Bookworm Transcripts

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We need to jump into follow-up right away, Mike.

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All right, let's do it.

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Because I have thoughts on today's book.

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Okay.

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You've got two follow-up items.

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I've got three.

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You want to go first?

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Yeah.

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So my first one is start doing some music after dinner.

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And I can say that we've been doing this fairly regularly,

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where we will finish eating dinner at night.

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And I will help clean up as much as I possibly can,

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so that my wife can go pick out some music

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and she sits down on the piano.

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We play a song or two.

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The girls run around the house like crazy little monkeys.

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And it's a great time.

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It's really entertaining.

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I think we need a video of this.

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We need a video of this.

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I eat.

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Okay, I'll take a note.

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I will do my best to get a video.

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I will post it somewhere.

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It's very entertaining.

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So that was number one.

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That one's been going really well.

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Number two, I wanted to just have a conversation with my wife

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about what our second mountain goals are.

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And I have done that.

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And we are exploring some ways of tackling said mountain,

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none of which I can share here,

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which is a bit unfortunate.

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But I can say that having that conversation with your spouse

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is extremely rewarding.

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Highly recommended.

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I'll leave it there.

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All right.

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Some mine are in the question format.

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First two anyways.

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First one is who are my mentors?

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Which I mentioned a couple of them on the last podcast.

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I had a chance to tell a couple of them in person.

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You know, I flew out to San Francisco for the relay live show,

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which was pretty incredible.

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15 relay hosts on stage split up into four teams

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for a family feud style game show with Jason Snell as the host.

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And Mike and Steven were running the scoreboard.

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And Steven was making sure nothing broke.

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But that was a really good time.

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And got to see a bunch of people, including David Sparks,

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who I called out in that episode as being one of my mentors.

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So that was kind of cool to spend some time with him.

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And meet a couple new people.

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I texted you.

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I got to meet Brad Dowdy, the pan addict.

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Right.

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He remembered you.

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So he said, hi.

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I told him that you mentioned that he cost you thousands

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of dollars.

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He's cost me a fair amount of money.

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I'm not sure it's thousands, but it's a huge number of change.

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Yeah.

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So really the takeaway from that is that I have not only identified my mentors,

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I've started telling people that I view them as mentors.

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And I could tell that it meant a lot.

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So I think for the rest of them, this is going to be something that I'd

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absolutely 100% have to do in person.

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I don't think it's going to be a phone call.

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Definitely not a text message, but still have to follow through with the rest of the people

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on that list, which really wasn't, you know, to the definition of done for that action item.

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But having seen what happened, it's definitely the approach I want to take with the other people

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that I listed there.

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Nice.

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Nice.

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Cool.

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I'm really glad you got to do that.

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Yeah.

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It's really fun.

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Turns out, grab a whole tangent here for a second.

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Okay.

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The, uh, we're going to those.

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Yeah.

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Well, this is kind of in line with, with what we were just talking about, but I am more and more

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realizing the importance of relationships and going to the relay thing was expensive.

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Rachel came with me, which was really cool because I got to share that experience with her.

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And more importantly, as I was telling her on the way back, it really means a lot that she

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is involved with that part of my life.

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You know, it's not just like, oh, you go hang out with your nerd friends and I'll be here when you

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get back.

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It's something that we get to get to share, even though she doesn't really consider herself a

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nerd.

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The fact that, you know, she's there, she feels comfortable in that environment.

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And she likes meeting those people hanging out with those people, just like I do.

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Like that's, that's super cool.

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But, you know, the, go back to my, my main point that like the relationships really are the

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principal thing.

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Before I went to the relay live event, it was

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a lot of money and I was having it, like, I don't think I'm going to go.

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Really can't swing it right now.

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I am 100% glad that, that I went.

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And I don't think that I'm ready to make a blanket rule, just like spend all your money on experiences.

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I think we talked about that at some point.

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Right.

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But being there and building those relationships, like that was the thing that I couldn't plan for

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on paper prior to going. And afterwards is the thing that added definitely the most value to the,

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the trip is being able to make those connections and meet those people.

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Not that there's even something that's necessarily coming from it right away.

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It's just getting to meet those people and hang out with them and build those relationships.

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Like that's, I realize more and more now that that is, that is really important to me.

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So kind of tangential action item, not really ready to make it official, but like thinking about

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how can I continue to build relationships and everything that I do?

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And looking for those opportunities to do so that are outside of the day-to-day routine sort of a thing.

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Sure.

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Anyways, that kind of leads into my second one.

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How can I build my communities?

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Although to be honest, for this action item, I really haven't done a great job of this.

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I have been traveling.

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I have been busy.

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And I didn't, I haven't really thought a whole lot about how I can do this for bookworm or faith-based

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productivity specifically. But as I mentioned, there's a whole bunch of takeaways and inspirational

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moments that I've gotten well on this, this trip and during that sabbatical week.

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So I feel like there's been some progress made on this already, but nothing that I can

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point to and say like, I did this, if that makes any sense.

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Yeah, it does.

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Because I think I've been on a similar path as you lately where I've been, I've been trying to

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figure out how to be more specific with building relationships lately. And I think there are a lot

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of ways that you can do that. There must be something in the last two or three books we've

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gone through, Mike, to spark that in you and me at the same time.

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Because I feel like that's something we've been slowly learning more about and realizing the value

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of. Maybe that's partially because we do so much online that we have starting to focus more on the

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offline side of things. But there's something there. And I think you're spot on with doing things in

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person, building out communities, whether it's with bookworm or through relay or whatever that

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path is. There's definitely a lot of value there. It's almost like we were made that way, Mike.

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Yeah. Well, just one small example, I guess, when we were at the relay thing. So we're in this

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theater and there's, I think, 350-ish people there. And it's a pretty nice theater. They have it set up

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so that there's an intermission in the beginning. And if you want to go back to the green room,

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you can duck behind the stage and there's a half-hour break in the middle of the show, basically.

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And they said, "Essentially, you can go mingle with people in the audience if you want to,

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but if you just need a break, go this way." And as tired as I was from traveling and how exhausted

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I was being jet-leg from the two-hour time zone difference, which really made me feel like a wimp.

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But it's true. I was definitely feeling it by that evening. I forced myself, I say forced. It

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really wasn't that bad. But my natural instinct is as an introvert, go hide somewhere, recharge.

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But during that half-hour break, I went out into the audience and it's kind of interesting

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because I'm fairly new to the relay network. And there's some people there who have been there

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for a long time and there's some people there who are a much bigger deal than I am. There's a line

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of people to get to Merlin Man, but I can walk wherever. No one comes up here. So I just go

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into the audience. I found the guy who wore this dog-cout t-shirt that I wore at Max

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Stock and I'm like, "Hey, I like your shirt." I started talking to him. It was cool to see how

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the intentional relationship building, even though that wasn't naturally my comfort zone. I wanted

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to just go hang out in the back, get a bottle of water, and just not talk to people for a while.

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But I'm like, "I'm here. This is the whole point of this thing." And so I forced, again, I say

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force, but it really isn't forcing. It's just against my natural nature to do that sort of thing.

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But I recognize that I'm in this place and this is why I'm here. I'm going to go build these

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relationships. So I didn't talk to a ton of people, obviously, but I talked to a few people and the

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few people that I did talk to. It was really great to talk to them. And I could tell that it

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meant a lot. The fact that I am a relay FM host, that gives me some sort of platform.

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And I can use that platform to make people feel really good, which is very much in line with the

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life and error thing. I want to make people feel like a million bucks, even if I don't have a million

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bucks. And so I recognize that that's kind of in my DNA, that's the kind of thing that makes me

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feel really good, even if it is against my personality. And I want to take that to the next level,

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and then to get to your point about how has this become like a revelation for us recently? I kind

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of think it's a perfect storm of things. So number one, I listened to that life and error audiobook.

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At the same time, number two, we were going through the four hour work week and was absolutely

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repulsed by the tone of it. And again, so it was like an anti point through.

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Yeah. Well, I want to be careful here, because as I mentioned in the club, like if you like that

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and you benefit from that, that's completely fine. But I just when I went through it as kind of like,

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what he's saying is kind of right, but it feels wrong. And I had to reconcile like,

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how do I put that square peg into a round hole? And I feel like the second mountain kind of did that

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for me. So it's kind of all these things for me anyways, lining up that have led to this

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aha moment, I believe. Sure. Makes sense. So my biggest question about all of your follow up right

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now has to do with you learning a second language. Yes. I told you I was going to ask this,

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will you roll an R on a I cannot roll an R, but I am I am crushing it with a dual lingo. And I have

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yeah, my wife and my two oldest kids into it now too. Nice. Well done, sir. Yeah. So I have

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I'm trying to look in the the app here. I think a 12 day streak of like getting however many

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XP you need. You know, that's basically just answering questions, right? Sure.

