

00:26:02

I have one I'm going to add that you talk and I'll add. Okay, cool. The first one though,

00:26:07

planning is prime. And I should also add that each one of these ingredients is a chapter and

00:26:13

he starts it with a story about a chef and usually some failure and then correction of the principle

00:26:19

that they're going to be talking about. And at the end, they give a couple pages of kind of like

00:26:25

action items. They're not really action items, but it's distilling it down into more practical

00:26:31

applications of this outside of a kitchen, which I thought was kind of cool. But in this first one,

00:26:37

they talk about different types of planning errors and how you need to be able to plan ahead.

00:26:44

Key idea from this section is to greet the day, not fight it. This is where that phrase,

00:26:51

chefs don't plan well because they're better than us. They plan because they don't. If they

00:26:54

don't, their career is dead. That's where it comes in. And the thing that I want to talk about here

00:26:59

is the section of page 57, at least in my version of the book, where they talk about tasks and how

00:27:06

they should be on your calendar. So before I rant, I'm going to give you a chance to either

00:27:14

jack me up or talk me off the ledge. Okay, I'll talk you off a ledge because this is one of my

00:27:19

action items. Okay. And it's a little bit too full that I guess I have it is two different

00:27:23

action items here. But so OmniFocus, one of the things that they've implemented on

00:27:32

the iOS three, the OmniFocus three version for iOS, is the ability to see appointments on your

00:27:39

calendar and do tasks or deferred tasks all in a line so you can see them as the day goes on.

00:27:48

And that's coming to OmniFocus three for the Mac as well. So they're bringing that over.

00:27:55

If you use due dates, because I don't really use due dates at all. In OmniFocus, it means that I

00:28:05

can use due dates for whatever I want. And whenever I have an actual date, when something absolutely

00:28:12

must get done, I already have a habit of putting it on my calendar. So because I know I have to happen

00:28:18

that day and my calendar is my roadmap for the day. So because I'm so picky about that, I can use

00:28:25

those due dates and use OmniFocus to use the two of them in conjunction with each other so I can

00:28:32

see my tasks and the calendar items in one place without it cluttering up my calendar itself.

00:28:38

So like because of that, I can see what he's getting at. But at the same time, this can come back to,

00:28:46

I believe it's Patrick Rohn that said this at one point. This has been maybe three, four years ago.

00:28:53

Yep. I remember this episode of Mike's on Mike's like it was yesterday.

00:28:57

Yeah, I know. I still miss Mike's on Mike's. Come on, Farti, come on. But Patrick Rohn would say,

00:29:05

you know, if not now, when? Like he would see a very simple question. And when you really start

00:29:10

to get into it, if you're going to defer a task, when are you going to defer it to other than just

00:29:15

a black hole? Like, okay, if you're going to fully adopt that, then yes, it should either go on

00:29:21

a calendar or in a system that has a specific date and time when you're going to do it.

00:29:25

So that's the theory there is that, you know, if you're going to do something, commit to it and put

00:29:30

it, you know, say when you're going to do it and then follow through on it. I think that's the

00:29:36

mentality that he's going for here because, you know, I want to start using that forecast view more.

00:29:41

I haven't decided I put an action item here as hyper scheduling. But as I'm talking, I'm putting

00:29:49

a question mark next to that. Because I know this is something that David Sparks does and has written

00:29:56

about lately. But I've played around with using like estimated times in Omni Focus and then moving

00:30:03

them over to say fantastic. So that it puts it on my calendar. I haven't fully decided if I want to

00:30:10

do that or not, because typically my day gets derailed and it completely falls apart. So I am

00:30:16

not sure I fully want to do that. But there's some ways of thinking about it that I might want

00:30:21

to experiment with to get there. But I think I know where you're going to go with this whole

00:30:29

appointments and tasks being the same. So I'll quit my little journey and let you join in on your

00:30:38

rant. Okay. Well, before the rant, maybe I can redeem this a little bit.

00:30:42

Okay. So you're going to put a disclaimer on your rant now.

00:30:46

Well, I will say that as we record this about a month ago, I was a guest on learn Omni Focus

00:30:53

with Tim Stringer. Yep. And I walked through my Omni Focus setup and there were a handful of people

00:30:59

in there who said, "I can't believe how little you have in your Omni Focus."

00:31:05

And I get here. The other thing from people all the time though is, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe

00:31:11

how much you get done." So there's not a direct correlation between the number of tasks that are

00:31:17

in your system and the number of things that you have to maintain and the amount of work that you

00:31:23

actually produce. And I think that's a really big mental hurdle for a lot of people to get over.

00:31:30

So I will use Omni Focus strategically for a couple of different things. And I went over those

00:31:35

in the, I think there's a YouTube recording of it if people wanted to go look at it. So

00:31:40

I'll put in like ideas in there so that when I need to do backlog grooming for blog posts,

00:31:45

whatever for Asian efficiency, I've got a whole bunch of ideas. I can just slot them in. Now,

00:31:48

I jot those down as I think of them. I've got my 12-week years measured in there. I've got

00:31:53

thinking time questions. So when there's a question I want to ponder for a while,

00:31:56

I'll put it down with a tag of thinking time. And then when I do have thinking time, like I will

00:32:00

just go to that perspective and I'll grab one of those questions and I'll just think about that

00:32:04

for a while. So different applications of stuff there, but it's not a list of everything that I

00:32:10

have to do in a given day. And there's a couple of reasons for that. The big one is that Asian

00:32:17

efficiency is a team and Omni Focus is not made for teams, even with the web version. So we use

00:32:23

Jira, which means that I either have to copy all of those tasks in Omni Focus. If I want to work

00:32:29

just off of Omni Focus and then maintain two test management systems or be okay with when I'm in

00:32:34

Asian efficiency mode, I'm not even looking at Omni Focus, which is kind of where I've landed.

00:32:39

Now Omni Focus can do all sorts of great stuff like you were talking about. You can put in the

00:32:43

due dates, you can put in the estimations, you can hyper schedule, you can pack that forecast view,

00:32:48

and you can tailor it so it looks absolutely beautiful and tomorrow is going to be awesome.

00:32:53

And then exactly what you just said happens, it gets blown up. And then you've got to go back

00:32:58

and you've got to adjust a whole bunch of things, which is why the answer to the Patrick

00:33:04

Ruin question, if not now, when for a lot of the stuff I do, it'd be like, I don't care.

00:33:08

Not now, that's all I care about. Later somewhere down the road.

00:33:13

So yeah, yeah, I'll put it in a something maybe list, I'll review it every three months. And

00:33:18

eventually when it is the right time, I'll schedule the time to work on it. But I think doing that

00:33:24

on a regular basis with all of your different tasks is overkill for a lot of people. No,

00:33:29

I'm not saying that you can't do that. But I just think you shouldn't default to that.

00:33:35

And I think that there is a truth to be had here where there are scheduled and unscheduled tasks.

00:33:45

And your unscheduled tasks, if you really want to get them done, you've got to create the time

00:33:50

on your calendar to order to get them done. That kind of goes along though with one of,

00:33:55

was it this section they were talking about the not just the daily means, but like finding your

00:34:01

me's point, you know, how many tasks you can complete in a day. I think so. That sounds right.

00:34:05

Yeah. So I think that has a lot more value than saying, I'm going to defer this or make this do

00:34:11

on this particular day, because I can tell you if I started doing that, I would just be picking

00:34:16

arbitrary due dates sometime in the future. And then all of a sudden it gets to that day.

00:34:21

And there's 20 things here. And you're stressed out already and you're trying to

00:34:27

defer some things because there's no way you can get it all done. You might defer the wrong ones.

00:34:30

So I tend to fall into the camp of only put the absolutely time sensitive things on your calendar.

00:34:38

But I also, you know, a time block every day, and I set aside time for it. This is what I'm

00:34:42

going to be doing. I'm going to be doing deep work here. I'm going to be writing right here.

00:34:44

I'm going to be recording a podcast right here. So I do set aside the time for some of those

00:34:49

things. But I don't put all those details into a test management system and track all of that

00:34:54

because it's just not worth it to me. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think, you know,

00:34:59

whenever I mentioned like the hyper scheduling thing that I'm considering,

00:35:04

it's a bit of a misnomer, at least for me, because I think what I'm doing the best I can to

00:35:13

adapt to the tags thing and Omni focus. I'm trying. I was one that was kind of against them even

00:35:20

considering moving to tags. And I know I'm in the minority, but you're a purist.

00:35:25

Because even and I'm going to get into this later, whenever you start explaining the work

00:35:29

clean system, all I saw was GTD the whole time. I could not help it. Yeah. Side note, I

00:35:37

with the tags thing, I'm trying to get to the point where I understand and have a system that

00:35:44

allows me to put multiple contexts on a tasks on a given task. And the reason for that is because

00:35:50

what I'm trying to do is determine the types of work that I do or need to do. And determine when

00:36:02

the best time of day is for that type of work, which is a lot harder to do than you would think,

00:36:08

especially when you do client work, because I could spend the entire day just writing and

00:36:14

responding to email. And I think some of my clients would prefer it if that was all I did.

00:36:21

But especially lately, it's darn near impossible for me to stick with email.

00:36:28

But I think what I'm trying to do is determine what these types of work are.

