75: Getting Results the Agile Way by J.D. Meier

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1. 00:00:00 We need to jump into follow-up right away, Mike.
2. 00:00:01 All right, let's do it.
3. 00:00:03 Because I have thoughts on today's book.
4. 00:00:06 Okay.
5. 00:00:07 You've got two follow-up items.
6. 00:00:09 I've got three.
7. 00:00:10 You want to go first?
8. 00:00:11 Yeah.
9. 00:00:11 So my first one is start doing some music after dinner.
10. 00:00:16 And I can say that we've been doing this fairly regularly,
11. 00:00:21 where we will finish eating dinner at night.
12. 00:00:23 And I will help clean up as much as I possibly can,
13. 00:00:27 so that my wife can go pick out some music
14. 00:00:29 and she sits down on the piano.
15. 00:00:31 We play a song or two.
16. 00:00:33 The girls run around the house like crazy little monkeys.
17. 00:00:35 And it's a great time.
18. 00:00:37 It's really entertaining.
19. 00:00:38 I think we need a video of this.
20. 00:00:40 We need a video of this.
21. 00:00:42 I eat.
22. 00:00:44 Okay, I'll take a note.
23. 00:00:46 I will do my best to get a video.
24. 00:00:48 I will post it somewhere.
25. 00:00:49 It's very entertaining.
26. 00:00:50 So that was number one.
27. 00:00:53 That one's been going really well.
28. 00:00:54 Number two, I wanted to just have a conversation with my wife
29. 00:00:58 about what our second mountain goals are.
30. 00:01:02 And I have done that.
31. 00:01:05 And we are exploring some ways of tackling said mountain,
32. 00:01:11 none of which I can share here,
33. 00:01:13 which is a bit unfortunate.
34. 00:01:14 But I can say that having that conversation with your spouse
35. 00:01:18 is extremely rewarding.
36. 00:01:20 Highly recommended.
37. 00:01:21 I'll leave it there.
38. 00:01:21 All right.
39. 00:01:23 Some mine are in the question format.
40. 00:01:27 First two anyways.
41. 00:01:28 First one is who are my mentors?
42. 00:01:30 Which I mentioned a couple of them on the last podcast.
43. 00:01:34 I had a chance to tell a couple of them in person.
44. 00:01:39 You know, I flew out to San Francisco for the relay live show,
45. 00:01:43 which was pretty incredible.
46. 00:01:45 15 relay hosts on stage split up into four teams
47. 00:01:51 for a family feud style game show with Jason Snell as the host.
48. 00:01:55 And Mike and Steven were running the scoreboard.
49. 00:01:59 And Steven was making sure nothing broke.
50. 00:02:01 But that was a really good time.
51. 00:02:04 And got to see a bunch of people, including David Sparks,
52. 00:02:07 who I called out in that episode as being one of my mentors.
53. 00:02:10 So that was kind of cool to spend some time with him.
54. 00:02:13 And meet a couple new people.
55. 00:02:14 I texted you.
56. 00:02:15 I got to meet Brad Dowdy, the pan addict.
57. 00:02:18 Right.
58. 00:02:20 He remembered you.
59. 00:02:21 So he said, hi.
60. 00:02:22 I told him that you mentioned that he cost you thousands
61. 00:02:25 of dollars.
62. 00:02:26 He's cost me a fair amount of money.
63. 00:02:29 I'm not sure it's thousands, but it's a huge number of change.
64. 00:02:31 Yeah.
65. 00:02:32 So really the takeaway from that is that I have not only identified my mentors,
66. 00:02:39 I've started telling people that I view them as mentors.
67. 00:02:43 And I could tell that it meant a lot.
68. 00:02:47 So I think for the rest of them, this is going to be something that I'd
69. 00:02:50 absolutely 100% have to do in person.
70. 00:02:54 I don't think it's going to be a phone call.
71. 00:02:55 Definitely not a text message, but still have to follow through with the rest of the people
72. 00:03:02 on that list, which really wasn't, you know, to the definition of done for that action item.
73. 00:03:06 But having seen what happened, it's definitely the approach I want to take with the other people
74. 00:03:11 that I listed there.
75. 00:03:12 Nice.
76. 00:03:13 Nice.
77. 00:03:14 Cool.
78. 00:03:14 I'm really glad you got to do that.
79. 00:03:15 Yeah.
80. 00:03:16 It's really fun.
81. 00:03:18 Turns out, grab a whole tangent here for a second.
82. 00:03:22 Okay.
83. 00:03:23 The, uh, we're going to those.
84. 00:03:24 Yeah.
85. 00:03:25 Well, this is kind of in line with, with what we were just talking about, but I am more and more
86. 00:03:31 realizing the importance of relationships and going to the relay thing was expensive.
87. 00:03:40 Rachel came with me, which was really cool because I got to share that experience with her.
88. 00:03:45 And more importantly, as I was telling her on the way back, it really means a lot that she
89. 00:03:50 is involved with that part of my life.
90. 00:03:52 You know, it's not just like, oh, you go hang out with your nerd friends and I'll be here when you
91. 00:03:55 get back.
92. 00:03:56 It's something that we get to get to share, even though she doesn't really consider herself a
93. 00:04:01 nerd.
94. 00:04:01 The fact that, you know, she's there, she feels comfortable in that environment.
95. 00:04:04 And she likes meeting those people hanging out with those people, just like I do.
96. 00:04:07 Like that's, that's super cool.
97. 00:04:08 But, you know, the, go back to my, my main point that like the relationships really are the
98. 00:04:15 principal thing.
99. 00:04:16 Before I went to the relay live event, it was
100. 00:04:19 a lot of money and I was having it, like, I don't think I'm going to go.
101. 00:04:23 Really can't swing it right now.
102. 00:04:25 I am 100% glad that, that I went.
103. 00:04:28 And I don't think that I'm ready to make a blanket rule, just like spend all your money on experiences.
104. 00:04:35 I think we talked about that at some point.
105. 00:04:36 Right.
106. 00:04:37 But being there and building those relationships, like that was the thing that I couldn't plan for
107. 00:04:44 on paper prior to going. And afterwards is the thing that added definitely the most value to the,
108. 00:04:50 the trip is being able to make those connections and meet those people.
109. 00:04:53 Not that there's even something that's necessarily coming from it right away.
110. 00:04:57 It's just getting to meet those people and hang out with them and build those relationships.
111. 00:05:00 Like that's, I realize more and more now that that is, that is really important to me.
112. 00:05:06 So kind of tangential action item, not really ready to make it official, but like thinking about
113. 00:05:13 how can I continue to build relationships and everything that I do?
114. 00:05:17 And looking for those opportunities to do so that are outside of the day-to-day routine sort of a thing.
115. 00:05:22 Sure.
116. 00:05:23 Anyways, that kind of leads into my second one.
117. 00:05:25 How can I build my communities?
118. 00:05:26 Although to be honest, for this action item, I really haven't done a great job of this.
119. 00:05:30 I have been traveling.
120. 00:05:31 I have been busy.
121. 00:05:32 And I didn't, I haven't really thought a whole lot about how I can do this for bookworm or faith-based
122. 00:05:39 productivity specifically. But as I mentioned, there's a whole bunch of takeaways and inspirational
123. 00:05:47 moments that I've gotten well on this, this trip and during that sabbatical week.
124. 00:05:52 So I feel like there's been some progress made on this already, but nothing that I can
125. 00:05:57 point to and say like, I did this, if that makes any sense.
126. 00:06:01 Yeah, it does.
127. 00:06:02 Because I think I've been on a similar path as you lately where I've been, I've been trying to
128. 00:06:09 figure out how to be more specific with building relationships lately. And I think there are a lot
129. 00:06:16 of ways that you can do that. There must be something in the last two or three books we've
130. 00:06:20 gone through, Mike, to spark that in you and me at the same time.
131. 00:06:24 Because I feel like that's something we've been slowly learning more about and realizing the value
132. 00:06:31 of. Maybe that's partially because we do so much online that we have starting to focus more on the
133. 00:06:36 offline side of things. But there's something there. And I think you're spot on with doing things in
134. 00:06:45 person, building out communities, whether it's with bookworm or through relay or whatever that
135. 00:06:51 path is. There's definitely a lot of value there. It's almost like we were made that way, Mike.
136. 00:06:58 Yeah. Well, just one small example, I guess, when we were at the relay thing. So we're in this
137. 00:07:04 theater and there's, I think, 350-ish people there. And it's a pretty nice theater. They have it set up
138. 00:07:12 so that there's an intermission in the beginning. And if you want to go back to the green room,
139. 00:07:18 you can duck behind the stage and there's a half-hour break in the middle of the show, basically.
140. 00:07:24 And they said, "Essentially, you can go mingle with people in the audience if you want to,
141. 00:07:29 but if you just need a break, go this way." And as tired as I was from traveling and how exhausted
142. 00:07:37 I was being jet-leg from the two-hour time zone difference, which really made me feel like a wimp.
143. 00:07:43 But it's true. I was definitely feeling it by that evening. I forced myself, I say forced. It
144. 00:07:51 really wasn't that bad. But my natural instinct is as an introvert, go hide somewhere, recharge.
145. 00:07:59 But during that half-hour break, I went out into the audience and it's kind of interesting
146. 00:08:04 because I'm fairly new to the relay network. And there's some people there who have been there
147. 00:08:08 for a long time and there's some people there who are a much bigger deal than I am. There's a line
148. 00:08:12 of people to get to Merlin Man, but I can walk wherever. No one comes up here. So I just go
149. 00:08:18 into the audience. I found the guy who wore this dog-cout t-shirt that I wore at Max
150. 00:08:22 Stock and I'm like, "Hey, I like your shirt." I started talking to him. It was cool to see how
151. 00:08:28 the intentional relationship building, even though that wasn't naturally my comfort zone. I wanted
152. 00:08:36 to just go hang out in the back, get a bottle of water, and just not talk to people for a while.
153. 00:08:41 But I'm like, "I'm here. This is the whole point of this thing." And so I forced, again, I say
154. 00:08:45 force, but it really isn't forcing. It's just against my natural nature to do that sort of thing.
155. 00:08:50 But I recognize that I'm in this place and this is why I'm here. I'm going to go build these
156. 00:08:54 relationships. So I didn't talk to a ton of people, obviously, but I talked to a few people and the
157. 00:08:58 few people that I did talk to. It was really great to talk to them. And I could tell that it
158. 00:09:02 meant a lot. The fact that I am a relay FM host, that gives me some sort of platform.
159. 00:09:09 And I can use that platform to make people feel really good, which is very much in line with the
160. 00:09:14 life and error thing. I want to make people feel like a million bucks, even if I don't have a million
161. 00:09:17 bucks. And so I recognize that that's kind of in my DNA, that's the kind of thing that makes me
162. 00:09:24 feel really good, even if it is against my personality. And I want to take that to the next level,
163. 00:09:31 and then to get to your point about how has this become like a revelation for us recently? I kind
164. 00:09:36 of think it's a perfect storm of things. So number one, I listened to that life and error audiobook.
