Important and Urgent

I've been thinking a lot lately about my work. One of the advantages of journaling is that it gives you a way to check in with yourself and find out what's on your mind. Sometimes that feedback isn't all positive. A few months ago, I went back and read several journal entries. What surprised me most was the sense of urgency that seemed to permeate nearly all of my recent journal entries.

Somehow, I'd drifted into a mindset where every day felt like a race for my life, and my journal entries reflected that. The Eisenhower Matrix explains that we can put most things in a two-axis grid.

If you ever go down the rabbit hole of productivity literature, this is one of the first things you'll stumble across. The critical point here is that the Important/Unimportant axis is entirely separate from the Urgent/Not Urgent axis. Indeed, one of the big lessons of the Eisenhower Matrix is that doing important work that is not urgent is one of the best places you can spend your time.

I knew and understood this, but looking back at journal entries, it became clear that I'd turned the Eisenhower Matrix into the Eisenhower line in my head.

I got in the habit of thinking of all critical work as urgent and all unimportant work as not urgent. This mindset led to all sorts of bad habits on my part:

1. I was looking at all my important work as urgent. That's silly. Most of my important work is not urgent at all. Nevertheless, I'd been adding a level of anxiety for no good reason.

2. With the increased anxiety, I felt more stress than I should. That made me think I should back off so much "urgent" work. Think about that for a moment. I told myself to do less critical work because of this urgency/important trap I'd laid for myself. I was tying myself in knots over that because I'd forgot to separate urgency from importance.

3. I had some small personal items fall through the cracks. They were not essential tasks, but they had some urgency. My linkage of priority with urgency worked in the opposite direction, too, at my own peril.

The truth is that there is no relationship between importance and urgency. Those are two attributes entirely separate from one another. So I've taken steps to disabuse myself. Specifically, I've added to my journal prompts the question, "Where have I created false urgency?" Forcing myself to answer that question daily has helped, and things are more in balance again. I've turned the line back into a matrix.

So often, we get hung up on little things like this that wreak all sorts of havoc. The difficulty isn't usually course-correcting once you find the problem; the difficulty is noticing and identifying the problem in the first place.

Useful Complexity

I’ve been thinking about the many emails I have received about my recent posts about my status board. I wrote about this on Monday, but that only spurred another round of email from folks that can be summarized as a concern for useless complexity.

In summary, I already have systems to manage projects and tasks, but recently I’ve been using a personal status board to give me an overview of what’s on my plate and its current status. This is all data already in my existing systems but not as accessible to my visually-biased brain as a big diagram.

All of these folks writing to me are not coming from a place of criticism so much as legitimate curiosity. Why would I add one more thing to managing projects rather than spending that time doing projects? From my perspective, this status board was born out of frustration (and underlying anxiety) that, despite my systems, I didn’t have a way of quickly seeing everything and where it stands. I have many oars in the water, and the various threads of my life are very different. I added the complexity of the board to address this problem. The status board is, for me, what I would call ”useful complexity”.

I understand the drive for simplicity. A simple solution is, nearly always, superior to a complex one. But at the same time, a simple solution can also only get you so far.

While in law school, I had one job: stay in the top 20% and keep my scholarship. I thought about it every day. I didn’t have a job. No wife. No kids. Really no commitments except testing in the top 20%. To make things even more interesting, in law school (at least my law school), there was only one test at the end of the semester. Particularly at the beginning, I had no idea if I was any good or bad at being a law student. None of us did.

So with a single goal every day, my system was pretty simple. I wrote three things down on my napkin each morning. I stuck it in my pocket. I didn’t go to bed until they were done. Trust me, I came to appreciate the benefits of simplicity during those years.

Now my life is much more complex. I have clients that rely on me, customers that buy things from me, partners and team members that depend on me, and a family that needs me. Complexity in obligations begets complexity in management.

Ultimately, that led me down the road of creating one more bit of complexity in how I manage my projects. It was not some desire to fiddle, but a genuine need for another tool to make sure I don’t blow it.

Whether something like a status board makes sense depends entirely on where you exist on that spectrum between 1991 and 2021 Sparky. I think the real lesson I’ve taken from all this feedback is not to be afraid to add useful complexity, provided it is actually useful. So long as the bang is bigger than the buck, you‘re okay. I probably spend less than 30 minutes a week managing the status board, and in exchange, I no longer feel that where-the-hell-is-everything anxiety.

Maybe one day, things will slow down for me, and I will be able to turn the complexity knob down with some of these tool. But for now, they are making me better, not worse. My lesson is not to be biased toward simplicity or complexity but instead to be intentional about where I draw those lines for myself.

Where are you drawing those lines? Are you always looking for the most complex solution? Are you worshipping at the church of simplicity only to fail at your commitments? These are both slippery slopes and only something you can manage if you pay attention.

