Bookworm Transcripts

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Well Joe, the people have spoken.

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We have our top books of 2019.

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- I'm excited about this.

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We certainly do have some good ones here.

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- Yes, and to be honest, number one,

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it's not even close.

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It's number one by a large margin.

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- Yes.

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- Which kind of makes me happy

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because I really, really like this book.

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- Yeah.

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- So I thought maybe for the beginning of this episode,

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we could go over some of the top results,

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top three from the poll, and then maybe your top book

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of 2019 and my top book of 2019.

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- Sure, yeah, absolutely.

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- But the number one book, as voted on

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by the Bookworm Club, was "Atomic Habits"

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by James Clear, episode 63.

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And I completely agree with that.

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"Atomic Habits" is a phenomenal book.

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I actually read it at the end of 2018 when it first came out.

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We recorded the episode in 2019,

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which is why it was in the poll.

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But this is a phenomenal book in,

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back in Christmas 2018, I think I gifted

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like five different copies of this book

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to people that I knew.

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- Nice.

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- I generally hesitate to gift copies of books

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because I feel like I'm a little bit weird.

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And if I really enjoy a book, there's a good chance

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that other people won't, but James Clear's book was so good

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that I took the chance.

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- Decided to bring the rule.

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- Yeah, I broke the rule.

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Number two at 17% of the vote was "The One Thing"

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by Gary Keller and Jay Popisan,

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which again, I really enjoyed that book.

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That was episode 60.

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And number three, episode 64,

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was "Digital Minimalism" by Kale Newport.

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And then there were a lot of others that were 5% or lower.

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But thank you to everyone who participated in the poll

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and good job picking these three books.

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- Yeah, for sure.

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I think if I were to go back and pick the top three myself,

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this would be pretty similar.

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I think these are three very influential books.

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And there's a lot of good books on this list to choose from,

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but I have a hard time arguing against these

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as the top three books.

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- I know I had a number of people say like,

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I only get one vote.

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Like, yes, you only get one vote.

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Like, it's all that's allowed.

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You're not allowed to pick multiple here,

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which makes it quite a bit harder, I think.

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But I'm with you whenever I look at this list of books,

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the three that came to the top.

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Pretty easy ones for me to agree with, for sure.

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I honestly, if I had to go to number four,

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I'm not real sure where it would be

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because there's a bunch of them

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that I feel like could fit the number four.

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So seeing atomic habits,

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the one thing in "Digital Minimalism" at the top,

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that's a pretty solid lineup right there, for sure.

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- That is, yep.

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If you were to pick three books to read from this list,

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if you've not read any of them,

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that's a great place to start.

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So what was your top book of 2019?

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- So I, I of course, built the poll that went up there.

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So that meant I got the chance to vote right away.

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So I don't know if I biased people

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by having the first book voted for,

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but the one that I put as my number one

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was "Digital Minimalism",

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which I'm sure is probably not much of a surprise,

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but at the same time, like that book,

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I think I've read it a couple more times since then too.

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So it's one that I find myself continually coming back to.

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So I really, really liked that one, obviously.

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What was yours?

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- Mine is actually one that I just finished

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and is not even on this list.

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That is "Stillness Is the Key" by Ryan Holiday.

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I really enjoyed this book.

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It's very Ryan Holiday-esque.

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He's a phenomenal writer.

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The way that he writes and like the way that he puts together

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his stories is just phenomenal.

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He's one of the best storytellers I've ever read.

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And he just has so many,

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like there's a lot of people that have like the one liners

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that are very memorable.

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With Ryan Holiday, it kind of feels like every sentence

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is that way.

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So I ended up jotting down a bunch of things,

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a bunch of quotes, a bunch of notes

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and really, really enjoyed that book.

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So I don't know, maybe we'll cover that one

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at some point for Bookworm.

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- It's almost not even fair to pick one

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that's not on a list.

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What was your, which one did you vote for?

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Like which one was on the poll that you picked?

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- Oh, from the list.

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I think I voted for atomic habits

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because that was the most influential book.

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Like I said, I technically read that first in 2018.

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So I was gonna pick a different one

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if I had to pick my top book that I read in 2019.

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- Sure.

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- I reread that.

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So I guess you could say I read that in 2019 too.

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(laughing)

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But yeah, I really enjoyed that book.

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I think that's the book, the kind of book

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that you could recommend to just about anybody

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and they're going to get something out of it.

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They're gonna enjoy it.

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- Sure.

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- It's very broad reaching, but also very well written,

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very practical book.

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And I just, I enjoyed it so much.

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- Nice.

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Well, good luck on picking another one for the next year.

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I feel like this is gonna be a tough one to beat

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as I'm looking at these top three books.

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Like this is, this is gonna be a challenge, I think.

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- For sure.

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- But there's always a long list of great ones.

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So we'll see what we, so we'll land on in 2020.

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But that said, thank you to everyone who voted.

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And I'm sorry that I made you pick only one.

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(laughs)

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But I think it's worked out better in the long run.

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But there's that top books of 2019.

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- Awesome.

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All right, so let's talk about action items now.

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Joe, did you figure out what your just cause is?

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- I know things that it's not like.

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(laughs)

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- I guess that's helpful.

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(laughs)

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- Here's where I am in the process.

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I made a list of things that could qualify as my just cause.

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When I made said list, it was much longer than I expected.

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I had 18 different potential items on this list.

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And I have been slowly combining, consolidating,

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whittling it down, wondering what I was thinking

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or what I was smoking whenever I made the list.

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And then I'm down to about four on that list.

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But I don't have the full answer yet

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'cause holy buckets, this is hard.

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(laughs)

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This is not a simple thing to just,

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I'm gonna go determine what my just cause is this weekend.

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No, it doesn't work that way.

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So I am continually working on it,

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but I don't have the full answer yet,

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but I can say I've made progress on it.

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- Okay.

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- Does that count?

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- Well, I also have an action item here

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of figuring out what my just cause is

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and now you've made me think that I did it wrong.

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(laughs)

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So I basically tried to combine all of the different things

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that I have the life theme, the core values.

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And I did land on a phrase which I know to your point

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is not gonna be 100% correct,

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but I think it's a great place to start at least.

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So here we go.

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My just cause is to help people make the most

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of what they have to work with.

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There you have it.

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- Interesting.

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I feel like that can go so many different directions.

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- Exactly.

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That's kind of the point.

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(laughs)

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So there's a productivity angle to that.

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There's a tech nerd angle to that.

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There's a spiritual church angle to that.

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There's a lot of different angles to it.

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- No kidding.

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- That's the single theme cause, whatever.

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That is, I'm gonna mark that as done,

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even though like I said,

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it will probably evolve and change over time.

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- Sure.

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- The other action item I had was to consider

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how can I build a circle of safety for my kids?

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I think there's a lot more work to be done with this,

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but I also think that there's some steps

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in the right direction.

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So kind of going back to the what is my just cause,

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I also identified a couple of words for this year,

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which David Sparks and I unpack this

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in the recent episode of Focus,

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but my two words were rest in relationships.

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So I had those as like my themes

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for my just cause, if you will, for the year 2020.

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Like that's what I want to prioritize.

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And one of the things that touches both of those areas

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and is in alignment with this,

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helping me fulfill this action item,

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I believe is we did something a little bit different

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for Christmas this year,

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instead of buying individual gifts for all the kids

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and each other, 'cause we've all got too much stuff.

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We floated the idea first of all,

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and everybody thought it was great,

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so we ran with it, but we did a couple of group gifts.

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One of them was a puppy named Lucy,

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which you have seen, at least in video.

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- Hi, Lucy.

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- And the other was a ping pong table.

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And I liked playing ping pong when I was a kid.

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We got a pretty nice ping pong table

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with the hope that my kids would really enjoy it.

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Like I said, we've talked to them about this before.

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We decided to do this this year,

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and they were all really excited about it.

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So the goal was that they would really enjoy playing ping pong.

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I would take more breaks during my day,

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like I'd be in a writing session,

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I'd come out of my office, my kids are homeschooled,

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so we time our breaks together,

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and instead of scrolling through social media or whatever,

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I can play some ping pong with my kids.

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And one of the things that's interesting

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is that, and this was the hope,

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was that just spending time together

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will facilitate conversations,

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whether that happens to be while you're playing a board game

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or eating a meal together,

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also happens around the ping pong table.

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So I think that that is just one small step

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in how I can help build a circle of safety for my kids,

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just by continuing to develop those relationships.

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But like I said, there's still a lot more to be done here,

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I know.

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- Sure.

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I feel like this is something you're never fully done with.

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- Exactly, yeah.

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So yeah, those are my action items,

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ready to jump into today's book.

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- Sure, I'm focused and ready.

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- All right, are you indestractable?

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Because that is in fact today's book,

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Indestractable by Near I All.

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- Probably not completely, but hey, we'll go give it a shot.

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(laughs)

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- Okay, this was a highly voted for book

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in the Bookworm Club.

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Near I All is also the guy who wrote the book Hooked,

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which was how to make habit forming products.

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I knew that as I went into this,

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I started Hooked and could not finish it.

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That's one of the few books

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that I have not been able to finish.

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And while I liked the premise of this book,

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I have to admit I was very skeptical going into it.

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I thought I was not going to like this at all.

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I thought this was basically somebody who was

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in the startup world trying to capitalize

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on the whole essentialism deep work trend

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that has been going on the last several years.

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I was pleasantly surprised though.

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There's a lot of great stuff in this book.

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We're not going to go through all the individual chapters

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because I believe there are 35 different chapters.

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They are broken down into different sections.

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And the good news is that, good news I guess.

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There's not just three sections.

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The also maybe good news is that there are seven.

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So that's the way we're going to tackle this episode

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is we're going to break it down into these different sections.

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And let's start here with the introduction.

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I put this on the outline,

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even though you maybe didn't need to

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because he has a couple of important points

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that he talks about at the beginning here.

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Number one being the difference between traction

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and distraction, which I liked.

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Traction is moving towards what you really want.

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Distraction is moving you away from what you really want.

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And that is going to pop up over and over and over again

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in the book.

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He's got a little diagram where he's got basically

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two different axes and then a point in the middle.

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And on the top of the cross diagram basically

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is the internal triggers on the bottom,

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is the external triggers.

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And then on the right you've got traction on the left,

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you've got distraction.

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So he's got little arrows pointing all these different ways.

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Basically what you want to do

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and how this is broken down,

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you want to master your internal triggers,

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make time for traction,

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hack back external triggers and prevent distraction

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with packs.

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And anything else you want to add from this introduction

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otherwise we can jump right into the first part here

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which is mastering those internal triggers.

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- Just the book overall

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is specifically geared towards understanding

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what causes distraction and then what to do about it.

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I haven't read, hooked and I don't own it,

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don't have really much of an interest to read it.

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But I know that there are a few,

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quite a few people that say that it was hard to read

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but at the same time I hear other folks say

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it's very easy to read.

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I was curious, Mike, why did you put it down?

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Was it because the style of it was hard to read

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or was it the content that caused it to be

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like something you didn't want to go through?

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- I think it was just the wrong thing at the wrong time

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and it just felt icky.

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- Sure.

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- I tried to read it,

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it must have been a couple of years ago now

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and I remember getting about halfway through it

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and recognizing that everything that he was saying is true

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and then at that point saying, oh my gosh,

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everything that he's saying is true.

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- Sure.

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- And I can see how Facebook is using this

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and Google is using this and all of these evil empires

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are using this against me.

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And it just did not sit well with me and at that point,

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I gotta put this down.

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I can't think about this anymore.

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But that's kind of to near IEL's point

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is like this traction versus distraction.

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Distraction, he talks about in the next section,

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what motivates us really,

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he talks about distraction being an unhealthy escape

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from reality.

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So if I'm honest with myself when I was reading Hooked,

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I was like, this is reality, I don't like it,

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I need to find something to distract me from it.

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- Sure, yeah.

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No, I think the whole traction, distraction,

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internal external triggers, diagram,

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and just to expand on that slightly,

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with the internal triggers at the top,

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the external triggers at the bottom,

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you have arrows that come down and up

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from each of those respectively.

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And then they go to the outside from there.

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So you'll have internal triggers from the top coming down.

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And it can either go to distraction on the left

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or towards traction to the right.

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Same thing with external triggers,

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they come up from the bottom

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and can either go left or right to distraction or traction.

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And like, I'm not really sure how this diagram

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is supposed to be used other than it's just helpful

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to understand it somewhat.

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'Cause he does come back to it quite a few times.

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And it is kind of helpful to see

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just to give you that reference point

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and something to talk through.

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But I really came away from it

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with the more of an understanding of,

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okay, if I have internal and external triggers

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that can cause distraction,

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how do I get that to shift over to the traction side?

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Basically, what am I doing wrong?

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- Sure.

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- That was a lot of what I got from that piece.

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But obviously we're gonna go through

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a number of these different individual pin points,

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but that diagram, although it's helpful at the beginning,

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I'm not sure it was super helpful overall,

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but that's just me being--

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- Yeah, I wasn't a big fan of the diagram, to be honest.

