26: The Sleep Revolution by Arianna Huffington

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1. 00:00:00 I was collecting all the books that I need for a podcast with you.
2. 00:00:02 There's a few. I was looking through my list yesterday of what I've all read in the last year or so.
3. 00:00:09 And it's pretty impressive. I like going back and looking at my list of,
4. 00:00:15 I think there were 33 books that I've read since we started this podcast.
5. 00:00:19 Oh, wow. So every book we've read, I've got it on a one shelf and they're in order
6. 00:00:26 from the way we've recorded them. And that's purely because I'm a creature of habit.
7. 00:00:30 And every time I get done with it, it goes on that shelf.
8. 00:00:33 I'm not going to rearrange it. So it just ends up being in the exact order that we've
9. 00:00:38 read them. So it's kind of a fun, fun way to look at it and say, oh, there's Bookworm.
10. 00:00:44 Like that is every book of Bookworm right there. It's kind of cool.
11. 00:00:48 That sounds like a joke thing to do.
12. 00:00:51 It's very Joe. Yes.
13. 00:00:56 So but every time we record a podcast here, I have to go, of course, get the book that we're
14. 00:01:01 going to talk about. And then now I have to grab the book for my gat book.
15. 00:01:06 And then I need to grab the one that we're going to pitch for the next round.
16. 00:01:12 So I always have at least these three books, but then I usually have like four or five sitting
17. 00:01:16 on my desk at the same time. Nice. Let's just say I'm obsessed. Maybe slightly.
18. 00:01:23 That's okay. We have a podcast called Bookworm. It's okay to be obsessed with books, right?
19. 00:01:28 That's right. Although we missed National Bookday, I believe. I think it was
20. 00:01:33 Saturday or Sunday as we record this. Because we're complete failures with social media,
21. 00:01:38 apparently. I think that's okay though. At least I am. I was thinking about this this morning.
22. 00:01:44 I was like, I am not so great at Twitter lately. I used to be really good at Twitter.
23. 00:01:47 I'm not sure what happened, Mike. I used to be good at posting things and posting my articles.
24. 00:01:52 And that's about... I post my articles and stuff, if I would write one, when they happen.
25. 00:01:58 But past that, I really don't promote on social media at all. It's probably terrible.
26. 00:02:04 That's okay because you know what you are good at posting? New podcasts.
27. 00:02:08 I am good at posting new podcasts. That's fun.
28. 00:02:15 So what Josh? What Josh? Wow. Rough morning, apparently. So what Mike is alluding to for the
29. 00:02:22 listeners is that I have recently released a new podcast with another friend of mine,
30. 00:02:28 Josh Rinch, called Theoretical Accountability. Oh, I thought it was a big friend of Mike.
31. 00:02:32 Well, the first one kind of turned into that. I told Josh, I was like, I feel like we just
32. 00:02:39 threw Mike under the bus and he's not here to defend himself. This is not cool. So, yes.
33. 00:02:45 You can remiss for that one. Sorry about that. Sorry. I was confused. I get it now,
34. 00:02:49 but I listened to all three episodes. So by episode three, it's transformed from the pick on Mike
35. 00:02:54 podcast to the now we're actually going to hold people accountable to our goals podcast. Got it.
36. 00:02:59 And it doesn't help that I've now got people sending me emails
37. 00:03:05 getting onto me for not seeing Star Wars.
38. 00:03:11 Yeah, it's an absurd number of people. I tweeted something about that. I don't want to pick on you
39. 00:03:15 too bad, but you definitely need to need to see that. I like Josh's idea of making that one of your
40. 00:03:21 12-week year goals. Right. Right. Yeah. That's okay. You can pick on me since we've picked on you.
41. 00:03:27 You just don't start at the beginning. Skip the first three episodes and do them in a chronological
42. 00:03:33 order. Do episode four, five, and six first. Okay. Okay. Why is that? Is that just because
43. 00:03:38 that's where everyone else is? Those are the originals and they're way better than the
44. 00:03:42 prequels or whatever you want to call. Okay. So at one, two, and three, those are the ones that
45. 00:03:47 Lucas redid when he had a whole bunch of money. And he basically could do anything that he wanted
46. 00:03:52 and there's a lot of just dumb cheesy stuff in there. The originals were the amazing technical
47. 00:03:59 achievements of their day and they're still pretty cool. Even my kids like the four, five, and six
48. 00:04:05 better. Nice. Nice. Well, I will keep that in mind. It sounds like I'm not going to live very long
49. 00:04:10 if I don't. I don't watch these soon. So yes, for the listeners, that has all come out in this
50. 00:04:18 other podcast, theoretical accountability. I'll drop a link to that in the show notes, but I'm not
51. 00:04:24 going to belabor that one a whole lot here. Essentially, what it is is Josh and I started
52. 00:04:30 holding each other accountable in theory on our 12-week year goals. And after about three months,
53. 00:04:39 I realized we were spending more time having fun rants than we were actually keeping each
54. 00:04:45 other accountable to our goals. And it's a fun conversation to have, thus theoretical accountability.
55. 00:04:50 Nice. There's the plug. I'm done. I'll leave it alone now.
56. 00:04:56 All right. So next one on the list here is mine, I think, to do versus OmniFocus. I assume you're
57. 00:05:02 talking about my original statement about, "Maybe I'll get into to do." Well, Matt Ryan basically
58. 00:05:09 talked me out of it. I've been watching from it. Did he want to talk you into it? He is. But also
59. 00:05:14 in that podcast, he's like, "Well, I know that Ken Case from OmniFocus is," or the Omni Group
60. 00:05:18 is mentioned that they're going to implement some of the features that I liked about to do that are
61. 00:05:23 currently missing, like multiple contexts, for example. And I know that he tweeted a while back,
62. 00:05:29 "Hey, anybody interested in a team-based version of OmniFocus?" And of course, the internet went nuts.
63. 00:05:35 Who would so? Yeah. So I kind of feel like if I were to switch everything over to do now,
64. 00:05:41 it's only a matter of time before OmniFocus comes out. And it's probably sooner rather than later
65. 00:05:47 with everything that I'm looking for. That tends to happen to me a lot. I sit on the fence for a
66. 00:05:53 long time, and then by the time I do something, the time has passed. Like, for example, we've had
67. 00:05:58 time Warner Cable here in Wisconsin for a long time. I read the Swiercouter article about how you
68. 00:06:05 can save 10 bucks a month if you get your own router. So I went and I bought my own router,
69. 00:06:09 got it set up, and I'm like, "Hey, that wasn't so bad. I should have done it a long time ago."
70. 00:06:12 About two weeks after I did that, they changed to Spectrum, and they got rid of the monthly
71. 00:06:17 modem fee. So cool. Thanks, guys.
72. 00:06:22 Nice. So then you lost money on it instead of making money on it.
73. 00:06:28 Yeah. I mean, I do own my own modem at the moment, and I don't have any of the connectivity
74. 00:06:33 issues that I was having with the older modem that I was using, but I'm sure I could have just
75. 00:06:37 got a new one. Anyways, Tangela, we don't need to go down. But all that to say, the way my brain works,
76. 00:06:43 I am now watching intently what is happening with Todo and OmniFocus, but I don't feel like I'm
77. 00:06:48 in a place where I feel comfortable switching yet. I've seen a lot of these things come up.
78. 00:06:54 To do is come up. What was the other one for a while? Todoist was very big. I guess it still is.
79. 00:06:59 I would switch to Todoist in a second if they would implement start dates or defer dates. Come
80. 00:07:04 on, Todoist. Seriously. This is basic task management stuff. You don't want everything due,
81. 00:07:09 because you're going to go into your task manager and see all this stuff that's overdue, and you're
82. 00:07:13 not even going to know what's really due, because you only have one option when to do
83. 00:07:16 this, and that is to put a due date on it. You can't say, "Oh, I want to start thinking about this at a
84. 00:07:21 particular date." This seems so simple. But if Todoist would do this, I would switch into second,
85. 00:07:26 because you can add tasks via the Amazon Echo. You can integrate with a whole bunch of email
86. 00:07:32 applications. Todoist has a great API. There's a lot of email apps out there that integrate directly
87. 00:07:38 with Todoist, which OmniFocus does too, but only if you're on the Mac and only if you use certain
88. 00:07:43 clients. I am looking for another iOS client that will go directly from the email client to
89. 00:07:52 OmniFocus. There's two. There's dispatch and there's airmail. I don't personally do a whole lot of
90. 00:07:57 email on my mobile device, and I periodically will delete the app, pull it off a period of time.
91. 00:08:01 Yeah, I did. I recently put it back on for a season, but I'm going to delete it again. It's just
92. 00:08:06 my cycle, I guess. But people ask me all the time at Asian efficiency, like, "Well, what
93. 00:08:13 do you mail apps do you recommend for iOS?" I'm constantly going in there and seeing what's available.
94. 00:08:18 Dispatch is the only one that has the direct link to the original message in the message URL
95. 00:08:26 format. Airmail creates the link as well, but it's an airmail format, which means that if you
96. 00:08:30 try to use that link on your Mac, for example, and you don't have airmail installed, that link is
97. 00:08:34 useless. I don't know why dispatch is the only company that uses that message URL or gives you
98. 00:08:40 the option to use it, but dispatch is kind of... It was a great app, and it seems like it's kind of
99. 00:08:48 in maintenance mode now, and there's not much new stuff being added to it. It's a little clunky,
100. 00:08:54 a little bit slow. Sometimes I'll find that if I were to archive a message in dispatch,
101. 00:08:59 to move on to the next message, and then like archive or delete that one, sometimes it takes a
102. 00:09:03 little while for it to register, and so I'll delete a message, and then it'll come back, and then
103. 00:09:08 like, "Wait, what just happened here?" I'm sure you're just pinging the server, and it's taking a
104. 00:09:12 little while, but little things like that that just don't make it a real pleasant experience,
105. 00:09:18 but I feel completely stuck because it is the only application that provides that message URL
106. 00:09:23 format. Very technical geeky ramp there, I guess, but yeah. Swipe still an number of folks.
107. 00:09:32 So I was not expecting to strike a chord when I said to do it, but there you go. I've got an
108. 00:09:41 email app I'm playing with, what's it called? Notion? Have you seen this one? So it does the whole
109. 00:09:49 open width to where you can use the share sheet, and you can send an email to OmniFocus with
110. 00:09:56 that. I just tried it on my phone, so you can do that, but it doesn't look like it sends the link,
111. 00:10:01 it sends the whole content of the email. Exactly. That's what I want, and that doesn't make a whole
112. 00:10:07 lot of sense from a task management nerd perspective anyways. Anyway, I threw it to do versus OmniFocus
113. 00:10:15 on the list just because I knew you had mentioned it, but I've been seeing, like, Todo has been making
114. 00:10:20 the rounds of pulling people from OmniFocus, so has Todoist for a little while, but I always
115. 00:10:27 have to ask these questions of why, and what's it get me, and I rarely find features in those apps
116. 00:10:34 that are compelling enough to get me off of OmniFocus. But some of the rationale that people go
117. 00:10:41 through whenever they do that is the devices that they have that they have to use. So if I work in
118. 00:10:48 a PC-only world, OmniFocus gets really hard to use if you can use it at all. But I don't work in
119. 00:10:55 that world, and whenever I'm using my phone, people want a lot of features on your phone to do things.
120. 00:11:01 I get that, but I just don't use it that way. My phone is the list that I'll work off of
121. 00:11:08 versus my Mac. So I'll pull up my list on my phone, and that's what I work off of. I'm not really doing
122. 00:11:13 any heavy lifting with my phone. I do all the heavy stuff on my Mac. Maybe that's why I'm so big
123. 00:11:18 into Apple scripts. Who knows? But that's where I land on it. I don't get too picky with it, but
124. 00:11:24 I knew that you were exploring it, but I was curious where you were headed with it.
125. 00:11:28 I love to do at the moment. What makes me nervous is it's a newer app, and it's published by one guy,
126. 00:11:37 and I love indie developers, but I am not willing to trust my entire productive life,
127. 00:11:42 like how I get things done to one developer who may just decide based on an Apple change
128. 00:11:50 in the new iOS operating system. He doesn't have a team behind him to implement new frameworks,
129. 00:11:55 be like, "Oh, forget this." I'm just waiting and seeing with that.
130. 00:12:01 I think Todo has some cool stuff on iOS, but again, I feel like OmniFocus is pulling in a lot of
131. 00:12:08 those features, and they're pulling some stuff from some other apps that are very beneficial.
132. 00:12:14 What to do has the repeating reminders. That's awesome. I use that regularly. Whenever OmniFocus
133. 00:12:22 gets that, I will probably delete DOO from my phone. There's just no point in it at that point.
134. 00:12:27 And Matt Ryan said in that episode that that's one of the things that is coming. In fact,
135. 00:12:32 why don't we put a link to that episode in the show notes? If people are still listening to this
136. 00:12:36 episode because they are using this sort of thing, Matt did a great job of explaining to do,
137. 00:12:41 or I was explaining to do in that episode. This was on each and the efficiency.
138. 00:12:46 Yep. I can get you the link, but he did an awesome job. I had to talk him into it. He was
139. 00:12:53 nervous about coming on the podcast, but I thought he did a great job. He explained it very thoroughly,
140. 00:12:59 but also it's very approachable. You don't have to be an expert in test management to understand
141. 00:13:03 what Matt likes about Todo and how he's using it and stuff like that. I always think things
142. 00:13:08 like that are helpful. Does somebody just show me your mental rationale on how you got to something?
143. 00:13:13 I may not agree with you, but it's at least interesting, I think. Yeah, he even spun one of
144. 00:13:19 the things that I didn't like about Todo, which is Todo has this built-in view where they have
145. 00:13:24 these three bars, which indicates essentially the priority level. I'm like, "That's not right.