165. 00:09:41 At the same time, number two, we were going through the four hour work week and was absolutely
166. 00:09:44 repulsed by the tone of it. And again, so it was like an anti point through.
167. 00:09:49 Yeah. Well, I want to be careful here, because as I mentioned in the club, like if you like that
168. 00:09:55 and you benefit from that, that's completely fine. But I just when I went through it as kind of like,
169. 00:10:00 what he's saying is kind of right, but it feels wrong. And I had to reconcile like,
170. 00:10:06 how do I put that square peg into a round hole? And I feel like the second mountain kind of did that
171. 00:10:13 for me. So it's kind of all these things for me anyways, lining up that have led to this
172. 00:10:17 aha moment, I believe. Sure. Makes sense. So my biggest question about all of your follow up right
173. 00:10:24 now has to do with you learning a second language. Yes. I told you I was going to ask this,
174. 00:10:30 will you roll an R on a I cannot roll an R, but I am I am crushing it with a dual lingo. And I have
175. 00:10:39 yeah, my wife and my two oldest kids into it now too. Nice. Well done, sir. Yeah. So I have
176. 00:10:45 I'm trying to look in the the app here. I think a 12 day streak of like getting however many
177. 00:10:55 XP you need. You know, that's basically just answering questions, right? Sure.
178. 00:10:59 Dual lingo is interesting because they have like a heart meter. And when you get a question wrong,
179. 00:11:05 it uses one of your hearts when you run out of hearts, you basically have to watch some ads or
180. 00:11:09 you wait until tomorrow or you can upgrade and you never run out of hearts. You can just go through
181. 00:11:14 it as much as you want, which is really interesting. So you can completely go through everything into
182. 00:11:18 a lingo. It looks like anyways for free. But if you want to get rid of the annoyance of having to
183. 00:11:25 wait to recharge your meter when you answer much of questions wrong, because you are learning a
184. 00:11:30 second language and you're going to make mistakes, then they don't force you, but they invite you
185. 00:11:36 basically to upgrade. And so far, I've been able to get by without the upgrade. Somebody shared
186. 00:11:40 with me another program, which was a paid upfront program, which I'm sure is is good. But dual lingo
187. 00:11:46 just seems to work for me much more so than any of my Spanish classes in high school did. So I'm
188. 00:11:52 going to keep going with this at some point, maybe I will plateau inside of dual lingo and have to
189. 00:11:58 try something else. But there is tons of stuff in here. And I feel like if I went through all of
190. 00:12:04 the things that they have for for Spanish, then I would be at the point where I would I would
191. 00:12:11 check this off as is completed. I guess I have learned the second language. Obviously, you can
192. 00:12:15 keep keep going with it. You can keep going with it with English. I wouldn't say I've mastered that
193. 00:12:20 language yet. Although the quote unquote. So you're going to pull up dual lingo and start learning
194. 00:12:26 English. No, I don't think so, but we'll see. Toastmasters helps with that. There you go. Well,
195. 00:12:36 let's let's get to our book. But before we do that, I just want to point something out because I
196. 00:12:40 ran into some friends this past weekend, and I was wearing my bookworm sweatshirt. And one of
197. 00:12:48 the ladies in the group said, Oh, I love your sweatshirt. It's like, actually, it's a podcast.
198. 00:12:52 I run with a buddy of mine, really? And then that sparked a whole conversation. So it reminded me
199. 00:12:57 that we don't talk about this a whole lot, but you can still get t-shirts and sweatshirts through
200. 00:13:01 cotton beryl. That's an ongoing thing, right? That hasn't changed, right, Mike? Correct. Okay,
201. 00:13:07 so if you were interested in a bookworm t-shirt or sweatshirt, and I love these, like, they're
202. 00:13:13 the best material in shirts and sweatshirts I've ever had. I love them. Link in the show notes.
203. 00:13:18 Go get one. We love these things. Definitely pick one up. They are very comfy for sure. All right,
204. 00:13:24 that said, I'm going to go back in time to the time when Joe learned about GTD and learning what
205. 00:13:31 getting things done was. So back in the day, this is long before bookworm long before Mike and I
206. 00:13:37 decided if we're ever going to read books, we got to do it together on a podcast. Like back
207. 00:13:41 before that time, I became aware of GTD, started trying to implement it before I read about it.
208. 00:13:48 But at the same time I ran across this book, getting results the agile way. And at the time,
209. 00:13:55 it seemed like people were like in one of these two camps. It seemed like one was exclusive from
210. 00:14:03 the other and people didn't do both at the same time. It seemed like getting things done resonated
211. 00:14:09 with me more at the time. So I went down that path, have been on that path for quite some time now.
212. 00:14:14 But it has also kind of morphed to the point where I've seen people read this book and then
213. 00:14:21 implement this on top of GTD. So I don't think they're actually exclusive. But this particular book
214. 00:14:29 has a lot of support. There's a lot of people who have talked about this one and seemed to really,
215. 00:14:36 really like getting results the agile way. This is by J.D. Meyer, by the way.
216. 00:14:41 The tagline on this is a personal results system for work and life. The second tagline,
217. 00:14:48 which kind of confused me at first, but how to focus and prioritize, manage time and information
218. 00:14:53 and employ the power of balance and flexibility for meaningful results.
219. 00:14:56 A third tagline, a list of lists.
220. 00:15:00 Yes, yes, and repeated definitions. It's kind of nuts. I'll get to that one later.
221. 00:15:08 But there's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot in here. And I have to say I did not care for this one.
222. 00:15:17 Mike, people talk about this a lot and I really, really struggled with this book. It was to the
223. 00:15:23 point where I almost texted you and say, is there any way we can drop this book from
224. 00:15:29 bookworm? Because I did not want to finish this and I did not know how to come on this show and
225. 00:15:34 talk about it. There we are. That's out in the air. I'm done. What are your thoughts on this book?
226. 00:15:40 Confession time. I guess. I also heard about this book a long time ago.
227. 00:15:45 And I read Getting Things Done. That was kind of my first foray into the productivity space.
228. 00:15:54 I started reading productivity, self-development, business type books after that because
229. 00:16:02 I got a lot out of that one the first time that I read it. Almost ended my journey though when I
230. 00:16:09 came across this one the first time because I started reading it and I couldn't get past the
231. 00:16:15 first section where he was talking about hotspots. That just did not make sense to me.
232. 00:16:20 And since I was new to GTD, I was like, I don't know how to reconcile this. I'm going to stick
233. 00:16:25 with what I know and just put this back on the shelf. Did make it through this time.
234. 00:16:30 And this book is, I think the best way to describe it is kind of like a productivity primer.
235. 00:16:40 As I went through it, I realized that there is a ton of stuff in here that we have talked about
236. 00:16:46 in other books. And there's a lot of great advice in here, but he doesn't really get into a lot of
237. 00:16:52 the concepts. And then like you said, he does repeat a bunch of them. So my initial thought was,
238. 00:16:57 this feels like a book that ended up being created from a series of blog posts and was never designed
239. 00:17:05 to be a book that taught specific concepts. He just took all of his blog posts. And since he
240. 00:17:14 was blogging about these things and his ideas were bouncing around his brain, that's why I think
241. 00:17:17 show up multiple times. I could be completely wrong with that. But that's kind of the initial
242. 00:17:21 reaction that I had. The other thing is that with all of these lists of things and all of the
243. 00:17:29 titles that he gives things, but not really the descriptions, it reminded me of a saying
244. 00:17:35 that I picked up, I don't remember exactly where, but I heard it from Aaron Walker.
245. 00:17:42 He said, you can be a mile wide and an inch deep or a mile deep and an inch wide. This book feels
246. 00:17:52 like a mile wide and an inch deep to me, which is kind of frustrating if it's the first time that
247. 00:17:59 you've come across any of these things that he mentions in the latter part of the book,
248. 00:18:03 because you're like, I want to know more about that. But he just gives you a couple of sentences,
249. 00:18:08 and then he's on to the next thing in his list. I didn't count up all of the items that are in
250. 00:18:14 the list, by the way. But there's got to be hundreds. Let me just look real quickly.
251. 00:18:19 20 key factors for motivation, 10 strategies for motivation, 10 pitfalls of motivation,
252. 00:18:23 25 strategies for results, 25 keys to results, 30 common productivity pitfalls,
253. 00:18:29 the top five, why even have those two sections together? The top five are also in the 30 common
254. 00:18:36 pitfalls. That's why another anecdotal piece of evidence for this was a series of blog posts.
255. 00:18:42 They've got the values, the principles, the practices. There's so many
256. 00:18:46 lists in here. After a while, you start to see the same things popping up over and over again.
257. 00:18:52 That has a couple of results, I think. Number one, it makes you start to understand on a positive
258. 00:19:05 side. It makes you start to think that you're wrapping your head around the system and how
259. 00:19:09 everything ties together. But on a negative side, it also is like, I've heard this already,
260. 00:19:14 so you just kind of tune out. Which is definitely what happened to me about the end of this book.
261. 00:19:18 Well, when you were running through that outline, if my quick math caught on, there was 140 points
262. 00:19:25 there just in what you rattled off. There's more than that because there's lists within those lists.
263. 00:19:34 You can definitely tell this is a self-published book because there's a lot of those lists where
264. 00:19:38 he'll have 10 items and then he wants to go through those 10 items. But the titles that he uses
265. 00:19:45 when he goes through the specific item, he rewords so it doesn't line up with what he said in the
266. 00:19:51 original list. That just drives me crazy. Sometimes he would use the same title and he uses a
267. 00:19:58 slightly different definition, which I thought was actually helpful. But at that point, I would
268. 00:20:03 rather you just go say everything you want to say about the first thing, the first time that we see
269. 00:20:08 it, and then just reference it over and over again instead of trying to define it every time.
270. 00:20:12 Right. Well, and like a good example is the Monday vision. We'll get into that. But if my math,
271. 00:20:21 if I found them all, he defined what the Monday vision is 14 times.
272. 00:20:28 Yeah, that could be. Okay, how many times do you have to tell me what the Monday vision is?
273. 00:20:34 Sure. It was very hard to read. There was one story in the book, I believe,
274. 00:20:42 unless I just missed them because I tuned them out. There was one story at the very beginning that
275. 00:20:46 helped him where he explained where this came from, this whole process. And there's not another
276. 00:20:54 story in the whole book. And again, unless I tuned it out and missed it. So that to me,
277. 00:21:00 that makes it very hard to go through it. That does make it less interesting for sure. I wouldn't
278. 00:21:05 necessarily say that that is a negative thing if the content is engaging enough. I'll stick with it.
279. 00:21:13 Right. But I'm kind of weird that way where I like nonfiction books, over fiction books. So
280. 00:21:17 that means that I've been a long time since I've picked up a book and wanted to put it down
281. 00:21:32 in quite a while. So all right, all of that rant out of the way. There's three parts to this book.