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I don't think it's all that helpful.

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I think it's helpful in showing

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or lending some visible credibility,

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maybe to what he's going to tell you.

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I don't know, if you have a diagram,

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it just kind of looks like you've thought this through

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more fully than maybe somebody else.

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- Sure, yeah.

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- That's kind of the purpose I felt like it was serving.

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But I don't disagree with any of it.

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I just don't think it's all that helpful.

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Sometimes you see those diagrams and you're like,

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oh, that makes so much sense.

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I can totally see how this is going to help me.

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That's not what you get from this diagram.

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- Right, right.

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- But that's okay.

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So first section here under Mastering Internal Triggers,

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there's a couple of things I wanted to talk about.

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Number one, he's got a whole chapter

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on how time management is pain management.

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I thought this was fascinating

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because this is totally true,

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at least I can see it in my own life,

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how we try to manage our time in a way

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that we don't feel quote unquote bad.

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And he says that there are a couple different

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psychological factors that make satisfaction temporary.

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Number one is boredom.

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Number two is a negativity bias.

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Number three is rumination.

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And number four is hedonic adaptation.

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So no matter how great our situation is,

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at some point we're going to feel dissatisfied with it.

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And when we start to feel dissatisfied,

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we're going to look for something

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that's going to give us the next dopamine hit.

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And that's not a healthy way to deal with things.

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Distatisfaction and discomfort,

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he says dominate our brain's default state.

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And instead of just using them

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or trying to placate our brain and medicate

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with whatever it happens to be,

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whether it's drugs, alcohol or social media,

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we can use those things to motivate us

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instead of defeat us,

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which I think is a very interesting idea.

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Feeling bad, he makes the point

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in this section isn't actually bad.

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And I think that's an important idea worth unpacking.

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I really like the concept of time

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being the same as pain management,

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'cause I don't know how many times

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I'm in scheduling conversations.

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And it really is which process

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or which path is going to be less painful.

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Okay, if I'm choosing between something

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that's going on at our church and event

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that I either need to be at or should be at,

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and something that, say a piano recital for my daughter,

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that is pain management at its finest, most likely.

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So that's one that I struggle with,

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but I also really enjoyed his analogy there.

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So yes, managing pain, it's not fun.

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That's still a thing we gotta do.

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- It's not, but it's interesting to think that,

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it's interesting to make the connection

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between time and pain,

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'cause he talks about the four psychological factors.

00:18:59

And the first one being boredom,

00:19:01

when I read this section,

00:19:03

I was thinking of my six-year-old's face

00:19:05

where he's always gotta be doing something,

00:19:08

and if he's not, he's like, "Dad, I'm bored."

00:19:13

And you can see the pain on his face

00:19:15

as he's telling me that he's bored.

00:19:17

And I'm like, "I would love to be bored, buddy."

00:19:19

(laughs)

00:19:21

- That phrases one that doesn't get used in our house,

00:19:25

'cause I'm one of those dads that,

00:19:28

if you tell me you're bored,

00:19:29

I will solve that problem for you right now.

00:19:32

(laughs)

00:19:33

- Well, that's kind of what he discovered too,

00:19:36

is like, "Well, I can find something for you to do."

00:19:39

- No, either make yourself busy

00:19:41

or the baseboards need washing.

00:19:44

(laughs)

00:19:45

Something will be discovered for you.

00:19:48

- Yeah, but I think that maybe we don't deal with boredom

00:19:52

the same way that my six-year-old does,

00:19:54

but we do try to cope with this in some way, shape, or form.

00:19:59

I think this is what drives a lot of social media behavior.

00:20:03

Email too to a certain degree,

00:20:06

although there's a whole section in email

00:20:08

I wanna get into later on in this book.

00:20:10

I feel like email maybe is more associated with work.

00:20:14

And so boredom, I guess, could apply there,

00:20:18

but more so, it's busy work that would appear there.

00:20:22

But anytime you've got any sort of space

00:20:25

in your personal life,

00:20:26

you tend to wanna fill it with something,

00:20:28

whether that be an endless feed in Infinity Pool

00:20:32

or the latest shows on Netflix, Disney Plus, whatever.

00:20:36

I think it's important to recognize

00:20:38

that just because there's some space

00:20:40

there doesn't mean that you have to fill it.

00:20:41

And again, I just read Stillness is the key

00:20:43

by Ryan Holiday, so this is really front of mind for me.

00:20:46

That just because there's some stillness

00:20:48

doesn't mean you gotta make some waves.

00:20:50

- I think we have a habit of,

00:20:52

if you have space or you have time, we like to fill it.

00:20:56

We just read margin, which is the antithesis

00:20:59

to filling all the open gaps.

00:21:01

And it's one that I've kind of been on that train

00:21:06

to some degree, as far as taking advantage of times

00:21:11

when you're in the car and listening to a podcast

00:21:13

while you're driving.

00:21:15

It's pretty rare that I'm listening to anything

00:21:17

whenever I'm on short commutes or even long commutes.

00:21:21

It's usually dead silence.

00:21:23

And I'm fine with that,

00:21:25

but it seems like whenever I recommend that

00:21:28

or mention it to other people,

00:21:29

what?

00:21:31

I could never do that.

00:21:32

- Yeah.

00:21:33

- Well, yes, you could, in fact.

00:21:36

But you don't just jump into that.

00:21:40

You have to have a little bit of the mindset

00:21:42

that you're just trying to make sure

00:21:44

that you have the space to think.

00:21:46

And not everyone sees the need for that or wants that.

00:21:49

- Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense,

00:21:52

but I have to admit that I'm probably one of those people

00:21:54

who would push back against that idea.

00:21:57

(laughing)

00:21:59

- I remember it last time I--

00:22:00

- Took a car ride in silence.

00:22:02

That being said, you know,

00:22:03

I also have been fairly intentional

00:22:05

about pruning back the inputs in my life.

00:22:10

So I don't know, maybe that's evidence

00:22:13

that I haven't gone far enough yet.

00:22:15

I also think an idea kind of tied to this

00:22:19

is this whole concept of ego depletion.

00:22:22

Because when it comes to quieting inputs

00:22:27

or seeking stillness slash boredom,

00:22:30

the, if you're not used to it,

00:22:32

the first thing you wanna do is seek out something

00:22:36

to fill that gap.

00:22:37

It makes you one uncomfortable.

00:22:40

And I think another way to say that maybe would be

00:22:42

that you don't have enough willpower

00:22:43

to just sit there and silence.

00:22:45

And willpower is an interesting idea.

00:22:47

We read a book on the willpower instinct.

00:22:51

And I forget if in that book they talked about willpower

00:22:54

as a finite resource, I think they probably did.

00:22:56

'Cause that's what most of the traditional,

00:22:58

traditional psychology world has kind of

00:23:03

been teaching that model.

00:23:05

But in this book, he mentions a study by,

00:23:09

did you see who this was by?

00:23:11

Carol Dweck, the mindset lead.

00:23:12

- Yeah, I did see that.

00:23:14

- Okay, so this showed that signs of ego depletion

00:23:17

were only found in test subjects who believed

00:23:20

that willpower was a limited resource.

00:23:22

So his point is that maybe this whole idea

00:23:24

of ego depletion or the idea that willpower is limited,

00:23:28

maybe this is something that we've made up,

00:23:32

which is a very interesting idea.

00:23:33

And I don't know exactly where I land on this,

00:23:38

on this debate or this topic,

00:23:40

but I am more and more considering the idea

00:23:43

that willpower maybe isn't as limited as we think it is.

00:23:47

For a long time, I was all in with that idea

00:23:49

that willpower was limited.

00:23:51

And I'm trying to limit the number of decisions

00:23:53

that I have to make in the morning.

00:23:55

Steve Jobs wearing the same turtle neck

00:23:57

and jeans every day so he can use his willpower

00:24:00

and make the decisions that really matter.

00:24:02

But I think that he talks in here about Michael Inzlich

00:24:07

who believes that willpower ebbs and flows like an emotion,

00:24:10

I can totally see that playing out in my own life.

00:24:15

When I'm in a good emotional state,

00:24:19

then I have a lot more willpower

00:24:21

than when things are going wrong.

00:24:24

And I don't know, I think maybe there's something to this.

00:24:27

So what was your reaction to the whole ego depletion

00:24:30

argument that he makes?

00:24:32

- I think it makes an awful lot of sense

00:24:34

that willpower is not something that you can wear out.

00:24:38

I can tell you, the willpower instinct does refer to it

00:24:43

as a muscle, as weird as this is,

00:24:45

I have this book sitting right in front of me.

00:24:47

So I reached out and grabbed it, flipped to the section on this.

00:24:50

Here's a quote from page 57 of the willpower instinct,

00:24:54

'cause that's how fast I got there.

00:24:56

Self-control is like a muscle.

00:24:58

When used, it gets tired.

00:24:59

If you don't rest the muscle,

00:25:01

you can run out of strength entirely,

00:25:02

like an athlete who pushes himself to exhaustion.

00:25:05

So that's right out of that book.

00:25:08

(laughs)

00:25:08

So I would tend to agree with Nier here that

00:25:15

I think it is a thing that you can,

00:25:19

I think it is a muscle to some degree,

00:25:21

but I'm also of the mindset that,

00:25:25

yes, you can develop yourself control.

00:25:28

You can develop willpower.

00:25:31

And I think that in the process of doing that,

00:25:34

you can develop it to the point where

00:25:37

you have more than enough for the entire day

00:25:39

for pretty much anything.

00:25:42

That's kind of the way I'm starting to view it,

00:25:45

given a number of the books we've read lately and such.

00:25:48

That's kind of where I'm leaning.

00:25:50

I don't know if we really need to know the full answer here,

00:25:54

other than if you will work on this muscle,

00:25:57

it will get stronger.

00:25:59

And it won't really ever run out if you don't let it,

00:26:04

'cause there, how many times do you run across folks?

00:26:07

Like at the end of the day, I always give in,

00:26:10

it's like, well, if you give in at the end of the day,

00:26:12

that just means that your triggers

00:26:16

are more prevalent at that time.

00:26:18

- Sure.

00:26:19

- So you're setting yourself up wrong in that case.

00:26:22

Whereas, take for example, my diet stuff

00:26:26

that I've been doing for a year now,

00:26:28

it's pretty easy anymore for me to resist sweets.

00:26:33

And the worst time of the day is at night

00:26:36

when everyone else has made their way to bed

00:26:39

and I'm kind of left alone cleaning up the kitchen

00:26:41

and there's a plate of cookies.

00:26:42

Like, it's not that I'm running out of willpower at that time,

00:26:47

it's just that is the time of day

00:26:48

when it's super easy to cheat,

00:26:49

'cause no one would really know.

00:26:51

You know, like that's the time when it's the hardest,

00:26:54

but it's not because of anything else's going on,

00:26:56

it's purely environmental at that time.

00:27:00

So I think there's a lot that you can do,

00:27:03

but if you're smart overall, you'll be fine.

00:27:06

Like, you can work on this, it'll be okay.

00:27:10

- And he would say that instead of the plate of cookies,

00:27:13

it's the distraction that we willingly embrace instead.

00:27:18

- Right, right.

00:27:20

- By that internal trigger.

00:27:22

You know, as you were talking,

00:27:23

I kind of got this idea of willpower as a formula

00:27:28

and I don't know if this is 100% correct,

00:27:31

but I think there's elements of truth

00:27:33

to all of these different things.

00:27:34

So maybe you've got so many willpower units

00:27:38

and we'll call that W, okay?

00:27:41

And then the number of willpower units that you have

00:27:45

is multiplied or divided by the emotional state

00:27:50

that you have.

00:27:51

So let's say there's a negativity scale

00:27:53

from one to 10, where one is,

00:27:58

you're not negative at all, 10 is you had a really crummy day

00:28:01

and you're just feeling super bad about everything, okay?

00:28:04

So maybe W divided by, we'll call that E,

00:28:08

emotional state, W divided by E.

00:28:11

So if you've got 100 willpower units

00:28:14

and you had a really crummy day, that's reduced.

00:28:17

On the one to 10 scale, again,

00:28:19

just completely arbitrary numbers,

00:28:20

but your willpower then has gone from 100 to 10.

00:28:25

It's significantly reduced based on your emotional state.

00:28:28

I don't know, I guess I'm kind of a logical person

00:28:30

and I've always kind of liked math.

00:28:32

So envisioning it in like a formula like that

00:28:35

kind of helps me understand it a little bit better.

00:28:37

But I think there's probably a relationship

00:28:40

between those two variables

00:28:41

and the emotional state is kind of a force multiplier,

00:28:45

however you want to work that into the equation

00:28:49

for either good or bad when it comes to

00:28:52

the amount of willpower that you have.

00:28:53

Whereas the willpower instinct, that being a muscle,

00:28:55

that just assumes that everything else is constant.

00:28:57

You've always got these many willpower units

00:28:59

and that I don't think is completely true.