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Dual lingo is interesting because they have like a heart meter. And when you get a question wrong,

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it uses one of your hearts when you run out of hearts, you basically have to watch some ads or

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you wait until tomorrow or you can upgrade and you never run out of hearts. You can just go through

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it as much as you want, which is really interesting. So you can completely go through everything into

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a lingo. It looks like anyways for free. But if you want to get rid of the annoyance of having to

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wait to recharge your meter when you answer much of questions wrong, because you are learning a

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second language and you're going to make mistakes, then they don't force you, but they invite you

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basically to upgrade. And so far, I've been able to get by without the upgrade. Somebody shared

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with me another program, which was a paid upfront program, which I'm sure is is good. But dual lingo

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just seems to work for me much more so than any of my Spanish classes in high school did. So I'm

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going to keep going with this at some point, maybe I will plateau inside of dual lingo and have to

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try something else. But there is tons of stuff in here. And I feel like if I went through all of

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the things that they have for for Spanish, then I would be at the point where I would I would

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check this off as is completed. I guess I have learned the second language. Obviously, you can

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keep keep going with it. You can keep going with it with English. I wouldn't say I've mastered that

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language yet. Although the quote unquote. So you're going to pull up dual lingo and start learning

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English. No, I don't think so, but we'll see. Toastmasters helps with that. There you go. Well,

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let's let's get to our book. But before we do that, I just want to point something out because I

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ran into some friends this past weekend, and I was wearing my bookworm sweatshirt. And one of

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the ladies in the group said, Oh, I love your sweatshirt. It's like, actually, it's a podcast.

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I run with a buddy of mine, really? And then that sparked a whole conversation. So it reminded me

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that we don't talk about this a whole lot, but you can still get t-shirts and sweatshirts through

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cotton beryl. That's an ongoing thing, right? That hasn't changed, right, Mike? Correct. Okay,

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so if you were interested in a bookworm t-shirt or sweatshirt, and I love these, like, they're

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the best material in shirts and sweatshirts I've ever had. I love them. Link in the show notes.

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Go get one. We love these things. Definitely pick one up. They are very comfy for sure. All right,

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that said, I'm going to go back in time to the time when Joe learned about GTD and learning what

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getting things done was. So back in the day, this is long before bookworm long before Mike and I

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decided if we're ever going to read books, we got to do it together on a podcast. Like back

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before that time, I became aware of GTD, started trying to implement it before I read about it.

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But at the same time I ran across this book, getting results the agile way. And at the time,

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it seemed like people were like in one of these two camps. It seemed like one was exclusive from

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the other and people didn't do both at the same time. It seemed like getting things done resonated

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with me more at the time. So I went down that path, have been on that path for quite some time now.

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But it has also kind of morphed to the point where I've seen people read this book and then

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implement this on top of GTD. So I don't think they're actually exclusive. But this particular book

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has a lot of support. There's a lot of people who have talked about this one and seemed to really,

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really like getting results the agile way. This is by J.D. Meyer, by the way.

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The tagline on this is a personal results system for work and life. The second tagline,

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which kind of confused me at first, but how to focus and prioritize, manage time and information

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and employ the power of balance and flexibility for meaningful results.

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A third tagline, a list of lists.

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Yes, yes, and repeated definitions. It's kind of nuts. I'll get to that one later.

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But there's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot in here. And I have to say I did not care for this one.

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Mike, people talk about this a lot and I really, really struggled with this book. It was to the

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point where I almost texted you and say, is there any way we can drop this book from

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bookworm? Because I did not want to finish this and I did not know how to come on this show and

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talk about it. There we are. That's out in the air. I'm done. What are your thoughts on this book?

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Confession time. I guess. I also heard about this book a long time ago.

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And I read Getting Things Done. That was kind of my first foray into the productivity space.

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I started reading productivity, self-development, business type books after that because

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I got a lot out of that one the first time that I read it. Almost ended my journey though when I

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came across this one the first time because I started reading it and I couldn't get past the

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first section where he was talking about hotspots. That just did not make sense to me.

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And since I was new to GTD, I was like, I don't know how to reconcile this. I'm going to stick

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with what I know and just put this back on the shelf. Did make it through this time.

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And this book is, I think the best way to describe it is kind of like a productivity primer.

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As I went through it, I realized that there is a ton of stuff in here that we have talked about

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in other books. And there's a lot of great advice in here, but he doesn't really get into a lot of

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the concepts. And then like you said, he does repeat a bunch of them. So my initial thought was,

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this feels like a book that ended up being created from a series of blog posts and was never designed

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to be a book that taught specific concepts. He just took all of his blog posts. And since he

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was blogging about these things and his ideas were bouncing around his brain, that's why I think

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show up multiple times. I could be completely wrong with that. But that's kind of the initial

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reaction that I had. The other thing is that with all of these lists of things and all of the

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titles that he gives things, but not really the descriptions, it reminded me of a saying

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that I picked up, I don't remember exactly where, but I heard it from Aaron Walker.

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He said, you can be a mile wide and an inch deep or a mile deep and an inch wide. This book feels

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like a mile wide and an inch deep to me, which is kind of frustrating if it's the first time that

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you've come across any of these things that he mentions in the latter part of the book,

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because you're like, I want to know more about that. But he just gives you a couple of sentences,

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and then he's on to the next thing in his list. I didn't count up all of the items that are in

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the list, by the way. But there's got to be hundreds. Let me just look real quickly.

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20 key factors for motivation, 10 strategies for motivation, 10 pitfalls of motivation,

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25 strategies for results, 25 keys to results, 30 common productivity pitfalls,

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the top five, why even have those two sections together? The top five are also in the 30 common

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pitfalls. That's why another anecdotal piece of evidence for this was a series of blog posts.

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They've got the values, the principles, the practices. There's so many

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lists in here. After a while, you start to see the same things popping up over and over again.

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That has a couple of results, I think. Number one, it makes you start to understand on a positive

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side. It makes you start to think that you're wrapping your head around the system and how

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everything ties together. But on a negative side, it also is like, I've heard this already,

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so you just kind of tune out. Which is definitely what happened to me about the end of this book.

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Well, when you were running through that outline, if my quick math caught on, there was 140 points

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there just in what you rattled off. There's more than that because there's lists within those lists.

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You can definitely tell this is a self-published book because there's a lot of those lists where

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he'll have 10 items and then he wants to go through those 10 items. But the titles that he uses

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when he goes through the specific item, he rewords so it doesn't line up with what he said in the

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original list. That just drives me crazy. Sometimes he would use the same title and he uses a

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slightly different definition, which I thought was actually helpful. But at that point, I would

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rather you just go say everything you want to say about the first thing, the first time that we see

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it, and then just reference it over and over again instead of trying to define it every time.

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Right. Well, and like a good example is the Monday vision. We'll get into that. But if my math,

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if I found them all, he defined what the Monday vision is 14 times.

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Yeah, that could be. Okay, how many times do you have to tell me what the Monday vision is?

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Sure. It was very hard to read. There was one story in the book, I believe,

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unless I just missed them because I tuned them out. There was one story at the very beginning that

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helped him where he explained where this came from, this whole process. And there's not another

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story in the whole book. And again, unless I tuned it out and missed it. So that to me,

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that makes it very hard to go through it. That does make it less interesting for sure. I wouldn't

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necessarily say that that is a negative thing if the content is engaging enough. I'll stick with it.

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Right. But I'm kind of weird that way where I like nonfiction books, over fiction books. So

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that means that I've been a long time since I've picked up a book and wanted to put it down

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in quite a while. So all right, all of that rant out of the way. There's three parts to this book.

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The first is the approach. So what is agile results? Part two is basically that again,

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but at different levels, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly results. And then part three is an

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explanation of those results, which I had a hard time putting together. So when we get there,

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I'll share some of that part. But part one, the approach, he does go into why agile results.

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This is his story of where this came from with him working at Microsoft, being overwhelmed when he

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first got there and then needing a system. And in the process of needing a system, he goes to

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meet and learn from people who have been with Microsoft for quite some time and who know how to

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achieve results in that culture. And then takes notes from them. And over time builds out the system

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called agile results. Yes. And there is a diagram that he has. It's like a one page thing with

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nine different boxes, which made absolutely no sense to me when I looked at it. Because

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immediately when I saw it, I'm like, how can I apply this to the way that I work with my daily

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planning template? Yeah. And I quickly gave up on that idea. But there are some similarities to

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what I do and what he's talking about, which is why I think that this maybe is complicated at first,

00:23:10

because you're seeing the way that it works in his life, but it's really not probably a copy and

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paste sort of thing that you can apply to your own life. It's too complicated for that. Getting

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things done has a very clear hierarchical tree. And you just make a yes or no decision at each

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point. And that's a lot easier to follow. This is a lot more fluid. And if you don't understand a

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lot of the basics that he talks about, but doesn't get into detail within this book,

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right? There's no way this is going to work for you. But we can kind of break this down.

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Before we do that, he talks about the three keys to results in the first chapter. And he defines

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agile is the ability to respond to change, which I completely agree with. He talks about some things

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that make agile different things like outcomes over activities, testing your results. The one

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that kind of stood up to me was fixed time but flex the scope. I really like that. That's kind of

00:24:03

in line with the whole scrum methodology and sprints, by the way. But this is kind of bigger than that.

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Scrum is a version of agile, but agile is kind of the framework that scrum is built on,

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if that am I defining that correctly? Yep. Scrum is a version of agile.

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So scrum is agile, but agile is not necessarily scrum.

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Correct. And then there's the general public has a tendency to mix that up.

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I do too. But I wanted to call that out because I do think that this book has a higher level

00:24:37

approach, which if you're going into it thinking that you're going to get all of the macro level

00:24:42

specific things that you need to do, because he even talks about how this is a system and

00:24:47

the solution is a system, which I put in my node, no, oh, brother. But if you're going into it

00:24:54

expecting that, it is going to be a little bit different. But I think it's not so bad if you do

00:24:59

understand this is high level and you go into it with the understanding that you're going to have

00:25:03

to make some modifications to what he's talking to you about in order for it to work for you.