282. 00:21:40 The first is the approach. So what is agile results? Part two is basically that again,
283. 00:21:49 but at different levels, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly results. And then part three is an
284. 00:21:56 explanation of those results, which I had a hard time putting together. So when we get there,
285. 00:22:04 I'll share some of that part. But part one, the approach, he does go into why agile results.
286. 00:22:11 This is his story of where this came from with him working at Microsoft, being overwhelmed when he
287. 00:22:18 first got there and then needing a system. And in the process of needing a system, he goes to
288. 00:22:24 meet and learn from people who have been with Microsoft for quite some time and who know how to
289. 00:22:29 achieve results in that culture. And then takes notes from them. And over time builds out the system
290. 00:22:36 called agile results. Yes. And there is a diagram that he has. It's like a one page thing with
291. 00:22:44 nine different boxes, which made absolutely no sense to me when I looked at it. Because
292. 00:22:50 immediately when I saw it, I'm like, how can I apply this to the way that I work with my daily
293. 00:22:56 planning template? Yeah. And I quickly gave up on that idea. But there are some similarities to
294. 00:23:04 what I do and what he's talking about, which is why I think that this maybe is complicated at first,
295. 00:23:10 because you're seeing the way that it works in his life, but it's really not probably a copy and
296. 00:23:15 paste sort of thing that you can apply to your own life. It's too complicated for that. Getting
297. 00:23:20 things done has a very clear hierarchical tree. And you just make a yes or no decision at each
298. 00:23:26 point. And that's a lot easier to follow. This is a lot more fluid. And if you don't understand a
299. 00:23:31 lot of the basics that he talks about, but doesn't get into detail within this book,
300. 00:23:35 right? There's no way this is going to work for you. But we can kind of break this down.
301. 00:23:40 Before we do that, he talks about the three keys to results in the first chapter. And he defines
302. 00:23:46 agile is the ability to respond to change, which I completely agree with. He talks about some things
303. 00:23:51 that make agile different things like outcomes over activities, testing your results. The one
304. 00:23:57 that kind of stood up to me was fixed time but flex the scope. I really like that. That's kind of
305. 00:24:03 in line with the whole scrum methodology and sprints, by the way. But this is kind of bigger than that.
306. 00:24:09 Scrum is a version of agile, but agile is kind of the framework that scrum is built on,
307. 00:24:16 if that am I defining that correctly? Yep. Scrum is a version of agile.
308. 00:24:21 So scrum is agile, but agile is not necessarily scrum.
309. 00:24:24 Correct. And then there's the general public has a tendency to mix that up.
310. 00:24:29 I do too. But I wanted to call that out because I do think that this book has a higher level
311. 00:24:37 approach, which if you're going into it thinking that you're going to get all of the macro level
312. 00:24:42 specific things that you need to do, because he even talks about how this is a system and
313. 00:24:47 the solution is a system, which I put in my node, no, oh, brother. But if you're going into it
314. 00:24:54 expecting that, it is going to be a little bit different. But I think it's not so bad if you do
315. 00:24:59 understand this is high level and you go into it with the understanding that you're going to have
316. 00:25:03 to make some modifications to what he's talking to you about in order for it to work for you.
317. 00:25:07 Sure. Three three keys to the results. So he says that the key to time management is energy
318. 00:25:13 management. The key to energy management is passion. The key to results is time, energy,
319. 00:25:17 and technique. He's got this Venn diagram of those three things, time, energy, and technique,
320. 00:25:21 intersecting, which produces the results. I liked this and it brought me back to the time,
321. 00:25:29 energy, and attention thing framework that I was working on with the Asian efficiency team
322. 00:25:36 before I left. The attention one never really felt quite right to me. I knew focus was a big
323. 00:25:45 thing and it's becoming more and more important. The ability to focus,
324. 00:25:51 David Sparks has said, is going to be the superpower in the going forward because there's so much
325. 00:25:56 abstraction. I agree with that. But I think technique is actually a better term than that,
326. 00:26:02 because it's the application of the attention or the application of the focus.
327. 00:26:07 It's the intention turned into action to produce the results that you're looking for.
328. 00:26:15 And again, results is kind of the intersection of all of these things, but time, energy, and
329. 00:26:19 then a technique. I see that as the manifestation of the attention. You can have your attention
330. 00:26:26 on something and you're just staring at it. But when you apply a technique, you're producing
331. 00:26:32 some motion. And that's the thing that's ultimately going to move you towards the results that you
332. 00:26:36 want. So I did like this piece. Sure. I was just trying to find, there it is. This book was written
333. 00:26:43 in 2010, at least the one I'm looking at. Yes, 2010, which would make me think that this is
334. 00:26:50 kind of before a lot of the whole mindfulness and focus trend had picked up. Sure. So maybe
335. 00:26:58 there's some of that in there as well with a little bit of age coming on it. But yeah, no,
336. 00:27:04 I get it. I get it. The next section here is when he gives a full overview of the whole system.
337. 00:27:10 And I have to say that this really short chapter was like, it should have stopped.
338. 00:27:17 Like, I think this is where it should have been the blog post. This particular chapter should have
339. 00:27:25 been the blog post and then it was done. Sure. That's my thinking. And this is where he defines
340. 00:27:31 the first time, what is the Monday vision? How do you, the rule of three, everything is done in
341. 00:27:40 threes with this whole system? Yep. The Monday vision, the daily outcomes, the Friday reflection.
342. 00:27:46 We'll break these down here in a little bit. But what are hotspots? But then he's got this chart,
343. 00:27:52 like you're saying with nine boxes that show how this whole thing works. So he repeats that
344. 00:27:58 though. Three boxes. Yeah. Two likes three so much. Yep. Like, okay. And where he can,
345. 00:28:05 he tries to put three items in those and you can tell he kind of tried to get them to work.
346. 00:28:10 So yes, that's the overview. But again, that's in the book, this is where he defines all the
347. 00:28:17 pieces the first time. And then he goes through them later on. Yeah. So this rule of three,
348. 00:28:23 I actually think this is a great place to start. He says, identify three outcomes for the month,
349. 00:28:27 identify three outcomes for the week, identify three outcomes for the day. And then on Fridays,
350. 00:28:33 when you do in your review, identify the three things going well and the three things to improve.
351. 00:28:37 So I understand, you know, he wants to pick a number, make it consistent and apply it everywhere.
352. 00:28:43 I do think that even better version of this though, is the highlight that we learned about in make
353. 00:28:51 time. Yeah. I added that to my daily planning sheet and that has helped a lot. And that's basically
354. 00:28:59 the rule of one. Like you big one thing that's going to be the most important, which when you have
355. 00:29:04 a huge list of tasks that you need to get done is really, really hard to do. But for the way that
356. 00:29:10 I work, I think that's a better application of this. However, I think if you're coming from,
357. 00:29:15 I have a thousand things on my task list, and I'm going to just try to get as many of them done as
358. 00:29:19 I can, this rule of three could provide a very helpful framework that will help you not be burned
359. 00:29:26 out at the end of the at the end of the day. So I do see some value in this. It's not the way that
360. 00:29:31 I would choose to apply it. He's also got these hotspots, which he defines as work personal and
361. 00:29:37 then a life frame. I don't really like the breakup of work versus personal. I believe that it is
362. 00:29:47 just your life and there's personal and work aspects of it, but you have to figure out how to make
363. 00:29:52 those work. And then everything that he has in the life frame, mind, body, emotions, career,
364. 00:29:57 financial relationships and fun, those could fit into one of those two boxes. They could also fit
365. 00:30:03 into other boxes, possibly. So I don't really like the way that these are compartmentalized,
366. 00:30:11 but I do think that there is value in identifying the things that you want to focus on, the things
367. 00:30:19 that you want to apply intention to and try to improve. Like if you are just cranking all day
368. 00:30:28 every day, you can quickly find yourself and I've been there in a bad emotional state. And if you
369. 00:30:34 never take stock of where you are at emotionally, then it takes just one little thing and then you
370. 00:30:41 fly off the handle. So if you can recognize that you don't have much margin in that particular area
371. 00:30:48 to borrow Sean Blanck's term and then do things to create positive outcomes in that specific area
372. 00:30:58 in your life frame, that is a good thing. It's kind of like you're trying out meditation again.
373. 00:31:05 I can almost guarantee you that at least at one point in the process was the process,
374. 00:31:12 where you identified, I'm not happy with the way I am, my emotional state right now. And I'm
375. 00:31:18 going to do something about it. So I am going to download this app and even if it doesn't stick,
376. 00:31:22 I'm going to give it a shot. And that's totally in line with agile here, just I don't like the
377. 00:31:27 way that's broken up into life framework and personal. I would get rid of those three distinctions
378. 00:31:32 and just list all of that, the stuff that you care about in the hotspots area.
379. 00:31:37 Yeah. And I think I'm 100% with you on that. When I read his breakout of it, it just rubbed me
380. 00:31:46 wrong the whole time. Like, okay, so you want me to compartmentalize these things. I know that
381. 00:31:54 doesn't work. And my brain runs too fast for that to function long term. I even spoiler alert,
382. 00:32:03 as of this morning, as we're recording this, I release a new article on how I'm using OmniFocus.
383. 00:32:09 And my whole layout of how I have all my projects broken out, yes, it has like a work area,
384. 00:32:17 but it's just so that I can keep those specific projects in line. But if you look at how I actually
385. 00:32:24 operate off of all that, it doesn't matter where those tasks are, they all get pulled into a single
386. 00:32:29 list. And that's how I prefer to operate. Like, I don't want to think about things is like,
387. 00:32:35 that's personal, this is work. Like, this is just what I do and how I live. And that's
388. 00:32:39 how I want to keep operating. So I think I'm with you. I just really struggled with
389. 00:32:45 like everything I read. Well, again, it's not that far off. But if you were to make a diagram
390. 00:32:53 off of what you do, compare it to what JD Meyer is telling us to do, then it is going to look
391. 00:32:59 very different. That's the thing. And so in that sense, these diagrams actually hurt more than they
392. 00:33:05 help, I would argue. Sure. I mean, I get why he did it. He's trying to give you a mental model
393. 00:33:10 that you can wrap your head around if you're brand new to this stuff, but had the opposite
394. 00:33:14 effect for me. Right. The next section here is values, principles, and practices. And
395. 00:33:20 to me, after having read the book, I realized this is a precursor of, what is it, 32
396. 00:33:28 list items across four pages? Yes. That maybe is five pages, something like that. It's like this
397. 00:33:35 quick hits sort of thing with all these different like action over analysis paralysis.
398. 00:33:42 I'm just going to read this one because it made me kind of made me laugh whenever I read this is
399. 00:33:47 point number one of all these undervalues. Taking action is the best antidote for analysis paralysis.
400. 00:33:54 Rather than over engineer or try to figure out everything up front, start taking action.