Project Status Board

I recently read Cal Newport's A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload . One of the things Newport talks about in the book is finding alternatives to email for different kinds of work. He explained that as a college professor, he manages graduate students using a Trello-based Kanban board.

While it has nothing to do with email or collaboration, this got me thinking about how I'm managing my various projects when wearing my lawyer, podcaster, blogger, and field guide producer hats. Traditionally, I keep lists of active projects in a text file (currently in Obsidian). I tag all active projects in OmniFocus as an "Active Project" and then set a custom perspective to surface only active projects.

But I also know that I think visually, and the idea of a Kanban-style status board for my projects does have a certain appeal to me. So over the weekend I went down the rabbit hole of the current crop of Kanban-style apps. There is a lot out there. Trello, monday, and Notion all look like they're up to the job. But in this case, I'm looking to make something that only I'll be tracking. (I do my team-based stuff in Basecamp.) Because I don't need it to collaborate, it doesn't need to be a web service.

One of the Newport book stories was about the copper works at the Pullman railcar factory and how, in the early 20th century, they made what could be considered a big spreadsheet on the wall of the factory to track projects and labor. Again, because I don't need to share this with anyone on the Internet, I considered doing something like this with a whiteboard in my studio, but I also wanted to figure out if my solution could show up on mobile devices and link to my projects. Also, I have this gigantic monitor, so I figured I could use all of that screen real estate. I experimented with Pages and Numbers but ultimately built my project status board using OmniGraffle.

OmniGraffle has a great set of alignment tools. I made a standard rounded rectangle box in which I can list the project's name and, if there is a related OmniFocus project, I included a small OmniFocus icon. Using OmniGraffle's linking tools (and some contextual-computing-style linking), I added a link directly to the related OmniFocus project on the OmniFocus icon. Then the full project rectangle gets a separate link to the project document in Obsidian. I can re-arrange the blocks as needed and, when done, I put the OmniGraffle document in preview mode (Option-Command-P). This blows the diagram up to full-screen size, and all of the embedded links are live so that I can jump from there to any specific project or OmniFocus document. On the macro level, I've also included links to the specific locations in Obsidian, OmniFocus, Basecamp, and Airtable, where appropriate. Here is the final product with a lot of confidential data blurred out. You can still get the idea.

View fullsize

Click to enlarge.

So now I have three screens on my Mac. The left screen is Fantastical in full-screen mode showing the week view with 14 days. This is where I block time and plan future days. The center screen has no full-screen apps. Instead, it has all my windows from my working apps. (How I arrange that is a post for another day.) And the third screen, to the right, is my OmniGraffle generated project status board. I'm only a few days into using this status board, but I can already tell I'll be keeping it. Another nice benefit of doing this in OmniGraffle and storing it in iCloud is that I'm equally able to view and edit the status board on iPhone and iPad with the mobile version of OmniGraffle.

The Never-Ending Inertia of Habits

I've been thinking a lot lately about habits. I think most of us have it wrong about habits. We think of habits as these little behaviors we intentionally build into our own selves when the need arises.

While we may think that habits are intentionally formed, habits are more often unintentionally formed. Things like getting french fries on the way home from the office, planting yourself in front of the TV for hours at a time, and hitting the snooze button are all habits unintentionally formed. The unintentional ones are the most insidious because they check all the habit boxes (cue, craving, response, reward) without the human being conscious of them arising.

Then one day, you wake up and realize you can't stop eating french fries. You waste way too much of your time in front of the television. You can't get out of bed in the morning. And you don't know why.

Put simply, habits are always forming. The train never stops. Perhaps even more important than being intentional about forming new habits is being aware of all the habits you have already formed, many of which are self-destructive. I have tried to pull this intentionality to the front by making a list of all habits I'm observing in myself (some good, lots bad) and then trying to rewire myself where appropriate. This will take a while, but awareness is definitely the first step.

Leveraging COVID Constraints

I can't help but feel things will be a lot more normal-leaning in the next six months as the COVID vaccines make their way into arms, and we, collectively, finally get the upper hand on this damn virus. Kids will go back to school. People will go back to work. We'll be more social with one another. At least one can hope.

Assuming that is true, I've been taking stock lately of all the changes I've made to my life throughout the pandemic due to the constraints it brought. Once life gets back to life as normal, I don't want to necessarily abandon all of the changes I made during lockdown. Maybe you shouldn't either.

Several of the changes I've made to how I work have turned out to be substantial improvements over how I was getting things done pre-COVID. For example, having my kids and wife back home 24/7 means I had to be very particular about scheduling when I record podcasts, screencasts, and videos. This actually resulted in me getting more consistent recording work done than when I had free reign to do it whenever I wanted. I'm now making a list of the positive changes I've made during lockdown and figuring out how to keep those parts when things get more normal.

