264: The Accountability-Shaped Hole

0:00Welcome to Focus to Productivity Podcasts about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my dear friend, Mike Schmitz. How are you today, Mike? I'm doing great. How are you, David? Good. I'm glad you're feeling better. I'm ready to make some good focused podcast stuff. Before we get into it today, it's a feedback episode and thanks again, gang, for delivering. We got some great feedback questions that we're going to stump each other with today. I just wanted to call it real quick. My YouTube channel. I have been putting real effort into it the last three or four months, getting regular videos up there. I'd love you to go see it. I put one up that I think is really fitting for the focus audience. It's about something really close to my heart, the materials, the per-about-opus thing. Mike, I almost pulled that video the night before it went out because it's very personal and it's just kind of a thing I do that kind of makes me, I don't know, makes me sound a little pretentious, I think, but it's something I do. I let it ship anyway. I got a bunch of really nice emails from people that really enjoyed it and got something

1:01out of it. I think if anybody would enjoy this, it would be the focused audience. Go check it out. I'll link it in the notes and sign up for my YouTube channel. Yeah, I'm glad that you're making progress on this. I know this has been a recurring theme on the podcast. Glad you're getting some consistency behind that channel. I think this is long overdue. Glad to see it. Getting some life. Yeah, I got it helper on that. I think the... We're going to talk about this in one of the questions today. I think being committed to somebody else makes you more accountable sometimes. You know, absolutely. And guess what gang it is September and you know what that means, right? Absolutely. It's time for relay for St. Jude. It is childhood cancer awareness month. Means we're asking the relay community to come together and support the life-saving work of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. This is one of my favorite things that we get to do every single year because St. Jude is just such an incredible organization. And we want to invite you to join relay and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in

2:03a recognizing child-hung cancer awareness month before St. Jude opened in 1962. Childhood cancer was largely considered incurable. But today, thanks in part to better therapies that St. Jude has helped to develop more than 80% of U.S. child-hung cancer patients survive. And St. Jude cares for some of the world's sickest children regardless of their race, ethnicity, ethnicity, beliefs, or ability to pay. Its patients receive the customized care they need to treat child-hung cancer and other life-threatening diseases no matter what barriers they face. And because of its supporters, St. Jude can provide children with cutting-edge treatments not covered by insurance. You know, I was with Stephen. We were at Macstock of all places, you're a place. And Stephen said, I'm thinking about doing this thing with St. Jude and I don't know if it'll work or not. Now we've been doing it eight years. They've raised so much money to help it out and gang, it's such an easy check to write. You know, there's a thing about when you help somebody out, how much it helps yourself. And you're giving money to a group that helps kids with cancer.

3:06It's like, it's such a simple thing. Daisy and I actually we stay for it every month. It's kind of like on our, our plan, our financial plan. One of the nice things we get with our work is a Daisy work for Disney. And Disney does matching to every year. Actually, she's the one who makes the contribution and we double everything that we give because the company matches it. So, now you should think about giving St. Jude some money. You should look into that. Maybe your employer will help out as well. Yeah, I think it's safe to say that that worked out. That was a good idea. Yeah. Raised a ton of money so far and let's keep it going, gang. So this September helps St. Jude give kids with cancer hope for more tomorrows. Again, we're inviting the relay community to help us reach our goal. It's $700,000 this September for childhood cancer awareness month. As always, there are multiple ways to support the campaign. You can make a donation at sttjud.org slash relay today. And your donation can unlock some fun rewards. Donors making an individual gift of $60 or more will be eligible to redeem a digital bundle

4:09of campaign themed wallpapers and a macOS screensaver. And donors making a gift of $100 or more can redeem the 2026 Western themed sticker packs. So give those kids more tomorrows go to sttjud.org slash relay to donate or start a fundraiser of your own today. All right, Mike. We had a lot of feedback. Let's just dive in. So the first one is from Mark and my heading for this is capacity, just another target. So Mark wrote the discussion of three or four good creative hours was a relief at first. Then it became one more target to miss. Some days I get two useful hours and I feel as if I failed before lunch. How do you use capacity as a limit without turning it into a score? We've had a lot of discussion recently on the show about that scorebook and metrics and and markets home with this question. He does. And I just got through a week where my capacity got thrown out the window. Yeah, it happens, right? Yep. So it's kind of a relative term.

5:10I don't think you can treat your capacity as something firm that you're going to commit to. It is a little bit fluid. As you mentioned in the notes, it's not a, not a daily quota that you're, you're trying to hit. Yeah. That was my, my, my advice back to him. It's like, you got to stop thinking about it like a quota because that's not the way it works. It's like, it's a target. It's something you aim for and you know, life happens. You do your best. Yeah. You are not a factory trying to crank out widgets. So the whole idea of capacity, I don't know, I have a little bit of, a little bit of recoil when I hear that word now. You know, I just got done reading a book called The Goal, which is all about the theory of constraints, which is a cool idea. But all of the metaphor in that book is around trying to increase the production of this factory. And I just don't like that, that imagery at all. Well, especially with knowledge work, it just doesn't apply. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, a recurring theme on the show is effort not results.

6:14And I think that applies to this question. You know, you do your best, you know, and you don't, you don't look at the result, you look at the effort. And did you give the most important, the best available attention that day? You know, and if you did, whether it was four hours or 30 minutes, then you're doing good. You know, don't beat yourself up. The question is, you know, is that effort? Like if you get through a day and you found that rather than try to do the hard work, you spent the whole day, you know, I don't know, goofing off an email or in my case, let's just say hypothetically vibe coating up an app that you're not sure you even need. That's a problem, you know, think about the important stuff. Are you putting effort into it? If you are, you're doing it right. And I think that's as far as you need to go with that mark. I would not give yourself that goal of hitting a target every day. It just, it's a fool's errand.

7:15Yeah. I think the thing when you make a any sort of number, a target, you end up trying to get to that specific point. And the phrase comes to my progress, not perfection. You really just want to do a little bit more, a little bit better in the right direction with what you're going towards. So I guess depending on when you would want to apply this, I would, I would say the numbers really don't matter at all. It's really the trends that you want to be looking at, especially if you're really on your focus journey. I don't know where mark is that here, but if you're trying to establish a baseline, you know, you hear people talk about, well, I can only do four hours of creative work. So you may have that four hour capacity in mind when you get started, but maybe you can only do 30 to 45 minutes of, of real focus work at the beginning. I would just, you know, recognize, okay, I did 30 minutes. And then the next day, maybe I did 35. And as long as that's trending in the right direction, like you should, you should

8:16feel happy about that. You shouldn't measure, measure backwards from that four hour target and be like, I'm not there yet. Yeah. So you, you bring up a good point. I think part of it is, is the muscle strong enough for four hours, right? Yep. And so you got to build it. And so that's the first piece, but it's like, even if the muscle is strong enough, you know, the universe, you know, what does it say, man, plans, God laughs, right? You know, I have a phrase life will life you. Yeah. So some days it just doesn't work, even if you have all the muscles. But this led to me to come up with a question for you, Mike. I wanted to talk about, because I think it's related. How do we recognize a low capacity day? And what do we do in response? Like I know that you've had some, some struggles with stuff going on. You're moving. You got it, you know, a thing in your life. How do you recognize that low capacity day? And what happens when you recognize it? Oh, we can, we can talk about it. I mean, I wrote a newsletter about it. My, my wife broke her leg. Yeah. Shortly after we recorded with cat mobile, she broke her tibia and her fibula.

9:20She now has a titanium rod in her leg and a long road to recovery. When that happened, you know, all of the plans I had that week, he immediately got thrown out the window. So this is a little bit different than maybe a low capacity day. But I'll just talk about how I manage it though. Like when life happens to you, then suddenly production is going to slow down. Yes. Yes. So the way I handled that really was triage. And this is the newsletter that I wrote. I'll put a link in the show notes of people want to dig into this. There's a, it can be traced back. The word triage can be traced back to a surgeon during the Napoleonic wars, where the officers were wounded and they were going to treat it as they, they came in and traditionally they were treated by rank. This one has a higher rank. So it gets treated first. And there was just too much to do. So the surgeon flipped the, the order and basically started looking at, you know, which soldiers are probably going to be okay,

10:22whether they receive immediate medical care, which soldiers are probably going to die, even if they get immediate medical care. And then the third category is which ones do the, does the immediate medical care make the difference in whether they deliver die? That's where I need to focus my efforts. That's kind of what I did with the, the stuff that was on there. Yeah. Everything took second place to, I need to get my wife to the hospital. For her surgery, I need to be there when she comes out. I need to be there for whatever she needs. And then I was in the middle of a cohort at the, the same time. And my first thought was, well, maybe I can make this cohort work. And I was like, no, that I quickly dismissed that. Yeah. I sent the email to everybody and was like, you know, I have to modify the schedule. I'm sorry about that. And I thought everybody would be mad at me. I thought some people who had never, you know, don't have the relationship with, would ask for refunds. That didn't happen. Everyone was really accommodating. So that kind of filled in, you know, whenever I had some, some time I was able to fill, I was able to do those obligations. And then all the other stuff that really was, it didn't have to happen that week.