00:36:35

Communications is definitely one of them, developing code or brainstorming. These are different

00:36:42

mindsets and different modes of working. And I know the different times of day, I think,

00:36:48

when I'm best suited for each of those. And the problem is that sometimes mid-morning is like a

00:36:54

sweet spot for me. So brainstorming needs to be at that time. But that's also like my core

00:37:00

deep work time. It's when I'm going to get code done. It's when I'm going to be able to handle

00:37:06

difficult projects. And that time is limited, even more so lately with health stuff. So because of

00:37:14

that, I have to pick and choose which of those mindsets I'm going to work on in those specific

00:37:22

times. So when I say hyper scheduling, that's the type of thing I'm referring to, is this mode of

00:37:28

work needs to happen at that time. And then tagging work in OmniFocus that fits that. And then that

00:37:35

is the view that I'm looking at whenever I get to that time of day. Which I think is probably similar

00:37:41

to what you're doing, just more intuitively and less explicitly. Is that fair?

00:37:46

Yep. So if I were to apply this myself, I would probably work the same way and say,

00:37:54

I've got two hours to do this type of task. And I'm going to go look at my perspective,

00:37:58

which contains all those types of tasks. And I'm going to select one or two to work on.

00:38:02

The difference is that I'm not going to put the due dates on those things, because who cares?

00:38:06

Yeah. And I think if I was working that way, I would probably ignore the due dates as well.

00:38:12

I think it would probably get to be too much to do it that way.

00:38:15

Yeah. And then obviously there's different ways that you can do this digitally or analog.

00:38:20

A lot of people probably would flag those or put them in an action perspective. And a lot of

00:38:24

people do that with email to put things they need to reply to in an action folder. But the

00:38:28

problem is that you just throw them all in the digital folder and then all of a sudden you go

00:38:33

in there to do stuff. Holy cow, I got 27 things in here for today. So that's why I transfer it

00:38:39

all to paper. And I've got space for five most important tasks. That's my my me's point or my

00:38:45

me's number, you know, those five things, whether they be meetings that have a specific time,

00:38:51

or they're just something that I need to get done at some point that day, those are the five

00:38:54

things that are most important. Those are the things I'm going to make sure that I get done.

00:38:58

And actually it's up to five. It's not more than five. I kind of felt the way that they describe this.

00:39:04

It seemed very open-ended about finding your me's point. How many tasks you can complete.

00:39:09

I think that's pretty dangerous, honestly. I think a lot of people will bite off more than they can

00:39:15

chew if like they just reading this book and they're going to start applying the system. Like they'll

00:39:19

do five one day and be like, oh, I can do six. You know, and then they do six and then it bumped

00:39:23

up to seven, eight, 10, whatever. And then before long, they're consistently not hitting their

00:39:28

me's point and stuff's backing up in their system. And then eventually they're calling

00:39:32

agent efficiency for help because everything's overwhelmed. We help people like that all the time.

00:39:40

They come there because like, I don't know what to do anymore. And I kind of see this system,

00:39:46

quote unquote, they teach in this book, like contributing to that if you're not careful.

00:39:51

I think there needs to be more parameters around this. There's got to be some training wheels.

00:39:56

Yeah, I'm with you there. During this section is when they introduced the concept of a daily

00:40:03

me's and we've talked about me's point and we've, I think we've maybe even referred to daily

00:40:09

me's already, but that's shorthand for me's and plus just to make that clear for the listeners.

00:40:15

By daily me's, you know, if you want to translate this, it's a daily review. And if you want to go

00:40:24

into the GTD world, this is when you're figuring out what tasks you're going to work on that day.

00:40:28

Like that's it. Really? I think it does get a little bit more than that. You know, this hyper

00:40:36

scheduling thing or this planning process, he says to take 30 minutes a day and do that,

00:40:44

schedule out what your actions are going to be for that day, clean up your desk, you know,

00:40:49

do all the little stuff to get yourself back in top working condition.

00:40:54

Who is it? Stephen Covey, sharp in the saw, that concept. Yep. That would be the same thing here.

00:41:01

This is a an idea that I think we've seen referenced in multiple books now. Everybody likes to

00:41:10

create their own term for it. Everyone likes to say, you know, they like to coin a phrase

00:41:16

around it, typically. So I think this is one that's useful. I've had something like this.

00:41:24

I don't think I've unified it as much as what he refers to. Like it's planning out the day

00:41:30

ahead of time is something I haven't been real cray-d at, but probably should be. So that's,

00:41:37

that's a piece that I want to try to do there. But planning out your day, cleaning up the work

00:41:42

space at my desk, cleaning up my digital workspace at the same time, like those are all

00:41:46

things that in theory I'm doing, but in reality, I do rarely. And that is the, the great hypocrisy

00:41:53

of every productive person. Especially every productivity writer out there.

00:41:58

Yeah. Yeah. We struggle with the same stuff guys. We know what to do, but we don't always do it.

00:42:05

Or in most cases, don't. Yeah. I had the same thought. And one of my action items is to create

00:42:10

my, my daily means. And I kind of viewed it in my head at the time. I viewed it as like a shutdown

00:42:17

routine, but hearing you describe it just now, I think that kind of clarified it a little bit more.

00:42:22

You explained it better than, than I had in my head. But the, the essential idea was still the

00:42:28

same. Like I want to make sure that before I leave for the day, I've emptied out my drafts inbox,

00:42:34

I've emptied out my Omni Focus inbox, I've emptied out my email inbox. Like that, those are the types

00:42:39

of things that I typically just leave. And then, okay, I'm done working. I got to go. You know,

00:42:44

I'll come back the next day and don't want to deal with this stuff again. And that's why like,

00:42:49

I won't check my email for a week. And then at Friday, I'll crank through 450 messages.

00:42:53

Same later folder. Yeah. And I think that like he said, it's 30 minutes a day. I don't even think

00:42:59

it would take me 30 minutes a day, but I want to establish that habit of just emptying those

00:43:03

things all the time. And I feel like that would give me a lot bigger sense of control over my day.

00:43:09

I think that like talking about GTD, you can tell that Dan is definitely a GTD fan.

00:43:14

Oh, sure. For sure. I think that he really, he really buys into this idea of, of, I think it's

00:43:21

David Allen. He said on the paper off the mind, you know, write these things down, put them in the

00:43:25

system that you can trust. And then you don't have to worry about them anymore. I recognize that I

00:43:30

do a good job getting them in. But then I don't look at them consistently enough to empty them.

00:43:34

I need to empty those inboxes. David Allen will call it on a more consistent basis. I want to

00:43:38

make that part of my daily means. Yeah. I do you know when you're putting this within your day?

00:43:44

Because I you mentioned like shut down ritual. That's exactly what I'm doing it or planning to do it.

00:43:49

That's the hard part. Because like today we're recording this podcast and then basically as

00:43:54

soon as we get done, I'm jumping in the car and hitting the ash gosh, even though my list is not

00:43:58

done yet. So what do I do there? Do I make sure I do my daily means anyways and just kick off the

00:44:05

other things I didn't get done until tomorrow? Maybe. I haven't really thought through that whole

00:44:10

process yet. But just like I've consistently do my morning routine now, like that was a struggle

00:44:15

for me for quite a while. But I've gotten into a habit with that. I want to do the same sort of

00:44:19

thing with this daily means. And I like the idea of the daily means better than just a shut down

00:44:25

routine. Yeah. I think the shut down routine, the way that's phrased, it makes it easy for me to

00:44:30

think like, well, I don't need to worry about that. I just got to go. But this is kind of putting

00:44:36

tomorrow. You're thinking about tomorrow today, like getting myself in a state where tomorrow

00:44:40

might work is going to be easier. I don't know. I think that might help it stick.

00:44:44

I created a checklist and OmniFocus literally called Meezen Ploss. Of course you did.

00:44:50

I know, right? And what I ended up doing, and I didn't really intend this until I started

00:44:58

planning it out. So I'm curious to see whenever you do this. And we talk about next time

00:45:02

how this actually works out because I had previously a checklist for the shut down ritual. And I had

00:45:10

like an evening ritual and then a daily review. All three of those, for whatever reason, when I was

00:45:18

planning this out, they seemed to all like converge on each other. And I realized that what I actually

00:45:24

needed to do was build like this checklist that starts right before I get off of work and just

00:45:32

runs until bedtime, which is weird to me that my entire afternoon and evening operates off of a

00:45:40

checklist. And I don't really follow it per se, but the structure is there. So it has things like

00:45:48

cleaning out, I try to do all like my inbox clearing before I get off work. But then there's

00:45:54

things that I try to do when I first get off work that helps keep the house up like checking on

00:45:59

laundry or checking to make sure dishes are put away or clean and that sort of thing. And

00:46:04

I've just found that those tend to help me keep my little world in order. And that's been extremely

00:46:12

helpful. But at the same time, the planning out of the next day, I have found, I think it's actually

00:46:19

best to do that at night before I go to bed. So I'm trying to do it from my phone, which means that

00:46:25

the system and omni focus that I end up using has to work off of that. Not a good idea. I don't

00:46:30

know that that's a good idea though. So like I, my brain starts to run with it. So I don't know that

00:46:37

that will really work out, but there's got to be some timing and they went it all works out. So I

00:46:42

think like for me, this whole daily me's thing like, kind of needs to be at the end of the work day,

00:46:47

but it kind of needs to be later in the day as well. So I don't know where it's going to land.