As far as tech, this is not rocket science. I'm just doing it in a text file. I've got the idea to build this list in the back of my mind and, as I go through the days and encounter changes I would like to keep, write them down. Ultimately, I'll incorporate check-ins for myself to make sure I keep up with the new habits in the future via OmniFocus.

The Essential Weekly Review

Lately, the Focused podcast has been covering planning, goals, and roles. I think, overall, we don’t spend enough time checking in with ourselves. This is true on an emotional basis (which is why I think journaling and meditation are a great idea). It’s also true on a more strategic level, which I is why I do a weekly review every week.

As you go through your days, it is easy to get lost in the weeds with your task lists and calendars. You need to take a step back and make sure that the windmills you are tilting at actually relate to what gives your life meaning. It is so easy to get off track.

I like to think of weekly reviews as compass checks. If you’ve ever been hiking, you know how important it is to make sure you are actually going in the direction you intend. For that, you’ll need to check your compass. The more frequent you check that compass, the more likely you are not to stray.

So once a week I sit down and look at the roles in my life and how I’m doing. I write down a few words, but more importantly, I force myself to do that compass check and make sure I’m actually marching in the right direction.

I also do monthly and quarterly reviews, and maybe I’ll write about those another day. But one of the best ways to keep yourself on course is to adopt your own weekly review. Put simply, once a year (or twelve times a year) isn’t enough. Fifty-two times a year is much more helpful. Moreover, once, you get rolling with a weekly review process, you’ll find it doesn’t take an extraordinary amount of time. My weekly review takes about an hour. Think about all the dumb things you do in a week that take an hour and give one of those up. I guarantee you a weekly review will be worth it.

So here are a few tips if you are interested in trying it out for yourself:

1. Set an Appointment

   Schedule the time, and treat it as you would an appointment with someone else. The weekly review is way more valuable than most meetings. By putting it on the calendar, you are dramatically improving your chances of actually doing it.

2. Have an Agenda

   My weekly review starts with an audit of my roles (as discussed in this week’s Focused episode). How am I doing as a dad, a brother, a MacSparky, a healthy human? I take each role and look at how I’m doing and how I could improve. I also ask myself if I’m generally making progress on that role.

After that, I have some weekly prompts that I ask myself generally. It’s a long list, and I don’t answer every question every week, but instead use the list as a jumping off point when something strikes me. A few of the questions, to give you an idea, are as follows:

• What was the best use of my time this week?

• What was the worst use of my time?

• What’s my biggest challenge right now, and what should I do about it?

• What can delegate this week?

• What frogs will I eat in the next week? (This is a reference to the Mark Twain quote, “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”)

• What am I looking forward to?

These questions have changed over time, as has everything else about my weekly review. Once you start doing a weekly review, you’ll find ways to change and modify it to your needs. You just need to start and go from there.

Most importantly, when doing a weekly review, take on the role of a supportive friend and not overcritical parent. It is so easy to beat up on yourself in this process. A few weeks ago I fell into a news-cycle doom-scrolling hell and got almost nothing done. I acknowledged that in my review and made plans to turn things around the following week ... and I did! Don’t be hard on yourself, be supportive.

I find it interesting that, for me, most weekly reviews are helpful in clearing out all those background processes in my brain and setting me up for a successful week. But once in a while, a weekly review becomes much more when a prompt question unlocks a problem or issue that was lurking just below the surface. You won’t get to those sorts of problems until you specifically look for them.

If you haven’t tried weekly reviews, I would ask you to commit to a ten-week experiment. Ten weeks isn’t a long time, but will be long enough for you to see the benefit of a weekly compass check.

Boxing in the News

I have always been pretty good about not letting social media get in the way of being productive. For whatever reason, I don’t easily fall into the Twitter infinity pool. I discovered in 2020, however, that this super-power does not apply when it comes to the news. Between COVID and everything else 2020 brought, I found myself spinning into multiple hours of reading and consuming news coverage too many times. I thought I had it licked by the end of the year, but last week relieved me of any such delusion.

The Trouble with the News
A certain amount of knowledge of current events is important and can be helpful. From watching the news, I have been inspired to donate money and time to worthwhile causes. I also think it is important, on a personal level, to understand what is going on in the world. When I was growing up, the news was typically a half-hour program viewed by networks as a civic duty more than a profit center.

That has changed however. Now there are fully 24/7 networks on whatever band of the political spectrum you want. These networks are built around the premises of sucking you in and keeping you there. It is very much a profit thing, and they are good at winding you up to stick around for that next segment/hour/day.

While some news is good, too much news is bad. There comes a point where you stop learning about current events and instead become zombified by them. Too much news can poison you.