11:24That stuff basically just didn't happen. All of the YouTube videos, all of the course videos that I was working on. I want to make progress on that stuff, but it just didn't happen. And you know what? That was okay. Because the main thing was I got to take care of my wife. Yeah. I mean, that's it. I had a similar experience in the labs with Daisy had her heart attack a few years ago. I had an event planned and that's the only event I've ever canceled in labs. And I just told them the truth and actually heard from several members that are cardiologists, you know, asking me, all right, what can I do to help? You know, so it's just, you know, you understand that the people are much more forgiving. But, but I also think the capacity thing can be handled in advance. And like you had an emergency capacity problem, but often we just have days that we have less capacity because you've got a lot on your plate. Maybe you've got extra meetings that day or you've got just, you know, things going on in your life that are going to require you to not have as much time to focus on the deep work.

12:25And I think that is absolutely predictable on the week level. And when I do my week plan, that's one of the questions I ask myself as I look at each day. It's like, what are the, you know, one or two days this week that I'm just not going to get much actual deep work done, you know, what are the low capacity days? And I know that going in, I also look at the opposite for high capacity days, you know, days where I don't have a lot of recording going on. And I can really just sit in my desk and do, do hard work. And going in, I know, you know, like, oh, yeah, this is Tuesday. This day is going to be really busy. And I'm not going to get a lot of, you know, the, the deep work done. And that's okay. And I don't, that way I have the expectation going in. I don't feel disappointed at the end, but I also hold myself more accountable on the days where I don't have a lot because, you know, the down days are the one where it would be easy to go just like get lost in the wood shop all afternoon or, you know, just do something else when I really probably need to do a little work. So, so I think, you know, planning forward capacity is really useful to mark.

13:25So I would look at it. Now, some people tell me they can do this on a week on a month basis. I can't, I can't at the beginning of months. Oh, yeah, that day's definitely going to be a hard day. But, but I think at the week level, you have a better idea. You know, it's actually on your plate for the weekend with days working down. So I would recommend on Sunday night or Friday afternoon or Monday morning, I do a kind of a capacity audit for your week and see if that doesn't help. And as always, don't beat yourself up on any of this stuff. We're all doing our best. What do you think about the use of numbers with that? When you're in the capacity audit, I think the way I do that is I just see, you know, if I've got a screencast online module that I got to do this week, I just know that that's going to eat up probably a day, day and a half worth of time that I would have spent making other things. So I just try not to put as much on my schedule, but I don't have any formal process for that. I'm not saying this is, you know,

14:26going to count for 12 hours. And so I've only got, you know, 14 other hours that I can assign to this type of activity. It's more just a feel thing. Yeah, it's not that scientific, but like on days where you've got back to back recordings, even with a couple hours in between, you're not going to get any real work done. At least that's my, my experience. Whereas days that are widely open, then I think I can really like dig in and have, you know, six hour block without an eruption. I used to, and we could talk about this on the show, I used to track the, not the, what was it that used to call them, the, the move the needle hours, you know, where like how much time does it spend being a lawyer? How much time did I spend, you know, doing Max Barkey stuff like actual production work? And it was a good barometer for me as I was kind of like working on those muscles, but I don't do that anymore. I feel like I'm just fine. You know, I know what I'm doing well and what I'm not. And when I'm not, I can kind of bring some of those tools back into the frame, but I don't feel that I need to track moving the needle hours anymore,

15:29although I do think of that as moving the needle work. That makes sense. Yep. The metrics that you choose to focus on should support more intentional application of your time, energy and attention. But you shouldn't direct your time, energy and attention towards boosting the metric. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this whole question from Mark came out of that episode about metrics. And I feel like I need to allow you job of it because that show was inspired a lot by my theme wins book, The Score. And so I just say one more time that book is so good. And I just, I think Mike should read it for bookworm, frankly, I'm going to just make a real pitch for that. But if the metrics and things are, is a thing that concerns you or you feel like you get hung up on them, that is an excellent read and just just just, uh, I'm not keep saying it. It's a good book. Go check it out. Julie wrote it, chronotype advice when you do not own the calendar.

16:32You and I always are talking about your prime time, your productivity prime time. And we are these two precious creators who have a lot of control over a schedule. From the year 19, uh, 92 to 2022, I did not. I was at the whim of judges and other lawyers and clients and it was rough. But it's easy to forget and Julie set me right. She says, I know, uh, basically she told me, okay, Mr. fancy creator. She said, I know my best hours aren't really, but those hours belong to getting children ready and commuting. My employer controls the rest of the day is knowing my chronotype useful. If I cannot move my best work into the next window, um, you know, and I, uh, I thought, well, Julie, thanks for, uh, for calling me out. She was nice about it, but yeah, she's right. It's not always that easy, right? It is not, um, although I would say that, uh, the chronotype, ideally you want to align with that sometimes you can't and sometimes that's okay.

17:35The way I transitioned from working with the family business to everything that I do online was I started getting up an hour earlier to write before I went into the office. I am not a morning person and I started getting up at five a.m. Yeah. And it was difficult at first. It got easier as I went. I prefer not to get up at five a.m. But that was a season where that's where the time existed. So that's what I did. I think we can use the chronotype as a, as an excuse sometimes. It's like, well, I'm just not feeling it right now. And you do, I mean, there's truth to following the energy and the writing this stuff as much as you can. But sometimes you just got to do the best you can with what you got to work with. Yeah. Agreed. Um, one of the things I told Julie and I reply was, uh, borrowing against the future. And usually that said kind of an indicative connotation. Like you're working really late. I remember when we were in trials, sometimes we'd be up at one a.m.

18:37And I would tell the associate, look, we're just borrowing against tomorrow. At this point, we're not at our best and we're going to lose sleep and we're going to wake up late tomorrow when we could have been doing better work. And, you know, that's a thing. But I think in chronotype things, I think you can borrow against the afternoon or the morning. So if you're, if your prime time is in the morning and, and talk your boss about that, say like, like, I'd really like to do my, my productive work in the morning. Uh, can we, can I push meetings to the afternoon said, you know, and, like, if you're telling your boss you're thinking about being more productive for them, they're going to listen. And I think you can, you can borrow against, you know, later in the day to kind of customize it. So I would try that. I would still try to find 30 minutes. I would just, I would work at, I understand it's difficult. I've raised children. I've had, I've had a job where you had very little control. But, but even just little wins of 30 minutes could, could really make a difference. So I wouldn't give up the ship. I would not throw in the towel.

19:39I agree. And I'll also say that my getting up at 5 a.m. The reason that that worked was not just because I started getting up earlier and made no other adjustments. Yeah. Sure. To your point about borrowing from tomorrow, if you're going to, to do that, you have to account for things on the, the other side. Yeah. So that's the one thing I would not do is just start setting the alarm earlier. Make sure that you're still getting the rest that you need and, and, uh, showing up sharp. I think any productivity advice that relies on like force of will is probably not going to work. And, and just saying, well, I'm just going to start getting two hours less sleep a day. Well, buddy, that's not going to work out for you. Yep. And I've had to learn that lesson the, the hard way because I was diagnosed with epilepsy. One of the things that can trigger a seizure is not get enough rest. So I got to be real careful that I'm doing everything I can to get a good night

20:39sleep, getting eight hours a night. Um, in some ways, that's been a pain because, well, it'd be nice to just borrow an extra hour here or there. But if it means that I'm not able to function the next day, uh, or I shouldn't get behind the wheel and drive, then, uh, I'm not, not able to do that. So it's kind of a forced constraint that I've had to learn to, to deal with. And I think that actually is a, a lesson that everyone can benefit from applying. Yeah. You've mentioned that before and you definitely have higher stakes for lack of sleep than most of us, but I don't want to belittle the rest of us that aren't dealing with that because the lack of sleep is equally a problem. And, uh, I think that's something that you just got to, just got to accept that there are minimum base values. And every time I meet somebody who's like, well, I can get five and five hours of sleep. I just, I just don't buy it, you know, maybe there are some people that they can do. But I feel like you're going to, you're taking years off your life in my opinion. I mean, I'm not a doctor, but it just seems silly. Get enough sleep.

