Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. How's it going, Mike? Pretty good. How are you, David? It's nuts here, man. The wind just keeps blowing really bad. So my life is... You wait until the wind wakes you up, then you check the WatchDuty app to make sure there's no local fires, and then you go back to sleep. So that's my life right now. But hopefully these winds will end soon and we'll be okay.
Well, we don't have the winds or the fires. It's been negative 30 degrees Fahrenheit, though, the last couple days. I don't even know if I could do that, you know? I just don't know how I would survive that.
it's uh basic basically like hoth from uh from star wars yeah and that's like the best look on it right you know yeah you add star wars to it i was once in minneapolis taking depositions and the whole downtown section is connected by tunnels like even the homeless people live in the tunnels because it was january super cold and
The deposition was like three days. And on the third day, the witness kind of cracked and gave me all the evidence I needed. So I was feeling really good. And I decided to walk back to the hotel, which was like one block away outside. I can't believe how cold it was. I just can't even get over it. But, you know, growing up in California, you just really have no ability to cope with it or no clothing either to cope with it.
It's true. It's not the heat, it's the humidity that gets you. There you go. Either way, we are The Focus Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about the new release of the Productivity Field Guide. I have been... working hard on that now for for really a year and this was the the guide i released last year but now i've been teaching it for a year learned a ton from the people taking it and made some modifications and i've got an updated version
Yeah, you've been busy. Before we get into the specifics of the field guide, I would love to just ask you, you mentioned you incorporated a bunch of new stuff from teaching it the first time. What was the... most surprising thing from teaching the material or what was the biggest insight that you got from working with people going through it? The big insight was I had been living with this stuff for like 10 years and
That's the problem when you teach something you've been living with for 10 years is you take for granted certain ideas that you don't make explicit. And people just coming into it will go down the wrong path. I clarified a lot of that stuff. Like a good example is a big tenet of this system for me. And we talked about it a little bit last year when it was released.
To me, the foundational element of my life are my roles. You know, the father, husband, Max Barkey, all the different roles I fulfill in my life. I like to look at that as like kind of the top level. of how I look at myself and try to improve myself. But I use this Greek concept of arete, which is kind of the ideal version of yourself. And so one of the things I...
I teach is that you figure out what your roles are and then you figure out the ideal version of yourself for each role. And you use that kind of as a, as a compass bearing, you know, when you do your reviews, am I making progress? One of the things people would tell me is they're like, well, the problem is I feel like I'll never get to Arte. So it's just constantly disappointing.
they're getting it wrong. You should not be judging yourself against the perfect version of yourself. You should be aiming at the perfect version of yourself. You should be judging yourself against the version of you three months ago that started the journey. You know, that's the only person you should really ever judge yourself against is yourself. Don't look at other people. Don't look at the ideal party. You look at, am I closer?
now than i was before you know it's like the thing you and i talk about in the show about the gap versus the gain you know a lot of people just kind of took for granted that they're supposed to judge themselves against the ideal and that's not the way it works yeah the gap versus the gain is a really powerful uh powerful idea and just to summarize for people who aren't familiar with that The emphasis is on the progress that you're making, not how quickly you are able to achieve a specific goal.
And when you approach it that way, you can look back at where you started. You can measure your progress forward as opposed to, oh man, I haven't achieved my goal yet. And that creates the motivation to keep going and ultimately, I think, leads to much higher levels of productivity and ultimately you doing more of what matters.
Kind of the whole idea behind the focus podcast, if you ask me. Yeah. And the concept of Arate for me changes like, like as a father, a good one is the dad one, like as a father.
When I first started doing this, my kids were like in elementary school, and now they're college graduates. Well, the ideal version of a dad to a fifth grader is a lot different than the ideal version of a dad to a... high school teacher and um that is that's different and so over time you will adjust it so you don't have to worry about am i there right now because there is going to move on you
But the question is, am I pushing toward it? And that's the key. I mean, don't be hard on yourself. That's a good example of where people were getting a little hung up. And I was able to kind of... really address that with this updated version all those hangups people were hitting going through it the first time and hopefully give people you know more of a path towards success i mean i taught this thing i mean we ended up with like a couple thousand people
going through the course in one way or another. I did a free course over the summer to high school and college kids. We had the customers that came in, and a lot of people in the Mac Sparky labs kind of were beta testers in the process. So there's a lot of people that have gone through this, and that gives you a lot of great feedback. Nice. Let's get into the details. What's new with this one? So the course itself is 70 plus videos. I say plus because I keep adding more.
um you know as things just can't help yourself well yeah like i did one on um i did one on analog tools you'll like that one mike i did it at my writing desk and um And during the video, I kept saying, well, there's an easy way to get my handwritten text OCR now. And I'll show you to that later. But the video came out really kind of nice as it was when I was editing. I'm like, I promised.