146. 00:13:29 There's only one priority level. It's either priority or it's not." He's like, "Yeah, that's true,
147. 00:13:34 but the thing about Todo is that you can use it however you want." They say that in the tagline,
148. 00:13:39 GTD to XYZ and everything in between. They give you the framework, essentially, they're basically
149. 00:13:45 like, "Yeah, use this however it makes sense." What he did is he took those priority levels and he
150. 00:13:50 made those energy levels. I was like, "Oh, that makes so much sense because I've tried to implement
151. 00:13:55 energy level-based context before." They just never stick because it runs into that problem again
152. 00:14:02 where you've only got one context per task. Does this really belong in low energy or does this
153. 00:14:07 belong in studio, for example? It may be something I need to do in my studio while I have low energy
154. 00:14:12 or he gave the example in the podcast. It's something that you want to do when you're in New York
155. 00:14:17 with your brother. What do you do with those use cases and one of the ways he got around that
156. 00:14:23 was implementing the priority levels as energy levels, which I thought was a brilliant hack,
157. 00:14:28 if you will, to do? We tend to hack these apps. It's kind of fun. How could I use this feature to
158. 00:14:37 do what I want in a way that they didn't want me to use it? Do that a lot. Let's shift off.
159. 00:14:42 Probably enough about Tasmid. Yeah, I was like, "We could spend a long time on that."
160. 00:14:46 I want to revisit grit from last time because you and I were both thinking through ways to help
161. 00:14:53 our kids when things get hard and helping them develop more grit. How's that going on? You're in.
162. 00:14:57 Well, this is one of the things that is kind of hard to measure. I can tell you that one of my
163. 00:15:06 specific action items was implementing that hard things rule. We have that actually on our agenda
164. 00:15:13 for the next family meeting. I've talked to my wife a little bit about this outline the different
165. 00:15:18 steps essentially. She's in agreement with the principal of it. Now we just need to figure out
166. 00:15:24 what is everybody's hard thing. That being said, we are doing this already. I just want to get it
167. 00:15:31 in writing. We've got our daily habits, our daily rituals. For example, play guitar on the worship
168. 00:15:39 to my church. I practice that. I practice other things that I do consistently in my kids. They're
169. 00:15:46 playing piano, so they're practicing every single day. I just want to get it formalized essentially
170. 00:15:54 and then just make sure that we're recognizing that, yes, we are consistently doing these hard
171. 00:15:59 things and then having a formalized record of that.
172. 00:16:04 Nice. I've been trying to notice when, especially our oldest, is working on something and then she
173. 00:16:11 just wants to give up and go do something else. I've been trying to catch those moments and try to
174. 00:16:17 encourage her to keep going. You did this. Let's add one more level to it and see if you can get
175. 00:16:23 that done. Well, I want to go do this other thing. Well, no, let's stick with it just one minute
176. 00:16:28 longer and just trying to slowly build that into her because she's like me. She likes to bounce from
177. 00:16:32 thing to thing. I think she's got a tendency towards the ADHD thing from an attention standpoint,
178. 00:16:37 not necessarily hyperactive, but trying to help her with that. She doesn't like it at all.
179. 00:16:45 So that'll be a process to continually help her with that.
180. 00:16:48 On this topic, this is an interesting observation that I've noticed. I'm not saying that there is
181. 00:16:58 100 percent value in this, but just one of the ways that I've seen this play out
182. 00:17:04 really just brought to my attention after reading that book. As I mentioned in the last
183. 00:17:08 episode that we got an Nintendo Switch, and the only game that we have for it at the moment is
184. 00:17:12 the Zelda game. My nine-year-old loves Zelda, but he's really bad at it.
185. 00:17:22 And so I noticed that at the beginning, he would prefer to watch me play it because I've played
186. 00:17:31 those types of games for a while. And some of the racing games and things like that, he can do
187. 00:17:36 circles around me. But that type of game, that's not something that he has typically played in the
188. 00:17:41 past. And so he would like to see me beat the monsters and be more successful because it is a
189. 00:17:48 very difficult game. I mean, even for me who's grown up playing those types of games, it's very,
190. 00:17:53 very difficult to get used to. You do die a lot in that game. So there's a lot of failure built in
191. 00:17:59 to the game. And I've noticed a shift in him, though, where he's gone from preferring to watch
192. 00:18:05 me play it to him actually playing it, even though he's way behind me in terms of where he is in the
193. 00:18:12 game. I'll come home because we limit the time that where kids spend playing video games every day.
194. 00:18:18 And he'll, like, first thing he says when he goes get in the door, he's like,
195. 00:18:22 I made it to Kakariko Village or I feed that rock monster. And I'm like, yeah, way to go, guy.
196. 00:18:26 Because yeah, it's just, it's interesting how like even something like video games,
197. 00:18:32 build confidence. And I would say grit. Now, obviously, I'm not going to say, oh, this is their
198. 00:18:37 hard thing. You know, that's, that doesn't count. But it is interesting to recognize the
199. 00:18:42 different arenas that this, this plays out in. Nice. Nice. I think working with kids on this
200. 00:18:47 stuff is not simple. And if you've got something like that, that's awesome. I'm trying to,
201. 00:18:53 I'm trying to find something like that for my oldest, but I haven't nailed it down yet.
202. 00:18:56 Because she's not old enough to be able to to determine that on her own. So she's going to need
203. 00:19:01 some help with it. But it's way goes. I want to talk about your, oh, no, before we get to this
204. 00:19:08 Apple script, Angela Duckworth's TED talk. You said you were going to watch it, did you?
205. 00:19:13 I did. I watched it. It was really good. She's a lot younger than I thought she was.
206. 00:19:18 I thought the same thing. She looks like she's maybe 30, 35 in that video. Right. And she's talking
207. 00:19:26 about, obviously it's, it's while she was doing her research. So when you read grit, she's got
208. 00:19:32 a whole bunch of research projects that she's done. And she's explaining what she found during
209. 00:19:36 the research. And some of those things you can tell that she is completed and some of those that
210. 00:19:40 she's in the middle of when, when she gave the talk. And I think the talk was from like 2013,
211. 00:19:46 2014, if I remember right. Yeah, somewhere in there. Yeah. A lot of the key concepts from the book
212. 00:19:51 surface in, I think it's six and a half minutes or something like that. But she did a great job,
213. 00:19:56 I thought. And really, like, if you were going to look for a six and a half minutes synopsis of the
214. 00:20:01 book, definitely check out that, that TED talk. She talks about the West Point things. She talks
215. 00:20:06 about how she doesn't necessarily know how you develop grit, which she kind of talks about in
216. 00:20:12 the book too. She can say like, these things are linked and successful people have this
217. 00:20:16 grip, but there is no formula for teaching this stuff. She talks about the growth mindset, which I
218. 00:20:23 think is a really important key. She doesn't say like, this is the way to do it. But she basically
219. 00:20:27 alludes to, well, there isn't a formula for this thing. People who have the growth mindset seem to
220. 00:20:32 be able to develop this stuff do better. And so I really liked that part of it. But I thought
221. 00:20:37 she did a great job on the talk. It's very, very entertaining. Yeah, it got me wanting to watch
222. 00:20:42 more TED talks. Well, go to my world. I love TED talks. I'm always watching them. It seems like
223. 00:20:49 there's, there's enough of them out there that you can fill in time with them all, like in regular
224. 00:20:53 scenarios instead of watching YouTube, I find myself on TED. Yeah. So one of my goals as of
225. 00:21:01 maybe a month ago is to actually give a TED talk. I was at a Toastmasters competition,
226. 00:21:08 I think I maybe mentioned this last time, where I made it past the first round,
227. 00:21:14 made it past the club speak off, whatever, because you have to choose one person to represent your
228. 00:21:20 club. Next round is like the, I don't know all the different terms, but there's like multiple
229. 00:21:26 clubs that are there in your region or section, I don't know, Josh would know, because he's like
230. 00:21:32 the regional director. So basically I got past that first regional round and made it to the second
231. 00:21:37 regional round where I took third. And so at that point, if you take first, you go to the bigger
232. 00:21:44 region. And then from there, I think it's international, if you do well there. So I took third, which was
233. 00:21:50 pretty good. I blanked in the middle of my speech, which was just completely nerves because I've
234. 00:21:55 given that speech a bunch of times and I had it down. There were a couple guys that were there that
235. 00:22:00 were very animated. The guy who won was a ex-marine and kind of told his personal story during his
236. 00:22:08 talk and just played up the fact that like he's not your stereotypical Toastmasters speaker and
237. 00:22:12 everybody's telling them you can't, you can't do this, you can't do that. And he's like, well,
238. 00:22:16 I have to do that because that's who I am. Yeah. So flaws and all here I am. So I was, it was cool
239. 00:22:21 to meet him. He had a very inspirational story. I'm glad that he won. But everybody, him and
240. 00:22:26 then the guy who took second, they both came from a different club and they're like, man,
241. 00:22:30 your speech was so good. They're like, the guy who won, he basically, he's like, I may have won,
242. 00:22:36 but your speech, like you're going to give a TED talk someday. He's like, that was so good.
243. 00:22:41 And I'm like, oh, cool. I never even really thought about that. But I dug into it a little bit and I
244. 00:22:46 think that would be awesome. And kind of right up my alley. Yeah, are you going to shoot for a TED
245. 00:22:50 X or the legit TED? Well, I think TED X is the place to start.
246. 00:22:55 Looking at the process, it looks like that one is quite a bit easier to get into. I don't really
247. 00:23:01 have public speaking credentials, so to speak. So that's probably the place to start. Nice.
248. 00:23:07 Nice. That would be really cool. I would do what I couldn't be there if you do that, my friend.
249. 00:23:12 But Toastmasters is great. Like I never even considered myself a public speaker. I've been
250. 00:23:17 involved with Toastmasters now about a year and a half. And just seeing crazy growth in that area
251. 00:23:24 where now it's something that I really enjoy doing. I still get nervous every single time.
252. 00:23:28 Good. But I guess, as long as it doesn't make me forget what I'm speaking. Well, that was the hard
253. 00:23:34 part is like, you don't, for the speech competition, you don't get a podium, you don't get any notes.
254. 00:23:39 Like you're up on the stage and you're giving your five to seven minute talk and you're just
255. 00:23:45 giving it. Like it's different than even at the club level, like I would, I don't usually use notes,
256. 00:23:53 but I have them up on the podium with me just in case. So just not having my notes there was
257. 00:23:59 enough to freak me out to the point where I just completely forgot where I was at one point.
258. 00:24:03 Yeah. Josh is talking about he's doing this Minneapolis Ignite. He's got a talk on bacon that
259. 00:24:10 he's doing. And he mentioned that his slides auto advanced. They're all timed and they just move on.
260. 00:24:16 No one's hitting the button. No, he can't trigger it. It's just he has to go.
261. 00:24:20 That would freak me out. That's exactly what I thought. Like, I don't think I could do this.
262. 00:24:24 No, no, not at all. And you know, it sounds like Josh is a lot further in Toastmasters than I am.
263. 00:24:32 So I can't say that like this is not the spirit of Toastmasters. But my understanding,
264. 00:24:36 the way our club runs, like you've got a word of the day that they give you and then you're
265. 00:24:41 supposed to try to incorporate that into your speech kind of gets you to think on the fly.
266. 00:24:45 And if you say the word of the day, then everybody wraps on the table.
267. 00:24:50 Nice. Just as like recognition that, hey, you did this. And so one of the things that I've tried
268. 00:24:57 to incorporate in Toastmasters, because I tend to be very rigid and I write everything out and
269. 00:25:00 I've got everything planned. And then I just try to stick to the plan, which is why I try to make
270. 00:25:04 our talking points fluid for you. Yeah, exactly. Like this is good for me. This is good practice.
271. 00:25:09 I think that for a lot of speeches, and maybe the one at the Ignite Conference is a little bit
272. 00:25:15 different. So again, not trying to say, Josh, you're doing it wrong or anything. But one of the big
273. 00:25:21 benefits of Toastmasters that I get is that you kind of think on your feet. And even if you've got
274. 00:25:26 your outline, even if you've got your speech down, the ability to adapt that as you go based on
275. 00:25:33 what the audience is doing, even, if you say something and you're like, "Oh, wow, they really
276. 00:25:37 responded to that. Hammer that home more, really spend a little bit more time on that point, whatever."
277. 00:25:42 Again, it's going to be different depending on the format of the talk that you're giving. But
278. 00:25:48 that's one of the things that I like about Toastmasters is that it doesn't have to be so
279. 00:25:53 word-for-word memorization. And I'm trying to get away from that, I guess, is the short version of
280. 00:26:01 that big spiel. How would that play into doing a TED talk? Because those are word-for-word scripted,
281. 00:26:07 right? Usually. I mean, most of the people that you see give TED talks, it seems like they've got
282. 00:26:13 it scripted. But even in the Angela Duckworth one, you can tell she's got a joke in there. And
283. 00:26:18 at some point, she delivers the line, and then everybody laughs. So what do you do when everybody
284. 00:26:24 laughs? If you are so focused on, "I've got to get done by a certain time," that's going to throw
285. 00:26:30 you off. But that's not a bad thing necessarily, unless you make it because you've got everything
286. 00:26:34 timed out perfectly. That's just weird to me that for whatever reason, they wouldn't give
287. 00:26:41 them a clicker, so you can't at least control it. Don McAllister did that, by the way, at the last
288. 00:26:47 max stock. He had the video from one of his screencasts online things, and then he narrated it live.
289. 00:26:53 He did a great job with it, but when he started, I was like, "This is not going to end well."
290. 00:26:58 Yeah. He even acknowledged that one. This might not turn out well, but I'm going to narrate a video.
291. 00:27:04 So, good luck, Josh.
292. 00:27:08 Yeah, I've got tickets to that. I want to see how he does. But I guess every single one of those
293. 00:27:14 talks is going to be that way. So I don't know, if we'll see. I will let you know how it goes. That
294. 00:27:19 comes up here in a couple of weeks, so it'll be good. Let's talk about your Apple script,
295. 00:27:25 or rather that it probably won't happen. You're still the only one that donated to it, Mike.
296. 00:27:32 Dang it. Well, we tried. I tried more accurately.
297. 00:27:39 So, I'm going to kill it. I'll send you your donation back.
298. 00:27:44 Okay. There you go. Thanks.
299. 00:27:47 What are you going to do for a... Do you need a nagging thing? I don't know what else to help you
300. 00:27:53 with on that. No, probably not. It would be nice, but that's okay. We'll figure this out.