00:25:07

Sure. Three three keys to the results. So he says that the key to time management is energy

00:25:13

management. The key to energy management is passion. The key to results is time, energy,

00:25:17

and technique. He's got this Venn diagram of those three things, time, energy, and technique,

00:25:21

intersecting, which produces the results. I liked this and it brought me back to the time,

00:25:29

energy, and attention thing framework that I was working on with the Asian efficiency team

00:25:36

before I left. The attention one never really felt quite right to me. I knew focus was a big

00:25:45

thing and it's becoming more and more important. The ability to focus,

00:25:51

David Sparks has said, is going to be the superpower in the going forward because there's so much

00:25:56

abstraction. I agree with that. But I think technique is actually a better term than that,

00:26:02

because it's the application of the attention or the application of the focus.

00:26:07

It's the intention turned into action to produce the results that you're looking for.

00:26:15

And again, results is kind of the intersection of all of these things, but time, energy, and

00:26:19

then a technique. I see that as the manifestation of the attention. You can have your attention

00:26:26

on something and you're just staring at it. But when you apply a technique, you're producing

00:26:32

some motion. And that's the thing that's ultimately going to move you towards the results that you

00:26:36

want. So I did like this piece. Sure. I was just trying to find, there it is. This book was written

00:26:43

in 2010, at least the one I'm looking at. Yes, 2010, which would make me think that this is

00:26:50

kind of before a lot of the whole mindfulness and focus trend had picked up. Sure. So maybe

00:26:58

there's some of that in there as well with a little bit of age coming on it. But yeah, no,

00:27:04

I get it. I get it. The next section here is when he gives a full overview of the whole system.

00:27:10

And I have to say that this really short chapter was like, it should have stopped.

00:27:17

Like, I think this is where it should have been the blog post. This particular chapter should have

00:27:25

been the blog post and then it was done. Sure. That's my thinking. And this is where he defines

00:27:31

the first time, what is the Monday vision? How do you, the rule of three, everything is done in

00:27:40

threes with this whole system? Yep. The Monday vision, the daily outcomes, the Friday reflection.

00:27:46

We'll break these down here in a little bit. But what are hotspots? But then he's got this chart,

00:27:52

like you're saying with nine boxes that show how this whole thing works. So he repeats that

00:27:58

though. Three boxes. Yeah. Two likes three so much. Yep. Like, okay. And where he can,

00:28:05

he tries to put three items in those and you can tell he kind of tried to get them to work.

00:28:10

So yes, that's the overview. But again, that's in the book, this is where he defines all the

00:28:17

pieces the first time. And then he goes through them later on. Yeah. So this rule of three,

00:28:23

I actually think this is a great place to start. He says, identify three outcomes for the month,

00:28:27

identify three outcomes for the week, identify three outcomes for the day. And then on Fridays,

00:28:33

when you do in your review, identify the three things going well and the three things to improve.

00:28:37

So I understand, you know, he wants to pick a number, make it consistent and apply it everywhere.

00:28:43

I do think that even better version of this though, is the highlight that we learned about in make

00:28:51

time. Yeah. I added that to my daily planning sheet and that has helped a lot. And that's basically

00:28:59

the rule of one. Like you big one thing that's going to be the most important, which when you have

00:29:04

a huge list of tasks that you need to get done is really, really hard to do. But for the way that

00:29:10

I work, I think that's a better application of this. However, I think if you're coming from,

00:29:15

I have a thousand things on my task list, and I'm going to just try to get as many of them done as

00:29:19

I can, this rule of three could provide a very helpful framework that will help you not be burned

00:29:26

out at the end of the at the end of the day. So I do see some value in this. It's not the way that

00:29:31

I would choose to apply it. He's also got these hotspots, which he defines as work personal and

00:29:37

then a life frame. I don't really like the breakup of work versus personal. I believe that it is

00:29:47

just your life and there's personal and work aspects of it, but you have to figure out how to make

00:29:52

those work. And then everything that he has in the life frame, mind, body, emotions, career,

00:29:57

financial relationships and fun, those could fit into one of those two boxes. They could also fit

00:30:03

into other boxes, possibly. So I don't really like the way that these are compartmentalized,

00:30:11

but I do think that there is value in identifying the things that you want to focus on, the things

00:30:19

that you want to apply intention to and try to improve. Like if you are just cranking all day

00:30:28

every day, you can quickly find yourself and I've been there in a bad emotional state. And if you

00:30:34

never take stock of where you are at emotionally, then it takes just one little thing and then you

00:30:41

fly off the handle. So if you can recognize that you don't have much margin in that particular area

00:30:48

to borrow Sean Blanck's term and then do things to create positive outcomes in that specific area

00:30:58

in your life frame, that is a good thing. It's kind of like you're trying out meditation again.

00:31:05

I can almost guarantee you that at least at one point in the process was the process,

00:31:12

where you identified, I'm not happy with the way I am, my emotional state right now. And I'm

00:31:18

going to do something about it. So I am going to download this app and even if it doesn't stick,

00:31:22

I'm going to give it a shot. And that's totally in line with agile here, just I don't like the

00:31:27

way that's broken up into life framework and personal. I would get rid of those three distinctions

00:31:32

and just list all of that, the stuff that you care about in the hotspots area.

00:31:37

Yeah. And I think I'm 100% with you on that. When I read his breakout of it, it just rubbed me

00:31:46

wrong the whole time. Like, okay, so you want me to compartmentalize these things. I know that

00:31:54

doesn't work. And my brain runs too fast for that to function long term. I even spoiler alert,

00:32:03

as of this morning, as we're recording this, I release a new article on how I'm using OmniFocus.

00:32:09

And my whole layout of how I have all my projects broken out, yes, it has like a work area,

00:32:17

but it's just so that I can keep those specific projects in line. But if you look at how I actually

00:32:24

operate off of all that, it doesn't matter where those tasks are, they all get pulled into a single

00:32:29

list. And that's how I prefer to operate. Like, I don't want to think about things is like,

00:32:35

that's personal, this is work. Like, this is just what I do and how I live. And that's

00:32:39

how I want to keep operating. So I think I'm with you. I just really struggled with

00:32:45

like everything I read. Well, again, it's not that far off. But if you were to make a diagram

00:32:53

off of what you do, compare it to what JD Meyer is telling us to do, then it is going to look

00:32:59

very different. That's the thing. And so in that sense, these diagrams actually hurt more than they

00:33:05

help, I would argue. Sure. I mean, I get why he did it. He's trying to give you a mental model

00:33:10

that you can wrap your head around if you're brand new to this stuff, but had the opposite

00:33:14

effect for me. Right. The next section here is values, principles, and practices. And

00:33:20

to me, after having read the book, I realized this is a precursor of, what is it, 32

00:33:28

list items across four pages? Yes. That maybe is five pages, something like that. It's like this

00:33:35

quick hits sort of thing with all these different like action over analysis paralysis.

00:33:42

I'm just going to read this one because it made me kind of made me laugh whenever I read this is

00:33:47

point number one of all these undervalues. Taking action is the best antidote for analysis paralysis.

00:33:54

Rather than over engineer or try to figure out everything up front, start taking action.

00:33:58

The results will inform your thinking and you can change your courses needed.

00:34:01

And the first thing I thought was, well, if you're in the middle of analysis paralysis,

00:34:05

how do you break out of that in order to take the action? Like you gave me absolutely nothing

00:34:08

to work with other than don't do that. Well, yeah, that's not helpful. I think

00:34:16

you're right. You know, there's not a whole lot of specific son how to break out of that. But

00:34:23

for the right person, I feel like maybe there's enough there, not for a newbie for sure.

00:34:29

But I mean, basically what he's saying is stop thinking about the work and start doing the work.

00:34:33

Sure. And I do think that if you were to make that mental, mental switch in your head and you

00:34:39

were to just step out there and just start making something that everything that he said there is

00:34:44

probably true. But if you are in that state where you don't know what the next thing is,

00:34:52

then just saying take action isn't helpful. So you do need to be able to identify

00:34:57

if you're in that place. Like, I don't even know where to start. It would be great if he said,

00:35:00

here's how you identify where you should start. But he doesn't do that.

00:35:04

Yep. And I felt that wave. I can't say I was that strongly against all of his values,

00:35:10

principles and practices that he lays out here. But I didn't get anything out of this. Like,

00:35:18

I feel like this is an area where I should have been like, oh, yeah, I should do that. Oh, yeah,

00:35:21

this would that would be helpful. Yeah, that would help. But I came out of it. Like, what did I just

00:35:26

read? Like that it didn't resonate with me at all. Yeah. So just to give you an example,

00:35:33

he's got what makes agile different. And there's a bunch of things that I listed here in my,

00:35:37

my node file, which I will upload to the club. So if you don't want to read the book, but you want

00:35:42

all of the list items, this is a great one to download the mine. There you go. There you go.

00:35:48

But in the initial list of what makes agile different, he's got things like fixed time,

00:35:55

flex scope. What was the other one that I, and then that shows up, let's see, that shows up in the

00:36:02

principles section. But then there is outcomes over activities. Is that the one? Yeah,

00:36:12

outcomes over activities. That's in the values list. So the values, principles and practices here,

00:36:19

the practices, he's got number one, the rule of three. That is one of the key concepts that he

00:36:23

taught us in chapter two. And this, at this point, I'm making these lists of values,

00:36:28

principles and practices. And I'm starting already to see the repetition. I'm like,

00:36:32

huh, and this is on page 30. Okay. Well, I'll let that slide for now, but I feel like I know this

00:36:40

already. Yep. So this is that it doesn't take very long to get to the point where this starts to

00:36:48

feel weird because he's repeating himself. But if that's if that's his intention with the book,

00:36:54

by the way, I guess there probably would be some value in doing that because by the time you get

00:36:58

done with this, you do know what the rule of three is and you do know that you're supposed to fix

00:37:03

time and flex, flex scope. But it's kind of annoying to have to read the same thing over and over

00:37:10

and over again. Yep. All right. Hot spots. Yeah, I kind of talked about hot spots already.

