How to Focus on the Most Important Things with Charlie Gilkey

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their

good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Charlie Gilki, an author, speaker, and founder of Productive Flourishing, a website that helps creatives, leaders and entrepreneurs start finishing the stuff that matters. Charlie is routinely featured, showcased or highlighted in places like B n E, T, Time, Forbes, The Guardian, Life Hacker, and more. Today, Eric and Charlie discuss a host of topics, including his upcoming book. Hi Charlie,

Welcome to the show. Eric. I'm so delighted to be back and to be talking in this context. Yeah, last time we had you on it was a great conversation. I loved your book, but your and Eyes relationship was just sort of getting to know each other. We have since worked with you for a couple of years as sort of Jenny and Eye coach. I would say business coach, but that doesn't really get to the depth that we go to. So business slash mindset slash life coach, and

that's been a wonderful relationship. And so when we were thinking about, like, okay, new year stuff, what are topics? You know, you just came to mind as somebody who with your book start finishing with all the work that you do that you know, I thought we could make a conversation that we really useful for people as they are thinking about kind of the rest of the y year. So here we are. Here we are, indeed, and so glad you thought of me. So we'll start, like we

always do, with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparents. They say, well,

which one wins? And the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. There's a funny story here. In two thousand and fifteen, I wrote a post called which wolf will you feed? That is the parable? And then if you look down at the bottom, I was toking to toking with one of my teammates about it. It's like Eric Zimmer started a podcast on this right.

I don't know if you remember that back in the day, but we go away, way back, and so two things pop up for me. A question that I will often ask myself when I'm in a situation uncertainty or maybe discomfort, especially when it comes to other people, as I always go with, like, what's the most abundant possibility we can co create together? What is the most abundant possibility we

can co create together? Because if we focus on that, it gets us out of zero sum games, it gets us out of feeding bad wolves of I win, you lose, or like it has to be manipulation, and it really gets us into a sense of that sort of partnership. And it's a way of actually guiding me to go to you know, the good wolf as it were, right it, and to go that way. And there's a second aspect where you know, I'm a motorcycle rider, and in motorcycle riding and in driving, there's a rule, right you always

look where you want to go. You don't look at what you're trying to avoid, because that's the best way to crash into it, right, And so when you ride a motorcycle, you look through the curve. You look through the curve. And so for me, as I'm steering and navigating through life, even in those scenarios to where like I hear and feel the bad wolf as it were, right chopping, I'm always looking at the good Wolf and

say how do I steer towards that? And I might get it wrong, I might make a dumb dis choice. But in my experience, even before the parable and just the way that I roll with things, I'm like, I don't know that I have ever regretted steering towards the white Wolf. I've never regretted at least trying to build

the most abundant possibility with other people. And so I just sort of like do her that way, and over enough decisions, over enough days of our lives and interactions, it's one of those things I think you end up in the place where you don't have to ask the question anymore. You're just always steering that direction, and so it's always useful to come back, and you know, when when I'm in those points where I do need to steer, it be like, oh, that's what I need to do.

But that's a long answer for just saying that, Like, that's how I roll with the question and integrated and just use it on a day to day. It's interesting. And I am preparing to go surfing later in December with my son. I am so excited, and you know, I've been learning, you know, how do I learn more about surfing so when I get in the water, I can spend more time up on a wave. And that idea of looking where you want to go is so key there, you know. It's just that is a fundamental

lesson of surfing. You've got to be looking where you want to go, and if you do that, your body fairly naturally will follow, you know. So I think that idea of you know, looking at where we want to go, and I think there's a bunch of ways you've been really helpful to us. But that's one is we've started to look more at where we want to go. Where I had a tendency to look a little bit, like you said, at the thing I don't want to hit,

you know. So for me, a lot of the work has been around getting into more of I don't even like these words because they have echoes to me of things that I think are kind of new age, like the secret and stuff. But this idea of a of an abundance versus a scarcity mindset, Again, I don't love those phrases, but there really is something that has changed in me as I've looked more and more at what are the good things that are happening here in the business.

What are the positive things that could be happening instead of going, well, it's gone well up till now, but surely we're gonna wreck this thing soon. I just remember a fundamental conversation where you're like, well, why don't you just assume that, since you've figured it out up till now,

that there's no reason that's going to change. And I was like, wow, I guess given that I'm making up what's going to happen in the future anyway, we don't know, why not make it up in a way that turns out to be empowering versus a way that keeps me looking at the obstacles I don't want to hit Yeah, and thanks for putting that down, and I agree with you.

There are a lot of words in the broader industry that we're in that I don't love, like I don't even really love business coaching, but it's what everybody knows, right, So I'm like, Okay, I'll do that. That's fine, right. Thought leader is another one of those that kind of makes me a market right, but manifestation and so it

can take that vie. But really the insight is what we're talking about and so many of us don't allow ourselves space to dream about what's possible and where we can go, and so we just stay stuck in this world of what's the least bad thing that can happen to me right now? Right? And how do I avoid the least bad thing? And I'm like, how about we at least dream and say this is what life could look like and just settle with that it's possible first,

and then that it's plausible. Right, there's a pathway to there that doesn't require as being aliens and you know, it doesn't require hustle culture, it doesn't require burnout and maximum effort and all that sort of jazz. Like, we can go that direction and start finishing on the book

that you reference Earlier. I talked about our head trash, and I talked about sort of the no win scenarios that we talked about, right, and when we admit this is possible, Two, there's a way for us to get there that lets us roll into the third question, which a lot of people will struggle with, Well, what's the story that's keeping me from seeing that what's possible and what can be actualized is in front of me? And

that is actually where a lot of people get stuck. Right, So we did with that head trash sort of scenario. There's a fourth piece that you didn't sort of mentioned out there. It's like, Okay, now, once we've done all that, we have to do the hard inner work of prioritizing that that it's okay for us to have that abundance, that it's okay for us to live in that world.

