Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► Is it too late to wish you a happy new year?

00:00:02 ◼   ► I don't think it's too late to wish you a happy Cortexmas.

00:00:05 ◼   ► Yeah, I feel like we need to really do that before, because Cortexmas has happened.

00:00:13 ◼   ► If we say it's going to happen now, that's not true, right? Because there will be more soon.

00:00:18 ◼   ► But we've had... we had a lot of Cortexmases in the last year though, let's be real.

00:00:23 ◼   ► There were a lot of them.

00:00:24 ◼   ► Were there? I don't know. It felt like there were so few.

00:00:28 ◼   ► Cortexmas is such a precious time.

00:00:30 ◼   ► And I guess that ties into your 2017 theme.

00:00:34 ◼   ► Was it? No wait, mine was the year of less, right?

00:00:38 ◼   ► You were like year of something or other that no one could work out.

00:00:41 ◼   ► [Ding]

00:00:42 ◼   ► You don't remember my theme for the year? I'm disappointed.

00:00:44 ◼   ► You don't remember my confusing, poorly articulated theme for the year?

00:00:47 ◼   ► I didn't. No, I didn't remember it.

00:00:49 ◼   ► It's written in front of me.

00:00:51 ◼   ► And I still don't know what it meant.

00:00:53 ◼   ► So we are gonna talk about our yearly themes.

00:00:57 ◼   ► but we're gonna talk about last year's.

00:01:00 ◼   ► We're gonna evaluate how we performed

00:01:03 ◼   ► against our yearly themes.

00:01:05 ◼   ► So we kind of established these in episode 44 of Cortex

00:01:10 ◼   ► and spoke about them a little bit more in episode 45.

00:01:12 ◼   ► If you're catching up, it's probably worth listening

00:01:14 ◼   ► to those as well so you can hear us establish our themes.

00:01:18 ◼   ► My theme of 2017 was the Year of Less,

00:01:22 ◼   ► which was your 2016 theme, right?

00:01:24 ◼   ► that was where that debuted, is the year of less.

00:01:28 ◼   ► - Wow, we've done this for three, this is the third year.

00:01:30 ◼   ► Wow.

00:01:31 ◼   ► - The third time that we've done this.

00:01:32 ◼   ► - It's becoming a real tradition.

00:01:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that the 2016 one wasn't as like

00:01:37 ◼   ► set in stone.

00:01:38 ◼   ► - It wasn't as set in stone?

00:01:39 ◼   ► - But it was just like something you mentioned

00:01:41 ◼   ► that that was what you were thinking about in that year.

00:01:44 ◼   ► Right, but then I think it might have been in 2017

00:01:46 ◼   ► where we started to like think about this as a thing.

00:01:49 ◼   ► - That's when we started to lock ourselves in.

00:01:52 ◼   ► - To get like a real tradition going, which is important.

00:01:54 ◼   ► I guess I find traditions to be very important in podcast

00:01:58 ◼   ► People can look forward to it and it's something that is obviously cool on because I had people even in person tell me

00:02:05 ◼   ► When are you doing the 2018 year theme episode? So people like it. Yeah, I've got to say people people do like it

00:02:12 ◼   ► I had a number of people

00:02:14 ◼   ► Mentioned in person to me as well

00:02:15 ◼   ► Like they were thinking about their own

00:02:17 ◼   ► Themes for the year and I've seen a bunch of chatter on the quartet subreddit about what people are going to do for their own

00:02:22 ◼   ► and themes for the year.

00:02:23 ◼   ► So I do say, I think people like it.

00:02:27 ◼   ► And when we started talking about this,

00:02:29 ◼   ► I'll just again reiterate that I really much prefer

00:02:32 ◼   ► the idea of a theme versus a goal.

00:02:35 ◼   ► I still feel the need right now to be able to back out

00:02:38 ◼   ► and say like, you don't necessarily need a theme every year.

00:02:40 ◼   ► It doesn't need to be a tradition.

00:02:41 ◼   ► We don't absolutely have to do this maybe some year

00:02:43 ◼   ► it doesn't make sense to do.

00:02:44 ◼   ► - Right, but that year will just be the year of no theme.

00:02:47 ◼   ► Right, so that's how that works.

00:02:50 ◼   ► - Right, okay, that's how that works.

00:02:51 ◼   ► that the yearly theme stuff was so much better

00:02:54 ◼   ► than resolutions because--

00:02:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, resolutions are dumb.

00:02:57 ◼   ► - What you are doing is creating a basic idea or framework

00:03:01 ◼   ► that you can build many goals and resolutions

00:03:04 ◼   ► in throughout the year.

00:03:05 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:03:06 ◼   ► - You know, like instead of me saying,

00:03:08 ◼   ► oh, my New Year's resolution is to hire somebody,

00:03:11 ◼   ► it was no, I'm gonna be doing a year of less

00:03:14 ◼   ► and then part of that might be doing this,

00:03:16 ◼   ► but I wanna see how it goes.

00:03:18 ◼   ► So it works way nicer because it's more open-ended.

00:03:21 ◼   ► It's just a phrase as opposed to like a thing

00:03:24 ◼   ► that has an actual like binary yes or no, did I achieve it?

00:03:27 ◼   ► And I think that is a much nicer way

00:03:30 ◼   ► to think about my working life.

00:03:32 ◼   ► So I appreciate that introduction to that idea.

00:03:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's way better for the reasons you said.

00:03:37 ◼   ► I also like the idea that you don't feel as bound by it.

00:03:40 ◼   ► Like if someone sets up a theme for the year

00:03:42 ◼   ► and they realize halfway through the year,

00:03:43 ◼   ► it doesn't make sense.

00:03:45 ◼   ► It's not the same thing as like,

00:03:47 ◼   ► oh, I've set the goal that this is the year

00:03:49 ◼   ► I'm gonna be really healthy

00:03:50 ◼   ► and now I'm just a big fat failure, right?

00:03:51 ◼   ► It's a different thing of like,

00:03:54 ◼   ► I want to adjust the theme midstream.

00:03:56 ◼   ► You know, like it's a much better way

00:03:58 ◼   ► to think about things.

00:03:59 ◼   ► - And again, like I'll say that these are like

00:04:01 ◼   ► my personal feelings on it.

00:04:03 ◼   ► So for my company, we have goals and objectives

00:04:06 ◼   ► that we want to hit, right?

00:04:08 ◼   ► Related around hard numbers and percentage increases

00:04:11 ◼   ► of those numbers.

00:04:12 ◼   ► But for myself personally, I don't really like

00:04:15 ◼   ► to set those really, really rigid goals as such.

00:04:19 ◼   ► And I think it works better.

00:04:21 ◼   ► Like a company is made up of a selection of people

00:04:24 ◼   ► and I feel like that the goals,

00:04:26 ◼   ► if you wanna look at like, oh, what will our revenue be like

00:04:29 ◼   ► or how many listeners will we have, right?

00:04:30 ◼   ► There are types of things.

00:04:32 ◼   ► Setting goals and objectives for those makes sense

00:04:34 ◼   ► because it is vital for the existence of the business

00:04:38 ◼   ► that those things remain or grow,

00:04:40 ◼   ► where like for me personally,

00:04:43 ◼   ► it is not vital to my existence as to whether I,

00:04:46 ◼   ► well, maybe I was gonna say whether I go to the gym

00:04:48 ◼   ► three times a week or twice.

00:04:50 ◼   ► Possibly it is, maybe that's a bad example,

00:04:52 ◼   ► but it is not vital to my existence of like,

00:04:55 ◼   ► oh, how many books am I gonna read this year?

00:04:58 ◼   ► Like, I don't live or die on that metric.

00:05:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, I was just starting to laugh

00:05:04 ◼   ► because I was thinking, yeah,

00:05:06 ◼   ► a theme is personal to an individual,

00:05:08 ◼   ► which is also why it wouldn't make sense

00:05:10 ◼   ► for a company to do it.

00:05:11 ◼   ► Like I was thinking if Tim Cook came out one day

00:05:13 ◼   ► and was like, we have a theme for the year for Apple, right?

00:05:16 ◼   ► And like, what's going on with Apple this year?

00:05:18 ◼   ► He's like, "Oh, our theme for the year is beauty."

00:05:20 ◼   ► It'd be like, "Uh-oh, this company's in real trouble."

00:05:24 ◼   ► Because it's also like, it would just,

00:05:26 ◼   ► like what does that mean to people, right?

00:05:27 ◼   ► You'd need to then have all these bullet points.

00:05:30 ◼   ► So it's like, no, no, if you're a company,

00:05:33 ◼   ► you need some goals, right?

00:05:34 ◼   ► You need some metrics.

00:05:36 ◼   ► But for your flourishing as an individual human,

00:05:38 ◼   ► a theme is a much better framework in which to operate.

00:05:41 ◼   ► So tell me, Myke, how did your year of less go?

00:05:45 ◼   ► - So I actually had two yearly themes.

00:05:48 ◼   ► One of them established itself halfway through the year.

00:05:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, see, they're very open to change.

00:05:53 ◼   ► - I did a, I took it and turned it, right?

00:05:56 ◼   ► I innovated on the yearly theme idea.

00:05:58 ◼   ► And we'll get to the second one in a minute.

00:06:00 ◼   ► But the one that I established last year,

00:06:02 ◼   ► the beginning of the year, was the year of less.

00:06:05 ◼   ► Because I had spent a year talking to you

00:06:07 ◼   ► and looking at all of the things that you were doing

00:06:10 ◼   ► and the improvements that you were making

00:06:11 ◼   ► on your working life.

00:06:12 ◼   ► And throughout those conversations,

00:06:14 ◼   ► I decided that there was things that I needed to do for mine.

00:06:18 ◼   ► And one of the big, big things for Year of Less

00:06:21 ◼   ► was to get help, to get some kind of assistance.

00:06:25 ◼   ► And I did, we hired an assistant,

00:06:27 ◼   ► and this person has been excellent for us,

00:06:31 ◼   ► and we're giving more and more and more to them.

00:06:34 ◼   ► And it was a lot of work to get going.

00:06:37 ◼   ► My gosh, my gosh was it a lot of work to get going

00:06:39 ◼   ► with the interview process, and then after all of that,

00:06:43 ◼   ► you've got to help train someone, right?

00:06:45 ◼   ► You can't just be like, "Oh, here you go, do your job."

00:06:47 ◼   ► - Can you remind me, when in the year did that happen?

00:06:51 ◼   ► When were you doing interviews?

00:06:53 ◼   ► - At the very beginning of the year.

00:06:54 ◼   ► I think it was maybe February or March

00:06:57 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:06:58 ◼   ► - Okay, so it was very early in the year.

00:06:59 ◼   ► I just wasn't sure.

00:07:00 ◼   ► - It was very early, yeah.

00:07:02 ◼   ► I mean, just going through,

00:07:06 ◼   ► I don't know if I spoke about it at the time,

00:07:07 ◼   ► but I'm happy to say it now.

00:07:08 ◼   ► I think we've got like 150 applications for the job.

00:07:13 ◼   ► and we took 10 people to interview.

00:07:17 ◼   ► Now we thought, oh 10 people's fine, that's 10 hours

00:07:19 ◼   ► and we did it in one week.

00:07:21 ◼   ► It was like, it was a lot of work

00:07:25 ◼   ► to go through all of that information

00:07:26 ◼   ► and 150 is a lot when, it kind of gets a little mind numbing

00:07:31 ◼   ► because so many people write the same stuff, right?

00:07:33 ◼   ► Like I mean that's, the way that, it's funny,

00:07:37 ◼   ► you kind of think, and I know I've been in this position,

00:07:40 ◼   ► you think that there is a specific way

00:07:42 ◼   ► in which you should apply for a job, right?

00:07:44 ◼   ► The things that you write and things that you say.

00:07:46 ◼   ► But the problem with that is you then just blend in

00:07:49 ◼   ► like to everybody else.

00:07:52 ◼   ► Like going through some of these applications,

00:07:55 ◼   ► I kind of was unable to tell where one person ended

00:07:58 ◼   ► and the next person began by the end of it.

00:08:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

00:08:01 ◼   ► - And then, but you've also got the opposite problem.

00:08:03 ◼   ► If you try and stick out too much,

00:08:05 ◼   ► you maybe take a bit of a risk.

00:08:07 ◼   ► It is a tricky thing to apply for a job.

00:08:09 ◼   ► - It's a delicate balance, yeah,

00:08:11 ◼   ► because if you stick out too much, now you're the weirdo.

00:08:14 ◼   ► And it's like, oh, okay.

00:08:16 ◼   ► This is the application that sticks out way too much.

00:08:19 ◼   ► - There are certain types of jobs where it's easier.

00:08:21 ◼   ► Like with yours, people were able to provide you

00:08:24 ◼   ► with a piece of work, right?

00:08:26 ◼   ► And so there is like an entertainment quality value

00:08:30 ◼   ► which makes somebody stick out, I guess.

00:08:32 ◼   ► But for me, it was just like, write me a cover letter.

00:08:35 ◼   ► Like that was what I wanted to see.

00:08:37 ◼   ► And it's always just text.

00:08:39 ◼   ► I mean, and so yeah, it felt like it was blending in a little bit, but I don't know.

00:08:43 ◼   ► Maybe it's just because I don't like to read that I didn't enjoy it.

00:08:45 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:08:46 ◼   ► No, but it's, it is, it's going to be the case that when you,

00:08:49 ◼   ► when you start talking about 150 people applying to a thing, uh,

00:08:54 ◼   ► this is, this is where, again,

00:08:57 ◼   ► like people then start falling into categories. Like you're mentally,

00:09:01 ◼   ► you can't deal with 150 people in your brain.

