56: Hyperfocus by (and with) Chris Bailey

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Hey everyone, this is Mike.
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Just wanted to let you know before we get into this episode that we have a special guest
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interview with author Chris Bailey at the end of this segment.
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Chris has been on a lot of different podcasts talking about the content of the book, so
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in this episode we talk about the process.
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We talk about the lessons that he learned from writing the first book, the Productivity
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Project and how he applied those in this book.
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And we nerd out about some mechanical keyboards and the writing process itself.
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So if you want to go straight to that section, there are chapter markers in this episode
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which will allow you to do just that.
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And if you're a regular listener or a bookworm, make sure that you don't tune out early and
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you stick around for that conversation because it gives a little bit different perspective
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on the book writing process.
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It's a really fun conversation.
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So with that said, here is Hyper Focus by Chris Bailey.
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We got a big episode today, so we better jump in here.
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Let's go straight to follow up if you're okay with that.
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I'm good.
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Ready to set go.
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All right, so I've got three of them.
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We'll start with the one that is impossible to quantify.
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That is of me being a better friend.
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The cheater action.
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Now I like to think that I did better in this area.
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I can think of a couple instances that I could say, I think I was a better friend because
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of this, but ultimately it doesn't matter what I think it matters, the impression that I
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left with people.
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It's kind of the thing that I've been thinking about lately because another one of my action
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items is to make a list of what I can and can't control.
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So kind of related, but kind of getting into that one.
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One of the things that I wrote on that list is that I cannot control how people respond
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to what I write or what I throw out on the internet.
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I know you've dealt with haters online, Joe.
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So it can be frustrating, but what you can control is how you make somebody feel once
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you've been with them.
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So this was an interesting action item because it allowed me to recognize which lovers I
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can really pull and do something about and which ones I really can't do anything about.
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I also from this exercise of accruiting the two lists, what I can and can't control, recognize
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that there is actually a third list.
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So there are things that I can control.
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There are things that I cannot control and there are things that I can influence.
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So I have a limited amount of control over them.
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And some of the things on list lists just to give people some examples, quarterly goals
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for Asian efficiency.
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I'm involved with the management team.
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I go down to Austin once a quarter.
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We talk about our quarterly goals.
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I can say this is what I think our goal should be and this is why.
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And I know my input is heard and valued, but I don't get to be the one who's like, hey,
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this is what we're doing, guys.
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Oh, sure.
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Yeah.
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And then if you take that approach, not just with work, but also like your family, I can
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control or I can influence the level of planning and organization that we have at home, but
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I can't control it completely.
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Just as an example, my wife and I have a shared family calendar.
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I can do my part to make sure that it's always up to date.
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She's got to do her part too.
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So I can influence that, but I can't completely control it.
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And this is interesting because typically, like when you have these systems in a family
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specifically, I think you notice them when they don't work and when they don't work,
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the tendency is to say to the other person, well, you messed up.
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So when you view it as like I can influence, but I can't control it, it's kind of forcing
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you to think about it as like a 50/50 split.
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So it's like we messed up and we need to fix this, which totally changes the conversation.
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That's interesting.
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Yeah.
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I haven't really thought about that.
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I've always thought of things as being like, yes, I can, I can do that piece.
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Like that's definitely something I, I set the direction for it.
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And these are other areas where absolutely can't do a darn thing about those, but I've
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never really considered about the ones that are like the in betweeners.
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So that's interesting.
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Yeah.
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So kind of along these same lines, I mentioned one of my gap books was Atomic Habits by James
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Clear.
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Right.
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He has a quote in there where every time you do a habit that you want to create, you're
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casting a vote for the person that you want to become.
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He's got a big emphasis on identity based habits.
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So if you want to be a writer, what does a writer do?
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You know, they write.
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And so by showing up to write every day, you've identified with becoming a writer, just as
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an example.
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And so you can take that approach to, I think for this, what can I influence list is like,
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this is casting my vote for what the organization or the family unit or whatever team I'm a
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part of should be.
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And then really after that, like just the process.
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So control what you can control and then don't worry about the rest.
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But I don't know.
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It kind of compartmentalizes it and frames it in a way that like when you do the thing
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that you that you can do, it's kind of like, okay, there, I've done my part, if that makes
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sense.
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So you feel good about doing the right action.
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And now you're kind of okay with whatever outcome happens because at least you did your
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thing.
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And obviously, if you don't get the result you want, then you meet and you adjust and
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you repair constant growth, constant progress.
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It's kind of the theme of bookworm.
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I don't know.
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Does that make sense where it's like, at least I've done what I can do.
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I don't have to, I don't have to feel bad about, oh, or think that if I just would have
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done this thing different, or if I would have done this and I ran out of time or whatever,
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it's like, no, I've done what I can do.
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I've controlled that I can control.
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And so the results now the score is going to take care of itself.
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At least you're side of it.
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Like that's kind of how I'm seeing a lot of what you're talking about.
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But yes, there's a lot that you can do in some scenarios.
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I'm thinking about situations where you volunteer to lead teams, say at a nonprofit or something.
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And in those scenarios, although, you know, we like to think that whenever someone commits
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to something, they don't always like they're always going to be there, but that doesn't
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always hold true.
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But you can't change their reaction to their own commitment.
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You can only do everything you can to help them follow through on their own commitment.
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It's like, okay, I've done all the things I can do to help you follow through on what
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you told me you were going to do.
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Now I just have to trust that you'll either do that or I'll have to react to you not doing
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it.
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Like that's, I think there's a little something a little bit freeing in that.
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Yeah, definitely.
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And kind of that's the theme with the other stuff on my list too, what I recognize is
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that there's things that I can't control, but there's elements of that that I can control.
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So for example, if my kids are acting out or they're not listening, I can't really control
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that, but I can control my response when that happens.
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Sure.
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I can't necessarily control how much energy I have at the beginning of my day, but I can
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control what time I go to bed the night before to make sure that I get enough sleep.
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I can't control how much things cost, but I can control how much I save or budget.
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And I can't control, for example, when something awful is going to happen, but I can control
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whether I am ready for an emergency.
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Some of the other things that I can control because this list is a little bit longer, things
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like my daily schedule, who I work with, what I do for work.
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I mentioned how people feel when I've been with them.
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I can control what I say yes to.
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I can control whether I follow through on those habits that I know I need to do, like whether
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I journal every day, whether I complete my entire morning routine.
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And I can also control, you know, I think with this whole internet creator space, this
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is interesting because you create something, you throw it out there and you think like,
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okay, there, I've done it.
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And then my response typically is people love it, hate it, whatever it is what it is.
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It's the natural culmination of my experiences.
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So I'm not going to try and change it to Taylor, to somebody like this is just authentically
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me.
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This is who I am.
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Okay.
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But I tend to just throw things out there and never tell anybody about them, which is completely
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ridiculous because the people try to build these audiences.
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They try to build these email lists.
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They try to build these social media followings.
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And that's not really what I've been focused on.
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But I recognize that like I create stuff, I throw it out there and I tell nobody.
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And on some level, I'm kind of wondering like maybe there is a little bit of fear tied
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to that where I just don't want to deal with a potentially negative reaction.
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But if I'm giving my best effort to these things, then one of the things that I can control
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is the promotion for the things I make.
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And that's something that I should be doing.
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Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with some tweets telling us what you did.
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Right.
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You're not going to scare anybody with that mic.
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Just going to say that.
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Yep.
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You can tell us what you did.
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It's okay.
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Yeah.
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So I got to get better at that.
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The other item I had on my list was make a list of what's good in my life.
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And this is a fairly long list once I got rolling with it.
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I forget there was another action item at one point where I had to make a really lengthy
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list and it was really hard at first.
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And then once I got going, I just cranked through a bunch of them.
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Kind of the same experience here.
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You think about a couple things and you're like, "Oh, I really like the way this is going,
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really like the way this is going."
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And then immediately your brain starts focusing on all the negative stuff too.
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It's like, "Well, there's got to be a balance here.
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It's not all sunshine and rainbows."
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And you focus on the negative stuff and they're like, "No, no, no.
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It's not the point of the exercise.
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What else is going right?"
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So I got like two or three things and then I started thinking about five or six negative
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things.
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But in the end, I ended up with about 20 different things on my what's going well list.
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Awesome.
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So, and bookworm's on there.
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Go bookworm.
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All right, I got four here.
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The first one I've been not so good at, which is doing three gratitudes at dinner with my
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family.
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You would think this would be simple.
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This should be one of those things that just becomes a habit and you do it every time you
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sit down for dinner and my mind completely blanks on it.
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I don't know why that is.
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I even debated setting a reminder on my phone just to tell me that.
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That doesn't work because I set my phone in my office at that time.
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So I don't even know how to, I keep forgetting.
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Maybe this conversation will be the spark.
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Who knows?
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This is kind of funny because it sounds like this is your family.
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These are the people that you are closest to.
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Of course I can pick three things every day that I'd be thankful for.
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And if you really applied yourself, you probably could.
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But because you went from not doing this to doing this, my immediate thought when you
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said three was like, "There's going to be a point of friction there."
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Maybe that's too much.
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You don't want to tell people, "Don't be as grateful for the things you have."
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So when we went through it, I wasn't going to be like, "Hey, you should just dial it back
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and just do one."
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But I feel kind of vindicated that you are kind of struggling with this.
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Sorry.
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No, I mean, adjust and repair.
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That's kind of the theme of bookworm.
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You try something that doesn't work.
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You try something else.
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I guess maybe I should have called this out.
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But I kind of had this thought in the back of my head when you announced it.
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It was like, "This maybe is going to be a little bit harder than it sounds."
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That's fair.
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That's fair.
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And I'm curious, if anybody else has tried this, what their experience with it is too.
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Oh, that'd be interesting.
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This makes no sense.
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Gratitude.
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This is something we all recognize is important, but we all suck at it.
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So I was like, "Why can't I just do this?"
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Totally.
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I'm with you.
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Yeah, I think I'm probably going to dial this back because in granted, our kids are little,
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too.
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So if you said, "Let's do gratitude," they'll look at you funny and like, "What does that
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mean?"
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Like, "Well, well, okay."
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So yeah, you have to do the whole explanation thing.
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I think once they get what we're talking about, it will be able to say that.
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They're just having it fully.
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Right.
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I'm going to leave this one on the list and bring it back the next time.
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Just saying.
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Sounds good.
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There you go.
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I marked it.
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Another one I've been working on, "Evening Journaling Re-Vamp."
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And this has to do with me being more intentional with what it is that I'm journaling at night,
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basically writing down what went well that day so that I know what were the high points
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of the day.
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Some cases right now, what are a couple of things I need to change?
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And I've done that.
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I can't say I've done it every night since I've got those questions nailed down, but
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I have been a lot more consistent with it than I have been in months and years past.
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So I need to continue building that habit, but I'm still working on it.
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But it's at least in the right direction, I think.
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Nice.
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So, email patterns.
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I think you've ridiculed me about email.
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I don't know how many times.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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Here you go.
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I'm going to, for the sake of the show, I'm going to check my email right now just so
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I can tell you what.
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Okay.
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Because the last time I ran through my email was an hour and a half ago as we were recording
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this.
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Okay, Mike?
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Were you at zero?
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Was it zero at that moment?
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Okay.
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Okay.
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Right now there are 58 emails in here.
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Jeez.
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Now, granted, this is the heavy part of the day right now.
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And I know that before I can sign off today, I need to make another pass at those.
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I have not been great about, like, I haven't fully nailed down what my schedule should
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be with email to handle it correctly.
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And I think we're going to talk about it a little bit more in today's episode.
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I'll bring it up in a couple points here because I have another action item that pertains
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to email.
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And when that one comes out, I know you're going to nail me to the wall again.
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But nicely.
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Don't look down the list, Mike.
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Don't do it.
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Okay.
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But anyway, so email patterns, like, I think for me, I need about four, maybe five checkpoints
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in a day when I run through email.
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I've played with two, played with three.
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But I always, like, even this morning, there was one point when I was really getting anxious
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because I felt like I was just lost.
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And then when I did the check here about an hour and a half ago, I realized that was
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very founded.
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Like, I should have done a check earlier than when I did.
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So I think I'm still trying to figure that out and nail down what works so that I can
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serve my clients well and yet have a little sanity on my side.
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I will also say that I've been working on some, I don't want to say leadership changes,
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but I'm bringing a salesperson into my business as well to help handle a lot of those pieces.
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So this is a classic offloading step for me.
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So that's part of why I've got a lot going on because I've been slowly ramping that.
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And I'm going to be doing a lot of work.
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And I'm going to be doing a lot of work.
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And I'm going to be doing a lot of work.
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And I'm going to be doing a lot of work.
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And I'm going to be doing a lot of work.
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And I'm going to be doing a lot of work.
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And I'm going to be doing a lot of work.
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And I'm going to be doing a lot of work.
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And I'm going to be doing a lot of work.
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And I'm going to be doing a lot of work.
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And I'm going to be doing a lot of work.
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And I'm going to be doing a lot of work.
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And I'm going to be doing a lot of work.
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I don't want to say made fun of you for it, but kind of made fun of you for it.
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So I think in the last one, you had promised to give it a give it the old college try,
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which is why I put it back on here because I really want to see what this looks like.
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But sure.
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Sure.
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I will say that I so I made the change.
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This is coming from work clean of trying to put everything in the most efficient place you can.
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And I did do a rearrange of my desk and it's not correct.
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I know that.
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I have still had a fair amount of friction with my desk set up.
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So I actually need to do this again, which is why I was a little bit surprised to see here.
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Because I didn't remember this coming from last episode.
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So this is the downside of Mike setting up the notes is he's going to go and snag just random actions from the one he wants to see.
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Well, it was an action item from the last episode.
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So the original book that it inspired it was work clean.
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Man, that was sneaky, Mike.
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Well done.
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I need to do it again though.
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So it's good that it's here.
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So there you go.
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All right.
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Well, that gets us into today's book, which is hyper focus by Chris Bailey subtitle,
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How to be more productive in a world of distraction, which is a I don't want to say click baity title,
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but it's very provoking title.
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I think it's very like that's a promise that resonates with just about anybody who would listen to bookworm.
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And so this is going to be at least a subject matter anyways, very appropriate for just about anyone who lives in the information age,
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who deals with email and social media and all these different things that we're trying to keep up with.
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This is going to be a good book and full disclosure.
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Now as we're recording this, I've interviewed Chris Bailey on the productivity show.
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We're going to have a little bonus thing later on in this episode where we talked to him about the process and the things that he learned from writing the book.
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So kind of the bookworm spin on this.
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We're not going to just ask him to rehash all the content that he wrote about and has spouted on all the other productivity podcasts that are out there.
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That's what we're going to do.
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Yeah, we're going to dissect the content itself.
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But this is one that I covered for a gap book originally.
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And I know I talked highly of it, so it's no secret that I liked it.
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But this is, I think, the first book that has been a gap book that has graduated to a full episode.
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That's an interesting thought.
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I can't recall.
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There's a couple books that you and I have both done for gap books that would be very easy for us to just say.
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Let's go record that one.
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We haven't done that.
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But yeah, I think you're right. This might be the first time.
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Yeah, so let's jump in here.
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Let's talk a little bit about how the book is structured.
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There's ten different chapters, I think, in the book.
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And the first chapter to our introductory section where he explains a couple principles that he's going to be referencing the rest of the book.
00:19:00
And then the next several chapters after that are broken, speaking to the idea of hyperfocus.
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And then later on in the book, he has several chapters devoted to kind of the antithesis of hyperfocus, which is scatter focus, which is a really interesting approach, I think.
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There's so much stuff in the productivity space that's just laser focused on focus.
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It's like, this is the thing you need.
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And so Chris Bailey kind of has a little bit different approach to that where he's saying hyperfocus is great.
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That's maybe what Kel Newport would call deep work.
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But Chris Bailey's approach is that it's got to be balanced with the scatter focus too.
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And he talks about how you can kind of use these strategically to recharge your different modes and how they can all work together.
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So if you were going to break this down into sections, there's probably three sections in this book as well.
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Yup.
