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

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

Sample Planning Wallpaper Mac Main 2019-07.jpg

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

Screen Shot 2019-07-05 at 1.49.19 PM.png

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:

Work on a Field Guide
Writing for MacSparky
Producing a Podcast
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:

Does this need to be done at all?
If it must be done, can I automate/delegate it?
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.

Intentionality

Earlier this month I celebrated my birthday. For a while now I’ve treated my birthday like my own personal New Year’s Day. What I mean by that is I often reflect on what’s working, what’s not working and things I’d like to change going forward. Since going to work for myself, I’ve even expanded on this idea and made a point of taking my birthday off for a bit of introspection. Every year I find it’s a precious day and every year I take it a little bit more seriously.

Working with my pal Mike Schmitz over at the Focused podcast, inspired me to go even deeper this year with my “Birthday retreat”. In the past, I’ve gone to the beach or somewhere unfamiliar to get myself off the grid. This year I had some family plans in the late afternoon and didn’t want to spend the day driving so instead I went to my familiar Starbucks in the early morning along with a paper notebook, a fancy pen, and no technology. I unplugged myself from the Internet, turned my notebook to a clean page and just started writing.

I didn’t have a plan as I got started. Initially I intended to be there an hour or two, but in the end, the process (including a long walk and a nice lunch) was six hours.

The first thing I did was write down at the top of the page,”How am I doing?” I then wrote a small essay in answer to that question concerning each of the various areas of my life. In my case, that was MacSparky, the law practice, relationships, self-care, and overall. Like I said earlier, I didn’t have a plan.

I started with the intention of a sentence or two on each subject and, in my head at least, get all of those areas covered with one page of my notebook. However, when I started writing, things just began to pour out of me, and I quickly realized my arbitrary ideas out page count had to go out the window. Paper is cheap! I wrote for pages and pages. Apparently, I had a lot to get off my chest.

After that, I took a walk.

Then I turned to a new page in wrote a new question, “Where can I get better at this?”

By then I was wise to the fact that this process was going to take a while, so I settled into it. I then took on the same five categories discussed above and wrote at length about areas that I could to improve. I tried to take a growth mindset to the process. Again, I had a lot to say. Having just spent time reflecting on areas I can improve upon, I tried to figure out, constructively, how to turn thoughts into actions (and some new habits).

As I continued using up ink and pages, I noticed a word that kept showing up.

Intentionality

I didn’t start this little retreat with the idea of coming up with a theme for the next year, although I must admit I do like the idea. (Myke Hurley and CGP Grey’s yearly themes make a lot of sense to me.) Regardless, as I continued to write, I realized that I did have a recurring theme relating to things I can improve upon. I need to be more intentional.

Looking back over the last few years, the place I seem to fall down most often is when I dive into a project without thinking or ramble through days (and sometimes weeks) without clear intention. The things I want to fix quite often require me to bring more intention when both making and executing commitments.

I have always considered myself good at avoiding emotional whirlwinds. Partly as a result of lifelong meditation practice but also partly because I don’t get frazzled easily. What surprised me during this little retreat, however, was, upon reflection, the realization of how easily I can let life waylay my intentions.

There is a lot of personal thoughts in my notebook from that day, but here’s one paragraph I’m willing to share:

“Too often, I let the storm of life carry me away. The smallest client thing or smallest distraction will appear and needlessly lay waste to my plans, my focus, and my day.”

That sentence was the big take away for me from my small birthday retreat. Going into this next year, I intended to work on that. I’m not even sure at this point what that means, but I’ve already taken some small steps. I’m trying to give more respect to my carefully laid plans. If I care enough to make a plan, I need an excellent reason to upset it (or something needs to be truly on fire). Also, I’ve decided I am going to be much more intentional about that ever-so-dangerous word, “yes” and not use it going forward without some real reflection and a few night’s sleep.

I’m still figuring out what intentionality means to me. I’ve left some pages in my notebook and am continuing to reflect on this routinely.

Regardless, I find the birthday retreat one of the best things I do every year. Maybe with a little intentionality, I can spend even more time on these types of reflections and getting myself sorted out.

Hyper-Scheduling Feedback

I’ve had a lot of feedback about my prior posts about the hyper-scheduling experiment and implementation details. Here are the prior links:

The Hyper-Scheduling Experiment

Hyper-Scheduling Mechanics

This whole thing has turned into a short series here at MacSparky.com. There may be another post or two about this, but today I’d like to share some of the feedback. I’ve received a surprising amount of email/tweets/feedback on these posts. They fall into several categories:

Hyper-Scheduling is Insane

I recently spoke at the ABA Techshow, and at some point an old lawyer-nerd friend cornered me. “David, are you really doing all that crazy stuff with your schedule?” (That quote is nearly perfect. He didn’t use the word “stuff”.)