So I’ve started taking steps. First, I put a box around the news. I try to keep news consumption down to 30 minutes a day. There are lots of ways to do this, but one way I’ve found useful is the Reuters app on the Apple TV. You can log into it and get the day’s news boiled down to as little as 10 minutes. It then gives you a summary of national and world news, and once it finishes, it finishes. It doesn’t ask you to stick around.
Another practice I’ve been working on when watching the news is to do a little internal check-in once I turn the news off. “How am I feeling right now?” “How agitated am I?” “If I’m wound up, is there anything I can do to make a difference?” I also try to disconnect after watching the news. I’ll go make some music, pull some weeds in the garden, or take the dog for a walk. Then I can get back to work with a clear head.

If you’re like me and susceptible to the news infinity pool, take some times to build your own box for the news.

The Hustle Is Dead to Me

For the longest time, I proudly considered myself part of “the hustle”. I always kept many oars in the water, and they were all paddling, seemingly at once. Time for reflection or rest was for wimps.

I grew up with that work ethic, and I never questioned it. Over the last several years, I have thought a lot more about how I spend my time and what are truly my priorities. As a result, I find myself spending a lot more time on the things most important to me and a lot less time on everything else. I am no longer a rowboat. I am a speed boat with comfy chairs.

It’s only recently, with this new insight, that I have come back to this idea of “the hustle.” With a little wisdom and understanding, I now realize that “the hustle” is dumb.

The rules, as taught to me, were wrong. It is not he-who-works-most wins. It is he-who-focuses-on-what-is-most-important who wins.

The Relationship Between Task Lists and Calendars

I've written about hyper-scheduling and using my calendar to keep myself in check when planning tasks. Those posts often get questions from readers about the exact relationship between my calendar and my task list. If you keep both a calendar and a task list, it can get confusing to figure out what goes where. Of course, you know the dentist appointment goes on the calendar, but if you are going to get the most out of that calendar, it should be used for much more.

Your task list should be the keeper of all tasks. It is the full inventory of things you plan to do. If, however, you're like me, that inventory is pretty full. There is no way I'm going to wake up one day and complete every task on my list. Honestly, there are years worth of work in my OmniFocus database.

The purpose of the task list is to bring order to that chaos and give you a framework to hang current and future tasks and keep them in perspective. The goal is that when you plan your days and weeks, you can easily pull the wheat from chafe in that task list and know that out of all of those things, which are the ones that move the needle for you right now. Figuring out what is essential right now is the entire reason I've invested my time in mastering OmniFocus (and made the OmniFocus Field Guide). I want to get to the tasks that need my time with the smallest time investment on a daily basis.

It's at that point that my calendar joins in the dance. Once I have picked my tasks for the day or week, I need to plan when I will accomplish them. To do this, I need to answer a few hard questions:

1. How long will this take?
2. Do I have that kind of time available?
3. Exactly when will I give it that time?

Let's break that down further.

How long with this take?

As humans, we are generally terrible at estimating how long it takes to get something done. We usually vastly underestimate the amount of time required. If this is new to you, I recommend taking your initial time estimate and doubling it. Let's say one of your on-deck tasks is a client proposal, and you immediately think "one hour". Make it two. You can always scale back later, but if you are using calendar blocks and they are too short, you will fail at it. If it ends up taking one and a half hour to make that client proposal and you have a one hour block, you've already crashed. If instead, you had a two-hour block reserved, you can take a break for thirty minutes and play with the dog or work on something else. Bad time estimates are where most people have trouble when calendaring tasks.

You may find that you also have a set of essential but small tasks that also need to get done. I don't block time for small tasks, but I will block time to handle a pile of small tasks. In my case, I often have a one-hour calendar block called "Legal Flags". Those are small flagged client items in my OmniFocus database that I can lump together and get through quickly.

Do I have that kind of time available?

This process starts with a small list of tasks and you setting time estimates for them. Even with a short list of tasks, you may find you run out of time. There are only so many hours in a day. If you have realistic time estimates, you may find that you don't have enough time for all of your selected tasks. That's okay. It happens to me nearly every week. You then have to decide what gets done now and what has to wait for later. This process is the payoff of combining your tasks with your calendar. It allows you to be realistic about what can (and can not) get done in the time you have. It's the difference between a realistic list of tasks for the week that you can feel good about finishing and an unrealistic list that may sap all of your energy by Wednesday as you realize you have no hope of getting it all done. I guaranty you will get more done with a realistic list than an unrealistic one.

Exactly when will I do it?

The final step is to put those task blocks on your calendar. They are just as crucial as dentist appointments and will help you keep on track throughout the week in getting those most important tasks done.

So in answer to the question of what goes on my task list and what goes on my calendar, I'd say while all of my tasks are in my task list, only a select few graduate to the calendar. I'd also avoid going through this process for tasks any further than a week out. Everything is continuously in motion, and it isn't easy to know what will be the priority more than a few days from now.

Want to see what technology I use to pull this off? There's a post for that.