301. 00:27:58 You could use "do" on your... I suppose whenever OmniFocus gets their thing out, you could set up
302. 00:28:06 something potentially on the Mac that does it through OmniFocus. If they've got the recurring
303. 00:28:11 alerts, that might work. Potentially, this may be the thing that gets me to finally figure out
304. 00:28:20 Apple Script. I know enough about Apple Script to piece it together based off of examples and modify
305. 00:28:25 some stuff to make it do what I want, but just sitting down with a blank slate and writing it,
306. 00:28:30 that's above my head at the moment. I don't recommend people do that ever. Whenever you're
307. 00:28:37 starting out coding, I rarely recommend... Actually, I don't think I've ever recommended that you
308. 00:28:42 start out with a blank slate, because you don't know creating the framework is not going to be
309. 00:28:46 simple for you. If you find something that already exists, you'll be better off. If you
310. 00:28:52 found something that interacted and put things in today one, you could start with that. Then
311. 00:28:58 you'll find something else that has a recurring alert on it and try to combine the two.
312. 00:29:03 Yeah, I do know, by the way, I wrote a workflow post for the sweet setup on piping things into
313. 00:29:12 day one using IFTTT. I know that you can automatically get things into day one that way.
314. 00:29:17 Maybe the thing to do here is not the prompt, but just more documentation of what I'm doing
315. 00:29:24 through the day, storing that in day one automatically and then periodically, weekly, monthly, whatever,
316. 00:29:31 going through and looking at those posts. Nightly. Nightly might seem... That seems like a lot, but
317. 00:29:40 perhaps. I don't know. That's kind of what I do whenever I do my journaling at night. I try to
318. 00:29:44 reflect on what I did that day. Then that helps me set up tomorrow. That way, I'm not continuing
319. 00:29:50 down a road on some things. This reminds me that the sweet setup thing that I need to defend myself
320. 00:29:55 for this back burner context. This is another thing that you guys roasted me on. Well, I should
321. 00:29:59 Josh kind of got you on that one. Yeah, so let me give you an example of how I use this. I have
322. 00:30:06 a lot of content that I create. I sat down and thought about it this week. I'm like,
323. 00:30:13 what do I all create content for? My regular content creation schedule, what does it look like?
324. 00:30:19 So I do the weekly productivity show. I do the biweekly bookworm with you. I do a biweekly
325. 00:30:30 workflow post for the sweet setup. I occasionally write articles for the sweet setup. I'm working on
326. 00:30:36 one on Pomodoro apps. I do a monthly article for Screencast Online in the magazine.
327. 00:30:42 And about monthly, I do a 45 minute video screencast for Screencast Online.
328. 00:30:49 Then there's the faith based productivity stuff that I've been building up in the background,
329. 00:30:53 which I guess, oops, I kind of announced that now. So I guess I have to get some posts up before
330. 00:30:58 we publish this one. Okay, here you go. Accountability done. Yeah. So like, there's a lot of content
331. 00:31:05 there, but none of this stuff, I can wait until the last minute and then just crank it out.
332. 00:31:10 So these are all the types of things that I would put on the back burner context. I know the next
333. 00:31:16 four workflow posts that I have to write for the sweet setup. And they don't take me super long
334. 00:31:21 to do. They take a couple of hours. I got to create some screenshots, stuff like that. But
335. 00:31:25 those are the things where I don't want to go back into my review weekly. If I get to Wednesday
336. 00:31:31 and I've got an extra two hours and I'm feeling energized and I can do some deep work, I can get
337. 00:31:36 some writing done, I'm going to go to that back burner context and look at the whatever writing
338. 00:31:41 content creation piece I want to focus on and start working on that. And having that stuff
339. 00:31:47 instantly accessible without having to do a full review is invaluable to me.
340. 00:31:51 So is this back burner context? Is this, so I assume this is a technical thing in OmniFocus
341. 00:31:58 since you're still on OmniFocus? Is this a context that's on hold? Or are you flagging the projects as
342. 00:32:05 on hold inactive? I forget what the actual term is there.
343. 00:32:10 Well, most of these, I don't follow the test management philosophy to the T, which is break it
344. 00:32:16 down into the smallest step possible because workflow posts, for example, I will sit down on
345. 00:32:20 those. I will usually finish those in one sitting. So I'm not going to create separate tasks for
346. 00:32:26 outline the article and then download the app and create the screenshots and send the
347. 00:32:33 the finished version to Steven Hackett is the guy that I report to essentially with
348. 00:32:39 the, I create the content, send it to him and then he takes it from there.
349. 00:32:42 So I'll just have a task for creating this workflow post and it'll be sitting in my back burner
350. 00:32:49 context because I basically want it to be ready at any given moment. This is my sixth man off the
351. 00:32:54 bench talking NBA playoffs. Like you got to be ready. You know, monogenably hot off the bench.
352. 00:32:59 So I don't want to have to go into my my whole review and search through all my contexts and all
353. 00:33:06 my projects and things like that to get this stuff. But at the beginning of the day, I might not know
354. 00:33:10 that this is something that I want to work on either. It kind of depends on how my day goes.
355. 00:33:14 Sometimes because I'm creating content majority of the time, I will just feel brain dead and it'll
356. 00:33:22 take me a really long time to write whatever article I'm supposed to be writing, create obviously a
357. 00:33:26 lot of content and videos and things like that, which aren't even wasn't even on that list for
358. 00:33:30 Asian efficiency. And so like that'll be the stuff that I make sure it gets done first. And then
359. 00:33:35 at the end of the day, if I've got anything left in the tank, essentially, that's where the
360. 00:33:39 back burner context comes in. Okay, I was getting ready to ask, like what are the scenarios or the
361. 00:33:45 tools, locations and stuff where this back burner context gets pulled out that you start working on
362. 00:33:49 it? Yeah, so essentially, like when I do my weekly review, I'll identify that the next workflow
363. 00:33:56 post, which is due in two weeks, that's a prime candidate for something to be worked on whenever
364. 00:34:00 I've got a little bit of time and a lot of energy. So I'll throw that in the back burner context.
365. 00:34:04 And then during the next week, if that opportunity arises, I will pull that out and work on it.
366. 00:34:09 Otherwise it does have a due date by a certain date. So if it doesn't get to, if it doesn't get
367. 00:34:15 done at that point, then eventually it does become something that would fall into the normal workflow.
368. 00:34:21 What is the Asian efficiency pushes a context? And I don't know what product it is. It's something
369. 00:34:28 to do with OmniFocus. There's a context that they tend to talk about called, what does it do?
370. 00:34:33 Do is that right? I use that one all the time. Okay. And essentially, that's the one that
371. 00:34:40 doesn't fall into a specific context, specific place, but it's something that you've just got to do.
372. 00:34:48 So in the past, for example, you might have had separate contexts for Mac, iPad, whatever.
373. 00:34:55 And that would have made sense because the iPad would be more limited. And there were some things
374. 00:35:00 that you could only do on your Mac. And there are some things that I have a Mac context still
375. 00:35:05 because I prefer to do them on my Mac. But a lot of the things can be done on a myriad of devices
376. 00:35:12 and myriad of different places. So if you're thinking about context in the GTD sense, the person
377. 00:35:15 place or thing that you need to get the job done, while the person is me, the place or the thing is
378. 00:35:21 really anywhere because I've got this stuff with me. So I'm just going to put this as something
379. 00:35:25 that I've got to do. It's the catch all context where this is basically always available.
380. 00:35:31 Yeah, I stopped thinking about my context as the things that are required to do the task because
381. 00:35:39 that's where you start wanting multiple contexts for a given task. But if you shift it over to start
382. 00:35:46 thinking about which tool is best suited for that task, like I can make phone calls technically
383. 00:35:52 from my computer or my phone. So the question there is, well, which one is better suited for that?
384. 00:35:58 If I can only pick one, which one is it? Well, my phone, duh. In that case, that's pretty simple.
385. 00:36:05 But if it's something like Google, what am I, what's one I'm trying to do? I learn how to create
386. 00:36:10 better gluten strands in whole wheat sourdough. Here you go. Though we make homemade sourdough.
387. 00:36:15 There you go. With that, I could do that research on my phone, but it's better suited for my Mac.
388. 00:36:24 Now that one's a bit odd because I have a context called learn because I know that that one,
389. 00:36:28 it's a little better on the Mac, but it's pretty easy to do at the same level from my phone. But
390. 00:36:34 you get the idea. I mean, I'm trying to select the context that's best suited for a task as
391. 00:36:40 opposed to the ones that are possible because so many times I've got some that are possible
392. 00:36:44 to do from any and all devices or in any place. But it's better and more effective if I do it
393. 00:36:52 at home with my laptop set up in my docking station on my desk. Like that's best case scenario for
394. 00:36:58 like any development projects. Those are going to be better suited if I'm at home in that world.
395. 00:37:04 Does that make sense? Because it's just so much better to do a task that way.
396. 00:37:08 Completely agree. But what happens when you need to do that task and you don't have your preferred
397. 00:37:14 tool available? Chances are that nowadays you can still get that task done using a mobile
398. 00:37:20 application, for example, even on your phone. So that's where the do context comes in is if you
399. 00:37:27 can set up all your contacts so that everything is compartmentalized and you never have fires that
400. 00:37:33 you have to deal with, great. Do that. But in the case that there is and you need to be able to see
401. 00:37:40 these are the things that I can do right now. Like I am on my phone. I'm looking at my phone and
402. 00:37:46 that task, get back to the client X because it's set up in the mat contest because that's where I
403. 00:37:52 prefer to do it. That doesn't show up. Depending how your workday and your workflow plays out,
404. 00:37:59 that could be a bad thing. Yes, but I don't ever deal with that because I have a lot of clients
405. 00:38:04 and I deal with fires all the time. That's a lot of what I do. So every night we'll move
406. 00:38:12 under a book and this will make a lot more sense here soon. But every night I go through all of
407. 00:38:18 the available tasks that I have. So an omni focus I'm cycling through that context perspective
408. 00:38:24 that's built in. And I've pruned and worked on the projects and such that are actually available
409. 00:38:30 so that those lists are showing me the active project tasks only. And if I'm going through that
410. 00:38:37 every night, I know what needs done tomorrow in order to keep up. And the only fires that would
411. 00:38:43 come up that need taken care of that aren't already on my radar would be through email.
412. 00:38:48 And if those come in and there's a massive fire in email, I'll take care of it right away or prioritize
413. 00:38:55 it depending on how everything else I have going on fits in. But I don't really deal with that
414. 00:39:00 scenario, I guess. Maybe this is because I'm doing that review each night. I don't know.
415. 00:39:05 It's just not something I deal with. And I feel like I deal with a lot of fires, Mike.
416. 00:39:09 You probably do. I would say that the less maintenance you do with your system. So if you
417. 00:39:15 don't check your system every single night and ideally, I would agree that you should. But if you
418. 00:39:21 don't go through things every night, then that's where the value of a general catch all context can
419. 00:39:28 really benefit you because you need to be able to see the things that you can do at any given time
420. 00:39:34 filterable by context. And so if you haven't gotten to the point where you've divided up your day
421. 00:39:41 to the point where you know that I'm going to be able to do this thing in this particular place,
422. 00:39:45 then you're going into this scenario that I described earlier where it's like you need to
423. 00:39:51 be able to see what you have to do even if you're not at your preferred tool in order to get it done.
424. 00:39:55 Yep. I need to throw chapter markers on this episode. Not a bad idea.
425. 00:40:00 Yeah. The whole topic of task management I think does play into the book that we read for today,
426. 00:40:07 which is the Sleep Revolution by Ariana Ariana. Ariana. Ariana Huffington.
427. 00:40:15 And there's a lot of stuff in here. I put even a note here for page 167 about emergency scam
428. 00:40:22 modality, which we'll get into, we'll get to in a little bit. But this book was really interesting
429. 00:40:26 because she talks in the first section about the problems that we have to deal with, which
430. 00:40:32 lead to us not getting enough sleep. And then the second part of the book, she talks about
431. 00:40:36 some of the tactics and techniques, things like that, that you can use to get better sleep.
432. 00:40:44 But this was my choice. And I picked this book essentially because I heard about it in the Asian
433. 00:40:50 efficiency dojo a while back. And then like I mentioned in the last episode, I actually bought
434. 00:40:54 this while I was in Woodstock, Illinois for a max stock. And you were with me when I bought it.
435. 00:41:00 Yep. So every time we did bookworm, I'm like, oh yeah, I bought that book with Joe. We should
436. 00:41:05 really cover that one. And so now we covered it. There you go. There you go. I really liked this
437. 00:41:11 book, Mike. I think that's probably because I struggled to get enough sleep.
438. 00:41:15 Nice. Yeah. This is a sleep is a topic that is very important to me personally.
439. 00:41:23 Because when I was 18 years old, summer after, summer before my freshman year of college,
440. 00:41:30 I was diagnosed with epilepsy. And epilepsy is a genetic disease disorder, whatever. So my
441. 00:41:39 grandma had it and it typically skips a generation. And so they told me basically that I had it. And
442. 00:41:44 I have had two seizures in my life. I haven't had one in now, gosh, almost 15 years. So it's
443. 00:41:53 completely under control. But one of the things that I've had to keep tabs of ever since I had my
444. 00:41:58 first seizure was one of the things that told me that the contributor is not getting enough sleep.
445. 00:42:02 And actually on page 19 in this book, she says that we all have a seizure threshold,
446. 00:42:08 where if we don't get enough sleep at some point, your body is just going to completely shut down.