00:29:02

- Sure, I don't know that you're wrong.

00:29:03

I don't know if it's right or not.

00:29:05

I'm not sure I 100% followed your formula,

00:29:07

but it's a cool concept.

00:29:08

- Maybe I should write a book on it.

00:29:11

- Definitely.

00:29:12

- No, there's enough of those.

00:29:13

- A little power follow up.

00:29:14

- All right, let's go into part two here,

00:29:18

which is make time for traction.

00:29:21

There's a couple of things I wanted to talk about in here.

00:29:24

Remember traction being the things that we want to do

00:29:28

moving us towards what we really want.

00:29:30

There's four different chapters in this section,

00:29:34

but the first chapter talks about turning your values

00:29:38

into time.

00:29:40

And for anybody who cares at all about calendar management

00:29:45

and has listened to you or I for any length of time,

00:29:49

probably already knows everything that's going to be

00:29:52

in this section.

00:29:54

Basic idea is make sure you have time on your calendar

00:29:57

for the things that are important to you.

00:30:00

But one of the things that jumped out to me in this section,

00:30:04

he breaks down the three different domains

00:30:06

where you spend your time.

00:30:07

He says, "You have yourself, you have your relationships,

00:30:10

and you have your work."

00:30:11

I'm not sure I would break him down into those three buckets.

00:30:13

I kind of think the buckets are kind of pointless,

00:30:16

but that was the thing that kind of tipped the scales.

00:30:20

That was the tipping point in my mind

00:30:21

for understanding how important it was

00:30:24

for me to plan my week every single week.

00:30:29

He's got a weekly calendar template exercise in this chapter.

00:30:33

And I didn't really care for the exercise itself.

00:30:36

I've gone through and I've planned my deal week before.

00:30:38

I tend to do it every quarter when I do my personal retreat.

00:30:43

But after reading this chapter, I got inspired.

00:30:47

I'm like, I need to be doing this every single week

00:30:48

because I need to make sure that all of my priorities

00:30:50

are showing up on my calendar.

00:30:52

And that way I can make sure that I'm making time

00:30:55

for traction and eliminating the time for distraction,

00:30:58

making sure that I'm moving in the right direction.

00:31:01

- Yeah, he goes big into time blocking here,

00:31:04

which is definitely not a new concept.

00:31:08

I think in this case, he maybe struck a chord with me

00:31:13

'cause I've done time blocking.

00:31:14

I've done the whole ideal week thing.

00:31:17

That's a Michael Hyatt deal

00:31:19

that he's been talking about for years now.

00:31:21

And a number of people reference Michael Hyatt

00:31:24

when it comes up.

00:31:25

I'm not sure that he's the author of that concept,

00:31:28

but I think he's the biggest promoter I know of for that idea

00:31:31

at this time.

00:31:33

But I know that I've gone through that exercise

00:31:36

probably four or five times over the last probably three years.

00:31:41

And I always come away with it with a sense of,

00:31:46

this would be amazing and I work really hard on it

00:31:48

for two weeks and then I stop using it.

00:31:51

And in this book, I got the,

00:31:56

I don't know if I wanna say motivation

00:31:58

or the understanding behind it at a deeper level.

00:32:02

And it made me want to give it a solid run again.

00:32:07

I don't know if this is something that will stick.

00:32:10

I definitely stole a shortcut that our friend Max Sparky

00:32:15

put together that lets him set up calendar events

00:32:19

for the day automatically.

00:32:22

So he can trigger a series shortcut that does that.

00:32:24

And I have a couple of those for setting up weekend days

00:32:28

or weekdays and I've been playing around with this week

00:32:32

just as an experiment to see how it would go.

00:32:35

I've always been terrible about following through

00:32:38

on my own personal commitments to myself.

00:32:40

I'm much better at doing them for other people, not myself.

00:32:43

So this is something that I've always struggled with

00:32:45

and I know that, but I'm willing to give it another try.

00:32:49

We'll see how it pans out in the long run.

00:32:53

But I figure it's worth a shot, Mike.

00:32:55

We'll see.

00:32:56

(laughs)

00:32:56

It's worth a try, right?

00:32:58

- Yeah.

00:32:59

I'm a big fan of time blocking myself.

00:33:01

So I've been doing it pretty consistently for quite a while.

00:33:06

And my process of this has been for daily time blocking

00:33:11

where the night before I will actually

00:33:13

as part of my shutdown routine,

00:33:15

go into good notes and I will plan out tomorrow

00:33:21

and give every hour a job basically.

00:33:23

And then when I wake up the next morning

00:33:25

and I'm about ready to do my work,

00:33:26

I take out my pen and paper and I jot down

00:33:29

just a short list of the things that I want to do today.

00:33:32

I have the plan written in good notes,

00:33:35

but at that point, once I transfer it,

00:33:37

it's like that's already done what it needed to do

00:33:41

and provided the intention or direction

00:33:44

for how I'm going to spend my time at that point.

00:33:46

I feel free to chuck it if I want to,

00:33:48

but I also don't feel frantic like I don't have a plan.

00:33:51

But I have not been doing it on a weekly basis.

00:33:54

I've been doing it on just a daily basis.

00:33:56

I want to start doing it on a weekly basis too.

00:33:59

I feel like that's kind of a missing piece for me.

00:34:03

And the hypothesis here is that if I sit down

00:34:08

on a Sunday probably and just spend 15 minutes

00:34:14

thinking through what's gonna happen throughout the week,

00:34:20

I will be able to anticipate the pockets of time

00:34:23

where I can do the things that I want to do

00:34:26

and not waste them.

00:34:28

I don't know if that makes any sense,

00:34:29

but I feel like by doing it on a weekly basis,

00:34:33

I'll get a little bit higher up in the 50,000 foot view

00:34:37

that David Allen talks about, teaser for the next book.

00:34:39

And I'll be able to get a little bit bigger picture view,

00:34:44

which is gonna help me make sure that the stuff

00:34:48

that's lower down in the day-to-day

00:34:50

is moving in the right direction.

00:34:52

- Yeah, how does planning for your day-to-day change

00:34:57

from planning for the entire week?

00:35:01

'Cause my initial run at doing this

00:35:04

has been on a day-to-day basis.

00:35:06

So the night before I'm triggering this

00:35:07

and setting up the next day.

00:35:10

So what is it you're doing different on the weekly basis?

00:35:13

- Well, okay, so let me give you an example.

00:35:15

My oldest son is on a basketball team

00:35:19

and I would typically sit down the night before,

00:35:23

look at the calendar and realize,

00:35:25

oh, he's got a game tomorrow.

00:35:27

And that may or may not throw off everything else

00:35:31

that has to happen that day.

00:35:33

If we have to travel to get to that game,

00:35:35

I'm gonna be at that game regardless.

00:35:37

So usually it's the other things

00:35:40

that gotta get moved around to make that happen.

00:35:42

And the intention is that if I can,

00:35:44

at the beginning of the week,

00:35:45

okay, he's got a game on Tuesday and on Thursday,

00:35:48

I know those are coming up.

00:35:49

So on Monday or Wednesday when I have a little bit,

00:35:53

I find a pocket of time,

00:35:55

I can maybe work a little bit more on my work projects

00:36:00

so that I can cut out a little bit early

00:36:02

in order to get to the game.

00:36:03

Does that make sense?

00:36:04

- Yeah, that does.

00:36:06

- So it's not dealing with things as they pop up.

00:36:09

I've got a little bit more runway

00:36:12

and a little bit more time, warning, whatever,

00:36:15

to make the adjustments necessary

00:36:17

in order to make everything work.

00:36:20

Now, if you have enough margin built in your schedule,

00:36:23

you can probably just go with things.

00:36:26

But I want to build more margin

00:36:29

and then also become more intentional

00:36:33

from the beginning of the week on.

00:36:35

So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,

00:36:37

I'm not tackling those one at a time.

00:36:39

Yes, I'm still gonna fill out the day-to-day

00:36:41

time blocking for the next day.

00:36:44

But I'm anticipating that by looking at the whole week

00:36:48

as a whole, that's going to help me out

00:36:51

and provide exponential dividends

00:36:54

in terms of the day-to-day planning

00:36:56

and help me be more effective

00:36:58

in the time blocking on the daily basis.

00:37:01

- Okay, that makes sense.

00:37:02

- Okay.

00:37:03

- Now I might have to do more time blocking.

00:37:05

(laughing)

00:37:06

- Okay.

00:37:07

- It's fun, everybody's doing it.

00:37:08

- That's what I'm told.

00:37:10

(laughing)

00:37:11

- The other thing I wanted to talk about in this section

00:37:13

is scheduling relationships.

00:37:16

It's chapter 11, scheduling the important relationships

00:37:19

and he has a story in here about how he and his wife

00:37:24

host a regular kibbutz.

00:37:26

Do you know what a kibbutz is, Joe?

00:37:29

- Well, I do because I read about it,

00:37:31

but I'm sure the listeners do not, at least most.

00:37:35

- Okay.

00:37:36

So I don't know if this is like

00:37:38

the strict definition of a kibbutz,

00:37:39

but the way that they do it is they've got three other

00:37:41

couples that they get together with.

00:37:43

I think it's once a week and they share like a two-hour meal

00:37:47

and they come prepared to discuss a topic

00:37:50

or answer a specific question.

00:37:53

And that's a lot of formal structuring detail

00:37:57

for this get together, which I'm not 100% sure

00:38:00

I can pull that off.

00:38:01

I would like to, as he's describing this kibbutz,

00:38:03

I'm like, man, how do I get an invite?

00:38:04

(laughing)

00:38:06

'Cause that just sounds amazing to me.

00:38:08

But there are a handful of people in my life that I know

00:38:11

I need to develop more intentional relationships with.

00:38:13

I kind of think if I were to describe the kibbutz

00:38:16

exactly as he's described it in this book,

00:38:18

they'd be like, that's dumb, I'm not doing that.

00:38:20

But I do think that I can 80/20 this

00:38:25

and get people on board.

00:38:27

So I want to start hosting regular kibbutz's

00:38:30

with a couple other couples from our church.

00:38:33

And I need to spend a little bit more time thinking about

00:38:37

how I'm going to frame this to get buy-in.

00:38:40

But I think that this is a really cool idea.

00:38:43

- It really reminds me of like a small group

00:38:46

that gets together on a regular basis,

00:38:49

which is something we do through our church.

00:38:52

But I think this is maybe a little more involved

00:38:54

than that traditionally a kibbutz is actually a community.

00:38:58

Think of it as a small socialist community

00:39:01

'cause they share absolutely everything

00:39:03

and they're self-governed in that way

00:39:05

if I understand them, right?

00:39:07

So it's a collective community.

00:39:09

I think traditionally they were just an agricultural thing.

00:39:12

Anyway, that's all history, Israel, yes, Jewish.

00:39:17

But I think that for us as far as how that applies

00:39:23

in our lives as I know we have our small group

00:39:26

and we'll have like couples over once in a while,

00:39:28

but it's not a regularly scheduled thing

00:39:30

outside of our smaller meetings,

00:39:33

which are every other week.

00:39:34

We always have a meal whenever we do those

00:39:36

and it's as many people can come as they can.

00:39:39

I think there's five couples total in that.

00:39:42

I don't know if that would qualify per what he's getting at,

00:39:45

but I think it's at least pretty darn close.

00:39:49

That's my perception anyway.

00:39:50

- Well, I think it could,

00:39:52

but I also think that my experience

00:39:54

with small groups that it wouldn't.

00:39:56

So a small group, as I've been involved with them,

00:40:01

typically it's like a Bible study or something

00:40:04

and you go there, yes, to be with other people,

00:40:08

but primarily the focus is on the material,

00:40:12

reading the chapter, completing the workbook, whatever.

00:40:16

And at least the way my brain works,

00:40:18

I tend to focus on, well, I gotta get this chapter done.

00:40:21

I don't focus on like, I'm gonna go hang out with Johnny.

00:40:24

So when I'm reading this and I'm like,

00:40:28

I need to host a quibbit,

00:40:29

I want to remove any sort of achievement

00:40:34

from the process, any sort of focus

00:40:37

other than the relationships from the process.

00:40:41

I want it to be something that's not,

00:40:43

there's no expectations associated with it.

00:40:47

And I think that's part of the challenge

00:40:49

for me framing this the right way,

00:40:51

because everybody's busy.

00:40:53

And so I have to frame it in a way

00:40:58

that people understand that like,

00:41:00

we're solely, the whole purpose of this

00:41:03

is to build these relationships.

00:41:06

It's almost like going to somebody to be like,

00:41:07

"Hey, I really want to be a better friend with you.

00:41:11

Will you commit a couple hours every couple weeks

00:41:14

"dangin' out with me?"

00:41:16

Which is kind of ridiculous if you put it that way.

00:41:19

But that's kind of what we're going for.

00:41:21

But I also want to, I think there's value in this

00:41:24

to everybody that I've targeted for my quibbits.

00:41:29

And I think I can cast that vision

00:41:31

and get people on board with it.