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The intro stuff, the hyper focus, and then the scatter focus. But that's not really the way that it's written.
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At least the version I have because I got a pre-release version of this.
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Sure. Well, I do not have a pre-release version.
00:20:04
And it kind of looks like they didn't want to admit that there were three parts in this book, because at least the one I'm looking at, he's got a chapter zero, a chapter 0.5.
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And then it goes into part one, which is hyperfocus and then part two for scatter focus.
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So although he calls it like chapter zero and then part one and part two, I'm like, there's still three pieces to this.
00:20:30
Like, don't call it what it is.
00:20:34
Yeah, that chapter zero stuff, I forgot about that.
00:20:37
But that's interesting because that's where he talks about, you know, most people can't even finish a book.
00:20:42
So here's some simple things you can do to make sure that you get through this one, which is a cool idea.
00:20:47
And we should note Chris Bailey, this is a repeat author for us.
00:20:52
We did his other book, The Productivity Project.
00:20:55
So this is his second in that realm.
00:20:59
And I told a friend earlier in the week who asked me about this book because I was carrying it around with me.
00:21:06
And the point I made to them was, you know, this particular book, I read a lot of productivity in business books.
00:21:13
Obviously, we do most of those here on bookworm, but this is one of the better productivity books I've read in a while, I think.
00:21:20
It seemed to really resonate with me, so I really enjoyed this one.
00:21:24
So, good pick, Mike.
00:21:26
Oh, thank you. Thank you.
00:21:28
So you're saying hyperfocus is one of the better books you've read, not Productivity Project, correct?
00:21:33
Hyperfocus, yes.
00:21:34
Okay, cool.
00:21:35
Yeah, Chris Bailey's got an interesting style, which I'm sure we'll get into, especially at the end.
00:21:40
So if you're thinking that you've read Deep Work, why should you read Hyperfocus?
00:21:44
It's way different.
00:21:45
Yeah, I'd agree with that.
00:21:48
I think, you know, Productivity Project, I felt like was a good, like, give me a quick overview of everything that happens in the productivity space.
00:21:58
This specifically plays into, like, one aspect, I think, of Productivity.
00:22:06
Like, I think of Deep Work being that way.
00:22:08
Like, there are a lot of things that Cal Newport could have written in Deep Work, but he didn't.
00:22:14
He focused on one aspect of doing your best work.
00:22:18
And to me, this feels like the same thing, whereas the Productivity Project was borderline high-level overview of everything you could possibly want to know about Productivity in the space.
00:22:30
This narrows down onto one specific piece of that, which is how do you develop the focus and the attentional space to do that good work, and how do you maintain that focus.
00:22:45
So I think it's very well done.
00:22:47
I like this book.
00:22:48
Nice.
00:22:49
Hey, that's a great lead into the intro stuff.
00:22:51
So there's a couple of concepts you need to understand if you're going to read this book, and one of them is that attentional space that you mentioned.
00:22:58
So attentional space from the book, he has this really, I don't want to say, like, really cool-looking diagram because it's pretty simple.
00:23:10
It's basically a circle.
00:23:12
But it communicates the point really well that you have so much space that you can pay attention to at one point.
00:23:20
He kind of equates attentional space as the ram in your brain's computer.
00:23:26
And then there's different ways that you can fill up that attentional space.
00:23:32
So you can be laser-focused and doing deep work, and you've got this one thing that's going to require all of your attentional space, and there's no room for anything else.
00:23:41
But that doesn't mean that's the only way that you can use your attentional space, and we'll get into the next section, you know, how you can kind of cut this up and the different combinations that are possible here.
00:23:53
But I do think that the definition that he has of the attentional space, for me anyways, it really helped me understand how, it really helped me understand, I guess, the quantification of this limited resource, because it's hard to put a number on.
00:24:09
I've got this much attention, but that's kind of what happens when you look at the diagram that he had.
00:24:13
Yeah, I think it's interesting how, because there's a lot of points he brings this diagram back throughout the book, and we'll get into multitasking here in a bit, or maybe now's a good time, because with the attentional space, there's certain things that you can do while you're doing something else, because you have space in your attention to devote to more than one thing.
00:24:38
Like, he refers to, you know, the concept of walking, chewing bubble gum, and listening to a podcast at the same time, which I thought it was interesting, he mentioned in one of the footnotes that chewing gum sales have declined in recent years, which is fascinating to me.
00:24:54
But, you know, with all of those things going on, you actually have very little attention going into chewing gum, or into walking, but you may be devoting a lot to listening to the podcast.
00:25:05
Well, technically that's multitasking.
00:25:07
But when we think of the, you know, in the productivity space, we talk about how you can't multitask, it's not actually possible.
00:25:15
Well, actually it is. We're just, we're referring to the main focus of your attention. You can't have more than one main focus.
00:25:26
Correct.
00:25:27
I think that's how Chris would refer to it. But it is possible to multitask, just not the way we're used to thinking about it traditionally.
00:25:35
Right. So he talks about the three combinations that will work with the attentional space that you have available. One of those options is the one complex task.
00:25:43
And the reason that most people say you cannot multitask is because people will try to do multiple complex tasks at the same time.
00:25:52
And that is not going to work. You can't have your full attention on more than one complex task at a time. And so you're going to miss something.
00:25:59
You're going to mess something up. And it's just not worth it to try to work that way.
00:26:03
But there are other combinations that work. Like he used the example of a few small habitual tasks, he would call them.
00:26:10
He talks a lot about habits in the first couple chapters here, which this is not really a book on habits, but there they are again.
00:26:18
And it seems to be something that I keep hearing more and more about. And it makes me constantly go back and look at the habits that I have developed.
00:26:26
And ask myself, you know, is this the ideal state for my habits? Are there things that I want to change?
00:26:34
And then this isn't the James Clear book, but in that book, he talks about how if you want to make something a desirable habit.
00:26:42
If you want that to become a habit, then you make the activation energy lower. If it's something you want to stop doing, then you make the activation energy higher.
00:26:50
And so talking about hyper focus, how does that apply here?
00:26:54
For me personally, thinking about the activities that I want to create habits out of and then figuring out how to lower the activation energy
00:27:02
so that I can do multiple habitual tasks like that at the same time.
00:27:09
And this is also, I think when we were doing the power of habit, that's when I was reading this the first time.
00:27:13
And I mentioned that this is kind of been challenged. This is an idea that's been percolating in my head is, how do I take those single complex tasks and make them smaller so they're less complex and actually turn them into habits,
00:27:29
so that's something that I used to have to spend three hours of undivided attention on.
00:27:35
How can I make that a little bit simpler? And I think you even used the example of firing up a server in the background.
00:27:41
So I know that's possible, but I haven't figured out how that works for me.
00:27:45
The other combination here, which I should call out because I don't think we talked about it yet, is that if a task requires most of your focus, so not all of it, it's not technically a complex task,
00:27:56
you still have a little bit left over for a habitual task.
00:28:00
And this is, for me, I think the sweet spot that I want to get to.
00:28:04
How do I make things even just a little bit simpler so that I can tack on one additional habit while I'm doing that at the same time?
00:28:12
And this is just describing that maybe it sounds ridiculous to people.
00:28:16
Like, oh, you're just trying to crank out as much efficiency as you can at the cost of effectiveness, maybe.
00:28:22
But I don't know. I just want to figure out how I can make things as simple as possible.
00:28:27
Do you have an example of one of these tasks that you want to turn into a habit?
00:28:33
You reference the spinning up servers thing, which is a reference to, sometimes I have demo servers that I need to get going.
00:28:42
Well, it's easy for me to do something like writing show notes for a podcast or something.
00:28:47
Like, I can do something like that on top of doing the server spin up just because I've done it so many times.
00:28:53
It's second nature at this point.
00:28:55
Do you have an example of something like that that you're interested in turning into, you know, a routine?
00:29:01
Well, not necessarily turning it into a routine, but the show notes example is a good one because I've done a lot of the editing for Bookworm,
00:29:12
but I have done a couple of the more recent episodes.
00:29:16
And I know the first time that I edited an episode, it had been a while since I edited a podcast episode.
00:29:22
So I was so focused on the audio that I got done and you're like, "Hey, where are the links?"
00:29:28
And I'm like, "Oh, I didn't even pay attention to the links."
00:29:33
So when I did this last time, it was easy for me to be playing the audio and swipe over drafts on the side of my iPad
00:29:41
and jot down the things that were mentioned and then turn those into links while I was editing.
00:29:47
You know, I didn't have to go back later because for the most part, the Bookworm episodes, at least when I edited them,
00:29:53
I keep them pretty true to the initial conversation.
00:29:57
I'm not editing out every single um and filler word.
00:30:02
It's what you see is what you get for the most part.
00:30:05
I try to make us sound good and sound like we know what we're talking about, obviously,
00:30:10
but it doesn't take a lot of a lot of, like I'm not jumping in there all the time to stop the recording
00:30:16
and fix this one little thing where Joe breathes funny or whatever.
00:30:20
And so it's easy.
00:30:21
- Wait, that'll breathe funny.
00:30:22
- I never knew that.
00:30:24
- Well, I couldn't figure out how to get strip silence to work on Fairwright.
00:30:27
So there were some spots where I was like, hopefully that comes out.
00:30:33
I think it did.
00:30:35
But I'm not going back in there all the time, I guess, is what I'm saying.
00:30:39
I pay attention to the audio and I can still go to Safari and grab a link and put it in the show notes document
00:30:46
at the same time.
00:30:47
And that is something that when I did it previously was one complex test.
00:30:51
So I kind of view that as a test that requires most of my focus editing the podcast,
00:30:55
but the habitual task is just jotting down the notes in drafts.
00:30:58
- Got it.
00:30:59
That makes sense.
00:31:00
I feel like that sort of thing is super powerful.
00:31:03
- Yeah.
00:31:04
- I mean, if I were to, because I made you do this, go back, listen to the episode.
00:31:10
- Yeah.
00:31:11
- And then collect all the links.
00:31:12
That's another couple hours worth of work, right?
00:31:14
Because I got to go all the way through the episode again.
00:31:16
- Oh, I put it on two times speed and go for it.
00:31:20
- Yeah, but still, I mean, if I'm able to do that while I'm editing, I have potentially doubled the speed
00:31:27
that I can get that test done.
00:31:29
Even though one of those is a more complex task and one of them is very simple, it's still very time consuming.
00:31:33
- Yeah.
00:31:34
- So if I can do them both at the same time, hey, yeah, I'm going to do that.
00:31:37
- Go for it.
00:31:38
Now, in one of these intro pieces, he refers to four types of tasks.
00:31:45
And it seems like every productivity book has a four square matrix of some sort in it.
00:31:52
And he even references, yeah, it seems like everybody uses one of these charts of sorts,
00:31:58
which I appreciated him calling that out.
00:32:01
But the four quadrants in this particular chart across the top is unattractive and attractive.
00:32:09
Down the left is productive and unproductive.
00:32:13
So in the first one, you have productive and unattractive, which is your necessary work.
00:32:19
Then you have productive, attractive work, which is your purposeful work.
00:32:24
Then you go down the next level, unproductive and unattractive, which is your unnecessary work,
00:32:29
unproductive and attractive, which is your distracting work.
00:32:33
So he refers to this unnecessary work, unnecessary work, purposeful work and distracting work quite
00:32:40
a bit throughout the book.
00:32:43
My thought whenever I saw this was one, this is interesting.
00:32:46
It's a different way of categorizing your tasks.
00:32:51
But I had this thought in the back of my head of, could I use this in OmniFocus somehow?
00:32:55
- I had the same thought.
00:32:57
I'm still, I've been trying so hard to get used to the tags thing.
00:33:02
I'm trying to be a good OmniFocus promoter, but I'm just struggling with the tags thing
00:33:07
still.
00:33:08
I thought about just putting tags for necessary and unnecessary or distracting and purposeful,
00:33:15
or just using the tags for unattractive, attractive, productive and unproductive.
00:33:18
I thought about doing that.
00:33:20
But am I really going to use that?
00:33:23
I don't know.
00:33:24
He seems to think I should.
00:33:26
Well, I think you definitely could.
00:33:29
And actually, when I read it the first time, I had jotted this down as an action item to
00:33:34
divvy up my tasks this way.
00:33:35
- Okay.
00:33:36
- I never did it though, because the more I thought about it, I'm like, "Yeah, no."
00:33:40
- I was hoping you were going to say you tried it and it didn't work or something like that.
00:33:43
- Before you even got there, I was recognizing that this was fraught with failure for me anyways,
00:33:48
just the way that I work.
00:33:50
- Got it.
00:33:51
- But that's really side note.
00:33:53
That's an important distinction with anything that you would hear on this podcast or any
00:33:56
other productivity podcast, just because somebody tried something and it worked for them doesn't
00:34:01
mean that it is automatically going to work for you and you're going to get the same result.
00:34:05
- Right.
00:34:06
- Everybody's situation is a little bit different.
00:34:07
So the thing to recognize is the growth mindset like you talked about in the Carol Bloch book,
00:34:12
and listen to these ideas, listen to these principles, these strategies, these tactics,
00:34:18
and ask yourself the question, "How can I make this work for me?"
00:34:23
And if you can't make it work for you, then be okay with that.
00:34:28
If you were to apply every single quote unquote life hack that you saw, you would do nothing
00:34:32
but modify your systems and you wouldn't get any work done ever.
00:34:35
You'd be fiddling with it instead of actually doing the work like David Spark says.
00:34:39
- Right.
00:34:40
- So recognize that this maybe works for Chris and maybe this works for you, but I've
00:34:48
looked at it and because I'm constantly asking myself, "Is this thing a right fit?"
00:34:54
I recognize before I even implemented it that, "Yeah, this is not going to give me any benefit
00:34:59
when I go to OmniFocus to do my work because I'm not going to OmniFocus to do my work.
00:35:03
I'm going to Jira to do my work."
00:35:06
And so it just right away, I was like, "Now, that's more work than it's worth."
00:35:09
- Sure.
00:35:10
Yeah, I tend to live in OmniFocus throughout the day, not from a fiddly stance, but just
00:35:16
that's where I keep track of everything I've got going on.
00:35:19
So for me, it might make sense, but at the same time, I'm still kind of in flux on how
00:35:26
I want to use some of these pieces.
00:35:29
So yeah, I don't know.
00:35:32
It was a fun thought, but I don't think it's actually going to follow through.
00:35:36
- Yep.
00:35:37
It's a good thought exercise.
00:35:38
I do think that the value in looking at this diagram though really is in recognizing, Chris
00:35:44
calls us out on page 16.
00:35:47
He says, "The most urgent and stimulating things in your environment are rarely the most significant."
00:35:53
So how does that apply to this matrix?
00:35:55
Recognizing that there are things that are going to be attractive and productive, that's
00:36:00
the purposeful work.
00:36:01
That's the stuff that's easy to do.
00:36:03
The unattractive and productive stuff, that's the necessary work, that's the stuff that you're
00:36:08
going to procrastinate on.
00:36:11
And if you recognize that something is approaching you as attractive and you can clarify it as
00:36:17
unproductive, you recognize that it's distracting work.
00:36:20
It's easier to say no to that thing.
00:36:21
Does that make sense?
00:36:23
- It makes sense to me.
00:36:24
- Good.
00:36:25
(laughs)
00:36:26
Yeah, so the four types of tasks here, I do like the way that he describes these.
00:36:31
I know that a lot of different productivity books have graphs like this.
00:36:35
Most of them, I feel like they should have just stuck to the Eisenhower Matrix.
00:36:39
This one I thought was actually a cool way of looking at it.
00:36:43
- Right.
00:36:44
Yeah, every time I see one of these, I wonder, okay, does that make sense for me to categorize
00:36:50
tasks that way?
00:36:51
Like, even the Eisenhower Matrix, like, should I tag things as urgent and important?
00:36:58
Should I do that or not?
00:37:00
And more often than not, I realize that's just going to waste my time.
00:37:05
That's just not going to...
00:37:07
I am never actually going to look at that metadata when it's on there.
00:37:11
- Right.
00:37:12
Move on to hyperfocus.
00:37:13
- Hyperfocus.
00:37:14
What is hyperfocus?