Personal Retreat Technology

A few days ago, I published a video about my personal retreat experience. Since then, I’ve had many people ask me to explain further what technology I used. I’m about to explain what I did, but before I do so, there is a good argument that you shouldn’t take any technology on a personal retreat. It’s so easy to let the tech take over.

However, in my case I wanted to do a lot of typing and dictating, and tuning out infinity bucket apps has never been a problem for me so I brought along some Apple gear. If you want to bring technology and are worried you’ll be wasting time in social media instead of doing the hard work of a personal retreat, turn off your WiFi and cellular radios. I didn’t need to get that drastic, but if I’d caught myself lurking on Twitter, I absolutely would have done so. (I also did bring along pen and paper, just in case.)

If you are going to use technology, there are three phases to my version of a personal retreat:

1. Identifying and writing out your roles.

2. Asking tough questions about each role.

3. Planning for action in relation to each role.

For steps one and two, you could do this with any tool for managing words. A text editor would be fine. Apple Notes or even TextEdit could get the job done. The next level would be an app that supports headings and organization, like Drafts, Ulysses, or even BBEdit. As I explained in the video, the process is very non-linear. You’ll find yourself bouncing around among roles and questions a lot. For that reason, another excellent tool for this process would be an outliner or mind mapping app with both the ability to add plenty of text and folding branches. My two favorite apps for this process would be OmniOutliner or MindNode.

For this past retreat, I spent the first two days using Roam Research. I’ve been experimentally using Roam for a few months. It’s a powerful tool that combines the ability to turn anything into an outline with the ability to link any outline block in your Roam document (“graph” in Roam parlance) to any other outline block in your Roam graph with no friction. Roam is an excellent tool for this process … except for its immaturity. While Roam is a bit of a mind-bender and makes connecting thoughts very easy, it is still very new, and there are a bunch of parts to Roam that are not ready for prime time. My biggest concern is the lack of security. As I started to pour my heart into the retreat document, I became concerned about lack fo security in Roam, a web app, and ended up towards the end blocking and copying into OmniOutliner, which lacks Roam’s cool backlinks but has better security. (We’re going to be digging in on these research tools on an upcoming episode of Mac Power Users, and I’ve got a lot more on my mind when it comes to Roam and its competitors.)

For part three, turning my retreat ideas into action, I relied heavily on OmniFocus and Drafts. A lot of the process toward the end was writing plans out for myself and my collaborators. All of those started as blank text files in Drafts and grew into much more as I worked through the process.

I also set up a series of new repeating tasks and projects in OmniFocus to help keep myself accountable for some of my planned changes. Using a set of custom perspectives and review frequencies, OmniFocus can help keep me honest.

Looking back, my personal retreat technology wasn’t particularly novel or demanding. You need a place to write words down. You need a place to turn words into future actions. To go much beyond would probably just be a distraction on a retreat.

Mistakes Book

Dave Hamilton and Shannon Jean have been making The Small Business Show, a podcast about … well … small businesses, for five years now. It’s a great show, and I’ve even guested on it.

Recently Dave and Shannon released a book called We Love Mistakes that details so many potholes small business people often fall in. If you run a small business, or better yet, are thinking about starting a small business, this is required reading.

Course Corrections

When looking at yourself and how you get through your day, it’s easy to get hung up on big things, but so often the big things don’t happen overnight. They take time, planning, and money. And that is assuming you have any control over the big things.

In contrast, little course corrections can happen every day. They are easy to implement, and they take little effort to put into action. Best of all, small course corrections, even just a 1-degree turn, make a big difference over time.

Whenever I feel stuck and unable to move the icebergs in my life, I try to step back and start making little course corrections, so the iceberg is no longer a problem.

Maker, Manager, Consumer

I’ve been thinking lately about my journaling workflows. I’m increasingly using digital tools for daily journaling and questioning a lot of assumptions. One of those is about the purpose of journaling my day. Am I doing it to figure out what I was doing at 2:00 p.m. on a given day, or something else? The more I think about it, for me, the answer is something else.

Now I’m looking at my days not in terms of what I was doing at a specific time, but instead what I was doing with my time. I’m usually wearing one of three hats: maker, manager, or consumer.

The Maker

Whenever I’m adding something, I’m making. I interpret this broadly. Making Field Guides, writing blog posts, doing client work, and making music are examples of things I make. While a lot of the things I make are shared with the world, others aren’t. Whether it’s for others or for me, I’m still making.

The Manager

For Maker Sparky to produce, Manager Sparky needs to wrangle everything else. This is both an essential support role and an easy trap to fall into.

The Consumer

When I’m not making or managing, I’m consuming. This ranges from watching Star Wars to reading scholarly articles. It’s all-consuming. This isn’t bad. It’s one of the best ways I come up with ideas for Maker Sparky.