to show how to do ocr but i didn't really want that to be part of that video so then i ended up making a tech video of how to use chat gpt to get ocr of very bad handwriting like mine so like you just keep adding new videos on but so it's um i think it's like about 20 at this at this point i think it's 22 new videos
The book, because this one comes with a book as well, and the book went from 100 pages to 140 pages. I added a bunch of text, you know, talking about some of the different questions and ideas. The book is in... three formats it's in pdf epub standard and epub flowable so if you want to change the font size or whatever you can do all that so try to make it as easy as possible
And then there's two versions. That's a standard version. You get that stuff. For the plus version, you get all that plus a 12-week seminar. And that, to me... was another thing I learned last week. Doing the webinar was, I think, a huge plus because... A bunch of people that were going through it together could get on the call with me and just talk about where they were having problems and where it was working and challenges that we're facing.
To me, the webinar course surprised me in how useful it was. I mean, you always know those are going to be good, but for some reason, you know, this... topic really gets people talking about things that are important. And so I'm really looking forward to doing that again, but that's a quarter long webinar series. And the way it works is...
I do them at different times because I have customers in New Zealand, but also in Germany. So you've got to have them at different times. I do some on weekends, but all of them get edited and uploaded to the course as well. And then with the plus version, you also get the full webinar series from last year. So you get to watch all the webinar videos from last year if you want. So it's a lot. And if you're listening to the show.
You can use the discount PFG10 for 10% off. Productivity field guide, right? PFG10. And then if you bought it last year, you should already have received an email from me with a special upgrade discount. And if you did buy it and you didn't get that email, let me know. I'll take care of it. But that's kind of the foundation. This is the one productivity product I make every year. To me,
It's the most important thing I make. I mean, it's the big one for me. Yeah, I was just about to ask if that was the plan to release the annual updates. I know some people... May not be thrilled with that, but if you look at how much new material that you've added to this, the upgrade pricing that you're offering is still a pretty great deal. Yeah, it's a big upgrade discount.
What I tell people is, look, if you bought it last year and you're happy, you don't want to get the upgrade, that's fine. But there's a lot of people that do want more material on this. And I have a lot in my system I need to get out on this. So I'm going to do upgrades with it, and it's up to you. It's fine. I'm okay if you feel like, hey, thank you a lot for that. I get it. Now I don't need any more of these webinars. That's cool. But if you'd like some more help, there it is.
And part of it is going to be related to the market. There's a tremendous amount of work that goes into this. If nobody buys it, then I probably won't do it anymore. To me, of my professional life, it's the thing I'm most proud of.
When I look back, I mean, all the cases I won for clients, all the field guides I've made, none of them have ever got the kind of response this field guide got in terms of like... hearing from people all over the world who are using it hearing from people i just got an email yesterday from somebody who him and his wife went through it um and over the holidays and now they're both like on track and they're very happy with it it's like
I love teaching about things like OmniFocus and shortcuts, and that's awesome. And I'm glad I can help people with that. But you don't get emails and contacts saying, you changed my life because you taught me how to make a shortcut.
Whereas this does have the potential to help people really kind of turn things around. And so it... you know what i mean if you're if you were at the end of your life this would be something i look back on with some degree of pride like actually i did help people and um
I don't know. I get kind of hooey when I start talking about this stuff. But it's just something I'm very proud of. Well, you should be. It's pretty impressive, everything that's in here. You mentioned the webinars, and I agree with you. that going through it live with somebody is a different experience and you get much more out of it than when you just go through the material on your own. That's why I'm a big fan of the cohort-based course model.
This isn't exactly that. And I think this is sort of your version of it, though. Do you have currently the outline for the types of things that you're going to be covering in those webinars yet? Yeah, but it's not finalized as we record. But yeah, that'll get added to the course, the outline. But a lot of it will be stuff from the course, but also some of it will be kind of new stuff that came out of doing it last year.
But yeah, it's going to be 12 weeks and you're going to get your money's worth. Nice. But yeah, so that's been my big project is getting that kind of... finished up and polished i spent a bunch of time i spent some money too this year i got a better mic um and i just kind of like every year the production values bump up a little bit as i get better at it and understand it more so that
It's been fun kind of putting all this together. The thing about this course for me is this is stuff I developed just to help myself. I didn't really know that I would share this with anyone. except it just started to kind of... matriculate out from other stuff I was doing. Like it was kind of in the background of things I was making. The OmniFocus and Obsidian Field Guides in particular are ones where I kind of made reference to some of the stuff.
I wasn't sure if anybody would care. And it was very surprising to me how much people did care and how useful it was to others. last year and it like i said it it's a lot of good feels uh related to this product for me do you get into the tech stack at all you mentioned omni focus and obsidian field guides those are two separate products which are just specifically how to use those particular apps how much overlap is there with this
None. None. I really, like all of the stuff I do in it, I largely use Apple Notes for almost everything I teach. This system does not require you to master any complex software. And in fact, you could do it with a legal pad. And one of my goals is I want to remove as many barriers as possible for people to... to try and use a roles-based RTA kind of system. So I felt like, you know, me getting into using OmniFocus and Obsidian and all this stuff to do this.