00:46:52

That's what you just described is the exact problem I've always had with any sort of like

00:46:59

evening routine in omni focus is I don't want to be going to my phone. And I even struggle with

00:47:05

this a little bit with my my journaling reflection, which I use a workflow workflow for soon it'll be

00:47:12

a shortcut shortcut. But like I don't want to go to my my phone for that type of stuff. It just feels

00:47:19

feels wrong on so many levels. But if you don't, like if you have your checklist in there and you

00:47:25

don't, then you get into it the next day and you have to go through and check off all the things.

00:47:31

Oh, I actually did that like that just kind of undermines the credibility of your system, at least

00:47:36

to me. It's like, well, if I did these things, but my system says I didn't do these things,

00:47:40

can I really trust my system? Fair enough. All right. That's a tough one. Let me know what you do.

00:47:45

Okay, we can talk about it next time when I still don't know what I want to do.

00:47:49

Yep. It's forever a process. Okay. So planning is prime. That's the first ingredient of the habits

00:47:58

of sorts. I'm going to skip number two. And this is the one I added here was number three, cleaning

00:48:02

as you go. Because I feel like this is something that I do in almost every area of my life as much

00:48:12

as I can, except digitally. So the concept here is that as you go about doing your work,

00:48:21

you're cleaning up behind yourself such that when you're done, you have very little to do because

00:48:26

it's already done, as far as like putting everything back where it belongs. I think a good place to

00:48:33

see this is just in people's general cleanliness around their house. Like that seems to be a good

00:48:40

way to see that, especially with kids because they do not do this. And it drives me up the wall.

00:48:47

And I think every night before dinner, I'm playing cop and you have this room to clean up. And you

00:48:55

have that room to clean up. And if you don't get it done in time, you will not be getting dinner.

00:48:59

Like that is the way it goes. But yeah, anyway, I feel like this is something that I have been

00:49:07

trying to pour over to a digital space, because I'm pretty sure on the digital side, I am terrible

00:49:17

at this. Simple things like I'm looking at Safari right now. And I think I have like 15 tabs open.

00:49:25

On that window, I also have four different windows open. So I probably have somewhere around 25 or

00:49:32

30 tabs open in Safari. Why? Don't know, just the way I do things. Some of those are articles I

00:49:40

want to read. Sometimes it's forms I want to fill out or products I'm looking at buying or

00:49:45

something like that. And instead of putting that somewhere and coming back to it

00:49:49

thoughtfully, I just leave a Safari tab open for it. No idea why I do that. But it's something

00:49:59

that I do. So I'm not real good about cleaning up behind myself digitally. That might have

00:50:05

something to do with the fact that it doesn't seem to matter because all I have to do is close the

00:50:10

lid and it's gone. So I don't have to look at it. I have a site out of mind. Yeah, so there's an

00:50:17

analog physicality aspect here where I don't have a problem cleaning up my desk, but I have a problem

00:50:23

keeping my computer clean. Do you deal with this? Is this just me? Because I feel like I'm a bit of

00:50:30

a crazy person here. No, I just talked about this in the first one. I don't empty out my inboxes.

00:50:35

Stuff sits in there forever. So I definitely need to do that, do a better job of that. I just put it

00:50:40

along the Daily Me stuff as opposed to cleaning as you go. But again, this is something I totally

00:50:47

get the value of and I struggle with because like you said, you just close the lid and you don't

00:50:51

see it anymore. But this section right here really hit on a bunch of stuff for me and

00:51:01

caused me to think about a whole bunch of things a little bit differently. And I don't have any

00:51:07

specific action items from this one, but I know that it's going to impact my workspace and even

00:51:14

like our home because it's a very small thing. But like I have my desk set up and I've got a big,

00:51:21

a bigger desk. So it's got plenty of room. And as we're recording this right now, I've got my

00:51:26

headphones plugged into my recording interface. When I get done, I take the headphones off, I put

00:51:32

them on the desk, but there is no place for the headphones. And after reading this section,

00:51:37

that bothered me. It's like, I've got pens out on my desk, but I don't have a place for the pens.

00:51:42

I've got my headphones on the desk. I don't have a place for the headphones. I got to buy one of

00:51:45

those Uggmunk gathers, you know, and I held off, but I like was so close to buying it like four or

00:51:51

five times last week. Like this is awesome. You know, when I saw it, when it launched, I'm like,

00:51:57

well, who who would use that sort of thing? And then I read this book and I'm like, I get it.

00:52:00

There's a place for this. There's a place for that. Oh, they make my desk so much better. I bought

00:52:04

a trash can from my office. I didn't have a trash can. I told this to do it.

00:52:09

How did you do that? How did you have an office without a trash can? That

00:52:12

but I don't even understand that. I don't have any use for trash can except for one thing. I fill

00:52:19

out this sheet every single day. And in the morning, if I haven't filled it out the night before,

00:52:25

you know, I'll rip the sheet off and I'll create the new one for the day. And I've got the

00:52:31

piece of paper. Now I have to go upstairs to throw it away. And I thought to myself,

00:52:37

it's one time a day. Why do I need to buy myself a trash can? Look at you. You're so fancy. You can't

00:52:42

go up the stairs. You know, like that's how I justified it to myself. And I'm like, no, like,

00:52:48

I need to have a trash can right here. Just for that one piece of paper that I throw away every day.

00:52:54

But yeah, and so like I want to I want to take additional steps, but I don't know exactly what

00:53:00

they are. And I definitely do not want to spend a bunch of money to to figure out a place for

00:53:07

everything in my workspace so that when I am done for the day, I can empty the inbox. I can

00:53:12

put everything back exactly where it is supposed to be put it in its home. And then it's right

00:53:17

there where it's supposed to be when I come back the next day. I have an action item here

00:53:24

over this. I want to sketch out my workspace. So my main desk, because I have things like I've

00:53:33

got a sound board. I've got a video encoder. I've got my microphone. I've got my headphones. I've

00:53:37

usually got two or three books plus some notepads, pins, like note cards. It's easy for me to rattle

00:53:44

all this off. I'm sitting here looking at it. I have all this stuff, but I feel like it is in a

00:53:50

good spot. But overall, I get the impression that it's not laid out right. Because even as we've

00:53:57

been recording this, I've caught myself like reaching across myself a few times. Like, okay,

00:54:03

so that tells me I've got the pins on the wrong side. But I can't put them over here because my

00:54:07

sound board is there. But I keep reaching over this way to do my sound board. Anyway,

00:54:12

all that to say, I think I have my setup backwards. But I'm not real sure. So what I need to do is

00:54:19

sketch out basically my desk and try to figure out, well, what hand do I normally use things with

00:54:27

and try to move things to that side. And I think that may actually force me to move my screen off

00:54:33

center, which might drive me a little bit mad because I'm pretty sure that I really like having

00:54:39

my computer sit dead center on my desk because that's what everyone does. But I think I actually

00:54:45

need it off center. And I don't think I'm going to like that, Mike. You and Johnny, I have both.

00:54:49

I know. I know. I want it centered. But I don't think it actually makes sense.

00:54:53

Logistically, I don't think it makes sense. But I won't know that until I sketch it out. So,

00:54:59

therefore, I have an action item to sketch it out. Cool. You're going to share your sketch with us.

00:55:03

Sure. I'll do that. Awesome. This is me dropping my pin because I was trying to grab a pin to

00:55:07

write it. Share desk sketch. There you go. I got it written down. Awesome. No idea where that's going

00:55:14

to land. It'll end up on bookworm somehow. Yep. Anything else from cleaning as you go or should

00:55:22

we go to the fourth ingredient? No, let's go to number four. All right. So, the fourth ingredient

00:55:27

is making first moves. I re-titled this in my head, eating your frog. Like that's really what

00:55:34

this came down to for me. We need to do that book. He talks about the first moments count more than

00:55:41

the later ones and that not all time is created equal. He talked about how the present has more

00:55:45

value than the future. I really do think that there's a lot of truth to all of that. The whole

00:55:50

idea of making first moves seemed kind of weird to me. But yeah, first things first, basically,

00:55:57

eating your frog, doing the things that you tend to procrastinate on early. That's not how he

00:56:04

phrased it in this book. But that's where my mind went. Like if you've got a big project

00:56:08

that you want to accomplish, you have to take action on that thing early in the day. It's got to

00:56:17

be important enough to prioritize. Otherwise, you're just never going to get around to it.

00:56:21

Which is why I always cringe a little bit when people are like, "Oh, I work better at night.