My purpose in journaling is tracking how I’m spending my time in these roles. I don’t view any of them as inherently good or bad. The magic is in the balance. While making is most important to me, both managing and consuming enable making. I want to spend more time making than consuming. I need to spend time managing, but not go down the management/productivity rabbit hole so far that I don’t make anything.

So with this in mind, I’ve been focusing my journaling lately not so much on what I had for lunch, but what I make, manage, and consume. Using tags, I can then see it on a daily, weekly, and even monthly basis. If I look at my week and realize I spent most of my time sharpening pencils and sorting tasks (manager) and not enough time producing content (maker), I know I need to make changes. You can get similar information by tracking your time, but I think there is something more concrete looking at a list of things you’ve made, managed, and consumed over a period of time.

Implementing this isn’t difficult. You could create a text file and start making a list. You can do the same thing with a pad of paper and a pencil, or, if you’re using a digital journal like Day One, add tags for #maker, #manager, and #consumer. The real benefit of this comes in planning and review. If you’re going to track yourself as a maker, manager, and consumer, you should have some expectations and a feedback mechanism for living up to them.

Waking Up and Sleeping

I was recently reading Benjamin Hardy’s article about waking up early. He makes many good points, but I can’t help think he is missing a huge caveat. While waking up early can help you, not getting enough sleep will wreck you.

Not getting enough sleep messes with your body in so many ways. Memory issues, trouble concentrating, mood changes, weight gain, and balance issues are just the start of the list. Not getting enough sleep also lowers your libido. We’re talking less sex, people! Seriously, a doctor friend once explained it to me simply: “Not getting enough sleep is like operating the human body while intoxicated.”

I’m all for playing with your schedule. If you need to get up at 3:00 a.m. to be the best you, then absolutely do it. But if you think you can do that without getting enough sleep, you’re kidding yourself.

Time Saved. Time Lost.

I have been thinking about how the coronavirus pandemic has changed my life. There are lots of big and small ways. Have you thought about how the pandemic has changed time for you?

There were things you used to spend your time on, but where are you now saving time? That long commute is on hiatus. The drop-in visitors to your office to “shoot the breeze” is much less likely. If you think about it, there are lots of ways you may be saving time now that you weren’t before.

On the flip side, what are the new time sucks in your life? These days “Zoom Meeting” is becoming just as dirty of a phrase as “Powerpoint Presentation” was before all this madness started. 

Everyone has their own accounting of time gained and time lost over the past several months, but if you’re not aware of your own, you should be. A half-hour commute to work equates to five found hours per week, 20 hours per month, 240 hours over a year. That’s six weeks in your pocket. You could do a lot with that time. The question is whether you will recognize you have it and what you will do with it.

How Much News Is Too Much News?

I have always prided myself on being someone who does not need to delete apps. You know, someone who deletes Twitter or Instagram every few months so they can avoid getting lost in that and instead focus on creating something. I am lucky enough that I can put limits on those things—or at least I thought I could. It turns out that the news can be my undoing.

The year 2020 has been a doozy. Getting lost in the news is a lot easier this year than in years past, and I am spending too much time on it. Keeping informed is good. Reading different versions of the same story repeatedly is nothing more than a fancy bit of procrastination. When I was growing up, the news was contained for us. It came on in the evening and lasted about 30 minutes. With 24-hour news channels and so many websites, now the news can get crammed down your throat like Homer Simpson’s donuts. This is bad for several reasons:

• It takes a lot of time. I need to make a living and support my family. Excessive time with the news gets in the way of that.

• It closes my mind. With the way modern algorithms work, once I read one story, the computers decide what kind of news I like and try to feed me more of that. The longer I go, the more biased and extreme the feed gets.

• It wipes me out. This year. This year. Do I need to explain how reading too much news drains me of the will and energy to do anything productive?

So, I am taking steps. I am rerunning my timers, this time with the idea of putting a 30-minute box around the news every day. Once I hit 30 minutes, I am done. Rather than get lost in the news, I would rather use that time for something else. Maybe I can spend a bit of it trying to make things better.

Time Tracking with Timeular

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Lately, I’ve been trying a new time tracking gizmo, a Timeular device. It’s a polygon-shaped piece of plastic and electronics that connects to my iPhone. I can assign a different task to each side, and when I switch modes, say going from screencasting to legal clients, I just flip the gizmo to put the briefcase icon (legal) sunny side up, and the iPhone app starts tracking time toward the new task.

It’s simple, easy to set up, and an excellent way to track time, particularly, if you find yourself doing a lot of work away from your computer, where a software solution (like Timing) can track time for you. Indeed, I find it a nice compliment to Timing and use the Timeular primarily to track moving the needle time.

I’m only a week in, but I haven’t thrown it out the window yet. The Timeular gizmo works great and is entirely accurate, provided I remember to spin it to the next task before switching gears. Of course, it is in that human-based step that things usually fall off the rails. I haven’t turned it into a habit yet, but I can see the benefit of this device and its simplicity. For me, the trick is keeping it in sight. I need to move it between my two desks and always have it just within sight at least, until a habit kicks in.