It's just too much. Like you're watching, like, wait, I got to master another app just to do this. You know, I don't want people to feel that way. In fact, this year, I have moved a lot of the roles-based RTA.
um stuff into analog because for me personally doing it slower with a pencil and paper seems to pay off some dividends that i didn't realize so um and and i try and i apologize like every time i mention that in the course because i don't want people saying oh now i gotta go get a fancy notebook you know it's like i don't want people to feel that way this stuff is all doable with
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Our thanks to Jelly for their support of the Focus podcast and all of Relay. All right, so with all of the videos that you added... to this version david you gave me uh gave me access to it and there were a couple that caught my eye so i want to ask you some specific questions about some of the updates here Sure. One of the new videos is titled Sparky's Happiness Formula. What is that? You know, this is something that just kind of came to me in teaching it and like living this stuff.
So I kind of explained in the first segment, like to me, the foundation of it is, you know, you pick your roles, you get your best version of yourself and you keep iterating on that until you, you know, you get better at it. And, you know, I was reading, I read a lot of classic philosophy, Hellenistic Greek philosophy. That started for me in college because I studied political philosophy and I had a great teacher who really pushed me into all those guys.
And I'm not on the stoic bandwagon here. I actually, maybe I'm more of an Aristotelian. I don't know. But I do definitely follow a lot of those writers, including some of the Stoics. So I've read a bunch of stuff there. And the thing that's interesting to me back then was the really aim of philosophy in that era.
was happiness like they're like okay what is this human experience like at this point they have a civilization they've got bread on the table they've got a roof over their head so the point of philosophy to them was really more of, it was a different tenor than it is today. Today, modern philosophy is like, let's sit around a naval gaze about whether or not we live in a simulation, you know, that kind of stuff.
Whereas they looked at philosophy back then, I think a lot more the way modern civilization looks at kind of self-help stuff, like how do I improve myself? and they really a lot of them were thinking towards they called it euda mania but it's really happiness you know what is how does this human form i'm in become happy
given that I have my basic needs now satisfied. And a lot of them came up with some formula because there's different ones, the cynics, the stoics, the different schools, but they all came up with...
kind of some formula to it, but a lot of them kind of resolve to ethical living plus something. And to me, it's ethical living plus the pursuit of your arete. And the reason I... I realize this is not only a way to be more successful and make progress on the things important to you, but I think it also leads to a happy existence.
I don't mean that it frees you from suffering if somebody dies or you get sick or all the things that life can throw at you. But I do mean that in general, as a human being, if you are... Pursuing intentionally the best version of yourself in the areas of life that are most important to you and doing it ethically.
It's hard not to be happy with your existence and not want to jump out of bed every day. And I compare the version of myself before I started exploring this stuff to the version of myself now, and it's night and day. So I call it my happiness formula. I don't mean that I have some magic solution here that works for everybody, but it definitely works for me.
And having taught the course now, I've heard from people for whom they are having similar experiences. And this is just something I cribbed from a bunch of 3,000-year-old Greeks. Everything is a remix, right? Yeah. Yeah. But I fell into it is my point. I just kind of fell into it. I didn't mean like when I started this exploration, I was in my forties and I was realized I had gone adrift.
You know, it happens to a lot of us, right? I was successful. I was a busy attorney. I had a wife and kids. But I feel like every day I just woke up and just did whatever was thrown at me. And I didn't have any direction in my life. And so I went back and started rereading the stuff from college. And this stuff just kind of, it took years for this stuff to kind of fall in place for me. But then I look at myself now versus myself then. Now it's 15 years ago.
And my existence is entirely different and I'm much happier. So I don't know. It's weird, but it's true. This maybe is beyond the scope of the productivity field guide, but you talked to. a bit about Arate, and that obviously is very personal, and you have to identify that for yourself. The ethical living piece, do you have a definition for that, or at least what it looks like for you? I think you know, right? It's like that.
Supreme Court definition of pornography. I can't describe it, but I know it when I see it. You know as you go through your life if you're doing the right thing or not. And for me personally, that is a big deal. I mean, everything falls apart if I don't live ethically. And it's a challenge when you're a lawyer because there are so many ethical challenges you face every day. And you have an obligation to your client, but you also have an obligation to the truth. It's tough.
That job really puts you in a sticky place sometimes. But that's one of the reasons why I'm happy not to be doing it anymore. But you know it, and anybody listening, I think, should probably know. if they're living an ethical life or not. I just kind of leave it at that. I don't try to define it. Sure. The other thing that stood out to me from... Something you said already today with recording, but also you've got a video titled Sparky's OCR trick. I think this ties into the analog tools.