And for many many people, the idea of taking a month off and traveling when you've got a business and all those types of things, it's like, that's not something that someone like me does. And then it's like, oh, let's unpack that. Why Because if you fundamentally think that you don't deserve that, or that it's not possible or not relevant for you, you're going to keep creating this

very thing. A burnout of frustration of not having meaning and work of not feeling fulfilled, not expressing yourself, not because you can't do it, because you're unwilling to permit yourself to do it. That's where a lot of the work comes from. Yeah, and that statement, I think this is where insights from certain things like self help. You know, the fundamental insight is there. Right, So when we say

you don't permit yourself to do it. When I hear you say that, what I know you're saying is there's a whole lot of things to unpack underneath that. It's not a simple like, well, I give myself permission, right, Like this is not you know, just say the word and it will happen. Right. It is a way of orienting everything that we do. But I was thinking about something the other day, and I was thinking about will come up on nine years for this podcast in January,

thank you. And if you had told me a decade ago that my life would look like it looks, I would not have had any frame of reference at all. I hadn't even thought of the podcast ten years ago, right,

I was coming up on thinking about it. I interviewed a guy named Benjamin Hardy recently in his book is about Future Self, and it's really about imagining that your future self could be in a dramatically different place than it is, because we tend to assume that in a decade we're going to be fundamentally like we are today, and very often that is not at all true. And

so the other thing that I think about is. I think I first met you probably at Camp Good Life that Jonathan ran, and that was the first time I allowed myself to say out loud and dream that I would be able to do the podcast as a full time thing. Up to that point, I just didn't see that that was a possibility. I mean, in my heart, I occasionally would allow myself to peek at it, but I wouldn't cope so far as to say, like, I'm going to make that happen. And that was the first

time where I went, Okay, I'm gonna do this. And it still took me, I don't know, two years, three years, I don't know how long it took me after that moment to make it happen. But as soon as I knew that was what I wanted, then I could start to make plans towards that. I could start to say,

all right, well what would it take for that to happen? Okay, all right, well now if I know that's where I want to get, if I know that's what it's going to take, and this is what so much of your work is really good at is and saying all right, now, let's start deconstructing that into what I need to do

to get there. What are the things that are going to get in my way that are both internal my own obstacles, the way I think about the world, my limitations that they are external, the people around me, the structures I have in my life, all that different stuff. But I am more of a believer than I've ever been that you know, there are real possibilities for ourselves. But I agree with you, A big one is starting to even say this could be possible. And I may

not know how to get there. I may not even be ready to say, like, by damn, I'm gonna make it there, but I can at least go that's where I want to be. Now, let me start to work with that a little bit more. Yeah, and the coach and me is gonna want to add two words to what you said, Yeah, this is what's possible. This is

what's possible for me. Those two words for me become really powerful because oftentimes, you know, you're talking about podcasting, like you're listening to Jail to you, John lu Domas, You're listening to all those folks and they're talking about all these podcasting business like that's great, and people are like, oh,

that's possible. But there are a smaller segment of those people that said, actually, that's possible for me, like me, this person now, not some other idealized version of myself, not some you know, it's great for John, it's great for Eric, it's great for Charlie, and you know, um,

great for Terra and all all the people. Right for me, Okay, if it's possible for me and there are some levels that I can press to get there, thanks for unpacking the permission slash permit thing, because it's not at all like you just say it's gonna happen, then it happens. Not that's some serious horse shit. What Actually, it becomes an organizing principle for how you look at that? In my world, if your dream is not on your schedule,

it's just an aspiration. And that's okay. Call it an aspiration. Don't call it a priority, right, don't call it a project, don't call it something you're working on. It's an aspiration. Cool cool coo coo coo cool. Right, But when you start talking about it as a priority or as a project, it has to live on your schedule. And I know that sounds super simplistic, but when you want to look

at so many people. They come to me like I'm trying, I'm working on the thing, or I want to do a thing, and for me it becomes a prayer, simple like so where's it live on your schedule? And they're like, well, I've I've been thinking about doing It's like you've been doing that for years, okay, probably not thinking time. Where does this live on your schedule? And it's like, well, but see what happened was I can't do that because

my job. And then this other person like okay, well you know I talked about this and start finishing where you know, projects, especially best work projects, these projects that are going to create your future self what we're talking about here. Um, they really liked you out that only

uniquely you can do. They're both mirrors and bridges. Okay, they're mirrors because they reflect your internal landscape, what you think about yourself, what you believe is possible, who you think you are, but they also mirror what's happening in your external world. So many people chanke like bite off

the best work project. They'll go to the conference or listening to Ted talking maybe a podcast like I'm gonna do the thing, and they decided to do the thing, and immediately they're confronted with their head trash and limiting beliefs, They're confronted with their competing priorities, are confronted with all these things, and then they look at their schedule like, how I can't do this new thing. I'm I was already overloaded with the old thing. How am I going

to do the new thing? They're just mirrors, but they're bridges because they are the bridge towards your future self, that future work that you're going to do. And then the fun thing about it, you have to trust that it's fun. I know some people listen to its like Charlt that sounds terrible. The great thing is the bridge that you're building takes you further than you think you're going to go. You can't imagine when you really do this type of work where all it's going to go.

You you just think it is gonna get me over this little river, But all of a sudden you keep building. And to your point, are you wake up one morning? I gonna do this A lot with clients, like you've been in conversations like let's roll back two years ago and let's examine what we're talking about now. Based upon what two years ago you would think about this, Like, they can't understand this conversation, right, because the best work

project you've been building has led you here. Right. So I say all of this because when people start thinking about making a big or small change in their life, I think the first thing, aside from permission, like giving themselves doing it. It's like, okay, now it is just a matter of alignment. How are we gonna align the inner story with the outer story? How are we going

to do this? How's it live on the schedule? I can go through a lot of that stuff, right, But yeah, it's not at all about the permission, because if you give yourself permission and then you don't do the follow one bridge building work, probably haven't given yourself permission, right. You probably are still stuck in the like I'll get to it when I get there, or it's possible, but you haven't gotten to that it's possible for me, and

I'm going to start building it. Last thing I'll say on this is when you really commit to the path, it's okay that it can take you longer to get there than you originally thought, at the same time that many people get there faster. Than they thought, Yeah, they would be able to get there. Yeah, And in many ways, the unrealistic version of me thought I would be where I'm at faster, or thought that if I wasn't there faster,

I wasn't going to get there, right. That's the one I fall prey to very often, is like, well, if this thing really had any legs, right, it would have taken off by now. We would have been here by now, instead of realizing like that whole thing about it's such a cliche at this point that like overnight success is

not overnight success. You know. I look at some people that I admire, and when I really start looking at like when did they start what they were doing, I'm like, oh, goodness, that they got a decade on me, right, Like they've got a decade on me doing some of that stuff.