Regardless, I think I like the Timeular device, and I want to keep at it to see how much it can help me keep track of that ever-elusive moving the needle time. I bought mine on sale from Timeular directly. Mine is the basic package with no monthly subscription. They have a summer sale going on right now so if you’re interested …

Recovery Day

One of the oldest (and best) pieces of productivity advice is to always plan on a recovery day after a trip. It is such an obvious idea that I hesitate to even post about it. Nevertheless, it is advice that I seldom followed … until now.

The problem for me wasn’t that I didn’t acknowledge the importance of having time after a trip to catch up. Indeed, I so often crash in terms of my workload after trips that it seems like a running bit on the Focused podcast.

The problem is that I never thought about recovery day early enough. It always seemed to slip my mind right up until the night I’d return home from a conference or vacation and realize that my calendar for the next day was an impossible concoction of items that cropped up in my absence mixed in with a full schedule of meetings and other deadlines I’d scheduled before I left. Past Sparky screwed over present Sparky ... yet again.

The hallelujah moment for me came with this most recent trip where I, for the first time in my life, scheduled an honest to goodness recovery day. Indeed, I spent all day yesterday with no appointments and no scheduled meetings or calls. Instead, I just caught up with the backlog and brush fires that cropped up over the last few days as I have been traveling and making a little time to spend with my wife.

The trick, for me, was to schedule the recovery day months ago. I have a checklist when I’m planning a trip. It has lots of things like” buy airplane tickets” and” reserve a hotel room”. After my most recent post-trip scheduling debacle, I added a new entry, “schedule recovery day”. 

So several months ago when I was making my initial pass at the list for the Relay 5th anniversary trip, I scheduled August 26, 2019, as my recovery day following that trip. It was a full-day event, and with it sitting there, squatting on my precious calendar real estate, I was constantly reminded of it in the weeks leading up to the trip. When folks would ask me to schedule some time for a meeting or take on a new commitment, past Sparky actually started looking out for future Sparky. Unlike virtually every other trip in my life, I treated yesterday, the day after, as untouchable. Of course, it worked. Without any commitments or unnecessary deadlines, I was able to catch up with those items that generally plague me for days (and sometimes weeks) after a trip.

Today normal programming resumes and I’m back to deadlines and meetings, but I’m doing it without the emotional baggage of feeling behind from the trip. My little experiment about the recovery day worked exactly as well as anybody who’s ever tried a recovery day could (and did) tell me it would… brilliantly.

If all goes according to plan, I have only one trip left this year, which is, thankfully, vacation. Nevertheless, I have already scheduled my recovery day for when I return.

My Six Month Planning Wallpaper

I talked about planning wallpaper recently on Focused. I’ve been doing this for a few months now and find it a good way for me to keep my big projects rolling. All of these items are already in my calendar. I know these dates in my head. I think about these plans all the time. Nevertheless, the reason I go to the trouble of putting this on my desktop is to give me a nudge when I need it most. As part of my monthly review process, I open the file, delete the past month, move the others around, and add a new month to the end so I’ve got an updated planning wallpaper heading into the new month. I have multiple monitors but just keep this on my iMac, center screen.

The quote at the top is from my friend, Merlin Mann on one of his podcasts. (I have no idea which one.) I first saw it in a wallpaper designed by Chase Reeves (but I can’t find it anymore). Regardless, it still inspires me when I’m feeling the resistance. Merlin does have a knack for words. I used a chisel because I felt that was the tool that best represents the sentiment. If you wanted to modernize it, a jackhammer could also work. Grin

Several folks asked me to share the wallpaper so here is a version of it. I’ve included the OmniGraffle project below. If you spent a little time on it, you could recreate something like it with Preview, but it’d be more work. Rather than make this a full sized desktop wallpaper, this is actually much smaller. I just center it on the screen and then, on my Mac, match the background color of the rest of the desktop to match the background of the text. Enjoy.

Planning Wallpaper OmniGraffle File

Moving the Needle

Do you ever have one of those days where it feels like you worked all day and yet got nothing done? It happens to us all, and it can be frustrating. We all have things we’d rather do than be working and there can be nothing more frustrating than realizing you’ve squandered a day on nonsense. One of the most important questions to ask yourself at the end of each day is, “How much time did I spend doing my most important work?” If we’re not mindful of that question, too often, we fall short.

I experience this all too often, and I got thinking about the problem. Hyper-scheduling helps but just because I’ve set aside time, doesn’t always mean that time gets spent wisely. How do I become more mindful of the work that matters when I’m in the trenches?

Lately, I’ve been doing a different sort of time tracking experiment that’s been helping me out. 