447. 00:42:13 You're going to have a seizure. And in her case, she hit her head on the desk and she woke up in a
448. 00:42:17 pool of blood, as she said. Sounds pretty graphic, pretty major. But when you think about it,
449. 00:42:23 there's a lot of bad stuff that can happen from not getting enough sleep. She talks about the
450. 00:42:29 concept of micro sleep and nodding off when you're driving could be fatal, not only for you, but for
451. 00:42:34 a lot of other people. And so we kind of think that we've got this superhero syndrome going on,
452. 00:42:40 where, oh, I can survive on five hours of sleep at night or whatever. And no, you can't. Unless
453. 00:42:46 you're in the 1% of the population, that's a short sleeper. Everybody thinks that they are in that
454. 00:42:51 1%. That's the thing. You're probably not. You're most likely not. I'll go far and say you're
455. 00:42:59 definitely not. You need to recognize that your body functions only the way that it's supposed to
456. 00:43:06 only when you have enough fuel, only when you have enough sleep and your brain is able to
457. 00:43:10 recover and restore the stuff that gets used up throughout your day. And most people just don't
458. 00:43:18 give it the time to recover. I will say at the beginning of this book, she did a very good job of
459. 00:43:23 explaining, I guess, the dangers of not getting enough sleep or sleep deprivation. And I dealt
460. 00:43:29 with a lot of people. Well, I shouldn't say dealt. I deal with a lot of people who fall into that
461. 00:43:35 category for sure. After doing the sleep questionnaire at the end, Mike, I realized I'm not really in
462. 00:43:40 that category despite me wanting more sleep. But I deal with a lot of people who are zombies.
463. 00:43:46 You can get them to say yes to just about anything it seems like if you lead them right
464. 00:43:51 way. Would you have to be a little careful with? Because I feel like I have to take responsibility
465. 00:43:55 for some folks because they're not in their right mind to be making decisions. And at what
466. 00:44:00 point do I take responsibility for them? Because they're not doing their part. I hate that.
467. 00:44:04 But I feel like I have to do it. Before we go too far down this, I want to talk about
468. 00:44:08 our sleep habits pre-book. Because I have a feeling that they changed, at least what we want to do
469. 00:44:16 change it. Am I wrong in that? Because I definitely wanted to change some things.
470. 00:44:20 Well, did you want to change things? Sleep is something that has been pretty important to me
471. 00:44:27 for a long time. Focused on not only getting enough sleep, but also getting enough good sleep,
472. 00:44:35 quality sleep. So I've understood the different stages of sleep, the effect of blue light,
473. 00:44:40 stuff like that, which we'll get into in this episode. So I've known, I guess, for a while what
474. 00:44:47 I've wanted my evening routine to be. And I have intermittently stuck with that. But what this
475. 00:44:57 book did is it reignited the desire to really cement that in stone. To really implement on a
476. 00:45:06 daily basis and basically not compromise even one time. Because that one time becomes another
477. 00:45:12 time becomes another time and then pretty soon instead of going to bed at 10 o'clock, you're going
478. 00:45:16 to bed at 1130. Not just the one time, but every single night. And that's where you get this cumulative
479. 00:45:22 effect with this, this lack of sleep. So my sleep habits on paper haven't really changed a whole lot,
480. 00:45:31 but we'll see, I guess, whether this really sticks. Essentially, what I try to do is not use my phone
481. 00:45:40 after APM. I've been bad at this especially recently. Part of the problem is that
482. 00:45:49 Tann and I play Carcassonne on iOS all the time. And he's always making moves late at night and
483. 00:45:54 I get the notifications. Is he in a different time zone than you? No, no, he just is a late gamer,
484. 00:46:01 I guess. So, but I try to not use my phone or my computer after eight o'clock. And then after the
485. 00:46:10 kids go to bed, because eight o'clock is there, their bedtime, usually try to read and not stare
486. 00:46:15 at a screen. Again, not been great at this. My wife and I have gotten into Mystery Science
487. 00:46:21 Theater 3000 is on Netflix now. So we've been going back and watching those at night after the kids
488. 00:46:26 go to bed. Probably not great for the quality of sleep that we get. And I've also tried to
489. 00:46:31 make sure that I go to bed at 10. But like I said, I've seen that creep where I've been going to bed
490. 00:46:36 essentially consistently at 11. And I usually get up about six, six, 30. So still getting seven and a
491. 00:46:43 half hours of sleep essentially. But right. If you go to bed earlier, you get better sleep. So I
492. 00:46:50 definitely want to want to shift it that way. Are you a nap or at all? I'm not. I have a hard time
493. 00:46:57 falling asleep. And so whenever I've got like a half an hour, 45 minutes, I'm like, I'll take a nap.
494. 00:47:03 Then it doesn't usually work for me. Okay. The exception though would be last Friday.
495. 00:47:08 When about 1 p.m. I just felt completely thrashed and completely useless. So I like
496. 00:47:14 just stopped what I was doing, went home and took a nap. And I fell asleep instantly. I knew that
497. 00:47:20 last week was a was a busy week for me. And so by the end of the week, I just I had nothing left
498. 00:47:24 in the tank. So it was a good thing that I did that. Nice. But generally, I do not nap.
499. 00:47:31 I'm not much of an apper either. But I so I go to bed at I start going to bed at about nine.
500. 00:47:38 It's about nine 30 quarter to 10 before I'm asleep. Actually getting in bed. Well,
501. 00:47:44 time I get in bed. I read for a little bit. Well, let me back up. So at about 830,
502. 00:47:52 I will start like getting breakfast ready for tomorrow and getting my clothes out for tomorrow
503. 00:47:57 and making sure the house is is tidied up and doors are locked. Windows are shut. Blah, blah, blah.
504. 00:48:02 So I do all that stuff ahead of time. That way the house is ready to go for tomorrow.
505. 00:48:08 And then whenever I go upstairs, get myself ready for bed, crawl into bed. I'll read
506. 00:48:12 a little bit of fiction at night. So I've lately been reading the Hobbit, Mike, which is fun.
507. 00:48:18 I'm not I haven't really been a fiction reader for a long time. Like really ever.
508. 00:48:24 Yeah, me either. Judge me. No, I I cannot actually read fiction. I don't know why. I just have a
509. 00:48:31 really tough time doing that. It's. Is it put you to sleep? No, it's just I guess there's so many
510. 00:48:39 nonfiction books that I know I want to read that it feels somewhat indulgent or I kind of feel like
511. 00:48:46 a slacker like I should be doing something that's actually building me in a personal development
512. 00:48:51 standpoint. So it has to be productive. I guess, which I know like even verbalizing that sounds
513. 00:48:57 sounds like yeah, yeah, but I don't have any other justification for it.
514. 00:49:04 I do it because it helps me fall asleep, not that I need help falling asleep. I'm one of those that
515. 00:49:09 if I lay down and I'm I'm done with life for the day, I can be asleep in mere minutes.
516. 00:49:18 Like it's not hard for me to fall asleep. My wife kind of hates it on occasion because,
517. 00:49:23 you know, we'll kiss rollover, go to night, go to sleep that whole thing. As soon as I roll over,
518. 00:49:28 I maybe two, three minutes and I'm out and drives are crazy.
519. 00:49:33 No, yeah, that's not me. I don't know if that's because I'm just exhausted every day or
520. 00:49:40 if that's just a skill that I've picked up. I've been that way for a long time, a very long time,
521. 00:49:46 pre college even. So yeah, it's something I've been good at. I typically, you know, again,
522. 00:49:53 that's nine thirty quarter to ten before I'm asleep and then I get up at five a.m. So I still
523. 00:49:58 hit that seven seven and a half range. I think just from how I feel, I think I need around seven
524. 00:50:05 and a half to seven forty five somewhere in that range. Not quite eight o'clock, eight o'clock,
525. 00:50:10 I tend to be unruly according to my wife because I'm just I got too much sleep and I'm rambunctious.
526. 00:50:16 So she doesn't like it when I sleep that much. But I yeah, I shoot for about that range.
527. 00:50:24 I can take naps pretty easy, but I don't. I again, if I lay down now, naps are a little bit harder
528. 00:50:31 for me to fall asleep, but still it's 10 minutes and I'm out and I'll take about a 20 minute nap.
529. 00:50:36 I'll wake up and I'm good to go, but I haven't done that in months, months, months.
530. 00:50:41 So do you use an alarm clock in the morning? I do, but it's usually not necessary.
531. 00:50:46 Well, I shouldn't say that. It's necessary since we had our third child. Pre third child,
532. 00:50:53 I was waking up just a few minutes before my alarm. What I don't know, Mike, is is that habit
533. 00:50:59 because I know the alarm is going to go off or am I actually rested at that point? I think those
534. 00:51:04 are two different things. Yeah, it could be. But I would say that the quickest way to figure out
535. 00:51:12 exactly how much sleep you need is like for a week, don't use your alarm clock. Yeah,
536. 00:51:16 I that is as scary as it sounds. I realize that and not everybody can afford to all wake up when
537. 00:51:22 I whenever I wake up, but also people tend to go to sleep a lot later than than they should.
538. 00:51:30 But the reason I point that out is like you said, you get seven hours, seven and a half hours of
539. 00:51:34 sleep every night. In the book, she talks about how two weeks of only six hours of sleep. So that's
540. 00:51:40 only one less hour of sleep. If you were to get one less hour of sleep, you're maybe not even
541. 00:51:45 going to notice it the day of. But if you do that for two weeks, it is the equivalent of going 24
542. 00:51:52 hours without sleep, which she also elsewhere in the book says is the equivalent of like a 0.1
543. 00:51:59 blood alcohol level. So it's essentially being legally drunk.
544. 00:52:02 Yeah, but it doesn't take a lot to get to that point. One less hour of sleep for two weeks, I think
545. 00:52:12 probably anybody who's quote unquote busy has been there. But if you were to unpack it, which is
546. 00:52:20 why we're talking about the sleep habits and the evening routines, you could probably go to
547. 00:52:25 bed an hour earlier. You don't have to watch Game of Thrones or whatever TV show, Mr. Science
548. 00:52:29 Theater 3000 before you go to bed. Yeah, you could cut that stuff out, but it's no fun.
549. 00:52:35 That's what everybody think. That's what people are sitting here thinking. It's like, yeah, I could,
550. 00:52:40 but I don't want to. But right, but feeling good is what is worth more than staying up on your
551. 00:52:47 favorite TV show. That's the thing. And most people don't realize it. They think that I can do both.
552. 00:52:53 You can't do both. And what this book really heightened for me was there is a choice to be made
553. 00:52:58 here. You cannot do all of these things that you want to do. David Allen, you can do anything,
554. 00:53:04 but you can't do everything. You have to say, notice some stuff. But when you say, notice some
555. 00:53:09 stuff and when you say yes to getting enough sleep, that makes everything else that you're going to do
556. 00:53:14 better. So if you were to just look at it from a productivity standpoint, well, I've got too much
557. 00:53:18 to do. I can't get enough sleep. If you were to get enough sleep, the stuff that you have to do
558. 00:53:22 gets done quicker and better. The quality of your work improves and you do it more efficiently.
559. 00:53:26 At least that's my hypothesis. Yeah, I think that's true because I had a period where I was
560. 00:53:32 taking naps regularly. And that's when I was working corporate, which was, it was not approved
561. 00:53:39 by our corporation, especially from a culture standpoint. What I would do, this is kind of funny,
562. 00:53:45 I would, after lunch, I would go out to my car. So we had our own parking garage, but it was
563. 00:53:51 very dark and cool because it was somewhat underground. And I would go out to my car,
564. 00:53:57 kick the seat back and take a nap in my car, which was fine until Minnesota winter came around.
565. 00:54:03 There you go, cold, but right. Yeah, you do what you can. But I would take naps there. And that was
566. 00:54:08 mostly because we had our first child. And I was not used to the lack of sleep that that brought.
567. 00:54:16 So that meant that I was trying desperately to get some sleep. And then I would take those naps,
568. 00:54:21 but taking that 30 minutes to go do that for me seemed like I was losing a lot of time.
569. 00:54:28 But I knew that if I did that, I would get a lot more done in the afternoon. And that's something
570. 00:54:33 that you don't really trust that that's going to happen until you try it. It feels kind of two.
571. 00:54:39 It's one of those things. Yeah, yeah, it seems really weird to try it because I feel like I'm
572. 00:54:44 going to lose a lot of someone's going to notice that I'm missing because I was used to meetings
573. 00:54:48 all day long. So I would decline a meeting to go do this. And one, that didn't really go well,
574. 00:54:54 because people would see that it wasn't on like I didn't have room on my calendar. So I started
575. 00:54:58 booking meetings with myself over that time period so that it looked like I was busy at that time,
576. 00:55:02 even though I had nothing going on. That was very fun. You can you can spoof exchange in Office 365
577. 00:55:09 doing that. It's pretty easy. Well, if they're like most meetings, they were probably much,
578. 00:55:17 you were probably much more productive taking the nap instead of going to the meeting.
579. 00:55:21 So since then, I've learned what makes a good meeting and what's not. And I realized that I had
580. 00:55:26 very few true meetings. I had a lot of time that I spent on the phone and in the room with other
581. 00:55:32 people, but meeting to actually accomplish something was fairly rare. And yet I was on the phone or
582. 00:55:39 in a meeting room all day long. There you go. Death by meeting corporate America.
583. 00:55:44 So so far, we've talked about meetings and task management.
584. 00:55:47 Yeah. Welcome to the sleep revolution.
585. 00:55:48 So yes, I had a period when I was doing napping and I think I'm going to try to get back to that
586. 00:55:56 per this because although I feel like I'm getting pretty good sleep at night, it's disrupted.
587. 00:56:02 I know that because we have a four month old. So my wife is in and out of bed,
588. 00:56:06 taking care of baby in the middle of the night. I'm not really able to help in the middle of the
589. 00:56:10 night and she knows that. So I don't even try. But yeah, there's that whole thing. So I feel like
590. 00:56:18 I want to try taking naps in the day because I don't think I'm getting enough at night.
591. 00:56:22 Sure. That makes sense. And by the way, my wife and I have an understanding as well.
592. 00:56:27 So I don't I don't judge you. Some people honestly, honestly, I am a very deep sleeper.
593. 00:56:33 My wife is a very light sleeper. And then also a couple with the couple that with the fact that
594. 00:56:37 my seizure threshold is a lot lower, I guess, higher. However, you want to say that because of my
595. 00:56:44 diagnosis, it's it's basically we don't want to take any chances. Yeah, haven't had seizures in a
596. 00:56:48 long time. My doctor even the last time I went to him is like, well, so you want to come off your
597. 00:56:52 medication? And I'm like, well, sure. But what could happen? And you know, he's like, well,
598. 00:56:57 you might have a seizure. So do you drive? And yes, I drive everything. Oh, don't do it.