00:37:16

I do think they give you scaffolding for supporting your life, but I don't like the way that he did

00:37:24

them necessarily. There's probably a million ways that you could do this, by the way. My version of

00:37:30

this, I would argue is broken down into the eight different areas that I've identified in my own

00:37:36

wheel of life from my personal retreat course. Yeah. That's a different version of the hot spots.

00:37:40

The difference is that instead of trying to hit all of these hot spots every single day, week,

00:37:47

month, whatever, I'm picking the lowest ones that I want to focus on for the next period,

00:37:52

the 12 week year. And I'm going to set some goals and create some habits that are going to make a

00:37:58

positive impact in that particular area. And some of those things have turned into habits that I

00:38:04

stick with, like a daily journaling habit. So it does translate into his version of the hot spots

00:38:11

under the life frame. But that's not the approach that I would take. And I feel like it's a little

00:38:17

bit more difficult. It feels like more mental overhead to see this list of all these areas and

00:38:27

then say, okay, make sure that you hit all these. I feel like it's a lot more approachable if you

00:38:31

just tackle one at a time. Sure. No, it makes sense. I mean, the hot spots is the, it's just his term

00:38:39

for areas of focus from GTD or the wheel of life, like what you're saying, which is also the term I

00:38:46

think it was used in make time. Or maybe that was free to focus. Those two are blending to some

00:38:51

degree to me. It's a very similar concept. I think one of the things that he spells out here

00:38:58

is to use those as a way to manage your energy and where you're spending your focus. He doesn't

00:39:04

use that term. I wish he would. But he does recommend that you use these as a way to gauge if you're

00:39:12

on the right path or not. And I would agree with that. But I, I really wanted him to show like within

00:39:21

your system, how do you recommend doing that? Maybe he did. I just didn't catch it somewhere.

00:39:28

So correct me if I'm wrong, but he never does spell that out. No, I mean, he kind of leaves it up to

00:39:33

you to identify what are the things in work and personal. He's got listed activities, active projects

00:39:42

and then a backlog. And then in the life frame, mind, body, emotions, career, financial relationships,

00:39:46

and fun. But I think the real power of this is if you chuck that list and identify your own

00:39:53

stuff, that's important. Sure. Yeah. You want to add video games to that list? Go right ahead. I mean,

00:39:58

done. Last section here in the approach is Monday Vision daily outcomes,

00:40:05

Friday reflection. He defines them again here. Take a while guesses what these are just from

00:40:12

the titles of them. Monday Vision, set a vision on Monday for what you want the week to look like.

00:40:17

Daily outcomes define three tasks that you must complete that day. And then Friday reflection

00:40:25

is to reflect on those on that Monday Vision to see how well you did. Now, the key there is that

00:40:31

you need to select your three items for your daily outcomes based on your Monday Vision.

00:40:37

That's to me, that's like the core foundation of his entire system is that particular habit

00:40:44

in that particular flow. And I understand that I can see how that's helpful. I really like the

00:40:54

highlight concept better than that. But I also like the concept of habit building more so than this.

00:41:01

So sure. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with all of that. I do like the idea of taking Monday to be your

00:41:11

Vision day. I don't think it necessarily needs a whole day, although that's kind of where my

00:41:17

brain went is like, that's an interesting idea. Yeah. If I just took all of Monday to prioritize

00:41:24

for the rest of the week, would that increase or decrease the amount of output that I'm able to

00:41:30

to create? Sure. Would I write more or less if I stopped writing that day and just

00:41:38

thought about what I wanted to write? Yeah. It's an interesting idea. And I don't think I'm in a

00:41:43

place where I'm able to say, Hey, everybody I'm working with, peace out. I'm just thinking today.

00:41:49

Yeah. But it would be an interesting exercise. Maybe somebody can do that for us and repeat that

00:41:54

and report back. I don't see that as something I'm going to even experiment with. I

00:42:03

have a tendency to do some vision casting of sorts from like blank spaces throughout the week or

00:42:11

on like week long trips anymore or conferences and such. Like I'll do that sort of thing then.

00:42:19

Not all whole day every week, but sure. Taking those higher views, like I'm slowly realizing that I'm

00:42:28

wanting to work myself into the habit of acting on things right away as opposed to putting it on

00:42:35

a list. So a lot of what this seems to be designed around is putting things off to later

00:42:42

as opposed to getting it done right now, even though he does say action over. I don't even

00:42:48

remember what he said, but I I'm less and less inclined to put things on a list and more inclined

00:42:55

to try to get things done right now, even if it takes an hour to get it done. Like that's

00:42:59

yeah, I'm just learning that the more I do that, the more productive overall I am,

00:43:04

even in the right direction, if I'm able to say yes or no as to whether or not it should be done or

00:43:09

not in its entirety from the get go, like I do a lot better just with that whole now concept.

00:43:16

Sure. And I think in order to embrace a concept or a system like that, you do need to have

00:43:24

some margin where you can just say, okay, I'm going to do this right now.

00:43:30

Correct. Instead of running from thing to thing, that would be an interesting follow up book,

00:43:35

by the way, would be Margin by Richard Swenson. It's a book that I read a while back. Got on my

00:43:40

bookshelf here. I haven't read it in in several years. I think that was actually pre-bookworm.

00:43:46

So if anybody wants to hear us talk about margin, go vote for that one.

00:43:52

But that would be an interesting follow up to this, because this book, I think, assumes that you have

00:44:01

some flexibility in that, but that's obviously the natural question is if I don't have that,

00:44:08

how do I apply this? And then maybe the follow up question, at least for me, would be if I

00:44:13

don't have the space to do this the right way, how can I get the space to do this the way that I want?

00:44:19

And honestly, Margin is the answer, which again, is one of those things that you hear about it,

00:44:24

and you're like, oh man, that would be nice. But I can't just, I can't work on that right now.

00:44:28

I'm too busy to even think about margin, which means that you're going to continue to

00:44:33

run in the hamster wheel for a while. But anyway, we'll put a pin in that. Go recommend that one.

00:44:39

If you want to hear us talk more about it. I do want to call it one other piece to this.

00:44:43

You mentioned the Friday reflection. This is basically the weekly review.

00:44:46

Yes. And this is something that I thought he does a good job explaining this because he says,

00:44:54

make sure to schedule your reflection for at least 30 minutes on your calendar every week.

00:44:58

I feel like if people who read GTD understood that and put that on their calendar for 30 minutes

00:45:04

every week, probably about 500% more of them would actually do their weekly review.

00:45:11

That number is probably low. But I remember maybe David Allen does mention that. It's been a while

00:45:17

since I read the book. But I remember going through that and thinking, oh yeah, weekly review,

00:45:21

I totally get this, I need to do this, and then I never did it. And then it was like, well,

00:45:26

why didn't I do this? And then later on, just reading other things, learning other things.

00:45:32

Like if I think it was Patrick Roan, actually, who mentioned in an old mics on mics podcast,

00:45:38

like if it's not on your calendar, it doesn't exist. Like everything you have to do has to take

00:45:44

place within the context of time. So if you're going to do your weekly review, you got to put

00:45:48

that on your calendar. And I was like, ah, that makes so much sense. I feel like--

00:45:53

Specifically remember that episode because I remember he had the phrase, if not now,

00:45:59

when? Yes, exactly. And he would ask that question. And I don't know why. I got a chance to meet

00:46:06

Patrick Roan, I don't know, about a year ago now. And I had to make sure he knew, like,

00:46:11

for whatever reason, that particular phrase has stuck with me for a very, very long time.

00:46:16

And I still, to this day, whenever I look at how I build task management systems, I always have to

00:46:22

think about with this specific project or a context or a tag or whatever it is, which,

00:46:28

side note, I'm not using tags at all in OmniFocus anymore. I have a tagless system.

00:46:32

I read just a blog post. Link in the description. I don't know why I'm bringing this particular

00:46:37

article up. I'm not intending to do this. But I'm always looking at these things from the stance of,

00:46:43

well, if I'm going to put this on this list, when does it actually get done? Because if I just put

00:46:47

on a list and there's not some form of a routine or a habit or a calendar item that's associated with

00:46:53

that, it'll just disappear. I'll never get it done. And that's the black hole for me where things

00:47:00

just go and they disappear. Joe's task, go to die inside a tag. It's totally do if I don't have

00:47:06

a timeframe for it. So yes, I love, sorry, I interrupted you on this whole thing. But yeah,

00:47:10

Patrick Roans, if not now, win. Love that question. No, that was basically the main point I was

00:47:15

going to make was that that little two sentence thing that he shared, I felt like that was really,

00:47:22

really good. And it can get lost inside of the list. But there are a couple places like that,

00:47:27

where there's things that you may not agree with any of the system that he's outlining. But there

00:47:34

is a couple things in here that can really have a positive impact. Going back through my notes,

00:47:39

I also see I mentioned at the beginning, how I continue to get the understanding that relationships

00:47:44

are really important. It's kind of wedged into the hotspot section. So it doesn't really make a

00:47:49

whole lot of sense here. But he says continually invest in your relationships, your relationships

00:47:53

are either growing or they're dying and people will flow in and out of your life. But that's very

00:47:58

much in line with what I was saying at the beginning of this podcast didn't even realize that that

00:48:03

was something that I had called out in my mind. I have a little light bulb icon. That's like an

00:48:08

inspiration thing. Like when something really hits me, that's one of the keys that I used.