00:56:27

I'm a night owl. I'm just going to save my most important task for later on." And I'm like,

00:56:31

"Well, okay, you do you. But when you're still in the situation that you are and you're not

00:56:37

making as much progress as you want to, come back and let's talk." Because eating that frog,

00:56:44

that's the thing that got me to write my book, got me connected with Asian efficiency, got me

00:56:49

connected with everybody that I work with online today. That's really the thing. If you were to

00:56:53

distill how I got to where I am, the one thing I did was I ate my frog. I prioritize those things

00:56:59

and I did them first. So I get the idea of making first moves. And a lot of times,

00:57:04

there's different ways this could be applied too. It's not just doing the hard things first in the

00:57:07

day. It's also, you've got a big project. The natural tendency is going to beat a whole back

00:57:14

on that thing. Well, let me just plan this a little bit more. Let me fiddle with my system a

00:57:19

little bit more. Let me rearrange my tasks and alphabetical order and only focus. Rather than

00:57:25

doing something because it's hard. There's a lot of value in this. But I don't know. I think this

00:57:32

whole chapter made it a little bit more difficult than it needed to be. Really, just do the important

00:57:38

stuff right away. If I were to sum it up, that's what I would say. I think he screwed this chapter

00:57:42

up. I do. I think what you're getting at is what he intended. The story that he tells here is that

00:57:54

whenever something comes into the kitchen, so an order comes in for a meal. And the chef calls out

00:58:02

what that order is. And one of the cooks, the basic example that he uses is they take a pan and

00:58:10

they put it on the range. And that pan on the range is their reminder that they have mushrooms

00:58:17

to cook. Like that is how they know what comes out. And that is their first move is putting the

00:58:23

pan on the fire. Pans down. Yep. Pans down. Well, I think what he was trying to say and what he

00:58:31

ended up saying in the book was that do the first thing to get something started. Yeah. I think it's

00:58:37

how you got to eat that frog. But I think he used the wrong story here to introduce the topic. Because

00:58:46

to me, whenever you're putting, you know, pans down, putting a pan on the fire, what you're actually

00:58:51

doing is creating a reminder to do that. Like you're not physically doing the task. You're not doing

00:58:58

the thing you don't want to do first. You're creating the reminder to do something. And I cannot

00:59:06

place the word, but it has to do with something like propinquity or something like that has to do

00:59:11

with like putting something in place such that you don't forget it. Like if you want to remember

00:59:16

to take a book with you to work, set a book on top of your car keys, like that type of thing,

00:59:22

I think is what he actually should have been talking about in that in that particular chapter,

00:59:27

but he didn't. So like, I feel like he came at it wrong. Yeah. And I got really confused because of

00:59:34

how he was discussing a specific story, but then like made this pretty big jump to make the statement

00:59:41

of, you know, basically just get to work. Like was how I came out from that. But I really wanted

00:59:49

him to go to the to go through the process of explaining from a digital and an office stance

00:59:54

what the equivalent would be to creating that reminder, which I think if I were to make that jump,

01:00:03

what he's actually trying to do is say, right, it into a system could be when something comes,

01:00:09

like something comes you get it into your system. Like to me, that's what he should have been

01:00:14

making the jump for instead of, you know, do the most important things first thing in the morning.

01:00:19

Like to me, those are two different competing things that he was trying to convey in the same

01:00:24

chapter. That's a good point. I never really thought about it till you described it. But going

01:00:27

back over my notes, you're right. He kind of is talking about like, this is how you multitask.

01:00:31

Right. Right. It doesn't work. Like if you're going to apply this to the way you handle email,

01:00:37

if you were to because he talks about the three benefits of first moves, number one,

01:00:40

it creates a mark and I put in parentheses, task and omni focus, like you said, but let's say you're

01:00:44

going through your email and you're not using a task management system. Let's say you're just flagging

01:00:47

your emails. So you're going through your emails and you're just flagging them, not responding to them.

01:00:54

How does that help you? Like I could totally see a scenario where, okay, I flagged all my emails.

01:00:59

Now I'm going to go do something else and you forget about your flagged emails. In the kitchen,

01:01:04

you're maybe not going to forget that you've got a pan on the range. Like it's always right there

01:01:10

in your face. So maybe that example isn't exactly what he's talking about. But yeah, I guess that's

01:01:17

the first part, creating a mark and I zeroed in on the second and third of the benefits. It creates

01:01:22

momentum and then it multiplies your time. I think both of those tie directly to eating your frog.

01:01:27

You know, you do the hardest thing, first thing in the morning. For me, that frog, the idea is that

01:01:32

you can go through the rest of your day knowing at least you got that thing done and you feel good

01:01:35

about that. If your day doesn't get thrown off track, you've created a bunch of momentum for the

01:01:41

rest of your day. If your day does get thrown off track, then at least you got that thing done and

01:01:45

you can feel good about that. But because you're using your resources and the best way possible,

01:01:53

you know, the beginning of your day, you got the most mental horsepower and throw at things,

01:01:56

then that is going to number three, multiply your time. And he talks a little bit in here

01:02:01

about the time duality, like the immersive time versus the process time. I kind of view this as

01:02:06

like deep work and shallow work. You could probably do this a lot of different ways. You know,

01:02:12

regard figure out your own productivity system and you can figure out two different states,

01:02:16

you know, high energy and low energy. And you can break up your day based off of that. You know,

01:02:21

Chris Bailey would talk about your biological prime time and don't try to do your writing when

01:02:26

you typically have like the mid at the early afternoon law right after you eat lunch or something.

01:02:31

You know, so I think like that that is that's an important point here too. But I don't see these

01:02:38

things kind of going on at the same time and needing to put a marker down as soon as I hear

01:02:43

about something and then immediately switching to something else and just continuing that pattern.

01:02:48

At some point, I'm going to focus on things. And I guess with a kitchen, maybe it's a little bit

01:02:53

different because you don't know when that order is going to come in and you have to get a pan down.

01:02:58

But I at least have the luxury where I can close my email client and I don't open it till the end

01:03:05

of the day. Like I said, I'm a bad at email maybe. I check it or I get through everything like once

01:03:09

a week. But that's a choice that I make. You don't have that choice in a kitchen and you probably

01:03:15

don't have that choice in an office environment either for a lot of people.

01:03:18

Yeah, I don't have that choice. And you know, the example you gave of flagging emails,

01:03:23

like that's a good one because that's exactly what I do is, you know, I'm running through email

01:03:28

and I'm flagging the ones that I need to spend more time with. But the catch there is that I have

01:03:34

time in my day scheduled for when I'm going to go deal with those because it's not uncommon for

01:03:42

me to get a single email that can take me 30 minutes. Like that does happen on a regular basis,

01:03:47

probably on a daily basis. A lot of my day anymore is, you know, reacting to whatever comes at me.

01:03:53

So I don't know what I'm going to deal with most days. So I don't really get to plan a lot of

01:03:59

things ahead of time. I can plan, you know, like the new projects that we're working on or when I'm

01:04:05

going to respond to new client emails and such like that sort of thing I can, I can plan on, but,

01:04:10

you know, dealing with, you know, bugs in the system or doing deployments and stuff like that

01:04:17

stuff is real time. And I'm on the phone or in the email client back and forth with clients

01:04:23

for an extended amount of time. So as little fun as that sounds, you know, especially to you,

01:04:31

I'm sure, like that is just the way that the world of client work seems to work, especially

01:04:36

in web development. Yeah, that's why I'm not there. Fun times. All right, number five,

01:04:44

finishing actions. Why don't you introduce this one? I feel like this one's right up your alley.

01:04:48

Sure. So the key point here is that 90% done is 0% done,

01:04:54

which makes sense from a chef's perspective. You're either done with addition. It's presentable.

01:05:02

It's exactly what the customer expects or it's not done and it's not going out. And I guess like

01:05:09

the way I work with Asian efficiency and some of their teams, like using the scrum method and

01:05:16

really agile or Kanban, you know, you could apply this a couple different different ways. It doesn't

01:05:21

have to be specifically scrum canon, but it's kind of built around this idea of the only work you

01:05:27

get done is the work that you actually ship. And that really talks about like that. That was

01:05:33

really the main idea in this section to me was finishing these actions because the ones that

01:05:38

you don't get finished kind of don't count. He talks about how excellence is quality delivered.

01:05:43

And he mentions in here, and this is the talking point I put down, is the reasons why we stop.

01:05:50

So the reasons that we don't finish actions and he lists four specific things. Fear,

01:05:56

fatigue, scatteredness, and overconfidence. And I thought maybe it'd be worth unpacking a

01:06:03

little bit. Like, what are the ones that we struggle with? I think for me, one of the things I am

01:06:11

prone to, although I tend to not say no to stuff, especially once I've said yes in the first place,

01:06:18

like it's hard for me to go back and say, you know what, I was wrong. I can't do this. So I think

01:06:23

for me, maybe one of them is overconfidence. And I don't have specifically like the list of

01:06:30

things that I'm not able to do because I've said yes to too much, but I'm sure that they're there.

01:06:36

I think the way that this manifests for me is that I just don't have the margin a lot of times to

01:06:40

recognize the better opportunities that are right there. Not necessarily even better work

01:06:46

opportunities, but opportunities to spend time with my family, for example. Those are the things

01:06:51

that can keep me from shipping, you know, quality time with my kids if you want to phrase it that way.

01:06:58

I think probably the one that I struggle with is probably around the fatigue piece that he talks

01:07:06

about. I feel like I have so, especially with, you know, running a business with web development

01:07:15

as its focus in a niche market that has no real competition for me. Like, there are a few freelancers

01:07:26

that compete with what I do, but there's not really another business per se of another team

01:07:32

that competes with it, which means that we get a ton of work and it's easy to get overwhelmed

01:07:38

and it's hard to keep up with. So because of that, it's easy for me to look at, you know,

01:07:44

here's an example. So I just pulled up my Communicate perspective on OmniFocus. So these are emails,

01:07:54

phone calls, Slack messages, you name it, you know, Trello board updates. Like, I've got

01:07:59

it all over the place. I have a little over 120 of these that I need to do right now.