And it does take longer, but I'd love that idea of you know, the bridges go further than you think, because we are at a point we are doing well enough that we are starting to have a business that supports us and is giving us a little bit of

the lifestyle that we want to have. And that's another really important thing that I think you have helped with has been us really orienting to For me, it's been getting away from that hustle culture mentality that more better, we need to be bigger, we need to do more, we need to make more money, and really asking in the context of my life, what do I want, then going you know what I want. I want to be able to take a month off. I've never been able

to do anything. I've never had time in my life for that, and you know, thinking a, that's not possible, but be then going Okay, it is possible, and here's what the trade offs for that will be, because nothing is free. You know. It's been a very different orienting process towards not only what is possible, but what we want.

And I love that you name very early on in start finishing and in the work you do, you name this competing priority thing, because that's real, right, Like, if my goal is to make as absolutely much revenue as we can make this year, that is a competing priority to taking a month off, perhaps, right. And so for me it's a matter of going, Okay, well, which of

those things is more important? You know? And there are ways that we've seen into you've helped me see into, like well maybe not right, Maybe taking a month off is not a limiting factor you're making money. Maybe it's an enabling factor in a way that I never would have seen. Right, Like, I came back from a month off, and I was like, I am ready to interview some people. I am ready to do some podcasting, like in a way that I hadn't been in a couple of years.

You know, I didn't notice that I was burned out, but I think I was a little bit. And so I came back, and our growth since doing that has been really good, And some of that was just I feel like I came back with a new spirit that I never would have predicted. You know, I would have thought, I'll come back from a month off, things are going to be in shambles. I'm going to dread getting back to work. Yeah, I mean just all sorts of stuff.

And I just continue to sort of be amazed by how things continue to unfold, and so much of it, I think also is this thing that we talked about on this show all the time, and it's the heart of the Spiritual Habits program, which is little by little,

a little becomes a lot. It's little by little, this thing has built and it's all these little activities that have been strung together over a long period of time that start to really create sort of these results that continue to grow in ways that are difficult to understand or predict. Yeah, I love that for so many different reasons. So this is true of any business scenario or career scenario.

At a certain point, when you've been in the game long enough, Unfortunately for newcomers, you learn to sort of wait to see how many of the newcomers are going to stay in it past the bright shiny object aspect of it, right, Yeah, asked like whatever thing that bought them in that, you know, the month long or quarter long, You're you're gonna be like, come back to me in a year, right, come back to me in a year

or two. Right. And I know, especially if you're a newcomer, you're like, hey, Charlie, that sucks because I really need people's attention now. Right. But fundamentally, what happens is there are a lot of people who just don't make the long term little by little gain and so not speaking for all folks have been around for a while, but

there's some heartbreak that goes on. It's like, we can't invest in so many people to have of them fall off different ways of handling that, and I'm sure I'm gonna get some emails about that, but partially in your in your case, like nine years is a long time to be rocking a podcast. It's a long time. And so there's like an episode a week, you know, like we even when I'm not here for them, like episodes

are coming out. Yeah, And so it becomes one of those things to where, like in any industry we're just talking about sort of a media primari industry, it's like, oh yeah, I've heard of Eric. Oh yeah, I've heard of it. Oh yeah, I've heard of that podcast. By the time you hear about it, you know, for a year or two, you're like, oh, that's a real thing at this point, right, it's not a starter project anymore. That's like a full on pro thing. So that works

for everyone. And so when we start talking about you know, I mentioned projects earlier, and in start finishing, I'll talk about really sitting with the reality that a significant life changing, career changing project it's going to take you about five years to really see all the way through, right, And people are like that seems like a long time. It's

like it's a short time. It's a short short time, and there's only so many of these that you can do at a time, turns out, right, And so when we look at that future self and are you able to commit to something that long. By the time you're in it two or three years and you're still trucking along and you're still doing that, you've developed enough sovereignty, talent, expertise, contacts and just overall momentum that you start to be

able to do a lot, right. And so I think you know in your case, when you're talking about taking a month off, there's a way in which all of the possibilities that you end up creating, you're just not present too because you don't realize you've built them right there, like right in front of you, and um sometimes taking that step back and be like, wait a second, I've

really built this great thing. And then you'll have the scenario that you had where you come back and not only is it you're fired up to do the podcast, but you're also fired up to do the new secret project. Right. I see a direct line between those two, right, And it's hard to say, hey, I need you to take a month off. So did you go, get recharged and come back with a secret project. And oftentimes that's exactly what happens. M M. My secret project is the Charlie

Gilki Fan Club. I don't know if we've talked about that yet. It's gonna be launching in January. Now, Okay, you take bitcoin for that too, right, absolutely? Absolutely? Yeah? That thing about a five years for a life changing project. And now as I've been in it, and I feel like, okay, you know, it was about five years before the podcast truly changed my life on the external level. You know, it was about five years before I was able to

do that as a full time thing. Right Now, there were good things happening way before that from it, right like the benefits it had to me, the people I was meeting, the conversations I was having. But for it to actually get to the point where it changed my life enough that it changed like what I got to

do for a living, that took me five years. The really sobering things I was going back through your work was this idea of take the number eighty five, subtract your current age from that, which in my case is fifty two, which leads you to thirty three years. Divide that by five years per project, you go, Okay, I've got six and a half really big life changing projects to take on. That is a sobering thing. There are certain things that people talk about, like you only have

four thousand weeks. I'm like, well, I've still got That's just too big a number to rationalize. But it reminds me of something else that has happened to me, which is you think about somebody that you care about but you don't see very often. Let's say you live on the other side of the country from your mother, and you're like, well, I see her twice a year, and you know she's probably got you know, let's say ten years at the outside means I might see my mom

twenty more times in my life. That is a sobering thing. That cause is you to work on the competing priority thing, right, which is what it takes to do a life changing project. You have to go, oh, I've only got six of them left, assuming I'm still really firing on a lot of cylinders at five, which is definitely not the case for a lot of people. You know, I mean Jenny's mom.