21:42This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Gusto, Payroll, HR and benefits simplified. Get three months for free. Go to gusto.com slash focused. We're all talking about getting focused here, but let's be honest. There's probably one task on your list. You constantly push to next week because it's just too tedious for a lot of business owners. That's payroll. Gusto is here to take that entirely off your plate. So it becomes the easy part of your job instead of the dreaded one. I represent it. A lot of small businesses in my time as a business attorney. And I'll tell you that payroll and HR management is the thing that everybody makes mistakes on. You just can't do that yourself. You need an expert. And Gusto is the online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses. It's all in one remote friendly and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay higher on board and support your team from anywhere with gusto. You get automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers comp 401k.

22:46You name it. Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every budget. And it doesn't take a lot of time. They have automated tools built right in offer letters on boarding materials, direct deposit and more. That's why Gusto's rank number one on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026 and trusted by over 400,000 small businesses. Don't take my word try Gusto today at gusto.com slash focused and get three months for free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at g us to calm slash focus. One more time, gusto calm slash focus and our thanks to gusto for their support of the focus podcast and all of relay. Keith wrote in about delegation and the management tax. He said I use Kathy Campbell's delegation matrix and handed off two tasks I dislike. All right. Good job Keith says the work is getting done. But giving direction, checking it, answering questions takes nearly as long as doing it myself.

23:49How long should I expect the management tax to last before deciding the delegation failed? Keith yourself, you're so close. Yep. Yep. Delegation taxes are real thing though. Yeah. Yeah. It cost time before it saves time. Right. Yeah, except that. And I do think that you have to you have to look at thyself in this stuff. And I'll tell you because I am a sinner here. I used to work with a lot of parolecules and it took me years to realize that they weren't all dumb. I was just the world's worst delegator. And like I I did not want to pay the tax. I just wanted to say this is a problem. I need you to do it for me. And I just needed done exactly the way I do it. But I'm not going to tell you how that is. You know, and to simplify. And I think you have to really look at when you're when you're bringing on somebody you have to distinguish good training versus bad hand off.

24:50And and you know, look at thyself there because that's very important. Every time this comes up, I always talk about make videos sit down with them because I've done it. I've tried to do it. The heart, the you know, the easy way, quote unquote and never works. It was the old Stephen Covey fastest slow and slow as fast. Out of your heard that one Mike. That completely applies to delegation. You've got to go slow when you're getting people started. Yeah. I heard at one point, there's a number for the point where if you are going to delegate a repeating task, where it's worth it for you to continue to delegate it. And the multiplier versus how long it takes you to do it versus doing it yourself was something ridiculous like a hundred times. Yeah. Delegating something, you know, should take longer, but we don't have an idea for how much longer it's going to take. And really what that that quote was saying is, even if it takes a hundred times longer to delegate it, then it does for you to do it.

25:56It's still worthwhile in the long run. Yeah. So stick with it would be my my advice and a couple of things because I'm in the middle. We'll talk about this later, but I'm working with a VA. And so I've noticed a couple of patterns whenever I try to to delegate things. If I try to delegate something and I explain something and it keeps coming back wrong. Yeah. I don't assume that the person on the other end is not smart enough to figure this out. I'm saying I have not been clear yet about what exactly I want this to look like. Yeah. And the thing that helps the most with working with my VA and helping her to understand this is what I want this to look like is recording those feedback videos like you were talking about. Not even here's the whole SOP, the whole process. Yeah. Now here, you know, this is what I want you to do from now on. Literally every time I make changes to a LinkedIn carousel or something, I'm recording feedback about my thought process behind what I changed, what I like, what I don't like.

27:01And I'm using Screen Studio to do that. I can add zooms, I can add highlights. It's really, really simple. It's a I'm not sure do you use Screen Studio at all? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's great. It's like a loom plus plus. You can create these shareable links. So I'll record the video. I'll put it in Slack. And after a couple of revisions, she's really starting to pick up on it. So yeah, there is a cost to this. It's worth paying. It's going to take longer than you think maybe it should. But just be as clear as you can. Be patient. And I think the key for me is assume the responsibility for when it doesn't work and see how you can maybe be a little bit more clear going forward. And I'd say, Keith, the delegation is another muscle, right? And the first time you do it's going to be a lot harder than the second or the third time. And you're going to learn doing it a few times, you know, what the common questions are. So you'll be able to kind of address those if you want.

28:01And there's a whole other discussion on this reaction of a future episode about working with AI and is it a distraction? And I think that delegating the AI is a whole nother can of worms that is somewhat related. But we'll get to that on another episode. Simon Rodin, dependence on accountability. I thought this was a fascinating question. External accountability works extremely well for me. He says, the problem is that I sometimes cannot act without it. Is that a weakness to fix or should I stop fighting the way I am wired and build more accountability in my life? He acknowledges that he needs external accountability. I talked earlier about that YouTube thing by getting someone to help me. Suddenly, I'm doing more of it. So obviously it works for me too. But I never thought of it as a weakness. What do you think of that question? It's a fascinating question. And I don't think it is a weakness. My brain immediately goes to the conversation that we had with Kat because she talked briefly about the four tendencies

29:06by Gretchen Rubin. And she broke down those different categories of people and their response to commitments that they make to others. And if accountability to other people is something that really works for you, I would guess that it's probably linked to the way that you're wired. I think Kat described that or Gretchen Rubin describes that as the obliger. Or you want to follow through on the commitments that you make to other people. That's not good or bad. That's not a personality flaw. That's recognizing that this specific mechanism works for me. And I think in general productivity advice really is just... The approach to productivity advice in general should be do more of what works and ignore what doesn't. I actually wrote Simon back. I'm like, look, don't complain about something that's working for you. It's good. Just go with it. If you want to be less reliant on it, I had a couple ideas.

30:07One is try a few lower stake items without accountability and see how you do. There's nothing wrong with that. And I also thought this might be a thing that you may want to use AI for. Like if you use a frontier model and tell it you're working on a thing and tell it to be your accountability partner, if you don't want other humans involved, you could do that. That doesn't work for me personally. My experience is that I find AI to be a nag very quickly. I don't like it talking to me and telling me what I should be doing. I feel like it's a dumb robot and it shouldn't be doing that. But for some people, I think it works. And then the more I think about this question, it always comes back to the common thing I talk about in this show is reflection. What you get with external accountability is reflection from a third party. I think often when you can't do it without that, it means that you may not have enough of a reflective process yourself. And I didn't ask, I'm about this, so I'm not throwing any arrows here. But just, you know, I think if you've got a good weekly review, a good quarterly review,

31:11and you're giving yourself tough questions and reflecting on them yourself, that fills the accountability shaped hole in your life a lot of times. And that can solve the problem. My own experience with this YouTube thing was that it wasn't enough. I reflected on it every quarter and didn't do a damn thing. Finally, I got someone to work with me and it helped out. So I'm not saying this is going to solve your problems, but I do think that a reflective process can actually help if you're looking for other options. But if you've got a method that works, don't ever think of it as a weakness. It's just a tool you're using. Yeah, exactly. That's it right there. It's just a tool. Grace wrote in one roadblock three categories. This was from Kat's episode that came in afterwards. She says the logical biological and psychological categories helped me see why another productivity system was not fixing the problem. My roadblock seems to live in all three categories. I am tired. The next action is vague and I'm afraid the result will be bad.

32:12Sorry, it was funny. Yes, yes, Grace, we are all with you. Which part should I address first? The sympathetic laugh. Yeah. Well, Kat would say start with the logical then go to the biological and then finally the psychological. These might be three different roadblocks, by the way. It's not just one roadblock that's keeping you from taking action. So maybe this is one roadblock three categories, but the way it's worded, I would actually think this is maybe three different roadblocks. Sort of like Dave Ramsey talks about with the debt snowball. You pay off the smallest debt first. Get some momentum. Tackle the easiest problem first. That's what I tell her. Go for the cheapest one first. Whichever one is the easiest one to fix, do that. Which Kat would say is going to be the logical one. Yeah. So if I were to take this and the way I would approach these specific roadblocks, maybe this is helpful.