00:37:16
- The definition from the book is expanding one task project or other object of attention
00:37:22
to fill your attention space completely.
00:37:26
That is hyperfocus.
00:37:27
It's kind of talking about the third category or combination that you can use for your attention
00:37:33
space, that one complex task.
00:37:38
And from there, there's a lot of different...
00:37:42
In chapter three, for example, he talks about the different stages of hyperfocus, how attention
00:37:47
without intention is wasted energy, the rule of three, lots of different things that pertain
00:37:52
to hyperfocus.
00:37:54
But hyperfocus itself is really the place that you need to start.
00:37:58
And I do think that this definition of hyperfocus is maybe more approachable than the idea that
00:38:05
you get from reading deep work.
00:38:07
Because deep work, I love that book, but I kind of feel like you walk away from that
00:38:12
thinking, "I need to develop my focus muscle.
00:38:14
I'm just this puny weakling and I got to get in the mental gym."
00:38:18
And hyperfocus, you feel like, "I could do that.
00:38:20
Maybe I can't do it for eight hours every day, but I can do that."
00:38:23
- I wish I could do that all the time.
00:38:26
- Right.
00:38:27
And this is a case of...
00:38:30
When he goes through the definition of this and what it entails, I immediately thought
00:38:34
of deep work, but at the same time, he even called that out and saying, "This isn't deep
00:38:40
work.
00:38:41
It's kind of the mode that you need to be in in order to do your deep work, which I really
00:38:47
enjoyed.
00:38:48
But at the same time, I realized and had to kind of come to grips with the fact that I
00:38:53
kind of rarely do this right now.
00:38:55
So some of my action items, which I'll get to in a bit, kind of revolve around that,
00:39:00
is how do I set myself up to do this?
00:39:03
Because I don't right now.
00:39:06
I get the feeling that you're able to do this quite a bit.
00:39:09
Is that a fair judgment?
00:39:11
- I'm not quite sure how to answer that without sounding pretentious, but yeah, I think so.
00:39:20
I think honestly a big piece of that is just the how over time I've shifted the expectations
00:39:27
surrounding email.
00:39:29
- Yeah.
00:39:30
- Where people know when they email me that it may take a week or more for me to get back
00:39:36
to you.
00:39:37
And some people, I mean, should I respond to some people quicker than that?
00:39:41
Yeah, I probably should.
00:39:43
But not at the expense of doing the things that are really important to me, which it
00:39:50
really comes out to doing the important work.
00:39:54
So I don't know.
00:39:56
I mean, there's good and bad to this.
00:39:58
I do think that a lot of it could be correlated to boundaries or expectations.
00:40:05
And you do have to shift that stuff over time.
00:40:07
It's not like you can just tell your clients tomorrow, "Hey, new policy at joebullig.com.
00:40:13
I am no longer going to reply to email except for Friday afternoons."
00:40:16
That takes some time to get there.
00:40:18
But I kind of feel like since I've done that, it's easier for me to do this.
00:40:24
Yes, that is a fair statement.
00:40:27
- And I also feel like the work that the type of work that you do is very conducive to that.
00:40:32
- Yes.
00:40:33
- Here's the thing.
00:40:36
Even if I wanted to work towards that, if I wanted to work to the process where I am
00:40:40
checking email once a week, I need to get out of the business that I am in.
00:40:46
It just doesn't work.
00:40:48
Especially even if I offloaded the client side, which is part of my plan.
00:40:54
So even after that offloading is complete, there will still be things that need responses
00:41:00
within 24 hours.
00:41:02
So I will still need to be in at least once a day.
00:41:06
Can I get it down to once a day?
00:41:08
Probably.
00:41:09
I'm going to get it to that point.
00:41:10
But once a week, that's not going to fly.
00:41:13
Working in tech will not fly at once a week email checks at all.
00:41:18
They just won't work.
00:41:19
So I feel like that type of, it also depends on the sector, I guess is what I'm getting
00:41:24
at.
00:41:25
- Yep.
00:41:26
I totally agree with that.
00:41:27
And if you want to work in an industry or you want to set up your business in a way that
00:41:35
you are responsive to email, just as the example that we're talking about now, that
00:41:41
is completely fine.
00:41:43
You just have to recognize that it's going to not facilitate an environment where hyper
00:41:49
focus is incredibly easy to do.
00:41:53
And everybody's motivated by one or two things.
00:41:56
You're either motivated by the avoidance of pain or the pursuit of pleasure.
00:42:01
For me, it's painful to have to be on call for that type of stuff.
00:42:06
I hate going into my email client.
00:42:09
And so it's easy for me to say, yeah, that's something I just don't want to do.
00:42:13
But if you are working as a consultant or some industry where you're getting paid good
00:42:20
money, maybe to solve other people's problems, you've got a golden handcuffs situation where
00:42:24
maybe that's a little harder to do.
00:42:26
And there's probably lots of different things in between there.
00:42:30
And so you can kind of define this for yourself.
00:42:32
But I guess I've had such a strong negative reaction to living that way that as soon as
00:42:39
I started working with Asian efficiency, basically, I was like, okay, I want to get as far away
00:42:43
from that under the spectrum as I can.
00:42:45
What can I get away with?
00:42:47
Right.
00:42:48
How can I talk to the least amount of people as possible on a regular basis and still get
00:42:53
my work done?
00:42:56
Very fair point, well said, after he does this whole definition of hyper focus, he does a
00:43:05
number of things to help us through the process of how do we actually develop this as a habit
00:43:12
and how do you make it a part of your routine.
00:43:15
And some of that is setting up like what he calls distraction free mode, which we see
00:43:21
in a lot of places.
00:43:23
But he goes a little bit further in defining the types of distractions that you may run
00:43:30
into in that process.
00:43:32
And guess what?
00:43:33
We have a four quadrant grid here, again, that he morphed the bottom two into one.
00:43:39
I love this one, by the way.
00:43:41
You like this one?
00:43:42
Yeah, this one's really good, I think.
00:43:43
This is kind of a fun one.
00:43:45
Four types of distractions.
00:43:48
Those that are fun, those that are annoying, those that you have no control over and those
00:43:53
that you do have control over now.
00:43:56
Just to describe the picture on the top, you've got fun and annoying and on the left
00:44:01
side, you've got no control and control.
00:44:03
Correct, correct.
00:44:05
So then to go into the quadrants there, the ones that are annoying, that you have no control
00:44:11
over, he puts in the box, deal with it, get back on track.
00:44:16
Yeah.
00:44:17
So that is fun and no control.
00:44:20
You might as well enjoy those.
00:44:21
If you have a fun distraction that comes along, you might as well enjoy it.
00:44:26
Then he gets down to the ones that you do have control over, both annoying and fun versions
00:44:32
of those.
00:44:34
He indicates that you need to deal with those ahead of time.
00:44:38
That's where I think email in such lands.
00:44:41
Yeah, definitely.
00:44:43
I want to go back to the fun and no control distractions.
00:44:50
This is, I mean, he's a big advocate of mindfulness and meditation, which I know we'll talk about
00:44:56
in a little bit.
00:44:57
Oh, good.
00:44:58
But I think that this is one of the major benefits of that mindfulness is recognizing
00:45:05
that you don't have control over this thing.
00:45:07
So yeah, maybe just go along for the ride and enjoy it.
00:45:11
This is something that I have struggled with over the years, where if my plans get messed
00:45:15
up, I almost like throw a conipiton fit.
00:45:19
Hard to describe myself, but no one has ever said this to me, but I kind of feel like you
00:45:28
can tell on my face that I am incredibly annoyed and you really don't want to talk to
00:45:33
me.
00:45:34
I'm definitely not enjoying the potentially fun, but no control distractions.
00:45:42
And I feel like I have made a lot of progress in this area.
00:45:47
That was one of the benefits of doing that action item from the last episode where I
00:45:51
made the list of things that I can control and things that I can't control.
00:45:54
I'm getting better at recognizing the things that I can't control.
00:45:57
And when something does happen that I can't control, don't get bent on a shape about it.
00:46:02
Just deal with it or enjoy it, whatever, when it's over, then get back on track.
00:46:08
Do what you can to get back into your state of work.
00:46:11
Now that also leads into another distinction here, which is really interesting.
00:46:15
He says there's two places that distractions originate.
00:46:18
So this two by two grid could actually maybe be three dimensional, but they distractions
00:46:26
can originate from ourselves or from others.
00:46:29
Now, not all distractions are equal.
00:46:34
And I know that there are people who work in a corporate environment, for example, that
00:46:38
there's absolutely nothing you can do about the distractions of other people.
00:46:42
And you feel like you're just dealing with these one after the other throughout the entire
00:46:46
day.
00:46:48
But I think maybe for a lot of people, we tend to make those a bigger deal than they
00:46:56
really are.
00:46:57
And I'll just speak to myself.
00:46:58
I know I've done that.
00:47:00
He has an interesting statistic here, though, that when we get interrupted by other people,
00:47:08
we get back to work six minutes sooner than when we get interrupted by ourselves.
00:47:15
So really we are our own worst enemies when it comes to these distractions.
00:47:20
We're real smart with this, aren't we?
00:47:22
Yeah.
00:47:23
But it's easy to project the blame is like, oh, the reason I didn't get anything done
00:47:26
today is because Joe in accounting keeps popping into my office.
00:47:32
Joe keeps texting me.
00:47:33
It's her fault.
00:47:34
It's her fault.
00:47:35
Yeah, exactly.
00:47:36
It's not my fault.
00:47:37
No, I've got my stuff together.
00:47:38
I can focus on my work.
00:47:40
Well, Chris would say, no, you can't.
00:47:44
Oh, yes.
00:47:48
This is where I have a handful of action items that come from here because I know that there
00:47:55
are quite a few distractions I have throughout the day that I can control that are self-inflicted
00:48:06
and I don't do anything about it.
00:48:08
So I keep thinking, oh, I'll do better tomorrow.
00:48:12
And then I make it worse.
00:48:13
Exactly.
00:48:14
Oh, well, I'll get better tomorrow.
00:48:16
I wonder how many tomorrow's I've wondered about.
00:48:19
Yeah, no joke.
00:48:21
I don't think I actually want to know the answer to that.
00:48:25
Another thing from this section, by the way, he talks about the five sources of distraction.
00:48:30
Okay.
00:48:31
So running through these real quickly, number one, notifications, number two, smartphones,
00:48:36
number three, emails, number four, meetings, number five, the internet.
00:48:42
Okay.
00:48:43
I have mentioned on this podcast that I do not have email on my phone and occasionally
00:48:48
I'll put it back on.
00:48:49
As of right now, there is no email on my phone and I'm taking that even to the next
00:48:52
level, which we'll talk about when we get to the action items.
00:48:55
But when I read this section, it occurred to me that if you got an email on your smartphone
00:49:01
about a meeting, you've checked all five of these.
00:49:05
So the simple way to reduce all of these distractions is to remove email from your
00:49:11
smartphone.
00:49:12
Whether you feel comfortable or not doing that, if you really are frustrated with all
00:49:16
of these distractions, you can address all five of these areas with one swift uninstall
00:49:23
action.
00:49:24
You could.
00:49:25
I don't really want to though.
00:49:29
I know.
00:49:30
I know a lot of people are not going to do that and I get it.
00:49:33
You know, it's scary.
00:49:37
Even from, well, I guess I'll talk about my action item here.
00:49:41
One of the things that he also mentions in this section is to kind of reconsider what
00:49:46
your devices are for and how you want to be using them.
00:49:49
Okay.
00:49:50
So the other day, I was sitting on the couch at night and I think we were watching a baseball
00:49:59
game and because my 11 year old, as soon to be 11 year old is a big Milwaukee Brewers
00:50:06
fan and this is like the first time they've been in the playoffs in like eight years.
00:50:10
His favorite player is probably going to win the National League MVP.
00:50:14
And so it's a lot of fun.
00:50:16
But I tend to go to social media during commercials and he's watching me on my phone and he makes
00:50:25
this comment.
00:50:26
It wasn't anything negative to him, but he made a comment because he's always like peeking
00:50:32
over my shoulder, see what I'm doing.
00:50:33
He's like, Hey, what you doing?
00:50:34
Oh, I was just looking at Twitter.
00:50:35
He's like, Oh, you really like to look at Twitter, don't you?
00:50:37
I was like, Oh, that's that's the worst.
00:50:41
That's the worst.
00:50:42
Yeah.
00:50:43
So I have as of today, deleted all social media off of my phone.
00:50:49
I do not have Twitter.
00:50:50
I do not have Instagram.
00:50:52
I have found myself since I did that going to my doc and tapping on the place that Twitter
00:50:57
ific used to be.
00:50:59
And it opens up day one.
00:51:01
So now you have to log your feelings.
00:51:03
Wait, what?
00:51:04
That's genius because now you're not only not getting Twitter, you're now bringing up
00:51:08
the opportunity to log how you feel about not having social media in day one.
00:51:13
Exactly.
00:51:14
It also shows you how much of that is ingrained in your muscle memory, the fact that I'm just
00:51:18
going there anyways, even though the app is no longer there.
00:51:23
So I get it and I had a real hard time.
00:51:27
I think even on the last episode, I mentioned like, Oh, I'm not going to get rid of Twitter.
00:51:31
I like Twitter, you know, but I've, it's not worth creating that picture for my kids.
00:51:39
I don't want, I don't want them to think that that's okay because it's not.
00:51:44
If it's an addiction, which it is because I'm still physically going there to open Twitter.
00:51:49
Right.
00:51:50
That's not something I want to reproduce.
00:51:52
So I've got to deal with it in my, my own life before I can tell them, Hey, you shouldn't
00:51:55
do that.
00:51:56
You know, I need to, to walk the walk before I tell them, Hey, this is the way that you're
00:52:01
going to use your, your devices because they don't, they're not old enough to have devices,
00:52:05
but I want them when they do have their own smartphone, tablet, whatever, that they know
00:52:10
how to use it appropriately.
00:52:12
They're not just using it for consumption, but they're using it to, to create.
00:52:16
They're not just downloading information, but they're intentional about how they're
00:52:23
spending their time on those devices.
00:52:25
And I've got to live that out before I expect them to.
00:52:29
So some of the, well, I think how many are there?
00:52:32
I've got four action items from this book and three of them come from this section.
00:52:39
No, all four of them come from this section.
00:52:41
We just haven't talked about the last piece.
00:52:44
So the, with distractions, I'm, and one of the things that he talks about in the book
00:52:49
is this concept of an hourly awareness chime.
00:52:53
And he recommends setting up something to go off on the hour, every hour throughout the
00:52:57
day.
00:52:59
Just as a, an indicator of, make sure you're not going into autopilot mode and doing things
00:53:04
you shouldn't be doing, or if you are in a distraction, use that as a reminder to come
00:53:08
back to your intention for that time.
00:53:13
And I'm pretty sure that with all the firefighting and stuff that I normally do throughout a
00:53:17
day that I'm quite terrible at this.
00:53:20
So I am, I've been trying to figure out how to do this right way.
00:53:24
I have a dumb watch and it has that hourly chime ability on it.
00:53:30
The problem is I've, I set that to go off a couple days ago.
00:53:35
My wife about lost her marbles with me on this, because, because, and it's silly stuff,
00:53:41
I tend to take my watch off at night and I put it on the counter in the bathroom where
00:53:46
all our bathroom is right next to our bedroom.
00:53:49
And that silly watch would beep beep in the middle of the night.
00:53:54
And if it did that at exactly the wrong time, it would wake my wife up in the middle of
00:54:00
the night.
00:54:02
So she about lost it with me over that one.
00:54:06
So I had to turn that off.
00:54:07
So I may have to do something like with the, the do app or something on my phone to do
00:54:14
that.
00:54:15
Basically, I need to figure out how I want to do this, but I need some sort of a reminder
00:54:18
to help me not just go down the path of distractions like I have a tendency to.
00:54:25
Right.
00:54:26
So yeah, that the chimes in the middle of the night would drive me crazy too.
00:54:31
I felt bad once you set it, because I'm one of those that would sleep through it and
00:54:34
never know it was, I didn't even know it was happening.