We can't just let that flow by. We got to dig into that a little bit. So what is this? So I am... I've never been able to take a picture of my handwriting and have it turned into text reliably. I write in block caps like an architect, and I've done it since I think I was a senior in high school. My handwriting has always been printed block text. So much so that when I took the bar exam in 1993. They used to make you write out a handwriting exemplar just to prove it was you.
Back in the day, that was how they did it. I'm sure they do something more sophisticated now. But they say, handwrite out this paragraph. And that would be used against you if they thought you sent someone else to take the test for you. I couldn't remember how to write a cue. I'm so stressed. I'm in this three-day test. I'm like, how do I handwrite a cue? I hadn't written one for like 10 years. So anyway, I write out. And when you do the block text,
OCR gets constantly confused. It makes it all caps or it just doesn't do it well. And one day I thought just for giggles, what if I gave it to ChatGPT? So I wrote a prompt explaining that I write in all caps, like an architect, block text, you know, the capital letters are bigger than the non-capital letters. So I wrote out, like, I took a few minutes to make a prompt that I thought would work.
And I took a picture of a page of notes, and it got it right on the first shot. And then I've kept that kind of prompt in my ChatGPT history. And I keep throwing more at it. And whenever I see mistakes, I explain to it what mistake it made. And now it's almost like a perfect engine. I can put almost anything into it and it gets it out as tech.
For people who do traditional handwriting, they've probably had for some time now the ability to get their handwriting turned into reliable text on a computer. But for me, I finally got it with ChatGPT. And so I made a video showing how to do that. That's like the most techie video in the whole course. So good on you, Mike, for finding that one.
Yeah, well, anything AI, I'm kind of fascinated by. On that note, a couple of AI notes. The RTA statements, a couple people who went through the course last year wrote me. And they would write their Arate statements. And then they would, and the way it works is like you pick like, okay, let's use the example of husband. Like, okay, I've got an Arate statement of what is the ideal husband.
So here's a couple of them. It's a bunch of bullet points for me. I put Daisy's needs and concerns above my own. I always keep my promises with her. I'm fully present. I give more than I take. I look for secret ways to make her life easier. And it goes on for like, I've got like 15 of these points. And so I write them out and that's.
the rt statement i look at and then when i do the reviews i read that and say how am i doing on some of these are things here i could improve upon but some of the people went through the course took theirs and then they sent it to chat gpt and said This is a list of my ideal virtues as a husband. Do you think I missed anything? And people would basically ask ChatGPT to read it and give them ideas for additional points.
And I thought that was really good. I mean, whatever it takes, right? So I threw some of mine at it, and it didn't really give me much. I think I maybe took one or two on the whole list. I thought that was an interesting use of AI. And then another one was I took, as I was prepping the update, I took the, because I wrote a book, I recorded.
seven hours of video i put all the transcripts of all the videos and then i took all of the transcripts of all the webinars from last year so it ended up with like hours and hours of this of these transcripts and then i fed it all to notebook lm and then i so i made the world's expert of the productivity field guide in notebook lm and i started asking it questions like what was the most difficult thing for people to do. And like I started asking questions.
to get feedback. And I had made a list of additional points I wanted to make as I was going through teaching it, but it was good to have that feedback mechanism from Notebook LM also giving me ideas of things that I should make more clear and improve. upon with this new edition nice yeah i've heard a lot of people talk about notebook lm and i think the way that you're using it is pretty interesting uh i have not done anything with that um but
I think that's the real value of the AI stuff is it can summarize everything that and uses a data set, everything that you've created around a particular topic. And if you take the time to put your own.
rt statements and for me it would be a life theme but same sort of idea you know all this stuff in there and you created this tool where you can kind of just query like hey what's the thing that i should do in this situation and it's going to search all that stuff and spit some things back to you which again isn't the thing that you just want to automate but it's an interesting data point and using it as a conversation partner be like hey
You said this was really important to you. Maybe you should think about it from this perspective. Oh, yeah, I guess, you know, that makes a lot of sense. I guess I'll do this because it's in alignment with my my vision and my values. I think that's that's pretty cool.
Yeah, it really was useful that way. Another thing I did with this new edition was I published my entire RTA statements for all of my roles, which was a little intimidating. You know, last year... when i released the initial version i think i just gave like a partial list for a couple roles um but i was i felt like that stuff is so private i felt like i shouldn't share that but
One of my big lessons teaching it is people just need examples to get an idea of how to make their own. And the more I read it, I felt like, you know, there's nothing in here that's secret. It's just like... These are the roles I'm pursuing and how I want to become better at them. And I just did a blocking copy. I didn't read them again. I just put them in a book without checking it because I knew I would edit myself if I did.
But I put them all in there, and I just figure heck with it. I mean, if this helps people learn it better, then it's okay with me. Nice. All right, the other thing that you have... Talk to me about a little bit. I know it's a work in progress and probably worth unpacking here is the whole idea of softer time blocking.