33:14Maybe this is not, I don't know, but if I am tired, I would see if I can't do something to increase the quantity and the quality of my my sleep. I feel like the next day you would be able to get feedback on that roadblock. The next action is vague. That one might be a little bit tougher because you can try to define it, but maybe you define it a little bit wrong. But I think you can again figure that one out and add some specificity to the next action. The one I feel like that's going to take the most work is I'm afraid the result will be bad. That one you're going to have to wrestle with. I wrote about that in my newsletter. For me, it came out on that episode actually. I had some inner turmoil between this competing idea that social media is inherently evil. And I need to be on social media to grow my creator business. And rather than reconcile that, I just kind of avoided it. That's not the case anymore. I'm getting some progress there because I put in the work to reconcile that and ask myself point blank.

34:18Do I really believe that I cannot show up on social media in any way, shape or form without being a hypocrite and making the people close to me mad at me? And when I looked at it that way, it's like, well, obviously, I can figure this out. But I avoided it for a long time. So that one I think you might have to untangle a little bit. I feel like a lot of the feedback we got in this episode was people inappropriately identifying with one of the blocks. I heard from people saying, well, I'm not logical. So it's always an issue. I can't logically think these things through or I get hung up on psychological issues around work. And I feel like, as soon as you start identifying with one of these things, I think that's a mistake. These are just, it's a diagnostic tool. It's like every, every problem where every project has these three goals or these three potential barriers. And you just diagnose which one is hanging you up and you move on.

35:19You should not grab onto the identity of one of these things and make it a universal rule in your life. And so I don't really like with that takeaway from this stuff. Just don't look at this stuff so heavy, please. Yeah. I think the immunity to change framework, that's kind of fascinating to me. This is not, you know, why did I not follow through on writing the report that I was supposed to write yesterday? Yeah. This is more long term. I've struggled with this thing for months, maybe years, and I cannot figure out why. It's a recurring issue. I think that's where this, this tool can be really valuable. All right. We heard from Tom about the accumulating task list. Yeah. This was interesting. So Tom emailed me directly, but I wanted to get these, these questions in here. So Tom says, if I continue to add every interesting idea or thing to look into, along with things that need to be done,

36:25I get way more tasks than I will ever get to. My biggest issue is during review after a lot of accumulation. It's too much to go through everything and eventually most of the list just stays where it is. So how do you organize your tasks so they're easy to start through during review? And do you call the list down each time and delete things or just move them to a someday, maybe a list so they're out of the way? I have thoughts. What do you do, Mike? This maybe sounds a little bit bad, but I don't really worry about those lists. And those lists can show up a lot of different places. It can be task list. It can also be a read later list. Yeah. That's the thing that came to mind with some of the description here. These sound like, you know, I want to read this article, I want to read this book, whatever. Reminds me of Oliver Berkman. I think it's meditation from mortals where he talks about the read later list as a river of items that are just flowing before you. And it's okay to just let stuff go, drop off the end.

37:28And if something in that river, you know, if you open up your read later list, something at the top, whatever jumps out to you, then you can pick it up and you can actually engage with it. But just because you captured it into a read later list does not mean you have an obligation to follow through with that. So the larger point for me is that I view all of those lists as sort of recommendation engines, but not lists of things that I absolutely need to do. Yeah, a list of lists. My task management system, I've kind of re-engineered it over the years. And the way it works currently is I have three statuses, the primary statuses. The first is an idea, like something I capture. And that is as the recommendation engine. It's just a bunch of stuff in there. And then the next level up is the shelf. That's something that I'm thinking about I might want to actually do. And at any one time I've got, you know, maybe ten items on the shelf. And then I have the bench, which is one to three items that I'm actually going to get done. And, you know, for me, it's just elevating things, you know, from the shelf to the bench and from ideas to shelf.

38:31And it's a kind of a random process. This is the thing where I do use AI, though. I occasionally, I have my AI occasionally go through the idealist and call it from things that are now untimely. Like if I wanted to write a blog post about iOS 26 on the verge of us releasing iOS 27, it'll just cut that out. Because that's not going to happen anymore. It's out of data. It's old or I've moved on. I'm not interested in something. So it's got pretty good at helping me call the junk out. So it's easier to filter. But I have no like attachment. And I am fully aware that everything on the idealist is not going to get done. That's fine. You know. Yeah. The other thing I think is it pertains to tasks. And I think you probably take the same approach there. Is we both have an analog component, which we treat as the actual list of things that we need to do that day. So whenever we look at the list of lists, they're really just the recommendations. Hey, based on all the metadata that I have, these are the things that you should really be thinking about today.

39:31But just because the task manager that you choose to use says, hey, these are the 10 things that have a due date of today. I know I'm not going to get all 10 of those things done. So I got to pick the three that are most important. Put those on the list. And that's what I'm going to focus on. Yeah, I have more to say about that too. We got some some feedback about that. So we got that coming up in the show. Nice. One more question here from Tom on tracking inputs. You want to tackle this one next? They said, for instance, you check email and there are three different emails you need to deal with one urgent one due in a couple days and one interesting to look into. How do you add each of those to the tracking system, copy and paste it, add a link to it. Do you put them in an inbox or decide right to put them deal with them right there similar with Slack or other messaging systems? How do you add details so that you know what's about but not repeating it all on your input? It's just it's really an inputs triage in question like how deep do you go down with it?

40:32I have found that I am brutal about putting things into another system. I don't want to go through email and stop and deal with it right then unless it is truly a very immediate thing. Every time I try to do that, I am spending the whole day in the inbox right. You know, you go off and do a thing and you really lose control of your day. So, you know, accept that you're not going to deal with everything. The stuff that you can deal. I mean this this again goes to kind of the Stephen Covey stuff and some of the you know the. Getting things done is like if you can deal with it quickly you should deal with it. I actually still believe that for an email. But if it all requires consideration or thought I push it forward. And if it's something I need research or I can create a task related to it. I also my email system has a delay thing where I put it to the afternoon and I can come back like sometimes I get an email that I just want to.

41:33Like let linger in the you know subcultures for a while before I reply. So I'll delay those and respond to them. But I do not spend a lot of time triaging email. I go through it. It gets it gets dealt with it gets deleted. It gets archived. You know, so I just do not I do not process deep things while going through you know. Yeah, I'm not great at email. I'll say that upfront. But I'm okay with that. When I process email I will go through and I will reply if I can do it quick and it's something that needs a reply. If it's something that needs a little bit more thought my way to approach this is to flag those items. And then I use the flag items as the things that when I have an you know an hour long email block and I need to reply. I'll crank through those however I still don't get through all of those flagd emails and that is still okay. I wrote an article a long time ago for this sweet setup about lessons in email from Napoleon Bonaparte.

42:36A lot of Napoleon in this episode turns out. But he had this process where he would have his secretary hold the mail for two weeks before he actually delivered it to him. And he took great pride in opening those letters and looking at all of the issues that had resolved themselves. I used to do the same thing with lawyers who wrote me urgently and I would just send them a letter back rather than email them. Yeah, just to slow it down. I think there's some truth to that there. There's a story about Eisenhower when he got the White House and they delivered his mail to him and it was an envelopes and he lost his mind a little bit. He's like, guys, I'm the president. You should not be delivering this to me an envelope. You should have gone through it and only given me the ones I only need to see. Yeah. And there's something to that. And guess what? With AI, we can kind of get that. I am like one thing that has dramatically increased my relationship with email is AI customer support stuff.

43:37Like we did a whole episode on this on the intentional AI podcast, but I built a machine that essentially deals with repeatable simple customer support questions for me, which used to be kind of the bane of my existence. I just I hated going to the website, clicking the refresh password button and all that. So now that just gets done for me. So I mean, for people who have the ability to hire a personal assistant to do that for them, they've known this for years, but now those of us less fortunate can can use AI to do some of that for them too. But I'm at Tom, I feel you, but I can tell you my experience every time I try to deal with substantive email while going through the email. It derails the day. And so I really firmly try to like my morning email buzzes fast, you know, and that's just the way it's got to be. Yeah, that's the larger point, I think, to this is if you can at all, there are some professions like sales, for example, that maybe this is a little bit harder pull off.