00:41:34

I think underlying they probably have the same goals

00:41:39

or desires that I would in terms of,

00:41:42

yeah, we really need to just spend more quality time together.

00:41:47

We're doing a lot together already,

00:41:50

but it's usually service-oriented and we're busy

00:41:53

and we're working even if it's not at work.

00:41:56

And I want to start prioritizing the relationships

00:42:00

and the people going back to my words for the year

00:42:04

more than the tasks or the projects.

00:42:07

- I think this is where our small group

00:42:10

tends to break the mold because we have a running joke of,

00:42:15

are we gonna do material this time?

00:42:17

So we're terrible at actually doing the studies

00:42:21

and getting through whatever it is

00:42:22

where we feel we should do.

00:42:24

So I think for the last nine months or so,

00:42:27

what we've really been doing is we get together,

00:42:30

we always have a meal together.

00:42:31

I think we, what is it, 6.30 when we meet?

00:42:34

And somewhere around 7.45, 8 o'clock,

00:42:39

we'll migrate to a living room or something

00:42:41

and then we just go around the circle and do prayer requests.

00:42:44

And that gives everybody the opportunity to share,

00:42:48

what are you struggling with in life?

00:42:50

What do you need prayer for?

00:42:51

What's the celebrations that you have going on?

00:42:54

And everyone gets the chance to share in that.

00:42:57

And then we do a prayer time

00:42:58

and then it's just a conversation after that.

00:43:00

That is the sum total of what we do.

00:43:02

So it's not like there's any prep work for it

00:43:06

other than food.

00:43:07

So that's why I say I think in our cases

00:43:10

is a little odd and might qualify.

00:43:14

But I also understand like what he's getting at

00:43:16

is building deep longterm relationships,

00:43:20

which I think is something that my wife

00:43:22

and I have been very intentional with

00:43:24

when it comes to other couples and families

00:43:27

in the church that we know and want to get to know more.

00:43:30

So I feel like we have a pretty good setup for it.

00:43:35

I don't think we're gonna get together

00:43:37

with another like two other couples

00:43:39

on a regular Saturday morning or something.

00:43:42

Like it just gets to be too much of a scheduling mess for us.

00:43:46

But if you don't have other couples

00:43:48

that you're regularly connecting with

00:43:50

and having those deep conversations with,

00:43:53

I could definitely see how that's something

00:43:54

that people really want to work towards.

00:43:58

Yeah.

00:43:59

I'll stop rambling now.

00:43:59

No, your small group, it sounds really interesting.

00:44:03

Like I said, it sounds very different

00:44:05

than every other small group I've ever been part of.

00:44:07

We break a lot of rules for sure.

00:44:09

It's also very appealing to me.

00:44:12

But yeah, so this is a formal action item for me.

00:44:15

By the time we record next,

00:44:16

I should have some feedback on how it went

00:44:20

as I've loaded this idea to different people.

00:44:23

And to tell you the truth,

00:44:25

this kind of scares this nod out of me.

00:44:28

I don't like hanging out with people very much.

00:44:31

I'm more of a loner.

00:44:33

I prefer to be at home in a corner with a book.

00:44:36

Yeah.

00:44:37

But like I said, this is something from my reflection.

00:44:39

This is one of my words for the year.

00:44:41

I know this is something I need to prioritize.

00:44:43

So this was the right thing at the right time,

00:44:47

at least this part of this book.

00:44:49

And yeah, that's gonna be one of my action items for sure.

00:44:53

- Sounds good.

00:44:54

- All right.

00:44:55

Part three is hack back emotional triggers.

00:44:59

There's a lot in this section,

00:45:02

lots of different chapters on hacking back group chat,

00:45:06

hacking back your smartphone, hacking back your desktop,

00:45:09

your online articles, your feeds.

00:45:12

Lots of cool stuff in here.

00:45:14

To be honest, there was a little bit of a desire

00:45:18

as I was going through this, like,

00:45:19

oh, we should talk about that one.

00:45:21

Oh, and we should talk about that one.

00:45:22

Oh, we should talk about that one.

00:45:23

But I limited it to.

00:45:24

- I'm proud of you, Mike.

00:45:26

- So if you want to, I will put a plug in here though,

00:45:29

for like hacking back your smartphone,

00:45:31

'cause you have an article in the mindfulness Monday thing

00:45:33

that I started over in the suite setup,

00:45:35

which is very much in line with what I was hoping

00:45:38

that would turn into is like ways that people

00:45:42

are intentionally setting up their devices

00:45:44

to in near our IELTS words, hack back your smartphone

00:45:50

and your feeds and notifications, things like that.

00:45:51

So we'll link to that in the show notes

00:45:52

that people want more of that type of stuff they can go there.

00:45:56

But the two things I want to talk about here

00:45:57

were email and meetings.

00:46:00

Email because you and I have talked about email a lot

00:46:03

over the years and he's got an interesting formula here,

00:46:06

which I wanted to talk about.

00:46:07

And then also I wanted to see how Joe's email situation is.

00:46:12

- Huh.

00:46:13

And what would you like to know, Mike?

00:46:15

- Is this still area of pain for you?

00:46:21

- I think that it has been somewhat.

00:46:25

I get around 120 emails a day still

00:46:31

and always fight with myself over how much time

00:46:36

to put towards it and am I getting through it enough?

00:46:40

I can tell you that in the last week

00:46:42

I've been pretty good about having one scheduled time

00:46:47

every day to go through and respond to emails

00:46:51

and try to get back to people in a good time.

00:46:54

What I didn't know and I only learned this

00:46:58

because of reading through indestractable

00:47:01

and near mentioning the concept of writing emails

00:47:06

and scheduling the time when they should go out.

00:47:09

- Ah, that's where you found out about send later.

00:47:13

- So I did not know that mail mate

00:47:19

has a send later field where you can put in

00:47:23

the date and time of when you want that email to be sent.

00:47:27

I did not know that this thing existed.

00:47:29

And whenever I discovered that I immediately moved

00:47:34

any and all accounts I have straight back into mail mate,

00:47:37

I was running dual applications mail mates

00:47:40

and Apple mail for a bunch of reasons.

00:47:44

But I did put it all back together into one

00:47:47

and start using mail mate 100% once more

00:47:52

and trying to use this send later functionality

00:47:56

and so far I'm loving that.

00:47:59

It's made my life so much easier

00:48:01

'cause I can send, I can put those replies together,

00:48:04

choose when they need to go out

00:48:06

and make sure that they're being sent

00:48:08

to that person at the right time

00:48:09

because it does matter quite a bit when it comes to

00:48:12

especially things at a church

00:48:13

'cause there are a lot of emails

00:48:14

that I need to send out about a certain Sunday

00:48:18

but I don't want them to go out before this coming Sunday

00:48:21

because it'll confuse the people receiving it

00:48:24

about what day am I referring to.

00:48:26

Even if they have the date on there

00:48:28

people still get it wrong.

00:48:30

One of my frustrations.

00:48:34

Anyway, I feel like I'm doing better with email.

00:48:38

I don't keep it on my phone.

00:48:41

I am better about not checking it multiple times a day,

00:48:46

hundreds of times a day.

00:48:47

It's getting better.

00:48:49

I think I'm slowly,

00:48:51

and I think some of my work scenario has allowed that

00:48:54

'cause I'm not necessarily in a client based.

00:48:58

System, like my work isn't dependent on clients anymore.

00:49:02

It's definitely service oriented,

00:49:06

but not, it doesn't have the speed

00:49:09

with which I used to operate under.

00:49:11

Does that answer all your questions, Mike?

00:49:13

- Yeah, good for you.

00:49:14

I wanna tie this back to the first chapter in this section

00:49:21

which is ask the critical question

00:49:23

and this is something that I feel like

00:49:25

I have done a pretty good job of for a while

00:49:28

but that also publicly facing means

00:49:30

that I may come across as a bit of a jerk

00:49:33

because I am intentionally bad at email.

00:49:35

But the question that he poses at the beginning

00:49:39

is is this trigger serving me or am I serving it?

00:49:42

And I found that the majority of the email

00:49:44

that I was receiving was requests from somebody else

00:49:48

for something that they wanted

00:49:49

which really had nothing to do with the things

00:49:53

that were important to me or the things

00:49:55

that I was measuring success based on.

00:49:58

It was in nears words, probably all distraction.

00:50:03

At least a very low traction to distraction ratio.

00:50:08

So I've kind of cut this out for the last,

00:50:13

I don't even know, probably a couple of years at this point

00:50:16

but I totally recognize why this is so difficult

00:50:20

for a lot of people.

00:50:21

There are a lot of tactics in this whole section

00:50:23

on hacking back external triggers.

00:50:25

I don't really want to go through all of the different tips

00:50:28

that he gives for reducing time spent in email

00:50:30

but I do like this formula that he came up with

00:50:33

and this is again not something that is new to me

00:50:37

necessarily but the way that he described it is kind of new

00:50:42

and that is that the amount of time we spend on an email

00:50:45

capital T equals the number of messages received

00:50:48

or N times T times spent on each message.

00:50:52

Okay, well that makes a lot of sense

00:50:54

and if you hear me describe that on a podcast,

00:50:56

you're probably like, well, there's nothing revolutionary

00:50:58

there but if you view this as a math problem,

00:51:00

there are two variables that you can control here

00:51:03

and you can very obviously see which ones they are.

00:51:06

Number one, you can reduce the number of messages

00:51:08

that you receive or number two, you can decrease the amount

00:51:11

of time spent on each message which is why somebody

00:51:15

like, I think it's Chris Bailey who has the auto responder

00:51:18

at the bottom of his emails is saying,

00:51:20

sorry everything's so short but I keep my replies

00:51:22

to five sentences or less.

00:51:24

Somebody does that, I forget exactly who that is

00:51:27

but you totally understand why they do that kind of thing.

00:51:30

- I think it's our friend Josh that does that.

00:51:32

- Okay, no he stole that from somebody

00:51:35

'cause he's not the first person I've heard that from

00:51:37

but anyways, it makes that sort of approach

00:51:42

a lot more palatable when you understand why

00:51:46

and that's the thing that a lot of people have trouble

00:51:49

when you suggest something like that,

00:51:50

I could never do something like that

00:51:52

because I'm gonna offend people.

00:51:53

Well, the people that you're gonna offend

00:51:54

are the people who don't understand how much time

00:51:57

you're wasting an email and they're just contributing

00:51:59

to the problems.

00:52:00

So at some point you do have to, I don't know,

00:52:03

maybe I shouldn't say it that way,

00:52:04

you don't have to hurt feelings necessarily

00:52:07

but you do have to push back a little bit

00:52:10

and there is a chance that people will take offense to that

00:52:13

but it's important and when he talks about email here

00:52:18

and why it's so addictive and how it takes the average person

00:52:21

64 seconds to reorient on what they were doing

00:52:24

when they went to check their email, think about that.

00:52:27

So let's say you used to check your email 100 times a day.

00:52:31

Every time you checked it, even if you didn't get a message

00:52:34

that you had to do anything with,

00:52:35

it took you 64 seconds to reorient,

00:52:37

that's almost two hours of your day reorienting

00:52:40

just from checking the email.

00:52:42

So I think like a couple big takeaways from here

00:52:46

one you already mentioned is batch process

00:52:48

and then number two, ultimately, if you can get to the point

00:52:52

that's great, like I have where you know

00:52:56

that people are gonna be maybe offended by your approach

00:52:59

to email but you just choose not to live there.

00:53:02

That's ultimately where you wanna end up.

00:53:04

Now I say that because that's one area

00:53:07

where I have had some success in

00:53:09

but the other area here meetings is definitely one

00:53:11

where I have not had success.

00:53:12

(laughs)

00:53:14

Oh man, I have been in a lot of meetings lately,

00:53:19

different organizations and things that I'm involved with

00:53:23

where they're just not good meetings.

00:53:28

(laughs)

00:53:29

And he has in this section a couple of great ideas here

00:53:34

for making meetings better.

00:53:38

And I admit that I am scared to try any of these

00:53:42

but I also think that all of these tactics are brilliant.

00:53:45

So one of the easiest ways to prevent meetings,

00:53:48

he says is to require two things,

00:53:50

that meeting organizers circulate an agenda

00:53:52

of what problem will be discussed

00:53:54

and that they give their best shot at a solution

00:53:57

in the form of a brief written digest.

00:54:00

I love this, I feel like yeah, absolutely.

00:54:02

If I was able to convince everybody (laughs)

00:54:05

that I'm involved with,

00:54:07

that these are the two rules for creating a meeting

00:54:10

that would significantly eliminate

00:54:13

the majority of the meetings that I'm sitting in

00:54:15

but also probably not gonna happen.

00:54:18

I do like this other one though

00:54:20

for maintaining attention during meetings.

00:54:22

I feel like this one has a much better chance of success

00:54:24

and that is no screens.

00:54:27

It drives me nuts when I see people sitting in a meeting

00:54:31

behind a laptop screen.

