72: Make Time by Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky

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1. 00:00:00 So Joe I see that you have continued to be busy on the social media is promoting all of the bookworm things.
2. 00:00:06 It's quite fun. I should probably stop at some point but.
3. 00:00:10 Well people are noticing my wife specifically noticed and she's like so what's the deal with the bookworm YouTube channel?
4. 00:00:17 I'm like just go look at it and hopefully it makes sense.
5. 00:00:21 [laughter]
6. 00:00:22 If you're on YouTube and you would rather listen to the show through YouTube, people do that.
7. 00:00:28 Yeah I know which I don't understand but.
8. 00:00:30 I was looking at the stats it's not a ton of people but there are people listening to the show through YouTube now.
9. 00:00:38 So even has the waveforms and everything.
10. 00:00:40 Yeah I noticed that that's entertaining for about 30 seconds.
11. 00:00:45 I don't think I could look at that for an hour and a half.
12. 00:00:48 Yep.
13. 00:00:48 But hey you do you.
14. 00:00:49 I know I know it was zero work to add the waveform so anyway.
15. 00:00:56 The audiograms are way cooler with that but.
16. 00:01:00 Yeah that's true.
17. 00:01:01 Those are kind of a fun deal but yes I have been posting.
18. 00:01:06 I had a little bit of some breaks here and there because I was gone last week.
19. 00:01:11 I was out in North Carolina celebrating our anniversary and so I had a bunch of things scheduled for while I was gone but.
20. 00:01:19 I had a little bit of a hiatus whenever I got back but it should pick up now so I've got like the next few days taken care of.
21. 00:01:26 And then the next week we'll keep pushing through it but yeah I mean you can follow Bookworm on Instagram.
22. 00:01:31 Bookworm.fm on Instagram.
23. 00:01:33 Also we are on Twitter.
24. 00:01:35 I realize we don't talk about Twitter.
25. 00:01:37 We've been on Twitter for a very long time.
26. 00:01:39 Is that from day one probably?
27. 00:01:41 I don't remember when we started that one.
28. 00:01:42 Yeah I think it is but it's interesting.
29. 00:01:46 Yeah we never mention it and it's also the only real social media platform that I hang out on.
30. 00:01:51 So if you want to get my attention you have to come to Twitter.
31. 00:01:54 Sure.
32. 00:01:55 Sorry everybody.
33. 00:01:56 So we are on Twitter.
34. 00:01:59 I've been changing up how that has operated.
35. 00:02:03 I've been keeping tabs on all of the authors we've read in the past and just trying to pay attention to which of them have new books coming out.
36. 00:02:11 And posting about those as they come up.
37. 00:02:14 There's a lot of links they have to do with libraries, books you should read, etc.
38. 00:02:19 So there's quite a few things I'm doing there that I haven't done previously.
39. 00:02:24 So all that to say I've been doing stuff on social media and it's been kind of fun.
40. 00:02:30 Cool have you gotten many submissions for listener bookshelves?
41. 00:02:34 I have a couple.
42. 00:02:35 Yeah.
43. 00:02:36 So I have a few there that'll start coming out.
44. 00:02:41 Is that tomorrow?
45. 00:02:42 I don't remember.
46. 00:02:43 There's yes and I would love some more.
47. 00:02:47 Well I haven't looked at the buffer so I have no idea.
48. 00:02:50 Yeah I would love more.
49. 00:02:53 So if you have and it doesn't matter and I had a couple of people ask me this of does it have to be my personal library?
50. 00:03:01 No.
51. 00:03:02 If you find even if it's a bookstore and you took a cool picture of it like pictures of bookshelves period libraries at bookworm.fm send me an email.
52. 00:03:12 I would love to see those and if you have an Instagram account shoot me your username for that and I'll make sure you're tagged in that photo.
53. 00:03:19 So yeah hit me up I'm all over that.
54. 00:03:22 Cool.
55. 00:03:23 I guess we should mention Max stock one more time for all of you who are procrastinating until the last possible moment.
56. 00:03:30 Well if you're listening to this and you haven't gotten a ticket for Max stock but you still want to come.
57. 00:03:34 Congratulations this is the last possible moment.
58. 00:03:37 Yes.
59. 00:03:38 Because this episode will drop exactly one week before Max stock starts.
60. 00:03:44 So you do not have a lot of time but I believe the coupon code will work up until the beginning of Max stock.
61. 00:03:51 So if you have not purchased a weekend pass and you want to get one for $179 instead of $249 which is a savings of $70 for those of you who aren't math nerds.
62. 00:04:06 You can use the coupon code FOCUSED.
63. 00:04:09 Apparently there are multiple ways to spell focused.
64. 00:04:11 I always thought it was just a single S but apparently it's also valid to use it with two S's.
65. 00:04:16 That's not the way you spell coupon code though.
66. 00:04:18 FOCUSED will save you $70 and you'll be able to come hang out with me.
67. 00:04:23 Joe, everybody Josh is going to be there.
68. 00:04:26 He's presenting.
69. 00:04:27 David Sparks is going to be there.
70. 00:04:29 They're doing the Mac power users episode 500 live as part of Max stock.
71. 00:04:34 So it'll be a good time.
72. 00:04:35 I'm looking forward to that.
73. 00:04:36 I really want to see how this live event goes for MPU.
74. 00:04:40 I think that'll be a lot of fun to watch.
75. 00:04:42 Yeah this one will be interesting because it's also like a milestone show.
76. 00:04:47 So I attended MPU live in Chicago when was that in the spring I think?
77. 00:04:52 And Chris Bailey came down.
78. 00:04:54 We hung out together so that was kind of fun.
79. 00:04:57 But that was like a normal episode.
80. 00:04:59 They obviously had a couple guests come on but they talked Mac power user stuff.
81. 00:05:04 And this one I believe is going to be kind of a basically Stevens collecting questions
82. 00:05:13 from listeners that Max Sparky is going to answer.
83. 00:05:16 And it's kind of a weird episode too because it's episode 500 but Steven just joined this year.
84. 00:05:23 So in the forum is a lot of people saying, "Oh it would be great if Katie could be there."
85. 00:05:27 She's not coming.
86. 00:05:28 Sorry.
87. 00:05:29 Right.
88. 00:05:30 I feel kind of bad for Steven but I know I'm sure it'll be a lot of fun but I also think
89. 00:05:35 it's going to be a little bit different.
90. 00:05:37 Yeah.
91. 00:05:38 I mean what do you do?
92. 00:05:39 I mean things more things change.
93. 00:05:40 You got to deal with situations as they come.
94. 00:05:42 So the one constant throughout the years is bookworm.
95. 00:05:45 We just keep going.
96. 00:05:48 We've had our moments.
97. 00:05:50 It's been close a couple times but you mentioned the other day and I don't think I responded
98. 00:05:54 to it because I just saw it in passing and I forgot but you mentioned that we've been
99. 00:05:59 at this for over three years now which is kind of cool.
100. 00:06:02 Yeah.
101. 00:06:03 So I honestly didn't realize that until you had tweeted about it.
102. 00:06:07 Right.
103. 00:06:08 So thanks for doing that.
104. 00:06:10 You know immediately when you mentioned that I went into retrospective mode and I'm like,
105. 00:06:14 how am I different now than I was three years ago?
106. 00:06:16 Like sure.
107. 00:06:17 What have I learned that I didn't know when we started this podcast and it's hard to put
108. 00:06:25 a specific number or identify a specific thing.
109. 00:06:29 I would say that one big thing that's changed is the way that I read books.
110. 00:06:33 I feel like I get a lot more of the books that I read now because I've kind of developed
111. 00:06:38 this my node system and that's very different than when we first started where I was just
112. 00:06:43 jotting down a couple of things that stood out to me from the book that we read.
113. 00:06:48 I don't think that's necessarily a wrong way to do it either but I do recognize that
114. 00:06:52 I find myself remembering and retaining information a lot better ever since episode 42 I think
115. 00:06:58 was kind of a tipping point.
116. 00:06:59 I think that was the one where we did how to read a book.
117. 00:07:03 So I don't know any navel gazing you want to do over the last three years of bookworm?
118. 00:07:11 See, there's a lot of things that I could say about it.
119. 00:07:17 The only reason I thought about it is because I was thinking this is my third max stock
120. 00:07:22 and I went to my first max stock right after we started bookworm.
121. 00:07:27 That's how I came to the realization that holy cow it's been three years.
122. 00:07:32 Some people look at it and say we're on episode 72.
123. 00:07:37 That's a little over a year if you're doing it weekly but we don't and we've had some
124. 00:07:41 spells where it's been three sometimes four weeks between episodes which means it takes
125. 00:07:47 a while to go through 72 books not including all the gap books too.
126. 00:07:53 So there's a lot of time involved there.
127. 00:07:55 I have noticed though that over time kind of what you're saying like the way that you
128. 00:08:01 read books morphs and changes over time and I used to go through a book and it's like
129. 00:08:08 okay this is borderline life altering but as time goes on you kind of shift away from
130. 00:08:15 expecting books to be life altering and you're just looking for one or two snippets out of
131. 00:08:19 them.
132. 00:08:20 That's true.
133. 00:08:21 Yeah, it's a good point.
134. 00:08:22 It's not any fault to the books.
135. 00:08:26 It's purely the mass amount of information that you collect on a regular basis.
136. 00:08:31 So because of the number and the volume of information, number of books and the volume
137. 00:08:38 of information that we go through the chances of running across one as impactful as man's
138. 00:08:43 search for meaning is quite slim.
139. 00:08:47 So you're only going to have the cream of the crop that do that.
140. 00:08:51 So it's been kind of fascinating to see that over time.
141. 00:08:54 So it's been a good run.
142. 00:08:56 I'm happy for the last three years.
143. 00:08:58 Go bookworm.
144. 00:08:59 Yeah, and thank you to all the listeners who have faithfully listened over the years and
145. 00:09:04 specifically got a call out the premium members, the people who are actually willing to pay
146. 00:09:09 a couple bucks a month in order to support us in this crazy venture of reading a book
147. 00:09:13 every couple weeks.
148. 00:09:14 So the show doesn't exist without you all.
149. 00:09:18 So thank you for your support.
150. 00:09:20 Certainly.
151. 00:09:21 So for the teaser, we have something to add to the premium memberships, which we'll mention
152. 00:09:25 at the end.
153. 00:09:27 Cliff Hanger, sorry.
154. 00:09:28 Happy to do it.
155. 00:09:29 All right.
156. 00:09:30 Should we jump into action items?
157. 00:09:33 Sure.
158. 00:09:34 I have an epic fail on mine this time.
159. 00:09:37 Goal was to start writing letters to my kids.
160. 00:09:39 You would think this would be something that would be highly motivating and I would just
161. 00:09:42 jump on immediately and I haven't touched it.
162. 00:09:46 And that's sad.
163. 00:09:47 That is kind of sad.
164. 00:09:48 It's quite terrible.
165. 00:09:50 Even when I'm saying this out loud, it kind of hurts me to say this, but yes, I haven't
166. 00:09:53 touched it.
167. 00:09:55 I have the notebook.
168. 00:09:57 What's step one?
169. 00:09:59 I have the notebook.
170. 00:10:02 Have the pin.
171. 00:10:03 I know what I want to do.
172. 00:10:04 I just haven't done it.
173. 00:10:05 I'm going to do this first thing tomorrow morning because it's Saturday and I will have
174. 00:10:10 the time.
175. 00:10:11 Okay.
176. 00:10:12 I'm going to do it.
177. 00:10:13 My action item was to build out my story file in day one, which I have done, but not
178. 00:10:19 too.
179. 00:10:20 It's not complete, but then again, it's probably never going to be complete.
180. 00:10:23 So I did add a bunch of things from my trip to Costa Rica, inspired by my wife the other
181. 00:10:31 day who said, "Hey, did you do that?"
182. 00:10:33 We're going to shoot us listening to bookworm.
183. 00:10:35 Oh, shoot, I forgot.
184. 00:10:39 But I did do it.
185. 00:10:41 And I still have some, like I still want to flesh out some of this stuff, but I have
186. 00:10:45 like the rough bullet points that I mentioned from the last episode where like I have
187. 00:10:49 the building blocks there, but I do want to add some more meat to those things.
188. 00:10:54 And then also I haven't gone back in just like retrospective, all of the crazy events
189. 00:10:59 that have happened even in the last couple of years, but really like throughout the
190. 00:11:03 course of my life, I haven't gone through and gotten all of that stuff in there, which
191. 00:11:06 is ultimately what I want to do with this.
192. 00:11:09 And then once I have all of that, obviously it's being aware of things as they happen
193. 00:11:13 so that I can continue to build that out.
194. 00:11:15 So this one's never going to be finished, but made some decent progress on it anyways.
195. 00:11:21 Sure.
196. 00:11:22 Good job.
197. 00:11:23 Thanks.
198. 00:11:24 That was pretty quick for action items, but I believe we're ready to go into today's
199. 00:11:29 book.
200. 00:11:30 I think so.
201. 00:11:31 I'm excited about this one.
202. 00:11:32 It'll be fun.
203. 00:11:33 All right.
204. 00:11:34 So I have a disclaimer here because I mentioned when we, when I picked this one that this is
205. 00:11:38 kind of the anti-systems book, well actually there is a system here.
206. 00:11:42 Yep.
207. 00:11:43 It's not really a system.
208. 00:11:44 Did you forget that there's a system?
209. 00:11:45 There's a system in this?
210. 00:11:46 Yeah, I guess I kind of did because they talk about it right at the beginning.
211. 00:11:49 We'll get into that, but then there's a whole bunch of tactics and things and basically
212. 00:11:53 like apply this however you want.
213. 00:11:54 So I did that.
214. 00:11:55 I applied it however I wanted and completely chuck the system until we forgot about it.
215. 00:12:00 So there is a very basic system which we'll talk about here, but this is make time how
216. 00:12:04 to focus on what matters every day by Jake Knapp and John Zorotzky.
217. 00:12:09 And it is very different than some of the other systems books that we have read because
218. 00:12:14 it is not prescriptive, just follow XYZ and you'll get one, two, three.
219. 00:12:19 Instead it is a basic framework that they present at the beginning and then a whole
220. 00:12:23 bunch of tactics they call them and you pick and choose the ones that you want to use.