44:37But what's that that Parkinson's law? I think that says that the task will expand to fill the time that you give it. Well, no matter how much time you give email, it's not going to be enough. So put a time box around it, say I'm going to do it for an hour in the morning, do it for an hour in the afternoon. If you got to extend that, that's fine. But put some parameters around it and then disconnect from it and do the actual work. Yeah. The irony with email, of course, is soon to reply you're inviting another email. Yeah, exactly. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Keeper Security. One week password is like an open door to all the stuff you wouldn't want anyone else getting access to. And Keeper slams that door shut on every account that you have with a strong, unique password for each one. So nothing is left exposed. Keeper is a password manager that creates strong, unique passwords for all your accounts. Stores them securely in one place and logs you in automatically across all your devices.

45:40So you never have to remember, guess or worry about getting locked out of your accounts again. Whether you're running a household or a business the same system extends to your whole team. You control who has access to what you share log in securely. And Keeper keeps data protected without adding extra work to anyone's day. It doesn't feel like extra security and that is the entire point auto fill face ID fingerprint login. They're all fast enough that protection happens in the background, whether you're at your desk or on your couch from individuals to families to growing companies. Keepers the password manager that millions turn to when they want their accounts actually locked down tight. One of the things that I love about Keeper is that in addition to passwords, you can also save private files, photos and videos to your Keeper vault. All with full end to end encryption on all your devices. So if you have specific numbers or notes that you want to keep hidden from everybody else, you can store those securely in Keeper. They've also got a cool feature called breach watch where you can get instant alerts when stolen passwords from breach websites that match yours appear on the dark web.

46:44So you know when it's time to update those passwords. But the best thing about Keeper is the simplicity. You can have a unique strong random password for every login and you don't have to remember any of them. You just log into Keeper and Keeper does the rest. It really is a solid password manager. And if you don't currently use one, you should definitely give Keeper a shot. And right now Keeper is offering our listeners of the focus podcast 60% off personal family plans when you go to keeperssecurity.com slash focused FOC US ED. Now this incredible offer is only for podcast listeners. And once again, that is K E E P E R security dot com slash focused for 60% off personal and family plans. And if you're running a team at work, check out Keeper's business plans. Just make sure to use our link so they know that we sent you once again Keeper security dot com slash focused our thanks to Keeper security for their support of the focus podcast and all of relay.

47:46All right, Mike, I got a collection of rapid fire questions we've had. I just had some good ones in the queue and I thought, well, let's just go through them. We don't need to give them a full treatment, but let's just answer them quickly. So let's go with it. What's the first thing you protect when every part of life has a legitimate claim on your attention? I don't know how to answer this. Well, I take a little bit of issue with the word legitimate claim on your attention because I feel like there are different levels of legitimate claims. I think if I had to pick, I would say that the family stuff comes first, not just the, you know, my wife breaking her leg and I got to get her to surgery. There are people in my family who think I am weird because I'll prioritize being at the soccer games instead of working the extra hours to make my business grow faster. That's okay. I understand the trade offs there, but I know that it went on my deathbed. I'm not going to wish that sure I had cranked out more, more videos.

48:48So family. Then I think when it comes to work, there are probably different levels of that as well. I would say the, I don't know how to describe it, but like the cohorts and the podcasts, like the live stuff that I do, that would be the next level, next tier in terms of the priority list. And then it would be the deep creative work and then all the admin stuff. First thing I guess those going to be family. I realize looking through these lists, these are not rapid fire questions, but the, but the, you know, the answer is it depends on because I teach that productivity field guide and I have a whole system of RIT and roles that I like to pursue and actually prioritize them like my wife is more important to me than my work. It doesn't make sense, but it doesn't work that way, right? You know, sometimes the thing you're doing for work needs to get done more than making sure her life is as good as possible. You know, if she's doing fine, but there's still something I need to do for work, I need to do it for work.

49:51So, you know, the answer is it depends. I just don't think you can have a hard and fast rule, but I do think it helps to have in your mind some priority of what's more important than other things. So, when you get it tied, you know, it's direction to go. Exactly. And the one metaphor for this that I really, really like, and I'll share here from the one thing that they talk about how you've got all these balls that you're, you're juggling, right? And the view is that they're all made of glass, and I don't want to let any one of these fall, but they explicitly say in that book that work, which tends to be the one that we prioritize, that one's made of rubber, and you should feel free to check that one when you need to. That's a good one. I never heard that before. What's a realistic focus practice for someone whose workplace rewards immediate replies? This is tough. I was in this, the scenario when I was working with the digital marketing agency.

50:53I think you kind of just have to work with what you've got. So, recognize that there are certain windows when you are going to have to be on call, and you are going to have to have some of those immediate replies. And that sucks, but it is what it is. Big picture, you can maybe try to establish some communication expectations. That's what we did and get everybody on the same page. But even if you have no control over that, I think there are still pockets of time that you can find where you can disconnect from that. But I would look for the patterns, figure out when you can steal 30 minutes here and hour there for the to focus on the stuff that you really want to instead of, you know, making sure that you're responding to the Slack messages. Yeah, what I told them was just look carefully at that concept of culture of immediate reply. Like sales are the one we always talk about.

51:54Yeah, if a customer writes to you, you're in sales. The sooner you get back, the more likely you are to close it, I get it. But there are a lot of jobs where there's a culture of immediate reply that's not really required. And I think that open conversations with your coworkers and your bosses sometimes can help change that culture because usually the metric of success to use a term is, is, you know, did we do the job as good as possible? Did we, you know, did we make the widget as good as possible? A lot of times immediate reply is not the best method to get there. And so think about whether you actually are in that culture. And if you are, then like we said earlier, just like I think was it grace, just, you know, pull time out where you can do your best. But, but I had that I feel like in my law practice, a lot of people I worked with was everything was go, go, go. And I was the one who started putting blocks of time in my calendar that was unavailable to do the work and the first response was to make fun of me.

52:58And then within a year, everybody was doing it. So you could be the agent of change. Yeah, there's a story about that real quick from deep work by Kale Newport where someone is in this exact scenario. Their boss keeps popping in needs immediate replies. And basically just ask them, what do you say I do here that is the most valuable. So it comes out of their mouth. And then well, I don't get to do that because I'm always on call. Can I block two hours in the morning where I'm not responding to you when you message me in a first like, well, I don't know. And like, well, you said this is the most important thing. This is the thing that adds the most value to the organization. Okay, I guess we can try it. And then same thing you use described. Of course it worked and everybody's doing it then. I used to also, and I have shared this before, but I used to have a list of pending work I was doing like on paper. And I kept it in my top drawer. And if somebody came and said, I need you to do this thing for me, I would pull it out and say, okay, tell me which, you know, where does it fit on this list?

54:00Yeah, that's more important than that motion. You need me to write or is it more important that trial? John wants me to go do it. So put it on the list. Tell me where it fits, you know, and make them accountable for it. And often they'd be like, you know what? I'm going to give this to Mary instead of like. How much empty space belongs in a good weekly plan and how do you stop other people from filling it? Yes. I don't know that there's a formulaic answer for this. Yeah, there's no formula. But I think there should be some empty space. There should be some margin. There has to be some margin for sure. Yeah. One of the things that I do when I time block my day, this is not weekly, but even in the daily, I overestimate how long things are going to take. So I build in some of that margin for me. Some things will actually take longer than I think. Some will actually get done shorter. And so it kind of evens out. You got to add a lot more though when you're talking about weekly. When I'm doing my weekly plan, I'm putting one priority thing in the morning and in the afternoon.

55:03I'm not blocking all the hours. Like that's the thing I want to do this this this day. So for today, it is record focused in the morning. You know, everything else that I get done in that morning at a weekly level is gravy. Yeah. And when you say you intentionally give yourself longer blocks than you need, you're probably not. You're probably giving yourself appropriate sized blocks. Because we just have this human failing about always underestimating how long it takes to do it. Yeah, there's an element of truth to that too. I do think I've gotten more accurate over time. And I still always use one hour blocks. So if something's going to take a half hour, it gets an hour. And that gives me some built in margin just by forcing myself to use the larger units. I do kind of a soft form of day, theme, as I'm playing a week out of I see there's a day where I'm doing a bunch of recording or a lot of commitments. That's also the day I'll put in things like like today I'm recording this morning. I'm doing the robot club at noon and then I'm getting a haircut in the afternoon because like I'm going to be spent.