By seventies seven, you know, there was no more life changing projects, so For me, that was a really sobering thing to really think about what am I really going to work on? And I think that's another thing I've gotten a lot from the work with you, maybe more than anything else, is simply been what are you doing that is standing in the way of your important work?

Back to that Benjamin Hardy interview, he quoted a guy named Robert Brault, who I actually don't know who that is, but he said, we are kept from our goals not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. And I was like, wow, that resonates, because very often I would take the clear path to the lesser goal because I can see my way there. It's not as hard,

it's easy without realizing what I was sacrificing. Absolutely, And I know a lot of listeners right now are gonna want to like negotiate about that five years or how many projects cannot put into a time right, We're going to start doing some accounting that way. I get it. I get it. And maybe you're a superhero that can

do a whole lot of different things at once. But for many people when they really look at that, because not only in my world are projects as sort of the career or business projects we're talking about, but that's also the work of your life as well, so those run parallel to that. So it's not so you might

be like, oh, he's just talking about career projects. Nah, no, I'm not talking about that and just that, right, because taking care of kids and aging elders and pets and moving across country and all those things count as projects, right that you're doing in between. And I think people don't really think about that about why life it seems so full, It's like, well, part of it is the work of your lives. You're not counting as projects. I mean, that was a really big thing that when we started

looking at for listeners. The reason I'm referencing this is not because I want to be self referential. I just think it's helpful to give actual, real life examples of this stuff, right, is that when we started looking in our life and we went, okay, well, Jenny runs the household, right, not that like she does everything. We have some division of labor, but when it comes to making sure that there are groceries in here, when it comes to making sure you know, she likes to cook, there's a lot

of things that she does. That's a project. So to expect her work output to be equal to mine, it's not fair because that's a real project. And then we looked at her mom and said, Okay, her mom has Alzheimer's. That's a project that Jenny has on her plate. Do we wish it wasn't, of course, but given the way that we're going to step up to the plate on this, that's a project. And so again it allowed us to have this way of thinking about our lives holistically. That

really worked. There's another line you have about many people end up with their days filled with projects they aren't counting. I mean, that's a really big thing. It's a really important thing to get all that laid out so that we can be realistic about what else can go on the plate. You know what else am I able to do? You know? New Year's Resolutions are a classic time of the year for this, Right, I Am going to start working out for an hour and a half a day.

Well maybe, but where's that time coming from? Like, we can't take that out and just go well, we tend to isolate things. Well, I can do that. I can do an hour and a half. That's not too hard. Well, no, it's not in a vacuum, it's not too hard in a life with a full time career and two children and an aging parent. Well, okay, now we need to

really think about that. And a lot of times, what that does, in addition to allowing us to prioritize, I think, is allow us to stop feeling bad about ourselves all the time that like, I'm not accomplishing what I think I should be accomplishing because we're not taking into account all the stuff that happens in life and then making decisions do I want to continue to do that, and then realizing that when we do choose that I'm choosing my children. Good, great choice. Give yourself credit for that

choice precisely. You know, so many people come to me at Productive Flourishing and they're like the priming that they get from just everywhere is I want to do more,

more and more, bigger better. Right. It's a challenging marketing thing for us, to be honest, because on the one hand, we don't want to like say, yeah, we can help you do more, but the reality is starting with we're gonna make sure you're focusing on the really best and right things first, which for many people means doing and committing to fewer things because we start talking about you mentioned so thanks so much for loading up projects. So we have you know, at PF and then start finishing.

We have what's called the five project rule, the long nerty way of saying it is no more than five active projects per time perspective. Easiest way to unpack that is the time perspective and time horizon does the work.

So think about we're recording this in December, right, you might hear this in January, but whatever, right, So for December, looking at the area, because like, you've got no more than five active top of deck, top of mind projects per month, month size projects because most of us can kind of feel what a month's size project feels like

a quarter and year gets kind of walky. But I'm saying, like when you look at the wonderful Jenny Gay like in what she's going through, I'm I'm like, she's grieving because she lost mom, you know all those things right,

going on vacation, she's got the meditation training. Okay, so those are three projects that we've got right there, right, If anything are going on with the pups, right, given her role, that that becomes another thing, and she's got this sort of vacation it's location or she's in Lisbon right now, right when we're recording this, she is, yeah, alright, that that's a project. Left me at home with the dogs. Well now we know who let the dogs out? Anyways,

about a lot of dogs out. And so like if Jenny were coming, or if you were coming and be like, okay, that's five projects, Like what else are you gonna put in that? And without getting into the game where we stuff and we stuff and we micro crunch and we make things so stressful that even as we're getting things done, we're so stressed out about it that we can't enjoy it. Like I've been working with another client who and I see this pattern a lot, so working with her on

the intensity of her work. She's done a great job of minimizing the amount of work that she needs to do to power her life in her business, but she's made the work that she does in the pace she has to produce so stressful that she would rather work an extra day with less stress than to work the way that she's been working yet and so it ends up in this counter and to it a sort of thing where the main question for me a lot of times when it comes to people doing their best work

and how they get it done, is how do we structure this in a way so that you can actually breathe and enjoy it as you're doing it. Because if it's always just about crunching it and getting it done and doing it in the mandi amountum amount of time and get the maximum reserves all those things that we hear at a certain point for many people, that becomes

really really unsatisfying. Like think of like if you had your favorite dessert and then I'm like, great, I'm gonna go make your favorite dessert for you, and I put it down in front of you and then pull out a stopwatch and say you've got fifteen seconds. Go enjoy it, maximize it, get it right. If you take five minutes, you're wasting time. It makes no freaking sense. We want a certain amount of savoring it when it comes to

so many things that truly matter to our life. If I did the same thing with you and your son, I'm like, okay, Eric, you're going surfing, Like, look, you don't need a whole lot of surfing time, you need like three hours. So what we're going to do is we're gonna get you there and that afternoon we're gonna have you surf from one to four. Wonder four, that's your window. We've got it optimized exactly for you. You're like, yeah, nah, that's not that's not really the vibe we're going for.