Yeah. Want to talk us through your evolved approach to your time block scheduling? Yeah. I mean, so part of the course, in addition to all the heady RTA role stuff, there's also a tactical section of the course. I think the most important is the beginning where I explain this whole system and you kind of come up with a way to pursue your better self. But then I also share some of my favorite tactics.
I'd called it hyper-scheduling for years. I really probably should call it block-scheduling. I think hyper-scheduling has an implication that it's hyper, right? But either way, we do... I work with the people that go through the course on doing block scheduling. A lot of people are intimidated by it, or a lot of people are like, look, I got a job where I just can't block that much in advance.
And is there a better way of doing this? So I came up with a couple alternatives just in teaching the materials. And one of them, I ended up using myself, and I still use it as a daily driver. My scheduling and block scheduling has changed a bit. My life has got to a point because of choices I've made where there's a lot of reliably repeating blocks. Like often on Mondays, I write blog posts for the week and I write a newsletter. And often on Wednesdays, I record the lab report.
a podcast for the max market labs and you know there's there's just certain days that i do think certain days that i podcast on and do podcast prep so i have a lot of repeating stuff and that would make it easy to block the whole week out very easily But not everybody can do that. So the softer approach, what I consider, is where you write down the blocks that you want to do. Like maybe you start with a weak list.
Like, and I'm just using myself as an example. Like each week I spend two blocks of sponsor time. You know, whether it's recording ads or corresponding with people about ads at the website or recording ads for the shows and all that stuff. And I do it usually on Monday and Thursday. And it's about an hour each. And I know that's a block that I'm reliably going to need. So in my list of weak blocks, I'll have sponsor one, sponsor two. And then on Sunday, I'll handwrite in.
I can do this analog or digital. You know, you can use, pick your poison in terms of tools, but you can say, you know, on Monday and Thursday, I'm going to give a block to them, but I don't put the time in. And some of this grew out of talking to Kuro Ashtini.
who talks about kind of like giving yourself the out of not picking up a block every day, but just considering it. But mine are a little more firm than that because I actually do need to get these done. But I give myself flexibility as to when it gets done. And that's just an example. I have them for writing. I have them for research time and all the different things that I do.
I've got a series of these each week that I kind of make fit in as I go through the week and as the week evolves. Like if something happens with the family and I need to spend... um you know a bunch of time dealing with that then those blocks won't happen that day that's okay i can push them to the next day but they don't really get a time until the morning of
And then or the night before, because I actually do it the night before. But when I'm actually right on the day, then I say, OK, I am going to do that sponsor block. I'm going to do it at 1 p.m. tomorrow. And that's when I kind of like lock it in. Whereas.
The way I would originally teach it is like you would do that on Sunday for the whole week. And I try to be just more flexible with myself about these. So then when you don't put it on the calendar early, that gives you an easier excuse to move it around as needed. So that's a piece of it. Make sense? It does. It's interesting because the...
The planning your week on, on Sunday, for example, which I've heard you talk about previously, I've always felt kind of bad because that never has really worked for me. I tend to, uh, to time block just the day before, but. I've kind of adapted my approach to a little bit and I like what you've, before I get to that, I like what you've done where basically if I were to summarize it, you're sort of mode blocking before your task blocking. Yeah. Is that accurate?
yeah so you're figuring out this is the mode that i want to be in during this time and then you're figuring out when right before you get there this is what i'm going to be working on I think even if people are averse to the whole idea of time blocking your tasks, you probably don't even need to go that far. As long as you know, I'm going to be writing during the next two hours.
when you get there and you sit down to write, you often know this is the thing that I need to write. And that's the trick with all this stuff, I think, is identifying enough structure that you... know what to do when you get there and you've removed the uh the barriers to doing the the task but also you've not spent hours fiddling and planning just to have your perfectly time-blocked day completely get blown up because life has lifed you. Yeah, exactly. In fact...
That's a whole other topic. I did a whole video on adaptation because I feel like as important planning is, the skill of adaptation is just as important because everything changes on you. Yep. Another even simpler block scheduling technique I teach is for people who are adverse to it. People are like, look, I don't want to do all this time blocking stuff. I just don't want to do it.
one of the approaches I would teach is like, okay, that's fine. You don't have to, but tell me the one thing that's in the back of your mind that you can't seem to get done. You know, the sales report or the. you know, whatever it is, you know, it could be a personal thing to the taxes or whatever. Okay. So let's say, just pick the one thing that's, that's really bugging you block just that.
You know, figure out a time you can do that. Say next Tuesday, I'm going to do that. Next Tuesday afternoon, I'll do the taxes. All right, write that in the calendar. But don't do any other time blocking. Do your life as normal. But next Tuesday, don't miss that appointment.
do the taxes and then see how you feel. And like, it's always the, the way people feel is always the same. There's a sense of relief the moment you put it on the calendar. Cause it's like, that's no longer the, the boogeyman. That is just haunting you. No, you've addressed the boogeyman. You put him in a cage on Tuesday. And then on Tuesday, you'll slay him. And then you'll feel a little more confident. And I'm like, then after that.