00:54:37
So yeah, I felt bad for there, but to go along with the distractions piece, you ever
00:54:45
use these distraction blockers on iPhone or Mac at all, iOS or Mac?
00:54:51
I've dabbled with them because I have eliminated email for the most part.
00:55:00
That was always the big one for me.
00:55:02
It wasn't that I would go to some website and spend a bunch of time there.
00:55:07
So I really, the way that they work hasn't really been that beneficial to me.
00:55:14
Sure.
00:55:15
The one place that it would be really beneficial is the smartphone, but it's so sandbox that
00:55:20
it really doesn't help.
00:55:23
Right.
00:55:24
So the solution that I'm at with that is just delete the things.
00:55:28
Okay.
00:55:29
I have played around with this just because, and I haven't decided what I want to do,
00:55:34
freedom seems to be a big one, though they've got pulled from the App Store on iOS for who
00:55:41
knows whatever reason Apple decided.
00:55:44
But I've played around with that concept on the Mac just because it's too easy for me
00:55:48
to get into things on my Mac and I spend most of my time there.
00:55:54
I haven't decided what I want to do with that.
00:55:56
So I have it down here as kind of a question mark of sorts.
00:56:01
I've been using the screen time bits on my phone, which is kind of helpful.
00:56:07
It's too easy to bypass it, to be honest.
00:56:10
I could make it harder, but then I might have an actual issue later on.
00:56:14
But anyway, so that's one piece.
00:56:17
The last I'll bring up here.
00:56:21
So email.
00:56:22
I have a tendency to use email as a to-do list of sorts.
00:56:27
Don't crucify me here.
00:56:29
This is one of those things that I know.
00:56:33
I know I know I know I know.
00:56:36
And yet I realized when I went through this section and he calls it out, "Keep an external
00:56:41
to-do list."
00:56:42
And he's like, "Well, I have one."
00:56:43
He's like, "Well, I guess I'm not using it the way I should."
00:56:46
Whoops.
00:56:48
So I took a little bit of time.
00:56:49
This was just yesterday to set up some of the shortcuts.
00:56:53
I actually texted you about this a little bit of setting up some shortcuts in my email
00:57:00
so that I can get them into OmniFocus easier.
00:57:04
So I'm working through some of those details.
00:57:06
It doesn't work quite the way I want it to, but I'm on the right path there.
00:57:10
So I'm trying to get better about, if I have an email, it's going to take me more than
00:57:14
three seconds to respond to getting that out of my email app and getting it into OmniFocus
00:57:21
so that I can have the link there.
00:57:23
That's what I'm working on to help me get away from that because there's too much going
00:57:27
on in my email.
00:57:28
I got to get it out of there.
00:57:30
Right.
00:57:31
Okay.
00:57:32
I'll stop now.
00:57:33
Well, that's the eternal struggle for anybody who has actions that they have to take from
00:57:39
email is I already feel overwhelmed.
00:57:43
So why should I take the extra time to go send this to a separate test management system
00:57:50
when I'm just going to come back here and deal with it again later?
00:57:53
But then if you just sit there and deal with it, that's how you get stuck doing 6.3 hours
00:57:58
of email every day.
00:58:01
So I get it.
00:58:03
I know when you had texted me, you were talking about custom key bindings in Mailmate to get
00:58:09
real nerdy for a second.
00:58:11
So Mailmate, that's one of the reasons I love Mailmate is that it's so easy to send stuff
00:58:15
to the appropriate place and also why I'm stuck using Evernote for the time being.
00:58:21
There's lots of other cool apps out there like Notion, for example, but they don't have
00:58:26
that direct integration with email clients like Mailmate that I kind of rely on because
00:58:35
I don't want to just leave the important stuff in there.
00:58:39
But also if you have to go in there multiple times a day, it's easier to justify not sending
00:58:44
it to a task management system.
00:58:46
If you have to zero it out every couple of hours, it's a lot easier to say in your head
00:58:51
anyways, I don't really need to send this where it should be going because I'm just going
00:58:54
to reply to it shortly anyways.
00:58:57
Which is exactly the habit that I've gotten into.
00:59:01
That's the thing that I have struggled with is that these are things that if I set down
00:59:07
do the task, it'll take me four minutes to complete it and one to write the email back.
00:59:13
It just doesn't feel like it's worth putting it into OmniFocus, but then it piles up in
00:59:18
my inbox and then I'm just doing the whole emergency scan thing quite frequently and
00:59:26
it's easy to lose things that way.
00:59:29
Between lost items and clients that have had to contact me multiple times over things
00:59:34
because I didn't get back to them, that's why.
00:59:38
Whoops.
00:59:39
Yep.
00:59:40
Also leaving those things in your inbox, what it really does is it decreases the amount
00:59:46
of attentional space that you have for things.
00:59:49
Really all of the distractions, that's the net effect of those things is that they decrease
00:59:55
the amount of attentional space that you have.
00:59:58
The other thing that's worth calling out here under the area of hyper focus is that there
01:00:01
are things that you can do to increase your attentional space.
01:00:06
Lots of benefits from that, obviously.
01:00:09
He lists these in the book, he talks about how you can plan for the future more, helps
01:00:13
you get back on track quicker.
01:00:14
You have a better ability to process complex tasks and you have an increased ability to
01:00:18
think about what's coming next while still working on the original intention.
01:00:23
So it minimizes that attention and residue that I think that was Cal Newport and DeepWork
01:00:29
where we first heard about that.
01:00:31
But the number one way that you can increase your attentional space from what I remember
01:00:36
reading this section is to meditate.
01:00:38
So Joe Beulich, how did you feel about this section?
01:00:41
Do I have to answer that question?
01:00:43
I have an action item to start meditating again.
01:00:53
Somebody should go back and tell me how many times I have done this action item.
01:00:58
It's a lot.
01:01:00
Part of the reason I put it down here, because I totally get it.
01:01:04
I understand his point.
01:01:05
He's been meditating for what, 10 years, a decade, if I remember correctly.
01:01:11
But one of the things that I think I'm starting to come around to is that in a lot of the
01:01:19
previous times when I've tried this, I've been in situations where I could control a
01:01:23
lot of my day-to-day.
01:01:26
It was pretty easy for me to stay on task.
01:01:30
I had a lot of the focus ability at the time.
01:01:33
But I think what has happened is in the last probably six to nine months, my job duties
01:01:40
throughout the day have changed such that I am very scattered all over the place throughout
01:01:46
the day.
01:01:47
It's easy for me to get overwhelmed.
01:01:50
It's just the way things have morphed.
01:01:53
There's enough going on more so than I'm ever used to.
01:01:56
I think maybe the current mindset that I work through each day, I think that that has put
01:02:03
me in a place where maybe my specific scenario right now would greatly benefit from that,
01:02:08
because I don't have the longer stretches that I used to have and just don't see the
01:02:14
issues or I am seeing the issues that I didn't used to see.
01:02:18
I think there's maybe some, there's potential in this particular scenario, I think.
01:02:25
That's partly why I wanted to try it.
01:02:27
Also, I'm getting tired of people telling me how great it is.
01:02:32
I feel like at one of these points I'm going to understand it.
01:02:37
Every time I attempt it, I learn something more about it and see potential in it, but
01:02:44
not enough to warrant maintaining it as a habit.
01:02:49
Maybe it'll stick this time.
01:02:51
I don't know.
01:02:52
I'm going to give it another round.
01:02:55
No commitment here.
01:02:56
I will try it and stay with that.
01:02:58
The framing of meditation as the key to increasing your attentional space in this book is different
01:03:05
than anything else I've ever seen when they're trying to convince you that, "Hey, you should
01:03:09
meditate," because he talks about how one study showed a 30% increase in working memory
01:03:15
after only a couple of weeks of daily mindfulness meditation.
01:03:21
You can increase your attentional space by, he's saying, "30% within a couple of weeks
01:03:27
by doing mindfulness meditation."
01:03:31
That's pretty crazy.
01:03:32
Basically if you read this section after you've read the first part of this book, where you're
01:03:36
talking about dealing with the distractions and you feel like there's no hope that my
01:03:42
attentional space is capped at 80 attentional space units or whatever, he's saying, "No,
01:03:48
you can get 30 more in only a couple of weeks by doing this mindfulness meditation."
01:03:54
He also in this book, I forget exactly where.
01:03:58
Maybe it's later on where he talks about being well rested and getting enough sleep.
01:04:03
When you don't get enough sleep, one of the studies that he mentioned, I think it was
01:04:07
from this book, he mentioned that, "10 minutes of mindfulness meditation has the same restorative
01:04:13
effect for your brain as up to an hour of additional sleep."
01:04:19
There's obviously a lot that happens in your brain from developing this mindfulness meditation
01:04:24
habit.
01:04:25
I think when you view it as it's going to provide me this specific benefit, instead of just like,
01:04:33
"Oh yeah, you might feel more calm or in control or whatever," that's kind of hard to wrap
01:04:38
your head around and say, "Yeah, that's something that I really need to do."
01:04:42
It's not quantifiable.
01:04:44
When you say your attentional space, this is how you get things done, this is how you
01:04:49
do deep work, this is how you accomplish your important projects, this is how you pay the
01:04:54
bills, then it's a lot easier to justify.
01:04:57
Yeah, I'm going to invest this 10 minutes every day because it's going to buy me back
01:05:02
all of this additional time or ineffectiveness, if that makes sense.
01:05:06
It makes sense.
01:05:07
I just want to see it.
01:05:12
At this point, I have the action item because I'm basically saying prove it.
01:05:17
That's kind of what I'm thinking.
01:05:20
So, that is hyperfocus.
01:05:25
You had mentioned when you were talking about recognizing that you felt scattered, I think,
01:05:30
is how you put it.
01:05:32
The other part of this book is scatter focus, but these are definitely not the same thing.
01:05:38
Hyperfocus is your brain's most productive mode.
01:05:41
The scatter focus is not emergency scan modality where you're scanning the horizon for the
01:05:46
next email you have to respond to right away.
01:05:48
The next thing that you have to do, scatter focus is kind of your brain taking a break
01:05:53
and allowing it to be more creative.
01:05:55
Is that fair?
01:05:56
Yeah, I really resonated with this whole section just because what he's calling scatter
01:06:03
focus, the technicals of what it is, like the how you go about it piece, those are things
01:06:12
I've been promoting for a long time.
01:06:16
It involves things like taking breaks and such and collecting dots so that you can connect
01:06:20
dots later.
01:06:21
Those are things that I feel like I've been talking about for a long time, but I've never
01:06:27
even attempted to formalize it the way that Chris did here.
01:06:32
So I was going through this and thought, yes, yes, yes, yes.
01:06:35
For once, these are things I do.
01:06:39
I got a little bit of redemption in this particular part of the book.
01:06:43
Yes, although I suck at hyper focus, like I'm really good at scatter focus, but maybe
01:06:48
a little too much so.
01:06:50
Yeah, to be honest, I think you're maybe a little bit too hard on yourself.
01:06:54
I think you probably are a lot further than a lot of people when it comes to being able
01:07:03
to hyper focus just because I've known you for a length of time and I've seen the stuff
01:07:08
that you've produced.
01:07:10
There's no way you can do that without being able to hyper focus.
01:07:15
But I do get what you're saying.
01:07:17
You're your own worst critic and it's easy to focus on the flaws and all the things that
01:07:23
you don't do well.
01:07:25
And especially when you're talking about hyper focus, that's kind of like the gold standard
01:07:30
that everybody's like, oh, I should be able to do this, but it's really, really hard.
01:07:34
And even when you're really, really good at it, it's not something that you do for eight
01:07:37
hours a day.
01:07:39
I had mentioned at one point that when on the concept of deep work that it's a successful
01:07:45
day if he can get two hours a day to just do focus deep work for writing or creating
01:07:51
or something.
01:07:52
And I think that that's probably true, but two hours out of 24 hours, like what are you
01:07:56
doing the rest of the hours?
01:07:58
And so that's where scatter focus can really help you because if you're focused on, I'm
01:08:03
going to do hyper focus for this period of time, you can't spend the rest of the time
01:08:10
firefighting.
01:08:11
You have to use scatter focus in order to recharge your batteries.
01:08:17
And that's kind of the next point here.
01:08:19
But a couple of things to point out about scatter focus is that it allows you to set
01:08:25
intentions and plans for the future.
01:08:27
So this is the mode when you're thinking about like, where do you want to be in five
01:08:30
years?
01:08:31
That's kind of scatter focus.
01:08:32
It also lets you recharge and it fosters creativity.
01:08:35
There's also different styles of scatter focus.
01:08:38
So when you are out for a walk, for example, and you're capturing ideas, that's capture
01:08:43
mode and that's he says best for identifying what's on your mind.
01:08:47
There's also a problem crunching mode where you're and I've talked about doing this where
01:08:52
I'll take my dog for a walk.
01:08:53
I won't listen to a podcast.
01:08:55
I'll get stuck somewhere and I'll have a problem that I'm trying to solve and I'll
01:08:58
be gone for 15 minutes.
01:09:00
And by the time I get back, I've figured out the solution just because I've created the
01:09:03
space in order to do that.
01:09:04
So Cal Newport would call that a productive meditation, I think, is the term that he used.
01:09:11
Same kind of idea though, where you're just going to let your brain focus on the problem
01:09:14
instead of doing the actual work.
01:09:16
And then there's the habitual mode, which is best for recharging and connecting the
01:09:20
greatest number of ideas or dots, which is another really cool idea that we're going
01:09:25
to talk about in a little bit.
01:09:27
Yeah, scatter focus I think is one that depending on which mode you find yourself in a lot,
01:09:33
the capture mode, the problem crunching mode or the habitual mode, depending on which ones
01:09:39
you use a lot.
01:09:40
I've referred to in the past my interest in maintaining my yard as my own to mow.
01:09:49
A lot of people tell me, "Well, you can save some time if you just hire that out."
01:09:52
Oh sure, I could, but I get a lot of cool ideas when I'm mowing the lawn.
01:09:58
There's a lot of value in that.
01:09:59
I'm not going to turn on the radio or a podcast on my way to run some errands because that's
01:10:04
the headspace I need to think through things.
01:10:08
When I'm doing those things, that's what I find myself and where I find myself doing
01:10:12
this the most.
01:10:14
Connecting dots and such, whenever you are reading books and stuff like what we do, you
01:10:18
always come up with new ideas and I talk to enough clients and new companies and stuff
01:10:25
that you kind of get their ideas to.
01:10:27
They're going to do X, Y, and Z on their community.
01:10:31
I wonder if that would apply, I wonder if Y would work on this over here.
01:10:36
You can start to pull some of those pieces together, but I don't ever really find myself
01:10:39
making those connections until I have a chance to go do something that's maybe habitual,
01:10:46
driving to do errands, or mowing the lawn.
01:10:50
Until I get the chance to go do that, those ideas don't really crop up.
01:10:54
To me, I feel like the hard part with that is that you can just let your mind wander and
01:11:00
let it go wherever, but if you could point it in the right direction and then let it wander,
01:11:05
which is kind of counterintuitive when you first say it like that, but if you can give
01:11:11
yourself a general direction to let your mind play with ideas, to me that's where some of
01:11:17
the power of this comes in.
01:11:19
That's a thing I feel like I've been trying to do for a long time.
01:11:21
This whole idea generation process is one that I've been very particular about over
01:11:25
the years.
01:11:27
That's the piece of this that I feel like is extremely powerful.
01:11:31
Yeah, I totally agree.
01:11:33
On the topic of collecting dots, I've specifically mentioned that before in previous episodes
01:11:39
of the podcast because there was an Austin Cleon book that really impacted me when I
01:11:44
was struggling with not being able to be creative and recognizing that what you create
01:11:48
is really the logical summation of all the dots that you've collected over the years.
01:11:53
But there's a whole section in this particular book about how not all dots are created equal,
01:11:59
which I really, really liked.
01:12:01
One of the things that I jotted down was books are better than Netflix, but he kind of,
01:12:06
yeah.
01:12:07
Again, he's got a powerful visual, I think, which explains this a lot better than a bunch
01:12:12
of words can.