It's not a surfer vibe, Charlie. I know it's not. It's why surfing is such an unlikely hobby for me, because surfers are so like, you know, good vibes only, man, that's a good energy for me to be absorbing. Look, it's the same way with with riding my motorcycle. Like I could look at Google Maps and it'll be like, this will take you three hours in a car, and I'm like, m that's gonna take me three hours and forty five minutes on the bike because I'm gonna stop.

I want to get off and like all the things you have to do on a motorcycle. But I don't choose not to do it because it's gonna take me forty five minutes longer. Right, because the quality of the right itself, Like I don't want to get on the bike and be like, Okay, I can ride three miles faster than the speed limit. I can cut out a few stops. I can do all that, because not only would it compromise my enjoyment of the experience, it's also dangerous,

right um. And so I've got two things going forward. And when so many people look at their work, I think we're talking directly to people who have a lot of autonomy and the work that they do and how they get it done right. So I want to be clear about that. If you work in an organization where they're tracked me down to the thirty seconds, that's a different context. Big love to you for that, right, I know you're going through a different thing than what we're

talking about right now. We might come back to that in just a second. But for those who do have much more autonomy, which is really a lot of us, especially in the hybrid work world that we work in now, there's not so often that manager this like looking at your computer seeing what you're doing in that amount of time. What I've seen time and time again across our audience is that because we have made work so stressful, the doing work so stressful, we end up in these distractions

and time wasters and filler stuff. Just to give ourselves a little bit of emotional reprieve that if work wasn't so stressful to start with, we wouldn't need that reprieve to begin with, so we don't end up on social media or email or whatever your thing is, right, And so I'm like, what if we say, you know what I talked a little bit about focus blocks earlier, ninety minutes,

two hundred twenty minute blocks of time. What if we decide to get off the sort of clock time you haven't exactly an hour to work on things or whatever that is. And so you know what, I'm going to carve out my morning so that it's roughly ninety two

blocks of time. And if i work seventy five minutes and I'm just kind of done because I've put in the hard yards and I need to walk the dogs, or I need to sort of get some coffee, allow for that, Allow that spaciousness, Allow for that, because what will end up happening is much like we were talking about about you with your trip, is you'll create enough space such that you come back or charge and able to really think about whatever problem you're going on, or

have novel insights, or be able to like be a better human with the other teammates that you're with because you're not so compressed and snippy. All of those when taken as a habit, taken as a practice, when am I slide in the team habitute a little bit eric, but when taken as a practice, dramatically change the quality of your work in your day, every day, every day. So, yeah, the winds can come. You can pat yourself on the back, you can do your victory laugh and all that kind

of whatnot. But you're not just holding out through a slog of painful work for a win. You can go to work engaged, energized, expressing yourself feeling a sense of meaning and purpose while you're doing the work, which is a win no matter what happens. So let's orient this more towards people who have a little bit less autonomy. Let's not go so far as to be like you're

working in a call center there monitoring every minute. Let's say the average white collar person who's got some degree of autonomy and their job, they also have a bunch of stupid meetings, They've got a lot of pressures on them.

How does someone like that start to think about making the work experience less stressful because I think you're absolutely right in that for a lot of people, if we were to look at how our time is actually spent, we would see that a lot of it is with coping strategies that don't accomplish anything, you know, whether it's ESPN or it's solitaire, or its Facebook or Instagram or whatever your thing is. One of my favorite phrases ever is from this guy Tim Urban. I think you probably

know who that is, who who wrote about procrastination. He called these things the dark playground, and that is my favorite phrase because that's exactly what they feel like. Right. You know you should be working, but instead you're on Instagram, which might be an enjoyable experience, but it's not that

enjoyable because you know you should be working. So what are ways of taking the little bit of autonomy we have and starting to change our relationship to what we're doing so that maybe more of the time at work is spent on work, so that we free up time for more things that matter. Yeah, I love this question. It's one of the guiding principles of my next book,

which is called Team Habits. And the chief difference between sort of the scenario we were just talking about when you're mostly an individual doing the work and you have a lot of autonomy and working in a team. Is that working in a team is my definition working with other humans, which means you end up with social overhead. You end up in negotiation, like if I block off my schedule, that might impact you Eric if we're co workers, because now I'm not available to you for different things.

And so that's just part of working in teams as you end up with a social overhead. So given that there are two different acts of approach here, one is to really reclaimed the time, the open time that you do have and use that more purposefully. And most companies, unfortunately, there's like the stated values of what's going on in the stated priorities, and then there's like the shadow values

and priorities. There's like this other game that you've got to play right to be successful and really well aligned to organizations and really high performance ones. There's not so much of the shadow game, like it's just on the table people know how to win. So I come from a military background. It was an Army Joint Force Military Logistics coordinator. What I loved about working in the army is by and large, there wasn't a shadow game, right.