221. 00:12:28 And there are a ridiculous number of these, let's see, 86 of them?
222. 00:12:33 Of the tactics.
223. 00:12:35 But yeah, but they say at the very beginning, you know, you're not going to use all of them
224. 00:12:39 just pick and choose the ones that seem to work for you.
225. 00:12:42 And they're all based off of personal experience and kind of experiments that they've tried
226. 00:12:45 on themselves.
227. 00:12:47 And it's written by two people who have the same approach, but also different things
228. 00:12:52 work for different people and they kind of compare and contrast that.
229. 00:12:56 There's also some awesome illustrations in this book.
230. 00:12:58 Yes.
231. 00:12:59 I don't have an affront of me.
232. 00:13:00 I'm not sure who did the illustrations, but they're amazing.
233. 00:13:03 I think it was Jake.
234. 00:13:05 It's one of the two.
235. 00:13:06 Okay.
236. 00:13:07 They're great because there are several times when they're talking about technology and
237. 00:13:12 they've got all of these like cartoon animations for like a computer or an iPhone, which I
238. 00:13:18 don't know, like seeing it drawn like that paints it in a different light.
239. 00:13:23 At least it did for me when I was going through it.
240. 00:13:26 It feels like you have more control over those things, which is really what they want
241. 00:13:32 to like.
242. 00:13:33 That's the point they want to make throughout the book is that you do have control over
243. 00:13:35 this stuff.
244. 00:13:36 Right.
245. 00:13:37 But it feels a lot more approachable when it's a cartoon form, like you're not so scared
246. 00:13:41 of the machine.
247. 00:13:43 Yeah.
248. 00:13:44 My opinion anyways.
249. 00:13:45 No, that's fair.
250. 00:13:47 I have to say when I pick this up, I opened the front cover.
251. 00:13:52 This isn't even to the first page.
252. 00:13:54 This is on the cover itself.
253. 00:13:56 On the inside, there's this diagram, which looks like a system.
254. 00:14:04 I read some of the captions that go with this diagram.
255. 00:14:09 My first thought was, wait, I thought this was not a systems book.
256. 00:14:13 Mike rails on systems books.
257. 00:14:16 And then he picked one.
258. 00:14:19 I hadn't even got to the first page yet.
259. 00:14:21 Yeah.
260. 00:14:22 So I had to throw a disclaimer out there because there is, yeah, there is a diagram.
261. 00:14:26 It's not as intimidating as it looks like the one on the inside cover you're talking
262. 00:14:29 about, right?
263. 00:14:30 Where they have a couple of arrows and things.
264. 00:14:32 But I personally, I don't know, I guess you could call this a system.
265. 00:14:39 I don't know.
266. 00:14:40 It doesn't feel like a system compared to all of the other systems that we've covered
267. 00:14:43 in all of the other books that we've read.
268. 00:14:45 It feels to me like this is how your body is designed to work.
269. 00:14:54 And it's going to do this and you can maximize any one of these areas using the different
270. 00:14:59 tactics, like you can kind of figure out what works, plug and play.
271. 00:15:05 But I don't know.
272. 00:15:06 It gets, well, let's just talk about the system, I guess.
273. 00:15:09 Well, and since we're here.
274. 00:15:11 Yeah.
275. 00:15:12 And let me just say this because I would say that the quote unquote system, and I think
276. 00:15:18 the reason you're waffling on it a little bit is because really the system is the one
277. 00:15:24 thing.
278. 00:15:25 So the book, the one thing.
279. 00:15:27 Focusing one thing and focusing on that for your day and getting it done.
280. 00:15:32 Like that's, that's really it.
281. 00:15:34 But yeah, that's my perception of it anyway.
282. 00:15:38 I think so.
283. 00:15:39 Although I think even the one thing has more of a system.
284. 00:15:41 So you could condense this one in make time to pick one thing and focus on it.
285. 00:15:47 That's it.
286. 00:15:48 Yeah.
287. 00:15:49 Right.
288. 00:15:50 And so that's kind of the idea behind make time is like, well, you're not going to find
289. 00:15:53 time.
290. 00:15:55 If you are constantly just going from one thing to the next, whatever happens to pop up in
291. 00:16:00 front of you, you're going to find yourself not doing the things that are important to
292. 00:16:06 you.
293. 00:16:07 So how do you do that?
294. 00:16:08 Well, you pick a highlight.
295. 00:16:11 That's the first part of the system.
296. 00:16:14 That's the focal point, the single activity to prioritize and protect on your calendar.
297. 00:16:18 And this is an interesting idea to me is, and one of my I have an action item associated
298. 00:16:22 with this, but we'll talk about that in a little bit.
299. 00:16:23 It's kind of like, what's going to be the highlight of your day as you're planning it,
300. 00:16:27 whether it's the night before or in the morning.
301. 00:16:30 And then the next piece of that is laser.
302. 00:16:33 So you're going to do everything you can to limit your distractions so that you can focus
303. 00:16:38 on your highlight.
304. 00:16:40 You're going to control your technology so that you can easily find that laser mode.
305. 00:16:46 And then underneath that kind of related to laser is this energized piece.
306. 00:16:50 So you need to use your body to recharge your brain.
307. 00:16:55 And this is where things like exercise, food, sleep, quiet, face to face time come in, and
308. 00:17:00 then reflect where you recognize what worked, what didn't, and then you adjust and improve
309. 00:17:05 your system.
310. 00:17:06 This is kind of like journaling before you would go to bed.
311. 00:17:09 That's kind of how I use that.
312. 00:17:11 Sure.
313. 00:17:12 And that's why I guess, you know, I didn't think of this as a system because I feel like
314. 00:17:16 I have my own journaling system.
315. 00:17:18 Okay.
316. 00:17:19 Which overlaps with this system in the reflect piece, but also like isn't a one to one matching
317. 00:17:27 of the reflect piece of their system either.
318. 00:17:31 So I feel like this right here is kind of how your body wants to function if you were
319. 00:17:38 to just get out of its own way.
320. 00:17:41 And all of the tactics are things that you can use to kind of like trim the fat so to
321. 00:17:47 speak, where you can kind of prune your own day to day so that your body can kind of
322. 00:17:56 just flow in this natural state.
323. 00:18:01 I'm probably not doing a very good job of explaining this, but it doesn't feel like
324. 00:18:04 something like, okay, I need to make an intentional choice to follow these simple steps so that
325. 00:18:12 I can get this result.
326. 00:18:13 Does that make sense?
327. 00:18:14 Yeah.
328. 00:18:15 If this might be an easy way to do it.
329. 00:18:18 So I don't know if we can put a picture of this, this show notes, this whole diagram.
330. 00:18:24 But there's really four aspects to it.
331. 00:18:27 One is off on the side.
332. 00:18:28 So there's three points to this highlight laser and reflect and then energizes underneath
333. 00:18:34 the laser point because you won't be able to laser focus 100% of the time.
334. 00:18:39 But they do have little descriptions for each of these.
335. 00:18:42 So highlight, start each day by choosing a focal point, laser, beat distraction to make
336. 00:18:47 time for your highlight, reflect, adjust and improve your system every day, and then the
337. 00:18:53 energizes, take care of your body to recharge your brain and that feeds into the laser piece.
338. 00:18:58 So with each of those, essentially what you're doing is picking one thing, the most important
339. 00:19:02 thing to do for the day, focusing on it, and then try to figure out how well did you do
340. 00:19:07 at it and make adjustments and improve.
341. 00:19:10 Like that's really it.
342. 00:19:12 Yeah, and then also to complicate this simple diagram even further.
343. 00:19:17 Yeah.
344. 00:19:18 Like energizes underneath, it doesn't really have its own place in the flow.
345. 00:19:23 But the next, or the rest of the book is broken into some different sections.
346. 00:19:29 So we're talking about the introduction right now.
347. 00:19:30 The next section is how make time works.
348. 00:19:34 Actually, I guess that's kind of what we're talking about right now.
349. 00:19:38 The introduction, that's where they talk about the fact that they're time dorks and how this
350. 00:19:42 isn't a productivity book.
351. 00:19:43 They make that very clear right at the beginning.
352. 00:19:45 Maybe that's another reason why I didn't think of it as a systems book.
353. 00:19:48 But then they're broken down into the sections, highlight, laser, energize, and then reflect
354. 00:19:54 as the last section.
355. 00:19:56 And for highlight, laser, and energize, there are a whole bunch of tactics that go along
356. 00:20:01 with it.
357. 00:20:02 For reflect, there really isn't.
358. 00:20:03 For reflect, there's a couple things.
359. 00:20:04 You know, there's the scientific method they talk about and there are three hypotheses, which
360. 00:20:07 we'll get to in a little bit.
361. 00:20:09 And a form that they use to rate how they did during the day.
362. 00:20:13 But like I said, I journal the same sort of stuff.
363. 00:20:16 So there was nothing new for me in that particular section.
364. 00:20:20 But kind of the approach we took with this is because there's these different sections
365. 00:20:25 and all these different tactics and no way that we'll get through all of them as we kind
366. 00:20:28 of picked out a couple that we wanted to talk about specifically.
367. 00:20:34 And actually, you know, before we get into some of the specific tactics, we probably
368. 00:20:38 should talk about a couple of their main ideas that will resurface throughout the book.
369. 00:20:43 And that is Infinity Pools in the Busy Bandwagon.
370. 00:20:45 Yes.
371. 00:20:46 Now, I do want to preface the Infinity Pools piece with these two guys, Jake Knapp and
372. 00:20:53 John Zorotzky.
373. 00:20:57 They are ex-Google employees.
374. 00:21:00 One of them worked on Gmail.
375. 00:21:02 The other one worked on YouTube.
376. 00:21:04 Yeah, I think Jake was email and John was YouTube.
377. 00:21:07 Yeah, I'm going to guess that most everybody has heard of Gmail and YouTube.
378. 00:21:12 I don't think there's anyone listening that hasn't heard of those two services.
379. 00:21:17 So these guys worked on those and helped bring about some of the modern day views that we
380. 00:21:25 use today in those tools.
381. 00:21:28 Infinity Pools, it's what it sounds like, anything that has an infinite amount of information
382. 00:21:34 they can give to you, a Twitter feed, an Instagram feed, a YouTube list of videos,
383. 00:21:41 like things that if you refreshed, you would get something new every single time.
384. 00:21:44 It's infinite, thus an Infinity Pool.
385. 00:21:47 Yeah, it's interesting because there are things that fall into the category of Infinity Pool,
386. 00:21:53 though, that you wouldn't really think of as Infinity Pools.
387. 00:21:57 I first heard about this book when I interviewed Shahid Amada in episode 70, I believe, of Focused.
388. 00:22:06 And he's a video game developer who got rid of his iPhone X and went down to an iPhone
389. 00:22:12 SE after reading this book and basically deleted all of the Infinity Pools off of his device.
390. 00:22:19 And that was, I thought, kind of a drastic approach, especially for a video game developer.
391. 00:22:24 But it really got me interested in the idea.
392. 00:22:27 And he mentioned a couple things like he needed to order some screwdrivers off of Amazon.
393. 00:22:32 So he had the Amazon app open and he went and he found the screwdrivers, but then he continued
394. 00:22:36 to search through the Amazon app.
395. 00:22:40 And he's like, "Oh, that's an Infinity Pool.
396. 00:22:42 That's got to go."
397. 00:22:43 Yeah.
398. 00:22:44 Like anything that has additional information and you can never exhaust, basically, that's
399. 00:22:49 what an Infinity Pool is.
400. 00:22:51 Even a web browser, Safari on your phone.
401. 00:22:54 Yeah, exactly.
402. 00:22:55 Could be the same thing, for sure.
403. 00:22:57 The other piece of this busy bandwagon, overflowing inboxes, stuff calendars, endless to-do lists,
404. 00:23:04 I mean, how many things have we talked about numerous times, Mike?
405. 00:23:08 They all play into this busy bandwagon mindset that if you want to meet the demands that
406. 00:23:15 people place on us and just keep up with everything that's going on, you will be overwhelmed
407. 00:23:20 and way too busy.
408. 00:23:21 Yes.
409. 00:23:22 That's the busy bandwagon.
410. 00:23:23 Yep, exactly.
411. 00:23:26 And these are not new ideas, but the way they describe them, I think, is very approachable.
412. 00:23:31 I feel like the Infinity Pool specifically, once you grasp the idea of that, you're going
413. 00:23:35 to identify those all over the place.
414. 00:23:39 Right.
415. 00:23:40 It just kind of sticks with you.
416. 00:23:41 You're going to be going through whatever app you have on your phone.
417. 00:23:44 You'll think you've got it all cleaned up.
418. 00:23:45 You're not going to be distracted anymore.
419. 00:23:47 And then you'll be in something like, "Dang it, this is an Infinity Pool.
420. 00:23:50 It's got to go."
421. 00:23:51 Yeah.
422. 00:23:52 The reason that they bring these things up is because they also have this concept of defaults.
423. 00:23:57 Again, we've talked about this before.
424. 00:24:00 Most of this book is not groundbreaking.
425. 00:24:03 It's not something brand new.
426. 00:24:04 They're just packaging a bunch of things that have been talked about before in a very
427. 00:24:08 unique way.
428. 00:24:09 Yep.
429. 00:24:10 But this concept of defaults is, "What is your default answer in a given scenario?"
430. 00:24:17 You're standing in line, you're waiting.
431. 00:24:19 What's your default answer?
432. 00:24:21 Most people, it's pull out the phone and entertain yourself in some way.
433. 00:24:25 Yep.
434. 00:24:26 Their argument is, "Change your defaults."
435. 00:24:28 So many of the tactics that we'll get into later revolve around changing your defaults.
436. 00:24:32 Yep.
437. 00:24:33 Definitely.
438. 00:24:34 All right.
439. 00:24:35 So that being said, I think we're ready to dive into some of these tactics.
440. 00:24:39 So let's go into the next, and I'm going to call this the first section, and that is
441. 00:24:44 highlight.
442. 00:24:45 Now, in here, they've got some, in each of these sections, they have a little bit of
443. 00:24:53 information at the beginning, and then they've got a whole bunch of tactics that go along
444. 00:24:58 with it.