Pick the next thing that's in the back of your mind, the next boogeyman, and put him in a cage. And you don't have to do any more than that. Don't go any further. Don't do any other additional block playing, but just use that one trick. just to take care of the one thing in the back of your mind, or maybe two things. So I taught that in the course, and a lot of people like that kind of approach.
But it's funny to me because in like three months later, those same people would write me and say, oh, no, I'm fully blocked schedule. It's like it's almost like a gateway drug, you know, but you don't have to go all the way with it. But but that is at least a way to get started.
sure yeah i like the uh putting the boogeyman in the cage via intention setting that's a interesting visual you should definitely get some art made for that one yeah yeah cool so i have my my own uh update on on time blocking which i wanted to touch on real briefly here and it kind of ties back to the the ai thing sure because we got a an email from somebody who i'm not going to spoil the
the thing that they shared, because I think this is actually a cool idea for a future show. But they had plugged a prompt into ChatGPT to ask for a term for something. And I thought that was pretty brilliant. So I have been doing this like modified split time blocking ritual and I didn't have a term for it. And then I just took this approach and what I came up with or chat GPT came up with is block priming.
Now, this is basically doing my time blocking two separate times, once at the end of the day as part of a shutdown routine and once at the beginning of the day as I am getting clear about what I'm actually going to be doing when. And that sounds maybe like repeat effort, but actually what I've found is it's splitting the effort. I don't think it's any additional effort, but what it does by doing it at the end of the day, the pre-time blocking.
is I actually am more effective in hitting that shutdown routine, which I've always struggled with. And the way that this works for me, to get into the nerdy details for a minute.
is I have mentioned on the show an app called Morgan, which I have fallen in love with. It's got a whole bunch of calendaring features, but it's way more than a calendaring app. It's kind of hard to explain. If you just go look at the website, it'll look like... calendar app, but really it's a scheduling app and it helps you find those spots in your schedule where you can take intentional action on the things that are important to you.
And not too long ago, they added an integration with Obsidian, which is like catnip to Mike Schmitz. So I've got my whole Obsidian. task management system you know i've got the the dashboard which shows me the tasks and i can go look at that and kind of get my bearings for what's going on
But then those tasks, which are using the Obsidian Task plugin, can actually get piped into Morgan. And with Morgan, you've got an interface where on the left, you've got the tasks. That's like a sidebar sort of a thing where you can see everything that's due tomorrow, due.
uh today things that are overdue things that are coming up in the next week and they're all broken down into the categories and then on the right you've got the calendar so you put in your calendars and and you can drag your tasks then from that sidebar into the calendar and it's not just a specific app so this is you know to me this is better than dragging something from a
an app like OmniFocus into Fantastical because if you work with other people, you probably have tasks in multiple places. So in Morgan, you can have Obsidian tasks, you can have Notion tasks, you can have ClickUp tasks, you can have Todoist tasks. They can all be listed there.
And then you can drag those onto the same calendar as you plan your day. And so what I do is I look at the things that are coming up tomorrow in my Obsidian tasks specifically. That's the one that really I'm focused on right now.
Although as I continue to work with more people in Notion, I'm probably going to bring that stuff in there as well at some point. But I'm looking at the things that are due tomorrow in Obsidian. I'm going to the daily... the daily page for tomorrow in Morgan, and I'm dragging those important tasks onto the time block plan before I shut down for the day.
So I'm not time blocking the whole day. I'm just figuring out, you know, this specific task that I have to do, I'm going to do it at this point. And then the next day, when I get to the co-working space generally. I like going there, getting in the car, having that transition time of a 15-minute commute. It's not that big a deal to me, and it helps me get into, okay, it's time to work mode as I walk into that co-working space.
Then I'll get there, I'll open up the fancy notebook, I'll open up the Morgan plan for today, and I will use that as the foundation, but then I'll fill in a couple of gaps with the rest of the time until I've given every hour a job. And then from there, I've got the time block plan in the fancy notebook. I'll write down the three tasks I'm going to do on the note card, prop that up in front of my desk and work off of that as I go through my day. And I love this.
I don't even know how to describe what a difference this has made. And it could be just anchored to the fact that I'm actually shutting down now at the end of the day. And I'm able to disconnect from the... the open, from the things that have happened during the day and I'm closing the open loops before I go spend time with my family or go to the basketball game or whatever. But this has been a huge benefit to me. And thank you to...
to a listener, TJ, for the idea of using ChatGPT to coin the term block priming. Yeah, I looked at Morgan. I also looked at motion, which is... Another kind of AI planning calendar tool. I don't know if you're familiar with that one. I've heard of it. Yeah. For me, they don't really, they just don't really resonate. Like, I don't feel like I need AI to help me plan my day.