00:54:33

My initial thought is you're not paying attention at all.

00:54:37

Not that you're playing solid there

00:54:38

but you are probably checking email or social media

00:54:41

or something but you're not paying attention

00:54:43

to the person who is speaking,

00:54:45

whether or not that's me is kind of irrelevant.

00:54:47

It just grinds my gears when I see that.

00:54:50

- You wanna know the screen that drives me nuts

00:54:52

in meetings?

00:54:53

- What's that?

00:54:54

- Apple watches.

00:54:55

- Ooh, yeah.

00:54:57

This is one that is usually ignored

00:55:01

when this topic comes up

00:55:02

because everybody says phones and computers put away.

00:55:06

But the moment that happens,

00:55:07

you know what follows,

00:55:09

the people with Apple watches are looking down

00:55:11

at those silly things about every five minutes

00:55:14

and that drives me nuts 'cause it's just as bad.

00:55:17

- Yeah, true.

00:55:18

- So I get frustrated by it

00:55:21

because the theory that I'm always told

00:55:23

is meetings are when the Apple watch is shining

00:55:28

because it allows you to check on

00:55:30

and get the notifications you really need

00:55:32

from people who really matter

00:55:33

without pulling out your phone

00:55:36

or getting your computer out.

00:55:37

Like that's the idea,

00:55:37

which is in my mind,

00:55:40

an excuse to check a screen when you shouldn't be.

00:55:44

Like that's my view on it.

00:55:46

So anyway, that's kind of my pet peeve.

00:55:50

And it's honestly, it's one of the main reasons

00:55:52

I don't have an Apple watch

00:55:53

'cause I don't want that temptation there

00:55:56

because it's slowly replacing the phone checks

00:55:59

from at least the people that I'm around that have them.

00:56:02

It ends up replacing that.

00:56:03

So you might as well pull your phone out

00:56:05

because it's checked just as often.

00:56:07

And I notice it every single time.

00:56:09

I'm told people don't notice it.

00:56:11

Yeah, we do.

00:56:12

It's all over.

00:56:15

So anyway, I'm gonna get off my soap box now,

00:56:18

but I am lucky in the sense that I have

00:56:21

exactly one meeting every week

00:56:25

that is on the calendar, it's regular.

00:56:27

It's about an hour and a half,

00:56:29

sometimes two hours, sometimes it's one hour

00:56:32

with our entire staff at church.

00:56:37

And it's run pretty well.

00:56:39

There's usually, and we have a set agenda.

00:56:41

It's the same every time 'cause it's event based.

00:56:44

So we're trying to make sure that we've got all our events

00:56:48

for the next week, month, two months,

00:56:50

three months out in process.

00:56:53

So it's basically a project management check-in.

00:56:56

And that does work pretty well

00:56:58

'cause we're covering a lot of ground very quickly.

00:57:01

Other than that, I have one-on-one conversations

00:57:05

with people in hallways,

00:57:06

and that's pretty much the extent of what my meeting life

00:57:10

looks like right now.

00:57:12

And I am not upset about that at all.

00:57:15

'Cause most of my time has spent working on task lists

00:57:19

instead of talking about task lists.

00:57:22

Lucky.

00:57:23

(laughs)

00:57:24

Yep, I'm not complaining about that one at all.

00:57:27

(laughs)

00:57:29

Regarding the Apple Watch thing,

00:57:31

he mentions this is way in the last chapter,

00:57:33

but he has this statement,

00:57:36

"When someone picks up their phone in a social situation,

00:57:39

he says, "I see you're on your phone, is everything okay?

00:57:40

I wonder if you could adapt that to...

00:57:43

I see you keep looking at your watch, is everything okay?"

00:57:45

(laughs)

00:57:46

I should totally do that.

00:57:47

I know you would hate me for that, I'm sure.

00:57:49

(laughs)

00:57:51

Yeah, do that and see how it goes.

00:57:53

Report back, see if people are like,

00:57:54

"Oh, sorry," or if they're like, "What?"

00:57:57

Yeah.

00:57:58

"Why are you calling that out?

00:58:00

You're not supposed to notice this.

00:58:02

Nobody sees me do this."

00:58:04

You didn't see anything.

00:58:06

So yeah, if you're looking for a lot of productivity tactics,

00:58:10

there's lots of them in this section,

00:58:11

lots of broken down in the different chapters,

00:58:15

but yeah, I think we can wrap that one up here.

00:58:18

Let's move on to the next section,

00:58:20

which is part four,

00:58:23

Prevent Distraction with Packs.

00:58:26

And two things I wanted to briefly talk about

00:58:31

in this section.

00:58:32

Number one is his burn or burn pact,

00:58:36

which is an example of a pre-commitment.

00:58:40

And this was where he wanted to lose weight

00:58:43

so he would tape a crisp $100 bill on his calendar

00:58:48

and he would either work out that day

00:58:51

and burn the calories,

00:58:52

or he would take a lighter,

00:58:54

which was right by the calendar,

00:58:55

and he would burn the $100 bill,

00:58:58

which was obviously painful

00:58:59

because $100 is a lot of money.

00:59:02

So I don't know that I'm ready to start burning Benjamin's,

00:59:07

but I think that putting a price tag as a consequence

00:59:12

on the, for not doing an action that you want to do

00:59:18

is an interesting idea.

00:59:20

I've heard of people doing this digitally

00:59:23

where like they'll schedule an embarrassing tweet

00:59:26

to go out in the morning if they oversleep

00:59:29

and they have to physically wake up

00:59:30

and manually turn it off every morning

00:59:32

to prevent it from going out.

00:59:34

That would be another version of this.

00:59:36

And I don't have an action item here specifically

00:59:38

for how I want to start using these pre-commitments

00:59:41

or create these packs,

00:59:43

but I think it's an interesting idea.

00:59:47

And I think the next time that I have a very difficult problem

00:59:52

that I'm trying to solve,

00:59:54

I will definitely use this idea of the pre-commitment

00:59:58

to figure out how I can establish the habit of the routine

01:00:02

that's gonna allow me to complete it successfully.

01:00:05

- Hey, sometimes do this with tweets

01:00:08

where I will tweet out what the topic

01:00:11

for my next newsletter is, but I haven't written it yet.

01:00:15

- Nice.

01:00:16

- So I'll do that.

01:00:17

Sometimes we're, I'll send that tweet out

01:00:19

on a, say a Tuesday morning,

01:00:22

and I've not written that,

01:00:24

which means that sometime that day,

01:00:26

I have to make sure that I sit down and write that article.

01:00:29

- Now we all know whenever we see those tweets.

01:00:31

- The world knows that it's supposed to be coming

01:00:34

tomorrow morning, like, "And I haven't written it."

01:00:37

- Okay, so that's one thing that I do.

01:00:40

I also will sometimes do that with,

01:00:43

like for example, I'm working on a new video course,

01:00:46

and I tweeted out that I was doing this

01:00:49

and a rough, I don't think I've given an exact date,

01:00:53

but I will be of when that would release,

01:00:56

which means that now I have to do that

01:00:59

because people are expecting it.

01:01:01

So I'll do pre-commitments like that.

01:01:04

I don't really do it where a negative

01:01:06

is the default other than just shame,

01:01:10

but that's probably about as far as I go with it.

01:01:15

I don't really do anything that involves dollars.

01:01:18

That seems silly to me, but teach their own.

01:01:21

If it works, go for it.

01:01:23

- Well, you kind of have done that with Bookworm

01:01:25

because if you haven't read the book

01:01:27

and we get on the mic to talk about it,

01:01:29

you look like a fool.

01:01:30

- There is that, yes.

01:01:32

- So there is a negative consequence to that,

01:01:37

but I never really thought about it

01:01:39

as a negatively charged pre-commitment

01:01:44

until you were just talking now.

01:01:47

So I don't know if that fits the description or not, but.

01:01:50

- I don't know.

01:01:51

Kind of depends on how you want to look at it,

01:01:52

but some people are gonna see it and say,

01:01:55

"Hey, that's exactly what I have to do.

01:01:58

"I've heard of people that will,

01:02:00

"like if you don't hit this goal,

01:02:01

"it will, someone will donate your money

01:02:05

"to an organization that you are very much against."

01:02:08

- Yeah.

01:02:08

- Like I've heard of those as well.

01:02:11

Again, it just seems odd to me,

01:02:14

but I get that it works for some people though.

01:02:17

- Sure.

01:02:18

- The other thing that I wanted to talk about here,

01:02:21

just real briefly, is the voter study.

01:02:24

They had basically one group who answered questions

01:02:27

about whether they would vote

01:02:29

and another group that answered questions

01:02:31

about whether they were voters.

01:02:33

And they found that the group that was asked

01:02:35

about being a voter were much more likely to vote.

01:02:39

And the same effect can be had with statements like,

01:02:43

"I can't," which is behavior driven or "I don't,"

01:02:46

which is identity driven.

01:02:47

This reminded me very much of atomic habits

01:02:50

and the whole identity based habits versus outcome based habits.

01:02:54

And I thought that was kind of interesting.

01:02:58

With voting specifically, it's interesting

01:03:00

because that's one of those things

01:03:03

that you typically don't think about

01:03:05

except for specific periods.

01:03:07

And it's interesting to me how changing the phrasing

01:03:13

can make people get out and vote

01:03:16

where maybe they wouldn't have previously.

01:03:18

So in that sense, it's almost like driving the behavior,

01:03:22

which I guess is kind of the same thing

01:03:23

as the identity based habits

01:03:25

that James Clear talks about in atomic habits.

01:03:27

So though, that seems very individual driven

01:03:30

as opposed to, if I say the right words,

01:03:33

I can get you to do the right actions.

01:03:37

That feels a little bit weird to me,

01:03:39

a little bit manipulative, but I don't know.

01:03:42

I haven't fully processed that yet.

01:03:45

- I think the thing it reminded me of

01:03:47

is I know there are a handful of folks online

01:03:50

that will talk about calling yourself a writer

01:03:54

or a blogger or a podcaster when you're first starting.

01:03:59

So if you wanna write a book,

01:04:00

start calling yourself a writer.

01:04:02

And what does a writer do?

01:04:04

Will a writer sit down and writes every day?

01:04:06

Well, if you call yourself a writer,

01:04:08

you can't call yourself a writer

01:04:10

and not sit down and write every day.

01:04:11

Like that's the mentality that goes with that.

01:04:14

So I think there is a lot of truth to this,

01:04:19

but I don't know how I feel about using it on other people.

01:04:25

Whenever you start phrasing things in a certain way

01:04:28

in order to drive things in other people's actions,

01:04:31

like I don't like that feeling.

01:04:35

Personally, if I'm talking about myself,

01:04:37

absolutely 100% on board.

01:04:39

- Yep, me too.

01:04:40

- But I don't really wanna be trying

01:04:42

to do the whole manipulation thing.

01:04:45

Maybe I do, but I just don't want you to know about it.

01:04:48

- All right, all right.

01:04:50

Joe's deep dark secrets.

01:04:52

- Evil laugh here.

01:04:53

- No, I agree.

01:04:54

It's totally different when you're talking about,

01:04:56

I want to make sure that I follow through

01:04:58

and I do X instead of Y

01:05:00

in terms of making positive change in my life.

01:05:02

But the moment that you start applying it

01:05:04

to other people instead of yourself feels a little bit weird.

01:05:07

And so to hear him talk about it in terms of

01:05:09

the voter study and again,

01:05:11

you're trying to get people to vote.

01:05:13

So that's not in any way, shape, or form

01:05:15

a negative activity, but it still feels weird to think

01:05:19

that if I call you a voter instead of somebody

01:05:22

who should vote, that that's enough to get you

01:05:25

to follow through and take the action.

01:05:28

I don't know, it just didn't sit real well with me.

01:05:31

- That's fair.

01:05:32

- All right, part five is how to make your workplace

01:05:37

indestractable.

01:05:38

And the basic takeaway here is that

01:05:41

for a lot of people you can't.

01:05:42

(laughs)

01:05:43

Just kidding.

01:05:44

- Yep, happens.

01:05:46

(both laugh)

01:05:48

- He does have a diagram in here,

01:05:51

which is this circle.

01:05:55

It starts with number one,

01:05:57

people here are always connected.

01:05:58

That leads to number two, reducing control over one's time,

01:06:02

which leads to number three to get ahead

01:06:04

of how I was into be available,

01:06:06

which leads to number four, increasing expectations,

01:06:08

to be always on, and then that just keeps going.

01:06:12

And I work with the Blanc Media Team

01:06:17

where this is not an issue.

01:06:18

We use Basecamp specifically because you can't see

01:06:21

when people are online and when they're not.

01:06:25

In fact, he mentioned, I forget which section it was in.

01:06:28

It wasn't this one, but in this book,

01:06:31

he quoted Jason Fried,

01:06:34

and let me see if I can find this,

01:06:37

because this was really interesting.

01:06:39

And I noticed that he actually just retweeted this message.

01:06:44

Okay, yeah, it was hacking back group chat.