You knew what it took to get to where you were trying to go, right, found out the hard way. The most of corporate America is not like that, right, So be conscious of that shadow game. You know what I'm talking about. If you're listening, you're working in an environment because you have to win that one, right more than anything else. But within the confines of that game, be thinking about, like, Okay, how do I ship the most valuable work that pushes my team forward? And there

are going to be trade offs, right. You may not be able to fill out the TPS report. Right, There

may be awkward conversations about the TPS report. And in most scenarios, if you're shipping the really important work, you'll get a pass, right, Like you're not gonna get fired, right, And in fact, you're probably going to end up with teammates that are gonna be able to cover for you for that over time, because the organization itself will value the high output, the high quality work that you're doing

over the TPS report. I've started sending a couple of text messages after each podcast listener with pause sive reminders about what's discussed and invitations to apply the wisdom to your life. It's free, and listeners have told me that these texts really helped to pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important. When you get a text for me during your day to day life, it's one more thing that helps you further bridge that gap

between what you know and what you do. Positive messages when you need them for me to you. So if you'd like to hear from me a few times a week via text, go to one you feed dot net slash text and sign up for free. I found this to be absolutely true in my life because probably the first number of years I was in software startup companies. It was kind of an all in kind of thing. But the last ten years I was in corporate America, you know, big corporations. I was primarily a consultant coming in,

but for all intensive purposes I worked there. You know, I was project manager, product managers, that sort of thing, and all that time, the first five years of it, I was running a solar energy company, and the last five I was running a podcast. So I've got very serious about I don't have forty hours for that and

forty hours for this. I don't have eighty hours on top of being a family person, right, So what I started to do is be like, what do I have to do to be successful in these jobs, these corporate jobs? What really really matters? And so I got really good at just narrowing down to what really matters. And what I found was that a it actually freed up time. But be to your point, like I was seen as

a star. Now I didn't have quite so much of the I have to get promoted mindset, right, So it's not exactly a one to one comparison, although when I was at GAP, actually I was an employee. But that fundamental focus on what really matters here, what is this group, team, organization, division trying to do what it the end of the year will be like this was successful and ruthlessly focusing on that allowed me to get time to do the things I wanted to do and to actually be seen

as successful. Now I wasn't necessarily maybe seen as always the most compliant, right, but at the end of the day, to your point, I got a lot of passes because our projects were succeeding, our products were coming out, the things that mattered were happening, and it's an uncomfortable process, right, It was an uncomfortable process to be like, well, I'm just not going to those meetings, you know, I'm going to decline them and see what happens. You know, I'm

gonna say I'm sorry, I have a conflict. I'm going to not respond to emails that don't need me to respond. My whole career up to them had been like, I want them to know that I'm valuable, and I'll show that by responding to every email, being in every meeting. And I was misguided. I was misguided, you know. And so I say all that because I had this actual experience really happened right in the heart of kind of corporate American what we would normally think. And again, this

isn't gonna work in every scenario and every place. Sometimes to your point, the shadow games are so bad. I found that the shadow games did start to fall away when you got done what was most important precisely. And look, I did this in the army, right, um, and if I could pull it off in the Army, that the very thing you're talking about and being like, look, I can't do all the things right. I did the math

well before the other people did the math. I was like, this is literally impossible for me to win this game. All the things are not going to happen. However, I happen to know what my battalion commander wants, and I happen to know what my brigade commander wants, and I happen to know because I did the research, like what are the general like military general objectives and what are we trying to do? And I'm going to orient my company. When I was a commander, I'm going to orient my

units to be the best at that thing. Right, whatever they said we were trying to do, let's do that. So when it came time for us to opt out of things or to not be president or to do something like that, I'd be like, hey, um, sir, so I'm sending a representative to do this. Right, they're going to take notes for us, but my unit is over here doing this other thing unless you have strong preferences to the otherwise, unless we are absolutely required to be there.

And they'd be like, go ahead and do what you doing, captain. Because when it showed up, like I knew the game. I was an army officer, you get that, right, I knew the game where It was like, I want to be the person when it came time to give updates and status reports about my unit that talked to the least because I didn't have to talk a whole lot, right, whatever the metrics were, whatever, it was, here's where we are. Boom boom, boom boom. Good dog, captain next, that's what

you wanted to hear, right. It reminds me of at one job. I was running the biggest software project in the entire organization. It was hundreds of millions of dollars project, and my boss almost never talked to me. And originally I was like, why is he not like what? Does he not like me? Does he like this is the biggest project under his purview? And what I realized after a little while was he wasn't talking to me because

he didn't need to, right. He wasn't talking to me because I was giving him the information he needed and he knew that I had it under control and if I didn't, I would come to him, you know. Instead of suddenly feeling like I was left out, I just realized, like the complete lack of attention from him in my case turned out to be a real positive. Same here, Same here, and so that's that's just what we did. So what we have to put on here on deck, though,

is you gotta ship. You have to hit those numbers. You have to hit whatever the things are, because you can't really beg off and be like, hey, I went off the meetings, I'm gonna do not gonna answer the email because I'm doing X by the end of time period, and then the end of time period comes and you haven't done X, because then it just feels like you're shirking. Yeah, right,

you have no leverage. Right, but if you if you can say, look, I'll use the military language, sir, I can attend that, or I can do this other thing that's really important to you. Yes, I can't do both. My default is going to be to do this thing. Do you agree. I found that to be the exact magic question too, was Okay, I have these two things that are back to our terms about competing priorities. When you have more autonomy, you have to solve this yourself.

But in that environment, I was able to go, here's these two things, pick you know, which do you want the focus on? And that was tremendously empowering, you know, to just sort of constantly. My dog Beans is rolling around like a lunatic behind me, and I'm sure it's coming through the microphone Christopher. Sorry, um Beans. He has made a ninth inning comeback and I think is going

to play some extra innings anyway. She's back there rolling around, which is always a sign that she's she's doing well when she's acting silly like that. But it was interesting because things like status reports and such we often see as such a negative and I actually found them to be really positive for me when I use them, right, you know, because I could go and I could say, here are the five things. Are these the five most important things? Are they okay? Good? Then I know and

I can focus. And asking the people who were above me to make priority decisions was a really empowering thing because I think what happens in a lot of cases, and I do this, I tell like people on my team now, and I told people on my team then. I don't have a very good brain for how much I'm putting on your plate. Like I just have a tendency to be like this needs done, This needs done, Nicole. This, Nicole that Nicole, that right, you need to tell me

when we are exceeding your capacity. I don't know your capacity. I'm not keeping track of your capacity. And so when I was able to do that up to my superiors to say, Okay, I need some help sorting out because we've got nine things here and there's time for five. Help me pick, you know, in a respectful not a rebellious way, but a very respectful like, I want to make sure that I've got your back, So what's most important?