00:48:12

So when I can go back through this, I can kind of really quickly glean, you know, what are the

00:48:16

big ideas that impacted me from this book. Then you realize that as I'm looking at the chapter list,

00:48:23

you know, but those types of things are in here, just like making sure to schedule your reflection.

00:48:27

That's a great tip and you should absolutely do that for your weekly review.

00:48:30

Sure. So part two, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly results. And I took four chapters and put it into

00:48:38

one line item because effectively like pick three goals for the year using those three goals for

00:48:45

the year, pick three things for your month using those pick three things for your week using those

00:48:50

pick three things for your day. Like, okay, there you go. All right. Now part three.

00:48:54

I could not disagree with this section more. Yeah. I, well, so let me just say that I really do,

00:49:06

I really do believe in the 12 week year idea, even if you don't like the 12 week year book,

00:49:13

because I get it if you're reading it that you do have to kind of cut through some of the

00:49:20

sensational language. But I really do think it's a powerful idea that if you set yearly goals,

00:49:29

you will wait until the 11th month, the 11th hour. And then you're going to try to accomplish them.

00:49:36

And maybe you'll get there. Maybe you won't. But basically you've wasted a whole bunch of time.

00:49:42

Right. This whole part in the book is where his working from Microsoft comes out, I believe.

00:49:51

Sure. Because he's working corporate and corporate is in a like, they still mandate yearly goals.

00:50:00

Yep. So he's, he's just taking that and then like, okay, these are my goals for the year that I was

00:50:05

given and probably not allowed to have any say in. So here's what I'm going to do with them.

00:50:11

Like that's what it feels like to me. And I think you're right. Like the 12 week year thing is

00:50:16

a great concept. I have personally, I run on like eight week cycles right now. So I've kind of

00:50:24

shrunk down even off of the 12 week year. But yeah, I don't like this section at all.

00:50:33

Well, the thing that really jumps out to me from the first section, if I were to pick like one thing

00:50:40

that agile is based off of it's this whole fixed time flex scope idea. Yep. In fact, even says agile

00:50:46

is the ability to respond to change. I guarantee you there will be change in a 12 month period.

00:50:52

So why even bother setting those yearly goals? I feel like if I were to do that,

00:50:59

I would write those three things down for the year. And then I go through my first

00:51:06

month quarter, whatever. And I learned some things. And I realized that one of those three things

00:51:13

is not really the thing that I should be working on. But the fact that it's written on my piece of

00:51:19

paper that I look at all the time would be enough to keep me moving towards that thing

00:51:24

just because I had written it down. And I'm like, this is the plan. We're going to stick with it.

00:51:30

It just, it feels like if to me, it would force me into a negative, a potentially negative

00:51:37

course where it's giving you these boundaries. Yes. But maybe you need to be able to turn off the

00:51:45

road that you're on and go in a different direction. Right. And I feel like by starting with the

00:51:51

yearly goals, you are kind of forcing yourself and providing the inertia to keep going in a

00:51:57

specific direction. I feel like you do need to create some momentum. And the 12 week year for me is

00:52:04

kind of the sweet spot for that where it can help you, it can help you create the, the incentive that

00:52:12

you need to keep moving, because it's, you can see how it is leading you towards the outcomes that

00:52:18

you want to achieve. Those are anchored by the wheel of life, not a yearly goal. But what's great

00:52:26

about the 12 week year, in my opinion, is the ability to just chuck it four times a year,

00:52:31

three times a year and say, yes, I'm going to start over. Right. So there's no clear cut. And again,

00:52:38

you know, if you're coming to this with the impression that this is going to be the system,

00:52:43

you just have to apply it. It's probably not going to work for you. If you're going to take pieces of

00:52:48

it, then there could be a lot of value in this. Yeah. But just the way that this is described, I

00:52:53

feel like provides too much structure and not enough freedom. Yes. I'm with you 100%. Because I,

00:53:04

this is where like this whole eight week thing, and it's because I know about every five to six weeks,

00:53:11

sometimes less than sometimes a little more than something comes my way that forces me to course

00:53:17

correct. And that's just the the rhythm that my life seems to fall into. I don't really know why,

00:53:26

it just kind of is. And if I operate on eight week cycles, it means that about the time those

00:53:32

changes come around, I can finish up what I'm working on and then adjust to those changes.

00:53:37

Yep. Like that's, that's the way that I'm operating on. Now, can I take his the last three pieces of

00:53:44

this the month, week and day side of it and ignore the year? Maybe I probably could. But I,

00:53:51

it seems like it's forced to try to come up with three things each time. Like whenever I go through

00:54:00

those eight week cycles, it's pretty common for me to have one thing I'm focused on. Sure. Like,

00:54:06

that's that's what I'm driving towards. And to try to find three things within that one thing for

00:54:13

the week to work on doesn't always make sense. A lot of times it's one thing that I'm working

00:54:19

out for that week. And then I have one thing on that day. Maybe that has to do with how detailed

00:54:24

I break things down into or don't. But I understand his rule of three, I get why he loves that. And

00:54:33

it's just everything is consistent. But I think I'm with you on the one thing. Yeah. I didn't even

00:54:39

try to do that reference. But I was thinking that the whole time you're saying I didn't connect it

00:54:45

until it came out of my mouth. But maybe that just resonates with me way more than three. I don't

00:54:51

know. Yeah. Now that being said, as much as I hit the section, this is where all of my action items

00:54:57

come from. Of course it is. So there is living proof that you can disagree with the main message

00:55:05

and still mind some gold nuggets from the books that you read. So we don't need to go through

00:55:11

all of his process here. But again, there are lists and it's very specific. You start your day,

00:55:17

you design your day, you drive your day, you end your work day, and then you end your day. And

00:55:20

there's different things in here. I'll just call out a couple of the ones that stood out to me.

00:55:25

So number one, under design your day, he has a point where you should set boundaries and limits.

00:55:31

And he has some things that you should fix time for like eating, sleeping, and he specifically

00:55:35

listed working out. I kind of get the idea that he really is into exercise. I don't know specifically

00:55:41

if he's a weightlifter, runner, whatever. But you do kind of get that vibe as he's talking about

00:55:50

the different things that fitness is important to him. And I have created an exercise habit. I work

00:55:57

out six days a week, every single week, I'd say about half the time I work out every single day.

00:56:03

And it's always a struggle for me though, to find the time to do it. I find that when I go to plan

00:56:11

out my day the night before, I have to consciously put forth a bunch of effort to carve out the time

00:56:18

to make that happen. In fact, that's another thing that he mentions in here is that you carve

00:56:23

out time for what's important. You don't find time, you make it. Making time for what's important is

00:56:27

the driver of great results. When I read that, I instantly thought of Curtis McHale. I know he

00:56:30

doesn't like that terminology making time. But again, I think that's the best description that I've

00:56:35

heard so far. So I'm going to run with that one. I really agree with that. You make time, you don't

00:56:39

find time. And then so my first action item here is setting up time every day for working out,

00:56:46

specifically from seven to eight or something. I haven't identified specifically when this is

00:56:50

going to be because I want to rethink my whole morning routine. And what time I start my day,

00:56:57

that sort of thing. It's always been difficult for me to work out when I get up early. But I also

00:57:04

am reading, Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins as my gap book. And holy cow, that is an inspirational

00:57:12

book, tons of language. But really, really good. And this guy just like, he's pushed himself through

00:57:20

so much. He joined the Marines. He had to go through Hell Week three times. He didn't fail out,

00:57:24

but he like his body broke basically, and he couldn't finish. So he did it three times, then he ran

00:57:29

a bunch of ultra marathons and crazy stuff. Like he keeps pushing himself past what he,

00:57:36

I'm not done with it yet, but he keeps pushing himself past what he thinks he's capable of.

00:57:40

And when you read those stories, you kind of get jacked up and you're like,

00:57:44

I wonder what I'm actually capable of. And I'm sure I'm capable of working out in the morning.

00:57:48

So I want to push myself to do that. Just don't know the specifics yet.

00:57:52

There was another one here under drive your day for power hours or when you feel strongest in the

00:58:00

zone. Because I am an intermittent faster, I know that this is the morning for me.

00:58:09

And I want to identify my power hours and I want to shade them on my daily planning sheet. So I

00:58:14

have a visual indicator. Like these are special, only put really important stuff here. I kind of

00:58:20

think I do that already with how I do it, but I want something visual. Sure. And then the last one

00:58:27

in your day, he's got four questions to cap your day. I what did I learn? What did I improve? What

00:58:33

did I enjoy? What kind of act did I do? Not a huge fan of these questions, but I kind of get

00:58:38

him and I have my own journaling prompts that I use. That's basically what these reminded me of.

00:58:43

I think these are great starters. But again, the four questions to cap your day isn't the

00:58:47

magic piece here. It's just identifying for yourself. What are the questions that you want to use in

00:58:51

your own reflection? But then the shutdown routine. So I want to write down my shutdown routine.

00:58:57

And this has popped up before, but I just never get around to doing it or I do it. And then

00:59:02

it ends up not sticking. Like I want to be able to say at this time, every single day, I am done

00:59:08

with work. And here's the checklist of things that I do as I disconnect completely. And maybe

00:59:13

it's just the nature of working online with other remote teams that that's more difficult for me.