01:12:14
So again, he's got a graph and on the Y axis, he's got usefulness and on the X axis, he's
01:12:20
got entertainment value.
01:12:21
There's kind of this line that slopes downward from the top of usefulness.
01:12:27
That would be like high usefulness, low entertainment.
01:12:30
Then he's got dotted lines, which break this kind of down into the different tiers.
01:12:35
You've got things that are highly useful, but not very entertaining.
01:12:40
Those things are useful, things that are a little less useful, but they are more entertaining
01:12:45
or balanced.
01:12:46
And then there's things as you go further away from usefulness and increase in entertainment,
01:12:52
you've got entertaining and then eventually trashy.
01:12:55
This is an interesting idea because, again, tuning our own horn, but bookworm is interesting
01:13:02
and because it's a combination of both entertainment and usefulness, I would argue.
01:13:09
You can get the ideas from these books without having to read the entire book.
01:13:14
And hopefully we do it in a way that it's actually fun to listen to.
01:13:18
But those are the ideal dots to collect.
01:13:21
And that was one of the things that I wrote down when I read it the first time was to
01:13:25
take stock of everything that I'm consuming.
01:13:29
What are the things that I'm listening to, what are the things that I'm reading and watching,
01:13:33
and how do I eliminate a couple of the things that maybe are entertaining but not very useful
01:13:39
with things that are more balanced?
01:13:41
And that's kind of a strategy that Chris advocates for as well.
01:13:45
He mentions specifically like TED Talks, but I think podcasts could fall into that category
01:13:49
as well.
01:13:50
Depending on the podcast.
01:13:52
Depending on the podcast, right?
01:13:53
I think I forget who I was mentioning.
01:13:56
This was you I mentioned it too, but I believe it's the Chinese that have, in the US, podcasts
01:14:03
are primarily for entertainment.
01:14:06
That's kind of how we use them.
01:14:08
We use them as a way to fill in the blanks, I guess with time.
01:14:15
But the Chinese see them as self-improvement.
01:14:19
And I think most podcasts in China are actually paid.
01:14:24
So the podcast market has a much higher value in China than it does in the US.
01:14:30
Kind of weird.
01:14:31
Interesting.
01:14:32
Yeah, so it's just a different mentality there I think.
01:14:34
So anyway, that's just a fun little tidbit.
01:14:36
Yeah, I do think that this is a really powerful idea though, and it's worth evaluating for
01:14:42
everybody, even people who listen to Bookworm is to take stock of all of the dots that you're
01:14:47
collecting.
01:14:48
And again, just being intentional, being mindful might be another way to describe it, but recognizing
01:14:54
what sort of dots are you collecting.
01:14:58
And then there's another idea from this section called clustering, where if there is a specific
01:15:03
problem that you're trying to solve, you could just collect a whole bunch of dots around
01:15:07
a subject or a topic, and then you apply the scatter focus model and you take a step back
01:15:11
and you see all the dots and you see how they're connected.
01:15:15
And then just by creating that space for the scatter focus, you're like, oh, that's a solution.
01:15:21
That's the answer that I was looking for.
01:15:23
It maybe doesn't appear as like, here's x, y, z that you need to do to solve this problem,
01:15:29
but you get x from this book over here and you get y from this podcast over here and you
01:15:32
get z from this TED talk over here.
01:15:34
And then you line them all up.
01:15:36
And when you have the time to do intentional scatter focus, you can see how those things
01:15:41
are connected.
01:15:42
I think this made transitionists into the next piece here.
01:15:48
But one of the things that I took away from the broader piece of this book is that hyper
01:15:54
focus and scatter focus really need to work together.
01:15:58
And although hyper focus is our most productive way of working, scatter focus is our most
01:16:05
creative way of working.
01:16:07
And that's a thing that I feel like is very helpful just to understand is I can go about
01:16:13
building my distraction free mode and I can go about making sure that I'm getting my
01:16:17
hour or two hours or five hours of focus time in a day if you're superhuman.
01:16:24
You can work on doing that, but unless you have this scatter focus habit built in on top
01:16:30
of the hyper focus habit, neither are really going to thrive.
01:16:38
And I think that's the piece.
01:16:39
And I think you're being generous in saying that this is maybe something I'm good at.
01:16:43
You know, as an example, I don't think I've had a true hyper focus session in at least
01:16:47
a few weeks.
01:16:48
So like that's that said, this is something that I know that I need to to focus on just
01:16:56
because no pun intended there.
01:16:59
But it's something that I need to dedicate a little bit of energy towards developing because
01:17:04
there are things that I can be doing in my workday that aren't email and firefighting.
01:17:12
There are some things I can be doing to build into the business for now.
01:17:16
So that's that's a thing that I know that I need to be doing.
01:17:18
But if I don't have this scatter focus side of things, I may not have all the ideas I
01:17:24
need to do to focus on during that session.
01:17:28
So I think it's important to have both for sure.
01:17:31
Yeah, and that's a really good, really good point.
01:17:35
I also think though that when it talks when you bring it back to your ability to hyper
01:17:41
focus, it doesn't just have to apply to your workday.
01:17:46
You can apply hyper focus to the different areas of your life that you and I don't even
01:17:53
want to say set goals in.
01:17:54
But the things that are important to you, I would say that you have applied hyper focus
01:17:59
in the way that you deal with your family because you're cutting out all the distractions.
01:18:03
You're leaving your phone in your office before you walk upstairs or whatever.
01:18:07
So again, don't be so hard on yourself.
01:18:12
You're going to stick to this, aren't you?
01:18:16
Well, I think that there's a logical and a natural kind of cadence with this stuff.
01:18:24
And you can improve that cadence, you can improve that rhythm when you can apply intentionality
01:18:32
for this is the set, the part of the day.
01:18:34
I'm going to be doing hyper focus when I'm done with that.
01:18:37
I'm going to go the other way and do scatter focus.
01:18:39
It kind of reminds me of again that grid from the power of full engagement, where you're
01:18:44
going back and forth between high positive energy, low positive energy, and the goal
01:18:49
is to stay away from the negative side.
01:18:51
But you have to be intentional, you're going back and forth between high positive and low
01:18:54
positive.
01:18:55
Maybe there's even a direct correlation there between hyper focus being high positive and
01:19:00
scatter focus being low positive.
01:19:01
I don't know.
01:19:03
But I think that the idea of hyper focus is something that is more generalizable than
01:19:07
just applying it to your work.
01:19:10
And I also think that the way Chris describes it in this book as like hyper focus being
01:19:15
the productivity mode or scatter focus being the creative mode, that's kind of selling
01:19:20
it short.
01:19:22
I think that when it comes to hyper focus, I get why he uses the term productivity because
01:19:32
typically you're focusing on how efficiently can I get the tasks on my list done.
01:19:40
But I also think that part of productivity is not just cranking out the widgets, but how
01:19:46
effective you are and if the thing that you're working on is creating a blog post, creating
01:19:54
a podcast, creating a product, creating a video, like technically that's the creativity
01:19:59
mode.
01:20:01
But I would argue that a lot of the effectiveness that comes from how clearly you can communicate
01:20:06
in that creative outlet is going to be based on the hyper focus mode.
01:20:13
Does that make sense?
01:20:14
Yeah, I could see that.
01:20:16
And this is where, like I was kind of referring to it earlier where you got to have the scatter
01:20:22
focus side to really get the ideas, but then you need the hyper focus side to act on it.
01:20:30
Like that's at least that's how I was seeing it.
01:20:33
Yeah.
01:20:34
So if you're getting ideas about how to improve your home life and you are applying those,
01:20:41
are you using hyper focus or scatter focus?
01:20:44
It's easy to say, well, it's not hyper focus because I'm not writing X number of words.
01:20:48
There's no way to quantify quality time with my kids.
01:20:51
But hyper focus maybe is a skill that does help you be more focused and engaged when you're
01:20:58
now, I've got four boys at home.
01:21:00
So we're sitting at home, we're playing, playing Legos or whatever.
01:21:04
I don't, I don't know what you do with little girls.
01:21:07
Maybe you have tea parties.
01:21:09
Not quite there yet.
01:21:10
No, they like to jump on dad.
01:21:12
We have like, we play the pillow game.
01:21:14
Yeah, basically I get whacked with pillows.
01:21:16
So maybe hyper focus allows you to be better at playing the pillow game.
01:21:20
You know, like I think it manifests other ways than just the amount that you produce
01:21:27
in work mode.
01:21:28
That's fair because I'm pretty good at separating.
01:21:31
I'm not always the best at staying separated, but I think I follow what you're saying.
01:21:37
Okay.
01:21:38
Now, obviously in this book, I think it's slanted towards the work mode.
01:21:43
Great.
01:21:44
And that's kind of spoken to with the other point here about how they work together because
01:21:48
Chris mentions the biological prime time, which is actually an idea.
01:21:51
He brings up in the productivity project.
01:21:53
And this is all about identifying what is the optimal time to sit down and do hyper
01:21:58
focus type work.
01:22:00
So if you can identify that you're most alert, energized, whatever, you can write the most
01:22:04
words, you can do the most of whatever thing is producing the most value, then that's when
01:22:10
you should hyper focus for that thing.
01:22:12
So maybe it's 10 a.m.
01:22:13
It's probably not right after lunch if you go have a big lunch every day.
01:22:17
So there is some value in recognizing that and that kind of lends it to the work context.
01:22:22
But like I said, I don't think it's necessary.
01:22:24
I needs to stay there right after lunch is, you know, prime nap time right there.
01:22:30
That's yep best, which is in the section on scatter focus, there's a whole chapter on
01:22:38
recharging your attention and there's a big section in here about sleep.
01:22:43
And he mentions on page 166 that for every hour of sleep you miss, you lose two hours
01:22:47
of productivity the next day.
01:22:48
I'm not quite sure.
01:22:49
I can't recall how he quantified that specifically.
01:22:52
But a lack of sleep leads to feeling more pressure at work.
01:22:55
You can focus for a shorter duration of time.
01:22:57
You go to social media more often, you have more negative moods, you gravitate to less
01:23:00
demanding tasks, you spend more time online.
01:23:03
You naturally move in the direction of those distractions.
01:23:07
So taking a nap after lunch may be the most productive thing you can do because it sets
01:23:12
the boundary in the barrier then for all of the distractions the rest of the day.
01:23:15
I'm going to take a nap and I'm going to tell my wife that Mike told me to take a nap.
01:23:20
All right.
01:23:21
Can I do that?
01:23:22
You tell her that Mike told you to take a nap because your attentional space is reduced
01:23:27
by up to 60% when you don't get enough sleep.
01:23:30
I'm going to write it in those words.
01:23:39
I'm writing it down right now and I'm going to see what she says whenever I write those
01:23:43
out or when I say that.
01:23:45
You don't have to nap by the way because he mentions in chapter 10 about working together.
01:23:50
It's all a backtrack.
01:23:51
I was looking forward to that.
01:23:52
Well, you can.
01:23:53
You can.
01:23:54
There's definitely a lot of value that comes from sleep.
01:23:56
For people who do not want to take a nap, that's also the most effective time for scatter focus
01:24:01
is when you have the least energy.
01:24:02
He calls that your creativity prime time.
01:24:05
Yes.
01:24:06
I think we've covered everything here.
01:24:09
Have we hit it all?
01:24:10
I think we got through it all.
01:24:12
So go into, I guess, action items?
01:24:17
Yes.
01:24:19
You've got at least one here we haven't talked about yet.
01:24:21
Yeah.
01:24:22
I did mention that this one is already done.
01:24:25
You can follow up with me in two weeks and see if it's stuck.
01:24:29
But I've taken social media off of my phone in line with considering how I use my devices.
01:24:37
I don't want my smartphone, which is always there to be so accessible for distractions,
01:24:45
even if they're self-imposed distractions, even if I know that when I go into Twitter,
01:24:49
it's a conscious choice I'm making.
01:24:51
I'm not responding to a notification because they're turned off.
01:24:54
Thank you, Twitter, for eliminating all of the ability for third-party apps to do that,
01:24:59
by the way.
01:25:00
It makes it easy to do this.
01:25:03
Thanks for making it easier to use your service less.
01:25:05
I appreciate that.
01:25:09
The other one that I wrote down, though, was in the section on email, and maybe this didn't
01:25:16
hit you the same way it hit me because you are naturally doing this with the volume of
01:25:20
email that you have to respond to.
01:25:21
But I like this whole idea of writing emails with five sentences or less.
01:25:27
I think that as I think about this, it's probably something I tend to be a little bit
01:25:33
wordy in my email, so it's something that I'll struggle with initially.
01:25:37
But I obviously see the value in this.
01:25:39
The more succinctly you can communicate your points, especially via a text-based medium
01:25:44
like email, the better off you're going to be.
01:25:48
This is a challenge that I want to embrace is clearly communicating what I need to in
01:25:53
five sentences or less when I respond to email.
01:25:56
Yeah, I can't do this at all.
01:25:59
It's not going to apply to every email, by the way.
01:26:01
I know that there's going to be some emails that it is going to be impossible to do this,
01:26:06
but I think this is a cool idea to apply this force constraint to myself when it's
01:26:14
to a lot of the email that I deal with.
01:26:16
I have a lot of clients that, because part of the caveat here is that if you can't say
01:26:22
it in five sentences or less, you should be making a phone call or connecting with them
01:26:28
in some other medium.
01:26:30
I have a lot of people I can't do that with.
01:26:33
It's not even an option because of where they're at in the world or time zones don't
01:26:38
allow us to sync up and such.
01:26:40
It's too much of a hassle to try to get it scheduled, blah, blah, blah.
01:26:44
I have quite a few clients where I'm sending multiple paragraphs explaining something.
01:26:53
I try to make sure I'm as succinct as I can be, and detailed as I can be, but doing it
01:26:58
in five sentences and conveying what I need to convey, that's just not going to happen
01:27:02
in most cases.
01:27:04
Maybe the exception then is five sentences outside of a text expander snippet.
01:27:10
That could be.
01:27:11
I have a ton of text expander snippets for this sort of thing, but I will say that if
01:27:16
it's not like an explanation and just conveying that something was done or what needs tested
01:27:21
and such, those are almost always two or three sentences and they're done.
01:27:25
A lot of those are very, very quick, but I have quite a few in a day that are quite lengthy.
01:27:32
At one point, I had a logger.
01:27:34
It's been a while since I've done this, but I had a key logger at one point that was telling
01:27:38
me that I was typing on average 35 to 40,000 words in a day, which is nuts.
01:27:45
That's half a book.
01:27:47
It's a lot.
01:27:49
Anyway, five sentences or less.
01:27:51
Kudos to you.
01:27:52
I can't commit to that, but I'm sure you're going to have a few that don't convert to that.
01:27:59
I like that being the goal though.
01:28:01
Yeah, it's a good one.
01:28:02
I like it though.
01:28:03
I've got four here, and I think I've mentioned these all, but I'm working on the hourly
01:28:08
awareness chime, just as a reminder to pay attention to what it is I'm doing right now.
01:28:12
I'm looking into distraction blockers.
01:28:15
Not sure if that's actually going to stick or not, but it's something I at least want
01:28:17
to explore.
01:28:20
Don't use my email as a to-do list.
01:28:22
I even wrote in parentheses here.
01:28:24
I know, I know, I get it.
01:28:27
Then lastly, meditation.
01:28:28
Again, in parentheses, it hurts to say this again.
01:28:32
Anyway, there we are.
01:28:34
That's what we got.
01:28:35
All right, author's style and rating.
01:28:38
This will be fun.
01:28:40
As we're recording this, we're getting ready to go into the interview with Chris.
01:28:44
This will be fun.
01:28:45
Right.
01:28:46
You want me to go first?
01:28:48
Sure.
01:28:49
Okay.
01:28:51
I really like Chris's style.
01:28:54
I think that this is honestly a much more approachable book on the topic of focus than
01:29:01
a lot of the stuff that is out there.
01:29:04
This is really, really smart.
01:29:05
He's read a lot of the same research papers that a lot of the other people have.
01:29:10
He references Mahali on page 20, something, page 21.
01:29:16
Yeah.
01:29:17
It's a requirement.