599. 00:57:03 So it's just kind of like not worth the risk, essentially. But yeah, it's it's it's interesting,
600. 00:57:10 though, because the this book really highlights to me the fact that like you can't play the superhero,
601. 00:57:18 you have to figure out how much sleep you actually need. And she's got a lot of different phrases
602. 00:57:24 and stories in here where I think just kind of like articulates you are in the camp of not getting
603. 00:57:30 enough sleep if this fits you. One of the things that stood out to me, because I've totally been
604. 00:57:34 here and done this, even with my professed attention that I give to getting enough sleep and getting
605. 00:57:41 enough quality sleep, page 46, she says, most of us force our reluctant brains, indeed, our
606. 00:57:45 reluctant selves to wake up with multiple alarms, often set five minutes apart on our phones,
607. 00:57:51 insistently nudging us toward what passes for consciousness. So I still do this when I have like
608. 00:57:57 a meeting or something early in the morning that I have to be at. For example, I went to Austin,
609. 00:58:05 Texas not too long ago. And you know, I'll set my alarm in the morning there because we've got
610. 00:58:09 our meetings at 830. I want to make sure that I absolutely 100% do not oversleep and miss that
611. 00:58:14 that meeting. And sometimes, you know, the alarm won't wake me up. I'll wake up before the alarm.
612. 00:58:19 Anyways, but that's just not not a chance I'm willing to take. But essentially, when I read this
613. 00:58:26 quote, it hit me that like the fact that I have to do that at all just illustrates that I'm really
614. 00:58:31 not getting as much sleep as I really need. But you're waking up without the alarm, most of the time,
615. 00:58:37 right? Sometimes. I use an app called Sleep Cycle, which all right, I've heard of this,
616. 00:58:44 kind of gets into the sleep tech that I put near the end because she's got a whole chapter on the
617. 00:58:48 technology. But this is one app that I think works pretty well. I've used some other stuff that
618. 00:58:54 does not work pretty well. Maybe we can talk about that when we get to the sleep tech session. But
619. 00:58:58 essentially, what Sleep Cycle does is you plug it in and you turn your phone over, you put it by
620. 00:59:03 your bed. And it uses the microphone to determine what sleep cycle you're in. So she talks in the
621. 00:59:10 book about the four stages of sleep. And essentially, there's the progression from when you just fall
622. 00:59:16 sleep where you're in light sleep to very deep sleep. And then the REM, the rapid eye movement
623. 00:59:21 sleep, that's where the restoration for your brain comes in. And so you go from light sleep to deep
624. 00:59:26 sleep back up to light sleep. And your breathing changes as you go through those different cycles.
625. 00:59:32 And even in the book, she talked about how your body temperature cools. And you basically like,
626. 00:59:37 don't move at all. When you get, when you get down to the deepest sleep, so the microphone will pick
627. 00:59:42 that up and determine which stages sleep that you're in. So it gives you analytics, essentially,
628. 00:59:47 of how well you slept, it even gives you a sleep score. But also, you can set an alarm, but it'll
629. 00:59:52 be in a range of 30 minutes. So if you say you want to get up by 630, what it will do is it will
630. 00:59:57 monitor your sleep between six and six 30 and pick the ideal point to wake you up. Because if you
631. 01:00:04 get woken up when you're in that deep sleep, then you wake up and you feel groggy, disoriented,
632. 01:00:10 and it's really hard to get going with your day. And sometimes that feeling lasts the entire day,
633. 01:00:15 like you just can't shake it. But if you get woken up when you're coming up out of your deep sleep
634. 01:00:19 and you're in your light sleep, then you, then you wake up in your alert and you feel refreshed,
635. 01:00:24 and you're ready to go. So this actually does make a huge difference. And to me personally,
636. 01:00:32 anyways, where I've started using this app, and so it'll kind of pick the ideal point between six
637. 01:00:37 and six 30, when you're in your lightest sleep possible, and the alarm will sound at that point.
638. 01:00:43 I tend to avoid apps like this, and it's not because they don't work, or I don't think they
639. 01:00:48 would be helpful. It's because I run my phone in airplane and do not disturb mode a lot,
640. 01:00:54 or I have the I have it on vibrate instead of the volume up. That's a more common one for me.
641. 01:00:59 And they don't always go off. Like they can't override some of that stuff.
642. 01:01:04 Like the built-in alarm can. I wish I could use this stuff, but I am not good about making sure
643. 01:01:11 my phone is set correctly to allow it to go off, and then it won't go off at all. And now I have
644. 01:01:16 an even bigger problem. So I wish I could use these things because I think they're kind of cool,
645. 01:01:21 but I don't because I forget. Is that bad? No, no. There's another version of this, obviously,
646. 01:01:31 that's not not built around an application. Actually, there's a lot of different ones. You
647. 01:01:36 could use a Fitbit, you could use those Apple Watch apps, for example, people sleep with their
648. 01:01:40 Apple watches on. I personally don't know how you can do that because the battery doesn't last long
649. 01:01:43 enough. You're gonna have to have watches. There you go. Actually, CPG Gray, I believe,
650. 01:01:48 talked about how he did it. Exactly. Do that at one point. But there's also hardware options
651. 01:01:53 for this. And let me just look this up real quickly because I backed a Kickstarter project.
652. 01:01:58 Yeah, here's the website. It's hello.is, and I will paste this here so you can put this in the
653. 01:02:06 show notes. But this is a little, it's like a little globe, and it looks kind of fashionable,
654. 01:02:13 but you set it on your nightstand, and then essentially it does what Sleep Cycle does.
655. 01:02:18 It's got lights that go with it. And the same concept, it will track your sleep and then wake
656. 01:02:25 you up in a 30 minute range when you're coming up out of your deep sleep. And then the way that
657. 01:02:29 you turn the alarm off is you just wave your hand over it, and it turns the alarm off. So,
658. 01:02:34 absolutely phenomenal idea. Implementation has not been great.
659. 01:02:39 Do you have hardware things? I do. Yeah, like I said, I backed it on Kickstarter,
660. 01:02:44 so I got the first gen one, and it was like six to eight months late. Finally got it was super
661. 01:02:50 excited, and the app was garbage. They do update it consistently. I don't know how much they can
662. 01:02:57 update the hardware. But it looks like it's gotten a lot better. I just had not a great
663. 01:03:04 experience with it, and I tried to use it for quite a while, and eventually gave up on it just
664. 01:03:09 used Sleep Cycle, because if I'm traveling, for example, I'm not going to have this with me anyways,
665. 01:03:14 so I don't want sleep data in multiple locations. I believe now that kind of is remedied with the
666. 01:03:22 health kit stuff, so I think Sleep Cycle ties into Health Kit now, and this does as well.
667. 01:03:26 That wasn't the case six months ago, a year ago, whatever, when I was messing around with all this
668. 01:03:33 stuff, also this thing, in addition to having this unit that you plug into the wall and puts on your
669. 01:03:38 nightstand, there's a little pill they call it that clips on your pillowcase, and that's the thing
670. 01:03:42 that actually has the microphone. That has a round battery that you have to replace about every year,
671. 01:03:50 which isn't a lot, but I don't want the battery to die, and then my alarm not go off, because I
672. 01:03:57 forgot to change the battery. It says, "We'll last about a year. I've never actually tested it to see
673. 01:04:04 how long it will go." I just see a lot of failure points with this that I'm not willing to take a
674. 01:04:11 chance on, but it's a really cool idea, and you can even get multiple sleep pills at home, so you
675. 01:04:16 could have one for you, one for your wife, and then you can even have separate alarms based off of
676. 01:04:21 that if you wanted to. It can handle multiple user profiles, so to speak. The problem I have with
677. 01:04:27 all this tech, since we're going to go ahead and start on our tech, is that I don't travel a lot,
678. 01:04:36 but when I do, I don't want to be tied to these other systems. There are some occasions when I'm
679. 01:04:44 in a place where there's not a good internet signal, and I may or may not have an outlet that I can
680. 01:04:50 use for it. I get a little bit leery of using stuff like this, because I don't know. I don't want to
681. 01:04:57 become dependent on it, I guess, as my hang up, because I feel like if I become dependent on it,
682. 01:05:02 then I've got another issue where I'm somewhere new. I'm visiting someone, and now I can't sleep,
683. 01:05:08 which just adds to the stress of a situation of the whole travel bit, and I just don't want to deal
684. 01:05:14 with that. I agree, but I also don't go camping as much as you apparently. When I travel,
685. 01:05:22 it's actually more important for me to use this type of stuff, because this provides a little
686. 01:05:27 bit of familiarity and systems when I'm traveling where all the other stuff I have no control over.
687. 01:05:32 I went to Austin, my flight got canceled because of quote-unquote weather, but United wouldn't pay
688. 01:05:39 for a hotel even though it was no weather. You were brave on United. Well, it was before the
689. 01:05:45 guy got dragged off. That's the point. I was complaining for a few days, and then I'm like,
690. 01:05:49 "I guess my experience wasn't so bad." It could have been a lot worse. Yeah, but in that particular
691. 01:05:55 instance, there was a lot of stuff going on in Austin. I couldn't find a hotel room. I had to
692. 01:06:00 stay at some hotel that I normally would not stay at. It was not a real great experience.
693. 01:06:05 Pretty loud. Walls were pretty thin. In that particular scenario, like I said,
694. 01:06:11 sleep's really important to me. If I don't have the supports, then it could be a very long night
695. 01:06:18 and a very long next day, which is what happened anyways, because I had to get up so early. I had
696. 01:06:22 to get up at four in the morning. Having to get up that early through my body off anyways, but
697. 01:06:28 not being able to have these tools in place. Another thing that I use whenever I travel,
698. 01:06:34 I have special headphones for blocking out noise. Let me see if I can find these real quick.
699. 01:06:41 Are these the Bose? They're not. They are called bed phones.
700. 01:06:47 I found them. Let me send you the link here. This, again, was, I think, if not a Kickstarter,
701. 01:06:55 like some sort of crowdfunding project. I've had these forever. Essentially, what they are
702. 01:07:01 are very thin headphones with a huge cushion on the actual headphone itself.
703. 01:07:07 If you fall asleep like the person in the picture on the right and you have a headphone in,
704. 01:07:14 you're not going to wake up and your ear is going to be hurting. Interesting.
705. 01:07:18 They have a very slim profile. They're not like the Apple EarPods or anything like that
706. 01:07:22 where they are hard. They stick out because that causes, obviously, a lot of discomfort.
707. 01:07:28 I have a pair of these that I will bring whenever I travel. Just in case I'm in that hotel room,
708. 01:07:33 for example, and there's a lot of noise, and I will put on some low instrumental music to help
709. 01:07:39 me fall asleep. Something like brain FM works great for this. They've got sleep programs in there.
710. 01:07:44 There's a lot of applications that you can buy now with those, what do they call them,
711. 01:07:48 binaural beats or whatever. They're like the sound patterns which are proven to help you fall asleep.
712. 01:07:55 I never really got those to work very well, but the headphones are a big help sometimes.
713. 01:08:02 Interesting. Essentially, the way my brain works, I always think worst case scenario while I'm
714. 01:08:07 traveling. What's the worst thing that happened? Then I try and control what I can.
715. 01:08:12 Makes sense. I just got back from a trip down in St. Louis. One of my wife's friends has got
716. 01:08:18 married down there. I get it. Sleeping in hotels, I've done a lot of that in the past.
717. 01:08:25 I'm not a huge fan because there's enough other people that have such different sleep habits that
718. 01:08:30 just make zero sense to me whatsoever. They'll keep me up regardless. Maybe they'll wake me up early.
719. 01:08:37 Well, they won't wake me up early. I'll wake them up early and pay back.
720. 01:08:42 It's not fun. For me, it has a lot to do with what pillow do I use and how comfortable is the bed.
721. 01:08:52 My wife has gotten to where she sleeps with a white noise machine. She's got an app on her phone.
722. 01:08:57 I couldn't tell you what it is. She has that running. That seems to help quite a bit.
723. 01:09:04 Drowning out some of the other stuff. Outside of that, it's all the habits that I have and how I
724. 01:09:10 go to bed that help me out. I don't really get into the tech thing.
725. 01:09:14 I think that's okay. The tech, I would say, that my big takeaway from the technology section of
726. 01:09:20 this book in particular is that a lot of the technology just isn't there. I used Hello as the
727. 01:09:26 example where it's a great idea, implementation-wise, the technology really doesn't match up with the
728. 01:09:35 desired and promised user experience. Even the jawbone up and the Fitbit and all that type of stuff.
729. 01:09:42 It's great in theory that this thing can sense exactly when you're coming up out of your deep
730. 01:09:47 sleep and wake you up. I question how effectively it can really monitor that.
731. 01:09:54 A sleep cycle does a pretty good job, but it's on my nightstand. It's not right next to me.
732. 01:10:01 How does it really know? If I turn to the other way or I turn over in the middle of the night,
733. 01:10:06 does that throw it off? I'm sure that they've got team and researchers that is accommodating
734. 01:10:13 for that. They recognize that that stuff is happening. It feels to me right now,
735. 01:10:18 people are understanding how important sleep is. There's this technology that's coming out that's
736. 01:10:22 trying to help facilitate that. We're in the early stages of this yet. There's not really
737. 01:10:29 anything that's like, "Yep, this will work 100% of the time. This is foolproof. This is awesome.
738. 01:10:33 I haven't found anything like that yet." This is also why I tend to avoid some of the activity
739. 01:10:38 trackers. If I start using tech like this, I do one of two things. I either become dependent on it,
740. 01:10:47 which I don't want to do, because then what happens if it doesn't work or the update breaks
741. 01:10:52 it or something? I just don't want to depend on it in that way. If I start using this stuff,
742. 01:10:59 it can, doesn't always, but in my case, I think it would. It would keep me from paying attention to
743. 01:11:06 my own body. If I wake up and I'm tired when I first get up, I didn't get enough sleep.