00:59:18

But it is something that I aspire to do. So those are my action items. Yeah, I gave up on the shutdown

00:59:25

routine concept. And it's partly because I've adopted kind of a weird alternative to that in

00:59:33

that I know I have a set number of things I need to get done at the church each day. So I'm working

00:59:40

there full time. And somewhere between about two and three 30, I'll get done with the things I

00:59:49

needed to get done that day. And when I hit that point, the next thing on my list is, you know,

00:59:56

things like checking in on email, checking in on some forums, like those are some things that I've

01:00:00

got as like habits that come up, you could probably call that a shutdown routine. But I don't have

01:00:05

a set time when I get to that. It's just a thing that I try to get done every day. And if I don't

01:00:11

have time for it, say I get done at like 10 till four, and I usually go home at four, I just don't

01:00:17

do it. I just cancel it, put it off till tomorrow, and then don't do it. And if I have any form of

01:00:24

like a cleanup or move things around and you know, clean up my computer, clean up the desk,

01:00:29

anything like that, that's usually done at night. If I'm going to do it, and it's part of like an

01:00:33

evening ritual, so I kind of broke this whole shutdown thing down into like whenever I can get

01:00:40

to those instead of saying, okay, at three 30, I'm going to go and stop everything I'm doing and

01:00:46

do this particular list. No, it just doesn't work that way. Because I'll never do it because I'm

01:00:52

always engrossed in whatever it is I'm working on. I'm like, well, I can do that a little bit later.

01:00:56

But if I just have it as things somewhere, I want to get these things done today. If I can,

01:01:02

I'm more apt to actually do those. Sure. So maybe I just don't like calling it a shutdown routine.

01:01:07

But you know, it does seem to work pretty well for me. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm

01:01:14

going back and forth on this so many times. But I feel like I was inspired after reading this again

01:01:20

to give it a shot. So sure. I don't have a high degree of confidence in this action item

01:01:27

sticking for me, but okay, we'll follow up with it. Sounds good. Well, part three

01:01:32

is results explained. I have to say when I saw this in the outline, and after I finished reading

01:01:39

part one or about, well, I shouldn't say that the first couple three chapters of part one.

01:01:44

My thought was that in part three, he was going to then break down everything he talked about in

01:01:50

part one and show why it works. That is not what I got at all. I got another five chapters of lists

01:02:03

to throw at me. The first of which is the results frame personas and pitfalls personas.

01:02:12

You see that? That sounds weird. I don't know. We'll go with personas.

01:02:18

Okay. I don't know why that sounds weird whenever I say it. I don't know.

01:02:23

So just an example of some of the things that they list here under the personas,

01:02:27

starter, finisher, thinker, doer, simplify or maximize a critic, opportunist, perfectionist,

01:02:33

stuff like that. The idea being here that these are kind of all different hats that you could wear,

01:02:41

at least that was my interpretation of this, which I guess has some value, but this is not something

01:02:52

that I was struggling with or thinking about. I tend to be the kind of person where

01:02:59

if there's something that needs to be done, I'll figure out how to do it. I'm not going to say,

01:03:04

oh, well, I am not functioning as a controller right now, or I'm not thinking about this as a

01:03:11

marketer. I have my marketer section blocked off for Thursdays at 3 p.m. It's just like,

01:03:17

this is the task in front of me. I think there's limited value in these sorts of things. Maybe

01:03:24

as you scale this into a larger company, there is. I don't know. Maybe it's not on the list here,

01:03:31

but I do see some value if you were to set aside an entire day for meetings and say,

01:03:35

I am going to be a meeting attender on this day. That's really the only example I can think of

01:03:40

where this can be useful, though. He does say three ways to use the personas.

01:03:47

So you know yourself, team up, and then you can improve the situation. But I kind of feel like

01:03:53

if you're able to function in whichever one of these you naturally gravitate towards,

01:03:58

that's great. For everybody else, just figure out how to get the job done.

01:04:03

A better way to define this, in my opinion, is Dan Sullivan's unique ability. So you can

01:04:10

identify your unique ability, and then you want to maximize the time that you spend on your unique

01:04:13

ability. But after, to a certain point, especially when you are in a situation and you're not in

01:04:24

a Microsoft, where you have a job that's designed around your skill set, you're just

01:04:29

solving problems where you are, which is probably the majority of people who are listening to this,

01:04:36

honestly. This stuff doesn't matter. It's great if you're able to say, this is what I'm good at,

01:04:41

and I'm going to try to carve out more time for that. But that's not the approach that he takes

01:04:44

here. He's just saying, these are all the different things that you might have to do,

01:04:47

and you're going to have to switch between them. Good luck. Yeah. I don't understand how you apply

01:04:54

what he lists here. Yeah. To add to that, the results frame piece of this is the hotspots.

01:05:01

Again. I'm not sure why he called it something different in the title of it,

01:05:09

because he calls it results frame, and then he has a chart for the hotspots and a definition of

01:05:16

those hotspots. I could not figure out what he was trying to do with that.

01:05:22

The results frame I put in parentheses, this is just a list of popular productivity topics.

01:05:31

There's that. He lists things like action, efficiency, and effectiveness, energy management,

01:05:38

expectations, focus, goals and objectives, information management learning,

01:05:41

mindset motivation, planning, prioritizing, stuff like that.

01:05:44

I don't really understand how this translates into anything that you can use.

01:05:54

I got it. Going back to your thought of this is a whole bunch of blog posts thrown together.

01:06:02

This is keyword injection for his website for SEO. That's what that is.

01:06:07

It could be. Basically, it's a list of things that anybody who is concerned about what they're

01:06:12

getting done has already heard of or studied in some way, shape, or form before. I do understand

01:06:21

how if you were to master these things, they would increase the results you're able to get

01:06:27

as you focus on your hotspots. Just listing these things like learn how to plan and prioritize

01:06:36

doesn't really help you. I guess you could tackle these one at a time and say,

01:06:41

"I'm going to improve my self-awareness skill over the next week."

01:06:44

But I don't know. A lot of this stuff, not to go back to emotional intelligence as kind of what it is.

01:06:51

If you were to develop emotional intelligence, then that would have a positive impact on

01:07:01

the results frame for your hotspots. I would argue. Just listing a bunch of things,

01:07:07

I felt at this point, was just useless and a not great way to start this section.

01:07:12

Well, he ends that section by talking about productivity pitfalls. Whenever I read this,

01:07:23

they sounded familiar, which at this point, everything sounds familiar. If you go back and take a look

01:07:30

in the first part, values, principles, and practices, most of these pitfalls are those

01:07:35

small backwards. The inverse of those, right? Like a lack of boundaries, for example,

01:07:41

because that's one of the things that they talk about in the front section.

01:07:45

I don't know. Again, this felt like a blog post, especially with the top five. These are the top

01:07:52

five that people suffer from. At one point, that probably was a blog post. It was probably a great

01:07:59

blog post. But then following that up with, here's all of the other common pitfalls and then no real

01:08:04

strategies to avoid them other than, "Hey, we talked about this previously." It's not very useful.

01:08:13

And I say lack of boundaries, for example, there's lots of stuff in here as he goes through the

01:08:18

boundaries section. It comes up over and over and over again. But it's never very deep. And even

01:08:23

if you compiled it all together, it's still not going to be a whole lot of strategy for you if

01:08:27

lack of boundaries is a specific problem for you. All this list is going to do is make you feel

01:08:32

bad about where you are. It's not going to help you out of the hole.

01:08:36

Well, the next two sections here, I'm going to lump them together. 25 keys to results

01:08:43

and 25 strategies for results. Not sure why I didn't just call it 50 points or something. They

01:08:51

feel like they should be together. I don't even know what's in these because I think I just skimmed

01:08:57

them. I couldn't understand what he was trying to get across. It feels like more of the same.

01:09:02

From the first part here, the results frame, personas, pitfalls. It feels like he just

01:09:09

has more lists he wants to share. Or again, these are blog posts he just wanted to throw in.

01:09:14

Had a word count. Basically, I have more lists to share.

01:09:17

So I don't even know what to say on these other than there's more lists of things you should do.

01:09:26

Even the terminology between them is somewhat consistent. So if you're looking for a difference

01:09:33

between keys and strategies, it's hard to find. There is some cool stuff in here.

01:09:41

I actually liked the idea of above the line or below the line, number 11, under the 25 keys to

01:09:47

results. He's got a couple diagrams, which I think are really good. This kind of comes back to

01:09:56

in the first section. We didn't really talk about this because, again, there's not a whole lot of

01:10:00

structure around this idea. But he talks about prioritization in the Monday Vision daily

01:10:05

outcomes Friday reflection as either a must should or could. And he's got a couple of diagrams here.

01:10:13

Basically, must should and could are things that contribute, I would say, at a high level

01:10:19

to the outcomes that you want to achieve or they provide a lot of value. And then things that

01:10:25

provide a moderate amount of value, things that provide only a little bit of value.

01:10:28

And then there's these diagrams for above the line where the things that you must do. These are

01:10:34

things that provide a ton of value. And then as you progress to the things that you should do or

01:10:38

could do, there's diminishing returns there. Below the line, the value that is produced from

01:10:47

the must should could, again, like these bars where must is the biggest one, should is the

01:10:52

medium one and could is the smallest one. But as you go down when you're doing below the bar

01:10:57

tasks, then you're increasing your dissatisfaction. I've got these in my mind,

01:11:03

not for people who want to take a look at these. But I thought this was kind of a cool way

01:11:07

to think about the results that you are gathering. Like diminishing returns, for example,

01:11:14

that's not as big a deal as something that is actively producing unhappiness if you are stuck

01:11:20

below the line. And recognizing that and saying, I'm absolutely not going to do these could or

01:11:25

should tasks. I'm just going to do the things that I have to do. And I'm going to do everything

01:11:29

that I can to get above this line and kind of change my relationship with the things that I

01:11:36

have to do. Like that's kind of a cool idea. But it's one point in a very long list and easy to

01:11:42

gloss over. Right. The next section here is motivation. I kind of get like, I understand why he has

01:11:51

this one in here. Like, I finally found something like, okay, I get it, I get it. I'm with you on

01:11:56

the flow here. And it has to do with like, why are you doing this? Why are you focusing on

01:12:03

being more productive or effective and understanding the why behind what you do?