445. 00:24:59 And so let's talk about some of the specific tactics here that relate to highlights.
446. 00:25:06 But then I also want to talk about from this section, they talk about the problem with
447. 00:25:09 to-do lists.
448. 00:25:11 I feel like the tactics are the place to start here, though.
449. 00:25:15 And one of the ones that I really liked under the "Choose Your Highlight" section for the
450. 00:25:21 tactics was number five, the "Might-Do List."
451. 00:25:26 And when I read this, I kind of thought that this was the approach I was trying to articulate
452. 00:25:34 with my back burner context way back in the day.
453. 00:25:37 Oh, the one that you'd agree for?
454. 00:25:39 Yeah, and I have not used in a very long time.
455. 00:25:42 Yeah, because I was trying-
456. 00:25:44 Yeah, well, to be fair, I don't really use OmniFocus anymore, but that's another conversation
457. 00:25:50 for another day.
458. 00:25:52 Yeah, so number five, the "Might-Do List."
459. 00:25:56 Basically the approach here is you've got a whole list of things that you might do, and
460. 00:26:00 then you look at that list and you pick the one that's going to be your highlight.
461. 00:26:04 And if I'm remembering right, my use case for this back burner context was, these are
462. 00:26:10 the things that I might do.
463. 00:26:13 And then I was going to pick the ones that I wanted to do from there for the things that
464. 00:26:17 I was going to- that were going to become my most important task for the day.
465. 00:26:21 I think that's from memory, I believe that's kind of how I was to find that.
466. 00:26:26 Maybe I'm wrong in that.
467. 00:26:28 But I think that I was fairly close to describing what they describe as the "Might-Do List."
468. 00:26:34 The only difference is that I was selecting multiple things and they're saying, "Just
469. 00:26:37 pick one."
470. 00:26:38 And I like their version better.
471. 00:26:39 Just pick one.
472. 00:26:41 Because the task manager basically, my little note in this section, that is your "Might-Do
473. 00:26:50 List."
474. 00:26:52 And when you select more than one thing, as you go throughout your day, you can find
475. 00:26:57 yourself kind of going back and forth between them, trying to find the path of least resistance.
476. 00:27:04 And they say that you're especially vulnerable on page 51 to the path of least resistance
477. 00:27:07 thinking when you don't actually plan.
478. 00:27:09 But I've found it even when I do plan and I've selected five different things that I'm
479. 00:27:12 going to work on throughout the day, you look at the first one and you're like, "I don't
480. 00:27:16 really want to do that right now.
481. 00:27:17 What's next on the list?"
482. 00:27:20 But when you have a highlight, it brings you back to this is the thing that you said is
483. 00:27:24 absolutely critical for today.
484. 00:27:27 So that's the thing you work on.
485. 00:27:28 And when you get that done, if you've got more in the tank, then you can just tackle
486. 00:27:33 the next thing on the list and you can get ahead.
487. 00:27:35 But when you make one thing, the highlight, it's a lot easier for me anyways to transition
488. 00:27:42 into Go mode for that.
489. 00:27:44 And then they would say, "Take that a step further and put it on your calendar."
490. 00:27:48 I kind of do this with my daily planning sheet.
491. 00:27:51 I block all my time, although I haven't specifically gone to the length of blocking out three hours
492. 00:27:57 for I'm going to work on this specific thing.
493. 00:27:59 I just kind of frame out like I'm going to, for these hours, I mean, actually, like the
494. 00:28:04 beginning of the day, for example, today, I've got an hour set aside for my morning routine
495. 00:28:07 and then I'm going to be home and I'm going to be writing.
496. 00:28:10 And then I've got a recording bookworm with Joe blocked off from 1 to 3 p.m. central time.
497. 00:28:15 And then more writing after that.
498. 00:28:17 And then later tonight, I've got a men's meeting at our church.
499. 00:28:21 So those are the types of things where I'm blocking out all the different hours throughout
500. 00:28:24 my day.
501. 00:28:25 But I don't have specifically on there, you know, write this specific thing for this specific
502. 00:28:31 project.
503. 00:28:33 That feels to me like a step too far.
504. 00:28:35 But I do have, and this is kind of where one of my action items comes in, of adding the
505. 00:28:40 highlight to my daily planning template.
506. 00:28:42 I did redo that and I do have now at the top of my daily planning template in the area
507. 00:28:46 for my highlight.
508. 00:28:47 So I pick one thing that's going to become my focus.
509. 00:28:50 And I found, since I started doing that even just like a week ago, that that's really helpful.
510. 00:28:55 That really keeps me on track, makes sure that I don't waste the beginning of my day, which
511. 00:29:01 is really my biological prime time or Jocelyn K. Glai would call it like your golden hours.
512. 00:29:06 Like when you're really in a state generally to do good focused work, you know, you don't
513. 00:29:12 want to waste that time trying to decide what to do.
514. 00:29:14 So by planning my day the night before, by putting my highlight on there, it's a lot easier
515. 00:29:18 to, okay, let's just do this.
516. 00:29:20 Yeah, I have to say this whole concept of a might do list, it still feels weird to me.
517. 00:29:27 It seems like just a someday maybe project list.
518. 00:29:31 Maybe that's all it is.
519. 00:29:33 But it just, it never, like to me, it's the same thing as when we had this back burner
520. 00:29:37 context thing that we were talking about way back now.
521. 00:29:41 It feels very similar to that.
522. 00:29:42 I totally understand your interest in it.
523. 00:29:45 I just don't work off of lists like that.
524. 00:29:47 And it just feels so weird.
525. 00:29:49 Yeah.
526. 00:29:50 Well, here's, here's the thing like as we're recording this, what was it like last week,
527. 00:29:54 Omni Focus added the ability to drop a task, right?
528. 00:29:59 Yeah.
529. 00:30:00 Well, the reason they added that feature is because people have things on their list that
530. 00:30:03 they don't want to do anymore and they're dropping them.
531. 00:30:07 So that illustrates my point that your task manager is essentially a might do list.
532. 00:30:12 You can only pick one thing from that list that you're going to work on at a given time.
533. 00:30:17 You can have a whole bunch of things, flag five things that you want to do today.
534. 00:30:21 But kind of the revelation I got as I'm going through this is like, that's too much.
535. 00:30:26 You got to pick one thing.
536. 00:30:27 Sure.
537. 00:30:28 And only that's going to be your focus.
538. 00:30:30 You can't say, I'm going to focus and prioritize this, that and the other thing.
539. 00:30:34 You got to pick one.
540. 00:30:35 And if you can't say one thing is the most important, then you're operating whether you
541. 00:30:40 realize it or not where everything is kind of on this might do list and everything is
542. 00:30:44 in your back burner context and you're kind of always looking at it thinking, what should
543. 00:30:48 I be doing right now?
544. 00:30:49 And kind of freaking out whenever you choose something because you may have chosen the
545. 00:30:52 wrong thing, at least that was my experience.
546. 00:30:54 Right.
547. 00:30:56 Another tactic from this section is tactic number 13, design your day.
548. 00:31:03 And you kind of mentioned it here a little bit.
549. 00:31:05 I go with scheduling time for your highlight, your focal point for the day.
550. 00:31:10 And they take this a step further and use like the hyper scheduling or the block scheduling
551. 00:31:17 concept and design every moment of the entire day so that they know when each thing is going
552. 00:31:25 to happen.
553. 00:31:26 This is not something I can do given my current work scenario.
554. 00:31:32 Being an IT, you never know when people are coming up, but I'm assuming this is something
555. 00:31:36 you would like to try.
556. 00:31:37 Yeah.
557. 00:31:38 And I would argue this is something that I have been doing when I'm with my daily planning
558. 00:31:42 template, but this is awesome.
559. 00:31:44 And this is the reason why I've kind of gone away from OmniFocus because I recognize that
560. 00:31:50 OmniFocus can collect the things that I have to do personally.
561. 00:31:53 But for all of the other teams that I have worked with, they all use something different
562. 00:31:57 for collaborating on a project.
563. 00:31:59 And I went back and I thought through in the last year, what are all the teams that I've
564. 00:32:04 worked with and the programs that they've used.
565. 00:32:07 And at one point, I was working with teams that were using Jira, Basecamp, Asana, Patio,
566. 00:32:17 and there was one other one.
567. 00:32:18 There were five of them, all at the same time.
568. 00:32:21 And I'm like, okay, so I'm not going to duplicate all the tasks from all those different systems
569. 00:32:26 and put them into my OmniFocus just so that OmniFocus is the single source of truth.
570. 00:32:30 I'm going to look at those things when I need to look at them.
571. 00:32:33 And I'm going to have a general idea of what I need to get done when.
572. 00:32:36 And I've got a big wall calendar in my office that kind of shows what my deadlines are.
573. 00:32:42 But then for daily planning, I am going to just write everything out.
574. 00:32:47 And I use a template inside of GoodNotes, which is amazing.
575. 00:32:53 This is the single most killer feature for the iPad Pro, in my opinion.
576. 00:33:00 GoodNotes is an absolutely amazing app.
577. 00:33:01 And if you really use the import your own PDF template feature, you can turn this into
578. 00:33:07 just about anything for planning.
579. 00:33:10 In fact, if you go to atc.com and you search for GoodNotes templates, you will find tons
580. 00:33:17 of digital templates, template packs that people have created where you can just import them
581. 00:33:22 into GoodNotes and you can use them with your iPad and your Apple Pencil.
582. 00:33:26 It's amazing.
583. 00:33:27 And then the OCR is all your text.
584. 00:33:28 You can go back.
585. 00:33:29 You can search everything.
586. 00:33:30 You need a new page.
587. 00:33:31 You just swipe from right to left or you hit the little plus button in the upper right.
588. 00:33:34 You can select from any of your templated pages so you can insert whatever you want whenever
589. 00:33:38 you need it.
590. 00:33:39 It's like having your own.
591. 00:33:40 So like if you've looked at the self journal or Michael Hyatt's full focus planner, if
592. 00:33:45 you look at those, every time I've tried to use one of those, I've always come close
593. 00:33:50 and like the general ideas, but there's always been a couple of things where it's like,
594. 00:33:53 "Ah, I don't really want to do that."
595. 00:33:55 So what I found is you can create your own templates and I do it in Omnigraffle now.
596. 00:34:01 And you can pick and choose the pieces that you want and create a digital version that
597. 00:34:05 is exactly how you want it to work.
598. 00:34:09 And then you never have to buy another notebook again.
599. 00:34:12 You just pick and choose the pieces or the pages that you want, stick them wherever you
600. 00:34:17 want and you can build your own digital planner.
601. 00:34:21 And that to me, I don't know, again, you're the analog guy.
602. 00:34:26 So there is something to be said for pen and paper.
603. 00:34:29 I get it.
604. 00:34:30 Like the right pen, the right paper, it just feels different.
605. 00:34:34 But with an iPad Pro and the new Apple Pencil specifically, it's shorter.
606. 00:34:37 It feels more like a pencil and it feels much more natural in your hand.
607. 00:34:42 It feels close enough for me where I don't miss writing on paper every single day because
608. 00:34:48 I used to do that with my daily planning sheets.
609. 00:34:49 I used to print them off, make tablets, and I'd throw them away in the trash can every
610. 00:34:53 day after I was done.
611. 00:34:55 But this just feels so much better and I can tweak the system as I go.
612. 00:35:03 I can go in Omnigraffle, I can make a single change like my action item for this was to
613. 00:35:07 add that highlight section to the top of my page.
614. 00:35:09 I did that.
615. 00:35:10 It took a couple minutes.
616. 00:35:11 I had a new template, throw it in their BAM.
617. 00:35:12 I can continue to roll with that.
618. 00:35:14 So here's some of my argument against, because I see this all the time, people want to use
619. 00:35:21 the iPads for this sort of thing.
620. 00:35:25 So I have a paper notebook that I use for a lot of stuff, more on that in a little bit,
621. 00:35:33 because it's morphing right now.
622. 00:35:35 I had a situation this morning where one gentleman was trying to show me a few things on his
623. 00:35:42 iPad that he had sketched out and written.
624. 00:35:45 And I had my notebook there.
625. 00:35:47 I had my thumb and finger in, I think it was four different places in my notebook and could
626. 00:35:52 flip back and forth between things very quickly and could look at three, four, five things
627. 00:35:57 at one time in that scenario.
628. 00:36:00 Technically speaking, you can get that done on an iPad, but it is nowhere near as simple
629. 00:36:07 as just stick your finger in it and physically move it.
630. 00:36:11 That's true.
631. 00:36:12 Although you can bookmark specific pages in your notebooks.
632. 00:36:15 So you can get back and forth between your bookmarks pretty quickly.
633. 00:36:19 And it's probably not as quick as the scenario that you're describing, but again, good enough.
634. 00:36:25 And it is of course not near as tactile either.
635. 00:36:28 Yes.
636. 00:36:29 Yeah, that's true.
637. 00:36:30 Although it feels pretty good.
638. 00:36:33 It's not going to feel the same obviously as a pen on paper, especially if you like those
639. 00:36:38 fancy fountain pens like you do.
640. 00:36:40 Totally.
641. 00:36:41 But I don't know.
642. 00:36:43 It gives you so many advantages that that just really isn't a that big a deal for me.
643. 00:36:50 Sorry, analog wins.
644. 00:36:51 Okay.
645. 00:36:52 Now that's it.
646. 00:36:53 I got to move on quick before you get argue with me.
647. 00:36:57 The problem with to-do list, Mike, what's the problem with to-do list?
648. 00:37:00 All right.
649. 00:37:01 The problem with to-do list as the authors state in this section is that they are usually
650. 00:37:08 a reflection of other people's priorities.
651. 00:37:11 No matter how many tasks you get done, there are always more to take its place and they
652. 00:37:16 can obscure what's really important.
653. 00:37:19 I agree with all three of those things.
654. 00:37:23 What's your opinion on this?
655. 00:37:25 This is-and I was so happy when I saw this on the outline.
656. 00:37:30 This is something I have been working towards and tweaking and conceptualizing for about
657. 00:37:35 a year now.
658. 00:37:38 It's come out in a few places with one or two individuals who have previously worked
659. 00:37:45 for me under Pro-Course.