56:06I know ahead of time this day is not going to be a great deep work day for me. Whereas Thursday this week, I currently don't have anything on my calendar. And I'm really kind of protecting that as people are asking me to do things. I'm like, well, I'm not available Thursday. And so I think the you know getting that margin in can be done on the planning basis if you're careful. So so think about it. You should have some margin. Give yourself plenty of time for the big blocks. This next one I really liked. How do you plan for a season when you know your capacity will be lower but do not know by how much. And from personal experience, I would answer that one. Assume your capacities even lower than you think. If you know going in, you're going to have a rough time. It's going to be rougher than you think. So do not over commit. I think that's pretty great advice. Yeah. One of the things that helps with that, by the way, is the focus. New year calendar. It's in the video version behind me. Yeah. If you can see all your big commitments coming up on that year at a glance calendar, that's kind of a visual indication for me. Like maybe dial it back a ditch this this week quarter, whatever.

57:14Another good question. I think this one was aimed at me, but I want you to answer it. What do you do with a project that still matters but hasn't been that has been abandoned three times? So you got a project you think is super important, but you can't you keep not doing it. What do you do, Mike? I think you got to be real with yourself and say, maybe this isn't as important as I think it is. Yeah. I think it's okay to continue to to punt it, but honestly, if it was me after three times, I would let it go. I kind of have this this three times rule. That's usually a pretty good indication, even with things that I capture, you know, sometimes I'll capture an idea and it'll sit in my capture bucket for a while before I curated into the long term storage and actually turned into something. And if something sits in that capture bucket for a while, I just delete it and I don't worry about it and trust that, you know, if I'm going to continually chase the things that are picking my curiosity. And that's something that is important. It's going to come back to me. So after three times, you know, something that I thought was important, I'm not taking action on it. I got to be real with myself.

58:19It's probably isn't as important as I think it is, but if I'm continuing to to engage with with projects that I think are leading me down the right path and this is important, then it will come back to me at some point. I agree. And I think if you're hesitant to do that, then I would give it what I'd call the long punt and just say, you know, put the next review day on this in 18 months. And if you go 18 months, you haven't thought about it, then it wasn't as important as you thought. If you get three months, you're like, man, I really want to do that thing. Then then you're going to make time for it. So last one of these, what happens to focus when you leave a career or role that supplied most of your identity? Great question. This was a digital context. This is from a last member who recently retired and he's struggling. And you go first. I'm going to say, I don't know that I'm equipped to answer this question, but this is my approach to it.

59:23I don't view the work that I do or my occupation as my complete identity. I don't even view it as a significant portion of my identity. It is a way that my identity gets expressed. Everything I do connects back to a personal mission statement that I call a life theme. My life theme is I help people multiply their time and time and tell them leave a bigger dent in the universe. So the things that I do professionally connect to that and that provides the motivation and the why behind the things that I do. But also it's a reason that I coach soccer. It's a reason that I volunteer at church. It's a reason behind all of the things that I do and there is no distinction for me between work and life when I'm trying to figure out how do I best use the time that I have available. It's just my life and I have to figure it out. And I'm glad that I get to do the work that I do.

1:00:25And yes, I do have to work to pay the bills so that my family can live. And if you are in a job where you don't really feel like this is my true calling or vocation, I get it. That's fine. You can go do your nine to five and that's how you pay your bills and that's fine. And then you scratch the meaning it's somewhere else. I think that's a totally fine approach. You have to figure out for yourself how you want to want to do this stuff. But I think what I would how I would approach this projecting forward when I actually retire is I would just look for different ways to live out my life theme. You know, this is what I think I'm I'm here for. I've actually got in my obsidian vault two different notes. One is my ideal future where this is where I want to be five years in the future, something like that. And then the other one is my eulogy, which is what I want people to read when I die. And so there's a lot of different ways that I live that stuff out, whether I'm in the workplace or not.

1:01:26I would look for ways to express that the best that I could. Yeah, I really think people no matter what job you have, no matter how important you are, you know, the CEO of, you know, Apple or whatever. If your identity is attached to that job, there will be dragons, you know, and you know, there will be a time when that's no longer your job. So what is your identity at that point? I think if that's something as you listen to this, you're thinking, oh, I do identify my job a lot. Then you need to immediately figure that out. Like, you know, I have the productivity field guide, Mike's got his cohorts. He does as well. I think that your identity should never be what you do. It should be an expression of what you are. And there are other parts of your life that are equally and probably more important. And you need to identify those and pursue those. And so no one thing is going to become the entire identity. And I've seen it happen. People crash really hard when they don't have that figured out.

1:02:28And that is coming for all of us. So make sure you figure it out. But yeah, the way to defend that problem, you know, it's like the Chinese proverb, the best time to plan a tree is 10 years ago. Well, now is the time to figure that question out no matter where you are. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Daylight. The only made for Mac CRM solution start your free trial today. Go to daylight D-A-Y-L-I-T-E dot app. If you run a business on a Mac, you know the challenge. Client emails are in one place. Notes are somewhere else. Projects live in another app. Because you don't have a unified system, things slip through the cracks. This happens all the time. The more buckets you have, the more water you spill. And that's exactly the problem daylight was built to solve. For over 20 years, daylight has helped service-based businesses keep their clients, projects, tasks, calendars, and communications connected in one place.

1:03:29Every email, meeting, note, file, and follow-up becomes part of a complete and ever-growing client history, giving you the context you need to know what happened, what's next, and who needs your attention instantly. I know a lot of Mac using lawyers, and I'll tell you there are so many law practices running on daylight. Because this is the kind of tool you need when you've got a business that's tracking a lot of information. And on a personal note, I have seen these guys evolve this product for 20 years. The thing that impresses me about the daylight team is how they never rest on their laurels. They've got a great app, but they're continuing to evolve it and bring it into whatever the newest technology is. And that's why it's just as impressive today as it was 20 years ago. And it looks good too. It's built exclusively for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, so daylight feels right at home in the Apple ecosystem. If you're ready to spend less time searching for information and more time moving your business forward, visit daylight.app and start your free trial and use code focused 50 to get 50% off your first year of daylight on any annual plan.

1:04:36That's daylight, d-a-y-l-i-t-e.app, code focused 50 for 50% off your first year of daylight. And our thanks to daylight for their support of the focus podcast. Alright, Mike, we talked earlier. You've got a virtual assistant. You mentioned it on a prior show that you'd hired one, but I put a note in I wanted to follow up with you on that because now it's been a few months. And I guess the first question is how's it going? It's going pretty well. The reasons for it not going really well are mine. Just the season of life that I happen to be in. I'm not able to delegate quite as effectively as I would like. We've got daily meetings, which are just a half an hour long. And in the last couple of weeks specifically, a lot of it has been reminding me, hey, I need this from you.

1:05:37And it just is what it is. So I know full well that I am not maximizing the hours that are available to me with my assistant. I'm okay with that. As I shared previously when we were talking about this, my definition of success for this is that I have someone who manages my social media calendar and I'm able to post a couple times a day. I got nothing else out of my relationship with my with my assistant. That would be a win and that would still be worth it for me. And that has worked. So minimum viable product for this has worked. However, there's definitely room for improvement here as well. And I am looking forward to dialing this in even more and adding more. Things to my my assistants play being able to delegate other things and including at some point email and in calendar management that really excites me.

1:06:46Yeah, I mean, and you've got things going on. So that is interesting. Do you feel like pressure because you you're paying her and you feel like you're not fully utilizing her? I do and I know that one of the things I should be doing is tracking time. You know, I've talked to her about that. I want to eventually have these reports where I want to know how you're spending your hours not so that I can micromanage it but just so that we can look at it and decide which of the efforts are worth continuing to do and which ones, you know, just aren't worth it. And we should focus on something else. We're not at the point where that really matters. And I don't have the capacity to review those. So we've talked about it a couple of times as like we're going to dial this in at some point in the future. And it's not happening currently. So I mean, someone could be looking at the way I'm managing this project and spot a whole bunch of red flags.