We’ve talked a lot lately about meaningful work on the Focused podcast and the phrase “moving the needle” has come up. I like that phrase, and it got me thinking about what moves the needle for me. What are the things that, at the end of the day, I want to know I accomplished? I’ve come up with a practice that helps me get better at that.

Identify What Moves the Needle

For everyone it’s different, but for me, the work that moves the needle was pretty easy to identify:

1. Work on a Field Guide

2. Writing for MacSparky

3. Producing a Podcast

4. Doing Client Legal Work

I’ve probably got more needle-movers than most people because my work is so diverse. The exercise of identifying this was important because it was the first step to putting this work at the front of my mind. I’m not sure determining what moves the needle for you will be as easy as it was for me. I’m at a stage of my career where I’ve been doing this long enough that I already had a pretty good idea. Nevertheless, you need to start by identifying what it is for you.

The obvious criteria for work that moves the needle is that it earns you money. While that is important, I don’t think it is the only, or even necessarily the most important criteria. I’m lucky enough to have work in my life that I enjoy doing and, at the same time, helps others and lets me earn a living. That didn’t happen overnight. If you are in a time of transition, what moves the needle for you may not be what pays you the most but instead pushes you forward to the next thing. The important thing at this first step is that you need to have that conversation with yourself and figure it out.

Also, what moves the needle today isn’t necessarily what will move the needle for you in one (or ten) years. This is an ongoing discussion with yourself.

Regardless, once you figure out what moves the needle, you need to keep yourself honest.

Track Your Work that Moves the Needle

At the beginning of the week, I lay out out a page in my notebook with a series of lines for each activity that moves the needle for me. Here’s my page from a few weeks ago. (PFG is a secret project. Grin.)

I do this with pen and paper, but you could do this digitally with a spreadsheet, or a text file, or just about any application where you can write things down. 

At the beginning of the week, I just put a series of hash marks on a grid page. There are for grids between each hash (representing 15 minutes) and 6 hours on a line. I fill in the line as I get work done. Here is this week’s page, as of Tuesday afternoon.

As I go through each day and spend time on work that moves the needle, I log it on this page. Consider it time-tracking light. I’m not keeping track of how much time I spend doing everything. I’m just keeping track of the time I spend moving the needle. This has several benefits.

First, I can see how much I’m getting done on the work that matters. That feels good, particularly when you end a day and know that you spent a substantial portion of your day doing this type of work.

Second, you have a mechanism to hold yourself accountable, not just at the end of the day but throughout the day. The process of finishing a few hours of client work and then logging it on this page comes with its own unique blend of happy chemicals in my brain. Likewise, when I get to mid-morning and realize I haven’t logged any work for the day that moves the needle, I get a kick in the pants to fix that.

I just started doing this in April, and I’m admittedly still in the honeymoon phase of this practice, but I can tell you it is working. It helps me stay focused throughout the day, and my enthusiasm for the idea is even higher now than when I first started doing it. The question of getting my most important work done is much more present in my mind now, and that has obvious benefits for me both mentally and in terms of actual production.

This practice is not meant as a substitute for time tracking. You can do this whether or not you time track. The point, at least to me, is to give myself an easy accountability measure for the work I want to get done every work day. I think the trick is to keep it simple so you can stick with it.

One of the effects on me is that I’m more vigilant about asking myself the question, “Does this move the needle” throughout the day and even before agreeing to additional projects. 

But Not All Work Moves the Needle

There still is some work that both must get done and doesn’t move the needle. I think plenty about that work as well every time I set time aside to do it. This is work that gets in the way and, with this practice, I’m more motivated than ever to throw it overboard. I’ve got a series of questions I ask myself every time I pick up this type of work:

1. Does this need to be done at all?

2. If it must be done, can I automate/delegate it?

3. If I must do it, what is the least intrusive way for me to accomplish it?

There are a couple of insights I’ve had on those category three jobs. First, I’ve been intentionally scheduling time for that stuff when I’m the least productive. For me, that’s after 3 pm on most days. Also, I find I get that type of work done faster if I pile it all together and set aside a few hours to do it, rather than picking it up piecemeal throughout the day and week. I’m currently experimenting with ganging all that work into one block in the week (currently Wednesday afternoon). I’m not sure if that is going to work or not, but it sure feels better knowing I have set aside a place for that work during the rest of the week.

Being deliberate about my work that moves the needle and tracking that daily has had immediate consequences for me. I’m doing better at getting client work done while at the same time, I shipped a new field guide. It’s working for me. I hope it works for you as well.

This whole system of moving the needle isn’t some stroke of inspiration from nowhere but instead results from me reading and talking to others about my own challenges and obstacles to getting my work done. Significant influences on me in coming up with this include Mike Schmitz, Shawn Blanc, Matt Ragland, and Michael Hyatt, but those are only the tip of the iceberg. Also, Mike and I speak about this at length in Focused 74.