That unlocked a lot for me in the corporate world, because then I was able to go, okay, good, I've got to pass on these other four things. I mean, I think these days because self managed work has evolved because of where we are, I would I would add a slight tweak of saying rather than I can't do these and which like say something along the lines of, I think these are the five most important because do you agree or not? Yeah? Right? Am I correct about that?

And if they're like, you're correct, okay, because it shows that you've done that work of actually doing their job of translating it for them and you're not just like too many things pick for me and here's what I'm gonna do, right, And so one last thing I guess

on this. Well, when we work in teams and we're talking about that individual side of things, we're still on the individual wack by the way, Right, it's just understand thing that you write your own performance report, whatever the form is, whatever the performance schema is, figure that out preemptively, right, what you're going to be like doing and like what your win thing looks like, and use that as a gauge.

Because if you walk in and have done some of his work and walk into your boss or manager and be like, okay, performance review time. Here's what I've done over the last six months. Right, Here are some of the things I know I need to work on because we've talked about them. Right, here's my plan of action for doing that. You have a very short performance conversation, right, unless you're just wildly misreading things. And if you are

misreading things, you need to know that sooner rather than later. Right, And so just that would be the other thing I would want to say, is much like to tie into the conversation about dreaming and putting out where you want to be going is here in your very performance evol where like six months from now, what do you want your manager or your boss to be praising you on put it on there. What projects have you done? What what KPI is, whatever your corporate language is. What have

you done? Is it sells, is it customer service? Whatever, doesn't matter, right, and then make that the organizing principle for how you make decisions. Right, Because in a weekly like hey, new project, because your bosses be bosses, right, new project, You're like, okay, well, I was going there is this new project adding to my scope of responsibilities

that I need to update, which is fine. You might be getting one of those shadow promotions, right or is it a distraction that's going to keep you from doing some of those things that you might need to tell you boss, like hey, hey, hey, like I can do that, but these things here, I think you want done more at least in all of our other conversations, Am I the right person to take on this and compromise some

of these? You have a lot of different conversations, but you get those conversations when you're doing the co creative work of like driving your work towards that Ye. So much of this I think comes back to the core idea of being proactive versus reactive, right, Like to do any of what we're talking about, take some time of planning,

of thinking, of looking at competing priorities. You list sort of five challenges that get in the way of this, right, and these all happen right in an alignment here, right, Like, what are my competing priorities? What is my head trash the beliefs that are holding me back? You know, do I not have a realistic plan? Right? If I don't have a plan, then I'm just working But to what and how? You know? Too few resources? And then finally the last one is you know, sort of poor team

alignment that you've talked about. And again those may not all apply in your environment, but I think more of them do than we often think, right, team alignment, all that sort of stuff I've been able to. I won't say, overcome a bad boss, but create a team environment that

is better than the leadership we're getting. Absolutely. You know, there's a saying in organization development and recruiting and sort of workforce management that people don't leave bad companies, they leave bad bosses, right and so um over on the

team side of things. So when I say team, I mean the four to eight people you work with like day in, day out, Like most teams are actually decomposed about that size, not the like we're the development team that's got sixty people, Like, no, that's an a work like that's a that's a group. Your team, in your team of four to eight people. Turns out, you have an incredible amount of autonomy, or not autonomy, you have an incredible amount of rapport and influence and conversations. It's

not like some other rando over there. It's like Eric, you like mess with Eric all day, right, You're trading stuff, You're getting to get to the coffee like you're you're batting. Like. It's not like asking Eric like hey, Eric, um, can you cover for me at the meeting and take notes and sort of you know here, here's where my status update is, like I really need to focus on this and I'm struggling and I can't go to that meeting. I could be like, yeah, I could probably do that, right,

I'll cover for you next time. Okay, Well, that team habit of being able to cover for each other becomes a way in which you can all start to unpack and be like, wait a second, if we can all like give each other updates and someone else can carry the message, can we like, I don't know, have a Google doc where we just put our thates on and maybe we don't as a team have that meeting to where we sit around for an hour telling each other stuff that we could read. And I'm not a verse

to meetings. I'm not that guy of just like meeting, get out of them. But I think when we're more purposeful and we operate as a team and we create team habits. Now, the difference between an individual and a team habit, there's a nuance here, and a few individuals on a team doing a habit does not make it a team habit, right, It makes a few individuals doing an individual habit. When the team as a whole moves and operates in a certain way and that's just how

the team rolls, then you have a team habit. This is where a lot of the magic unlocks because they are a bad team. Have its that exists, such as one that's a pet peeve for me and let's get rid of a lot of people. Is the idea that if your calendar is open, you're immediately available for a meeting. Okay, coo coo, coo coo cool. Well that means Tuesday night you go home from work and you're like, great, I gotta plan tomorrow. I'm gonna get stuff done because I

gotta open schedule. The next morning, a teammate sees that you have an open schedule and they're like, oh, I need to talk to Eric. And then another teammate see that, and you show up to work. You had a plan. All of a sudden you have two meetings, and that work that you could have done different things with this now evaporated into meetings. Right. The funny thing about team habits is they are oftentimes implicit and unconscious agreements we make with each other and we just sort of do

them like any habit. And like when I went I'm out talking in the field to people, I'm like, hey, did you choose the whole open schedule equals you can schedule a meeting thing? And they're like ah, And then you go down the list. No one agreed to this. So I get the opportunity to talk to executives like, hey, so this is going on. Did you all agree with us and make this edict? And I'm like, now we hate it too, And I'm like, the entire organization hates this,

and none of y'all have thought to change this. What's it gonna take here? But that's the beauty. In the team of four to eight people, you don't have to have higher ups approve this. You can come up with novel ways to solve some of these problems. Take the CC thread from hell. Y'all know what I'm talking about, right.