744. 01:11:14 If I wake up and I feel rested and I'm ready to go start a fire, if I wake up that way,
745. 01:11:20 then I know I got enough sleep. If I wake up tired, that tells me I should probably take a nap
746. 01:11:24 that day despite me not doing it. That's my sense, is that if I start using these things,
747. 01:11:32 these trackers and such, I might lose that touch of understanding of myself and that sense of,
748. 01:11:39 "Am I in a good place or not?" I really don't want to lose that sense, because I feel like that's
749. 01:11:44 extremely helpful in the long run. I completely agree with that. I think where technology can help
750. 01:11:51 is as a substitute for the sleeping pills that she mentions. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah.
751. 01:11:57 That whole section really made me angry. She talks about how some of the different ones
752. 01:12:05 caused people to do things. Yeah, and Lunesta, I think, was another one, where they actually
753. 01:12:12 have in the warnings, you may do a whole bunch of stuff and not realize it until the next morning,
754. 01:12:17 which just scares me. Essentially, the whole idea behind the sleeping pills, even if you're not
755. 01:12:23 doing those, even if you're doing something mild, you can get melatonin pills, which, again,
756. 01:12:28 I bring those sometimes when I'm traveling, because I usually am pretty anxious at night
757. 01:12:33 when I'm traveling. If I just want to not take a chance, I'll take a melatonin pill, but that's
758. 01:12:38 natural. Your body's producing melatonin anyways, as long as you're not staring at blue light
759. 01:12:43 till midnight, but we'll get into that a little bit. But she mentions that 14% of people are taking
760. 01:12:50 these sleeping pills not occasionally, but every single night. And she had a phrase in that section,
761. 01:12:57 she says, "We're overtired, but we can't sleep," which obviously there's a bigger issue here then.
762. 01:13:04 Sounds like our baby. Yeah. That gets into the whole test management thing, I think. But before we
763. 01:13:11 get there, the whole idea behind sleeping pills, like from a marketing perspective, this is genius,
764. 01:13:18 because your target market is everybody. And essentially what they're doing is they are
765. 01:13:25 the answer to a manufactured need that potentially everybody deals with. There's a lot of manufactured
766. 01:13:32 demand for these sleeping pills, especially as it becomes more and more important, and people
767. 01:13:41 start to realize the importance of sleep. She had a whole section on the history of sleep,
768. 01:13:46 which personally I didn't really like kind of reminded me of what's that book we read, The Shallows.
769. 01:13:52 It was shorter, thankfully. But to sum up that whole section, she talks about how sleep used to
770. 01:14:00 be really important. People thought it was great, and then people started shifting and believing that
771. 01:14:06 you didn't really need that much sleep, and it was kind of a badge of honor not to get enough sleep.
772. 01:14:10 And now she's kind of advocating for, and I believe what we're kind of at this tipping point where
773. 01:14:15 people are again realizing the importance of sleep. And all these uber productive people are saying
774. 01:14:20 that the reason that they're so productive and the reason they get so much done is because
775. 01:14:24 they are well rested. Like that sounds great. And everybody wants wants to achieve that now.
776. 01:14:32 But they're so anxious, and there's so many other things, there's so much stimuli, there's so much
777. 01:14:37 stuff that we're dealing with throughout the day that when it comes time to go to sleep,
778. 01:14:41 you're like, okay, now I've got seven hours, seven and a half hours to get sleep.
779. 01:14:45 Let's go to sleep right now. And they can't. So then it's like, well, how do I do that?
780. 01:14:51 I know I'll take a pill. That's the easy button, but we're not dealing with the root of the issue,
781. 01:14:58 we're just treating the symptom. And if you just treat the symptom, it's really not helping the
782. 01:15:05 disease at all. In fact, she says that the sleeping pills on page 58 only give you an extra three
783. 01:15:11 to 34 minutes of sleep. But then, like I mentioned, they have tons of side effects.
784. 01:15:16 Right. And some of which scare the crap out of me.
785. 01:15:20 Yep, definitely. I just don't want to think about that.
786. 01:15:23 Tell me about this blue light thing. You've mentioned it a couple times,
787. 01:15:27 and I know that it has a pretty big impact on you. And I feel like it has an impact on me,
788. 01:15:32 but why don't you explain it? It has an impact on you, whether you think it does or not.
789. 01:15:37 I get that. Maybe that's what I should say.
790. 01:15:41 Hunds or research. If you go to the first people I really noticed
791. 01:15:45 took an approach to solve this with the technology is flux. So the website, I believe, is JustGetFlux.com.
792. 01:15:54 And flux is an application which has been on Mac and Windows 2, I believe, for a long time,
793. 01:15:59 which changed the color of your computer monitor after you went to sleep. So blue light is essentially
794. 01:16:07 the light that is emitted from your electronic devices, your television, your computer, even your
795. 01:16:11 phone, that makes your brain think that it is still daytime. So your body is naturally wired to,
796. 01:16:21 once the sun goes down, maybe you'd light a candle or something, you'd have some warm,
797. 01:16:26 orange-ish light. But your body still knew that it was night and it would produce the melatonin,
798. 01:16:32 which would eventually help you fall asleep. But if you're staring at these screens, they are
799. 01:16:36 emitting this blue light, which is much more similar to the type of light that you see during the day.
800. 01:16:42 So what it's signaling to your body is that it's not nighttime yet, so don't produce the melatonin.
801. 01:16:47 So if you're staring at your computer screen or you're staring at your phone until 10 p.m. at night
802. 01:16:52 and the sunset four hours ago, your body naturally has this cycle where it gets ready for sleep,
803. 01:16:59 but you haven't started that yet. And so you're continually telling your body, "Go, go, go,
804. 01:17:04 push, push, push." And then you get to the point where you are exhausted, but because you've been
805. 01:17:09 looking at this blue light, you can't fall asleep. And so your body may be exhausted, but your mind
806. 01:17:14 is still racing. Exactly. So what Flux does is it changes when the sun goes down and it can even
807. 01:17:21 use your location to look at your local sunset sunrise. It will change your screen and you can
808. 01:17:28 control the temperature, but over time it will make it more and more orange-ish to represent the
809. 01:17:34 warm light of a candle light as opposed to the harsh blue light, which is just jolting and keeps
810. 01:17:40 your body awake. So iOS now has a feature called Night Shift, which somewhat does the same thing,
811. 01:17:47 but prior to Night Shift, if you were to ever take your phone in the middle of the night and unlock
812. 01:17:52 it, for example, and you're blasted with this light, you're like, "Ah, my eyes." That's the intensity
813. 01:17:58 of that blue light. And so even if you don't realize it, using something like Flux or Night Shift to a
814. 01:18:05 certain extent, but Flux is a lot better, in my opinion, it's a lot more severe, a lot more harsh,
815. 01:18:10 and some people will say, "Well, it looks so orange. I can't use my screen." Well, you shouldn't be
816. 01:18:13 using your screen at this time anyway, if Flux is that. You shouldn't know that. But what it does
817. 01:18:21 is that it severely reduces the strain on your eyes. If you don't believe the blue light thing at all,
818. 01:18:29 it's just causing your body not to work as hard. But the Flux website, they've got tons and tons
819. 01:18:34 of research papers which show essentially what I just unpacked in a couple of minutes in much
820. 01:18:40 more detail. And so if you have a scientific brain like Joe's, maybe you want to go read that research.
821. 01:18:46 Some of it, I suppose, can be interesting. It's all interesting, Mike. It's all interesting.
822. 01:18:51 The gist of it is that Flux gives you indications that, "Hey, you shouldn't be using your computer
823. 01:18:57 anymore." And then even if you have to, it makes it easier for you to fall asleep when you do.
824. 01:19:02 It'll even give you notifications saying, "Hey, you've got to get up in nine hours."
825. 01:19:06 So, dummy, put your computer to bed. Yeah. Have you the Night Shift thing, maybe it's not Night Shift,
826. 01:19:11 the alarm part of iOS has a bedtime feature now. Have you seen this? I use this. I love this.
827. 01:19:17 Yep. Yeah. I think it's a really cool idea. But again, iOS is getting to the point where
828. 01:19:24 they're recognizing that this stuff is happening. People are using their phones all hours of the
829. 01:19:28 night and they're trying to implement this stuff to get people to make more effective habits. I
830. 01:19:32 think that's awesome. I also think that it's not as good as something like Flux though.
831. 01:19:39 And I don't want to diminish what they're doing because doing it at all is good.
832. 01:19:45 But for me, like I said, I discovered Flux a long time ago. And in my opinion, it's way better.
833. 01:19:51 The people behind Flux live, breathe, and eat this stuff. Their mission is to develop this
834. 01:19:58 application which is going to give you the maximum benefit in this particular area.
835. 01:20:03 Whereas Night Shift is just a feature, the bedtime thing is just a feature that,
836. 01:20:06 yeah, you can use it. Hopefully people will use it. But if they don't use it all well,
837. 01:20:10 they're still going to use all the other features that are built into the operating system.
838. 01:20:15 It's more a case of this is one of many things versus this is the only thing. And obviously,
839. 01:20:21 the company that this is their only thing, it's going to be, in my opinion, a better product.
840. 01:20:26 Yeah. The reason I like the bedtime feature, there's two things. One, it has the alert that
841. 01:20:34 tells you, hey, you should not be on your phone. You should be going to bed now. I like that because
842. 01:20:38 it's kind of an indicator to me that, okay, at this point, I should not be on my phone or it's
843. 01:20:43 going to impact my sleep. It's pretty helpful to me to have that. The other thing I really like
844. 01:20:48 about it is the sounds that it can use for an alarm are not jarring in any way. They're slowly
845. 01:20:56 progressing. They come in easy and then they progressively get louder. I love that because it
846. 01:21:02 doesn't. One, my phone, I don't do any of these tracking systems that know where I'm at in my
847. 01:21:08 sleep cycle at all. I don't know any of that. And I don't know that I want to. I think I would
848. 01:21:14 rather worry about my bedtime than I would about my time getting up. But anyway, that's beside the
849. 01:21:19 point. I'll get there in a minute. But I like that the sounds that they use are slowly progressing
850. 01:21:24 because then it slowly pulls me out instead of jarring me and giving me that adrenaline shot
851. 01:21:28 and making me like, "Whoa, it just happened." I don't want to do that in the morning. I like the
852. 01:21:34 slowly get me up thing, but at a certain time. For some reason, I like that. So that's the part I
853. 01:21:40 really enjoy about the bedtime piece. It does do some tracking to know, did you sleep that long?
854. 01:21:47 It's only tracking, when did I set my phone down and plug it in? It's working off of that,
855. 01:21:54 which isn't very accurate in some cases. It's pretty accurate for me. But that's mostly because
856. 01:22:01 I go to bed when that thing tells me it's bedtime and I fall asleep very quickly. So it's fairly
857. 01:22:07 accurate for me, but I would imagine for the general public it's not at all.
858. 01:22:11 Right. Now, so the situation that you just described, then this is the thing for you.
859. 01:22:20 Hello, I'm your keyboard. Yeah. And I have one of these as well.
860. 01:22:24 This is an enormous alarm clock light, essentially. It's the Philips HF 3520 wake-up light with
861. 01:22:35 colored sunrise simulation. Oh my gosh. So this is the inverse of the sunset and the flux effect.
862. 01:22:43 All right. So if you want to get up early prior to the sun getting up and you want to be naturally
863. 01:22:52 led out of your deep sleep by a specific time, then this is the thing because what this will do
864. 01:22:57 is if you were to crank this all the way up, it is very, very bright. But let's say you set your
865. 01:23:02 alarm for 6 a.m. on this. What it will do is it will both with sound and with the light,
866. 01:23:08 there's a bunch of different sounds you can choose from their little nature sounds, waves,
867. 01:23:12 birds, things like that. Things that are not jarring. Okay. So let's say you set it for 6 a.m.
868. 01:23:17 at 5 30, it will start to glow and the sounds will start and it will get progressively brighter
869. 01:23:22 and progressively louder until the time that you have to be awake. Interesting. And so as your room
870. 01:23:28 gets louder and as it gets brighter, your body naturally is coming up out of that deep sleep,
871. 01:23:33 but it's not just blaring the song that you chose for your or the sound for your alarm.
872. 01:23:38 Right. At that specific time. So this also can do what you're talking about. The thing I don't like
873. 01:23:42 about this, just me personally, is that there is no way to turn off that clock display.
874. 01:23:48 Oh. So that means that if you were to wake up in the middle of the night and you see that,
875. 01:23:54 oh my gosh, it's only three in the morning. Oh, and then me, like I'll take that time,
876. 01:23:59 whatever I woke up be like, well, if I can fall asleep right away, I can get two more sleep cycles
877. 01:24:03 in. So that obviously is counterintuitive. I don't like to have the time displayed in my
878. 01:24:12 bedroom at all. We have that done already. So I like to know that. And honestly, it's helpful to
879. 01:24:18 us because then we know when Hazel, our youngest is waking up or going to sleep and does she need
880. 01:24:23 to go back to sleep? Did she eat an hour ago? So she doesn't need to eat right now. We use it for
881. 01:24:29 that because then you know, have the head two hours? Yeah, we kind of need to know that.
882. 01:24:35 So I already have a clock that shows the time right now. My thing is,
883. 01:24:39 this might be perfect for you. Maybe. But the thing is, I get up at five and my wife doesn't
884. 01:24:43 always get up until about seven, seven thirty. Yeah, that's the other issue with this is that
885. 01:24:49 you could mean, obviously, you could set it on one side of the bed and maybe it'll wake you up
886. 01:24:55 and not your wife. You can press a button and then have it instantly turn off again.
887. 01:24:59 Yeah. But my guess would be that it would affect the other person as well.
888. 01:25:04 Yeah. I think if we got to have the same time, that would be awesome.