1:07:47And like I said, I'm honestly okay with it. Never got better than it is right now. It's still worth it. It's pretty inexpensive in terms of a commitment for me. And honestly, I kind of love the fact that it's able to help someone on the other side of the world do things that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise. Like for example, one of the things that happened a couple of weeks in was they were my assistant and her son were walking back from school or something and he got bit by a stray dog. And so they had to take him in and get rabies medication and stuff like that. And the fact that she has a part time VA job now they can afford the medicine. Like I love the fact that I am able to support her here in that way. Yeah, there's a lot of capacity things that a lot of capacity to be filled yet. And we're going slow. One of the things I talked about when we did the interviews was she wants opportunity to grow and I basically said, you know, I want a partner in my business.

1:08:51I want you to handle as much operationally as you are able to. So yes, of course, there will be opportunities to grow as much as you're able to handle basically. There have been tools that we've used that have made this a lot easier. I'm paying for the Slack, whatever team account. And the reason that paying for that is I want to have the record of all the conversation there. We use Claude as well on the team level so that can pull in Slack conversations. It can connect to notion and it can find all of the dashboards and things like right now what she's doing is she's taking all my newsletters and she's running these Claude skills and breaking them apart into these. Social posts, she's editing them slightly. I'm going in and I'm editing them more and I'm making it my own approving it and then she's actually scheduling it. So the tools have really helped a lot a lot as well.

1:09:51We've got granola so all of the meetings get transcribed and she can just say, hey, know what are the things that Mike asked me to do today and it gives her the summary inside of of Slack because everything is connected. We just go back and forth asynchronously in Slack on the stuff that we need to chat about and we have those daily calls. I think that daily calls have been really helpful. Daily calls that are just 30 minutes and then every time I go through and I redo a carousel or something, I'm recording that live and I'm giving that video feedback. Not as in like make sure we adjust it this way, but just as I mentioned earlier, here's my thought process behind the changes that I'm making because she's new to me. She's new to practical pkm and all the stuff that I create. So I'm trying to help her understand how I think about things and already I'm starting to see that that's been helpful because it changes the way that she asked the follow up questions and she starts to wrap her head around some of that stuff. What do you think of granola everybody keeps talking about granola lately? Is it that good?

1:10:54It's okay. It's kind of expensive. I think it's 15 bucks a month if you pay for it, but it's got an MCP so it can connect to everything. There's actually a, are you familiar with app sumo? They've got like all these, like the one off lifetime deal sort of a stuff. They have a tool that they built the big one that they sell is called tidy cow. It's kind of like a savvy cow or or can only replacement. They've got a new one now called meeting coach, which is a direct competitor to granola that's like a $5 you know pay once. So people are interested that sort of thing and they just want it as a record of things that's the place I would have people look first. But I've used granola for a long time and I actually really like it. And because it connects to slack, it's great because that you can ask questions about what do we talk about in yesterday's meeting. You know, and it's going to surface all that stuff and it's worth it. You know, just not to have to go running around trying to find all that information when you need it.

1:11:56So now in this case you're a your a B.A. You aren't really getting found time because she's actually taking on a thing you weren't doing before, right? Exactly. Yeah. It was a thing that I struggled to do. But I don't think honestly it was a time issue as we talked about with the roadblocks. I think there was really something else there. But the external accountability has been enough for me to follow through and actually do this. The idea, the idea of a 30 minute daily meeting to me sounds just terrible. I just can't imagine doing it. I can't get myself to do it. It's actually pretty great. I look forward to that that meeting every day because we show show up and if there's something specific that I want to help with, you know, I go in with that. Like today it was I'm almost done with the newsletter and I want you to turn this into a sub-stack post so we can publish it on sub-stack on Wednesday. So make that, you know, put that at the top of your list. And then she's doing a really great job of identifying the other things that she can do that are helpful.

1:13:07So she say, you know, what about this? You know, can I can I do this? I'm like, oh, yeah, that is actually something that you could do. But I realize I haven't shown you how to do that yet. So there's the big picture, you know, how this fits into everything. I'll record the walk through. She's making all of the SOPs. So I walk through it and I like, hey, can you turn this into an SOP? She creates it using a structure that, you know, I have general ideas for structure for SOPs. But honestly, she's the one that's going to be using them. So like whatever structure you want, I'm good with. Yeah. She'll put it together. We'll review it together in the call. I don't like this. I think we should change this. Oh, this right here should actually link to this other thing. So it's just a couple of minutes for me to go through that stuff with her live on the call instead of having something show up. Hey, can you look at this at some point? So in some ways, it's also good going back to a question we got earlier about responding to things, you know, when they come in by having that space every single day instead of getting slack requests.

1:14:08Hey, can you look at this? Can you look at this? We can batch them together in 30 minutes. Hey, I said that was the rule when I had people in the firm is we would have a meeting where they come and ask all their questions at once rather than bugging me all day. And I just, I'm like, Keith, I hate to pay the management tax. This is a failure of my own behalf. Like I think you should meet with her every day. And probably as you're doing that, you're going to develop a better relationship. You're going to find more that you trust her to do. And that's probably the recipe for success in this long time, long term. Do you regret it at this point? No, I don't regret it at all. I wish I would have done it a lot sooner. Can you say you're willing to say how much are you spending? I don't know if you want to talk about that. We can cut this if you want. Yeah, I don't mind because I mentioned that I use the service online jobs.ph. And there are a lot of different ability levels of assistance that you can find on that website. So there are online assistance that you could pay thousands of dollars a month because they are really, really professional video editors or something like that.

1:15:16But that's not the nature of the work that I wanted to do. So I purposely put out a very small budget at the beginning. I wanted to keep it under $1,000 a month. So I pay her $200 a week. That's actually a little bit more than the agreed upon amount. We agreed on $750 a month. So that ends up being like $180 something. I cover some fees. And then I pay her every week using using wise. There is a concept of the 13th month when you're working with assistance in the Philippines. And so that's basically at the end of the year you give them an extra months worth of salary. That's an additional additional cost and it's sort of a cultural expectation. I'm okay with that. And again, I'm okay uping that amount as she takes on more responsibility. But at this point, no, just what she's doing, I feel like this is a win-win situation. And it's just going to get better.

1:16:19But I think the key is that I've been very patient going into it. I'm in this for the long haul. I'm not looking for red flags and reasons to pull the plug. I'm looking for places that I didn't delegate effectively. Yeah. And whenever I recognize those and I accept the responsibility for it and I try again. And I spend the extra time to make sure that she is clear on what exactly I want her to do. And she's been able to figure it out. I've been very pleasantly surprised. The bottleneck has always been me basically. Yeah. And is that, I forgets that 20 hours a week that you're getting for that? That's full time. I mean, she's not putting in full time effort at this point because I cannot keep up with her. And I told her that and she understands that and that is completely okay. It's expected that her workload is going to grow. And I've told her, you know, when you feel like you're reaching your capacity,

1:17:23then that's where we really got to start paying attention to how long each of these things is really taking because we have to make decisions about what to cut and what to keep. But I feel like we're a long ways off from that. And even if it never changed from what we've got right now, I still think it's worth it. And then how do you find that? Somebody, you're familiar with agent AI and you've got it doing a bunch of work for you. Where do you see the line strong between a virtual assistant and AI assistants? I don't know to tell you the truth. I think a lot of the things that I'm having her do, I could if I spent enough time with the different skills and projects and things like that. I could probably have AI do a lot of these things. I don't think they would do them as well. I think I would get a lot more AI speak in the drafts that I have to look at.

1:18:28And that just kind of drives me crazy. I also don't trust AI to do some of the things that I'm having her do. She's making some judgment calls based on taste and things like that. This is the format of the slide that we should use here. Or this is the visual that we should include on these slides for this carousel. And that's something that I wouldn't ever ask AI to do. I would just accept that that's something I'm going to have to have to do. So I think AI could maybe get me about 80% of the way there. But I don't think I would be getting quite the same product. And I definitely wouldn't have the same accountability to an AI that I do with an actual human showing up every day talking through things. I think if I was trying to do this with AI, I would still be stuck in not publishing consistently. I really feel that people are overestimating what AI can do for them.

1:19:30Like there are things it absolutely can do. We've talked about some of those during this episode, but there is a ceiling on that despite what everybody's telling you. And I think the trick is to embrace the stuff it can do and then go gets a human for the rest. Yep, agreed. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the only one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. So whether you are just starting out or scaling your business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings with a professional website, grow your brand and get paid all in one place. I've been using Squarespace in some way, shape or form for at least the last five years. It's the host that we use for the intentional family podcast that I do with my wife. It's the platform I recommended and we used to build a new church website that I didn't have to maintain and it even powered my personal brand for quite a while.