660. 00:37:47 They've mentioned this concept that within Pro-Course, we've been operating on a project
661. 00:37:52 level.
662. 00:37:53 We'll dictate tasks.
663. 00:37:57 We'll say here is a project.
664. 00:37:59 Here are the general concepts of what need done.
665. 00:38:03 Go.
666. 00:38:04 Ask me if you have questions.
667. 00:38:06 That's the way that we've operated.
668. 00:38:09 Because of that, I've been slowly morphing my own personal systems to just a simple project
669. 00:38:16 list, not necessarily a task list.
670. 00:38:20 Reviewing that list of projects on a daily basis and then making a to-day list.
671. 00:38:23 So just a daily list for now, what I got to get done today.
672. 00:38:28 Not worrying about breaking things out on a deeper level on a task or to-do list that
673. 00:38:35 I'm going to work off of each day.
674. 00:38:38 It's only created for that one day.
675. 00:38:40 You get the difference there.
676. 00:38:41 It's not a long term task list.
677. 00:38:44 What we traditionally see in something like OmniFocus.
678. 00:38:47 It's just maybe three or four or five things for today and then a project list to help
679. 00:38:54 me reference to know what it is to do for today.
680. 00:38:56 Yeah, that makes total sense.
681. 00:38:59 Now all of the GTD purists are screaming at us right now because they're saying, "Well,
682. 00:39:06 you need to have a place where you can capture things so you don't forget about them."
683. 00:39:11 Sure.
684. 00:39:12 And that is one positive they call out with to-do lists is that they allow you to capture
685. 00:39:16 things so you don't have to hold them in your brain.
686. 00:39:19 Although as I thought about this, there's a couple different ways that I would need
687. 00:39:27 to capture things.
688. 00:39:30 Most of the things that I've wanted to capture lately I realized have been ideas.
689. 00:39:36 Those don't need to go in a task manager.
690. 00:39:39 That's kind of what I was doing.
691. 00:39:40 I had an ideas perspective inside of OmniFocus where I would tag things with ideas that would
692. 00:39:46 show up there and then when I decided I wanted to write a blog post or create a podcast or
693. 00:39:51 whatever on a topic I would just select from that ideas bucket.
694. 00:39:54 But that doesn't have to exist in a task manager.
695. 00:39:56 And the other thing that a task manager, the service that it was, that it was a SERP, the
696. 00:40:02 thing that it was doing for me was it was allowing me to be reminded of something that
697. 00:40:08 was due.
698. 00:40:10 And I don't think I need a full-on task manager for that sort of thing.
699. 00:40:15 I've been toying around with the idea of using the new Reminders app once iOS 13 and Mac
700. 00:40:21 Quest Catalina comes out.
701. 00:40:23 It's got expanded functionality.
702. 00:40:26 It's got subtasks and things like that.
703. 00:40:28 It's still not anywhere close to the power of the functionality of something like things
704. 00:40:32 around OmniFocus.
705. 00:40:33 But for me, I don't think I necessarily need it to be.
706. 00:40:36 I need to be able to say a Hoi telephone remind me to do this thing at this time.
707. 00:40:41 And Reminders is going to be more than enough for that.
708. 00:40:45 And the passive also used do for that sort of thing with the nagging reminders.
709. 00:40:50 But I don't know.
710. 00:40:52 I think my life has simplified in recent history where I don't need to be reminded of a ton
711. 00:41:01 of things all the time.
712. 00:41:04 And I've got a little bit more control over my day and my schedule.
713. 00:41:08 So there's less of a chance that I'm going to just ignore something if my phone is telling
714. 00:41:14 me, hey, you really need to do this now.
715. 00:41:17 That's my initial thought with this.
716. 00:41:19 Obviously, I'll try it out and see.
717. 00:41:21 Maybe I do need something a little bit more powerful.
718. 00:41:23 But that's the thought process at the moment.
719. 00:41:25 Yeah.
720. 00:41:26 No, and that makes sense.
721. 00:41:29 And I alluded to this earlier.
722. 00:41:30 I'm in the process of trying out a lot of things on paper.
723. 00:41:36 And I found myself because of this book and some other areas, you know, one of the action
724. 00:41:43 or the tactics later on is to write things on paper, like write something down today.
725. 00:41:47 I think it was at number 54.
726. 00:41:50 So I was combining that with doing a daily highlight.
727. 00:41:55 Like those two pretty easy.
728. 00:41:57 Like I'm in the process of writing out a list each day now.
729. 00:42:01 But I was trying to get a feel for what do I do with these things that it's not today,
730. 00:42:07 but it's sometime in the next week or the next month or, you know, how do I handle that?
731. 00:42:13 So I was trying to figure out how to put together like a six month view, but I needed
732. 00:42:18 dial in on this month and then specifically today.
733. 00:42:21 And it occurred to me.
734. 00:42:24 That's the bullet journal.
735. 00:42:26 I think that's how that tends to operate.
736. 00:42:29 So I'm in the middle of kind of an experiment of sorts of just trying out the bullet journal
737. 00:42:35 process.
738. 00:42:36 I know there's a few other folks that are doing that in the productivity space right
739. 00:42:39 now.
740. 00:42:40 Myself included, but I don't follow it like the system that they talk about.
741. 00:42:45 I've taken basically the planning pieces of it, but I don't keep my master task list
742. 00:42:49 there.
743. 00:42:50 And I don't really think that a master task list is something I'm really going to keep
744. 00:42:58 at all.
745. 00:42:59 And I think that's what they're getting at.
746. 00:43:01 So what I've been doing is I've of course tweaked it.
747. 00:43:03 I don't do the whole dot thing that they do.
748. 00:43:06 I'm old school and use Patrick Roan's dash plus system.
749. 00:43:12 So I definitely think that writer kind of somewhat ripped that off of Roan.
750. 00:43:19 It's very similar, but definitely different.
751. 00:43:22 Anyway, that's side note.
752. 00:43:24 So anyway, I've got some pretty different ways of using it, but it's kind of a heavily
753. 00:43:29 modified version of a bullet journal of sorts.
754. 00:43:33 So I'm trying that out.
755. 00:43:35 We'll see how it goes.
756. 00:43:36 But the main thing is for a way to help me manage projects and make decisions about projects
757. 00:43:41 as opposed to tasks themselves.
758. 00:43:44 Yep.
759. 00:43:45 Exactly.
760. 00:43:46 Well said.
761. 00:43:47 I think they talk about, by the way, at the beginning of this section how goals can be
762. 00:43:53 useful for orienting you in the right direction, but they make it hard to enjoy the time that
763. 00:43:57 you spent working along the way, which I like the way that they describe that.
764. 00:44:01 Yeah.
765. 00:44:02 They say that tasks are too machine-like.
766. 00:44:04 Goals are too far away, but in their opinion, highlight, that's the Goldilocks and the Three
767. 00:44:10 Bears.
768. 00:44:11 You know, that one is just right.
769. 00:44:12 Yeah, totally.
770. 00:44:14 And I tend to agree with them.
771. 00:44:15 For sure.
772. 00:44:17 That's the highlight section.
773. 00:44:18 Okay.
774. 00:44:19 Choosing one thing for today.
775. 00:44:21 How do you decide what it is that one thing is going to be today?
776. 00:44:24 The next section is laser.
777. 00:44:25 How do you laser focus on that one thing?
778. 00:44:29 We've got three tactics written down here.
779. 00:44:32 And I noticed, Mike, that one of those, I think, got both of us into an action item.
780. 00:44:39 Did I get this right?
781. 00:44:40 Well, maybe you didn't.
782. 00:44:41 You didn't do it entirely.
783. 00:44:43 You copped out on it.
784. 00:44:44 Well, I kind of, so I should mention here that this is not the first time I've read this
785. 00:44:54 book.
786. 00:44:55 I covered this as a gap book a while ago.
787. 00:44:58 And one of the things that stood out to me in this section was this idea that you're
788. 00:45:05 alluding to number 20.
789. 00:45:08 That is to clear your home screen.
790. 00:45:11 So my home screen is not completely clear.
791. 00:45:15 It has a couple of apps that I use for positive interactions with my phone at the top.
792. 00:45:23 So like right now, I've got my habit tracker, the shortcuts app, which I used to trigger
793. 00:45:29 my reflection template at the end of the day, the per app that I use, and the Bible app,
794. 00:45:35 which I've got a group reading plan with a couple of my discipleship guys at the bottom.
795. 00:45:39 In the doc, I've got my node, day one, drafts, and at the moment, OmniFocus actually, but
796. 00:45:46 that will probably be gone soon.
797. 00:45:49 So those are all, if I were to go into any one of those apps, that's kind of a positive
798. 00:45:54 interaction with my phone.
799. 00:45:55 Twitter would not be there.
800. 00:45:58 Any of the other infinity pools would not be there.
801. 00:46:01 Email is not on my phone at all.
802. 00:46:03 Any of the things that are going to be a distraction are not going to show up on my home screen.
803. 00:46:09 They argue that you should just remove everything from your home screen.
804. 00:46:11 I didn't do that, but I did take the idea and prune things.
805. 00:46:16 By the way, the idea of distraction, I want to call it a quote from this section or an
806. 00:46:21 idea from this section because I really like this.
807. 00:46:24 They say that distraction is like a disco ball, scattering your laser rays all over the place.
808. 00:46:31 And I really like that.
809. 00:46:32 So obviously the goal is to eliminate the distractions.
810. 00:46:38 You can do that different ways.
811. 00:46:40 That's why they have all these different tactics and things that you can do.
812. 00:46:43 So another one here is like next-year notifications.
813. 00:46:45 That's number 19, a distraction-free phone, number 17, which I have as an action item.
814. 00:46:52 And I actually have been trying it.
815. 00:46:53 Like I'm not 100% there, but they have a number of steps to get to what they're calling a
816. 00:46:58 distraction-free phone.
817. 00:47:00 Yep.
818. 00:47:01 And I'm going through most of those.
819. 00:47:02 I haven't done all of them, but I'm darn close.
820. 00:47:06 And they make a pretty compelling case for doing that.
821. 00:47:11 They share a couple of statistics.
822. 00:47:13 They say in 2017, Americans use their smartphones more than four hours per day.
823. 00:47:17 It's probably gone up since then.
824. 00:47:18 They cited a study that showed that people touched their phone on average 2,617 times
825. 00:47:25 per day in 2016.
826. 00:47:26 Again, it's probably gone up.
827. 00:47:28 And there's a great quote on page 88.
828. 00:47:31 They say, "When we use our smartphones to navigate an unfamiliar city or have a video
829. 00:47:34 call with a friend or download an entire book in mere seconds, it's like having superpowers.
830. 00:47:38 But by default, we don't just get the best of modern technology.
831. 00:47:41 We get it.
832. 00:47:42 We get all of it all the time.
833. 00:47:44 We get futuristic superpowers and addictive distraction together on every screen.
834. 00:47:47 The better the technology gets, the cooler our superpowers will become, and the more
835. 00:47:51 of our time and attention the machines will steal."
836. 00:47:54 And I completely agree with that.
837. 00:47:56 And the rest of this section is basically tactics on how to eliminate those distractions
838. 00:48:02 and control your defaults.
839. 00:48:04 Sending you a picture via iMessage.
840. 00:48:07 And it is a picture of my home screen.
841. 00:48:09 Nice.
842. 00:48:10 Drafts made it back on.
843. 00:48:14 Drafts is back on my phone.
844. 00:48:15 It's the only thing.
845. 00:48:16 It is the only thing on that first page because it's the only thing I have in my dock.
846. 00:48:24 And I have a few things on.
847. 00:48:27 There's two other pages to it.
848. 00:48:30 But first thing, we can put this in the show notes.
849. 00:48:33 First thing someone's going to ask me is where is that picture from?
850. 00:48:35 That is from my trip to North Carolina last week.
851. 00:48:38 We were a mile up in the sky on a peak.
852. 00:48:41 And I took that picture with my phone.
853. 00:48:43 So that is where that came from.
854. 00:48:45 So that picture has some meaning to me personally.
855. 00:48:49 And the idea here is that whenever I open my phone, there's absolutely nothing for me
856. 00:48:53 to do but take notes into drafts.
857. 00:48:56 Like, that's the concept.
858. 00:48:57 I like it.
859. 00:48:59 And so far it's been pretty helpful.
860. 00:49:01 It means that it specifically forces me to think, wait, why am I here?
861. 00:49:09 As opposed to just letting the default be tap on the first thing that seems interesting.
862. 00:49:15 So because of the distraction free phone process and going through that, like, there is no
863. 00:49:21 social media on my phone.
864. 00:49:23 There is no email.
865. 00:49:24 There's none of that.
866. 00:49:26 All it is is either creation tools or things that are not distractions, like navigation
867. 00:49:36 and such.
868. 00:49:37 So that's all I've really got on it.
869. 00:49:38 But yeah, that's my home screen.
870. 00:49:39 Just drafts.
871. 00:49:40 That's it.
872. 00:49:41 Nice.
873. 00:49:42 Yeah.
874. 00:49:43 And that's one of the reasons I mentioned regarding the no social media stuff, one of
875. 00:49:49 the reasons that I am only on Twitter, I actually like Instagram, but they refuse to make an
876. 00:49:53 iPad app.
877. 00:49:54 So yeah.
878. 00:49:55 I'm not going to install Instagram on my phone because that's one of those infinity pools
879. 00:49:59 that I will get sucked into.
880. 00:50:01 Right.
881. 00:50:02 So again, you know, I've kind of tempered the idea.
882. 00:50:06 I haven't gone all the way in like you have, but I've seen positive benefit from it.
883. 00:50:11 And I'm sure, you know, the more you follow that idea, the more benefit you're going to
884. 00:50:15 get in terms of you're not going to be distracted by things on your phone.
885. 00:50:20 I would argue for anybody who's considering the step one maybe is identifying or recognizing
886. 00:50:27 the problem first.
887. 00:50:28 So I honestly believe there may be people who just don't have an issue with distractions
888. 00:50:36 on their phone.
889. 00:50:37 I think they are probably very rare.
890. 00:50:38 I think most people do and they just don't even think about it.
891. 00:50:42 So they don't realize it.