889. 01:25:07 Yeah. So I think that for this to really work, you would have to have an agreed upon sleep time
890. 01:25:15 and wake time. As much as I would love for that to happen. We had this conversation. So when we
891. 01:25:23 were coming back from St. Louis, my wife got a little interested in this and I told her I was
892. 01:25:29 a little bit behind on reading it. I wasn't sure I was going to complete it before we recorded this
893. 01:25:34 morning. So she was kind enough to read it to me as we were driving. And so it was interesting
894. 01:25:39 because that led to a few conversations between us about, you know, how much sleep do you need and
895. 01:25:44 does that affect how you go to bed and all this? It was an interesting conversation, but
896. 01:25:48 she was very clear to call out, yeah, she needs close to nine hours of sleep. She's one of those
897. 01:25:52 that needs more than most. And this would not go over well. Like us getting our wake up times to a
898. 01:26:00 line would require going to bed at different times. And we don't like doing that. So we have to
899. 01:26:05 shift at one side or the other. Gosh, this thing would be cool though, but I would become dependent
900. 01:26:11 on it again. Let's back up a little bit and talk about the test management thing and
901. 01:26:20 yeah, that relates to sleep because this was one of my big takeaways. Okay, I sense this common theme
902. 01:26:27 kind of throughout this this whole book. In page 63, for example, she talks about how millennials are
903. 01:26:33 the most stressed generation, almost a third saying that they can't sleep because they are
904. 01:26:38 thinking of all the things they need to do or did not get done. She talks about how 60% of people
905. 01:26:44 have fallen asleep while holding their phone. She talks about how lack of sleep can cause
906. 01:26:49 irreversible loss of brain cells. On page 102, she talks about how sleep allows you to process
907. 01:26:54 things better and less emotionally because the amygdala can't hijack things. The amygdala is the
908. 01:27:02 emotional response that triggers the fight or flight response in your brain. And essentially,
909. 01:27:07 as I'm reading all this stuff, I'm thinking of David Allen in the whole mind like water concept.
910. 01:27:13 How if you don't have a system that you can trust, then you can't respond appropriately to any of
911. 01:27:20 these given impacts. David Allen would say that like he uses the example when you throw up a pebble
912. 01:27:24 in into still water. What happens is that the the ripples will emanate from the point of impact
913. 01:27:29 in direct response to the size of the impact. They're not going to be
914. 01:27:34 bigger on one side and less on another side unless you threw it at an angle or whatever.
915. 01:27:40 In essence, his approach to task management then is that you want to respond to things
916. 01:27:45 appropriately. You don't want to fly off the handle when things are not a big deal.
917. 01:27:49 When something is really major, you want to be able to recognize that you want to be able to
918. 01:27:53 get your family out of the house immediately when it is burning down. But you don't want
919. 01:27:59 to respond to that email immediately with a super emotional response. You want to sleep on it
920. 01:28:04 for a night before you. And then usually after that, you don't want to send that email.
921. 01:28:09 So little things like this. And what I got out of this book and pertaining to this is that
922. 01:28:16 sleep is one of the things that can cause your system to go haywire and can instantly throw you
923. 01:28:24 into that state of emergency scan modality that David Allen talks about.
924. 01:28:29 Page 167, she says lying about putting out imaginary fires is one of the most
925. 01:28:35 draining things we can do. And instantly, when I read that, I'm like, yeah, emergency scan modality.
926. 01:28:39 Where you're living your life like a firefighter, you know that your system can't handle everything.
927. 01:28:44 You know, you can't keep up with everything. You know, there's a bunch of stuff you're not
928. 01:28:47 getting to. So what you end up doing from a task management perspective, getting things done
929. 01:28:53 perspective, David Allen perspective, is that you are scanning the horizon, looking for the
930. 01:28:58 next thing that you forgot to do, looking for that fire to pop up. And then you go and you
931. 01:29:03 deal with the thing that is urgent. And then you go back into your emergency scan modality,
932. 01:29:07 you're just scanning the horizon looking for the next fire that you got to put out.
933. 01:29:10 And when it comes to productivity and goal achievement and creating the future that you want,
934. 01:29:18 which really is the heart behind bookworm, I would say is that we want we're reading these books,
935. 01:29:24 not just to check them off on a list, but because we want to improve ourselves.
936. 01:29:30 And I think last time you asked me like, how do you actually implement the stuff that you read?
937. 01:29:33 And I mentioned that I believe it has a cumulative effect. It gives you a bigger toolbox with which
938. 01:29:38 to solve your problems that that you encounter. And I 100% believe that that's true. So if we're
939. 01:29:45 going to do all of this stuff, then let's make sure that we don't throw it all out the window
940. 01:29:51 by not getting enough sleep. You can have the best system. You can read the most books.
941. 01:29:58 You can do everything right. And if you're not getting enough sleep, you are in Ariana Huffington's
942. 01:30:04 words, you're legally drunk. We would not advocate for people coming to work and doing their job
943. 01:30:11 when they're drunk. But we would, and we hold people up on a pedestal who come to work and do
944. 01:30:18 their job even when they're tired, even when they're exhausted. But the decisions that they're
945. 01:30:22 making, especially if they are higher level, if they're management level, if they're CEO level,
946. 01:30:28 if the decisions that you're making are affecting other people, like this is the worst thing that
947. 01:30:32 you can do. Yeah. And it just creates a lot of mind. Yeah, it creates a ton of problems. Those
948. 01:30:39 bad decisions, they can be fatal, not just by you deciding to get in a car and drive when you're
949. 01:30:44 drowsy. You know, it's same decision getting in the car deciding to drive when you're drunk.
950. 01:30:48 Like if you haven't sub-24 hours, there should be a test that you could do to pull when you pull
951. 01:30:54 people over and go to jail because your blood alcohol level, essentially, your brain alcohol
952. 01:31:01 level, because you haven't gotten enough sleep at a certain point. Your brain sleep level is too low.
953. 01:31:05 Yeah, you're putting people in the exact same situation. You're putting all their people's lives
954. 01:31:10 at risk when you do that sort of thing. And that's just like the severity of that when I read this,
955. 01:31:16 like, wow, this is a really big deal. One of the sections I really liked was the part where she's
956. 01:31:22 explaining how to get good sleep or how to get to sleep. And so my process that I use whenever I go
957. 01:31:30 to sleep is very simple. I try to kind of go into this whole fantasy imagination world,
958. 01:31:36 which sounds kind of weird, but that's where the Hobbit has come in from me lately because
959. 01:31:39 it's definitely a fiction world. But I've done this a lot, like just made up stories in my mind
960. 01:31:46 whenever I'm going like I lay down and my mind just starts running with random fictional stories.
961. 01:31:50 And I think that's what helps me fall asleep is because it's not I'm not worrying about work.
962. 01:31:55 I'm not worrying about code that I'm writing or anything like that. I'm just off in this fictional
963. 01:32:00 world. And she didn't really talk about that, but I've talked to some folks who do the same thing.
964. 01:32:05 And I feel like that's a fairly common thing for people who fall asleep right away.
965. 01:32:09 Folks who are like me who less than five minutes you're out. That seems to be one of the things
966. 01:32:15 that people talk about, at least that I've run into, that that's how they fall asleep right away.
967. 01:32:20 Have you ever heard of this? Am I just really weird and running across really weird people?
968. 01:32:24 Maybe, like I said, I naturally have trouble falling asleep. And so she talks about this
969. 01:32:30 478 method, which I've tried a couple times. I haven't gotten to the point where I've fallen
970. 01:32:36 asleep using it, but I think I can see the effect that it has. I think it's a trigger.
971. 01:32:43 That was what I thought. I think it's just developing the habit. What is it called?
972. 01:32:47 Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, where you're creating that trigger where your mind knows
973. 01:32:51 what to do. And that's what that is.
974. 01:32:54 Yeah. And so essentially just to summarize this real quickly, the 478 method, you breathe in for
975. 01:33:02 four counts, and then you hold it for seven counts, and then you breathe out with, as she described
976. 01:33:07 it, a whooshing sound for eight counts. And you do this over and over again. And when I was doing
977. 01:33:14 this, what I found is that holding it for seven counts and then breathing out for eight counts,
978. 01:33:20 after doing this a couple times, felt like I was a little bit short of breath, which maybe is the
979. 01:33:25 desired effect. I could see that being the thing that if you just do that consistently,
980. 01:33:30 that's enough to knock you out. Because she says if you do this consistently, you can get it to
981. 01:33:35 the point where you can do this and fall asleep consistently after only one minute.
982. 01:33:38 And this is not the first place that I've heard of this either. So I do actually believe that this
983. 01:33:44 works. But I don't know, just following the process, the way my brain works, I'm so focused on,
984. 01:33:50 okay, did I do this exactly right? That I don't think I could.
985. 01:33:53 You're worried about it before 70. Yeah, exactly.
986. 01:33:55 Was that three and a half or was that four? Exactly. Like that, seriously, this is the
987. 01:33:59 stuff I think about in my holding this long enough. Am I going too fast, too slow?
988. 01:34:04 Like she didn't give me enough details. That's what's going through my head as I'm implementing
989. 01:34:08 this. And I'm just like, this is completely counterintuitive, counterproductive. This isn't
990. 01:34:12 going to work for me. So I'm sure that it. Yeah. One of the other things that she said, though,
991. 01:34:17 that I think I can totally see this having a big impact on me is on page 211 not to go back to
992. 01:34:24 task management, but kind of. She says, finish every day, finish every day and be done with it.
993. 01:34:30 You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
994. 01:34:33 Forget them as fast as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. My takeaway from this is when you are
995. 01:34:38 done with the day, finish the day. And this is where the evening routine, evening ritual comes in.
996. 01:34:44 But a big part of this for me is to not think about what happened anymore.
997. 01:34:49 And so I've got this daily reflection template that I've set up in day one in Launch Center Pro,
998. 01:34:54 and I do it occasionally. Yeah. I know theoretically, intellectually, that I should be doing this
999. 01:35:00 consistently. And this, when I read that, it just reminded me that like, that's what that is doing.
1000. 01:35:06 It's not just to have a record of this stuff. It is so that you can wipe the slate clean at the
1001. 01:35:12 end of the day, and you don't have to think about these things anymore. And even if you've got a
1002. 01:35:18 task management system, I find myself still struggling with this, where I can have everything
1003. 01:35:23 in my task management system. But because I haven't formally erased the blackboard of my mind,
1004. 01:35:29 which is what journaling and reflection does, I have trouble disconnecting from that stuff.
1005. 01:35:35 At the end of my workday, I do a shut down ritual. We've talked about this before.
1006. 01:35:40 And part of that for me has incorporated a brain dump. Like what she's talking about. I just go
1007. 01:35:47 through what is it I use? I'm going to look it up. I'm going to find a link to it. I use,
1008. 01:35:53 there's a trigger list that David Allen has for GTD whenever you do a brain dump. And I run
1009. 01:35:59 through that thing, which is long, to be honest. But I run through it very quickly, and it triggers
1010. 01:36:05 anything I think I may have to do. And I dump them into inboxes. And then in the morning,
1011. 01:36:10 I go through my inboxes. So that serves as kind of a brain dump for me. That way, I know the system
1012. 01:36:15 at least has things captured. And then I can go through them later. And that helps me a lot to
1013. 01:36:20 not worry about it. But I do it at the end of my workday, not before I go to bed. And I do that
1014. 01:36:25 because I don't want to be thinking about work stuff when I go spend time with my family. That's
1015. 01:36:29 why I do that. Yeah, and that makes sense. But even from a non work or task perspective,
1016. 01:36:34 I find personally that I can be thinking about what happened during the day, even if there's no
1017. 01:36:40 action item associated with it. Like you have to follow up with this person on this. Yeah,
1018. 01:36:44 it's just constantly thinking about, well, you know, that kind of stunk or yeah, I really enjoyed,
1019. 01:36:49 you know, that experience. And I find that I will continually throw these things around in my brain,
1020. 01:36:57 roll them over and over and over and over and over again until I actually get it off the,
1021. 01:37:02 off the mind and on the paper, so to speak, even though it's digital paper.
1022. 01:37:06 Getting into a screen. We've been going on this for a while now. Let's shift over to action
1023. 01:37:14 items because I think that's going to incorporate like, what are we going to do for our sleep habits
1024. 01:37:17 now that we've read the book? I think that's going to incorporate that. Yeah. So for me,
1025. 01:37:22 I'm going to go to bed. That's all I wrote on this list. Because I know,
1026. 01:37:29 I say that I go to sleep at 9.30 quarter to 10 ish, but I've been pretty bad, especially the last
1027. 01:37:38 month or two about, you know, it's pushing 9.30 before I even start going to bed, which means it's
1028. 01:37:43 10 10 15 before I'm asleep. And that's not good. You know, that puts me down below that seven hours
1029. 01:37:49 of sleep. And that's not a good day if I do that. So I want to be better about that. So I'm going to
1030. 01:37:54 be more particular about going to bed and starting my evening ritual of getting me ready and getting
1031. 01:38:00 to bed. I'm going to be a little more diligent about that. To kind of go with that, I'm going to
1032. 01:38:06 try to get my nap habit back. It's been a while since I've been into the nap habit that since I know
1033. 01:38:12 that I can fall asleep pretty easily. And I know that I like when I take a nap, I don't need an
1034. 01:38:19 alarm of any kind. I will just wake up 20 minutes later after I fall asleep. I know that. And it's
1035. 01:38:25 never failed me. I don't know why I can do that, but I love that I can do that. So sorry for those
1036. 01:38:30 of you who can't do it. I'm going to take advantage of it because I can. So I want to get that habit
1037. 01:38:37 back. It's pretty easy for me to notice that I'm pretty tired after lunch, since at that point,
1038. 01:38:42 I've been up for seven hours, seven and a half, eight hours almost. So I'm going to try to start
1039. 01:38:48 developing that habit of taking a nap after lunch whenever I go back to quote unquote work at that
1040. 01:38:54 point. We'll see how that goes. Hopefully that'll help me to get to a point where I'm getting enough
1041. 01:38:58 sleep in a day. That's my goal in all of this is I don't think overall I'm getting enough sleep
1042. 01:39:04 per day. And I'm trying to get I think roughly 30 to 45 minutes more on average. That's what I'm
1043. 01:39:11 shooting for. Nice. So my first action item is actually relating to a section which we didn't even
1044. 01:39:19 get to which is okay. There's a lot of good stuff in this one. There's yeah, there's a lot of good
1045. 01:39:22 stuff in this book, which is how do you get enough sleep with kids? Let me just real briefly touch
1046. 01:39:29 on this and say if you have kids, because it's hard, it's even more important to get sleep when
1047. 01:39:35 you can you have to be even more diligent and even militant. Yeah. Bedtimes and things like that,
1048. 01:39:43 because you can't just accept the fact that oh, my sleep is going to be terrible for a period
1049. 01:39:48 because it does have real very real impact. And essentially, if you are robbing yourself of sleep,
1050. 01:39:55 you are robbing the people who you love of the real you going back to the emergency
1051. 01:40:01 scamodality. Like I don't want my kids to remember me as super emotional, fly off the handle. Everything
1052. 01:40:06 was a big deal with dad. Yeah, that's not that's not the memories I want them to have. So
1053. 01:40:13 I want to instill in them that sleep is important, but also this is one thing that she brought up,
1054. 01:40:19 making bedtime fun and positive for my kids. And I don't know exactly what this looks like yet,
1055. 01:40:24 but I can tell you that couple of my kids with older ones, they totally get it. They are fine
1056. 01:40:29 going to bed, but the younger ones, it's like it's time for bed. No. Yeah. So, my goal is to think
1057. 01:40:37 about how to change that reaction. And we do have a routine that we follow and we do like read
1058. 01:40:43 stories at night before we go to bed and stuff like that. But I need to think on this and see if
1059. 01:40:49 there's anything else I can do to just encourage them that the bedtime routine is not only important,
1060. 01:40:55 but it's also fun. So we had a bit of an issue with our oldest not wanting to go to bed. This
1061. 01:41:01 probably been about a year and a half ago. She was about two and a half at the time. So she's younger,
1062. 01:41:06 so keep that in mind. And what we started doing was telling her, bedtime will be here in 10 minutes,
1063. 01:41:13 like just warning her that it was coming. And then here, when was it? It would have been this past
1064. 01:41:19 Christmas, my in-laws at our request got them a one of those time timers, time time, I think
1065. 01:41:28 that's what it's called. It's where you turn the dial and it has the red background and the red
1066. 01:41:32 disappears as the time ticks away. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes, but it's super
1067. 01:41:37 handy because I can turn that to set it for bedtime. And then the girls know, even our two-year-old,
1068. 01:41:44 she can't read numbers. And even our oldest kind of struggles with it at the moment, we'll get there.