01:29:18
But he distills it down into some really simple mental models.
01:29:22
There's a lot of diagrams in this book which help me anyways kind of solidify these concepts
01:29:28
in my head, whereas a lot of other books might just talk around these topics because
01:29:33
there's a lot of things that he covers in here from habits to meditation to obviously
01:29:37
focuses like a big thing, creativity, biological prime time, sleep.
01:29:42
There's a ton in here, but it's easy to see how it all works together.
01:29:49
This is not, I don't think, and this is just because I've read a lot of books.
01:29:55
If this was the first focus book I picked up, maybe I would think that this was just absolutely
01:30:00
amazing.
01:30:01
But I think it's really, really good.
01:30:03
I don't think it's on the same level.
01:30:05
Like I said about the Shawn Acre book, it's not when I compare it against man's search
01:30:10
for meaning, I can't rate it a five.
01:30:13
But I think it's really, really good.
01:30:14
I think for somebody even who's been in the productivity space for a long time, there's
01:30:17
a lot of stuff that you'll get from this.
01:30:19
But for somebody who maybe this is their first productivity book, their first book on
01:30:23
unfocused, deep work, whatever, this is a great place to start.
01:30:27
I will definitely be recommending this book to just about everybody.
01:30:32
I'm going to rate it 4.5.
01:30:33
Nice.
01:30:34
Nice.
01:30:35
That's exactly where I was going to go.
01:30:37
So 4.5, yes, times two.
01:30:41
And I will agree that Chris is, he's really good at writing for sure.
01:30:47
So Kudos there.
01:30:49
At the same time, I feel like there's a lot of tidbits that you can get out of this and
01:30:56
a lot of action items that come with it.
01:30:58
It also doesn't, again, it doesn't hit that man's search for meaning level.
01:31:05
You know, good point there.
01:31:06
So yeah, I think 4.5 is a good place to put this one.
01:31:10
Cool.
01:31:11
Upcoming books.
01:31:12
Yeah.
01:31:13
So the next one up is my choice and I have selected Predictably Irrational by Dan O'Reilly.
01:31:21
And I think I talked about this just slightly last time.
01:31:24
But the tagline here is the hidden forces that shape our decisions.
01:31:28
It's a New York Times bestseller, notable book in the New York Times, book review of
01:31:33
the year sort of thing.
01:31:35
I have to revise an expanded edition.
01:31:37
I didn't realize that until I started reading it a couple of days ago.
01:31:40
So we'll see how that works.
01:31:43
It's over 300 pages.
01:31:44
So this is kind of a big one.
01:31:46
Yeah.
01:31:47
Sorry about that.
01:31:48
Got to get busy.
01:31:50
All right.
01:31:51
The one after that is my choice and I went to the Bookworm Club for this one and I looked
01:31:58
at which book had the most votes and it is indeed Scrum by Jeff Sutherland.
01:32:05
So we're going to be doing that one after Predictably Irrational.
01:32:10
This is a book that I have read previously.
01:32:12
Have you read this?
01:32:13
I have not.
01:32:14
It's been on my list for quite a while though.
01:32:15
Okay.
01:32:16
So this is a, this is a, already I'll tell you, because I've mentioned it on other podcasts
01:32:21
that this is a good book and I think this is going to be interesting to see how as we're
01:32:27
reading this for Bookworm, this applies to a non-work context.
01:32:32
Yeah.
01:32:33
But I'm excited to go through it with you.
01:32:35
Yeah.
01:32:36
It'll be fun.
01:32:37
I don't have a gap book this time.
01:32:39
No gap books for Joe.
01:32:40
Okay.
01:32:41
So I do have a gap book and it is the new book by the Basecamp Guys.
01:32:48
It's called It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work.
01:32:51
So Jason Freed and I forget the other guy, the guy basically who wrote Ruby on Rails.
01:32:57
Nope.
01:32:58
If I remember.
01:33:00
Nope.
01:33:01
This is a, so they've written a couple books like Remote and rework was the other one that
01:33:09
really impacted me several years ago when I, when I read it.
01:33:13
This is kind of in that same vein.
01:33:15
So it's a lot of like really short couple page chapters if you want to call them that
01:33:20
on specific topics.
01:33:21
But so far it is really well done.
01:33:25
David Heinemayer, I think is the name you're looking for.
01:33:28
Yep.
01:33:29
I just wasn't going to try to pronounce that.
01:33:31
I live in the Rails world.
01:33:33
So yes, go David.
01:33:35
Yeah.
01:33:36
I knew you really was.
01:33:38
Fun times.
01:33:39
All right.
01:33:40
So if you want to recommend a book, you can do so at club.bookworm.fm.
01:33:47
And like I mentioned, I picked Scrum.
01:33:51
That's the one that's got the most votes at the moment.
01:33:55
So that would be the place to go to recommend a book for yourself.
01:33:59
You can also go to the website bookworm.fm/list.
01:34:02
I believe gives you a list of all of the books that we have covered and all of the upcoming
01:34:08
books as well.
01:34:10
And if you like the show, there's a couple ways that you can help us out.
01:34:14
One is leave an iTunes review.
01:34:16
Link in the show notes for that too.
01:34:18
You can click on any of the links in the show notes for the books.
01:34:23
Those are Amazon affiliate links.
01:34:24
So those give us a little bit of a kickback.
01:34:26
If you are interested in the books and decide to pick them up, if you use our links, we
01:34:30
get a little bit of a kickback from that.
01:34:31
So that's a second way you can support the show.
01:34:34
Third, you can join the club.
01:34:36
So club.bookworm.fm.
01:34:37
Again, link in the show notes.
01:34:40
That is where we have conversations about all of these episodes.
01:34:43
If you have action items from the books or you're curious about certain ones or have
01:34:49
a book that you want to recommend, that's all done on the club.
01:34:51
So join the club and share your thoughts.
01:34:54
Yeah.
01:34:55
And I want to call out specifically an iTunes review.
01:35:00
So Martin LTPM rated it five stars.
01:35:04
It excellent, says good coverage of books.
01:35:06
I may even purchase one or two that I've passed on before and gave some very constructive
01:35:11
criticism, which I apologize because he mentioned that we overused the words quote unquote
01:35:16
and actually, and I know that I did that a couple of times this episode.
01:35:19
But this is awesome.
01:35:20
I love this.
01:35:21
So thank you for sharing this because this is the big benefit I got from joining Toastmasters.
01:35:26
Pretty much overnight when I joined Toastmasters, I stopped saying I know I still say it occasionally,
01:35:31
but compared to where I was when I first started going to Toastmasters, it's night and day
01:35:35
difference.
01:35:36
And all it was was somebody pointing out that you tend to say this all the time.
01:35:40
Yeah.
01:35:41
So this is really, really good.
01:35:42
I love this and I'm going to do everything that I can to stop overusing these buzzwords.
01:35:48
So thank you for the feedback.
01:35:50
Thank you for the rating.
01:35:51
And if you are following along, the next book is predictably irrational.
01:35:56
So we will talk to you in a couple of weeks.
01:35:59
So Chris Bailey, welcome to Bookworm.
01:36:03
Thanks for having me, man.
01:36:04
Good to be here.
01:36:05
Absolutely.
01:36:06
So the way this is going to go, this is going to be slotted in with a normal Bookworm episode
01:36:12
where we actually dove into the content of your book already.
01:36:15
So what we wanted to do for this segment is kind of talk about something that's probably
01:36:20
a little bit more interesting to our listeners anyway.
01:36:22
And I know as we were talking about before we hopped on the call that maybe it's more
01:36:26
interesting for you too because you tend to talk about the content in a lot of different
01:36:30
places.
01:36:31
So what we want to do here is kind of talk about the process and really where you got
01:36:35
the idea for the book, that sort of thing.
01:36:37
Yeah.
01:36:38
Yeah.
01:36:39
That's kind of like it's a curious part about publishing a book because when the book comes
01:36:43
out, you will have read it four or five times if you go through the traditional publishing
01:36:47
route.
01:36:48
And so you're familiar with the content and you're kind of like, okay, I'm ready to get
01:36:52
this out into the world.
01:36:53
When you start talking about it in various media outlets, and I'm fortunate that my publisher
01:36:59
is good and the context that I have are good and people are interested in my work so that
01:37:04
I get a bunch of interviews around the book, but you're right that it is the same questions
01:37:08
coming up again and again and again multiple times a day often.
01:37:12
And so it's nice to talk about the process because I'm sure a lot of the folks that are
01:37:19
listening are nerds about the process of creating anything.
01:37:23
It's just so curious because you have this end product, this hardcover book that I'm holding
01:37:28
in my hands right now.
01:37:30
But how does this come into fruition when it starts as an idea in somebody's mind and
01:37:37
turns into something that you can throw down on your desk and crack open and start flipping
01:37:42
through the pages.
01:37:43
So it's just so fascinating because I remember being fascinated about this idea before I
01:37:47
started even thinking about writing a book.
01:37:50
And so I learned the lessons the hard way with the first book and then wrote a second
01:37:53
book, using the lessons that I learned from writing the first one.
01:37:57
So it's fascinating.
01:37:58
And so hopefully it's interesting, but it also helps people if somebody's considering
01:38:04
writing a book that's hardcover, whether it's traditionally published, whether it's self-published,
01:38:09
regardless of how it's published, thinking through these ideas.
01:38:13
And it should be fun.
01:38:16
One of the things that I see a lot with these books, and Mike and I have been teasing about
01:38:20
this a lot for how many episodes now, Mike.
01:38:23
But it seems like most books are structured where they've got three parts.
01:38:28
And in this particular book, I could see you were trying to get away from that.
01:38:33
There's part one and part two, but then you have this chapter zero concept that's in there,
01:38:39
which is very interesting to me.
01:38:41
And I'm very curious, like, how did that come about and how did you discover the structure
01:38:45
for this book?
01:38:47
Do you follow Merlin Mann's work at all?
01:38:50
I think most people in our space do, it seems like.
01:38:53
I remember listening to maybe on Macbreak Weekly a long time ago, and he used to say step zero
01:39:00
all the time.
01:39:01
And so I'm going to have a chapter zero in this book because it's not really a chapter
01:39:05
one.
01:39:06
It's kind of like a preface to the book itself, kind of like a story that frames the book.
01:39:12
And then there's kind of the tactics after that that set you up to read the book, so
01:39:16
how to focus better on reading hyper focus, which is chapter zero point five.
01:39:21
And funny enough, when we were pitching this book around to different publishers, we met
01:39:26
with a lot of editors.
01:39:28
And it turned out this is like so inside baseball, but I feel there's a few nerds out there
01:39:32
who might be curious about this story.
01:39:34
I was just chatting randomly with my editor, and I saw him on Twitter.
01:39:37
And I saw that he followed somebody by the name of John Saracusa.
01:39:42
And I saw that he followed somebody else by the name of Marco Arment.
01:39:46
And a few other people in the Apple tech space, and he published a few books with Guy Kawasaki
01:39:52
and Ray Kurzweil and other kind of nerds like that.
01:39:57
And so I thought, oh, like this guy, he's down with technology.
01:40:02
And he'd be totally game for this.
01:40:04
And it turns out that he was another reason for the chapters hero in addition to kind of
01:40:09
that muted Merlin man ism is good reads.
01:40:14
You know, I like to update my page count in good reads whenever I'm reading a book, but
01:40:18
it pisses me off.
01:40:19
Sorry for swearing.
01:40:20
You might have to get bleep that up.
01:40:21
But it really bugs me whenever I encounter the like preface of the book, and they use
01:40:28
Roman numerals as like the page numbers.
01:40:32
And so when you type in your page number count on good reads, you don't get credit because
01:40:36
only when you start the book, that's when chapter page one occurs.
01:40:40
And so that man, I'm not going to, you know, for the three people that read my book that
01:40:44
struggle with the same thing, I don't want them to go through that as well.
01:40:47
So yeah, it's kind of like a, it's kind of like a nerdy reference in a way that most
01:40:52
people won't get, but and everybody, I feel a lot of people might look at it and think,
01:40:56
oh, because most of my readers aren't tech nerds, you know, they're, you know, they're
01:41:00
everyday people that walk by the book in the bookstore.
01:41:03
But I feel a lot of people might think it's a mistake, but you know, now we know the truth.
01:41:10
I didn't catch the Merlin man reference, but I did really like the way that, you know,
01:41:14
you wrote this book on focus and in chapters 0.5, you're explaining for people who would
01:41:20
have trouble reading this book.
01:41:21
Here's a couple of things you can do to focus to read this book on focus.
01:41:25
Yeah.
01:41:26
Little meta, but I thought that was brilliant.
01:41:27
Well, that's kind of the odd thing about productivity books is that the people who need them the
01:41:32
most are the people who are the least likely to pick up a book about productivity.
01:41:37
Like, you know, it's a book about focus.
01:41:39
It's not that we don't have time to read.
01:41:40
It's that we don't have the attention to read.
01:41:43
And so my, my intention with that chapter is like, okay, how can I maximize the odds
01:41:47
that somebody's actually going to make it through this thing so that it, it helps them
01:41:51
improve their lives?
01:41:52
Because that, that should be the intention when you write a book is how do you make somebody's
01:41:57
life better?
01:41:58
Because if you make their life better, they're going to tell people about your book and then
01:42:01
the, the effects will cascade from that point.
01:42:04
That's what I really believe.
01:42:06
And so yeah, it's just like a, okay, how do I maximize the odds of this?
01:42:10
That's great.
01:42:11
Like I said, I think I really like that part of it.
01:42:13
Now you mentioned you learned several lessons between productivity project and hyper focus.
01:42:18
Maybe we can come back to those lessons specifically, but how did you get the idea for hyper focus
01:42:23
after the productivity project, what was the process there where you landed on this is
01:42:27
the thing for my next book?
01:42:29
The productivity project, it kind of, you know, I did a year of productivity experiments.
01:42:33
I learned a lot, you know, kind of looking at all the research about the topic.
01:42:38
So though, you know, that's enough for a book and, and you know, a bunch of agents approached
01:42:42
me after the project was done and, and that led to a deal to write the book with, with
01:42:46
Penguin Random House.
01:42:48
But you know, the second book, I didn't, it's kind of like the first one in a way where
01:42:55
I didn't begin the productivity project.
01:42:58
What was then a, you call the year of productivity thinking, I want to write a book about productivity
01:43:03
by the time this year is done.
01:43:06
You know, and I think the second book was kind of the same where, you know, if I'm going
01:43:11
to write a book, I want it to be something that I'm very, very curious about and something
01:43:16
that I struggle with myself.
01:43:19
And now it's really the impetus of writing hyper focus was that I noticed how distracted
01:43:25
I was as somebody who's a pretty big nerd about productivity.
01:43:29
And so, okay, maybe if this is something that I struggle with, maybe it's something other
01:43:33
people struggle with too.
01:43:35
And maybe if I struggle with it, but yet I'm giving advice that, that we should resist
01:43:41
distraction, maybe there's a part of the bigger picture that I'm missing here with the book.
01:43:47
And so it was really at that point where I thought, oh, maybe there's something here.
01:43:52
Maybe there's something here that not only could help other people out, but could help
01:43:57
me out in the process.
01:43:59
And so, you know, whereas the first book, it was kind of the natural next step after
01:44:04
doing a year of productivity experiments and looking at the research.
01:44:09
But, you know, the second project was born out of necessity in a way that the first one
01:44:16
wasn't.
01:44:17
Does that make sense?
01:44:18
Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense.
01:44:20
And it seems like it's a natural progression there.
01:44:22
That was one of the things, I know you weren't privy to it, but Mike and I were going through
01:44:27
the book in a lot of detail right before we jumped on here.
01:44:30
And one of the things that we talked about is how the productivity project is very insightful
01:44:35
into your experiments and it serves as a really nice high level overview of everything you
01:44:41
really need to know about productivity.
01:44:43
Whereas this kind of focuses on one aspect within that, but it's one of the most important
01:44:49
aspects.
01:44:50
Yeah, which is interesting to see, like, okay, well, you needed to write this.
01:44:54
You know, it needed to be the next step.