00:09:04 ◼   ► And so you start like binning people into groups and that,

00:09:07 ◼   ► And that's where it's like, oh, the day,

00:09:09 ◼   ► like I have a lot of sympathy for everybody

00:09:10 ◼   ► applying to any kind of job,

00:09:13 ◼   ► because that's part of what the trouble is,

00:09:16 ◼   ► is like trying to indicate to the person

00:09:19 ◼   ► who's reading the applications,

00:09:20 ◼   ► what kind of person you are,

00:09:24 ◼   ► and like that you can do the job,

00:09:26 ◼   ► and like how do you signal that

00:09:28 ◼   ► when your only tool is a resume?

00:09:31 ◼   ► It's incredibly difficult.

00:09:33 ◼   ► And the issue is if you as the hiring manager

00:09:38 ◼   ► want to get this done in a timely fashion,

00:09:42 ◼   ► there is nothing you can do

00:09:45 ◼   ► than to just disregard some people, right?

00:09:47 ◼   ► - Oh yeah. - Like you've re-

00:09:48 ◼   ► And it's a shame and I wish it kind of wasn't like this

00:09:51 ◼   ► and you could, in theory, if you had a month

00:09:55 ◼   ► to make your decision going through the resumes,

00:09:57 ◼   ► then you could read everyone and consider them all.

00:10:00 ◼   ► But if you are trying to fill a position,

00:10:02 ◼   ► which typically whenever you're trying to fill a position,

00:10:05 ◼   ► speed is always good, right?

00:10:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's right.

00:10:08 ◼   ► - There is just an unfortunate part of it

00:10:10 ◼   ► in that you have to disregard some applications.

00:10:13 ◼   ► I mean, I hired when I was working at the bank,

00:10:16 ◼   ► I used to hire as well, it was part of what I did.

00:10:19 ◼   ► It was the same thing there as well.

00:10:20 ◼   ► It's like some people you're just like,

00:10:22 ◼   ► I can read this and feel like I have a good sense

00:10:25 ◼   ► of the type of person you are

00:10:26 ◼   ► and you're not the type of person I want for this job.

00:10:28 ◼   ► And it's like, but have I really looked at it in detail?

00:10:31 ◼   ► Unfortunately not, but there's kind of nothing

00:10:34 ◼   ► you can do about it.

00:10:35 ◼   ► So sympathies to anybody applying for jobs.

00:10:38 ◼   ► It is horrible.

00:10:40 ◼   ► But anyway. - It really is.

00:10:42 ◼   ► - The interesting thing, I probably could have

00:10:44 ◼   ► predicted this, but it's good to know that

00:10:46 ◼   ► whilst it is great to have to do less work of my own,

00:10:50 ◼   ► right, so I have somebody who's able to take work

00:10:53 ◼   ► away from me and do it for me,

00:10:54 ◼   ► that's actually not the value.

00:10:57 ◼   ► The value is less aggravation.

00:10:59 ◼   ► I find myself being less annoyed at work

00:11:04 ◼   ► because there's this thing I have to do.

00:11:07 ◼   ► I am able to move around some of the tasks

00:11:09 ◼   ► that are less enjoyable or just things

00:11:12 ◼   ► that I've done too many times.

00:11:14 ◼   ► There were some weekly tasks, which I've been doing

00:11:17 ◼   ► for three years every single week,

00:11:20 ◼   ► and it was like a spreadsheet-based task.

00:11:21 ◼   ► And it's like, well, I get no joy out of this anymore.

00:11:23 ◼   ► I used to enjoy it, but I don't like it anymore.

00:11:26 ◼   ► And I could sit down to do it on a Sunday evening

00:11:29 ◼   ► or Monday morning, and it was like,

00:11:31 ◼   ► "Oh, here we go again," right?

00:11:32 ◼   ► And being able to pass that stuff away,

00:11:35 ◼   ► I have way less tasks that I have roll my eyes at now,

00:11:39 ◼   ► and that has been a wonderful result of my yearly theme.

00:11:44 ◼   ► Basically, it's like a year of less,

00:11:49 ◼   ► comma, work/annoyance, and that's been great.

00:11:53 ◼   ► - Right, right.

00:11:54 ◼   ► - The other thing that I did as part of my year of less

00:11:57 ◼   ► was

00:12:17 ◼   ► but it hasn't, again, that was what I expected would be the case, right? Like, oh, it would

00:12:23 ◼   ► tell me the things I'm spending too much time in and then I would stop doing so many of

00:12:28 ◼   ► those things, right? That was my initial thought. That was my hypothesis. In the same way that

00:12:32 ◼   ► like hiring an assistant means I will do less work. But the result has actually been time

00:12:40 ◼   ► Time tracking has helped me highlight how much work I actually do and those numbers

00:12:47 ◼   ► make me feel psychologically better because anybody that runs their own business especially,

00:12:54 ◼   ► but anybody that is very invested in the work that they do can get into a situation where

00:13:01 ◼   ► it's on your mind all the time.

00:13:04 ◼   ► So you feel like you're working 24 hours a day.

00:13:08 ◼   ► So to be able to look at graphs and charts

00:13:11 ◼   ► and say like, oh, on Monday,

00:13:13 ◼   ► I actually only worked for five hours, not 23.

00:13:17 ◼   ► There is like a psychological benefit in that for me

00:13:21 ◼   ► where I don't feel like I'm as busy anymore

00:13:25 ◼   ► because I actually have some stuff that I can point to.

00:13:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think the phrase you used earlier in the year

00:13:32 ◼   ► talking about this was that you can talk back to your mind.

00:13:36 ◼   ► And I think that's a great phrase because it's,

00:13:40 ◼   ► when your brain thinks that you've been way busier

00:13:44 ◼   ► than you actually are, it's busy releasing all

00:13:49 ◼   ► of the stress hormones and worries that are related to that.

00:13:52 ◼   ► And it's a way to try to calibrate your brain to say,

00:13:56 ◼   ► I guess we're busy, but it's not what you think it is,

00:14:01 ◼   ► So you can chill out, we don't need to be at 11 on the anxiety meter of all the stuff that needs to get done.

00:14:07 ◼   ► We can take it back to a much more reasonable level.

00:14:10 ◼   ► And here's a spreadsheet that you can look at which proves this to you.

00:14:14 ◼   ► So I think that's a really good point about the time tracking.

00:14:18 ◼   ► The service that we both use, Toggle, they have pretty good reports.

00:14:23 ◼   ► And when the year ticked over,

00:14:27 ◼   ► our mutual friend Federico Fattici,

00:14:29 ◼   ► he tweeted, he's like, he tweeted his graph, right,

00:14:32 ◼   ► like his pie chart to show like how his work was split up.

00:14:34 ◼   ► I was like, oh, that's a good idea.

00:14:35 ◼   ► So I looked at mine.

00:14:36 ◼   ► And I, again, always find interesting things.

00:14:39 ◼   ► 50% of my working time in 2017 was spent editing podcasts,

00:14:44 ◼   ► whilst 25% was recording.

00:14:47 ◼   ► This is not a surprise to me,

00:14:49 ◼   ► because I, some projects don't take twice the amount

00:14:53 ◼   ► time they take to record but some take four or five times right depending on

00:14:56 ◼   ► what the show is and what I'm doing and when I I mean I kind of shared this

00:15:02 ◼   ► online as well so it was very interesting and I had a few people

00:15:04 ◼   ► reach out to me offering their editing services right and it was like it is

00:15:11 ◼   ► interesting that that is what people take from it they see that and they're

00:15:14 ◼   ► like oh you must want to do less of it but I don't really like that's not what

00:15:19 ◼   ► that means. It's like, okay, I see it's 50% of my time, but I consider that time valuable.

00:15:26 ◼   ► And there have been projects in 2017 that I have handed over to somebody else. Actually,

00:15:31 ◼   ► I'm just about to hand over another show to be edited by somebody else, which is great

00:15:36 ◼   ► because it's probably one that, well, I know this person can do it very well and there's

00:15:41 ◼   ► no need for me to continue doing it anymore specifically. So it's fine, right? I can hand

00:15:46 ◼   ► that won over, but I'm not dying to do that for any of the projects that I'm currently

00:15:51 ◼   ► doing because we work with some very talented editors. We have a few people that we work

00:15:56 ◼   ► with at Real AFM who we give these projects to. So I know there are people that can do

00:15:59 ◼   ► it, but I don't feel like I need to or want to. Like, I think people look at some of,

00:16:04 ◼   ► they look at podcast editing or they look at some task and they're like, "Oh, that's

00:16:08 ◼   ► just like monkey work, right? You don't want to do that." But I make podcasts, that's my

00:16:14 ◼   ► job. Like that's what I do. And part of that is the editing of them. So it's like, would someone's

00:16:20 ◼   ► like, oh, you do 25% of your time is spent hosting a show. You should give, I should do that for you.

00:16:26 ◼   ► Right? Like I can take some of that time away for you. And it's like, well, no. Right? It's,

00:16:31 ◼   ► but it's the same thing to me. And I think you would agree, right? You could hand over the

00:16:35 ◼   ► editing of all of your shows, but you choose not to. It's something you can get help along the way,

00:16:40 ◼   ► but you still want to be involved in it.

00:16:42 ◼   ► Yeah, and what you ideally want, having brought on the assistant,

00:16:49 ◼   ► is to see that in the pie chart of your working life,

00:16:53 ◼   ► that a larger percentage of it is being made of what are the core value-producing activities that you engage in.

00:17:04 ◼   ► And the editing is an example of something that...

00:17:07 ◼   ► It's like invisible work, right?

00:17:11 ◼   ► When a show is well edited, people are not aware of it.

00:17:15 ◼   ► And so people can easily think of something like that as,

00:17:19 ◼   ► "Oh, you can just have somebody else do that?"

00:17:23 ◼   ► But for some of the shows that you work on,

00:17:25 ◼   ► like the voice of the show

00:17:29 ◼   ► or the particular way that things come out

00:17:31 ◼   ► is really dependent on exactly the edit.

00:17:36 ◼   ► I have to say, I am a little bit surprised

00:17:38 ◼   ► at the ratio of your editing time versus recording time.

00:17:41 ◼   ► - I was surprised about it, I was.

00:17:43 ◼   ► But like I see it and I'm like, okay, right?

00:17:46 ◼   ► Like it was a surprise to me,

00:17:48 ◼   ► but it's like, if that's what it takes,

00:17:50 ◼   ► that's what it takes.

00:17:51 ◼   ► I mean, okay, I'll also say like,

00:17:53 ◼   ► podcast editing also includes all of the posting

00:17:56 ◼   ► and all that sort of stuff.

00:17:57 ◼   ► So we can add a little bit more time on every time, right?

00:18:00 ◼   ► right? Like, you know, it might add like 15 minutes on every single time.

00:18:04 ◼   ► Okay, that makes more sense though actually than that ratio.

00:18:09 ◼   ► It includes everything that happens from the moment I open Logic to the moment that the show

00:18:15 ◼   ► is posted, right? Like it includes all of that stuff. I had like a show posting thing for a

00:18:20 ◼   ► while but it just seemed silly to me because it was just stop one timer, start another timer,

00:18:25 ◼   ► because by and large I post a show immediately after it's finished editing, typically, right?

00:18:32 ◼   ► Like I don't have many shows so that's not the case so I kind of just leave that one thing.

00:18:36 ◼   ► I mean the ratio I actually was kind of happy with that it's like I start with preparation,

00:18:42 ◼   ► double the amount of preparation is into recording, and then double the amount of recording

00:18:49 ◼   ► is into editing. I was like okay like that's interesting, that's kind of how it breaks down

00:18:55 ◼   ► for me. So yeah, I feel like it all kind of works out.

00:18:58 ◼   ► Yeah, I was just pulling up my own report because I was curious to see. And of course,

00:19:04 ◼   ► this is not entirely fair, but I was looking at with Cortex, like what is the ratio of

00:19:08 ◼   ► preparation and editing versus recording time. And mine is a lot closer to 50/50, but that's

00:19:14 ◼   ► because I'm able to farm out most of the work of producing Cortex to you, Myke. But I was

00:19:20 ◼   ► just kind of curious to see what it is. That for me, the ratio on this show is a lot closer

00:19:24 ◼   ► to 50/50 for how much time is recording versus how much time is involved in absolutely everything

00:19:30 ◼   ► else.

00:19:31 ◼   ► CB; Yeah and I guess it's worth mentioning that a vast percentage of my podcast recording

00:19:35 ◼   ► time is Cortex.

00:19:37 ◼   ► SH; That's right. I wasn't going to ask but I figured that this is, I know that this is

00:19:42 ◼   ► the bulk of the work in terms of any particular show, how much time do you spend editing,

00:19:48 ◼   ► and I know that I place a heavy editing burden on you Myke and I apologize for that.

00:19:52 ◼   ► - There is no, I've said this many times,

00:19:54 ◼   ► there's no apology needed.

00:19:55 ◼   ► Like I am happy to do it because the show,

00:19:59 ◼   ► it all works out, right?

00:20:00 ◼   ► Like the time that I put into it,

00:20:02 ◼   ► the compensation works great, like it's fine.

00:20:04 ◼   ► Like I'm happy to, like if the show,

00:20:07 ◼   ► if this show had like 500 people that listen to it,

00:20:10 ◼   ► I wouldn't do this, right?

00:20:12 ◼   ► But it all works out at the end of the day.

00:20:14 ◼   ► So like, I'm fine with it, right?

00:20:16 ◼   ► Like it all works out.

00:20:18 ◼   ► - But it says the other thing,

00:20:19 ◼   ► like looking back on the year for you,

00:20:22 ◼   ► of trying time tracking. Like you said, with this show, you feel like the amount of time

00:20:28 ◼   ► you spend on it and the reward you get from it is comparable. Do you feel like now with

00:20:32 ◼   ► a year's worth of data that tracks well across all of your projects, do you feel that your

00:20:36 ◼   ► projects get the amount of time that they deserve or do you feel like there's stuff

00:20:42 ◼   ► that's over or underserved?