401. 00:33:58 The results will inform your thinking and you can change your courses needed.
402. 00:34:01 And the first thing I thought was, well, if you're in the middle of analysis paralysis,
403. 00:34:05 how do you break out of that in order to take the action? Like you gave me absolutely nothing
404. 00:34:08 to work with other than don't do that. Well, yeah, that's not helpful. I think
405. 00:34:16 you're right. You know, there's not a whole lot of specific son how to break out of that. But
406. 00:34:23 for the right person, I feel like maybe there's enough there, not for a newbie for sure.
407. 00:34:29 But I mean, basically what he's saying is stop thinking about the work and start doing the work.
408. 00:34:33 Sure. And I do think that if you were to make that mental, mental switch in your head and you
409. 00:34:39 were to just step out there and just start making something that everything that he said there is
410. 00:34:44 probably true. But if you are in that state where you don't know what the next thing is,
411. 00:34:52 then just saying take action isn't helpful. So you do need to be able to identify
412. 00:34:57 if you're in that place. Like, I don't even know where to start. It would be great if he said,
413. 00:35:00 here's how you identify where you should start. But he doesn't do that.
414. 00:35:04 Yep. And I felt that wave. I can't say I was that strongly against all of his values,
415. 00:35:10 principles and practices that he lays out here. But I didn't get anything out of this. Like,
416. 00:35:18 I feel like this is an area where I should have been like, oh, yeah, I should do that. Oh, yeah,
417. 00:35:21 this would that would be helpful. Yeah, that would help. But I came out of it. Like, what did I just
418. 00:35:26 read? Like that it didn't resonate with me at all. Yeah. So just to give you an example,
419. 00:35:33 he's got what makes agile different. And there's a bunch of things that I listed here in my,
420. 00:35:37 my node file, which I will upload to the club. So if you don't want to read the book, but you want
421. 00:35:42 all of the list items, this is a great one to download the mine. There you go. There you go.
422. 00:35:48 But in the initial list of what makes agile different, he's got things like fixed time,
423. 00:35:55 flex scope. What was the other one that I, and then that shows up, let's see, that shows up in the
424. 00:36:02 principles section. But then there is outcomes over activities. Is that the one? Yeah,
425. 00:36:12 outcomes over activities. That's in the values list. So the values, principles and practices here,
426. 00:36:19 the practices, he's got number one, the rule of three. That is one of the key concepts that he
427. 00:36:23 taught us in chapter two. And this, at this point, I'm making these lists of values,
428. 00:36:28 principles and practices. And I'm starting already to see the repetition. I'm like,
429. 00:36:32 huh, and this is on page 30. Okay. Well, I'll let that slide for now, but I feel like I know this
430. 00:36:40 already. Yep. So this is that it doesn't take very long to get to the point where this starts to
431. 00:36:48 feel weird because he's repeating himself. But if that's if that's his intention with the book,
432. 00:36:54 by the way, I guess there probably would be some value in doing that because by the time you get
433. 00:36:58 done with this, you do know what the rule of three is and you do know that you're supposed to fix
434. 00:37:03 time and flex, flex scope. But it's kind of annoying to have to read the same thing over and over
435. 00:37:10 and over again. Yep. All right. Hot spots. Yeah, I kind of talked about hot spots already.
436. 00:37:16 I do think they give you scaffolding for supporting your life, but I don't like the way that he did
437. 00:37:24 them necessarily. There's probably a million ways that you could do this, by the way. My version of
438. 00:37:30 this, I would argue is broken down into the eight different areas that I've identified in my own
439. 00:37:36 wheel of life from my personal retreat course. Yeah. That's a different version of the hot spots.
440. 00:37:40 The difference is that instead of trying to hit all of these hot spots every single day, week,
441. 00:37:47 month, whatever, I'm picking the lowest ones that I want to focus on for the next period,
442. 00:37:52 the 12 week year. And I'm going to set some goals and create some habits that are going to make a
443. 00:37:58 positive impact in that particular area. And some of those things have turned into habits that I
444. 00:38:04 stick with, like a daily journaling habit. So it does translate into his version of the hot spots
445. 00:38:11 under the life frame. But that's not the approach that I would take. And I feel like it's a little
446. 00:38:17 bit more difficult. It feels like more mental overhead to see this list of all these areas and
447. 00:38:27 then say, okay, make sure that you hit all these. I feel like it's a lot more approachable if you
448. 00:38:31 just tackle one at a time. Sure. No, it makes sense. I mean, the hot spots is the, it's just his term
449. 00:38:39 for areas of focus from GTD or the wheel of life, like what you're saying, which is also the term I
450. 00:38:46 think it was used in make time. Or maybe that was free to focus. Those two are blending to some
451. 00:38:51 degree to me. It's a very similar concept. I think one of the things that he spells out here
452. 00:38:58 is to use those as a way to manage your energy and where you're spending your focus. He doesn't
453. 00:39:04 use that term. I wish he would. But he does recommend that you use these as a way to gauge if you're
454. 00:39:12 on the right path or not. And I would agree with that. But I, I really wanted him to show like within
455. 00:39:21 your system, how do you recommend doing that? Maybe he did. I just didn't catch it somewhere.
456. 00:39:28 So correct me if I'm wrong, but he never does spell that out. No, I mean, he kind of leaves it up to
457. 00:39:33 you to identify what are the things in work and personal. He's got listed activities, active projects
458. 00:39:42 and then a backlog. And then in the life frame, mind, body, emotions, career, financial relationships,
459. 00:39:46 and fun. But I think the real power of this is if you chuck that list and identify your own
460. 00:39:53 stuff, that's important. Sure. Yeah. You want to add video games to that list? Go right ahead. I mean,
461. 00:39:58 done. Last section here in the approach is Monday Vision daily outcomes,
462. 00:40:05 Friday reflection. He defines them again here. Take a while guesses what these are just from
463. 00:40:12 the titles of them. Monday Vision, set a vision on Monday for what you want the week to look like.
464. 00:40:17 Daily outcomes define three tasks that you must complete that day. And then Friday reflection
465. 00:40:25 is to reflect on those on that Monday Vision to see how well you did. Now, the key there is that
466. 00:40:31 you need to select your three items for your daily outcomes based on your Monday Vision.
467. 00:40:37 That's to me, that's like the core foundation of his entire system is that particular habit
468. 00:40:44 in that particular flow. And I understand that I can see how that's helpful. I really like the
469. 00:40:54 highlight concept better than that. But I also like the concept of habit building more so than this.
470. 00:41:01 So sure. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with all of that. I do like the idea of taking Monday to be your
471. 00:41:11 Vision day. I don't think it necessarily needs a whole day, although that's kind of where my
472. 00:41:17 brain went is like, that's an interesting idea. Yeah. If I just took all of Monday to prioritize
473. 00:41:24 for the rest of the week, would that increase or decrease the amount of output that I'm able to
474. 00:41:30 to create? Sure. Would I write more or less if I stopped writing that day and just
475. 00:41:38 thought about what I wanted to write? Yeah. It's an interesting idea. And I don't think I'm in a
476. 00:41:43 place where I'm able to say, Hey, everybody I'm working with, peace out. I'm just thinking today.
477. 00:41:49 Yeah. But it would be an interesting exercise. Maybe somebody can do that for us and repeat that
478. 00:41:54 and report back. I don't see that as something I'm going to even experiment with. I
479. 00:42:03 have a tendency to do some vision casting of sorts from like blank spaces throughout the week or
480. 00:42:11 on like week long trips anymore or conferences and such. Like I'll do that sort of thing then.
481. 00:42:19 Not all whole day every week, but sure. Taking those higher views, like I'm slowly realizing that I'm
482. 00:42:28 wanting to work myself into the habit of acting on things right away as opposed to putting it on
483. 00:42:35 a list. So a lot of what this seems to be designed around is putting things off to later
484. 00:42:42 as opposed to getting it done right now, even though he does say action over. I don't even
485. 00:42:48 remember what he said, but I I'm less and less inclined to put things on a list and more inclined
486. 00:42:55 to try to get things done right now, even if it takes an hour to get it done. Like that's
487. 00:42:59 yeah, I'm just learning that the more I do that, the more productive overall I am,
488. 00:43:04 even in the right direction, if I'm able to say yes or no as to whether or not it should be done or
489. 00:43:09 not in its entirety from the get go, like I do a lot better just with that whole now concept.
490. 00:43:16 Sure. And I think in order to embrace a concept or a system like that, you do need to have
491. 00:43:24 some margin where you can just say, okay, I'm going to do this right now.
492. 00:43:30 Correct. Instead of running from thing to thing, that would be an interesting follow up book,
493. 00:43:35 by the way, would be Margin by Richard Swenson. It's a book that I read a while back. Got on my
494. 00:43:40 bookshelf here. I haven't read it in in several years. I think that was actually pre-bookworm.
495. 00:43:46 So if anybody wants to hear us talk about margin, go vote for that one.
496. 00:43:52 But that would be an interesting follow up to this, because this book, I think, assumes that you have
497. 00:44:01 some flexibility in that, but that's obviously the natural question is if I don't have that,
498. 00:44:08 how do I apply this? And then maybe the follow up question, at least for me, would be if I
499. 00:44:13 don't have the space to do this the right way, how can I get the space to do this the way that I want?
500. 00:44:19 And honestly, Margin is the answer, which again, is one of those things that you hear about it,
501. 00:44:24 and you're like, oh man, that would be nice. But I can't just, I can't work on that right now.
502. 00:44:28 I'm too busy to even think about margin, which means that you're going to continue to
503. 00:44:33 run in the hamster wheel for a while. But anyway, we'll put a pin in that. Go recommend that one.
504. 00:44:39 If you want to hear us talk more about it. I do want to call it one other piece to this.
505. 00:44:43 You mentioned the Friday reflection. This is basically the weekly review.
506. 00:44:46 Yes. And this is something that I thought he does a good job explaining this because he says,
507. 00:44:54 make sure to schedule your reflection for at least 30 minutes on your calendar every week.
508. 00:44:58 I feel like if people who read GTD understood that and put that on their calendar for 30 minutes
509. 00:45:04 every week, probably about 500% more of them would actually do their weekly review.
510. 00:45:11 That number is probably low. But I remember maybe David Allen does mention that. It's been a while
511. 00:45:17 since I read the book. But I remember going through that and thinking, oh yeah, weekly review,
512. 00:45:21 I totally get this, I need to do this, and then I never did it. And then it was like, well,
513. 00:45:26 why didn't I do this? And then later on, just reading other things, learning other things.
514. 00:45:32 Like if I think it was Patrick Roan, actually, who mentioned in an old mics on mics podcast,
515. 00:45:38 like if it's not on your calendar, it doesn't exist. Like everything you have to do has to take
516. 00:45:44 place within the context of time. So if you're going to do your weekly review, you got to put
517. 00:45:48 that on your calendar. And I was like, ah, that makes so much sense. I feel like--
518. 00:45:53 Specifically remember that episode because I remember he had the phrase, if not now,
519. 00:45:59 when? Yes, exactly. And he would ask that question. And I don't know why. I got a chance to meet
520. 00:46:06 Patrick Roan, I don't know, about a year ago now. And I had to make sure he knew, like,
521. 00:46:11 for whatever reason, that particular phrase has stuck with me for a very, very long time.