01:44:57
So it's very interesting how those two fit together.
01:44:59
And, you know, I'm not somebody who kind of like thinks, okay, what's the next step in
01:45:06
my career?
01:45:07
And oh, maybe a book about focus is marketable.
01:45:12
And then oh, I'm going to, you know, find a way to write a book about focus.
01:45:16
You know, it really does start from that place of something that I struggle with.
01:45:21
And you know, it very much was a project, just like the productivity project, but most
01:45:25
of it was invisible.
01:45:26
So immediately after encountering this lesson, I started looking at all the studies I could
01:45:32
find about the time.
01:45:33
And I feel a lot of people say they read a study from front to back, but they don't
01:45:37
actually do.
01:45:38
You know, most people are kind of BSing when they say they do that because studies can
01:45:43
be very dry and very boring.
01:45:45
So they have to be, you know, you have to be curious enough about exploring the depths
01:45:51
of an idea if you want to, if you want to pursue connecting information about that topic.
01:45:58
And so, you know, I started pouring over, luckily I hope nobody ends up telling the school this,
01:46:03
but my fiance, she's studying for her PhD.
01:46:06
And so I get free access to all of her, her university's studies.
01:46:11
So I get like, you know, access to all the study portals.
01:46:15
So I don't have to pay 20 or 30 dollars a pop.
01:46:17
And so I just, you know, I started pulling and pulling and pulling and printing off and
01:46:20
you know, connecting all of these different pieces of information until, you know, I discovered
01:46:27
an iPad app called Papership, which allows you to read these things digitally and highlight
01:46:32
them digitally.
01:46:33
So I wasted a ton of paper unnecessarily.
01:46:36
But you know, it got to the point where I had accumulated around 25,000 words of notes
01:46:41
about this topic that was pure research.
01:46:45
And so I think this is something that not enough people think about when they write a
01:46:48
book.
01:46:49
So, you know, is how dense do you want the book to be?
01:46:53
Because, you know, you see this a lot with books in the productivity space where there
01:46:59
will be one little bit of science and then a big long anecdote that is a waste of everybody's
01:47:06
time that just exists to fill some word count.
01:47:09
And so I think that's something that not a lot of people consider.
01:47:12
I made a few notes before the call because I was kind of thinking through, you know, how
01:47:18
I used, you know, what consideration went into structuring the book.
01:47:23
And you know, one of them was that I didn't want three parts.
01:47:25
I wanted just two, you know, the two intentional modes of our mind.
01:47:28
But another big consideration was, okay, how dense do I want this book to be?
01:47:33
And the book ended up being about 70,000 words.
01:47:38
And so I collected about 25,000 words of scientific research that the book is based on top of.
01:47:45
And so it's not one little bit of science followed by 10 pages that you have to wade
01:47:50
through a vanik notes.
01:47:52
It's much more concentrated that that.
01:47:53
You get the odd example.
01:47:55
You get the story very, very occasionally, which backs up and supports the science that
01:48:01
you want to get across to people because you need to make it digestible in some way as opposed
01:48:05
to just rhyming off a bunch of statistics.
01:48:08
But I think that's kind of the key is how dense do you want the book to be?
01:48:11
What proportion of a book do you want to be science?
01:48:14
Do you want to be tactics versus what proportion of it?
01:48:18
Do you want to be examples and stories and, you know, just stuff like that?
01:48:23
And I don't think enough people consider that ratio before they write a book.
01:48:27
But I think this is something that separates the best books that I've read or my favorite
01:48:32
books that are in this science help space from the ones that are my least favorite is the density of them.
01:48:39
Yeah, regarding your fiance's research access, don't worry, your secret is safe with us.
01:48:46
It's just you, us and the rest of the internet.
01:48:48
Oh, okay, nobody will hear this from Queen's University in King Sinonteria.
01:48:54
Right.
01:48:55
I do want to ask you a question because the productivity project was based off of a bunch
01:48:59
of experiments that you did.
01:49:01
And this book is based off of a lot of research on a particular topic.
01:49:06
Is it difficult for you going from, I'm going to be a guinea pig to, I'm going to be a thought
01:49:11
leader on this topic.
01:49:13
Oh man, don't call me that.
01:49:15
Well, the reason I bring it up is that I think a lot of people deal with this imposter syndrome.
01:49:19
I know I deal with it where it's like, who do you think you are saying this stuff?
01:49:23
Because you mentioned like you did all those research, you started this project because
01:49:27
it was something that you dealt with.
01:49:29
So how did you overcome that or what was the process there before you felt comfortable
01:49:34
attaching your name to, hey, these are the ideas that are going to make a positive impact
01:49:38
in your life?
01:49:40
I honestly didn't really think about that too much.
01:49:43
You know, it felt like a more, if I can be a bit candid, like a growing up project where
01:49:51
I conducted all the, I still continued to conduct experiments on myself because you know, they're
01:49:56
very much away by which you can, they're kind of a vehicle to make productivity more attractive
01:50:05
and marketable to a general audience because it makes it interesting.
01:50:09
You know, instead of talking about the science of meditation, if you tell people a story
01:50:13
of, you know, I meditated for 35 hours over the course of a week while working outside
01:50:18
of the boundaries of that experiment, it's a great vehicle through which to communicate
01:50:24
what you want to get across with the research.
01:50:27
And so, you know, I did conduct a few with the book, like, you know, living in boredom
01:50:32
for a month and, you know, one or two others, but I think the research itself was a sort
01:50:39
of experiment in my eyes.
01:50:41
So I guess it wasn't really that big of a jump.
01:50:44
You know, the experiment was digging through the research and getting to the bottom of
01:50:49
what is it that makes our attention tick.
01:50:53
And so from that research, the structure of the book sort of presented itself.
01:50:59
You know, I didn't come into it with a lot of preconceived notions about the way our
01:51:04
attention works.
01:51:05
So I didn't, you know, so that allowed me to be surprised throughout the process, like
01:51:09
from ideas like that.
01:51:11
You know, sometimes being interrupted is a really good thing.
01:51:15
Sometimes not blocking distractions is good, especially if we, you know, more anxious people
01:51:24
because it just stresses us out more and, you know, decreases our heart rate variability
01:51:30
and things like that.
01:51:32
And so, you know, I think, you know, starting from the research and using that as a sort
01:51:36
of experiment and connecting all of that, it was sort of one experiment as opposed to
01:51:40
a couple of dozen, but it wasn't that different in my eyes.
01:51:44
That makes sense.
01:51:46
So what was the hardest part about writing this particular book for you?
01:51:52
That's a good question.
01:51:53
Good luck.
01:51:55
Yeah.
01:51:57
I can't, you know, let me just flip through the table of contents here.
01:52:01
I can't really say that there was a part of it that was that difficult.
01:52:06
And yeah, you know, just kind of looking through the, maybe perhaps the difficult part was,
01:52:11
I do a lot of talks and lectures for just, you know, random stuff.
01:52:16
I speak at companies and conferences and things like that.
01:52:19
And so finding the attention around those projects, you know, writing on airplanes and
01:52:26
in airports and in diners before and after talks, you know, you know, talks, they consume
01:52:32
more attention than they do time.
01:52:34
You know, you speak for an hour on a stage where at least I do.
01:52:38
And you spend a few days thinking about it.
01:52:41
And so it's hard to write in those few days leading up to a presentation when you're thinking
01:52:46
about doing a good job and hopefully being helpful during the talk itself.
01:52:50
So I think that was the challenge more so than anything.
01:52:53
When I had the time to write, you know, it came pretty naturally, but because I had a
01:52:58
structure for the book ahead of time, you know, I don't think this is something enough
01:53:02
people do when it comes to writing a book.
01:53:05
So I had the 25,000 words of research notes.
01:53:08
Then, you know, I came up with a structure that sat on top of that research.
01:53:13
So I maneuvered the notes around and, you know, this took several months to kind of shape
01:53:19
them and mold them with my hands into something that was more of a, in the shape of a book
01:53:24
that I would want to read myself.
01:53:28
But once that happened and once the research notes were there and kind of a structure or
01:53:32
framework that I liked, it sort of wrote itself.
01:53:36
I think this is a big mistake that people make with writing is that they don't consider
01:53:40
the structure of a bigger project before they begin writing it.
01:53:45
But when you have that structure, you're able to then make connections.
01:53:49
And so they go, okay, this idea that I wrote about in chapter two, that's relevant in chapter
01:53:55
four and I can reference this and it's connected with this idea in chapter seven.
01:53:59
In this chapter 10, we can draw back and you can begin to see the connections as opposed
01:54:03
to just writing it on the fly and not having any of this high level perspective of the
01:54:09
structure of the book.
01:54:10
Because there's kind of, there's kind of like in my eyes and I think a lot about the
01:54:14
process of creating something.
01:54:16
There's kind of two levels of a book.
01:54:19
There's, you know, it's like the forest and the trees.
01:54:21
There's the ground level structure where, you know, it's sentence structures, making things
01:54:25
flow.
01:54:26
It's being able to explain things.
01:54:28
It's, you know, leaning on the science whenever possible.
01:54:31
And then there's kind of the broader architecture of the book where you want it to be structurally
01:54:37
sound.
01:54:39
You want it to be, in this case, I spent a good amount of time making the book symmetrical.
01:54:45
And so you'll see that in chapter, or in parts one and two, part one has five chapters, part
01:54:50
two has five chapters, then you have the kind of sandwich with the acknowledgments at the
01:54:55
end and chapter zero and point five at the beginning.
01:54:59
And so I think this is something that made the process incredibly natural, was having
01:55:04
that structure ahead of time so that for a couple of months after that structure was
01:55:08
defined and we were pitching it around to different publishers to see who wanted to publish it,
01:55:14
there was that period of time that incubation phase where the thoughts, as I scattered my
01:55:20
attention, one of the ideas in the book, I was able to connect the various chapters with
01:55:25
one another to make it more succinct and maybe to eliminate some redundancy at the same time.
01:55:32
Chris, one of the things that I find myself noticing and I don't bring it up a lot on
01:55:39
bookworm, but every once in a while, I'll notice something that is of interest to me.
01:55:44
But in this particular case, you know, since I have you here, this makes it easy.
01:55:48
But you know, you did this small experiment that you talk about in the chapter on taming
01:55:53
distractions and you did this 30 minute process where you just let your mind go and wrote
01:56:00
down all the things that you ended up doing, which was like bouncing around Twitter and
01:56:04
Reddit and, you know, news websites, your other Twitter, email, Amazon as such.
01:56:09
But you made this interesting little side note when you mentioned Reddit that the specific
01:56:14
subreddit was about mechanical keyboards.
01:56:17
And Mike is a clicking keyboard fan. I have been considering diving into this world.
01:56:25
Yeah.
01:56:26
How long have you used a mechanical keyboard?
01:56:28
Which one are you using?
01:56:29
I'm very curious now.
01:56:30
Oh my God.
01:56:31
So thanks for this little side note.
01:56:32
Yeah.
01:56:33
This little tangent that honestly, we could do an entire show about clicky keyboards.
01:56:38
I started off with a cherry blue keyboard.
01:56:40
That's your next book.
01:56:41
Yeah.
01:56:42
Oh, God.
01:56:43
Talk about a career shift that you want to think of a book that isn't marketable.
01:56:50
I think one on mechanical keyboards will sell all of like a half a dozen copies.
01:56:56
But actually that might be a curious deep dive into this world.
01:57:01
In my eyes, and I've explained it this way once or twice before.
01:57:05
So forgive me, dear listener, if you've heard me mention this, but in my eyes, you know,
01:57:11
I have a piano in my office.
01:57:14
And most people have played one of those keyboards where there's no weight to it, where you just
01:57:20
kind of push down on a button and that button is shaped like a piano key.
01:57:26
And then it flips a digital switch somewhere which triggers some bits to play a sound out
01:57:31
of the speakers on the keyboard, which you know is just kind of like a MIDI file or a
01:57:35
wave file in some software program on the computer where they just minimize the latency
01:57:40
to make it sound okay.
01:57:43
And the difference between a mushy non-mechanical keyboard and a mechanical keyboard is one
01:57:51
that I think is the equivalent of going from one of these plain old keyboards, the piano
01:57:58
keyboards to a grand piano.
01:58:01
So you feel the weight.
01:58:03
You know that when you push down on one of the keys, because it's a string instrument,
01:58:09
it hits a string in the back which you then hear.
01:58:12
There's a beautiful, beautiful simplicity and elegance of richness to that sound and to
01:58:19
that experience.
01:58:20
You know that you're more connected with what you're doing.
01:58:23
And I would make the argument that the exact same thing is true when you go from a traditional
01:58:29
keyboard to a mechanical keyboard.
01:58:31
So there's all kinds of different switches.
01:58:33
Some of us like Cherry, you know, the main two are Cherry blues and Cherry browns.
01:58:39
So Cherry blues, I find they have an aggressive, aggressive sound.
01:58:43
When you push down on one, it's like you're pushing down on a tiny little spring that
01:58:49
collapses and it gives more feedback when you actuate the key switches.
01:58:55
And so it's louder than it pisses off your roommates and the people that you live with
01:59:00
a bit more if you want to be passive-aggressive about it, which is another underrated benefits
01:59:06
of mechanical keyboards.
01:59:08
But, you know, the Cherry blue switches are a bit too crispy for my taste.
01:59:17
Yeah, you know, I hear it and I think, you know, that's, but I'm a big fan of the Cherry
01:59:23
brown.
01:59:24
So I think brown like chocolate, it's a bit smoother, it's richer, it's more of a luxurious
01:59:30
sound.
01:59:31
In my opinion, it's an upgrade from the Cherry blues.
01:59:34
I think a lot of people don't realize what they're missing because they buy a Cherry
01:59:39
blue keyboard and they type on it, they enjoy the mechanical keyboard life.
01:59:44
And then, you know, because that's the default with most of these keyboards, they don't get
01:59:48
to experience a different kind of key switches.
01:59:50
You know, they're key switch samplers where you buy it and it has...
01:59:54
I've got one right here.
01:59:55
You've got one!
01:59:56
So you've got like the green, you've got the clear, the brown, the blue, the black.
02:00:01
Yep.
02:00:02
The red...
02:00:03
Here's the blue you were talking about.
02:00:05
Yeah.
02:00:06
And then here's the brown.
02:00:08
Oh, yeah.
02:00:09
It's a lot less clicky.
02:00:10
Oh, yeah.
02:00:11
I will say that there's a lot of gaming keyboard.
02:00:15
I don't like the look of it so I didn't buy it.
02:00:17
But it's one of my favorite...
02:00:19
I forget the name of the key switches that they use, but it's a mechanical keyboard.
02:00:24
And you know, go to an office supply store and you can feel it out.
02:00:27
And I think that's an underrated one, but I don't know what the key switches are called.
02:00:31
But you know, it's like going from...
02:00:33
It's just upgrade.
02:00:34
Especially if you write a lot, if you do a lot of typing throughout the day, it's such
02:00:39
a luxurious way of using a computer.
02:00:42
Totally agree.
02:00:43
So which keyboard do you use?
02:00:45
Is it a Logitech one?
02:00:46
I've got the DOS keyboard with the Cherry Brown switches.
02:00:51
In Canada, like you can't order it online.
02:00:53
And I went to the store and they had the DOS keyboard because I needed the Mac layout
02:00:57
and I needed the Cherry Brown instead of the blue.
02:01:01
So it was like two customization options.
02:01:02
I think it took a month or two to...
02:01:05
Maybe they had to use a dog sled or something to get to my part of Canada.
02:01:08
But it finally came.
02:01:10
And I upgraded from...
02:01:12
Oh man.
02:01:13
I forget the name of the other keyboard.
02:01:15
I think it was a DOS keyboard as well.
02:01:17
Just because DOS has the Mac layouts and there's a beautiful volume slider too, which
02:01:23
has a great knob feel, which I'm a big fan of.
02:01:26
I've got a DOS keyboard that I've got blank keycaps on.
02:01:30
Oh really?
02:01:31
You're a blank keyboard?
02:01:32
It's part of a productivity experiment.
02:01:35
The goal was to see if I could train myself to be a touch typist and improve my words
02:01:39
per minute.