00:20:45 ◼   ► I think by and large I am happy with the balance of my stuff.

00:20:53 ◼   ► Especially because I've seen some of those things go down to some of, again so I'm going

00:20:58 ◼   ► to put a link to this image in the show notes so people can see it.

00:21:01 ◼   ► And I'll give a bit of color around a couple of things.

00:21:03 ◼   ► So you can see some of these things are self-explanatory, right?

00:21:06 ◼   ► Editing, recording, show preparation, sponsor booking.

00:21:09 ◼   ► That is like when we have a sponsor and we're inputting all of their information and dealing

00:21:13 ◼   ► with contracts and stuff like that and also contacting new people, it's all of that kind

00:21:17 ◼   ► of stuff.

00:21:18 ◼   ► Sponsor aftercare, that's just a phrase that I made up.

00:21:22 ◼   ► That just means like answering questions and working on things that people need, right?

00:21:28 ◼   ► So like our sponsors might need certain things.

00:21:31 ◼   ► That decreased significantly for me as the year went on because this was a lot of stuff

00:21:36 ◼   ► that we handed over to my assistant is the aftercare stuff.

00:21:40 ◼   ► So like dealing with people's queries and questions and stuff like that.

00:21:43 ◼   ► The one that I was really surprised about was how highly the MacStories project was.

00:21:48 ◼   ► I was just looking at this. The fact that MacStories even registers as a thing for the whole year is hilarious to me.

00:21:54 ◼   ► That was the production of the audiobook that I put together. It was a significant portion of my year.

00:22:00 ◼   ► So that was a big surprise. It taught me some things to think about for the future, if I'm ever going to do that kind of thing again.

00:22:06 ◼   ► because it also went higher then. So, Relay FM general is typically whenever me and Steven

00:22:11 ◼   ► have calls about the company, I did less of that in time, in the entire year, than working

00:22:21 ◼   ► on the audiobook. So that was fun. That was a fun thing to see. But the overall balance

00:22:26 ◼   ► of this list, I have no immediate need to change any of it. I am happy with it. I did

00:22:35 ◼   ► look by the way and um cortex accounts for 10% of the overall editing time which i okay so 10

00:22:43 ◼   ► 10 of that 50 yeah 10 of the of the 50 so it was about it was about 70 to 80 hours

00:22:50 ◼   ► right now that's interesting because i mean our show is effectively

00:22:55 ◼   ► one every three to four weeks pretty much on average no no it's way more frequent than that

00:23:01 ◼   ► - No, it's not. - You're exaggerating now.

00:23:03 ◼   ► - No, no, it's about three,

00:23:03 ◼   ► 'cause it used to be every two weeks,

00:23:04 ◼   ► most of the year it's been one every month, like at 2017.

00:23:08 ◼   ► So we're about three weeks, I would say, is fine.

00:23:11 ◼   ► But every other show I do, by and large, is weekly.

00:23:14 ◼   ► I have a couple of fortnightly shows.

00:23:17 ◼   ► So 10% of that overall thing is significant, right?

00:23:20 ◼   ► There is some significance there.

00:23:21 ◼   ► So we're getting really into the weeds now,

00:23:24 ◼   ► but time tracking was very good

00:23:26 ◼   ► because now I am able to value my doing nothing time

00:23:31 ◼   ► significantly more.

00:23:32 ◼   ► I don't feel like when I'm doing nothing,

00:23:37 ◼   ► when I'm playing Stardew Valley,

00:23:40 ◼   ► I am not like, oh, I'm not working, I'm not working,

00:23:44 ◼   ► I've not done enough today,

00:23:45 ◼   ► I don't worry about that stuff anymore

00:23:47 ◼   ► because I have a much greater sense

00:23:49 ◼   ► for how long it takes me to take care of my work.

00:23:52 ◼   ► And it turns out it's not 15 hours a day.

00:23:56 ◼   ► It's more like six or seven, right?

00:23:59 ◼   ► That's typically my work amount in during a day,

00:24:02 ◼   ► but it's spread throughout the day, right?

00:24:04 ◼   ► So it feels like the workday begins at eight

00:24:07 ◼   ► and ends at two,

00:24:08 ◼   ► because my work happens at chunks throughout the day.

00:24:11 ◼   ► But once I got a better handle on how my time was spent,

00:24:15 ◼   ► which I did this year,

00:24:16 ◼   ► I was able to value everything more than before.

00:24:20 ◼   ► So that has been a great goal for me,

00:24:23 ◼   ► a great thing to achieve.

00:24:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that is,

00:24:25 ◼   ► I mean, this sort of jumping ahead a little bit,

00:24:28 ◼   ► This does tie into some of my own thoughts for the previous year, but yeah.

00:24:32 ◼   ► Being able to...

00:24:34 ◼   ► Being able to turn a bunch of that doing nothing time mentally from...

00:24:42 ◼   ► from like a guilty pleasure into "No, I'm just doing this and it's fine"

00:24:48 ◼   ► is a big psychological advantage.

00:24:51 ◼   ► And it is difficult for everybody, but it is also especially difficult if you're self-employed.

00:24:56 ◼   ► Like this is a thing that I just when I talk to people who are self-employed is a constant refrain that it can be

00:25:02 ◼   ► that you have so much that is under your control, but it can be very difficult to

00:25:07 ◼   ► enjoy your free time because there is this endless list of things that could in theory be done.

00:25:13 ◼   ► So it's it's really great to hear that that the time tracking is helping you feel like you have evidence to show your brain that you've

00:25:20 ◼   ► done stuff, you have a good estimate of how long things

00:25:24 ◼   ► Take you and then that that makes your doing nothing or relaxing time

00:25:29 ◼   ► More able to be valued in in the moment. So that that sounds like a really great improvement and

00:25:34 ◼   ► Another thing that I was even surprised to discover so I have no idea

00:25:40 ◼   ► I don't know if anybody cares enough to pay attention to this kind of thing

00:25:43 ◼   ► Mm-hmm, but I I would say this is probably a surprise for anybody that does pay attention including myself

00:25:50 ◼   ► For the first time in maybe my entire podcasting career

00:25:54 ◼   ► 2017

00:25:56 ◼   ► was the first time that I have not launched a new show that I have been a part of I

00:26:01 ◼   ► Find I find this totally shocking. I couldn't believe it. I found it out by accident

00:26:06 ◼   ► Because I was for some other purposes. I was looking at all of the shows that we've launched in 2017

00:26:14 ◼   ► And I realized I'm not on any of them

00:26:19 ◼   ► Yeah, when you mentioned this to me, I feel like it blew my mind. I was like, oh surely you're wrong

00:26:24 ◼   ► Surely you're wrong, but I'm not wrong. This is the first time ever and I was like wow

00:26:30 ◼   ► This is a big surprise to me. How do you feel about that?

00:26:33 ◼   ► What it tells me is that I internalized

00:26:36 ◼   ► the year theme

00:26:38 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. I have had ideas that I've just not done

00:26:41 ◼   ► Because that's adding more right a new show is adding more and I mean I had some projects that I've

00:26:49 ◼   ► I'd been working on in 2017 that I killed at the last minute

00:26:53 ◼   ► because I came to realize how much work they would have taken

00:26:57 ◼   ► and I didn't believe that the value would be there

00:27:00 ◼   ► ultimately either creatively or financially.

00:27:02 ◼   ► So I decided not to go through with them.

00:27:05 ◼   ► And this isn't a thing,

00:27:06 ◼   ► so when we talk about my next yearly theme,

00:27:08 ◼   ► it is building on what I learned

00:27:11 ◼   ► and how I think to go forward from it.

00:27:13 ◼   ► But this was a big surprise to me

00:27:14 ◼   ► because I really do believe that this is the first time

00:27:18 ◼   ► in seven years that I have not launched a new show

00:27:22 ◼   ► in an entire Canada year period.

00:27:25 ◼   ► So I think that that tells me that the Year of Less theme

00:27:30 ◼   ► was a significant success

00:27:35 ◼   ► because I internalized something

00:27:39 ◼   ► and basically stopped myself from this habit

00:27:44 ◼   ► that I have built up over the last seven years

00:27:47 ◼   ► of every time I have an idea, I just do it.

00:27:50 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:27:53 ◼   ► So I was pretty proud, I was pretty happy to see that.

00:27:56 ◼   ► It may sound like a strange thing to do,

00:27:58 ◼   ► but I feel like I am so congratulatory towards you on that,

00:28:03 ◼   ► because it is really hard not to just go

00:28:08 ◼   ► with all of the new projects.

00:28:10 ◼   ► And especially when you have the power

00:28:13 ◼   ► to make those projects happen.

00:28:15 ◼   ► - Nobody can stop me, right?

00:28:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, exactly.

00:28:18 ◼   ► It's like nobody can stop you,

00:28:20 ◼   ► which is the best and the worst part of it, right?

00:28:23 ◼   ► Like you wanna do a new project,

00:28:24 ◼   ► like there's nobody to stop you.

00:28:25 ◼   ► And it's always like the new project

00:28:29 ◼   ► is always more exciting than the current project, right?

00:28:32 ◼   ► It's always like, ooh, this new project, so exciting.

00:28:35 ◼   ► It's turning my head.

00:28:36 ◼   ► It's like, well, you know,

00:28:37 ◼   ► but it takes a lot of recognition and ability

00:28:43 ◼   ► to not pursue all of those things.

00:28:46 ◼   ► So yeah, whenever it was, you told me a couple weeks ago

00:28:48 ◼   ► that you hadn't done a new show in 2017

00:28:51 ◼   ► and I just found it mind blowing.

00:28:53 ◼   ► But I really do think it's great.

00:28:56 ◼   ► And I would also suspect that this is partly a better ability

00:29:01 ◼   ► on your part after having done this for many years

00:29:06 ◼   ► to have a sense of what a potentially good payoff

00:29:10 ◼   ► for a project is or isn't.

00:29:12 ◼   ► Like when you're newer, it makes more sense to just like try a bunch of stuff and see what sticks on the wall.

00:29:20 ◼   ► But, you know, now that you are an established podcast person, you have an established podcast network,

00:29:27 ◼   ► and you now have a better sense of the value of your time, it makes less sense to go off on a whole bunch of new projects.

00:29:35 ◼   ► Like they can be damaging in a way.

00:29:37 ◼   ► And you also probably have a better internal mental compass about what are the valuable

00:29:43 ◼   ► directions to go in.

00:29:45 ◼   ► And not everything that occurs to you that seems like a great idea one week is a good

00:29:51 ◼   ► way to go the following week.

00:29:52 ◼   ► Yeah, like I've made a conscious effort that if I have an idea and begin on it, I don't

00:29:59 ◼   ► launch it quickly.

00:30:01 ◼   ► Like I spend, I have, I mean we've had shows that we even have artwork for that will never

00:30:07 ◼   ► be used.

00:30:08 ◼   ► Now I've seen some of that artwork.

00:30:09 ◼   ► You've seen some of it.

00:30:10 ◼   ► It's very nice.

00:30:11 ◼   ► It's wonderful.

00:30:12 ◼   ► It's actually one of my favorites ever but no one's ever going to see it.

00:30:14 ◼   ► Don't ask, you won't see it.

00:30:16 ◼   ► Sorry.

00:30:17 ◼   ► Maybe I'll use it for something one day and if I ever use it then I'll tell you that

00:30:21 ◼   ► that's what it, that it was for the secret project.

00:30:23 ◼   ► But it was just, I kind of let it just stay a little bit and decided that no, I don't

00:30:30 ◼   ► this is the right thing for me to do. So I've had a few things like that this year and I

00:30:36 ◼   ► think it's been of great benefit. And as I say, it ties into my 2018 theme, which we'll

00:30:41 ◼   ► talk about in a bit because I still have, I had a lot of things, I had a lot of stuff

00:30:44 ◼   ► to say this time. Halfway through 2017, I started my second yearly theme, which will

00:30:52 ◼   ► run until June of this year, which is the year of positivity/optimism. I refer to both

00:30:59 ◼   ► things I can never remember which one it is but we'll call it the year of

00:31:02 ◼   ► optimism. Right and it follows the Apple calendar year. It follows the Apple

00:31:06 ◼   ► calendar year so WWDC to WWDC. So much of my life is focused around talking about

00:31:12 ◼   ► technology with a significant focus on Apple anybody that listens to this show

00:31:17 ◼   ► knows that and 2015 to 2016 to 2017 there was a decline in overall

00:31:25 ◼   ► excitedness amongst people that care about Apple products. There was a lot more frustration

00:31:30 ◼   ► than there ever had been. And this really culminated in the beginning of 2017. It was

00:31:35 ◼   ► just a bad time. There were no new products. Everyone was happy. No matter what you liked,

00:31:40 ◼   ► there was nothing for you.

00:31:41 ◼   ► Yeah. I still think of this period of time in my mind as the Apple Valley of Darkness

00:31:46 ◼   ► that we were wandering through.

00:31:47 ◼   ► It was a dark time. If you cared about this stuff, it was a dark time because everything

00:31:51 ◼   ► that happened was not good. And then WWDC 2017 was like the apology year and everybody

00:31:59 ◼   ► got something. It was Tim Cook turned into Oprah and everyone got something, right? There

00:32:05 ◼   ► was something under everybody's seat and we all got the thing that we wanted. So I decided

00:32:11 ◼   ► to make a concerted effort, which I'm still working on, that I would try and be more positive

00:32:15 ◼   ► and optimistic when talking about technology because that's what I enjoy. I actually don't

00:32:22 ◼   ► like being mad about it. I like to enjoy it. That's why I talk about it. It's not fun.