This sentiment boils down to a lot of people who have never tried something like this marvelling at what an extraordinary investment of time hyper-scheduling appears to be.

I agree putting something like this in place takes time, particularly when getting the habit started. However, having been doing it now for awhile, the time investment is not nearly high as someone who has never tried it would think. I schedule each day and the end of the day prior. Using the mechanics I explained in the last post, most of the scheduling is simply selecting prior instances in the calendar week view, duplicating the item, and then moving it into place. For me, most days start with some Field Guide Work for two or three hours and most days end with shutting things down and planning the next day and in between comes a whole lot of legal work and podcasting that varies on a daily basis.

A key competent of all of this is having a task management system that can help you keep track of all of your tasks (so you don’t have to) and unearth those priority tasks out of the database on a daily basis. I’m pretty adept at OmniFocus so it usually doesn’t take me long to find those tasks that will get checked off the day before and assign appropriate time blocks to get the job done.

For me, the trickiest part about setting it up is being realistic about how much can be accomplished in the next day and not biting off more than I can chew. The practice of hyper-scheduling however, has provided an excellent tool for me to get better at that skill. At this point, hyper-scheduling takes me about 20 minutes. As explained throughout this series of posts, a 20-minute daily investment for all of these benefits is a no-brainer.

Hyper-Scheduling is Unrealistic

No plan survives contact with the enemy.

–Helmuth von Moltke

This second category of criticism boils down to the above quote. It doesn’t matter how much time you spend scheduling if you walk into the office to find it on fire. I’d generally agree with that criticism. Several times since I’ve started hyper-scheduling, I’ve had days where a true client or family emergency appeared requiring me to sweep aside my carefully laid plans and spend the day manning the fire hose.

I guess the real question for these critics is exactly how often do they find that the office is actually on fire. If that’s a routine thing, I think that is more of a problem with the office than hyper-scheduling. The lawyer equivalent of a fireman is a litigation attorney. I was in that racket for 20 years and can tell you at the time I experienced a lot more fires than I do these days. If you have a job that requires you to put out fires on a daily basis (and you’re okay with that), I don’t think hyper-scheduling is for you.

Conversely, however, I’d ask you to make sure the there truly is a fire. As my law practice has transitioned to a transaction-heavy practice and away from the sausage factory that is modern litigation, before hyper-scheduling I was acting like there were daily wild fires where, in hindsight, there were very few. Too often I’d let the smallest problems derail me. Hyper-scheduling has given me more perspective so that a lot of things that I was earlier treating as four-alarm fires now just gets blocked into some time in the next few days and I’m able to stick with the original plan.

Hyper-Scheduling is Nothing More than Sophisticated Procrastination

One reader wrote me and opined that my hyper-scheduling seemed like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The argument is that Hyper-scheduling is a way to fiddle, instead of doing work. I think this could be true if you were too precious with your scheduling. The minimum block of time for me to deal with a specific problem is usually no less than an hour. I don’t Hyper-Schedule by making a dozen 15-minute project blocks that I then carefully arrange like a jigsaw puzzle. That would be a waste of time. All of the little, important things I do every day get OmniFocus flags and lumped together in the “Capture Flags” block. I agree someone could implement hyper-scheduling in a way that gets too fiddly. However, I think someone that gives it the smallest amount of thought and deliberation could avoid that trap.

Hyper-Scheduling Doesn’t Actually Give You any Additional Time

Yup.

This was my own biggest source of resistance to the experiment in the first place. Scheduling myself for ten hours a day does not magically give me 20 hours of work. It’s still just 10 hours. While that is true, adding the planning and deliberation to the day has allowed me to get a lot closer to 10 hours of work done in a 10 hour day where before I was getting more like five or six hours of work done in a 10 hour day because I spent so much time blowing in the wind.

For me, Hyper-Scheduling adds a sense of purpose to the day and lets me be much more deliberate with my time and the projects I spend my time on. Either way, while it’s true this technique doesn’t magically give you additional time, it lets you use the time you do spend on important work much more efficiently.

Hyper-Scheduling is Nothing New

These are my favorite emails. I’ve received lots of affirmation from readers that have been doing this in some form or another for years and ask me, in one way or another, “What took you so long?” Some folks call it block scheduling, others call it fancier things like value-based time management. I’m certainly not the first guy to this party, and I find that comforting.