You don't know who to send it to, So you have some messages and you send it to everybody, and then everybody sends it to everybody, and then you spend most of your days reading CC threads where you're not sure if you need to pay attention, but you know that you can't be left out? Right, how much of our time goes for that? Right? We could as a small team decide, you know what, today is Eric's day?

He covers the CC threats. His job is to read the CC threads and let us know if there's actually something relevant in that jam, right, and if so, to let us know and sort of like speak on our beat. Hey, my team is doing X, Y and Z. Why don't you know about it? He can be the liaison for the CC threat today. Maybe Charlie does it tomorrow. That gives the entire team four to eight people like only one person has to read this thread to figure out what's going on. The seven other of you can get

to work right. It's an easily available solution. We just don't think because of the unconscious way team habits work. We don't think of a way to get out of that situation. So a lot of what I'm talking about on there, not to not to go too much into that, but you ask the question of how do we, when

we work in corporate America, get better about this? Is one start thinking about, like, how are we as a collective going to solve some of these problems and make them so habituated that like we know how to respond to certain things. But we're going to get out of the idea that we need management and senior leaders to figure this out for us. Because it turns out, I'm gonna say what you all know, change management programs have an abysmal success rates when they come up from the

top down. Between two thirds and three quarters of change management projects don't work. They fail. So when's the last time from high up someone's created a policy that has actually made your life better? I know, a sound perhaps political on this one, don't mean to right, but in our small groups of four to eight people, we have

an incredible amount of thing. And here's the thing, much like what we were talking about on the start finishing an individual side, when your small team takes better care of each other, builds that trust and belonging, does better work. You know, if you work with these people eighty five percent of the time I've spent the majority of your time working with the people, your work life has just

gotten better, significantly, right, significantly better. And all it took was a few of you coming together and deciding here's how we're going to try some things together. Because it turns out if your team wins in the same way

that you as an individual win. If your team wins, they get a lot of say about what they get to opt in and out of right, they get the cold light when it comes to like, oh well we can't really put that team on it because they're really working on these really important things and they got it going on, so let's not mess with them. Or you get the high priority projects where you get additional resources to get behind it right because they know you're gonna get it done. You get a lot of the perks

when your team wins. Right. So when as a team, which means create team habits. I'm as excited about that because most of us spend the majority of our waking lives working in teams. Let's be real, Yeah, if we can make our day to day interactions with our team these people like, I don't know, it breaks my heart to some way because I'll talk to people and they were like, I don't know, Charlie. Like, as an individual, I love or really dig the people that I work with,

but I hate working with them. And I'm like, we can fix that. That is such an easy thing to fix, right. Some of us just have to stand up and feed the wolf of being better as a team, creating better team habits, and thinking what's it going to take for us to not show up and have the same setbacks day and day out. We talked about proactivity. The thing about being proactive versus reactive is being proactive takes courage.

You might pick wrong, you might spend three months or six months working on the wrong damn thing, leaning the ladder against the wrong wall. It's much easier if someone comes to you and says, here's the ladder, there's the wall, leaning against it, like I need it done by the end of the day, but having that courage with your team and as an individual to really say, here's where we're trying to go, let's organize ourselves to get there.

It makes such a dramatic difference because you don't end up in this place of resignation and quiet quitting and what happens in the workplace when we disengage, we disengage again. Partially,

it can be bad cultures and bad bosses. I get that, but I've done this work long enough to know that some of us have just not gotten to the place where we see the possibility that's right in front of us with these humans if we otherwise love and care about that's the opportunity I wanna want to present, like make that better. Yeah, I'm so excited to learn about the book. And my team now is a very small team.

But it was one of the things I loved and I miss about the work I used to do, and I think it was why I was successful to the extent I was in the career that I was was I somehow had some knack an intuitive sense that the team that small eight to tend people right around me, that I could influence that, and that if I did it would have outsized results, you know, and that that group really working well together and caring for and caring about each other was a great protective against a lot

of the other b s that's floating around. And so I think what you're on is an incredibly important and valuable piece of work. Appreciate that. Yeah, I'm a team guy, you know this. I think when we're in a team where we have great performance and great belonging, it's just one of the most sublime human experiences. M It is so hard to be and I miss being the Army because again, I'm not moving so many different people and just seeing organizations are and seeing like all the things

play out. Right, Um, I have wonderful clients, so I get to see it on that side of things. And so that's where I want us to remember. Just like with start Finishing, the whole point of Start Finishing is helping people get on a pathway to do that work that makes their work sublime and makes the experience of

doing it sublime and just really mundanely magical. I think the same thing can be applied in teams, and I'm really excited right um to do that and actually team habits came because as I was talking about start finishing enough managers and teammates to be like, how do we apply this to the team, because that sounds like a good idea, Charlie, how do we get more focus blocks?

Like we see it? How do we do it? And I'm like, so you mean to tell me, as your little squad over here, each of you can't carve out three minute blocks of time to really do deep work Like that's impossible for all of you and for most of them, like they kind of squirm and then give me the evil eye. And then finally you'd start to see someone be like, yeah, we can probably do that, right, Okay, Okay, there's our possibility for change. Well, Charlie, thank you so

much for coming on. It's always a pleasure to talk to you in any capacity, and I'm just happy to have had you on. Thanks for having me and listeners like, um, I know we had a ranging conversation here, but when this airs, we have been going through a few years of pandemic stuff and disruption, and there's a lot of

uncertainty in the air. I just hope that in the midst of all of it, you sort of point your attention and your heart and your dreams to where you really want to go, and use that as an organizing principle for how you set your goals in the new year and look at your schedule and not just being a place to where you're accepting the givens that are right in front of you, because if you do that, you're going to keep getting what you're getting. Awesome. Thank you,

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