01:12:11

He has a bunch of quotes, but he goes through some sections here of mostly understanding yourself.

01:12:19

He has to throw in another list of 10 pitfalls for motivation, which includes analysis paralysis

01:12:26

and perfectionism yet again. Yep. That's the third or fourth time we've seen analysis paralysis.

01:12:32

Yep. Must be something he struggles with. So he does go through 10 pitfalls of motivation and

01:12:37

then 10 key strategies for motivation and then 20 key factors for motivation.

01:12:45

Yep. 20 key factors because somehow that's different. And again, these are all

01:12:50

they're all interesting and they could be helpful for each of them. But when you've got two sentences

01:12:59

about something, it's hard to take that and come out with, oh yeah, I need to make some changes.

01:13:08

This is exactly what I need to do with that. Okay. There's so much of it that you just glaze

01:13:13

over it. And you come out of this, at least I came out of this more demotivated than motivated.

01:13:20

I'm like, okay, there's so much here. What on earth am I supposed to do with that? I don't

01:13:25

know. I'm going to go grab a cookie. Sure, sure. Which I did not do because I shouldn't do sugar.

01:13:33

So I know. Well, there are in his defense, there are some some things that are different between

01:13:40

pitfall strategies and key factors. But it's not immediately clear what those are. Just as an

01:13:46

example, he's got a Venn diagram at the beginning of this, I believe, where motivation comes from

01:13:50

your thoughts, feelings and body. And then in the middle is kind of why you do what you do.

01:13:56

Those are all things listed under the 20 key factors for motivation, but not in any specific

01:14:01

order. In fact, body is 12. Thoughts and feelings are 10 and 11. And if you're reading these as a

01:14:06

numbered list, you would think that the higher up you go, the more important they are. He's basically

01:14:10

told us prior, though, that these are the three main things when motivation comes from, then he lists

01:14:14

nine other things above that. Yes. So a little bit confusing there. I don't necessarily think he's

01:14:21

wrong. I mean, number one, he talks about pain and pleasure. That absolutely is the key

01:14:27

motivator for everybody, whether you realize it or not, you're either trying to avoid pain or

01:14:31

increase pleasure. Pain, I would argue, you should break those apart. The avoidance of pain typically

01:14:36

is a higher motivator than the pursuit of pleasure. But I understand why he grouped those together.

01:14:43

Sure. But I just use that as an example of how these things can really be muddied. And there's

01:14:48

not enough here to really grab onto in terms of differentiating these. Again, I just jotted down

01:14:56

the titles because by the fifth time you hear about perfectionist me, like, okay, I got that.

01:15:01

I don't need to write it all all down again. But the result is that the more distance you get from

01:15:07

this book, the more this stuff just kind of blends together. And so whatever distinctions and points

01:15:12

that he's trying to make in this particular section, they are quickly lost. Not necessarily,

01:15:16

you know, again, it's, it depends on what his goal was with this book. If it's just like a

01:15:22

reference work, and you want to come back at some point and write an article about things that

01:15:29

impact your motivation, this would absolutely be a great place to start. You look at this list of

01:15:32

20 things and okay, I'm going to write about these and do some more research and flesh these out.

01:15:37

Like that'd be a great starting point. Maybe that's what he was doing when he wrote this.

01:15:41

But in terms of like the bookworm approach where we want to pick up a book and learn some new ideas

01:15:48

and apply these things, it's just harder to latch, latch on to something specific here,

01:15:53

because there's not a whole lot of meat behind any one of these and he's quickly on to the next

01:15:58

thing. Yeah. It feels like it would have been a lot more effective to spend some time synthesizing

01:16:07

all of your points about motivation down to three. And there we go.

01:16:14

Let's spell those out in a lot more detail as opposed to giving us 40 items across six pages

01:16:21

to somehow figure out. I don't know. The last chapter here, mindsets and metaphors.

01:16:28

I think there's some interesting things in here. I don't know that they're brand new,

01:16:33

but he covers the difference between an abundance mindset and a scarcity mindset.

01:16:41

A positive mindset versus negative and a growth mindset over a fixed mindset. Now we've talked

01:16:46

about the growth versus fixed mindset, read a whole book on it and talked about it here.

01:16:50

That's one that he must like because he gave us a list for that one and not the other two.

01:16:59

Yeah. It's kind of the key indicator. Then he gives us a list of things on how to change your

01:17:08

mindset, which again is helpful, but it's four points on a third of a page, half a page.

01:17:15

Yeah. I mean, there are some good things in this section. I can't say anything jumped out at me

01:17:22

specifically that was new that made me want to change things, but it does reiterate some things

01:17:30

elsewhere in the book and some things we've covered in the past. So I don't know, any thoughts on this

01:17:36

mic? Yeah. There was one thing in here that really jumped out to me and the whole section on learned

01:17:41

helplessness. I say a whole section. It's a very short section. But I thought it was good.

01:17:48

It talks about the problem of learned helplessness is that you apply it personally. You think that

01:17:54

your state is permanent and it's pervasive, which means that it impacts everything.

01:17:59

And the solution to that is to kind of flip all of those views on its head and recognize that the

01:18:03

state you're in right now, it's only temporary, that it's situational. Okay. So it's going to change

01:18:08

in that it's specific. So it applies to this one area of your life over here, but not to these

01:18:12

things over there, which are actually going pretty well. I thought that was a really powerful idea.

01:18:17

There should be a whole book written and probably is just on that specific piece.

01:18:20

You know, so again, to reiterate the point that you can go through a book and not really enjoy the

01:18:29

main message, but still get these these gold nuggets here where I feel like this is something

01:18:35

that the next time I find myself in a situation where I'm frustrated and I feel like there's

01:18:42

nothing I can do about it, I look back at these things and say, Oh yeah, I'm taking this personally.

01:18:47

I'm thinking that it's always going to be this way. And I'm thinking that this is impacting every

01:18:50

year of my life. But when I recognize that this is a temporary state, that it's situational based

01:18:56

on the current set of circumstances. And it's only applying to this one thing. It makes it seem like

01:19:01

it's not that big a deal. It gives me a better perspective on it, which is why it's in the mindset

01:19:04

section. But I don't think necessarily people are going to make those connections like I did.

01:19:11

Right. Like a very, it's very easy to completely skip over and gloss over that, that piece of it.

01:19:17

Sure. Which again, is like the whole book though, the mindset stuff that he talks about in here,

01:19:23

if you've not read mindset, that may completely rock your world. Now we read mindset. So I went

01:19:28

over it and I'm like, yeah, I know that already. And Carol Black did a much better job explaining it.

01:19:32

But that's just me. Fair enough. I don't feel like there's any other points on this.

01:19:39

I would like to cover other than it feels very disjointed to me. Again, I think after about the

01:19:48

first three or four chapters, I just became jaded towards the whole thing. And it made me heart,

01:19:53

it made it very hard for me to keep an open mind with it once I had been kind of turned off

01:19:59

to the whole thing. So sure. Thus, you can probably sense the extreme negativity from me on this

01:20:04

whole thing. But it is, for me, it was very hard to go through and understand or pick out little

01:20:12

points that I felt were helpful here and there, mostly because I didn't have any trust

01:20:17

in him because he hadn't won that trust. So I found myself looking for loopholes where I would

01:20:26

normally be looking for the positives. And it's been a while since the book has led me down that path.

01:20:32

So apologies for all the negativity. Maybe that's because you're an Apple user and he works at

01:20:39

Microsoft. I don't know. I work with Microsoft stuff and I've recommended Microsoft a little bit

01:20:44

lately. So I'm just kidding. Interesting point though. Should talk about action items?

01:20:52

Yes. You're going to reiterate your three? Yeah, I'll just real quickly reiterate the three that I

01:20:57

picked out from the short section that neither of us liked. Did you try to get three? No, I did not.

01:21:05

That was coincidence. Dang it, JD Meyer. You're rubbing off on me. All right. So the first one,

01:21:12

set time every day for working out. Again, I don't know exactly when that's going to be,

01:21:16

but it is going to be probably in the morning. The second one, I don't find my power hours and

01:21:20

shade them on my daily planning sheets. I have a visual indicator and only put the really important

01:21:24

stuff during those hours. And then number three, right out my shutdown routine. Again, not with

01:21:30

high hopes of this actually sticking, but going to give it another shot. Cool. I have one potential

01:21:39

and I say potential because I'm not committed to it yet. I kind of want to sleep on it one more

01:21:46

night before I make this decision. But I wrote down three MITs. Most important tasks.

01:21:52

If I had anything from this that reached out to me in any form, it was this concept of three. Now,

01:22:00

obviously, I've mentioned in a few places that I kind of like the rule of one instead of the rule

01:22:06

three, which is why I'm not sure that I want to do three. I know that I won't do it on a weekly or

01:22:12

a monthly basis or especially not a yearly basis. If I do it anywhere, it would be on a daily

01:22:18

outcome list. But I'm not sure that given my day to day work that that's realistic.