1069. 01:41:50 But she, both of them can see they're still red on the clock. So it's not bedtime yet, or it's
1070. 01:41:56 almost gone, which means it's almost bedtime. And for some reason, knowing that it's coming and
1071. 01:42:01 then seeing that time tick away, whenever it goes off, they are the ones that say bedtime and then
1072. 01:42:07 they run upstairs. Like they are the ones that do that, not us, which is super helpful because then
1073. 01:42:13 I don't have to worry about them throwing a fit at bedtime. Yeah, I think that's good. And we do
1074. 01:42:20 something similar with the wake times. We have this, it's called the okay to wake alarm clock.
1075. 01:42:24 Oh, yeah, I've seen these things. Yeah. Essentially what it does is it's an alarm clock for kids that
1076. 01:42:28 turns green when it's okay to get up. So we have this okay to wake alarm clock where,
1077. 01:42:34 especially the younger ones, they know you can't come out of your room till the clock is green.
1078. 01:42:37 Right. We have it set for 7 a.m. And what that does is it gives my wife and I a little bit of a buffer
1079. 01:42:41 in the morning to make sure we can get our morning routine done. Right. And so this kind of sounds
1080. 01:42:47 like the same sort of thing at the end of the day, but I think I want to go even deeper with that.
1081. 01:42:51 Like how do I get them excited about bedtime, if that makes sense. And maybe excited is not the
1082. 01:42:56 right word because you don't want them all jacked up, obviously when they go to bed. Right. But looking
1083. 01:43:00 forward to it, not just like, oh, I've got 10 minutes, I'm going to finish what I'm doing. But
1084. 01:43:05 yay, we get to go to bed now. I don't know. Maybe that's impossible with kids. I don't know. I figure
1085. 01:43:10 this out. I can make a product and sell it to parents everywhere. Yeah, you know, billion
1086. 01:43:15 are there. That's that's the need I'm recognizing. And I have to ponder this a bit more. But yeah,
1087. 01:43:22 there's got to be something. We found that and part of what helped us was that both of the older
1088. 01:43:27 two both love reading books. They love it when we read to them. And we just made sure that we
1089. 01:43:32 incorporated that as one of the first things we do when we're getting them ready for bed. And if
1090. 01:43:38 we do that, they're super excited to go do that. That's that's what eventually got them to the
1091. 01:43:44 point where, you know, we set the timer and they're like excited for it to go off because they know
1092. 01:43:48 what means we need to go read a book. So that's what helped us. But I have not
1093. 01:43:54 I don't think I ever met your kids. So I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know what they specifically would
1094. 01:43:59 mean this near. They're also different. Why are they also different? I don't know. I don't know.
1095. 01:44:04 So that's the first action item. Second one, no eating after 7 p.m. There's a whole section
1096. 01:44:11 in the book about exercise and diet and how that impacts your sleep. And there are a couple days
1097. 01:44:19 during the week in particular where we're going until nine, sometimes even later. And if I'm not
1098. 01:44:26 careful, what I can end up doing is eating dinner after I get home. And what I want to do is
1099. 01:44:31 essentially figure out a way during the day to get the meals that I need in without having to resort
1100. 01:44:37 to eating right before I go to bed. Because those nights I can I can tell I don't sleep as well.
1101. 01:44:41 So no eating after 7 p.m. And then I mentioned with sleep cycle and stuff like that. When I
1102. 01:44:47 started reading this book, I've started using that again. I've kind of gotten away from it again.
1103. 01:44:52 Like a lot of this stuff is just it's stuff that I've known and it's stuff that is stuck for a
1104. 01:44:58 little while. And I'm hoping that you know, because you're holding me accountable on a podcast that
1105. 01:45:02 it can actually get stick. But but the whole thing is adjust and repair. I mean,
1106. 01:45:09 I don't think I don't think that it's healthy or productive to say I'm going to make all of these
1107. 01:45:20 huge changes every two weeks every time I read a book, which kind of gets back into what we're
1108. 01:45:25 talking about at the beginning of the last episode, I believe, where people are like,
1109. 01:45:28 how do you implement all this stuff? Just implement what makes sense. Try it. See if it sticks. And if
1110. 01:45:34 it doesn't stick, you know, it's it's not a huge deal. Don't beat yourself up about it because,
1111. 01:45:39 oh, I used to do this and now I don't anymore. It's every every day, every week, every year,
1112. 01:45:44 like, adjust and repair and then just make sure that you're moving forward. So I just want to
1113. 01:45:49 throw that out there because I think that there can be a tendency to if you have a mind like mine,
1114. 01:45:56 beat yourself up like, Oh, man, I stink at this stuff because I said I was going to do this. And
1115. 01:46:00 now I don't anymore. Like, oh, well, make a decision start today. Right. Right. Cool.
1116. 01:46:07 What would you think of her writing style? I liked it. The only part I didn't really like was the
1117. 01:46:14 history of sleep chapter, like I mentioned, but I thought it was really good. I thought it was
1118. 01:46:18 really approachable. I thought it was a very easy read. You pick it up and it's pretty big. It's like
1119. 01:46:24 286 pages or something and there's a bunch of appendices in the back, including a whole list of
1120. 01:46:29 hotels that she recommends because they help you fall asleep. I was pretty cool. A bunch of links
1121. 01:46:35 to research, which obviously I didn't read, but maybe you will. Oh, come on. So yeah, I thought
1122. 01:46:42 it was a really good book. A lot of this stuff, like I said, I've known this stuff conceptually
1123. 01:46:48 before. I understood the concept of blue light and the sleep cycles and all that because I've done
1124. 01:46:52 that part of the research anyways myself previous to reading this book. But for people who are just
1125. 01:46:58 getting into this, this is the definitive resource, I would say. You should look at this.
1126. 01:47:02 I'm going to write this four and a half stars.
1127. 01:47:06 Nice. I also enjoyed the book. I agree with you. It was very easy to just
1128. 01:47:13 pick it up and go to town on it. She had one, well, I would disagree with you on the history
1129. 01:47:21 thing, but I love history. The whole biophysics sleep thing where you sleep three or four hours
1130. 01:47:29 and then you get up for an hour, hour and a half and then you go back to sleep for four hours.
1131. 01:47:32 That's always intrigued me. I'm not going to experiment with that.
1132. 01:47:36 The history piece I always think is interesting. I like to know where we came from because then
1133. 01:47:44 it helps me put things in context. Anyway, I really like that. But the chapter that kind of
1134. 01:47:48 made me stop and pause was the dreams chapter. I'm like, "Okay, this is getting a little
1135. 01:47:53 frou-frou for me." But I understand people love recording dreams and they think there's a lot
1136. 01:47:59 to them. It's not for me. I wish she would have scaled back on that one because you can tell she's
1137. 01:48:05 a big believer in that and spent a lot of time on it. I wish she didn't, but that's the way it is.
1138. 01:48:11 Again, I agree with you. A lot of great examples. It was made it very easy to read.
1139. 01:48:18 I had some small qualms with the dreams piece. I felt like she used a lot of examples that
1140. 01:48:24 seemed to repeat each other on occasion. It seemed like there was a number of the sports
1141. 01:48:28 stories. I was like, "Okay, here's another one and here's another one with the same thing." It
1142. 01:48:32 seemed like it was repetitive in that sense. But I'm not going to dock it too much for that because
1143. 01:48:38 it was still very helpful to see that. I would put it at a four out of the five. I liked it a lot.
1144. 01:48:47 So, upcoming books. The next one's mine.
1145. 01:48:50 Yep. Because it was your choice. Out of our minds, Sir Ken Robinson,
1146. 01:48:55 you got another couple TED Talks you need to watch for this one, Mike.
1147. 01:48:57 You're going to be a TED Talk master here before long.
1148. 01:49:01 I actually did not have a specific book in mind that I absolutely wanted to cover next. I went
1149. 01:49:07 back to the recommended list. I found the seven habits of highly affected people by Stephen Covey,
1150. 01:49:12 which I think I probably know all of these habits already, but I've never read the entire book.
1151. 01:49:17 Yeah, I've never even picked it up.
1152. 01:49:19 This is just obviously a productivity classic. So, yeah, excited to read that one.
1153. 01:49:24 It's like required reading.
1154. 01:49:25 So, the next one up would be Out of Our Minds, Ken Robinson, and then seven habits of highly
1155. 01:49:32 effective people. Out of Our Minds is, it's about creativity in school systems. If it's the one I
1156. 01:49:40 recall, and I remember picking it, I didn't pull it up to look at it specifically.
1157. 01:49:43 Yes. So, yes, the tagline on it is learning to be creative. And Ken Robinson is on this whole path
1158. 01:49:51 of school systems and how they don't encourage creativity. They actually inhibit or destroy
1159. 01:49:57 creativity in our kids. So, I'm interested in that. We each have kids, so I'm hoping this will
1160. 01:50:03 help me understand how to teach them. What do you have for gap books? What are you reading
1161. 01:50:08 between here and there? I am reading a book that Tan actually gave me. And it's an internet marketing
1162. 01:50:16 book, but it is fascinating. It really dives into the whole idea of funnels and internet marketing.
1163. 01:50:22 And a lot of, I'm getting a lot of stuff out of this. I've started it already. I've read actually
1164. 01:50:27 100 pages the first day that I picked it up. Nice. And it's dot com secrets by Russell Brunson.
1165. 01:50:32 So, this is a book that if you don't like the sensational celebrity personalities like Tony
1166. 01:50:40 Robbins, stuff like that, you probably wouldn't like this guy. But, and I personally don't like that
1167. 01:50:46 that personality either. But the content in here is just really, really good understanding
1168. 01:50:52 the psychology behind internet marketing and all that. So, very beneficial for anybody who works
1169. 01:50:57 online. Nice. Nice. I am picking up the end of absence tagline, reclaiming what we've lost in a
1170. 01:51:05 world of constant connection. I might be obsessed with this topic. I like learning a lot about it.
1171. 01:51:12 I think it's partly because I want to know how to teach my kids the right thing. I think that's
1172. 01:51:15 why I'm obsessed with it. Yes, there you go. So, a lot of books here, if you have one, and since
1173. 01:51:22 Mike is starting to step into pulling things from our recommendations list, and I think I'm going to
1174. 01:51:27 start doing that soon as well. But, if you have one that you would like us to go through, bookworm.fm/recommend,
1175. 01:51:34 or go to the home page, hit the big button on the right that says recommend. It'll get you to
1176. 01:51:39 a form. You can fill that out and tell us what you want us to read. And if you want to see what
1177. 01:51:42 else has been recommended, just stick out there on the website. There's a list, bookworm book list.
1178. 01:51:49 What's the URL bookworm.fm/list? And you can see what all we've been through.
1179. 01:51:55 Yeah, and if you want to help other people find the show, going over to iTunes and leaving us a
1180. 01:51:58 review would be very helpful. We want to dislodge that other radio station podcast.
1181. 01:52:02 We're going to get there. Yeah. And if you want to engage with us on some of the books that we've
1182. 01:52:08 read, you put together a discussion site, the Productivity Guild, which I believe is the Productivity Guild.com.
1183. 01:52:14 Yeah, just Productivity Guild.com. I rebranded the discussion site. So, it's the same thing. I just
1184. 01:52:20 give it a different name. I need to get new logos and stuff for that at some point. But there you go.
1185. 01:52:24 But if you're into this and you've been reading along with us, especially with this one, I would
1186. 01:52:31 be interested on this particular episode to go to the guild, if you would, listeners, please.
1187. 01:52:36 Let us know what your sleep habits are, what you're trying to do, what you're going to change.
1188. 01:52:41 I'm interested to see what other people are doing, especially those who are along on the trip with
1189. 01:52:45 us on Bookworm. So, yeah, go out to the guild. Share your thoughts. What are you up to? And if you
1190. 01:52:52 are reading along with us, be sure to pick up out of our minds and we'll go on a journey with Ken
1191. 01:52:56 Robinson next.