892. 00:50:44 But you know, maybe you don't need to delete everything.
893. 00:50:48 But maybe you do.
894. 00:50:49 I think it's worth considering that you may have fallen to either of those categories.
895. 00:50:54 It's true.
896. 00:50:56 There's another tactic here.
897. 00:50:57 Actually, we've got two more to go over here under the laser section.
898. 00:51:01 You wrote down, watch out for time craters.
899. 00:51:03 What's a time crater, Mike?
900. 00:51:05 I just like the idea of time craters.
901. 00:51:07 So they tell this story of one of them have gone to this place in Arizona, I think, where
902. 00:51:13 a meteor had hit and it was like a mile in diameter.
903. 00:51:16 And the meteor wasn't anywhere close to that big when it hit.
904. 00:51:21 But that's the idea is that these small things can suck up a lot of time.
905. 00:51:28 And one of the examples that they use is composing a tweet inside of Twitter.
906. 00:51:32 That maybe only takes a few seconds, a couple minutes, whatever.
907. 00:51:36 But then you end up scrolling through a bunch of other things.
908. 00:51:38 And then that leads to checking all the other things.
909. 00:51:42 And pretty soon you've spent a couple of hours because you were just going to compose a
910. 00:51:47 tweet.
911. 00:51:48 So that's the idea is identifying what are the things that can really get you off the
912. 00:51:54 rails and eat up significant amounts of time.
913. 00:51:58 They also say that recovery time can be a time crater.
914. 00:52:03 So if you eat a big lunch, for example, you may have to, well, not may, you will not have
915. 00:52:12 a ton of energy right after that.
916. 00:52:14 You're going to feel like going and taking a nap.
917. 00:52:15 So don't try to do something like write a bunch of words right after you've eaten a
918. 00:52:21 big meal.
919. 00:52:22 You can go ahead and eat a big meal if you want.
920. 00:52:24 But if you're going to, you have to recognize that there's going to be ramifications throughout
921. 00:52:28 the rest of your day that are tied to that one simple act.
922. 00:52:32 And I don't have an action item associated with this.
923. 00:52:35 I just really like this idea.
924. 00:52:38 And I think it's something that people should be aware of because it always starts off
925. 00:52:42 as just one little thing.
926. 00:52:44 And this can, by the way, also be applied in the positive where like, let's say you want
927. 00:52:49 to create an exercise habit, you don't say, I'm going to go to the gym for an hour.
928. 00:52:54 You say, I'm just going to go on the treadmill for five minutes.
929. 00:52:58 And then once you get on there, you complete the workout because you're already there,
930. 00:53:01 you know?
931. 00:53:02 So the idea being that small actions can have a big impact.
932. 00:53:08 And in this specific case, obviously, in terms of distractions, it's a negative thing.
933. 00:53:11 Sure.
934. 00:53:12 I can't say I am good at this, but I definitely have time creators.
935. 00:53:18 Everybody does.
936. 00:53:19 That's kind of the point.
937. 00:53:20 Like they're going to be different for everybody.
938. 00:53:22 You may not be tempted to go compose a tweet if you're not on Twitter.
939. 00:53:27 But maybe you like scrolling through Amazon.
940. 00:53:30 I don't know.
941. 00:53:32 Thus.
942. 00:53:33 And this is where like the distraction free phone thing comes in for me because that's
943. 00:53:36 way more effective because if I have a time crater, it's on my phone.
944. 00:53:39 I don't really deal with that as much on my Mac, which is kind of weird.
945. 00:53:44 You would think it would be way easier to do it there.
946. 00:53:47 But I have a tendency to see my Mac as a tool to get work done.
947. 00:53:50 And my phone historically has been a, what do I call that, a pacifying device.
948. 00:53:57 So I have a tendency to deal with issues on the phone more so than the Mac, thus creating
949. 00:54:04 a distraction free phone.
950. 00:54:06 The number of times I've pulled it out, seen this beautiful landscape and thought, oh,
951. 00:54:10 yeah, and then close it and put it back in my pocket.
952. 00:54:12 I don't want to know how many times I've done that.
953. 00:54:14 So it does work.
954. 00:54:16 It is successful in that sense.
955. 00:54:19 You know, I don't have a screenshot, but I know that David Sparks, my focus podcast
956. 00:54:25 partner, talking about how he created like this six month wallpaper and he puts it on
957. 00:54:30 his desktop, but he also put it on his phone, I believe.
958. 00:54:33 And he's got basically his outline for all the things that he wants to get done for the
959. 00:54:38 next six months on there.
960. 00:54:39 And he keeps his iPhone home screen clean so that he sees that every time he opens it.
961. 00:54:44 And just by looking at like, oh, I've got this field guide that I want to launch in
962. 00:54:48 a couple of months, like that's enough for him to not go be distracted by something,
963. 00:54:53 but buckle down and do the actual work.
964. 00:54:55 Yeah.
965. 00:54:56 A couple of the time creators I wanted to call out here, email is absolutely a time crater.
966. 00:55:00 And another one that I thought of is your, your task manager.
967. 00:55:03 This can totally be a time creator.
968. 00:55:04 I recognize that this is kind of where Omni focus fell for me is like, I'm not using it
969. 00:55:09 to its full capacity.
970. 00:55:10 So I need to put more things in here.
971. 00:55:11 I need to take advantage of all these fancy perspectives.
972. 00:55:14 I need to review every week, even though I don't have that many things to review.
973. 00:55:17 Like it just got to be more, more time spent babysitting the system than was justified
974. 00:55:26 in terms of what I needed to get done.
975. 00:55:29 In fact, when I was launching faith based productivity, I mean, you saw us because you
976. 00:55:33 actually slept in my office.
977. 00:55:35 Like I had everything written out on the whiteboard.
978. 00:55:38 That was everything I had planning wise or this activity.
979. 00:55:41 I knew what I needed to do based off of everything that was on that whiteboard.
980. 00:55:45 I didn't create all the projects and things and Omni focus because I didn't want to have
981. 00:55:48 to go back there.
982. 00:55:49 I just had to have something where when I walked into the office, I saw it.
983. 00:55:52 I saw the date circled there and I'm like, okay, time to get to work.
984. 00:55:56 And I knew what I needed to do.
985. 00:55:58 So I think that if you are going to try and track every minute detail of the things that
986. 00:56:04 you are going to do, that could definitely be a time creator too.
987. 00:56:07 For sure.
988. 00:56:08 You're fiddling with the system instead of doing the actual work.
989. 00:56:11 Another tactic in the laser section is number 53.
990. 00:56:15 Avoid the allure of fancy tools.
991. 00:56:17 Yes.
992. 00:56:18 Okay, Mike, you and I have both worked in the productivity space for a long time.
993. 00:56:22 How many times have you seen people decide to try a different task manager just because
994. 00:56:27 they feel it will make them more productive?
995. 00:56:30 So many times.
996. 00:56:33 This was interesting because I recognize that I when someone says, oh, I found this new
997. 00:56:40 app and it's great.
998. 00:56:41 It does all these things.
999. 00:56:42 My initial response is I'm not going to use that because it's going to be gone in six
1000. 00:56:47 months.
1001. 00:56:48 Right.
1002. 00:56:49 Even if it's not, I tend to not try those things until the app has been around for several
1003. 00:56:55 years and I'm like, okay, I guess it's sustainable.
1004. 00:56:57 I'm going to get shot.
1005. 00:57:00 One specific area where you see this all the time is third party email apps on iOS.
1006. 00:57:06 There is not a good third party email app, in my opinion, for iOS.
1007. 00:57:11 There are lots of options.
1008. 00:57:12 Spark is the least sucky one.
1009. 00:57:15 But you know, that means though, Mike, right?
1010. 00:57:19 Don't do email on your iPad.
1011. 00:57:23 Exactly.
1012. 00:57:24 That's kind of what I've, that's kind of the place I've landed.
1013. 00:57:28 Even though I'm using my iPad more and I really like it, there isn't a great application for
1014. 00:57:34 email on there.
1015. 00:57:35 If I could get mail made on my iPad, I'd be really happy.
1016. 00:57:38 But I'm okay with just saying the Mac is going to be the place where I'm going to check email.
1017. 00:57:43 It's more efficient that way anyways when I've got a keyboard with me all the time.
1018. 00:57:48 And the iPad is going to be used for the other things like different devices, different
1019. 00:57:51 modes.
1020. 00:57:52 It's a completely valid approach.
1021. 00:57:55 But the, the really the point I wanted to make was that dispatch was the one app that
1022. 00:57:59 I was like, yes, this is the thing for iOS.
1023. 00:58:03 Because you could send things to different places, different applications.
1024. 00:58:07 And you could use that message URL scheme.
1025. 00:58:09 So once you sent it, you could still get to those messages, even if you weren't using
1026. 00:58:13 dispatch on your Mac, which there was no Mac app.
1027. 00:58:15 So that was no problem.
1028. 00:58:17 But it hasn't been updated in years and nobody else has used that default message URL scheme.
1029. 00:58:23 Everybody uses the proprietary one.
1030. 00:58:24 If you send something to a task manager and spark an email, you're going to have to use
1031. 00:58:28 an email or spark URL scheme, which means that you click on that on your Mac, you're
1032. 00:58:32 going to have to have the Mac version of that app in order to view it.
1033. 00:58:36 And that's a big deal to me.
1034. 00:58:38 It's probably not a big deal to a lot of people.
1035. 00:58:39 And so if you don't understand that, don't even worry about it.
1036. 00:58:42 But that was a big part of my productivity workflow.
1037. 00:58:45 And when dispatch just became terrible, I'm like, man, come on.
1038. 00:58:49 Like, throw me a bone.
1039. 00:58:50 Just update this for me.
1040. 00:58:53 You know?
1041. 00:58:54 But obviously they're not going to do that.
1042. 00:58:55 And it's hard.
1043. 00:58:56 Really the bottom line is that it is hard to make money on the iOS app store for that
1044. 00:59:02 particular product category, especially given probably all the infrastructure that you need
1045. 00:59:06 in order to implement all of those features that people want.
1046. 00:59:10 And you have to recognize that there are whole categories, I guess, of applications where
1047. 00:59:17 people will just decide it's not worth it.
1048. 00:59:20 And you're not going to be able to do what you used to do.
1049. 00:59:23 Not just a particular app, but third party email clients, like I said, there is not a
1050. 00:59:26 single one in there that I would trust at the moment.
1051. 00:59:29 Right.
1052. 00:59:30 Task managers maybe are a little bit more stable.
1053. 00:59:32 And I don't know, like, Evernote replacement type apps, like, I don't know what category
1054. 00:59:36 you would call that reference apps maybe.
1055. 00:59:37 But I think that's not a great representation of those types of apps.
1056. 00:59:42 You can pick your category and you may find something that is going to be more stable.
1057. 00:59:46 But like, that's always in the back of my mind is like, when is this going to go away?
1058. 00:59:50 It's only going to be a matter of time before they just decide, "I'm not going to do this
1059. 00:59:54 anymore."
1060. 00:59:55 Even now we focus, it's been around forever.
1061. 00:59:57 You know, that one's probably, you could make a case for that one being the most stable.
1062. 01:00:02 But who knows?
1063. 01:00:03 It could be gone tomorrow.
1064. 01:00:04 You really, you really can't be sure.
1065. 01:00:06 Right.
1066. 01:00:07 And I feel like this comes up more and more.
1067. 01:00:10 I've had a handful of folks ask me about tools that are web-based.
1068. 01:00:17 They don't really want the app, even if it hasn't.
1069. 01:00:20 And it has to do with the website is more universal.
1070. 01:00:26 So they don't have to be locked into a specific device even.
1071. 01:00:31 So me personally, I've been on this boat for a while with moving over to text files and
1072. 01:00:38 analog because I just get tired of these things dying off.
1073. 01:00:43 You know, Evernote was the one that bit me hard to begin with and kind of started me
1074. 01:00:46 down that trail.
1075. 01:00:47 They made it to where I either had to pay them or not use the tool.
1076. 01:00:53 And like, well, I'm not spending that amount of money per year to just throw things at
1077. 01:00:58 it.
1078. 01:00:59 So goodbye.
1079. 01:01:00 Like, you know, that's the way that is gone for me.
1080. 01:01:04 So thus, I'm playing around with bullet journal.
1081. 01:01:06 I've played around with things like that in my notebooks for a long time.
1082. 01:01:10 I've moved a lot of things over to text files.
1083. 01:01:13 I will use tools once in a while, like in Valt, but only because it uses text files on
1084. 01:01:20 the back end.
1085. 01:01:22 This is the only reason I've considered what's the one Devin think people revert to quite
1086. 01:01:27 a bit.
1087. 01:01:28 I've read a few times because you can store the files and text files, but the UI has been
1088. 01:01:32 terrible historically.
1089. 01:01:34 So like, I just don't want to be locked into some proprietary stuff.
1090. 01:01:39 I played with bear.
1091. 01:01:40 I played with you, Lissies.
1092. 01:01:41 I've played with, you know, Apple notes and all that.
1093. 01:01:44 But at the end of the day, I'm dependent on that app staying around.
1094. 01:01:50 And it doesn't necessarily stay around.
1095. 01:01:53 Yeah.
1096. 01:01:54 So what do you do?
1097. 01:01:56 Exactly.
1098. 01:01:57 Now, I will say that like I mentioned, I use good notes a lot and I really like good notes.
1099. 01:02:02 I would recommend good notes to anybody.
1100. 01:02:06 And you may say, well, might not my good notes disappear?
1101. 01:02:09 Yes, it is possible that good notes can disappear.
1102. 01:02:12 But the difference I would argue with good notes is that you can export all of the things
1103. 01:02:17 that are in there as PDF files.
1104. 01:02:20 So you mentioned text files.
1105. 01:02:21 I would argue PDF files are the other thing that are kind of timeless.
1106. 01:02:26 Yep.
1107. 01:02:27 So I kind of have an exit strategy, I guess, for any app that you're going to use.
1108. 01:02:31 Like if I really need to get everything out of here, can I do so?
1109. 01:02:35 And what's it going to look like?
1110. 01:02:37 If good notes disappears tomorrow and I have to export everything as PDF files, I'm not
1111. 01:02:41 going to be sad that I have all of these PDFs.