00:32:28 ◼   ► So I've been focusing on that. And of course you slip every now and then, but the overall

00:32:32 ◼   ► feeling is that it's going to be cool and we're going to enjoy it and it's going to

00:32:35 ◼   ► be great. So I'm happier to talk about this stuff on shows now because I'm generally more

00:32:41 ◼   ► happy about it. So that was my theme. So my theme for 2017 and I'm very happy with them.

00:32:46 ◼   ► Yeah, I feel like the year of positivity, at least from my subjective experience, was

00:32:53 ◼   ► good timing and also sort of like good for your mental health because yeah, it's like

00:32:59 ◼   ► I also listen to a bunch of these shows, like the same shows that you listen to where it's

00:33:03 ◼   ► like everybody's wandering through this valley of darkness together and it's like yeah, it

00:33:08 ◼   ► is terrible but at a certain point you just get tired of listening to everybody talk about

00:33:12 ◼   ► how stuff is terrible. Even when like I too am there in the valley of darkness like talking

00:33:17 ◼   ► about how things suck as well right like we're all here together. But this is one of these

00:33:23 ◼   ► things where like for mental health sometimes you have to take a little bit of a like a

00:33:27 ◼   ► reevaluation and say like yeah stuff sucks but I'm gonna try to force through a thing

00:33:34 ◼   ► And happiness is one of those funny topics where you can make things better through playing

00:33:44 ◼   ► tricks on yourself and in some ways deciding that you're going to have a more positive

00:33:49 ◼   ► outlook on stuff.

00:33:51 ◼   ► You can make that start to occur.

00:33:54 ◼   ► And I think it also happened to be great timing and a good time to start it with the 2017

00:33:59 ◼   ► WWDC.

00:34:00 ◼   ► But yeah, I'm very glad that we're past that part.

00:34:03 ◼   ► And I have to say, as a listener to your shows, I was always glad when you were doing the

00:34:10 ◼   ► year of positivity.

00:34:11 ◼   ► And I feel like there were a few moments where it really came through.

00:34:14 ◼   ► They're like, "Oh, there's Myke being positive about stuff.

00:34:16 ◼   ► I can hear him doing it."

00:34:18 ◼   ► And as a listener, I was appreciative.

00:34:20 ◼   ► Saying it's like a mental health thing is a really good point, because it was.

00:34:25 ◼   ► I was just finding myself just being sad about the thing that I liked and then having to

00:34:29 ◼   ► talk about it like three times a week every week.

00:34:32 ◼   ► And it was just like, this isn't good for my overall feeling.

00:34:36 ◼   ► So I decided to make a change to it and to try and see the lighter side of things.

00:34:41 ◼   ► It's still a battle because I have a lot of opinions and sometimes my opinions aren't

00:34:46 ◼   ► always that things are good.

00:34:48 ◼   ► But ultimately, I've been very happy.

00:34:51 ◼   ► I mean, this came out a couple of weeks ago when I was talking about my general content

00:34:57 ◼   ► in technology, which you decided to be a rain cloud over, but we don't have to worry about

00:35:01 ◼   ► things like that.

00:35:02 ◼   ► My general feeling about technology right now is that I'm very happy with my technology

00:35:09 ◼   ► right now, and I feel like I'm still on the righteous path of the multi-pad lifestyle,

00:35:15 ◼   ► even though some people decided to leave it.

00:35:17 ◼   ► So anyway, let's talk about your incredibly confusing 2017 theme.

00:35:21 ◼   ► The year of betrayal!

00:35:23 ◼   ► It was cool, I think.

00:35:24 ◼   ► BRIAN: You can't let other people's happiness get in the way of your happiness, Myke.

00:35:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, sure, that's what that is.

00:35:29 ◼   ► Today's episode of Cortex is brought to you in part

00:35:33 ◼   ► by our friends at Hover.

00:35:35 ◼   ► Building your online identity has never been more important

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00:37:10 ◼   ► Looking back on my my past year

00:37:13 ◼   ► It had a confusing start with a terrible name

00:37:17 ◼   ► Which so I originally was calling it the year of new and then a listener to the show having having heard me try to wander through

00:37:23 ◼   ► a bad description of what I was up to

00:37:25 ◼   ► Redubbed it the year of

00:37:27 ◼   ► Redirection which I like much better because you weren't actually doing anything new so the funny thing is in retro

00:37:34 ◼   ► I was I was going through this morning getting ready for the show

00:37:36 ◼   ► and I was going through all of my records from the year and like looking stuff over and

00:37:40 ◼   ► It's funny to me because actually calling it the year of new slash

00:37:44 ◼   ► is actually perfect because there were like a bazillion new things this year.

00:37:49 ◼   ► It just so happens that this stuff isn't really public facing to people.

00:37:54 ◼   ► But Year of New/Redirection actually ended up being just a perfect name for the year.

00:37:59 ◼   ► But while I was going through the year, I was thinking of it as the Year of Redirection and

00:38:05 ◼   ► what this meant for me was

00:38:11 ◼   ► trying to think more deliberately about how I am spending my time,

00:38:17 ◼   ► like what things maybe have too much time, where are some areas where I should spend

00:38:22 ◼   ► more time in a different way than I currently was.

00:38:28 ◼   ► And part of this was that going into 2017, I feel like I was dealing with a little bit of burnout,

00:38:36 ◼   ► so I was trying to think about how can I

00:38:40 ◼   ► arrange my working life in a different way, or how can I do a bunch of things in a different way

00:38:44 ◼   ► in that upcoming year. There is a little bit of a funny thing talking about this year because I realized that

00:38:51 ◼   ► this again is one of these funny moments where I feel like I'm coming up against this this

00:38:57 ◼   ► this edge of like being a private person who makes his living in a very public way.

00:39:02 ◼   ► And also there was just a bunch of stuff that happened business-wise that doesn't make sense really to talk about in a public way.

00:39:09 ◼   ► So it's funny because it's like I had all of this stuff happen and I redirected a bunch of my energy and time on various projects

00:39:17 ◼   ► But so I am gonna have to talk about this in like kind of a high-level way

00:39:21 ◼   ► But I'm aware of that because there's a bunch of places where it's like I just I just don't either want to or it doesn't make

00:39:26 ◼   ► Sense really to go into the details. The laser shark business is booming. Myke, don't tell people about the laser sharks.

00:39:33 ◼   ► The volcano layer extraction company is just,

00:39:36 ◼   ► it's working excellently.

00:39:38 ◼   ► - You joke, but you're closer than you think.

00:39:40 ◼   ► - Oh God.

00:39:43 ◼   ► I'm still convinced that you are trying

00:39:45 ◼   ► to build an office building.

00:39:46 ◼   ► I am convinced of this.

00:39:48 ◼   ► Absolutely 100%, I believe that you are trying

00:39:52 ◼   ► to build an office complex, but this is the story.

00:39:54 ◼   ► This is the thought though.

00:39:56 ◼   ► - I'd love to do it, but I've got to finish

00:39:58 ◼   ► my clothing assembly line first, right?

00:40:00 ◼   ► Like there's only so much of me I can do at once.

00:40:02 ◼   ► There's only so many industries and factories you can build upon.

00:40:05 ◼   ► Yeah, it's totally true.

00:40:08 ◼   ► But yeah, so there's a bunch of stuff which is not obvious to people, but like, one of the things that people who pay very close attention to the numbers would notice is like a thing that I decided to do, which you were sort of referencing earlier, is I very intentionally at the beginning of 2017 decided to crank down

00:40:31 ◼   ► my podcast output just a little bit.

00:40:34 ◼   ► So if someone is going through like,

00:40:36 ◼   ► how many episodes were published each month,

00:40:38 ◼   ► you were joking about there being more Cortexmuses,

00:40:41 ◼   ► but there totally were.

00:40:42 ◼   ► And that was a very intentional decision on my part.

00:40:47 ◼   ► - And this was something that we discussed

00:40:49 ◼   ► and we worked out a good plan for the year.

00:40:51 ◼   ► And I think we were, but I was very happy with the output

00:40:55 ◼   ► of the last year's shows as well.

00:40:57 ◼   ► And yeah, it was less, but I don't,

00:40:59 ◼   ► but I actually think it was a positive impact

00:41:02 ◼   ► on the show overall.

00:41:04 ◼   ► Yeah, and I have to say, you were great to work with

00:41:07 ◼   ► during this time because it is this,

00:41:10 ◼   ► one person is saying, "I want to pull back 15%

00:41:15 ◼   ► over the course of the year."

00:41:17 ◼   ► And it's like, "Well, it's a partnership.

00:41:19 ◼   ► We work on this thing together."

00:41:20 ◼   ► But you were great with this.

00:41:22 ◼   ► And so that was one of the big things

00:41:24 ◼   ► with the year of "Redirection" for me,

00:41:27 ◼   ► was this was one area where I thought,

00:41:29 ◼   ► The podcasts are great. They're a great way for me to spend my time.

00:41:33 ◼   ► But I was also aware of like, man, I had this little bit of a feeling of burnout that it's like,

00:41:39 ◼   ► every week there is a show to do,

00:41:42 ◼   ► and I need to have a few more times in the year where it's like,

00:41:47 ◼   ► "Okay, I have one or two weeks in a row where there's no podcasts."

00:41:51 ◼   ► And I think this is the case of being like,

00:41:57 ◼   ► Being an introverted person, I always do find that the podcasts are quite mentally draining in this very particular way,

00:42:06 ◼   ► and I just needed some little bit more time to, like, recoup from that.

00:42:11 ◼   ► That was a case where Year of Redirection was great.

00:42:14 ◼   ► Like, just pulling back a little bit, like I said, about 15%, was fantastic,

00:42:21 ◼   ► and it's one of these cases where it's like, "Okay, I'm taking a small hit business-wise,

00:42:27 ◼   ► but I'm getting a massive improvement psychologically.

00:42:31 ◼   ► I feel much better about this.

00:42:33 ◼   ► And I also think it made the shows

00:42:35 ◼   ► genuinely better as well to have more breaks.

00:42:38 ◼   ► - I would say from my perspective,

00:42:41 ◼   ► less shows meant that I could prepare better

00:42:44 ◼   ► for all of them.

00:42:46 ◼   ► So the things that we were talking about and themes,

00:42:50 ◼   ► I was happier with our 2017 output than our 2016 output

00:42:54 ◼   ► because I have more time to come up with ideas.

00:42:56 ◼   ► And it is worth noting that this year will probably be pretty similar.

00:43:00 ◼   ► Sometimes there's one, sometimes there's two.

00:43:01 ◼   ► And that's kind of just how we're going to be going forward,

00:43:05 ◼   ► because it fits into both of our schedules really nicely.

00:43:08 ◼   ► Because in case you'd never guessed, we travel quite a lot.

00:43:12 ◼   ► And sometimes it can be a nightmare for us to align our travel schedules.

00:43:16 ◼   ► Like that is an example of a thing where in one way, it sounds like an easy thing to say,

00:43:23 ◼   ► like, oh, I'm just going to pull back a little bit.

00:43:25 ◼   ► But I did this across like all of my various business endeavors was trying to pull back like 15% across the board and everything

00:43:32 ◼   ► I'm involved with like in everything that I do

00:43:34 ◼   ► and that ended up being like a whole

00:43:36 ◼   ► year-long project and it was like a very carefully managed thing and trying to like

00:43:41 ◼   ► balance a whole bunch of inputs and outputs like that that was a really big deal

00:43:46 ◼   ► but I feel like it was a huge success and a big win on my part and

00:43:50 ◼   ► there were a number of times in the year where

00:43:54 ◼   ► having that like extra 15% of time

00:43:57 ◼   ► really did allow me to

00:44:00 ◼   ► redirect efforts and energy into other things that came up or things that ended up being new endeavors of one kind or another.

00:44:07 ◼   ► So it was

00:44:09 ◼   ► it was really great for me, and I'm so glad I did it, but I remember at the beginning of

00:44:14 ◼   ► 2017 like I was looking back through my initial planning notes and it's like, man,

00:44:19 ◼   ► I was really worried that it was gonna make 2017 just a total disaster.

00:44:23 ◼   ► that little bit of a pullback, but it didn't. It was really a great decision.

00:44:28 ◼   ► A disaster in what way?

00:44:30 ◼   ► Like, I've never had things on regular schedules, obviously,

00:44:36 ◼   ► but I feel like there's got to be some kind of minimum threshold below which you go

00:44:41 ◼   ► that it starts turning bad.

00:44:43 ◼   ► Like, and I was worried, like, maybe I'm closer to whatever that minimum threshold is

00:44:48 ◼   ► than I thought, and going like 15% less will bring me below that threshold.

00:44:53 ◼   ► But it turned out that's not the case.

00:44:55 ◼   ► So it's like everything keeps growing and like we said, the show is actually doing better than they were before.

00:45:01 ◼   ► So I was just worried like how close am I to the edge of too infrequent?

00:45:06 ◼   ► And maybe I'm way closer to that edge than I think.

00:45:10 ◼   ► But so no, it worked out great.

00:45:14 ◼   ► And like I said, for me personally, it was really great and it was really important during a couple of times in the year in particular.

00:45:19 ◼   ► So that is like one of the most public-facing ways that people can see something is different in the year of redirection.

00:45:27 ◼   ► But you brought up travel, Myke, and this is where I feel like the year of new is a thing.

00:45:35 ◼   ► Because this past 2017, the amount of travel that I did exploded.