01:22:26

Because working in IT, a lot of my stuff is support. Probably 75% of the work I'm going to do every

01:22:34

day is unknown until I get there. I can find and make time for one in a day and I know I can do that.

01:22:44

But trying to choose three feels a little bit irresponsible. So I would either have to break

01:22:50

them down further or ignore the rule of three in that case. So I'm leaving it as a question mark

01:22:57

because I'm not sure how that's going to pan out. You follow me on all that? That's kind of a weird

01:23:04

yes. You're looking for something to take from this book. The only thing you can find is the three

01:23:08

MITs, but you're not sure you like it. Thanks. Thanks for that. Some rosation.

01:23:13

On that note, we should do style and rating. I can go first on this since I'm the negative

01:23:23

negative Nancy here. I think it's obvious I didn't care for this book. Just from a writing style

01:23:33

stance and from an editing stance, we bring this one up once in a while. Lots and lots of grammar

01:23:40

issues and typos. He really needed a full blown editor on this more than there were a number of

01:23:48

cases where I would read something and then have to stop and reread it two or three times to try

01:23:52

to figure out what it was he was trying to say because the words actually don't work in a sentence.

01:23:58

So it's not an actual coherent phrase. So I had to go through and figure that out from time to time.

01:24:05

That just bugs me. I'm not a grammar Nazi, but I have a hard time with it.

01:24:11

Anyway, lots of grammar issues and typos. I found it very confusing to follow once I got through

01:24:16

the format of his system, which was early on, and then struggled to put together what it is he's

01:24:24

trying to do in especially part three. I just could not figure out why that part was there. Save the

01:24:29

motivation piece. Basically, his main point in this whole book seems to be to break things down

01:24:38

into three smaller chunks and turn actions into habits. Now I can resonate with the whole turning

01:24:45

actions into habits, but that is my summarization of what he's trying to get across and not getting

01:24:52

across. That's my perspective. My last thing here, I am looking at a list that I didn't share with Mike.

01:24:58

I think he's an upholder. If I go back to the four tendencies by Gretchen Rubin, I think he's

01:25:06

an upholder because he has this perspective that if you spell things out and make a list of things,

01:25:13

it will get done. Did you catch this? Well, no, because I blog.

01:25:20

You are one. No, I disown anything from the four tendencies.

01:25:25

All right, sure. You know, my stance on the research basis of that survey, not assessment.

01:25:34

Well, I'm going to hold up to it. I say he's an upholder because the way that he lays all these

01:25:43

things out, just break this down and then this down. Once you've got this broken down, it'll be

01:25:49

fine because then you'll get that done. No, if I've broken that down, it to me feels like I've

01:25:56

done all the hard work and then I'm just not going to do the list. So that actually has a negative

01:26:02

effect in my case. So I need to be done with that. This whole book is a very glorified view of

01:26:11

picking three things and doing it. That's my overall summarization. As far as how to rate it,

01:26:18

I struggled with this one. At one point, I told my wife, it's like, I think this might be the

01:26:24

first 1.0, 1.5 book that I ever go through. There are some key components to it that I could see.

01:26:32

You could pull out and run with, but I will most definitely not recommend this book. I think I'm

01:26:40

going to put it at 2.0 in my case. I don't think people should pick this up. There are other books

01:26:46

that do a much better job. I have complaints with his system. He's hard to read. Don't pick this one

01:26:53

up. All right. I'm put it to. There you go. I'm done. That's actually a little bit more generous

01:26:58

than I thought you were going to be. I don't think I hated this as much as you did. Although,

01:27:06

like I said, I really think the visuals of the systems that he has here kind of do more hurt

01:27:14

than help. He's got a lot of templates and things inside of the book that you can use,

01:27:22

but it's totally not the way that I would do things. Really, I can't see anybody applying

01:27:28

that specific way. I do think that there are definitely a lot of gold nuggets in here. I feel

01:27:34

like J.D. Meyer is probably a very smart person who understands this stuff. As such, doesn't feel the

01:27:41

need to expound on these things, but it's hard to pick out the few things in here that really can

01:27:51

be of benefit to your specific situation because they very easily get lost in the lists.

01:27:57

Even the system at the beginning of the book is too complicated to follow in the nine box diagram.

01:28:06

That doesn't look like a workflow diagram to me. I know me personally, as I was thinking about,

01:28:13

"Well, how do I implement aspects of this?" I was going to start drawing out my own productivity

01:28:17

workflow diagram. I was like, "No, it sounds like too much work. Just forget it."

01:28:20

I'm with you that I don't think I would necessarily recommend this book. I do feel like I did get

01:28:30

some stuff out of this book more so than I thought I was going to after the first section. There is

01:28:36

a lot of repetition. One plus side of this self-published book, since you said it was self-published,

01:28:41

it does stand the right way on my bookshelf. I'm like, "Thanks, smart notes."

01:28:45

I don't know. I feel like there's some good stuff in here, but it's more work than it needs to be in

01:28:53

order to unearth it. You really have to work at it in order to identify the key ideas for you

01:29:00

personally. I'm generally not a fan of services like Blinkist. I should caveat that because I feel

01:29:09

like with a service like Blinkist where you can read a whole book in 15 minutes, that's what they

01:29:13

say. The value of the ideas tends to be diminished by the truncated time frame. In my opinion,

01:29:23

it's going to the gym and doing bench press with no weight on the bar and then saying,

01:29:27

"There, I did my workout." It's the resistance and pushing through and reading. It allows you to

01:29:33

get the full idea and the weight of those ideas that really is impactful as we read books.

01:29:38

That obviously is not going to happen here. By nature, it's a very surface-level list of lists.

01:29:46

If you were going to Blinkist a book, this might not be a bad one to do.

01:29:50

We're just listening to this episode.

01:29:53

Or listen to this episode and call it a day. You could do that too. That being said,

01:29:59

there were a couple of things in here that I think added value to me going through it. I am

01:30:05

glad that I read it. I did have trouble with it and I had to really crank through that last

01:30:10

section with all of the lists, especially as I'm trying to jot down all these stupid lists in my

01:30:14

MyNODE file. The third section is huge. Just spend more time in your MyNODE file than you did reading.

01:30:21

Well, eventually I just went to Siri dictation. I don't even care if there's stuff. I'm just

01:30:26

going to get these things down. I'm going to rate it higher than you. I'm going to put it at 3.0.

01:30:33

Again, that's just because I feel like there's some good stuff in here, but it's definitely

01:30:38

harder to get to than some of the other books that we've read. It's a hard read based on the

01:30:45

style and just how things all tie together or don't. But if you're going to put forth the effort,

01:30:52

there will be some things I think in here that are going to be a value. There are probably

01:30:59

whatever you're looking for. There's probably a better vehicle to get you there.

01:31:03

Good deal. All right. With that one in the trash, what's next, Mike?

01:31:08

It's going on my shelf, I believe. The next one is... I won't trash it.

01:31:14

The next book is "Range, Why Generals Triumph in a Specialized World" by David Epstein,

01:31:21

which I have not started yet. This is a listener recommendation. If I'm remembering,

01:31:27

right? I don't have it open in front of me. It was the most requested book besides Sapiens,

01:31:31

which we will cover at some point, but not yet. It's a long one.

01:31:39

We're going to have to commit to that one, I think.

01:31:41

That may be our first two part episode.

01:31:42

No, I don't think I could talk about Sapiens twice.

01:31:46

All right. Well, after "Range," the next one we're going to pick up is "Creativity Inc" by Ed Catmull.

01:31:53

Interesting choice.

01:31:55

The Pixar team story and how they go about doing their things. I think this would be really

01:32:02

interesting to talk through with you, Mike, and to discuss just in general. Yeah, "Creativity Inc" by

01:32:09

Ed Catmull. I'm interested in that. I've actually listened to this on Audible, and it is a good

01:32:14

book. I will buy the real book and read it for this particular episode, but it's essentially a

01:32:20

biography. It's a biography of a company, not a person. It is definitely a little bit different

01:32:28

than the type of books that we typically cover on Bookworm. This will be interesting.

01:32:33

Yeah. Going to force us to branch out a little bit.

01:32:37

All right. "Gapbooks," I've got one that I bought while we were in Woodstock. That is the

01:32:44

Messy Middle by Scott Belsky. Haven't started this. This is a... Looks like a huge book,

01:32:49

but the pages are actually pretty thick. I don't think it's going to be that bad,

01:32:53

and it also looks like a very interesting read with a lot of diagrams and pictures.

01:32:57

So, just try and get that one done in between. Yeah. Getting results kind of

01:33:03

kicked my butt when it came to reading. So, I'm kind of behind on the whole "Gapbook" thing.

01:33:08

So, I'm still going through "Primal Branding" by Patrick Hanlon. Hopefully, I'll have that one

01:33:12

finished up quickly because I need to finish that before I pick up range and have a deadline on range.

01:33:18

So, there you go. I'm about to read that one quick. All right. "Primal Branding," that is.

01:33:24

So, there you go. But, yes. All of this, everything we've covered, if you have thoughts on this,

01:33:29

you think I'm absolutely crazy and you completely disagree with me. I don't think you should

01:33:35

disagree with me. Go to the club, club.bookworm.fm. Let us know your thoughts. Join the club.

01:33:40

All the cool stuff happens over there. It's true. And if you are looking for another way to

01:33:45

support the show and you want some sweet swag, you can go to the Kotburo site where we've got

01:33:52

T-shirts and sweatshirts. Link will be in the show notes. But that'll do it for this episode.

01:33:57

So, if you're reading along with us, pick up range and we will talk to you in a couple of weeks.