01:08:04

Like that's, and when I look at that list, it's draining to even consider that I need to get

01:08:14

through all of that. So I have a tendency to say, oh, there's so much to do there. Obviously,

01:08:21

I'm not going to get it all done. It can wait an hour. Like, that's my tendency. And it's

01:08:27

frustrating because it means that that list can get longer than I can keep up with. So

01:08:32

then, then what you really have to do is either bring somebody on to do it for you, or just,

01:08:39

you know, eat your frog or, you know, do the scheduling piece or try to figure out what it is

01:08:43

that's keeping you from jumping in or take off a small piece of that and work on that.

01:08:49

But that's what I struggle with is just the sheer fatigue of the volume of things that I need to

01:08:55

be doing at any given time. But some of this has to do with just right now, I'm dealing with a lot

01:09:01

of health issues. And we talked about that last time. And that has put me in a spot where

01:09:06

I am getting behind on a daily basis, which means it continues to accrue. So then the question is,

01:09:12

what can I drop? And those are never fun conversations. Those are some things that Mike and I were

01:09:19

talking about ahead of time. Quick note, bookworms not going anywhere. So if that ever crossed your

01:09:26

mind, I'm sticking around with bookworm. So that's not a thing I'm cutting. But that's those are

01:09:31

the conversations I have to have. I'm not currently cutting anything, but I'm readjusting where I

01:09:35

spend my energy because of those issues. But right now that fatigue piece, definitely the one that's

01:09:41

keeping me from completing things for sure. Yeah. And I wanted to talk about that one specifically,

01:09:47

because I knew that that was something that you were dealing with. But there's a point that they

01:09:51

make in this book, which I think is important for everybody else who is not going through a physical

01:09:59

thing. They mentioned that fear often masquerades as fatigue. So if you find yourself in that position

01:10:07

where, Oh my gosh, look at all these things I have to do. I'm so tired. I don't want to do any of them.

01:10:12

The root issue really might be fear, fear that you landed this job and you sold yourself and

01:10:19

your skills. And maybe they're not where you said they were. You're afraid that you're not going to

01:10:25

be able to deliver on the quality of a thing. So you just drag your feet and don't even start. I've

01:10:30

been there. Or on the other side, maybe you know you can do this thing. And you're a little bit

01:10:38

scared of your success. And that sounds stupid to say, but we've unpacked that before on this

01:10:43

podcast where I think I've kind of dealt with that to some degree where it's like, well, yeah, I know

01:10:48

I can do this. And I'll kind of do it halfway because I don't really want to see where it's

01:10:55

going to go because that'll force me to make an uncomfortable decision about some other things.

01:10:59

And I'll have to let those things go. So I think that there's a couple different ways that this

01:11:03

fear could masquerade as fatigue. And I could totally see how that could manifest in the lives of just

01:11:11

about any of our listeners. The other thing I want to call it from this section is the comparison

01:11:16

that he makes between striving for perfection and perfectionism. Perfectionism, he says, is creating

01:11:23

something of highest quality. So if your skills aren't to a certain point, you will not be able

01:11:29

to create something of highest quality. And you will tweak and tweak and tweak and edit and edit and

01:11:35

revise, revise, revise, never ship the thing. That's perfectionism. But striving for perfection

01:11:42

is something a little bit different. In my opinion, anyways, when I read this, he says striving for

01:11:47

perfection is delivering something of highest quality. So it's doing the very best that you can,

01:11:53

but shipping the thing saying this is the best that I can do and then let other people weigh in on

01:11:58

whether it's good enough or not. If you're in a five star restaurant, you're doing a three star job,

01:12:03

like you need to know that you're not quite there yet. But that doesn't mean that this isn't a great

01:12:08

dish that you created or isn't a great article that you wrote, or this isn't a great podcast

01:12:12

episode that you recorded, whatever, for where you are right now. And the value is in the journey.

01:12:18

I think striving for perfection, that's kind of like the growth mindset sort of thing. I'm going to

01:12:23

spend an honest effort doing this thing, getting it as good as I can, but I am going to throw this

01:12:29

out there and for better or worse, people will say stuff about it, but I don't care. I'm going

01:12:33

to learn from it and I'll do better next time. Yes. I don't know what to add to that. I was

01:12:39

sitting here turning things like, "Okay, how do I jump in after that?" I don't even know. So,

01:12:43

well done. Thanks. Sorry for making it backward. No, it's okay. It's all right. No, I think that's a

01:12:49

good good good point there. So, let's jump into the next one to number six, slowing down to speed up.

01:12:56

I think this is maybe one of the most called out pieces, per se, if about like the whole meditation

01:13:05

thing, mindfulness piece that we were talking about earlier. I think this is maybe where it

01:13:09

manifested itself the most. But the idea is that if you're going too fast, you tend to get sloppy.

01:13:17

And when you get sloppy, you're not as effective and you don't accomplish as much.

01:13:22

So, with chefs in the kitchen, if you're moving too fast with a knife, you're possibly making a mess

01:13:31

of the counter instead of just your cutting board. And you're also creating more of a mess for

01:13:37

yourself to clean up later. So, it takes more to get it all done. But if you chop slower and more

01:13:43

deliberately, you don't create as much of a mess. Like that is the concept here, I think.

01:13:48

And so much of, you know, we were talking about like 10% happier. Okay. Should a Joe do meditation?

01:13:56

Probably. Is Joe going to do meditation? Not likely. At least not.

01:14:03

He doesn't have time. Not until Mike makes me read the book. But, you know, these are things that,

01:14:09

you know, Joe should probably do. But we're not going to do it right now. So, I played around with

01:14:15

a lot of, you know, can I be more intentional with each individual email and making it cleaner so that

01:14:23

it doesn't require as many back and forths like that is how I tend to translate it.

01:14:28

That doesn't work when you have a super high volume. But anyway, that's being a dead horse at

01:14:35

this point. But I think there's a lot of potential here for doing less and more deliberately

01:14:42

so that you're more effective. Which I think is a common theme we see across a lot of these books

01:14:49

and even have some of the books that we've read that are specifically dedicated to that topic.

01:14:54

But I don't know. What are your thoughts on it, Mike? The key phrase here is that chefs never run

01:15:01

because they're always in the right place. Which kind of blew my mind. Like if you see a chef running,

01:15:07

that's a red flag immediately to an experienced chef. It's like, you don't know what you're doing

01:15:13

because you wouldn't have to run if you knew what you were doing. Now, contrast that to just about

01:15:19

anything you see online, like the Gary Vaynerchuk's hashtag hustle, you know. And I wrote a book

01:15:25

called Val-Shall Hustle. But I've got a different approach to it than he does. And I think that

01:15:31

that's important. I think that that's one of the big lessons you can glean from this book. And it

01:15:38

really challenged me because there are times when I get frantic. I think for the most part,

01:15:44

I do a pretty decent job with this. But I've got an action item from here. I don't think I wrote

01:15:49

it down because there's no way you're going to be able to hold me accountable to this. But when I

01:15:54

feel pressured, when I feel the need to rush, I want to go deliberately slower when I feel rushed.

01:16:02

And you can apply that to responding to email. You could you could apply that to writing an

01:16:09

article. I mean, there's so many ways that you could apply this. I'll just use the writing

01:16:14

an article one as an example or writing a script for a video or whatever. Typically,

01:16:19

when I sit down to write a blog post or write a script for a video, I've got an idea of how

01:16:25

many words I need. So sometimes in Ulysses, I'll even put that as like a goal. And then you can

01:16:30

see the circle fill up. And when you get it long enough, it turns green and releases all those

01:16:35

happy chemicals in your brain. But I don't often do that because I'm quote unquote, "in a rush."

01:16:40

I just got to bang this thing out. And sometimes I can do it. Sometimes I sit down at the keyboard

01:16:47

and I'm like, "Okay, words come to me." And I realize that at that point, like,

01:16:54

I'm just pushing too hard. And sometimes I feel so stupid because I'll sit there for like 20, 30

01:17:00

minutes. And the longer it takes to like get something, the more pressure you feel. It's kind of the

01:17:08

same like when you're going to bed and you're like, "I got to get up early tomorrow morning.

01:17:13

Oh my gosh, it's 11.30. I've only got six more hours." It just makes it harder for you to fall

01:17:19

asleep. I do the same thing when it comes to my creative work sometimes. So I want to be intentional

01:17:27

about what next time I'm in that state, say, "Okay, calm down. We're just going to start real slow."

01:17:36

Just one sentence. And I think that that is going to be enough to help get me moving

01:17:45

and not waste all that time spinning my wheels. "Okay, I got to do this. I got to do this. I got

01:17:50

to do this thinking about all the things I have to do after I fold up my iPad and I'm done writing

01:17:53

or whatever." I think that this is going to help me to consistently be moving in the right direction.

01:18:01

And I want to deploy this tactically. I think this is similar to when I like taking my book

01:18:07

and reading in stressful situations or stopping and going and reading. To me, it's similar to that,

01:18:14

at least what you're talking about. It seems like it applies there. Maybe you could correct me on that.

01:18:20

But it seems like it's a... And that's been something that's led me to reading a little bit more.

01:18:26

But I've been doing less reading overall lately because of that overwhelm piece that I'm dealing

01:18:34

with right now. So health has not been kind to me and it's been causing problems there.

01:18:40

Recurring theme noted. But I feel like doing a book and reading a book during stressful times

01:18:48

has been extremely helpful to me and slowing me down. But I'm kind of being forced to slow down

01:18:54

right now. But that's life. It's where it goes.