522. 00:46:16 And I still, to this day, whenever I look at how I build task management systems, I always have to
523. 00:46:22 think about with this specific project or a context or a tag or whatever it is, which,
524. 00:46:28 side note, I'm not using tags at all in OmniFocus anymore. I have a tagless system.
525. 00:46:32 I read just a blog post. Link in the description. I don't know why I'm bringing this particular
526. 00:46:37 article up. I'm not intending to do this. But I'm always looking at these things from the stance of,
527. 00:46:43 well, if I'm going to put this on this list, when does it actually get done? Because if I just put
528. 00:46:47 on a list and there's not some form of a routine or a habit or a calendar item that's associated with
529. 00:46:53 that, it'll just disappear. I'll never get it done. And that's the black hole for me where things
530. 00:47:00 just go and they disappear. Joe's task, go to die inside a tag. It's totally do if I don't have
531. 00:47:06 a timeframe for it. So yes, I love, sorry, I interrupted you on this whole thing. But yeah,
532. 00:47:10 Patrick Roans, if not now, win. Love that question. No, that was basically the main point I was
533. 00:47:15 going to make was that that little two sentence thing that he shared, I felt like that was really,
534. 00:47:22 really good. And it can get lost inside of the list. But there are a couple places like that,
535. 00:47:27 where there's things that you may not agree with any of the system that he's outlining. But there
536. 00:47:34 is a couple things in here that can really have a positive impact. Going back through my notes,
537. 00:47:39 I also see I mentioned at the beginning, how I continue to get the understanding that relationships
538. 00:47:44 are really important. It's kind of wedged into the hotspot section. So it doesn't really make a
539. 00:47:49 whole lot of sense here. But he says continually invest in your relationships, your relationships
540. 00:47:53 are either growing or they're dying and people will flow in and out of your life. But that's very
541. 00:47:58 much in line with what I was saying at the beginning of this podcast didn't even realize that that
542. 00:48:03 was something that I had called out in my mind. I have a little light bulb icon. That's like an
543. 00:48:08 inspiration thing. Like when something really hits me, that's one of the keys that I used.
544. 00:48:12 So when I can go back through this, I can kind of really quickly glean, you know, what are the
545. 00:48:16 big ideas that impacted me from this book. Then you realize that as I'm looking at the chapter list,
546. 00:48:23 you know, but those types of things are in here, just like making sure to schedule your reflection.
547. 00:48:27 That's a great tip and you should absolutely do that for your weekly review.
548. 00:48:30 Sure. So part two, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly results. And I took four chapters and put it into
549. 00:48:38 one line item because effectively like pick three goals for the year using those three goals for
550. 00:48:45 the year, pick three things for your month using those pick three things for your week using those
551. 00:48:50 pick three things for your day. Like, okay, there you go. All right. Now part three.
552. 00:48:54 I could not disagree with this section more. Yeah. I, well, so let me just say that I really do,
553. 00:49:06 I really do believe in the 12 week year idea, even if you don't like the 12 week year book,
554. 00:49:13 because I get it if you're reading it that you do have to kind of cut through some of the
555. 00:49:20 sensational language. But I really do think it's a powerful idea that if you set yearly goals,
556. 00:49:29 you will wait until the 11th month, the 11th hour. And then you're going to try to accomplish them.
557. 00:49:36 And maybe you'll get there. Maybe you won't. But basically you've wasted a whole bunch of time.
558. 00:49:42 Right. This whole part in the book is where his working from Microsoft comes out, I believe.
559. 00:49:51 Sure. Because he's working corporate and corporate is in a like, they still mandate yearly goals.
560. 00:50:00 Yep. So he's, he's just taking that and then like, okay, these are my goals for the year that I was
561. 00:50:05 given and probably not allowed to have any say in. So here's what I'm going to do with them.
562. 00:50:11 Like that's what it feels like to me. And I think you're right. Like the 12 week year thing is
563. 00:50:16 a great concept. I have personally, I run on like eight week cycles right now. So I've kind of
564. 00:50:24 shrunk down even off of the 12 week year. But yeah, I don't like this section at all.
565. 00:50:33 Well, the thing that really jumps out to me from the first section, if I were to pick like one thing
566. 00:50:40 that agile is based off of it's this whole fixed time flex scope idea. Yep. In fact, even says agile
567. 00:50:46 is the ability to respond to change. I guarantee you there will be change in a 12 month period.
568. 00:50:52 So why even bother setting those yearly goals? I feel like if I were to do that,
569. 00:50:59 I would write those three things down for the year. And then I go through my first
570. 00:51:06 month quarter, whatever. And I learned some things. And I realized that one of those three things
571. 00:51:13 is not really the thing that I should be working on. But the fact that it's written on my piece of
572. 00:51:19 paper that I look at all the time would be enough to keep me moving towards that thing
573. 00:51:24 just because I had written it down. And I'm like, this is the plan. We're going to stick with it.
574. 00:51:30 It just, it feels like if to me, it would force me into a negative, a potentially negative
575. 00:51:37 course where it's giving you these boundaries. Yes. But maybe you need to be able to turn off the
576. 00:51:45 road that you're on and go in a different direction. Right. And I feel like by starting with the
577. 00:51:51 yearly goals, you are kind of forcing yourself and providing the inertia to keep going in a
578. 00:51:57 specific direction. I feel like you do need to create some momentum. And the 12 week year for me is
579. 00:52:04 kind of the sweet spot for that where it can help you, it can help you create the, the incentive that
580. 00:52:12 you need to keep moving, because it's, you can see how it is leading you towards the outcomes that
581. 00:52:18 you want to achieve. Those are anchored by the wheel of life, not a yearly goal. But what's great
582. 00:52:26 about the 12 week year, in my opinion, is the ability to just chuck it four times a year,
583. 00:52:31 three times a year and say, yes, I'm going to start over. Right. So there's no clear cut. And again,
584. 00:52:38 you know, if you're coming to this with the impression that this is going to be the system,
585. 00:52:43 you just have to apply it. It's probably not going to work for you. If you're going to take pieces of
586. 00:52:48 it, then there could be a lot of value in this. Yeah. But just the way that this is described, I
587. 00:52:53 feel like provides too much structure and not enough freedom. Yes. I'm with you 100%. Because I,
588. 00:53:04 this is where like this whole eight week thing, and it's because I know about every five to six weeks,
589. 00:53:11 sometimes less than sometimes a little more than something comes my way that forces me to course
590. 00:53:17 correct. And that's just the the rhythm that my life seems to fall into. I don't really know why,
591. 00:53:26 it just kind of is. And if I operate on eight week cycles, it means that about the time those
592. 00:53:32 changes come around, I can finish up what I'm working on and then adjust to those changes.
593. 00:53:37 Yep. Like that's, that's the way that I'm operating on. Now, can I take his the last three pieces of
594. 00:53:44 this the month, week and day side of it and ignore the year? Maybe I probably could. But I,
595. 00:53:51 it seems like it's forced to try to come up with three things each time. Like whenever I go through
596. 00:54:00 those eight week cycles, it's pretty common for me to have one thing I'm focused on. Sure. Like,
597. 00:54:06 that's that's what I'm driving towards. And to try to find three things within that one thing for
598. 00:54:13 the week to work on doesn't always make sense. A lot of times it's one thing that I'm working
599. 00:54:19 out for that week. And then I have one thing on that day. Maybe that has to do with how detailed
600. 00:54:24 I break things down into or don't. But I understand his rule of three, I get why he loves that. And
601. 00:54:33 it's just everything is consistent. But I think I'm with you on the one thing. Yeah. I didn't even
602. 00:54:39 try to do that reference. But I was thinking that the whole time you're saying I didn't connect it
603. 00:54:45 until it came out of my mouth. But maybe that just resonates with me way more than three. I don't
604. 00:54:51 know. Yeah. Now that being said, as much as I hit the section, this is where all of my action items
605. 00:54:57 come from. Of course it is. So there is living proof that you can disagree with the main message
606. 00:55:05 and still mind some gold nuggets from the books that you read. So we don't need to go through
607. 00:55:11 all of his process here. But again, there are lists and it's very specific. You start your day,
608. 00:55:17 you design your day, you drive your day, you end your work day, and then you end your day. And
609. 00:55:20 there's different things in here. I'll just call out a couple of the ones that stood out to me.
610. 00:55:25 So number one, under design your day, he has a point where you should set boundaries and limits.
611. 00:55:31 And he has some things that you should fix time for like eating, sleeping, and he specifically
612. 00:55:35 listed working out. I kind of get the idea that he really is into exercise. I don't know specifically
613. 00:55:41 if he's a weightlifter, runner, whatever. But you do kind of get that vibe as he's talking about
614. 00:55:50 the different things that fitness is important to him. And I have created an exercise habit. I work
615. 00:55:57 out six days a week, every single week, I'd say about half the time I work out every single day.
616. 00:56:03 And it's always a struggle for me though, to find the time to do it. I find that when I go to plan
617. 00:56:11 out my day the night before, I have to consciously put forth a bunch of effort to carve out the time
618. 00:56:18 to make that happen. In fact, that's another thing that he mentions in here is that you carve
619. 00:56:23 out time for what's important. You don't find time, you make it. Making time for what's important is
620. 00:56:27 the driver of great results. When I read that, I instantly thought of Curtis McHale. I know he
621. 00:56:30 doesn't like that terminology making time. But again, I think that's the best description that I've
622. 00:56:35 heard so far. So I'm going to run with that one. I really agree with that. You make time, you don't
623. 00:56:39 find time. And then so my first action item here is setting up time every day for working out,
624. 00:56:46 specifically from seven to eight or something. I haven't identified specifically when this is
625. 00:56:50 going to be because I want to rethink my whole morning routine. And what time I start my day,
626. 00:56:57 that sort of thing. It's always been difficult for me to work out when I get up early. But I also
627. 00:57:04 am reading, Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins as my gap book. And holy cow, that is an inspirational
628. 00:57:12 book, tons of language. But really, really good. And this guy just like, he's pushed himself through
629. 00:57:20 so much. He joined the Marines. He had to go through Hell Week three times. He didn't fail out,
630. 00:57:24 but he like his body broke basically, and he couldn't finish. So he did it three times, then he ran
631. 00:57:29 a bunch of ultra marathons and crazy stuff. Like he keeps pushing himself past what he,
632. 00:57:36 I'm not done with it yet, but he keeps pushing himself past what he thinks he's capable of.
633. 00:57:40 And when you read those stories, you kind of get jacked up and you're like,
634. 00:57:44 I wonder what I'm actually capable of. And I'm sure I'm capable of working out in the morning.