00:45:43 ◼   ► It just exploded in this totally unexpected way and

00:45:50 ◼   ► I feel like here's the best way I can-- because I was looking at like how much time I've spent in airports this year

00:45:56 ◼   ► which is like phenomenal amount of time

00:45:58 ◼   ► But the thing that really hit home, which just happened yesterday, was

00:46:05 ◼   ► At the beginning of the year, I sort of knew that I was going to be doing a bunch more traveling

00:46:10 ◼   ► I had a vague idea that this was a thing that was going to happen in the year and

00:46:13 ◼   ► I was talking to a friend of mine about it and

00:46:16 ◼   ► He convinced me to sign up for one of the airline reward programs

00:46:21 ◼   ► I was like, I don't know if I should like who cares I can't just do one point. It's wild to me

00:46:26 ◼   ► I can't believe you are on one. Well, I just thought it was dumb right and and friend and also like

00:46:31 ◼   ► For most of my life the amount of traveling that I did was very little

00:46:37 ◼   ► And it wouldn't really have mattered

00:46:40 ◼   ► But so I signed up at the beginning of the year and you know when you sign up so I signed up with British Airways

00:46:45 ◼   ► And it's like they send you a card and they're like welcome to the peasant class of rewards, right?

00:46:49 ◼   ► You get nothing except this card which now says that you're in our you're at the bottom of our caste system

00:46:55 ◼   ► And I'm like, whatever

00:46:57 ◼   ► so

00:46:58 ◼   ► Yesterday I literally got a golden envelope in the mail. Right? The golden envelope is a great thing to get

00:47:06 ◼   ► from British Airways that I opened up and had like tissue paper and and this fancy thick paper and like

00:47:14 ◼   ► They're like welcome to the golden god class of travel

00:47:18 ◼   ► So I I have been on virgin for the last couple of years and I've gone through that. Mm-hmm that whole thing

00:47:27 ◼   ► But I had to take a few flights with BA this year because virgin didn't serve some places. So I lost my gold status

00:47:35 ◼   ► By like just that hair. I lost it

00:47:38 ◼   ► So I'm now switching over to BA because I've done BA's before that their progression through their system

00:47:44 ◼   ► Is much better like you get more for less with them

00:47:48 ◼   ► So yeah, I I'm going through that right now and probably by the end of the year

00:47:54 ◼   ► I might get to gold because I have a lot of travel on BA this year including like all of my honeymoon stuff

00:48:01 ◼   ► So I think we're gonna be good

00:48:04 ◼   ► Yeah, but it's like I have to say that when I got that golden envelope

00:48:07 ◼   ► It was a real mixed feelings moment. It was like oh god. This is a physical manifestation of

00:48:13 ◼   ► The subjective feeling like I feel like I've traveled a lot this year as I know here is manifest

00:48:19 ◼   ► Proof that the amount of travel I have done has just exploded

00:48:22 ◼   ► Like I counted up like even just just in the summer. I think in the space of six weeks

00:48:29 ◼   ► I stepped on ten planes, like it was some crazy number. Like the whole summer of travel was was especially

00:48:35 ◼   ► explosive and then this year was was on top of that and this feels like a really new and very

00:48:42 ◼   ► different thing in my life and it was also the case that had I not cut back on some other work stuff

00:48:50 ◼   ► that would - the combination of increased business travel plus

00:48:55 ◼   ► maintaining the previous year's schedule, that really would have been a disaster.

00:48:58 ◼   ► Because we certainly ran into enough times this year of just trying to coordinate both of our schedules that it was really hard,

00:49:04 ◼   ► or we were really running up against some very narrow windows of time.

00:49:08 ◼   ► We live in the same town, but I think we have seen each other more this year overseas.

00:49:14 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. Yeah, without a doubt. That is the case.

00:49:17 ◼   ► It's been an interesting experience.

00:49:24 ◼   ► and I also feel like I've traveled so much I have become a very fundamentally different person with travel.

00:49:32 ◼   ► I'm now the kind of person who doesn't have a lot of stress cutting it real close getting to an airport.

00:49:39 ◼   ► I don't think I'm ever gonna get there.

00:49:41 ◼   ► I never thought I would be there either, but I have become that guy.

00:49:45 ◼   ► My thing is now, I don't think about the fact that I'm gonna be getting on a plane very much before I do it.

00:49:53 ◼   ► Right? Like I know that like before I started traveling a bunch of times every year like

00:49:57 ◼   ► Thinking that I'm about to get on a plane to go to America or whatever was like a big thing. That was in my mind

00:50:03 ◼   ► For a bit, right, but now it's kind of just like I'll pack but I'm not really thinking about it

00:50:10 ◼   ► I packed the day before and then I just wake up and go to the airport

00:50:12 ◼   ► Like it's like going to this is such a terrible thing to say I guess but it's like going to get a train now

00:50:18 ◼   ► Because I fly so much right and and the reason we both do this is

00:50:23 ◼   ► Basically everybody that we work with by and large lives in America. So there's so many

00:50:27 ◼   ► Businessy things that occur which require us to be on the other side of the ocean

00:50:33 ◼   ► So that I do it so many times now that it's it's like any kind of former transport

00:50:39 ◼   ► Which is a way healthier way to consider air travel

00:50:44 ◼   ► Because you don't fret about it

00:50:46 ◼   ► I always found myself fretting about it because there are so many things about the process

00:50:51 ◼   ► That are meant to make you fret about it and I'm now happy that I don't need to do that. Yeah, I agree

00:50:57 ◼   ► There's a lot of travel fretting that is gone

00:51:00 ◼   ► Part of that is being part of a members rewards program

00:51:03 ◼   ► which has which has advantages like for me a huge psychological advantage is being able to

00:51:08 ◼   ► pick a seat

00:51:11 ◼   ► further and further ahead in time.

00:51:13 ◼   ► So it's like I know I really do not want to be

00:51:15 ◼   ► penned in in a window seat on an airplane if I can possibly avoid it.

00:51:19 ◼   ► And so like getting an aisle seat is extraordinarily psychologically important to me when I'm flying.

00:51:24 ◼   ► And so being able to like book and get that way in advance makes a big difference.

00:51:28 ◼   ► But yeah, also just like the pure familiarity with travel has has definitely decreased the amount of fretting.

00:51:36 ◼   ► And has made some things possible,

00:51:39 ◼   ► which would have been a huge, a huge deal, like an inconceivably large deal otherwise.

00:51:45 ◼   ► I'll just briefly relay a story that I feel like encompasses the entirety of my travel year.

00:51:53 ◼   ► But I had traveled so much this year that come December I had decided there's going to be no more travel.

00:51:59 ◼   ► I cannot do any more flights. It's too much. It's all too disruptive.

00:52:03 ◼   ► I don't want to do it.

00:52:04 ◼   ► And it's like, that's one of the reasons why I was really interested in going to PodCon,

00:52:08 ◼   ► but I was like, I can't get on one more plane because I've just flown too much this year.

00:52:14 ◼   ► And it's a long one. It takes a long time to get to Seattle, turns out.

00:52:18 ◼   ► Yeah, it takes a long time to get to Seattle, but I was thinking like,

00:52:21 ◼   ► "Oh, but I can stay on Grey Master time, it'll all be fine."

00:52:24 ◼   ► I was trying to scheme it out, but the rational part of my brain said like,

00:52:29 ◼   ► "Too many flights, dude. You just can't do this.

00:52:32 ◼   ► decide that there is a travel veto on December, no more traveling.

00:52:37 ◼   ► And I decided it and I thought, okay, that's great.

00:52:40 ◼   ► And then, for reasons that I can't go into the details,

00:52:45 ◼   ► we'll just say that this is one of the many problems of being a self-employed dual citizen

00:52:50 ◼   ► where one of those citizenships is America.

00:52:52 ◼   ► America makes it real difficult for self-employed people living abroad.

00:52:56 ◼   ► But it turned out, I found out on Christmas Eve

00:53:00 ◼   ► that I needed to go to America to sign a document before the end of the year.

00:53:05 ◼   ► And so I ended up at the very last minute between Christmas and New Year's

00:53:11 ◼   ► buying a plane ticket to go to America for 36 hours

00:53:16 ◼   ► to return and fly back before New Year's.

00:53:19 ◼   ► And while that was an enormous pain in the ass,

00:53:26 ◼   ► there was a part of me which because I had done so much travel, I was like,

00:53:29 ◼   ► "You know what? I can just deal with this."

00:53:31 ◼   ► Right? It's not...

00:53:32 ◼   ► It was not something I wanted to do,

00:53:36 ◼   ► but had I not done a ton of flying otherwise,

00:53:39 ◼   ► that would have been an incredible psychological problem.

00:53:43 ◼   ► But I just had this feeling of resignation of like,

00:53:47 ◼   ► "I guess I'm going to America for 36 hours

00:53:49 ◼   ► to sign a single piece of paper

00:53:51 ◼   ► that before the end of the calendar year."

00:53:53 ◼   ► Like, "Okay, here I go."

00:53:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, that really summed up a difference in you.

00:53:58 ◼   ► Like, and I noticed it because we were chatting

00:54:00 ◼   ► over Christmas and I knew I was seeing you

00:54:03 ◼   ► over the New Year's period and you told me

00:54:05 ◼   ► that you were getting on a plane

00:54:07 ◼   ► and I was like, that's a different man.

00:54:09 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:54:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

00:54:11 ◼   ► - He's changed, he's changed.

00:54:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, what I loved about that though

00:54:14 ◼   ► is even when I checked in, the gate agent

00:54:16 ◼   ► looked at my ticket and she's like,

00:54:18 ◼   ► you're going to America for 36 hours?

00:54:20 ◼   ► And I'm like, yes, that's correct, man.

00:54:22 ◼   ► - Don't judge me.

00:54:24 ◼   ► You don't know my struggles.

00:54:25 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:54:28 ◼   ► It was totally nuts, but I felt like that was the perfect encapsulation.

00:54:32 ◼   ► I decided there's no more travel, and of course at the 11th hour something else comes up,

00:54:37 ◼   ► which is like, "This is mandatory travel, you have no option about it."

00:54:40 ◼   ► Like, "Okay, guess it's gonna happen."

00:54:42 ◼   ► So I feel like looking back on my past year,

00:54:46 ◼   ► the amount of travel, the amount of new locations,

00:54:50 ◼   ► like, that is a huge difference in what was occurring over the previous year.

00:54:55 ◼   ► The other major thing though, which was related to my year of new and year of redirection was

00:55:01 ◼   ► while you were doing time tracking for the first time last year, I was deciding to try to time

00:55:07 ◼   ► track everything in my life for the previous year. And I have to say, I feel like that was also

00:55:15 ◼   ► a really great thing to do, and I've really appreciated this...

00:55:23 ◼   ► I don't know, I don't even know how to phrase it, but I feel like there is...

00:55:26 ◼   ► I don't know how to say this in a way that's not going to sound to people like it's a bad thing,

00:55:31 ◼   ► because I mean it in a very good way.

00:55:34 ◼   ► But I feel like having done this for a long period of time,

00:55:39 ◼   ► of trying to keep track of not just working hours,

00:55:43 ◼   ► but also like leisure time, or socializing time, or any kind of time,

00:55:50 ◼   ► I really have like a mental clock in my head

00:55:54 ◼   ► that is running and

00:55:58 ◼   ► that will sound bad to people, but what I mean by it is I feel like it's established a real kind of

00:56:06 ◼   ► in the moment presence in a lot of the things that I do.

00:56:12 ◼   ► So, like,

00:56:14 ◼   ► again, so the worst way that people would think about it is like,

00:56:18 ◼   ► Like if I'm socializing with someone, I do keep track of my socializing time, but it's

00:56:22 ◼   ► not like I'm there on my watch and it's like, "Oh God, how much time am I spending with

00:56:26 ◼   ► this person?"

00:56:27 ◼   ► - Bleep, bloop, 10 personality points allocated.

00:56:31 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:56:34 ◼   ► It's much more this feeling of like, I have decided to spend time with this person and

00:56:40 ◼   ► I'm going to be as mentally here in the moment as I possibly can be.

00:56:45 ◼   ► And I feel like this is a mental improvement that has been booted up in my brain by trying

00:56:54 ◼   ► to always have a timer running in the background so that I'm just time tracking my entire life.

00:56:59 ◼   ► So I feel like it has made me much more present focused than would otherwise be the case.

00:57:09 ◼   ► So I would not recommend that everybody do this thing that I have done.

00:57:14 ◼   ► I really think it is on the edge of crazy to try to time track an entire life, but I

00:57:19 ◼   ► have found it really good and it has been a worthwhile thing to do after having already

00:57:27 ◼   ► been for years familiar with the idea of doing just time tracking around more specific activities.

00:57:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I think I have an example of this too, because I do ultimately think that what you

00:57:39 ◼   ► do is way more than I would want to do, but once you get into time tracking as a concept

00:57:44 ◼   ► that exists in your life, you're able to apply it to some different things. So as is always

00:57:50 ◼   ► with human beings, I am trying to make a more concerted effort of taking care of my health.

00:57:57 ◼   ► And right now that is meaning to exercise more. Now I'll give you a fact about Myke

00:58:02 ◼   ► Myke Hurley hates exercise.

00:58:05 ◼   ► I have tried so many different things.

00:58:09 ◼   ► I have never ever enjoyed physical activity.

00:58:11 ◼   ► I didn't enjoy PE in school.

00:58:14 ◼   ► I just don't.

00:58:15 ◼   ► For whatever reason, I'm not good at any of it

00:58:17 ◼   ► and I don't like it.

00:58:18 ◼   ► It's just how I am.

00:58:19 ◼   ► I do not get a good feeling from going to the gym

00:58:24 ◼   ► no matter what I do.

00:58:25 ◼   ► I just don't.

00:58:25 ◼   ► I know that this is something that people get

00:58:27 ◼   ► and whatever and endorphins and blah, blah, blah.

00:58:30 ◼   ► I never get a good feeling out of it.

00:58:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, (beep) those people, that's my feeling.

00:58:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

00:58:36 ◼   ► The only type of activity that I enjoy is swimming.