1112. 01:02:43 They're not going to be sitting in a useless, useless pile on my desktop.
1113. 01:02:46 Like, what do I do with these?
1114. 01:02:48 They're PDFs.
1115. 01:02:49 I can use them anywhere.
1116. 01:02:50 Right.
1117. 01:02:51 Yeah.
1118. 01:02:52 I would say like PDFs, picture files, text files, even markdown files.
1119. 01:02:56 You know, for the most part, those are all, to me, safe file formats to operate in for
1120. 01:03:04 the long term.
1121. 01:03:05 Text files have been around since day one.
1122. 01:03:08 It's not going anywhere.
1123. 01:03:10 So I don't know.
1124. 01:03:12 We've beat this pretty hard at this point.
1125. 01:03:14 But the key point that they're making is that if you're going to stay laser focused,
1126. 01:03:20 spending your time playing around with new tools and exploring new stuff or trying to
1127. 01:03:26 do something fancy with like scrivener and such, like that type of thing, just stay away
1128. 01:03:32 from it.
1129. 01:03:33 It's going to just create more bloat in the process when you should be working on your
1130. 01:03:38 highlight.
1131. 01:03:39 I think that's their point.
1132. 01:03:41 Yeah, definitely.
1133. 01:03:42 So don't, when everyone's talking about the new test manager hotness, don't feel like,
1134. 01:03:47 "Oh, I need to go check that out because maybe it'll solve a problem for me."
1135. 01:03:51 It's probably going to just eat up a bunch of your time as you look at it and try it out
1136. 01:03:56 and then you realize that, "Oh, this isn't going to be the right thing anyways and you're
1137. 01:03:59 going to go back to the old thing, but you're going to have wasted a bunch of time."
1138. 01:04:03 There's also a whole section in here which I just want to call out.
1139. 01:04:05 We don't have anything specific from here, but the whole idea of slowing your inbox is
1140. 01:04:10 an interesting idea.
1141. 01:04:12 And number 38 specifically, be slow to respond.
1142. 01:04:15 They mentioned shifting from as fast as I can to as slow as I can get away with.
1143. 01:04:19 I feel like I've done this with email.
1144. 01:04:21 Yeah.
1145. 01:04:22 Over the last couple years.
1146. 01:04:23 But they articulated it way better than I would have.
1147. 01:04:27 So that's the basic idea with a lot of these things.
1148. 01:04:31 And I think the baseline of as slow as you can get away with is going to be different
1149. 01:04:35 for different people, different situations, but that should be what you're aiming for.
1150. 01:04:40 Yeah.
1151. 01:04:41 And I will say this is something I'm working towards.
1152. 01:04:43 I have it as an action.
1153. 01:04:45 I'm off of number 34, which is email at the end of the day and only once a day.
1154. 01:04:50 And historically, I haven't been able to do that because of the client side of things.
1155. 01:04:53 But I'm transitioning out of that and I've been offloading all of my client business.
1156. 01:04:58 So that means that I can get to this point.
1157. 01:05:02 So I'm in the middle of all of that transition right now.
1158. 01:05:05 So as part of that, probably by the time we hit max stock, by the time we record next
1159. 01:05:11 mic, I should be able to be at that point where I'm just doing it once a day.
1160. 01:05:15 So I'm finally going to be solving some of my email nightmares.
1161. 01:05:19 Nice.
1162. 01:05:20 Whoo.
1163. 01:05:21 All right.
1164. 01:05:22 Next section, energy.
1165. 01:05:23 Yes.
1166. 01:05:24 I'm excited about this section, even though we only have two points here.
1167. 01:05:28 Neither one really covers a whole bunch of energy, but energy is something I've had to
1168. 01:05:33 pay very close attention to because of the whole Lyme disease stuff I fight.
1169. 01:05:37 So yes, energy levels.
1170. 01:05:41 Right.
1171. 01:05:42 So this section has a bunch of tactics which are going to appear, well, I guess depending
1172. 01:05:51 on your frame of reference.
1173. 01:05:55 But if you have been following the productivity space for any length of time, you probably
1174. 01:05:59 heard all of this stuff before.
1175. 01:06:01 For example, exercise, eat right, disconnect, and get enough sleep.
1176. 01:06:07 Really that's kind of the main ideas here.
1177. 01:06:10 But there's specific tactics from here which I feel like this section has some gold in
1178. 01:06:15 it.
1179. 01:06:16 Number one that I want to talk about is actually number, let's see, what is this?
1180. 01:06:23 It's in the outline number 70, which is to wake up before you caffeinate.
1181. 01:06:29 And this is something that struck me the first time that I read this.
1182. 01:06:33 And I feel like I've kind of made this shift already.
1183. 01:06:36 But even before I read this, I recognized for myself that I didn't want to drink coffee
1184. 01:06:41 like as soon as I woke up.
1185. 01:06:43 But they explain why that is not a great idea.
1186. 01:06:47 They mentioned that your cortisol is high when you first wake up.
1187. 01:06:50 And if you drink coffee when you have a cortisol coursing through your veins, then it's not
1188. 01:06:54 going to do a lot of good for you.
1189. 01:06:56 If you wake up at 7 a.m., you really want to wait until about 930 to have your first cup
1190. 01:07:02 of coffee.
1191. 01:07:04 And I think that this makes a ton of sense and probably reduces the amount of coffee that
1192. 01:07:11 you would typically drink.
1193. 01:07:14 And then they have this little grid here in the book.
1194. 01:07:18 They have the curve, your energy levels.
1195. 01:07:22 And they talk about the prime time for caffeine.
1196. 01:07:24 They show the afternoon dip.
1197. 01:07:28 And if you're going to drink coffee in the afternoon, this is the point where you should
1198. 01:07:32 do it.
1199. 01:07:33 And after 4 p.m. basically do not touch the stuff.
1200. 01:07:37 I know you actually are a little bit more strict about this even than what they articulate
1201. 01:07:41 here.
1202. 01:07:42 But basic idea being that you need to give your body enough time for that caffeine to
1203. 01:07:45 work its way through if you don't want it to interfere with you going to bed at night.
1204. 01:07:51 Right.
1205. 01:07:52 Yeah.
1206. 01:07:53 I've known that you shouldn't do coffee immediately when you get up.
1207. 01:07:57 I can't say that I thought through it a whole lot to decide when I would.
1208. 01:08:01 Just because by the time I get up and get around and get to making it, it's already
1209. 01:08:05 an hour after I've been up.
1210. 01:08:08 I do have it as an action item though to wait a little bit longer than what I normally do
1211. 01:08:12 because I think for me I'm still into it a little bit early.
1212. 01:08:17 I've tried it the last couple days of waiting until it's about 2 hours, 2.5 hours after
1213. 01:08:23 the time I get up before I have that first cup.
1214. 01:08:27 Seems to make a little bit of a difference.
1215. 01:08:29 I can't say it's drastic but I'm going to keep it as a build into my habit structure
1216. 01:08:35 right now just to see how it pans out long term.
1217. 01:08:39 But yeah, I know that if I'm going to drink coffee, I need to be done finished drinking
1218. 01:08:45 coffee in the day by like 9.30 o'clock in the morning so that I've had more than ample
1219. 01:08:50 time for that to get out of my system before bedtime at night.
1220. 01:08:53 Otherwise Joe can't sleep too well.
1221. 01:08:57 Yeah.
1222. 01:08:59 And that's the important thing I would argue with this whole section on optimizing caffeine
1223. 01:09:04 because they actually have a whole bunch of tips related to this.
1224. 01:09:07 Like take a caffeine nap, that sort of thing.
1225. 01:09:11 And I feel like the idea that you really need to understand here is that caffeine should
1226. 01:09:19 be used sparingly I guess and also you need to recognize when to do it optimally so that
1227. 01:09:30 it doesn't become the crutch that most people think of it as or most people who don't drink
1228. 01:09:37 coffee for example, they kind of view this as like an addiction that you absolutely can't
1229. 01:09:42 break away from.
1230. 01:09:44 And every single year I go on like a 21 day fast at the beginning of the year and give
1231. 01:09:48 up coffee for 21 days just to show my body like I'm boss you can't control me.
1232. 01:09:55 So that stuff really doesn't bother me when people say that I really do just enjoy the
1233. 01:09:59 taste of a good cup of coffee but I can function without it.
1234. 01:10:04 And I think you know the point of this section is that it can be a help it doesn't have to
1235. 01:10:09 be a hindrance but you do have to recognize the effect and when you know that you can
1236. 01:10:14 apply it strategically to help you focus on and laser on your highlight.
1237. 01:10:19 We have another tactic here number 81 spend time with your tribe in other words hang out
1238. 01:10:27 with people Mike thus max stock.
1239. 01:10:30 Yeah so you went straight to the end for this one but I put this on here because they
1240. 01:10:38 say that even introverts are hardwired for connection.
1241. 01:10:43 I just spent a week with my family in Dork county which was awesome but at one point
1242. 01:10:51 during that vacation I admit I told my wife my ideal vacation is an island with nobody
1243. 01:10:58 on it.
1244. 01:11:02 So I guess you know when I read this section again it hit me that even for someone like
1245. 01:11:14 me who I would consider myself very introverted I need to spend time with the right people
1246. 01:11:22 finding those people who can give me energy.
1247. 01:11:25 And one of the action items that I had on here from the last time that I read it that
1248. 01:11:29 I actually did for the last episode I believe was to make a list of energy givers.
1249. 01:11:34 I did that when I identified all my plus plus people you know.
1250. 01:11:38 Does that make the list?
1251. 01:11:40 Yeah so I kind of did that already but yeah specifically max stock I would argue that's
1252. 01:11:46 for me spending time with my tribe.
1253. 01:11:50 Last time I was at max stock I found by the time we went home I was like kind of depressed
1254. 01:11:57 and I recognized on the way home I said something along the lines to my wife something along
1255. 01:12:04 the lines of like these are my people.
1256. 01:12:09 Like they get me.
1257. 01:12:12 So recognizing who is your tribe I think is important and then surrounding yourself with
1258. 01:12:19 those people as often as you can is also important.
1259. 01:12:24 Maybe you can't do it in person all that often.
1260. 01:12:27 You know I would be great if max stock happened multiple times per year but it's not going
1261. 01:12:34 to happen.
1262. 01:12:35 That is why I go down whenever I can to like the relay live events though and I'm toying
1263. 01:12:40 with the idea of going out to San Francisco for the five year anniversary thing.
1264. 01:12:44 It's going to be expensive but again that's my tribe those are my people.
1265. 01:12:50 And every time I get around those people I just feel I don't even really know how to
1266. 01:12:56 describe it.
1267. 01:12:57 It feels like home more so than actually being home.
1268. 01:13:03 Like around here where I live there are a handful of people who are max nerds who listen
1269. 01:13:10 to podcasts who care about productivity but they're the exception not the rule.
1270. 01:13:16 You're not going to just bump into those types of people when you're out about town.
1271. 01:13:21 And it's probably the same thing for you even though you're close to Minneapolis like you
1272. 01:13:25 could probably find those people easier than I could.
1273. 01:13:29 But I don't know like it's fine most of the time for me not to physically be in the same
1274. 01:13:37 place with those people but I recognize that every time I am physically in the same place
1275. 01:13:41 with those people it does rejuvenate me.
1276. 01:13:44 It does something inside of me.
1277. 01:13:46 And so I can't manufacture that as often as I would like but step one is identifying the
1278. 01:13:52 places and the times where that can really happen.
1279. 01:13:55 And then investing in that.
1280. 01:13:57 It's hard for me to quantify the value of going and being in that place and being around
1281. 01:14:05 those people because it will inspire me and that momentum will carry on for weeks after
1282. 01:14:11 I've been there.
1283. 01:14:12 It's not just the dollar value of booking a flight and finding a hotel and then the time
1284. 01:14:17 that you're going to be there like going to craft and commerce for example that was another
1285. 01:14:22 place where like I was really energized by my time there.
1286. 01:14:27 And if you open your eyes to the opportunities that are around you those experiences you
1287. 01:14:32 know those are the things that are really going to stick and going to be worthwhile.
1288. 01:14:35 So that's not really an action item that I want to like pick something else to go to
1289. 01:14:41 but kind of in the back of my mind is like be looking for those things.
1290. 01:14:44 Sure.
1291. 01:14:45 Yeah I feel like I hang out with a number of groups of people on a pretty regular basis.
1292. 01:14:51 Again we're in a higher populated area than I think what you are.
1293. 01:14:55 But at the same time it's all about different types of tribes too.
1294. 01:15:01 If I'm hanging out with a small group from church that's one area and I love hanging
1295. 01:15:06 out with our small group.
1296. 01:15:08 Totally.
1297. 01:15:09 And I also have this tribe around computers and nerdy thus Max-Stock and that kind of scratches
1298. 01:15:16 the itch there.
1299. 01:15:18 You know I'm finding people in my area that are into books so the bookworm has kind of
1300. 01:15:23 got some local following as well.
1301. 01:15:25 Hi folks.
1302. 01:15:27 You know those tribes are different but they're also very important to connect with people
1303. 01:15:33 in those different areas.
1304. 01:15:34 Yeah.
1305. 01:15:35 That's a piece of it that I've been trying to focus on more recently and this simply
1306. 01:15:38 confirmed that.
1307. 01:15:40 And the bookworm club for example that can totally be this for a lot of people but it's
1308. 01:15:48 not going to do the same thing as being physically in the same place.
1309. 01:15:54 So you can absolutely join the bookworm club and then the live recordings like be part
1310. 01:15:58 of the conversation that is a version of spending time with your tribe.
1311. 01:16:03 And you can be energized by hanging out in the same place online.
1312. 01:16:07 I don't want to discount that because there is a lot of value in that.
1313. 01:16:11 Sure.
1314. 01:16:12 But it isn't the same.
1315. 01:16:13 It isn't the same as looking Joe in the eyeball and talking about stuff.
1316. 01:16:19 Yeah.
1317. 01:16:20 And there are a handful of opportunities to do that every single year.
1318. 01:16:24 And the value of doing that is greater than just the cost associated with it in my opinion.