01:18:57

Yeah. And I guess the action item for me or the application of this for anybody else who is not

01:19:06

dealing with something physically being forced to slow down is to do that anyways. And there

01:19:12

are productivity benefits that come from that. Because like you said, if you slow down, you're

01:19:16

not going to be making such a mess. You're not going to have to fix things later. You're going to

01:19:20

get it right the first time. And I think a lot of it for me just comes down to the procrastination.

01:19:26

Like, I don't want to do this right now. But I will just, you know, I'm just going to write

01:19:33

a couple of sentences. Just going to do this for five minutes. And as soon as you do that,

01:19:38

as soon as you take one step in the right direction, it gets a whole lot easier.

01:19:44

That's kind of the approach I want to take.

01:19:45

Just get it started. Just do the first thing.

01:19:48

Just get it started. But the way to do that is to slow down and to scale it back. Like,

01:19:54

not say, okay, thousand words, half an hour, go. Because I've done that before. And sometimes

01:20:00

I get done and I'm like, hey, that's actually really good. But not always. And when it doesn't

01:20:05

happen, don't get frustrated. And you know, for the first five minutes, when nothing's coming,

01:20:10

don't be like, okay, now I got to get thousand words done in 25 minutes. Like, okay, no,

01:20:14

first minute, this isn't working. What we're going to do is we're just going to scale this back.

01:20:18

We're just going to do this. You know, you can do this. This is easy.

01:20:21

Right. I want to make it to the point where like, if you don't do it, it would be stupid.

01:20:27

Because it's so simple and so easy to do. Which is exactly the opposite of where my brain typically

01:20:33

goes. It's like, okay, now you got less time to do this thing. It's going to be even harder.

01:20:36

Now you really got to bring your A game. I want to be able to say, no, you don't need your A game.

01:20:41

Let's just settle for a C this time. And just get the ball moving. And I think that that's going to,

01:20:48

there's probably going to be, I don't know this off the top of my head. But I want to apply this.

01:20:53

Like I said, technically when I recognize myself in that situation, which has been a couple times

01:20:58

even today, I'm guessing that I'm going to be amazed at like, how many different areas of my

01:21:03

life I'm going to be able to apply this to. But I can think of a couple of my work, my daily work

01:21:07

already, where this would really help out a lot. Let's get you on the right track, it sounds like.

01:21:11

We will see. It's where the shot. All right. We've been talking for a while and we haven't even

01:21:17

gotten to the the working clean system. Should we go there next? Sure. So we can talk about GTD.

01:21:22

Yeah, actually, I was going to try and do this section without talking about it.

01:21:27

Now why would we do that? Because that's what it is.

01:21:29

That's true. That's true. I called out a couple of things in the outline here,

01:21:34

which I wanted to talk about. One of them we kind of mentioned already the two types of actions

01:21:39

to schedule and the unscheduled. He calls these steps to achieving your missions.

01:21:45

And he's got three different types of missions, self work and family. He talks about how there's

01:21:51

no difference between tasks and appointments. Or he talked about how I don't really agree with that.

01:21:56

But that being said, I guess you're right. Like the rest of this kind of is GTD-ish,

01:22:03

although there's no cool diagram to go with it. Yeah, the cool diagram is what makes it definitely.

01:22:09

Yep, maybe that's why he wrote a new version. Maybe he's got a diagram now.

01:22:14

I was trying to see if I could pull up all the individual steps that he writes.

01:22:23

There's four steps that he wrote in the back of the book. And some of them have more than one

01:22:27

sub step. So it's not really four steps, but the four steps are clean your station,

01:22:34

sharpen your tools, plan your day and gather your resources. So under clean your station,

01:22:39

he's got three that I wrote down anyways. Maybe there's more, but these are the ones that I

01:22:43

jotted down. Empty and log your physical inputs, clear and log your digital inputs,

01:22:48

and set the table. I view that as like getting your workstation ready so that when it's time to

01:22:55

sit down and do your work, you can do that as easily as possible. Agent efficiency calls

01:23:00

us clear to neutral, in my opinion. And then the other two, there's basically analog and digital

01:23:05

buckets that you've got to empty. I do think though that it's more complicated than just,

01:23:12

okay, empty the analog bucket and empty the digital bucket. Like there are multiple

01:23:16

buckets that need to be emptied. And I think there's value in identifying the different

01:23:22

inboxes that you have in your life that you want to empty regularly. That's one of my

01:23:26

actions with my daily means. I've already identified my email inbox, my on-the-focus

01:23:31

inbox and my drafts inbox. But maybe there's a couple others. I really haven't set aside the

01:23:35

time to think about this yet. And I want to make a list of all of the things so that I can say,

01:23:40

okay, yep, did that, did that, okay, I'm done. And I think until you identify those inboxes,

01:23:45

you really can't be sure that you've emptied and logged your physical inputs and cleared and

01:23:50

logged your digital inputs. Yeah, I have a whole list of inboxes that I, like in my

01:23:55

Mies and Plus project, I have process inboxes is one of those. But that's actually a sub check list

01:24:01

because there's a few different points throughout the week that all run through that. I'm just trying

01:24:07

to get it to where it's daily. But that list is where I can collect. These are the list of

01:24:13

inboxes that I want to process regularly. It's amazing how often I find myself adding one

01:24:19

to that list. Like, oh, there's another inbox that I have been ignoring for months. Maybe I should

01:24:25

do something about that. Yes. I like the concept of scheduled versus unscheduled work. But I think

01:24:31

that comes back to the conversation we started off with in the first ingredient of planning is prime

01:24:37

because I think that's similar to like schedule stuff has to do with like the appointments and

01:24:42

things that have to happen at a certain time or like for me deployments for websites. But then

01:24:48

there's a lot of the other side of it that we were talking about where you schedule blocks to work

01:24:52

on the type of task and that's kind of unscheduled where I'm going to work on things that doesn't

01:24:58

have a set date and time. I think that's the two differences there. At least that's how I'm

01:25:04

thinking about it. It seems to work out well that way for me anyway. Yeah, you can totally figure out

01:25:09

how to make this work for you. But I think unless you spend some time thinking about it and identify

01:25:14

all those things, it by default will not work. Again, just physical, digital isn't enough.

01:25:22

Maybe go ahead and give a bunch of examples there. He does talk about the tools for working clean

01:25:29

in another section in this third course here. I don't know. Maybe that is enough. But when I read

01:25:37

this, I immediately thought like, well, it's more complicated than that. I get what he's doing.

01:25:45

He's trying to condense this down into a simple four-step system. But I don't know. It's not that

01:25:52

easy. Did you look up their app? I did not look up there. I forgot about the app. There is a work

01:25:58

clean app. Highly, highly encourage you to skip it. Yeah, I mean, it's different. There's not even

01:26:08

enough ratings to show a rating on it. That tells you how little it's been used. The last time it was

01:26:16

updated was a year ago. I think that speaks for itself. That's all you need to know there.

01:26:21

Don't use the app. That's what I'll tell you. I downloaded it just to see what it was all about.

01:26:28

And got really confused. You can set up what he calls missions. And then you choose the first

01:26:33

action for that mission. And then the rest of the actions you define for that mission are back

01:26:38

burner actions. Basically, back burner content. It's this whole series of projects. And you can

01:26:48

only act on the first available action to use the Omni-focused terminology. I did look at this.

01:26:54

I didn't download it though. I took one look at it and I'm like, "Nope." Yeah. So, yeah,

01:27:01

it's very bare bones and very little you can do with it, it seems. So, yeah, just skip it. Don't

01:27:09

waste your time. Just get yourself a back burner context and I'm going to focus on you. Good to go.

01:27:13

Do you still use that? Not as a back burner anymore. I've got a couple things that have kind of

01:27:20

replaced that. I would say that they've kind of been replaced by the ideas bucket and then the

01:27:24

thinking time. So, that's right. It's not worth it. Well, they are back burner stuff. They are

01:27:32

things that don't have dates. They are always available. They're never like on pause, but they're

01:27:38

not things that I will in the course of my normal day, like go look at. I will wait until I've got

01:27:45

thinking time set aside on my calendar and then I'll pull up all my thinking time perspective.

01:27:49

All the different tasks that are available there and then I'll tackle one of those.

01:27:53

Again, if not now, when, who cares? Is my answer. When I get to it or when I'm good and ready.

01:28:02

Fair enough. Fair enough. So, the spirit of the back burner lives on, but- Okay. I still think I win.

01:28:11

You long-term in. I think the other- Just to run through the other steps here real quickly,

01:28:18

sharpen your tools, talks about adjusting your calendar and adjusting your action list.

01:28:22

This makes a lot of sense. The thing I would push back with here is that the action list should

01:28:29

not appear on your calendar. I think that those need to be two separate things. Number three,

01:28:34

plan your day. Totally on board with that one. The number four, gather your resources, gather the

01:28:38

tools you're going to need ahead of time that I completely agree with. The four steps here,

01:28:44

whether you decide to use these, whether you decide to use GTD or something else,

01:28:48

I do think that on page 227, there's a quote that I really like here that kind of sums up

01:28:54

this whole thing. He says, "Process Dodgers believe that they are artists and that creativity

01:29:00

needs complete freedom." But true creatives, the people who actually make the food, the art,

01:29:05

the architecture, the products and the services we enjoy, understand that excellence comes

01:29:10

from cultivating a craft through dedicated, dogged practice. True artists have a process.