I know what's important. In fact, I've kind of gone the opposite direction. So the way I do it now is I use the blocks as the driver. So a good example earlier, I'd said I'm going to do two sponsor blocks. Well, what am I going to do during those blocks? Well, in OmniFocus, I've got a list called sponsor. And let's say there's 15 things in there. I'll go in and do as many as I can in the time allotted it. And then I move on and I don't think about it anymore.
And like, if I have a list where I'm consistently not getting the stuff I need done, then that tells me I need to give a bigger block to that thing in my life, you know, and it just allows you using the, using the, um, the calendar blocks as the foundation.
It puts that limitation on you because you only have so much time in the day and you can only have so many blocks. I mean, one of the reasons why the Automators podcast went away is because I realized I had more blocks than I had time to do it all. And I had to give some things up. And so I gave up one of my shows. And that's the way I've been doing it. So I kind of call it block-based task management, where the block is the unit.
the task manager is just the list you go to. Yes. So I agree with that. I don't keep a, an insane. list of tasks in uh obsidian either so it's it's just like some big things that that show up in my my daily list um however i do find that having the tasks and the calendar events in one interface, which I can use then, which is sort of designed to be a time blocking tool has been really helpful. And just to just to be clear, like Morgan, the way I'm using this.
You can drag the tasks into the calendar. You can drag them in from multiple places. And if you go to the website, they'll talk about the AI features. I don't use those at all. I am just using this as a calendar app. with the ability to, at the end of the day, spend five minutes to decide where am I going to do the thing that is due tomorrow. And also kind of get a handle on, you know, if there's too many things in that list, then I have got to be ready to cut. But I like knowing that.
The day before, as opposed to I'm walking into today and oh my gosh, look at all these things that I, I have to get done. If I, if I see five things in the do tomorrow list. I'm going to decide right then and there, this one's not getting done and I'm going to bump that to next week or whatever. The other thing about Morgan is it's actually a great calendar app. It is not cheap, but neither is Fantastical. And it's got the booking pages and all that kind of stuff. So you can...
It is a scheduling tool. It's given you everything that you need, not just to plan your tasks by using time blocking, but also to wrangle schedules and calendars with multiple people. And I think it's really well done. yeah no i get it and uh i like i have used the feature the way you described where you drag a task out of on me focus and put it on to fantastical and it creates a task for it but i just don't do that either i
I really just, I think we're kind of doing the same thing. I'm just doing it the hard way and you're doing it more, more technically, you know, using the link between Morgan and Obsidian and your other applications. I think the important thing for me is that we are both bumping up against the limitation of time when we do the planning, which allows us to be a little more realistic about what we do. Yes. And just to be clear,
The way that the integration works, you're not syncing back to Obsidian. I'm going to do this task at this time. It's literally just a planning tool. What is nice is that at the end of the day when I am doing my block priming, I'm also looking at the tasks that I scheduled that day, and I can just check them off. The only thing that gets synced back to Obsidian is that this task was done.
And then whatever, you know, repeating setting I have for those, like, for example, I've got one for a Publish the Focused episode that goes every two weeks and it's linked to the checklist. that I've got to go through before the episode gets, gets published just to make sure that I don't, don't forget anything. And, um, because it's all, you know, plain text using that obsidian tasks plugin.
I can check the box in Morgan. And then next time I go into Obsidian, it's deleted that previous version of the task because that's the way I have it set up. And it's created the next version and it's adjusted the due date appropriately and all that kind of stuff. So that's the thing that really clicks for me is that it's not.
just an add-on sort of a thing. They actually worked with the developer of the Obsidian Task plugin, which is the foundation of my crazy task management system, which I've got a video. I'll put it in the show notes that people really want to see what that looks like. But that's really the glue for this is that it's built off of that Obsidian Task plugin. And that integration is just so nice. And it's got these little visual flourishes. So like when you...
Check the box to complete the task. And Morgan, you get the little confetti, you know, the little dopamine hit, like, hey, you got something done. Good job. So yeah, I'm very impressed with this app. And I've seen people talk about it for a long time. I mentioned this in the video I did on this block priming.
Danny Hatcher is one person who I've heard rave about Morgan for years. And I've looked at it and it's kind of, I don't really get that. Why does anybody need this? And then when they added the Obsidian Task integration, I tested it out for myself. I was like, oh. I get it now. This is great. Well, I guess I got to look at it again, Mike. But yeah, it is a nice looking app. And it definitely looks kind of like the calendar for Obsidian, right? Yep.
That is, that's a whole different thing. Like if you're all in with Obsidian, why not? This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Indeed. Go to indeed.com slash focus. and join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast. If you're looking to expand your team this year, join the 3.5 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast.