1319. 01:16:34 You know, even for an introvert like me, I recognize that that's the stuff that really
1320. 01:16:39 recharges my batteries because that's this whole section, the energized section.
1321. 01:16:43 That's what it's all about.
1322. 01:16:45 So we've picked our highlight.
1323. 01:16:47 We have laser focused on it.
1324. 01:16:49 We have learned how to maintain energy for that laser focus.
1325. 01:16:54 Once you've done those aspects of this system that Mike didn't want to go about.
1326. 01:17:00 This non system.
1327. 01:17:02 You need to reflect on what you've done so far.
1328. 01:17:05 And they bring up the scientific method.
1329. 01:17:08 I don't have that list in front of me and I am not a scientist.
1330. 01:17:11 So I cannot refer you to the exact steps.
1331. 01:17:14 I'm sure Mike will have it by the time I'm done here.
1332. 01:17:17 But once you've gotten into the end of this process, the goal is to revise and reiterate.
1333. 01:17:26 Like go over it again.
1334. 01:17:28 You have to figure out what happened, what went wrong, make a hypothesis of how to change
1335. 01:17:32 it, make an edit and go about determining what to do next.
1336. 01:17:36 Is that fair?
1337. 01:17:38 Yeah.
1338. 01:17:39 So the scientific method that they outline is observe what's going on.
1339. 01:17:42 Guess why things are happening the way they are.
1340. 01:17:44 Experiment, test your hypothesis and measure the results and decide if you were right.
1341. 01:17:48 And that's why they've got their own tracking sheet that they use.
1342. 01:17:52 I, again, you know, I've got a reflection template.
1343. 01:17:55 I'm not tracking how focused I was or what my energy levels were.
1344. 01:17:58 Although I definitely see that as being valuable if that's where you want to, if that's what
1345. 01:18:06 you want to tweak, you know, if you really want to just maximize your energy levels,
1346. 01:18:11 it's valuable to track that sort of stuff for a period of time until you get that nailed
1347. 01:18:14 down.
1348. 01:18:15 I feel like I've been doing that for a while.
1349. 01:18:17 There's a whole section in the energy part about sleep, for example.
1350. 01:18:21 And you know, I don't need to go there, but you know, I've mentioned before, if that's
1351. 01:18:26 something that I care deeply about because of the epilepsy I've been diagnosed with.
1352. 01:18:32 So I've been applying a lot of that stuff.
1353. 01:18:34 And so I just at this point have no need to track that energy level because I know that
1354. 01:18:38 the things that I'm doing are the right things.
1355. 01:18:40 I just need to keep doing them.
1356. 01:18:42 But if you wanted to use that, totally take it.
1357. 01:18:45 They've also got three hypotheses that they share here regarding the highlight laser and
1358. 01:18:50 energize.
1359. 01:18:51 The highlight hypothesis is that if you set a single intention at the start of each day,
1360. 01:18:54 they predict you'll be more satisfied, joyful and effective.
1361. 01:18:57 The laser hypothesis is that if you create barriers around the busy bandwagon and infinity
1362. 01:19:01 pools, they predict you'll focus your attention like a laser beam.
1363. 01:19:04 And the energized hypothesis is that if you love a little more like a prehistoric human,
1364. 01:19:09 they predict you'll enhance your mental and your physical energy or live a little more.
1365. 01:19:14 Sorry, that's a typo.
1366. 01:19:15 Yeah.
1367. 01:19:16 So on the energized piece, I think a piece of that that we didn't cover is that they
1368. 01:19:21 refer to our cave mandates and how we used to live.
1369. 01:19:26 Yeah.
1370. 01:19:27 What's that guy's name?
1371. 01:19:28 Erk.
1372. 01:19:29 Erk.
1373. 01:19:30 You are a erk.
1374. 01:19:31 So live like Erk.
1375. 01:19:32 He hunted and gathered his food, which meant that he was moving all the time, spent time
1376. 01:19:38 in community with his people.
1377. 01:19:41 And the type of food that he ate was all natural whole foods.
1378. 01:19:45 You get the idea.
1379. 01:19:46 Yep.
1380. 01:19:47 Putely.
1381. 01:19:48 Dead when it was dark.
1382. 01:19:49 Yadda yadda yadda.
1383. 01:19:50 But anyway, that's the hypothesis there.
1384. 01:19:54 So yeah, so I really don't think we need to spend a ton of time in this reflection.
1385. 01:19:58 Yeah.
1386. 01:19:59 Other than like the main idea here is have some sort of way to measure if what you are
1387. 01:20:04 doing is working.
1388. 01:20:06 And it doesn't have to even have a number associated with it.
1389. 01:20:08 You can just generally jot down.
1390. 01:20:10 How do you feel at the end of the day?
1391. 01:20:13 The way I do this with my reflection template is just a star rating.
1392. 01:20:16 And I've got one through five stars.
1393. 01:20:18 How'd you do overall today?
1394. 01:20:20 And if there was something that happened, I'm going to jot that down in that entry that
1395. 01:20:24 impacted that.
1396. 01:20:26 But I don't know.
1397. 01:20:27 I've kind of tweaked this system to the point now where I know what the right things are
1398. 01:20:32 to do.
1399. 01:20:33 I need to get up early, which means I have to go to bed at a decent time the night before.
1400. 01:20:37 I need to eat healthy and I need to exercise.
1401. 01:20:40 Yeah.
1402. 01:20:41 That's the big thing.
1403. 01:20:42 I got to know what my highlight is going into the beginning of my day or the big thing
1404. 01:20:46 that I want to get done.
1405. 01:20:47 And that's one of the big changes I'm going to make.
1406. 01:20:50 And I've actually already made it, I mentioned, to my daily planning sheet, adding that highlight
1407. 01:20:53 section to it, just a refinement of those things.
1408. 01:20:57 But feel free, I guess, to make this your own.
1409. 01:21:02 Just keep an eye on this.
1410. 01:21:03 Don't just blindly go from one day to the next and, oh, I hope this is going to work
1411. 01:21:06 out in the end.
1412. 01:21:08 Sure.
1413. 01:21:09 Yeah.
1414. 01:21:10 I don't know that I have an action item on the reflect piece because I have some reflective
1415. 01:21:15 type time built into my days that will tell me if I'm on the right track or not what I
1416. 01:21:22 need to change.
1417. 01:21:23 So yeah, I don't know.
1418. 01:21:25 I think it's good.
1419. 01:21:26 It's a good thing to do.
1420. 01:21:27 I think if you're doing absolutely nothing, following their recommendations is an excellent
1421. 01:21:32 place to start.
1422. 01:21:33 I just think that we have experience with this at this point.
1423. 01:21:36 Yep.
1424. 01:21:37 So trying to adopt their methodology doesn't make any sense, I don't think.
1425. 01:21:40 Right.
1426. 01:21:41 No, I agree.
1427. 01:21:42 All right.
1428. 01:21:43 Action items.
1429. 01:21:44 Totally.
1430. 01:21:45 I'm game.
1431. 01:21:46 All right.
1432. 01:21:47 So I've got a couple which I've kind of mentioned.
1433. 01:21:50 I've been applying this stuff as we go.
1434. 01:21:52 The big one that I applied from this, going through the book this time, but I've already
1435. 01:21:57 done this is adding a highlight section to my daily planning template.
1436. 01:21:59 I really, really like this.
1437. 01:22:01 This has made a big difference for me.
1438. 01:22:04 I've also, there's a whole section in here on sleep that I mentioned and there was one
1439. 01:22:08 thing that I jotted down when I went through this the first time.
1440. 01:22:12 The action item was to try a sleep mask because they mentioned you want to block out all
1441. 01:22:20 the light and you want to fake the sunset by cutting the blue light, by dimming the lights,
1442. 01:22:30 that sort of thing.
1443. 01:22:32 And the sleep mask was the inexpensive solution that I'm like, I should just try that even
1444. 01:22:37 though I never liked the idea of wearing something on my face as I went to bed.
1445. 01:22:42 But after I wrote that down, my wife decided to get blackout curtains for our bedroom,
1446. 01:22:49 which have been amazing.
1447. 01:22:51 So I've actually already done that one, but these are great.
1448. 01:22:55 I love them.
1449. 01:22:56 And we also have a, it's not a gravity blanket, but it's one of those weighted blankets on
1450. 01:23:02 our bed.
1451. 01:23:03 Yep.
1452. 01:23:04 So you get in and this thing is on top of you and it takes a couple of minutes before
1453. 01:23:09 it's like sleeping in a warm hug.
1454. 01:23:12 Yeah.
1455. 01:23:13 Like you're just, you're ready for bed and you don't want to, like, you don't want to
1456. 01:23:15 get up until, until the morning.
1457. 01:23:17 Like what it, it's hard to describe the effect that it has on me, but it helps me transition
1458. 01:23:22 into sleep a lot easier.
1459. 01:23:24 Sure.
1460. 01:23:25 So those have been a couple of things that I've, I've already done that have been great.
1461. 01:23:29 And then the other one I mentioned condensing my home screen.
1462. 01:23:32 I've, I've done that.
1463. 01:23:33 I'm kind of thinking through other additional ways that I can do this.
1464. 01:23:38 I'm sure there are, I'm not going to go all the way to the point that you have, but I'm
1465. 01:23:43 going to try to trim this down even further.
1466. 01:23:45 All right.
1467. 01:23:47 I expect updates and screenshots, by the way.
1468. 01:23:50 All right.
1469. 01:23:51 Prove it.
1470. 01:23:52 In other words.
1471. 01:23:53 So anyway, on my side, I have five down here.
1472. 01:23:56 They're pretty quick.
1473. 01:23:57 Some of them are already done.
1474. 01:23:59 One is explore bullet journaling.
1475. 01:24:00 I'm doing an experiment in the month of July to see how it goes.
1476. 01:24:04 I, for those who are into bullet journaling, leave a comment on this episode in the club
1477. 01:24:10 and let me know if you think a month is enough time for that experiment.
1478. 01:24:15 I kind of speculate that it's not, but it's a month is a long time for me with an experiment.
1479. 01:24:21 I don't know if that's enough.
1480. 01:24:23 So if you have experience with this, help me out here.
1481. 01:24:28 That's one.
1482. 01:24:29 Two, I blanked out my home screen.
1483. 01:24:31 That one's done.
1484. 01:24:32 I've gone through the process of building a distraction free iPhone.
1485. 01:24:37 Still got one or two things I got to do on that yet, but I'll detail those out in the
1486. 01:24:41 club as well.
1487. 01:24:42 Moving email to once a day at the end of the day, I'm in transition getting there right
1488. 01:24:47 now.
1489. 01:24:48 So it'll take a little bit of time to get that one.
1490. 01:24:49 And then one I'm working on already is waiting until I drink my first cup of coffee in the
1491. 01:24:54 morning just to let my body fully wake up before before the day starts.
1492. 01:25:00 Nice.
1493. 01:25:01 There you go.
1494. 01:25:02 So like I said, this is the second time that I read this interesting observation as I went
1495. 01:25:12 through and looked at all the different action items that I had written down the first time.
1496. 01:25:17 I had implemented most of them, even though I typically don't implement action items from
1497. 01:25:23 non-bookworm books.
1498. 01:25:25 This book just really impacted me.
1499. 01:25:28 Some of the different tactics and that's really, in my opinion, the beauty of this book we mentioned
1500. 01:25:34 earlier that our perspective on how we read books has changed.
1501. 01:25:37 It doesn't have to completely change your life.
1502. 01:25:40 There just has to be a couple of things that you really like and that you're going to apply.
1503. 01:25:44 This book is the perfect book for that because there are so many things in here and they give
1504. 01:25:48 you permission right at the beginning to pick and choose the ones that you want.
1505. 01:25:52 They mention at the very beginning, this is not a productivity.
1506. 01:25:56 This is not a, I would argue, a systems book because it's not going to be prescriptive of
1507. 01:26:01 this is what you need to do in order to get this result.
1508. 01:26:04 They basically say, here's a whole bunch of stuff.
1509. 01:26:06 Here's our experience with it.
1510. 01:26:07 You may want to try some of this stuff and see if it works for you.
1511. 01:26:10 But the stuff that they share is really, really good.
1512. 01:26:13 It's also very, very approachable as people who maybe are interested in productivity books
1513. 01:26:19 but are put off by some of the used car salesman type of speech.
1514. 01:26:26 There's none of that in here.
1515. 01:26:27 The illustrations are really entertaining.
1516. 01:26:30 I think that, I'm kind of sad that it took me so long to find this book.
1517. 01:26:38 Even for someone who has been in the productivity space for a long time, there was a lot of
1518. 01:26:41 stuff in here that I really, really enjoyed.
1519. 01:26:43 I would recommend this to absolutely anybody.
1520. 01:26:47 I really am having a hard time finding a reason not to rate it five stars.
1521. 01:26:52 I think I got to rate it five stars.
1522. 01:26:54 Like I said, it's really the kind of thing that will speak to anybody no matter what
1523. 01:26:59 situation you happen to find yourself and you'll find one idea in here that just really
1524. 01:27:03 is really, it speaks to you.
1525. 01:27:05 The whole thing, even if you went through it and found absolutely nothing, is very entertaining.
1526. 01:27:09 They have a very relaxed approachable, fun writing style.
1527. 01:27:15 The fact that there's two different authors, this is the first book we've read where it
1528. 01:27:19 feels like they've both contributed and it's been a positive.
1529. 01:27:23 Right.
1530. 01:27:24 Yeah, I think this is a great book and I'm really curious to hear your perspective on
1531. 01:27:29 it because I know you really liked Michael Hyatt in my opinion.
1532. 01:27:32 This is kind of like the other end of the spectrum compared to that one.
1533. 01:27:37 I will say, I will join you.
1534. 01:27:39 These guys are awesome to read.
1535. 01:27:41 They do a fantastic job keeping you engaged.
1536. 01:27:45 Every once in a while you run across one that's kind of hard to put down.
1537. 01:27:48 We read a lot of these but they don't always necessarily hit that point where I want to
1538. 01:27:53 go grab it and read it.
1539. 01:27:56 There's quite a few points where I find myself, it's a good book.
1540. 01:28:02 I enjoy reading it but it doesn't draw me to it if you get what I'm saying.
1541. 01:28:07 This one definitely had me wanting to make time to sit down and read it.