01:06:46

Jason Fried says, "Group chat is like being in an all day

01:06:50

meeting with random participants in no agenda."

01:06:52

And he literally just retweeted that specific thing

01:06:54

in Link to a blog post about it today.

01:06:57

So that was interesting.

01:07:00

He talks about how Jason Fried does.

01:07:02

Traffic lights are for automobiles, not people,

01:07:06

like the green, yellow, red icons,

01:07:08

where you're either away, busy, or available.

01:07:11

So Basecamp obviously does not have that sort of thing.

01:07:15

And then they've got the normal work hours

01:07:18

and you don't even see your notifications

01:07:20

when it's outside of work hours.

01:07:23

As you record this, I'm on a two week sabbatical,

01:07:25

which feels amazing. (laughs)

01:07:27

Really enjoy it.

01:07:29

So I am coming from a little bit privileged position

01:07:32

as it pertains to this, but I also have worked

01:07:35

in been in different situations where I totally get this.

01:07:39

He makes the point in chapter 26,

01:07:41

how distraction is assigned to dysfunction.

01:07:44

He talks about high job strain and environments

01:07:48

with an imbalance between effort and reward,

01:07:53

predicting a higher likelihood of developing depression

01:07:56

at work, which costs the US economy alone

01:07:58

over $151 billion annually in absenteeism.

01:08:02

And that's a mind blowing figure when you think about it.

01:08:09

And my mind immediately went to all of the startups,

01:08:15

I say startups, but there's a lot of companies now

01:08:18

that promise an unlimited vacation policy.

01:08:22

But below the surface, you know that there are expectations

01:08:27

around that unlimited vacation policy,

01:08:30

and it's not really unlimited.

01:08:32

And I guess me personally, I would tend to just kind of

01:08:37

keep pushing until I hit the glass ceiling

01:08:39

and find out what those expectations really are,

01:08:41

but most people just don't wanna rock the boat.

01:08:43

They're not, they're only gonna take one or two weeks,

01:08:47

even though it's unlimited.

01:08:49

And so the thing that I've been thinking about is like,

01:08:54

why do we even need these unlimited vacation policies?

01:08:58

Well, because the work culture is driving people crazy, maybe.

01:09:02

And I don't know that there's a lot

01:09:06

that the average worker maybe can do

01:09:09

to make your workplace indestractable.

01:09:12

I felt like this section is kind of geared more

01:09:16

towards the executive who has control over things.

01:09:20

But even just awareness of it is probably a good thing

01:09:25

and can help you recognize if you're in an unhealthy situation.

01:09:28

I felt like this section was definitely

01:09:30

for high level managers.

01:09:32

Maybe that's because in my role,

01:09:36

the whole point is to be accessible.

01:09:40

I'm an IT guy.

01:09:43

People bring problems to me when they come up.

01:09:46

Guess when they come up all the time,

01:09:48

which means I'm distracted all the time.

01:09:51

- Yeah.

01:09:51

- A prime example is whenever I came back

01:09:54

from Christmas vacation,

01:09:57

the first day I was back, I had my coat on,

01:10:00

had my backpack, had my lunchbox,

01:10:03

walked in the main doors to the building.

01:10:06

I made three steps inside the building

01:10:09

and I heard, "Joe, welcome back.

01:10:11

Hey, can you come take a look at?"

01:10:13

Okay, so I go off on the side.

01:10:17

We look at the thing, we fix it.

01:10:19

I start working my way towards my desk.

01:10:22

I get about halfway there, "Hey, Joe, welcome back.

01:10:24

Hey, while you're here, can you?"

01:10:27

Now, I still have my coat and backpack,

01:10:29

everything in my hands.

01:10:30

I haven't even made it to my desk yet.

01:10:32

I went through five different requests

01:10:34

before I made it to my desk.

01:10:36

- Wow.

01:10:37

- So after I got sat down, first thing I did,

01:10:41

work up a coffee, pull out my laptop

01:10:44

and go hide in a corner somewhere.

01:10:46

'Cause I knew I was gonna have six, 700 emails

01:10:51

to work through.

01:10:52

So I went, found a corner, hid for about an hour and a half,

01:10:56

got through all of that and then came back.

01:10:58

But then the rest of my day was,

01:11:01

"Hey, Joe, welcome back.

01:11:02

Can you?"

01:11:04

My whole day was that way.

01:11:05

- Sure.

01:11:06

- That's just normal.

01:11:08

It's pretty common for me to get one or two requests

01:11:11

for something before I ever make it to my desk.

01:11:13

That is normal.

01:11:15

So reading this section, I thought,

01:11:19

that'd be nice.

01:11:20

Not gonna happen.

01:11:21

(laughs)

01:11:22

- Right, right.

01:11:23

- There's just not anything I'm gonna be able to do

01:11:25

about that because that's the expectation.

01:11:28

The only way I can really come about that is go hide.

01:11:31

And people seem to respect that.

01:11:34

At least for now.

01:11:36

I don't know what that will do long term,

01:11:38

but I'm gonna take advantage of it while I can.

01:11:41

But for now, I just have to run away.

01:11:44

- Yeah, that's kind of my reaction to reading this too

01:11:48

was not even that I needed to change anything,

01:11:51

but I instantly had empathy for the person who read it

01:11:54

and couldn't change anything.

01:11:56

(laughs)

01:11:57

I'm like, there's a danger in reading this

01:11:59

where if your higher ups don't understand it,

01:12:02

that you'll just get depressed about the way things are.

01:12:06

- Yeah.

01:12:07

- But also interestingly in this section,

01:12:09

they talk about Slack.

01:12:11

Slack is one of the things

01:12:13

that Jason Freed was railing about

01:12:16

in the previous section in this book.

01:12:19

I think that was chapter 10,

01:12:21

no, chapter 16 where he had that quote.

01:12:25

So Slack is kind of the poster child

01:12:27

for you talk about email being bad.

01:12:30

Well, now there's the Slack thing

01:12:32

and everybody's expected to be connected at all times.

01:12:35

But Slack's got a slogan on the walls of their office

01:12:40

that says, "Work hard and go home."

01:12:42

So internally as a company culture,

01:12:45

they have this belief that it's okay to be offline.

01:12:49

So that really was interesting to me

01:12:51

and got me thinking about all of these people

01:12:53

who are complaining about things like Slack,

01:12:57

maybe you're just using it wrong.

01:12:59

Maybe we just tend to default to craving the distractions

01:13:04

and the interruptions.

01:13:06

And so we're gonna look for whatever vehicle we can

01:13:08

that will provide those.

01:13:10

And if you really need to use a tool

01:13:12

that is super minimal and eliminates all that stuff,

01:13:14

great, do what you gotta do.

01:13:17

But reading this section on Slack

01:13:19

and the company culture that they have there

01:13:22

made me at least think from the way that NIR

01:13:24

just described it that maybe it's getting a bad rap

01:13:28

when it shouldn't.

01:13:29

Yeah, 'cause I think that Slack,

01:13:31

the tool can be extremely useful in some scenarios.

01:13:36

Having worked in client work with a lot of tech companies

01:13:43

I was a part of numerous Slack groups.

01:13:47

And frankly, when you're working on something together,

01:13:51

half the world away from each other, it's amazing

01:13:54

to have that communication while you're both

01:13:57

working through things.

01:13:58

"Hey, I did this.

01:13:59

"Can you check on that?"

01:14:00

And then let them go do it

01:14:01

so you're not on the phone listening to silence

01:14:03

most of the time.

01:14:05

So I think there is definitely a place

01:14:07

for that back and forth chat,

01:14:09

but the expectation of those teams

01:14:14

was that you were on it all the time.

01:14:17

Now, me as the contractor in those scenarios,

01:14:21

I was able to say,

01:14:22

"Hey, I am a part of too many of these.

01:14:24

"I can't just sit on yours all day.

01:14:27

"If you wanna pay my hourly rate to do that,

01:14:29

"sure, absolutely."

01:14:30

But I don't think you wanna do that.

01:14:32

So I never really had anybody take me up on it.

01:14:35

So I was able to get out of that culture.

01:14:38

It's not one that I have any interest in whatsoever.

01:14:43

There've been a couple of folks at our church say,

01:14:45

"Hey, I've run across this Microsoft Teams thing.

01:14:49

"There's a chat thing built into that.

01:14:50

"Do you think we should use it?"

01:14:51

And my instant response is,

01:14:53

"No, we are not implementing a chat structure at the church.

01:14:58

"It never has existed and I will fight it to the death.

01:15:02

"I am not putting that in.

01:15:04

"Call me if you need something."

01:15:06

That is what we're going to do.

01:15:08

So I think it is fascinating to see how Slack, the company,

01:15:13

they themselves don't promote the always on culture

01:15:19

that seems to come with using their tool.

01:15:23

- Yeah, exactly.

01:15:24

- It's just fascinating to me.

01:15:26

- Yeah, it would be interesting to talk to a Slack executive

01:15:32

about the negative press that Slack gets

01:15:36

in the pockets of the productivity world

01:15:39

where we tend to hang out,

01:15:41

which is the one that is focused on the deep work,

01:15:46

the essentialism, the one thing,

01:15:49

that whole side of it, not the efficiency,

01:15:53

the life hacks, that sort of stuff.

01:15:56

It would be interesting to see their response

01:15:59

to that type of stuff.

01:16:00

And also what kind of advice or tips they would give

01:16:05

on how they define the right way to use the tool.

01:16:09

So one thing that Neer mentions,

01:16:11

which I thought was brilliant,

01:16:13

and I want to try to implement this, but again,

01:16:16

it's not an action item because I don't know

01:16:17

if I'll have success is using emoji to communicate

01:16:22

whether it's just in the reactions.

01:16:24

So getting everybody to decide on a language, for example,

01:16:28

for I've seen the message and I'm thinking about it

01:16:31

and I'll get back to you as opposed to not receiving

01:16:34

a response for several days and then sending the person

01:16:37

the direct message, "Hey, did you see my question?"

01:16:39

It's like, "Yeah, yeah, I did.

01:16:41

I'm just thinking it through."

01:16:44

Because I do think that for a lot of organizations,

01:16:47

communication is super important.

01:16:49

You've got to be able to communicate well.

01:16:51

You've got to make sure that you're able to stay

01:16:53

on the same page, have unity in your vision.

01:16:56

And so, speed of communication does help with that

01:17:00

to a certain extent, but also you've got to be able

01:17:02

to cut out the distractions and focus on the work

01:17:06

that's important.

01:17:07

I don't know.

01:17:08

There's obviously a lot to unpack there

01:17:11

and the lines probably going to be different

01:17:13

for everybody and every organization,

01:17:15

but it's definitely worth considering.

01:17:18

- Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of different ways

01:17:19

you could take this and not everyone can do things

01:17:23

about what's going on.

01:17:24

So, you really have to translate it to your scenario.

01:17:28

I don't think there's a one size fits all on this one.

01:17:31

- Sure.

01:17:32

Although it does give me an idea for my next bookworm book.

01:17:36

So.

01:17:37

(laughs)

01:17:38

- Okay, here we go.

01:17:40

- All right, part six,

01:17:42

how to raise indestractable children.

01:17:45

I didn't really care for this section all that much.

01:17:50

There were a couple of things that I did want

01:17:52

to call out here, but I think this is something

01:17:55

you got to figure out for yourself.

01:17:58

He does mention this idea of self-determination theory

01:18:02

where your body or the body needs three things

01:18:05

to flourish autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

01:18:10

And so the question is how can we as parents,

01:18:14

those of us who have kids,

01:18:15

how can we help our kids develop those skills?

01:18:18

One thing that kind of blew my mind was the statistic

01:18:22

that teens in the US are subject to 10 times

01:18:25

as many restrictions as mainstream adults,

01:18:28

twice as many as Marines,

01:18:30

and twice as many as incarcerated felons.

01:18:34

It made me really happy that we homeschool.

01:18:36

(laughs)

01:18:38

- Yeah.

01:18:39

Yeah, I think this section is one that,

01:18:42

like all of his details and the story about his daughter

01:18:46

and such about how they taught her to come up

01:18:49

with her own rules around technology.

01:18:53

Like, it's all great, but there was one thing

01:18:58

that I got out of this section that he never actually

01:19:00

talked about that was just kind of a tangential thing

01:19:03

that I discovered through reading that was that,

01:19:07

you know, I need to be more focused on teaching my kids

01:19:10

to make decisions for themselves

01:19:12

instead of helping them make decisions.

01:19:14

- Sure.

01:19:15

- So that was a thing that came out of that.

01:19:17

I was like, yeah, that's kind of a great thing

01:19:19

to be working towards, but he never said that.

01:19:22

And it's not part of this book.

01:19:24

It was just kind of my interpretation of it.

01:19:27

But the more time I've spent with that concept

01:19:29

and marinated on it the last probably week,

01:19:32

that's hard. (laughs)

01:19:35

That's a lot harder to help them make decisions.

01:19:38

When I just wanna say, no, you can't have a cookie right now.