00:58:39 ◼   ► I like to swim.

00:58:41 ◼   ► I'm pretty decent at it, I enjoy it.

00:58:44 ◼   ► And it's, I believe to be a pretty good workout.

00:58:48 ◼   ► Now, the problem that I have is that

00:58:50 ◼   ► where I live there are not a lot of places I can swim.

00:58:55 ◼   ► So I have to travel somewhere to go to a pool

00:58:59 ◼   ► and travel back and the problem that I was seeing was I believed that it was taking too

00:59:04 ◼   ► much time for me to complete this activity and that it was eating into my days too significantly.

00:59:12 ◼   ► So I decided to time track it. I was like, let's find out shall I? I've had this feeling

00:59:19 ◼   ► a bunch before so let's find out. I was right, it was taking too much time so I have optimized

00:59:26 ◼   ► some of the travel to and from the place that I'm going to.

00:59:30 ◼   ► So I've tried to find ways to cut down the travel time

00:59:33 ◼   ► and to build it into days differently,

00:59:35 ◼   ► but I got the answer that I needed

00:59:37 ◼   ► from actually doing some real time tracking

00:59:40 ◼   ► to see how many hours this thing was taking.

00:59:43 ◼   ► I was finding that it was taking me three hours

00:59:47 ◼   ► to do 45 minutes of swimming.

00:59:48 ◼   ► Well, that's not good, is it?

00:59:51 ◼   ► That's not efficient, so I've found ways

00:59:54 ◼   ► cut that down by like a third. So it's like okay so let me try and see how I can build this in.

01:00:00 ◼   ► So yeah that's just like an example of when you get into the time tracking mindset you can use

01:00:06 ◼   ► real data to prove theories or disprove theories and then action upon them. That's what the benefit

01:00:13 ◼   ► for me is of seriously time tracking but I am not of the inclination to do what you do yet.

01:00:21 ◼   ► Like I don't want to track the time that I spend playing Nintendo. Like I don't I don't need to see that right like I'm good

01:00:28 ◼   ► I'm good. Let's just assume that all of the time that isn't work time is spent playing Nintendo and then we're good

01:00:35 ◼   ► Yeah, but see this this is why I like doing the whole lifetime tracking because I

01:00:43 ◼   ► Think that we when we get to what our themes for the next year are I'll talk a little bit about more

01:00:49 ◼   ► But it does then...

01:00:51 ◼   ► If you're trying to do the whole life tracking, there is data in like the missing data.

01:00:56 ◼   ► And that's an interesting thing to look at is to say like, "Oh, when, you know, I'm awake 16 hours a day and

01:01:02 ◼   ► like, but how many hours did I actually get in the day?" And then that missing piece becomes an interesting piece of data.

01:01:10 ◼   ► Like, "Where did that time go?" Or

01:01:12 ◼   ► "Why is it that during this week or this month I was clearly way worse at time tracking than other times?"

01:01:18 ◼   ► So I like having that because I feel like there is this sense of information in the negative space of the time tracking

01:01:28 ◼   ► if you're trying to be really complete in what's occurring.

01:01:32 ◼   ► We can talk more about that later, but I guess I'll just say that the year of new and the year of redirection was sort of

01:01:39 ◼   ► vague, much more vague than the year of less was for me, which had this really precise meaning.

01:01:45 ◼   ► But I still feel like a lot of what I was trying to do, I did.

01:01:52 ◼   ► I feel much better about my work-life balance.

01:01:55 ◼   ► There were some things last year that made me think about how I spend family time and wanting to try to increase that.

01:02:03 ◼   ► And that is definitely a thing that I accomplished.

01:02:06 ◼   ► There were a bunch of new things that I did, new experiences, some new business ventures.

01:02:12 ◼   ► There was a bunch of new stuff that was great because I had been able to redirect how I

01:02:20 ◼   ► spent some of my time into those new things.

01:02:22 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the balance.

01:02:24 ◼   ► It wasn't that you were necessarily seeking out these new things, but by redirecting your

01:02:29 ◼   ► time, new things could come to you.

01:02:34 ◼   ► It's kind of like that is the way I think that it ended up balancing out because I don't

01:02:39 ◼   ► know if you necessarily set out the year to be like, "I need some new business ventures!"

01:02:43 ◼   ► I don't know if necessarily that was what you were thinking.

01:02:46 ◼   ► Like when you open up space, things become available. So I feel like that was really

01:02:53 ◼   ► good. I guess in some ways I feel like I had much more of the advantages and fewer of the

01:02:59 ◼   ► disadvantages of being a self-employed person during the year of Redirection. Like I think

01:03:04 ◼   ► that's that's

01:03:06 ◼   ► Largely what happened like I did some analysis

01:03:09 ◼   ► I did like a like an 80/20 analysis of

01:03:12 ◼   ► Where where are the pain points in my life and where are the benefit points in my life and realized that was a little bit

01:03:18 ◼   ► off and worked to

01:03:20 ◼   ► Reduce the things that were causing pain and increase the number of things which were causing enjoyment

01:03:24 ◼   ► so I feel like that that's the summation of like your of redirection ended up being the year that I was able to

01:03:32 ◼   ► benefit more from being a self-employed person than I had in previous years.

01:03:36 ◼   ► Yeah, because you could do whatever you wanted, right?

01:03:39 ◼   ► There was more of that feeling of like, I can pick and choose and do the things that I want to do

01:03:44 ◼   ► without the feeling of like, I am bound into the things that I must do.

01:03:48 ◼   ► There was kind of a little bit more flexibility in there.

01:03:51 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I always think this, that there's a...

01:03:55 ◼   ► It's a thing I see with a lot of people and it's very natural for it to happen, but it's like...

01:04:02 ◼   ► I don't know how to phrase it, but there's this way that being successfully self-employed

01:04:09 ◼   ► you can end up just building yourself a golden cage.

01:04:13 ◼   ► And I feel like in 2016 I came a little close to that edge or closer to that edge than I

01:04:20 ◼   ► really want to be and that's a thing that I'm always very conscious of and then like

01:04:24 ◼   ► 2017 was riding that ship a little better.

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01:06:06 ◼   ► So I have two themes for 2018 starting out, which is also being coupled with my

01:06:13 ◼   ► third theme, which is running into a June. Yeah, so you're gonna have three overlapping themes. That's what's gonna happen? Okay. Yeah

01:06:20 ◼   ► Yeah, well, okay, so it will make sense when you hear them. So so one of the themes of my year

01:06:24 ◼   ► Is the year of adulting I am gonna become a serious adult this year is

01:06:30 ◼   ► It's time to get serious because this year I turn 30 years old and I'm getting married

01:06:38 ◼   ► It's pretty serious. Yeah, I feel like these are pretty serious big adult things that will occur

01:06:45 ◼   ► So that's I know that's just gonna be a prevailing thing in in my life this year

01:06:49 ◼   ► year. I don't believe there are any significant actions to it, but they are just guiding a

01:06:56 ◼   ► lot of things that are happening. So especially my wedding, it is guiding a lot of activity

01:07:02 ◼   ► and focus this year in a way that I am going to take my foot off the gas a little bit more

01:07:10 ◼   ► with some work stuff this year because I have a very serious, big event going on. So that's

01:07:16 ◼   ► That's kind of a thought.

01:07:17 ◼   ► And really, I don't think that it will...

01:07:20 ◼   ► No one will see it, right?

01:07:21 ◼   ► It's kind of in a way less than what you did.

01:07:24 ◼   ► I'm not gonna pull back on a bunch of stuff, but it's just informing some things that I'm

01:07:29 ◼   ► gonna be doing and kind of how I'm gonna be approaching some projects that are existing

01:07:34 ◼   ► and new because I'm gonna be having this huge thing going on in my life this year, which

01:07:40 ◼   ► I'm very excited about.

01:07:43 ◼   ► But it's obviously gonna make an impact on me.

01:07:45 ◼   ► Which is a great thing about being self-employed

01:07:49 ◼   ► is that I'm able to make those decisions, right?

01:07:51 ◼   ► And it was like when I was buying the house

01:07:56 ◼   ► and I remember saying on the show about like,

01:07:58 ◼   ► it's like a job of its own and I don't know how people,

01:08:03 ◼   ► I just don't know how people do it, including me,

01:08:05 ◼   ► I don't know how I did it.

01:08:06 ◼   ► And it's a similar thing, like getting married,

01:08:10 ◼   ► it's like a job of its own.

01:08:13 ◼   ► And that's why there is an entire industry of wedding planners that exist, because it

01:08:18 ◼   ► is like a big, huge project to manage.

01:08:21 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a giant logistical challenge on many levels.

01:08:25 ◼   ► Yeah, probably the biggest logistical thing that I will ever be involved with.

01:08:30 ◼   ► So yeah, that's informing a lot.

01:08:32 ◼   ► So that's one thing, but there's less kind of actions from that.

01:08:36 ◼   ► And okay, so this might sound in contrast to the previous thing that I just spoke about,

01:08:43 ◼   ► let me try and explain 2018 will also be for me the year of branching out so I

01:08:50 ◼   ► have some things that I want to do I have some new things that I want to try

01:08:55 ◼   ► and I want to see if it's something that I'm able to do so like one of those

01:09:02 ◼   ► things is more live shows I love doing live shows and but they are there they're

01:09:10 ◼   ► real bear to a range and we did more in 2017 than we've done in 2016 and I want to continue

01:09:16 ◼   ► that. I don't have any handle on what that's going to be. I have no plan. We have no plan,

01:09:23 ◼   ► like significant plan right now, but we want to do more of them, right? So we want to hopefully

01:09:30 ◼   ► do one at WWDC this year, which we didn't do last year. So, you know, no plans, but

01:09:34 ◼   ► it's just hopes. And so that is a big thing because doing, anytime you add another live

01:09:40 ◼   ► show into the Canada like it's a it's a big logistical challenge and I am very

01:09:44 ◼   ► lucky in that I have Steven to manage that stuff. Steven is very good at

01:09:47 ◼   ► putting together live shows, my co-founder at Relay Event. It's something that he has

01:09:51 ◼   ► developed in his skill set but for me if I'm if I'm involved in hosting them that

01:09:57 ◼   ► is huge for me. So like before I do any type of live show I go into an almost

01:10:02 ◼   ► catatonic state. I can't talk to anybody and I really get kind of like focused on it in

01:10:11 ◼   ► a very significant way. Like for like an hour before I'm like sick. I don't even know what

01:10:19 ◼   ► it is. I don't know if it's nerves. I don't know where it comes from. I don't know if

01:10:23 ◼   ► it's stage fright. I don't know what it is because as soon as we start I'm great, fine.

01:10:27 ◼   ► I can do it.

01:10:28 ◼   ► But I feel like I always need to prepare more.

01:10:33 ◼   ► And so I kind of get into this zone for a while.

01:10:36 ◼   ► So there's always a lot to do,

01:10:38 ◼   ► but it's something that I get great pleasure from

01:10:40 ◼   ► when we do them.

01:10:41 ◼   ► I love doing it.

01:10:43 ◼   ► So we want to try and do more of that.

01:10:45 ◼   ► And then trying new ideas is probably

01:10:49 ◼   ► the bigger thing for me.

01:10:50 ◼   ► And I've made hints to this in the past

01:10:53 ◼   ► that there is an idea in my brain,

01:10:55 ◼   ► which is, it is a podcast idea.

01:10:57 ◼   ► I don't know if it's ever going to happen

01:11:01 ◼   ► because it's so different to anything else that I have done.

01:11:05 ◼   ► But I have been stewing on this idea for about six months

01:11:10 ◼   ► and it won't go away.

01:11:12 ◼   ► It keeps coming back.

01:11:13 ◼   ► - It's a good sign.

01:11:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's what, so that's that, okay,

01:11:17 ◼   ► so that's one of the big things, right?

01:11:20 ◼   ► 2016 Myke would have already launched this project.

01:11:23 ◼   ► - Right.

01:11:24 ◼   ► But 2017 Myke learned to wait

01:11:27 ◼   ► So I'm still sitting on it

01:11:30 ◼   ► but it's something that I really want to do and I

01:11:34 ◼   ► saw Hamilton last week in London

01:11:38 ◼   ► and it's only made it worse because

01:11:41 ◼   ► Hamilton was created by one person and it is this

01:11:45 ◼   ► incredible

01:11:48 ◼   ► Incredible thing which I urge anyone to go and see if you can because it's probably the greatest single piece of media

01:11:55 ◼   ► I've ever consumed it is a tour de force. I can't believe it. I

01:11:59 ◼   ► Was just gonna say here like I haven't seen Hamilton

01:12:03 ◼   ► I was aware whatever was like last year when I first came out that I started hearing everybody in the world talk about and overhype

01:12:09 ◼   ► this thing

01:12:11 ◼   ► And I got like sick of hearing people talk about Hamilton and I was like, ah, this is ridiculous. Whatever

01:12:17 ◼   ► Like, this is just like a fad.

01:12:19 ◼   ► But then I felt like my mind was changed because I, uh, last year I watched Moana and I was like,

01:12:26 ◼   ► "Man, the music in this was just amazing. I just made this, this was so fantastic. Like,

01:12:30 ◼   ► this music is great." And I thought like, "This is one of the best movie watching experiences

01:12:34 ◼   ► I've had in a really long time." And I did a thing which I never do, which is like,

01:12:38 ◼   ► "Who made this movie?" And I looked up and it's like, "Oh, turns out that the guy who made

01:12:43 ◼   ► Hamilton did all the music for this and I was like, "Ah, okay, maybe this Hamilton thing is worth seeing."

01:12:51 ◼   ► Great, Hamilton is in London. It's gonna be here forever. Please try and get tickets to it. And I

01:12:57 ◼   ► advise anyone to do what I did because I think this is great. Don't listen to the music beforehand.