1:20:31Bottom line, if you would rather focus on the content instead of connecting all the technical pipes, then you should definitely check out Squarespace. I'm a former web developer. I know how to do all that stuff, but sometimes it's just not worth it to have to maintain all of that stuff. You just want something that allows you to get your content out there to the world that will look good no matter where people are accessing it. And that is what Squarespace gives you. And when you use Squarespace, you can get discovered fast with integrated SEO tools because nobody wants to build a beautiful website only for zero people to see it. That's why every Squarespace website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions, an auto-generated site map and more so more people find your site through search engine results. You can also make smarter business decisions with Squarespace's built-in analytics. Keep track of the stats that matter with intuitive built-in analytics tools makes it super easy for you to review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement and track revenue from bookings, invoices or product sales. You want to try Squarespace for yourself and I definitely think you should head to squarespace.com slash focused FOC USED to sign up for a free trial.

1:21:39And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code focused and you'll save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Once again, that is squarespace.com slash focused, offer code focused to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for the focus podcast. Our thanks to Squarespace for the support of our show and all of really. Speaking of AI experimentation, I just kind of wanted to share my daily note journey. I have a newsletter about it a few weeks ago and got a lot of feedback on that. You know, I'm always thinking about like what's the best way to stand top of what I have to do and because AI does know a lot about me with especially my work because I've got all that in this one obsidian database. A couple of months ago, I started this daily note experiment of having it, you know, a symbol notes for me on a daily basis of what's on my list and it already does a good job. Like I have a thing that gives me every day to kind of help me triage. So I thought the natural next step was to have a daily note.

1:22:41So that's a thing I've been working on sort of and it failed. It failed. Okay. So you have to tell us more about that. But when you're talking about daily note, you're talking about like from the obsidian sense. This is everything that would, you know, relevant to today. Yeah. So the idea would be you look at the note for today and it tells you your calendar. It tells you the things that you must do. It gives you like upcoming events and upcoming deadlines and just gives you kind of like. It's like having that, you know, executive assistant walk in your office and tell you the daily brief before you get started. It's a great idea. So why did it fail? It just it didn't work for me. And for me, I do a lot of future playing too. So like I would think like I want to write the newsletter on Thursday. So I tell the AI and then it shows up on Thursday and I don't think about anymore. To give you a little more context, I am, I have a thing called the dispatch and that is generated from every morning and that kind of is a version of that. But it's not boiled down. It's just kind of like it is more of the triage. It's like, okay, these are all the tasks you have.

1:23:44These are the things that were on your list that didn't get done. These are the upcoming events and, you know, upcoming sponsored deadlines, upcoming recordings you need to prepare for. It just kind of gives me all that stuff. But then it says, okay, what would you actually do today? And then I just hit the open mic button with whisper flow and I just read through and talk. You know, I say item 17 pushed to Thursday item 18 delete. I'm not going to do that. You know, I go through and then I just kind of talk through all that. You know, item 20 send Mike, you know, prepare an email confirmation of Mike that he's available. You know, stuff like that. So I do that on a daily basis, but the boiled down daily note piece that came out of it. I just never looked at it. You know, I have got it like, you know, dig through a digital device to find it. And I just found it just it wasn't giving any traction. I tried it and then I paused it. Then I tried it again. I tried to make it more whimsical to attract me to it more.

1:24:47And I just found that none of that stuff for me could replace a note card. All right. So what do your note cards look like? What how many of them? You know, yeah. We've talked about these note cards or field notes like a little notebook. And so what I find is when I go through that dispatch in the morning, what I usually do is I write down a list of things for the day. And then that's what I work from. And then I've got little trays on my desk. They sit on so they're like in front of my face all day. And I also have the stack of them that I filled out for the next couple weeks. So if I say I want to do the newsletter on Thursday, I just pull out the note card for Thursday. I write it down in the top line. So it's sitting there when I get the Thursday. So I, and the essence get the same benefit. But I'm using an analog version of this. And, and that is to me more sticky than the automated daily note, which in a lot of ways is more efficient, creates a permanent record is searchable.

1:25:48I mean, and the AI can auto like I can say put newsletter on Thursday for the rest of the year. And it will do it for me every time instead of me having to write it down on Sunday, right? But, you know, again, fast as slow and slow as fast. So I just find the daily note cards work better for me. Which I think is an important observation that we can all learn from. Focus on what actually works. I kind of think with your with your note cards that there's, I only back up. I think with the note cards that you're working with now, obviously, if it works, you know, continue with it. But I can definitely see an evolution of this system as you go. I feel like the, the dispatch that you're describing there is such a max sparky thing. Yeah, that's got to click at some point in the future. Yeah. Well, you would think, but I keep trying it and it doesn't quite do it. You know, so much of that. I finally just told the AI just to unlier all that stuff and just get it out of the system.

1:26:59Because you're also using up tokens to generate these things and, you know, and to go a little deeper, the augment cards, we've talked about them. We've had Jeff Sheldon on the show. So we're definitely in the bag for these guys. When you get a pack of them, there's the white ones, which are the daily cards, but then they have like beige ones and brown ones. And the beige ones, I always put the, the quarterly planning monthly plan weekly planning, primary, like goals on them. And those are in front of me all month. You know, I just see it right there. I can tell you right now my big three for quarter three are circle transition, no side quests and a decision on row up builders club, which by the way, is made. You know, so, so like those are the three related to work that that are there and it's sitting front of my face. And then the brown one of your obligations there is don't do something. Yeah, no side quest. Well, that that we talked about that on the Q three show. Yeah, then on the brand ones, I put like kind of one off list like I decided to do another season of robot builders, thought I have a card here with everything I needed to do to get launched and I checked them all up.

1:28:02All this stuff would work in a digital system, but and I'm not overly analog. I need the digital system to keep me afloat. But for some reason, for me, this last 10 yards on these cards works. I've also done it with field notes. Nice thing about field notes is you can put them on a book, put it in your pocket. I go back and forth on those things, but I actually kind of like the line spacing of the cards and Jeff just did such a good job making their their so kind of bespoke. They're very fancy. And I've done the thing where I've left the house and stuck a stack of cards in my pocket. We had a medical thing in the family too. So I spent a lot of time in the hospital last few days and I was going through my cards and I don't know. For some reason, the you know that last 10 yard bit doing that digitally has just not landed with me and it hasn't for a long time. And I think I've just got to kind of accept that. Yeah, yeah, I've heard you talk about that that last mile. That was going to be my question is, do you think that you will always have an analog component to that last mile in your productivity system?

1:29:06I think so. And I'm not I partly is just I think the act of scratching it into paper like makes it real for me. I think I also like the romance of it a little bit if there is such a thing as romance and I long right. But most importantly, I like the physicality that I've got them in front of my face. I can move around and as much as I like all the digital tools at some point, I don't want to look at the screen anymore. Yeah, I think I'm the same that there is something about the switching mediums from the brain to the list that is going to be a permanent part of my workflow. Even if it's not a truly analog note card and pen like I've been doing it lately on the super note nomad. Yeah, same thing. Digital planner. Technically, that's that's digital, but it feels analog. It's more analog the digital in my opinion. And that there's something about that that translation into that that last step that makes it much more effective.

1:30:10I haven't got fully disciplined on this practice yet, but if at the end of the day, I take a picture of it and give it to the AI. It knows what it then it just you know, it goes in the system and says, oh, I see you wrote the newsletter. Okay, that's done. You know, and because I checked it off on a card, it's kind of funny, right? You know, so the robot is ingesting the card as well. The analog robot. All right, we are the focus podcasts. Thanks for listening. We appreciate your support. Thank you to our sponsors this week. Man, we did good. We had several sponsors, Gusto, daylight, keeper and square space. Thank you very much. If you'd like to become a deep focus subscriber, get an ad free extended version of the show, you can do that. Go to relay.fm slash focus and sign up there. We'd love to have you today on deep focus. Mike and I are going to talk about systems for bad days. That inspired out of one of the questions we answered today. What are the actual systems we put in place on a bad day? And I thought that would be kind of fun. So we're going to do that. Thank you again for our sponsors. Go support St. Jude everybody. We'll see you next time.