01:19:41

That's really what I wanna say,

01:19:43

but they need to come up with that answer on their own.

01:19:47

And that's a lot harder to do in the long run for sure.

01:19:51

- Yeah, he also talks, the very first chapter

01:19:54

in this section is avoid convenient excuses.

01:19:56

And he talks about how technological leaps

01:19:58

are often followed by moral panics.

01:20:01

So don't deflect the blame when your kids don't act

01:20:05

the way that you want them to,

01:20:07

don't blame the sugar high is how he puts it.

01:20:09

And I think that that's something that is happening

01:20:12

right now with smartphones is people are just blaming

01:20:15

the smartphones.

01:20:16

And that's not the right approach.

01:20:20

He mentions that a lot of parents give their kids smartphones

01:20:22

so they can contact them,

01:20:24

but it ends up being too much too soon.

01:20:25

And that's because they never teach them how to manage it.

01:20:28

He talks about swimming pools versus smartphones

01:20:30

and how we don't keep our kids out of the water forever.

01:20:32

We teach them how to swim,

01:20:34

but nobody teaches their kids how to use a smartphone

01:20:36

when they give it to them.

01:20:37

Well, I want to, you know, I'm not gonna just say here.

01:20:41

Here's a portal to everything on the internet.

01:20:44

Now have at it, like that's just stupid.

01:20:46

(laughs)

01:20:47

Well, especially when you think about it that way,

01:20:48

but we don't recognize the danger in that a lot of times.

01:20:52

So that's not something new from the section for me,

01:20:55

but I could see for certain people

01:20:58

that maybe that is the first time

01:20:59

you've kind of heard those arguments

01:21:00

and that being valuable.

01:21:03

But the big thing, the main point here is to teach them

01:21:07

to set their own limits.

01:21:09

You mentioned how his daughter set her screen time limits.

01:21:14

We kind of did the same thing with our kids

01:21:16

and their video game time,

01:21:19

where we've got four boys who are very much into video games.

01:21:23

And we used to limit it to 30 minutes a day,

01:21:28

but usually it was my wife who was home with the kids

01:21:31

and she had to manage it,

01:21:33

which was extremely frustrating.

01:21:36

She's trying to work with some of the other ones

01:21:40

and go through school work 'cause we homeschool

01:21:42

while also trying to keep an eye on the video game time

01:21:46

out of the corner of her eye.

01:21:47

And then kids are in the middle of a level or something

01:21:50

they don't want to quit and they get frustrated.

01:21:53

So one of the things that we did is we bought

01:21:55

one of those time timers.

01:21:57

I can't remember if I showed this to you

01:21:58

when you were here and not.

01:21:59

- We have one.

01:22:01

- Do you?

01:22:01

Okay.

01:22:02

So you know what I'm talking about then,

01:22:03

but it's basically a time timer.

01:22:05

We had a sit down meeting with our kids and we're like,

01:22:08

okay, so this is not working.

01:22:10

We need to change this.

01:22:12

And we started by asking them the question,

01:22:14

what do you think is fair for a screen time?

01:22:17

And they said an hour and we said, okay,

01:22:21

we can try an hour, but if we're gonna do an hour,

01:22:23

then you have to be able to manage this on your own.

01:22:26

Mom can't be the one who's telling you it's time to wrap up.

01:22:30

So we got one of those time timers

01:22:31

that sits under the TV now and they get an hour

01:22:35

of video game time, but they manage it themselves

01:22:38

and they quit before the timer is done.

01:22:41

The agreed upon rule is that if the timer goes off

01:22:45

before the system is turned off, like powered off,

01:22:50

then they lose their video game time tomorrow

01:22:52

and they are the ones who set that rule.

01:22:54

So when they go over, there's no argument.

01:22:58

It's like, oh, I messed up as opposed to,

01:23:00

oh, mom and dad are so unfair.

01:23:02

And I don't know, I guess you could make the argument

01:23:06

like our video game time, maybe that's too much, whatever,

01:23:09

but I don't know, it is more than we would have just said,

01:23:14

okay, this is how much everybody gets,

01:23:17

but I also thought that it's something we need to teach them

01:23:21

to manage on their own and in the big scope of things,

01:23:23

like if you look at your screen time on your phone,

01:23:26

you probably spend a lot more than an hour

01:23:27

in front of a screen.

01:23:29

So if you're gonna say, well, it's unhealthy,

01:23:32

you can't stare at a screen that long,

01:23:34

but you are on your phone six hours a day.

01:23:36

You're a little bit of a hypocrite.

01:23:39

So even though I've made major strides

01:23:42

in curbing my unintentional technology use,

01:23:47

my screen time is a couple hours a day.

01:23:51

And I think, I wanna teach my kids to be intentional with it

01:23:56

and if video games are the important thing to them right now,

01:23:58

that's fine.

01:23:59

I'm also gonna teach them some positive ways

01:24:00

to use it like whole family's gotten into dual lingo now.

01:24:04

They do coding through Bitzbox.

01:24:08

A lot of their school stuff is done on the computer.

01:24:12

So they're writing papers, they're making presentations,

01:24:17

they're even recording stuff inside of GarageBand sometimes.

01:24:20

Like that's all stuff that I consider

01:24:22

to be a positive use of the technology.

01:24:25

And so I wanna obviously limit the quote-unquote

01:24:30

negative stuff.

01:24:32

And again, I don't necessarily have a bone to pick

01:24:35

in our video games, good or bad sort of a thing.

01:24:38

I enjoy them myself.

01:24:40

But teaching them that it's okay in moderation.

01:24:43

And when you're done with that,

01:24:46

you have to go do something else, which is,

01:24:50

I don't know, I was gonna say the word productive,

01:24:53

but that's not the word I wanna use.

01:24:55

More intentional, you're gonna be making something,

01:24:58

you're gonna be creating something,

01:25:00

you're gonna be doing something not just,

01:25:03

what's the word I'm looking for here?

01:25:05

- Analog.

01:25:06

- You gotta do something analog,

01:25:08

something with another person or something in the real world.

01:25:09

- Yeah, well we do that too, you know,

01:25:12

like you gotta go play Legos or something now,

01:25:14

you gotta take a break.

01:25:15

But it's more so the mindset behind it,

01:25:19

it's the create not consume sort of a thing.

01:25:22

I don't really care whether you are building

01:25:25

the Lego creation or you're working on a puzzle

01:25:28

or you're drawing a picture,

01:25:31

but you need to stop just consuming stuff.

01:25:36

- Yeah, makes sense.

01:25:37

So get out of consumption mode,

01:25:42

and get out of that mode and get into something

01:25:45

other than that mode.

01:25:47

- Yes, yes, exactly.

01:25:49

- Makes sense.

01:25:50

I don't think our kids are old enough to really need

01:25:52

to do anything along those lines,

01:25:55

though they don't really get the opportunity for screens.

01:25:59

At all, you know, they have no iPads,

01:26:01

there is no communal computer at all right now.

01:26:06

The sum total of their screen time,

01:26:08

it seems like it's Sunday night

01:26:10

when we watch a TV show together.

01:26:12

And that's really all my girls get right now.

01:26:15

Granted, the oldest is six.

01:26:17

So we're starting to get to the point

01:26:19

where we need to have this conversation

01:26:20

and start being a little more proactive about it.

01:26:23

But right now it's pretty easy

01:26:24

'cause it's non-existent.

01:26:27

- Yeah.

01:26:27

- It's easy.

01:26:28

- Yeah, I miss those days.

01:26:30

(laughs)

01:26:32

It's especially hard for some of the older ones,

01:26:34

you know, when some of their friends have cell phones.

01:26:37

Like they have the devices in their hands all the time

01:26:40

and it's encouraging to hear them talk about how

01:26:45

they see their friends using stuff in a way

01:26:50

that they know is not positive

01:26:53

because we talk about it so openly.

01:26:56

But I also know that if I were to say,

01:26:58

"You know, we're not gonna do screens,"

01:26:59

and then they see their friends

01:27:01

who are looking at screens all the time,

01:27:02

the fact that they're not connected to them at all

01:27:04

is just gonna increase the desire

01:27:06

that they wanna go see what that world is all about.

01:27:09

You know, I wanna teach them to navigate it successfully,

01:27:13

not keep them from it.

01:27:14

- Yeah.

01:27:15

- Not saying that what you're doing right now is wrong either,

01:27:18

but it does get more complicated as they get older for sure.

01:27:21

- Oh yeah.

01:27:22

And I know we'll get there,

01:27:23

but I'm not there, so I'm gonna revel in the moment.

01:27:26

- Enjoy it.

01:27:27

(laughs)

01:27:29

All right, the last section here, part seven,

01:27:30

how to have indestractable relationships.

01:27:33

This is literally just two chapters

01:27:35

and there's not a whole lot in here.

01:27:38

There is the question that I mentioned earlier,

01:27:42

which I thought was brilliant.

01:27:43

And if I have opportunity to use this,

01:27:45

I totally am going to because I'm not scared

01:27:47

of making things awkward.

01:27:49

And that is when you see somebody

01:27:50

using their phone in a social situation

01:27:52

to call them on it and say,

01:27:53

I see you're on your phone, is everything okay?

01:27:55

(laughs)

01:27:58

That's under the chapter, chapter 34,

01:28:00

spread social antibodies among friends.

01:28:03

I feel like you gotta be careful with this.

01:28:06

For certain people, they're gonna totally get it.

01:28:09

For certain people, they're gonna wonder why you're so weird.

01:28:12

You gotta have a little bit of a solid foundation there,

01:28:17

I feel like before you would take a tack like that,

01:28:19

or not care if you'd get disconnected

01:28:21

from this person.

01:28:23

So navigate that with care.

01:28:25

And the other thing is the idea of fubbing,

01:28:28

which I'd not heard this term before,

01:28:30

but I thought this was great.

01:28:32

Fubbing is that is to ignore when in a social situation

01:28:37

by busying yourself with a phone or other mobile device.

01:28:41

I've been guilty of this myself,

01:28:42

but honestly, this is something that I see all the time.

01:28:47

Like whenever somebody is waiting for coffee

01:28:51

at a coffee shop or something,

01:28:52

you see them pull out their phone.

01:28:55

And I noticed those types of things.

01:28:58

I tend to people watch.

01:28:59

(laughs)

01:29:00

And every time I see it, I'm like,

01:29:02

"Oh, they made it 12 seconds," or whatever.

01:29:06

And I like having a term for this,

01:29:08

but I guess it really is no whole lot

01:29:11

of practical application of this,

01:29:12

other than to try to catch myself when I'm doing it.

01:29:14

'Cause like I said, I do this too.

01:29:16

- Yeah, I just did this yesterday.

01:29:19

Not intentionally.

01:29:20

I was at Costco.

01:29:22

We were having new tires put on our suburban.

01:29:25

And they were a little bit longer getting that done

01:29:28

than we were planning on.

01:29:29

The whole family was there

01:29:30

and we were sitting on some tables

01:29:33

just outside the tire center.

01:29:35

And my wife went to go look for something.

01:29:39

I'd forget what it was.

01:29:40

And it was just me and the three girls there.

01:29:43

And I had pulled out my phone to do something.

01:29:48

I think it was jot down a note or something.

01:29:50

And this kind of goes back to the shaming thing of,

01:29:53

"Hey, I see you're on your phone.

01:29:54

Is everything okay?"

01:29:55

A gentleman who worked at Costco came up to me,

01:29:59

put his hand on my shoulder while I was on my phone

01:30:03

and said, "You have three beautiful daughters.

01:30:06

You're a lucky man."

01:30:07

Like he made that comment.

01:30:09

And in that moment it triggered all kinds of things.

01:30:12

Like he caught me on my phone.

01:30:13

I think he did that intentionally when I was on my phone.

01:30:16

I feel like he was sitting back here

01:30:18

just waiting for me to pull it out.

01:30:19

That's what it felt like.

01:30:21

But at the same time I loved him for it

01:30:24

because he in some way as a stranger snapped me out

01:30:29

of whatever it was I was doing and realized,

01:30:31

I'm sitting here with my three girls

01:30:33

and we're not even talking about anything.

01:30:35

We're just kind of ignoring each other.

01:30:36

What on earth am I doing?

01:30:39

This was yesterday.

01:30:40

And I was so grateful to that man,

01:30:44

but he didn't make me feel horrible about it.

01:30:46

So he was very tactful in his mechanism for doing it.

01:30:50

So I understand the whole,

01:30:52

"Hey, I see you on your phone, is everything okay?"

01:30:56

But I feel like there are a lot of other ways

01:30:57

that you could apply that

01:30:58

and other ways that you could bring that out.

01:31:00

So just mentioning things and talking to them

01:31:05

and just pointing to them and saying,

01:31:07

"Hey, what are your thoughts on what we're talking about

01:31:09

while they're on their phone?"

01:31:10

Is a great way to just say,

01:31:12

"Hey, I see what you're doing, stop it."

01:31:14

(laughing)

01:31:15

- Anyway, that was great. - Anyway, yeah.