01:13:02 ◼   ► Experience it. Who would do that? Who would do that? So many people. Because honestly, you can

01:13:07 ◼   ► and it's fine and you can get it, but see it.

01:13:10 ◼   ► So obviously I am no delusion of grandeur here.

01:13:14 ◼   ► I don't think I can create something

01:13:16 ◼   ► that is of the scale of Hamilton.

01:13:19 ◼   ► - No, see that's what I'm hearing.

01:13:20 ◼   ► Myke's gonna make, right?

01:13:21 ◼   ► - Hamilton two.

01:13:23 ◼   ► - Myke's working on Jefferson right now.

01:13:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's what I'm doing.

01:13:26 ◼   ► But it was just, because what I wanna do is a big project,

01:13:31 ◼   ► is a huge project.

01:13:32 ◼   ► It's something that I don't know

01:13:33 ◼   ► if I have the skills or capabilities to do,

01:13:36 ◼   ► But seeing something created by one individual is very inspiring to me because it's like,

01:13:44 ◼   ► well, it shows that people are able to do these types of things.

01:13:48 ◼   ► So maybe I can make something that's okay.

01:13:52 ◼   ► So it's only basically what is happening to me is I have this idea and everything is inspiring

01:14:00 ◼   ► me.

01:14:01 ◼   ► Right?

01:14:02 ◼   ► So many things that I'm seeing are like pushing me to be like, see, you can do this stuff.

01:14:07 ◼   ► People can do this stuff. Maybe you can. So it's only feeding the flame. And yeah,

01:14:13 ◼   ► people could probably guess what I have going on in my mind if they pay attention to the clues.

01:14:18 ◼   ► If you guess it, you're probably right. But it's a project that I don't know if I had the

01:14:24 ◼   ► capability to do. But 2018, I will make the decision. By the end of this year,

01:14:30 ◼   ► I'll have either done it or I'm never gonna do it. I'm setting that for myself. It's like

01:14:35 ◼   ► You can't keep doing this forever. If you want to try and make a go of this thing. You've got to do it this year

01:14:42 ◼   ► So we'll see that's that's so my bigger theme this year is branching out trying some new big projects

01:14:49 ◼   ► But also being mindful of not just trying anything and everything that comes to my mind like I learned in 2017

01:14:56 ◼   ► Well, I look forward to seeing your enormous project at some point.

01:14:59 ◼   ► Or not seeing it.

01:15:00 ◼   ► Hamilton 2 coming to Broadway.

01:15:02 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:15:04 ◼   ► Yeah, but I think that what you just said there is also a great point about deciding that you're going to do this thing or you're going to have to let it go.

01:15:15 ◼   ► Because otherwise you can't just keep having it in the back of your mind for forever.

01:15:19 ◼   ► And I think that's an interesting point to have with that.

01:15:24 ◼   ► So yeah, I wish you all the best of luck with that, Myke.

01:15:29 ◼   ► Thank you.

01:15:30 ◼   ► I hope it turns out well.

01:15:32 ◼   ► And all the live shows you're going to arrange.

01:15:34 ◼   ► That we're going to do, right?

01:15:36 ◼   ► How many live shows do you want to commit to? Ten?

01:15:38 ◼   ► Zero. Zero.

01:15:40 ◼   ► I'm committing to zero right now, Myke.

01:15:42 ◼   ► The Cortex World Tour.

01:15:44 ◼   ► Cortex World Tour.

01:15:46 ◼   ► How many dates do you have? Zero.

01:15:50 ◼   ► So what's your theme for 2018?

01:15:53 ◼   ► Okay, so we need a little bit of a run-up to this because

01:15:58 ◼   ► when I was recapping my year, it's mostly talking about how it was great. Like, year of redirection, very happy, things worked out well.

01:16:06 ◼   ► But there's an alternative name that I could have given that year, looking in retrospect.

01:16:13 ◼   ► And I think I could have called 2017, standing now at the beginning of 2018,

01:16:20 ◼   ► the year of chaos.

01:16:23 ◼   ► Because while I had cut back-

01:16:26 ◼   ► That would have been a really bad name to give it proactively.

01:16:29 ◼   ► Yeah, no, obviously.

01:16:31 ◼   ► Proactively, that's not the name to give the thing, but retroactively.

01:16:36 ◼   ► I think I'm going to always think of 2017 as like this year of chaos.

01:16:40 ◼   ► Because this year was just a year where I felt like

01:16:47 ◼   ► I never had any real consistent schedule for any significant length of time.

01:16:52 ◼   ► I feel like things were just all over the place and

01:16:56 ◼   ► Again, I do like to try to verify this kind of stuff

01:17:00 ◼   ► So when I was like reviewing all the documentation I had from the previous year the data

01:17:04 ◼   ► Totally bears this out that that last year was a year

01:17:09 ◼   ► That was just all over the place in every metric I can think of

01:17:13 ◼   ► and

01:17:15 ◼   ► So like one of the things I was mentioning before about the negative space and time tracking

01:17:19 ◼   ► I was looking over the year and I could see, like I wanted to see how well did I do with this time tracking?

01:17:24 ◼   ► And my mental framework is that on any particular day I should have 12 hours.

01:17:31 ◼   ► Like 12 hours is the bare minimum of competency.

01:17:35 ◼   ► 14 hours is good and like 16 hours is the theoretical maximum of how much time I would be tracking in a day.

01:17:42 ◼   ► And the median day for the whole year was like 13 and a half hours, which I was pretty happy with.

01:17:48 ◼   ► But if you break it down by months, some months, I'm tracking

01:17:53 ◼   ► 15 and a half hours a day, like I'm doing great. And a couple of months, particularly in the summer and in April,

01:18:00 ◼   ► I've got like six hours a day, right? Like total disaster across the board in terms of the time tracking.

01:18:07 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, I remember those months. I remember I decided like, the hell with this,

01:18:11 ◼   ► I can't possibly do it at all.

01:18:12 ◼   ► So I just have like a string of zero days in a row because I'm like, I can't, I can't

01:18:16 ◼   ► psychologically deal with this today. I've just got too much.

01:18:18 ◼   ► And I looked at things like

01:18:22 ◼   ► records of exercise and like records of health and it's like

01:18:27 ◼   ► crazy lines all over the place of like how frequently frequent were you exercising? It's like crazy or like

01:18:34 ◼   ► like things with like other health stuff like diet stuff. It's like, okay. It's like, okay great

01:18:40 ◼   ► I have this stretch of time where everything is perfect. I was really focusing on and then it just goes to total disaster later

01:18:46 ◼   ► And I think a huge portion of that was just, I am not a person who was used to the travel,

01:18:54 ◼   ► so it's like I can see that it's like the calm pond of my life is totally destroyed with ripples and waves

01:19:02 ◼   ► every time a rock of an airplane is thrown into it.

01:19:04 ◼   ► And it's like this really takes things out of place.

01:19:08 ◼   ► But even on top of that, I can just see again from the records,

01:19:13 ◼   ► was really bad last year about things like weekly reviews and trying to stay on top of

01:19:19 ◼   ► stuff. I think it wasn't helped by my sort of abandoning task managers for a while as

01:19:26 ◼   ► well, which went into this theme of like a year of chaos.

01:19:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I still honestly still can't get my head around that. Like, I don't feel like

01:19:34 ◼   ► I was ever satisfied with the reasoning in which you were doing it. Like, it just never

01:19:39 ◼   ► clicked for me. I feel like that that was a mistake that you made in the year.

01:19:44 ◼   ► Well, I think I needed to pull back from some of that stuff. That was a little bit

01:19:49 ◼   ► of like, redirection. Like I'm going to just like let this kind of go. But so what

01:19:56 ◼   ► I feel like with last year, it had this experience where high level things

01:20:03 ◼   ► were really great. It was a really successful year. But on like the low

01:20:07 ◼   ► level it was totally this this like year of chaos so my theme for the upcoming

01:20:13 ◼   ► year is the year of order that there is going to be order in 2018 oh yeah yes

01:20:22 ◼   ► chaos to order so good yeah you've you've had a brainwave when you came up

01:20:29 ◼   ► with that one I like it it's been itching it's been under my skin for you

01:20:34 ◼   ► you know, maybe since mid-December I started thinking about this,

01:20:37 ◼   ► because as we were coming up to our year themes, I was like,

01:20:39 ◼   ► "I don't really have a year theme, like I'm just wishy-washy, like whatever."

01:20:42 ◼   ► And as I started to think about it, I was like, "This is what it is.

01:20:46 ◼   ► It's the year of order, it's 2018."

01:20:48 ◼   ► Um, and I've sort of started on this in some ways,

01:20:53 ◼   ► but there's like a sentence in my mind,

01:20:57 ◼   ► which I feel like is this guiding sentence for the year,

01:21:01 ◼   ► which is, like, the work isn't the work, the system is the work.

01:21:07 ◼   ► And so I feel like I've set up a bunch of stuff already to try to help with.

01:21:12 ◼   ► Like, okay, in the morning, like, you get up and the first thing that you do is the writing.

01:21:18 ◼   ► And like, it doesn't matter how much you write or if it's good at all,

01:21:22 ◼   ► because the system is the work, the work isn't the work.

01:21:25 ◼   ► Like, one of my real focuses this year is

01:21:29 ◼   ► I'm still expecting that there's going to be a lot of travel, like I can already see my calendar has a bunch of dates already in the future, like, oh god, here we go.

01:21:37 ◼   ► But I think there can be a real difference when I'm going into the year expecting and acknowledging, like, there is going to be travel, there are going to be disruptions,

01:21:49 ◼   ► but I cannot allow them to be as disruptive as they were last year.

01:21:54 ◼   ► like last year I was really caught off guard by a lot of that kind of stuff. So for me, one of the

01:22:00 ◼   ► things is like re-establishing a very clear schedule and sequence of habits to follow. Like that is one

01:22:10 ◼   ► of the big things for me in the year and it's really interesting because I'm coming back to you

01:22:18 ◼   ► off the end of a... of a...

01:22:20 ◼   ► Gragation, off...

01:22:22 ◼   ► in... the snowy wastelands,

01:22:25 ◼   ► meditating on this idea of the Year of Order.

01:22:28 ◼   ► - You're on a leadership retreat. - My wife literally has started to call these things that I do.

01:22:32 ◼   ► She's like, "You're going on corporate retreats for one?

01:22:34 ◼   ► - Like, that's what you're doing?" - Yeah.

01:22:36 ◼   ► And it's like, "Yes, that is 100% the case."

01:22:39 ◼   ► Set up a little table, name plaques, and then you move around the table,

01:22:42 ◼   ► depending on what you need to be talking about, you know?

01:22:45 ◼   ► Yeah, we do, I mean there's brainstorming on whiteboards of like where's the company gonna go for the next year

01:22:51 ◼   ► How do you build the human pyramid?

01:22:53 ◼   ► That's an excellent question

01:22:55 ◼   ► Wouldn't you like to know?

01:22:57 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:23:01 ◼   ► But so, here's the thing that was interesting to do

01:23:05 ◼   ► I had actually set up as part of the year of Redirection

01:23:10 ◼   ► I had set up in advance this period of time at the beginning of 2018 to be like this dedicated

01:23:16 ◼   ► Grey Incorporated company retreat and

01:23:19 ◼   ► Because it was really useful last year and like I want to do this again next year

01:23:23 ◼   ► But I was really aware that

01:23:25 ◼   ► When I do these trips normally I can very quickly get into like a great schedule and I had a freaking

01:23:33 ◼   ► brutal time this year

01:23:36 ◼   ► forcing my brain back into this regular schedule, and it was just like, "Ah, I can see, like, I'm just not

01:23:43 ◼   ► used to this because my year has been so chaotic

01:23:46 ◼   ► that my brain is like, fucking the idea that we've gotta, we've gotta bust out the order again."

01:23:53 ◼   ► And it was just, it was an interesting experience to have, like, it's taking me a lot of time to force this change, and

01:24:00 ◼   ► it reminded me of

01:24:02 ◼   ► back, back when I was adulting and

01:24:05 ◼   ► And when I did my teacher training program and realized, like, this is the first thing I've ever come up against in my life

01:24:12 ◼   ► where I can't just slack my way through, and I actually need to figure out, like, how to organize myself to be able to get things done.

01:24:20 ◼   ► And I remember that was a really difficult mental time of, like, "Man, I'm so used to just sliding on through life,

01:24:26 ◼   ► but suddenly I can't do that now, and I have to, like, become a different person in order to succeed in this endeavor."

01:24:31 ◼   ► So being on my corporate retreat, I was just aware of like, man, this is real evidence that the past year has been a very chaotic year

01:24:39 ◼   ► because this thing which is normally not a lot of effort for me to do, to like click back into a regular schedule, is actually quite hard for me to do.

01:24:47 ◼   ► Like even things like waking up at a consistent time in the morning, like just brutal.

01:24:52 ◼   ► But it's evidence that like, when I look at my health data, like my sleep schedule is all over the place for the past year.

01:24:57 ◼   ► So that's a big part of it, is this idea that it is the routine, like the routine is the work,

01:25:04 ◼   ► the work isn't the work, and I'm really going to be focusing on that a lot.

01:25:09 ◼   ► That's one of the really big things.