01:29:16

A hundred percent, yes. It doesn't matter what your process is, but once you land on that process,

01:29:23

that is the thing that is going to allow you to be creative. It's not just waiting until

01:29:28

inspiration hits. Wasn't it Stephen Pressfield, the war of art that we talked about, he has a

01:29:35

quote in there from some guys like, "Only right when inspiration hits." Fortunately,

01:29:38

it shows up every day at nine o'clock sharp or something like that.

01:29:40

Right. If you set up your system and you follow the process, then the results kind of take care

01:29:48

of themselves. It's been a while back now, but at one point David Allen was doing some

01:29:52

interviews with creatives who were using GTD because he's been on this thing for a long time

01:29:58

and saying how people who are drawn to GTD are the people who need it the least,

01:30:05

whereas the people who need it the most are typically like creatives and such.

01:30:09

He was finding people, one of which I think was a rock musician who used GTD to write more songs

01:30:19

in a year than they ever had. That seems to strike a chord, at least with me, because I feel

01:30:26

like I'm drawn to GTD because I know that I need it and I fail miserably without it.

01:30:30

At least my view. This is work clean, not GTD, but it's the same system. When you look at how

01:30:40

he lays it out, it's the same thing. Just saying.

01:30:42

Nice. Yep.

01:30:44

And it there? I think so.

01:30:46

Before we get to the action items, I want to just say that the way this book is written,

01:30:54

I had a ton of action items. I actually dialed them back quite a bit for the ones that I put on

01:31:00

this list here. But the way that he wrote this really got me thinking about things in a different

01:31:06

light. And so that was definitely a pleasant side effect, I guess, of reading this book was that

01:31:12

even though a lot of these principles I've heard before, the way that he phrased them

01:31:16

showed me areas in my life that I could apply stuff like this. But to keep the next episode

01:31:22

from being a completely follow up episode, I picked four. Fair enough. All right.

01:31:28

All right. So the first one, I said put routines on my calendar and then in parentheses again,

01:31:34

because I have done this. I have a calendar on my I use busy cal to manage my calendars. I've got

01:31:41

several different personal calendars. One of them is called goose. It's the whole idea like

01:31:45

protect the golden goose. And those are the things that I used to like schedule on there when I was

01:31:50

going to go for my runs or when I was going to go to the gym, my morning routine, stuff like that.

01:31:55

And I want to get back into updating that calendar. It kind of fell by the wayside when I started

01:32:02

plotting out everything and time blocking everything on the piece of paper. But I can totally see how

01:32:09

putting this putting this first, putting the big rocks in self care first, will have have benefits.

01:32:16

So I want that not to be an afterthought. Also rethink sequential projects and omnifocus.

01:32:22

So that you mentioned the work clean app that is built around the idea of sequential projects.

01:32:26

There's one thing you can work on right now. Everything else is on the back burner.

01:32:29

I have never used sequential projects and omnifocus except when I absolutely needed to probably 98%

01:32:37

of my projects are parallel projects. But he talks a lot about doing like the first thing,

01:32:45

making first moves and stuff like that and identifying the things that you can do

01:32:49

right now. I realize that the reason I tend to go to parallel projects is because I don't want to

01:32:56

put any extra effort to identify what order these things need to be done in. And so that

01:33:01

challenged me like a lot of these projects, maybe they are sequential projects and I need to go back

01:33:06

and spend a little bit more time in my next weekly review and clarify some of that stuff and change

01:33:12

them from parallel to sequential. Next one is to write out my daily me's. We talked about that.

01:33:18

And the last one, which trying to think which ingredient this was from, but he talked about

01:33:27

oh, ingredient nine, inspecting correct. So identifying the things that are broken and then

01:33:31

fixing them. One of the things that I wrote down there was to keep a list of the mistakes that I

01:33:37

make. So the next time something is super hard. Is this going to be public? Maybe.

01:33:44

It'll probably be pretty embarrassing. I was expecting a pretty no on that.

01:33:48

Well, we'll see. We'll see. I want to though recognize when something is not working and instead

01:33:56

of getting frustrated about it, just that'll be my cue to jot something down, probably in drafts

01:34:04

initially. I'm guessing that when it comes to fixing these things, I'll create a list and

01:34:10

Omni focus. But my first step is just to make a list of all the mistakes that I make throughout

01:34:18

my day. So go to the go to the store and forget something. You know, that's going to go on the list

01:34:26

or go downtown and realize, you know, I forgot my computer. So can't do any work at the coworking

01:34:32

space. That is a ridiculous example. That doesn't happen. That stuff like that, I want to jot down

01:34:37

and have a list. Not to say, hey, look at what a big loser you are, but to identify the ways that

01:34:43

I can eliminate the friction as I go about my day. Fair point. I am kind of surprised you don't

01:34:49

use sequential projects and Omni focus. I think that is. I probably should. You know, reading this

01:34:54

book makes me want to. So I think I think I need to. Unlike I said, I do occasionally, but for the

01:35:02

most part, I just do parallel projects whenever I can. So I want to rethink that.

01:35:07

Yeah, I feel like I have a number of like, templated projects that I use for that, like releasing a

01:35:11

bookworm episode. Like that's a classic because, you know, there's a whole series of steps and they

01:35:16

have to happen in a certain order. I can't share the link on Twitter unless the link exists. So,

01:35:22

you know, those pieces have to be done in a certain order. So that's where sequential projects come

01:35:28

in for me is usually something that I know is going to repeat. Anyway, so mine, I have four,

01:35:35

maybe three, depending on how you define a couple of these daily. Meas. I mentioned like this flux

01:35:42

of between shutdown ritual and evening ritual. Because like, as we're recording this, it's four

01:35:49

o'clock just after right now. And usually I would have started that process 30 minutes ago.

01:35:56

So do the math. I didn't do it yet today. So how does that happen in on those days? Like those

01:36:04

one-offs. Do you just skip it and do it the next morning and it's entirely? I don't know.

01:36:07

But those are some things I want to try to nail down. As part of that daily meas one of the steps

01:36:14

there is to like plan out the next day in my digital calendar. I've tried this in the past,

01:36:20

but I think I've been coming at it wrong because I want to start using this OmniFocus forecast view,

01:36:27

especially since OmniFocus 3 for Mac is coming out very soon. I think isn't it a couple of weeks?

01:36:35

That's supposed to come out through four weeks, I think. It is officially September, but no

01:36:41

specific date. Yeah, because I think they were waiting to figure out when the new Xcode was

01:36:45

going to release. And I am drawing a blank on when that was supposed to happen. Maybe they don't know

01:36:53

yet. How they release is September 24th. So that would tell me the new Xcode would release

01:36:59

September 24th. That has to be out before they can submit it. So it's probably the last week of

01:37:05

September. Yep. Before that can come out. Anyway, I want to start using that. I'm primarily going

01:37:13

to use it for my phone anyway. So it's not a huge deal that it's not on the Mac right away,

01:37:18

but I want to start doing this scheduling of time blocks throughout the day. Maybe that's

01:37:23

hyper scheduling. I don't know. Kind of weird phrasing there. So anyway, I want to work on that.

01:37:29

And then finally, I want to sketch out my desk and try to get it laid out better because I think

01:37:34

I've got it set up wrong. And I'll share that as best I can. I don't really know what that's

01:37:38

going to look like. Maybe it's going to be on the whiteboard. That'd be kind of cool. That would be

01:37:42

cool. We'll see what happens during one of my brainstorming sessions. It'll be scary. Send us

01:37:47

pictures. Yeah, that's true. I'll take pictures. Okay. Got it. On it. All right. Author style and

01:37:53

rating. You know, you made the comment that it's easy to come away from this with a lot of action

01:37:59

items. I was in the same boat. I have like different ways of thinking about things because of this.

01:38:08

I think that has to do with the fundamental premise of the book because it's based around

01:38:14

something in real life, not just theory. A lot of books that we read seem to come from the basis of

01:38:21

scientific research or a theoretical concept that they have proposed. And although that's great,

01:38:29

I think this comes out of the other way around. Like they're taking a real world scenario and

01:38:34

pulling principles out of that, which means it naturally has a lot of examples and it has a lot

01:38:41

of very practical and sometimes very small details that you can apply, which, sorry, which I think

01:38:51

for you and I is something that we tend to gravitate towards. Like, oh, I could tweak that just this

01:38:56

little way. Like we like to tweak and fuss with things. So I think it applies to us very well

01:39:02

in that realm. So I think it's a great book and I should note this is a listener recommendation

01:39:07

and thank you for the recommendation. We'll talk about how you can do that here in a little bit.

01:39:12

But this is one that I'm glad to have read it. I think that he's a good writer because I feel

01:39:19

like his ideas I understood pretty well. In a couple places, I felt like he kind of botched

01:39:25

the example versus the way that he was talking about it when we went over that a little bit.

01:39:31

So I think as far as a rating, I'd put it at a four just because I think there's a lot that you

01:39:36

can take away from this. But I wouldn't say it's over the moon going to completely alter everything

01:39:42

you ever do and completely change the way that you do work. Like I wouldn't say that. And I don't

01:39:47

think it fits in the category of those four and a halfs and fives that we have floating out there.