635. 00:57:48 So I want to push myself to do that. Just don't know the specifics yet.
636. 00:57:52 There was another one here under drive your day for power hours or when you feel strongest in the
637. 00:58:00 zone. Because I am an intermittent faster, I know that this is the morning for me.
638. 00:58:09 And I want to identify my power hours and I want to shade them on my daily planning sheet. So I
639. 00:58:14 have a visual indicator. Like these are special, only put really important stuff here. I kind of
640. 00:58:20 think I do that already with how I do it, but I want something visual. Sure. And then the last one
641. 00:58:27 in your day, he's got four questions to cap your day. I what did I learn? What did I improve? What
642. 00:58:33 did I enjoy? What kind of act did I do? Not a huge fan of these questions, but I kind of get
643. 00:58:38 him and I have my own journaling prompts that I use. That's basically what these reminded me of.
644. 00:58:43 I think these are great starters. But again, the four questions to cap your day isn't the
645. 00:58:47 magic piece here. It's just identifying for yourself. What are the questions that you want to use in
646. 00:58:51 your own reflection? But then the shutdown routine. So I want to write down my shutdown routine.
647. 00:58:57 And this has popped up before, but I just never get around to doing it or I do it. And then
648. 00:59:02 it ends up not sticking. Like I want to be able to say at this time, every single day, I am done
649. 00:59:08 with work. And here's the checklist of things that I do as I disconnect completely. And maybe
650. 00:59:13 it's just the nature of working online with other remote teams that that's more difficult for me.
651. 00:59:18 But it is something that I aspire to do. So those are my action items. Yeah, I gave up on the shutdown
652. 00:59:25 routine concept. And it's partly because I've adopted kind of a weird alternative to that in
653. 00:59:33 that I know I have a set number of things I need to get done at the church each day. So I'm working
654. 00:59:40 there full time. And somewhere between about two and three 30, I'll get done with the things I
655. 00:59:49 needed to get done that day. And when I hit that point, the next thing on my list is, you know,
656. 00:59:56 things like checking in on email, checking in on some forums, like those are some things that I've
657. 01:00:00 got as like habits that come up, you could probably call that a shutdown routine. But I don't have
658. 01:00:05 a set time when I get to that. It's just a thing that I try to get done every day. And if I don't
659. 01:00:11 have time for it, say I get done at like 10 till four, and I usually go home at four, I just don't
660. 01:00:17 do it. I just cancel it, put it off till tomorrow, and then don't do it. And if I have any form of
661. 01:00:24 like a cleanup or move things around and you know, clean up my computer, clean up the desk,
662. 01:00:29 anything like that, that's usually done at night. If I'm going to do it, and it's part of like an
663. 01:00:33 evening ritual, so I kind of broke this whole shutdown thing down into like whenever I can get
664. 01:00:40 to those instead of saying, okay, at three 30, I'm going to go and stop everything I'm doing and
665. 01:00:46 do this particular list. No, it just doesn't work that way. Because I'll never do it because I'm
666. 01:00:52 always engrossed in whatever it is I'm working on. I'm like, well, I can do that a little bit later.
667. 01:00:56 But if I just have it as things somewhere, I want to get these things done today. If I can,
668. 01:01:02 I'm more apt to actually do those. Sure. So maybe I just don't like calling it a shutdown routine.
669. 01:01:07 But you know, it does seem to work pretty well for me. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm
670. 01:01:14 going back and forth on this so many times. But I feel like I was inspired after reading this again
671. 01:01:20 to give it a shot. So sure. I don't have a high degree of confidence in this action item
672. 01:01:27 sticking for me, but okay, we'll follow up with it. Sounds good. Well, part three
673. 01:01:32 is results explained. I have to say when I saw this in the outline, and after I finished reading
674. 01:01:39 part one or about, well, I shouldn't say that the first couple three chapters of part one.
675. 01:01:44 My thought was that in part three, he was going to then break down everything he talked about in
676. 01:01:50 part one and show why it works. That is not what I got at all. I got another five chapters of lists
677. 01:02:03 to throw at me. The first of which is the results frame personas and pitfalls personas.
678. 01:02:12 You see that? That sounds weird. I don't know. We'll go with personas.
679. 01:02:18 Okay. I don't know why that sounds weird whenever I say it. I don't know.
680. 01:02:23 So just an example of some of the things that they list here under the personas,
681. 01:02:27 starter, finisher, thinker, doer, simplify or maximize a critic, opportunist, perfectionist,
682. 01:02:33 stuff like that. The idea being here that these are kind of all different hats that you could wear,
683. 01:02:41 at least that was my interpretation of this, which I guess has some value, but this is not something
684. 01:02:52 that I was struggling with or thinking about. I tend to be the kind of person where
685. 01:02:59 if there's something that needs to be done, I'll figure out how to do it. I'm not going to say,
686. 01:03:04 oh, well, I am not functioning as a controller right now, or I'm not thinking about this as a
687. 01:03:11 marketer. I have my marketer section blocked off for Thursdays at 3 p.m. It's just like,
688. 01:03:17 this is the task in front of me. I think there's limited value in these sorts of things. Maybe
689. 01:03:24 as you scale this into a larger company, there is. I don't know. Maybe it's not on the list here,
690. 01:03:31 but I do see some value if you were to set aside an entire day for meetings and say,
691. 01:03:35 I am going to be a meeting attender on this day. That's really the only example I can think of
692. 01:03:40 where this can be useful, though. He does say three ways to use the personas.
693. 01:03:47 So you know yourself, team up, and then you can improve the situation. But I kind of feel like
694. 01:03:53 if you're able to function in whichever one of these you naturally gravitate towards,
695. 01:03:58 that's great. For everybody else, just figure out how to get the job done.
696. 01:04:03 A better way to define this, in my opinion, is Dan Sullivan's unique ability. So you can
697. 01:04:10 identify your unique ability, and then you want to maximize the time that you spend on your unique
698. 01:04:13 ability. But after, to a certain point, especially when you are in a situation and you're not in
699. 01:04:24 a Microsoft, where you have a job that's designed around your skill set, you're just
700. 01:04:29 solving problems where you are, which is probably the majority of people who are listening to this,
701. 01:04:36 honestly. This stuff doesn't matter. It's great if you're able to say, this is what I'm good at,
702. 01:04:41 and I'm going to try to carve out more time for that. But that's not the approach that he takes
703. 01:04:44 here. He's just saying, these are all the different things that you might have to do,
704. 01:04:47 and you're going to have to switch between them. Good luck. Yeah. I don't understand how you apply
705. 01:04:54 what he lists here. Yeah. To add to that, the results frame piece of this is the hotspots.
706. 01:05:01 Again. I'm not sure why he called it something different in the title of it,
707. 01:05:09 because he calls it results frame, and then he has a chart for the hotspots and a definition of
708. 01:05:16 those hotspots. I could not figure out what he was trying to do with that.
709. 01:05:22 The results frame I put in parentheses, this is just a list of popular productivity topics.
710. 01:05:31 There's that. He lists things like action, efficiency, and effectiveness, energy management,
711. 01:05:38 expectations, focus, goals and objectives, information management learning,
712. 01:05:41 mindset motivation, planning, prioritizing, stuff like that.
713. 01:05:44 I don't really understand how this translates into anything that you can use.
714. 01:05:54 I got it. Going back to your thought of this is a whole bunch of blog posts thrown together.
715. 01:06:02 This is keyword injection for his website for SEO. That's what that is.
716. 01:06:07 It could be. Basically, it's a list of things that anybody who is concerned about what they're
717. 01:06:12 getting done has already heard of or studied in some way, shape, or form before. I do understand
718. 01:06:21 how if you were to master these things, they would increase the results you're able to get
719. 01:06:27 as you focus on your hotspots. Just listing these things like learn how to plan and prioritize
720. 01:06:36 doesn't really help you. I guess you could tackle these one at a time and say,
721. 01:06:41 "I'm going to improve my self-awareness skill over the next week."
722. 01:06:44 But I don't know. A lot of this stuff, not to go back to emotional intelligence as kind of what it is.
723. 01:06:51 If you were to develop emotional intelligence, then that would have a positive impact on
724. 01:07:01 the results frame for your hotspots. I would argue. Just listing a bunch of things,
725. 01:07:07 I felt at this point, was just useless and a not great way to start this section.
726. 01:07:12 Well, he ends that section by talking about productivity pitfalls. Whenever I read this,
727. 01:07:23 they sounded familiar, which at this point, everything sounds familiar. If you go back and take a look
728. 01:07:30 in the first part, values, principles, and practices, most of these pitfalls are those
729. 01:07:35 small backwards. The inverse of those, right? Like a lack of boundaries, for example,
730. 01:07:41 because that's one of the things that they talk about in the front section.
731. 01:07:45 I don't know. Again, this felt like a blog post, especially with the top five. These are the top
732. 01:07:52 five that people suffer from. At one point, that probably was a blog post. It was probably a great
733. 01:07:59 blog post. But then following that up with, here's all of the other common pitfalls and then no real
734. 01:08:04 strategies to avoid them other than, "Hey, we talked about this previously." It's not very useful.
735. 01:08:13 And I say lack of boundaries, for example, there's lots of stuff in here as he goes through the
736. 01:08:18 boundaries section. It comes up over and over and over again. But it's never very deep. And even
737. 01:08:23 if you compiled it all together, it's still not going to be a whole lot of strategy for you if
738. 01:08:27 lack of boundaries is a specific problem for you. All this list is going to do is make you feel
739. 01:08:32 bad about where you are. It's not going to help you out of the hole.
740. 01:08:36 Well, the next two sections here, I'm going to lump them together. 25 keys to results
741. 01:08:43 and 25 strategies for results. Not sure why I didn't just call it 50 points or something. They
742. 01:08:51 feel like they should be together. I don't even know what's in these because I think I just skimmed
743. 01:08:57 them. I couldn't understand what he was trying to get across. It feels like more of the same.
744. 01:09:02 From the first part here, the results frame, personas, pitfalls. It feels like he just
745. 01:09:09 has more lists he wants to share. Or again, these are blog posts he just wanted to throw in.
746. 01:09:14 Had a word count. Basically, I have more lists to share.
747. 01:09:17 So I don't even know what to say on these other than there's more lists of things you should do.
748. 01:09:26 Even the terminology between them is somewhat consistent. So if you're looking for a difference
749. 01:09:33 between keys and strategies, it's hard to find. There is some cool stuff in here.
750. 01:09:41 I actually liked the idea of above the line or below the line, number 11, under the 25 keys to
751. 01:09:47 results. He's got a couple diagrams, which I think are really good. This kind of comes back to
752. 01:09:56 in the first section. We didn't really talk about this because, again, there's not a whole lot of
753. 01:10:00 structure around this idea. But he talks about prioritization in the Monday Vision daily
754. 01:10:05 outcomes Friday reflection as either a must should or could. And he's got a couple of diagrams here.