01:31:17

I was grateful to Costco, man.

01:31:18

Good job, sir. (laughing)

01:31:20

- Nice, I love that story.

01:31:22

(laughing)

01:31:23

Well, that wraps up the book.

01:31:25

Talk about action items.

01:31:26

- Yes, I have a couple.

01:31:28

You have a couple, ready to set go.

01:31:30

- All right, so I've got two,

01:31:32

which I have mentioned already.

01:31:34

The first one on my list here is to plan my week every week.

01:31:38

That's the one that I feel is going to provide

01:31:41

the biggest benefit in how my week goes.

01:31:46

And the second one is to host a regular quibits.

01:31:51

And again, I don't know how this is gonna go.

01:31:53

I'm slightly terrified at the idea of bringing this up

01:31:57

to the people that I have targeted.

01:31:59

They are kind of, well, actually I should say,

01:32:02

they're all couples at our church

01:32:04

and I know some of them will be on board with it.

01:32:08

Some of them will be like, "What, why?"

01:32:10

(laughing)

01:32:12

So it's a very different, I guess diverse maybe,

01:32:16

group of people in terms of their view on

01:32:20

relationships, technology, productivity,

01:32:21

whatever you want to define that as.

01:32:23

So, but that is my action item

01:32:26

and I will report back on that one next time.

01:32:29

- I'm looking forward to that one.

01:32:30

And it just is completely unrelated side note

01:32:33

every time I look at the outline and see quibits,

01:32:34

I keep seeing kibble.

01:32:36

- I know.

01:32:37

- I don't know why that is.

01:32:39

My two action items, one is to try time blocking.

01:32:43

So I'm planning out my week, doing the whole batching

01:32:47

of my time and trying to make sure

01:32:48

that that lines up with my values.

01:32:50

We've talked about this.

01:32:51

The other one is start using freedom.

01:32:54

He mentioned freedom in the app, in the book,

01:32:58

at one point, kind of offhandedly.

01:33:00

I have used freedom on my Mac a handful of times

01:33:03

and when he mentioned it,

01:33:04

I remembered that freedom had a problem a while back.

01:33:08

They're a content blocker that lets you block websites

01:33:11

and apps and such.

01:33:12

But they had an issue a while back

01:33:14

because they were using a VPN to do that.

01:33:16

And Apple kind of got angry at some companies

01:33:19

that were doing that and pulled their apps from the store.

01:33:23

They were one of them.

01:33:24

And I remember they were still fighting

01:33:27

and working on ways to bring the app back.

01:33:30

And I hadn't checked in on them in a long time.

01:33:32

So I brought it up, checked in on them.

01:33:33

It turns out they do have a way to do it now

01:33:37

by blocking content directly through a VPN configuration.

01:33:40

I guess Apple went back on it.

01:33:42

I don't know.

01:33:43

I didn't read up on the story.

01:33:45

But long story short, I'm using freedom.

01:33:48

And using it at times when I'm writing,

01:33:52

but also at night when I'm getting ready for bed

01:33:54

to just block everything,

01:33:56

to where it's not even possible for me to get into anything.

01:34:00

It's really nice at night at bedtime

01:34:03

because then it's like, if it's scheduled,

01:34:06

I know at nine o'clock, my phone's gonna be unusable.

01:34:09

So I really can't get into anything.

01:34:12

Thus, the only thing I can do is pick up a book

01:34:14

and go to bed, you know, the thing I should be doing

01:34:16

and have committed to doing.

01:34:18

So it's, I haven't been using it extensively,

01:34:22

but it's one that I want to continue to use more of.

01:34:25

So anyway, all that to say, use freedom, go freedom.

01:34:29

- Very cool.

01:34:30

All right, style and rating.

01:34:33

So I picked this one because I was interested in the topic,

01:34:37

but as I mentioned at the beginning,

01:34:38

did not have super high expectations for it,

01:34:42

had a bad taste left in my mouth

01:34:45

when I started reading previous book, Hooked.

01:34:49

And I was pleasantly surprised by this one,

01:34:52

despite there being way too many chapters

01:34:54

and way too many sections.

01:34:55

- Sure.

01:34:56

- The last two sections definitely felt like

01:34:58

they were kind of tacked on at the end

01:35:01

'cause the editor was like,

01:35:02

oh, you should really talk about this stuff with kids

01:35:04

and relationships, definitely a lot lighter

01:35:07

than the other chapters.

01:35:10

I feel like there's not as much meat there.

01:35:12

So it's one of those books again,

01:35:14

that's probably longer than it had to be.

01:35:16

The whole section on hacking back external triggers,

01:35:20

that really kind of,

01:35:22

it was hard for me to make it through that section

01:35:25

'cause it was a lot of like the productivity tips,

01:35:27

tricks, life hacks sort of stuff

01:35:29

that I've heard over and over and over and over and over again.

01:35:32

So it wasn't a fan of that section,

01:35:35

but as we went on in this book,

01:35:38

specifically on preventing distractions with packs

01:35:42

and the whole section on making time for attraction,

01:35:46

scheduling your important relationships,

01:35:47

there was a lot of stuff in here

01:35:49

that really impacted me more than I thought it was going to.

01:35:53

I already mentioned the kibbit's thing

01:35:55

like that alone was worth reading this book

01:36:00

in my opinion.

01:36:01

He does a good job of explaining things

01:36:04

in a way that is very approachable,

01:36:06

even if his diagram isn't all that great.

01:36:08

I feel like it at least makes sense

01:36:11

and it provides the framework for the rest of the book.

01:36:14

I think it makes the topic of focus

01:36:19

more approachable than just,

01:36:23

hey, you need to pay attention,

01:36:25

which is kind of the message that you get left with

01:36:29

when you read a lot of the other stuff.

01:36:31

You get inspired like, yeah,

01:36:32

I just need to pick the one thing

01:36:33

that I should be working on

01:36:34

and then you get in the middle of things

01:36:36

and oh, this is also important.

01:36:38

And you're like, I don't know what to do.

01:36:39

I just forget about it.

01:36:41

Like this feels like he gives you more stuff

01:36:44

to more tactical stuff, smaller things that you can do

01:36:48

to kind of move the needle in the right direction.

01:36:50

So I think it's very helpful in that sense.

01:36:53

In terms of how many stars to rate it,

01:36:55

I'm gonna rate it 4.0.

01:36:57

I don't think there's anything super revolutionary in here.

01:37:01

It would be cool to take the topic of like

01:37:04

kibbutts and relationships in terms of being

01:37:06

indestractable and productivity

01:37:08

and just write a whole book on that particular topic.

01:37:11

That's definitely the part that struck me the most.

01:37:13

I don't think that's near Eyal's thing

01:37:16

or definitely not what he intended to do with this book.

01:37:21

There were a lot of personal stories and anecdotes in here

01:37:25

like he talks about his wife wearing the concentration crown

01:37:28

so that she can't be interrupted.

01:37:30

I felt like that stuff really added a lot to the book

01:37:33

and made it seem a lot less like a business book

01:37:35

and a lot more personal and approachable.

01:37:38

So I think I would recommend this to just about anybody.

01:37:43

Although there's definitely gonna be different camps of people

01:37:47

in terms of whether they think that this book is awesome

01:37:50

and they get stuff out of it

01:37:51

or if it's just a bunch of information

01:37:53

that goes in one ear and out the other.

01:37:56

But in general, if you're looking for something

01:38:00

that can help you even a little bit

01:38:03

to be more focused on the things that are important to you

01:38:07

or carve out a little bit more in terms of intentionality

01:38:10

or eliminating some of the distractions in your life

01:38:13

whether they be personal or professional,

01:38:15

I think it is worth a read.

01:38:17

- I feel like there is really one main tip or trick

01:38:22

that he mentions in the book and that's time blocking.

01:38:26

And he refers to it over and over and over again

01:38:29

and uses that as the basis for pretty much

01:38:31

every tip and trick in here.

01:38:34

And although that's not 100% true,

01:38:37

like it's not the only thing he talks about,

01:38:39

it's his core that he keeps coming back to.

01:38:42

I think if you're the type of the person

01:38:44

that needs to understand why things happen

01:38:46

in order to make changes

01:38:49

and you're also someone who gets distracted a lot,

01:38:51

this is an excellent read for you

01:38:53

because it explains why you get distracted

01:38:57

and where those can come from,

01:38:58

both internal and external and what to do about it.

01:39:01

I think that's super helpful.

01:39:02

Personally, when it started off,

01:39:06

I felt like, oh man, this could be a 50 book.

01:39:10

And then we got to the areas where he's talking

01:39:13

about time blocking all the time

01:39:14

and I get a little nervous when that's the core thing

01:39:18

he's recommending because I've tried that.

01:39:20

I don't know how many times now and it's not stuck.

01:39:24

So I don't know if that's me

01:39:26

or the concept itself is potentially flawed.

01:39:29

I don't know what the answer there is.

01:39:31

But I do think that understanding the why behind it

01:39:35

is super helpful.

01:39:37

And there are some points here that I got out of it.

01:39:39

I'll join you at the 4-0.

01:39:42

It feels like that's about the right place to put it.

01:39:45

He's an easy author to read.

01:39:47

I'll give him that.

01:39:48

It was pretty easy to have with me

01:39:50

and read through multiple pages or chapters at a time

01:39:54

just because he is a good writer.

01:39:56

So well done in that sense near Yale.

01:39:59

So I'll join you at the 4-0, Mike.

01:40:03

- All right, cool.

01:40:05

So let's put indestractable on the shelf.

01:40:09

What's coming up?

01:40:11

- Making it All Work by David Allen.

01:40:13

And what am I?

01:40:15

50, 60 pages into this one already?

01:40:18

This will be an interesting conversation.

01:40:21

I'm not gonna say much more than that.

01:40:23

I think this will be a fun one to go through.

01:40:25

Kind of a follow up to getting things done.

01:40:27

And I have a feeling you're gonna have a lot of thoughts

01:40:29

on this one, Mike.

01:40:30

(laughs)

01:40:31

- All right.

01:40:32

After that, I mentioned in the middle of this episode

01:40:37

that I knew what my next book was going to be.

01:40:40

I want to go through, since we mentioned Jason Free

01:40:44

a couple times here, I wanna go through,

01:40:45

it doesn't have to be crazy at work.

01:40:48

I've read this before as a gap book.

01:40:50

And I think this will be an interesting conversation

01:40:54

about how this gets applied not only to the workplace,

01:40:57

but also to the different organizations like churches

01:40:59

that you and I are both involved in.

01:41:01

- That'll be fun.

01:41:02

- So, and it'll be, a lot of Jason Free's writing

01:41:07

is like these short little chapters.

01:41:09

So it'll be another one of those ones

01:41:11

where we're not gonna try and capsulate everything

01:41:12

that he talks about.

01:41:13

We're gonna pick out the things that really speak to us

01:41:17

and unpack those ideas.

01:41:18

So, I think that'll make a great episode.

01:41:21

- Yeah, that will be a good one.

01:41:22

I've read that one before as well.

01:41:24

So, this will be a reread for both of us

01:41:26

and I have it right in front of me.

01:41:28

That'll be fun.

01:41:29

- Cool.

01:41:30

- It's a good one.

01:41:31

I don't have a gap book still trying to make work

01:41:34

on the margin thing and adding more books

01:41:36

doesn't help with that.

01:41:37

So, do you have one this time?

01:41:40

- I do.

01:41:41

So, I ordered Principles for Success by Ray Dalio.

01:41:46

And if you hear that, you're probably like,

01:41:47

wait, Principles by Ray Dalio.

01:41:49

Didn't you read that already?

01:41:50

Yes, yes, we did.

01:41:51

Principles for Success is an illustrated

01:41:55

like kids' version of Principles.

01:41:57

- Interesting.

01:41:58

- And yeah, so Principles I absolutely loved

01:42:03

and I want to see what the simplified version looks like.

01:42:07

I'm not sure if my kids will like it or not,

01:42:11

but I don't know.

01:42:12

I think even if they don't really get into it,

01:42:17

I think it'll be an interesting review

01:42:19

of Principles at the very least.

01:42:21

And hopefully I'll recognize that,

01:42:24

yeah, there is something here for my kids

01:42:27

and they can maybe apply some of the principle stuff

01:42:30

for themselves.

01:42:31

- Cool.

01:42:32

Good pick.

01:42:33

- Thank you, sir.

01:42:34

All right, well, that'll do it for this episode then.

01:42:37

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01:42:51

And five bucks a month will get you access to my MyNode files.

01:42:57

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01:43:00

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01:43:05

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01:43:18

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01:43:21

That's another perk of being a Bookworm Club member.

01:43:23

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01:43:25

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01:43:28

- Those are very fun.

01:43:29

It's always fun to see, like, get frustrated

01:43:32

'cause this microphone won't work.

01:43:34

All right, so let's put in Distractable on the shelf

01:43:36

and next time we will join David Allen

01:43:39

in learning how to make it all work

01:43:42

and we will see you next time.