1542. 01:28:14 They definitely kept you engaged.
1543. 01:28:17 It's the first time you're right, there's two authors but they do a fantastic job of letting
1544. 01:28:21 each of them speak because although it's co-authored, they have call outs where you know Jake wrote
1545. 01:28:27 this piece and John or Jay Z as they refer to him in the book, Jay Z definitely wrote
1546. 01:28:32 this other section.
1547. 01:28:34 And sometimes they have competing opinions about things.
1548. 01:28:37 Yes.
1549. 01:28:38 Like morning versus night.
1550. 01:28:40 Should you do important highlight work in the morning or should you do it at night?
1551. 01:28:43 Well, one of them does it in the morning and the other one does it at night so they can't
1552. 01:28:46 give you one particular opinion on it.
1553. 01:28:51 They fight over it.
1554. 01:28:52 So it's kind of fun to see those battles take place within the book.
1555. 01:28:56 This is one that if you're in the productivity space you've been there for a long time, you're
1556. 01:29:00 going to get a lot out of it.
1557. 01:29:01 If you're brand new to it, it's very approachable, easy to get a lot out of it.
1558. 01:29:05 I have to join you at the 5.0.
1559. 01:29:08 This is a fantastic book.
1560. 01:29:09 I'm with you.
1561. 01:29:10 I wish I had seen this earlier.
1562. 01:29:12 And frankly, I kind of wish I had run across this much earlier in my productivity journey.
1563. 01:29:19 It's a great one to get started with, but it's also a great one to continue to get better
1564. 01:29:22 with.
1565. 01:29:24 It's fascinating in that it's not really a system, but it's a flow to work through.
1566. 01:29:33 And it's not like task level and it's not necessarily goal level.
1567. 01:29:39 It's that middle ground of the project level, which is what I was referring to earlier in
1568. 01:29:44 the episode.
1569. 01:29:45 So it's a piece of it.
1570. 01:29:47 Michael Hyatt did this to some degree too and free to focus in trying to help you determine
1571. 01:29:52 what projects should or shouldn't you be operating with.
1572. 01:29:56 And I think they do a wonderful job of helping that come out.
1573. 01:30:02 So I absolutely love this book and highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in
1574. 01:30:06 it.
1575. 01:30:07 Awesome.
1576. 01:30:08 All right, let's put this one on the shelf.
1577. 01:30:10 Next time we're covering one that's been out for quite a while, I think it's been recommended
1578. 01:30:15 for a while.
1579. 01:30:17 It's towards the top of the vote list, though I didn't know that when I picked it.
1580. 01:30:21 The four hour work week by Tim Ferriss.
1581. 01:30:24 Strong opinions on Tim Ferriss, one way or the other.
1582. 01:30:27 Some people absolutely adore him.
1583. 01:30:28 Some people cannot stand him.
1584. 01:30:30 That's probably why he's so successful.
1585. 01:30:33 We need to cover this one, Mike.
1586. 01:30:34 It's been kind of looming over us for a while.
1587. 01:30:37 Get your popcorn ready.
1588. 01:30:38 It's all I'm going to say.
1589. 01:30:40 Have you read this one before?
1590. 01:30:43 I started.
1591. 01:30:44 I had to put it down because I couldn't stand Tim Ferriss.
1592. 01:30:46 I'm going to finish it this time.
1593. 01:30:50 I have the book.
1594. 01:30:51 I have not even cracked it open.
1595. 01:30:52 I've never been into this book in any way, shape, or form in the past.
1596. 01:30:56 So I feel like this is a very dangerous book.
1597. 01:31:00 That's fair.
1598. 01:31:01 We'll see.
1599. 01:31:02 All right.
1600. 01:31:03 So I have in the document here some question marks for my upcoming book.
1601. 01:31:07 But I do actually have a book.
1602. 01:31:08 I looked at the votes.
1603. 01:31:10 You encouraged people to vote before we started because I tend to pick things live.
1604. 01:31:14 You do this like every time.
1605. 01:31:15 Not picking this one live.
1606. 01:31:17 But I did look earlier today at the ones that people had voted for.
1607. 01:31:23 The next one, highest on the list that we have not covered is sapiens.
1608. 01:31:30 I with max.coming up can't read this one.
1609. 01:31:33 It's like 500 pages.
1610. 01:31:35 Okay.
1611. 01:31:36 Sure.
1612. 01:31:37 So I'm on the list and there's a couple of them that are tied below that.
1613. 01:31:40 It doesn't have to be crazy at work in Second Mountain by David Brooks.
1614. 01:31:44 One of the people in my mastermind who I'm going to try and get to submit a picture of
1615. 01:31:48 their library because they actually have, I've been told, one of those like sliding
1616. 01:31:52 ladders that I want in my library some day.
1617. 01:31:54 Oh, I totally want one of those.
1618. 01:31:56 Yes.
1619. 01:31:57 Well, Michael Diamond, we have a, we link to it and we can link to it again.
1620. 01:32:01 He's got a list of great books on his website.
1621. 01:32:05 He did not vote for this in the Bookworm Club, but he has told me recently in a mastermind
1622. 01:32:09 meeting that I should read Second Mountain by David Brooks.
1623. 01:32:11 So that is going to be the tiebreaker for me.
1624. 01:32:13 Okay.
1625. 01:32:14 And that is the one that I'm going to pick.
1626. 01:32:16 I looked at the description of this briefly on Amazon and it's really, it sounds interesting.
1627. 01:32:22 It sounds like the type of book that speaks to kind of finding your purpose, which as
1628. 01:32:28 the developer of faith, this productivity, like that's, that's something I'm interested
1629. 01:32:31 in.
1630. 01:32:32 I feel like that's something that a lot of our listeners probably are interested into.
1631. 01:32:36 It'll be kind of cool to go through a book like that.
1632. 01:32:40 And so that's the one I'm going to pick.
1633. 01:32:43 Awesome.
1634. 01:32:44 Looking forward to that.
1635. 01:32:45 I have a gap book that I recently finished up.
1636. 01:32:51 Or no, that I'm just now starting.
1637. 01:32:53 I just finished one.
1638. 01:32:54 Now I'm into another one.
1639. 01:32:55 Anyway, this one is high performance habits by Brendan Bertchard.
1640. 01:33:00 I don't know how he says the last name, Bertchard swim around with high performance habits.
1641. 01:33:05 I picked this one up at like a goodwill somewhere.
1642. 01:33:08 It was like three bucks, I think.
1643. 01:33:11 But I've seen him around Brendan a few places.
1644. 01:33:15 And I've seen this book mentioned in quite a few places.
1645. 01:33:18 Curious to see, well, I'll put it this way.
1646. 01:33:20 I thought it was going to be similar to atomic habits, which is why I haven't started it.
1647. 01:33:24 I've had it for a few months now.
1648. 01:33:26 I thought it was going to be very similar to that.
1649. 01:33:29 But it's not.
1650. 01:33:30 Yeah, you thought wrong.
1651. 01:33:32 Yeah, I definitely thought wrong.
1652. 01:33:34 It's more about what habits should you be building to become a high performance individual
1653. 01:33:38 as opposed to performing good habits if you get the difference there.
1654. 01:33:44 So I had a misunderstanding on it.
1655. 01:33:46 Yeah.
1656. 01:33:47 So if you take James Clear and apply some Tim Ferriss with a dash of Grant Cardone, you
1657. 01:33:53 get Brendan Bertchard.
1658. 01:33:55 Maybe a little bit of Tony Robbins in there.
1659. 01:34:01 Yeah.
1660. 01:34:02 I don't think that's what I'm going to be reading.
1661. 01:34:05 That's fair.
1662. 01:34:06 That's fair.
1663. 01:34:07 My gapbook, which I actually finished up, I read through it in a couple of days.
1664. 01:34:11 It was very entertaining.
1665. 01:34:12 It was Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman and Mark Winters, I believe.
1666. 01:34:17 The idea behind this book is that a good company requires two different types of entrepreneurs,
1667. 01:34:22 a visionary and an integrator, and they've got an assessment so you can identify which
1668. 01:34:26 one you are.
1669. 01:34:28 And there were several aha moments from going through this one.
1670. 01:34:31 I'll upload the My Node file to the Bookroom Club for premium members so you can download
1671. 01:34:37 that and take a look at some of the things in there.
1672. 01:34:39 But it's interesting.
1673. 01:34:41 And I feel like a lot of things that they share are very true.
1674. 01:34:44 But there is definitely, I don't know, I feel like this one elicits strong opinions
1675. 01:34:49 too, not to the level of somebody like Tim Ferriss probably.
1676. 01:34:52 But Gino Wickman is also the co-author, I think, of Traction and kind of the architect of
1677. 01:34:58 the EOS system, which seems to elicit some strong opinions from people.
1678. 01:35:04 Fair enough.
1679. 01:35:05 Well, that brings us to something I need to clarify because I have mentioned this in a
1680. 01:35:13 couple different places.
1681. 01:35:15 Some publicly some under behind the premium wall.
1682. 01:35:19 We've all been waiting for the big reveal.
1683. 01:35:21 I know.
1684. 01:35:22 I know.
1685. 01:35:23 So in the premium membership on the club, the Bookworm Club, which, by the way, Bookworm.fm/membership,
1686. 01:35:32 and you can sign up.
1687. 01:35:33 Mike has been posting his book notes for his gap books and the Bookworm books.
1688. 01:35:42 Most of them.
1689. 01:35:43 Yeah.
1690. 01:35:44 I don't take my notes in such a way that are conducive for sharing and they don't make
1691. 01:35:51 much sense to really anyone but me.
1692. 01:35:54 So I was trying to figure out, like, okay, I've been reading these gap books.
1693. 01:36:00 I've got notes on the Bookworm episodes.
1694. 01:36:03 The Bookworm episode notes come out in the recording, as we've seen today.
1695. 01:36:10 But my gap books don't really come out in any way, shape, or form.
1696. 01:36:14 And I was trying to nail down how do I go about sharing these.
1697. 01:36:17 So what I've done, and I've recorded one already, but I'm recording like 15 minute
1698. 01:36:23 overviews of those gap books.
1699. 01:36:27 I've recorded one for All Marketers or Liars by Seth Godin.
1700. 01:36:32 I've got some notes written down for essential manners for men that I'll record that one
1701. 01:36:38 probably when we're done recording this one.
1702. 01:36:41 And I'm going to trickle those out next week, which means before this episode goes live.
1703. 01:36:46 So by the time you're hearing this, premium members, you will have seen two of these little
1704. 01:36:53 15 minute overview episodes.
1705. 01:36:56 And if you are interested in those, you can do that.
1706. 01:36:59 Again, at bookworm.fm/membership.
1707. 01:37:02 And I'm going to start doing these for all of my gap books.
1708. 01:37:05 Just because I feel like I want to share my thoughts on them, and it's kind of my way
1709. 01:37:08 of sharing my gap books, whereas Mike does his My Node files.
1710. 01:37:13 So there you go.
1711. 01:37:14 Yeah, Joe tried to get me to do this, but I'm terrified of the idea of sitting down by
1712. 01:37:18 myself in front of a microphone for 15 minutes when I don't have a script in front of me.
1713. 01:37:22 So I'm going to continue to do the My Node files.
1714. 01:37:25 I'm pretty good at sitting and just rambling sometimes.
1715. 01:37:29 So we'll see how focused they are.
1716. 01:37:32 But here we are.
1717. 01:37:34 So that said, if you're interested in that, join the premium membership.
1718. 01:37:39 Again, as you've probably noticed, we've been slowly adding things to that premium membership.
1719. 01:37:45 There's access to a members only section.
1720. 01:37:47 You get a badge on your avatar on the club.
1721. 01:37:50 You get Mike's book notes.
1722. 01:37:52 There's an exclusive 4K resolution bookworm wallpaper for your computer.
1723. 01:37:57 There's now going to be my gap book episodes.
1724. 01:38:01 You can listen to the recording live.
1725. 01:38:03 There's going to be a lot going on with the premium membership.
1726. 01:38:07 So if you haven't joined that, I highly recommend it.
1727. 01:38:10 That said, you can also recommend a book to us.
1728. 01:38:15 You've noticed Mike continues to pick from that list.
1729. 01:38:17 I do once in a while as well.
1730. 01:38:19 Join the club, click the button for recommend a book, and make sure you vote for other ones
1731. 01:38:25 that are coming up.
1732. 01:38:26 So that Mike gets a pick done and gets the one you want.
1733. 01:38:29 Sapiens is a long though.
1734. 01:38:30 I know we're going to have to cover it at some point.
1735. 01:38:32 There's also a list of books on the main website.
1736. 01:38:36 So bookworm.fm/list.
1737. 01:38:38 All the books we've covered in the past.
1738. 01:38:40 So that way you can see everything we've covered.
1739. 01:38:42 There's tons and tons of books out there.
1740. 01:38:45 So go check those out for sure.
1741. 01:38:47 All right.
1742. 01:38:48 And I want to call out the bookworm club one more time and ask you to go and share
1743. 01:38:54 your own action items.
1744. 01:38:57 Join the conversation around ours or if you have some of your own.
1745. 01:39:01 Feel free to share those as well.
1746. 01:39:03 It doesn't have to be something that we got from the episode we want to hear how these
1747. 01:39:09 books are impacting your lives as well.
1748. 01:39:12 And if you want to support the show, there's a couple of ways that you can do that.
1749. 01:39:15 You already mentioned the premium membership for the bookworm club.
1750. 01:39:19 You can also go over to iTunes and leave us a rating and review.
1751. 01:39:23 The other way you can support the show, I guess, we don't really talk a lot about this, but
1752. 01:39:26 all of the links in the show notes are affiliate links.
1753. 01:39:30 So if you decide to pick up a book and read along with us, then if you use one of those
1754. 01:39:34 links that buys Joe and I a cup of coffee when we see each other at Macstock.
1755. 01:39:40 Definitely appreciate that.
1756. 01:39:41 All right.
1757. 01:39:42 That said, we're going to go into a landmine next time with the four hour work week by
1758. 01:39:48 Tim Ferris.
1759. 01:39:50 Looking forward to this one, Mike.
1760. 01:39:52 Tune in next time.