01:25:11 ◼   ► There is a little sub part of the Year of Order, which I haven't quite figured out precisely what this is yet,

01:25:21 ◼   ► but it comes out of the time tracking which is this idea of like a war on

01:25:27 ◼   ► unintentionally

01:25:29 ◼   ► so

01:25:31 ◼   ► one of the things with time tracking that I actually mentioned in those early episodes is I

01:25:35 ◼   ► Do try to keep track of what I think of is like

01:25:39 ◼   ► Unintentional time where I'm doing something, but it's not really like on purpose

01:25:45 ◼   ► I'm not being intentional about the thing that I'm doing and

01:25:48 ◼   ► so I

01:25:50 ◼   ► I have this idea that like part of the year on order there's like a sub front

01:25:54 ◼   ► Which is the war on unintentionality and so that that can be things like

01:25:58 ◼   ► For example social media like spending less time on social media or the time that I spend on social media is more

01:26:06 ◼   ► Intentional rather than unintentional

01:26:10 ◼   ► So that's that's a thing like looking over my time tracking data is I find the amount of

01:26:17 ◼   ► intentionality time registered in the last year. It's like, it's too much. I don't like it and

01:26:22 ◼   ► I feel like I want a much higher percentage of the time in my life to be

01:26:27 ◼   ► intentional versus

01:26:30 ◼   ► unintentional. So that's that's another like part of this idea, but that part is much

01:26:35 ◼   ► less well formed than just the idea of like

01:26:39 ◼   ► 2018 is the year of order. I'm gonna bring order to the world.

01:26:43 ◼   ► So jealous of your name.

01:26:45 ◼   ► You really went from just like atrocious name to excellent name, right?

01:26:52 ◼   ► 2017 was just bad name and 2018 is real good name.

01:26:56 ◼   ► But it has to be because I really think I could not survive another year of redirection.

01:27:03 ◼   ► Like I think I would just I would just lose it if I had another unstructured year.

01:27:08 ◼   ► Like the redirection year was like just a course correction change.

01:27:11 ◼   ► You can't do that every year forever. Like that's not how that works, right?

01:27:16 ◼   ► Restructuring things takes some time and you do it once and then you do it again in like five years time

01:27:22 ◼   ► Like it would be pointless to do what you did last year every year because you'd never get anything done

01:27:29 ◼   ► Constantly changing your business but not actually producing anything. It's not really a benefit to that

01:27:35 ◼   ► Yeah, so anyway, there we go. Year of order 2018. Oh, man

01:27:41 ◼   ► And I just, as you said that, I just got a push notification in Todoist that just says

01:27:47 ◼   ► to work on big project idea.

01:27:48 ◼   ► Calling to you Myke.

01:27:51 ◼   ► I want to thank FreshBooks for their support of this show.

01:27:54 ◼   ► Please take it upon yourself, if you are a freelancer, to sign up for FreshBooks.

01:28:00 ◼   ► Now is the time.

01:28:01 ◼   ► I'm going to mention it again.

01:28:02 ◼   ► It's New Year's time.

01:28:03 ◼   ► It's time to make some changes.

01:28:05 ◼   ► Make this your yearly theme to get your finances in order and one of the ways to do that in

01:28:11 ◼   ► is to sign up for FreshBooks. We have been using them for our invoices since day one

01:28:16 ◼   ► of Relay FM and it has drastically reduced the amount of time, aggravation and hassle

01:28:21 ◼   ► it takes for me to get my job done. FreshBooks can save up to 192 hours for freelancers with

01:28:27 ◼   ► their cloud accounting software because it's so easy to use. You get notifications that

01:28:32 ◼   ► tell you what you need to be focused on. You can automate late payment email reminders

01:28:36 ◼   ► so you don't have to spend time chasing people. You can even see when somebody's looked at

01:28:40 ◼   ► your invoice. It's more than just invoices, you can set up projects with your clients

01:28:51 ◼   ► and share documents. You can also have all of your expenses run through. It's a full

01:28:56 ◼   ► system. If you're not using Freshbooks yet, now is the time to try it because they are

01:29:01 ◼   ► offering an unrestricted 30 day free trial for Cortex listeners with no credit card required.

01:29:06 ◼   ► Just go to freshbooks.com/cortex and when it tells you how did you hear about them,

01:29:13 ◼   ► say that you heard about them from this very show.

01:29:16 ◼   ► Our thanks to FreshBooks for their continued support of the Cortex Podcast and Relay FM.

01:29:21 ◼   ► So I asked from the Cortex Twitter account @_CortexFM if you're interested in following

01:29:27 ◼   ► the account for some Ask Cortex questions related to yearly themes.

01:29:32 ◼   ► We have answered throughout the course of this conversation a lot of them. There were

01:29:37 ◼   ► actually quite a few surprising amount of people that wanted to know about time tracking.

01:29:41 ◼   ► So there you go. You've got it, right? Those of you who care about time tracking, you've

01:29:44 ◼   ► definitely got that conversation this time. But there were a couple that I wanted to ask

01:29:49 ◼   ► you and for us to think about. Tony asked, "How do your themes inform your use of devices

01:29:56 ◼   ► and/or your favorite apps?" Now, I could say for me, one of the big projects

01:30:02 ◼   ► that I'm trying to work on requires a lot more planning than usually a show that I would

01:30:07 ◼   ► do requires. It needs more writing to it, it needs more thought, it needs more outlining.

01:30:12 ◼   ► So I'm more heavily using notes than I would typically. I will be using Bear more for longer

01:30:19 ◼   ► pieces of writing. And I'm thinking about using something like an app like MindNode,

01:30:25 ◼   ► which is like a mind mapping application to try and plan out some big things, some big

01:30:31 ◼   ► overarching ideas and to try and get my thoughts more compiled. So I think that because of

01:30:37 ◼   ► the way that me and you work, the themes always inform the app choices because this is how

01:30:43 ◼   ► we get our work done is with these apps. So it does change. I mean, I guess for you, year

01:30:48 ◼   ► of order will mean finally getting your project management in check.

01:30:53 ◼   ► Yeah, we can talk about that on another show, but yes.

01:30:55 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:30:57 ◼   ► I'll say that there's, um...

01:30:59 ◼   ► Two years ago, one of the things that I did, which I need to do again for a variety of reasons,

01:31:06 ◼   ► is I actually-- I sat down with

01:31:08 ◼   ► GoodNotes, my favorite handwriting app, and I was just writing out what all of the devices

01:31:14 ◼   ► were in my life. Like, okay, which iPads and computers do I have? Like, where are they? Like, what's--

01:31:19 ◼   ► Here's-- I have a phone. I have a watch.

01:31:22 ◼   ► And I just sat down with that list for a long time and sort of thought very intentionally about what are each of these devices for.

01:31:31 ◼   ► And so I think this is a thing that people don't really do, like they just sort of happen to let devices do whatever.

01:31:39 ◼   ► But I'm a big fan of artificial restrictions around devices.

01:31:45 ◼   ► And I'm definitely intending to again sit down and really think through

01:31:52 ◼   ► what is the minimum viable use for the various devices in my life.

01:31:57 ◼   ► I'm not interested in devices that can do absolutely everything all the time.

01:32:01 ◼   ► I'm interested in being really intentional about what they can do.

01:32:05 ◼   ► When I was doing it two years ago, part of what I was thinking about is

01:32:09 ◼   ► what notifications can be seen where.

01:32:13 ◼   ► and what devices do I have access to at different times in the day

01:32:17 ◼   ► and so therefore what kinds of things do I want to be able to do on them

01:32:21 ◼   ► and then setting up the devices as much as is possible

01:32:24 ◼   ► so that those actions are the only things that are possible to do on those devices

01:32:30 ◼   ► so I feel like the year theme fits into that

01:32:34 ◼   ► because it's the idea of what do you want these devices to do for you in your life

01:32:39 ◼   ► And with the Year of Order, I definitely have a bunch of restructuring to do with all of the devices in my life.

01:32:46 ◼   ► And Jonathan asks, "What tools or mechanisms do you use to keep track of your yearly themes?

01:32:50 ◼   ► Do you review your progress frequently?"

01:32:53 ◼   ► Do you do anything like this?

01:32:55 ◼   ► There are things, like I have a bunch of questions that I kind of work through.

01:32:58 ◼   ► And yeah, one of the questions is, it's not exactly a question, but it's like a, it's a note at the top of the document that like this is the year of whatever.

01:33:06 ◼   ► and that's a thing that just exists to keep it more present in my mind as the year is going along.

01:33:11 ◼   ► But what about you?

01:33:12 ◼   ► I don't think I have a necessary structure, because the first time I did it was last year,

01:33:16 ◼   ► and the thing that I was doing, which was time tracking, in and of itself is a review which is constant.

01:33:22 ◼   ► So it wasn't really like I had to sit down and... I don't do the reviews the way that you do.

01:33:27 ◼   ► That's not a thing that I do.

01:33:28 ◼   ► Especially as well, a lot of my work is kind of,

01:33:33 ◼   ► it's self-structured in that way.

01:33:36 ◼   ► - That's true, yeah.

01:33:37 ◼   ► - I am very focused on quarter to quarter

01:33:39 ◼   ► because that's how my business operates.

01:33:42 ◼   ► So I don't really have to sit down

01:33:44 ◼   ► and do a performance review of myself

01:33:47 ◼   ► because I can see it on a spreadsheet

01:33:50 ◼   ► how the business is doing and course correct where needed.

01:33:55 ◼   ► I mean, maybe if I want to continue doing my year

01:33:58 ◼   ► of branching out, it might require more reviews

01:34:01 ◼   ► because these are things which are bigger than numbers.

01:34:05 ◼   ► These are different things.

01:34:06 ◼   ► Like last year, I could still really look at numbers more,

01:34:10 ◼   ► and those numbers were in and of themselves

01:34:12 ◼   ► just easy to see how it was going.

01:34:15 ◼   ► But my branching out stuff, it's a lot more fluffy

01:34:18 ◼   ► than last year's goals, right?

01:34:20 ◼   ► So it may require some progress reviews.

01:34:23 ◼   ► I haven't worked that out yet, but it's probably something I should think about.

01:34:27 ◼   ► And Jeff asked, what is some advice you would give to someone looking to get their theme in place?

01:34:32 ◼   ► Oh, number one advice. Don't try to do it quickly.

01:34:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:34:37 ◼   ► Like don't listen to this show and think, I have an idea for a theme

01:34:42 ◼   ► and my theme for the year is going to be this.

01:34:44 ◼   ► Like, I think what has happened in all of these cases is it's been a kind of slow build.

01:34:51 ◼   ► this idea of like, "hmm, I think I need a theme for the year"

01:34:55 ◼   ► or like, "what is my theme for the year going to be?"

01:34:57 ◼   ► and

01:34:58 ◼   ► it's useful to have that as something that's on the back burner

01:35:05 ◼   ► and not something that you just instantly decide

01:35:08 ◼   ► because if you feel like you go into this state where

01:35:10 ◼   ► you're thinking about what the theme should be

01:35:13 ◼   ► I feel like that helps you be more observant

01:35:16 ◼   ► in your own life about what needs to happen

01:35:18 ◼   ► like, and that's definitely what happened to me this year

01:35:20 ◼   ► where coming out of the year of chaos I thought like, "Oh, my chaotic life doesn't need a year theme."

01:35:26 ◼   ► But simply being aware like, "Oh, I'm going to talk to Myke about it at the end of January,"

01:35:30 ◼   ► started booting up a little process where I noticed and thought much more about

01:35:35 ◼   ► how my life was going and the things that I wanted to change in my life.

01:35:38 ◼   ► So without a doubt, don't be hasty with your year themes, right?

01:35:43 ◼   ► Like, let it simmer for a while.

01:35:45 ◼   ► Like the idea of yearly themes came to me when you started talking about the year of less

01:35:50 ◼   ► I didn't have a theme that year

01:35:51 ◼   ► I have a theme the next year because we spent the entire year talking about themes

01:35:57 ◼   ► So it like was embedding in my mind. So honestly I would say

01:36:00 ◼   ► Try it if you think that yearly themes are good then aim to have one in 2019

01:36:06 ◼   ► But spend this next year with that in mind and you know, maybe you could do what I did

01:36:11 ◼   ► did maybe in June come up with a six month themes like a theme for the rest of your year

01:36:16 ◼   ► but if something isn't jumping out to you immediately like of course that's what it

01:36:20 ◼   ► is like it's the clouds have parted and the idea has come to your mind then just spend

01:36:25 ◼   ► some time rolling around this idea in your brain that you want to have a yearly theme

01:36:30 ◼   ► listen to us talking about our themes as we progress throughout the year and stuff like

01:36:33 ◼   ► that and then work out what yours could be just through kind of like osmosis of having

01:36:37 ◼   ► this thinking don't push it.

01:36:41 ◼   ► Or I might suggest if you want to get started a little sooner, it might be perfectly fine

01:36:47 ◼   ► to do like how I review my life in terms of like seasons, like thinking about things more

01:36:52 ◼   ► intentionally every season.

01:36:54 ◼   ► Quarterly.

01:36:55 ◼   ► Maybe start smaller.

01:36:56 ◼   ► As it tends to be called gray quarterly, remember.

01:36:57 ◼   ► Like this is how everybody else in the world works.

01:36:58 ◼   ► No, I like seasons, right?

01:36:59 ◼   ► No, I like it.

01:37:00 ◼   ► I know this how you like it.

01:37:01 ◼   ► It's much better.

01:37:02 ◼   ► It's much more romantic, Myke, to call it a season.

01:37:06 ◼   ► Of course it is.

01:37:07 ◼   ► But is that what we, is that how we think of our work now?

01:37:09 ◼   ► Romance.

01:37:10 ◼   ► I appreciate the vague boundaries of seasons.

01:37:13 ◼   ► I don't like the precision of the quarter.

01:37:15 ◼   ► I like the vague boundary of the season.

01:37:17 ◼   ► So I think also maybe breaking it down

01:37:21 ◼   ► into smaller chunks like that might be helpful

01:37:23 ◼   ► for just starting out a little bit.

01:37:26 ◼   ► But yeah, I think that the not starting urgently

01:37:29 ◼   ► is the main thing.

01:37:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, until next time.

01:37:31 ◼   ► - Until next time, good luck with your year themes.