755. 01:10:13 Basically, must should and could are things that contribute, I would say, at a high level
756. 01:10:19 to the outcomes that you want to achieve or they provide a lot of value. And then things that
757. 01:10:25 provide a moderate amount of value, things that provide only a little bit of value.
758. 01:10:28 And then there's these diagrams for above the line where the things that you must do. These are
759. 01:10:34 things that provide a ton of value. And then as you progress to the things that you should do or
760. 01:10:38 could do, there's diminishing returns there. Below the line, the value that is produced from
761. 01:10:47 the must should could, again, like these bars where must is the biggest one, should is the
762. 01:10:52 medium one and could is the smallest one. But as you go down when you're doing below the bar
763. 01:10:57 tasks, then you're increasing your dissatisfaction. I've got these in my mind,
764. 01:11:03 not for people who want to take a look at these. But I thought this was kind of a cool way
765. 01:11:07 to think about the results that you are gathering. Like diminishing returns, for example,
766. 01:11:14 that's not as big a deal as something that is actively producing unhappiness if you are stuck
767. 01:11:20 below the line. And recognizing that and saying, I'm absolutely not going to do these could or
768. 01:11:25 should tasks. I'm just going to do the things that I have to do. And I'm going to do everything
769. 01:11:29 that I can to get above this line and kind of change my relationship with the things that I
770. 01:11:36 have to do. Like that's kind of a cool idea. But it's one point in a very long list and easy to
771. 01:11:42 gloss over. Right. The next section here is motivation. I kind of get like, I understand why he has
772. 01:11:51 this one in here. Like, I finally found something like, okay, I get it, I get it. I'm with you on
773. 01:11:56 the flow here. And it has to do with like, why are you doing this? Why are you focusing on
774. 01:12:03 being more productive or effective and understanding the why behind what you do?
775. 01:12:11 He has a bunch of quotes, but he goes through some sections here of mostly understanding yourself.
776. 01:12:19 He has to throw in another list of 10 pitfalls for motivation, which includes analysis paralysis
777. 01:12:26 and perfectionism yet again. Yep. That's the third or fourth time we've seen analysis paralysis.
778. 01:12:32 Yep. Must be something he struggles with. So he does go through 10 pitfalls of motivation and
779. 01:12:37 then 10 key strategies for motivation and then 20 key factors for motivation.
780. 01:12:45 Yep. 20 key factors because somehow that's different. And again, these are all
781. 01:12:50 they're all interesting and they could be helpful for each of them. But when you've got two sentences
782. 01:12:59 about something, it's hard to take that and come out with, oh yeah, I need to make some changes.
783. 01:13:08 This is exactly what I need to do with that. Okay. There's so much of it that you just glaze
784. 01:13:13 over it. And you come out of this, at least I came out of this more demotivated than motivated.
785. 01:13:20 I'm like, okay, there's so much here. What on earth am I supposed to do with that? I don't
786. 01:13:25 know. I'm going to go grab a cookie. Sure, sure. Which I did not do because I shouldn't do sugar.
787. 01:13:33 So I know. Well, there are in his defense, there are some some things that are different between
788. 01:13:40 pitfall strategies and key factors. But it's not immediately clear what those are. Just as an
789. 01:13:46 example, he's got a Venn diagram at the beginning of this, I believe, where motivation comes from
790. 01:13:50 your thoughts, feelings and body. And then in the middle is kind of why you do what you do.
791. 01:13:56 Those are all things listed under the 20 key factors for motivation, but not in any specific
792. 01:14:01 order. In fact, body is 12. Thoughts and feelings are 10 and 11. And if you're reading these as a
793. 01:14:06 numbered list, you would think that the higher up you go, the more important they are. He's basically
794. 01:14:10 told us prior, though, that these are the three main things when motivation comes from, then he lists
795. 01:14:14 nine other things above that. Yes. So a little bit confusing there. I don't necessarily think he's
796. 01:14:21 wrong. I mean, number one, he talks about pain and pleasure. That absolutely is the key
797. 01:14:27 motivator for everybody, whether you realize it or not, you're either trying to avoid pain or
798. 01:14:31 increase pleasure. Pain, I would argue, you should break those apart. The avoidance of pain typically
799. 01:14:36 is a higher motivator than the pursuit of pleasure. But I understand why he grouped those together.
800. 01:14:43 Sure. But I just use that as an example of how these things can really be muddied. And there's
801. 01:14:48 not enough here to really grab onto in terms of differentiating these. Again, I just jotted down
802. 01:14:56 the titles because by the fifth time you hear about perfectionist me, like, okay, I got that.
803. 01:15:01 I don't need to write it all all down again. But the result is that the more distance you get from
804. 01:15:07 this book, the more this stuff just kind of blends together. And so whatever distinctions and points
805. 01:15:12 that he's trying to make in this particular section, they are quickly lost. Not necessarily,
806. 01:15:16 you know, again, it's, it depends on what his goal was with this book. If it's just like a
807. 01:15:22 reference work, and you want to come back at some point and write an article about things that
808. 01:15:29 impact your motivation, this would absolutely be a great place to start. You look at this list of
809. 01:15:32 20 things and okay, I'm going to write about these and do some more research and flesh these out.
810. 01:15:37 Like that'd be a great starting point. Maybe that's what he was doing when he wrote this.
811. 01:15:41 But in terms of like the bookworm approach where we want to pick up a book and learn some new ideas
812. 01:15:48 and apply these things, it's just harder to latch, latch on to something specific here,
813. 01:15:53 because there's not a whole lot of meat behind any one of these and he's quickly on to the next
814. 01:15:58 thing. Yeah. It feels like it would have been a lot more effective to spend some time synthesizing
815. 01:16:07 all of your points about motivation down to three. And there we go.
816. 01:16:14 Let's spell those out in a lot more detail as opposed to giving us 40 items across six pages
817. 01:16:21 to somehow figure out. I don't know. The last chapter here, mindsets and metaphors.
818. 01:16:28 I think there's some interesting things in here. I don't know that they're brand new,
819. 01:16:33 but he covers the difference between an abundance mindset and a scarcity mindset.
820. 01:16:41 A positive mindset versus negative and a growth mindset over a fixed mindset. Now we've talked
821. 01:16:46 about the growth versus fixed mindset, read a whole book on it and talked about it here.
822. 01:16:50 That's one that he must like because he gave us a list for that one and not the other two.
823. 01:16:59 Yeah. It's kind of the key indicator. Then he gives us a list of things on how to change your
824. 01:17:08 mindset, which again is helpful, but it's four points on a third of a page, half a page.
825. 01:17:15 Yeah. I mean, there are some good things in this section. I can't say anything jumped out at me
826. 01:17:22 specifically that was new that made me want to change things, but it does reiterate some things
827. 01:17:30 elsewhere in the book and some things we've covered in the past. So I don't know, any thoughts on this
828. 01:17:36 mic? Yeah. There was one thing in here that really jumped out to me and the whole section on learned
829. 01:17:41 helplessness. I say a whole section. It's a very short section. But I thought it was good.
830. 01:17:48 It talks about the problem of learned helplessness is that you apply it personally. You think that
831. 01:17:54 your state is permanent and it's pervasive, which means that it impacts everything.
832. 01:17:59 And the solution to that is to kind of flip all of those views on its head and recognize that the
833. 01:18:03 state you're in right now, it's only temporary, that it's situational. Okay. So it's going to change
834. 01:18:08 in that it's specific. So it applies to this one area of your life over here, but not to these
835. 01:18:12 things over there, which are actually going pretty well. I thought that was a really powerful idea.
836. 01:18:17 There should be a whole book written and probably is just on that specific piece.
837. 01:18:20 You know, so again, to reiterate the point that you can go through a book and not really enjoy the
838. 01:18:29 main message, but still get these these gold nuggets here where I feel like this is something
839. 01:18:35 that the next time I find myself in a situation where I'm frustrated and I feel like there's
840. 01:18:42 nothing I can do about it, I look back at these things and say, Oh yeah, I'm taking this personally.
841. 01:18:47 I'm thinking that it's always going to be this way. And I'm thinking that this is impacting every
842. 01:18:50 year of my life. But when I recognize that this is a temporary state, that it's situational based
843. 01:18:56 on the current set of circumstances. And it's only applying to this one thing. It makes it seem like
844. 01:19:01 it's not that big a deal. It gives me a better perspective on it, which is why it's in the mindset
845. 01:19:04 section. But I don't think necessarily people are going to make those connections like I did.
846. 01:19:11 Right. Like a very, it's very easy to completely skip over and gloss over that, that piece of it.
847. 01:19:17 Sure. Which again, is like the whole book though, the mindset stuff that he talks about in here,
848. 01:19:23 if you've not read mindset, that may completely rock your world. Now we read mindset. So I went
849. 01:19:28 over it and I'm like, yeah, I know that already. And Carol Black did a much better job explaining it.
850. 01:19:32 But that's just me. Fair enough. I don't feel like there's any other points on this.
851. 01:19:39 I would like to cover other than it feels very disjointed to me. Again, I think after about the
852. 01:19:48 first three or four chapters, I just became jaded towards the whole thing. And it made me heart,
853. 01:19:53 it made it very hard for me to keep an open mind with it once I had been kind of turned off
854. 01:19:59 to the whole thing. So sure. Thus, you can probably sense the extreme negativity from me on this
855. 01:20:04 whole thing. But it is, for me, it was very hard to go through and understand or pick out little
856. 01:20:12 points that I felt were helpful here and there, mostly because I didn't have any trust
857. 01:20:17 in him because he hadn't won that trust. So I found myself looking for loopholes where I would
858. 01:20:26 normally be looking for the positives. And it's been a while since the book has led me down that path.
859. 01:20:32 So apologies for all the negativity. Maybe that's because you're an Apple user and he works at
860. 01:20:39 Microsoft. I don't know. I work with Microsoft stuff and I've recommended Microsoft a little bit
861. 01:20:44 lately. So I'm just kidding. Interesting point though. Should talk about action items?
862. 01:20:52 Yes. You're going to reiterate your three? Yeah, I'll just real quickly reiterate the three that I
863. 01:20:57 picked out from the short section that neither of us liked. Did you try to get three? No, I did not.
864. 01:21:05 That was coincidence. Dang it, JD Meyer. You're rubbing off on me. All right. So the first one,
865. 01:21:12 set time every day for working out. Again, I don't know exactly when that's going to be,
866. 01:21:16 but it is going to be probably in the morning. The second one, I don't find my power hours and
867. 01:21:20 shade them on my daily planning sheets. I have a visual indicator and only put the really important
868. 01:21:24 stuff during those hours. And then number three, right out my shutdown routine. Again, not with
869. 01:21:30 high hopes of this actually sticking, but going to give it another shot. Cool. I have one potential
870. 01:21:39 and I say potential because I'm not committed to it yet. I kind of want to sleep on it one more
871. 01:21:46 night before I make this decision. But I wrote down three MITs. Most important tasks.