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I am reading a book for Bookworm, naturally, but I wanted to make sure that I mentioned it here because it's fascinating. It's Poor Charlie's Almanac. The story of this is it's a book by Charlie Munger. So it's talking about his life. It's got reflections from his kids. It's got talks that he gave. But the real interesting thing about this is that it's published by Stripe Press. And there is a free online version of this book that is just absolutely beautiful. It's incredibly well-designed.
web page. So I will put the link to this in the show notes for people who want to take a look at this, but the website has a bunch of additional photos and things from the life of Charlie Munger, which I guess people aren't familiar with him. He's the right-hand man to Warren Buffett with, I forget the name of their company. Berkshire Hathaway. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. So very successful investment firm. And it's.
A lot of interesting tidbits from his life and just kind of the lessons that he's learned along the way. I mean, you always get the blurbs of the books and they're always a little bit. fantastic or extreme but there was uh there was one from somebody who said that this is a million dollar education in a book and i don't think that's necessarily wrong because it's uh
edited versions of a lot of his real popular talks that he gave at business schools and commencements and things like that. So I am really enjoying this book so far. And everyone should go check out the free online version. I will check it out. I am not reading a book. I've been spending all my time on this update, but I bought a book. Does that count?
Sure. Yeah. So I've got a book that I haven't read here. I can't recommend it, but it was recommended to me by a listener and it's called I've Got Time by Paul Lumens. I don't know if you've heard of this book. It's called A Zen Monk's Guide to Calm, Focused, and Meaningful Life. So somebody told me, you should check that book out. He says a lot of the same stuff you do. So I don't know if it's any good or not. It's sitting here on my shelf. As soon as I get this...
This is Productivity Field Guide Shipped. That's the next book I'm going to read. Nice. Speaking of yourself, I think maybe we'll... Talk a little bit more about that in deep focus for people who are hanging around. You do. It looks very nice. All right. You got any shiny new objects? You go first. I need to think about this. I don't really have. Okay. Well, I've got a long-term shiny new object. The seed was planted.
on this podcast a long time ago when we were talking about how i don't really have anything that i do for fun just for me like just just for fun there's no productivity benefits to it at all And I think I mentioned probably on that episode, I don't remember which episode that was, that, you know, I've been intrigued by this idea of the Steam Deck. Are you familiar with the Steam Deck, right? Yeah, it's a PC in your palm. Yeah, it's kind of like a very ergonomic Nintendo Switch Plus Plus.
And I know they just announced the new Nintendo Switch. So maybe the timing on this is terrible for me. But I did get a Steam Deck. And the thing that pushed me over the edge is that I am a huge... civilization fan are you familiar with the civilization games by sid meyer yeah yeah so civ 6 came out i don't know 10 years ago and uh i've been starting to see all these ads all over the place for civ 7 which is coming out
in a couple of weeks and it is steam deck certified so i pre-ordered civ 7 and i've gotten a steam deck and it is going to become my civilization machine nice nice And you can play it in bed. Exactly. Yeah. I've got a couple other games that I've collected over Steam over the years. Steam is available on Mac.
now so a handful of games are if you buy them via steam you can play them on your mac so i've got a couple of those too like firewatch and uh I think there was a deal on Skyrim a couple of weeks ago, so I bought that. Yeah, I got the Steam Deck actually yesterday as we record this, so I haven't had a whole lot of time to mess around with it, but I have played with it a little bit. I got the OLED version, so the screen looks great.
The blacks are really black, which for some of those, you know, atmospheric type games is important. But yeah, this is going to be fun. Hopefully I don't lose too much time to... Playing the Steam Deck. Yeah, just whatever you do, stay away from Ghost of Tsushima. That game will take all of your time if you find it. I remember you talking about the open world Harry Potter game. That's available on the Steam Deck as well. But I've resisted so far. Yeah, look out.
Yeah, I really haven't. I don't have anything shiny new. I have upgraded some of the gear. Like we said during the show, I bought a new microphone. I got a shotgun mic on your recommendation, and that helped the audio and stuff. I have just had my head down on productivity field guide so much. I'll tell you one thing I did buy. The plotter has now got me on their whale list, you know, because I bought.
the book i bought the notepads and they sent me a thing out where they had a time limited notepad with a foil stamped cover of a japanese temple and i just bought it i didn't i'm sitting here looking at what am i going to do with this thing it's like it's the same you know you can pull the paper out and put it in notebooks and all that but yeah
That was kind of a splurge buy for me, but I haven't really spent much money lately. I've been too busy getting all this together. So I don't have anything really too shiny and new lately. Maybe in the future. Well, that's all right. Yeah, I made up for you, I think, this time around with the OLED Steam Deck.
All right. Well, that wraps it up for today. If you want to check out the productivity field guide, there's links in the notes for the plus and the standard version. Don't remember that discount code PFG10 gets you 10% off. Go check it out. Let me know what you think. And I really appreciate your consideration. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm.
Go there. If you want to sign up for Deep Focus, the ad-free extended version of the show, you can do that right there. We appreciate your support. Helps us a lot. And today on the Deep Focus segment, I think we're going to be talking about... my bookshelf project and curating my books. So that'll be fun. And otherwise we'll see you next time.