02:01:40
And the too long didn't read version is that yes, yes it did.
02:01:42
Oh really?
02:01:43
I just grabbed the other ones.
02:01:45
Yeah.
02:01:46
Oh man, yeah.
02:01:47
This takes me back.
02:01:48
Yeah.
02:01:49
Also the font on this isn't as nice.
02:01:52
It's like a more intense version of Roboto on Android.
02:01:58
So I'm a big fan of the DOS keyboard.
02:02:01
Anyway.
02:02:02
Yeah.
02:02:03
There you go.
02:02:04
Dang it.
02:02:05
Thanks for that.
02:02:06
I've been very curious.
02:02:07
I've been playing around with buying one of these things for a while.
02:02:08
I've been looking at the DOS keyboards.
02:02:09
Yeah, you just cost Joe some money.
02:02:11
I'm gonna go that route.
02:02:12
You did.
02:02:13
I would pony up for one of those switches so you can just fiddle with it for a bit and
02:02:17
sure.
02:02:18
Because I feel it's very subjective.
02:02:20
Yeah, get the key tester Joe.
02:02:22
Yeah.
02:02:23
I may have to do that.
02:02:24
I do a lot of writing.
02:02:25
Mostly through emails it seems like.
02:02:27
But yeah.
02:02:28
So Mike, did you buy one of the testers and then buy a keyboard or did you go the other
02:02:32
way?
02:02:33
No, I bought a keyboard and then heard John Gruber talk about the key tester and decided
02:02:38
buy one.
02:02:39
But it's a fun dust toy.
02:02:40
Oh yeah.
02:02:41
Yeah.
02:02:42
What's your favorite after having it there?
02:02:44
Well, I have the cherry blues on my DOS keyboard.
02:02:47
I have a code keyboard in front of me, which I got through a mass drop, which has the clear
02:02:51
ears.
02:02:52
But I think that you're right.
02:02:53
The browns feel the best to me.
02:02:56
Hmm.
02:02:57
You know, I hear that from the most people, but it's so funny that the blues are the default.
02:03:01
Maybe the browns are costly or to manufacture.
02:03:04
They can't get the scale going enough.
02:03:06
But yeah, I think I would recommend for people who don't want to pick up the tester to just
02:03:12
go for the browns.
02:03:14
So did you write the good chunk of your book then on this clicky keyboard that you have?
02:03:19
Yeah.
02:03:20
So the productivity project was written on cherry blues and hyper focus was written on
02:03:24
cherry browns.
02:03:25
I love that.
02:03:26
Maybe you could see it on the difference.
02:03:30
Yeah.
02:03:31
What was the, what were some of the lessons that you learned from writing the productivity
02:03:36
project that you did things maybe differently when you wrote hyper focus?
02:03:39
Because you mentioned that at the beginning of the episode here.
02:03:43
I think one of the keys was really having a well thought out structure, you know, kind
02:03:48
of inside baseball when we pitched the productivity project.
02:03:51
It was originally pitched as a book called the productivity playbook.
02:03:55
You know, we pitched it around to different publishers.
02:03:58
And so the one publisher came back and said, yeah, we want to publish it.
02:04:03
But our idea is to publish it as the productivity project and have something that's more narrative
02:04:09
based.
02:04:10
And so the proposal and you know, when you have a book proposal that you're pitching different
02:04:14
publishers on about half of it so that it's 40, 50 pages, about half of it is the detailed
02:04:21
table of contents of the book itself.
02:04:23
And the other half is kind of a marketing plan because they want to know who reads your
02:04:27
stuff.
02:04:28
They want to know how much of an audience you have and that, that you're going to be
02:04:30
able to generate enough of a push to get the book out into the world.
02:04:35
And in the detailed table of contents for the first book, it was written in 50 chapters
02:04:42
because it was more of a tactical book, the productivity playbook.
02:04:46
Each chapter was its own kind of tactic.
02:04:48
And in the end, in the final book, it ended up being 25 chapters long.
02:04:53
And so I feel that was like a big jump and a big lesson learned from the first book was
02:04:59
that the more time you spend on crafting a detailed table of contents that you know can
02:05:07
be expanded to a book, the more that the finished book will end up looking like the detailed
02:05:14
table of contents and what you originally set out to write in the first place.
02:05:19
And so I look at the proposal for hyper focus and the finished book is virtually identical
02:05:27
to the one that was in the proposal.
02:05:30
And you know, unfortunate that each of the editors that I've had that looked at that acquired
02:05:35
both of the books, they were like, okay, we trust you, you know, run out, do a good job
02:05:40
and come back and we'll see how it goes.
02:05:43
And so, you know, it wasn't really a limitation from that side of the spectrum.
02:05:47
It was very much that my thinking was more concrete with hyper focus.
02:05:57
Another big thing was having a target word count for each chapter.
02:06:02
And this was one of my favorite parts about putting together the research is, you know,
02:06:07
say for the first chapter, there were 5,000 words of research notes that I had gathered.
02:06:12
And for the second chapter, I had 10,000 words of research notes that I'd gathered.
02:06:17
And let's say for the sake of argument, the book is just two chapters long.
02:06:21
Then I could then define a target word count for each chapter that is related proportionally
02:06:29
to how many words of research notes that I had accumulated for the chapter so that the
02:06:34
density of the book overall could stay about the same.
02:06:38
And so, you know, say the first chapter would be 20,000 words long and the next chapter
02:06:43
would be 40,000 words long.
02:06:46
And so it was a way of kind of maintaining that density so that the greater, broader
02:06:52
architecture of the book was consistent from chapter to chapter.
02:06:56
And so I think it was very much having that framework in which to write, you know, learning
02:07:02
from the first book and then jumping over to the second book that really helped create
02:07:06
a product that, you know, and this is not the throw of the first book under the bus by
02:07:11
any stretch of any measure because I am extraordinarily proud of how it turned out.
02:07:16
But when you get a book, yeah, yeah, you know, people seem to like it.
02:07:21
But the thing about getting a book deal is that when you get the deal, you wait for somebody
02:07:27
to tell you how to write the book.
02:07:29
And then you realize that nobody is going to tell you how to write the book.
02:07:33
You have to turn the idea that's in your mind into something that's 80,000 words long.
02:07:39
You know, how do you think on that scale?
02:07:41
How do you connect ideas on that level?
02:07:43
And so what you end up doing is you kind of, you know, you work really hard, you get a
02:07:48
bit stressed out when the deadline approaches and you hopefully end up with something at
02:07:52
the end that you're proud of.
02:07:55
But you know, that that was kind of the wonderful thing about writing book number two is having
02:07:59
all of those lessons and learning how to sort of pace myself in the writing process.
02:08:04
This was kind of another fun thing that I did over the course of the writing process
02:08:08
is that the target word count that I had was 70,000 words for hyper focus.
02:08:12
It was about 80,000 words for the productivity project, but I figured I wanted it again to
02:08:17
be a bit denser, not in a bad way, but in a more way of being respectful of somebody's
02:08:23
time so they don't have to wade through a lot of stories and stuff.
02:08:26
And so what I did on this level was have kind of a trend line in my office.
02:08:32
And so every few days, especially after I'd written a bit, I would print off a chart that
02:08:39
had two lines on it.
02:08:40
There was one line that had a consistent slope where on the left was zero words, on the right
02:08:45
it was 70,000 words and it went up over time, on the bottom axis that was the deadline that
02:08:51
I had the days leading up to.
02:08:53
And on the left hand side, the vertical axis was the word count, how many words I'd written.
02:08:58
And then every few days I would update that chart so that there was another line that
02:09:03
danced around that pacing line.
02:09:05
So I knew if I was ahead of pace or behind pace, I would always try to be above that
02:09:09
line.
02:09:10
Sometimes I dip a bit below if I had a few talks, but then I'd realize, okay, I need
02:09:14
to get my stuff, my affairs in order here because my next month is really booked up.
02:09:21
And so I need to write a lot when I can to be above that pacing line.
02:09:25
It's a wonderful way of doing any project that's longer term in my opinion, losing weight
02:09:30
or body fat.
02:09:32
You know, it's another wonderful way where you have that trend line.
02:09:34
And so you can see your progress relative to that so you can reward yourself along the
02:09:39
way.
02:09:40
And no one to hunker down and get rid of all the potato chips in your house.
02:09:44
I think you need to do something similar with the long term writing projects that you have
02:09:49
to, especially when it's something that's so big, 70, 80,000 words.
02:09:55
So breaking it down on that chapter level in a way that's consistent with the density
02:09:58
of the content that I wanted to have, as well as having that pace overall, I think, is something
02:10:03
that really helped the end product.
02:10:06
Yeah, that is great advice.
02:10:08
This is something I've talked to Mike a couple times about is when we go through these books
02:10:13
and we're trying to give a synopsis of what the book is about, but then also trying to
02:10:20
offer our opinions about it.
02:10:21
And one of the things that we've played around with is trying to...
02:10:26
And we talk about it a little bit when we talk about author style and how easy it is
02:10:30
to read and stuff.
02:10:31
But there's certain books that I feel like should have been an article, like a blog post
02:10:36
of sorts, give me a 1500 word synopsis.
02:10:40
That would have been a much better use of everybody's time as opposed to writing this
02:10:45
60, 70, 80, 100,000 word exposition on a topic that you could have covered in 1500 words.
02:10:53
So I am grateful that you thought this through when you put this book together.
02:10:59
Honestly, it's not something that enough people think through.
02:11:03
And I know this for a fact because when I speak with the editors that I have, so I've different
02:11:07
editors in different countries.
02:11:09
So I have a Canadian editor, UK editor, and of course the main US editor and editors around
02:11:15
the world where the translations are published.
02:11:18
And the number one problem they tell me, whenever they look, these are all acquisitions editors.
02:11:24
So they edit the book for content and they know what resonates with the end reader,
02:11:30
but they also actually buy the books on behalf of the publishers.
02:11:34
And the number one challenge that they say is that is feeling out whether an idea is bigger
02:11:42
than an article, that whether an idea is book sized or whether it's the size of a long article
02:11:48
that might be in the Atlantic or the Guardian or one of these long form media pieces.
02:11:55
And so it's a challenge that I think everybody in the industry faces.
02:12:00
And I think one of the reasons why when you pitch a book to various publishers, they ask
02:12:04
for that detailed table of contents so they know what's going to be in the book and so
02:12:09
that they can feel out on that more granular level of whether a book is going to be a bit
02:12:16
shorter or a bit longer.
02:12:17
I think this is, you know, now that you mentioned that, something that I had a greater amount
02:12:22
of awareness about when it came to the second book, you know, I don't know if the first
02:12:26
book could have been 50 chapters in hindsight because it's so hard to feel out that density,
02:12:32
not having gone through the process in the first place, but you know, having gone through
02:12:36
it once and feeling out that some of the chapters that I would have tried to write would have
02:12:41
just been a few paragraphs unless I tried to extend them in an unnatural way just by
02:12:46
adding stories.
02:12:48
It's a fascinating consideration and it's so difficult to feel out how big of an idea
02:12:56
something is.
02:12:57
But you know, I had such a gift in writing hyper-focus in that I sat on such a mountain
02:13:03
of research that supported the ideas that I wanted to write about.
02:13:07
So, you know, when you have that research, the 25,000 words research notes, and you add
02:13:12
the tactics on top of that through which we can become more focused and productive when
02:13:17
we do the tactics which are connected to the research, the book is kind of, you know,
02:13:23
that natural length of 70 to 80,000 words.
02:13:26
70 to 80,000 words is about, it's about 220 to 250 pages.
02:13:31
So the length of a regular kind of non-fiction book that's published in the business space,
02:13:38
depending on, you know, character spacing and the font that's used and how many kind
02:13:42
of aside there are in the book and how many chapters there are because that determines
02:13:47
how many breaks there are on pages as well.
02:13:49
So, yeah, it's a fascinating consideration and I think this is something that more people
02:13:54
should consider when they write a book and it's another reason, just yet another reason,
02:13:59
you know, to do that detailed table of contents.
02:14:01
When I wrote the Productivity Project, I did not want to make a detailed table of contents.
02:14:05
I just wanted to write the frickin' book.
02:14:08
But I think this detailed table of contents is what made it possible to write a book in
02:14:12
the first place.
02:14:13
And it's a step everybody wants to skip because you think, oh, you know, when I was in college,
02:14:18
I wrote a bunch of essays and they always said, you know, do this structure before, but
02:14:23
it's, you know, I don't need to.
02:14:24
I just wrote the essay and I got a good grade.
02:14:26
Well, if you don't make that when you're writing a book, the book is going to flop unless
02:14:30
you're writing fiction.
02:14:32
You need to have that structure ahead of time for the book to be well thought out and
02:14:36
to respect people's time, frankly, because there's so many books out there that don't
02:14:41
care about the reader.
02:14:42
The author is in the center of the book, not the reader.
02:14:45
And so I think that that's kind of another skill that at least I try to develop is, you
02:14:50
know, thinking, okay, what will help the reader out the most?
02:14:53
Every reader is different, of course.
02:14:54
But what can I write about that will help somebody out when they sit down to read it?
02:14:59
And yeah, it's, I think that's another key when you're writing this stuff too.
02:15:05
That's great stuff.
02:15:06
Thanks, Chris.
02:15:07
I know you got to get out of here.
02:15:08
So before you go, is there anywhere else that you would want to send people to connect
02:15:11
with you?
02:15:12
Obviously we're going to have a link to the book in the show notes, but anywhere else
02:15:16
that people can go find out more about you and what you're up to.
02:15:19
My site is called The Life of Productivity.
02:15:24
You can look at my books.
02:15:26
The newest one is called Hyper Focus, how to be more productive in a world of destruction.
02:15:31
And the first one is called the Productivity Project.
02:15:34
And they're both something that I'm proud of.
02:15:36
And I just find it so fun to nerd out about the process behind creating things.
02:15:43
We didn't even chat about how I wrote each of the two books in text edit.
02:15:47
The entire book.
02:15:51
We need another half hour, I think.
02:15:54
It's a text edit is I think the most underrated application on the Mac.
02:15:59
I write everything in it.
02:16:00
I write, I even have, it's like a bit of custom code.
02:16:05
I think it's like a shell script where you select a bit of text, I press command, alt
02:16:09
control C, I get, no, command alt shift control C, and I get a little script that counts all
02:16:17
the amount of words in a document.
02:16:19
So I have so many of these little hacks, but the outlining mode in text edit, I think is
02:16:23
one of the most underrated features.
02:16:24
So if you go to text edit and you press alt tab, you get a bullet.
02:16:27
I think you can start typing, then you press enter, and then you do tab or shift tab to
02:16:31
go back a tab.
02:16:33
And it's so easy to select text and it's so freaking easy to write in the app and select
02:16:39
text and bold it and make it bigger.
02:16:42
And I think this is something that not enough people do is just get out of your own way.
02:16:48
You don't need a fancy app.
02:16:49
You just need word pad or text edit because the idea should be in your head, not in the
02:16:55
app.
02:16:56
Oh my gosh, that is such great advice because there's so many people who are like, if I
02:16:58
just buy this app, I'm going to be able, it's because it's so easy to read it right.
02:17:02
Text edit is literally on every computer.
02:17:04
Yeah.
02:17:05
Yeah.
02:17:06
You know, not enough people think about the structure of the product.
02:17:12
They think, you know, I think, you know, thinking about the process of making something
02:17:16
is important, but you should think more about the structure of what you want to make as
02:17:21
opposed to the process by which you should make it.
02:17:24
So you know, I try to do a healthy amount of nerding out about the process and looking
02:17:29
at the architecture of a book, but eventually you just have to write.
02:17:33
Right.
02:17:34
Yeah.
02:17:35
Man.
02:17:36
Well, thanks so much, Chris.
02:17:37
Appreciate your time.
02:17:38
I think that this is going to be great.
02:17:40
Our listeners are going to love this.
02:17:41
So thanks so much for being on.
02:17:43
Yeah, it's so fun to talk about this stuff.
02:17:45
Thanks for having me, guys.
02:17:46
Thanks for joining us, Chris.