872. 01:21:52 If I had anything from this that reached out to me in any form, it was this concept of three. Now,
873. 01:22:00 obviously, I've mentioned in a few places that I kind of like the rule of one instead of the rule
874. 01:22:06 three, which is why I'm not sure that I want to do three. I know that I won't do it on a weekly or
875. 01:22:12 a monthly basis or especially not a yearly basis. If I do it anywhere, it would be on a daily
876. 01:22:18 outcome list. But I'm not sure that given my day to day work that that's realistic.
877. 01:22:26 Because working in IT, a lot of my stuff is support. Probably 75% of the work I'm going to do every
878. 01:22:34 day is unknown until I get there. I can find and make time for one in a day and I know I can do that.
879. 01:22:44 But trying to choose three feels a little bit irresponsible. So I would either have to break
880. 01:22:50 them down further or ignore the rule of three in that case. So I'm leaving it as a question mark
881. 01:22:57 because I'm not sure how that's going to pan out. You follow me on all that? That's kind of a weird
882. 01:23:04 yes. You're looking for something to take from this book. The only thing you can find is the three
883. 01:23:08 MITs, but you're not sure you like it. Thanks. Thanks for that. Some rosation.
884. 01:23:13 On that note, we should do style and rating. I can go first on this since I'm the negative
885. 01:23:23 negative Nancy here. I think it's obvious I didn't care for this book. Just from a writing style
886. 01:23:33 stance and from an editing stance, we bring this one up once in a while. Lots and lots of grammar
887. 01:23:40 issues and typos. He really needed a full blown editor on this more than there were a number of
888. 01:23:48 cases where I would read something and then have to stop and reread it two or three times to try
889. 01:23:52 to figure out what it was he was trying to say because the words actually don't work in a sentence.
890. 01:23:58 So it's not an actual coherent phrase. So I had to go through and figure that out from time to time.
891. 01:24:05 That just bugs me. I'm not a grammar Nazi, but I have a hard time with it.
892. 01:24:11 Anyway, lots of grammar issues and typos. I found it very confusing to follow once I got through
893. 01:24:16 the format of his system, which was early on, and then struggled to put together what it is he's
894. 01:24:24 trying to do in especially part three. I just could not figure out why that part was there. Save the
895. 01:24:29 motivation piece. Basically, his main point in this whole book seems to be to break things down
896. 01:24:38 into three smaller chunks and turn actions into habits. Now I can resonate with the whole turning
897. 01:24:45 actions into habits, but that is my summarization of what he's trying to get across and not getting
898. 01:24:52 across. That's my perspective. My last thing here, I am looking at a list that I didn't share with Mike.
899. 01:24:58 I think he's an upholder. If I go back to the four tendencies by Gretchen Rubin, I think he's
900. 01:25:06 an upholder because he has this perspective that if you spell things out and make a list of things,
901. 01:25:13 it will get done. Did you catch this? Well, no, because I blog.
902. 01:25:20 You are one. No, I disown anything from the four tendencies.
903. 01:25:25 All right, sure. You know, my stance on the research basis of that survey, not assessment.
904. 01:25:34 Well, I'm going to hold up to it. I say he's an upholder because the way that he lays all these
905. 01:25:43 things out, just break this down and then this down. Once you've got this broken down, it'll be
906. 01:25:49 fine because then you'll get that done. No, if I've broken that down, it to me feels like I've
907. 01:25:56 done all the hard work and then I'm just not going to do the list. So that actually has a negative
908. 01:26:02 effect in my case. So I need to be done with that. This whole book is a very glorified view of
909. 01:26:11 picking three things and doing it. That's my overall summarization. As far as how to rate it,
910. 01:26:18 I struggled with this one. At one point, I told my wife, it's like, I think this might be the
911. 01:26:24 first 1.0, 1.5 book that I ever go through. There are some key components to it that I could see.
912. 01:26:32 You could pull out and run with, but I will most definitely not recommend this book. I think I'm
913. 01:26:40 going to put it at 2.0 in my case. I don't think people should pick this up. There are other books
914. 01:26:46 that do a much better job. I have complaints with his system. He's hard to read. Don't pick this one
915. 01:26:53 up. All right. I'm put it to. There you go. I'm done. That's actually a little bit more generous
916. 01:26:58 than I thought you were going to be. I don't think I hated this as much as you did. Although,
917. 01:27:06 like I said, I really think the visuals of the systems that he has here kind of do more hurt
918. 01:27:14 than help. He's got a lot of templates and things inside of the book that you can use,
919. 01:27:22 but it's totally not the way that I would do things. Really, I can't see anybody applying
920. 01:27:28 that specific way. I do think that there are definitely a lot of gold nuggets in here. I feel
921. 01:27:34 like J.D. Meyer is probably a very smart person who understands this stuff. As such, doesn't feel the
922. 01:27:41 need to expound on these things, but it's hard to pick out the few things in here that really can
923. 01:27:51 be of benefit to your specific situation because they very easily get lost in the lists.
924. 01:27:57 Even the system at the beginning of the book is too complicated to follow in the nine box diagram.
925. 01:28:06 That doesn't look like a workflow diagram to me. I know me personally, as I was thinking about,
926. 01:28:13 "Well, how do I implement aspects of this?" I was going to start drawing out my own productivity
927. 01:28:17 workflow diagram. I was like, "No, it sounds like too much work. Just forget it."
928. 01:28:20 I'm with you that I don't think I would necessarily recommend this book. I do feel like I did get
929. 01:28:30 some stuff out of this book more so than I thought I was going to after the first section. There is
930. 01:28:36 a lot of repetition. One plus side of this self-published book, since you said it was self-published,
931. 01:28:41 it does stand the right way on my bookshelf. I'm like, "Thanks, smart notes."
932. 01:28:45 I don't know. I feel like there's some good stuff in here, but it's more work than it needs to be in
933. 01:28:53 order to unearth it. You really have to work at it in order to identify the key ideas for you
934. 01:29:00 personally. I'm generally not a fan of services like Blinkist. I should caveat that because I feel
935. 01:29:09 like with a service like Blinkist where you can read a whole book in 15 minutes, that's what they
936. 01:29:13 say. The value of the ideas tends to be diminished by the truncated time frame. In my opinion,
937. 01:29:23 it's going to the gym and doing bench press with no weight on the bar and then saying,
938. 01:29:27 "There, I did my workout." It's the resistance and pushing through and reading. It allows you to
939. 01:29:33 get the full idea and the weight of those ideas that really is impactful as we read books.
940. 01:29:38 That obviously is not going to happen here. By nature, it's a very surface-level list of lists.
941. 01:29:46 If you were going to Blinkist a book, this might not be a bad one to do.
942. 01:29:50 We're just listening to this episode.
943. 01:29:53 Or listen to this episode and call it a day. You could do that too. That being said,
944. 01:29:59 there were a couple of things in here that I think added value to me going through it. I am
945. 01:30:05 glad that I read it. I did have trouble with it and I had to really crank through that last
946. 01:30:10 section with all of the lists, especially as I'm trying to jot down all these stupid lists in my
947. 01:30:14 MyNODE file. The third section is huge. Just spend more time in your MyNODE file than you did reading.
948. 01:30:21 Well, eventually I just went to Siri dictation. I don't even care if there's stuff. I'm just
949. 01:30:26 going to get these things down. I'm going to rate it higher than you. I'm going to put it at 3.0.
950. 01:30:33 Again, that's just because I feel like there's some good stuff in here, but it's definitely
951. 01:30:38 harder to get to than some of the other books that we've read. It's a hard read based on the
952. 01:30:45 style and just how things all tie together or don't. But if you're going to put forth the effort,
953. 01:30:52 there will be some things I think in here that are going to be a value. There are probably
954. 01:30:59 whatever you're looking for. There's probably a better vehicle to get you there.
955. 01:31:03 Good deal. All right. With that one in the trash, what's next, Mike?
956. 01:31:08 It's going on my shelf, I believe. The next one is... I won't trash it.
957. 01:31:14 The next book is "Range, Why Generals Triumph in a Specialized World" by David Epstein,
958. 01:31:21 which I have not started yet. This is a listener recommendation. If I'm remembering,
959. 01:31:27 right? I don't have it open in front of me. It was the most requested book besides Sapiens,
960. 01:31:31 which we will cover at some point, but not yet. It's a long one.
961. 01:31:39 We're going to have to commit to that one, I think.
962. 01:31:41 That may be our first two part episode.
963. 01:31:42 No, I don't think I could talk about Sapiens twice.
964. 01:31:46 All right. Well, after "Range," the next one we're going to pick up is "Creativity Inc" by Ed Catmull.
965. 01:31:53 Interesting choice.
966. 01:31:55 The Pixar team story and how they go about doing their things. I think this would be really
967. 01:32:02 interesting to talk through with you, Mike, and to discuss just in general. Yeah, "Creativity Inc" by
968. 01:32:09 Ed Catmull. I'm interested in that. I've actually listened to this on Audible, and it is a good
969. 01:32:14 book. I will buy the real book and read it for this particular episode, but it's essentially a
970. 01:32:20 biography. It's a biography of a company, not a person. It is definitely a little bit different
971. 01:32:28 than the type of books that we typically cover on Bookworm. This will be interesting.
972. 01:32:33 Yeah. Going to force us to branch out a little bit.
973. 01:32:37 All right. "Gapbooks," I've got one that I bought while we were in Woodstock. That is the
974. 01:32:44 Messy Middle by Scott Belsky. Haven't started this. This is a... Looks like a huge book,
975. 01:32:49 but the pages are actually pretty thick. I don't think it's going to be that bad,
976. 01:32:53 and it also looks like a very interesting read with a lot of diagrams and pictures.
977. 01:32:57 So, just try and get that one done in between. Yeah. Getting results kind of
978. 01:33:03 kicked my butt when it came to reading. So, I'm kind of behind on the whole "Gapbook" thing.
979. 01:33:08 So, I'm still going through "Primal Branding" by Patrick Hanlon. Hopefully, I'll have that one
980. 01:33:12 finished up quickly because I need to finish that before I pick up range and have a deadline on range.
981. 01:33:18 So, there you go. I'm about to read that one quick. All right. "Primal Branding," that is.
982. 01:33:24 So, there you go. But, yes. All of this, everything we've covered, if you have thoughts on this,
983. 01:33:29 you think I'm absolutely crazy and you completely disagree with me. I don't think you should
984. 01:33:35 disagree with me. Go to the club, club.bookworm.fm. Let us know your thoughts. Join the club.
985. 01:33:40 All the cool stuff happens over there. It's true. And if you are looking for another way to
986. 01:33:45 support the show and you want some sweet swag, you can go to the Kotburo site where we've got
987. 01:33:52 T-shirts and sweatshirts. Link will be in the show notes. But that'll do it for this episode.
988. 01:33:57 So, if you're reading along with us, pick up range and we will talk to you in a couple of weeks.