01:39:53

So I'm going to put it at four. I'm going to join you at four stars. It's a good book. It's not a

01:39:58

great book. It's not life changing, but there's lots of things that I'm going to apply from this,

01:40:04

or I'm going to give a shot anyways. I think the core ideas are pretty powerful. I also think that

01:40:10

they are explained in the first section. I think the 10 ingredients part is the weakest part of

01:40:16

this, but it's also the longest part. So if you were to cut out a section of the book, I don't know,

01:40:23

maybe first course and third course, or at least condense the number of ingredients. I think 10 is

01:40:31

maybe too many. And it doesn't really explain how you're going to apply these using the system either.

01:40:39

I feel like the first course talks about the values of Meas and Plas, the third course talks

01:40:46

about committing to the values, implementing the values in the system, but doesn't really say,

01:40:51

here's how you apply the ninth ingredient, the tenth ingredient. Lots of stories. So those are

01:40:56

good, although not really caring about the culinary world. Sorry. It felt like a lot of these stories

01:41:03

started to sound the same. I was tempted to skip a lot of the later ones. I didn't. I read them,

01:41:11

but I felt like a lot of the stories, even though the people were sometimes even the same

01:41:19

between story to story. It was hard to keep track of, "Okay, this thing happened to this person,

01:41:24

and this was a lesson. Now this person's back, and they're creating a different point based on

01:41:28

this person. They're going to tell another story about another person, totally different situation.

01:41:32

They got to set that all up in the first part of each chapter. I didn't really care for that.

01:41:37

But I do think that it's a good book, and I would recommend it. I'm glad that we read it.

01:41:41

I already told my wife that she should read at least the first part of it. I think this whole idea,

01:41:47

Meezen Plas is really important, and it's become a rallying cry. So whenever we notice that something's

01:41:53

out of place or too hard, we're going to Meezen Plas. I just need each other to like, "Hey,

01:42:00

let's clean this up," sort of a thing. There you go. I subtly recommended that to my wife that she

01:42:07

should read it, and she read the tagline on it, "What great chefs can teach us about organization."

01:42:12

She looked at me and said, "No, not reading that." I'm like, "Okay, fair enough." I think that

01:42:19

wraps up work clean. So what's up next, Mike? Next book is My Choice, and that is The Happiness

01:42:25

Advantage by Sean Acor. The one after that is officially assigned to you, but I pushed you into

01:42:31

this. First off, the happiness advantage, the tagline on that is how a positive brain fuels

01:42:39

success in work and life. I'm very interested in this one. I'm glad you picked it.

01:42:43

It's an international bestseller. It can't be bad, right? It shouldn't be bad.

01:42:51

Anyway, that's Mike's official pick. Then we're doing a special thing. After that,

01:42:59

I don't know what you want to call it. It doesn't really fit.

01:43:02

Yeah, let's not make too many promises here, but let's just say we are going to cover

01:43:07

hyperfocus and maybe we'll have a special bonus. Okay. Yeah, there's the potential bonus in there.

01:43:13

So this is kind of a joint selection, I would say. So anyway, it's different, and I don't really

01:43:21

know what that's going to mean quite yet. What's going to happen is Mike has the next

01:43:27

selection, which is The Happiness Advantage. Then we're going to do hyperfocus, and then I'll

01:43:31

select a book for after that, and I don't know what that is yet. So Mike is next, then we're

01:43:37

joint next, and then after that, I'll pick one up, and then we'll go back into the order of things.

01:43:43

So it might throw things off with if people are used to Otter even on who's picking and such.

01:43:49

Yep. Because I think there's a few people that have mentioned that it's like, "Oh, Joe always

01:43:51

picks on the even number episodes." I'm like, "Well, sorry, we're going to throw that off."

01:43:57

We messed that up not too long ago. It's true. It's true. We did. So now we got to get it back

01:44:01

online. So that's why we're doing it. Totally. It's the 100% the reason why we're doing this.

01:44:07

And then for Gap Books, I have access again to a pre-release, which is Atomic Habits by James Clear.

01:44:15

James Clear is one of my favorite internet writers, and he writes a lot about habits. If you've

01:44:21

ever read any of his stuff, it's jamesclear.com. Atomic Habits looks to be a lot of the same type

01:44:28

of writing. So I'm anxious to dive into this one. Okay. So you haven't started yet. I was going to

01:44:33

ask you how it compared to the power of habit. So I'm curious. I've just read the first section,

01:44:38

which is his story, which is pretty wild. Okay. I'm going to mess up some of the details. But

01:44:43

basically, I believe a baseball player in high school got hitting the bat with, or hitting the

01:44:49

head with a bat and rushed to the hospital and basically had to reform his life. It was pretty

01:44:56

serious. And Dr. said, "You're going to deal with this stuff?" Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was able to

01:45:00

overcome a whole bunch of it through habits, having to address it that way. More details,

01:45:08

maybe forthcoming. Okay. Fair enough. I'm interested in that one. But yes, I actually did get a

01:45:14

gap book read this last time around. Love is the Killer App by Tim Sanders. You did this one.

01:45:21

Such a good book. Yeah. It's a little odd given that it was written in 2002.

01:45:28

And he's talking about how great Yahoo is. He was the chief operations guy or something for

01:45:35

Yahoo. So this is 2002. So Yahoo was... He was working with Mark Cuban. Yeah, it was a big deal then.

01:45:40

So it's a little odd to be reading it now thinking about then. But other than that,

01:45:46

it's been great. I'm almost wrapped up with it, but I've really enjoyed it. So it's a good one.

01:45:51

Principles are so good. In fact, the subtitle of that, I was just looking at it. I don't have it

01:45:57

in front of me, but we read how to win friends and influence people. It's...

01:46:01

How to win business and influence friends.

01:46:03

Yes, yes, exactly. It's kind of a different take on it. I was kind of clever.

01:46:08

It's cool. I like it. It's a fun book.

01:46:11

All right. So if you want to recommend a book, you can do so at bookworm.fm/list. I believe that's

01:46:18

got a list of all the books and a button to recommend a book. But there's also the Bookworm

01:46:23

Club. So that's club.bookworm.fm and you can register there and recommend a book and

01:46:28

book for ones that you want us to cover. And if you join the club, it's easy to recommend a book.

01:46:34

There's a button at the top that says "recommend." And if you click that same button on the bookworm.fm

01:46:39

site, that's just what it does. It takes you over there so that you can recommend a book there.

01:46:44

Just share the link to the book on Amazon. That way we can figure out which one you're talking

01:46:48

about and tell us why you want us to cover it. But also, there's a link in the show notes for

01:46:54

the iTunes show. So click on that. You can leave us a review. Are we still trying to take down

01:47:01

KCRW? This is kind of your thing. We are. I actually have a couple. I've got it open. So I've

01:47:06

got a couple reviews to call out here. First is COOKS 14202, who says, "I love learning new things.

01:47:14

I've got a long list of books to read. Can't read them fast enough. While those books I want to read

01:47:18

or have already read or reviewed in great detail, buy these two people. Joe and Mike dissect productivity

01:47:22

books in detail. In an entertaining way, after listening to each episode, I feel like I get almost

01:47:27

as much out of it as if I were to read the book in the first place. I had a book every now and then

01:47:31

to my reading list, but I'm happy just learning what I can. Listening to Joe and Mike in many

01:47:35

cases. From listening to this, the best thing I've gotten out of it is the action list. The hosts

01:47:39

create each week based on the books they read, how to apply what they learn each week to real life.

01:47:44

I've started doing that myself. Get more out of every book I read this way. It says, "Become my

01:47:48

favorite podcast." So thank you, COOKS 14202, for that five-star review. That's really cool. I also want

01:47:54

to call out a one-star review. Okay, so this one, our first one-star review. Awesome. This is by

01:48:02

Jesse Geeks. It says, "So close to being a great podcast, but both of the hosts can't seem to make

01:48:07

it a single episode without discussing their religion." This would be appropriate for religious

01:48:11

podcasts, but for podcasts, both nonfiction books, is completely undermines the host's credibility

01:48:16

one-star. Sorry, Jesse. I am who I am, and I'm sorry that that it's so close to being a great

01:48:23

podcast for you, but be telling my story makes it intolerable. Listen to, I know that there's

01:48:29

going to be people out there who are just completely turned off by that, but I don't know. I can't

01:48:33

fake it. As I said to somebody in the bookworm club, you should read these types of books and

01:48:37

these types of books. I'm not interested in those types of books. I don't consider this, by the way,

01:48:43

a nonfiction podcast, it's a growth-minded podcast. I would say that we're here because we want to

01:48:54

learn and be better than we were yesterday, and we invite anybody who wants to do the same thing and

01:49:00

can tolerate us to join us for the journey. It's so great to be a great podcast, and then you

01:49:06

rated it a one. I don't really think we rate that way. I guess we weren't that close. Yeah,

01:49:12

apparently we were way off. Yeah, I don't put much stock in those, but that's where it goes.

01:49:18

So anyway, if you want to be the first reviewer there, and you have a bunch of action items,

01:49:23

if you want, you could share them on the club. That's a way to do that if you want. If you're

01:49:28

looking for a little bit of accountability, Mike and I have each other, and we have this show,

01:49:32

and we have all of you that are keeping us honest. So there's a little bit of accountability there

01:49:36

as well. But if you want some of that accountability, you can use the bookworm club for that as well.

01:49:42

So feel free to share your action items out there as well. All right, so thanks, everybody,

01:49:47

for joining us. The next book that we're going to cover is The Happiness Advantage by Sean Acre,

01:49:54

and we will talk to you in a couple weeks.